Out of Season

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Walter Hocker agreed that he’d take a tour of the crash site with Vincent Buscema after the two had had a chance to talk in private. That was fine with me. It would keep them busy for a few more hours, and keep them off of Johnny Boyd’s back.

I had a feeling that Boyd’s reaction was as much to the federal authority as to anything else. I didn’t know what he’d meant with the comment about it taking the agents two years to figure something out, and it hadn’t been the time to push the point.

I hadn’t told him about the cause of the crash when I’d had the opportunity, and now he had heard the message loud and clear that the federal agents, at least, included him in the pool of suspects. If he was innocent, and at that point I was sure he was, becoming the target of an investigation would be enough to send his blood pressure off the scale.

I couldn’t imagine Johnny Boyd taking potshots at a passing airplane. Almost certainly he carried a rifle in at least one of his ranch trucks, and I had no doubt that he could drop a coyote in its tracks at a couple hundred yards. But firing at a pesky, circling airplane was another matter altogether.

As we drove away from the ranch, I turned to Estelle, whose only contribution to the conversation as we left the ranch house had been a quiet “Thank you” directed at Maxine Boyd. “So, what did she tell you?” I asked. “And that was nicely done, by the way.”

“She’s worried, sir,” she said. She didn’t look at me, but concentrated on the gravel road, her black eyebrows knitted.

“She has good reason to be, after that exchange,” I said.

“No, not about that. She’s really upset about trouble brewing between her husband and Richard Finnegan.”

“Really? Trouble how?”

Estelle took a deep breath. “Apparently Richard Finnegan has a grazing allotment from the Forest Service for a piece of property on the back side of Cat Mesa. There’s no more grass there than anywhere else, but there is a productive spring on the allotment. Finnegan wants to pipe the water over to one of his major stock tanks. Remember those rolls of black-plastic pipe that we saw by Finnegan’s barn?”

“Sure. But that’s got to be a hell of a distance. And pipe isn’t cheap. So what’s the argument?”

“Simple, as ever, sir. There’s a corner of the Boyd ranch that’s situated right in the way. If Finnegan can’t run the pipe across Boyd’s property, then it means going up an escarpment and out of the way over the east. A lot more distance, and going up the escarpment means that he couldn’t use gravity flow. He’d have to pump.”

I frowned. “And so…what’s the argument? Are you saying that Johnny won’t let Dick Finnegan run a few yards of black plastic across his property?”

“He will,” Estelle said. “But he tried to cut a deal with Finnegan to use some of the water in exchange for letting the pipe go across his land.”

“And Finnegan objected to that? Is he out of his mind?”

“Maybe. The last argument they had, and I guess from what Maxine was saying, it was right in the Boyds’ front yard, was that Dick Finnegan maintained that he can’t afford the extra pipe it would take to go around Boyd’s property, or pay for a pump, and that there isn’t enough water to serve both their needs. He’s being held up, he contends.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What’s the old saying out here-there are more friendships broken over access to water than anything else?”

“Except in a wet year,” Estelle said. “Then it’s over alcohol.”

“And this is what Maxine wanted to talk to you about?”

Estelle nodded. “She’s afraid that the two of them will exchange more than words sometime. She said that her husband has a hot temper and so does Dick Finnegan.”

“No kidding,” I said. “By the way, did she happen to say which stock tank Finnegan wanted to run the pipe to? Was it the one at the block house, by any chance?”

“She didn’t know. And we didn’t have long to talk. I did ask her, though, if she knew anything about someone up in this part of the county impounding wildlife.” Estelle slowed for the Newton cattle guard and at the same time, glanced in the rearview mirror. The dark Suburban still followed us at a discreet distance.

“At first she didn’t want to say anything, but I could tell she knew something about it. I told her that we really needed to know and that before the crash, the sheriff had been talking with Doug Posey…and that maybe that was why the sheriff was flying out over that area. Anyway, she said, ‘Oh, that’s another get-rich-quick scheme. It doesn’t amount to anything.’ But she wouldn’t say whose scheme it was.”

“What did she mean by that, I wonder.”

