world, Joe thought, all the patience that didn’t manifest itself in greedy, impatient fishermen like Jeff O’Bannon.
“Yeah, okay,” Not Ike said. “You gonna give me a ticket?” Joe shook his head. “Just get the new permit, okay?”
Not Ike looked up, his face dark with sudden concern. “You found the Ripper yet?” “No.”
Not Ike stepped close to Joe. “I think I seen them in the alley downtown the night before those two men got killed.”
“Really.”
“I was fishin’ a ways upstream, around the corner. I told the sheriff and that deputy. Even the FBI guy.”
Joe wasn’t sure what to ask. “What did they look like?”
“Wiry. Hairy and wiry. Creepylike. They were up in the alley, in the shadows,” Not Ike said and gestured toward downtown Saddlestring, toward the alley behind the buildings on Main Street.
“And there’s something else.” “What’s that?”
Not Ike leaned in even closer, until his lips were nearly touching Joe’s ear, and his voice dropped dramatically. “I caught three fish that night.”
Tuff ’s death was likely caused by massive head injury,” the county coroner told Joe when he finally returned Joe’s cell phone call. “It was obvious even before we sent the body to the FBI that there was severe head trauma. The wound looked like what a hammer or baseball bat would make, but most likely it was caused by a rock he hit when he was thrown from the horse. We found blood and tissue on a rock up there.”
“What about the autopsy?” Joe asked, as he drove. “Anything unusual?”
“Nope. His blood alcohol level was .15, so he was legally drunk. But I don’t think there are any laws against that if you’re riding a horse.” “But nothing else you found that was odd? Toxicology?”
Joe could hear tinny country music playing in the background in the coroner’s office.
“Nothing other than the obvious mutilations and the teeth marks of your grizzly bear.”
Joe rolled his eyes. His bear again.
“Have you spoken to the coroner in Park County about the other guy?” Joe asked. “Or should I call him?”
“I talked to Frank yesterday,” the coroner said. “He’s a friend of mine. Basically, he determined the same thing on Mr. Tanner: blunt trauma head injury likely caused the death, although Frank thought it was possible that the blow to the head didn’t kill the victim outright. Frank said it was possible the man had a severe concussion, and that they started skinning him before he actually expired.”
“Yikes,” Joe said, feeling a chill. “I agree.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, Frank’s guy didn’t have any of the other wounds we saw with Tuff Montegue. The body seemed to be found in the same place it fell, and there was no predation of any kind on it. Your bear didn’t make it over to Park County, I guess.”
“Right,” Joe said absently, but it made him think of something. “Thanks, Jim.”
“You bet,” the coroner said. “I’ve been over all of this with Sheriff Barnum and Agent Portenson.”
“I know,” Joe said, his mind elsewhere.
On the other side of town, outside the town limits, Joe pulled off of the highway into the rutted, unpaved parking lot of an after-hours club called the Bear Trap. The Bear Trap was a one-level cinder-block building with bars on the few small windows and a fading members only sign on the front door. The place looked like a bunker. There were five vehicles, battered pickups parked at odd angles near the front of the club. The Bear Trap skirted liquor laws by proclaiming itself a private club, and it catered to drinkers who were still thirsty after the bars in Saddlestring closed at 2 a.m. It made the Stockman’s Bar in town seem like an upscale establishment. Joe had been to the Bear Trap once before, following up on an anonymous poaching hotline tip that a “member” had been seen taking a pronghorn antelope out of season and that the poacher had retired to the club after field-dressing the animal.
The poacher had been easy to find and arrest, because the still-warm carcass of the antelope was in the back of his pickup under a tarp, blood running in thick strings from beneath the tailgate into the mud, and the man himself was at the bar wearing a shirt matted with blood and clumps of bristly pronghorn hair. The poacher surrendered without a fight, and seemed to look forward to a calm night in jail. The Bear Trap was the kind of a place where a blood-stained shirt didn’t really stand out, the bartender had told him later. The bartender’s name was Terry Montegue, Tuff ’s brother.
Joe checked his gun and the pepper spray on his belt before entering. Once he was inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The barred windows were shuttered closed, and the only light came from Coors, Bud, and Fat Tire beer signs, a fluorescent backlight over the bar, and an ancient jukebox playing Johnny Horton songs. Joe liked Johnny Horton, but wasn’t sure he could ever justify the fact if somebody challenged him to say why.
Four drinkers were crowded together on stools in the middle of the bar, and Terry Montegue hovered over them behind the bar. Joe heard the sound of dice being scooped into a cup, and saw a clumsy flurry as the drinkers stuffed the cash they had been gambling into their coat pockets.
“Nothing to worry about,” Terry told the drinkers, looking over them at Joe. “It’s just the game warden.”
Joe smiled to himself, gave the drinkers a wide berth, and sat on a stool at the end of the bar.
Montegue was tall and bald with a beer belly that hid the buckle on his belt. He had a fleshy, cruel drinker’s face, made worse by the scar that cut a white, wormlike path up his cheek, through his eyelid, and into his brow. He wore a too-small short-sleeved shirt that showed off his arm muscles, as well as the rattlesnake-head tattoos on both forearms.
“Can I get you something?” Montegue asked.
