Incident at Big Sky by Johnny France

Author:Johnny France
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504043991
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

PART 3

Pursuit

12

Madison County

Late July, 1984

The kidnapping, murder, and subsequent manhunt had so altered the pattern of France’s daily life that he found it difficult to return to his normal routine, once he had come down from the Big Sky command post.

The business of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department and the commercial life of the county, however, continued at their normally hectic summer pace. This was peak season for the river guides and trout-fishing outfitters. Ranchers worked around the clock, irrigating the hay crops on which their annual profit depended to a great degree. As Johnny told people, this was, indeed, great “summer country.” The obvious corollary was that Madison County, like most of Montana, was literally obliged to make hay—and money—while the sun shined. Few tourists drove their Winnebagos through the January snowdrifts to sample the delights of chicken fried steak or cream of broccoli soup at Bettie’s Cafe. The hay that the ranchers were now able to wrest from their parched, chalky fields would keep their pregnant cows alive through the frigid void of the seven-month winter.

And everyone from ranchers to motel owners to white-water guides depended to some extent on the sheriff’s department to patrol the roads, help out at accidents, investigate petty crimes, round up loose stock on the highways, and generally maintain law and order, so that the tourists would have a pleasant stay in the recently subdued mountain frontier. Between July Fourth and Labor Day, the two-month tourist bonanza reached its peak. So did the rate of car crashes, drunk driving arrests, break-ins and vandalism, not to mention an increase in the year-round problem of bar fights.

To police the whole county, Johnny had himself and seven regular deputies, around the clock. In theory, there were reserve deputies to supplement his force. But many of them were ranchers and outfitters for whom prolonged extra duty would be a real financial burden. That was a moot point, however, because he’d already overspent his annual budget for the reserves during the week-long manhunt, and he couldn’t get too much more blood from Bill Dringle’s budgetary turnip.

The net result of this situation for Sheriff Johnny France was that he found himself in a complicated and frustrating position. The more he brooded on Don and Dan Nichols—and there were probably not ten waking minutes in his day when he didn’t think of them—the more convinced he was that they were still up in the mountains, working their home country from the Beartrap east into the Spanish Peaks. But Johnny simply did not have the human or financial resources to maintain a massive law enforcement pressure on that area. If he was going to catch them, he knew, it would be through cunning and not through any kind of large, brute-force operation.

Part of Johnny’s strategy of cunning was based on the assumption that Don Nichols did carry an AM transistor radio, and that news reports on the progress of the pursuit would reach him each day. There was no way to

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