Fear No Evil

Chapter 28

Northwest of Laramie, Wyoming

Matthew Butler was sweating like a stuck pig, hidden in some bushes, baking in the sun, but sitting resolutely behind a Swarovski BTX spotting scope with dual eyepieces and a 115-millimeter objective lens. He had the six-thousand-dollar scope aimed across the lush green field in front of him, beyond the low, dry sage flat to the first rise and the first timber.

The wooded hillside was a thousand yards off. But when Butler looked through the BTX’s twin eyepieces, which gave him thirty-five-power magnification as well as stereoscopic vision, the first timber appeared to be a hundred yards away.

Butler could clearly see magpies flitting about and squabbling. And he could make out every branch, every twig, and every grass stalk waving in the hot afternoon breeze around the bighorn sheep ram that lay on the hill just inside the timberline.

He knew the ram. He’d named it Kong because of the mass of its horns. Kong was as big as they came in Wyoming, real record-book material, and a remarkable animal to see in the wild.

Butler had been watching the ram come and go on the ranch for the past two years. He and his men had tried to monitor and protect the rare wild sheep as much as was possible. But around three o’clock that morning, Vincente woke Butler up at the ranch house and said he’d gotten up for a piss and heard what he thought was a low-caliber rifle shot outside the bathroom window. They’d come down and used the infrared scopes to find the dying bighorn out there on the rise.

It had been gut-shot. They’d dispatched the animal and left him there.

Vincente checked the game camera they’d had installed in the trees beyond the gate and east boundary fence of the Circle M Ranch. Sure enough, around two a.m. a small, beat-up motor home without license plates had come by the camera.

Thirty-five minutes later, the same vehicle went by again, moving in the opposite direction. In both photographs, they could see two men, one much older than the other, in the cab of the motor home. In the photo of them leaving, the old guy had his head thrown back and was laughing.

That picture had so enraged Butler, he had climbed in the makeshift blind at five thirty a.m. and waited. He’d been there seven and a half hours. With the temperature north of ninety.

But Butler and his team were stubborn hunters. They would wait until dark and all night to catch the poachers who’d shot the ram, likely in their headlights or with a thermal scope, which enraged Butler even more.

He was not against hunting, not in the least. But he despised poachers who’d shoot an animal at night, defenseless. And they hadn’t even killed it outright, just left it to suffer.

The irony that he had often hunted people at night with such devices was not lost on Butler. But then again, the people he hunted were by no means defenseless.

“Cap?” Vincente said in Butler’s earpiece. His voice sounded crackly from the sweat.

“Here.”

“It’s showtime. We see the motor home. Arkansas plates on it now. Just turned into the campground.”

There was a Wyoming state campground on a nice trout stream a half a mile from the ranch gate. Of course that’s where they’d be.

“Let me know when they start walking our way.”

“Roger that.”

Vincente’s alert came a half an hour later, at three in the afternoon, almost twelve hours after the poachers had put a bullet through the ram’s belly.

“They just crossed the road, climbed the ridge in camo and face paint,” he said. “They’re probably forty minutes from that ram.”

Butler triggered his mike, said, “Purdy, crawl that motor home.”

“On it,” she said.

Twenty minutes later, his burglar said, “Got in the rig and you were right. They’ve got false compartments and three big bloody sheep skulls and horns in them. And there’s a custom twenty-two bolt-action rifle in here with a thermal scope that must cost five grand.”

“Identification?”

“On both our crackers. Dudley Bob Hole, age fifty-two, of Stuttgart, Arkansas. Jim Bob Hole, twenty-four, looks like he still lives at home with dear old pops.”

“Heartwarming,” Butler said. “Anything else?”

“GPS tracker under the back left bumper.”

Butler did not like that. “Law enforcement?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Where are you?”

“In the motor home with the engine on and the AC blowing.”

“Hide the tracker somewhere there in the campground where you can find it and drive the rig up to the barn. Put the chemicals and the rest of it inside and hold your position until my call.”

“Roger.”

“JP, let’s get up there and in position opposite Cortland and Big DD.”

“On my way,” Vincente said.

Ten minutes later, Vincente drove up the ranch road in a green Honda Pioneer 1000 side-by-side utility vehicle.

“We got them now, jefe,” Vincente said as Butler climbed in. “Smooth hunting from here on out.”

Butler nodded. But he was thinking about that tracking device and who might have put it there and how he could use it to his advantage.