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Endangered: A Joe Pickett Novel - Softcover

Buch 15 von 27: Joe Pickett

Box, C. J.

 
9780425280157: Endangered: A Joe Pickett Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0425280152 ISBN 13: 9780425280157
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Don’t miss the JOE PICKETT series—now streaming on Paramount+

In this New York Times bestseller, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is determined to find out who put his daughter’s life in danger—even if it kills him.
 
Joe Pickett had good reason to dislike Dallas Cates, and now he has even more—Joe’s eighteen-year-old daughter, April, has run off with him. And then comes even worse news: She has been found in a ditch along the highway—alive, but just barely, the victim of blunt force trauma. Cates denies having anything to do with it, but Joe knows in his gut who’s responsible. What he doesn’t know is the kind of danger he’s about to encounter. Cates is bad enough, but Cates’s family is like none Joe has ever met.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

C. J. Box is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Joe Pickett series, five stand-alone novels, and the story collection Shots Fired. He has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, and two Barry awards, as well as the French Prix Calibre .38 and a French Elle magazine literary award. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. He and his wife Laurie split their time between their home and ranch in Wyoming.

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1


When Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett received the call
every parent dreads, he was standing knee-high in thick
sagebrush, counting the carcasses of sage grouse. He was up
to twenty-one.

Feathers carpeted the dry soil and clung to the waxy blue-green
leaves of the sagebrush within a fifty-foot radius. The air smelled of
dust, sage, and blood.

It was late morning in mid-March on a vast brush-covered flat
managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management. There wasn’t
a single tree for eighteen miles to the west on the BLM land until
the rolling hills rocked back on their heels and began their sharp
ascent into the snow-covered Bighorn Mountains, which were managed
by the U.S. Forest Service. The summits of the mountains were
obscured by a sudden late-season snowstorm, and the sky was leaden
and close. Joe’s green Game and Fish Ford pickup straddled the ancient
two-track road that had brought him up there, the engine
idling and the front driver’s door still open from when he’d leapt
out. His yellow Labrador, Daisy, was trembling in the bed of the
truck, her front paws poised on the top of the bed wall as she stared
out at the expanse of land. Twin strings of drool hung from her
mouth. She smelled the carnage out on the flat, and she wanted to
be a part of it.

“Stay,” Joe commanded.

Daisy moaned, reset her paws, and trembled some more.

Joe wore his red uniform shirt with the pronghorn patch on the
sleeve, Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, and a Filson vest against the
chill. His worn gray Stetson was clamped on tight. A rarely drawn .40
Glock semiauto was on his hip.

Twenty-one dead sage grouse.

In his youth, everyone called them “prairie chickens,” and he
knew the young ones were good to eat when roasted because they’d
been a staple in his poverty-filled college days. They were odd birds:
chicken-sized, pear-shaped, ungainly when flying. They were the
largest of the grouse species, and their habitat once included most
of the western United States and Canada. Wyoming contained one
hundred thousand of them, forty percent of the North American
population.

Of this flock, he’d noted only three survivors: all three with injuries.
He’d seen their teardrop-shaped forms ghosting from brush to
brush on the periphery of the location. They didn’t fly away, he
knew, because they couldn’t yet.

It was obvious what had happened.

Fat tire tracks churned through the sagebrush, crushing some
plants and snapping others at their woody stalks. Spent 12-gauge
shotgun shells littered the ground: Federal four-shot. He speared
one through its open end with his pen and sniffed. It still smelled of
gunpowder. He retrieved eighteen spent shells and bagged them.
Later, after he’d sealed the evidence bag, he found two more shells.
Since eighteen shells were more than a representative sample, he
tossed the two errant casings into the back of his pickup.

There was a single empty Coors Light can on the northeast corner
of the site. He bagged it and tagged it, and hoped the forensics lab in
Laramie could pull prints from the outside or DNA from the lip.
Problem was, the can looked much older than the spent shotgun
shells and he couldn’t determine if it hadn’t simply been discarded
along the road a few weeks prior to the slaughter.

Joe guessed that the incident had occurred either the night or
day before, because the exploded carcasses hadn’t yet been picked
over by predators. Small spoors of blood in the dirt had not yet dried
black. Whoever had done it had shot them “on the lek,” a lek being
an annual gathering of the birds where the males strutted and
clucked to attract females for breeding. The lek was a concentric
circle of birds with the strutting male grouse in the center of it. Some
leks were so large and predictable that locals would drive out to the
location to watch the avian meat market in action.

The birds bred in mid-March, nested, and produced chicks in
June. If someone was to choose the most opportune time to slaughter
an entire flock, this was it, Joe knew.

So “Lek 64,” as it had been designated by a multiagency team of
biologists charged with counting the number of healthy groupings
within the state, was no more.

Joe took a deep breath and put his hands on his hips. He was
angry, and he worked his jaw. It would take hours to photograph the
carcasses and measure and photograph the tire tracks. He knew he’d
have to do it himself because the county forensics tech was an hour
away—provided the tech was on call and would even respond to a
game violation. Joe knew he was responsible for the gathering of all
evidence to send to the state lab in Laramie, and it would have to get
done before the snow that was falling on top of the mountains
worked its way east and obscured the evidence. Since it was Friday
and the lab technicians didn’t work over the weekend, at best he’d
hear something by the end of next week.

He’d find whoever did this, he thought. It might take time, but
he’d find the shooter or shooters. Fingerprints on the brass of the
shells, tire analysis, the beer can, gossipy neighbors, or a drunken
boast would lead him to the bad guys. Sometimes it was ridiculously
easy to solve these kinds of crimes because the kind of person who
would leave such a naked scene often wasn’t very smart. Joe had
apprehended poachers in the past by finding photos of them posing
with dead game on Facebook posts or by looking at the taxidermy
mounts in their homes. Or by simply going to their front door,
knocking, and saying, “I guess you know why I’m here.”

It had been amazing what kinds of answers that inquiry sometimes
brought.

But he wasn’t angry because of the work ahead of him. There was
also that special directive recently put out by Governor Rulon and
his agency director about sage grouse. Preserving them, that is.
Game and Fish biologists and wardens had been ordered to pay special
attention to where the grouse were located and how many there
were. The status of the sage grouse population, according to Rulon,
was “pivotal” to the future economic well-being of the state.

Sage grouse in Wyoming had shifted from the status of a game
bird regulated by the state into politics and economics on a national
level. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was threatening to list the
bird as an endangered species because the overall population had
declined, and if they did, it would remove hundreds of thousands of
acres from any kind of use, including energy development—whether
gas and oil, wind, hydrothermal, or solar. The federal government
proposed mandating an off-limits zone consisting of one to four
miles for every lek found. That would impact ranchers, developers,
and everyone else.

That was the reason Joe had been on the old two-track in the first
place and stumbled onto the killing ground. During the winter, he’d
seen the flock more than once from the window of his pickup, and
sage grouse didn’t range far. Sage grouse did not exhibit the brightest
of bird behavior. He recalled an incident from the year before,
when a big male—called a “bomber” by hunters—flew into the passenger
door of his pickup and bounced off, killing itself in the
process. Joe’s truck hadn’t been moving at the time.

Years before, prior to the national decline in the sage grouse population,
Joe had accompanied outlaw...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0425280152
ISBN 13 
9780425280157
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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