Blindly lurching through the trees, almost tripping over his sleeping bag, he made it to the rocky edge of the lake and pitched forward into the icy water.
As the water numbed him and pink curlicues of blood swirled to the surface from where the bullet had creased his ribs and inner arm, he thought, I’ve shot and killed a man, and it was awful.
Thirty
Leading two horses, Joe Pickett rode south out of the Thorofare, on the trail to Turpin Meadows, in what became a kind of trek of lamentation. Smoke’s body was wrapped in the ground cloth Joe had slept on the previous night, and it was roped over the back of the outfitter’s own sorrel, the third horse in the string. Joe led his procession through camp after camp along the trail, too injured and tired to fully engage the guides and hunters who wanted to hear the whole story. The only men whom he told were the hunters from Georgia in Smoke’s camp, with their hired guides looking on. The guides stared at the canvas bundle on the back of their boss’s horse.
“We wondered where he went this morning,” Smoke’s lead guide had said, shaking his head sadly. “I always knew that hot head of his was bound to get him into trouble.”
There was no anger, no accusations aimed at Joe from Smoke’s men, which surprised him. What he saw was stoic sadness. And overt selfishness: “We can still hunt, can’t we?” one of the hunters asked.
“I don’t see why not,” the guide said, with just a hint of disgust.
“I’m sorry and all,” the hunter said, looking to the other hunters for support, “but some of us paid real good money for this.”
“I know,” the guide said, eyeing his clients and spitting a long brown stream of tobacco juice between his boots.
Then, to Joe: “Sometimes I wish I’da never gone into the service industry.”
Before setting out that morning, Joe had patched himself up. The crease from Smoke’s bullet had split the skin on his side and sliced a threeinch gash on the inside of his right arm. The bleeding from his side was profuse. He had lost more blood than he realized, which made him lightheaded. He grimaced while he pinched the wound together, catching a glimpse of a white rib, which had also been nicked. There was a roll of gauze in the cabin but no medical tape to hold it to his side, so he used silver duct tape instead. He was a fan of duct tape, once telling Marybeth that it was one of the five greatest inventions of modern history. Painfully, he pulled on a fresh shirt over the dressing and tossed the heavy, wet one into the cookstove to burn.
The news preceded him as he rode. Outfitters communicated with one another in a combination of ways—facetoface meetings, radio calls, and satellite phones, known as the “outfitter telephone line.” Normally, the “line” was used to pass along word that the elk were moving, or that a guide had been bucked off his horse and was injured, or that a hunter was sick or disillusioned and needed a ride back to the trailhead. In this case, the news was that the new game warden had shot and killed the most infamous among them, Smoke Van Horn, the Lion of the Tetons, in a gunfight.
As Joe rode south, they anticipated him in each camp. In one of the camps he had checked on the day before, both the guides and their clients stood silently on the side of the trail with their cameras, and Joe heard the whispery clicks of shutters as he rode by.
A hunter dressed in headtotoe camo gear said, “It’s like something out of the Old West!”
Joe was slumping in his saddle, fighting shock and the exhaustion that came from it, when he reached the edge of Turpin Meadows at dusk. The Tetons were backlit by the setting sun, their profiles sharp and black against a bruisepurple sky.
As he led the horses toward the campground, he saw emergency vehicles, ambulances, and sheriff ’s department SUVs in the lot, and people milling around. Apparently, Joe thought, one of the outfitters had been able to get the news to Jackson.
When they spotted him coming, he watched the small crowd stop what they were doing and turn toward him as one, some raising binoculars. One of the sheriff ’s men unnecessarily whooped his siren for a moment, to signal Joe to come in.
“You’ll need to turn over all of your weapons,” Sheriff Tassell told Joe as he helped him down from his horse. “We’ll get you to the hospital and then I’ll need a statement from you.”
Joe nodded grimly and dismounted. He could feel the scab of the wound in his side crack open under the dressing.
“How bad are you hurt?” Tassell asked.
“Not too bad,” Joe said. “I need some stitches, I think.
