Dead Blow

by Lisa Preston

  Darby nodded. “Spring campout. Year before last. Word was, cougars in the area.”

  “Cougars, huh?” Big cats aren’t too awful common around here, but I guess they scream deep in the national forest a bit.

  “Yeah, cougars,” he said, looking up suddenly at Melinda waving at us.

  “There’s a reason that tire was flat,” she said.

  “Sure,” Darby allowed.

  “So,” she went on, “maybe you could check, you know, inside it.”

  Like he maybe could improve on just plugging the puncture? I stared at her bad manners, but Darby shrugged and went for it, heaving the rim and tire onto the changer. That ear-splitting sound of the tire coming off the rim made me and Melinda wince. I don’t know how Darby can handle the noises of an indoor shop. At least my hammer strikes steel out in the open, where sound can walk away. In his shop, every slang of steel and creak of rubber echoed in a way that made me think my eyeballs would bleed. Charley would have skedaddled for sure with that racket.

  Somehow, we adapt. We could all hear something—sounded like a little rock—rattling around inside the tractor tire as he lifted it clear of the changer. Melinda and I heard it before Darby, we’ve still got all our ears’ ability. We leaned in as Darby kept warning me to watch for mountain lions near the Buckeye lease land.

  “So you be careful out there, Rainy.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, thinking a whole lot of things to be careful about as I stared with Melinda at what was in Darby’s hand—a little chunk of mushroomed copper—after he reached inside the tire to get the little thing banging around in the rubber walls.

  Melinda turned to use the phone without even asking for permission. Darby pursed his mouth up and no one said enough.

  “The thing is . . .” Darby rubbed half his jaw but didn’t rub up the rest of his thought clear enough to speak.

  “The thing is?” I asked.

  “I guess I’d like to call her up, let her know what I’ve found.”

  “Her, Donna Chevigny?”

  Darby nodded. Me, too. This was, after all, her tractor tire.

  “No matter what folks say about . . .” Darby’s jaw took another rubbing, both sides this time. He shook his head and shook the little copper chunk. “. . . this.”

  “What’s this, exactly?” I asked.

  “Exactly, I’d not be the one to say. But I’m sure someone at Sheriff Magoutsen’s office could put a finger on it.” He jerked his head at Melinda, talking low on the phone.

  “Well, less exactly then.” I wanted the answer and I didn’t want to be the one to say it. I nodded to give him the prodding he seemed to need. “That’s a . . ?”

  “Why, don’t you know? That’s a bullet.”

  Chapter 19

  THE UNIFORMED DEPUTY WAS ONE I’D seen before. It hadn’t exactly been a speeding thing. I don’t think it counts when you get a warning. But he showed up at Darby’s like he’d been set on us by dogs. Or Melinda. And his big news was that Suit Fellow would want a short statement from me and Darby about seeing the bullet come out of the tire. He called it establishing the evidence’s chain of custody, then said we could bring our own selves down to the sheriff’s office. I’d be seeing Suit Fellow again. I thought about what was shoved way down in my right front jeans pocket. I could hand it over to the deputy right now, but then Darby and Melinda would see and I’d have to explain it in front of them.

  “Got a horse to shoe,” I said. It was true, though I could have put it off. It’s one of the few accounts I have where the horse is so smooth, I’ll shoe when the owner’s absent. I was supposed to get this old pet done any afternoon this week and I’d penciled it in for myself this afternoon. And I had another one-horse account hard scheduled in for late afternoon, plus Leigh Ann to make up for. There. That ought to get me clear of Suit Fellow. The deputy turned back from his phone, took in Darby’s agreement to head to the sheriff’s Cowdry office right away, then nodded at me. “Four thirty’s fine. The investigator will see you then.”

  “Okey doke,” I promised. When I saw the investigator might be a good time for me to unload my right front jeans pocket, too. I moseyed on out of Darby’s shop, followed by Melinda.

  “Hey, can I talk to you?” She tailed me to my truck.

  There wasn’t much for me to say but, “Donna Chevigny doesn’t have a pistol.”

  “Mmm.” Melinda cocked her head.

