Free Fire (44 page)

Joe tapped a nail into a shingle to set it, then drove it home with two hard blows.

“Hey, Joe,” Ed called.

“Ed.”

“Fixing your roof?”

Joe passed a beat, discarded a sarcastic answer, and said. “Yup.”

Which gave Ed pause as well, and made him look down at his feet for a few long, contemplative moments. Ed, Joe had discerned,liked to be observed while contemplating. Joe didn’t comply.

“You know,” Ed said, finally, “a fellow can’t actually
fix
T-Lock shingles. It’s like trying to fix a car radio without taking it out of the dash. It just can’t be done properly.”

Joe took in a deep and waited. He dug another nail out of the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

“Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try or that you’re washingyour time. I’m not saying that at all,” Ed said, chuckling in the way a master chuckles at a hapless apprentice, Joe thought. The way his mentor-gone-bad Vern Dunnegan used to chuckle at him.

“Then what are you saying?” Joe asked.

“It’s just that you can’t really fix shingles in a little patch and expect them to hold,” Ed said. “The shingles overlap like this,” he held his hands out and placed one on top of another. “You can’t fix a shingle properly without taking the top one off first. And because they overlap, you need to take the one off
that
. What I’m saying, Joe, is that with T-Lock shingles you’ve got to lay a whole new set of shingles on top or strip the whole roof and start over so they seat properly. You can’t just fix a section. You’ve got to fix it all. If I was you, I’d call your insurance man and have him come out and look at it. That way, you can get got a whole new roof.”

“What if I don’t want a whole new roof?” Joe asked.

Ed shrugged affably, “That’s your call, of course. It’s
your
roof. I’m not trying to make you do anything. But if you look at the other roofs on the block—at my roof—you’ll see we have a certain standard. None of us have patches where you can see a bunch of nail heads. Plus, it might leak. Then you’ve got ceiling damage. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No,” Joe said defensively.

“Nobody wants that,” Ed said, nothing, puffing. Then lookingup at Joe and squinting through a cloud of smoke, “Are you aware your ladder fell down?”

“Yup,” Joe answered quickly.

“Do you want me to prop the ladder back up so you can come down?”

“That’s not necessary,” Joe said, “I need to clean the gutters first.”

“I was wondering when you were going to get to that,” Ed said.

Joe grunted.

“Are you going to get started on your fence then too?”

“Just trying to help,” Ed said, waving his pipe, “just being neighborly.”

Joe said nothing.

“It isn’t like where you used to live,” Ed continued on, “up the Bighorn Road or out there on your mother-in-law’s ranch. In town, we all look out for each other and help each other out.”

“Got it,” Joe said, feeling his neck flush hot, wishing Ed Nedney would turn his attention to someone else on the street or go wax his car or go to breakfast with his old retired buddies at the Burg-O-Pardner downtown.

Joe kept his head down, and started scraping several inches of dead leaves from his gutter with the spatula he’d borrowed from the kitchen drawer.

“I’ve got a tool for that,” Ed offered.

“That’s
okay
, Ed,” Joe said through clenched teeth, “I’m doingjust fine.”

“Mind if I come over?” Nedney asked while crossing his lawn onto Joe’s. It was easy to see the property line, Joe noted, since Ed’s lawn was green and raked clean of leaves and Joe’s was neither. Nedny grumbled about the shape of Joe’s old ladderwhile raising it and propping it up against the eave. “Is this ladder going to collapse on me?” Ed asked while he climbed it.

“We’ll see,” Joe said, as Nedny’s big, fleshy face and pipe appeared just above the rim of the gutter. Ed rose another rung so he could fold his arms on the roof and watch Joe more comfortably.He was close enough that Joe could have reached out and patted the top of Nedny’s watch cap with the spatula.

“Ah, the joys of being a homeowner, eh?” Ed said.

Joe nodded.

“Is it true this is the first house you’ve owned?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got a lovely family. Two daughters, right? Sheridan and Lucy?”

“Yes.”

“I met your wife Marybeth a couple of weeks ago. She owns that business management company—MBP? I’ve heard good things about them.”

“Good.”

