“Tom!”
Another voice shouted his name, too. “Tom! Now!”
Tom seemed to launch himself at the fence. Not at the section where I still hung, but the next one nearer to where the bulls were coming from. He didn’t make any effort to climb. Why didn’t he climb? He had to—
“Up!” I shouted—I saw a dark mass coming—“Tom!”
For an instant, the fence seemed to disappear, then I heard a slam, felt the reverberation through the rail I still clung to, and he was gone. Nowhere.
“It’s okay! It worked.” It was Mike. Below me, catching me around the middle, half lifting, half assisting me down.
“Tom?”
“He’s right here.”
And he was. Standing in front of me. The faint light adding caverns to that Abraham Lincoln face no longer shadowed by a hat brim.
“Lost my damned hat,” he said.
I sat down. Hard.
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” Not the first time I’d said it.
My knees were doing a decent job of holding me up. Now. Mike had wrapped his arms around me and hauled me up from the ground earlier, and I hadn’t objected that he hadn’t let go right away, leading me to the open area just past the pens, with the rodeo office diagonally to our right and the permanent fence Mike and I had sat on diagonally to our left.
My hands shook slightly. My breath wasn’t even. I refused to consider the agricultural byproducts that my senses told me clung to my jeans. Although some of the smell might have come from the bulls now peacefully milling in the fenced-in alley behind us. They needed a breath mint the size of Lake Michigan.
A half dozen new figures had arrived, apparently drawn by the noise. They asked if everything was okay, offered help, and demanded to know what happened. Most appeared to be cowboys staying on the grounds in vehicles parked on the far side of the open area. I didn’t recognize any. Certainly none was Evan Watt.
“When you took off,” Mike said, with disapproval vibrating in his wonderful TV voice, “we lost you for a while. It was only when we heard the fence rattling that we realized where you were.”
That must have been the illusive figure’s noise . . . which also stirred up the bulls. Started to stir them up.
“Someone shouted,” I said.
“We heard,” Mike said grimly. “Tom kept the lead bulls to the other side, to give you a chance to get up. Once we had you out of there, I went and undid the fastenings between the next two panels and swung one side in—didn’t want to do the near end, because the bulls would’ve streamed out. But doing that end meant they’d have to make a U-turn to get out.”
I put a hand on the nearest arm of each of them. “You—you both . . . You two were—” I couldn’t get anything else out.
Mike put his hand over mine and squeezed.
Tom leaned forward and said, “You ever take off like that again, and we’ll leave you to the damned bulls.”
Paycik laughed.
I snatched my hands back, but Burrell and Paycik were saved from more when shouts reached us from opposite directions.
Two figures were coming toward us from our left, from the direction of the arena, coming up the next open aisle among the back pens. And they were shouting something about the bulls.
A lone cowboy was coming from the direction of the rodeo office to our right. He had more ground to cover, and his shouts weren’t words yet.
“What about the bulls?” demanded Tom of the figures coming from the arena.
“The gate that should’ve kept them out of the alley is wide open. Wide open!” As he neared, I recognized the irate speaker as Oren Street. “Never should have been that way. Never seen it that way. Don’t know why it would be that way. It was like somebody swung ’er open and ran off. Never seen anything like it, I tell you. And then to have the end blocked off that way—it’s crazy.”
Tom asked a technical question about the gates, but my mind had jumped ahead.
Two people working together? Or was the figure I’d chased innocent—at least of this—and the bull-looser had grabbed the opportunity. Had the target been me? Or the running figure? Was that why the figure was running?
Street’s words caught my attention again. “Bulls shouldn’t’ve been there at all. Watt was supposed to have moved ’em on back. I heard the regular contractor give him the job. Don’t know what’s wrong with that no-good, broke-down excuse of a cowboy. Even if it wasn’t my bulls this time, there’s no trusting him anymore. I’m telling you right now. Evan Watt—”
“. . . Evan Watt!” came the shout of the cowboy approaching from the right, just now near enough to hear. He shouted more, but it was lost among questions and comments by the gathered cowboys.
“Quiet!” Mike commanded in a voice that needed no microphone. “What about Watt?”
The cowboy, coming to a panting stop, got out, “Needs help. Zane said . . . get help.”
“Where?” came from all the cowboys.
“Behind office. Trees. Creek.”
Mike started in that direction. Tom grabbed the newcomer by the arm and followed, demanding, “Show us.”
The rest of us strung out as our speed—or lack of it—dictated. Having already put in an all-out sprint, along with fence-climbing tonight, I was at the back of the pack.
Past the rodeo office, the scene resembled an anthill in the dark. Figures ran toward a large dark shape near the trees where Linda and I had sat this evening. Other figures, who must have heard the alarm first, were now running away from the trees, apparently going after more help.
As I neared the trees, stumbling over unlit and uneven ground, I heard engines behind, and headlights came on from trucks being driven toward the center of activity. So that must be what people had been running to do, to bring trucks to provide needed light. I changed my path to get out of the way for the first truck. Its lights showed the back of an old pickup with a camper shell at the center of activity.
