Dead Blow

by Lisa Preston

  “In the kitchen,” she said, jerking her thumb thataways as she moved off to the pasture. “I’ll catch Dunny.”

  Chapter 24

  THE THURMANS’ OTHER HORSES ALL STOOD well, Dunbar was the only dancer. By the time I got the fronts off of Jean’s last horse, her boy was set on a turned-over bucket to be my official horse fetcher and holder. The little guy could hang onto a horse’s lead rope as well as his mama, plus have time to sit in a chair and think about what a stinker he is.

  Melinda got there just as Jean was fixing to go in the house anyways. When Melinda asked if she could talk to the young man about what he saw at the shed, Jean looked a little mystified, but said sure as she headed for a ringing phone in her kitchen. I bet the woman never gets to sit down.

  “What did you see, son?” Melinda asked.

  I found myself stepping back as she used that too familiar term to this boy. Little Joby was no relation of hers and to my way of thinking, she shouldn’t ought to have talked to him like he was. Watching and listening to this slowed my work down considerably. The boy already knew he was in some measure of hurt with his mama and now this strange woman was at his place, quizzing him about something that happened forever ago.

  The kid wrinkled up his face when Melinda got on her knees in front of him.

  “Do you know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie?”

  Joby nodded and looked like he thought he might be about to catch a spanking. I decided I’d wade on in and stop her, if that was what she was a-mind to do.

  Melinda was on a roll, pointing at her jeans. “And if I said my pants were red, would that be the truth or a lie?”

  Joby’s voice was hoarse and he looked ready to crack with the pressure but he managed to whisper, “A lie.”

  She gave him a severe nod. “Good. Now if I said my jacket was brown, would that be the truth or a lie?”

  “The, um . . .” The kid went to gulping like a guppy pulled out of his fishbowl. “That would be the truth. Your jacket’s brown. Ma’am.”

  “Good. We’ll only tell each other the truth, agreed?”

  His eyes were too full for words now and he just nodded.

  “So, tell me what you saw. Will you do that for me?”

  The little guy nodded and looked a bit less likely to wet his pants as he got down to telling his story. He’d ridden from the Outfitters campsite through one buck fence on the forest land. He’d tied his pony and was sneaking up to a shed that had a barbed wire fence that extended off both ends of one side of the shed. On the other side, the shed had an electric fence over a water trough. He’d wanted to win the dare by hitting the bull with a rock, “Either in its bottom or its eye.”

  Properly distracted by that memory, Joby sniggered as he told the rest of his tale. His face lit up as he relived his moment of near glory, his hands flapped around helping him talk and his tongue went over his lips when he got to the juicy parts.

  Melinda wore a wood plank face that left me wondering if she realized that we’d heard a pure description of the shed at the back of the Buckeye ranch. When the kid described the water trough at the back of the shed, I could see plain that what I thought of as the front of the shed would seem like the back to the kid when he was standing on the lease land. And the kid hadn’t known the difference between the forest land and the lease land. He’d just known he wanted to hit a bull with a rock.

  Joby bent everything, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, even his green-stained fingers as he told about sneaking up to the shed. He went still as stone, telling how he’d seen someone else was there. At first he thought it was one of his buddies that he’d bet with, that another boy would beat him, be the first to hit the bull’s eye. Then he realized it was a grown-up riding to the shed, so he hid and watched.

  “Was it Mr. Chevigny?” Melinda asked.

  Joby shook his head. “Nah, I ’member him. It was someone else.”

  “What did the person look like?” Melinda asked.

  “It was kind of dark, you know.” Joby shrugged.

  “About how old?”

  Shrug. “He was just a grown-up.”

  This little dude didn’t know his momma’s age, I bet. Jean was probably ten years older than me and he probably had us both pegged as the same, just grown-ups.

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Couldn’t see. So he rode up and tied his horse and walked over and leaned across the water tank and put something down.” The kid talked with his body, reaching toward a pocket on his T-shirt that didn’t exist. Pretending to hold something in his hand, he leaned far out in a stiff-bodied way, bent at ninety degrees in the hips, knees locked, chest parallel to an imaginary water trough’s surface as he reached straight out with his arm.

