Off the Grid (11 page)

Earlier that day, Joe Pickett parked his pickup in the gravel lot in front of the Mustang Café to wait for the game warden of the Red Desert district, Phil Parker, to meet him for lunch. Joe was fifteen minutes early. Parker had suggested the meeting place.

The Mustang Café was a run-down structure within sight of I-80, ten miles west of Wamsutter. It had once been painted white, but it was now tinged pink from windstorms filled with Red Desert grit that had sandblasted the north side of it bare. There was a Coors sign in one window that simply spelled
COO,
and a brash
WE ARE OPEN
sign in the other window that looked cheerily out of place.

There was a single muddy pickup with Sweetwater County plates parked in front of the place and an ancient panel van in gray primer in the back.

Joe looked over the Mustang Café and planned to chide Parker about meeting there. He’d noticed over the years that shabby retail buildings on the fringes of society were never torn down—they were repurposed. That had certainly happened with this building.

Joe remembered the Mustang Café from fifteen years before when it had first been put up to serve coal-bed methane energy workers in southwest Wyoming. At the time, it was a notorious strip club, where patrons could eat biscuits and gravy for breakfast on the lip of the stage while women danced during the shift change in the oil patch. The place was shut down after it had gone to seed in a few years and it had become a hub for workers to buy drugs. A sting operation by the Division of Criminal Investigation had led to the arrest and conviction of the original owner.

After a bankruptcy auction, new owners took over and turned the building into a convenience store, again to appeal to the energy workers in the county. It was a place where they could fill up coffee thermoses or their sixty-four-ounce soft drink containers and heat up soggy bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches for breakfast or prepackaged green chili burritos for lunch. When the market for methane tanked, so did the convenience store.

It was then turned into a porn shop that stocked videos and magazines. But the Internet killed it.

Now it was once again the Mustang Café, but without the dancers. Joe had only been inside when it was a convenience store, but the sign out front said it was now a bar and grill.

Rather than wait outside for Parker to show up, Joe decided to get a table and wait.

•   •   •

J
OE
KEPT HIS HAT ON
when he stepped inside and he waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. When he could see, his first impression was that it wasn’t really worth the wait. The décor was haphazard—signed dollar bills stapled to the wall, a few dented
license plates nailed up, beer posters with long-legged women, a silent jukebox, and deer and elk antlers that needed dusting. A skinny man with deep-set eyes and stringy hair wearing an untucked, short-sleeved retro-western shirt with snap buttons stood behind the bar, while a put-together young woman with long dark hair and tight jeans, who kept her back to Joe, sat on a barstool.

“Anyplace?” Joe asked the bartender. There hadn’t been a sign to wait for seating.

“Anyplace you’d like,” the man said. He gave Joe a furtive glance and busied himself washing glasses. It was the behavior of someone who felt guilty about something who didn’t want to show it in the presence of a law enforcement officer, even if it was a game warden. Joe looked the bartender over and thought:
Drugs
. Buying for sure, but maybe dealing as well.

Joe could care less. In fact, he found himself fighting back a grin. It came from the realization that he
loved
this.

He loved being on assignment. He got a thrill out of walking into a microculture with a mission when no one knew him or why he was really there. Joe liked getting the lay of the land, listening to the conversations of locals to try and discern their backstories, motivations, and agendas. For a brief period of time, he didn’t have to answer callouts from dispatch or solve disputes between hunters and landowners or locate the remains of a game animal someone had poached on a back road. And when he showed up wearing his uniform, no one could ever see past it to guess what he was doing.

But not only did he want to complete this last job as Governor Rulon’s range rider, he wanted to find Nate Romanowski. He
missed
Nate. So did Marybeth, but she’d never admit it to Joe.

As if she could read his thoughts, the woman at the bar rotated a
slow quarter turn on her stool and looked at him over her shoulder in a sidelong stare. She was striking, he thought: alabaster skin, long black bangs, big brown eyes, a bee-sting mouth. Her expression was both bold and amused.

She doesn’t belong here,
he thought,
but she
acts like she owns the place.

