Chapter 21

IVY PLUGGED HER CAMERA INTO A laptop, then plugged the computer into Milt’s big wide-screen monitor. She powered up the camera, rousted the computer, and, with a few swipes and taps of her fingers on the computer, we were looking at her photographs of the hilltop crime scene. I hadn’t moved a muscle. Charley lay on my boot toes, making my feet, like him, fall asleep. The pins and needles started shooting up my legs. My breath hadn’t returned to normal.

“What, does your husband, uh,” I tried to make my voice sound super casual, like Ivy and I were just having a friendly, get-to-know-one-another conversation, and I hadn’t just hung up on Guy then my mama as they screamed about Milt Beaumont. “What does he do for a living?”

She flipped through her pictures on the giant computer monitor. “Milt? He’s an attorney.”

I chewed on that answer, imagining the bald man with the Lexus she’d been consulting all afternoon and who’d phoned with the inside scoop from the medical examiner’s officer minutes earlier. “If you’re married to an attorney, why’d you need that other fellow?”

“Leonard? Different kind of law practice. Milt handles financing and contracts in the industry.” Ivy waved at the red carpet photos on the office wall.

“The movies?”

“Right. Milt’s not a criminal attorney. Leonard is. It’s completely different work.”

Ivy had a criminal attorney on retainer. I chewed on that, wiggling my toes to stop the pins and needles. Charley rolled over and stretched, then tucked himself into a little fur ball for a snooze.

Ivy pinched her fingers together on the laptop and swiped them out, over and over, zooming in on one of her crime scene photos displayed hugely on Milt’s wide screen. “Oh, oh. Look at this.”

I didn’t want to see a picture of a corpse. I’d averted my eyes that morning when I’d dug him up, and again when she’d taken me up there on the four-wheeler.

But it was pictures of the evidence on the police tarp she’d enlarged. The coke shovel. A folding camp shovel. Was that second shovel what someone had used to bury Vicente? Next to the shovels was the dirty thermos the cops had found somewhere up there. I wondered when the coke shovel would be returned. It had nothing to do with the crime. Should I buy Ivy a new coke shovel for her forge if the police wouldn’t give back the one that I’d left up there?

I asked, “What do you think’s the deal with that thermos?”

Ivy cocked her head and swiped on with a shrug. “Sometimes, we sent hot meals up to Vicente. But look at this.”

The computer screen filled with a close-up of Vicente Arriaga’s state identification, library card, and a business card for a massage parlor called Pleasures in downtown Black Bluff. The card showed a silhouette caricature of a long-haired, high-heeled woman reaching out, which led me to believe it was not the kind of massage place where an athlete like Guy would go to get his leg muscles worked on.

“Pleasures massage parlor,” Ivy said, copying the phone number down on a piece of paper she grabbed from Milt’s desk. “Sounds sketchy. Let’s go.”

When Charley and I followed her out of Milt’s office, it was with the intention of getting my truck running, not playing junior detective in the poky little town of Black Bluff.

Eliana met us in the dining area. “Dinner ready.”

Ivy waved with a flourish. “Take some out to the men, if you don’t mind.”

“They not here.”

“Oh,” Ivy said, looking a tad miffed and jiggling her keys. “Well, it’s, um Oscar’s day off anyway. Gabe must have taken him to town. I need to talk to them, to everyone, when they get back.”

“You not eat now?” Eliana asked.

Ivy shook her head and said, “You go ahead and eat. Rainy and I are going to take a ride.”

It wasn’t my kind of ride. But I bet if I went to town with Ivy, got off this ranch where I was stranded, then I could get cell reception and perhaps the privacy to talk to Guy about everything.

***

Pleasures was a house. An old one, with dark blue siding, wrought iron security doors and windows, and a vague light inside.

“Come on, Rainy.” Ivy swung out of her Benz SUV, which she’d chosen over the Hummer and the sports car in her immaculate triple garage.

“Right behind you.” I turned to tell Charley, on the back seat, to wait.

From the car, I watched Ivy walk up the front yard’s stepping-stones to knock. I fished out my cell.

My dead cell.

I twisted my ponytail into a stick, muttered something unlady-like, and got my sweet self out of the Benz.

Ivy was already storming back. “I bet someone’s in there. I left a note, promised money for answers. I wonder if the police have already been here.”

This was all too much for me. What I needed was to be back at the ranch, jump-starting Ol’ Blue with this giant Benz. “If the guys are back when we get back, I’m going to confront them about Charley, ’cause it was probably one of them who hurt him a couple years ago.”

