The Blight Way (13 page)

“Well, if you're gonna be picky,” Pap said, forking a chunk of liver into his mouth.

“You got any suspects, Bo?” Dave asked.

“Not really. But there is something funny going on out at the Littlefield ranch. Most of Vern's crew has been let go and all he's got left are two fellows who can't tell one end of a cow from the other.”

“Vern told me that he was going broke with cattle,” Dave said. “Says the thing nowadays is grapes. He's turning the whole ranch into vineyards.”

“I don't think the guys he's got left have ever stomped a grape, either,” Tully said. “I met his new wife, too. Cindy. Got a ferret she lets run around inside her blouse.”

“Ain't that something,” Dave said. “First time I saw her blouse move like that I thought he must have picked Cindy up at a circus. Then this ferret sticks his head out her sleeve. He was smiling, too.”

Tully laughed and the old man almost choked on his liver-and-onions.

“I'll bet he was smiling,” Tully said. “She looks about sixteen but she admits to thirty-four.”

At that moment Deedee blurted out a twelve-letter obscenity, leaped back from a table of locals and dumped a tray of dishes on the floor. Then she started to cry, rubbing her rear end. The obvious culprit was grinning at her, but his companions seemed more embarrassed than amused. A couple of them glanced over at Dave.

“You want me to handle this?” Tully said.

“Would you?” Dave said. “I'm kind of tired today.”

Tully got up and walked over to the man. He kept his jacket buttoned to hide the badge. “You pinch her?” he asked.

The man leaped up and stuck his face up against Tully's.

“You think this is any of your business, pal, let's see you do something about it.”

“I don't mean to interfere, mister,” Pap called out. “But you better get out of his face!”

The warning came too late. Tully could already feel that strange numbing sensation creeping up his right arm.

Chapter 20

As they passed the sign that said “Blight City, Pop. 16,350,” Pap read it aloud, as if seeing it for the first time. “Sixteen thousand three hundred and fifty.”

It seemed to Tully that the old man read the sign aloud every time they passed it. “Strange,” he said. “The town hasn't grown a bit since we left.”

“It hasn't grown in seventy-five years,” Pap said.

“Then why do you read it every time we pass?”

“Just to annoy you,” Pap said.

Pap started making himself a cigarette. He paused for a moment and offered the opinion that Tully should have hauled in the guy for pinching Deedee. “That's assault,” he said. He had referred to the man by the same obscenity Deedee had used, although he usually avoided such extremes.

“Naw,” Tully said. “I doubt Dave will ever let him back in his establishment. And that's the only decent place to eat anywhere near Famine.”

“I'm not sure that's punishment. Maybe you should have let Dave handle it, then.”

“You ever see Dave handle a situation like that?”

“Can't say I have. Why?”

“Dave doesn't have an ‘Off' button, that's why. He starts, he can't stop. That's why he almost always lets somebody else handle a situation.”

“Where we headed now?” Pap said.

“Back to the Pine Creek Motel. You want to go home first?”

“I'll hang out a while. Never can tell when you might need my help.”

They stopped at the Pine Creek Motel. Earlier in the year there had actually been a creek behind the Pine Creek Motel, but it had dried up into a series of puddles over the summer. Janet Simmons, the owner, had set out several little picnic tables with benches for her guests. Half the rooms had sliding doors that opened out to the tables. Tully had dated Janet for a while, as he had almost all the women in Blight. Most of the relationships had ended the same way—not well. The breakup with Janet had been one of the more public and spectacular. It was still recalled with considerable amusement by the other diners at Crabbs Restaurant that evening. Tully wished he'd had time to read Danielle Steel before stopping by the Pine Creek.

The old pickup trucks were still parked outside the motel, but there was no sign of the ranch hands. He hoped they hadn't simply left the trucks and ridden a bus out of town.

“No,” Janet told him. “They're still here. I put them
in four rooms, which are costing the county a hundred and fifty dollars a day.”

Tully shuddered, thinking about explaining the bills to the county commissioners. “Hope they haven't caused you any trouble,” he said.

Janet laughed, rather bitterly, Tully thought. “No, I've had no trouble from
them
. They've been nice and polite.”

“So, you got any idea where they might be right now?”

“They're wandering around town, I expect. They eat over at Granny's three times a day, poor devils, but then they just wander around. Don't know what there is about Blight City that could interest them so much. Oh, wait, here they come now.”

Tully glanced in the direction Janet had nodded. The little band of cowboys had just come into sight around a corner. They wore jeans, denim jackets, and battered hats with the edges of the brims rolled up. Their faces brightened when they saw him. They smiled and waved at Pap, who had remained in the Explorer. The old man raised his hand in greeting.

Tully said, “I hope the lady proprietor here hasn't been too mean to you.”

“No, she's very nice,” Pete Barton said. “But I got to tell you, Sheriff, this is one boring town. We looked it over end to end three times already, and it's even more boring than I always thought it was.”

“It livens up on Saturday nights,” Tully said.

“But not so much anyone would notice,” Janet said. She walked back into the motel office.

“You can take off today, if you want. But let me know where I can find you. You can write it down, Pete, and leave it with Ms. Simmons in there. She's a friend of mine.”

“I don't think so,” Pete said.

“Why not?”