A figure froze at the left edge of the light. A man in partial light, maybe twenty feet in front of me, went to his knees at the pickup’s bumper, shouting something about out, his head turned toward that frozen figure.
Then the figure moved. Slipping away into the darkness.
A second truck adding its light made the man at the bumper identifiable as Oren Street and made sense of his motions—he pulled at something stuck in the tailpipe, struggling in the shadow cast by his body.
“Help me with this! I can’t seem to get the duct tape off.” he called. His earlier shout must have been a plea for help to get the thing out of the tailpipe—a hose, I realized, and started reaching for my phone as I jogged closer.
Stan Newton passed Street by, shambling toward the driver’s door, but Cas stopped. Stared for a heartbeat, then knelt beside Street.
Against a backdrop of confused calls of “Get him out! Get him out!” and conflicting orders, another truck pulled in with its headlights pointed at the front of the old pickup. It illuminated Grayson Zane and Mike heading toward the passenger door. A sound had me wondering for a split second if it had started to rain. No. Glass shattering. They’d broken the passenger window.
Zane reached in. The door opened.
I pulled up, hitting 911 on my phone.
RICHARD ALVARO proved he knew his community that night. He went where the people were. He established his incident room in an unused office near the hospital waiting room. Every soul who’d been on the rodeo grounds, along with a couple dozen more Sherman residents, showed up in the waiting room. It looked like a convention of black cowboy hats.
Alvaro also proved he was a humanitarian by letting me go home to change and shower before questioning me—but only after getting initial information from Mike, Tom, and me that we’d been together for all but a brief time.
“
And we heard her floundering around for some of that,” said Burrell.
I was too tired to even glare at him.
Even that alibi didn’t prevent Alvaro from having Deputy Shelton drive me home and wait in my living room while I showered and changed. He also let me put out fresh water and food for Shadow, since I didn’t know when I’d be back.
Shelton put all my dirty clothes in paper bags, which was more than a little creepy. But I couldn’t fault Alvaro for being thorough.
When we came back to the hospital, Jenks was getting into his KWMT four-wheel-drive. He was in Fine’s doghouse to be called out at this time of night for a few general shots.
Under those circumstances, it was considerate of him to first ask me how I was before complaining about the crappy assignment.
Inside the waiting room, I saw Heather and her mother had arrived, sitting across from Stan Newton. Needham Bender was taking notes as he talked with a man I recognized as a rodeo committee member. Linda Caswell had been there when I left and was still there, along with Street, Zane, and all the others.
As Shelton and I came in, Cas Newton entered from the opposite side with a tray of Styrofoam coffee cups. I crossed the room to intercept him before he got in amongst the chairs and couches.
“Was it you?” I demanded.
“Was what me?” This kid didn’t lie worth shit. No wonder Heather had known he was cheating with Pauline.
“Who led me into the ambush.”
“Ambush? I don’t know anything about—”
“You were skulking around the pens, and you ran when I called to you.”
“No,” he said.
“Thanks. I’ve got all I need.” I pivoted and went to where Mike had made room for me on a couch.
His raised eyebrows asked the question.
“He says no, but he’s lying. He was the runner,” I said just above a murmur. “Probably heading for a visit to his little friend.” Who was not present, I realized. “But probably not involved with the ambush.”
In an equally low voice, he said, “Richard’s talking to Tom now. No update on Watt.”
But it was no secret what had happened to him, not with a dozen and a half witnesses who’d seen the set-up as they helped get him out.
He’d been found in the locked cab of his pickup, with a hose roughly duct-taped to the exhaust pipe and fed in through a back window.
Breaking the passenger window and dragging him out to fresh air might have saved his life—too soon to tell—but it would have been moot if the pickup hadn’t run out of gas and stopped pumping carbon monoxide into the cab before it was spotted.
The truck was spotted by Grayson and the messenger cowboy I now knew was named Bucky. Bucky had just arrived in Sherman, having driven in from another rodeo. They’d encountered each other near the office and were passing the time of day—or night—when Zane spotted the pickup, off by itself. He’d ordered Bucky to get help, and he’d run to the pickup.
“Why?” I asked Alvaro, when I was called in to give my account after Burrell.
“Why? No, never mind that. I’m asking the—”
I overrode his objection. “Why did Zane treat it as an emergency immediately?”
“It was an emergency.”
“He couldn’t have known that.” Or shouldn’t have known. “The pickup wasn’t running anymore. No way could he see the hose or Watt in the cab. Why did he react that way?”
“He says instinct.” Our eyes met for a flash, before the law enforcement officer veil dropped over his. But I’d seen. He wasn’t satisfied, either. “Ask him yourself,” he added gruffly. “Now, about your movements . . .”
Oh, I will ask Mr. Grayson Zane that question. That question and several others. Yes, I will.
We went back over my movements, starting with the phone call, in which, I repeated, Evan Watt had not given any indication of what he wanted to talk to me about. To Alvaro’s further credit, he didn’t allow himself more than a solitary Stupid Easterner smirk over my encounter with the bulls. When other characters appeared in my narrative, he listened carefully, jotting notes as I told who I’d seen where doing what.
