“Let’s get Sharon a new saddle for her birthday,” Quentin shouted.
His daughter turned around. She was smiling. “Good idea!” She waved. “Hey, did you see that big flash of light last night?”
He nodded.
“What was it?”
“A meth lab blew somewhere, probably.”
Lacy looked at her father as if she were going to tell him something, but decided not to. She turned around instead and led the horse back into the barn.
“You might as well stay until Founder’s Day,” he yelled. Quentin thought she’d heard him, but she hadn’t.
The Phelps ranch was an original homestead. Like the Colliers, the original Phelps had given up panning for gold and become a cattleman during the Gold Rush. Quentin closed the door to the patrol car and looked down the empty, snow-covered single-lane county road. He walked down the icy verge and stood in front of a dirt road that led into the Phelps’s property. Fifty feet down, a series of fallen trees blocked the road and made it completely impassable by car.
Quentin shook his head and smiled. He walked to the mailbox nailed to the once-white fence. It was overflowing with mail. He pulled off his gloves and emptied the box, putting the envelopes and junk mail between his gun belt and his jeans.
He heard a car horn. A new black Range Rover pulled out from the bed-and-breakfast’s private road a half-mile down. It turned toward Quentin. A hand shot out from the driver’s side of the Rover and waved as it approached. The sheriff waved back. He watched the fancy highly-polished jeep come toward him. Quentin unzipped his jacket and stuffed a parcel that had been sitting on top of Chuck’s mailbox under his jacket, then walked over to the Rover that had stopped in the middle of the road, white steam coming from its exhaust.
Quentin knew the man behind the wheel, Todd Cooley. The man was wearing one of those expensive full-length leather coats city people could afford. Cooley’s sunglasses were hanging off his neck. His black hair was greased straight back; he looked like he’d just climbed out of a barber chair. He had on a cowboy shirt from the Sun Dance catalog made for “real cowboys” that cost a hundred dollars and no real cowboy could afford.
Cooley was an accountant in San Francisco and looked it, but dressed like a cowboy when he came up to the mountains. Cooley and some wealthy partners had bought a hundred acres and built the “Country Bride Inn and Spa,” a luxury bed-and-breakfast next door to the Phelps ranch. Since the accountant had bought the property from Chuck there’d been nothing but problems between Phelps and his new neighbors.
“Sheriff, good morning. I’m glad to see you,” Cooley said.
“Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”
“I had to call A.T.F, Sheriff. I just wanted you to know. In case, well, in case there’s a problem when they come out to talk to Phelps. Maybe you should be here, too.”
Quentin heard the words A.T.F. and froze. He didn’t like Cooley, and he didn’t like federal agents much—especially the DEA, staffed by paramilitary gunslinger types, who were always heavy-handed and patronizing when it came to dealing with the locals. (He’d heard a rumor that some of the DEA in Sacramento had partnered up with the bad guys, too.) And he certainly didn’t like the idea of some Federal agents from Sacramento picking on Chuck Phelps, who was a close family friend.
Great, that’s all we need, Quentin thought.
“Why, for God’s sake?” Quentin said, unable to keep the pique out of his voice. He’d had enough of the roly-poly accountant and his pushy big-city ways. Quentin practiced controlling himself. Have to get along with the city people, he reminded himself. It was something he’d promised Marie. He counted to ten as he listened to the over-dressed businessman. More and more of them were coming up to the Sierras, and Marie had been afraid they could, one day, organize and vote him out of office.
“He won’t stop with that shooting. I called ATF and told them he has automatic weapons. I’m sure of it. Probably machine guns. He’s some kind of gun nut. People don’t appreciate the sound of gunfire when we’re serving dinner at the Inn. That’s not what they come up here for. We have a glass-enclosed massage area—cost a fortune—faces that nut’s place. We’re trying to run a business here,” Cooley said. The accountant looked up the road toward Phelps’s cabin. “Besides, we’re afraid of him. He’s crazy and no doubt violent.”
Quentin finished buttoning up his jean jacket. His anger had passed as quickly as it had come. He held the package up against his chest. “I wish you hadn’t done that, Mr. Cooley. That’s going to make for trouble. People around here like to take care of their own problems. I told you I would talk to Chuck about his gun range. He’s reasonable. I can work this out, if you just give me a chance. The gun range is legal. I’ve told you. But maybe we could get him to use it just in the morning or something?”
“Sheriff, I like you. You have tried. I know you have, but Jesus Christ, the man’s a nut. They said they’d come out here and investigate. Sorry. But I think you local people are a little slow. I know he’s a local and all. I’m just trying to get along here.” Cooley nodded, put the Range Rover in gear and drove off. He turned around in Chuck Phelps’s driveway and raced down the road toward town.
You aren’t trying very hard, Quentin thought. All the rich city people that were moving in were the same, they all said they wanted to fit in, until it came time to fit in. Then it was always their way or the highway.
Quentin stood on top of a fallen pine tree and surveyed the road into the Phelps’s ranch. He saw no footprints or fresh snowmobile tracks. He looked down at the cabin, a good hundred yards down the snow-bound road. No smoke from the chimney. The cabin was small, hand-built by Chuck. He’d started it the summer he got back from the Marine Corps. His parents had lived in the original ranch house until they died a few years ago.
The sheriff looked to his left. He saw the original Phelps place two hundred yards to his right. A fancy Los Angeles plastic surgeon had bought it as a summer place. The original turn-of the-century two-story ranch house had been completely remodeled. It had a home theater and an indoor swimming pool, people said, a third story had been added, too. The doctor was rumored to have spent five million dollars on the renovations. A chimney was throwing off smoke from a small caretaker’s cabin in back of the doctor’s place.
Quentin climbed off the tree and onto the other side of the barricade. His cowboy boots pushed through the deep snow. He knew from experience it was going to be a trudge to the cabin as Chuck purposefully kept the road un-plowed. He started out lifting his knees high, his jeans getting wet in the fresh snow. The wind picked up, blowing from the east.
He remembered the Phelps family in the ‘70s when Chuck’s father was still alive. Crusty old Phelps used to call him “Kid.” Chuck Phelps’s old man wore jeans and cowboy boots his whole life and could count the times he’d been further than Sacramento. Quentin remembered, too, the picnics in the meadow with several generations of both families, huge plates of food, yellow jackets, and the smell of wild flowers blooming in June. After their parents died Chuck’s sister had sold off her share of the ranch for a lot of money, moved to San Francisco and married a tight-ass professor. Chuck stayed on, living on his veteran’s benefits.