Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country

Shots Fired: A Requiem for Ander Esti

On an unseasonably warm fall day in the eastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming, game warden Joe Pickett heard the call from dispatch over his pickup radio:

“Please meet the reporting party on County Road 307 at the junction of County Road 62. RP claims he was attempting to cross public land when shots were fired in his direction. The RP claims his vehicle was struck by bullets. Assailant is unknown.”

Joe paused a moment to let the message sink in, then snatched the mike from its cradle on the dashboard.

“This is GF-24. Are we talking about the junction up above Indian Paintbrush Basin?”

“Affirmative.”

“I can be there in fifteen minutes,” he said, glancing at his mirrors and pulling over to the side of the two-lane highway five miles west of Winchester. The highway was clear in both directions with the exception of a hay combine lumbering westbound a mile in front of him. His tires had been scattering loose stalks of hay since he’d turned off the interstate.

Joe drove into the borrow pit and swung the truck around in a U-turn. He knew of an old gravel two-track that would cut across swaths of public and ranch land and emerge on the crest of Indian Paintbrush Basin. The shortcut would save him twenty minutes as opposed to backtracking to the interstate and going around. If the sheriff were to respond, it would take at least forty-five minutes for a deputy to get out there from town.

Before the call had come, Joe was patrolling the northern flank of his district, keeping an eye out for a local miscreant named Bryce Pendergast, whom Joe had arrested the year before on assault and felony narcotics charges. Pendergast had been convicted and sent to the State Honor Farm in Riverton, but had recently walked away and was last seen climbing into a rusted-out white van driven by an unknown accomplice. A BOLO had been put out for him, and Joe surmised that Pendergast might visit his grandmother in Winchester, but it turned out he hadn’t. The old woman said not only had Bryce not been there, but that he owed her $225, and if he showed up without it she would call the cops. Joe liked the idea of putting Bryce in jail twice.

But a live situation trumped a cold one.

“Are there any injuries?” Joe asked the dispatcher, knowing the conversation was likely being monitored by other game wardens across the State of Wyoming as well as law enforcement and nosy neighbors throughout Twelve Sleep County.

“Negative,” the female dispatcher said. “The party reports bullet holes in the sidewall of his truck, but they didn’t hit anybody.”

“Yikes.”

“I’ll ask the RP to stay out of the line of fire but remain at the scene until you get there.”

“Do you have a name for the RP?” Joe asked, flipping open his spiral notebook to a fresh page while driving down the rough road, then uncapping a pen with his teeth.

The name was Burton Hanks of Casper. While Joe bumped up and down in the cab, he scrawled the name and Hanks’s cell phone number on the pad. His two-year-old yellow Labrador, Daisy, fixated on the wavery pen strokes as if she desperately wanted to snatch the pen out of his grip and chew it into oblivion, which she would if she got the chance.

“Did you run the name?” Joe asked the dispatcher.

“Affirmative. He’s got a general license deer tag and said he is attempting to scout Area 25.”

Joe nodded to himself. Area 25 was a massive and mountainous hunting area that included mountains, breaklands, and huge grassy swales. The official opening day was October 15, a few weeks away. Meaning Hanks was likely a trophy hunter out on a scout to identify the habitat of the biggest buck deer. Locals would literally wait until the opener to go up there, but serious trophy hunters would be out well in advance to mark their territory.

Joe had mixed feelings when it came to serious trophy hunters, but he put them aside.

As he motored down the washboarded county road, leaving a plume of dust behind him, the issue wasn’t scouting or trophy hunting or the ethics of trophy hunters. The issue was contained in two words: shots fired.

Before he reached the foothills to begin his climb into the timber and out the other side to Indian Paintbrush Basin, a herd of seventy to eighty pronghorn antelope looked up and watched him pass from where they grazed among the sagebrush. A herd that big — all does and fawns — meant there would be a bruiser of a buck somewhere watching over his harem, keeping them in line. Joe saw the buck over the next small hill. The animal was heavy-bodied and alert, with impressive curled horns with ivory tips and an alpha-male strut to his step.

Over the next hill, five young bachelor bucks, like pimply-faced adolescents with too much time on their hands and testosterone in their blood, milled about in a tight circle butting heads and, Joe assumed, plotting a coup attempt against the big buck to take charge of the harem. The bachelors strutted and butted at each other, and watched Joe go by with what looked like lopsided sneers.

Joe checked his wristwatch as he nosed his pickup through a steep-sided notch in the hill that would narrow ahead before the road climbed the last rise. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. He was expected home by six so he and his wife, Marybeth, could attend his daughter Lucy’s musical at the Saddlestring High School. She was a costar in a politically correct production he’d never heard of and was scheduled to sing a song called “Diversity.” He didn’t want to miss it, yet he did. Nevertheless, he hoped the shots-fired incident could be resolved quickly enough that he could make it home on time.

