Breaking Point

11

“His name is Bryce Pendergast,” Joe said to Lisa Greene-Dempsey, “and his partner in crime is a guy named Ryan McDermott.”

She sat in the passenger seat wearing a sweater over her shoulders with her briefcase on her lap and her phone in her hand as Joe drove through Saddlestring. She looked to Joe like she was trying to be a good sport by coming along with him. He was embarrassed by the unkempt appearance of the gear and paperwork stuffed into every nook and cranny inside the cab, and he was grateful he hadn’t brought Tube or Daisy along as well that morning.

“It’s kind of my office,” he said.

“I understand. So what is it we’re doing?”

“Checking on a couple of low-life poachers,” Joe said. “I’ve seen them around. They bounce from entry-level job to entry-level job and usually quit in a huff. Neither one of them graduated high school, although Bryce may have gotten his GED. I’ve seen Ryan McDermott’s name in the police blotter a few times for DWI, and I think Pendergast might have been picked up once for breaking into cars. I haven’t seen them out in the field, though, so I always considered them city troublemakers, not poachers.”

She shook her head as he talked, and said, “It’s troubling what happens to youth that are without opportunities.”

Joe shook his head and said, “Bryce’s parents are high school teachers, and Ryan McDermott’s dad is an Episcopalian bishop. They’ve had plenty of opportunities-they just didn’t want ’em.”

“Oh,” she said quickly, and looked away.

Joe said, “Sometimes people just turn out mean. You’ll go crazy trying to figure out ways to prevent it from happening altogether. The only thing we can do is arrest the bad guys and put them away if we can.”

She nodded and said, “This we can agree on.”

“Some common ground,” Joe said, smiling. He said, “People who violate our game and fish regulations often go on to do real harm to innocent citizens. It’s like a gateway drug to them to worse crimes down the road. You’ve heard of the ‘broken windows’ theory of law enforcement?”

She nodded. “If we rigorously prosecute even the smallest crimes, it will set a tone and prevent bigger crimes, right?”

“Right. Well, this is the frontier version. Someone who would kill an animal out of season for the thrill of it indicates a general lack of respect for rules and laws, and sets the stage for something worse to come. That’s why I throw the book at ’em if I catch ’em.”

She considered what he said, and seemed to agree, he thought.

He drove into an unincorporated area that hugged the west side of the town limit. The asphalt road gave way to rutted dirt, and the neat rows of suburban homes gave way to wildly incongruous houses, trailers, and lot-sized collections of junked cars and weeds.

He briefed her on the crime itself and the entries Sheridan had found on Facebook. LGD listened with interest and said, “Do you really think they’re stupid enough to put the pictures up on the Internet?”

“Oh, yeah,” Joe said.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Yup. And nothing makes me madder than slaughtering an animal and leaving it to rot.”

“But to post things on Facebook. . How dumb can they be?”

“Dumb,” Joe said. “Most criminals aren’t very smart-that’s why they’re criminals. I’ve caught guys because they mounted the heads of illegal trophies in their living rooms. This is a new wrinkle, though, putting up a kind of cyber-trophy.”

“These people,” she said, looking out her window at the ramshackle homes and trailers with tires thrown on the roof to keep the tops from blowing off in the wind. Then, catching herself, she said, “You know what I mean.”

“They’re not all bad,” Joe said defensively. “The kind of crime we’re investigating is actually pretty rare. Most folks around here hate poachers as much as I do, and they turn them in. They look at wildlife as a resource. They don’t want it violated any more than we do.”

“There are degrees of violation,” Joe said, knowing he was pushing the line. “If I find somebody who killed a deer to feed his family, I usually don’t come down on him as hard as someone who killed a deer for the antlers only. And this type of thing-leaving the carcass-deserves no mercy at all.”

She didn’t look at him when she said, “So you’re telling me you make your own rules?”

“I’d consider it discretion,” he said.

Then: “Do all my game wardens make their own rules?”

“Can’t say,” Joe said, realizing he’d provided fuel to one of her burning fires.

“I worry that getting too close to the locals might make some of my people go. . native,” she said, looking closely at him for his reaction. “You know, it might not be as easy to arrest somebody whom you saw at PTA board the night before, for example. Or you might be a little more sympathetic than necessary to a local rancher making a damage claim if that same rancher is on your softball team.”

Joe shrugged. “Seems to me we do a better job if we know the people we’re working for-if we’re among them.”

“Unless you forget who you’re working for,” she said, and shifted in her seat in a way that said the conversation was over.

