going on? What’s wrong with you two? You act like you see a ghost or something.”
Sheridan pointed toward the yard in front of the house but had trouble speaking. Jason turned to where she gestured.
The three Austrian pine trees their dad had planted so long ago in the front yard had all now grown until the tops were level with the gutter of the house. At the time they’d been planted, he’d joked that they were Sheridan’s Tree, April’s Tree, and Lucy’s Tree.
“April was our sister,” Sheridan said, pointing at the middle one. “She was killed six years ago.”
The door of the house opened, and their mother came out. Sheridan noted how Jason looked over his shoulder at her in a way that in other circumstances would have made her proud and angry at the same time. But now her mother looked stricken. There was no doubt in Sheridan’s mind that Jason’s mom had just mentioned the call they’d received.
3
WYOMING GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT, HIS RIGHT ARM and uniform shirt slick with his own blood, slowed his green Ford pickup as he approached a blind corner on the narrow two-track that paralleled the Little Snake River. It was approaching dusk in the deep river canyon, and buttery shafts filtered through the trees on the rim of the canyon and lit up the floor in a pattern resembling jail bars. The river itself, which had been roaring with runoff in the spring and early summer, was now little more than a series of rock-rimmed pools of pocket water connected by an anemic trickle. He couldn’t help notice, though, that brook trout were rising in the pools, feverishly slurping at tiny fallen Trico bugs like drunks at last call.
There was a mature female bald eagle in the bed of his pickup bound up tight in a Wyoming Cowboys sweatshirt, and the bird didn’t like that he’d slowed down. Her hair-raising screech scared him and made him involuntarily jerk on the wheel.
“Okay,” he said, glancing into his rearview mirror at the eagle, which stared back at him with murderous, needle-sharp eyes that made his skin creep. “You’ve done enough damage already. What—you want me to crash into the river, too?”
He eased his way around the blind corner, encountered no one, and sped up. The road was so narrow—with the river on one side and the canyon wall on the other—that if he had to share it with an oncoming vehicle, they’d both have to maneuver for a place to pull over in order to pass. Instead, he shared the road with a doe mule deer and her fawn that had come down from a cut in the wall for water. Both deer ran ahead of him on the road, looking nervously over their shoulders, until another screech from the eagle sent them bounding through the river and up the other side.
Another blind corner, but this time when he eased around it, he came face-to-face with a pickup parked in the center of the two-track. The vehicle was a jacked-up 2008 Dodge Ram 4x4, Oklahoma plates, the grille a sneering grimace. And no one in the cab. He braked and scanned the river for a fisherman—nope—then up the canyon wall on his right for the driver. No one.
He knew instinctively,
THE CALL THAT brought him to this place on this road in this canyon had come via dispatch in Cheyenne just after noon: hikers had reported an injured bald eagle angrily hopping around in a remote campsite far up the canyon, “scaring the bejesus out of everyone.” They reported the eagle had an arrow sticking out of it. It was the kind of call that made him wince and made him angry.
Months before, Joe had been assigned to the remote Baggs District in extreme south-central Wyoming. The district (known within the department as either “The Place Where Game Wardens Are Sent to Die” or “Warden Graveyard”) was hard against the Colorado border and encompassed the Sierra Madre Mountains, the Little Snake River Valley, dozens of third- and fourth-generation ranches surrounded by a bustling coal-bed methane boom and an influx of energy workers, and long distances to just about anywhere. The nearest town with more than 500 people was Craig, Colorado, thirty-six miles to the south. The governor had his reasons for making the assignment: to hide him away until the heat and publicity of the events from the previous fall died down. Joe understood Governor Rulon’s thinking. After all, even though he’d solved the rash of murders involving hunters across the state of Wyoming, he’d also permitted the unauthorized release of a federal prisoner—Nate Romanowski—as well as committing a shameful act that haunted him still.
Joe had called a few times and sent several e-mails to the governor asking when he could go back to Saddlestring. There had been no response. While Joe felt abandoned, he felt bad that his actions had damaged the governor.
And the governor had enough problems of his own these days to concern himself with Joe’s plight. Although he was still the most popular politician in the state despite his mercurial nature and eccentricity, there had been a rumor of scandal about a relationship with Stella Ennis, the governor’s chief of staff. The governor denied the rumors angrily and Stella resigned, but it had been a second chink in his armor, and Rulon’s enemies—he had them on both sides of the aisle—saw an opening and moved in like wolves on a hamstrung bull moose. Soon, there were innuendos about his fast-and-loose use of state employees, including Joe, even financial questions about the pistol shooting range Rulon had installed behind the governor’s mansion to settle political disputes. Joe had no doubt— knowing the governor—that Rulon would emerge victorious. But in the meanwhile, he’d be embattled and distracted.
And Joe would be in exile of sorts. He felt the familiar pang of moral guilt that had visited him more and more the last few years for some of the decisions he’d made and some of the things he’d done that had landed him here. Although he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have made the same decisions if he had the opportunity to make them again, the fact was he’d committed acts he was deeply ashamed of and would always be ashamed of. The last moments of J. W. Keeley and Randy Pope, when he’d acted against his nature and concluded that given the situations, the ends justified the means, would forever be with him. Joe’s friend Nate Romanowski, the fugitive falconer, had always maintained that often there was a difference between justice and the law, and Joe had always disagreed with the sentiment. He still did. But he’d crossed lines he never thought he’d cross, and he vowed not to do it again. Although he owned the transgressions he’d committed and they would never go away, he’d resolved that the only way to mitigate them was to stay on the straight and narrow, do good works, and not let his dark impulses assert themselves again.
Being in exile could either push a man over the precipice or help a man sort things out, he’d concluded.
DESPITE THE REMOTE LOCATION, his lack of familiarity with the new district, and pangs of loneliness, the assignment reminded him how much he loved being a game warden again,