  Body-talking was good for Joby Thurman. His eyes dried up as he automatically acted out what he’d seen. He was busy and lost in the moment of memory, showing how the person he’d watched lifted something off the ground behind the trough, put an item down with the other hand, then put back whatever the first hand had lifted. Melinda had him go over it a couple different ways and they went on past my interest in the hows of it all. I was left squinting away, looking at the Thurmans’ stock tank as I thought about the one at Donna’s shed. Hypnotized, I was, watching the way the sun danced off the ripples worked up by the wind at the water’s surface. The reflection danced on the barn wall like a disco show.

  What I really needed to be doing was finishing this Quarter Horse’s shoes. I got busy, only catching part of Melinda taking in Joby’s Big Serious story.

  “He leaned over and reached for the ground.” True to the little kid style of speaking, the boy moved as he talked.

  Someone might lean in that weird way to avoid a hot fence, especially near the water trough. Especially in steel shank shoes and clothes that are sweaty from a hard ride. All of which would be all the better to conduct elec-juicity.

  Hot, hot, Donna’s wire was. Electric fences needed a lot of power to hold cattle. People who know that, well, they wouldn’t like the gut-kicking jolt that comes from accidentally touching a bull-hot fence.

  But everyone knew about Dragoon, right? I shook my head, more and more thinking I was dead wrong to have sic’d Melinda on this little boy, to have wasted one of my very precious brain cells even thinking on something I didn’t understand and wasn’t my concern.

  While Melinda Kellan was making important breakthroughs in the proper interviewing and scaring of small children, I finished Dunbar and started loading up my tools.

  A hot wind coughed across the little prairie land beyond the Thurmans’ fields by the time Melinda was about done working Joby over and I went up to the house to get my check from Jean.

  Joby and Melinda were paused by Ol’ Blue when I got back. He hadn’t quite got himself free of her.

  “Has everything you told me been the truth?”

  With his thinking wrinkles strapped across his forehead and nose again, the boy came up with, “Yes, ma’am.” He laced his fingers together and rested the works on the top of his skull, smashing his overgrown crew cut with green fingers that left bits of pucky everywhere. I thought he was trying to keep his head from exploding since she’d made him think much harder than any little boy ought to have to try and do.

  “All right, buddy,” Melinda told the boy.

  Joby Thurman wiped his face with the backs of his fists and puckered up a good sour face for her. No little fellow likes a woman who about makes him bawl. They both seemed like they were glad to be rid of each other as he trundled off to the house and Melinda and I hung at Ol’ Blue. And I got to feel six kinds of smart, explaining the hot fence thing to Melinda as we left. I mean, she makes Guy look like horse people.

  “So, what was all that about?” I asked her.

  “All what?”

  “Look,” I said, “if you wanted to freak the kid out, why didn’t you pull a gun or smack him in the face or something?”

  She looked miffed, but I’
d quick gotten used to that look from her.

  “There are procedures to go through,” she said. “In the interview of a child, it has to be established that the kid can differentiate between truth and lying and the kid has to commit to telling the truth.”

  Understanding that whoever the boy had seen visiting the Buckeye shed from the federal land was the last person to see Chevigny alive and probably the one who made him quit being alive, we were both sharp. But then Melinda extended herself to me.

  “Let’s get some dinner. Maybe the Dairy Queen?”

  I nodded, thinking that’s what people do. Friends, like maybe girlfriends, they have lunch. Then I said something about how mean she was to the kid and she said something about how ignorant I was about police procedure. So, we had our second fight of the day. Maybe this having a girlfriend thing wasn’t for me.

  The girlfriend prospect muttered as she got in her little two-door, something about a ten millimeter round and about the Pritchards being in that Outfitters group and about a few folks knowing about Cameron and Loretta having an affair. I had a half notion that she was going to run to Magoutsen and tattle her big suspicions about Vince Pritchard. She wanted to make herself look good with her boss, get clerk of the year or something.

