The Payback Man (23 page)

“Let me worry about that. The chain of evidence will be impeccable, and one nice thing about Schockley’s no longer being with the police is that as a licensed private detective, he has more legal leeway.”

“I can also get busted for breaking and entering,” Schockley said.

“But you won’t let that happen, will you?” Vickers clapped him on the shoulder.

“What happens if you do find the things?” Steve asked. “Do I get a new trial?”

“Possibly. I would prefer a confession. Neater and faster.”

“From Neil? Confess? Never.”

“Not even if he thought you were going to kill him?”

Steve froze. Did Vickers know of his plans?

“I speak, of course, theoretically. I think it may be just possible to run a scam on your Mr. Waters. I have a personal dislike for the man that is out of proportion to this case, Steve. He put one over on me. Not many can do that. I intend to bring him to justice if at all possible.”

“Why did you wait so long?”

“All I can say is that I’m busy. Things tend to be shoved to the back of my mind. I work for a living, too.”

“You’re saying that if Eleanor and Mary Beth hadn’t come to your office and offered to pay for all this, you’d have let it go? Have let me rot?”

“That doesn’t matter now. One more thing. You must not tell a living soul about this meeting. The quarry must at all costs not be alerted.”

“Not even your clients?”

“The doctor and your sister? Especially not either of them. Mary Beth would tell the Colonel, the Colonel would tell others. The doctor would tell her colleagues to show that you are not a bad man. They would tell others
for the same reason. No. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we have had only a preliminary meeting this morning out of which nothing substantive arose. Do I make myself clear?”

“How long can I wait? Neil’s moving his family to Arizona.”

“I am aware of that. If Schockley is successful, then we move quickly. If not, we go back to square one, and it will not matter in the least where Neil Waters lives. Now, this session has taken entirely too long. I have other appointments. Keep the faith, Steve. My own ego is involved in this now. I never let my ego down.”

Eleanor demanded a report on the meeting. He hated to lie to her, but he agreed with Vickers. The fewer people who knew, the better.

“Please, promise me, Steve, that whatever happens with us, you won’t do anything that would put you back in jail.”

“I can’t promise.”

She turned away. “So I really was simply a means to an end.”

“No! Don’t think that! From the first moment I saw you I’ve had to fight to stay focused when all I want to is to think about making love to you.”

“Then why can’t you promise?”

“There are things going on I can’t tell you about.”

“Good things?” She searched his face.

“Please, just let it be.”

“I don’t understand you at all.” She turned on her heel and left him.

He barely heard Big’s excited chatter about all the things he’d done during the day. He’d named the little pit bull Daisy and told Steve he wanted to find some way to keep her. Steve was afraid he was in for another disappointment. Prisons didn’t allow pets.

By the time they reached the barn area, sleet dropped out of the night sky. Big had promised Eleanor he’d make
certain Marcus and the horses had been fed and watered. Steve volunteered to check the pasture cows and the buffalo.

“You go on up to the compound,” Steve told Big. “It’ll take me longer to check the pastures. Tell whoever’s on duty that I’ll be up there before supper.”

“Okay. Sure you don’t want me to stay?”

Steve shook his head. He wanted to think. In the compound no one was ever alone. Maybe the sleet would cool his fevered brain so that he could figure out what to do about Eleanor and his feelings for her. He wished he’d never promised Vickers to keep her in the dark.

J
UST AFTER DUSK
, Eleanor received a call from Selma. “Steve’s gone.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Listen, I’ve covered for you before. I hoped he was with you. If he’s not, he’s gone. Big left him checking the water troughs in the pasture. He should have been back fifteen minutes ago.” Her voice was so low that Eleanor could barely hear her.

He’d done it, then.

She refused to believe it.

“Selma, please, please, please, give me time to find him and bring him back. The weather’s foul, he didn’t have any transportation unless he’s driving a tractor down the highway. He can’t have gotten far. I’m on my way to the farm now. He may have gotten hurt by one of the buffalo.”

“I can’t keep doing this. I’ll lose my job.”

“He hasn’t run away.” Eleanor hoped she sounded more certain than she felt. “Not after today. He simply wouldn’t.”