  I kept my eyeballs looking straight ahead. “Do the police think someone shot that tire to roll the tractor on purpose?”

  “It’s a possibility. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, don’t even have to be very awake to figure that one.”

  A possibility it is now. Not something she thinks, it’s just a possibility.

  But she didn’t know the lay of the land, the way the barbed wire separated the lease land from the Buckeye proper, the way the electric fencing separated the hay fields from the rougher west land. The shed. I frowned. “Or maybe someone on the lease land did some sloppy hunting or target shooting.”

  “Could be,” Melinda said.

  Never, never, I thought, will she go with the likely answer. How can she get anything done? Melinda was one of those who watches a lot and grunts and asks a few questions but her commentary, when it comes, doesn’t always sit right with me. And that’s where I left it and her. If Melinda was trying to befriend me, she was none too skilled at the job. When I pulled out of Darby’s lot, I saw her in my side mirror, standing by her little car, watching me, like she was sizing me up.

  Ol’ Blue rumbled me to the three-acre place where Bill Ruddington’s silly two-year-old sorrel colt lost his sense when I called his old bay grade mare over to rotate her tires, so to speak.

  Ruddington’s mare’s a sweetie and that’s all I’ve ever heard him call her. He still rides her on Saturdays but mostly, she keeps his pasture looking good. Land looks much better with a nice horse or three ornamenting it, that’s my view. I shod Sweetie and got to my next client, where I did three trims, then on to a larger barn, just a mile down the road.

  Turns out, that horse wasn’t out and ready for me there. Some guy in cowboy dress-up was, waiting like he thought he was Mr. Business, one spanking clean boot on the bumper of a shiny blue short-bed pickup.

  “You the girl come to work on the horse?”

  “Sure am. You the flunky that’s gonna go fetch it?”

  Now that we were better acquainted, he got his boots moving in the right direction, away from me. I knew he was no horse-fetcher. At this barn, my only client was Leigh Ann, a real nice gal with good taste in horses and bad taste in men. I apologized up and down for not making the earlier appointment and felt my face go red as she brushed it off.

  Down the barn aisle, I got my toolbox out. Leigh Ann had just brushed off her Palomino gelding in the stall. Her man cluttered around like a skunk who was probably afraid of the twelve-hundred-pound golden muscle mass at the end of Leigh Ann’s rope.

  Mighty pretty like her gelding, Leigh Ann’s nice too, but she sure seems to attract a stupid brand of male. This cowboy wannabe had too much bluster for me to give him another glance. She was ignoring him now, frowning at the gelding’s dirt-packed foot when I bent over at the horse’s right front and it lifted automatically.

  “I picked him out this morning.”

  I believed her, too. “S’okay,” I said. Her gelding’s tender soled, so the dirt packed in his hoof helped pad the sole when I reefed with my shoe pullers to get the old iron off his feet. As I leveraged the pullers, the scent of old earth mixed with manure releasing off the sole chased the hoof pack that followed the shoe. I gave the shoe the wear-inspection warranted and racked it on my toolbox.

  Makes for a quiet piece of work, a couple of extra people with nothing to contribute there, no one sure what to think of anyone else.

  Almost an hour later, I was glad to finish that fourth foot, load my gear and get my check. The guy playing dress-up watched Leigh Ann put he
r horse in the paddock and never had two more words for me.

  * * *

  In the little lobby at the sheriff’s station, I wondered exactly who knew exactly what about that bullet in the tire, about that spent shell casing Donna found that was, oh yeah, still in my jeans pocket.

  Suppose someone had been at the Buckeye shed, gone to ground and waited and watched while Cameron Chevigny drove up the hogback? It had occurred to me that someone could have turned Dragoon loose and the bull had been the one to puncture the tire.

  But, no.

  Still, it got me to thinking about that bull because I was trying to come up with a reason for wanting Cameron Chevigny dead. Someone has to want something, some satisfaction, to go after someone else.

  A top rodeo bull who breeds well could be worth north of five figures. People don’t go to a rodeo to see a horse dead. A cowboy tossed around, sure, that’s a whole ’nother deal, but no one wants to watch a bull charge and crush a horse. Dragoon hadn’t rodeoed well, but maybe his value was in breeding.

