Chapter 5

THE SUN WAS TOO HIGH TO let me get oriented, but if town and the Black Bluff sale grounds lay west of the ranch as the woman with the Appy had said and I followed my nose past the first several crossroads to bigger roads, I hoped to get lucky beyond the strip of haze hanging over the interstate. The air’s so much cleaner in Cowdry. I had to get back. I had to get Charley, get home, and get married.

With twenty or thirty minutes’ driving, I cleared the town of Black Bluff and was on the west outskirts, where I pointed Ol’ Blue back through the main gate at the bull sale and aimed straight to the commercial area behind the grandstand where the announcer’s box was situated, beyond the dusty hot dog stand. In the main arena, everybody’s attention was on a half-dozen rough steers challenging a tiny black-and-white Border Collie.

A pang of longing pulled at my heart as I remembered running Charley in the arena first thing in the morning, and how I’d hoped to do it again. I told the good old boy in the front booth that I’d been robbed and needed to talk to the police.

He adjusted his greasy felt cowboy hat and looked at me more than twice. “Are you all right? Where’d that happen?”

“Here.”

“Just now? I’ll call the security guard.” He looked around, past countless parked pickups and tapped a radio by his announcer’s microphone. “Hey, Bob, come on up to the booth.”

“This morning,” I said.

He said he’d tell the man called Bob that I’d be waiting by the announcement boards, then waved a hand toward a structure like the sort of little semi-weatherproof bulletin board used for trailheads.

A couple of cowboys stood there with their backs to me, fingers tracing over the posted placings of the day. One of the gawkers elbowed the other and jerked his chin my way as I joined them. I turned my back to the bulletin board and decided the police had maybe ten minutes to come talk to me or I was going right back to the ranch to look for Charley.

The two men at the board cast more looks at each other and me. One nodded, maybe looking at my bare left hand.

The thing Guy and I have been negotiating—whether or not he’ll hang a bird band on my ring finger—well, maybe it ought to get settled his way. I’d had about enough of every cowpoke wanting to poke where he ought not. I never much cottoned to the way some guys yuckety-yuk each other into swaggering up to every gal standing alone for a moment. It’s bad chess, the way they ponder, then make their moves. I’ve never been any good at games, indoor or outdoor.

Now the kind of chess a herding dog plays, there’s a game I favor. The Border Collie in the arena had its head so low to the ground while he gave six steers the evil eye that the dog’s jaw was almost in the dirt. The cattle gathered tighter together, then froze as though the dog had cast a spell on them. He might as well have.

My mouth felt dry and bitter. My temples pulsed with pain that drilled straight through to my ponytail, and I was three breaths away from throwing up.

One of the cowboys tapped my arm. I flinched.

He jerked his thumb toward Ol’ Blue and nodded in a way that made his thick mustache and giant, joined-together eyebrows seem alive. “’Scuse me. You came in this morning? Brought that bull that used to go rodeo, did you? Charged a man in Salinas?”

I nodded, not seeing it necessary to say how I came to be hauling Dragoon. If the beast sold, he’d no longer be my concern.

The man bounced his unibrow and gave a crooked grin. It seemed one of us thought this might be the start of a beautiful daylong relationship. “That bull really unridden?”

I nodded again. So did the other fellow, a lanky wisp of a man, as he stepped closer to my rig and gave it a good going-over with his eyeballs. I still needed to hitch up Hollis Nunn’s stock trailer to Ol’ Blue but decided that could wait. Ol’ Blue’s much more maneuverable when not hauling.

My hope for the killer bull was that he’d be bought by someone who would be safe and maybe get him in a breeding program or at least a serious set of pipe corrals. Though I’d seen Dragoon’s respect for a fence, it still gave me the creeps for him to be contained in anything less than could stop a truck. The bull’s value was as wild as his nature. Whether Dragoon got tried again for rodeo—a deadly idea if ever there was one—used for breeding, or made into rank meat was for his future buyer to choose. It wasn’t the nicest thought to wander through my skull, but then, I wasn’t interested in ruminating on the bull. Right then, Charley was all that mattered to me. Maybe after I found my dog, I’d get serious about who hit me, stolen my tools, and moved my truck, then I’d deal with the bull. My head kept throbbing and I felt half-starved, but I would have barfed if I’d tried to eat.

