Breaking Point by C. J. Box
C. J. Box has written 20 novels, most of which feature Wyoming game warden Joe PIckett who has a talent for being in the right place at the right time to solve a crime, which often involves murder. His wife, Marybeth, a local librarian, helps him out by using her Google search skills, and sometimes one of his three daughters figures something out.
As Joe patrols his area of hundreds of thousands of acres, he comes across Butch Roberson, a casual acquaintance, who is camped out in the middle of nowhere. Joe asks Butch if he knows anything about some vandalism to a fence. Joe seems nervous as he assures Joe that he had nothing to do with it.
Butch, a contractor, is on edge because he is the likely suspect in the murder of two EPA agents who came by to forcibly evict Butch from the property he bought a few years earlier to build a retirement home. The land has a clear title and was environmentally vetted when Butch bought it. He had all of his building permits in place and started to clear the land. Then the rules seemed to change. The punishment for trying to build anything was a hefty fine that compounded very quickly, as well as confiscation of the property.
That type of draconian regulation-changing and brutal enforcement does not sit well with the good people of Wyoming, who are probably among the most environmentally protective people in the country.
Joe Pickett is an iconoclast. When he sees something that needs to be done immediately, he just does it. His theory is that it’s better to beg forgiveness after the fact than to ask permission beforehand. (Bob in the Basement is with Joe here.) Unfortunately, his superiors in the Wyoming state bureaucracy like to have employees strictly follow the rules. Joe has been busted occasionally to the point that he had lost his seniority in the Wyoming Fish and Game Department. Badges are based on years in service. He went from Badge 24 to Badge 48 recently after he was demoted. Joe and Marybeth resent this but Joe will not change how he responds to situations.
The newly-elected sheriff, Mike Reed, is a recent paraplegic who lost the use of his legs in a shoot-out in a previous novel. He is a no-nonsense and effective lawman who is investigating the disappearance of the two federal EPA agents. He and his men are looking around Butch’s house to see if there is any sign of the agents. While he and his crew are investigating, a helicopter drops the regional EPA director, Juan Batista, in from the regional office as well as FBI regional director Heinz Underwood and Chuck Coon, an investigator. Their job is to take over the investigation from the locals. Batista is portrayed as a typical overbearing federal bureaucrat, as is Underwood. Chuck Coon is more normal, and he and Joe have worked together before so there is some connection there.
Batista announces that he’s taking over the crime scene because he can’t let the Barney Fifes of the world mess up the investigation of the murder of two federal agents. (Younger readers –both of you – Google Barney Fife.) Sheriff Reed pushes back and Batista and the feds back off, although very irritated. FBI honcho Underwood demands certain things from Joe, most of which he cannot do because he lacks jurisdiction. Unbowed, Underwood tells Joe that he’s sending in a SWAT team. This is overkill, thinks the game warden. Joe and Sheriff Reed’s people will track down Butch. Why are they bringing in a SWAT team?
Meanwhile, Joe has a new boss, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, a political appointee, who picks this time to visit Pickett in the field. She was appointed by Governor Rulon, a Democrat who got elected in a state that is 70% Republican. The thinking is that the governor’s wife called for the appointment of one of her friends, Lisa, to the position.
Rulon has used Joe as his personal agent to figure things out in previous books. They have an interesting but close relationship. Rulon, like Joe, is a maverick.
Lisa is a progressive who wants to modernize the Fish and Game Department. She calls herself LGD, for whatever reason, perhaps a reference to the 1960s hallucinogenic LSD. Who knows?
Marybeth visits Butch’s wife, Pam, to sort things out. Pam tells the full story about how the EPA rules kept changing as the retirement house was about to be built. No one from the federal government would ever respond to any of Roberson's calls, texts, and emails. They just kept sending registered letters demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties without explaining exactly why the feds were owed so much money. A year earlier, three women showed up in a car as Butch was working on the foundation of the house and announced that Butch was violating wetlands laws and had to stop building. Butch knew that the lot was not on any listing of wetlands in Wyoming. None of them cared that Butch had all of the local, state and federal permits he needed to build. He was a contractor by trade and knew what paper he needed before construction began.