  The Cowdry sheriff’s office’s Authorized Personnel door swung open and my brain—such as it is—came back to the here and now, expecting Suit Fellow, but it was Vince Pritchard in his reserve deputy uniform. He shouldered into a jacket, rolling his arms around like he was almost too much man to fit in clothes.

  “Hey,” I said, “I need to—”

  “I’m pretty busy,” he said. “Got a lot going on.”

  Maybe while he was busy writing himself valentines he could fit in showing me the way to Suit Fellow?

  “A deputy said for me to come in and give a statement ’bout seeing that bullet come out of the tire—”

  “Bullet?”

  “Yeah, Darby and me saw it. And Melinda,” I said, “I was at Darby’s when, well, see Melinda suggested—”

  He shook his head and snorted, “Melinda,” like it was a cuss word and I thought he was going to tell me again about how she lived with her parents. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  Then he had another story and somehow the time to tell it. I’d heard about the fire last winter but not about the sheriff’s reserve deputies being there. Not the detail Vince Pritchard blabbered.

  There was a house fire in town and Melinda had been the one told to sit with the old lady that got burned out. I remembered reading in The Western that it was an old house, insulated in its attic with ancient newspapers. After it burned to dust, there was a follow-up article urging people not to heat their houses with the stove and oven, listing the government people who’d help out, listing the bank that donations could be made to help out the old lady.

  “All she had to do was keep the complainant—” Vince Pritchard swirled his eyeballs a lap in their sockets and explained to me “complainant means the owner in this case.” Oh, he loved his police-talk.

  I grunted. It was all the encouragement he needed.

  “At any rate, all little Melinda got tasked with was keeping the lady company while the crews worked. I handled the traffic detail.”

  Nodding, I could see it. Melinda the wanna-be reservist made to babysit, the full-fledged reserve playing the big man, telling people where to go. When I didn’t comment on his heroism, Pritchard went on, getting so scornful of Melinda Kellan it made me straighten up and lean back from the man as he got down to his complaint on her actions.

  “She’s a crier.” His voice boomed in the tiled lobby—lo, I hadn’t realized before what an echo chamber is made of tiling the floor and walls of a mini-office. Pritchard folded his arms across his chest.

  When he wouldn’t say more, I asked, “What? She cried?”

  He nodded and snorted in disgust, rolling his eyes and shaking his head like he was embarrassed to have to say it all. “Yeah, she cried. Tried to act like she didn’t, but I caught her. Tears coming out both corners.” He pointed his pointer fingers to the outside of his own eyeballs to make it all clear.

  It was easy to picture, except I imagined me instead of Melinda. Me sitting with an old lady who’d lost all her sweaters and pictures and dishes and maybe a little dog whose job it was to warm her lap when she’s reading a magazine in the evenings. An old lady lost her belongings, her all. I could see Melinda there as though I’d witnessed the sad scene, I could see me doing in her boots the same thing, if I’d been made to hold hands with an old lady in that fix. I pictured Donna Chevigny there, sitting on the bumper of a fire truck, while crews made work of trying to mend a problem that couldn’t be mended.

  I’d have leaked a few, I know I would have. And I’d like to think by now, maybe since last week or so, I’m a big enough girl to not be ashamed of having just a little bit of heart, enough to spare some kindness and sad feelings over someone else’s bad luck. What a nightmare, and in the daytime.

  Once this day-mare was done having its way with me, I looked up again, wrinkling my brow because it was all so sad to think on. Pritchard pulled the right spot up in the computer and gave me the dates and times and phone number I needed and then he got right back to chewing on Melinda.

  “She cried,” Pritchard said, “like a girl.”

  Chapter 20

  MAYBE MELINDA KELLAN WAS SUPPOSED TO have cried like a boy when she commiserated with a burned-out-of-her-house little old lady? I almost mentioned Pritchard’s crummy attitude to Suit Fellow, but come the moment, I was glad to just make my two-minute statement that I was there at Darby’s and saw the bullet come out of the tractor tire.

