'SHUT UP AND BE STILL,' Jeannie Keeley roared without looking toward the bedroom, and there was silence.
'What kind of animal?'
'I can't remember for sure. We laughed about it, though. I had a gym teacher by that name in high school, I remember that.'
'What was the gym teacher's name?'
'Mr. Merle Miller. We called him 'Killer Miller.''
'Was it,' Joe paused, searching his memory for the answer, 'a Miller's weasel?' He vaguely recalled the name from a course he once took in biology. All he could remember was that the species was indigenous to the Rocky Mountain west and had been extinct for at least a century,
maybe longer.
'Could've been,' she said. 'That sounds familiar, I think.'
'Did he tell you any more about it?' Joe asked.
She reached into her smock for a book of matches. She lit the cigarette she had put in the ashtray and inhaled deeply. 'Can't do it,' she muttered. 'I been since breakfast without a cigarette. I got to learn to quit. Ote would be pissed if he was here.' Which meant she had been smoking all along.
'Did he tell you any more about the Miller's weasel?' Joe asked again, this time letting his voice rise.
'Ote never told me nothing,' she said flatly.
***
When Joe drove out of the cottonwood trees into the sagebrush and the bright white sunlight, he could not get three things out of his mind. The first was whatjeannie had said about the animal Ote was going to give him. The second was the manic, almost deranged look she had had on her face when she told him about Ote. The last was the look on April's face when Joe first saw her in the bedroom. He had seen the expression before, but only on domestic animals. It was Maxine's expression, the Labrador look. It said: please hit me if it will make you feel better.
The static sound of gravel crunching stopped abruptly as his tires climbed onto the smooth pavement of the state highway. He pressed the accelerator and the engine roared. Twin spoors of dirt trailed him on the blacktop. He could not get away from the place fast enough. He turned in the direction of the interstate highway, away from Saddlestring.
The drive to Cheyenne would take six hours.
To hunt and fish in the State of Wyoming, Joe thought, people were required to buy licenses and, in some cases, pass tests that proved they knew how to use firearms and knew Game and Fish regulations. There were no such requirements for having children.
From the moment he walked into Game and Fish Headquarters in Cheyenne and said he was Joe Pickett and he was there to see Les Etbauer for a meeting, the atmosphere changed within the room. The receptionist looked at him warily and pushed herself away from her desk as if he were contagious. Joe noticed that two young female license agents shot looks at him the instant they heard his name, then quickly turned back to their computer monitors as if suddenly reading the most fascinating e-mails they had ever seen. The receptionist directed him down a long hallway and told him to take a seat on the molded plastic seat outside of a door. Painted on the frosted glass were the words lesley et bauer assistant director.
Joe took off his hat and sat down. There wasn't much to look at. The sprawling cinder-block building had been built in the early 1960s, and the walls were painted institutional yellow and lit with industrial neon tubes. The hallway was narrow and the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor was scarred. It was the kind of hallway that echoed and amplified the rat-a-tat sounds of clicking heels as people walked down it. Not that there were many employees about; most of the doors in the hall were shut and there were no lights on behind the glass. He recognized many of the names on the doors as his agency superiors, but apparently they were already gone for the day. As he sat waiting for Les Etbauer, Joe realized that he felt as though he was back in grade school and he'd been sent to the principal's office. Like most of the field wardens, Joe had spent as little time as possible inside this building. This was where the agency bureaucracy was, where policy was set and regulations formed. It was here that the director met with the governor and individual legislators while they were in town for the legislative session and where laws and new regulations were hammered out and concessions were made. This was the place where hunters, fishermen, landowners, and environmentalists stormed (although they rarely made it past the front counter) when things didn't go their particular way. It was the place where all of those departmental memos came from. It was a place where they knew him, but he really didn't know them.
During the long drive to Cheyenne, Joe had had a lot of time to think. He had mulled over not only where the investigation of the outfitter murders seemed to be leading him, but also about the things Vern had said in the bar. It was the first time since this had all started that Joe had had the free time to try and put the things that he'd learned together. The conclusions he had reached unsettled him.
A man with an open collar and a short-sleeved dress shirt that stretched across his large belly approached from an office far down the hallway, and Joe looked up at him as he passed. The man stopped warily and turned around.
'You're Joe Pickett?' The man asked.
Joe nodded.
The man looked down the hall in both directions to make sure no one was coming. 'I just want you to know that there are a lot of people here who think you're getting screwed.'
'Really?' Joe had not realized he had been the subject of discussion at headquarters, although the behavior of two license clerks behind the counter had hinted at that. The man took a tentative step toward Joe and bent forward.
'We hope you fight it and take it all the way to the governor,' he said.
'This kind of good old boy shit has gone far enough.'
Joe was confused. 'You seem to know a lot more about what's going to happen here than I do.'
The man snorted and a smug look passed over his face. 'Why do you think they'd want you here at four o'clock
