He shook his head.
“When he saw you tonight in the Pierpoint…what was the argument about?”
Edwin had enough control of his hands to finally light the cigarette. “I figure it only one way. I was there first, just minding my own business, trying to figure out what I should do. ’Cause see, I knew damn well who fired that shot at the airplane. If Dick thought someone was on to him about those antelope, that’s one thing. He could just shrug and say he was plannin’ to buy some summer lambs. If them antelope don’t like the fence, they can just jump out. But that car and whoever’s inside it? That’s something else. He gets real nervous, thinkin’ that somebody knows. Maybe he thought that I up and told somebody. And so he figures, what the hell. Take a shot. Who’d ever know?” He took a deep drag on the cigarette.
“Anyway, he come in to the Pierpoint, and I didn’t want to talk to him much, so I just left. Almost got to my truck when he caught up with me. First thing he said was, ‘You remember what I told you.’ He said he didn’t like all those federal agents pokin’ around any more than we did, but if I made any kind of trouble, he’d fix it so that Johnny or the boy, or maybe me, got blamed for it.”
“The shell casings,” I said.
“Don’t know about that,” Edwin said. “I kind of lost my temper and said something like, ‘You can just go to hell.’ I’d just about decided that I was doin’ the wrong thing, not going to the police. He kind of pushed me like, and then one thing led to another. I banged my knee and damn near saw stars, and then he up and kicked me. I said something like, ‘That’s it. I can goddam crawl to the sheriff’s office if I need to.’ And then he jerked a jack handle out of the back of his truck and started to come down on me with that. I stuck him.”
“Your knife?”
Edwin Boyd nodded. “Sure as hell is. It’s probably still in him, too.”
“And then you drove back here?”
“Fast as I could. I figured the best thing to do was to tell you just exactly what I know, and mark the spot.” He gestured with the cigarette. “And so there it is.” He looked up at me. “I guess you got to arrest me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Johnny Boyd sat down on the dozer track beside his brother. “It’s going to work out,” he said. “You just tell that same story to Judge Hobart and you’ll be home before first light.”
I turned to Tom Pasquale. “Go ahead,” I said. He started to reach for his cuffs. “Just be gentle.” He nodded, and Edwin Boyd stood up and offered his wrists. As I walked back toward the car, I could hear the deputy intoning the Miranda rights.
I sat down on the front seat, my feet still on the ground. The sky overhead was as clear as I’d ever seen it, a vast wash of stars from one horizon to another. Estelle appeared by the door.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Ready for bed, I guess. I was just wondering who will end up with the Finnegans’ ranch. Charlotte isn’t going to be able to cope.”
“The Boyds, I imagine,” Estelle said. “Nothing worked out quite the way Dick Finnegan would have liked, if Edwin’s story holds up.”
“Oh, it’ll hold up,” I said. “But I don’t much look forward to finding out who’s in that car under there.”
“Somebody who had an easy hunt out of season and then tried to pull a fast one by refusing to pay. Dick Finnegan was too strapped for cash to let that happen. That’s what I’d be willing to bet,” Estelle said.
“The one thing I’ve learned in all this time,” I said, “is not to make bets with you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Edwin Boyd had been accurate as hell in what he’d remembered. Thirty-six inches down, the massive bucket of one of Posadas County’s front loaders struck the roof of the car, and in another twenty minutes, the pathetic, crushed thing was hauled out and parked on the surface. Chris Lucero, the county employee who’d been shagged out of bed to dig up the prairie, shut down the machine and looked first at the car, then at me.
“Fun times,” he said.
It wasn’t, and the dozer had done a fair enough job of crushing the little tin can that it took Bob Torrez and Tom Pasquale nearly an hour using power jaws to pry part of it open. With a little imagination, the occupants appeared to be two men.
Richard Finnegan apparently had thought that the burial was adequate to cover his tracks without him having to attend to any other details. The Texas license plate was still intact, and came back as registered to a Vernon Dorrance of Houston. Mr. Dorrance had originally been seated behind the wheel-that much we could tell-before the weight of the dozer and the three weeks underground smeared him and his partner together.
The wallets were in place, in the hip pockets of Mr. Dorrance and his hunting buddy, Paul Friedel. A business card told us that Vernon Dorrance was actually Vernon D. Dorrance, Attorney at Law. There were credit cards and a blank check, but no cash.
Much of the rear of Mr. Dorrance’s skull was missing, the sort of damage that would be done by a high-velocity rifle bullet. What had killed Mr. Friedel wasn’t obvious, but I had no doubt that Dr. Francis Guzman would tell us within a few hours.
In the trunk of the car were two fancy, high-powered rifles and two boxes of ammunition, together with a few other odds and ends packed in two small suitcases, including a camera with ten photos taken in living color. If we were lucky, at least one of the exposures would show a proud great white hunter kneeling beside the antelope he’d stalked across the vast wastelands of Posadas County…a photo taken just before he stiffed his guide out of a day’s pay.
I left the final inventory to Sergeant Torrez, but what the two men had been after seemed clear to me. How and why they’d tangled with Dick Finnegan was just a guess on our part, and only one person would know the answer for sure.
Charlotte Finnegan invited us in for coffee. That wasn’t what I needed most at four o’clock in the morning, but playing hostess gave her something to do.
By then, she’d known for four hours that her husband was dead. Father Eugene Starkey had been with her most of that time after the deputies had left, but no one else had seen fit to pay her a visit-not that she had many neighbors who were on the night shift. One of the deputies told me that a sister who lived in Albuquerque was on her way down to stay with Charlotte until she decided which way to lean.
When Estelle and I arrived, we had known for two hours who was in the car.
I accepted the cup of coffee with a hand that wasn’t all too steady.
“How about a sandwich?” Charlotte asked with that sort of eager brightness that takes so much effort when all you really want to do is puddle. “I’ve got some nice sliced ham and some of that wonderful dark rye bread.”
“That would be nice,” I said, and looked down at my hands. Some of the prairie was still under my nails, and that brought back the image of the car and its ripe contents. “You mind if I wash up a little?”
The bathroom down the hall was neat as a pin, with the fake porcelain sink buffed spotless. I felt as if I were kicking Charlotte yet again as I watched the water and soap spot the finish. I used the dark towel with the roadrunner embossed on it and wiped out the sink when I was finished.
As I made my way back down the hall toward the living room of the mobile home, Charlotte stood with the sandwich on a paper plate in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other.
“Thank you,” I said, and sat down with a sigh on the sofa beside Estelle. Charlotte wilted into a rocking chair next to the television.