C Box - Winterkill

“You’re one of the few, then.” Hersig reached inside his blazer and handed Joe a folded sheaf of documents. The cover page of the fax was addressed to Robey, and the letterhead showed that it was from the Sovereign Citizens of the Rocky Mountains. After the cover was page after page of dense legalese. Statutes were cited throughout, including the Uniform Commercial Code. Joe was puzzled, and glanced up to Hersig.

“What is this?”

Hersig smiled sourly. “Two things, actually. The first is a subpoena to appear before their court to defend against the charge of impersonating a public official. The second is a lien against the county courthouse, the sheriff’s office, and my home for $27.3 million dollars.”

“What?”

Hersig nodded, and swallowed dryly. “Subpoenas and liens were faxed all over the place during the middle of last night.” He held his hand out-Joe noticed it was shaking slightly-and started counting off with his fingers. “The mayor, the town council, the county commissioners, the chief of police, the BLM director, Melinda Strickland, the governor of Wyoming…”

“Governor Budd got one?”

Hersig nodded and continued. “The Interior Secretary of the United States, the national Forest Service director, the director of the FBI, and I don’t know who all else got them nationally. Those are just the phone calls we’ve received this morning. That’s just the East Coast, which is two hours ahead of us. We don’t know how many people in the West will call.”

“What prompted this?” Joe had never seen Hersig so shaky.

Hersig’s eyes narrowed. Joe thought Hersig was about to spit a name out when the likely bearer of the name walked into the room.

Melinda Strickland wore her Forest Service uniform, and her cocker spaniel trailed behind her on a leash. She strode purposefully to the front of the room and stationed herself behind a podium. Sheriff Barnum flanked her on one side, Dick Munker on the other. Munker sucked on a cigarette with the same intensity as an asthma victim using an inhaler.

“Thank you all so much for coming,” Melinda Strickland said, her manner incongruously pleasant. Joe noted that her hair was a mousy brown color once again. “As you know, a situation developed yesterday that compounded during the night. I see Game Warden Joe Pickett in the back there-he somehow learned about this meeting-and we all have our friend Joe to thank for bringing at least one of the murderers to justice!”

Joe wished he could worm himself through the back wall, as officers, deputies, and troopers all turned and looked at him. His fellow state employees-the troopers-clapped sharply, but they were the only ones. Joe knew that the others, especially the deputies, probably felt they’d been shown up. His intuition was confirmed when he noticed how Barnum was glowering at him from the front of the room. Someday, Joe thought, he and I will need to have it out. There are scores to settle.

“The important thing…” Strickland shouted over nonexistent applause, as if trying to bring the silent room to heel, “The important thing is that we’ve been anticipating this situation for quite some time and we have everything completely and totally and awesomely under control. So now I’d like to turn the briefing over to Dick Munker of the FBI, who is heading up the operation on my behalf.”

Munker extinguished his cigarette and turned to the podium, but Strickland thought of something and remained. She raised a thick stack of papers in the air and waved them. Joe recognized them as similar to what Hersig had showed him.

“I don’t know how many of you got these during the night, but now you know the kind of twisted people we are dealing with here, ya know!”

Munker lit another cigarette and gave her a moment to leave the podium. When she did, he surveyed the room with amusement in his eyes before stepping forward. He wore a gray sweater over a black turtleneck, and a shoulder holster. A two-way radio was hanging in a case on his belt.

Munker began by nodding toward Joe. “A federal official is murdered while in his custody. The reason he gets murdered is because he manages to escape under the nose of our game warden here. Then our game warden, with a steering wheel handcuffed to his wrist, chases the escapee through the snow only to find him pinned to a tree by arrows.” His tone was accusatory, his eyes cold and mocking. “This is the man who is now our little hero. Well done, Game Warden.”

Joe felt as if he’d been slapped. Even the deputies who had withheld applause seemed surprised by Munker’s nastiness, and they didn’t turn around to further embarrass Joe. Only Barnum stared and smirked.

After a long, leisurely drag that allowed his comments to hang in the air even longer, Munker cocked his head to change the subject. “Gentlemen, we are at war, and this is now a war room.” Portenson wheeled a large chalkboard into the room. On it was a large-scale diagram of the Sovereign Citizen compound in relation to the two roads that approached it.

“We’ve had entrance and exit roads blocked,” Munker said, pointing at red X’s on the map. “The only way out, or in, is via those roads or over the snow to nowhere. As soon as this meeting is over, the roadblocks will be manned again. The compound is currently quiet after a full night of audio Psy-Ops-psychological operations. We’re waiting on a warrant being signed by the judge, and when we have it we can apply even more pressure. Unfortunately, the judge received one of those documents Ms. Strickland showed you earlier and he’s a little shaken right now.”

Munker smirked, and inhaled.

“These liens and subpoenas are old fucking news, gentlemen. The Montana Freemen invented the trick back in 1995. Those losers found out they could paralyze the local community and all of the goddamned ‘officials’ in the State of Montana by sending those things out. Nothing makes a politician crap his shorts faster than a threat of legal action. As some of you know, there are some dregs of the Freemen up there in that compound now, so they know how the scheme works.”

Joe barely heard what Munker was saying. He was still stinging from the unprovoked attack that started the meeting. It seemed to have come from nowhere. Joe knew that it was calculated. Calculated to do exactly what, he wasn’t sure. But it hurt.

When he glanced up, he realized that Elle Broxton-Howard was standing next to him. She looked at him with a mixture of false affection and pity. He hated that.

“… Sheriff, what can you tell us about Spud Cargill?” Munker asked, turning his head toward Barnum.

“Spud Cargill was thought to have been seen yesterday afternoon in a stolen vehicle driving like a bat out of hell up Battle Mountain Road,” Barnum said, passing out copies of Cargill’s photograph. Joe took one as the stack went by. It was a Saddlestring Roundup photo from two years ago, when Cargill caught a five-and-a-half-pound rainbow trout to win an ice-fishing tournament in Saratoga, Wyoming. “He was seen going up, and blew right through the roadblock, but he wasn’t seen coming down. It’s possible he came down between the shift change, but we have no information on that. There’s too many old Forest Service roads up there to keep watch on all of them, but we’ve tightened up the security on the main roads as of today. Our assumption is that he is in the Sovereign compound, and the Sovereigns are harboring him. Last night, as many of you know, they refused to turn him over or even let us look for him. This leads us to believe that Cargill may have been in cahoots with them since the beginning.”

“There’s a leap of logic,” Joe whispered to Hersig. Hersig pretended he hadn’t heard.