Free Breaking Point by C. J. Box Page B

her back by ten.
    Joe tapped on his horn, and the three teenagers inside glanced out. Joe flashed the boys with his cab-mounted spotlight and watched them recoil. April rolled her eyes and shooed them away, then gestured to Joe to wait for a moment while she closed down the store.
    As the two boys walked past Joe’s truck, they looked over at him sheepishly.
    —
    “N AW, I HAVEN’T MET HER,” Bill Haley told Joe, who was waiting for April to lock up and come out of the store. The cell connection between the two game wardens was scratchy and poor. “I’ve just heard things.”
    “What things?”
    “That she’s a do-gooder with grand ideas about, and I quote, ‘
dragging the agency into the twenty-first century.
’”
    Joe paused. “That might not be all bad, Bill.”
    “Hell, Joe,” Haley said, “I’m still struggling with the
twentieth
century.”
    Joe laughed.
    “Seriously,” Haley said, “I hear she considers herself progressive. She thinks the agency is a good-old-boy network, and she wants to shake things up.”
    Joe shrugged. “We could use a little shaking up from time to time.”
    “Maybe, but I’m too old and set in my ways for that. I’ve been around a while and I remember a couple of other bomb-thrower directors in the past. You weren’t around when there was a move to rename us ‘conservation officers’ or, worse, ‘resource managers.’ Back then, I just figured I could outlast them, and I did. This time, I’m tired and I just want out. Those types are wearing me down, Joe. I’m an old goddamned game warden and a good one, and that’s all I ever wanted to be.”
    “Gotcha,” Joe said. “Where did the governor even find her?”
    “I heard it was his wife,” Haley said slyly. “The First Lady has lots of friends in the smart set, I hear. The Gov owes her a couple, from what I understand.”
    “Hmph.”
    Joe wasn’t as plugged in to the gossip in Cheyenne as Bill Haley was, but he did recall phoning the governor’s office once and having the telephone answered by Stella Ennis, who had once tempted Joe himself. Stella had been named chief of staff, and she claimed she was sitting on the governor’s lap at the time. Stella compounded the problem when a reporter from the
Casper
Star-Tribune
asked her about her qualifications to be chief of staff and she answered, “Have you seen these lips?”
    It was a joke, but according to rumor, the response didn’t go over well with the First Lady.
    “All I know,” Haley said, “is it’s time for me to move on and leave it to you younger guys. Things are changing, and I’m not changing with them.”
    “I’m not that young,” Joe said, and as he did, April sashayed across the sidewalk and swung into the passenger seat.
    “No kidding,” April said, listening in. “You’re practically
fossilized
.”
    Joe shushed her, and said good-bye to Bill Haley.
    As they passed the impressive hulk of the Saddlestring Hotel on the corner on the way to Bighorn Road, Joe said, “There it is.”
    April grunted something, preoccupied with text messages on her phone.
    —
    A PRIL’S TRANSFORMATION from a moody, sullen, almost scary teenager into a bouncy and fashionable cowgirl had come so suddenly Joe and Marybeth were still reeling from it. It was almost as if she were trying on a new persona, Joe thought, like taking a new April for a test drive to see if she liked her. He was cautiously optimistic it might stick. Better a cowgirl than a Goth or Emo, Marybeth told him, pointing out that it had been two months since their foster daughter had worn all black or painted her mouth and nails the same color.
    It could be worse: much worse,
she’d said.
    Joe had agreed, and still did. But the trouble with cowgirls, he knew, was the cowboys who came with them.
    —
    I T WAS FULL DARK and sultry when Joe pulled into his driveway and turned off his engine.
    “Who’s here?” April asked, gesturing toward the ten-year-old Ford Explorer parked in front