Page 17 of Battle Mountain

“The governor will meet you in fifteen minutes,” Byrnes said, and disconnected the call.

—

Joe arrived atthe Twelve Sleep County Municipal Airport as the state plane touched down on the runway and taxied toward the small terminal. He parked his truck in front of the lobby doors, where he wasn’t supposed to park, and went inside.

Saddlestring had only two commercial flights a day, both to and from Denver. One was early in the morning and the second was midafternoon. Since he was there between them, Joe was the only living soul in the airport except for a cat that was curled up on the United Airlines Express ticket counter. Not even the six TSA agents, who often outnumbered the passengers, were present.

His boot heels clicked on the granite floor and echoed in the lobby. He crossed the room and ducked under the belt of the TSA retractable crowd-control stanchions, bypassed the metal detector, and pushed his way through the double back doors. As the stateplane approached and flared to its side, Joe reached up and grabbed his hat so the exhaust from the twin jets wouldn’t blow it off.

Rulon Onewas the unofficial name of the state airplane, named after Spencer Rulon, the currentandformer governor. Joe was achingly familiar with the plane, and he hated to ride in it. Not only was he a nervous flier, but the only reason he was ever in the aircraft was because of unusual and uncomfortable circumstances.

Governor Rulon had been elected—again—the previous November after a truncated campaign following the previous governor Colter Allen’s sudden announcement that he wanted to “spend more time with his family” and wouldn’t seek reelection. Joe had been there, on the plane now in front of him, when it all happened.

At that time, Joe had disabled Allen’s aircraft from taking off by firing several bullets into the right engine. It had been the most expensive act of destruction of state property in his career, and that was saying something. When the costs for repairing the jet were added to the list of wrecked vehicles Joe had been responsible for, it was very possible that no state employee would ever break his record. That fact had been pointed out to him several times by agency budget officers, and he tried to ignore it or change the subject.

—

Joe and Rulonhad a long history that Joe had thought was concluded four years before, when Rulon had completed his second term as a Democrat in an eighty percent Republican state. Governor Allen, a Republican rancher from Sublette County, had provedto be impulsive, unpopular, and corrupt. He’d since moved to California, and Joe had heard rumors that the ex-governor was trying to revive his dormant acting career to no avail.

Rulon was once again proving that he was a unique politician. So unique, in fact, that the voters of Wyoming looked past the (D) behind his name.

He’d hit the ground running by stating during his first week in office that he was going after federal agencies that had, in his opinion, overplayed their hands and exceeded their constitutional powers in recent years in the state. Therefore, he would sue them all. Those agencies included the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Education, and the Centers for Disease Control. No sitting governor had ever sued six federal agencies all at once. He also challenged the vice president to a duel with pistols unless the feds promised to “leave my state the hell alone.”

Why the vice president and not the president himself? Because, Rulon declared, the president couldn’t be trusted with a firearm.

It had been a wildly popular debut.

In his first stint as governor, Rulon had asked Joe to be his agent on various assignments. Rulon had said he liked the fact that Joe could go anywhere in the state and embed himself in all kinds of situations as a game warden and not be suspected of having an alternative agenda.

Rulon always made sure he himself had plausible deniability, and he’d made it clear that if Joe screwed up, he couldn’t expect to be bailed out. Reluctantly, Joe had agreed to those conditionsbecause he felt he had no choice. Rulon had called Joe his “range rider.”

Joe had speculated to Marybeth that perhaps with all of those legal initiatives going on at once that Rulon might have forgotten about him. That was fine with Joe.

But apparently not.

Chapter Five

The stairs toRulon One, a Cessna Citation Encore jet with the Wyoming Cowboys bucking horse logo on the tail, were folded down to the tarmac. Joe climbed them, and the copilot nodded a greeting and stepped aside so he could retract the steps and close the door behind him.

Governor Rulon sat grinning behind a small desk at the back of the plane and Ann Byrnes sat a row in front of him with an iPad on her lap. The other six seats in the aircraft were unoccupied.

“Ah, Joe,” Rulon said as he struggled out from behind the desk. “Thanks for meeting with me.” The “meeting area” on the aircraft was cramped for space.

When he was in the aisle, Rulon placed his meaty hands on both of Joe’s shoulders. It was a familiar gesture from an instinctively tactile man. Rulon chuckled and said, “Well, now—together again.” Then: “Why aren’t you wearing that fine hat I got for you?”

Years before, Rulon had presented Joe a nine-hundred-dollarResistol Cattle Baron cowboy hat with his name inscribed on the sweat brim.

“This is my work hat,” Joe said, touching the brim. “I save your hat for special occasions.”

Ann Byrnes cleared her throat and sniffed. “One might think that meeting with the governorwasa special occasion.”

“Give him a break, Ann,” Rulon said while he wedged himself back behind the desk and shot her a side-eye. “We called him out of the field.”

Byrnes looked at her watch and said to Rulon, “We have ten minutes if you want to be on time for the Wyoming Stock Growers reception this afternoon.”

“Oh, those guys will wait a few minutes,” Rulon said. “We both know they love me.” Then: “Sit down, Joe.”

Joe did so. Byrnes occupied the seat next to Joe and, despite her arch tone, he thought Rulon absolutely needed a chief of staff like her. The governor was notoriously exuberant, easily distracted, and often late. Past chiefs of staff had not always been good choices, including ones with secret agendas of their own, and once, an attractive female chief who was known to sometimes answer the phone while sitting on the governor’s lap.

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