Wolf Pack, page 7
Joe stopped his truck and waved. In return, the old man squinted back at him and twin columns of smoke plumed from his nostrils.
“Hello there,” Joe called out. He kept his truck running, and when he climbed out, he stood near enough to the open door that he could retreat behind it if the old man raised the shotgun.
“What do you want?” the man asked. “This is a private road.”
He had a leathery face, a large nose, and deep inset dark eyes. Late seventies, early eighties maybe. He looked like he’d lived a rough life. His voice was high-pitched and raspy. Joe caught a flat Old-Country-by-way-of-New-York-or-New-Jersey accent in his cadence.
“I’m the Saddlestring game warden. I’m looking for a trapper who listed his address as being on this road.”
“A trapper?” the man asked. There was a hint of amusement in the question. “What’s his name?”
“Tom Kinnison.”
“Tom? I don’t know nobody . . .” And then the man paused. Joe noted that something passed over his face, but it was barely discernible.
Then: “He ain’t here right now.”
“So you do know him?”
The old man shrugged, but didn’t answer.
“What are you hunting?” Joe asked, and gestured toward the shotgun.
“Nothing. It’s for protection.”
“Protection against what?”
“Bears. There’s bears around here coming out of their dens. They’re hungry. Oh—and wolves. I heard there were wolves around.”
“There are some wolves around,” Joe confirmed.
A twelve-gauge shotgun was a devastating close-in defense weapon for either species.
“You might consider picking up a can of bear spray,” Joe said. “Spray is actually more effective on charging bears than a load of buckshot.”
The old man waved the advice away. “I suppose there’s also wolf spray.”
“Not really.”
He patted his shotgun. “This is my wolf spray.”
“Is your place up the road?” Joe asked.
The old man said, “I live there, but it belongs to my son.”
“So you and Kinnison both live there?”
The man nodded warily.
“Tell me,” Joe asked, “is Kinnison a trapper?”
“How would I know? I stay outa his business and he stays outa mine.” Rat-a-tat-tat.
“Do you know when he’ll be back? I’d like to talk to him.”
“Naw, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Joe approached the old man and noted that he tensed up the closer he got. Joe made sure to keep his movements slow and deliberate. The last thing he wanted to do was get into a gun battle. Joe was a notoriously poor shot with his sidearm and he’d be no match against a shotgun blast.
He said, “If I give you my card, would you make sure he gets it? He can call or email me when he gets back.”
“I ain’t no errand boy,” the old man said.
“What’s your name?” Joe asked while he drew a business card out of his breast pocket and handed it toward the man. He was close enough he could smell the cigarette smoke from the man’s clothing.
“Ernesto, but they call me Papa.”
Reluctantly, Papa took the card from Joe and dropped it into his coat pocket without looking at it.
“Is your son around? Maybe he knows when Kinnison will be back.”
“Naw, he took my grandson to school. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“So I’m batting oh-for-two,” Joe said. “What’s your son’s name?”
Ernesto/Papa glared at Joe an uncomfortable length of time. Joe got the impression that this wasn’t the first time the old man had been questioned by law enforcement—and he knew he didn’t have to say what he didn’t want to say.
“His name is Bill,” the old man finally said.
“Thank you. Well, please ask Bill to give me a call if he knows when Kinnison is going to be around. My cell number is written on the back of that card I gave you.”
Ernesto/Papa nodded his head, but his eyes never left Joe’s face.
“So,” Joe asked, “have you encountered any bears on your walk?”
“No.”
“If you do, please let me know. We like to try and keep track of them.”
Papa looked at Joe suspiciously.
“I guess I’ll head back,” Joe said. He peered over the old man’s shoulder. “Is there a place I can turn around up ahead? This road is too narrow for me to do a U-turn.”
“Go about a quarter of a mile to the gate,” Papa said. “You can turn around there.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Joe said while extending his hand.
Papa simply stared at it for a moment, then stepped back to clear the road.
* * *
—
JOE CLIMBED INTO his truck and put it into gear. As he rolled past Papa, he tipped his hat to him. The old man glared at him with dead black eyes.
“That was strange,” he whispered to Daisy, who was curled up in the passenger seat.
Joe was a close study of people he encountered in the field. Almost all of them were armed, so Papa and his old-time shotgun wasn’t unusual in itself.
The large majority of hunters and fishers Joe met were helpful, polite, and law-abiding. He usually had a good sense of them within a few seconds.
The remainder fell into two camps—they were either overfriendly or sullen. The overfriendly types were either on the up-and-up but nervous to encounter law enforcement—a feeling Joe completely understood—or they were guilty of a violation and they used their gregariousness as an attempt at distraction.
The sullen ones were harder to read. Sometimes they were that way because they figured they’d been caught red-handed and they were in the process of dealing with their inevitable citation or arrest. But sometimes they were that way because they disliked authority of any kind and they were just putting up with Joe in the hope that he’d soon go away.
