Just in case the owner decided to travel all the way from Atlanta and show up unexpectedly, Charlie methodically cleaned up the ranch premises, task by task. He shoveled a three-month supply of manure from the paddocks and hid the moldy hay he had purchased behind a couple of fresh bales. He made a note to gather up the few cattle that wandered around the fifteen hundred acres.
There was an old nag wandering about the barnyard, her main enterprise being the swatting of flies with her tail. He returned her to the paddock and dug the curry comb out from under the cat’s litter box. He reminded himself to get her reshod. The second corral was empty, except for the gray Manx that had given birth to a litter in a cardboard box blown into a corner. The horse tolerated the mewing as long as Charlie slipped her a few oats. When old lady Crawford was alive, the nag had been a racehorse with a personal groomer. Hazel Crawford had co-owned the horse with an unscrupulous District Judge, and for a few years they had traveled the New Mexico circuit. The horse came in first place several times at Santa Fe Downs. Then the jockeys started fixing the races and dragged everyone down.
Hazel Crawford had owned the ranch in its glory days. The surrounding land was sparsely populated, there being more coyotes than people. A crack shot with a rifle, she hated trespassers. Without warning, she was apt to wing one their way to shoo them off. One time the old lady shot a man for running naked through her property. Hazel was less than five feet tall and didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, as tough a cowgirl as Annie Oakley. Previously, she ran a brothel in Santa Fe and a popular bar called La Taverna. At the latter, she introduced country music. It was rumored she maintained another brothel in the town of Golden, a little ways up Highway 14, in two trailers behind the local tavern. On weekends she returned to the ranch to catch up on chores and help the mares deliver foals. She rode her horse with the best of them, pulling off the saddle like it weighed nothing.
If she’d had her way, Hazel Crawford would have left this earth fighting. She never believed in doctors, preferring to cure ailments with country medicine and the Two B’s—bed rest and Budweiser, followed by a Jim Beam chaser. But old Bud and Jim couldn’t cure this one. Cancer caught her at seventy-nine and by eighty had taken her down. To the end, every morning she woke up and reached for her pack of Pall Malls.
Charlie assumed that the detectives who’d interviewed him were done with him. But there was that scuttlebutt about the lady shrink and he figured she’d eventually come around for some reason or other. He had his alibi down pat about McCabe. Not so much about Bart. Good thing his on-again, off-again girlfriend Brenda hadn’t been around for a while. She never could keep a story straight.
Charlie finished his chores. The house was dark. He fumbled with the flashlight, looking for the switch to the generator. There was a loud hum and then the lights came on. He had a crazy premonition about the place. Maybe Hazel had come back to haunt him. Maybe the owner had sent a PI to spy on him. Maybe McCabe had friends who wanted to get even. He couldn’t put a finger on it. Last winter when he’d killed a deer on the Indian ruins, he had been dragging it back to the barn. It was dark as hell and he had the distinct feeling of being watched. He couldn’t drag that carcass fast enough.
Brenda had felt it too. When he turned the generator off at night, it was pitch black. Fine if there was a full moon, otherwise, so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. He couldn’t get Brenda to understand that this wasn’t the city, where there was electricity in the house and street lights on every corner. After a while he wised up and bought a case of votive candles. It gave the place a romantic feeling. Chicks liked that.
For the past couple of months, he’d been hearing some really strange noises in the middle of the night, like something being dragged across the yard. One time he even thought he saw light coming from the barn, but he knew the dog would have been barking like crazy if there was anyone around. And the next day, the dog wandered around like he’d been on an all-night toot.