He turned on Fourth Street and slowed down under an overgrown canopy of ancient cottonwood trees. The duplex he was looking for, Bryce Pendergast’s last known address, was one half of the house. There was a marked difference between the condition of the duplex on the left side and the one on the right. The right side was freshly painted, and there were flowers planted on the side of the porch and floral curtains in the window. The right side of the lawn was green and well maintained. An ancient Buick was parked under a carport.

On the left side of the duplex was a jacked-up Ford F-150 parked in front on the curb so it blocked the sidewalk, and the small yard between the unpainted picket fence and the front door was dried out and marked by burned yellow ovals on both sides of the broken walk between the gate and the door.

“Guess which one Bryce lives in,” Joe said, pulling over and killing the engine.

He called in his position to dispatch and said he planned to question a potential suspect in a wildlife violation and gave the name and address.

“GF-forty-eight clear,” he said, and racked the mic. Then he remembered and said to Greene-Dempsey: “I should have said GF-twenty-one, I guess.”

She nodded nervously, her eyes dancing between Joe and the dark duplex.

Joe dug a digital audio micro-recorder out of the satchel on the floor and checked the power, then turned it on and dropped it in his front breast pocket.

She said, “Is that legal? To record somebody like that?”

“Yes. As long as one party knows the conversation is recorded, it’s legal,” he said patiently.

“So you’re just going to walk up there and knock on the door?” she asked. “Aren’t you going to call for help? For backup?”

“Don’t have any,” Joe said, trying to maintain his calm. “Plus, I think the sheriff’s department has enough on its plate right now, don’t you think?”

“Still. .”

“Relax,” he said. “This isn’t unusual. I’ll go up there and see if Bryce is in, and if he is, I’ll check him out.”

“How? You don’t have a warrant. .”

Joe said, “Here’s what I do, and I’ve done this many times. It’s my standard operating procedure. If Bryce or Ryan McDermott come to the door, I’ll be friendly and professional and say, ‘Hi, guys. I guess you know why I’m here.’ And then I’ll see what happens, whether they act like they don’t know, or they start lying and overtalking, or what. I’ve had people confess right on the spot quite a few times. Sometimes, they blurt out confessions to crimes I didn’t even know about, and sometimes they implicate their buddies.”

Greene-Dempsey looked at him with obvious doubt.

She said, “Maybe you should wait a few days for this. You know-after the sheriff’s department can provide some help.”

He thought about it, then shook his head. He said, “It’s been a week since that antelope was shot. They probably think they got away with it. But something about killing wildlife bugs many of them worse than if they’d shot a person. It’s like that little tiny bit of conscience they’ve got tells them it’s really wrong. So when you just ask them, sometimes they’ll start spilling.”

He touched the digital recorder with the tips of his fingers. “So if they confess, I’ve got it here.”

Joe said, “Even if they keep lying and don’t admit a thing or invite me in, they’ll know they’re under suspicion. That alone sometimes leads to them turning themselves in later or ratting on their buddy. Just showing up gets things moving in the right direction.”

She shook her head and looked at him as if he were crazy.

“Tell me this isn’t what you do all day.”

“It isn’t.” He reached for the door handle.

“You can stay right here. I’ll be back in a few minutes, I suspect.”

“No,” she said. “I want to see this. I want to see what my game wardens do. I can’t be a proper director if I don’t know how things work in the field.”

“Deal,” Joe said, swinging out and clamping his hat on his head. “You can be my backup.”

She grinned nervously at that.

The morning was heating up into another warm August day. Tufts of translucent cotton from the ancient cottonwood trees were poised on the tips of the grass, awaiting a breath of wind to transport them somewhere. As he approached the broken gate, he instinctively reached down and brushed his fingertips across the top of his Glock, his cuffs, and the canister of bear spray on his belt, just to assure himself his equipment was there. The hinges on the gate moaned as he pushed it open. Lisa Greene-Dempsey maintained a ten-foot distance behind him, and followed him cautiously into the yard.

He was wondering about the burned splotches in the grass on the left side of the shared yard when a woman pushed the screen door open on the right side and stood behind it.

“Are you here about the cat urine?” she asked. “It’s about time.”

She looked to be in her seventies, and wore a thick robe and pink slippers. She had a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Pardon?” Joe said.

“It reeks like cat urine,” she said, gesturing next door with a tilt of her head. “When it’s calm like this, the smell just about makes me sick. I’ve told them to clean it up, but they just laugh at me and tell me they don’t own no cats.”

