ALSO BY C. J. BOX
THE JOE PICKETT NOVELS
Stone Cold
Breaking Point
Force of Nature
Cold Wind
Nowhere to Run
Below Zero
Blood Trail
Free Fire
In Plain Sight
Out of Range
Trophy Hunt
Winterkill
Savage Run
Open Season
THE STAND-ALONE NOVELS
The Highway
Back of Beyond
Three Weeks to Say Goodbye
Blue Heaven
SHORT FICTION
Shots Fired: Stories from Joe Pickett Country
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G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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Copyright © 2015 by C. J. Box
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Box, C. J.
Endangered / C. J. Box.
p. cm.—(A Joe Pickett novel ; 15)
ISBN 978-0-698-18443-5
1. Pickett, Joe (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Game wardens—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Wyoming—Fiction. 5. Suspense fiction. 6. Mystery fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.O87658E53 2015 2014049854
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
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To Ivy
And Laurie, always
CONTENTS
Also by C. J. Box
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE | LEK 64
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART TWO | YARAK, INC.
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART THREE | ALL RISE
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
PART FOUR | KITTY WELLS DIED FOR YOUR SINS
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART FIVE | THE READY AREA
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
PART SIX | SPRING STORM
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
Men are what their mothers made them.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life
Therefore I did not know that I would grow to be
My mother’s evil seed and do these evil deeds.
—EMINEM, “Evil Deeds”
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.