“I mean, I don't think she is a friend of yours.”

“Hmmm. I do have a couple of questions for you, Pete. Did Vern Littlefield give you any reason why he was letting you go?”

“Nope, never said a word about it. He did mention a couple of times he was getting out of the cattle business. But he still had several hundred head. The two guys he's got left know nothing about cattle. Mostly they just rode around on ATVs. They didn't stay with us. I think they moved into the other big house at the main ranch, where Littlefield's parents lived before they died.”

“I wondered about that, too,” Tully said.

“One of the men, Bob Mitchell, might have known the new wife,” Pete said.

“Why do you say that?”

“When Vern's gone, they hang out together. Maybe it's nothing. It just seemed strange. We'd see them in a pickup truck, headed to town. Like that. I don't think they was having an affair or anything. Every time I seen her go by in a truck with Mitchell, she looked mighty unhappy.”

“Which town?”

“Famine. Sometimes Blight City.”

“How long would they be gone?”

“I don't know. We didn't pay that much attention.
Once, though, they didn't come back until it was nearly dark.”

“You all know Vern Littlefield pretty well,” Tully said. “I guess he really loves his elk hunting.”

“I don't know about that,” Pete said. “I think he likes to go up to the camp just to hang out all by himself for a few days. My guess is, he mostly pretends to hunt anymore.”

“You got any idea what gun he might take?”

“Vern wasn't the kind of guy who would hang around and shoot the bull with us about hunting or anything else, but one time we set up a little range for sighting in our own rifles, and he came out and sighted in one of his. It was a scoped Remington two-seventy.”

“How about Mitchell's partner, that Harry Kincaid? You know anything about him?”

“Nope. He and Bob Mitchell showed up here about four years ago. Never do any work. Can't tell one end of a cow from the other. Kincaid is one cold dude. Hardly ever says a word, just gives you that cold stare, when you speak to him. He'd be out on the ranch sometimes at night, hunting coyotes. He knew how to call them in with one of them little game calls. He must have shot dozens. Sometimes he wouldn't even bother to haul them in to Whitey's Furs, just let 'em lay. Whitey would give us twenty-five to forty dollars, depending on the size and condition of the coyote we shot. He would knock off five dollars if the exit wound was too big, so we started using exploding tips. Those bullets don't exit at all. For what they call a Pale Montana, that's kind of a light cream-colored coyote, Whitey would give us seventy-five dollars,
if it didn't have a big exit wound. I found a Pale Montana shot weeks before and left to rot by Kincaid. Can you imagine that, just leaving seventy-five dollars out there to waste? Made me sick.”

“You ever notice what kind of gun Kincaid was using on the coyotes?”

“Nope, I never did. I got a Ruger Ranch Rifle myself. It's a great varmint gun.”

“Accurate?”

“Shoot a flea off a dog's back at a hundred yards.”

“The two-twenty-three is what some SWAT teams use,” Tully said. “Our guys are trained to do the ‘double tap,' two shots in the middle of the body mass. I prefer the pelvis myself. Bullets hit that hard bone down there and go round and round. Put a man down a lot faster than two shots in the chest, at least in my opinion.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It is awful. But when you've got somebody trying to kill you, you don't think about that.”

“Two shots! Well, I guess if coyotes came armed, I'd want to use two shots myself.”

The other three cowboys were sprawled out on the benches of one of Janet Simmons's picnic tables. Their deaths from boredom seemed imminent.

“I appreciate the information, Pete,” Tully said. “I guess you all can take off for Texas right now if you want. Leave a note with Ms. Simmons, so I'll know how to reach you if I need to. One more question. Did you notice where Mitchell and Kincaid rode the ATVs?”

“Mostly up in the Hoodoo Mountains behind the ranch. Old dirt logging roads go every which way back
there. You probably could drive them all the way to Blight City, if you knew what roads to take.”

“You ever been on those roads?”

“Sure. A few years ago, Vern and me would go up there sometimes looking for timber to cut. He would pick out the trees and I'd mark them, and later some of us would go up and cut them. The trees didn't amount to much. Hardly seemed worth the trouble to cut and haul them.”

“What would he do with the logs?”

“Don't rightly know. Guess he'd sell them. Not much else he could do with them. He has a self-loader on a truck, and he'd haul the logs himself.”

Tully held out his hand and Pete shook it. “I'm glad you stayed in town,” Tully said. “For a while there I thought you all might head on down the road.”

Pete and the others laughed. “We thought about it, all right. And then your officer, Undersheriff Eliot, drove over and told us to stop thinking about it. So we stopped thinking about it.”

“Good idea,” Tully said.

Chapter 21

Tully dropped Pap off at his home and then drove over to his own place. His log house sat in the middle of a meadow surrounded by eighty timbered acres. He and his wife, Ginger, had built the house themselves, log by log. They had been married for nearly ten years. Then Ginger suddenly got sick and died. Something had burst in her brain. She was thirty-two. She was the only person who had ever made Tully feel as if he belonged to someone. She would often walk behind him when he hunted pheasants and quail. She didn't like hunting and never carried a gun. She just wanted to share in that part of his life, his doing something he loved. In the ten years since, there had never been a time when he hadn't felt alone. Only since Gail had stormed out on him had he started feeling good about being alone. It was all right to feel alone.