The cowpoke with the face caterpillars was still staring at Ol’ Blue. I guessed what he was thinking on. Dale’s Horseshoeing, my out-of-state plate, and out-of-state phone number on the truck door. Ooh, he saw himself a real live woman horseshoer. Yippee.

After the hairy half-cowboy left, probably hoping to eye the famous killer bull up close and personal, I thought of what had been in the trailer, too.

Naturally, I swiveled my noggin and accidentally met the look sent my way, a dip of a cowboy hat that had been trained on me over a hundred yards away by the heavy pipe corral where my morning cargo waited. Dragoon swung his head, snot flying, then circled in the stunted freedom that didn’t suit him. He took a mean lap around the dusty corral, pawing and threatening the world in a way that would have let me feel his power vibrating through the earth if I’d been closer to him.

“He farts sparks,” one rail-sitting dude shouted to another as they studied Dragoon.

I didn’t know if farting sparks was a good thing or a bad thing. Looking over at them didn’t help me figure much out except that the sandy-haired one needed time in a barber’s chair to keep that straw cowboy hat on better. He was eyeballing another couple of good old boys yonder who were checking out Dragoon.

The security guard for the sale showed up, blue uniform and all, and asked me what happened. He looked to be about thirty with an IQ of not quite triple his age. This grassy area by the bulletin board wasn’t private enough to suit me. Though the cowboys had left to ogle Dragoon at closer range, I could still see the flirty one looking my way, and I was working to not meet his smoky, brow-and-mustache-framed gaze, lest he feel invited back over.

“My dog’s missing, and some of my stuff was stolen. Someone hit me, truck-jacked me, and dumped me twenty-some-odd miles up the road.” My hand went to the back of my head. It was tender, felt thick and mushy, but since the lump was in my hair, I didn’t have a nice bruise to impress the security guard or a cop. I didn’t have squat.

After I told him my complaint, he wanted a real good description of who hit me.

“I think he was wearing jeans.”

Mr. Security Guard stared pointedly in every direction. I didn’t need to look to know what he saw.

No one wasn’t wearing jeans.

Finally, he tried again. “But you know it was a man, not a woman who hit you?”

I shook my head the two centimeters that didn’t make my nausea worse. “I really couldn’t say.”

“Well, your description eliminates anyone in slacks or a skirt, which is no one around here. Follow me?”

“I think I might. You’re saying you can’t help me.”

“’Fraid so.”

“Then I have to wait for a real cop to come fingerprint my truck?”

“Trucks don’t have fingerprints.” He grimaced and shook his head, like a man who was standing before a most simple woman. Then he sighed mightily and said he could call for a police officer to come talk to me.

The security fellow used his cell phone, worked to convince a dispatcher that I needed a deputy then told them I’d be waiting by the corkboard at the sale grounds.

I stared at the board’s older posts above today’s standings of how the dogs exhibiting at the sale competition had placed.

Maybe it’s just bad luck that my eyeballs happened to settle over a dog’s picture on a weathered flyer for stud services. I wished he hadn’t looked so much like a puffed-up, younger version of Charley. This was a yellow Aussie stud dog, Champion Beaumont’s Wild Firestarter, C.D.X., H.D. II, blah blah. Crying wouldn’t help, but this dog picture set me to thinking. Some stupid part of my brain—and there are a few—wondered what would happen if I couldn’t get Charley back. Would he wander and wonder why I didn’t come for him, why I’d left him and wouldn’t be his friend anymore? Was he hungry and alone and scared like he’d been when I found him? We’ve had great times together, helped heal each other. He’s family. He’s the one who okayed Guy, for the sake of all that’s good.

I got my day planner from Ol’ Blue, ripped a blank page from the back, and scribbled down the date, my cell number, the phone number at home, and Charley’s description. At the top and bottom, I wrote big.

Missing Dog. Reward.

I took five of my business cards and wrote an abbreviated version: Missing yellow Aussie. Reward. And I pinned it all to the weather-bubbled bulletin board next to offered flyers for hay sales and livestock of all kinds. Below the stud dog Aussie picture was a page about a missing teenage girl, a runaway who was considered endangered.

