Out of Season

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When I turned around and saw the dust plume as we turned south from Newton, I was glad that Estelle Reyes-Guzman was driving the lead vehicle. The two agents had elected to follow us, taking Costace’s Suburban. The monstrous truck would have held the four of us plus luggage for a month.

“It’s a back-seat thing,” Estelle said with a hint of a grin. “If they rode with us, one or both would end up sitting in back.”

“Can’t have that,” I said. To avoid traffic, we drove the loop around Newton, guaranteeing that if the two agents weren’t feeling lost before, they would be now. Neither Costace nor Hocker had visited the crash site, and we planned to go there afterward…not that there would be much left on the ground to see.

As we neared the Boyds’ ranch, Estelle slowed, forcing the pace down to little more than an amble. I knew exactly what was going through her mind.

Two big four-by-fours, spiraling vapor trails of dust, sliding to a stop in the middle of someone’s yard and then spewing out all kinds of strangers wearing dark glasses-it was enough to make anyone uneasy, especially folks whose list of monthly visitors rarely broke single digits. And especially well-armed folks who harbored an almost irrational distrust of things federal.

We idled into the Boyds’ front yard. I could see Edwin over by one of the trucks, a one-ton GMC fitted with a flatbed and a large feed hopper. Johnny Boyd came out from behind the rear of the truck and watched our progress toward the house. When we pulled to a stop, he tossed his gloves onto the back of the truck bed and started toward us, head down, fingers of his right hand groping in his shirt pocket for the habitual conversational smoke.

The dogs started yapping, but at a word from Johnny, all but the shepherd retreated to the workshop behind the truck. The dog trotted along beside Boyd, tongue lolling, ears toward us.

Boyd grinned wearily and extended his hand. “Sheriff, you still out and at it, eh? I keep thinking of how nice a long afternoon nap would go right about now. Don’t get too many nights like the last couple, that’s for damn sure.”

I shook hands and nodded. “That’s about it. Johnny, these two gentlemen are with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Walter Hocker from Oklahoma City, and the one who looks carsick is Neil Costace from the El Paso office.”

He shook hands with each in turn and then touched the brim of his cap. “Detective,” he said to Estelle. “Nice to see you again. It’s been a couple of hours.” Edwin remained by the truck, leaning against the front fender, weight off his bad knee.

“Two visits in one day, I don’t guess this is a social call. What can we do for you?”

I took off my Stetson and ran a hand across the stubble of gray hair. “Well, we’ve got some things that sort of puzzle us and thought that maybe you might have some answers. Or some ideas.”

Boyd sucked hard on his cigarette. “Do what I can. You know that. You want to talk in the house? No point in standing out here in the dust if we don’t have to. Got cold beer. Hot coffee. The worst water you ever tasted. What’s your pleasure?”

“Actually, a cup of hot coffee would be wonderful,” Walter Hocker said. He’d been surveying the ranch setting, both hands shoved into his pockets, rotating at the waist as if his feet were cemented in place. “Water a problem out here? That’s a good-sized windmill you’ve got there.”

The contraption hadn’t drawn my attention before, but the windmill was big, its blades spanning at least twelve feet, maybe sixteen, the pumping motor supported on a tower that must have been forty feet high.

“That well’s three hundred and thirty feet deep,” Johnny said.

“That’s a fair lift,” Hocker mused.

“You a farm boy?”

Hocker grinned at Boyd and tilted his head. “I’ve done my time. You ever been up on one of those rigs with a storm brewing?”

I looked over at the windmill’s steel tower again and saw it for what it so easily could be-a massive lightning rod. I could picture the young Finnegan boy scampering up the steel ladder with the speed and coordination that only the young enjoy. And then…a flash and a thunderclap all in one as a couple million volts shot through the angle-iron structure. The boy would never have known what hit him.

“Nope,” Boyd said. “Had a cousin killed on one, though. Over in eastern Kansas. And the neighbors here lost their boy that way. So it happens.”

“What do you do when the wind doesn’t blow?” Neil Costace asked. He had craned his head back to look up at the blur of blades.

“That don’t happen much,” the rancher said. “We got an electric auxiliary pump for those few times. But I don’t guess you came in to talk about my windmill.” He started toward the door and then turned to frown at me. “This about that picture you had earlier, Sheriff?”

“We haven’t been out to the block-house site yet,” I said, and that vague answer seemed to satisfy Boyd for the moment.