Papa, it seemed to Joe, fit into the latter category.
Plus, he thought, former urbanites from the East Coast, which is where Joe assumed Papa had come from, generally had no experience seeing a game warden in the field.
* * *
—
TREES HAD BEEN removed at the entrance of the closed gate so that people like Joe had room to stop and turn around and go back the way they’d come. He noted the thick concrete columns that emerged from the loam on either side of a heavy steel gate. There was a keypad mounted in the right column for entry as well as an intercom and button.
The gate was formidable, and to Joe it stood out like a glass-and-steel high-rise in a mountain meadow.
As he did a three-point turn, he could see the layout of the compound beyond the gate. There was a large two-story home with a green metal roof flanked by smaller cottages on each side. Two on the right, three on the left. The construction looked recent because the varnished logs on the structures shined bronze in the muted sunlight.
There was an attractive footbridge over a small stream that flowed through the property, and young cottonwood trees that looked recently planted.
A large open outbuilding on the other side of the ranch yard housed a collection of tractors, plows, and ATVs. Joe paused when he caught a glimpse of the back end of a white Ford Expedition parked in the building.
He flipped the caps off a pair of binoculars and raised them to his eyes. The license plate was covered with a coat of mud, but he could make out the numbers. It was Wyoming license plate 2-8948. Next to the bucking horse logo was the 2 that designated Laramie County, which was where the state capital of Cheyenne was located—and was four and a half hours and four hundred and forty miles away. Joe thought that was odd because locals usually got their plates in Saddlestring. He wrote down the plate number in his notepad.
And he wondered if inside the white SUV he would find the controls for piloting a drone.
He’d call dispatch to run the plate as soon as he hit the Winchester Highway. Then he’d call Katelyn and exchange the number with her.
Joe knew that Dulcie wouldn’t approach Judge Hewitt for a search warrant of the property until they had more than a long-distance glimpse of a white SUV for probable cause. But if Katelyn could get a plate number from the vehicle driven by the drone pilot . . .
* * *
—
PAPA STILL STOOD where Joe had left him on the side of the road. Joe assumed he’d stayed there to make sure he came back.
As he approached the old man, Joe slowed his pickup to a halt and leaned toward the open passenger window.
“Do you mind if I ask you another question?”
The old man plucked the cigarette out of his mouth with nicotine-stained fingers and waited.
“Does anyone fly a drone around here?”
“So what if they do?”
Not exactly a denial, Joe thought.
“I’m just curious. We’ve been having some trouble with a drone from around here chasing game off the winter range. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Papa lifted his chin in a haughty way. “Are drones illegal, Game Warden?”
“Nope. Not if they’re registered with the FAA. But chasing wildlife is a violation of state law.”
Papa seemed to consider what he would say. Finally, he looked away. “I don’t know nothing about drones.”
Joe thought he was lying, but he said, “Well, if something comes to mind, you have my card.”
Papa leveled his gaze again, but said nothing.
Joe watched the man recede in his rearview mirror as he drove away. He still hadn’t moved from his spot.
* * *
—
PAPA WATCHED AS the pickup burbled away and vanished out of sight.
Bill stepped out from behind an eight-foot stand of brush and joined him on the side of the road. Bill was a dark man who stood a head taller than his father. His short-cropped beard sparkled with silver, and he wore an embroidered cowboy shirt, a wide-brimmed black hat with a feather in it, and two-thousand-dollar ostrich-skin boots. His canvas rancher coat sagged on the left side due to the large caliber handgun in a special concealed-carry pocket inside the lining.
“What did he want?” Bill asked.
“He wanted to talk to Swole,” Papa said.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him he wasn’t here. Which is true.”
“Good.”
“He said Swole was a trapper.”
“Did he actually call him Swole?” Bill asked suspiciously.
“Nah. He asked for Tom Kinnison. It took me a second to realize who he meant.”
Bill sighed heavily. “I told that guy not to mess around with those damn traps he bought. He must have done something stupid.”
“Swole’s a stupid guy,” Papa said. “Then the game warden asked me if I knew anyone around here with a drone.”
Bill rolled his eyes and grinned.
Papa reached into his coat pocket and handed the card to Bill.
Bill read it and said, “Uh-oh.”
* * *
—
ON THE WAY back to Winchester, Joe slowed near a bank of rural mailboxes mounted on a fence next to the turnoff to Elkhorn Drive. He hadn’t paid them any attention when he’d made the turn to find Kinnison.
The third box from the left was the newest, and there were stick-on stencils pasted to the front opening.
It read: 2204, followed by HILL.
Bill Hill, Joe thought.
Then he moaned when he realized he knew that name.
Papa had said, Naw, he took my grandson to school. I don’t know when he’ll be back.