As the road got rougher and he pitched about within the cab, Daisy placed both her paws on the dashboard for balance and stared through the front windshield as if to provide navigation support.

“Almost there,” Joe said to her, shifting into four-wheel-drive low to climb the rise. The surface of the old two-track was dry and loose. He liked the idea of coming onto the scene from an unexpected direction. The sudden appearance of a green Game and Fish vehicle sometimes froze the parties in a dispute and gave him time to assess the situation on his own before confronting them or figuring out what to do. Most of all, it allowed him to see a situation with his own eyes before the involved parties weighed in.

He broke over the ridge and the vista to the east was clear and stunning: the foothills gave way to a huge bowl of grass miles across in every direction. The bowl — called Indian Paintbrush Swale, after the state’s official flower — was rimmed on three sides by timbered mountains either dark with pine in shadow or bright green if fused with afternoon sun. Between the swale and where Joe cleared the ridge top was a late-model maroon Chevy Avalanche faux pickup parked just off the county road. Two men stood with their backs to him at first, then wheeled around, obviously surprised that he’d come from behind.

One of the men, standing near the front of the Avalanche, was tall and heavy with a long mustache that dropped to his jawline around both sides of his mouth. He wore a battered brown cowboy hat with a high crown and had a deeply creased and weathered face that indicated he either worked outside or spent a lot of his hours outdoors. The second man looked to be around the same age — fifty-five to sixty — but was clean-shaven and softer in features. He was hatless but wore a starched chamois shirt and new jeans that looked hours out of the box.

The man in the hat waved Joe over. The second man was obviously subordinate to the large man and hung back to stay out of the way and observe.

Joe put his pickup into park and let Daisy out. The dog followed him a few inches from his boot heels and kept her head down, sniffing the grass and sagebrush along the way.

The man in the cowboy hat, Burton Hanks, said he was a little surprised Joe didn’t know of him.

“I’m the guy who broke the Boone and Crockett record for a mule deer in Wyoming last fall,” Hanks said. “Scored 201 and three-eighths overall. Six points on the right side and five on the left. The inside spread was twenty-eight and a quarter,” he said proudly.

“No offense,” Joe said, “but I don’t pay much attention to records. I’m here because someone reported shots fired. I assume you’re the reporting party.”

Hanks was chastened, but said, “That’s me.”

“So,” Joe said, “who was shooting at whom?”

“Some third-world asshole shot at us!” Hanks bellowed, gesturing toward his pickup. “All we were doing was starting to cross that basin down there. Come look at this if you don’t believe me.”

Joe followed Hanks around the Avalanche.

“Here’s the evidence,” Hanks said, pointing at the small bullet hole in the metal sheeting of the rear bumper guard.

“Yup,” Joe said, leaning close to the bumper. The hole was clean and the bullet was likely lodged somewhere in the sidewall of the bed. “Eight inches lower and it would have hit the tire,” Joe said.

“And five inches higher and it might have punctured the fuel line and blown us to kingdom come,” Hanks added. “Here, there’s another one,” he said, pressing his index finger against a second hole in the sidewall a few feet in back of the cab. The bullet had pierced the outside sheet metal and exited on the top rail of the pickup bed, leaving angry sharp tongues of steel. Which meant the shot had been fired from a lower elevation than the truck at the time, Joe thought.

“Let me get a couple of pictures,” Joe said, returning to his own truck for his digital camera. “Did you get a look at who did the shooting?”

“Hell yes,” Hanks said. “And you can put away that camera, Warden. I can point you at who shot at us and you can go down there and arrest him right now.”

Joe said, “You mean he’s still there?”

“That’s what I’m saying. You can borrow my binocs and I’ll point him out to you.”

Joe was surprised. Previously, a series of likely scenarios had circled around in the back of his mind: the shooter was also a trophy hunter intending to spook the competition; the shooter was zeroing in his rifle when the Avalanche got in the way; the shooter was poaching elk and was surprised by the intrusion. It didn’t occur to him that the shooter would still be in the basin twenty minutes later.

He frowned. The last thing he needed — or wanted — was a situation where a man with a rifle was hidden away in isolated terrain. A whole new set of scenarios — more dangerous than the first set — began to emerge. Joe knew that by the time the sheriff’s department arrived, the shooter could either escape or bunker in for a long standoff.

Hanks handed Joe a pair of Zeiss Victory 8×42 binoculars and arched his eyebrows in anticipation of a compliment. The binoculars were known to be the best, and were among the most expensive optics available, at over $2,000 a pair. Joe took them and refrained from commenting on them. But looking through them was like being transported into a clearer and sharper world than what was available to the naked eye.

