"I thought the hunting seasons were over," McLanahan stated. Joe could tell the deputy was in his hard-ass mode, and he guessed that being assigned to roadblock duty by the sheriff might have precipitated it.
"They are," Joe agreed. "But I've got winter range all over these mountains to check. What's going on here, anyway?"
McLanahan's face looked raccoon-like inside the hood.
"Roadblock. I'm supposed to check anyone coming in or going out."
"Because of the Sovereigns?"
"Yep. They've overstayed their welcome as of today. The eight-day camping limit has done run out."
Joe didn't understand. "What?"
"Folks can camp for eight days in this national forest campground. That's it. Then they have to move on. These yay-hoo extremists have not only overstayed their welcome, they've tapped into the electricity and the phone lines up there. I'm freezing my ass off down on this road and those assholes are up there surfing the Internet and using county power to heat their RVs." McLanahan spat, but the cold spittle didn't clear his lips. "Sheriff Barnum and Melinda Strickland want them to get the fuck out of our county. So they posted eviction posters up there last night, and I'm here to see if they leave."
So Barnum and Strickland are working together. How odd, Joe thought.
"And if they don't leave?" Joe asked.
A grim smile broke across McLanahan's face. "If they don't leave there's a plan in place to take care of business. We won't stand for any more incidents like what happened with Lamar or that BLM guy."
Joe rubbed his eyes. He knew it was a nervous habit, something he had the strong desire to do as stress built up inside him. "What's the connection between the Sovereigns and those two?" Joe asked. "Do they really think they're connected in some way?"
McLanahan's eyes were flat pools of bad pond water. "The day the Sovereigns showed up was the day Lamar got killed," he said, deadpan. "The BLM guy was a week later. Both are Feds. These Sovereign nutcases hate the government. We've got one of 'em in jail, but the rest are up in that camp. Is it really that hard to figure out, game warden?"
McLanahan said "game warden" in that way again. Joe controlled his anger, and asked calmly, "What are they going to do?"
"You mean, what are we going to do," McLanahan said, the grin still stretched tight. "Melinda Strickland called in a couple of experts in the field. They're in charge of the situation, and they're a couple of bad-ass cowboys."
Joe thought of the two men who had questioned Sheridan, then driven to the Forest Service building. But he said nothing.
"So what are you going to do if they don't leave?" Joe asked again.
McLanahan's bruised and mottled face contorted even further into a kind of leer. Joe realized that McLanahan didn't have a clue what Barnum, Strickland, and the two "bad-ass cowboys" were planning. But he didn't want Joe to know that.
"Let's just say that we're not going to stand around and scratch our nuts like they did in Montana with those Freemen," McLanahan finally said.
"What's that mean?"
"That's priveleged information," McLanahan blustered. He stepped away. "I'm freezing to death standing out here," he said. "I'm going to get in my truck and fire up the heater. You want to go up there you're going to have to clear it with Barnum first."
"Have you seen an older-model blue Dodge pickup come up this road?" Joe asked. "With a man and a woman in it? Tennessee plates?"
"Nope."
Joe watched McLanahan walk away. Joe's mind was swirling with new implications. He rubbed his eyes. In the afternoon, Joe patrolled the breaklands. He drove the BLM roads boldly, and took the ones that would crest hills or traverse sagebrush clearings, choosing to fully expose himself. He was looking for the light-colored Ford. He hoped the driver of the Ford, the man (or men) who had lured Birch Wardell into the canyon, would try to do the same to him. He needed some kind of action that would make him feel he was doing something, and occupy his mind to delay the inevitable.
The inevitable would be later in the evening, when he and Marybeth sat down with April to tell her that her mother wanted her back. Nineteen Jeannie Keeley sat in the dirty pickup wearing her best green dress and smoking a cigarette. The defroster didn't work worth a damn, and every few minutes she leaned forward and wiped a clean oval on the foggy windshield. When it was clear, she could see the redbrick facade of Saddlestring Elementary. It was Wednesday morning, the second day the children were back at school.
A bell rang, and despite the cold, children filed out of a set of double doors on the side of the building and across a playground that was mottled with snow and frozen brown gravel. Jeannie noted that there was a playground supervisor-a teacher, she supposed-walking stiffly on the perimeter of the children.
Her eyes squinted and fixed on a blond girl wearing a red down coat with a hood rimmed with fake white fur. The girl was in the middle of a group of three other girls huddling near the building. The girls, presumably classmates, were talking and gesturing with animation.
"There she is," Jeannie whispered, pressing her finger against the glass. "There's my April."
Clem, her man, cleaned a little oval for himself.
"Which one?"
"By the building. In that red coat."
Clem hesitated. He obviously couldn't pick her out. "Red coat?" he asked. "There's about twenty red coats."
Jeannie waved him off impatiently. "I goddamned know which one is my daughter, Clem."
"Didn't say you didn't," he answered, clearly looking to avoid a confrontation. She knew he would choose to do that. Usually, she wished he wouldn't talk at all. Rarely did he say anything worthwhile. She wished he would just shut up and drive. Jeannie had met Clem in eastern Tennessee at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. She had been waitressing, just about to quit and move on, and he was seated in her section. He was alone. He had driven her crazy with the length and precision of his order-how, exactly, he wanted his eggs cooked (just shy of over-easy with a dollop of butter on the yolk), his gravy ladled (on the side, in a soup bowl and not a cup, with plenty of pieces of pork sausage in it), his fried apples prepared (a double order with extra cinnamon) and his toast toasted (hard on one side, soft on the other). She had stared at the man with his prison pallor and thin dark hair when he'd asked her politely to repeat his order back to him. She did, and then asked him where in the hell he was from that he could order a breakfast like that and expect to get it. Eastern Montana, he said. Jordan. And it wasn't that he could get a breakfast exactly like that in Jordan. It was that he had been dreaming of this particular breakfast for three years in Deer Lodge, Montana, at the penitentiary. He told her his name was Clem. She told him her name was Suzy. She always lied about her name; it was habit. He ate his breakfast and read a newspaper, and didn't move until lunch, when she came to take his order again.
"How come your name tag says 'Jeannie' if your name is Suzy?" he had asked her.
"If you want lunch, you'll shut your goddamned pie-hole," she answered, and was overheard by the manager, an overeager junior achievement type who didn't even have the guts to fire her in person but sent the accountant to do it.
Jeannie had gathered her few belongings in a bundle and left the Cracker Barrel. Along with her possessions, she took some silverware and a few frozen steaks from the walk-in to her car. But the battery was dead, or something, and the car wouldn't start. She was furious at this turn of events, but Clem had been waiting for her in the parking lot and he had offered her a ride.
That was nine months ago now. Neither one of them had a place to stay, a place to go, or family to move in with. When Clem heard that a man named Wade Brockius planned to provide some refuge for people like him, he told Jeannie about it and they bought a twenty-year-old travel trailer with what little money they had and drove northwest. She had no idea at the time that she would end up in a place she knew, a place she hated, where her husband had been murdered and her daughter lost to her.