“She’s quite a lovely woman as well. I’ve met her mother, Missy. The apple didn’t fall far from that tree.”

“Yes it did,” Joe said, wishing the ladder would collapse.

“I heard you used to live out on the ranch with her and Bud Longbrake. Why did you decide to move to town? That’s a pretty nice place out there.”

“Nosy neighbors,” Joe said.

Nedny forged on, “What are you? Forty?”

“Almost.”

“So you’ve always lived in state-owned houses, huh? Paid for by the state?”

Joe sighed and looked up. “I’m a game warden, Ed. The game and fish department provided housing.”

“I remember you used to live out on the Bighorn Road,” Nedny said. “Nice little place, if I remember. Phil Kiner lives there now. Since he’s the new game warden for the county, what do you do?”

Joe wondered how long Nedny had been waiting to ask these questions since they’d bought the home and moved in. Probably from the first day. But until now, Nedny hadn’t had the opportunityto corner Joe and ask.

“I still work for the department,” Joe said. “I fill in wherever they need me.”

“I heard,” Nedny said, raising his eyebrows man-to-man, “that you work directly for the governor now. Like you’re some kind of special agent or something.”

“At times,” Joe said.

“Interesting. Our governor is a fascinating man. What’s he like in person? Is he really crazy like some people say?”

Joe was immensely grateful when he heard the front door of his house slam shut and saw Marybeth come out into the front yard and look up. She was wearing her weekend sweats and her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She took in the scene: Ed Nedny up on the ladder next to Joe.

“Joe, you’ve got a call from dispatch,” she said. “They said it was an emergency.”

“Tell them it’s your day off,” Nedny counseled, “tell ’em you’ve got gutters to clean out and a fence to fix.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Ed?”

“We all would,” Nedny answered, “the whole block.”

“You’ll have to climb down so I can take that call,” Joe said. “I don’t think that ladder will hold both of us.”

Nedny sighed with frustration and started down. Joe followed.

“My spatula, Joe?” she asked, shaking her head at him.

“I told him I had a tool for that,” Ed called over his shoulder as he trudged toward his house.

“I’M NOT USED to people so close that they can watch and comment on everything we do,” Joe said to Marybeth as he enteredthe house.

“Did you forget about my mother on the ranch?” she asked, smiling bitterly.

“Of course not,” Joe said, taking the phone from her, “but what’s that saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?”

The house was larger than the state-owned home they’d lived in for six years, and nicer but with less character than the log home they’d temporarily occupied on the Longbrake Ranch for a year. Big kitchen, nice backyard, three bedrooms, partially finished basement with a home office, two-car garage filled with Joe’s boat, snowmobile, and still-unpacked boxes stacked up to the rafters. It had been three months since they bought the house but they still weren’t fully moved in.

Ten-year-old Lucy was sprawled in a blanket on the living room floor watching Saturday morning cartoons. She had quickly mastered the intricacies of the remote control and the satellite television setup and reveled in living for the first time, as she put it, “in civilization.” Sheridan was, Joe guessed, back in bed.

Marybeth looked on with concern as he said into the telephone,“Joe Pickett.”

The dispatcher in Cheyenne said, “Please hold for the governor’s office.”

Joe felt a thrill race down his back at the words.

There was a click and a pop and he could hear Governor Spencer Rulon talking to someone else in his office over the speaker phone, caught in midsentence, “. . . we’ve got to get ahead of this one and frame and define it before those bastards in the Eastern press define it for us . . .”

“I’ve got Mr. Pickett on the line, sir,” the dispatcher said.

“Joe!” the governor said, “how in the hell are you?”

“Fine, sir.”

“And how is the lovely Mrs. Pickett?”

Joe looked up at his wife, who was pouring two cups of coffeeto bring one to Joe.

“Still lovely,” Joe said.

“Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Another hunter got shot this morning,” Rulon said.

“Oh, no.”

“This one is in your neck of the woods. I just got the report ten minutes ago. The victim’s hunting buddies found him and called it in. It sounds bad, Joe. It really sounds bad.”