Joe swept the grassy basin and the lenses filled with the backs of hundreds of sheep he hadn’t noticed before. The herd was so large it had melded into the scenery of the basin but now it was obvious. The sheep were moving only a few inches at a time as they grazed on the grass, heads down, like a huge cumulus cloud barely moving across the sky. Unlike cattle, sheep snipped the grass close to the surface and left the range with the appearance of a manicured golf green. Which is one of the primary reasons sheepmen and cattlemen had gone to war over a century before.

“All I see is sheep,” Joe said to Hanks.

“Keep going,” Hanks said. “Look right square in the middle of that basin.”

Joe found a distant structure of some kind and focused in.

“The sheep wagon?” Joe said.

The ancient wagon was parked in the middle of the giant swale. It had a rounded sheet metal top painted white that fit like a muffin top on a squared-off frame. Sheep wagons were hitched to vehicles and towed to where the herds were and left, sometimes for weeks. They had long tongues for towing, water barrels cinched to the sides, small windows on the sides of the metal cover skin, and narrow double doors on the front. The black snout of a chimney pipe poked through the roof.

There wasn’t a pickup parked beside the wagon but a saddled horse was tied to a picket pin, as well as a black-and-white blue heeler dog.

“That’s where the shots came from,” Hanks said.

“And all you were doing was going down the road minding your own business?”

“I don’t like the insinuation,” Hanks said haughtily. “We were driving on a county road through private land, legal as hell. When I drove the Avalanche down there from up here, I heard the first bullet hit before I even heard a shot. Then the second one hit. I stopped the truck and glassed the basin and saw that sheep wagon. The guy who shot at us had the top door open on the wagon and I could see a rifle barrel sticking out. I never saw him clearly. He didn’t close the door until we hightailed it back up here and called 911.”

Joe lowered the binoculars and handed them back. “You’re sure you didn’t do anything to provoke him?” he asked. “Were you spooking his sheep?”

“I goddamned told you exactly what happened,” Hanks said, turning to his friend. “Isn’t that right, Bill? I didn’t leave anything out, did I?”

Bill said, “Nope. All we were doing was driving along the road and that nut down there started popping off at us. We didn’t threaten him or nothing. And we weren’t even close to his sheep yet.”

“Why are you even asking these questions?” Hanks said to Joe. “Don’t you believe us? You saw the bullet holes.”

“I did. But this is the first time I ever heard of him getting aggressive and shooting at somebody.”

“You know him?” Hanks asked, incredulous.

“His name is Ander Esti. I recognize his horse. He’s been around this country for a long time — before I ever got here. He’s not the type to just shoot at somebody.”

“Well, this time he did, Warden,” Hanks said.

Joe nodded. He could detect no discrepancies in their story, although he couldn’t yet be sure.

“Where are you boys staying in town?” Joe asked.

Hanks said the Holiday Inn.

“Why don’t you go on back there for now. I’ll drive down and talk to Ander and I’ll bring him in to the county jail. I’ll stop by the Holiday Inn on my way home and let you know where things stand.”

Hanks and Bill looked at each other, obviously a little suspicious of the methodology Joe had suggested.

“Go back, relax, have a beer,” Joe said. “There’s no reason for the three of us to go charging down there. Ander Esti is… well… a unique individual. He can get a little excitable—”

“That’s fucking obvious,” Hanks huffed.

“There’s no need to spook him,” Joe continued. “I think I can handle this best on my own and I’ll let you know how it goes.”

Hanks turned somber. “Are you sure you don’t want me to cover you? I have my .308 Winchester Mag along with me,” he said, chinning toward the Avalanche. “Bill brought along his AR-15.”

Joe hardened his expression and said, “If you stick around here much longer, I’ll need to start asking you two why you brought your hunting rifle along a month before the season opens.”

Hanks and Bill looked at each other, and that seemed to settle it. Joe guessed Hanks to be one of those trophy hunters who maybe just couldn’t pass up a record-setting buck even if it was before the season opened. They agreed to meet Joe later and climbed into their Avalanche and started the slow, four-wheel-drive trek back to the highway.

When the Avalanche was out of view, Joe said to Daisy, “There’s something wrong here.”

The first time Joe met Ander Esti was on a similarly warm September day eight years before. Joe was assisting an exploration survey crew hired by the state to confirm corner posts and benchmarks that had been established in the 1890s, when the state was first mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey. The crew needed to reestablish property lines in the Pumpkin Buttes area for a new plat of the ownership of private and state lands. Because Joe was the warden for the district and knew the territory as well as most of the local landowners, he was asked to be on call if there were access issues for the survey crew, who had flown in from Virginia and were completely new to the vast and empty terrain.

