ESTESBOG

            

  It was the end of an early fall day on the eastern Colorado prairie. The sun, dulled by a layer of dusty haze, had settled onto the western horizon as if resting for a moment before sinking out of sight. The temperature was on the warm side and belied the rapid drop that would occur once the sun deserted the cloudless sky. The still air was nearly silent except for the distant pop-pop-pop of a single cylinder diesel engine on an oil well somewhere to the northeast and the occasional clackety-rattle of an orange-winged grasshopper changing locations in hopes of one last mating as the day came to a close. The shadows had been longer and darker of late, the product of shortening days and bone dry air. The same air was spice scented with sand sage, prairie dog weed, and the countless other aromatic herbs of the shortgrass prairie at the end of summer.

            On a low ridge facing the distant western horizon sat a woman with her knees drawn up to her chest. Betsy Robinson was a District Wildlife Manager, the unique form of game warden-biologist employed by the Colorado Division of Wildlife. She came here on occasion to be alone and to think.

            Down the shallow slope a 9-month-old wirehaired pointer puppy bounced with boundless energy despite the danger of landing on a pad of ever-present hunger cactus. The dog had not been on Betsy’s wish list. But her husband Ron, a Fort Morgan police officer, had been so proud of the struggling, yellow-eyed puppy when he brought it home unannounced one evening last spring; she’d held back her objections.

            Her dad, ever the optimist, had twice brought puppies home when she and her brother Josh were kids, and both dogs, male Labs, turned out to be incorrigible oafs with few redeeming qualities. Now Ron was gone and the female puppy was about all he’d left her from their brief lives together. She hoped Daisy would turn out to be a lot less hyper than the others she’d known. So far it was impossible to tell.

            In the four weeks since a traffic accident took Ron’s life at an intersection in Fort Morgan, Betsy had gradually located all of the papers that Ron had squirreled away in various hiding places – a bank deposit box, a locked metal box in the back of a closet, his locker at the police station, and his desk at home – and discovered the financial fix he’d gotten himself into before and during the time they’d been together.

            They’d met two years ago, soon after she’d been assigned to the Fort Morgan District fresh out of her training year with the Division in Denver. She’d been attracted to his easy smile and quick sense of humor. Ron loved the occasional adrenaline rushes of being a cop just as Betsy loved the cat-and-mouse, give-and-take of working the sometimes less than honest hunting and fishing public.

            Ron and Betsy had been married less than a year when she got the ominous radio call one afternoon from the Morgan County Communications Center just after leaving her agency’s area office in Brush.

“Wildlife 343, Morgan Comm. Please come to Morgan PD at once.”

Please? The dispatcher never used “please.”

There was something in the brevity of the message and the gravity of the woman’s voice that instantly conveyed this was not good. She knew when she saw Chief Kevin Curtis standing inside the door waiting for her that something must have happened to Ron. The fact that she was not summoned to High Plains Medical Center pretty much told her in advance to expect the worst.

Answering a call for another traffic accident, Ron’s cruiser was T-boned at the intersection of Platte Avenue and Main Street by a young woman in a Pontiac trying to run the red just after it turned and beat the start-up traffic entering from either side. It was nearly standard practice among Colorado drivers, but this time it didn’t work. Struck in the driver’s side door, Ron was killed instantly. The other driver was released from the hospital just last week and was expected to need more back surgeries in the coming year.

Betsy’s overwhelming grief had sunk in deeply by the funeral a few days later. By that time her mother and dad had arrived from Maine along with her brother Josh and his wife Terry. Ordinarily visits with her family members were stimulating and much fun. Her dad was a Professor of History at the University of Maine and her mother a social studies teacher in the junior high school in Orono. Josh, three years younger than Betsy, had been a military policeman and was now a new Maine Game Warden in the district east of Bangor which included parts of their Grandpa McIntyre’s old district when he, too, was a game warden in the mid-Twentieth Century. But this time around her grief acted to blur the entire visit.

