C Box - Winterkill

“Falcons?” Joe repeated, thinking about Romanowski’s birds. He hadn’t fed them yet; there had been no time. He had to get out there soon.

“Then he vanished off the face of the earth from 1984 through 1998. Nobody can vanish like that unless they’ve got special help from the Feds.”

“Special Forces?” Joe asked. “He said something about that when I saw him at the jail.” Two of Romanowski’s claims-about Mrs. Longbrake’s dalliances and his Special Forces background-were now much more likely true than false, Joe thought.

“Really? That’s interesting,” Hersig said. “I didn’t know that. And Romanowski’s not cooperating. Even with his P. D.”

“I know. He says he’s depending on me to help him out,” Joe said sourly.

Hersig frowned. “Romanowski’s only arrest was in 1999-he was held in Idaho for allegedly beating a rancher. He claimed the guy shot his falcon out of the sky. Spent ninety days in the Blaine County Jail for that.”

“Do you see a connection between Romanowski, the Sovereigns, and Lamar Gardiner?” Joe asked. “They all sort of happened at once.”

Hersig peered at the ceiling for several beats. “It almost seems like there’s got to be one, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe so,” Joe said.

The door opened and one of the Forest Service employees looked in. “Oops, sorry,” he said.

Hersig waved to indicate it was okay. “Leave the door open. We’re through, aren’t we?”

“Yup.”

Hersig heaved himself off of the desk, and they stood in the doorway looking out. Elle Broxton-Howard stood in the middle of a gaggle of midlevel Forest Service managers as well as Reed and McLanahan. Hersig tilted his chin toward her.

“She likes ’em rugged and real, or so she says,” Hersig confided to Joe. “Ranchers, cowboys, loggers. Real manly men.”

Joe stared at Hersig. “How do you know that?”

Hersig smiled, but his face was flushed. “She told me that. And believe me, she’s got a few notches on her lipstick case in this county already.”

As if she’d heard Hersig, or read Joe’s thoughts, Broxton-Howard suddenly turned, extricated herself from the knot of admirers, and walked boldly up to Joe Pickett.

“You were there when Mr. Gardiner was killed,” she stated flatly. Joe was surprised she hadn’t known that already.

“Yes.”

“You’ve met with Wade Brockius and the Sovereigns as well.”

“Sort of.” Joe felt his neck getting warm.

“Then we must have an interview,” she said, her eyes boring into his, her jaw set with sincerity. Without breaking her gaze, she fished Joe’s card out of her pocket and raised it until it came into her view.

“Joe Pickett. Game warden,” she said, in a breathy British accent. Then she turned on her heel and walked back to her admirers.

Marybeth entered the room from a dark hallway, looking for Joe. Joe felt both guilty and slightly exhilarated. As Marybeth made her way over, Hersig leaned toward Joe and mocked, “We must have an interview!”

“What did Robey say about April?” Marybeth asked, as they drove out of Saddlestring on Bighorn Road. The storm clouds had blocked out the moon and stars, and the wind was relentless. Tiny flakes of snow, like sparks, flashed past the headlights.

“He wasn’t encouraging,” Joe said. “But he didn’t indicate that Jeannie’s tried to get April back, either.”

“That was a very strange experience back there,” Marybeth said, sighing. “The funeral was disturbing, and the reception was even worse. The person I feel for the most is Carrie Gardiner. Or Cassie, as Melinda Strickland calls her. I almost look forward to seeing my mother.”

Joe laughed. “Me, too,” he said. But he was thinking of Melinda Strickland. And Nate Romanowski. And Elle Broxton-Howard.

“What did she say to you?” Marybeth asked abruptly.

“Who?” Joe asked. He sounded guilty, even to himself.

“You know who,” Marybeth snapped. “The chick you and Robey were melting in front of when I came from the bathroom. Ms. Broxton-Howard.”

Again, Joe felt his neck get hot.

“She wants to interview me,” Joe said.

“I’ll bet that’s what she wants,” Marybeth snorted.

Joe didn’t say a word. He had learned that, in these kinds of situations, the less he said, the better.

He felt Marybeth looking at him and he turned to her.

“Honey, I…”

“JOE!” Marybeth shouted. And Joe looked, saw the ragged form of a man bathed in the white of his headlights, his wide-eyed face black with streaming blood, outstretched frozen hands up as if to shield himself; then he heard the sickening thump despite his violent effort to wrench the car away into the ditch, saw what looked like a scarecrow turned bright red by the taillights bounce and crumple on the glass-slick surface of the snow-packed highway in his rearview mirror, heard Marybeth scream.

His name was Birch Wardell, he was an employee of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and Joe hadn’t killed him after all. The collision did break Wardell’s pelvis, however, which was just one of many injuries he sustained that day after wrecking his truck in a sharp ravine in the breaklands that led up to the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains.

The emergency-room doctor had recognized Joe from when he’d brought Lamar Gardiner’s frozen body in.

“I’m seeing more of you than I want to,” the doctor said. “And every time you show up, you bring trouble.”

Joe agreed with him. But at least this time, he thought, the man’s alive.

Joe sat in the hallway on a molded plastic chair, still in his jacket and tie, outside Wardell’s room at the clinic. It was well into New Year’s Day. He had called Marybeth to tell her that Wardell was alive and expected to recover. Marybeth thanked God.

“I can’t believe that poor man was walking down the middle of the road,” she said. “On a night like this.”

“I’ll try to find out why,” Joe said. “Now go to bed and get some sleep.”

“How are you going to get home?” she asked.

Joe hadn’t thought of that yet. Marybeth had taken the car home after they had brought Wardell to the hospital.

“I’ll figure it out,” he said.

The hospital was silent and subdued, the lights dimmed for the night. Mrs. Wardell had been in to see her husband after he came out of surgery, and she thanked Joe for bringing him into town.

“But I was the one who hit him,” Joe said.

She patted Joe’s arm. “I know,” she said. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. “But if you hadn’t found him, the doctor said there was no doubt he would have died of exposure out there. It’s eighteen below.”

“I wish I could have missed him, though.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Pickett,” she said soothingly. “He’s alive, and conscious. The doctor says he’ll be okay.”

“You think it would be okay if I talked with him?”

Mrs. Wardell looked over Joe’s shoulder for a doctor or nurse but the hall was empty.

“They gave him medication to help him sleep,” she said. “I’m not sure he’ll make much sense.”

Birch Wardell lay in his hospital bed with his eyes at half-mast. A thin tube of fluorescent light extending from the headboard lit up half his face and threw peaked shadows across his blankets. In addition to his broken pelvis, Wardell also had a broken collarbone and nose. Stitches climbed from his neck into his scalp like railroad tracks. Joe had overheard the nurses say that the tips of three of his fingers and four of his toes were severely frostbitten.

The man in the bed was stout and in his mid-forties, with a thick mustache and brown eyes. Joe had seen him before while patrolling.