C Box - Winterkill

“Why don’t you get in my truck, then?” Joe called. “I’ve got all four tires chained up and I’m pointed downhill. I think I can make it to town. We can come back up and dig out your Jeep later.”

Nate nodded once, then retrieved a daypack from his Jeep and waded through the thigh-high snow to climb into the cab.

“What in the hell happened to you?” Nate asked, looking Joe over.

“I got pounded on by a couple of the Sovereigns,” he said. “I deserved it.”

Joe slipped the pickup into gear and rolled forward to a dead stop in the deep snow.

“Uh-oh,” Nate growled.

Not responding, Joe shoved the pickup into reverse and gunned the engine, backtracking a few feet. Then he rammed it back into drive and hit the snow again with jarring force. The truck broke through, and Joe kept going.

“I’m not stopping again,” Joe said. “For anything.”

“Joe, I learned a lot about Melinda Strickland and Dick Munker in Idaho. None of it is good.”

“That’s where you went? Idaho?”

“I didn’t know you needed me here,” Nate said defensively. “You said as much. And yes, Idaho. Seventy percent of the state is federally owned and managed. If there’s any place where the locals know about specific federal land managers, it’s Idaho. I’ve got some friends there, and I was curious about Strickland and Munker.” He paused for a moment.

“Go on,” Joe said. He wanted to hear the story, but he also needed Nate to keep talking to help him stay awake and alert.

“I don’t want to scare you, Joe, but the fact is you’re going to need all the friends you’ve got against these two.”

Joe grunted. That wasn’t very encouraging.

“You want some hot coffee?” Nate asked, digging into his pack.

Joe nodded.

“Melinda Strickland is even worse than I thought,” Nate said while he poured the steaming coffee into Joe’s travel mug. “The people I talked to down there think she’s evil and insane. What they don’t know is if she started out evil and went insane, or started out insane so she doesn’t realize what she’s doing.”

Joe gulped the coffee, not caring that it was scalding his tongue. His body ached and his back was stiffening. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to tolerate the exertion it took him to keep the truck from bucking out of the tracks and off into a snowbank. He knew he should have asked Nate to drive, but it was too late for that; he wasn’t going to stop and run the risk of getting stuck.

“Just give me facts, Nate, not analysis,” Joe barked. “We don’t need psychobabble. We don’t have a lot of time, and I’m not sure I’ve decided how to play this yet.”

Nate refilled Joe’s cup and fitted it into the holder. As the cab finally began to warm up, he unzipped his parka.

“Melinda Strickland is the daughter of a senator from Oregon. She’s a trust-fund kid,” Nate said. “Her dad greased the skids for her to enter the federal government after she’d bounced around the Pacific Northwest and through various agencies in Washington, D.C. Apparently, she spent a few years in various institutions as well. Drug and alcohol problems. But the rumor is she’s a card-carrying paranoid.”

Joe shot a glance at Nate that he hoped reminded him to stick to facts.

“Even though she probably makes a good impression on some people at first, she’s a classic loose cannon, not capable of working with people. In a nutshell, she’s consistently treated her colleagues and co-workers like pieces of shit, saying things about them, playing one off of the other, and just general nastiness. She was involved in a bunch of lawsuits when she worked for the Department of Agriculture because of things she said and did to people. Her idea of management is to make subordinates cry. Oh, and she’s a pathological liar.”

Joe glanced over at Nate and could see that under his parka he was wearing his shoulder holster.

“Once she got into the Forest Service, she started bouncing all around the country. She left a mess everywhere she went. She’s the type that creates chaos out of order. No one knows what deep-seated problems make her the way she is, but the way the Forest Service handled it is how they generally handle things in the big government agencies.”

“Transferring her so she’s somebody else’s problem?” Joe asked. He knew how the game was played.

“Exactly,” Nate said. He spoke in a low, rhythmic cadence and rarely raised his voice. “She was in Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, South Dakota, Idaho twice, and then somewhere in Colorado. You know how it works-we all do. Longtime federal employees-especially if they’re middle-aged women and they like to threaten lawsuits and they’re daughters of senators-just don’t get fired very easily. Her big bosses are political appointees who know that if they can bury the problem for a while, the next administration will have to deal with it. Meanwhile, local communities are subjected to her and her ways .”

“Specifically?” Joe asked.

“Well, in Nevada she became convinced that a couple of the local ranchers with grazing leases were out to kill her dog. So she had them followed twenty-four hours a day by Forest Service rangers. This was in a town of three hundred people, where there were, like, two places to eat. And everywhere these ranchers went, two uniformed Feds went with them. Finally, one of the ranchers got drunk and forced a shoot-out. Both ranchers went down, and one Fed.”

Joe shook his head sadly, and instantly regretted it as a throbbing pain burned into the back of his skull.

“Finally,” Nate said, “The Forest Service ran out of places to hide her, and they were going to bring her up on harassment charges-finally hold her accountable for something-because she called a Latino contractor a “fat spic” in front of witnesses. Then her daddy stepped in and they figured out this new job for her. They made it up just for her-a position with a nice title but no staff or budget. It was a perfect place to stick her where she couldn’t do any damage. My contacts said that even that was a mistake, because when the administration changed, she convinced somebody to shuffle the budget and get her some funding. All of a sudden she’s got a travel budget, and in her mind a star was finally born. By the time the agency figured out what she’d done in a vacuum, that Elle what’s-her-name had latched onto her to do a profile and their hands were tied. They couldn’t get rid of the woman while she was being lionized by a journalist, so they just sort of let it go.”

“And now we’ve got her,” Joe said. His eyes burned with lack of sleep, and he felt a heightened sense of tension rising in his chest as they neared Saddlestring.

“They take a woman who hates people and put her in charge of a task force to go after rednecks who hate the government,” Nate said. “This is what I love about the Feds.”

Joe asked Nate to give him a minute and quickly called Marybeth on his cell phone. When she picked up, she sounded as if she had been up all night.

“I’m off the mountain and I’ve got Nate with me,” he said. “Yes, I’m fine,” he lied.

“Dick Munker, ” Joe said. “What’s his story?”

Nate whistled. “It would be a good thing,” he said, “If Dick Munker went away.”

“Meaning?”

“The guy is a bitter, sadistic asshole,” Nate said. “They knew this guy real well in Idaho, because he’s one of the FBI sharpshooters the state was trying to put in jail for Ruby Ridge. He was one of the triggermen. The first guy to shoot, it was alleged. Unfortunately, the case got dismissed because of jurisdictional problems. Munker did get demoted, and like Melinda Strickland he’s been bounced around the country in the hope that he’d retire so they wouldn’t have to take administrative action. The FBI hates to call attention to itself and its problem agents-especially these days-so they do everything they can to keep things quiet when they have a psycho on the payroll.”