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leaned back in my chair and slipped a foot under my desk to keep from doing my usual sheriff backflip with a full twist. “Are you sure that’s where she said she was from?”
    “Yes, damn it.”
    I stared at the receiver for a moment. “You seem a little agitated, Tim.”
    There was silence on the phone, and then he spoke. “I damn well am.”
    “Mind if I ask why?”
    “I don’t like having guns pointed at me in my own county.”
    “What happened?”
    He breathed a deep sigh, blowing some of the agitation through his teeth, and I could hear him easing himself into a chair. “I drove out that way, and mind you, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve been up in that Castle Rock territory near the South Fork of the Moreau except for that pipeline they got going through there.” He swallowed. “It’s a fort is what it is, Walt. I mean to tell you that they’ve got walls and fences up all over the place and gun towers—honest-to-God gun towers. Now they call ’em observation posts, but they’re gun towers is what they are. I saw individuals up there with deer rifles, and I gotta tell you I am not happy about this happening in my county.”
    “Who did you talk to?”
    “Some jaybird named Ronald Lynear. I get the feeling he’s the grand imperial Pooh-Bah around the place—him and another fella by the name of Lockhart and some severe-looking individual by the name of Bidarte.”
    I leaned forward. “And they say they never heard of either of them?”
    “Yeah, and I know that’s bullshit, because I’ve still got the slip of paper she gave me with directions on how to get to the place.”
    “Did you get any ID from her?” I raised my head as Vic came in and sat in her usual chair, propping her usual boots up on my usual desk.
    “Walt, these people don’t carry any ID. I got a name from her, Sarah Tisdale. The funny thing is, there was a phone number down here at the bottom that I didn’t pay any attention to ’cause it was out of state. Walt—it’s Wyoming.”
    “307?”
    “You bet.”
    “Give it to me.”
    “I already tried calling it, but there wasn’t any answer and no answering machine, of course.”
    “Give it to me anyway.” He read me the number, and I scribbled it down on the paper blotter on my desk, tore it off, and handed it to my undersheriff. “We’ll get the reverse registry and find out where it is.” Listening to the troubled man on the other end of the line, I dropped my pen and enjoyed the view as Vic left in search of the information I needed. “Tim . . . ?”
    “Yeah.”
    He sighed again, and I waited, then asked, “What’s really troubling you?”
    “Walt, you know me; I’m for freedom, folks’ rights to bear arms and all. . . . I mean that Waco shit needed to be handled better, but it needed to be handled.”
    “Yep.”
    “Well, what’s going on up there near Castle Rock is wrong. I was up there the first time about a year ago when we started getting complaints about abuse and Child Services wanted to know how many kids were up there and whether they were getting a proper education.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “We found out about ’em because a few of ’em came in filing for welfare benefits, claiming that their husbands had run off and left when their damn husbands are sitting out there in the pickups waiting for ’em.” There was another pause as he caught his breath. “Those kids aren’t going anywhere but the school of hard knocks, and the funny thing is that the majority of ’em are young men about the same age as the one you’ve got. They have all this heavy equipment, I mean more than you’d need in a ranching or farming operation, but they’d sunk lines into the river for water and didn’t have any irrigation rights—and you know as well as I do that there’s more men died over ditches than bitches in this country.”
    I leaned back in my chair. “True.”
    “Well, the local ranchers got in an uproar, and we went up there