“I don’t know. I was going to ask, but then I heard the ruckus out in the kitchen.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes, watching the last of Newton’s sorry buildings slide by. We hit the pavement and heard a roar of engine, and then Costace passed us. Hocker lifted a hand in salute.

“You know,” I said, watching the truck dwindle ahead of us, “Johnny Boyd said something to me yesterday, or maybe the day before, to the effect that if the federal agents got the chance, they could invent almost any case out of this scenario. We need to make certain we find the person who fired the shot, but I sure don’t want a bunch of other lives destroyed in the process.”

“Sir, if Johnny Boyd is running his own herd of antelope, then he might have reason to be edgy.”

“I can’t imagine that,” I said. “Of course, I’ve been wrong before.”

“The first thing I think we need to do is to find the block-house windmill,” Estelle said. “It’s on Finnegan’s land. I suggest that we drive out there and get ourselves a tour. Sheriff Holman thought it was important enough that he took a photo from the air. Let’s see if we can find out why.”

An hour later, a flustered Charlotte Finnegan was trying to explain to us how to find the windmill in question. Her husband wasn’t home, and at least one of the large rolls of black pipe had been taken. Mrs. Finnegan knew exactly where the government spring was, though-or so she said. If we followed her rambling directions, we would no doubt end up in Utah.

As we were preparing to leave her to her petunias, Estelle turned and asked, “Mrs. Finnegan, are there many antelope out here? Do you often see them?”

The woman frowned. “Now, sometimes,” she said. “We used to have a herd of nearly fifty that would roam of an evening.” She took a step forward and pointed. “You see that swale down past the fence? Well, they’d even come right in there.” She turned and smiled. “The little ones, you know. They’re so fetching. Just like little fractious goats.”

“Fractious goats,” I repeated and chuckled. “You say there used to be more of them than there are now?”

“Oh my, yes.” She paused to ponder the numbers, brightened and added, “But they move so much, you know. It’s so hard to tell. There must be some, because we still get the occasional hunter.” She smiled. “Most of the time, they’re lost too, especially if they’re from the city.”

Armed with one of the county maps that purported to show every road, trail, or cow path that had ever been worn into the Posadas prairie, and with Charlotte Finnegan’s instructions to “just stay north of the rise there,” we set out. Immediately behind one of the barns, we stopped for a barbed-wire gate and I held it open while Estelle drove the Bronco through. I managed to get it closed again without being bitten by the wire.

Away from any thoroughfare, the New Mexico prairie took on a marvelously textured beauty of lines, shadows, and patterns. I relaxed back in the seat, my right hand curled over the panic handle above the door, letting Estelle cope with the vague two-track.

“Tawny,” I mused aloud. “Tawny and russet.”

“Sir?”

“The colors out here. Tawny and russet.” I heaved a sigh. “You know, Martin Holman never really felt at home out here. All the years he lived in Posadas, the one love he never cultivated was being able to just enjoy the quiet of the prairie.”

“He preferred the solidity of asphalt,” Estelle said, but there was no ring of condemnation in her tone.

“I think he felt a little threatened by the vastness of country when it wasn’t neatly marked up into manageable chunks,” I mused. I let go of the panic handle and let the bumps gently nestle me down into the seat. “And he liked to plan ahead.” I cleared my throat. “You know, every once in a while he’d ride with me, and I know it used to drive him crazy when I’d turn off the headlights, open the windows, and just idle along, listening.” I chuckled. “He was forever asking me what I was listening for.” I turned and gazed out the window. “And I could never really give him an answer that he understood.”

“You probably would have been just as uncomfortable and out of place at one of his service-club luncheons,” Estelle said, and I laughed.

“For sure. And on an occasion or two, I was.” We fell silent for another dozen bumps or so and then I said, “You know what colors you’re going to have to get used to up in Minnesota?” Estelle shot a glance at me and then looked heavenward.

“Yes, sir.” And then, no doubt weary of hearing about it, she added, “White and green.”

“That’s it,” I agreed. “In the summer, it looks like green corduroy up there. Lumpy little hills, all roundy and green. And in the winter, white corduroy. Your mother is going to go crazy. Then the rest of you.”

