Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull (Bloodsong Series) (5 page)

His audience looked at the falling snow with amazement. If Las Vegas got half an inch of snow a year, that was generous. The old-timers from the res remembered differently.

“Didn’t it snow twenty-seven inches in 1949?” Henry asked Lloyd.

“Twenty-seven and a half. Everything shut down. It was fun, though.”

“An’ seven inches in 1945,” May added. “I was waiting for Cal to get home from the war.

“So this is one of those years?” Everyone nodded.

It was more than one of those years. The snow kept falling. The parking lot was blanketed with fluffy white.

Reason’s arena remained free of snow and the area where the spectators stood stayed was positively toasty. No one could explain it, but it kept them glued to the rail. They couldn’t get to their cars, anyway. Leroy continued working the horses.

“When you start a horse, you need to ‘sack them out.’ That means touch them all over. Some people use a saddle blanket to do it, others a feed sack. I use my hands.” Leroy heard himself talking, explaining what he was doing. His audience seemed far away. “I like to make sure the horse isn’t hurt or doesn’t have some hidden injury.”

He pressed his hands on the mare, seeing her energy from inside his trance. She had a bunch of sore spots, old injuries stuck in her body. He touched her head and felt her mental distress. She had been scared badly when she was brought in from the wild.

Pressing the flats of his hands against the mare’s body over her tight spots, Leroy dropped deeper into his healing trance. He didn’t look any different than normal, except that his eyes were closed. He suppressed the blue glow that normally covered him when he did what he was doing. He didn’t want to call attention to what was really going on. He pressed and pushed and stroked. As the mare gave up her soreness, she released heartfelt groans of pleasure and dropped her head almost to the ground.

The female observers noticed the mare’s reaction and followed Leroy with rapt attention.

“I just adjusted her a little. Body work, we call it in California.” The crowd laughed. “She’s sleepy now, so I’m going to pull out this lovesick gelding.”

When Leroy opened his corral gate, the black and white pinto charged the opening and Leroy. He put his hand up flat. The horse slammed his nose into it and stopped like he’d hit a brick wall.

“OK, now. We got to get something straight. I’m the boss, not you.” Leroy did a bunch of exercises with the horse, bending his neck one way and then the other, touching him all over. This horse held much more pain in his body than the mare. He had not made the journey from freedom to captivity easy for anyone. Leroy kept working and soon the pinto stood with his head down like the mare’s.

“Now’s a good time to stop. Anybody got some lunch? I didn’t bring mine.”

Leroy ate like royalty, mostly food the women brought. Things had changed since his father told him he wanted to get married. A lot of girls were watching him. Girls or women, whatever they wanted to be called. They were real pretty, wearing tight clothes cut way down. That was how they dressed in Las Vegas, he guessed. They tempted him with sandwiches and chocolate cake and themselves. Not one of them was right.  They flaunted themselves and brushed against him. He didn’t want any of them. His wife wasn’t among them.

“Well, better get back to work.” Snow was flying all over outside the perimeter of the arena and spectators. He trimmed the horses’ feet. They stood without moving or being tied. “You gotta make sure a horse’s feet are balanced and don’t have any problems. If you don’t do that, it’s like trying to go on a hike in some of the shoes you ladies wear. Torture and an invitation to injury. I’m not going to shoe these horses even though I brought my anvil and forge. It’s going to be enough for them to compete in the rodeo, much less having nails in their feet for the first time.”

Then the process moved faster. He rubbed the mare all over with his saddle blanket, and then carefully set his saddle on her back. She tolerated it well, so he tightened the girth a bit, then more.

“Easy does it. Don’t want to crowd her much.” He stepped up and walked around the ring on her back, no bridle, just a rope around her neck. “I do this because I can. Don’t you try it.” The mare picked up the jog, and then the lope.

“He’s the horse whisperer, Tina. You know the magical trainer that guy wrote the book about. Look at what he’s doing.”