And then, I thought privately, I was out of there.

“I’m going to be all over them,” Ivy said. “And I’ve already caught Oscar lying.”

“About what?” I asked. “And Gabe says it was Stuckey who jumped me at the bull sale.”

Ivy exploded. “How could he do that? What was Stuckey thinking?” She was already driving, but we didn’t seem to be going straight home. We went deeper into Black Bluff, past gas stations and a grocery store that sat kitty-corner from a smaller, dumpier tienda that advertised a whole lot of peppers and money transfer services for its clientele. There was even an actual pay phone on the outside wall of La Tienda. I didn’t have enough punch in me to dial the thirty-seven digits that would be required to use the public phone for free, but I wanted to jump out of Ivy’s car, hit the zero, and tell an operator to get my almost-husband on the phone.

The library was down the main street, where cute stores like an ice cream parlor, a quilt shop and, oh yeah, Great Dogs specialty shop had frontage in between a couple of coffee shops.

“Good,” Ivy said, nodding with satisfaction. “Solar put a notice up.”

There was a handwritten sign on Great Dogs’ door that announced the store was temporarily closed. I took that to mean more than the fact that it was Sunday evening. The store was not going to open in the morning.

“Can I charge my phone?”

Ivy pulled out a mini-USB cable for me. So I had power, and a signal, but the same person sitting beside me who had made me uncomfortable earlier when Guy and my mama screamed the name Milt Beaumont.

I didn’t call. I texted my mama: Still in Black Bluff. On your way to OR, can you come get me if I can’t get my truck started?

Approaching the ranch gate though, it was a reunion. Gabe’s beater Bronco blared his horn at the white Jeep Compass. Sabino Arriaga moved to the middle of the road, trying to flag us down after Gabe went around him. Ivy floored it, and we left Sabino behind as we roared through the ranch gate.

***

This was going to be my first time going toe-to-toe with Stuckey since I’d learned from Gabe that he was the one who knocked me out at the sale grounds. I’d sort of let that crime go when I realized that, long before he was my dog, someone had hurt Charley, but maybe that Saturday-morning crime mattered, too. Maybe Ivy was right—solving one thing solved everything. She figured the same person who hurt Charley had hurt Vicente. It kind of made sense. But as the Bronco pulled up between Ol’ Blue and the bunkhouse while Ivy cut sharper to the right to go into the giant garage attached to her giant house, I realized something else.

They’d deny it.

Whether all three of those men were in on it, or just one of them, all three would deny it. If only one of them did it and the other two didn’t even know, then all three would deny it and one would be lying. I explained it to Ivy as we pulled into her garage.

She shut the Benz off and looked at me as the garage door closed behind us.

“We have to be subtle,” she said. “And we have to stay on point.”

“I want to get my truck started.”

And I wanted to leave, but I chose not to say that part aloud.

“I’m sure the men will help you. Oscar’s staying in the bunkhouse tonight, like usual, now that the police thing has cooled off.”

She meant the immigration angle, not the, well, the murder problem.

Ivy added, “Please ask everybody to come up to the house after you do whatever with your truck. Don’t take too long.”

***

Standing out there in the dark with my truck was more than a little creepy, but I hupped Charley into the cab and popped Ol’ Blue’s hood like it was no big deal.

Then I screamed like a girl when someone touched my shoulder. Someone big.

“Stuckey, you scared me. My truck’s dead.”

His voice came out jokey. “Then you can’t leave.”

Gabe, behind him in the dark, spoke up. “I’ve got jumper cables.”

It was the most helpful thing anyone had said to me all day.

But the batteries weren’t Ol’ Blue’s problem. We gave them time to charge, I cranked. Ol’ Blue stayed dead. When Gabe and I gave up, I dropped the hood and the news. “Ivy wants everyone to come up to her house. I think she wants to talk.”

“Beautiful,” Gabe said, rolling his eyes. “When’s she going back to LA?”

I gave a wide-eyed shrug. Inside Ol’ Blue’s cab, Charley eyed me from the safety of the passenger side. I could almost hear his thoughts as he watched me.

Let’s go home.

Gabe coiled his jumper cables, stuffed them in the Bronco, and told Stuckey, “Go get Oscar.”

We watched Stuckey head off on his errand, watched different lights switch on and off inside the bunkhouse. I asked, “Is that first room on the right in there yours?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Why?”

Studying him with all my attention, I said, “I found my shoeing tools—the ones that were stolen when I got hit at the bull sale—in Stuckey’s locker.”

“Jesus. You did? What an idiot.”