Bill had taken his son, Justin, to school, where the boy had waited out front for Lucy to arrive with her dad that morning.
* * *
—
BEFORE CALLING EITHER dispatch or Katelyn, Joe tried Marybeth’s cell phone. It went straight to message.
He asked, “What do we know about Justin’s family?”
SUNDAY,
APRIL 29
We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.
Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, LETTER TO JOHN HOLMES
CHAPTER SEVEN
TWO DAYS LATER, on an unseasonably warm and cloudless morning on the sun-drenched western slope of the Bighorns, Katelyn Hamm observed closely as Nate Romanowski got prepared. The falconer had met her before dawn on the highway and followed her to the ridge where she’d seen the drone harassing the deer on the winter range. They’d parked their vehicles below the summit of the ridge so they couldn’t be seen from below on the valley floor.
She hadn’t met Nate before that morning and she was both wary of him and fascinated by him at the same time. She’d heard some of the stories, but it was impossible to know what was true and what was legend. Several of the falconers she knew in her district spoke of Nate with awe and in hushed tones. But an FBI agent she’d worked a case with said Romanowski should be rotting in federal prison and that “vigilantes” like him were a thing of the past and a threat to the future.
Joe claimed his friend Nate was talkative, but the only exchange she’d had with him in the last two hours was when he’d pulled up beside her pickup on the road.
“You’re Katelyn, I presume.”
“Yes.”
“Lead on.”
* * *
—
HE WAS TALL and rangy and there was a calm about him that was unnerving, she thought. He didn’t waste movement, and everything he did had a purpose. His broad back was to her as he leaned inside his vehicle and spoke in a low tone to the three or four birds he’d brought, as if prepping them for their assignments. She’d been a little concerned when he strapped on a leather shoulder holster with a large revolver under his left arm, but she’d heard about that, too.
He carried a five-shot .454 Casull revolver manufactured by Freedom Arms in Freedom, Wyoming. It was a hand cannon that could fire high-velocity rounds through all of the walls in a house and come out the other side, or disable an oncoming car. Supposedly, he was lethal with it.
The Yarak, Inc. van had been retrofitted. The back seats had been removed and replaced by several stiff rows of horizontal dowel rods mounted on the floor. Plastic sheeting had been placed over the carpeting and was splashed with white excrement. Behind the rods, or “stoops,” were square wire cages that appeared empty.
She guessed the van had the capacity to transport fifteen to twenty birds.
Four falcons stood erect on the first two stoops. Their heads were covered with tooled leather hoods, and long rawhide jesses hung from the talons that gripped the rods. The birds were so preternaturally serene that she had to watch them for several minutes to confirm that they were living, breathing creatures and not products of taxidermy.
Because she knew her voice would carry on such a still day, she spoke softly to Nate’s back.
“There’s no guarantee that drone will be up this morning, but a reliable trapper I know told me he’s seen it nearly every day in this area. That’s what I told Joe, anyway.”
Nate grunted that he understood, but he didn’t turn around.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. Then she felt embarrassed for saying it.
“This is a whole new concept,” she said, as if to explain herself. “I’ve never dealt with a drone before. Nobody has. It’s as new to me as it is to Joe. We’re in uncharted waters.”
He straightened up and turned around. His eyes were pale icy blue. He pulled a thick welder’s glove on his right hand. “I’d like to get that guy as much as you do.”
She nodded toward the falcons inside the van. “So do you let them fly up to get into position?”
He shook his head. “We wait until we’ve got a target.”
“How do you control them when they’re in the air?”
He looked at her for such a long time that she felt an urge to turn away. She felt chastened for her lack of falconry knowledge.
Then he said, “I don’t.”
* * *
—
JOE WAS four and a half miles away in the timber on the other side of the winter range. He’d used a forgotten logging road to get to the bottom third of the mountain, and he’d parked in an alcove where he could scope the meadow and get a few clear views of the sky above through openings in the pine trees.
He’d left his house at four-thirty that morning so he could get into position. Daisy had roused herself enough to jump into the cab, and she snored softly while curled up in the passenger seat.
Before the sun rose, he used his dome light to page through agency statutes to assure himself they were on firm legal footing.
According to section 12, “No person shall use any aircraft with the intent to spot, locate, and aid in the taking of any game animal from August 1 through January 31 of the following calendar year. Nothing in this Section shall apply to the operation of an aircraft in a usual manner where there is no attempt or intent to locate any game animal, such as aircraft used for the sole purpose of passenger transport.”
And: “(B) ‘Aircraft’ means any machine or device (including but not limited to airplane, helicopter, glider, dirigible, or unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV]) capable of atmospheric flight.”
He saw the problem: Whoever was piloting the drone had been doing so on April 26, when it was technically legal to do so. It would be hard to prove that the pilot wasn’t scouting big game with the purpose of hunting them later.