Then Joe smelled it, the whiff of ammonia.

“I’m surprised they sent the game warden,” she said, “but I’m not complaining. I expected the sheriff, but I guess you’re in charge of animals around here.”

“Sort of,” Joe said. “But I’m here on another matter.”

“Figures,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Nobody seems to care that much about my problems. Even the guy who owns the place just shrugs and tells me he won’t do anything because they pay the rent on time. I showed him where in the lease it said you can’t have pets, but he just doesn’t care.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I’m not here for that.”

“Just make sure to ask them about the cats.”

“Okay,” Joe said.

She stepped back and closed the door in front of her. A moment later, Joe saw the floral curtains part an inch so she could watch what happened next.

He turned to Greene-Dempsey and shrugged. She looked nervously at the front door of the left side of the duplex.

“You can still wait in the truck,” he said.

She shook her head no.

“Then make sure you stay back and to the side, please,” he said.

The odor got stronger on the porch when he knocked on the door. Because of the Ford pickup in front, he assumed somebody was home. When he leaned his head close to the door, he could hear and feel the thumping of bass notes from a radio or music player of some kind.

He knocked again, and heard the scuffling of feet. To his right, there was a glimpse of a face in the dirty window, and he waved at it as if to say gotcha.

Then, after some low murmuring on the other side of the door that indicated there was more than one person inside, a series of bolts were thrown. Joe thought, Bolts?

And Bryce Pendergast was standing in front of him with the door halfway open, his face contorted into a pulled-back grimace. Pendergast was naked from the waist up, severely thin, with a sleeve tattoo on the arm. He had long, stringy hair that glistened with hair product-or grease. The tendons in his neck looked to be as taut as guitar strings, and his breathing was quick and shallow. The right side of Pendergast’s body was hidden behind the door. A strong whoosh of the odor enveloped Joe on the porch.

“What do you want?” Pendergast asked, his voice high and strained.

Joe smiled and said in a friendly tone, “I guess you know why I’m here, Bryce.”

“I guess I do,” Pendergast said.

And in the instant it took for Joe to realize that the cat-urine smell was in fact raw ammonia from inside and the burns in the grass were from meth-making chemicals, Pendergast threw open the door and Joe saw the big pistol in Bryce’s right hand that had been out of sight behind the door. The pistol suddenly swung up toward his face.

Behind him, Joe heard Greene-Dempsey gasp-and Joe ducked and flailed his hands up, managing to knock Pendergast’s aim off as the gun exploded next to his ear.

Operating more out of instinct and terror than thought, Joe pinned Pendergast’s wrist to the doorframe with the back of his right forearm and stepped forward and backed into him, now grasping Pendergast’s wrists with both of his hands. Pendergast’s arm was pinned under Joe’s left armpit, the gun pointed toward the dried-out lawn, and it fired again, but Joe could barely hear the roar this time because his right ear was stunned silent. Joe recognized the weapon as an old Army Colt 1911.45 semiautomatic, and he knew what kind of damage it could do.

Joe slammed Pendergast’s wrist against the doorframe again and again, trying to make him drop the weapon. But Pendergast was younger and stronger. He could feel the hardness of Pendergast’s body pressed against his back. Pendergast was now beating his free fist down on Joe’s head, neck, and back, and Joe wasn’t sure he had the strength or leverage to knock the gun loose.

Although he was temporarily deaf in his right ear from the gunshot and the side of his face felt stunned, he could hear yelling from behind him inside the house and Greene-Dempsey’s high-pitched voice screaming, “Call 911! Call 911!” to the woman in the right duplex.

Pendergast’s fist came down hard on the top of Joe’s head, mashing his hat down nearly over his eyes and unleashing a wave of starbursts in front of his vision. He realized that if he didn’t take Pendergast down soon-somehow-he’d be a dead man. He hoped whoever else was inside the house wouldn’t come out front and join in on the parade of blows, or bring his own gun along.

Joe let go of Pendergast’s wrist with his right hand and reached out and grasped the suspect’s thumb, which was curled around the grip of the.45, and jerked back on it as hard as he could. The bone broke with a dull snap, and the thumb flopped back, held by skin alone. Because Pendergast’s body was pressed tight to his back, Joe could feel him stiffen as the pain shot through him.