I blinked a few times and waited.

The light was dim, so it was hard to tell, but Gabe might have reddened a shade or two with his comment. He patched things up with, “I meant Stuckey, not you. You seem like a real smart girl.”

No, I don’t. I seem like a girl in the wrong place, and for way too long, and way too slow to put things together.

***

Stuckey was the first to report to Ivy’s house. I waved him to the window by the fireplace for a little one-on-one time. Instinct told me to get him to come clean before Gabe and Oscar walked in. Across the great room, Ivy organized her calendar and papers at the head of the table while Eliana cleared away the many unused dinner dishes with plenty of clatter.

“Did you hit me Saturday morning at the bull sale? Move my truck? Take some of my tools?” I asked Stuckey, not interested in Ivy’s plan for going subtle.

“No!” His gaze darted around, resting longest at the front door.

Waiting for Gabe to come and save him, I decided. “People clapped after I worked my dog in the arena, they made an announcement. You saw Charley. You recognized him and freaked.”

“No!”

Air whistled out my pursed lips. It was sort of like dealing with a four-year-old who’d taken a cookie but was still married to the hope that no one had seen the naughtiness. I glanced across the room and could tell Ivy was keeping tabs on us. I liked the backup but doubted she could hear much of what Stuckey and I said, if anything. I remembered standing here with Oscar hours earlier, looking out the window that now showed only a black square of night. We’d been looking at a body bag. I started from scratch, again.

“Did you ride a four-wheeler out to the east gate of the ranch, get a ride to the bull sale from Robbie Duffman?”

Stuckey’s lips parted into a soundless oval and he nodded.

“Then at the sale, you saw my dog.”

Another nod. He did better with statements than questions.

“And you recognized him. You knew he was Flame.”

The nods came full and hard. Then he folded his arms across his chest. “You looked in my room? Went through my stuff?”

What could I say to that? That I had been putting laundry away for Eliana? I remembered the washer and dryer in the bunkhouse alcove. They did their own laundry. They had a real sweet setup on Ivy Beaumont’s ranch. It would be a lot to lose.

“Yeah, Stuckey, I snooped.” I pulled my track nippers out of my hip pocket. The reins had been up in my shirt. “These are mine, aren’t they?”

“I guess.”

I wanted to bonk him between the eyeballs with the nippers and recalled how I’d picked them up from my pile of reclaimed tools when I felt the urge to have a weapon handy. Stuckey was the kind of fella who had to be talked into the truth. I needed to make it easy for him to admit his wrongs. And there were bigger hooves to trim, so to speak. I thought of Charley, alone and happier in Ol’ Blue’s locked cab. I’d vented the windows to keep him comfortable, since he’d been clear he wanted to stay in the truck. I promised to deal with whoever had hurt him. I tried to make my voice steady as I said to Stuckey in a matter-of-fact way, “It was you. You hit me on the head at the sale grounds, and a couple years ago you—”

“No, ma’am.”

“Gabe said it was you.”

“He told?”

“You took my truck. You dumped me and my truck, and you stole my tools. Charley ran from you, and that’s why he was wandering the ranch.”

Stuckey’s face turned dark and hard, his eyes shiny. “’Bout what happened Saturday, what are you going to do now?”

“I’ve already done it. I took my tools back.”

A coat of anxiety fell off Stuckey’s shoulders and a better invisible garment, this one made of relief, settled over him. “Is that all?”

“Why’d you do it, Stuckey?”

“I ain’t sure.”

I smacked my hands on my hips. Mommed him a bit. “C’mon. You can do better.”

He tried harder. “I don’t know. Just because. Maybe you can’t understand, ’cause you’ve never done something that seemed like you might ought but might shouldn’t and you didn’t think it through or know why you done it at the time.”

Well, he’d just described a lot of my life.

“Did you ever hurt Charley?”

Stuckey looked at the door. Men’s voices muffled on the other side of it, stomping on the flagstone as they kicked dirt off their boots. We were out of time. Stuckey wasn’t going to offer more than he was forced to admit.

He grabbed me. I gasped. Voice hoarse, he asked, “You found the other thing?”

I wasn’t playing dumb, though I’m pretty skilled at it. “Other thing?”

Eliana opened the front door.

“Don’t tell. You have to hide it.” Stuckey’s whisper was sullen, a bit angry, but urgent.

“What?” I asked, leaning an ear close to his mouth as Gabe and Oscar came in.

“I’m not telling.” Stuckey’s eyes dilated, dark and flared. “That could get you killed.”