Winterkill - C. J. Box [51]
“I can’t believe that poor man was walking down the middle of the road,” she said. “On a night like this.”
“I’ll try to find out why,” Joe said. “Now go to bed and get some sleep.”
“How are you going to get home?” she asked.
Joe hadn’t thought of that yet. Marybeth had taken the car home after they had brought Wardell to the hospital.
“I’ll figure it out,” he said.
The hospital was silent and subdued, the lights dimmed for the night. Mrs. Wardell had been in to see her husband after he came out of surgery, and she thanked Joe for bringing him into town.
“But I was the one who hit him,” Joe said.
She patted Joe’s arm. “I know,” she said. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. “But if you hadn’t found him, the doctor said there was no doubt he would have died of exposure out there. It’s eighteen below.”
“I wish I could have missed him, though.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Pickett,” she said soothingly. “He’s alive, and conscious. The doctor says he’ll be okay.”
“You think it would be okay if I talked with him?”
Mrs. Wardell looked over Joe’s shoulder for a doctor or nurse but the hall was empty.
“They gave him medication to help him sleep,” she said. “I’m not sure he’ll make much sense.”
Birch Wardell lay in his hospital bed with his eyes at half-mast. A thin tube of fluorescent light extending from the headboard lit up half his face and threw peaked shadows across his blankets. In addition to his broken pelvis, Wardell also had a broken collarbone and nose. Stitches climbed from his neck into his scalp like railroad tracks. Joe had overheard the nurses say that the tips of three of his fingers and four of his toes were severely frostbitten.
The man in the bed was stout and in his mid-forties, with a thick mustache and brown eyes. Joe had seen him before while patrolling.
Wardell’s eyes found Joe in the doorway, and he raised his good hand slightly in greeting.
“You doing okay?” Joe asked softly.
Wardell seemed to be trying to find his voice. “Much better since they filled me full of drugs. In fact, I’m kind of . . . happy.”
Joe approached Wardell. The room smelled of bandages and antiseptic.
“Happy New Year,” Joe said, smiling.
Wardell grunted, and then winced because the grunt clearly hurt his ribs.
“Thanks for saving my life. The doctor said I couldn’t have stayed out there much longer.”
“I’m just sorry I hit you,” Joe said. “So what happened? You walked all the way out of the breaklands after you wrecked your truck?”
“I was on my way back to town,” he said. “Must have been about four-thirty or so. I had about another half hour, forty-five minutes of light yet. I wanted to get home because Mrs. Wardell and me had tickets for the steak and shrimp feed at the Elks Lodge for New Year’s.”
Joe nodded, urging him on.
“I seen a white pickup truck on BLM land up on a ridge, past the signs that say the damn road is closed in the winter. You know, in that cooperative Forest Service/BLM unit?”
Joe had patrolled the area. It was a rough, treeless expanse of sharp zigzag-cut draws and sagebrush that stretched from the highway to the wooded foothills of the Bighorns. The “unit” had been recently designated a research area, jointly managed by the two federal agencies to study the spread of native buffalo grass in the absence of cattle or sheep. The designation had raised the ire of several local ranchers who had grazed their stock in the breaklands for years, and of some local hunters and fishermen who used the roads to get to spring creeks in the foothills. Wardell was the project manager.
“Well, this white truck was in the process of pulling my ‘Road Closed’ signs out of the ground with a chain. When I seen that, I thought: ‘What the hell?’” Wardell pronounced it “hay-uhl.”
“I heard something about signs being vandalized,” Joe said.
Wardell nodded his head slightly. It took him a moment to start up again—the sedatives were working. Joe hoped Wardell could finish the story before he went to sleep. “It’s been going on for a few months