“Come on in,” he said, and we followed him into the house. He led us to the kitchen and gestured at the white table in the center of the room. “Have a sit-down,” he said. “Maxine!” he shouted, and added, “Excuse me a minute.” We heard him off in another part of the house and in a moment, he returned with his wife.

“She’ll get us fixed up,” Boyd said. He quickly introduced Maxine to the two agents, calling them “these federal boys,” and even before he’d finished, I heard the front door open and in due course, Edwin Boyd appeared, his face in a grimace and one hand reaching down toward his knee. He nodded at us and drifted off toward the easy chairs in the living room. He left no doubt in my mind about who was ranch boss.

“So,” Boyd said and clasped his hands together in front of him. “What brings the Federal Bureau of Investigation out to these parts?” At the mention of the agency, Maxine murmured something and almost lost her hold on the coffee urn. She shook her head and poured water into the machine, then turned to find the coffee and a filter. She shot a glance first at me and then at Estelle, but otherwise, her face was impassive.

Estelle hadn’t settled in a chair yet, and she took a step over to Maxine Boyd, setting a light touch of the hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Mrs. Boyd, would it be too much trouble to use your rest room?”

“Well, of course not,” the woman said. “It’s right around past the living room, that little doorway on the left. Let me show you.”

She flipped the power switch on the coffeemaker, smiled warmly at the rest of us and said, “Give it about five minutes. Johnny, use the mugs in the cupboard over the sink.” Johnny Boyd was already seated, well into the process of finding another smoke, one thin, long leg hooked over the other. I got the impression that he didn’t fetch his own coffee cups on a regular basis.

Estelle and Maxine left the kitchen and I didn’t waste any time. “Johnny, a couple of things have all of us puzzled.” He drew smoke and exhaled a thin blue jet. “In the past couple of days, have you or Edwin seen anyone around on your ranch property?”

“Strangers, you mean?”

“Anyone.”

“Not since the satellite guy was out here last week. Damn dish doesn’t work about half the time, and the other half, there’s nothing worth watching.” He smiled.

“No one Friday afternoon, when the plane went down?”

“Not that I know of. Of course”-he looked over at the coffeepot-“this is about six thousand acres we’re talkin’ about…so I guess that at one time or another, there could be a whole damn army over the hill and we wouldn’t know it. But no, I didn’t see anybody.”

Hocker turned so that he was sitting sideways in the chair, his left arm hooked over the back. The fingers of his right hand drummed a nervous little tattoo on the tabletop. “Hear any gunshots Friday?”

“Excuse me?” Johnny Boyd said, and Hocker didn’t reply immediately. He was gazing out the kitchen window at what appeared to me to be blank sky. Boyd got up and stepped to the cupboard. With one hand on the cupboard latch, he turned and asked, “Why would I hear gunshots?”

“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got some information that’s pretty nasty.” He took four mugs out of the cabinet and I waited until he’d lined them up on the counter. He was a patient man. He said nothing as he pulled the decanter out of the machine and filled each mug in turn.

“Take anything?”

I shook my head, and Hocker and Costace did the same.

“Edwin, you want a cup of coffee?” Johnny said loudly, and we heard a muddled, “No, no thanks,” from the living room. Johnny started to fetch a fifth mug, but I stopped him.

“Detective Reyes-Guzman doesn’t drink the stuff,” I said.

“So, then,” Johnny said, returning to his chair and his cigarette, “you were talkin’ about nasty information.”

“The pilot of that airplane was killed by a rifle bullet fired from the ground,” I said.

Dead silence hung in the kitchen for the count of ten. Hocker turned his head and regarded Johnny Boyd impassively, and Neil Costace did the same, coffee mug cupped between two hands.

Finally, Boyd said quietly, “You don’t say.”

I nodded.

“You’re sure?”

I nodded again. “A portion of the bullet was recovered during autopsy.”

Boyd frowned. “You mean somebody shot a rifle and that bullet flew all the way up and hit that airplane? Hit the pilot?”

“So it would seem,” I said.

He set his coffee mug down carefully and snubbed out his cigarette. “And you think it came from somewhere around here, or you wouldn’t be out here right now.” He regarded me, eyes unblinking. “Let me ask you something, Sheriff. When you and the detective were out here earlier today, did you know about this…” He paused and groped for the right words. “…this mystery bullet?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you mention it then?” His tone was even and controlled, just above a whisper, but a little muscle ticked under his left eye.