Butch got the name of only one of the women who visited him. Marybeth will do some digging to see what she can find out about the woman and the whole wetlands designation issue. Butch’s wife, Pam, had tried to call the woman who showed her ID. After her calls had been consistently ignored, she tried to call managers in the regional EPA office, but no one ever got back to her or responded to their registered letters. Finally, the EPA woman, Shauna Naous, talked to Pam for ten minutes and told her what she could do to appeal the process. It would cost $250,000 in legal fees and drag on for years and there was no guarantee that it would work. An appeal was not a good option.
Many months went by with no EPA action so the Robersons were starting to think that the problem had just gone away. Then last week, Shauna Naous, the woman with the ID, called and said that the two EPA agents were driving up with formal letters and warrants and that the fine was up to $24 million now. Butch had left the house a few days earlier to be alone. He had no cell phone service, so Pam couldn’t tell him what was happening. The theory is that Butch killed the two agents and buried them on his land. Joe thinks that, while Butch may have killed the agents, he’s not going to bury them on his land. Joe is suspicious of the whole deal. No warrants or other documents were ever given to Butch, and PIckett, as a game warden, knows that the land is not wetlands.
Joe is investigating a case where someone illegally shot an antelope buck and left it to rot in the field. People who shoot animals out of season usually want the meat, so this is strange. Sheridan, Joe’s oldest daughter who’s in college, knows who did it because they posted pictures of the slaughter on Facebook. A clue! Joe checks out the posting and confirms that the dead antelope is the one in the field.
Another element of the story involves the previous sheriff, Kyle McClanahan, a jerk who was defeated by the new sheriff, Mike Reed. McClanahan visits Dave Farkus, a loner loser, and offers him some work. The federal government is offering a hefty reward for anyone who finds Butch Roberson, and McClanahan want to get the money. Farkus is getting disability payments for a neck injury he faked and could always use more money. Besides, Dave is a good tracker.
Director Lisa Greene-Dempsey and Joe have breakfast so she can get to know the game warden she manages. She has a surprise for Joe. She got his old badge number 21 reinstated for which Joe is thankful. LGD offers Joe a new position and a raise as her field liaison. He’d have to move to Cheyenne and travel around the state which is bigger than many countries.Joe is flattered but really doesn't want to change jobs. He’ll think about it.
Joe and LGD talk about the murdered EPA agents. Joe gives her the backstory about how Butch was blindsided by the federal government, but she doesn’t care. All that matters is cooperating with the EPA to get Butch.
Governor Rulon is visiting the area to see what’s happening with the murder investigation and to keep the feds from bigfooting local law enforcement. The chief executive is a bit eccentric. He once challenged the US Secretary of the Interior to an arm-wrestling contest to determine policy on wolves. He likes Joe because they both are mavericks.
Joe invites LGD to accompany him as he questions the two alleged antelope killers, Bryce Pendergast and Ryan McDermott. Joe doesn’t expect trouble, but has his boss wait in the car. She wants to be in on the visit and goes with Joe. He knocks on the door and Bryce answers, holding a big pistol. Joe goes for the gun which goes off, missing Joe who overcomes Bryce by spraying bear spray – nasty stuff – in his face. Bryce’s partner, Ryan, ran off at the shot, but he was soon captured. It turns out that the two dimwits thought that Joe was busting them for cooking meth - or trying to cook meth. They hadn’t quite figured it out and kept starting small fires all over the place. They had forgotten all about the dead antelope.
Meanwhile, McClanahan had added Jimmy Sollis, a sniper, to his band of hunters, hot on the trail of Butch Roberson, who can be brought in dead or alive to trigger the reward. The boys banter about how much money the federal government has and that no one will miss the supposed $200,000 bounty. Farkus notices that all of McClanahan’s equipment, including an expensive rifle and lots of fun electronics, are marked as property of the county sheriff’s department. The ex-sheriff had taken a few goodies with him when he left office.
Marybeth is helping a local real estate agent, Matt Donnell, develop an old hotel he bought. He has a problem similar to Butch’s. The rule had changed since he bought the place and there’s no way he could develop it and not lose a lot of money on the deal. Marybeth is sad because she was a bit bored being a librarian and would like to have been part of the project. Joe feels bad for both Matt and his wife but he figures that it’s better to cut your losses early and move on.
Batista and the FBI need to cross a rancher’s land to go after Butch. Frank Zeller, the owner, is cantankerous and independent and doesn’t like being told what to do by people he considers to be clueless bureaucrats. Joe was told that if Frank doesn’t let the feds in, they’ll find all sorts of violations to write him up for and make his life miserable. Joe speaks with Frank who lets people cross his land.
