Open Season (14 page)

Once he reached home, Joe left his boots and yellow slicker in the mudroom, put his hat crown-down on his desk, and called Game and Fish Headquarters in Cheyenne and asked for the Wildlife Biology Section. He told a technician about the package he had sent them and asked whether the contents had been examined yet. He was asked to hold.

From his chair, he could smell coffee from the kitchen, and he could hear the murmuring of Marybeth and her mother at the table.

At last a man identifying himself as the chief biologist came on the line. Joe had heard of him but had never met him. Joe listened to him and felt his scalp twitch.

“What do you mean you don't have it?” Joe asked.

“Exactly that,” the biologist said, the righteous annoyance of a higher rank apparent. “No one here has seen it or recalls receiving it. How did you send it to us?”

Joe described the small box wrapped in brown paper and tape.

“You sent it regular mail? Not UPS? Not Federal Express? Not registered mail?” the biologist fired at Joe. “So there's no receipt. You sent it so there was no way to trace it?”

Joe felt his temper rise. He kept his voice low and even. “I called ahead and was instructed to send it by mail,” Joe said. “I was told that in these days of limited state budgets, we were to avoid extravagances like Federal Express.”

“Who told you that?” the biologist asked flatly.

“I think it was you,” Joe said. The voice sounded the same. “I called you the day I found it.”

There was a long, frustrated sigh over the telephone. “Well, we don't have it.”

“Can you look again? It's important,” Joe said. “Nothing I've had examined has ever been lost before, either from there to here or from here to there.”

There was a long silence. “Sure, we can look. But no one here recalls getting it.”

He asked Joe to confirm the address he sent it to and the section. He asked Joe if he had put enough postage on the parcel.

Joe started to answer when the biologist asked him to hold again because he said someone might have found it. Joe sat back in his swivel chair with the receiver up to his ear. He recalled how the boys in Cheyenne often felt about the wardens in the field and vice versa. Vern had warned him about it years ago—how the agency directors sometimes felt that field wardens would go native and forget they were state employees, that the wardens would start to think of themselves as advocates for local ranchers or hunters or boosters. Some of the Cheyenne brass thought of the field wardens as prima donnas out there with their fancy trucks, guns, and badges. Like they were local celebrities rather than subordinates. But the resentment could be mutual. Joe had never placed a call to headquarters before 8 A.M. or after 5 P.M., knowing that anyone he needed to talk to would only be in during those hours. He might start the day by patrolling the Bighorn break lands at 5 A.M., but things were different in Cheyenne. Biologists got paid the same whether they found a package or didn't find it.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sheridan and Lucy playing in the living room. Lucy was being a dog or something and was raising up on her hind legs for an invisible treat that Sheridan was giving her.
It was cute.
Marybeth had said the night before that the girls seemed to be doing extremely well and that the Ote Keeley incident had not seemed to upset them. Marybeth said both girls had spent the last two days playing near the woodpile in the backyard and never even mentioned what had happened there. She said Sheridan, Miss Emotional, had even been consistently sunny. Marybeth said she was beginning to feel that maybe there would be nothing to worry about after all.

“Nope, sorry,” the biologist said as he came back to the telephone. “We found a package and opened it, and it was a piece of a dead eagle a warden sent us from Ranchester to see if it had been shot.”

Joe cursed under his breath. The biologist agreed to call him if the package ever showed up.

Joe walked into
the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Marybeth and Missy were sitting at the table and stopped talking when he walked in, confirming that they had been talking about him. He filled his cup and turned and leaned against the counter. Marybeth looked radiant, and she smiled at him. Missy was smiling, too, and she looked at him with a kind of detached respect he had not seen from her before. Neither was about to ask him about the job offer or what he thought about it. Yet. They were both trying to gauge his mood.

Lucy crawled into the kitchen on all fours and propped up on her haunches near the table with her mouth open. Missy fed her a piece of a waffle from a plate. Joe guessed this routine had been going on most of the morning.

“There's your treat, little doggie,” Missy said.

“I'm not a doggie,” Lucy said over her shoulder as she scooted back into the living room to be with her sister.

“I don't know what's going on, but the girls are being angels,” Marybeth told Joe. “Maybe their grandmother brings out the best in them.”

Joe laughed, and Missy gave Marybeth a look.

The telephone rang in the office, and Joe excused himself to answer it. There was silence on the other end after Joe identified himself. The barely perceptible hiss in the line indicated it was long distance.

“You don't know me.” It was a woman's voice. “I work at headquarters in Cheyenne.” Her voice was steady, but nervous. She was barely audible.

Joe reached behind him without looking and closed the office door. It was now quiet in the room. He sat down at his desk.

“You called about a package today,” the woman said. “I saw it come in Tuesday and it went to Game Biology. Then it disappeared.”

“What do you mean it disappeared?” Joe asked.

“It disappeared.”

Joe thought about it, saying nothing. The woman again said that it had disappeared. She clipped her words, and he could sense the caution in her voice, as if someone might walk in on her any minute.

“Who are you?” Joe asked.

“Never mind,” she said. “I've got two kids and a husband who's out of work. I'm a state employee with benefits. I need this job.”

“I've got a couple of kids, too,” Joe said. “And another one on the way.”

“Then you had best just forget about that package,” the woman said sharply, not wanting to establish any kind of common interest. “Just forget about it and go on with your life.”

Joe frowned. It was the second time he had received that advice. While she talked, he slid open his desk drawer. The other envelope, the one with the last few pieces of scat, was still there.

She paused briefly, then continued. “Let me put it this way: anything you send us will get lost.”

