Chapter Eighteen
Given the stories she’d heard over the years and her limited interaction with a character named Pablo back in high school, April Pickett wasn’t sure what to expect from the owners of McElwee Land and Cattle.
She knew they were wild sisters named Lisa and Lainie McElwee, who had outsized legends wrapped around them.
And she’d heard Pablo refer to his “crazy-ass stepmother” and her “crazy-ass sister” a few times.
What she didn’t expect to witness, after taking the right-hand road at the crossroads at Antler Creek Junction and passing over the ranch boundary, was three men who looked like gangbangers chasing stray cattle away from a salt lick while screeching Spanish phrases and waving their arms like lunatics and firing their handguns into the air.
She could hear the pop-pop-pop of their pistols up on the side of the mountain that she skirted en route to the ranch headquarters. The half dozen cows finally got the message, it seemed, and they rumbled down the slope toward the road she was on.
April slowed down, but didn’t stop. She watched as the three men finally stopped chasing the cows. Two of them paused and looked visibly exhausted, and they leaned forward with their hands on their knees as if to gulp the thin mountain air.
They did not look like any cowboys she’d ever seen, although it wasn’t unusual for local ranchers to hire employees from other parts of the world, especially South and Central America.
It was an odd scenario, she thought. Cattle on the high desert were usually encouraged to spend time at salt licks, which were dusty bowls trampled into the sides of mountains. Salt blocks helped sustain the animals.
The three men appeared to have come from a battered travel trailer that was barely visible in a copse of trees halfway up the slope.
A two-track road cut across the sagebrush and climbed there, and she could see the back end of an old pickup parked on the other side of the trailer.
A wisp of smoke floated from a stovepipe on the top of the trailer before being whisked away by the wind.
What were the men doing up there? she wondered. And why were they so agitated about wandering cattle nearing a salt lick a hundred yards from their trailer?
The third man, the one who wasn’t doubled over, appeared to have noticed April’s car on the road below him.
He was dark and he wore a red bandana on his head.
The morning sun glinted off the weapon in his hand, but he held it down and low at the moment.
He watched her and said something emphatic to his companions, who both raised their heads.
So as not to give him a reason to aim the weapon or attempt to intercept her on the ranch road, April sped up. The spooked cattle crossed the road in front of her, panicked enough that they threw up small clods of mud behind them that landed with thuds on the hood of her car and the windshield.
—
Before encountering the strange scenario, April had speed-dialed Cassie Dewell in Montana via Bluetooth in her Toyota Tundra.
The call found Cassie sitting in her SUV on surveillance of the bad husband and father they’d been tailing.
Cassie said she was parked outside a low-rent motel west of Billings.
The subject’s car was in the lot and she’d followed him there from a strip club in Billings the night before.
She was waiting for him to come out with the two women he’d driven there.
She had her camera with the long lens ready on the seat beside her, ready to snap photos when the trio eventually emerged.
“I hope you nail the puke,” April said.
“Oh, I will. And I’ll be glad to put this case behind us. What’s up with you?” Cassie asked her.
“I’m going out to one of the three ranches we talked about,” April said. “This is the one my mom suspects the most.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, but I can get backup if I need it.”
“Well, good,” Cassie said. “But I hope you’ll be careful and diligent. And promise me you’ll back out of there for your own safety if the situation isn’t good.”
“Of course I will,” April said, grateful that Cassie couldn’t see her rolling her eyes. Then: “I haven’t done this a lot, you know. You’ve hardly ever let me interrogate a potential suspect.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Cassie said.
“We’re not law enforcement. We don’t have the power of the state behind us and we can’t call in reinforcements if the deck is stacked against us.
Not only that, but no one is obligated to answer our questions, and we can’t just cuff suspects and take them to the station for questioning.
We’ve got to always play it very cool, and you aren’t exactly known for that, April. ”
“So how should I play this?” April asked. She quickly detailed what she knew about the McElwee sisters.
“Goodness,” Cassie said. “They sound like…colorful people.”
“That’s one word for it.”
Cassie said, “Just talk with them, not to them, and be friendly about it. Ask them about their lives and their interests. Don’t judge them overtly.