When one of the surveyors did his triangulation of a possible benchmark from a hilltop, he determined that the ground they needed to stake happened to fall right in the middle of a sheep wagon that had been parked in a semi-arid mountain valley. The surveyor was uncomfortable approaching the wagon — he’d never seen such a thing in his life — and told Joe he’d witnessed a man wading through a herd of sheep with a rifle resting on his shoulder. So Joe volunteered to approach the sheepherder and suggest that together they could roll the wagon a few feet forward or back so a survey stake could be driven into the ground.

Joe knew at the time that the best way to approach sheepherders — who were often left with the herds for weeks at a time — was head-on and as obvious as possible. The men employed by ranchers to tend the massive herds were often Basque and some barely spoke English. Fresh water and food was delivered to them every ten days to two weeks by the rancher who employed the Basques. Because of their lack of human interaction, they could become isolated and jumpy, especially when coyotes or eagles were preying on the stock. Rarely was a sheepherder in a situation where his rifle wasn’t within reach.

So Joe drove slowly and deliberately toward the wagon, letting the stock part out of the way in front of his truck. As he neared the wagon he got out and shut his pickup door with a bang and called out. Although there was a saddled horse tied to the side of the wagon and a curl of smoke from the chimney pipe, the door didn’t open and the curtains inside didn’t rustle, even though it was the middle of the day.

He walked up to the wagon with his right hand on the grip of his weapon, but removed it when he reached the door. If the sheepherder looked out and saw him standing there with his hand on his gun, he didn’t want to appear to provoke him. As he reached up to knock on the door, he heard a pair of voices coming from inside. Joe paused.

They were speaking in Spanish, Basque Spanish. It was obvious from the back-and-forth cadence that one man was telling the other a series of jokes. The second man found the jokes hilariously funny, and snorted when he laughed. He laughed so hard the wagon rocked.

Two herders in one wagon was unusual, Joe thought, but not unprecedented. The inside of a sheep wagon was spartan and simple — a table with a bench seat on each side, a compact pantry and cupboard at floor level, a small woodstove for cooking, and a raised bunk at the back for sleeping — perhaps the earliest version of a camper trailer. Two normal-sized men inside would likely find the situation suffocating.

Joe knocked on the door and instantly the joking stopped.

He waited a beat, and knocked again and identified himself.

Finally, there was a scuff of boots on the plank-wood floor inside and the top door swung open to reveal a dark and compact man in a snap-button cowboy shirt, a loose silk bandanna hanging from his neck, and black eyes so small and intense that Joe stepped back.

It was Ander Esti, and he was alone and it was obvious he was just finishing up his lunch. He’d been telling jokes to himself. And laughing.

After they’d rolled the wagon ten feet back, Joe asked Ander if he often told jokes to himself. Esti gestured that he didn’t understand the question, and Joe let it drop.

Later, during the winter, Joe spotted Ander in the front row of their church during services. The man sat alone wearing a clean but ancient snap-button western shirt and he appeared to listen intently to the minister. He left after services, before Joe could talk to him, and he showed up again seven weeks later.

Joe asked the minister about the man, and the reverend chuckled and said Ander attended a different church every week in Saddlestring and was on his second rotation of the winter. He was generous with his donation in the plate but had no interest in joining. And he wouldn’t show up again once the snows melted and the ranchers were hiring.

Ander Esti was the kind of character, Joe came to find out, who moved through the community and somehow left no impression he’d ever been there. During the winter months, he’d be on the periphery of the small Christmas parade put on by the downtown merchants or alone in the top row of the high school basketball game. He never spoke to anyone, and when he was gone no one recalled he’d been there.

Ander seemed to float through the seasons with a light footprint and a particular pattern: work all summer and fall in the high country without a day off, then winter in town like a ghost, slowly spending the wages he’d made until it was summer again. He was self-sufficient and never applied for unemployment insurance or welfare when he didn’t work, and never showed up for free lunch at the community center.

Joe noticed him, though, because he made a point of it. But he never got to know the man well and never had a conversation with him. And when he waved at Ander, the man appeared not to recognize him.

The sheep wagon Joe approached was the same unit where he’d originally met Ander but even more in need of a new coat of paint. Shards of green were curling off the base of the wagon and windows of galvanized metal could be seen on the sloped roof. It was warm enough that there was no curl of smoke from the stove. Ander Esti’s roan gelding looked thinner than the last time, and his dog more vicious.

Joe grabbed the mike from the dashboard and called it in. Because he was in the swale, reception was poor and filled with static.

“This is GF-24,” he said to the dispatcher two hundred and fifty miles away in Cheyenne. “I’m approaching the scene of the incident. It’s a sheep wagon belonging to the C Lazy U Ranch north of Kaycee. The perp in question appears to be inside and I know him. His name is Ander Esti…” Joe spelled out the name.