Lost some blood.”
“You need the ambulance to take you in?” Tassell asked.
“No.”
Tassell turned to his deputies and gestured toward the third horse. “Untie the body and put it in the ambulance,” he told them. “Tell the driver to go straight to Dr. Graves’s.”
Joe walked slowly toward his pickup.
“You’re not driving yourself,” the sheriff called after him, exasperated. “What in the hell are you thinking?”
Randy Pope stepped out from the small crowd. He wore crisp jeans, new boots, a snapbutton shirt, and a denim jacket.
“I talked to Trey Crump,” Pope said. “He said to tell you you’re on administrative leave until the investigation of the shooting is concluded. As you know, it’s routine procedure.”
Joe nodded. “I figured that would happen.” Looking Pope over, he said, “Looks like you’ve been to the westernwear store.”
He ignored Joe’s comment. “He said to tell you to give him a call as soon as you could.”
“I planned to,” Joe said.
Pope stepped in close. “So was it a gunfight, like they say?”
“It was more like assisted suicide,” Joe said glumly.
“Smoke fired first.”
“Then you shot him?”
Joe nodded, too tired to speak.
Pope sighed and looked toward the darkening sky. Stars were beginning to poke through like needle pricks in dark fabric. “I need to work overtime just to keep up with the paperwork you generate,” he complained.
Tassell turned his SUV over to a deputy and drove Joe’s pickup, while Joe slouched in the passenger seat.
They were on the blacktop when the sheriff said, “This is Will Jensen’s truck, isn’t it?”
Joe nodded. “Mine burned up.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I heard about that. Things tend to happen around you, don’t they? Just like Barnum said they would.”
Joe didn’t respond.
“Will tried for years to build a case on Smoke, and in the three days you’re up there you kill the guy.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Joe said, but didn’t want to explain.
He was thinking about the contents of the last spiral notebook. How it was all coming together. How ugly it had been for Will at the end.
They drove in silence until Joe could see the lights of Jackson in the distance. It seemed as if he had lived there forever, not just a few days. The ambulance was stopped on the highway in front of them so that a long column of tourists on horseback could cross the highway en route to their guest ranch for the night. Tassell stopped directly behind it, the headlights of the pickup shining into the ambulance and illuminating the body wrapped in the ground tarp.
“There goes my budget for medical examinations for the fiscal year,” Tassell sighed.
After an examination, a blood test, twenty stitches in his side and eight in his arm, Joe was remanded to the hospital for a night of observation. He was given sedatives by a doctor whose name tag identified him as “Dr. Thompson,” who also wore a DayGlo button that read “ski bum.” The sedative was starting to dull the pain and bring him down. Before he went to sleep, he reached for the telephone at the side of his bed.
“Marybeth,” Joe said, thrilled at hearing the sound of her voice, “I just killed the only man in Jackson Hole I really understood.”
Thirty One
As he dressed the next morning, Joe tried to recall the conversation he’d had the night before with Marybeth, and snippets came floating back. It had been difficult to concentrate with the drugs kicking in, and the only thing that kept him awake during the conversation was the tone of her voice, which was urgent and somehow melancholy at the same time, as if she wanted to be angry with him but the circumstances prevented it. At the time, it was important for him to hear her voice, to touch base, to reestablish something. He needed her to be his anchor, to reel him back home from where he was. But she had other concerns. Sheridan was being difficult, having attitude problems, and life between Marybeth and her oldest daughter was getting tougher. “It’s a mother and daughter deal,” Marybeth said, as if Joe would understand that. In response, he offered to talk with Sheridan—they had a special rapport, he thought—but Marybeth said their daughter was already in bed.
He vividly remembered her telling him that Barnum was the 720 caller, the “720” being from a calling card, and that Nate had caught the exsheriff in the act in the Stockman’s Bar. The news of Barnum’s humiliation had swept through town, she said, and the old exsheriff was lying low, nowhere to be found. Joe cautioned his wife to watch out for Barnum.