  “Just documenting,” the investigator, Suit Fellow, said. Under fluorescent lights, he looked more than tired and needed a fresh suit.

  Maybe a bullet cropping up on a case you’d ruled an accident a year and a half ago made for a bad day at work.

  I stood up, the better to get into my pocket and pulled out the shell casing, handed it over and explained where it came from. He set his head in his hands, elbows on the table, like he had no manners at all, then snapped to.

  “I’ll talk to Donna Chevigny about it,” he said. “Miss Dale, you seem to be putting your fingers on things that might be evidence.”

  It didn’t sound like a good thing, the way he said it.

  “About the subpoenas Guy and I got,” I said. “You said before that if it went to trial, we almost for sure wouldn’t be needed on the first day, and you’d have a better idea from the prosecutor as the trial date got closer. You said there’s sometimes last minute negotiations and a plea, so it might not go to trial at all. Well, we’re getting closer. Do I have to go to court?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  I went for the door, pretty sure I was free, looked back to see him poke the shell casing with the tip of his pen.

  “Ten millimeter,” he said.

  * * *

  My last stop was at the Langstons’ where I found my little buddy crying like a girl. Abby was going away in a week and she’d decided her mare Liberty was going to wean Bean while she was gone. The girl wasn’t quite hostile but she wasn’t her usual fun self, wouldn’t smile.

  I nudged one of her tanned arms with one of mine. “You’re getting pretty brown, girl. Been out riding a lot?”

  “No, I’ve been going to the salon in town.”

  “The tanning salon?” I snorted. “Why go pay for skin cancer when it’s free under the sun?”

  “Girls in the city don’t have man tans,” she said.

  We scowled at each other.

  Then Abby frowned her mare up and down. “Liberty won’t get any exercise. She’ll just be hanging out here in the pasture.”

  “Maybe you could get a friend to come and give her some riding time,” I said.

  “I don’t want anyone else riding her.” The girl’s face showed all sour-like. “I did ask my mom about wind farming for you. She said you’re right, there’s big federal money in it right now. Some program for Oregon. She said she was going to do a presentation on it at what she called my school. What if they make me move in with her and go to school there in Portland? I won�
�t have any friends.”

  I gave her response the minute it needed. “Ride along with me for shoeing tomorrow, ’kay?”

  Sniffle. “’Kay.”

  * * *

  I picked Abby up early and we had a pretty good day, my mind all in the present work under my nose. Shoed the heck out of a bunch of horses, no time to clean up and restock or sharpen, so I’d be having to work on my kit in the evening and Abby would be good and tuckered. One client the next day had some special shoeing needs that I could get a jump on with some forge work at home, so I’d be tuckered, too. A good tuckering fixes many a ’tude, I think.

  Not until I dropped Abby off at home and she said, “My mother said there are no federal contracts for wind energy in Butte County,” did I recollect the very notion of murky messes hereabouts. But as I drove off, watching Abby head inside to her sad daddy, I thought about seeing a wind turbine way off to the west when I’d been astride north of the ravine at the Buckeye. And thinking about being on the chunk of land made me remember Dragoon, too. The bull that should have brought Cameron Chevigny and Hollis Nunn a nice side business in the rodeo world, but instead tried to kill horses. This was not my world.

  Guy was working late at the Cascade, so it was just Spooky and Charley and me at home. Rain came. Shoes needed making. I’d a good idea about the shape of those horses’ feet waiting for me at my first job of the morning, could get a jump on the bar stock work. I backed Ol’ Blue into the carport. With the rig turned around, I had a dry place to fire up my forge to a good roar. It was a better idea for me to be heating steel and shaping it, rather than stewing on failed businesses of wind farming and rodeo stock contracts.

  * * *

  In the morning, I left the house before Guy was out of bed, didn’t leave him a doodle, and went out for a full day’s shoeing at the one big training barn a bit of a drive north of Cowdry. The clients use several different shoers, but the barn owner uses me for four show horses. Their last horse came to them with a lot of foot problems and we’ve tried a few different things to get him comfortable and moving well. His frogs are growing better now after several shoeing cycles, and it’s an interesting but hard day when I work there.