by D C Young
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I’ll just sit over…”
“I meant that it’s taken by you,” Bill had interrupted. “Sit down and tell me if it’s too soon to propose marriage.”
The sound of her laughter had been musical. “It might be a little soon for that, cowboy.”
“Well, if you knew how thin the pickins are around here, you’d know that a feller has to snatch them up pretty quick whenever he gets a chance.”
“Thin pickins, huh?” Smiling, she sat down adjacent to him at the small, corner table.
Bill had whistled loudly and waved over the cocktail waitress. When the waitress arrived, he’d given her instructions. “Get whatever my friend…” he’d looked at her prompting her for a name.
“Juanita.”
“Juanita,” he’d repeated. “Get whatever my friend, Juanita, wants, put it on my tab and you just keep ‘em comin’ ‘till she says when.”
“Yes, sir,” the waitress had replied.
“Crown and Coke,” she’d said without hesitation.
“Crown and Coke?” Bill had bellowed. He stared at her hard, trying to get a feel for what was behind that stunning exterior. “You damn sure don’t look like the Crown and Coke type.”
Juanita had shrugged and laughed.
“Bill Kellerman at your service,” he’d bellowed, attempting a sweeping bow while still seated in a chair. All he had accomplished was bringing his head down onto the table hard. He had heard the muffled crack, but hadn’t felt a thing.
“Geez, are you okay?” Juanita had laughed.
“I didn’t feel a thing,” he’d laughed.
“It’s likely that you split the table if not your skull,” she had commented as she pulled back the bangs on the left side of his head and examined the knot that was beginning to rise up there.
Bill remembered the thrill that had gone through him at that first touch of his fingers and how, from that moment forward he’d dreamed of being touched by her all over.
“Back to that marriage proposal,” he’d begun again.
“Can I take a rain check?” she’d laughed.
“You can take any damn thing you want,” he bellowed. “Because you are, by far, the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The conversation had taken off from that moment forward as the two of them had begun to get to know each other. It was that conversation and the way that he had so freely and boldly talked about Greg Collins and the Blue Corn Ranch, which had cost him his job. He’d awakened at the Blue Corn late the next morning to the loud voice of his boss piercing through his splitting headache.
“You’ve got 30 minutes to have every last bit of your shit in your pickup and then you’d better be driving off this place,” the ranch owner had bellowed.
“What the hell?” Bill had asked, not knowing what reasoning was behind the sudden displeasure of his boss.
“A hell of a lot of people heard you runnin’ off your mouth about a hell of a lot that goes on around this place and damn near everything about the Silver Blue Hermosa project to the owner of the Caldera Ranch last night. Things that other people don’t need to know, especially her.”
“Caldera Ranch?” He’d tried to focus on what he’d done and who he’d talked to the night before, but the only thing that came to mind was Juanita. “I just had a couple of drinks with a pretty lady, is all.”
“That pretty lady was Juanita Esperanza and she played you like a kazoo at a six-year-old’s birthday party. Now get off this place and don’t show your face around here again!”
The whole thing had been the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life. Not because he had been a saint before landing at the Blue Corn Ranch. He’d been on the wrong side of the law for a dozen years, starting back while he was still in high school across the Nevada border in Carson City. After he’d nearly gotten himself killed in a drug war shootout east of Reno on I-80, he’d decided it was time to go straight and start over. He’d been successful at starting over and had, after a lot of hard work, landed his job with Blue Corn Ranch as a herd manager.
From that point onward, he’d been in the driver’s seat of a number of huge projects including the secret Silver Blue Hermosa project, which was focused on developing a new Californian breed of cattle. His criminal past had never been known by anyone in California and he’d been successful in keeping it a secret. That had all come to an end the day he had been dismissed from Blue Corn Ranch.
Bill pushed himself up from the table in the house at Caldera Ranch, trying to shake those memories out of his mind as he moved over to the kitchen counter to make a pot of coffee. It was the only thing that he drank much of since he’d lost his job at Blue Corn, though there were times when he’d wished that he had a little something more to drown his regret. He’d nearly gotten his life straightened out.
“But I’ve gone right back,” he muttered to himself as he measured out the coffee grounds into the basket of the coffee maker.
As soon as Juanita heard that Bill was out of a job, she had rushed to find him and hired him on. From the very start, she’d drawn him deeper and deeper into her plan and he’d willingly gone along with all of it like a bull with a ring in his nose. Juanita had gotten bolder and bolder as she started to play out her plan and he’d gone with her on it without raising a single objection. A little at a time, they’d skimmed good cattle off all the ranches around them to build up the Caldera herd, but it wasn’t until Juanita brought the little girl back with her from a trip to Laredo, Texas that he started to see just how bold Juanita Esperanza could be. Analisa had been introduced around the ranch as Juanita’s niece.
“Boss,” the ranch hand, Danny’s, voice called out from the kitchen door. “I was about ready to get cleaned up and head into town, unless you got something else.”
“Nah. Go ahead,” Bill answered. “But don’t stay out too late, we’re bringin’ in a pretty big bunch to work in the morning.”
