Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country

INTRODUCTION

The short stories in this collection were written over the last decade and appeared here and there — as limited editions, in obscure anthologies, or not at all. Three of them (“One-Car Bridge,” “Blood Knot,” “Shots Fired”) are new and original to this anthology.

I’ve received many inquiries over the years from readers asking where they could find the stories, and thanks to the good folks at Penguin/Putnam (especially my legendary editor, Neil Nyren), here they are. All of them. Four feature Joe Pickett and/or Nate Romanowski (“One-Car Bridge,” “The Master Falconer,” “Dull Knife,” “Shots Fired”) and the rest are wide-ranging, from the Wind River Mountains, Wyoming Territory, 1835 (“The End of Jim and Ezra”) to a dark little number in modern-day Paris via South Dakota (“Le Sauvage Noble”). Also included are pieces set in Yellowstone (“Pirates of Yellowstone”), the North Platte River in Wyoming (“Every Day Is a Good Day on the River”—one of my firmest beliefs, by the way), and during a ferocious Wyoming blizzard (“Pronghorns of the Third Reich”).

There’s a question that always comes up at talks and book signings, which is: “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s the most confounding question for a writer to answer, I think, and leads to an answer that is unsatisfactory for the person who queried. It’s as if when one revealed the true (but obviously withheld) answer, the curtain would be pulled back and the secret would be out.

I’ve always thought that the components of writing a novel are ninety-five percent craft and five percent creativity. I can respond to questions about craft just like a carpenter can talk about specific tools and tricks of the trade. Writing a book is like anything: One goes to work in the morning, every morning, and writes. Pages come out. Eventually, there are enough pages to make it a novel.

What I can’t answer well is where the five percent comes from, or how to pull it from the air. It’s just there—or it isn’t.

What follows are brief introductions to each story: where they appeared, why they were written, and where the ideas came from.

“One-Car Bridge” is a new Joe Pickett story that appears here for the first time. It derived from a dinner conversation over drinks with a third-generation rancher whose grandfather was notoriously tough on his employees — so tough that his legacy still hovers over the land like a black cloud.

“Pirates of Yellowstone” first appeared in an anthology called Meeting Across the River, where the editors asked a number of writers to contribute short stories based on the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. I puzzled over what I would write, since I don’t do gritty urban. Hank Williams, sure. Bob Wills, maybe. But the Boss? I was thinking this over one evening in Gardiner, Montana, within sight of Yellowstone Park, when I witnessed several black-leather-clad Eastern European types in street shoes smoking cigarettes outside a local bar. They fit into the rough outdoorsy atmosphere like gangbangers at a cattle branding. I found out they’d been recruited overseas to work inside the park but there weren’t enough jobs available when they arrived. So I speculated on what kind of job — and trouble — they might get into.

Nobody — oh, maybe ten people — read “The End of Jim and Ezra” when it appeared in an anthology called Geezer Noir II a few years ago. In fact, I’ve never even seen a copy of the book. The volume was withdrawn from the market due to legal issues that resulted from the tragic early death of its publisher, David Thompson — one of the truly good and brilliant men in the world of booksellers. David was the marketing director and friend to all at Murder By The Book in Houston, one of my favorite stores. The story took David by surprise because he was expecting something contemporary, not a piece about two mountain-men friends set in 1835. But he liked it very much and he urged me — someday — to write a historical novel set in the same period. We’ll see. Anybody who has spent too much time with a business partner will relate to Jim and Ezra.

“The Master Falconer” appeared as a limited-edition short story published by ASAP in California and was available to fewer than a few hundred collectors. Later, it was released as an e-story. The piece is the first time I tackled a tale centered entirely on Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer from the Joe Pickett series. I wanted to see if I could do it and also see if Nate could carry a story on his own. I liked the results, and it set the stage for Force of Nature later in the series. Plus, I was angry at the Saudi royal family.

