Breaking Point

14

As Joe drove up Bighorn road with Toby once again in the horse trailer, the immediate anger he’d felt in the lobby of the Saddlestring Hotel subsided and was replaced by frustration. He thought about the look of utter defeat on Marybeth’s face, something he’d rarely seen before. He didn’t like seeing his wife so disappointed.

He wanted to fix it somehow but didn’t know where to start. He wondered what she’d think about the job offer from LGD, and anticipated her response. Which is why he hadn’t told her about it.

As he drove, changing channels from one problem to another, Joe tried to imagine what Butch felt like up there in the mountains, away from his wife and daughter, sleeping on the ground and listening for the sounds of approaching pursuers. Unlike Butch, Joe and Marybeth had dodged a bullet. If they’d made the hotel deal they’d have been ruined instead of disappointed.

Butch had to know, Joe thought, that his life wasn’t worth anything anymore. His construction company would go bankrupt and his family would be affected in ways he could never have imagined.

Butch would know that if he turned himself in he’d be locked away for years. Did he regret what he’d done, or did he feel justified for having done it?

Joe sighed, knowing the question was academic. Butch Roberson was the only suspect in a double homicide-it didn’t matter what he felt.

He was surprised to see a jam of vehicles in front of the gate to the Big Stream Ranch. Pickups with horse trailers, SUVs trailing pods of ATVs, law enforcement panel vans, and a dozen other vehicles were massed on the shoulder of the highway and in the right- hand lane itself-a convoy that had been made to stop. Several uniformed deputies were standing on the blacktop, directing traffic.

Joe slowed and powered his window down as he approached Deputy Justin Woods.

“What’s going on?” Joe asked. “I thought they were going to set up their command post up at the forest boundary.”

“That was the idea,” Woods said, “but they can’t get access to cross the ranch.”

“What?”

“Frank Zeller won’t let them through,” Woods said, trying to stifle a smirk.

“Who’s in charge?”

“Julio Batista and his toady,” Woods said.

Joe thanked him and eased off the blacktop into the ditch and drove toward the front of the line. He could see Batista and Heinz Underwood shouting at someone through the poles of the gate, which was locked up with a heavy chain. Joe couldn’t recall seeing the gate closed before. He pulled parallel with Sheriff Reed’s handicapped van, shut off the engine, and swung out.

Reed was in his chair with the sliding door open, watching the action at the gate with a look of bemusement on his face. When he saw Joe, he arched his eyebrows in greeting.

“Woods told me,” Joe said. “So none of these geniuses made a call to Frank to ask permission to cross his land and set up a command post on it, huh?”

“Apparently not,” Reed said. “They call it an FOB, by the way.”

“So how long have you been waiting here?”

Reed glanced at his wristwatch. “About a half an hour.”

Joe whistled.

“I heard about Bryce Pendergast,” Reed said, his eyes moving to the reddened side of Joe’s face. “I can’t say I’m surprised, though. Pendergast and McDermott have been hanging with the tweaker crowd for a couple of years now, and I guess they thought they’d rather be buyers and sellers.

“Norwood called me a few minutes ago and said those idiots had all the ingredients they needed inside the house-Sudafed, iodine, phosphorus, Coleman fuel, acetone, denatured alcohol, and a bunch of flasks and beakers-but he said it didn’t look like they were in production yet. He said it looked like they were trying to figure out how to cook it, but so far all they’d made were mistakes. It’s a wonder they didn’t blow themselves up.”

“Good thing they didn’t,” Joe said. “There’s a nice old lady next door.”

“Oh-and we have McDermott in jail right alongside Pendergast. We caught him at the Kum and Go, buying a microwave burrito with his last pennies.”

Joe nodded.

“Sounds like you could have gotten yourself killed,” Reed said, concerned.

“Yup.”

“Bear spray, Joe?” Reed asked, incredulous.

“Good stuff.”

Reed grinned and shook his head, then got serious. “I think they could use your help over at the gate. You know Frank pretty well, don’t you?”

“I had breakfast with him yesterday morning.”

“Maybe you could talk some sense into him.”

Joe looked over and saw Batista gesticulating through the rails of the gate.

“Frank’s a stubborn old bird,” Joe said.

“Please, Joe,” Reed said. “Give it a try. We all look kind of stupid just sitting here.”

As Joe turned to join Batista and Heinz Underwood at the gate, Reed called after him, “Joe, they canceled their offer of a reward.”

Joe looked over his shoulder, relieved. “Good.”

“Couldn’t get authorization for it, I guess,” Reed said. “Too much red tape.”

“So it wasn’t like they came to their senses and realized it was too heavy-handed,” Joe said.

“Nothing like that.”