“I wasn’t plannin’ on being late. Just goin’ to the Midway for a couple a beers. You wanna…” He cut off the question as he remembered that Bill was off booze and then meekly apologized. “Sorry.”
“No harm,” Bill chuckled. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
After Danny closed the door behind him, Bill took a mug down from the cabinet, removed the carafe from the coffee maker without waiting for it to finish filling up, filled the mug, replaced the carafe and then shuffled back to the seat he’d occupied earlier.
He still wasn’t sure how it had been done. Seated in the saddle of that little paint pony, Analisa had seemed entirely harmless when they’d ridden out that morning a few weeks before. In fact, Bill had been pretty taken by the little Mexican girl, watching her handle Rex from her tiny little saddle atop his back. If he hadn’t watched those Silver Creek cowboys fall frozen into a stupor right in front of his eyes, he’d never have believed it.
One moment, they were as good a set of cowpunchers as you could find anywhere on the planet and the next, they were completely oblivious to the 180 head of cows that were being slipped right out from under their noses.
He, Juanita and Analisa had driven that bunch to a portable corral that Juanita had brought in at the head of Spring Gulch. They were loaded on three semi-trucks and sent somewhere that Juanita never revealed to him.
“The less you know, the better,” she’d told him.
Since that day, the cattle they’d stolen had been shipped to Caldera in bunches of 60, from wherever they’d been. They came off the trucks with a new set of notches in their ears and sporting different brands on their backsides. In the morning, the last of them would arrive and the cattle they’d stolen from their neighbor and Bill’s old boss would all be on Caldera Ranch. Worst of all, he hadn’t said a damn word to anybody and hadn’t done a damn thing to try to stop it either.
Chapter Eleven
A couple miles east of the run, I looked down and watched as a mere disturbance in the grass below me turned i
nto a wide trail of trampled grass. I had no idea for sure what I was looking at. My only idea was that somehow the thieves had managed to lead the cows away from the stockade, one by one, and then once they were all assembled, moved them en masse in an eastern direction. I scanned the area with my psychic eye hoping to find a trace of any energy the perpetrators might have left behind. It took a few minutes, but then I was hit hard by a force I didn’t recognize.
Quickly, I headed toward a nearby tree and landed on a big branch. I remained in my bat form and observed the ground carefully. My senses were much more heightened that way. I focused on the energy that had practically knocked me out of the sky; trying to single it out so I could get a more effective read on it. After a few minutes, several blades of grass around me began to glow softly. I watched as each tiny light joined itself to another and soon a stream of light was making its way across the ground toward the tree I was perched in.
I watched in wonder, almost frozen in fear and surprise, as the light moved up the tree towards me. I reached out my hand to touch it and as it wrapped itself around my wrist, I felt a tug and my mind was immediately transported into a vision.
I was watching the field from the very same branch I was perched on in reality. Below me, cows approached the clearing walking very slowly and in a single file line. There was about thirty feet between each cow as it arrived in the field and stood waiting patiently. As I’d said to Earnie and his cowboys countless times already, I’m no cattle expert but the way these animals were moving didn’t seem normal to me.
When I looked closer at where they were headed, I saw a small dark figure like a child, surrounded by a strange aura of magic. I knew it was magic because the light in the aura moved with what resembled a pulse; beating like a heart would. The magic didn’t concern me though. What did was the colors and emotions the magic expressed; dark blue and almost purple in color with cloudy dark red tendrils running wildly through it. This was a young and volatile being; perhaps someone who was being manipulated.
I was just about to send out my own psychic feelers to see if I could get a glimpse of the person behind the menacing red orb of aura light. As I was about to touch the outer circumference of light, the person; who I realized was a child… a little girl… when I felt a tug on my wrist and I was pulled right back into my own reality.
As I caught my balance on the tree limb and settled back into my perch, I was left with the distinct feeling of in-trepidation. Certainly, it was imperative for me to properly prepare myself before meeting the owner of the murky indigo aura in person.
I swooped down from the tree and landed in my vampire form; being close to the ground would make me less conspicuous as I followed the trail of battered grass across the plain. I followed the tracks over a ridge and part way down into the next valley. There on the valley floor tucked in close to the hillside was what I thought I should have been looking for.
It was some sort of temporary corral. It was empty but from the way the dirt inside its circumference had been trampled and turned over, it had housed several uneasy head of cattle recently. I walked up to the corral gates and took a close look around. It didn’t take me long to spot the next set of tracks leading away from the structure and into the hills. I looked up and about halfway up the embankment was a road leading to the top where a ranch spread out overlooking the valley.
Funny. Neither Earnie, Greg nor Fred mentioned another ranch being in the area and so close to both Silver Creek and Blue Corn.
I made my way up to the main gates, staying off the road and safely under the cover of the darkness. About a mile from the main buildings there was a gate. Over it was a large metal arbor decorated with the skull of a bighorn steer and a big hanging sign. The words on the sign read… Caldera Ranch.
I knew I was on the verge of cracking the case wide open but there were still too many questions unanswered for me. What force was in play that could make experienced cowhands like Randal and the others lose hours of time as someone cut through the fence and made off clean with hundreds of head of cattle without them even realizing?
