Out of Season

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Estelle pulled the patrol car close to the fence and stopped with the headlights off. She opened the windows and killed the engine. Sand, gravel, and bunchgrass crunched as the Bronco pulled in behind us and halted. Pasquale switched it off, and for a few seconds, the five of us sat in the darkness.

“Be kind of funny if he was going the other way,” Johnny Boyd said in a half whisper.

“He’d be easy to track,” I replied, and the rancher hacked what could have been a chuckle.

“I got to thank you,” he said after a moment. I didn’t see any cause to be thanked, so I didn’t reply. “You don’t exactly go chargin’ in on things, do you?”

“We try not to,” I said. “You get as old and clumsy as I am, you learn to watch where you put your feet.”

“I can see that the kid behind us gets a little squirrelly now and then.”

“Yes, he does. As you say, he’s young. But Deputy Pasquale is a fast study. And he’s got a veteran riding with him.”

Boyd coughed again. “Costace? That’s his name?” I nodded. “He seemed eager enough to ride on over here with the cavalry before you reined him in.”

“He got you in the car, didn’t he?” I said, and Boyd chewed on that for a moment. The thinking would do him good.

“And what are you going to do when Edwin gets here with that dozer? If this is where he’s headed?” he asked.

“I plan to get out of this car, walk up to him and ask him what the hell happened. And maybe while I’m at it, I’ll ask him why the first thing he did was jump on a goddam Cat and drive it a mile or two in the dark.” Estelle stirred as if she wanted to say something, but then thought better of it.

“He’s going to be arrested?”

“That depends on what he tells me.”

“Odds are good, though, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are.”

“You’ll let me be there?” I had never heard Johnny Boyd’s voice so small.

“I’m counting on it, Johnny.”

He fell silent.

“There it is,” Estelle said and pointed. Sure enough, off in the darkness to the west a couple of hundred yards, two bright lances of light appeared as the dozer clanked its way around a small outcropping that thrust up sharp limestone in the machine’s path.

“Let’s go find out,” I said and started the process of hauling my tired self out of the car. Before I had pulled myself upright, I realized that Deputy Pasquale was holding the door open for me.

“How are we going to stop that thing?” Pasquale asked, and I saw that he was holding a pump shotgun.

“Before you do anything else, put that back in the unit,” I said. He hesitated. “You piece all this together in your mind and you’ll understand why I’m asking you to do that,” I said gently.

Neil Costace stood in front of the Bronco, watching the approach of the ponderous machine, his hands thrust in his pockets. “Any man with even half his marbles doesn’t choose a bulldozer as an escape vehicle, Tom. The man wants to show us something,” he said.

Edwin Boyd drove the machine straight toward our position, until the only thing between him and Dick Finnegan’s property was the tightly strung fence. The machine never slowed. The blade caught a fence post squarely. Standing a hundred yards away, I could hear the groan and twang of the wire.

With enough tension stretching them over the sharp edges of the dozer’s blade, the barbed-wire strands finally parted and snapped away, their ends curling and snaking, lashing the dirt and tangling in the scant vegetation. The gridded sheep fencing was tougher, and it wrenched loose from the posts and followed on either side of the machine as it clanked across the flat toward the windmill.

Just when it looked like he would crash into the old windmill tower, Edwin Boyd spun the dozer in its own length so that it was facing due north. The blade dropped into the prairie soil twenty yards from the windmill tower and the stack belched as he opened the throttle. From fifty yards away, I could smell the dirt as the bulldozer ripped open the earth.

He pushed dirt for fifty feet, then raised the blade, drove over the mound he’d made and pivoted for what looked like a return run. Just as suddenly, the heavy growling of the diesel died, ticking into silence. The two headlights continued to stare at the freshly scarred ground, their beams softened with power only from the battery.

“Now what the hell?” Johnny Boyd said, and he started toward the dozer. The rest of us followed.

We had fifty yards to cover, but Edwin Boyd took that long to dismount. He managed to step to earth at the same time we reached the dozer. He leaned heavily against the massive tread of the old machine and tried to light a cigarette. I could see his hands shaking, and he was gulping air.

“Just take it easy, Edwin,” I said. “We’re here now.” His chest was heaving, and for a moment, I thought he would pitch forward on his face, taking all his answers with him.

He gave up finally, sitting on the cleats with lighter in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring at the ground. “Take your time,” Neil Costace said. “Just breathe deep and take your time.”

Johnny Boyd reached out and took Edwin by the left shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Ed. Talk to me now.”

Edwin Boyd shrugged as if he had no idea of where to start, and it was Estelle Reyes-Guzman who helped him into gear. “Is this where it’s buried, Edwin?” she asked, and his immediate nod was one of relief.

“You dig down three foot right here,” he said, swinging a finger to trace the rip he’d made, “and you’ll find one of them little foreign jobs. Roof’s caved in, and she’s kinda flat from having seven tons drove over her a few times, but it’s there.”

