Open Season jp-6

by C. J. Box

  She stood in the doorway, trying to look tough, Joe thought. Her unlit cigarette bobbed up and down as she seemed to think about it, and him. She was wary of him. He read the name embroidered on her smock. She was a waitress at the Burg-O-Pardner restaurant in Saddlestring. That was the place that specialized in deep-fried Rocky Mountain oysters and one-pound hamburgers for lunch.

  "I'd rather not invite you in the house," she said. "I got a sick kid in there, and it's kind of small. The house I mean."

  "I don't mind staying out here," Joe said.

  Inside the house, from the dark, a young girl called for her mom. Jeannie glanced over her shoulder and back at Joe. "Oh hell," she said. "Come on in."

  Joe sat down at a rough-hewn wood table in the kitchen while Jeannie tended to a girl Sheridan's age. There were four rooms in the dark house. The kitchen and dining room were crowded by the number of animal heads on the walls. Off of the dining room were a bathroom, a bedroom, and another bedroom that looked as if it were crammed full with bunk beds. Joe thought his house was small, and he wondered how the Keeley family managed without tripping over one another.

  April, the girl with the haunted face that Joe had seen at the funeral, was in the bottom bunk of one of the beds, and Joe could see a tangle of sheets and wet, dark hair. Jeannie gave the girl a glass of something and asked her to rest and be quiet until the man went away. The girl nodded her reply. Joe could also see another child--he couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl--playing on the floor in the room. The child wore only a disposable diaper and a T-shirt that was torn and dirty.

  Jeannie came back into the kitchen and asked if Joe wanted coffee. He said no and she sat down with a cup for herself. She took the cigarette out of her mouth and put it in an ashtray.

  "I can't smoke on account of I'm expecting, as you can tell," Jeannie said. "But sometimes I just have to stick one in my mouth for a while. It helps."

  Jeannie went on to tell Joe a lot of things he would rather not have known, like how Ote had no insurance when he died. How Ote spent every dime they made on horses, guns, outfitting equipment, and that damned truck he was buried in. How the Ford dealership in Casper where Ote bought the truck was on her case because, come to find out, Ote had missed the last three payments and they wanted the truck back and wouldn't that be a hoot? How Ote married her when he was home on leave from the army and she was a junior in high school and got her pregnant for the first time on their wedding night. That was three and a half kids ago.

  How Ote spent everything he saved in the service to buy this cabin and land in Wyoming so he could live his dream of killing things and getting away from people. He wanted to be a mountain man. He liked to say he was born 180 years too late. Ote hated people, but mainly he hated the government. Ote believed in the right to keep and bear arms. Ote told her all the time how he would die when the Feds came to get him for one thing or another. That's why he kept himself armed. That's why he showed her how to use and shoot the shotgun they kept in a rack near the door. That's why he wore a Derringer holster in his boot. Ote always thought his outfitting business would take off someday. He guaranteed a trophy to any of his clients on the promise that they wouldn't tell anyone when, where, or how they got it. He wanted to buy a float plane and expand into Alaska someday. He wanted to home school his kids, but she wouldn't let him because the kids drove her nuts when they were home all day, and besides, someday they would have to get jobs and go out on their own and Ote didn't know enough himself to teach anybody anything except how to butcher an elk. How Ote liked being with Kyle Lensegrav and Calvin Mendes more than he liked being around anyone else.

  Ote was a mean-spirited prick of a man. Ote thought he knew everything, but he was basically Mississippi white trash in the middle of northern Wyoming. He left her nothing, not even the damned truck. She would have to go on welfare, money from the government he hated. Wouldn't that make Ote spin in his grave? She thought there might be insurance and benefits through the Veterans Administration, since Ote was a veteran. She needed to pursue that. Again, money from the government he hated. Ore would keep spinning down there. Like a top.

  She would have to sell the house and the cars and move. Maybe she would take the kids; maybe she wouldn't. She wasn't sure. Her mama in Mississippi could take them for a while until she got her shit together. Go to Colorado, maybe. New Mexico. Arizona. Somewhere it was warmer. A good waitress could get a job anywhere.

  Joe listened and watched her. He was as unprepared for this torrent as he had been unprepared for her at the door with the shotgun. She would not stop talking. She was bitter about Ote's death, but possibly just as bitter at the life he had given her and left her with. Joe could see that she could have been pretty when Ote had married her. But her features were now sharp, and her outlook was flinty. He was surprised how quiet the children were in the other room. He wondered if they were simply terrified of her. And she was going to have another.

  "When he died, it was in your yard," she said, her eyes flashing. "He didn't even have the decency to die in his own yard. The prick. I had to sell his horses to pay for that funeral. I didn't know how much a front-end loader cost to rent. Why did I pay for his perfect funeral? Why? I'm so damned idiotic. He wouldn't have done that for me if I'd got shot. I bet he would have gotten drunk with his pals Kyle and Calvin and burned my body on a pyre like some kind of Indian woman."

  Joe rubbed his neck. He stole a glance at his watch. She had been going nonstop for forty-five minutes. He would need to leave soon if he wanted to get to Cheyenne on time.

  "Aren't you the guy Ote took the gun from?" she asked suddenly, grinning.

  Joe said he was.

  "Damn, he was proud of that," she said. "He couldn't stop talking about it for a while. Then he realized he could lose his outfitter's license. Then he got scared and depressed. You've got to understand that if Ote had lost his license, he might as well have been dead. It would have killed him. It drove me up the wall, him talking about it."