“Are you requesting backup?” the dispatcher asked.

Joe smiled to himself. “Negative. I’ll call in when I’m clear.”

Like before, Joe made sure his presence was known as he neared the wagon. He braked twenty yards from the front. Despite what the two hunters had claimed, Joe couldn’t imagine Esti being hostile. Nevertheless, he checked the loads in his shotgun before climbing out, but decided not to carry it to the front door of the wagon. Instead, he propped it inside the open door of his pickup. As he walked toward the front of the wagon, he touched the grip of his Glock with his fingertips but left it in the holster. He couldn’t conceive of a need to draw it out.

The sheep on all sides created a cacophony of mewls and abrasive calls. The blue heeler growled at him, showing its teeth and straining and lunging at a leash rope. The dog seemed unnaturally aggressive and upset, Joe thought.

Hundreds of sheep surrounded the wagon. They were so tightly packed together that they looked and functioned as a two-and-a-half-foot containment wall. Joe could hear them munching dry grass, and the sound became a low hum in the background.

“Ander? It’s Joe Pickett,” he called out as he neared the wagon but stopped well short of the dog. “Ander, you need to come out so we can talk. Some guys scouting for elk said you shot at their truck. They’re gone now — it’s just me.”

Although there were no sounds from inside, Joe noticed a very subtle shift in the wagon — weight being transferred from side to side, as if Esti was pacing. But it couldn’t be pacing because there wasn’t enough floor space. He must be shifting from the stool near the door to the bench at the table, Joe thought. He tried to picture Ander inside. The man was probably guilt-ridden and anxious about what he’d done. Joe couldn’t imagine what might go through a man’s mind after months of isolation with only a horse, a dog, and hundreds of sheep to talk to. Or what a man might think if he looked up and saw a strange pickup in the distance.

“Ander, come on out, but leave your rifle inside. Open your door so we can talk.”

Joe heard an impatient sigh and the latch of the upper door being thrown.

And Bryce Pendergast stood there holding Ander Esti’s lever-action carbine, pointing it directly at Joe’s face. Pendergast’s head was shaved and there were new tattoos on his neck and temple. He was shaking with rage or fear or meth and his eyes were wide open and wild.

Behind him, in the wagon, a female voice said, “Just shoot the motherfucker, Bryce. Just shoot him now.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Pendergast hissed to the woman. Then to Joe: “So, it’s you.”

Joe felt the blood in his face drain out and the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

“Where’s Ander?” Joe asked. “Do you have him with you in there?”

“Who?” Pendergast asked, his voice high and tight.

“Ander Esti. The sheepherder.”

“So that’s his name,” Pendergast said.

Joe wondered what exactly that meant.

“Okay, game warden,” Pendergast said, as he dropped his left hand from the front stock of the rifle but kept it aimed at Joe. “You need to unbuckle that belt and let it drop to the ground. Do it slow.”

Joe swallowed hard. He’d screwed up by forgetting his training and letting his familiarity with Ander Esti soften his approach. Never assume, he’d been taught. But he’d assumed.

He reached down and undid his belt and let his Glock, cuffs, bear spray, and extra magazines thump to the ground.

“I remember that goddamned bear spray,” Pendergast said, undoing the latch to the lower door and kicking it open. “It nearly fuckin’ blinded me.”

“I remember,” Joe said.

Joe recalled the takedown, when he was surprised by an armed Pendergast on the threshold of a rental house, and the first thing he was able to grab to protect himself was the canister of bear spray. And he remembered Pendergast writhing on the lawn, sobbing and crying that his rights had been violated.

Pendergast asked, “How’d you like that shit in your eyes?”

“I wouldn’t.”

Pendergast snorted and stepped down out of the wagon. The muzzle of the rifle trembled because Pendergast trembled. Joe looked at the man closely: wild eyes, flushed cheeks, sinew like taut cords in his neck, veins popping on his forearms.

As Pendergast cleared the door, Joe caught a glimpse of a skinny and dirty blonde inside, peeking out. She had long stringy hair and eyes as wild as Bryce’s. A tweaker, Joe thought. A couple of tweakers.

“Where’s Ander?” Joe asked.

Pendergast ignored him. He backed Joe up and squatted — with the rifle still aimed at Joe’s chest — to retrieve the gear belt and holstered pistol. He tossed it behind him so it landed in a coil beneath the wagon.

“We’re gonna be taking your pickup out of here,” Pendergast said. “Is there plenty of gas in it?”

“Yup,” Joe said. “But it won’t be as easy as that.”

Pendergast shook his head. “Why the hell not?”