“He blames me for his bad luck,” Joe said.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “Nate is around.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes,” she said, after a long pause, which led him to wonder. Then: “It is good, isn’t it?”
It seemed there was something else she wanted to say but didn’t.
She had offered to leave the girls with her mother and come to Jackson right away to see him, but he told her not to.
“I’m more tired than hurt,” he said, fixing his eyes on a blank television screen to keep them from closing, “and there’s a lot I need to do in the next couple of days. Remember that missing notebook I told you about?”
He could not remember how their conversation had concluded. What had he told her? Had he outlined his suspicions? If he had, he couldn’t remember her response. The details weren’t there, but what stayed with him as he dressed was a recollection of vague misconnection, as if they had been talking past each other, telling each other different stories, each with a point that the other didn’t, or couldn’t, grasp.
“So you’ve decided you’re fine and you’ll release yourself from the hospital?” Dr. Thompson said. “Usually a doctor does that. Namely me.”
Joe was standing with his back to the door, cinching up his belt. He turned to see Dr. Thompson holding a clipboard chart and leaning against the doorjamb. “I needed a good night’s sleep more than anything,” Joe said.
“I don’t disagree with your prognosis, given your, um, condition.”
Joe was confused.
“Let me look at your wound and get it redressed,” Thompson said. “Then we should probably have a little talk. You need to start taking better care of yourself, Mr. Pickett.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Joe said. “Am I sick?” He thought of how he had felt since arriving in Jackson, the foggy mental state, the sleeplessness, his lack of ability to concentrate. He steeled himself for bad news.
Thompson looked at Joe with amusement in his eyes, as if signaling him they could drop the pretense.
“Look, I’m a doctor, not a cop,” Thompson said. “The blood test we took last night is confidential information. No one can find out what’s on it. But you seem like a nice enough guy, and you have law enforcement responsibilities, and you carry lots of guns around with you. So you need to be aware of the side effects of your, um, indulgences.”
“My what?”
“First, take off your shirt and let me look at that wound.”
Stella Ennis was waiting for him in the hospital lobby, and the sight of her stopped him cold. She looked up at him over the top of a Jackson Hole newspaper.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Not as good as I thought, apparently.” His voice was shaky from the discussion he’d had with Dr. Thompson.
“You look pretty good,” she said, smiling.
“You do too.”
She laughed, throwing her head back. “You should have seen me ten years and fifteen pounds ago. I would have blown you away.”
She wore a black turtleneck sweater with silver and gold threads running through the fabric, and gray slacks. Her thick auburn hair brushed her shoulders. She shook the newspaper with exaggerated force.
“Did you know you’re a celebrity?” she asked.
“No.”
“How about I buy you breakfast?” “Okay.”
“We need to talk.”
“Yes,” Joe said, “we do.”
The morning was crisp and bright, the sun not yet well enough established to have burned the frost off windshields and lawns. They walked along a slick wooden sidewalk to a restaurant near the hospital that was crowded. The place specialized in baked goods and had a sign out front that read get your buns in here.
“I used to love this place,” Stella said, taking him by the hand and leading him past it, “but I’m a little too familiar in there and it isn’t as good as it used to be. Let’s go to the Sportsman’s Café.”
“That’s my favorite,” Joe said.
“I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It was Will’s favorite too.”
Ed seated them in the back booth near the kitchen door, and Joe ordered the Sportsman’s Special. Stella smiled knowingly at the order.
“I know,” Joe said. “Will’s choice too.”
“It’s spooky,” she said, ordering coffee and a bagel.
Joe looked at her across the table, and she looked straight back. Her name had come up so many times since he’d met her. He’d thought about her, even dreamed about her. The fact that he hadn’t told Marybeth about her said more than he cared to think about. When Stella looked back at him he had the impression he’d been on her mind as well, but he wasn’t sure in what context. It was as if they’d been circling each other for days, each looking for an opening.
“You start,” she said.
He sipped his coffee, burning his tongue. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had breakfast with a woman other than my wife,” he said.