What in hell was that energy I encountered out on the range and who in hell was wielding that kind of power?
I perched on the hillside over the ranch and watched the main cluster of buildings for a little while. It wasn’t long before the figure of a man emerges from the main house and made his way across the yard. He was carrying a flashlight in one hand, and as he waved it around in an effort to scan all the corners of the yard around him, the beam wandered in my direction… not very pleasant to my night vision eyes.
I followed the man’s silhouette across the yard as he headed towards a huge shed set up behind the stables. From the looks of the structure, it was recently built and covered at least a two acre span; quite an ambitious structure for a seemingly humble ranch spread.
He stopped in front of the shed door and fumbled with some keys. As he did so, he dropped the flashlight and sent it rolling off towards the edge of the shed. He gave chase after it. Instantly, I saw my opportunity and leapt off the hillside, changing quickly and taking flight. On silent wings, I flew closer and settled into the darkness of a nearby tree.
When the man finally got the shed door opened and turned on the lights, I was at first shocked by the brightness of his glossy red hair but then beyond him I caught a glimpse inside. It was a feed room stacked high with feed bags.
Peculiar.
He left the outside door ajar and I watched as he opened the second door, stepped through and then closed it behind him before I could see what was on the other side. I cursed softly then focused my mind. In an instant, I sent out a psychic tendril reaching out to find the man’s mind inside the shed. It didn’t take long… he was drunk and irritated and cold. I snuck into his mind without any effort and when I opened my eyes, I saw exactly what he did.
I couldn’t believe what I was looking at and my vampire heart must have skipped a beat. My shock and excitement must have alerted the man to my presence because he instantly closed his mind and my presence was ejected. I sat there on the branch of the oak tree shaking my head for a moment as I processed what I had seen.
Inside the newly built building at Caldera Ranch sat an entire herd of cows lying comfortably in hay lined stalls chewing the cud and lowing softly as content as could be. On several of their hind quarters I noticed a small brand; the image of which I committed to memory as I launched from my perch and soared back towards Blue Corn Ranch.
Chapter Twelve
Juanita gazed across Quartz Creek Valley toward Duck Basin. She’d ridden there with her father and grandfather many times. Regardless of fences, lines, grazing permits and the law, in her mind, Quartz Creek and Duck Basin belonged to Caldera Ranch. It wasn’t much longer before she’d have it back. She only had a few more strings to pull, one of which belonged to Senator Antonio de Armas. She’d pulled something besides his string in a hotel room after the symphony in Stockton where he’d made a “surprise” appearance, which was obviously arranged. These hicks are so blasé. It wasn’t the first time she’d had that thought since she’d returned to the place she’d grown up after having spent most of her adult life in Madrid and Barcelona.
She’d come back for a few visits over the twenty years prior to her return; one of them for her grandfather’s funeral. It wasn’t until her father had died and she’d come back to the broken down ranch that she’d inherited, that she learned the place had been gradually fading away for fifteen years. At first, she’d been bitter about the fact that the members of the Silver Blue Hermosa Coop had pushed her father off of his grazing lands, but she’d stumbled onto a stroke of luck in the Midway Bar three years before. When Bill Kellerman had opened his drunken mouth, he’d filled her head with all sorts of new ideas.
When Juanita learned that Bill had been fired from Blue Corn for blabbing, she’d seen an opportunity, but before she’d brought him into her plan, she’d done a little bit of digging into his past. It had taken some e
ffort, but she had uncovered Bill’s involvement in some things across the state line in Nevada that had been the perfect motivation for keeping Bill in line, as if he’d really needed much. He’d had stars in his eyes the first time he’d seen her and a nearly permanent hard on for her since then.
Juanita laughed as she recalled the day she’d knocked on the door of the Lamp Lighter Hotel room door and seen the expression on Bill’s face change when he’d answered the door.
“Jesus, Juanita, excuse me,” he’d said, as he glanced back into the pig sty that his room had become. He’d reached for a t-shirt, quickly slipped it on and then stepped outside, not wanting her to see inside. He didn’t realize until later that the door had locked behind him and he didn’t have the key. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard you got fired from Blue Corn,” she had replied.
“Yeah. Well, I guess I had a little too much to drink and maybe said some things I wasn’t supposed to.”
“Seems you haven’t learned anything from half of that lesson,” she’d replied. She’d wrinkled up her nose at the smell of booze that radiated from his entire body.
Bill had looked at her with an expression of confusion.
“If you’ll quit the booze and learn to hold your tongue, I’ll give you the second chance you so desperately need right now,” she’d announced.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I’ll hire you as my ranch manager if you promise to quit drinking and learn to keep your mouth shut.”
“Well, I don’t know, ma’am, I…”
“If you can’t manage to get control of yourself, who in their right mind do you think is going to let you manage their herd?” Bill looked down in shame. “The way I see it, you have two choices. Either you get it together and come work for me or I can start letting a few people in the area know about Fallon Station.”
Juanita had watched Bill Kellerman’s face turn so pale that it was nearly transparent. He swallowed the lump in his throat and whispered through gritted teeth. “That’s black mail.”