“It’s a law enforcement vehicle,” Joe explained, dancing as fast as he could. “It’s got a GPS black box inside. The suits at headquarters can track it if it moves even a foot from where it is right now. So if it moves, they have to call me for a check-in. If you take my truck and don’t answer when they call in, they’ll know you’ve stolen it and they’ll send out a tracker plane or helicopter. You can’t just take a law enforcement vehicle anymore.”

Pendergast seemed flummoxed, but he covered himself by saying, “Yeah, I guess I heard something about that.”

“So if you want to go somewhere, I’ll be happy to drive you,” Joe said. “But you can’t just leave me here and take it if you don’t want to get caught.”

“Maybe you’re going with us,” Pendergast said, narrowing his eyes.

“I thought that’s what I just said.” Joe grinned. Then: “So was it you who shot a couple of rounds at a pickup a while back?” Joe asked, keeping his tone conversational. “The guy who called it in said he thought it was the sheepherder.”

“It was Bryce,” the woman said from inside the wagon. “Ain’t that right, honey?” She was proud of him.

Pendergast nodded in agreement but kept his eyes locked on Joe.

“Get out here,” Pendergast said to the woman. “I need your help.”

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Just get the fuck out here,” Pendergast shouted.

“Jesus, you don’t need to yell,” she said, stepping out. Joe recognized her. He’d seen her playing girls’ basketball a couple of years ahead of his oldest daughter, Sheridan, for the same Saddlestring Wranglerette team. But she looked twenty-five years older than she should. He could see yellowed stubs where her row of white teeth used to be when she opened her mouth. She seemed to notice him staring and clamped her mouth shut. She was a serious meth user, all right. And maybe, he thought, she recognized him.

“So what did you do with Ander?” Joe asked. “I see his horse here and his dog.”

“Shut the hell up,” Pendergast said.

“So since your white van isn’t anywhere around here,” Joe said, “I’m guessing you broke down or got stuck somewhere close and walked until you found the sheep wagon. You were probably hoping there’d be a vehicle with it, but there wasn’t. So what did you do with Ander?”

“I said shut up while I think.”

“Never your strong suit,” Joe said. “But I’m worried about Ander. He’s known as a hard worker and a good guy, even if he’s a little… off. I’ve never met a rancher around here who didn’t want to hire him. He takes his job seriously and he never caused anyone any problems. He keeps to himself and works hard for a day’s pay. He’s trustworthy and honest and he’s never hurt or screwed anyone. I’d hate to think that something happened to him, because anyone who knew him liked the man.

“So,” Joe asked, “do you know where he is?”

Pendergast paused for a moment, then screamed, “Quit fucking asking the questions. I got the rifle — so I ask the questions.”

“Okay,” Joe said.

The girl shuffled up behind and to the left of Pendergast. Joe noticed for the first time that she held an old Colt .45 revolver in her hands. He glanced over his shoulder toward the open door of the wagon. No Ander. But he could see meth-smoking paraphernalia on the small table inside — crumpled aluminum foil packets, stubby pipes, open books of matches.

“Who knows you’re here?” Pendergast said.

Joe weighed his answer before he said, “Plenty of folks. I gave my location to the dispatcher just a few minutes ago. The sheriff’s department and the highway patrol are on their way. I’d suggest we end this before something bad happens.”

“When will they get here?” Pendergast asked, alarmed.

“Any minute,” Joe said.

Pendergast broke his glare and scanned the terrain for vehicles. “I don’t hear nobody coming.”

Joe shrugged. “Lots of folks are looking for you since you walked away from the Honor Farm. The best way to go here would be to put down the rifle and turn yourself in. That way you’ll be cooperating and they might go easy on you.”

“Fuck that,” Pendergast said, spitting out the words. “I ain’t going back there. You know what they had me doin’ on that farm? Milking fucking cows. I hate cows. I ain’t no farmer.”

Joe nodded. Bryce Pendergast had been raised well by solid parents. He had two brothers and a sister who had turned out all right. Bryce was in the middle, and had always been a wreck. Couldn’t keep a job, car theft, parole violations. He’d been in the process of setting up a meth lab with a buddy when Joe first arrested him.

“No, you aren’t a farmer,” Joe said.

Pendergast pursed his mouth and nodded as if they’d finally agreed on something. Then he seemed to recall why he’d asked the girl to come out of the wagon.

“Kelsey, put your gun on him for a minute.”

Kelsey — Joe now remembered her name as Kelsey Trocker — looked confused.

“What do you mean, on him?” she asked.

Pendergast sighed and said, “Raise that pistol and cock the hammer back and aim it at his face. If he so much as flinches, you pull the trigger. Now do you fuckin’ understand?”

“Yeah,” she said, “but you don’t need to talk to me like that.”

“Just do it.”

“Where you goin’?”

“I gotta pee.”

“Oh, okay.”

