Out of Season (32 page)
“Finnegan gets hunters from out of town, then?”
“Well, sure. Folks that don’t know better. See, he’s got this deal with some fella in Santa Fe. As a matter of fact, if I got it right, the guy is Finnegan’s former brother-in-law…or some squirrelly thing like that. Dick was boasting about it to me once, acting real coy, you know. He was pretty proud of himself. Anyway, this guy is in the business.”
“What business?”
“Travel, hunting. All that sort of stuff. There’s some big-game ranches up that way, legitimate ones. Rich folks come out and spend a week getting wined and dined and go home with a trophy elk or ram. Dick was hinting that every once in a while, his brother-in-law would send some hunters down this way for a quick trophy buck.”
“It’s hard to believe anyone in his right mind would pay that much,” I said.
Boyd laughed, a short, hacking chuckle. “They’ll pay even more for less, Sheriff,” he said. “Fifteen hundred or two thousand is petty cash to some folks. And the way things are going, open-country hunting is getting harder and harder. There’s less and less private land every year, and a good many landowners and ranchers don’t want hunters on the property…myself included. And the kicker is, Dick never cared much one way or another what season it was. Nobody was the wiser, so why inconvenience the payin’ customer by restricting him to one of the state’s seasons?”
“And Edwin doesn’t approve of all this? Of what Finnegan was doing?”
“He don’t think much of it. Neither do I, for that matter, but what Dick Finnegan does on his land is his business, long as it don’t get in my way.”
“You never tipped off the Game and Fish Department?”
“Nope. The thought crossed my mind once or twice. Guess I should have. But this is the way I figure it. The judge would hand a stiff fine on old Dick, and maybe he could pay it, and maybe he couldn’t. They might even stick him in jail for six months and leave old crazy Charlotte out there all by her lonesome. Maybe, maybe not. But then after a time, he’d be out of jail, and I’d still have him for a neighbor, still meet him now and then on some back road. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not afraid of too much, but I don’t need that. It’s his business, and I let it go at that.”
“Johnny, did Dick Finnegan shoot at that airplane?”
This time he didn’t hesitate, didn’t turn coy. “I don’t know, Sheriff,” he said and added, “If I knew, I’d tell you. He could have, and he could have hit it, too. I’ve seen him drop a coyote at five hundred yards, just resting the rifle over the hood of the truck. And that’s no small trick. But I don’t know.”
“Do you suppose Edwin knows?” Estelle asked. Her voice was quiet and husky, but it startled both Johnny Boyd and me.
“I don’t see how he could,” Johnny said. “He’s so goddam lame he can’t do much more than hobble. And at the time that shooting happened, he wasn’t even in the county.”
“That’s what he told us,” I said.
“If that’s what he said, then that’s what’s true,” Johnny said vehemently. “My brother don’t waste a whole lot of words, but one thing he don’t do is lie.”
“He hasn’t said anything recently that was out of the ordinary about Finnegan? They weren’t arguing about anything?”
“If they were, he didn’t tell me anything about it.”
I watched as we turned south on the narrow lane that would lead us to the first gate that marked Finnegan’s zoo. “When was the last time you talked with him?” I asked.
“With Dick? Oh, we cross paths regular. We both use the same road, you know.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“I saw him the day before yesterday.”
“That was before the crash?”
“Yes. That morning. We met at the intersection of the county road.”
“He say anything?”
“He said he was still thinking about running the pipe across that little spur of land I own. But he wasn’t sure of how much water there’d be.”
“And that was it?”
“And that was it. I told him that whatever he decided was fine with me. Just that if he was going to run pipe across my land, I could use some of the water a time or two.”
“It would have cost him quite a bit to go around, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure. Some.” He chuckled that dry, hacking laugh again.
“Half an antelope, maybe.”
“What did Edwin think about that?”
“Not much. He was pissed at Finnegan for borrowing our dozer to try digging his goddam pond and then turning around and being so goddam tight about the pipe deal. He stewed about that some. I figured it was just one of those things, you know. One of those things that gets sideways. To this day, I don’t know why Dick wanted to bother trying another pond. This country is mostly gravel. There’s no dirt tank in the county that will hold water unless you line it. Plastic or bentonite. But it’s his business. I told Edwin to just let it ride. Hell, it didn’t cost us anything except a couple gallons of diesel.”
