She did so, and before I dialed, I took a second to tighten my shoulder harness, hoping that Torrez remembered that the intersection of State 78 and County 43 involved a right-angle turn.
While I tried to fit my fat finger on the tiny buttons of the damn phone, I glanced at Torrez. “I wouldn’t put it past old George Payton to have called Johnny,” I said. “Maybe he figures it’s the least he could do for him.”
Charlotte Finnegan answered the phone on the second ring. Her “Hello” sounded like the whimper a child might make peeking around a door into a darkened room.
“Mrs. Finnegan, this is Sheriff Gastner. Let me talk with your husband, please.”
“This is Sheriff Gastner?”
“Yes, ma’am. Is Richard there?”
“We don’t have a very good connection,” she said reprovingly. “I can barely understand you.”
“Mrs. Finnegan, this is Sheriff Gastner.” I slowed down and exaggerated the enunciation as if she could read my lips across the phone lines. “I need to talk with your husband.” I braced my feet against the firewall as I saw the signs announcing the intersection with the county road.
Even as we squawled around the corner and emerged wheels-side-down heading northbound on 43, I heard Mrs. Finnegan say, “Richard went into Posadas, Sheriff.”
“He’s in town?”
She laughed apologetically. “I was rearranging the pantry and discovered I was out of canning lids.”
That stopped me short. I frowned and braced my free hand against the dashboard as we blasted up a series of tortuous ess curves below Consolidated Mining’s access road. “You were what?”
“I was out of canning lids. I know it’s early, but I find that if I don’t do things just when I think of them, why, when I need something, it’s not there. Now Richard came in earlier and mentioned that he needed several rolls of duck tape for morning. You know he’s working on that pipeline. And so as long as he needed that, I just added to the list.” She sounded most pleased with herself. “I believe the Day-Night market on Grande has both the tape and the canning supplies.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Finnegan. When he comes back, tell him I called. Good night.” She sounded like she’d have liked to settle into an all-evening confab, but I cut her off.
“Huh,” I said to myself and dialed dispatch. “Ernie,” I said, “have Tom Mears or whoever is available swing by the Day-Night store. Ask Peggy—I think she’s the one who works there at night—if Richard Finnegan stopped in sometime this evening to buy a few things.”
“That’s it, sir?”
“That’s it.” I switched off and for a few minutes, watched the darkness slide by. “Canning lids,” I said to no one in particular. “He went into town to buy canning lids. Canning lids in springtime.”
“Canning late snow peas,” Torrez said, but he didn’t crack a smile. We roared up the steep section of twisting macadam that passed Consolidated Mining, and a few moments later as we crested the hill above the reservoir, I tried the radio again. But either Mitchell had his radio turned off or he was in one of the many areas in the county where the signal couldn’t reach one of the repeater towers on the west end of Cat Mesa or across the county to the peak of San Cristobál.
“PCS, three-oh-three is ten-eight.”
Deputy Pasquale hadn’t had any more sleep than any of the rest of us, but he was in his element. He couldn’t even say routine numbers without sounding eager.
“He’d be a good one to have at our backsides,” I said and keyed the mike. “Three-oh-three, work your way up County Forty-three to the intersection with the ranch road. Wait on the pavement.”
“Ten-four.”
“Make sure you wait on the pavement,” I repeated, and Pasquale acknowledged. In another couple of minutes, we reached the turnoff, now so well-used by the airplane salvage team that the dusty tire marks of vehicles turning onto the highway from the dirt road had left a pronounced arc on the dark asphalt.
“Kill the lights,” I said, but Torrez’s hand was already moving toward the switch. The moon wasn’t up, and Torrez tapped the little toggle switch down low by the emergency-brake release. The tiny bulb mounted on the back side of the bumper, what he affectionately called his “perpetrator light,” cast just enough glow that he could see the edge of the road in his peripheral vision.
I buzzed down my window, straining to see ahead. We had 3.8 miles before we reached the first intersection, the two-track that wound off to the south, up the back side of Cat Mesa to where Dick Finnegan was fiddling with his spring and his piping. I wasn’t sure exactly what reference Torrez was using to keep the Bronco on the road, but he kept the speed moderate, looking off into the distance as if he could actually see where we were going.
