Free Fire - C. J. Box [3]
It was the first October in sixteen years Joe was not in the field during hunting season, on horseback or in his green Game and Fish pickup, among the hunting camps and hunters within the fifteen hundred-square-mile district he had patrolled. Joe was weeks away from his fortieth birthday. His oldest daughter, Sheridan, was in her first year of high school and talking about college. His wife’s business management firm was thriving, and she outearned him four to one. He had traded his weapons for fencing tools, his red uniform shirt for a Carhartt barn coat, his badge for a shovel, his pickup for a ’99 Ford flatbed with LONGBRAKERANCHES painted on the door, his hard-earned authority and reputation for three weeks of overseeing a twenty-seven-year-old meth dealer who wanted to be known as Shamazz.
All because of a man named Randy Pope, the director of the Game and Fish Department, who had schemed for a year lookingfor a reason to fire him. Which Joe had provided.
When asked by Marybeth two nights ago how he felt, Joe had said he was perfectly happy.
“Which means,” she responded, “that you’re perfectly miserable.”
Joe refused to concede that, wishing she didn’t know him better than he knew himself.
But no one could ever say he didn’t work hard.
“Unhook that stretcher and move it down a strand,” Joe told Bud Jr.
Bud Jr. winced but did it. “My back . . .” he said.
The wire tightened up as Bud cranked on the stretcher, and Joe stapled it tight.
They were eating their lunches out of paper sacks beneatha stand of yellow-leaved aspen when they saw the SUV coming. Joe’s Ford ranch pickup was parked to the side of the aspens with the doors open so they could hear the radio. Paul Harvey News, the only program they could get clearly so far from town. Bud hated Paul Harvey nearly as much as silence, and had spent days vainly fiddling with the radio to get another station and cursing the fact that static-filled Rush Limbaugh was the only other choice.
“Who is that?” Bud Jr. asked, gesturing with his chin toward the SUV.
Joe didn’t recognize the vehicle—it was at least two miles away—and he chewed his sandwich as the SUV crawled up the two-track that coursed through the gray-green patina of sagebrush.
“Think it’s the law?” Bud asked, as the truck got close enough so they could see several long antennas bristling from the roof. It was a new-model GMC, a Yukon or a Suburban.
“You have something to be scared of?” Joe asked.
“Of course not,” Bud said, but he looked jumpy. Bud was sittingon a downed log and he turned and looked behind him into the trees, as if planning an escape route. Joe thought how many times in the past his approach had likely caused the same kind of mild panic in hunters, fishermen, campers.
Joe asked, “Okay, what did you do now?”
“Nothing,” Bud Jr. said, but Joe had enough experience talkingwith guilty men to know something was up. The way they wouldn’t hold his gaze, the way they found something to do with their hands that wasn’t necessary, like Bud Jr., who was tearing off pieces of his bread crust and rolling them into little balls.
“She swore she was eighteen,” Bud said, almost as an aside, “and she sure as hell looked it. Shit, she was in the Stockman’s having cocktails, so I figured they must have carded her, right?”
Joe snorted and said nothing. It was interesting to him how an old-line, hard-assed three-generation rancher like Bud Longbrakecould have raised a son so unlike him. Bud blamed his first wife for coddling Bud Jr., and complained in private to Joe that Missy, Bud’s second wife and Marybeth’s mother, was now doing the same thing. “Who the fuck cares if he’s creative,” Bud had said, spitting out the word as if it were a bug that had crawled into his mouth. “He’s as worthless as tits on a bull.”
In his peripheral vision, Joe watched as Bud Jr. stood up from his log