C Box - Winterkill

There was another squawk.

“Damn it,” she said. “I don’t know whether anyone there can hear me or not, but I’m out in the joint management unit and I see a light-colored pickup up on top of a hill. I think it might be the vehicle Birch Wardell described. I don’t know whether to pursue it or not.”

Contact, Joe thought. He reached for the microphone, and waited for Jamie Runyan to repeat her message to the dispatcher once again.

“This is game warden Joe Pickett,” he said when she was through. “I read you loud and clear. Please stay put. I’m about fifteen minutes away from you.”

He increased his speed, and roared down the mountain as fast as he could without sliding off the road.

Jamie Runyan’s tan pickup with the BLM logo was pulled to the side of the gravel road with its exhaust burbling. Joe stopped behind her and swung outside. While driving down the mountain, he had unfastened his Remington WingMaster shotgun from his saddle scabbard behind his seat, and he carried it to her vehicle.

She was thick-bodied and plain, with a wide, simple face. She rolled her window down as he approached.

“Where did you see the truck?” Joe asked, scanning the horizon. Because she had parked in a depression, her truck would be hard to see from a distance.

She gestured up the road, over the hill. “I was going up that hill when I saw it. It was a light-colored, older-model pickup on the top of the next ridge. It looked to me like the guy was pulling our fence down with a chain.”

“Did he see you?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I backed down the road out of sight when I saw him.”

“Has anyone from your office replied to you?”

She shook her head. “I think I’m out of range in these damn hills. The only person I heard was you.”

Joe nodded. “Do you mind if I borrow your truck? You can stay here in my truck and keep warm.”

She searched his face while she decided. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’ve got a theory about what happened,” he said. “If you let me borrow your truck I’ll look like I’m BLM and I can test it out.”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. Only authorized government personnel are allowed to drive these vehicles.”

“I’m authorized,” Joe lied. “The Game and Fish has an inter-agency agreement with the BLM.” He thought he sounded convincing, and it worked.

She got out of the cab, remembering to take her sack lunch.

Joe racked a shell into the chamber of his shotgun, then flipped the safety on and slid it muzzle-down onto the floorboards. He narrowed his eyes and gunned the truck up the gravel road.

As he cleared the hill he could see the light pickup Runyan had described. And she was right-it was in the process of pulling a post-and-wire fence down with a chain attached to its bumper. The fence had been erected by the BLM and Forest Service to keep the public off of the management study area.

The truck was about a half-mile from Joe. On his present course, he would soon be on the road beneath it. In his mind, he replayed the scenario Wardell had described to him that night in the hospital: how the truck took off out of sight over a hill while Wardell pursued. Joe wasn’t sure of the terrain over the hill, but he assumed it would be similar.

Despite the cold, Joe rolled down his window so he could hear the other vehicle better as he drove. As his BLM truck bucked and pitched on the frozen gravel road, the light-colored truck dropped in and out of view. Soon, Joe could hear the motor of the light-colored truck grinding in the still morning air. In a minute, Joe would be close enough to look up and see the driver, he thought, or perhaps a license plate.

But the next time the truck came into view, it was speeding away. Joe saw its outline against the deep blue sky as it crested the hill and went over it.

Following Wardell’s script, Joe jerked the wheel and left the gravel road, pointing the squat nose of his BLM truck up the hill where he had last seen the other truck. He crashed through two crusty drifts, and nearly lost traction as he approached the top of the hill. His back wheels threw plumes of frozen gray dirt as the pickup fishtailed on dirt and ice, but then they caught solid rock and propelled him up and over the top.

Joe’s heart pounded in his chest as he crested the ridge and plunged over it. The tire tracks from the other truck went down the hill and vanished into a wide, tall swath of evergreen brush at the bottom.

Joe reached for the shotgun, which had slid toward the passenger door during the rough ride up the hill, and pulled it close to him as he descended.

On cue, a light-colored truck emerged from the brush below and started climbing the opposite slope, directly across from him. The truck labored up the hill as well, sliding a little in loose shale and kicking out puffs of dislodged rock. At the rate Joe was flying down the hill and the other pickup was laboring up the opposite slope, he would be on it in seconds.

Joe tapped the brakes to slow his reckless plunge and gripped the wheel tighter. The tracks he drove in would soon be swallowed in the tangle of ancient juniper.

Suddenly, the brush closed over the top of his BLM truck and branches scratched the sides of his doors like fingernails on a chalkboard. A sap-heavy bough slapped the windshield, leaving needles and gray-blue berries smashed against the glass. He caught a flash of an opening through the branches ahead But then Joe did something Birch Wardell hadn’t done. He slammed on his brakes. Then, throwing the pickup into reverse, he floored the accelerator at the same time that he cranked the steering wheel to the right. The engine whined and the tires bit, and the vehicle flew back and to the side through the brush in a cacophony of snapping branches.

BOOM!

Joe hit something metal and solid so hard that his head jerked back and bounced off the rear-window glass. He slumped forward over the wheel as bright orange spangles washed across his eyes. Then smoke, or steam, enveloped the cab of the truck in darkness. Trying to shake his head clear, he looked up and smelled the steam. It was bitter and smelled like radiator fluid.

The spangles had shrunk to the size of shooting sparks when he fell out of the door of the pickup and landed on his hands and knees in the dirt and snow. His hat was smashed down hard on his head, and he pushed it up so he could see.

The twisted grille of the light-colored pickup furiously spewed green steam. A pool of radiator fluid smoked on the ground, and was beginning to cut its way through the snow toward him. Standing, Joe retrieved his shotgun from the seat. He walked around the back of the BLM pickup toward the vehicle he had smashed into.

The windshield of the light-colored truck was marred by a single spidery star where a man’s head would have hit it. Joe skirted the steam and looked into the cab to see a man slumped over the steering wheel, a cap askew over his face and dark rivulets of blood coursing down from under the cap into the collar of his coat. Joe recognized the coat, and the logo that was painted on the truck’s door even though a thick smear of mud had been applied to obscure it.

It was a flying T-Lok shingle with wings.

Joe opened the door, and Rope Latham, the roofer, moaned and rolled his head toward him.

“How bad are you hurt, Rope?” Joe asked.

“Bad, I think,” Rope said. “I think I’m blind.”

Joe reached into the cab and lifted the baseball cap that had fallen over Rope’s eyes. A three-inch cut ran along Latham’s eyebrows. The cut looked like it would require stitches, Joe thought, but it didn’t look much worse than that.

“I can see!” Rope cried.

“Climb on out of there,” Joe ordered, prodding Rope Latham in the ribs with his shotgun. “Turn around and put your hands on the truck and kick your feet out.”