“Thirty minutes. That’s all you have. Then I’m ringing the alarms. Damn, I told you I hate tracking. And in this weather, too.”

Eleanor drove the rest of the way to the farm much faster than the speed limit, and slid to a stop on the con
crete pad in front of the barn. She jumped out of her truck and began to shout his name. No answer.

She pulled up the hood of her heavy parka. “He’s got to be here somewhere,” Eleanor said. She shouted into the wind. The night was as black and frigid as the inside of a closed refrigerator.

If he
hadn’t
escaped, he’d have to be in one of the pastures. That meant he was hurt or worse. Something had kept him from returning to the compound.

In another couple of hours the roads would be treacherous, but the sleet had not yet begun to stick to the frozen earth of the pasture. Eleanor opened the pasture gate, drove her truck through, closed it behind her, turned on her halogen headlights and set her floodlight on the dashboard. So far the sleet was light enough that the floodlight penetrated it, instead of bouncing off.

She began to honk her horn in an SOS pattern—three long, three short, three long. That was supposed to be the signal from victim to rescuer, but it was the only Morse code she knew, so it would have to do.

She drove carefully, but still hit bumps and hillocks. She narrowly avoided a half-dozen scrub locust trees that suddenly reared up in front of her where she could have sworn there were no trees before.

The pasture, so familiar in daylight, had taken on a nightmare quality. She couldn’t spot even one cow, although she knew they were there somewhere huddled in the hollows, under the trees or in the run-in shed. They were used to bad weather.

She reached the top of the levee that surrounded the stock pond. If Steve had fallen or been pushed into that icy water by one of the cows… She shivered. The pond was shallow, but weighed down with clothes, even a strong man might be pulled under.

She yanked up the hood of her heavy jacket higher, grabbed the spotlight and climbed out of the truck.

“Steve!” she shouted.

Only the wind answered.

“Steve! Where are you?”

For a moment she thought she heard something. She caught her breath. Was it a trick of the wind or a voice? She wove the light from side to side, each time trying to see farther out into the icy water.

“Steve, where are you?” she shouted again.

“South end.” The words were faint. The wind tried to rip them away, but she heard them.

Her heart leaped in her throat, and a moment later she drove carefully along the bank.

Her cell phone rang. She’d forgotten to call Selma.

She hit Enter and said, “I’ve found him.” She heard the relief in her voice. “He’s at the far end of the pasture. I’ll call when I’ve got him.”

“You’re sure? You’re not just putting me on?”

“No! Damn! I need to concentrate on my driving. I’ll call you.”

“You now have twenty minutes before I call out the COs.”

“I found him, Selma, I told you.”

“You say. Unless I hear his voice within twenty minutes, I’m setting off the alarms.”

Eleanor heard a dial tone.

Exasperated and with full awareness that she was racing not only the weather but the clock, Eleanor stopped the truck and stepped out to call him again.

This time his voice sounded closer. “About twenty yards in front of you. Be careful. I’m in the pond.”

“Oh, my God!” She jumped back in the truck and nearly stalled it.

Then she saw him. He stood up to his knees in water at the edge of the pond. She aimed the floodlight and her headlights at him and climbed out to go to him.

“Are you stuck?”

“No, dammit. There’s a cow in the pond. I can’t get her out and I think she’s trying to calve.”

Eleanor pulled her flashlight out of her jacket pocket. Steve had his arms wrapped around the neck of one of the cows. He was obviously pulling, and the animal was just as obviously fighting him.

“What makes you think she’s calving?”

“She was hunching and straining with her tail up in the air, and then she came down here. I was my way back to the barn when I saw her and grabbed her. If she’s had the calf, it’s drowned. I couldn’t hold both ends out of the water at the same time.”

Eleanor jumped down into the pond. She gasped as the icy water flooded in over the top of her red rubber boots.

“Careful. It’s slippery.”

She waded to the rear of the cow and stuck her hands into the icy water. She couldn’t feel anything. Thank God, the calf’s sharp little hooves hadn’t broken the birth sac. “The water must have arrested the contractions. We’ve got to get her out of here fast.”

