Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(2)
The top button of her blouse enlarged exponentially and then there was a high impact and an explosion of red and black.
TWO
WYOMING GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT WAS IN AN UNFAMILIAR saddle on the wide back of an unfamiliar horse when the call came for him to return to his Saddlestring District immediately, “if not sooner.”
He was eight miles from the trailhead in the Teton Wilderness with three other riders, all on stout mountain quarter horses. Snow had dusted the treeless tops of the Gros Ventre and Teton Ranges during the night and it was cold enough that clouds of condensation haloed their heads.
They’d saddled up in the parking lot of the Forest Service campground before dawn using headlamps to see. The leather of the saddles, reins, and latigos had been stiff with the fall morning cold, and it had taken a full two hours of riding in the light of the sun before the frost in the grass melted away and Joe’s tack thawed out enough to be supple.
They’d assembled and left so early for a grim reason: to locate the mauled and likely dead body of a local elk-hunting guide who’d been attacked the evening before by a grizzly bear. Or at least that’s what his client, a hunter from Boca Grande, Florida, had claimed.
Joe rode with his twelve-gauge shotgun out of its scabbard and crosswise over the pommel of his saddle. He’d loaded it with alternating rounds of slugs and double-aught buckshot. His bear spray was on his belt and he’d made a point to unhook the safety strap that held the canister tight in its holster.
Over his shoulder was a semiautomatic Smith & Wesson M&P rifle chambered in .308 Winchester with a bipod and red dot scope and a twenty-round magazine. Two of the other riders carried the same weapon because it had recently replaced M14 carbines in the arsenal of the department’s newly formed Predator Attack Team—a heavily armed, specially trained SWAT team created for bear incidents—to which Joe had recently been named.
His senses were on high alert for the sight, sound, or smell of a rogue six-hundred-pound bear. To Joe, every noise—whether it was the click of a hoof on a rock or the chatter of a squirrel in the branches of the trees—seemed magnified. He was jumpy and his mouth was dry. The coffee and jerky they’d eaten for breakfast that morning on the drive out to the campground roiled in his stomach.
Although he’d been on many similar horseback expeditions, this one felt oddly different. With all three of his daughters out of the house and Marybeth alone at home, Joe couldn’t help but feel he was getting too old for this kind of thing. He did his best to repress the thought and concentrate on the task at hand, although he couldn’t deny that he missed his wife and he wished she were closer.
*
JOE RODE THIRD in the string of horses, and his mount seemed to be most comfortable in that configuration. There was always a learning curve when it came to riding someone else’s horse, and he didn’t know the pecking order of the herd or the characteristics of the mount beforehand. Joe wished he were riding Toby, his wife’s well-trained horse, or Rojo, his gelding. Even a sure-footed and bomb-proof mule would do.
A Jackson biologist named Eddie Smith, also a member of the Predator Attack Team, rode last on a bay gelding. Like Joe, Smith had a Smith & Wesson M&P semiautomatic rifle chambered in .308 across the pommel of his saddle. The weapon had a twenty-round magazine and a red dot scope. His job was to cover the riders in front of him and to be the first to bail off his horse and confront trouble if it happened.
Joe had had no idea when he’d driven over the mountains to Jackson Hole the previous afternoon that he’d be pressed into helping find the mangled body of a local guide.
Or that he’d be given a gelding named Peaches to do it.
*
JACKSON HOLE game warden Mike Martin led the search and recovery operation. Martin had been hired by the agency the year before Joe, and Martin was badge number eighteen of fifty in terms of seniority. Joe had badge number nineteen, meaning there were eighteen game wardens with more seniority on the job and thirty-one with less.
Like Joe, Martin had bounced around all over the state of Wyoming in his career. He’d lived in half a dozen state-owned homes—called “stations”—and he’d been responsible for enforcing the Game and Fish regulations in high mountains, arid deserts, and vast sagebrush-covered steppes. Since the districts in Wyoming ranged from two thousand to more than five thousand square miles, Martin had spent a lot of his life in pickup trucks, on ATVs and boats, or on the backs of horses.
Martin had a battered cowboy hat, a thick gunfighter mustache, jowls, and round wire-framed glasses that made him look like a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt. His middle had thickened substantially over the years and strained the buttons of his red uniform shirt, but he was still surprisingly strong and agile and a better horseman than Joe.
Joe and Martin had worked together a few times over the years on cases that spanned both of their districts, and they got along well. Martin was brusque and flinty and proud of how out of step he looked when he was in a room with wealthy, sophisticated Jackson Hole resort elites. He’d become more curmudgeonly and cantankerous by the year, Joe thought. Martin was a fish out of water, a throwback, and it didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Joe could tell that Martin was also subtly suspicious of the man riding second and at times side by side with him: the Florida hunter.
“You’re sure this is the trail you took going in and coming out?” Martin asked the man, whose name was Julius Talbot. Talbot was dressed in high-tech camo hunting clothing that must have cost more than two thousand dollars from boots to cap. He had prematurely silver hair, a nice tan, pale blue eyes, and a jawline that made him look arrogant, whether he was or not. The only thing that marred his outfit were the floral-like splashes of dark blood on his pants and sleeves from the day before. The blood, he claimed, had come from the guide, not the elk he’d shot.