Dark Sky (Joe Pickett #21)(30)

“I’m not fucking around,” the man said while applying a little more pressure to the point of the knife. “I’ll push it all the way into your heart if you try anything stupid.”

“I won’t.”

“Walk slow.”

“Where are we going?”

“The camp, idiot.”

As he stepped away from the tree, Joe shot a glance over his shoulder.

“I know you,” he said.

“You should,” Kirby Thomas said. “You fucking arrested me once.”

Joe nodded and continued on. Six or seven years before, he’d been patrolling the breaklands in his pickup when he rounded a corner on a two-track road and saw that another truck was stopped and blocking his path. Joe had pulled around it to find a fatally wounded pronghorn antelope sprawled across the road in front of the truck and a man in the process of viciously kicking it in the head to kill it. The buck’s head snapped back with each blow and broken yellow teeth littered the ground. It was sickening, and Joe recalled the scene more clearly than he wanted to.

Kirby had obviously shot the antelope from the window of his truck directly from the road—two violations in one act—and instead of finishing off the wounded creature with a knife or fatal shot, he was manically kicking it with furious blows. That was until he looked up and saw the green Ford F-150 nose around his truck and he recognized who was driving it.

Joe would also never forget the look in Kirby’s eyes while he was kicking the pronghorn in the head. The young man looked out of control. Like he was really enjoying himself.

He arrested Kirby on the spot and cited him for the two clear violations as well as for not having a valid hunting license and conservation stamp and for wanton destruction of wildlife. The last charge was the stiffest and could result in jail time as well as the confiscation of Kirby’s truck and weapons and a ban on future hunting privileges, but Joe hadn’t been sure it would hold up in court. He hadn’t cared at the time, because he was both sickened and disgusted by Kirby’s acts and he wanted to make a public example of him.

Joe had learned from experience that men who violated hunting and fishing regulations, especially when they did so with sadistic glee, later turned out to be capable of anything. Which was why he wanted to throw the book at Kirby Thomas.

But he never found out whether he’d overcharged him or not because days afterward the young man was arrested for beating his live-in girlfriend to a pulp and was later sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins for domestic assault. Despite pleas from Kirby’s outfitter father, Earl, Joe didn’t drop his case against his son. Earl maintained that the hunting violations, whenever they were to be adjudicated, would damage his reputation as a prominent guide and outfitter in the area.

Instead, Joe held the charges in reserve for when he could serve them in person. He did it for himself and for that poor pronghorn antelope buck.

Until the moment Joe glanced over his shoulder, he hadn’t known Kirby was out. He didn’t think it was a good time to remind the man about the pending charges against him that Joe was sitting on.

And now Joe was terrified. He didn’t want to see that look in Kirby’s eyes ever again.



* * *



—

As Joe rounded the corner of the wall tent with Kirby right behind him, the knife point stinging him, he tried to quickly assess the scene:

Price sat on the log by the fire with his hands on his knees, looking up at Earl Thomas, who towered above him. Earl had a carbine in the crook of his arm.

Zsolt Rumy was sprawled on his side near the smoldering campfire. He had a head wound under his scalp that bled in rivulets across his face and pooled in the grass beneath his head. His wrists were bound together behind his back with nylon rope.

Brad Thomas, Earl’s massive other son and his partner in the outfitting business, straddled Rumy and grasped a shotgun butt-down, as if prepared to bludgeon the man yet again if he dared move. Joe noted that Brad’s large boots were approximately the same size as the tracks he’d seen earlier that morning.

Tim Joannides stood on the other side of the fire ring with his arms crossed in front of him and his head tilted toward Price, as if trying to solve some kind of puzzle. He wasn’t obviously injured and he wasn’t constrained.

Brock Boedecker stood just inside the flap of the doorway of the cook tent as if he didn’t know where else to go. He wore his big .44 in a holster at his side. So they hadn’t disarmed him. He looked at Joe as if pleading for some kind of understanding.

A glittering pile of smashed electronics—sat phones, solar battery chargers, PLBs, digital tablets, cell phones—were on the ground between the firepit and the opening of the wall tent.

Joe tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t on the fly. Too many mixed messages.

“Look who I found,” Kirby said to Earl.

Earl looked Joe over and nodded a greeting of sorts. Price gestured to Joe with his hands out, as if to say, What do you make of this?

Joe said, “What are you doing, Earl?”

“Something that should have been done a year ago, Joe,” Earl replied.

Joe shook his head, not understanding.

“Frontier justice, you might call it,” Earl said.

“For what?” Joe asked. “What do you think we’ve done?”

“You haven’t done anything,” Earl said. “Neither has Brock. You’re just with the wrong people at the wrong time.”