by D C Young
Almost rehearsed…
It was as if someone had subconsciously fed them a script which they recited in their own words over and over again.
Weird… but as I always say, my life is weird.
“Miss Sam,” Earnie said as we approached two men who were standing up from Adirondack style chairs on the wide wooden front porch of the ranch house. “This is Greg Collins, owner of Blue Corn Ranch and Fred Santino of Hermosa Ranch. They’re my partners in the Silver Blue Hermosa Ranching Co-operative and my best friends this side of the Mississippi River.”
I extended my hand to shake theirs without taking my gloves off. It was still quite chilly and I feigned being cold which they seemed to think nothing of.
“A lot colder up here than it gets in the sunny south, isn’t it?” Fred said, shaking my hand vigorously. “I’m from San Diego myself. The weather in the valley took a little getting used to but now that I’m pretty much settled into it, I find the range in temperature a whole lot more tolerable than the heat down there.”
I smiled. “I love the warmth.” I turned slightly and took Greg Collin’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Collins.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Miss Moon.”
As the men invited us to sit with them a pleasant woman in a blue plaid shirt and khakis came out to ask if we wanted a drink. A round of sweet tea was requested to which she nodded, turned and left.
“I notice the plaid shirts are a theme on the ranches,” I said sitting down in one of the relaxing chairs.
“Yes. They’re easy to take care of, great for the weather and stand up to the work load,” Earnie offered. “We wear red at Silver Creek, blue here at Blue Corn and over at Fred’s place, Hermosa, it’s green.”
“I like it,” I responded.
The three men beamed at my simple approval.
As they relaxed with the light conversation, I decided to take a look onto their psychic energies. The dark tendrils of doubt that I had seen on Earnie at our first meeting were gone, and both Fred and Greg seemed to wear the same pretty blue aura that Earnie did. It was rather tranquil being in their presence.
No threat here, Sam. These men are clearly the target of something more sinister than your regular every day inside job.
***
That night, I sat at one of the tables at supper sharing a bench with Earnie and Randal with Fred and Greg seated across from us. The food was very local and featured a lot of red meat served quite rare.
My favorite…
After dinner the cowboys hung out around the common room playing games and music until about ten o’ clock but soon after that, everyone began to disperse to their rooms for the night. I followed suit but as soon as I was sure everyone on the compound was sound asleep, I slipped out to the corral and headed to the edge of the hill the house sat on. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the cold wind coming up from the valley. It was cleansing and carried the smell of sweet grass from the pasture below I took a deep breath and several steps back. Then I ran and launched myself off the edge and into the valley below. In a second, I was soaring over the floor of the ravine in my bat form, swooping from side to side as I headed out towards the stockade we had ridden through from Silver Creek.
I flew low over the corridor searching hard for any sign of disturbance along the fences I may have missed on the ride over to Blue Corn and about ten miles out from the ranch, I spotted exactly what I had been looking for. It was a wide patch of trampled grassland leading away from a fifteen foot section in the fence. I swooped down for a closer look.
When I perched on the fence, it was easy to see where a blowtorch had been taken to the metal bars that ran along the top of the chain link fence.
Well, hello!
From the looks of it, someone had cut an entire section out of the fence to remove the animals, welded it back together again so no one would notice, and then herded the cows away along the trampled section of grazing land. Over the past week since the incident, the grass had recovered wonderfully but my night vision had picked up on the disturbance in the soil easily.
I looked out over the field and shook my head from side to side.
Who could have done this? And how?
They had somehow managed to pull off the heist right under the nose of six seasoned cowboys who I was now convinced were in on the theft. There was no way they weren’t involved.
Or was there? We’d surely be finding that out soon enough! Otherwise, it would mean I failed to solve the case.
I took flight again and headed out over the grass following the trail that had been left behind by the thieves and the co-op’s missing cows.
Chapter Ten
Bill saw the black car pull out of the garage. He stopped on his way to the ranch manager’s quarters, to watch his boss turn the car and start on down the driveway. She stopped and lowered the window to wave and call out to him.
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
“You bet,” he responded with a wave. He watched the car until it came to the end of the driveway, turned onto the road that passed in front of the ranch and then rumbled to life with a deep roar. Juanita didn’t spare the horses from the sound as she accelerated away from the ranch. Bill shook his head. “Damn.”
The Porsche matched her personality and flare.
If she doesn’t keep it under control on that sharp curve near the mouth of Spring Gulch, they’d be picking up pieces of her and that damn car all up and down the valley.
The Porsche was dangerous, but probably not nearly as dangerous as the woman behind the wheel. She was precarious in so many different ways that Bill wasn’t sure where to start whenever he considered it. The image of her curves in that red dress she was wearing and the feel and scent of her were as good of a beginning point as any. It was an image that hadn’t quickly left his head and he strolled toward the small, two-bedroom house that served as his living quarters on Caldera Ranch. It wasn’t the first time his mind had started down that path. He’d wandered off the straight and narrow from the very first time he’d met her.
As he turned the doorknob and stepped into the Ranch Manager’s house, the memory was as clear to him as it had been three years before. He settled into a chair in the kitchen and leaned his elbows on the table and allowed the image to come up in his mind.
The first thing he saw was a pair of large dark eyes, which made him sit up straight and try to clear the fog from his alcohol-saturated brain. Once he’d gotten past the eyes, the straight white teeth surrounded by a pair of full, red lips piqued his interest even further. He nearly sobered up entirely as his eyes traveled further downward. He’d gotten all the way to her feet when it finally dawned on him that she was speaking to him.
“Is this seat taken?” the dark-eyed beauty had asked.
“It is now,” he’d responded looking up at her with the broadest grin he could get to fit on his lips.
“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 into 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 f
elt 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.