“The information was still preliminary,” I said, and knew how lame that sounded. The quirky thought drifted through my mind that this was exactly the sort of time for a little dissembling-the sort of thing Martin Holman had been damn good at when need called for it. “We didn’t know what to think,” I said.

Boyd lit another cigarette. “So tell me just how you come to figure the shot was fired from somewhere around here.”

“Not from right here, Johnny. I didn’t say that. But the plane was flying in a pattern-a roughly rectangular pattern-that extended east-west from about your property here over toward the Finnegans’ property.”

“And then it up and crashed,” he said.

“Yes, it did. If the pilot had been shot, let’s say when they were flying over the mesa, or over the landfill, or over something like that, then they wouldn’t have flown all the way over here, circled, and then crashed.”

“Bullet kill him right away, did it?”

“It looks that way. A fluke thing.”

He frowned and took a tentative sip of his coffee. Mine remained untouched in front of me. “No one in this household,” he said finally, “fired a gun at any airplane. Not yesterday, not ever.” He set the mug down with a thump of finality. “You going to drive on over now and ask Dick Finnegan the same damn-fool question?”

“What question did we ask you?” Costace said quietly. “Just if you’d heard anything. We didn’t ask if it was you who fired that shot.”

Boyd flushed crimson and clenched his mouth shut so tight that his lips were two white lines. Hocker gestured toward the living room. I looked that way and realized that the agent could see the large gun cabinet from where he was sitting. “Mind if we take a look at your firearm collection?” he asked. The request was pleasant enough, conversational, but Johnny Boyd had heard enough.

He stood up and as if in slow motion, turned and set his coffee mug down on the counter by the sink. He looked out the window, eyes narrowed and jaw muscles so tight I could see them clench from across the room. His hands gripped the counter, and he turned without releasing his grip, looking at Hocker over his left shoulder.

“I guess what you can do is pack up and get off my property,” he said. “You can get yourselves out of my home, and you can get yourselves off my land.”

I heard quiet voices, and then Estelle appeared in the kitchen doorway. She stopped there, watching Boyd.

“Johnny-” I started to say, but he cut me off.

“There isn’t a thing more we need to say to each other, Sheriff. Just pack up your friends and get on out.”

Hocker sighed and pushed himself to his feet. “Mr. Boyd, you have to realize that in the course of an investigation like this one, we’re forced to dig out answers wherever we can.”

Boyd released his grip on the counter and turned around. “Well, you just go dig somewhere else. Can’t say as I’m surprised. Took you two goddam years, but you managed.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hocker asked.

“You just get,” Boyd snarled ignoring the question. His face was flushed and his anger had set his jaw to quivering.

“You know as well as I do,” Hocker said, “that if we have a bullet fragment, we’ll be running some ballistic comparisons. That includes your firearms. I can get a warrant if I have to, but we’d prefer-”

“I don’t give a good goddam what you prefer, Bucko,” Johnny said. “The next time you want to come on this land and talk to me, you make sure you have that warrant. And if it isn’t signed by Judge Hobart, then you better get it signed by him.”

Hocker shrugged, still glacially calm, and started to cross the kitchen toward Estelle.

Neil Costace took a final sip of his coffee and grimaced. “I’d think that you’d want to do all you could to prove you-”and that was as far as he got. Boyd pushed himself away from the sink and took two steps, bringing himself nose to nose with the FBI agent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hocker’s left hand drift down toward the gun under his jacket.

“I don’t have to prove a goddam thing,” Boyd snapped.

“Neil,” I said gently, “let’s let these folks be.” The two men stood as if frozen, Boyd glaring with white spots of anger on his cheeks, Neil Costace unflappable.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Hocker said. “We’ll be in touch.” He slipped past Estelle, and I waited until Costace and Boyd had unlocked eyes and Costace left the kitchen.

“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got a murder on our hands. You know as well as I do that the investigation is not going away. Now, if you know something, you tell me.” He didn’t reply. “You hear me?” His only response was to pull another cigarette out of his pocket. The hand that held the lighter shook.

I turned to Estelle and motioned toward the front door. Johnny Boyd’s voice stopped me. “I’ll be talking to you later, Sheriff,” he said. “Give me some time to calm down, and then we’ll see.”

I knew that was the best I could hope for.