“Every Day Is a Good Day on the River” was my contribution to an anthology of fishing stories written by crime writers called Hook, Line & Sinister. It was edited by my friend and fishing buddy T. Jefferson Parker and contained entries from Michael Connelly, Ridley Pearson, Don Winslow, James W. Hall, and others. There is some great stuff in it. The proceeds of the book went to Casting for Recovery, helping women cancer survivors, and Project Healing Waters, which assists returning veterans. Two great causes. The setting is a cold day on the North Platte River north of Casper, Wyoming. There are three men in the drift boat — two clients, a guide — and a gun.

“Pronghorns of the Third Reich” (my second-favorite title next to “Every Day Is a Good Day…”) is an example of how short stories are birthed at times in disconnected, disparate, and mysterious ways. In this case, there are two main ingredients that went into the pot to create a dark little stew. First, Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and unofficial czar of the mystery book universe, asked me to contribute a piece for a series of small books he was publishing using bibliophiles — book collectors — as the theme. Second, I was doing some research at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming when I stumbled on a single photo in the Charles Belden collection taken in 1936 that simply took my breath away. (Belden was a fascinating rancher and photographer based near Meeteetse, Wyoming.) I still stare at the photo and shake my head. But whatever you do, don’t spoil the surprise for yourself. Read the story and don’t jump ahead to that last page.

“Dull Knife” was the first Joe Pickett short story for ASAP (see above) and came from an incident I recalled years before while ice-fishing with my father on Ocean Lake in Central Wyoming. There were four or five of us boys, and our job was to check the holes every hour throughout the night to see if there was a fish on the baited hook. One night, in the distance across the frozen surface of the lake, we saw a mysterious glow from under the ice. We had no explanation for the phenomenon and our speculation ranged from underwater vessels (ridiculous) to UFOs (even more so) to something supernatural. Later, we discovered that the glow was the result of dying headlights of a completely submerged car that had crashed through the surface at night and sunk to the bottom. There were no fatalities, and we never learned how the car got there. Joe Pickett, of course, doggedly investigates this eerie accident in this story.

“Le Sauvage Noble” (“The Noble Savage”) is easily one of the most exuberantly twisted and cynical stories I’ve ever written. Again, this was for ASAP. The germ of an idea that later fueled the story occurred at, of all places, the American embassy in the heart of Paris. I was there as part of a contingent of state tourism representatives in France to host a dinner and cocktail party for travel agents and journalists who, we hoped, would write about the Rocky Mountain West or send clients there. I found myself standing next to two American Indians in full native dress. Since they weren’t from any of our states, I asked why they were there. It was because, they said with a wink, French women liked the idea of having sex with Native Americans, and they never missed an embassy reception. The reason made me whoop. The next night we attended the Wild West Show at Disneyland Paris, which somehow confirmed what the Indians had said and revealed something about the French I never would have imagined. You might need to take a shower after this one.

“Blood Knot” is the shortest of short stories: one thousand words. Why? Because a newspaper in the United Kingdom requested it, accepted it, and sent a check. But for whatever reason they never ran it, and no one has read it until now. Because of the limitation on the word count, it was a challenge honing this multigenerational encounter down to size. I couldn’t waste a word. And I like the results.

“Shots Fired: A Requiem for Ander Esti” is a Joe Pickett short story written solely for this anthology. It’s about dirtbags encountered in the middle of nowhere that bring about a sense of loss to Joe that almost overwhelms him. The impetus for the tale comes from an experience of my own many years before when I worked summers on an exploration survey crew based out of Casper, Wyoming. Our job (I was the lowly rodman) was to re-survey corners and benchmarks in the practically roadless Powder River Basin near Pumpkin Buttes. It turned out the location for the stake we needed to drive into the ground happened to be exactly beneath the only man-made structure within sight: a sheep wagon. The odds against something like that happening were incredible. Nevertheless, it was my job to approach this lonely wagon of a sheepherder who had likely not seen another human in weeks and knock on the door…

I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.

C. J. Box

Wyoming, 2014