Chapter Five
Four Weeks Before
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett sat on the knob of a brushy hill twelve miles out of town with his pickup running and the heater humming and his black Labrador Biscuit’s head in his lap.
It was four forty-five in the morning and he’d already been up for an hour and a half.
He’d had two cups of coffee from his thermos and a breakfast of elk jerky and roasted cashews.
He was watching a yearly ritual, an annual parade of dozens of hunters in their four-by-fours and recreational vehicles streaming up the state highway from Saddlestring toward the Bighorn Mountains in the dark.
The line of vehicles stretched for miles.
“Get ready,” he whispered to Biscuit. “Here they come.”
It was opening day of the general elk-hunting season.
Although he knew the hunters were probably hoping for snow in the mountains to better track their prey, it was cool and still and the temperature for the next week was supposed to be in the forties and fifties.
He knew that he’d spend the next several months in the mountains, working from dawn until dusk, checking hunters for proper licenses, making sure regulations weren’t violated, and dealing with situations that were unpredictable at best and sometimes bizarre.
There would be hundreds of hunters spread out over thousands of square miles, and then there would be Joe Pickett, the lone game warden of the Twelve Sleep District.
His badge number was ten, meaning nine game wardens in the state had seniority, and forty had been on the job for fewer years.
He wore a red uniform shirt with a pronghorn antelope patch on the shoulder and worn Wrangler jeans.
His green pickup with the same logo on the driver’s-side door was a Ford F-150 four-by-four.
His battered cowboy hat was placed crown-down on the dashboard in front of him.
The sheer volume of potential problems almost overwhelmed him when he thought about it—so many hunters, so many guns, so many potential situations that could arise—so he didn’t think about it.
Instead, he took solace in the fact that he’d experienced over twenty “openers” in his long career thus far and somehow he’d survived.
—
The sun hadn’t yet peeked over the craggy western summits of the mountains when Joe’s cell phone lit up on the dashboard and he reached for it. Clay Hutmacher Sr. was calling. Not a massive surprise.
Clay was the ranch foreman on the magnificent Double Diamond Ranch.
No doubt, Joe thought, Clay was looking through his spotting scope as opening-day hunters were attempting to access the elk-rich private land of the Double D that stretched from the state highway to the top of Eagle Mountain.
It happened every year, and when it did, Clay called Joe to complain about it.
“Joe Pickett,” Joe said as he took the call. “What’s up, Clay?”
“Hey, Joe,” Clay responded. Joe immediately noted the strange tone in Clay’s voice. The foreman sounded very down. “You’re being summoned.”
“Say again?”
“My boss wants to talk to you right away,” Clay said. “Like this morning. He’s flying back to Atlanta this afternoon.”
“Clay, do you realize it’s opening day of elk season?”
“I know that. But the boss doesn’t care. He says he needs to speak to you.”
Joe felt a flush of anger and he shuffled his position in the pickup and woke Biscuit.
A game warden’s duties were divided into three broad categories: law enforcement, resource management, and public engagement. Landowner relations fell squarely into the public-engagement lane.
Michael Thompson was a hedge fund billionaire who had purchased the Double Diamond Ranch less than ten years before.
With his very attractive younger wife, Brandy, he flew his jet back and forth to his headquarters in Atlanta.
He’d retained Clay Hutmacher, the longtime foreman of the ranch, but had fired most everyone else during fits of pique.
Most of the fired ranch hands were later rehired after Thompson cooled down and realized that the labor pool in the area was very shallow.
Thompson had recently started to dabble in Wyoming politics as a means to gain influence when it came to landowner-rights issues. He was headstrong and charismatic and Joe had already tangled with him several times.
Clay had lost his only son two years before when he was killed by a grizzly bear, and to Joe his old friend had also lost his drive, ambition, and his sense of humor. The Clay Joe once knew would have pushed back on a man like Thompson. But now Clay was both broken and subservient.
“Clay, I’ve got a few hundred elk hunters headed for the mountains right now. I’m sure Thompson can wait.”
“He says it’s important, Joe,” Clay said, his voice pleading. “When he says something is important, it’s my job to make sure that gets across.”
