Storm Watch (A Joe Pickett Novel, Band 23) - Hardcover

Buch 23 von 26: Joe Pickett

Box, C. J.

 
9780593331309: Storm Watch (A Joe Pickett Novel, Band 23)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593331303 ISBN 13: 9780593331309
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett investigates a mysterious death at a secret remote high-tech facility in this riveting new novel from #1 New York Times bestseller C.J. Box.


    When a prominent University of Wyoming professor goes missing, authorities are stumped. That is, until Joe Pickett makes two surprising discoveries while hunting down a wounded elk on his district as an epic spring storm descends upon him. First, he finds the professor’s vehicle parked on a remote mountainside. Then Joe finds the professor’s frozen and mutilated body. When he attempts to learn more, his investigation is obstructed by federal agents, extremists, and Governor Colter Allen.


    Nate Romanowski is rebuilding his falconry company—and financing this through crypto mining with the assistance of Geronimo Jones. He’s then approached by a shadowy group of local militant activists that is gaining in power and influence, and demanding that Wyoming join other western states and secede from the union—by force, if necessary. They ask Nate to throw in with them, but he’s wary. Should he trust them, or is he being set up?


    As a storm of peril gathers around them, Joe and Nate confront it in different ways—and maybe, for the first time, on opposite sides.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

C. J. Box is the author of twenty-three Joe Pickett novels, eight stand-alone novels, and a story collection. He has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, and two Barry awards, as well as the French Prix Calibre .38, the Western Heritage Award for Literature, and two Spur Awards. An avid outdoorsman, Box has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the Mountain West. He's an executive producer of Joe Pickett on Paramount+ as well as Big Sky, both of which are based on his novels.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Late March in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains wasn't yet spring by any means, but there were a growing number of days when spring could be dreamt of.

For Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, this wasn't one of those days. This was a day that would both start and end with blood on the snow.

At midday, he climbed out of the cab of his replacement green Ford F-150 pickup and pulled on coveralls and a winter parka over his red uniform shirt and wool Filson vest. He'd had the foresight to layer up that morning before leaving his house, and he was also wearing merino wool long johns and thick wool socks. He buckled knee-high nylon gaiters over his lace-up Sorel pack boots, then placed his hat crown-down on the dashboard and replaced it with a thick wool rancher's cap with the earflaps down.

On the open tailgate of his vehicle, he filled a light daypack with gear: water, snowshoes, camera, necropsy kit, extra ammo, ticket book, binoculars, sat phone. While he did so, he shot a glance at the storm cloud shrouding the mountains and muting the sun. A significant "weather event" had been predicted by the National Weather Service for southern Montana and northern Wyoming. Joe didn't question it. It felt like snow was coming, maybe a lot of it, and he needed to find an injured elk cow and put her out of her misery before the storm roared down from those mountains and engulfed him.

The interstate highway had closed an hour before, as it so often did because of heavy snowfall, high winds, and vehicle crashes. The winter, thus far, had been brutal. Storm after storm since Christmas, and very little melting. The snowpack in the mountains was one hundred and fifty percent of normal, which was a relief after several years of drought, but getting through it had been cruel. During his lifetime in the Rocky Mountains, Joe had rarely been bothered by long winters, but this year was different. He was getting tired of constant snow making everything he did more difficult.

He was located fifteen miles from Saddlestring on a paved but potholed county road that ran east to west, parallel to the foothills. It was on that road that morning that a young male driver en route to a Montana ski resort for spring break had taken a shortcut from the interstate highway. He'd apparently been looking at the navigation app on his smartphone screen when he plowed into a small herd of elk crossing the road.

The driver's car was totaled and had been towed away. The driver himself was under observation at the Twelve Sleep County Medical Center for an injury sustained when he bounced his forehead off his steering wheel upon impact. Two elk had been killed in the collision. A third elk, the cow Joe was after, had been seen by a state trooper who had responded to the accident call. On three good legs, the elk had somehow leapt over the fence beside the road and had last been seen limping away toward the mountains.