  In Ol’ Blue with Charley, I could think better about things Melinda mentioned that made Vince Pritchard look bad in this deal, and I tried to consider the situation from a couple different directions. I had no bone to pick with Pritchard, even though he wasn’t on my Christmas card list. If two men were scratching on the earth and peeing on trees to mark territory, either could be wanting to do the other in, though Cameron Chevigny’s reason to be after Vince Pritchard wasn’t as good as Vince’s reason to have gone after Cameron.

  And Stan Yates. Just because the investigator thought Yates was surprised to learn his girlfriend was having a horizontal rodeo with the neighbor, well, the investigator could be wrong. Old Suit Fellow had been wrong when he called Cameron Chevigny’s tractor rolling an accident. Maybe Stan had killed Arielle and Cameron.

  But if the sheriff’s detective was right about Yates being innocent, I could think of exactly one person in the world who made no bones about not liking Vince Pritchard.

  And now I had a dinner date with her.

  My gut said Melinda Kellan was wrong about Vince Pritchard. I’d an idea or two that he wasn’t tough enough stuff to handle a hard ride and hike from the Outfitter camp to the back of the Buckeye. He was one of those that seems to think he’s a big man and when push comes to shove, he’ll push and shove but he’s not an actual worker bee.

  But Melinda Kellan could run for hours. And what better way to disqualify a guy aiming for a job with the law than to accuse him of murder?

  Chapter 25

  SOME THINKING NEEDED TO BE DONE, preferably by someone with more smarts than me, but hey, work with what’s there. Okay, Melinda’d been maybe too insistent that Darby pull the tire off the rim. She’d been ready to see what was there. She’d pointed out that Vince Pritchard’s gun fired the same caliber bullet that Darby found inside the tractor tire. She probably knew Pritchard’s wife was dallying with Cameron Chevigny. Could she have swiped Pritchard’s pistol long enough to get out to the tractor from Keeper Lake and shoot the tire?

  The next thing I knew, I’d reached the Dairy Queen parking lot and there was Melinda Kellan, waving big. I pulled in and parked right under the big red plastic ice cream cone.

  It could well have been Melinda who shot at Chevigny’s overturned tractor in order to pin the killing on Vince. Had I ever explained to her that the horseshoe was from the Pritchards’ Paso?

  Or that Stan Yates called Arielle ‘Rielle’ and maybe Cameron did, too? I smacked Ol’ Blue’s glovebox, pulled out the knife Donna had gifted me, undid my belt and strapped on the scabbard.

  Melinda Kellan came up to me like we were friends, just gal pals having dinner. If she kept acting like that, it was going to be hard to hang onto my number one theory.

  “So,” she said, “Darby and the Pritchards are in that Outfitters group with your clients the Thurmans and a whole bunch of other people.”

  I turned my hip to show her my weapon. “I can put the Pritchards’ horse on the Buckeye, near the shed Joby Thurman was talking about. That shoe I showed you came from the Buckeye, but it’s off their Paso. And I reckon this knife is what got put under the cinder block behind the water trough.”

  Melinda frowned. “It wasn’t Vince that the kid saw put that knife behind the water trough and—”

  “Why do you think it couldn’t have been him?” I gave her a look, my You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are look, but she wasn’t as good as Guy at understanding my stares. “He’s the one with the best reason to go after Cameron—”

  She waved her hand. “Easier to show you than explain. Anyway, I checked the date. That kid saw someone at that shed the day Mr. Cameron Chevigny died. That was the Saturday night of the Outfitters campout. Same night. It was remote—”

  “The kid was definitely talking about the Buckeye shed. His description matches that shed exactly.”

  “Yeah? Sweet. I’d like to see that. Most likely, that someone was the person who shot the tire. Which means the kid, Joby Thurman, saw the killer.”

  “I reckon that’s right. You going to go after the kid some more?” I snorted. “You were pretty hard on him.”

  Her jaw flapped up then down and then around for another lap at not knowing what to say. “Was I?” She furrowed up her brow and pinked all at once.

  “Yeah, you were.”