Would Charley be considered endangered? Brokenhearted, at least, like me. Beside the full-page flyer for the girl hung another, though it was not protected in plastic, not in color, and not official-looking with phone numbers for the local police who still hadn’t showed up at the sale grounds to help me. The weather-bubbled flyer by my scrap note and business cards asked for information on a man, and the photo looked oddly familiar.

The security guard flicked a glance at the poster of the missing man.

“That case,” he said, tut-tutting with a shoulder-sagging sigh. “Yeah, that Arriaga character’s in town again, I heard.”

“Arriaga.” Was that the name of the fellow with the white rental car? He’d seen my truck go missing, which meant he’d been close to my disappeared dog. That joker had been way too handy to my being attacked, way too weird about where my truck had been driven off to.

He’d shushed me when I’d hollered for Charley. Had he been about to do something and I scared him off? Had he changed his mind just because I was yelling? What would he have done to me if I hadn’t walked away?

“That fellow was there,” I said, “after I was attacked or at least when I got dumped on a back road. He got me into his car when I was pretty out of it. See, I woke up on a dirt road a convenient half-mile or so from my stolen truck.”

“You should talk to the cop about that when he gets here.”

“What’s the story with that Arriaga dude?”

“He pops into town now and again, pisses people off, leaves.”

“That’s his job, huh?”

“Seems to be.”

“How long’s that been his thing?”

“Oh, a year, year-and-a-half now. It’s getting old.”

I nodded. It had gotten old with me in a lot less than a year. “He’s missing someone?”

“So he says.”

“This place seems to be a Bermuda Triangle of sorts.”

“Begging your pardon there, young lady. I don’t know of any aircraft down in the area.”

“No, I was thinking of my dog and my tools and, for a while there, my truck. And someone in that Arriaga dude’s family.”

If only the rent-a-cop had more enthusiasm. If only someone else at the sale grounds stepped forward as a witness to what happened to me. If only I’d taken note of exactly where Ol’ Blue had been. If only the rent-a-cop hadn’t muttered in Spanish to a man who walked up and interrupted.

After they had said their piece, He-Who-Hadn’t-Helped-Me gave me one order as he moseyed off to watch steers or dogs or drink a soda and enjoy a hot dog or four while I hadn’t had so much as a Milk Dud all day.

“You wait here,” he said, holding up his palm for me to fully comprehend his stay command. “Don’t leave. Wait by your truck.”

I reconsidered the cluttered bulletin board. Just a thick cork veneer glued onto the plywood sheets. Some of the ads were yellowed and tattered, some leafed over each other and some were spanking new, laminated. Business cards were pinned all over, too.

Horseshoeing. Reasonable rates. Call now. Robbie Duffman.

The notice was fresh, handwritten on a plain sheet of paper. I wondered if Robbie Duffman was a new shoer.

New shoers need tools.

Only a shoer or at least a horseman handy with the tools of my trade would have stolen tools out of Ol’ Blue. And whoever did that had first conked me in the head and stolen my truck and dog.

My morning sounded like a bad country song. Felt like one, too.

I wrote Duffman’s number down and told myself to check on every single shoer I could find for however long I had to be here. And then I looked more carefully at the old photo of the missing man. Middle-aged, grinning in a meadow, a dog leaning against his leg. I wouldn’t have remembered the name of the fellow who’d tried to show me that picture, but the same name was there, on the poster.

Arriaga.

Vicente Arriaga was missing, and any information would be rewarded.

I put my fingertips on the picture of the missing man, let my thumb slip off the photo. Swallowed and stared.

Charley sat beside him, leaning against Vicente Arriaga’s leg, smiling up at him, ready to work woolies. My Charley.

No way was I going to stand here waiting for a cop.

***

A California Highway Patrol officer flipped on lights and siren as soon as Ol’ Blue rolled within sight of the ranch.

The cop did not come up to the window like normal.

His PA squawked orders.

“Driver, exit your vehicle with your hands in the air, facing away from me.”

Really? I sat there for a second, thinking about the unlikeliness of pretty much everything that had happened today. The cop repeated the command over his PA and added, “Do it now.”

I unbuckled my seat belt, creaked Ol’ Blue’s driver door open, then stepped into the sun, making shadow puppets with my arms extended as ordered. Behind me, the black silhouette of a cop came up, gun in hand.