McClanahan and crew have found Butch’s camp but he’s not there. They lie in wait for Butch to return, with the ex-sheriff and the sniper talking about the mechanics of killing someone at long range. Farkus is not happy. He likes Butch and thinks that they should just bring him in but he’s overruled. Sollis sees his target return to camp and shoots him. What’s ironic here is that the reward had been rescinded. The Washington EPA vetoed it, so there’s no bounty on Butch.
Joe is a game warden, way down on the federal food chain of law enforcement, so he is not supposed to be involved in the pursuit of Butch. Since he knows the territory and knows Butch, he is recruited to lead the FBI team as they pursue the fugitive. Joe gets a kick out of the fact that the six federal agents on horses behind him don't know how to ride, but they lumber off.
Just as Joe and the horse-riding challenged FBI team are about to head out, Governor Rulon shows up and confronts Batista about a drone that is flying over the search site. Batista pushes back and the governor threatens to shoot the drone down with Wyoming Air National Guard fighter planes. Joe finds this interesting because the state’s air national guard has no fighter planes.
Having no real comeback, Batista accuses Rulon of being a racist. The governor is confused. Batista looks like a white man but apparently he is Hispanic. Rulon backs off. A bit later, he learns that the drone has been shot down. He is happy.
Back at Butch’s camp site, McClanahan and his team go check out what the sniper did. The good news for them is that the person has a fatal wound. The bad news is that it’s not Butch. Whoops! They killed the wrong guy, an elk hunter from Maine. Ex-Sheriff McClanahan, in classic shifting-the-blame mode, says that the guy was stupid, that he shouldn’t have been hunting in a crime scene. Their conversation is interrupted by Butch Roberson’s orders to drop their weapons. Whoops!
Joe leads the FBI team up the mountain. As they ride their horses, it’s becoming clear that the FBI agents have little faith in Underwood, their boss, who cannot ride a horse. Lots of snickering ensues. Another problem is that the agents didn’t bring food with them because their bosses assumed that the FBI crew would find Butch quickly.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch (this is metaphorical - it’s a camp site), Butch used a satellite phone to tell the feds that he has hostages, the guys who tried to kill him. He only trusts Joe Pickett to negotiate with him.
Back at Butch’s camp site, he orders his hostages to bury the guy that they killed so that the animals don’t eat his body. But he calls Batista on the satellite phone he got from McClanahan and threatens to shoot his hostages unless Joe is sent in to talk to him.
Joe talks to Butch and learns that McClanahan and crew killed an innocent hunter. Batista comes in to implore Butch to surrender, at which point a gunshot is heard. People assume that Butch has killed one of the hostages because Batista jumped into the conversation and Butch says that he killed Farkus.
Butch says that he’ll let the hostages go if he gets a helicopter sent to him to escape and if the EPA apologizes to him for what they did to him and his family with the absurd wetlands regulations penalties.
Batista agrees to the conditions, sort of. He has no intention of complying with them and he is trying to figure out where Butch is so he can take him out.
Meanwhile, Joe and his FBI crew are moving on to find Butch. The feds forgot to give their agents coats for the cold nights of late summer in Wyoming so they are freezing and irritated. Joe chortles. He is dressed warmly.
Along the way Joe talks to FBI agent Underwood. They sort of bond. The career FBI guy is in it only for his pension which will happen in a couple of years. He has little faith in the agency, but he wants to retire and enjoy life.
Pam and her daughter, Hannah, are staying with the Picketts while Butch’s situation is sorted out. Joe borrows an FBI satellite phone to call Marybeth and have her do some digging about Juan Julio Batista. Knowledge is good and it may come in handy down the road.
Joe and FBI guy Underwood continue to developed a relationship of sorts. Joe knows that the feds are never by going to give Butch a helicopter ride to freedom so he’s wondering what will happen. He learns that the plan is to kill Butch, not bring him in. With Butch dead, the case is settled and no one will ask embarrassing questions about why the EPA seemingly made up fake wetlands to get at Butch.
Butch and the ex-sheriff, Farkus, and Sollis, the sniper, are moving up the mountain, away from the pursuit. Butch ties Sollis’s hands together and makes him walk off in the woods alone. He gives him a backpack of food which the sniper can get to once he frees his hands.