Pendergast stepped aside while Kelsey stepped forward. Joe felt his life about to end when she raised the revolver and fumbled with the hammer in an effort to cock it. She was as shaky as Pendergast. Then she managed to figure it out and Joe watched the cylinder rotate and the hammer lock in place. He could see — close as he was — lead bullets in three of the four visible chambers. The chamber that previously had been lined up in the barrel had been fired.

And he thought he knew what had happened to Ander Esti.

Pendergast kept his eyes on Joe while he backed away, making sure Kelsey had the situation under control. Then he turned near the wagon and Joe could hear him unzipping his jeans.

“Did you shoot Ander?” Joe asked in a low voice.

She shook her head no, but something that scared her flashed through her eyes. Maybe she was just now remembering what they’d done…

“You don’t need to go down with him,” Joe said, chinning toward Pendergast. “If Bryce was the one who did it, you can get yourself out of this.”

“Shut up,” she said, and Joe could see her finger whiten on the trigger. He shut up.

After leaving a meager puddle in the dirt, Pendergast zipped up and hoisted the rifle. He strode back toward Joe, but then stopped, as if he suddenly recalled something. With a lopsided grin, he turned and found Joe’s gear belt and removed the canister of bear spray.

Joe thought, Oh no.

“Keep that gun on him,” Pendergast said to Kelsey, as he clamped the rifle under his left arm. He held the bear spray aloft in his right hand.

“How’d you like a taste of your own goddamn medicine?” he said to Joe.

“I wouldn’t.”

“You thought it was pretty damned funny when you used it on me.”

“No, I didn’t,” Joe said.

“I learned at the Farm that this stuff,” he said, gesturing to the canister, “ain’t even legal to use on a human. It’s too damned powerful. They shoulda arrested you for excess force for sprayin’ me.”

“It was self-defense,” Joe said. “You might remember you were trying to shoot me at the time.”

“Bryce,” Kelsey said, stepping back, “don’t get any of that stuff on me.”

“Don’t worry, darlin’,” Pendergast said, warming up to his idea. “Just don’t take that gun off him.”

“Be careful,” Joe said to Pendergast. “That spray doesn’t always go where you aim it.”

Which made Pendergast pause for a moment while he studied the canister in his hand. There was a ring to put his index finger through, and a safety tab to flip up so he could trigger the release with his thumb. The complexity of it seemed to overwhelm him, Joe thought.

“Why don’t you—” Kelsey started to say.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up!” Pendergast exploded. “He fucked me up with this stuff, so I’m gonna return the favor. Got it?”

Kelsey grimaced, and for a second the muzzle of the gun wavered.

“Really,” Joe said helpfully, “sometimes it shoots out about forty-five degrees from where you aim it. So you’ve really got to know what you’re doing.”

It was about the fifth lie he’d told them since he arrived, he thought.

“Honey, can’t you spray him later?” Kelsey pleaded.

Pendergast ignored her and advanced with the canister out in front of him. When it was three feet from Joe’s face, Pendergast squeezed the trigger. But because he hadn’t armed the spray by raising the tab, nothing happened.

But Kelsey didn’t know that. She’d covered her face with her left hand and closed her eyes to avoid blowback. Joe threw himself at her.

He wrenched the Colt free and bodychecked her with his hip and she fell away like a rag doll. Before Pendergast could get rid of the canister and reseat his rifle, Joe raised the .45 in Pendergast’s general direction and fired.

The gunshot was flat and loud and Pendergast went down as if the wires that had held him aloft had been snipped. Joe didn’t know where he’d hit him, but he thumbed back the hammer again and pounced. Pendergast had taken his rifle down with him and Joe didn’t want it aimed at him.

Pendergast grunted “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck” and rolled in the dirt away from Joe, who could see a red stain blossoming through the fabric of Pendergast’s pant leg near his knee. He looked as if he intended to roll to his backside and sit up so he could fire the rifle at Joe.

Joe shot him in the butt from three feet away and Pendergast howled.

The rifle barrel raised in the air and Joe grasped it with his left hand and jerked it away, then sent it flying toward the near flock of sheep that had frozen and watched them with dumb eyes.

When the rifle hit the backs of the sheep — they were that tightly packed together — the entire herd panicked and began to move away as if they were a single organism. Their bawls filled the air and thousands of tiny chunks of earth were kicked up by their sharp hooves and rained down near the wagon and on Joe and Pendergast and Kelsey.

“Ungh,” Pendergast moaned, “you shot me in the ass.”

“Yup,” Joe said, cocking the hammer of the single-action.

Kelsey had recovered from being thrown aside and was on her hands and knees, trying to stand up.

“Just stay down,” Joe said to her.