After making eye contact for a beat too long, she swiveled back around. He felt unjustly dismissed. And he immediately felt guilty about his reaction.

•   •   •

H
E TOOK A SEAT
in a booth so he could face both the door and the bar. The tabletop was sticky and punctuated with cigarette burns.

“Would you like to see a menu?” the bartender asked.

“Sure. Bring two. I’m meeting Phil Parker. Do you know him?”

“He’s the game warden around here?” the man asked.

“Yup.”

“Yeah,” the man sighed. “He comes by here every once in a while. He’s a character.”

“That’s him,” Joe said.

Phil Parker had a reputation within the department as a game warden who worked hard, played hard, and liked the ladies. He’d been married and divorced twice and he’d gotten into trouble in his former district in Star Valley when he was accused by a local Mormon bishop (who was also a Game and Fish commissioner) of sneaking around with the man’s wife. Thus, he was reassigned to the Red Desert country.

Joe didn’t know Parker well, because their districts were hundreds of miles apart, but he had once bunked with him at a mountain tactics workshop in the Wyoming Range near Afton. Parker had
snuck out of the room to go to town when Joe went to bed, but he’d shown up for breakfast the next morning with everyone else. Joe didn’t ask, and Parker didn’t tell. The only indication of what Parker had been up to all night was a wink over scrambled eggs and bacon.

The bartender came out from behind the bar with two laminated sheets—the menus. He placed one in front of Joe and the other where Phil Parker would sit.

“I’m Cooter,” he said.

“Of course you are.”

Cooter looked at Joe quizzically.

“Nice to meet you, Cooter. I’m Joe. Are you the owner of the Mustang Café?”

“Part owner,” Cooter said. “I’ve got a few silent partners who live in the area. They like to have a place to go at night, you know? As you can see, there aren’t a lot of other options here.”

Joe nodded. “Must be tough at times.”

“It’s not so bad,” Cooter said. “We do okay.” Which surprised Joe a little, considering he was the only customer in the place besides the woman at the bar.

“Should I wait to take your order when Phil gets here?”

“Please,” Joe said, noting that Parker had already gone from a good guy who stopped by once in a while to being on a first-name basis. Maybe the Mustang Café was back to its old tricks after all, he thought.

Joe checked out the menu. It read:

Hamburger

Cheeseburger

Bacon Cheeseburger

Chiliburger

Double Chiliburger

Hot Dog

Chili Dog

“Quite a variety,” Joe said.

Cooter shrugged. He said, “We pared it down to what everybody orders all the time.”

“Gotcha.”

Cooter hesitated for a moment, then said, “We got some other things, too. On the other side.”

Joe flipped the menu over. It read:

Vegan Chunky Chili

Al Kabsa

He said, “Really?”

“Them’s a couple of local specialties,” Cooter said.

“Vegan chunky chili?”

“Kidney beans, white beans, brown lentils, tomatoes, celery, onion, red onion, extra-firm tofu. Jan over there orders it every time,” he said, chinning toward the bar. She didn’t turn back around.

Joe paused, looking closely at Cooter to see if it was a joke.

“No meat in the chili?”

“No, sir.”

“And what is
al kabsa
?”

Cooter rubbed his hands together. He said, “It’s really pretty good. Chicken over rice. Lots of spices, including one called
shattah
that’ll blow your mind.”

Joe waited a beat, then said,
“Why?”

Cooter laughed. “Ah, a local guy around here showed me how to make it and he orders it every time he comes in. Sometimes he brings his friends and they all eat it. I thought I’d never get it down, but he says he thinks it’s great now. He scored me some Maggi cubes I put in it that really makes it go
zing
.”

“It just seems strange, is all,” Joe said.

“Oh,” Cooter said, widening his eyes and nodding his head emphatically, “this is a strange place! Stranger than hell! You never know who will show up and what they’ll want, but I am smart enough to cater to the few folks who really get a jones on for a particular item, you know?”

In his peripheral vision, Joe noticed Jan had turned and was looking over at them with a slightly annoyed expression on her face, as if silently imploring Cooter to shut up.