Then came the awful discovery. Ron had always been private about financial matters. He’d taken care of their finances and paid the bills – or so she’d thought. She found the little key on Ron’s key chain that unlocked the drawers in the big roll-top desk that he’d inherited from his grandfather back in Wisconsin. She was figuratively clotheslined with what she found in those drawers and in his wallet. Ron had eight credit cards, none of which she’d known about. Researching each one, she learned that the most recent three, all of which were in both of their names, had each been used to pay off the accumulated interest of the previous cards. Ron was barely afloat and incredibly in debt.

And just what was did that debt consist of? Between the desk drawers and the safe deposit box at a local bank – the key to which was in the desk – she was just now beginning to get the full picture. The only plausible explanation for what she was finding was that the man she thought she’d known so well was some sort of a closet gambler. If he was, he hadn’t been the usual addict who ran off to the casinos or Las Vegas or played the Internet. There were large sums held back when he cashed his paycheck and other comparatively large withdrawals both from his two checking accounts (one of which she’d never known about) and against each of the earlier credit cards, almost all in even increments of $100.

Ron covered his tracks quite well. There was not a single name or reference to a bookie. But other credit card records from restaurants and gas stations indicated he’d made trips at irregular intervals to Colorado Springs some 150 miles distant after each cash withdrawal. Other notes and literature hinted that his betting most likely involved major league baseball and football. She’d been well aware of his obsessive tracking of sports statistics.

If only she’d looked more deeply into that….

So the man she thought she loved so deeply was likely at least part fraud. Ron had kept so many important details from her that she was beginning to question if anything she thought she knew about him was in fact for real. How much longer, she wondered, could he have continued the balancing act before it all caved in upon him – them.

She had not told a soul of her discoveries about Ron’s financial affairs and secrets. The credit card debt – if this was all of it – totaled more than $80,000, almost as much as they owed on their house and at 4, 5, even 6 times the interest! She knew enough about bankruptcy and the recent “reforms” pushed by now Vice President Joe Biden a year or two before he moved up from U.S. Senator, to know that even if she took the bankruptcy option, there was no way to escape the avarice of the big credit card companies. The way things are now, despite the fact that unsolicited cards arrived in the mail promising “freedom” from financial worries; regardless of the fact that low advertised interest rates often jumped to as much as 30% per annum as soon as the first charge was made, it was now law that bankrupt cardholders could never escape that debt. Some in fact become indentured servants to the grave.

            As she sat huddled deep in thought, the sun dropped through the horizon and, with one last brilliant flash, disappeared from the orange, yellow and pink sky above the jagged western horizon. Right on cue coyotes began to howl from all points on the compass – some singly, others in small groups.

            Betsy looked around for Daisy, but the dog was nowhere in sight. The rolling terrain could easily hide her from view. She hoped the dog was still within earshot.

            As the wildlife officer got to her feet the ear-splitting report of a high-powered rifle very close by cut short the coyote chorus. It was very close, just over the ridge to her northwest. Then she heard a vehicle door slam – no, two doors. As she ran to the ridge, it occurred to her that a rancher might have mistaken Daisy for a feral dog. But when she reached a high enough vantage to peer over the shallow hilltop, she saw two men hurriedly dragging a large mule deer buck carcass by its huge velvet antlers to the back of a pickup. This caper was going down right in her lap!

            Unsnapping her holster as a precaution, the 140-pound female game warden walked up to the truck from the darker quadrant of the landscape unnoticed by the two larger, older men intent on making off with their prize before anyone was the wiser.

            Twenty feet from the tailgate Betsy finally spoke, “Division of Wildlife. What are you up to, gentlemen?”