Leroy stopped the mare. She settled on her hind end and slid like a horse that had been doing it for years. He touched her with his outside leg and she spun away from the contact, swiveling on her hind feet.

“He
is
the horse whisperer!” Tina replied. “But I didn’t know he was African American.”

Leroy did enough with the palomino to have the cowboys looking at him with envy and suspicion. “That’s enough for today. Now I’ll start the other horse.” Which he did. The rough, bucking horse never made a crow hop, the little buck that said, “Watch out. You’re about to take a ride on a rocket ship.” When he put him away, Leroy knew he had a horse that would win the championship.

“OK, folks. I’m going to do some roping on them tomorrow and teach them their jobs. We may go over to the Thompson & Mack and show them around before the rodeo.”

“Can we come tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“When will you start?”

“Dawn.”

Reason walked up to him when he was putting the horses away. “Leroy, did you keep the snow off the arena and the people? And keep them warm?”

Leroy thought, looking around at the cleared arena and mounds of snow elsewhere. “I guess so. Must have.”

“And you made paths to everyone’s houses and cleared their driveways? And kept the driveway to the tobacco shop clear?”

He looked around, noticing that snow a foot deep had been cleared, making it easy for folks to get to their houses. “I guess I did.” Leroy frowned, perplexed.

Reason dropped his voice, to a low whisper, “Are you a spirit warrior, Leroy? And a weather-changer?”

His nod was barely perceptible. “I guess so. I’m good with rain, an’ I guess snow, too.  Mostly I heal, but I can do other things if I need to. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Right, I won’t. But there were hundreds of people here today, Leroy. I expect that most of them noticed. Did you know that a hundred year snow hit the City Las Vegas today? Snowed for miles around.”

Leroy’s brows contracted. He sucked in a breath. That’s why he wasn’t going to be Grandfather’s successor. His power was unpredictable and sometimes made things worse.

He had the horses ready Friday. The tribe advanced him his entry fees. He intended to enter the palomino mare in tie-down roping and the  pinto in bulldogging. Those suited the abilities they’d shown in training. Reason was collecting bids on the two horses. He’d keep the auction open until after the rodeo. If either horse won a championship, its price would skyrocket.

Reason Jimson smiled. Brother Leroy driving in with his camper was good for the whole Nation.

6

INCLEMENT WEATHER

Flakes of snow dusted the runway as they arrived. “Don’t worry. It never snows here,” Austin said, hustling his family to the car rental desk. “Is it going to snow very long?” he said to the desk clerk.

“No. I’ve lived in Vegas all my life. Most we get is a little sprinkle. This will melt in a few minutes.”

They had to wait for the car he’d ordered. He wouldn’t drive one of those tiny foreign jobs. Snow continued to fall as they waited. The parking lot was blanketed in white. Had to be four inches deep.

There was a four-wheel drive truck with an extended cab available, but Austin didn’t want to be jammed in and jolt around in a tank like that. Their car finally came in, a black car like they drove in the Bureau. Blacked out windows with the shape of a beetle.

“Oh, cool dad. The Mafia drive cars like this.” J was excited for the first time. “I bet it is a Mafia car. They run Las Vegas.”

“Do you have any snow chains?” he asked the attendant.

“No, sir, it never snows in Las Vegas. It will melt soon.”

As they left the airport, they could see dozens of people frolicking in the snow, throwing snowballs and making snowmen as though the snowfall was the best thing in the world. Austin scowled. Why did they come on Wednesday? By tomorrow, the snow would be melted. But they had a whole week in Las Vegas. Things would work out.

“Can’t you find it?” Austin barked at Sylvia. Miles of fresh white fluff surrounded the car, saguaro cacti poking up here and there. The road was empty.

“No, dear, I’m a brainless idiot.” She juggled a paper map. He had carefully marked their route in yellow marker. “It isn’t where the brochure says it is, Austin. Can’t you understand that?” She poked her finger at an intersection. “We passed Rin Tin Tin Road half an hour ago.”

