Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(13)

A stray round was just as unlikely, Joe thought, although it wasn’t inconceivable. Everybody had guns in Wyoming, and shots were fired—at game animals, predators, targets, whatever—at all times of the day. Bullets traveled much farther than most people realized. The county shooting range was several miles from the club, and stray rounds could easily travel that far and still be lethal upon impact. But the targets at the gun range faced east, and the Eagle Mountain Club was south of the facility. A round that missed the target high—and it would have to be very high to clear the berm backstop—wouldn’t land anywhere close to the club.

Odd occurrences and random bullets had happened before, Joe knew. There had been a civil suit recently, north in Casper, where a man watching television had been struck by a .50 round fired two miles away from his home that tore through his wall.

“Any suspects you’ve heard about?” Joe asked her.

“There’s all sorts of speculation,” she said. “Judge Hewitt has lots of enemies. But I haven’t heard any names.”

Joe snorted. The judge did indeed have lots of enemies, including the many criminals he’d sent to jail and prison, as well as most of the lawyers who’d pleaded before his bench. Hewitt didn’t suffer fools in his courtroom, and for years he’d humiliated attorneys he considered unprepared or feckless.

Judge Hewitt was brutal when it came to sentencing defendants who were found guilty. He lectured them, called them “pukes,” “mouth breathers,” and “moral degenerates,” and ended many sentencing statements by saying if it were up to him the criminal would be sentenced to hard labor breaking up rocks. If the crime victimized seniors or children, he’d declared from the bench several times that he’d like to take the defendant outside the courtroom and shoot him himself.

An equal opportunity authoritarian in the courtroom, Judge Hewitt had castigated prosecutors and law enforcement officers whom he considered incompetent or derelict in the cases they brought before him. Joe had witnessed both the former county prosecutor and former sheriff get the bark peeled off them by the judge in public. Joe hadn’t been immune either, although after calling him a “poor excuse for a game warden” during one trial, Judge Hewitt had invited Joe back to his chambers during the recess. Joe had expected further abuse, but it turned out Hewitt wanted to talk about his upcoming hunt in Texas for feral pigs. He was looking forward to shooting them out of a helicopter with an AK-47.

Most of all, Judge Hewitt was a big-game hunter, and he structured his world around trips to go after exotic prey. He was working on his second North American Sheep Slam now—killing a Dall, desert bighorn, Rocky Mountain bighorn, and Stone sheep. He’d killed a brown bear in Alaska that was still on the record books, and a twelve-hundred-pound Asian water buffalo in northern Australia. Hewitt knew Joe’s views about trophy hunters, though, and he steered clear of that subject when they talked about the outdoors.

An alternative weekly newspaper in Jackson Hole had once written a cover story about him titled “?‘Hanging’ Judge Hewitt—the Law East of the Bighorns.”

Hewitt had framed the cover and it hung with pride behind his desk in his chambers.

Joe said to Marybeth, “The question isn’t who would love to see Judge Hewitt get shot. The question is who wouldn’t?”

“Poor Sue,” Marybeth said.

Joe told her how the governor had become involved, and that every law enforcement principal in Twelve Sleep County had been ordered to assemble at the courtroom, including him.

“That’s unusual,” she said. “Why is the governor involved?”

“Beats me,” Joe said. “But the request was made to Director Ewig. That’s why I’m back here.”

“I’ll ask around,” Marybeth said. “I’ll find out the connection between Judge Hewitt and the governor. It’s likely to be sordid.”

Joe agreed. Just about everything about Governor Colter Allen turned out to be sordid. Joe knew that from past experience, although for the past year Allen had left him alone, for which Joe was grateful.

After a slew of #MeToo allegations had emerged regarding Allen’s conduct before being elected, the governor had gone to ground. Like other politicians he no doubt observed, Allen hadn’t addressed the charges or really denied them. He’d simply refused to talk about them, and moved on. It was a new political world, Joe had learned. Politicians who were snared in scandal didn’t fight back or resign in shame, because there was no personal shame. They simply kept going, and it appeared to be working. Talk about recall and impeachment had died down. And for Joe, it meant Governor Allen hadn’t bothered him in months—until now.

“Will you be home tonight for dinner?” she asked as she slowed down on Main near the courthouse.

“I don’t know, but I hope so.”

“How are you going to get your truck back?”

Joe thought about that. “I have no idea.”

*

JOE BOUNDED UP the granite courthouse steps toward the large wooden double doors. He glanced down while he did so and grimaced. Although the blood of the victims had been scrubbed from the steps, the pockmarks from machine gun rounds still scarred the stone. He realized he hadn’t been on the steps since it happened, and it jolted him. The photos he’d seen of the crime scene, the four bleeding bodies sprawled on the steps, Sheriff Reed’s dead body in the street where his wheelchair had rolled, would always haunt him.