            Like children caught stealing from a cookie jar, both men let go of the deer antlers and straightened up in total surprise. They were a rough looking pair. As trained, Betsy took note of their features. Oil field roughnecks. One man was fortyish and wore a threadbare and stained reddish tan Carhartt barn jacket. He was balding and possessed about 2 days of dark whiskers on his round face. The second man, who stood farthest away on the opposite side of the deer, was probably the younger and thinner of the two. The man stood a little over 6 feet and wore a dark blue knit cap over longish, scraggly, dirty blond hair. He was clad in faded blue jeans and a black-stained blue denim jacket over a filthy white T-shirt.

            Neither man spoke or moved at first. Betsy broke the silence by saying, “I need to see some identification from both of you. And you can leave the deer right there. I’ll be taking that.”

            With a sheepish and somewhat submissive look, Carhartt relaxed, shrugged and responded, “Sure. It’s in the truck.”

            As Carhartt moved toward the driver’s door on Betsy’s side of the truck, Denim sidestepped to the opposite side of the truck body without taking his eyes off her. She sensed the danger just as he lifted a bolt action rifle from the truck bed and leveled it on her.

            “I don’t think you’re going to do that,” he snarled as he grinned through crooked teeth. “Now, turn around and head right back over that hill, Short Stuff.”

            “Jesus, Donnie!” Carhartt exclaimed. “What the hell are you going to do?”

            Lifting the rifle toward Betsy’s face, Denim snarled, “Shut up! She ain’t gonna do nothin’ to us.”

            It had finally happened – circumstances where the officer loses control of the situation. Betsy tried to process it all and figure out what to do next. Her pistol was in its holster on her belt. She could never bring it to bear before her adversary blew her to eternity. Carhartt’s entire demeanor was one of fear and timidity. The only real danger, she surmised, was the man across the truck bed holding the cannon. If she did as he said, she was certain he’d realize he could not get out of the course he’d committed to without killing her and trying somehow to hide her body. He’d shoot her in the back before she could get over the rise. So complying wasn’t the answer. She decided she’d stand and at least face the muzzle flash.

            “Listen, Bitch!” Denim said in a low, level voice. “I ain’t kiddin’.”

            Betsy heard the safety on his rifle click forward. This may be it, she thought. Her vision narrowed like a tunnel as she faced the man with the rifle.

            At that instant, a large, dark shape came flying through the air from the left and struck Denim at head level. The rifle flew up and landed with a clatter in the truck bed. Making noises Betsy had never heard, Daisy was slashing Denim as he screamed incoherently and writhed on the ground trying to shield his head from the snapping pointer.

            “Daisy!” Betsy yelled. The dog released Denim’s torn cheek and backed off a step.

            “What the fuck!” Denim growled as he felt his badly bleeding face. His expression lost its anger as he realized he was staring into the barrel of the woman’s .40 caliber Glock 23.

            “Roll over on your belly!” Betsy commanded as she simultaneously pulled the handcuffs off her belt and placed her heel squarely on the back of the man’s neck all the while keeping the pistol trained on his head. Bleeding from his lacerated face and punctured hands, Denim complied.

            Betsy looked for Daisy and realized her new partner was now on the other side of the truck keeping Carhartt pinned against the door with her teeth bared and the hair along her backbone standing straight up menacingly. Betsy pulled a pair of nylon clamps from a pouch on her belt and bound the wrists of the second man behind his back.

            When she returned to Denim, he was trying to get to his feet. She almost reached to pull off a piece of vegetation sticking to his bloody cheek when she realized it was his chewing tobacco plug coming through from the inside. Daisy had done some serious cosmetic damage.

            “That’s got to hurt,” she said matter-of-factly without a trace of sympathy.

            After patting down both men and reading them their Miranda rights, Betsy unloaded the rifle and a holstered revolver she’d found on the seat of the truck. With both men sitting on the tailgate and a funny-looking, hair-triggered hunting dog alternating her gaze on each of them, the game warden pulled her cell phone from another holster on her belt and speed-dialed Morgan Comm Center.

            Her voice was calm and even. “This is Wildlife 343. I need assistance from S.O. to transport two prisoners….”