“My mother is looking forward to the move, sir.”

“I know. You’ve said that before. It’s hard to believe. From Mexico to Minnesota. Ouch.”

“Maybe after all these years without any water, she’s ready to see some of it standing around.”

“Standing around is right,” I said. “You guys are going to end up buying a boat.”

“That sounds like fun, sir. Another year or two and los ninos can learn to water-ski.”

“Don’t enjoy the place too much,” I muttered. “And I’ll get it.” I opened the door as she slowed for another gate, this one little more than a tangle of barbed wire snarled between two posts. I found the end that would cooperate and swung the whole thing to one side.

Back in the truck, I picked up the map. “If that’s the rise that Charlotte was talking about, then the windmill is just beyond it.” The road almost immediately forked, and I added, “To the right.”

After another hundred yards, we idled up to the edge of a major arroyo. The two-track, in truly optimistic fashion, just plunged down one side, across two dozen feet of loose sand and then up the other side. The arroyo was at least twenty feet deep, and I could picture us stuck in the bottom while Dick Finnegan stood up on the rim and laughed.

“You might want to put it in four-wheel-drive,” I said, but Estelle was already accelerating.

Even as we tipped forward for the trip down, she said, “I think it’s plenty hard,” meaning the beckoning arroyo bottom, where we would plunge up to our axles and churn to a helpless stop. She was right, of course. We thumped across the bottom, a sprinkling of sandy gravel over bedrock, and roared up the other side.

As soon as we were level again, I could see the windmill, still tiny in the distance. “Over there,” I said.

I released my death grip on the panic bar and pulled the pile of photos out of the folder. I riffled through them until I found the block-house windmill shots, one of the house, the other of the windmill itself. I held them together, then looked over the top of the prints at the terrain ahead of us.

“This is it,” I said. “If you park on that rise, we can walk over.”

Outside the truck, the sun was hot. The breeze out of the west was just hard enough to make itself a nuisance, and I left my Stetson in the truck and pulled a Sheriff’s Department cap down hard on my head.

One of the problems with being fat, old, and bifocaled is that uneven ground becomes a major challenge. Estelle strolled beside me, scanning the surrounding terrain, musing about this and that. I walked with my head down, planting my boots in the few flat spots between the bunchgrass and the cacti.

The two-track beside us had been beaten into a powdery, pockmarked trail by the cattle, but the tracks were not fresh. Several tire prints ran past the windmill, but none angled over to it. The two-track was an arterial to elsewhere, with the windmill abandoned for another time when the water table might recharge.

The windmill was stationary, its rudder locked over so that the motor wouldn’t continue to drive the pump up and down. The galvanized-metal cattle tank, three feet high and a dozen feet across, had seen better days. Dark with rust from the times it had once held water, it was dented and far from level. And it probably leaked like a sieve, too. At one time, the water had puddled on the east side of the windmill tower, and when the cattle had waded in, they’d stomped a quagmire that had compacted the earth six or seven inches lower than the surrounding dry prairie.

I walked up to the tank and rested my hands on the rim. It was stone-dry inside. “In the photo, it looked like there was some water in here,” I said.

“Just the shadow of the tank rim,” Estelle suggested.

To the north, the block house nestled in a grove of junipers and greasewood. It looked even smaller than it had in the aerial photo.

I tried to imagine Philip Camp’s Bonanza flying overhead, coming in low and fast from the west. In order for Holman, seated on the right, to shoot the photo of the windmill, the flight path was just to the north, over the small rise behind the block house.

“So,” I said, “we’ve got an old windmill and a dry stock tank.” I turned and sat on the edge of the tank, arms crossed over my belly.

Estelle had the folder of photos, and she pulled out the one of the house. “Let’s go see,” she said.

“See what?” I muttered, but doggedly followed, determined to enjoy the tawny and russet colors of the dried vegetation, and now, the worn stones of the block house.

Maybe Martin Holman had become a fan of early south-western ranch architecture. And then, to give him the credit that he’d been perfectly capable of earning in the past couple of years, perhaps he’d seen something here that wasn’t immediately obvious to me.