Before Joe could ask about these locals, the door pushed open and Phil Parker entered and said, “Cooter, you should have poured me a beer by now.”

“On it, Phil,” Cooter said, raising one finger and scuttling back behind the bar.

“Jan, how’s my favorite little rock hound?” Parker asked with a big smile.

“I’m fine, Phil. Thanks for asking.” She had a sultry voice, Joe thought, with articulate phrasing.

He thought:
Rock hound?

Parker strode over to Jan and gave her a hello hug. Joe could tell the difference between a woman who wanted to be embraced and a woman putting up with it. In Jan’s case, it was the latter.

•   •   •

P
ARKER
WAGGLED HIS EYEBROWS
conspiratorially as he left Jan and approached Joe, who had started to scoot out of his booth seat.

“Naw, don’t get up,” Parker said.

They shook hands and Parker sat down across from Joe. Tall and broad-shouldered with large hands and a sweeping gunfighter’s mustache, an angular face, and weathered skin under a black cowboy hat with a sharply upturned rodeo brim, Phil Parker looked like a walking Marlboro ad.

“I hate to sit with my back to her,” he whispered with a sly smile. “I’m missing the scenery. Tell me if she looks around.”

“She’s not looking around.”

Parker leaned across the table closer to Joe. “She’s something else, ain’t she? Who would think you’d find a trust-fund beauty who likes to collect rocks way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“It does seem odd,” Joe said.

“Jan Stalkup,” he said. “I run across her out in the desert every once in a while, but usually in here. She likes that vegan crap Cooter has learned to cook up. Sometimes her friends show up here and she takes them south to look around, I guess. Maybe they go camping or whatever. She seems to know a lot of people and they seem to know where to find her.”

Joe sat back and cocked his head.

“I know what you’re thinking, but as far as I know she isn’t a prostitute,” Parker said. “I
wish
she was,” he added with a guffaw.

They made small talk for a few minutes, discussing the latest
policy initiatives sent down from the agency’s director, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, whom Parker despised. “What do you think about that GPS deal?” he asked.

Cheyenne had recently required all state vehicles, whether pool cars for bureaucrats or pickups for game wardens, to have installed GPS transmitters that would track and record every mile they took on the roads. While it made sense for state employees from the Department of Family Services and other personnel, game wardens across the state instantly rose up in arms. That’s because much of the time they spent watching hunters and fishers was done from their parked trucks. They didn’t want bureaucrats in Cheyenne asking them why they had just sat there on a certain hill for hours the previous week, or why they were in a neighboring county when dispatch called them to respond to an emergency.

“You know what I did after they installed that GPS on my truck?” Parker asked.

“I can guess.”

“I took it off and threw it in a ditch. Since I don’t plan to go to Cheyenne again in the future, I don’t know when they’ll get a chance to install another one,” he said with sly sidewise smile.

“My truck still doesn’t have one,” Joe said. “I missed the appointment.”

“Clever,” Parker said with a wink. “I thought they’d probably made a cost-benefit decision not to put one on your truck because it would just get damaged anyway.”

“Very funny,” Joe said.

“The rest of us game wardens like it when you waste another truck out in the field,” Parker said. “It makes us all look good by comparison.”

Joe changed the subject. “How come Cooter acted like he barely knew who you were when I asked about you?”

Parker shrugged. “You know the type. He’s got a suspicious mind-set like a criminal. His default mode is to obfuscate and deflect. I don’t even know if he’s aware of it.”

“Cooter’s a bad guy?”

“Most folks around here are . . . colorful,” Parker said with a laugh. “Including me.”

Parker had a devil-may-care manner and an infectious laugh that made Joe want to laugh along with him.

“So how in the hell are you, Joe?”

“Keeping up.”

“It’s been a while.”

“It has.”

“You have many run-ins with LGD?” he asked, meaning Lisa Greene-Dempsey.

“A few.”

“Is she as annoying as everyone says?” he asked. “Whenever she comes through, I’m conveniently out in the field or assisting another game warden somewhere. I’ve never actually met the woman.”