Page 34 of Battle Mountain

“I’ll help you.”

“Good. That way we can get them out of here.”

“Do you have a place for them?”

She said she did, but it wasn’t in the lodge. “I found an old vegetable cellar back in the woods. No one uses it for anything.”

“Perfect,” he said. He grunted as he lifted the first box.

“Follow me,” she said.

Chapter Eight

Joe was southboundthree miles north of Warm Springs on Wyoming State Highway 130, when he flinched involuntarily as a very large shadow passed over his entire pickup. It was an oddly similar sensation to an eagle flying overhead in front of the sun when he was in the field. But when he glanced up through the top of the windshield, he saw the gleaming underside of the fuselage and wings of a white corporate jet streaking toward town with its wheels down at low elevation.

A second later, the roar of twin jet engines made his steering wheel vibrate. The jet descended farther and touched down on a long runway on the south end of Warm Springs, and then it vanished and gradually taxied over a rise in the terrain on the other side.

He’d been to Warm Springs years before when the sagebrush flats on either side of the highway were covered with snow. That instance was also at the behest of a governor—although the previous one. The case involved the disappearance of a female British CEO of a public relations firm who had last been seen on one ofthe most exclusive guest ranches in the nation. The incident of the missing woman threatened to become an international incident if she wasn’t found.

That winter Sheridan had been employed as the head wrangler on the Silver Creek Ranch, where the CEO had vanished. Joe and Sheridan had been joined by Nate Romanowski in the investigation.

As often happened with Joe, the fairly straightforward investigation had gone pear-shaped. It had all ended well, though.

—

Mountains bordered thevalley on three sides: the Snowy Range to the east, the Sierra Madres to the west, and Battle Mountain to the south. The treeless summits of the peaks were dusted with snow, but nothing like it had been that January when Joe was there.

The layout of the river valley town was familiar to him, with its smoking lumber mill, distant twin water towers, and the wide North Platte River flowing through it. As he entered the town limits, he once again caught the slight whiff of sulfur from the public hot springs that gave the place its name.

—

When he enteredthe diner that hugged the left bank of the river, Wyoming game warden Susan Kany bounded up from her seat to greet him. She beamed and shook his hand with both of hers and led him to her booth.

A table of five middle-aged men in the center of the diner eyed Joe with bemused interest and watched him slide in across fromKany. Joe recognized them, even if he didn’t actually know them. They were the city fathers, and they met every day at the same table in the same restaurant to report on what had happened the day before and to make decisions on behalf of the town. A similar breakfast group met at the Burg-O-Pardner every morning in Saddlestring, and Joe felt like he had never left.

Joe knewthem, but he wondered what the group thought of him and Susan Kany together. Communities in Wyoming kept close track of their local law enforcement officers.

Two game wardens, each in red uniform shirts with pronghorn antelope shoulder patches, bronze name tags over pinned badges, Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots, and holstered handguns on their belts. Joe in his early fifties, lean and of medium height and build, with threads of silver permeating his short sideburns. Kany was a compact young woman in her late twenties, athletic and attractive, with large brown eyes and a quick smile.

Joe ordered coffee. Kany ordered a Diet Coke.

When the waitress delivered their drinks and took lunch orders, she said, “The word will get out to all the poachers in the valley that the game wardens are here having lunch.”

It was meant as a joke, and a couple of the men at the center table chuckled.

“Believe it or not, I’ve heard that one before,” Joe said to her.

“This is Joe Pickett, Yvette,” Kany said to the waitress. “He’s one of our more…well-knowngame wardens.”

“Thanks for not saying infamous,” Joe said.

“Welcome back,” the waitress said. “The last time you were here, you stayed at the Hotel Wolf. Room number nine, right?”

Joe eyed her with suspicion.

“I worked there in housekeeping at the time,” Yvette said with a wink. “I made your bed and left you clean towels. You were a pretty civilized guest. I appreciated that you didn’t leave me a messy room, and you left me a tip. Not many guests do both.”

“Ah,” Joe said. “Thank you.”

---