Sollis does get the ties off his hands and gets to the food. He hears a phone ring in the backpack. He answers it and is talking to Batista who thinks he’s talking to Butch despite Sollis denying that. A few minutes later, a drone fires a Hellfire missile at the soon-to-be-former sniper and he is literally blown up. Unaware that he killed the wrong person and certain that the Butch problem is gone, Batista is delighted. Whoops!
Joe and the team are on their way to the kill zone to check things out. Underwood’s phone rings and it’s Butch asking, “What the hell did you idiots just do?” The phone call ends and Butch and his hostages notice that the woods where the missile hit are on fire. Time to move on.
(I know that this is a work of fiction, but it really pushes the envelope to think that a regional EPA director could order a missile hit on someone in a dry forest.)
Joe and the FBI team get knocked off their horses by a herd of elk that were spooked by the explosion and the fire. Some of the agents were hurt and two of their horses ran away, no dummies they. Underwood puts the agents with no mounts doubled up on other horses and is moving away from the fire. Joe goes in the other direction, determined to find Butch.
He does track down Butch and his captives and announces that he’s putting Butch under arrest. Butch is fine with that. At least he’ll get a trial before he gets punished. Joe, Butch, Farkus, and McClanahan take off on foot to climb up over a mountain to get away from the fire. Since the trail is not big enough for a horse, Joe decides to sends Toby, his trusty steed, away. The clever game warden had been secretly recording Underwood’s prattlings about all of the illegal things that he and Batista routinely did. He puts the recorder and a note into an evidence bag and ties it onto Toby. Off he trots.
The fire is moving a lot faster than Joe had anticipated. They have to change plans and somehow navigate the nearby river in order to get away from the fire. They find a big log and use it as a makeshift boat. It works. The author writes about fifteen pages describing the river run, including having to shoot the rapids on a log. I know – that is ridiculous – but this is a work of fiction.
They get through the rough part of the river and are close to a campground where they can contact the authorities. Butch and Joe talk about the dead EPA agents. Butch admits killing them but Joe is suspicious because the story has holes in it. Joe thinks he has figured out what really happened which Butch confirms but swears Joe to secrecy. They get to the bustling campground where they are met by Underwood and his underlings and Joe’s boss, Lisa Greene-Dempsey. Underwood moves to arrest Butch but Joe jumps in and says that he made a deal with Butch that Sheriff Reed would be the arresting officer, not the feds.
Sheriff Reed shows up and makes the arrest. Joe gives his badge to LGD. He is completely fed up with the illegal actions that public officials have taken in this case and he’s had it. He’s finally reached his breaking point.
Joe gets his injuries from his adventure treated at the hospital. He’s unemployed and at home with Marybeth who has Batista’s picture up on her computer screen. Butch’s wife, Pam, is still staying with the Picketts. She notices the picture and made a very disparaging comment about Batista. It turns out that John Pate – Batista’s real name – knew Pam in college. It did not go well.
Joe calls in his friend, Nate Romanowski, a character who is off the grid but regularly helps Joe solve problems that need extra-legal solutions. A week after Joe got to the campground, he and Nate are driving to meet a person of interest who lives right next to where Butch wanted to build his house. Harry Blevens is a retired IRS agent who didn’t want Butch to build a house that would block his view of the lake. He got a call from EPA honcho Batista, who said he could help stop the project. They formed an alliance and as soon as Butch started construction, Blevens called Batista who made up the fake wetlands issue. That started the chain of events that led to five people dead, a ruined family, and an out-of-control 100-mile by 60-mile fire that caused the death of thousands of animals.
After some persuasion by Nate, Blevens admits that he had set the wheels in motion and also confirms that Batista was very interested in Butch’s wife, Pam, all of which Joe had recorded. He likes mini digital recorders, an ex-game warden’s essential tool.
After their confrontation with the former IRS manager, Nate opines, “There’s nothing worse on this earth than privileged bureaucrats who work the system. They never get caught, and if they do, there are no real consequences.”
Joe figures out a way to flush Batista out by having Pam hold a press conference. Before that, Batista was driving to see Pam to convince her to not reveal anything about her previous relationship with Pate/Batista. He had a shotgun in his car when he was apprehended, which the police theorize was going to be used to intimidate Pam into keeping quiet.