“Did they announce it to the press?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Reed said.

“So the word is still out there.”

“I’m hoping they’ll give a statement soon. I heard something about a press conference at the FOB.” He nodded toward the locked gate and added, “Assuming there’s an FOB.”

Joe shook his head, took a deep breath through his nostrils, and approached the gate.

Frank Zeller stood on the other side of the locked gate in his Wranglers, boots, and sweat-stained silver-belly Stetson. He cradled a lever-action Winchester.30–30 rifle that was pointed loosely off to the side. Joe had last seen the weapon the morning before, in Frank’s gun case. It was an old saddle carbine that had belonged to his father. The stock was scuffed, and the bluing was rubbed silver from years of rough use. He knew Frank had a large choice of rifles-every ranch house did-so he wouldn’t have brought the symbolic Winchester to the gate if he didn’t think the situation was profound.

Frank was short, wiry, and had a long craggy face that made him look tall in photos. Cobalt-blue eyes winked out from tanned and wrinkled skin, and his hands were so leathery it appeared he was wearing gloves. He wasn’t a warm or glib man, and he’d burned through two wives, seven or eight kids, and two dozen ranch hands since Joe had been in the valley. Frank Zeller was known for being one of the few remaining scions of the original founding ranches in the area that were still intact, and for not exactly welcoming newcomers. It took three years for Frank to meet Joe’s eyes as they passed on the highway, five years before Frank would raise a traditional single-digit salute of greeting from his steering wheel, seven years before Frank nodded at Joe in town, and nine years before he said Joe’s name aloud. The last two years, though, they actually talked, mainly due to the water-guzzler project Joe had proposed and installed, which Frank approved of.

Like so many western characters Joe had come to know, and despite his demeanor and his constant scowl and rancher uniform of long-sleeved shirts, hat, jeans, and boots, Frank turned out to be a bundle of contradictions. He loved opera and had spent his college years in Italy attending performances at La Scala in Milan; he’d endowed the Zeller Chair of Economics at the University of Wyoming; and he kept a luxury Sikorsky helicopter in a hangar at the Twelve Sleep County Municipal Airport that he piloted himself.

Julio Batista couldn’t have known any of that, though, and certainly not by the way he was talking through the gate to Frank, Joe thought. He caught the end of Batista saying: “. . we could take this all the way if we have to, Mr. Zeller. What you’re doing here is stubbornly preventing authorized federal law enforcement from engaging in a hot-pursuit investigation of a man who murdered two government employees in cold blood.”

Frank Zeller snorted and rolled his eyes. “So you’ve already convicted him, huh? I thought you had to arrest him first.”

“We need passage, and we need it now.”

Zeller said, “Not through my land, you don’t. Not without a court order and compensation. This is private property, and you aren’t crossing it without my say-so.”

“This is insane,” Batista said to Frank. “I could have you arrested right now.”

“Try,” Frank said, still cradling the rifle but not raising or pointing it. “You bust down that gate and your monkeys will start dropping like flies.”

“Is that a threat?” Batista said, his voice rising. “Did you just threaten me? And was there a racial aspect to the threat?”

“No threat,” Zeller said. “I made a promise.”

“Hey, Frank,” Joe said, interrupting.

Zeller’s eyes shifted to Joe, but he didn’t move his head. “Joe,” he said, his voice flat.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Batista said to Joe.

Joe ignored him.

“These fancy federal boys want to use my ranch to set up some kind of camp,” Zeller said. “They want to track up my meadows with their vehicles, and open up my place to all their friends to come in. They don’t want to talk terms, or deals. They just want me to unlock this gate and stand aside while they roll through like Patton’s army.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Batista whispered.

Zeller said, “When I want to lease forest for my cattle or cut wood to build a new corral, I’ve got to pay these boys a fee. But when they want to charge through my ranch and use it like it was a playground, they don’t want to pay me anything.”

“He’s got a point,” Joe said to Batista.

The administrator’s eyes flashed, and he whispered to Joe, “We don’t have time to negotiate an agreement. It takes months to get this kind of thing through-you know that.”

“You were quick enough with that reward last night,” Joe said.

“That has nothing to do with this,” Batista said, his voice rising again. “I thought you were here to help us.”

Joe shrugged.

Frank said to Batista, “This guy you’re after is on the National Forest, right? The forest is federal. So you can just turn your monkeys around and go into those mountains from the other side and I can’t stop you.”

“I told you,” Batista said sarcastically, “he was last seen on this side of the mountains. We’d waste more than a day going around to the other side and working our way back.”

“First time I ever heard of the government being worried about wasting time,” Frank said. “I could tell you some good stories.”

“We don’t have time for your stories.”

