Out of Season

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

We saw the brake lights of Torrez’s vehicle flash, bright and harsh in the darkness. We’d been idling along with our headlights off, depending on Torrez not to lead us into the middle of an earthen stock tank somewhere. After ten minutes, our eyes had adjusted so that the two-track we were following was a mere trace.

The beam from Torrez’s perpetrator light was just a bushel-basket-sized yellow ghost moving along the side of the trail.

We stopped, and I could make out Torrez’s large form outside the truck. Suddenly a ray of light stabbed out, illuminating a fence line.

“Gate,” I said to Costace, but no doubt he was capable of figuring that out for himself. It took a moment for Torrez to wrestle the barbed-wire gate back across the road so we could pass. He did so, got back in his Bronco and drove through for two car lengths. We followed, and as we pulled to a stop, he closed the gate behind us.

He paused at Costace’s elbow. “About a quarter mile or so,” he said, then added, “I think.”

I had cranked my head around and was looking back at the fence, the wires a faint gleam in the starlight.

“Shine your light over at the fence, Bob,” I said. He did so and I grunted. “Sheep fencing,” I said, seeing the rectangular, four-by-six-inch openings in the wire. “And four strands of barbed wire.”

“He’s got it on the gate, too,” Torrez said. “Makes it a bear to pull open.”

“Huh,” I said. “Finnegan raises sheep?”

“Never knew him to,” Torrez said. “Good antelope fence, though.”

“Why would he bother trying to keep antelope off his range?” Costace asked.

“Maybe not off,” Torrez said. “Maybe in.” He didn’t elaborate, but returned to his vehicle. We had driven no more than five hundred yards when his brake lights flashed again, and then the spotlight on the windshield post burst out across the prairie.

“Well, look at that,” Costace murmured. The antelope herd was off to the left, most of it bedded down in the bunchgrass, but a few of the animals were standing and looking toward us, curious. Torrez swept the beam across the herd. One of the large bucks took two steps and stopped, its head turned away from us, the flashy white hairs on its butt grabbing the light and warning the rest of the herd. The spotlight died and the image vanished, replaced by uniform black. For a moment, all I could see was the tiny red light on the top of my handheld radio.

“That’s a fair-sized herd,” Costace said. “Fifty, maybe?”

“At least,” I said.

“Amazing animals,” Costace said. “With all the traffic back and forth out here, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them.”

“We’re a ways from the main road,” I said.

“You ever watched them run? My God, they’re fast. We watched a couple of ’em when we drove over here yesterday…whatever day it was. Just two of them, not a herd like that one. They angled away from us, right over the hill. Must have been hitting thirty-five or forty miles an hour.” He shook his head. “I don’t think a little four-foot-high sheep fence would matter to them. They could jump that without breaking stride.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said to myself, and then chuckled.

“Now what?”

I lifted the small radio. “Bob, stop for a minute,” I said, keeping my voice soft. He did so without hitting the brakes, letting the unit roll to a halt. As we crunched up behind him, I asked Costace, “Does your dome light work?”

“ ’Course it works,” Costace said, and I could see the motion of his hand toward the light switch.

“No, no, leave it off,” I said quickly. “You need to fix that.” And then to the radio, I said, “Bob, come back here a minute, will you?” By then, my eyes had adjusted enough to see the shape of his vehicle swell as the door opened.

In a moment, his large form materialized beside the Suburban. “His lights sure as hell don’t work,” Costace said.

“That’s the whole point,” I replied. “You need to be able to open your door without advertising the fact to the entire world.” I leaned over and looked past the agent. “Robert, tell me what you know about antelope.”

“Sir?”

“You hunt every year, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s your favorite spot?”

Torrez paused, and I wondered for a moment if he was reluctant to give up personal secrets. “I usually go down on my cousin’s place. Down by Regal.”

“That’s Aurelio Baca’s ranch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He runs cattle?”

“Santa Gertrudis,” Torrez said. “And lots of antelope.”

“Aurelio uses barbed-wire fencing?”

“Sure.” Torrez leaned on Costace’s windowsill, and I could tell from the change in the tone of his voice that he’d tuned in to the same wavelength. “He runs barbless wire on the bottom strand, though, so the antelope can come and go. One clean strand doesn’t make any difference to the cattle, but it makes it easy for the antelope to scoot through.”

“Cut to the chase,” Costace said impatiently. “What are you guys telling me?”

“That fence we just crossed is designed to keep antelope in,” I said.

“How can it? It’s not high enough.”

“Antelope don’t jump fences,” Torrez said.

“What do you mean, they don’t jump fences? ’Course they do. There’s fences all over this country.”

“They duck through…or under,” I said. “They don’t jump.”

“I don’t believe that,” Costace said. “Fast as they are?”

“Fast has nothing to do with it. Remember when you watched them running yesterday?” I asked. “Remember what they looked like? A nice flat sprint, back flat like a horse’s. Not like deer. Deer bounce and leap, sometimes even doing that ridiculous gait where they go on all hooves at once, stiff-legged like some goddam four-legged pogo stick. Deer and elk jump. Antelope scoot.”

An entire row of pieces fell together for Neil Costace at that moment. “The only reason I can imagine to bother containing game animals is to make them easy to hunt. This is Finnegan’s land?”

“Yes.”

“So if he’s herding antelope, maybe someone complained. That would explain Martin Holman’s wanting to put questions to the Department of Game and Fish. And it might explain why Martin Holman wanted to see the area from the air. He could wander around here forever on the ground and not see what he needed to see.”

“Photos,” I said. “Lots of pictures of fencing.”

“None of which show the wire close enough to make it obvious,” Costace said.

“No, but no one ever said that Martin Holman was a brilliant investigator. His intentions were on track, though.”

“Are there any antelope in those pictures? If we blow them up enough, maybe we’ll see something. You have a couple of the photos with you, don’t you?”

“Yes. But let’s find that intersection before we blow our night vision all to pieces. If we’re right…if that’s what Holman was after, and if he saw the antelope from the air, I’m sure he’d try for a picture. Maybe it’s there, now that we know what we’re looking for.”

“And if Finnegan saw that airplane fly over, he might spook,” Costace said.

“He might if he saw the registration numbers and thought they were on an official airplane,” Torrez said.

I realized I had a fair crop of goose bumps on my arm. “Let’s find out,” I said.