Joe had heard about the incident over his radio while he'd been in another corner of his district looking for another problematic animal: a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound wolf that had gutted two yearling calves within sight of a rancher's home. By the time Joe had responded, the wolf had gone and the rancher was furious.

Joe had photographed the dead yearlings as well as the massive wolf tracks in the snow, and he'd opened up an official incident report that would be forwarded to his agency, who would forward it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The two yearlings had had their throats ripped out and they'd been disemboweled. The scene looked as if someone had dropped balloons filled with blood from a great height and they'd exploded on the hard-packed snow.

It was the fifth verified wolf kill of the current winter, and that was becoming a problem. Especially since there weren't supposed to be wolves in the area at all.
 
Joe knew that assumption was incorrect. He'd personally seen a big black alpha male and other wolves in the pack during the last decade. He usually saw them at times of danger or stress-so out of concern for the pack, he rarely mentioned seeing anything at all.

The rancher had crossed his arms across his chest and blamed Joe personally for the the wolves, since Joe worked for the state, which is to say the government, and it was the government that had introduced wolves back into Wyoming in the first place.

Joe had stood there and let the rancher blow off steam before speaking.

"You know that was the feds, right?" he'd asked the rancher. "Not us?"

"You're all the same," the rancher had said. "Bureaucrats paid with my tax money trying to ruin my way of life."

"Actually, we aren't. The feds reintroduced the wolves into Yellowstone Park. We're doing our best to deal with them now as they spread across the state."

The rancher pointed at his dead cattle. "And I must say you're doing a hell of a job." Then he chinned toward Joe and asked, "New truck?"

"Yup. My last one was totaled. I'm getting used to this one."

"You have to get used to a lot of new vehicles, don't you?" the rancher asked.

"Yup."

"Maybe if you wouldn't crash so many, it wouldn't be such a big deal."

"Maybe," Joe conceded. "You sound like my supervisor."

"I'm glad the state is rich enough to keep you in new trucks."

Joe was grateful when dispatch in Cheyenne called him away from the ranch to try to put the wounded elk out of her misery.

***

It hadn’t been difficult to find the crash site. There were tiny squares of broken glass glittering like sequins on the roadbed, as well as a few bloody hunks of elk hair. The two dead elk had been rolled off the pavement into the ditch and large ravens had already found them. Joe wondered if any enterprising locals would take advantage of a new law allowing the harvesting of road-killed meat, but no one had arrived as of yet. Maybe the coming snow and the winter storm watch had discouraged them.

Joe dug his cell phone out of his breast pocket and speed-dialed a man named Clay Hutmacher, who was the foreman of the Double Diamond Ranch on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. The "Double D," as it was called by locals, stretched out over twenty thousand acres and was adjoined by Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service holdings. Hutmacher was a longtime local who guided fly-fishers in the summer and hunters in the fall. His twenty-five-year-old son, Clay Junior, had recently been spending time with Joe and Marybeth's twenty-four-year-old daughter, Sheridan. Too much time, in Joe's opinion, even though Clay Junior had done nothing untoward. Yet.

Joe looked at every potential suitor of his three daughters with suspicion. It was up to the interloper to prove himself trustworthy. Several had not. One had physically abused his middle girl, April, and had turned out to be rotten to the core, confirming Joe's first impressions.

"It's Joe Pickett," he said when Clay Senior answered his phone. "I'm out on the state highway just west of the ranch. I wanted to get permission to cross over onto your property and kill a wounded cow elk that got hit by a car."

Technically, all of the wild animals in the state were the property of the people of Wyoming. Nevertheless, it was required to obtain permission from local landowners to access private property.

"I heard about that," Hutmacher said. "Some guy from Florida looking at his phone. I hope he's in critical condition."

"Nope," Joe said. "I think he's okay."

"We ought to charge him for killing two elk and injuring a third one," Hutmacher said. Joe knew the man to be quite protective of the herd on the ranch, especially cows who could birth more animals to hunt.

"Hey, you know who I'm looking at right now?" Hutmacher...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593331303
ISBN 13 
9780593331309
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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