The smell of dry sage was strong as the night air wafted by my face. I realized I was straining to hear more than to see. We reached the intersection, and Torrez stopped and switched off the engine. Both of us sat holding our breath, listening. Not enough wind stirred to rustle the few stalks of bunchgrass that hadn’t been trimmed by cattle.
For a full minute, we sat listening, and then I could hear a car coming up 43 east of us. By the way it was being flogged, I knew that it was Pasquale. Why he hadn’t chosen a career driving the NASCAR circuit, I didn’t know, but every once in a while, his prowess—or recklessness—behind the wheel came in handy.
I twisted around in the seat and saw the headlights in the distance sweep an arc across the prairie as he turned into the dirt road without putting the high-slung vehicle on its roof in the ditch.
I picked up the mike. “Stay right at that intersection, Tom,” I said. He keyed twice to acknowledge. “No one comes in or out this road until you hear from me.”
“Three-oh-three, ten-four.”
Torrez started the Bronco and we idled ahead, still listening. Another 2.2 miles brought us to a main intersection, this one a well-worn two-track to the north, and I knew it led to the block house windmill.
“Do you know where this shooting area is?” I asked.
Torrez nodded. “It’s on the same route as we took to the crash site, except there’s a fork up a ways, and instead of bearing left up onto the flat, we stay to the right. It’ll kinda snake around and then it ends up in a little box canyon. Boyd’s got one of his corrals there, too.”
“Then as the crow flies, it’s not far from the Boyds’ house.”
“Maybe two thousand yards,” Torrez offered.
“And about three miles if you have to drive it.” I leaned forward, staring into the darkness. The prairie was spooky, dark shapes looming up out of the darkness to slide by as we passed. The crunch of the tires on the gravel was inordinately loud, a sound that the silence of the prairie amplified to broadcast our presence for hundreds of yards.
“How far are we?” I asked.
“A mile or so,” Torrez said.
“All right. Let’s—” and I damn near choked on the words as the gunshots pealed out over the prairie. They came in rapid sequence, first three and then two more, so fast that the sounds were gone before the next heartbeat. I slammed forward against the harness as the Bronco jarred to a halt. We both held our breath, listening.
“Lights,” I said. “Let’s make some noise.”
Torrez pulled on the lights, and the sand and cholla and creosote bushes sprang into stark life, softened here and there by the remains of bunchgrass.
“And I want them to know it’s us,” I said and reached down and threw the little toggle switch that turned on the light bar on top of the Bronco. “Even if he’s just shooting at coyotes.”
Bob Torrez’s reply to that wishful thinking was to trigger the electric release for the shotgun that rode in the center vertical rack. I pulled the weapon out and set the butt on the floor between my feet.
I was a fair enough shot if the sun was just right and the ground under my feet was level, if the target was stapled into position downrange and the wind wasn’t blowing, if I had remembered the correct pair of glasses.
Not one of those conditions was in play just then, so a shotgun filled with five rounds of double-ought buck was a comfort. But what made my skin crawl was considering where those five, quickly fired rounds had gone.
“No one shot back,” I said aloud. Torrez didn’t answer.
We reached the fork in the two-track where one path led steeply up a graveled grade, beaten smooth by the constant traffic to and from the crash site.
The right-hand fork angled away sharply, following the bottom of what at one time had been a fair-sized arroyo. The sides steepened, dotted here and there with stumpy growth and cacti. The trail surface was packed gravel. In a heavy rain, the place would be a certain trap as run off from a thousand acres of bunchgrass prairie funneled down the limestone rocks and collected.
Torrez reached out and turned the handle of the spotlight, but we didn’t need it. The confines of the arroyo focused the glare of the headlights, and the winking of the red and blue lights on top of the Bronco bounced off the rocks and sand in surrealistic patterns.
“The area that Boyd uses for a backstop is just around the next bend or so,” Torrez said quietly. The Bronco’s back tires spun in the loose sand and we lunged this way and that against the ruts in the arroyo bottom. As the engine labored, Torrez reached out and tapped the four-wheel-drive button on the dash.
