Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [123]
Kerney stared out his office window at the fluffy wind-driven snow that melted as soon as it hit the glass. He’d last seen Johnny well over thirty years ago at the memorial services for his parents, who’d been killed in a traffic accident on the day Kerney had returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam. Johnny had shown up at the church late accompanied by a good-looking woman twice his age, his left arm in a cast, broken in a fall he’d taken at a recent pro rodeo event.
He remembered Johnny waiting for him outside the church, standing next to a new truck with the initials JJ painted on the doors above a rider on a bucking bronc. Dressed in alligator-skin cowboy boots, black pressed jeans, and a starched long-sleeve white western-cut shirt and wearing a gold-and-silver championship rodeo buckle, he’d flashed Kerney a smile, led him away from the truck where his lady friend waited, and offered his condolences.
“It’s a damn shame,” Johnny said with a shake of his head. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Eventually, I suppose,” Kerney replied.
“But not yet,” Johnny said.
“Not yet.”
They caught up with each other. Johnny, who been rodeoing since graduating from high school, had become a top-ten saddle bronc rider, while Kerney had finished his college degree and gone off to Vietnam as an infantry second lieutenant. Johnny’s parents, Joe and Bessie, who owned a big spread on the Jornada, a high desert valley straddled by mountains in south central New Mexico, where Kerney had been raised, had sold out and bought another ranch in the Bootheel of southwestern New Mexico. Joe had left his job as the president of a local bank in Truth or Consequences to take over a savings and loan in Deming.
Still in shock over the loss of his parents, Kerney didn’t have much to say, but he did promise to stay in touch with Johnny once things settled down. Johnny gave him a phone number where he could be reached and left with the nameless woman.
It had been typical of Johnny not to introduce his lady friend. He had a catch and release attitude toward women.
Kerney had never followed up with Johnny, perhaps because his boyhood friendship with Johnny had ended years before. At the age of sixteen Kerney had hired out one summer to work for Johnny’s father on the ranch. On his first day at work, he’d been sent out with Johnny to repair a trap to hold cattle for the fall roundup. The job consisted of replacing broken wooden fence posts with steel posts and stringing new wire with a fence stretcher.
By noon, they’d almost finished the chore when they ran out of steel posts. Johnny took the truck to get a dozen more from the ranch supply store in Truth or Consequences, while Kerney stayed behind to string and splice wire. Four hours later, Kerney was still waiting for Johnny’s return when the ranch manager, Shorty Powell, had showed up.
“Is this as far as you’ve got?” Shorty asked, surveying the unfinished trap.
“We ran out of posts,” Kerney replied. “Johnny went to get more.” He didn’t say anything about Johnny leaving him stranded in the hot desert sun for four hours with no water, no shade, on foot, and ten miles from the ranch headquarters. He didn’t tell Shorty that while he’d waited for Johnny he’d rebuilt and rehung the gate to the trap by himself, using the old wooden fence posts.
“This job should have been finished today,” Shorty said as he grabbed the mike to the CB radio in his truck and called for Johnny. “Where are you?” he asked when Johnny replied.
“Just leaving the store with the posts.”
“I want you and Kevin out at the trap first thing in the morning to finish up. I’ll bring Kevin back to the ranch.”
At the ranch, Johnny had not yet arrived. Shorty killed the engine and gave Kerney a long, appraising look. “That wasn’t a full day’s job I sent you boys out to do. What took so long?”
“We had a lot of wire to splice and the ground was pretty hard,” Kerney replied,