We pulled to an abrupt halt, our headlights illuminating the wire gate. In all the frenzy earlier, Tom Pasquale had actually paused long enough to make sure it was closed and the herd of evidence secured. Boyd didn’t seem in much of a hurry as he loosened the wire closure.
“What do you think?” I said to Estelle. “You’re the only one of us who seems to have an idea of where Edwin’s headed.”
She drove through the gate, pulling far enough ahead that the second vehicle could follow.
“I don’t think Dick Finnegan was much interested in ponds,” she said.
Estelle pulled the patrol car close to the fence and stopped with the headlights off. She opened the windows and killed the engine. Sand, gravel, and bunchgrass crunched as the Bronco pulled in behind us and halted. Pasquale switched it off, and for a few seconds, the five of us sat in the darkness.
“Be kind of funny if he was going the other way,” Johnny Boyd said in a half whisper.
“He’d be easy to track,” I replied, and the rancher hacked what could have been a chuckle.
“I got to thank you,” he said after a moment. I didn’t see any cause to be thanked, so I didn’t reply. “You don’t exactly go chargin’ in on things, do you?”
“We try not to,” I said. “You get as old and clumsy as I am, you learn to watch where you put your feet.”
“I can see that the kid behind us gets a little squirrelly now and then.”
“Yes, he does. As you say, he’s young. But Deputy Pasquale is a fast study. And he’s got a veteran riding with him.”
Boyd coughed again. “Costace? That’s his name?” I nodded. “He seemed eager enough to ride on over here with the cavalry before you reined him in.”
“He got you in the car, didn’t he?” I said, and Boyd chewed on that for a moment. The thinking would do him good.
“And what are you going to do when Edwin gets here with that dozer? If this is where he’s headed?” he asked.
“I plan to get out of this car, walk up to him and ask him what the hell happened. And maybe while I’m at it, I’ll ask him why the first thing he did was jump on a goddam Cat and drive it a mile or two in the dark.” Estelle stirred as if she wanted to say something, but then thought better of it.
“He’s going to be arrested?”
“That depends on what he tells me.”
“Odds are good, though, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are.”
“You’ll let me be there?” I had never heard Johnny Boyd’s voice so small.
“I’m counting on it, Johnny.”
He fell silent.
“There it is,” Estelle said and pointed. Sure enough, off in the darkness to the west a couple of hundred yards, two bright lances of light appeared as the dozer clanked its way around a small outcropping that thrust up sharp limestone in the machine’s path.
“Let’s go find out,” I said and started the process of hauling my tired self out of the car. Before I had pulled myself upright, I realized that Deputy Pasquale was holding the door open for me.
“How are we going to stop that thing?” Pasquale asked, and I saw that he was holding a pump shotgun.
“Before you do anything else, put that back in the unit,” I said. He hesitated. “You piece all this together in your mind and you’ll understand why I’m asking you to do that,” I said gently.
Neil Costace stood in front of the Bronco, watching the approach of the ponderous machine, his hands thrust in his pockets. “Any man with even half his marbles doesn’t choose a bulldozer as an escape vehicle, Tom. The man wants to show us something,” he said.
Edwin Boyd drove the machine straight toward our position, until the only thing between him and Dick Finnegan’s property was the tightly strung fence. The machine never slowed. The blade caught a fence post squarely. Standing a hundred yards away, I could hear the groan and twang of the wire.
With enough tension stretching them over the sharp edges of the dozer’s blade, the barbed-wire strands finally parted and snapped away, their ends curling and snaking, lashing the dirt and tangling in the scant vegetation. The gridded sheep fencing was tougher, and it wrenched loose from the posts and followed on either side of the machine as it clanked across the flat toward the windmill.
Just when it looked like he would crash into the old windmill tower, Edwin Boyd spun the dozer in its own length so that it was facing due north. The blade dropped into the prairie soil twenty yards from the windmill tower and the stack belched as he opened the throttle. From fifty yards away, I could smell the dirt as the bulldozer ripped open the earth.