As it turns out, John Pate - before he became Juan Batista - was infatuated with Pam Buridge, a girl he met in college. She was a Wyoming farm girl and he was from Chicago. They went out and the relationship went south quickly as he dominated and controlled her. Pam and John went to a bar one night and she met Butch Roberson and fell for him. John came by and brutally dragged her away, at which point Butch gets physical with Pate who gets the worst of the fight. Butch and Pam leave the bar together and end up getting married.
Joe meets Batista in jail. Besides having an illegal shotgun in his car, Batista was charged with several crimes based on what was on the digital recording that Joe’s horse, Toby, brought to Sheriff Reed. (You can’t make this stuff up. Toby must have taken lessons from Trigger, Roy Rogers’ wonder horse.)
Joe confirms the back story about John Pate’s compulsive relationship with Pam and also plays the recording he made of Blevens’ confession, which is damning to the prisoner. Batista will spend a lot of time in prison once Blevens makes a deal with the DA.
This is a big spoiler. My purpose in writing about books that are based on a character who appears in many books is not to get you to read the book I’m summarizing. Rather, it’s to give you a sense of what the books are about so that you might want to check out one of the other books featuring the lead character.
It turns out that Butch did not shoot the agents. One got out of the car, did not announce who he was, pulled out his pistol and confronted Butch as he was working on the house. Butch’s teenage daughter, Hanna, was off in the woods target practicing then. She saw the agent point the pistol at Butch so she shot the EPA guy. His armed partner came after Butch so Hannah also shot him. Butch is taking the rap for what his daughter did trying to defend him.
It’s a messy ending, sort of like a Greek tragedy, but it does tie things together.
Bob’s Take
C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels are similar to other series books that I’ve summarized in that the great outdoors is a major character in all of the writing.
Paul Doiron’s Mike Bowditch (Dead by Dawn) is a game warden in Maine who solves crimes.Rich Curtin’s Manny Rivera (February’s Files) is a deputy sheriff in Moab, Utah, who catches bad guys and gals in the great Southwest. C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming who has a knack for figuring out who did what while he’s stewarding his hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness.
All of these books are enriched by the backdrop of nature in the narrative. You learn a lot about the delicate balance between the world of people in a hurry to do things and the implacable elegance of forests, mountains and rivers.
C. J. Box is critical of faceless bureaucracies. FBI agent Underwood is morally bankrupt. He brags to Joe that he doesn’t work for the federal government. He works for premium overtime pay and his pension. He knows that federal employment is the sweet spot – high salary, great benefits, total job security, and a nice retirement. He brags to Joe about how Batista used Underwood to intimidate Batista’s neighbors who were against having him install solar panels on his house. Underwood went door-to-door and pointed out various made-up EPA violations so the neighbors decided to drop their opposition.
Batista is white. He changed his name after college because he figured a Hispanic name would benefit him. He checked off Hispanic on his application to the EPA. He was hired. This probably happens more than we know. In the 1990s, one of the major Boston TV stations hired a reporter who helped them look diverse. She was 100% Irish and looked it. She had been briefly married to a Hispanic and, after the divorce, she decided to keep his ethnic last name for professional reasons.
The title of the book makes sense. Butch had reached his breaking point with the EPA harassment so he basically went off grid. Joe Pickett reached his breaking point and quit his job as game warden.
In a few of Box’s books, Governor Rulan is a counter to the bureaucratic blob of the federal and state governments. He is a wild card who often uses Joe to handle a problem for him. This is good for Pickett, who is often out of work as a game warden.
There was a real case in Iowa similar to the fictional one in this book. In Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency, a couple fought the agency’s ruling that they couldn’t build a house on an acre of land because it was wetlands. The Sacketts argued that it was not wetlands when they bought it and that the EPA could not arbitrarily change the rules. The Sacketts charged regulatory overreach, with the EPA going way beyond what Congress had established by statute in defining wetlands. After 13 years, the Sacketts won the case. As in the book, the EPA was charging the couple $75,000 a day for violating their decree.
There’s a lot in the book about laws versus regulations as setting practice and policy. Laws are enacted by elected representatives of the people in a predictable process. Regulations are made up by unelected bureaucrats who often are very far removed from the people.
I enjoy all of the great outdoors books, including the Joe Pickett series. C. J. Box is very good at making characters come alive and I always learn a lot about how important it is to manage wildlife and wilderness carefully. People in Wyoming are very different politically than people on the coasts but all of us share an obligation to not mess with Mother Nature.
