“Just stay down,” Joe said to her.
She sighed and did as she was told, but raised her head and stared at the grass where the sheep had been. “It wasn’t me who shot that old man,” she said vacantly. “All I was in this thing for was to pick up Bryce when he got loose so we could go to California, where I’ve got friends. But no—Bryce wanted to see his old grandma first and said he knew a back way. He got my van stuck in the mud because he was too fucked up to drive. Then we had to walk all the way here and . . .”
Joe followed her gaze and there he was. Ander Esti’s body lay on its back not fifty feet from the wagon. His sheep had grazed around him and obscured him from view. There was no doubt from the odd angles of his arms that he was dead. That, and the hole in his forehead singed with a gunshot powder burn. The rifle Joe had flung—Esti’s ancient lever-action carbine—was in the dirt next to him.
Joe took a deep breath. He kept an eye on both tweakers while he released Esti’s blue heeler, who bolted for where the body was and sat down beside it as if guarding the remains.
Pendergast had rolled onto his side so his wounded butt cheek was off the ground. He moaned and gasped and said again, “You shot me in the ass.”
Joe said, “And I might just shoot you again.”
• • •
WITH KELSEY cuffed to the front bumper and Pendergast cuffed to a ringbolt in the bed of his pickup, Joe called in the incident and requested a Life Flight helicopter as well as the sheriff’s department crime scene team.
“The sheriff’s department advises it may take an hour to get there,” the dispatcher said. “They’re worried about the suspect bleeding out.”
Joe acknowledged the transmission and looked over the wall of his pickup bed at Pendergast, who had heard it.
“No great loss,” Joe said, and keyed off.
“That was fucking cold,” Pendergast said. But the bleeding had slowed since Joe had lifted him into the bed and wrapped the wounds. Most of the blood had flowed from Pendergast’s broken knee, and Joe was able to cinch it securely. The buttocks entry shot seeped black blood like a puncture wound, and it didn’t appear life-threatening.
Joe said to Pendergast, “You won’t be able to just walk away next time you feel like it, either. This time, you’ll go to big-boy prison in Rawlins and you’ll be there for a long time.”
Pendergast grimaced and looked away. He said, “There’s a pipe in that wagon. I need a hit to kill the pain, so do me a solid, won’t you?”
Joe turned away with thoughts of grabbing his shotgun and finishing the job.
Joe coaxed the story out of Kelsey.
After they’d gotten the van stuck and tried in vain half the day to dig it out with twisted lengths of greasewood, they’d set out on foot cross-country in the general direction of Winchester. After several hours, they saw the big herd of sheep and the wagon. Bryce figured there would be a pickup truck there as well, probably on the side of the wagon they couldn’t see, and they’d threaten the sheepherder and get his keys.
Ander opened the door and said something they couldn’t understand. Kelsey said it sounded like a foreign language but she couldn’t be sure because she was so fucked up. Bryce ordered the man to speak English. When he didn’t, Bryce took Kelsey’s gun, which she’d stolen from her grandfather before driving south to pick up Bryce, and shot Ander in the forehead. They dragged his body into the herd of sheep thinking, she said, the sheep would eat it and destroy the evidence.
“You didn’t know sheep don’t eat meat?” Joe asked.
“How were we supposed to know that?” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I told you,” Pendergast interjected, “I ain’t no farmer.”
• • •
ANDER ESTI’S BLUE HEELER wouldn’t let Joe get close enough to put a sheet over the body. He looked back at his pickup and Daisy, who watched him through the passenger window.
He wondered if Daisy would stand guard over his own body if it came to it. He thought maybe she would.
• • •
WHEN JOE CAME BACK to the pickup, the adrenaline rush that had enveloped him was fading into anger and melancholy. Pendergast looked up, his face a mask of pain and shock. Before he could speak, before he could beg Joe for a hit from his pipe, Joe said:
“That man you killed for nothing was one of the last of his kind. Those kind of men don’t hardly exist anymore. As far as I know, he doesn’t have a single family member to mourn him—just a few ranchers who won’t be able to hire anyone to do what he did because no one will do it anymore. I didn’t really know him and I don’t know if anyone else did, either, except for his dog and his horse, and they aren’t saying.”
Pendergast whispered, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t,” Joe said. “You’re too thick and stupid. Men like Ander keep this world running. You never worked an honest day in your life and all you’ve ever cared about is your next high. You just take things, and you took that man’s life. You murdered a man who did nothing but work. He never hurt a single soul. There is probably a lot more to him that I’ll never know. But I won’t get the chance to find out.”
Pendergast looked away. He said, “I don’t have to listen to this shit.”
“No,” Joe said, “but if I somehow could trade his life for yours, I’d do it.”
As if choreographed, the still evening was broken by the chopping sound of the approaching helicopter and the grind of a sheriff’s department SUV on the ridge above Indian Paintbrush Basin.
The sheep ignored the disruption. They’d long before bowed their heads to eat.
C. J. Box, Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country
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