“What do you think I’ve been trying to do? I’ve been yelling my lungs out. By the time I got to this stupid cow, I was all alone out here. I thought they’d have the dogs after me by now. This is one time I’d have been glad to see them coming, bloodhounds and all.”

“I made Selma hold off reporting you,” Eleanor said as she waded back to the bank. “Hang on to her, Steve. If we can get a rope around her head, we can winch her out with the truck.”

“Hurry. I can’t hang on much longer.”

Eleanor positioned the truck so that the winch on the front was generally aligned with the cow’s body, slid down the bank beside Steve and slipped the lasso over the cow’s head. Every muscle in the animal’s body was taut with resistance.

“Stupid cow!” Eleanor said. “Hold her until the line goes taut, then try to keep her from slipping it off.”

She kept the lights on Steve and the cow as she tied the line to the steel cable on the winch, engaged it and took
up the slack in the line. The instant she felt it come taut, the cow began to low and toss her head as she tried to free herself.

She leaned out the window. “Watch her, Steve, don’t let her trample you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I couldn’t feel my feet if she did.”

“Come on, you nitwit excuse for a bovine, get your rear end out of that water!”

She felt the truck begin to slip forward down the side of the pond toward the water and jammed on the brakes.

“I’ve got to move the truck back over the brow of the hill, Steve, otherwise she’ll winch me right down into the lake with her.”

“Do it fast.”

Once the truck was beyond the crest of the hill, she engaged the winch again. The cow began to take one grudging step after another out of the water as the winch forced her forward.

“Get behind her, Steve, and shove her butt out of the water before we have to rescue that calf from a watery grave.”

Steve threw her a look, but he went. The moment he put his hands on her flanks, he shouted, “Get her out of here
now.
I feel feet.”

Eleanor turned up the winch speed. The cow popped out of the pond like a cork and trotted up the hill until she stood with her nose against the hood of the truck.

From the cow’s rump, Steve said, “Eleanor, get back here.” His voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking the urgency.

Eleanor jammed on her emergency brake and ran toward him just as the cow gave a great groan and sank onto her chest.

As Eleanor dropped to her knees, the cow’s tail came straight up over her back and lashed across Steve’s face like a whip.

“Damn!” He grabbed the tail.

“It’s coming.”

With the floodlight now aimed three feet above their heads, they worked in semidarkness. The sleet had slacked off momentarily, but the wind had picked up. Eleanor’s hands were shaking and her teeth were chattering.

But the calf was warm. Or at least it was until it thrust its little front hooves through the sac that covered it and blinked wide brown eyes at the world.

“Get out of the way,” Eleanor said, and grabbed Steve’s arm just as the cow heaved herself up. They both grabbed for the calf as it slid to the ground.

The cow began to call instantly. The calf lay on the icy ground behind her. The new mother couldn’t turn her head because of the line that held her. “We’ve got to get the line off her.”

“We can’t leave them out here. The baby’ll freeze.”

“Can you pick him up?” Eleanor asked.

“This is one time I wish Big were here. Yeah. I can pick him up.”

“We’ll get him into the back of the truck. You’ll have to ride back there with him. I’m sorry, Steve. I promise we’ll get warm back at the barn.”

“What about the cow?”

“She’ll follow us. She won’t leave that calf.”

Eleanor ran around to the back of the truck to drop the tailgate, then helped Steve get the calf in. She pulled a tarpaulin out of her vet trunk. “Put that over you both.”

Steve laughed. A real laugh. “So now we’ll stay dry. God, I love your timing, Doctor.”

“I have no idea what the mother will do when I turn her loose. She may try to climb into the truck with you.”

She hit the release lever on the winch and leaned over the fender of the truck to pull the rope loose from the cow’s head.

The cow backed up, and for a terrible moment Eleanor was afraid she’d run back into the water. Eleanor inched
around to the front of the truck, ready to toss the rope back over the cow’s head. “Cow, don’t you dare.”

She realized a moment later that the cow saw that truck as the menace keeping her from her calf. She stomped once, made a “humph” sound, and charged.

Eleanor dove for the hood of her truck a nanosecond before the cow hit the radiator grill with full force.