The highway was a fucking mess. The windshield wipers did nothing. The snow kept falling. Austin made up his mind. Pulling carefully off of the road, he got out and approached the trunk. His feet immediately became wet––and then freezing. The cowboy boots he’d bought for the trip weren’t waterproof.

He lifted the heavy case out of the trunk, debating where to open it. He needed to open it, but he didn’t want his family to know what it held. An FBI man’s kit was as classified as they came. The snow fell. He shivered. His feet felt were soaked to the ankle. He got back in the car, turning up the heat.

“OK, everyone. I’m not supposed to show you this, so forget you saw it.” He opened the long briefcase.

“Oh, wow, dad! You’ve got guns! Can we shoot them?” J-man lit up.

“No, you cannot. Not these guns. We’ll find a range when we get there. I’ll teach you. Everyone should know how to shoot. It’s your right as an American.”

Two firearms were nestled into fitted indentations in the bottom half of the briefcase: his standard issue, semi-automatic Glock 22 pistol and the M4A1 carbine. The M4A1 was only 30” with the stock retracted. Some might find it odd to take a fully automatic assault rifle used by SWAT teams on a family vacation, but Austin knew that situations could come up. He would be ready. Plus he loved the guns and hated to be without them. An FBI man could carry them legally.

“You’re going to really like what I’m going to do next.”

He set up the satellite-based GPS that was packed on the top of the case. In 1997, it was brand-new and state-of the-art, with its own miniature satellite dish, which he put on the car’s roof. “We can find out where we are anywhere on the globe with this. It’s top secret. Made by Numenon for the FBI. Have you heard of Numenon?”

“Oh, yeah. They make a killer phone. The NumoPhone.”

“You can take pictures of yourself with it and send them to your friends.”

Austin’s back went up. He’d heard of that. He’d heard of senators losing their seats because of pictures they sent to their friends. “Well, that’s a different branch of Numenon. They made this for the Bureau.”

He quickly established that the Yippee-I-O Ranch was twenty-five miles farther up the road. “They lied!” Austin was outraged. “This isn’t the outskirts of Las Vegas. It’s the middle of the sticks.”

Sylvia examined the Yippee-I-O Ranch’s brochure. “It says ‘map not to scale,’ Austin. It never was where you thought it was.”

His jaws convulsed. He wanted to explode with profane speech, but he never would, in front of the children or anywhere. He was a Bureau man. “I’ll see about that. Let’s see if we can get some help.”

He set up the system’s satellite phone. In three minutes he was talking to the Sheriff, William R. Rodriquez. He identified himself to the operator and was passed straight to Rodriquez. The speaker allowed everyone in the car to hear what was said.

“I have to insist, Sheriff …” “Call me Bill.” “… Bill, that you don’t mention my presence to anyone. I’m strictly below the radar.” Austin looked up to find his children staring at him with rapt attention. Sylvia seemed a little sick.

“I’m on a covert operation. Now, what can you tell me about the Yippee-I-O Ranch? I’m supposed to rendezvous there this afternoon.”

“That old place? Is it still open? It’s way out there. Old couple used to own it. I don’t know what became of them …”

“It’s habitable?”

“Far as I know.”

“What about all this snow? Can you send a snowplow out? I’ll give you our coordinates.”

“I’d love to special agent …” “Call me Austin.” “Austin. We don’t have a snowplow. It hasn’t snowed like this since 1949. There’s not a snow plow in the county.”

Austin felt himself deflating. Twenty-five more miles of this?

“How about if I sent a 4WD black and white out to pick y’all up? Take you to one of the hotels in town?”

Austin deflated farther. All his research. The wonderful ranch vacation. Gone for a gaudy strip motel and casino. Prostitutes wandering around, and drunken gamblers. That was no place for the kids. He looked up. Sylvia was frantically mouthing, “Yes! Yes! Take it!”

“I can get you into some pretty fancy places.” The sheriff’s bonhomie radiated over the phone. “I know you can’t be comped, but we can figure out a way.”