“Are you talking about a car?” Johnny Boyd asked incredulously.

Edwin nodded.

“Well, shit, whose car is it?” Costace asked.

“Belongs to a couple of hunters,” Edwin muttered.

“And they’re still in the car,” Estelle added for him, and he nodded.

“Sure as hell are. You dig down right here and you’ll find ’em.”

“Finnegan buried them?” I asked.

“Sure enough did.” He took a long, shuddering breath and held it for several seconds, finally letting it go with a little gasp. “I guess I had the bad luck to happen on him just as he was finishing up. About three weeks ago. I came over to fetch some tools from that toolbox up on the dozer. I didn’t see much, but I saw enough. Saw part of the car roof, and through the back window, or where the back window used to be. Saw a hand.”

“Did Finnegan see you?”

“He did. Don’t think he knew that I saw the hand. Told me it was an old junker and that he was gettin’ rid of it long as he had a hole. I made the mistake of sayin’ something like ‘Pretty fancy paint for an old junker,’ and he told me to just forget it. Then I said something like, ‘Looks like you’re gettin’ yourself quite a herd of antelope boxed in here,’ and I guess that was the wrong thing to say, too. He got all huffy and told me to mind my own business.” Edwin took another deep breath. “Pond, hell. That’s what he was doing, is burying that car, and whoever was in it.”

“The pond didn’t make any sense from the very beginning,” Estelle said. “For one thing, he’d already scavenged the windmill pump, and so digging a new pond without the pump didn’t make sense. And he’d started his project to run pipe from the Forest Service spring on Cat Mesa to a stock tank that’s almost a mile east of here.” She looked at me and shook her head. “It didn’t make any sense that he’d all of a sudden spend his time digging a hole for a day or two, way over here, and then just as quickly give up.” She turned back to Edwin. “Do you know who might have been in the car, Edwin?”

He shook his head.

“When he saw you tonight in the Pierpoint…what was the argument about?”

Edwin had enough control of his hands to finally light the cigarette. “I figure it only one way. I was there first, just minding my own business, trying to figure out what I should do. ’Cause see, I knew damn well who fired that shot at the airplane. If Dick thought someone was on to him about those antelope, that’s one thing. He could just shrug and say he was plannin’ to buy some summer lambs. If them antelope don’t like the fence, they can just jump out. But that car and whoever’s inside it? That’s something else. He gets real nervous, thinkin’ that somebody knows. Maybe he thought that I up and told somebody. And so he figures, what the hell. Take a shot. Who’d ever know?” He took a deep drag on the cigarette.

“Anyway, he come in to the Pierpoint, and I didn’t want to talk to him much, so I just left. Almost got to my truck when he caught up with me. First thing he said was, ‘You remember what I told you.’ He said he didn’t like all those federal agents pokin’ around any more than we did, but if I made any kind of trouble, he’d fix it so that Johnny or the boy, or maybe me, got blamed for it.”

“The shell casings,” I said.

“Don’t know about that,” Edwin said. “I kind of lost my temper and said something like, ‘You can just go to hell.’ I’d just about decided that I was doin’ the wrong thing, not going to the police. He kind of pushed me like, and then one thing led to another. I banged my knee and damn near saw stars, and then he up and kicked me. I said something like, ‘That’s it. I can goddam crawl to the sheriff’s office if I need to.’ And then he jerked a jack handle out of the back of his truck and started to come down on me with that. I stuck him.”

“Your knife?”

Edwin Boyd nodded. “Sure as hell is. It’s probably still in him, too.”

“And then you drove back here?”

“Fast as I could. I figured the best thing to do was to tell you just exactly what I know, and mark the spot.” He gestured with the cigarette. “And so there it is.” He looked up at me. “I guess you got to arrest me, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Johnny Boyd sat down on the dozer track beside his brother. “It’s going to work out,” he said. “You just tell that same story to Judge Hobart and you’ll be home before first light.”

I turned to Tom Pasquale. “Go ahead,” I said. He started to reach for his cuffs. “Just be gentle.” He nodded, and Edwin Boyd stood up and offered his wrists. As I walked back toward the car, I could hear the deputy intoning the Miranda rights.

I sat down on the front seat, my feet still on the ground. The sky overhead was as clear as I’d ever seen it, a vast wash of stars from one horizon to another. Estelle appeared by the door.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Ready for bed, I guess. I was just wondering who will end up with the Finnegans’ ranch. Charlotte isn’t going to be able to cope.”

“The Boyds, I imagine,” Estelle said. “Nothing worked out quite the way Dick Finnegan would have liked, if Edwin’s story holds up.”

“Oh, it’ll hold up,” I said. “But I don’t much look forward to finding out who’s in that car under there.”

“Somebody who had an easy hunt out of season and then tried to pull a fast one by refusing to pay. Dick Finnegan was too strapped for cash to let that happen. That’s what I’d be willing to bet,” Estelle said.

“The one thing I’ve learned in all this time,” I said, “is not to make bets with you.”