  Joe looked at her as she talked, but his attention was diverted by the absolute quiet in the other room where the children were. He wanted to know what was wrong with the little girl in bed.

  "Ote liked you," Jeannie said. "He bragged for a while about that gun thing, then he got scared. He said he thought you were a good man. He said you were fair and square, not like Vern Dunnegan."

  Joe asked what she meant.

  She shrugged. "Ote didn't tell me a lot about his business. All I know is that Ote was really mad once because Vern caught him doing something--poaching, probably--and Vern made Ote make it right with him."

  "You mean a bribe?" Joe asked.

  "Something," Jeannie said. "Vern made Ote do something, but I don't know what. All I know is that Ote was pretty mad about it. This wasn't a fun place to be when Ote was mad."

  But she didn't know what specifically had happened. "That's the way things work," she concluded, as if she had forgotten Joe was a warden.

  "Not necessarily," Joe said.

  Joe couldn't listen to her much longer. He stood and asked her if he could get a glass of water. She waved toward the sink. On the way there, he paused at the children's bedroom door. April was in the bed. She looked feverish, her hair plasrered to her skull, but her eyes were calm and piercing. On the floor, a baby boy with big dark eyes turned to him. There was a look on the boy's face that suggested he expected Joe to step in and smack him. But Joe could see no bruises or injuries on either child.

  He turned on the spigot and filled his glass with brackish water that came from their well. Jeannie Keeley was staring at him. He absolutely could not figure her out. She could be cool and abrupt one minute, and absolutely gushing words the next. He wouldn't have been surprised if she had stood and walked back over to the rack and pulled down the shotgun again and aimed it at him. This house and the people in it were crazy.

  "Did Ote give you whatever he was going to give you to make things right?" she asked.

  Joe paused wit
h the glass nearly to his lips.

  "Ote said he had something that once you saw it you would drop all the charges against him and he'd have his license back. Did he give it to you?"

  "No. Did Ote tell you what it was?" Joe asked.

  "Something he and the rest of the guys found. Some kind of animal."

  "What kind of animal?"

  She paused and screwed up her face. From the bedroom the little girl cried, "Mama."

  "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 on Friday afternoon if the whole thing wasn't cut and dried? Think about it. If you get mad and want to protest, there's nobody to hear you until Monday morning."

  "What ..." Joe started to ask but the man turned quickly on his heel and continued down the hall. The receptionist had reappeared.

  He was going to be suspended. It was simply a matter of time until Etbauer pronounced those words. He had said a lot of words, Joe thought, but not those. Joe sat and listened. His mouth was dry, and his hands were wet. He couldn't quite believe this was happening even as he sat there. In his career, he had never received either a verbal or a written warning regarding his conduct, except for when he arrested the new governor for fishing without a license.

  His performance reviews had always been good if not brilliant. He had done his job well, he thought, to the best of his ability and according to regulations. He had tried very hard to be honest and fair. He had not cut corners, and he had worked hard. The time he spent working was far beyond what was required of him and he never asked for overtime or compensatory time. He never cheated on expense reports. He had reported what had happened with Ote Keeley because it was the right thing to do. He had never even suspected that it would result in anything but, at the worst, a mild reprimand. After all, he had recovered the weapon and arrested Ote with an ironclad case of poaching.

  But he was going to be suspended. Joe felt as though the wind had been kicked out if him.

  Etbauer went on and on in a thin, nasal voice. He sat behind his desk and read aloud the report Joe had written about Ote Keeley taking his gun. When he was through reading Joe's report, Etbauer found the passages in the agency handbook that pertained to depart
ment-issued firearms and read those aloud. Joe hoped like hell that Etbauer wouldn't notice that wasn't wearing his gun now and ask him about it.

  Etbauer had a wide, flushed alcoholic face and thick, photo gray glasses. Joe also noticed that he was balding. He didn't speak with Joe as much as speak to him. There was a quiver in his voice, and he mispronounced some of the words. It was as if Etbauer was reading aloud from a script.

  Joe didn't know much about Etbauer, but he had heard things. According to Wacey, Etbauer had gone straight from the U.S. Army to the Game and Fish Department without a real job in between. Wacey had called Etbauer "the ultimate government employee," a man who had never collected a paycheck in his life that wasn't from either the state or the Federal government. He had attained his rank due to a particularly bureaucratic method known as ADV or "advanced due to vacancy." That meant that Etbauer simply put in his time and moved up as others moved out or retired. As state employees either left to take other jobs or start businesses of their own, bureaucrats like Etbauer (who no private sector employer would ever want on the payroll) simply grew in power and seniority like a tumor within the agency, amassing security and building a fine pension.

  Joe had always considered individual words as finite units of currency, and he believed in savings. He never wanted to waste or unnecessarily expend words. To Joe, words meant things. They should be spent wisely. Joe sometimes paused for a long time until he could come up with the right words to express exactly what he wanted to say. Sometimes it confused people (Marybeth fretted that perhaps people thought Joe was slow) but Joe could live with that. That's why Joe despised meetings where he felt the participants acted as if they were paid by the number of words spoken and, as a result, the words began to cheapen by the minute until they meant nothing at all. In Joe's experience, the person who talked the most very often had the least to say. He sometimes wished that every human was allotted a certain number of words to use for their lifetime. When the allotment ran out, that person would be forced into silence. If this were the case, Joe would still have more than enough in his account while people like Les Etbauer would be very quiet. Joe had attended meetings where little got accomplished except what he considered the random drive-by spewing of words, like unaimed machine-gun bullets. What a waste of words, he often thought. What a waste of currency. What a waste of bullets.