Winterkill - C. J. Box [81]
Joe swallowed. “I want to let April know that we miss her, and that we love her very much.”
Brockius appeared to think it over. Then he shook his head again. “No, I don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said with finality.
“Just tell me she’s here and that she’s okay,” Joe asked. “It would mean a lot to my wife to know that.”
“She’s here,” Brockius said, in a tone so low that Joe could barely make it out. Then Joe realized that Brockius didn’t want to be overheard by anyone in the RVs or hidden away in the brush. “And she seems fine.”
“Thank you,” Joe said.
“You best move on now, Mr. Pickett.” Brockius’s voice was raised back to normal now. “We’ll make sure the clothes and toys go to good use.”
Obviously, the conversation was over as far as Wade Brockius was concerned. He handed the remaining boxes to Brockius, who took them. He and Brockius exchanged a long, silent look. Brockius appeared troubled by the situation with April. This is not the kind of thing, he seemed to be communicating, that I want to be involved in.
“What comes out of those speakers back there?” Joe asked, as he prepared to leave.
Brockius paused and looked up and over Joe’s pickup at the speakers.
“I don’t know yet,” he said in a bass rumble. “But I suspect we’ll be finding out soon.”
“Did your people have anything to do with that dirty trick down on the BLM land?” Joe asked, out of the blue.
Joe wanted to see Brockius’s reaction to the question.
Brockius’s face hardened, as it had before. He was not puzzled by the question, which to Joe meant that the Sovereigns were in communication with someone on the outside—or that they were involved with the ambush. Brockius turned to walk back to his trailer.
“I’d suggest you look a little closer to home, Mr. Pickett,” Brockius said over his shoulder.
The opportunity to look closer to home came almost immediately, as Joe descended from the snowy mountains. He was still in deep snow, with twenty miles of rugged BLM breaklands laid out in a vista below him. The town of Saddlestring, beyond the breaklands, glittered in the morning sun.
His radio crackled to life.
“I think I’ve got a situation out here.” The signal was strong, and the voice belonged to a woman. “This is Jamie Runyan calling BLM headquarters. Does anybody read me?”
Joe heard a rush of static and assumed it was somebody trying to reply to Jamie Runyan from town.
“I didn’t get that at all,” she said. “Try again.”
There was another squawk.
“Damn it,” she said. “I don’t know whether anyone there can hear me or not, but I’m out in the joint management unit and I see a light-colored pickup up on top of a hill. I think it might be the vehicle Birch Wardell described. I don’t know whether to pursue it or not.”
Contact, Joe thought. He reached for the microphone, and waited for Jamie Runyan to repeat her message to the dispatcher once again.
“This is game warden Joe Pickett,” he said when she was through. “I read you loud and clear. Please stay put. I’m about fifteen minutes away from you.”
He increased his speed, and roared down the mountain as fast as he could without sliding off the road.
Jamie Runyan’s tan pickup with the BLM logo was pulled to the side of the gravel road with its exhaust burbling. Joe stopped behind her and swung outside. While driving down the mountain, he had unfastened his Remington WingMaster shotgun from his saddle scabbard behind his seat, and he carried it to her vehicle.
She was thick-bodied and plain, with a wide, simple face. She rolled her window down as he approached.
“Where did you see the truck?” Joe asked, scanning the horizon. Because she had parked in a depression, her truck would be hard to see from a distance.
She gestured up the road, over the hill. “I was going up that hill when I saw it. It was a light-colored, older-model pickup on the top of the next ridge. It looked to me like the guy was pulling our fence down with a chain.”
“Did he see you?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I backed down the road out of sight when I saw him.”
“Has anyone from your office replied to you?”
She