Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [63]
Dick Stone has bad habits. If he’s not out on the tractor, he’s generally asleep. He has a lot of ailments. Megan keeps a slew of Chinese herbal remedies for his back, knees, and spleen. In the murky hours of the afternoon, after his morning nap, he will hobble downstairs and someone will be waiting to try to talk him out of his usual lunch of sweet rolls and cheap champagne.
But Stone is not in the disheveled bedroom, or the orchard, and the crackling shots have started up again.
I follow the sound, going out the kitchen door, past the rank old goats, the rabbits and ducks, into the barn to retrieve the Oreo phone, then out the back, running through high grass bordered by rampant blackberries. There is a vineyard of dead vines with unkempt half-assed spurs, and stakes in the ground that mark an abandoned garden. Watch out for the hose and rusty wires. Dick Stone keeps his orchard groomed; but behind the house, where nobody can see, everything runs wild.
Breaking into open field, I sprint past a marsh with a silver oval of groundwater in which you can just make out the vertical stance of a great white heron. Megan says that in her grandfather’s day the acreage was used for wheat. She has given it back to migrating birds. I’ve found a trail through the cottonwoods and speed-dial Donnato in Los Angeles, wanting him to know I am heading into an uncertain situation. The sky is clear and the clouds are white and racing—there should be good reception, but the screen says, No Service. Even Rooney Berwick isn’t perfect.
There’s a streambed and I stumble through it, thrashing up the other side. I cannot say I am a woods person; always seem to pick the route with the most thorns. But now I’ve hit a maze of dirt roads and the going is easier and the shots are nearer. Tall cottonwoods have given way to a wasteland of scrub manzanita, crossed by an overhead grid of high electric wires. I’m in some kind of power station. The air changes. Fetid. Septic. Flies are buzzing an overflowing garbage can of trash—beer bottles and a recently disposed-of diaper.
Coming around a curve, I see a new half-ton Silverado, obsidian black, parked at the edge of the clearing. Beside it are a beach chair and a picnic cooler, and an old-fashioned portable radio playing country music, which you can’t really hear over the exploding rounds. Straight ahead, his back to me, a white man of medium build is firing at silhouette targets on wire pulleys a hundred yards away.
The sleeves of his T-shirt are rolled up, James Dean–style, exposing gleaming muscles, and damn if he doesn’t have a pack of cigarettes tucked in the fold. Out near the tree line, below the targets, are some sorry shot-up benches and piles of broken glass and rusted debris accumulated over the years, where the locals have been having a grand time blasting the hell out of innocent objects, like a refrigerator. Amazingly, a posted sign declares we’re in a bird sanctuary.
I’m starting to get mad. Maybe it’s the diaper.
“Hold your fire, please. Would you mind holding fire? Do you know this is a wildlife sanctuary?”
The man lowers the weapon and turns, squinting into the blinding sun.
“I ain’t botherin’ the birds.”
“You could, though,” I shout. “You could shoot one by accident. I just saw a bald eagle.” Okay, a heron. “You realize you can go to jail for killing an American bald eagle?”
The rifleman says, “I think I know a target from a bird.”
One hand shading his eyes, the man is peering at me with slow astonishment, as if I’d landed on his picnic table and swooped the hot dog off his plate.
“This land is protected! There are all kinds of life-forms here that shouldn’t be destroyed. That’s why we have laws, and why the signs are posted!”
I am delivering the rap with a passion that does not come from playing the undercover role, but from a deeper shift in my awareness. Remembering