Lone Creek

14

Madbird switched off the flashlight beam and we stood there in the dark, up to our ankles in the sea of garbage that was the dump at Pettyjohn Ranch. We'd spent a good ten minutes kicking and pawing through it. We'd found some of the plywood that had come from our job. But there wasn't any doubt. The D-8 Cat had been moved again, and the horses were gone-dug out, with junk then spread around to cover the hole. The only sign that they'd been there was a trace of that rotten smell.

That slick bastard Balcomb had long-cocked me again. Maybe he'd come out here to check and seen that hoof sticking up. Maybe he was just playing it safe.

Maybe I hadn't done such a hot job of convincing him I hadn't seen them.

We walked around for several more minutes trying to figure out where the Cat had taken them. But the ground around the dump was scarred with years of its tracks, and the dirt road was hard as concrete. To the northeast lay a big chunk of grazing land, several thousand acres of scrub timber and prairie where nobody ever set foot. I was willing to bet that those carcasses were out there now, dropped into a ravine or shoved up against a hillside and covered over-this time, thoroughly enough so nothing could get to them.

Madbird stopped, like he was listening. I stopped, too, thinking he was hearing a vehicle. But the night was still quiet. That part, at least, was going well.

"I'm wondering if we ain't looking in the wrong direction," he said. "Forget where they went to-what about where they come from? It don't seem likely they got killed right here. They'd of had to be penned up or tethered. If we find that, it might tell us something."

I rubbed my hair in exasperation. With all the brain racking I'd done, that obvious point had slipped right by me.

"I'd guess he took them out in the woods and tied them to trees," I said.

"Then why didn't he just bury them there? It don't make sense he'd haul them back here." He swung his hand southwestward, toward the ranch proper. "I'd say more likely he was in the hay fields. Then he'd of had to move them someplace he could cover them up, and this is the closest."

We started walking in the direction he'd pointed, making an arc through the meadow that surrounded the pit's rim. Within a minute, his flashlight picked out the Cat's tracks, wide ridged lines crushed into the stubble of second-cut hay.

"Well, will you fucking look at that," he said softly. "You know this place pretty good. What's out there?"

The tracks angled away from the road, straight across the field toward the northernmost border of the ranch. I had to think for a few seconds, but then I remembered.

"An old calving shed," I said. "It's another half mile, give or take."