She sighed and did as she was told, but raised her head and stared at the grass where the sheep had been. “It wasn’t me who shot that old man,” she said vacantly. “All I was in this thing for was to pick up Bryce when he got loose so we could go to California, where I’ve got friends. But no — Bryce wanted to see his old grandma first and said he knew a back way. He got my van stuck in the mud because he was too fucked up to drive. Then we had to walk all the way here and…”

Joe followed her gaze and there he was. Ander Esti’s body lay on its back not fifty feet from the wagon. His sheep had grazed around him and obscured him from view. There was no doubt from the odd angles of his arms that he was dead. That, and the hole in his forehead singed with a gunshot powder burn. The rifle Joe had flung — Esti’s ancient lever-action carbine — was in the dirt next to him.

Joe took a deep breath. He kept an eye on both tweakers while he released Esti’s blue heeler, who bolted for where the body was and sat down beside it as if guarding the remains.

Pendergast had rolled onto his side so his wounded butt cheek was off the ground. He moaned and gasped and said again, “You shot me in the ass.”

Joe said, “And I might just shoot you again.”

With Kelsey cuffed to the front bumper and Pendergast cuffed to a ringbolt in the bed of his pickup, Joe called in the incident and requested a Life Flight helicopter as well as the sheriff’s department crime scene team.

“The sheriff’s department advises it may take an hour to get there,” the dispatcher said. “They’re worried about the suspect bleeding out.”

Joe acknowledged the transmission and looked over the wall of his pickup bed at Pendergast, who had heard it.

“No great loss,” Joe said, and keyed off.

“That was fucking cold,” Pendergast said. But the bleeding had slowed since Joe had lifted him into the bed and wrapped the wounds. Most of the blood had flowed from Pendergast’s broken knee, and Joe was able to cinch it securely. The buttocks entry shot seeped black blood like a puncture wound, and it didn’t appear life-threatening.

Joe said to Pendergast, “You won’t be able to just walk away next time you feel like it, either. This time, you’ll go to big-boy prison in Rawlins and you’ll be there for a long time.”

Pendergast grimaced and looked away. He said, “There’s a pipe in that wagon. I need a hit to kill the pain, so do me a solid, won’t you?”

Joe turned away with thoughts of grabbing his shotgun and finishing the job.

Joe coaxed the story out of Kelsey.

After they’d gotten the van stuck and tried in vain half the day to dig it out with twisted lengths of greasewood, they’d set out on foot cross-country in the general direction of Winchester. After several hours, they saw the big herd of sheep and the wagon. Bryce figured there would be a pickup truck there as well, probably on the side of the wagon they couldn’t see, and they’d threaten the sheepherder and get his keys.

Ander opened the door and said something they couldn’t understand. Kelsey said it sounded like a foreign language but she couldn’t be sure because she was so fucked up. Bryce ordered the man to speak English. When he didn’t, Bryce took Kelsey’s gun, which she’d stolen from her grandfather before driving south to pick up Bryce, and shot Ander in the forehead. They dragged his body into the herd of sheep thinking, she said, the sheep would eat it and destroy the evidence.

“You didn’t know sheep don’t eat meat?” Joe asked.

“How were we supposed to know that?” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I told you,” Pendergast interjected, “I ain’t no farmer.”

Ander Esti’s blue heeler wouldn’t let Joe get close enough to put a sheet over the body. He looked back at his pickup and Daisy, who watched him through the passenger window.

He wondered if Daisy would stand guard over his own body if it came to it. He thought maybe she would.

When Joe came back to the pickup, the adrenaline rush that had enveloped him was fading into anger and melancholy. Pendergast looked up, his face a mask of pain and shock. Before he could speak, before he could beg Joe for a hit from his pipe, Joe said:

“That man you killed for nothing was one of the last of his kind. Those kind of men don’t hardly exist anymore. As far as I know, he doesn’t have a single family member to mourn him — just a few ranchers who won’t be able to hire anyone to do what he did because no one will do it anymore. I didn’t really know him and I don’t know if anyone else did, either, except for his dog and his horse, and they aren’t saying.”

Pendergast whispered, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t,” Joe said. “You’re too thick and stupid. Men like Ander keep this world running. You never worked an honest day in your life and all you’ve ever cared about is your next high. You just take things, and you took that man’s life. You murdered a man who did nothing but work. He never hurt a single soul. There is probably a lot more to him that I’ll never know. But I won’t get the chance to find out.”

Pendergast looked away. He said, “I don’t have to listen to this shit.”

“No,” Joe said, “but if I somehow could trade his life for yours, I’d do it.”

As if choreographed, the still evening was broken by the chopping sound of the approaching helicopter and the grind of a sheriff’s department SUV on the ridge above Indian Paintbrush Basin.

The sheep ignored the disruption. They’d long before bowed their heads to eat.