If the governor was correct, this was the third shooting of a big game hunter in Wyoming thus far this fall, Joe knew. The first was still being investigated as a accident, but the second “hunting accident” the week before raised alarms. A third would be disastrous.

“I don’t know all the details yet,” Rulon said, “but I want you all over it for obvious reasons. You need to mount up and get up there and find out what happened. Call when you’ve got the full story.”

“Who’s in charge?” Joe asked, looking up as his day of homeowner chores went away in front of his eyes.

“Your sheriff there,” Rulon said, “McLanahan.”

“Oh,” Joe said.

“I know, I know,” the governor said, “he’s a doofus. But he’s your sheriff, not mine. Go with him and make sure he doesn’t foul up the scene. I’ve ordered DCI and Randy Pope to get up there in the state plane by noon.”

“Why Pope?” Joe asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Rulon said, “if this is another murder of a hunter we’ve got a full-blown economic crisis on our hands. Not to mention another Klamath Moore press conference.”

Klamath Moore was the leader and spokesman for a national antihunting organization who appeared regularly on cable news and was the first to be interviewed whenever a story about huntingand wildlife arose. He had recently turned his attention to the State of Wyoming, and particularly Governor Spencer Rulon,whom he called “Governor Bambi Killer.” Rulon had respondedby saying if Moore came to Wyoming, he’d challenge him to a duel with pistols and knives. The statement was seized upon by commentators making “Red State/Blue State” argumentsduring the election year, even though Rulon was a Democrat.In Wyoming the controversy increased Rulon’s popularity within the state among certain sectors while fueling talk in othersthat the governor was becoming more unhinged.

“Why me?” Joe asked.

The governor snorted. Whoever was in the room with him— it sounded like a woman—laughed. Something about her laugh sounded familiar to Joe, and not in a good way. He shot a glance toward Marybeth, who looked back warily.

“Why you?” Rulon said, “What in the hell else do you have to do today?”

Joe reached back and patted the list in his pocket. “Chores,” he said.

“I want fresh eyes on the crime scene,” Rulon said. “You’ve got experience in this kind of thing. Maybe you can see somethingMcLanahan or DCI can’t see. These are your people, these hunter types. Right?”

Before Joe could answer, he heard the woman in the governor’s office say, “Right.”

Joe thought he recognized the voice, which sent a chill through him. “Stella?”

“Hi, Joe,” she said.

At the name Stella, Marybeth locked on Joe’s face in a death stare.

“I was going to introduce you to my new chief of staff,” the governor said, “but I guess you two know each other.”

“We do,” Stella Ennis purred.

“Joe, are you there?” Rulon asked.

“Barely,” Joe said.

WHILE JOE CHANGED into his red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope Game and Fish Department patch on the shoulder and clipped on his badge that read J. PICKETT, GAME WARDEN above his breast pocket, Marybeth entered the bedroomand said, “Stella Ennis?”

The name brought back a flood of memories. He’d met her in Jackson Hole on temporary assignment three years before. She was the wife of a prominent and homicidal developer who was still awaiting trial. She’d “befriended” the previous Jackson game warden and complicated his life. She tried to do the same with Joe, and he’d been attracted to her. It was a time in his life—and Marybeth’s life—where they seemed on the verge of separation. They’d persevered. Now they owned their first home.

“The governor introduced her as his new chief of staff,” Joe said.

“How is that possible? she asked, “Wasn’t her husband convictedof trying to kill her?”

Joe shook his head. “Marcus Hand was his lawyer and he convinced the jury it was an accident and she was still alive somewhere. Turns out he was right. The Teton County D.A. plea-bargained the rest of the charges and Don Ennis paid some fines and moved to Florida”

“How did she wind up in the governor’s office?”

“I have no idea,” Joe said, “She’s resourceful.”

“This state is too small sometimes,” she said.

“Yup.”

Marybeth approached Joe and pulled him into her with her hands behind his neck, so their faces were inches apart. “Stay away from her, Joe. You know what happened last time.”

“Nothing,” Joe said, flushing.

“Yes, but,” she said.

“Honey . . .”

“She’s a very good-looking woman. I’ve seen pictures of her. She’s beautiful and very dangerous. But so am I.”