Joe watched the two as if viewing a tennis match, following each as they spoke.

Joe turned to Batista, and said, “You might try working with Frank here, instead of bullying him.”

“You’re useless,” Batista said, waving his hand at Joe and turning away, “just like the rest of these people up here.”

He strode back toward the SUV, but not without a go-ahead nod to Heinz Underwood. Joe saw Underwood acknowledge the signal, which had no doubt been prearranged.

Underwood stepped toward Joe, his expression hard but slightly bemused. “Walk with me,” he said.

Joe cautiously fell in beside him as Underwood walked down the length of the barbed-wire fence far enough that neither Frank Zeller not the occupants of the convoy could overhear.

“You’re friends with this rancher?”

“We’re acquainted.”

“I’d suggest you give him a little advice.”

“Depends on what the advice is,” Joe said.

Underwood said, “You might want to suggest to him that whatever payment he might want right now will be zilch compared to what could happen if the full attention of the EPA Region Eight office turned on him all of the sudden, is all.”

Joe didn’t respond.

“Just looking from here,” Underwood said, gazing out at the huge ranch spread out through the valley, “I think I see cows crapping in the streams, which might violate the Clean Water Act. I think I see clouds of methane rising from hundreds of flatulent cattle, which might violate the 199 °Clean Air Act. I think I see ranch buildings that might not be up to code, and old shingles on that big ranch house that are probably made of asbestos. An army of inspectors might just find all sorts of things that would shut down this operation or fine him boatloads of money for years to come.

“There’s a lot of wildlife habitat down there in that valley,” he said. “One kind of wonders if there are any protected or endangered species. It looks like good forage for the Preble’s jumping mouse, or sage grouse, or maybe even some aquatic species that might be threatened by all this agricultural activity.

“Not only that,” Underwood said softly. “Mr. Zeller seems to have way too many cows down there to run an environmentally sustainable operation. Look at them all.”

Joe saw small knots of registered Herefords grazing far below on natural meadows.

“That’s not so many,” he said.

“Boy, I’m just not as certain as you are,” Underwood said. “I think there might be more cows than there is grass. They might chew that grass down to nothing and leave a wasteland.”

“Frank’s been operating his place for forty years,” Joe said. “And before that it was his grandfather and his father. Look at it. It’s in great shape.”

“Maybe to your eyes,” Underwood said, “but when we count the cattle and measure the forage it might be a different story.”

Joe looked over with a pained expression on his face.

“It can be done very quickly,” Underwood said. “Using drones.”

“Drones? Like in the military?”

“We’ve got a few in service right now. In fact, there may even be one or two entering the airspace of these mountains as we speak.”

“Are you threatening Zeller?”

“That’s not a threat,” Underwood said softly. “That’s just offering him some good friendly advice.”

Joe said, “Why don’t you tell him?”

“Naw,” Underwood said. “It would be best coming from his old pal Joe.”

Joe shut his eyes for a moment, the ball of rage he’d felt earlier in the day forming again in his chest. He said, “What is it with you guys?”

Underwood shrugged and gestured toward Batista. “Comes from the top.”

Through clenched teeth, Joe said, “This is the kind of scheme you ran on Butch Roberson, isn’t it? You make up charges and accusations and then your target spends the rest of his life trying to prove you wrong.”

Underwood shook his head and said, “We didn’t write the laws. We just enforce them.”

“These aren’t laws,” Joe said. “They’re regulations you hide behind.”

“We didn’t write the regulations,” Underwood said in a tired, singsong cadence. “We just enforce them. From what I understand, your director has ordered you to help us do that. So I’d suggest you offer some friendly advice to the rancher so we can do our job.”

“Or you’ll ruin him,” Joe said.

“I never said that.” Underwood smiled.

Joe stood shoulder to shoulder with Frank Zeller as the convoy of vehicles rumbled through the open gate. Frank was furious.

“Maybe you can sue them after the fact,” Joe said.

“Or maybe,” Zeller said, “I can call a meeting of the Cattlemen’s Association and raise an army of ranchers and wranglers and take my ranch back. They might not do it for me, but they’ll do it in memory of Butch Roberson.”

“He’s not dead yet,” Joe said.

“Matter of time,” Frank said flatly, nodding at an SUV filled with black-clad special agents that passed through the gate.

Joe looked over. “So you’ve seen him.”

“Maybe. Won’t say yes, won’t say no.”

“You’re helping him out?”

Zeller shrugged.

“About the army-you’re kidding, right?”

Frank Zeller wouldn’t meet his eyes.

Joe looked to the horizon over the peaks of the mountains, expecting to note thunderheads gathering and a summer storm building, but the sky was blue and clear as far as he could see.