“I want your help,” I said. “I don’t want him hurt, or anyone else hurt either. And neither do you. But he’s the only one with all the answers.”
Boyd took his time lighting a cigarette, the smoke curling up and out the side window.
“Johnny,” I went on, “when I told you that it looked like your brother and Finnegan had an argument, you didn’t seem surprised. You want to tell me about it?”
“It won’t be the first time,” he said and pushed himself back in the seat, wedging himself against the door. “My brother and Dick Finnegan haven’t seen eye to eye on a lot of things over the years.” He sighed. “I don’t know what it is, ’cause my brother is about the gentlest man on the planet. He minds his own business and just asks that the rest of the world do the same.”
“Did he and Finnegan argue over something recently?”
“The damn antelope,” Boyd said, and he shut his mouth tight after those three words and turned to watch the road as Estelle negotiated a turn where the ruts had been cut deep into the prairie. She bridged the deepest portions, keeping the big sedan’s undercarriage out of the dirt. The lights of the dashboard were just enough to outline Boyd’s features, and by the set of his jaw, I could only guess at the struggle he was having.
“Finnegan was impounding antelope,” I said. “We know that. We were out there just a little while ago. We saw the sections of sheep fencing. We went all the way over to the corner, by the abandoned well. That’s the one you called Williams Tank.”
“Well, then,” Boyd said, and let it go at that, as if we knew all there was to know.
“I don’t understand, though,” I pressed. “Sheep fencing isn’t cheap. Where’s the profit in a handful of antelope? I’d think you could sell a good steer for more money than you’d get for some critter about the size of a big German shepherd.”
“First off, it ain’t no ‘handful,’ Sheriff. Dick’s workin’ on a pretty good herd. Hell, I counted thirty-four once, in just one clan. And it isn’t selling the animals for meat that it’s all about.” Boyd fell silent again.
“Then what’s it for? Hunters?”
“That’s right.”
“There’s money in that?”
Johnny Boyd snorted. “You’re kidding. Hell, some of the city boys will pay a thousand bucks a pop for a chance at an antelope with a good set of horns. Guaranteed success. A nice, private little hunt. Dick’s got about a section of land fenced in like what you saw, both to the south by the old windmill and another area north. You remember where that old stone house is?”
“Sure.”
“Up north of that.” Boyd crushed the remains of the cigarette out and dug another from his pocket.
“So he sells hunts,” I said.
Boyd nodded. “That’s where the money is. Ten hunts at a thousand bucks each will pay for a lot of ranching. Tax free, interest free. Any time of year that it’s convenient. My brother doesn’t think much of that,” Boyd said.
“Finnegan gets hunters from out of town, then?”
“Well, sure. Folks that don’t know better. See, he’s got this deal with some fella in Santa Fe. As a matter of fact, if I got it right, the guy is Finnegan’s former brother-in-law…or some squirrelly thing like that. Dick was boasting about it to me once, acting real coy, you know. He was pretty proud of himself. Anyway, this guy is in the business.”
“What business?”
“Travel, hunting. All that sort of stuff. There’s some big-game ranches up that way, legitimate ones. Rich folks come out and spend a week getting wined and dined and go home with a trophy elk or ram. Dick was hinting that every once in a while, his brother-in-law would send some hunters down this way for a quick trophy buck.”
“It’s hard to believe anyone in his right mind would pay that much,” I said.
Boyd laughed, a short, hacking chuckle. “They’ll pay even more for less, Sheriff,” he said. “Fifteen hundred or two thousand is petty cash to some folks. And the way things are going, open-country hunting is getting harder and harder. There’s less and less private land every year, and a good many landowners and ranchers don’t want hunters on the property…myself included. And the kicker is, Dick never cared much one way or another what season it was. Nobody was the wiser, so why inconvenience the payin’ customer by restricting him to one of the state’s seasons?”
“And Edwin doesn’t approve of all this? Of what Finnegan was doing?”
“He don’t think much of it. Neither do I, for that matter, but what Dick Finnegan does on his land is his business, long as it don’t get in my way.”
“You never tipped off the Game and Fish Department?”
“Nope. The thought crossed my mind once or twice. Guess I should have. But this is the way I figure it. The judge would hand a stiff fine on old Dick, and maybe he could pay it, and maybe he couldn’t. They might even stick him in jail for six months and leave old crazy Charlotte out there all by her lonesome. Maybe, maybe not. But then after a time, he’d be out of jail, and I’d still have him for a neighbor, still meet him now and then on some back road. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not afraid of too much, but I don’t need that. It’s his business, and I let it go at that.”
“Johnny, did Dick Finnegan shoot at that airplane?”
This time he didn’t hesitate, didn’t turn coy. “I don’t know, Sheriff,” he said and added, “If I knew, I’d tell you. He could have, and he could have hit it, too. I’ve seen him drop a coyote at five hundred yards, just resting the rifle over the hood of the truck. And that’s no small trick. But I don’t know.”
“Do you suppose Edwin knows?” Estelle asked. Her voice was quiet and husky, but it startled both Johnny Boyd and me.
“I don’t see how he could,” Johnny said. “He’s so goddam lame he can’t do much more than hobble. And at the time that shooting happened, he wasn’t even in the county.”
“That’s what he told us,” I said.
“If that’s what he said, then that’s what’s true,” Johnny said vehemently. “My brother don’t waste a whole lot of words, but one thing he don’t do is lie.”
“He hasn’t said anything recently that was out of the ordinary about Finnegan? They weren’t arguing about anything?”
“If they were, he didn’t tell me anything about it.”
I watched as we turned south on the narrow lane that would lead us to the first gate that marked Finnegan’s zoo. “When was the last time you talked with him?” I asked.
“With Dick? Oh, we cross paths regular. We both use the same road, you know.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“I saw him the day before yesterday.”
“That was before the crash?”
“Yes. That morning. We met at the intersection of the county road.”
“He say anything?”
“He said he was still thinking about running the pipe across that little spur of land I own. But he wasn’t sure of how much water there’d be.”
“And that was it?”
“And that was it. I told him that whatever he decided was fine with me. Just that if he was going to run pipe across my land, I could use some of the water a time or two.”
“It would have cost him quite a bit to go around, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure. Some.” He chuckled that dry, hacking laugh again.
“Half an antelope, maybe.”
“What did Edwin think about that?”
“Not much. He was pissed at Finnegan for borrowing our dozer to try digging his goddam pond and then turning around and being so goddam tight about the pipe deal. He stewed about that some. I figured it was just one of those things, you know. One of those things that gets sideways. To this day, I don’t know why Dick wanted to bother trying another pond. This country is mostly gravel. There’s no dirt tank in the county that will hold water unless you line it. Plastic or bentonite. But it’s his business. I told Edwin to just let it ride. Hell, it didn’t cost us anything except a couple gallons of diesel.”