Cold Wind - C. J. Box [9]
It was a riderless horse. The animal was big and sleek, well groomed, with a saddle hanging upside down under its belly. Joe knew from experience that when the saddle was inverted, it meant the horse had run hard and usually at great distance. The exertion loosened the cinch and the top-heavy configuration of the saddle caused it to slide. The horse was grazing on a strip of grass between the tracks of the road, but it had obviously noted the oncoming pickup by the way it periodically raised its head and noted the approach.
Joe looked back at the truck, expecting it to be closer to the horse by now. But the pickup had stopped in the road, and the occupants—two older men bundled in Carhartt jackets and fluorescent orange headgear—were out of their vehicle and gesturing to each other. The passenger was again pointing ahead, but it wasn’t at the horse, but higher. Much higher.
“What?” Joe asked, as he opened up the field of vision on his spotting scope and swung it back to the right.
He scoped the horizon behind the horse and saw nothing worth noting, nothing unusual enough to prompt two lazy road hunters to jump from their vehicle. Then he looked beyond the crest at the long straight line of wind turbines in the distance. They were now bathed in full morning light and framed against the deep clear blue of the cloudless sky.
The blades all spun in the lazy rotation that Joe had come to learn in reality wasn’t lazy at all at the blade-tip. At least nine of the ten were spinning swiftly. He concentrated on the one that wasn’t. He’d observed enough wind turbines before to know there could sometimes be a marked disparity of wind speed from unit to unit. And he knew that sometimes turbines were damaged or disabled and the blades turned roughly in comparison with the other machines. But there was no doubt there was something strange about this one, because it turned at less than half the speed of the others in the row.
Joe climbed the tower with his scope until he could see the nacelle, a structure on top where the hub held the turning blades. And he could see what was wrong and he whispered, “Jesus.”
A form was suspended from a chain or cable that was looped around the shaft of one of the three spinning blades. The form was close to the hub. It hadn’t slid down the length of the blade because the tether held fast where the blade widened. Even with the weight, the rotor turned fast enough that the object flew through the air between the blades, circling up and around the hub like a spider held by a web on a rotating fan.
Although the distance was great and Joe’s trembling fingers shook the view within the scope as he adjusted it, he caught glimpses of the form as it flashed through his field of vision. Portly, solid, arms cocked out to both sides, legs spread in a V—it certainly looked like a body.
Was it a real body? Joe could imagine workers hanging a dummy or mannequin in some kind of prank. How was it possible for someone even to get up there, much less get caught up in a chain attached to the shaft of a blade? How long had it been up there?
Then he linked the area, the horse without a rider, the location of the wind turbines, and Missy’s frantic phone calls the day and night before.
“Oh, no,” he said aloud, while he plucked the mike from his dashboard and called dispatch in Cheyenne. He’d hold off calling Marybeth, he decided, until he could confirm the flying body belonged to the former Earl of Lexington.
4
En route to the wind turbine with the form spinning on the blade, Joe passed the antelope hunters and exchanged waves with them—they were locals he recognized from town, and ethical hunters who took good care of their game meat—and he bounced along past them on the two-track to the Lee Ranch fence line. As he drove, the towers