Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(38)
Joe winced. It made at least some sense to talk to the movie producer, and he was on his list of suspects. But string him up?
“Don’t tell the sheriff what you’re doing,” Hewitt said. “He’d just figure out a way to throw a wrench in it. Let’s keep him out of this.”
*
COUNTY ATTORNEY Duane Patterson was in an observation room down the hall from the ICU and Joe poked his head in as he passed by. Dr. Arthur was in there as well. The two of them were in the midst of an animated but hushed conversation while Arthur probed through Patterson’s scalp with his fingers, no doubt checking the wounds from the glass. Patterson sat on top of a recliner bed in the clothes Joe had seen him in that morning.
Joe heard the doctor emphasize the words “oxygen” and “asshole” and Patterson glared at him while he spoke. Joe thought it was unprofessional for Arthur to discuss his other cases with a patient, if that was in fact what he was doing.
“Now I’m interrupting,” Joe said to them.
They stopped speaking abruptly and Arthur quickly said, “Just making my rounds.”
Joe had assumed that.
“I’m trying to convince him to release me,” Patterson said to Joe. “There’s no reason for me to be in here taking up a perfectly good bed.”
“How’s he doing?” Joe asked the doctor.
“Cranky,” Arthur said. “But not as cranky as the last one.”
“Welcome to my world,” Patterson said. Then, to Dr. Arthur, “So can I go?” He seemed unduly angry, Joe thought.
Arthur probed through Patterson’s hair thoroughly but gently. He said, “There are a couple more slivers we’ll need to take out. But after that I see no reason to keep you here.”
Patterson sighed impatiently. Something Dr. Arthur had said or done had obviously set him off. Joe was curious what it was.
“Do you need a ride to your house?” Joe asked Patterson. He intended to brief the prosecutor on both the sheriff’s theory and the discovery on the hill.
“My office, maybe,” Patterson said. “I’ve got a ton of work to do.”
“I’ll give him a lift,” Arthur said to Joe. “My shift’s just about over.”
Joe thought it was a kind and personal gesture.
“After we increase Sue Hewitt’s oxygen, of course,” Arthur said with a wan smile.
Patterson said to Arthur, “I wish you’d spend more time with Sue than on me. I’m fine.”
“First things first, Mr. Patterson,” Arthur said. “I can handle more than one patient at a time. That’s what I do here.”
Joe clamped on his hat and told Patterson, “I’ll catch up with you later.”
He made a note to himself to remember to ask the prosecutor what his problem with the doctor had been.
ELEVEN
DENNIS SUN LIVED WITH HIS THIRD AND MUCH YOUNGER wife on a five-thousand-acre ranch outside of Winchester and it took Joe twenty minutes to get there. He took the exit off the interstate, cruised through the small town, and noted that no one on the street took a second look at him in his beat-up WYDOT pickup. He felt like he was operating undercover.
Sun had purchased the ranch ten years before after the worldwide success of an action-thriller starring Bruce Willis. The movie had been the high mark of Sun’s career and subsequent films had been panned by critics and avoided by American audiences, but, Joe had heard, they did well enough in Asia that Sun continued to work. Joe hadn’t seen any of the movies, although Sun had premiered the last two—a fantasy about a Genghis Khan–type conqueror and a space thriller set on the rings of Jupiter—in Saddlestring for area audiences.
The producer was short and compact with darting eyes. He used different accents at different times, depending on which country he’d visited last. He was an eccentric who wore scarves even in the warmest weather, but he was embraced by the local art community because he was the only Hollywood figure most of them had ever met and he lived part-time in Twelve Sleep County. Sun raised beefalo on his ranch—a hybrid of bison and Hereford cattle—and he had a small herd of large exotic draft horses that had been left over from the Genghis Khan movie. Joe knew about the unusual mix of livestock because the beefalos had flattened a barbed-wire fence and frightened a grazing elk herd, and someone had called the Game and Fish Department to shoo them back. Sun had been on location somewhere in Eastern Europe at the time.
Dennis Sun had done extensive construction at his ranch headquarters when he was flush with cash and converted one outbuilding into a private screening facility and another into an editing studio. A large hangar on the property had stored his airplane and helicopter until Judge Hewitt ordered them seized for his poaching crimes.
Until Joe had arrested the man for killing deer and elk on his ranch two years before, he hadn’t met him in person. Sun had been apoplectic when Joe handed him the citations. He couldn’t believe that it was possible to be arrested for harvesting big game on his own property, and although Sun was a well-known and outspoken progressive in his politics who gave large contributions to big-city socialist candidates, he’d accused Joe and the state of Wyoming of acting like “anti–private property totalitarians.”
Joe had explained that in Wyoming the wildlife belonged to the state, not the landowner. As he did so, he thought he sounded just like an anti–private property totalitarian.