Pendergast howled in Joe’s other ear, but the.45 dropped to the concrete of the porch and bounced into the grass. As it did, Joe let go and wheeled, ripping the first thing he could find-a big canister of bear spray-from his belt with the intention of blasting Pendergast in the eyes. But Pendergast’s eyes were closed tight as he howled and hopped up and down on one foot, cupping his wounded right hand with his left, the thumb flopping from one side of his hand to the other, and Joe didn’t see an opening. So he reared back and struck Pendergast solidly on the bridge of his nose with the bear spray canister, staggering him.

While Pendergast was off-balance, Joe reached in through the open door and grabbed a handful of his hair and yanked down, and the man stumbled past him and crashed facedown on the lawn, his arms windmilling. Before Pendergast could come to his senses enough to scramble for the.45, which was within his reach, Joe fell on him and forced him back to the ground and hit him three more times on the head with the bear spray canister until Bryce yelled, “No more, man!”

When Joe paused, Pendergast opened his bloodshot eyes and looked up. Joe quickly held the canister out and blasted the man in the face with a red burst of bear spray.

Ten minutes later, with Pendergast cuffed facedown and howling in the grass, Joe leaned against the grille of his pickup, dabbing his eyes with a moist cloth provided by the woman in the right duplex. She’d called 911, she said. He’d gotten a whiff of the bear spray’s blowback himself, and it seemed like every fluid in his body was trying to pour out of his nose.

Lisa Greene-Dempsey stood a few feet away, shaken. She glared at him with her hands on her hips.

When he was able to make out her blurry image, Joe said, “You saw all that, right?”

“Of course I saw it,” she said, angry. “I saw the whole damned thing. You could have gotten yourself killed.”

“You didn’t get hit with any of the bear spray, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. It’s nasty stuff.”

He knew bear spray contained much more oleoresin capsicum than standard law enforcement personal-defense pepper spray, and it could turn a charging grizzly. It wasn’t designed for use on humans, but at that moment Joe didn’t care.

“I hope we don’t have a lawsuit on our hands,” she said.

“How you doing, Bryce?” Joe called out.

“I’m blind! I’m fucking blind!” Pendergast cried.

“Let him sue,” Joe said. “I thought he was going to kill me, and the bear spray was the first thing I could grab onto.”

She said, “I saw his partner run out the back and keep running down the alley.”

“Was it McDermott?”

“How should I know?” she said, her voice rising.

“We’ll find him,” Joe said. His cheek burned where the gun had gone off, and his eyes, nose, and mouth were on fire from the blowback. There was a high whistle inside his right ear that blocked out any other sound.

“Excuse me,” he said to Greene-Dempsey, and staggered past her toward the cab on his truck. “I’ve got to get on the radio and let everybody know to keep an eye out for McDermott. He won’t get far on foot.”

When he was done and hung up the mic, he turned to find Greene-Dempsey blocking his path.

“You could have been killed,” she said again, shaken. “I could have been killed.”

“I know,” he said. “This isn’t how it usually plays out. I had no idea things would get western.”

He could feel adrenaline painfully dissipating from his muscles. He imagined she felt the same way and her method of dealing with the comedown was to upbraid him.

He said, “They were cooking meth-or trying to cook it. I don’t think they had it figured out yet, judging by Bryce’s reaction. I should have known by the smell and the chemical burns in the grass.”

In the distance, several blocks away, he heard the whoop of a siren.

“Maybe they found McDermott,” Joe said.

“I hope so,” Greene-Dempsey said.

“They’re not all meth heads,” Joe said defensively, to a point she hadn’t raised. To Pendergast, still crying on the ground, “You’re not all bad, are you, Bryce?”

“Fuck you, I’m blind!” Pendergast shouted back.

Greene-Dempsey looked from Joe to the suspect, her anger replaced by caution.

“Joe. .” she said worriedly.

Joe grunted and stepped around her and walked toward Pendergast in the yard. Pendergast continued to rage on that he was blind, and Joe stepped around him and retrieved the.45 and stuffed it in his belt. As he returned to the truck, he wheeled near Pendergast and reached again for the holstered canister of bear spray.

“No, no!” Pendergast screamed. “Put that back!” He tried to wriggle away in the direction of the house.

Joe turned and shrugged to Greene-Dempsey. “See, he’s not blind.”

She started to say something when the iPhone in her hand chimed. Joe watched her check the screen, and she looked up and said “Julio Batista” before taking the call. As she listened, her demeanor changed to one of utter seriousness, he thought.

Greene-Dempsey signed off, lowered the phone, and said, “They’re ready for you now. You’re supposed to meet them at some ranch outside of town, and he said you knew the place.”

“Big Stream Ranch,” Joe said dourly.

“That’s the one,” she said.