“You’re a very good witness, Elizabeth,” he said at the end.
“I’m a reporter. But I know eyewitness accounts are suspect—even from reporters. So, you don’t think this is a suicide attempt?” I tried to keep my voice casual, but he still went official on me.
“That has yet to be determined. Until it is, in light of what else has happened, we need to get as much information as possible. Now, let’s go back to this figure you saw off to the side. Street says he doesn’t remember seeing anybody before Cas.”
“But he looked right at her and—”
“Her?”
My mouth opened in surprise. “I don’t know why I said her, Richard, I truly don’t. Maybe it was subconscious, something about the movement or . . .”
I stared at the table’s gray surface, felt my eyes lose their focus. Instead, seeing Street drop down by the tailpipe. The figure. Frozen. The faintest motion. The lights. The figure, turning, leaving— “Blue.”
“What?”
“The figure had a streak of blue in her hair.”
THE NIGHT dragged on. Needham asked us to unburden our souls to him. I responded by asking him to copy all his notes and share them with us. He chuckled almost silently and moved on.
The crowd thinned out, with many leaving after their time with Richard. Vicky and Heather were among those. As they left, Heather shot one look at Cas, who was watching her.
But what caught my attention was Vicky giving me an I’ll-get-you-later glare. How unfair was that? Both Mike and Tom had told Alvaro about seeing the Uptons depart the rodeo grounds with enough time to have rigged Watt’s truck. All I did was corroborate that they could have loosed the bulls on me by parking somewhere and doubling back on foot.
I went to find coffee, but got distracted.
Beyond the bank of vending machines, I saw a deserted, half-lit cafeteria, and beyond that a patio. I went out, letting the door close softly on the broom handle someone had placed on the floor to keep the door from locking.
A few tables and chairs populated the patio, but I chose to sit on the low wall bordering one end, my feet dangling above the ground. I was glad I’d grabbed a denim jacket as I left the hovel. Even the hottest climate can feel relatively cool in the middle of the night. In Wyoming, it’s not just relative.
I felt more than saw the mountains’ bulk off my right shoulder. A different volume of darkness began to present their shape as my eyes adjusted. Looking to the south, I almost thought I recognized the peaks of the Tetons. But that was imagination, because they weren’t visible even in daylight.
While the mountains on my right gave a sense of solidity, the horizon toward my left ceded nearly all the space to the sky. It was almost too big, too star-spattered, too teeming and too empty at the same time.
“Elizabeth.”
I jerked my head around. I hadn’t heard anyone open the door or approach. Yet here stood Linda Caswell.
I brought one leg back over the wall to the patio side. “Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier. About lying in a murder investigation. What I told you about Keith Landry and me, that was all true. But I was trying to distract you. Make you think along other lines.”
“Because you knew I knew Landry bribed Stan.”
That stopped her for a long breath. “Yes.” She sat on the wall, facing the patio, leaving me her profile. “Tom’s right, you are smart. You have no reason to believe me, but I knew nothing about the bribe until earlier today. Yesterday now. I still don’t believe Stan murdered Landry.”
We sat in silence a moment. “So, I’m smart, and you have a knack for dealing with diff
icult people. Your father, your sister, your brother-in-law, and the rodeo committee.”
That drew a huff of delicately blended disgust and self-deprecation. “Which made me all the more susceptible to the most shopworn line of flattery.”
“You were emotionally vulnerable.”
She made the sound again, turning to me. “Because the dried up old maid is always emotionally vulnerable?”
“Because of your sister’s death.”
She looked past me. Out to the horizon. That ever-mirage horizon of Wyoming where things look much closer than they are.
I thought about Linda and her sister. And then I thought about the two brother horses her nephew had showed me, one born bucking, the other not.
“This county. This damned county.” She spoke as evenly as someone asking for the salt shaker at dinner. A jolt like holding a frayed electrical cord went through me. There was emotion there, yet even more control.
Once more giving me only her profile, she stated, “You know the Caswell history, I’m sure. My father, his lost romance and late marriage, and how he drove my mother to her grave in his quest for a son.” The scoffing sound returned, quieter, but harsher. “She died of cancer. She refused treatment because of the pregnancy. They didn’t want to say breast cancer then. The same cancer my sister died of. When Inez got the first diagnosis, she asked me to research the family medical history before she decided on treatment. We never knew . . . Inez decided on a double mastectomy and aggressive treatment. That’s almost certainly why she had those two years. Before it came back.”
Stillness weighted the long silence before she spoke again.
“Has anyone you loved died of cancer yet?” Her final word sent an atavistic shiver through me. She turned, looking for my answer.
“No.”
“They tell you to celebrate each day—the support people, the doctors. They tell you to enjoy the life while it’s still there. What they don’t tell you is that every second of celebration, every instant of enjoyment has its dark twin of grief. It’s a marathon of mourning. Every waking instant—more, because even dreams . . .
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