“Why are you doing this?” Joe asked.

There was a hint of exasperation on the other end of the phone. “I don't know,” she said. “I just felt that I had to. I have to go now.”

“Thank you,” Joe said but she had already hung up.

Joe thought about what to do. Still holding the receiver, he sifted through his desk until he found his old address book and then dialed his friend Dave Avery. Joe and Dave had gone to college together and Dave now worked as a game biologist for the Montana Fish and Game Department in Helena. After they had caught up (Dave had divorced but was engaged again), Joe asked him if he could send him a sample for an independent analysis.

“Where was it found?”

“My backyard.”

“And my Wyoming colleagues can't decide what squeezed it out?”

“There's some dispute,” Joe hedged. He didn't want to go into the story of the lost sample. There wasn't any need to.

“Sound's like you're challenging me,” Dave said. “Name That Shit.”

“I am,” Joe said, forcing a laugh. Dave agreed to take a look at it, whatever it was, and to keep both the sample and the results in confidence.

Joe sat back in his swivel chair. He thought about what the woman at the lab had told him. He wondered how he could go about finding out who she was and if he even should. He believed she had told him the truth about the missing sample. He wished she hadn't, because things had suddenly become a lot more complicated.

The tires of
Joe Pickett's pickup made a sizzling sound as he drove through the wet streets of Saddlestring to the county sheriff's office. It was still raining, and there were very few people out on the streets. Those who were out were scurrying from one door to another holding their hands on top of their heads. Joe thought how strange it was that the rain had continued throughout the day. Rain was a rarity this time of year; in fact, it was a rarity, period. Wyomingites, Joe had observed, didn't know what to do when it rained except get out of it, watch it through the window, and wait for it to go away. The same people who chained up all four tires and drove through horizontal snowstorms and bucked snowdrifts just to go have lunch in town during the winter had no clue what to do when it rained. A few ranchers stretched plastic covers, sometimes referred to as “cowboy condoms,” over their John B. Stetsons but few people owned umbrellas. Fewer yet would let themselves be seen with an umbrella open because it would appear urban and pretentious, and the only rain slickers he ever saw were rolled up neatly and tied to the backs of saddles, where they generally remained. But Joe liked rain and wished there were more of it.

Vern had been right. Saddlestring was dying. A decade ago the coal mines in the county were operational and the Twelve Sleep Oil Field was pumping, but now both were silent. Only a reclamation crew still worked at the mine, and the oil wells had since been capped, waiting in vain for the price of a barrel of oil to rise. Even the agricultural jobs had shrunk as out-of-state wealth bought local ranches for tax write-offs and in some cases took them out of production. Cattle prices were the lowest in a decade. A quarter of the storefronts on the main street were boarded up. In the past five years, the population of the town had decreased by 30 percent. Houses were available in all parts of town, and the prices were cheap. Saddlestring's one radio station had announced it was going off the air as of the first of next month. Unemployment was high and getting higher. Vern's pipeline would pump not only natural gas but new blood and dollars back into the community.

Saddlestring was a classic western town borne of promise due to its location on the railroad, but that promise never really played out. In the 1880s, a magnificent hotel was built by a mining magnate, but it had faded into disrepair. The main street, called Main Street, snaked north and south and had a total of four stoplights that had never been synchronized. The two-block “downtown” still retained the snooty air of Victorian storefronts designed to be the keystones of a fine city, but beyond those buildings, the rest of Main Street looked like any other American strip mall, punctuated by gun shops, sporting goods stores, fishing stores, bars, and restaurants that served steak.

Joe entered the sheriff's office and hung his jacket and hat on a rack.

“Still raining?” asked Deputy McLanahan from his desk behind the counter. Joe said it was and asked if Sheriff Barnum was available. Wendy, the receptionist/dispatcher, eyed Joe coldly, long enough to remind him that she still didn't like him after their telephone conversation on Sunday. But then she relented and buzzed Barnum on the intercom, saying “Game Warden Joe” was here to see him.

Sheriff Bud Barnum sat behind a desk stacked with mountains of paper and mail. He was sipping from a large white foam cup that he appeared never to put down. Although Barnum's office was good sized, there were stacks of magazines and documents everywhere, and the untidiness of it gave Joe a claustrophobic feeling. There was a single, brown Naugahyde chair across from Barnum's desk, and Joe moved a few pieces of unopened mail from it and sat down.

Barnum sipped loudly from his cup. Joe could smell the strong coffee.

“You ever been to that new coffee place down the block?” Barnum asked. Joe nodded that he had. Marybeth liked to meet him there for coffee and oversized muffins when he took a morning break.

“It's a pretty good place,” Barnum said quietly. “The people who own it are a little goofy, though. It's kind of a hippie establishment. They moved here from California, and she doesn't wear makeup or shave her legs, which I don't understand the significance of. He was some kind of computer engineer before he sold his stock and moved out here. All their food is vegetarian.”

To Joe, Barnum looked very tired. His pallor was grayish, and there were bags under his eyes.

“They've got all these different kinds of coffee these days,” Barnum said, looking at the big foam cup. “This is Ethiopian Jaba-Java. All my life I thought there was only one kind of coffee and that it came out of a big red can with a little Mexican or Colombian farmer on it. Then all of the sudden there are a hundred kinds of coffee. They feature a new kind of special coffee every day in that place. I've been trying a different one every day to try and make up for all of those years I was sheltered. I don't know why it is that alcohol and tobacco are now bad, but jolts of caffeine are suddenly good. It is beyond me, and it makes me feel old.”