We rounded the corner in a spray of gravel and damn near crashed into Johnny Boyd’s pickup truck, parked squarely in the middle of the tracks. With no time to stop and a violent wrench of the wheel, Torrez took the high ground. We slid sideways and I heard a loud bang as the left rear hit something far more solid than sand. We jolted to a stop crosswise in the arroyo, squarely in front of Boyd’s truck, its headlights silhouetting us in grand style.
“Not good,” Torrez muttered, and I damn near hit my head on the dash as he slammed the truck into reverse and the Bronco shot backward. He spun the wheel and turned on the spotlight at the same time, so that three powerful lights illuminated the scene ahead of us.
Hocker’s Suburban looked huge and black in the harsh light. Sergeant Mitchell’s unit was parked beside it.
Twenty yards in front of us, frozen in place by the drama of our charging, sliding entrance, stood Johnny Boyd. He held what looked like a short, black weapon. Off to the right were three other figures—two looking as if they were in a passionate embrace, and a third sitting awkwardly in the rough gravel.
“What the hell is this?” I said and grabbed for the door handle.
Bob Torrez was far faster, far more agile, than I. In the time it took me to open the door and work both myself and the shotgun out of the Bronco, he was braced against the driver’s-side door, handgun steady against the Bronco’s windshield post.
“Put down the weapon, Johnny,” he bellowed. I hefted the shotgun, and in the awkward, harsh light, I could see that Boyd was turned with the muzzle of the weapon facing away from us. He didn’t move.
“Eddie, are you all right?” I shouted.
By then, I could make out who was who, and evidently Mitchell wasn’t about to break his embrace with Neil Costace. The two of them were plastered against the front fender of Mitchell’s vehicle, with the FBI agent bent backward until his head was touching the windshield wiper.
“We’re just fine,” I heard him say matter-of-factly. “Tell that asshole to put down the rifle.”
I pumped the shotgun, the mechanical racking loud and deadly on that soft night air. “Johnny, do as he says.”
“I’m not going to put his in the dirt,” he said, and for an instant, I couldn’t believe what I’d heard.
“You what?”
“I said I’m not putting this weapon down in the dirt. Tell those two clumsy morons to stand off, and we’ll see.”
The tone of his voice saved his life. I couldn’t guess what the circumstances were that had led to this strange tableau, but Eddie Mitchell was busy restraining one of the agents, not the rancher. On top of that, Mitchell’s back was turned to Boyd.
“Bring that weapon over here.” I snapped out the order just loud enough for him to comfortably hear me. “Put it on the hood of the vehicle.”
Boyd thought about that for a minute, then turned his head toward Mitchell and Costace. “Have you got ahold of him?”
“We’re fine,” Mitchell said.
And then, for the first time, I heard Neil Costace’s voice, almost conversational. “Goddam it, all right,” he said, as if he’d just lost a long-standing argument.
“Don’t get itchy,” Boyd muttered, and he held the weapon by its fore end over his head with one hand and walked toward us. I lowered the barrel of the shotgun, but Torrez’s weapon never wavered. The rancher reached our unit and slowly lowered the rifle and laid it on the hood.
“Back off,” I said, and he did so, standing easily ten feet away, hands on his hips. Torrez moved quickly and secured the rifle. It was one of those small rifles patterned after the larger military M-14, identical to those mounted in each one of our department vehicles. He popped the clip and racked the bolt back in one swift motion. A live round clattered against the hood of the truck and slid off into the gravel.
“Put that thing in the truck,” I said. “Now, what the hell is going on here?”
“Why don’t you ask those stupid sons a bitches?” Boyd muttered and at the same time, he fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket.
Eddie Mitchell took a step backward, and Neil Costace shook himself as if his joints were all out of place. He held out his hands, fingers spread and palms toward the deputy, then he knelt beside Walter Hocker. The only portion of the conversation I could hear was the cursing.
I stepped around the door and approached Boyd. He stretched out his arms, wrist to wrist, in the voluntary “cuff me” position.
Torrez started to oblige, but I waved him off. In the gleam of the lights, I could see the brassy glint of live rounds still in the assault rifle’s clip. If Johnny Boyd had wanted to clean house, he could have done so long before this.
“Stay here,” I told him, and trudged across the gravel toward the other men.