Nothing but Trouble_ A Kevin Kerney Novel - Michael Mcgarrity [128]
“No.” Gundersen turned his gaze to the calf. “If you gents don’t mind, I’d better be off to the vet’s. I don’t want to lose this youngster.”
They watched Gundersen drive away. In a nearby holding pen the mother cow lowed miserably for its departing calf. “All we’ve got is circumstantial evidence,” Leo said. “Not enough to arrest Martinez or get a search warrant for Shaw’s barn. Do we pull Martinez in for questioning?”
Kerney nodded. “I think I know where to find him.”
The day had turned uncommonly humid. Kerney looked at the sky. A line of squalls was building to the south, broken by a daunting sun fueling a gathering wind. It could be storming fiercely in the Bootheel, dropping hailstones the size of quarters. Or clouds of dust could be whipping across the flats without so much as a drop of rain hitting the ground. “Let’s go,” he said.
All night, Buster Martinez had worried about the Santa Fe cop’s interest in his saddle. He’d read somewhere that cops could get information about stolen merchandise from a computer back East in some government office that kept national records. Hopefully, Buster had thrown Kerney off base by telling him he’d gotten the saddle in Nevada. If push came to shove, he’d say that he bought it off a guy for cash money at last year’s National Pro Rodeo Championship Finals in Las Vegas. He’d been there during slack season and could prove it.
At the Shugart cabin Martinez and two day hands, Ross and Pruitt, loaded cattle into stock trailers the film company had hired to move fifty head to the copper smelter. They’d trailed the animals up from an adjacent pasture where the herd had rested overnight. According to one of the truck drivers the cows would be used in a scene at the copper smelter sometime soon. A big holding pen had been thrown up where the animals would be fed and watered until needed.
Except for the heavily foraged, harshly trampled grass, the soft cow pies surrounded by fly swarms that littered the land, and the numerous tire ruts in the ground, all signs that a movie had been filmed in the valley were gone. Above Martinez’s head the sky crackled with thunder and a lightning flash cut through the thick cloud bank that had settled over the valley. Suddenly, the light drizzle changed to a torrent of hard, howling, windblown rain that pelted Martinez’s face.
He dismounted, lashed the last of the cows up the ramp into the stock trailer, slammed the tailgate closed, and turned to see Ross and Pruitt riding at a hard gallop, making for the safety of the partially standing wall of the old line shanty. As he remounted to join them, car headlights lurched over the crest of the ranch road. Through sheets of rain he could see the light bar on the roof, the five-pointed sheriff’s star on the door.
Martinez hesitated. Were the cops coming for him? He could think of no other reason for them to be here. Under another lightning flash he held his horse in check and waited until the squad car drew near. He saw Kerney’s face through the windshield, saw him curling his forefinger at him in a come-here gesture, and the thought of going to jail again made him bolt. Getting arrested and locked up on a DWI for one night had been bad enough. He spurred his horse toward Granite Pass.
Behind him he heard the sound of the squad car in pursuit. The hard rain beat against the packed earth, pooling and running into the draw that led to the pass. Martinez pushed his mount into the draw, forced it up an incline, and clattered it into the rocky canyon mouth. The sound of the engine receded and he turned in the saddle. The squad car stood snout up on the lip of the draw, wheels spinning, digging to gain traction. But behind the car, riding Pruitt’s dapple gray, came Kerney, head down, low in the saddle, at a full gallop.
Martinez gave his horse free rein. Rainwater gushed down the cliff face, submerging the narrow trail. The horse stumbled on a rock, pitched, recovered, and wheeled into a mesquite that sent it spinning. Martinez clamped tight with his knees, kept pressure