Dark Sky (Joe Pickett #21)(8)
Joannides looked suddenly distressed.
“Don’t worry,” Joe said. “I brought canisters for everybody.”
“Thank you.”
“What about PLBs?” Joe asked.
Personal locator beacons weren’t a legal requirement, but they were a good idea, Joe thought, especially since the Aloft team wasn’t experienced in the wilderness.
“Those we found,” Joannides said. “Skiers and snowboarders use them, I guess.”
* * *
—
As they took the exit to the state highway from the airport, Joe’s cell phone chimed with three messages, one after the other. He dug the device out of his breast pocket and checked the alerts on the screen. He was alarmed to have received such a sudden onslaught. Was it some kind of emergency?
The texts were from two of his daughters and his wife.
Lucy, his youngest at twenty years old and a sophomore at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, wrote:
You’re with Steve-2? OMG. I nearly fainted.
The text was studded with emojis of rolled eyes, emojis laughing hysterically accompanied by tears, and Lucy’s own face emoji looking seriously shocked.
April, his twenty-two-year-old who had recently graduated from Northwest Community College in Powell and was purportedly taking a couple of months off to figure out her future, wrote:
How can the most uncool man in the world be hanging out with Steve-2? The world is upside down.
Joe knew April wasn’t referring to Boedecker as the most uncool man in the world.
Marybeth, who must have sent her text from her desk at the Twelve Sleep County Library, where she was the director, wrote:
This is a photo I never expected to see! Good luck and I hope you get your elk. Call when you can.
Xoxoxoxoxoxo,
MB
Joe turned to Joannides. “How can my daughters know what we’re doing all of a sudden?”
Joannides said, “We posted it. Steve-2 will be thrilled to know your kids use the platform.”
“I thought this hunting trip was supposed to be below the radar?”
Joannides grinned. “Nothing Steve-2 does is below the radar. When he posts to ConFab, all of our users get the image. He’s a very high-profile individual. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t.”
“Maybe you should talk to your daughters some more.”
Joe sighed. At least Sheridan, his oldest, hadn’t texted him. He wasn’t surprised. Since taking a job with Yarak, Inc. as an apprentice falconer the year before, she was often traveling or in remote locations with bad cell service.
“Is this whole hunting trip going to be posted to social media for all the world to see?” Joe asked.
“What do you think?” Joannides replied.
“Is that wise?”
Joannides paused to consider the question. Finally, he said, “Steve-2 made the call. He thinks it’s important to expose our users to aspects of real life they probably don’t know, like the hunting culture. His life is an open book. Sometimes it’s hard to restrain him when he gets enthused about a new topic. He knows there’ll be some serious pushback from users who hate the idea of hunting, but there has been serious pushback before and our users keep growing. ConFab has grown two hundred and fifty percent this year alone. We’re taking on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and all of the ‘dinosaur platforms,’ as Steve-2 likes to put it.”
Joe nodded. Joannides had answered the wrong question.
“Aren’t there people out there who don’t like him?” Joe asked.
“Sure there are. There are always negative people and haters, especially on social media. But we like to think of them as users who just haven’t been persuaded yet.”
Joe nodded again and drove on. In the past, he’d been accused of appearing naive at times. But it was nothing compared to Steve-2’s crew, he thought.
But then again, as Governor Allen had said, Steve-2 was a billionaire tech mogul. Joe was a Wyoming game warden.
* * *
—
The pavement gave way to gravel, then eventually narrowed into a two-track road. The pine trees closed in on it and branches swept by and sometimes scratched the exterior of Joe’s pickup. Each time it happened, Joannides flinched as if he expected a branch to break through the windshield and impale him.
Joe drove slowly and cautiously as the trail switchbacked up the mountain. At clearings he slowed to look ahead for oncoming vehicles—there were too many places where trucks meeting on the road would have no place to pull over or back up.
As they made a sharp turn to the right on the side of the slope, the Twelve Sleep Valley opened up to the east. The vista was almost overwhelming, even for Joe, who had experienced the view many times before. Depending on the weather, the time of day, and the cloud cover, the look of the valley changed every time. The tree-clogged river zippered through the bottom and the small town of Saddlestring shimmered in the sun in a distant cluster of sun-glints. Thirty miles away, another mountain range emerged from low-hanging clouds.
The magnificence and vastness of the scene was lost on Joannides.
“I brought the green smoothies for tonight since you said we might be getting to camp late,” Joannides said, not even looking up. “You don’t need to worry about that.”