He pushed dirt for fifty feet, then raised the blade, drove over the mound he’d made and pivoted for what looked like a return run. Just as suddenly, the heavy growling of the diesel died, ticking into silence. The two headlights continued to stare at the freshly scarred ground, their beams softened with power only from the battery.
“Now what the hell?” Johnny Boyd said, and he started toward the dozer. The rest of us followed.
We had fifty yards to cover, but Edwin Boyd took that long to dismount. He managed to step to earth at the same time we reached the dozer. He leaned heavily against the massive tread of the old machine and tried to light a cigarette. I could see his hands shaking, and he was gulping air.
“Just take it easy, Edwin,” I said. “We’re here now.” His chest was heaving, and for a moment, I thought he would pitch forward on his face, taking all his answers with him.
He gave up finally, sitting on the cleats with lighter in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring at the ground. “Take your time,” Neil Costace said. “Just breathe deep and take your time.”
Johnny Boyd reached out and took Edwin by the left shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Ed. Talk to me now.”
Edwin Boyd shrugged as if he had no idea of where to start, and it was Estelle Reyes-Guzman who helped him into gear. “Is this where it’s buried, Edwin?” she asked, and his immediate nod was one of relief.
“You dig down three foot right here,” he said, swinging a finger to trace the rip he’d made, “and you’ll find one of them little foreign jobs. Roof’s caved in, and she’s kinda flat from having seven tons drove over her a few times, but it’s there.”
“Are you talking about a car?” Johnny Boyd asked incredulously.
Edwin nodded.
“Well, shit, whose car is it?” Costace asked.
“Belongs to a couple of hunters,” Edwin muttered.
“And they’re still in the car,” Estelle added for him, and he nodded.
“Sure as hell are. You dig down right here and you’ll find ’em.”
“Finnegan buried them?” I asked.
“Sure enough did.” He took a long, shuddering breath and held it for several seconds, finally letting it go with a little gasp. “I guess I had the bad luck to happen on him just as he was finishing up. About three weeks ago. I came over to fetch some tools from that toolbox up on the dozer. I didn’t see much, but I saw enough. Saw part of the car roof, and through the back window, or where the back window used to be. Saw a hand.”
“Did Finnegan see you?”
“He did. Don’t think he knew that I saw the hand. Told me it was an old junker and that he was gettin’ rid of it long as he had a hole. I made the mistake of sayin’ something like ‘Pretty fancy paint for an old junker,’ and he told me to just forget it. Then I said something like, ‘Looks like you’re gettin’ yourself quite a herd of antelope boxed in here,’ and I guess that was the wrong thing to say, too. He got all huffy and told me to mind my own business.” Edwin took another deep breath. “Pond, hell. That’s what he was doing, is burying that car, and whoever was in it.”
“The pond didn’t make any sense from the very beginning,” Estelle said. “For one thing, he’d already scavenged the windmill pump, and so digging a new pond without the pump didn’t make sense. And he’d started his project to run pipe from the Forest Service spring on Cat Mesa to a stock tank that’s almost a mile east of here.” She looked at me and shook her head. “It didn’t make any sense that he’d all of a sudden spend his time digging a hole for a day or two, way over here, and then just as quickly give up.” She turned back to Edwin. “Do you know who might have been in the car, Edwin?”
He shook his head.
“When he saw you tonight in the Pierpoint…what was the argument about?”
Edwin had enough control of his hands to finally light the cigarette. “I figure it only one way. I was there first, just minding my own business, trying to figure out what I should do. ’Cause see, I knew damn well who fired that shot at the airplane. If Dick thought someone was on to him about those antelope, that’s one thing. He could just shrug and say he was plannin’ to buy some summer lambs. If them antelope don’t like the fence, they can just jump out. But that car and whoever’s inside it? That’s something else. He gets real nervous, thinkin’ that somebody knows. Maybe he thought that I up and told somebody. And so he figures, what the hell. Take a shot. Who’d ever know?” He took a deep drag on the cigarette.
“Anyway, he come in to the Pierpoint, and I didn’t want to talk to him much, so I just left. Almost got to my truck when he caught up with me. First thing he said was, ‘You remember what I told you.’ He said he didn’t like all those federal agents pokin’ around any more than we did, but if I made any kind of trouble, he’d fix it so that Johnny or the boy, or maybe me, got blamed for it.”