But most of all, keep them talking. If you keep them talking long enough, they’ll let something slip.
But if you’re dominating the conversation or challenging them, they’ll either clam up or get belligerent.
That helps no one, and you may only get one bite of the apple.
“Take their side if you can,” Cassie continued. “Lend a sympathetic ear to their grievances. If they think of you as an antagonist, that won’t help you learn anything. If they think of you as their friend or ally, they might reveal things that surprise you and help you along.”
“You’re good at that, aren’t you?” April said.
“I am, if I do say so myself. Plus, there are very few suspects I can physically subdue if it came to that. So I don’t throw my weight around, or my private investigator credentials.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” April said. “I’ll try to dial things back, but one thing you said bothers me. How can I try and be on their side? If they had something to do with hurting my dad, I swear I’ll mess them up.”
“April…”
“I mean, I’ll try to do what you say. But it might be tough.”
“Good. How is your dad doing?”
“We think the surgery will be later today. Until that, we don’t know.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed and pray for him,” Cassie said.
Until that moment, April wasn’t aware that Cassie prayed. And while she might have smirked at it before, she didn’t do so now.
“Thank you,” April said.
“Keep me updated,” Cassie said. “Not only about your dad, but about you. I need you to come back in one piece.”
“Aw, really?”
“Really. But don’t let that go to your head.”
Then April said: “Oh, fuck me. You won’t believe what I just drove up on.”
“What?”
“Three gangbangers in the middle of nowhere chasing around some cows on the side of a mountain. They’re on foot and they look demented. They’re shooting pistols in the air.”
After a beat, Cassie chuckled. “That’s such a Wyoming thing to say.”
—
Pablo was a six-foot-three sophomore when April had met him in high school.
Until Pablo, she’d not heard the phrase “gender fluidity” before, but Pablo was a walking, talking demonstration of it.
Pablo wore flowing scarves, painted his nails black and his mouth bright red.
He had scored twenty points in his first high school basketball game, but then promptly quit the sport.
Instead, he organized the first-ever Saddlestring High School cheer club to cheer on his ex-teammates.
Pablo was smart, popular, quirky, well-liked, and generally the funniest person in the room.
She recalled Pablo talking about moving to Saddlestring from Northern California, and what a shock it was to his system.
Pablo’s father was a semi-famous artist named Eduardo who didn’t use his last name.
Likewise, Pablo was simply Pablo. Eduardo had married either Lisa or Lainie McElwee.
April couldn’t recall which one. According to Pablo, his stepmother and step-aunt were “modern-day Wild West outlaws, like Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley.”
“Annie Oakly wasn’t an outlaw,” April had told Pablo.
“Whatever—you know what I mean,” Pablo had said with a dismissive wave of his long fingers.
Pablo went on to say that he’d never lived on an isolated ranch before, much less one as unusual as McElwee Land and Cattle.
People of all kinds—he described them as “desperadoes”—showed up at any time of the day or night.
All of them seemed to have some kind of business with the sisters that had nothing to do with livestock.
But it wasn’t only sketchy types. There were also cops, politicians, and artists who worked “the fringes.”
“I never know who will show up or why they’re there,” Pablo said. “But the living room in the lodge often reminds me of the bar scenes in Star Wars.”
Pablo vanished abruptly when his father was kicked off the ranch by either Lisa or Lainie, or both. April hadn’t thought of Pablo for years, but now she hoped he’d landed well. She was a little surprised he wasn’t yet famous in one way or another.
—
April rolled into the ranch yard and kept alert.
She scanned the outbuildings for movement, and the main log house for anyone peering out the windows.
A pack of hounds appeared from under the front porch and surrounded her Toyota.
While the dogs leapt and snarled at her, she stayed in her vehicle and hiked her jacket with her left hand and tucked a 9mm Glock into the back of her tooled western belt with her right.
A middle-aged blond woman with an exaggerated helmet of hair backed out through the screen door on the porch and turned slowly around to face April.
The woman held a combat shotgun at the ready, and she squinted to see who had just arrived.
She wore a huge flowing robe with vintage buckaroos printed on it. She looked to April like a human tipi.