C. Box - Breaking Point

“Yes,” he said, “I think it’s broken.”

“Will it mend on its own? I know that happens sometimes.”

“And sometimes it doesn’t,” Joe said. They both knew what would happen to the bird if the wing didn’t heal itself. No veterinarians in the area accepted wounded wild birds because there was little they could do other than stabilize them. There was a rehabilitation center in Jackson and another in Idaho, but Joe didn’t know when he’d have the time to get to either-or if either place would want the bird.

“Be right back,” he said, and went out of the barn and around the house to his pickup. He came back with a thick roll of Ace bandage from his first-aid kit and asked Sheridan to hold the bird still. He carefully wrapped the elasticized tape around the bird so its wings were bound tight. The bird didn’t squawk while he did it, and Joe was pleased with the job.

“Let’s keep this on him,” he said. “See if that wing mends. Who knows? Maybe he’ll fly again.”

Joe put his hand on Sheridan’s shoulder. She was tough, and had grown up with a full awareness of the circle of life in the wild. She could deal with it, however this turned out.

“I hope so,” she said. “I’m already kind of fond of him. Did Nate ever name his birds?”

“No.”

“I might.”

He nodded and turned to go back to the house, when she said, “The EPA isn’t entirely evil.”

Joe stopped short of the door. “I didn’t say they were,” he said. “They paid for my water guzzlers.”

“I feel they mean well in most cases,” Sheridan said. “The good they do outweighs the bad, I feel.”

Joe turned and nodded. “Probably,” he said, and no more.

“I just wanted to get that out,” Sheridan said, looking away. “I don’t want to get in a big argument about it.”

“I’m not arguing with you. There are bad eggs in every bureaucracy, and the bigger the agency gets, the more there are. We have a few knuckleheads in the Game and Fish Department. But I can’t figure out how this could have happened twice .”

“Well,” she said, “thanks for listening, anyway.”

“Sure,” Joe said, reaching for the barn door.

“Oh-I need to show you something else later.”

“What?”

“Are you investigating a case where some idiots shot an antelope buck about a million times and left it to rot in a field?”

“Yes,” he said, taken aback.

“I think I know who did it,” she said.

“Did you hear something at the restaurant?” he asked.

“No. They posted some photos on Facebook.”

Joe smiled. “Yes, I’d like to see it.”

“Is Mr. Roberson a murderer?”

He hesitated, but when she looked hard at him, he said, “Probably.”

“Poor Hannah,” Sheridan said, and fed her kestrel another piece of chicken.

Joe lay in bed with his fingers laced behind his neck and stared at the dark ceiling. The curtains rustled slightly with a cool breeze coming down from the mountains, and he could hear the horses tussling in the corral. It was 2:30 in the morning.

Pam had left, and Hannah stayed over again. While Joe was in the barn with Sheridan, Lisa Greene-Dempsey had called his cell phone and left a message saying she was in town and he was to meet her for breakfast at the Holiday Inn the next morning at 7:30. It wasn’t a request.

Sheridan had shown him the Facebook pages for nineteen-year-old Bryce Pendergast and twenty-year-old Ryan McDermott, both of Saddlestring, both classmates of hers from high school. Pendergast’s page showed him cradling a used.223 Ruger Mini-14 rifle with a banana clip. McDermott’s had a short video of a full-grown pronghorn getting cut down by a series of shots and someone off camera hooting about it. The photo and the video had been posted the same night a week before. Joe recognized the buck by its curled-in ivory-tipped horns.

“Can’t sleep either?” Marybeth asked, fully awake.

“Nope.”

“I can’t stop thinking about the Robersons,” she said. “How horrible it is what happened with them.”

Joe grunted. He said, “Something about the story Pam told us doesn’t sound right.”

“Do you think she was lying? Leaving something out?”

“I want to hope that,” Joe said. “But it’s so similar to what happened in Idaho. There’s no way it can just be a coincidence.”

Marybeth asked, “Is it possible it’s some kind of warped policy directive? To go after people in different states in the same way?”

“Not likely,” Joe said. “The EPA is getting heat and bad publicity for the Sackett case because it was so outrageous. There’s no way they would encourage their people to do it again. No, this is similar, but it’s different. I just can’t figure out how. And I can’t figure out why Pam and Butch are in the middle of it.”

Marybeth sighed and snuggled in closer to him. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It just always amazes me how you can know someone for years and then find out things about them you never even imagined. I never had a clue about their dispute with the EPA, or that Butch had left Pam for so long.”

“They kept it in all that time,” Joe said.

Marybeth placed her bare arm over his chest. She said, “Sometimes I think the most mysterious thing that exists is the interworking of a relationship. You can just never even guess the things that go on behind closed doors.”

Joe said, “Nope.”

“Hannah is the one I’m most worried about.”

Joe said, “Yup.”

Joe thought about the arrival of Batista and Underwood on the scene. Underwood seemed to Joe like a type he’d dealt with before: tough, cold, professional-doing a dirty job well if they had no choice. A little like his friend Nate Romanowski and Nate’s friends. Despite Underwood’s manner and innuendo, Joe thought he could deal with him.

Batista was another matter. Batista unnerved Joe in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

But when he closed his eyes, he saw the haunted face of Butch Roberson, somewhere up there in the beetle-killed forest in the dark, no doubt listening for the first sounds of the men who would be coming to hunt him down.

Early the next morning, Dave Farkus awoke from a dream about someone pounding on his door to realize that, yes, someone was pounding on his door. And when someone pounded on the door, the entire twelve-by-sixty-foot single-wide trailer-perched on cinder blocks and sheathed in peeling sheet metal-shook as if it were coming apart at the rivets. He could even hear dishes tinkling in the cupboards above the sink.

“Hold on, goddamnit!” he shouted. “I’m coming, I’m coming. .”

Farkus threw back the covers and the stray black cat that slept on his bed screeched and ran for the closet. He stood up, spine popping like a muffled series of demolitions, and rubbed his face with his hands. Pulling on a pilled pair of sweats and a T-shirt, he slid his feet into a pair of cowboy boots and staggered down the narrow hallway past the bathroom, using the walls on both sides for balance.

Dave Farkus was fifty-seven and pear-shaped with rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns, and a bulbous nose. His top left incisor had a thin slot in it from biting off fishing line. He glanced at the digital clock over the stove. It was 6:29. He wondered who would be out and about so early. In his experience, if someone knocked on his door before seven or after nine at night, trouble of some kind was waiting on the porch.

He could see a bulky silhouette through the louvered slat windows of the metal front door. The silhouette was wearing a cowboy hat, and Farkus thought, They’ve come for me.

The trailer Farkus rented sat on an acre of sagebrush south of town, with a view of the municipal dump on one side and a gravel pit on the other. Someone had once attempted to plant a garden outside but had never progressed beyond making a rectangular outline in the dirt with river rocks. A 1953 Chevrolet pickup without an engine was propped up on its rims on the side of the trailer. Over the years, the trailer had settled so it listed slightly to the south. The high-altitude sun had faded the curtains to the point that they looked like parchment paper. The Formica tabletop was scarred with cigarette burns from a previous owner, and the floors were permanently gritty. But it had a satellite dish!