  She shook her head and I got set to hammer in my point since she seemed to be arguing. But she said, “Crap. I didn’t mean to be. If I was, I screwed up.”

  Well, hey. She reminded me of someone. Except she admitted when she’d made a mistake.

  For the first time, it occurred to me that if I let myself, I could like Melinda. I could even learn from her.

  “Got to think outside the box,” she said. “Come up with stuff that hasn’t been considered, maybe some far out stuff, just every kind of possibility there is.”

  “Like?”

  “Like the person who fired that round might not have been the only person involved in this mess.” She ticked off one finger, several spares at the ready.

  “Or?”

  “Or who else possibly had something to gain by Chevigny’s death.”

  Giving this the brow-scrunching-think it deserved, I pursed my lips and offered up, “Maybe some other stock contractors? Someone who wanted Dragoon?”

  She nodded, getting into this. “Or had a grudge against him?”

  “Cameron Chevigny or the bull?”

  “Either or both. Maybe someone lost money in a bet or a ride or got hurt.”

  “And that someone bumped off Cameron by rolling his tractor?” I snorted ’cause it was too far out. And it was getting hungry out. I headed for Dairy Queen’s glass door. “Let’s eat.”

  In the lobby, an older couple with what looked to be a passel of grandkids stared when I asked Melinda, “So that someone bumping a man off by shooting his tire out would be who, the cowboy mafia?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Well, there isn’t one.”

  “Says you.”

  “Yeah, says me. Look, I’m saying this as a cowboy.”

  “So now you’re a cowboy?” Melinda tried for a real superior look, her tone full of all kinds of the knowing of someone who doesn’t believe a thing.

  She didn’t know who she was messing with. My eyebrows can arch up like that, too. I proved it then and there.

  Nothing like a Dairy Queen kid in a paper hat to break a mood. “Can I take your order?”

  No skinflint, that Melinda. It’d be a safe bet that I had more pocket money than she did, but she stepped up first when the kid totaled our order.

  “On me, next time,” I said. She grinned and I think it struck us both that there’d be a next time. We spent an hour, jabbe
ring over sandwiches and sundaes. She punched my phone numbers into her cell and I scribbled hers on a paper napkin to put into my address book and little phone later.

  I said, “You tell that Suit Fellow about Jean’s kid seeing someone out there on the Buckeye? He’s gotta be impressed, what and all with you basically finding that bullet, too. No wonder you’re an evidence tech.”

  Melinda’s head was nodding and shaking all at once. “Yeah, well, checking into that tire, was, um, I went about it wrong.”

  I wasn’t with her at all on this one. “You solved the deal,” I said. “You’re the one who thought to check inside the tire, the only reason we know the tractor rolling was no accident. And today, you’ve got it pegged that someone was out there fiddling with something behind the water trough on the day Cameron Chevigny died.” I patted my hip, pulled out the knife. “This, most likely, ’cause that’s exactly where I found it, behind a concrete block that they have as a spacer back of the water trough.”

  She studied the bone-handled beauty again. “Heart R. Think this was meant as a gift?”

  “Yep. And Arielle Blake went by Ree and Rielle and things like that, too.”

  Melinda gaped. “How do you know?”

  “Yates told me.” I ate the hot fudge first, because it’s at its best right away.

  “Well, she was having a fling with Chevigny. Poor Stan Yates.” Melinda took the knife, then stared at me as she returned it. “I didn’t solve anything.”

  I holstered the knife. “But you, I mean, you figured out something happened. The guy who investigated Chevigny’s death said it was an accident. Someone shot out the tire and rolled the tractor.”

  “Someone could have shot the tire any time after it rolled.” Cheeseburger grease rolled down her elbow and she used the last napkin.

  “True, but what’s more likely? That someone shot the tire to roll the tractor—and maybe they were really aiming at him but settled for rolling the tractor—or that sometime after the tractor rolled, someone came by and shot the low tire? Think about Stan Yates. Your investigator thought he was innocent, but he also thought Cameron Chevigny died in an accident. You nailed that part.”