Before Joe could respond, Clay said, “He also said to remind you that he’s very close to several of the Game and Fish commissioners and he doesn’t mind calling them up. Or, in this case, having me call them up.”
“Are you really going to play this card, Clay?” Joe asked.
“It’s not me,” Clay Hutmacher said in a whisper.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department was overseen by a board of commissioners who were appointed by the governor.
If one or more of them were carrying water for Michael Thompson, Joe knew they could make his life miserable.
On top of that, Thompson was a major donor to Governor Rulon, and the director of the agency was new to the job and considered a political animal who probably wouldn’t hesitate to throw an individual game warden under the bus, even if he was number ten in seniority.
Still, Joe chafed at being put in a position where he was at the beck and call of a local ranch owner.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Joe said after a long pause. “I’ll work my way in your direction, because that’s what I was planning to do anyway. If I don’t get into any situations or receive any callouts in the next hour, I might be able to get there. That’s the most I can promise.”
“Thank you, Joe,” Clay said. “I hope it’ll work out for your sake…and mine.”
Joe punched off without saying goodbye.
—
Rather than take the quicker route west on the interstate highway, Joe spent the morning working his way in that direction using Antler Creek Road.
He stopped at several hunting camps that had been set up on public Bureau of Land Management land to check the licenses and conservation stamps of both in-state and out-of-state hunters, and he’d inspected the hanging carcasses of both deer and elk to make sure they were tagged correctly, which they all were.
The hunters were uniformly chatty and accommodating, with the exception of one party of five from Pennsylvania, who immediately raised his suspicions.
The hunters would not shake his hand or make eye contact at first, and they spent most of the time he was there staring at their boots.
Although he didn’t see any violations and the hunters were all legal, Joe made a note to himself to revisit the camp in a few days to try to find out what it was the party was hiding.
He planned to use his best opening line on them, which was “I guess you know why I’m here.
” It was an inquiry that had worked time and time again and had produced all kinds of results, many not anticipated by him.
He confirmed his suspicions after leaving the hunting camp and parking his pickup over a hill and out of view of the Pennsylvania hunters. Joe activated a radio scanner installed beneath his dashboard and listened as someone asked, “Is he gone?”
The response, presumably from the camp, was “Yeah. I think so.”
“Did he find anything?”
“Nada.”
“Is it okay to come back now?”
“Give it a few minutes. Don’t worry, we won’t drink all the beer.”
Joe nodded to himself. He scrawled in his notebook that there were more than five hunters in the group and that the sixth bore special interest when he returned.
—
When he reached Antler Creek Junction, Joe took the northern spur.
Almost immediately, he was struck by the number of No Trespassing signs and written threats of prosecuting trespassers with the full weight of the law.
One large sign was practically the size of a billboard, Joe thought. He didn’t recall seeing it before.
It read:
NO TRESPASSING.
No Hunting or Fishing Allowed Except by Permit.
Unless You’re Making an Authorized Delivery to the Ranch, Do NOT Get Out of Your Vehicle.
Patrolled by Air, Vehicle, and Foot.
Violators Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of the Law.
We Stop at Nothing to Prosecute You for Any Violations.
Our Lawyers Will Beat Your Lawyers.
DOUBLE DIAMOND RANCH, LLC
As if in response to the message, Joe noted, someone had shot the sign multiple times with a rifle or pistol.
—
The Thompson home was spectacular: three levels burrowed into the side of a mountain with huge eastern-facing windows and protruding decks on every floor.
Sixty-foot spruce trees had been placed on the slopes next to the structure to help it blend into the alpine surroundings, and the eight-car parking garage was primarily underground and accessed by a circular driveway.
All of the infrastructure that made the Double D an actual working ranch was strategically hidden away from view from the Thompson house, including the foreman’s home, outbuildings for the heavy equipment and ranch vehicles, and the airstrip used for Thompson’s private Gulfstream jet.
Joe took the circular driveway and avoided the huge front entrance and parked near the garage, where Clay Hutmacher’s ranch pickup was parked.
Clay drove a light gray Ford Raptor with the name of the ranch stenciled on both front doors.
Joe knew Clay had a small office inside.
He told Biscuit to stay put because he knew from an earlier visit that Brandy Thompson was allergic to dogs.