Steven Havill: Out of Season

“Now what the hell?” Johnny Boyd said, and he started toward the dozer. The rest of us followed.

We had fifty yards to cover, but Edwin Boyd took that long to dismount. He managed to step to earth at the same time we reached the dozer. He leaned heavily against the massive tread of the old machine and tried to light a cigarette. I could see his hands shaking, and he was gulping air.

“Just take it easy, Edwin,” I said. “We’re here now.” His chest was heaving, and for a moment, I thought he would pitch forward on his face, taking all his answers with him.

He gave up finally, sitting on the cleats with lighter in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring at the ground. “Take your time,” Neil Costace said. “Just breathe deep and take your time.”

Johnny Boyd reached out and took Edwin by the left shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Ed. Talk to me now.”

Edwin Boyd shrugged as if he had no idea of where to start, and it was Estelle Reyes-Guzman who helped him into gear. “Is this where it’s buried, Edwin?” she asked, and his immediate nod was one of relief.

“You dig down three foot right here,” he said, swinging a finger to trace the rip he’d made, “and you’ll find one of them little foreign jobs. Roof’s caved in, and she’s kinda flat from having seven tons drove over her a few times, but it’s there.”

“Are you talking about a car?” Johnny Boyd asked incredulously.

Edwin nodded.

“Well, shit, whose car is it?” Costace asked.

“Belongs to a couple of hunters,” Edwin muttered.

“And they’re still in the car,” Estelle added for him, and he nodded.

“Sure as hell are. You dig down right here and you’ll find ’em.”

“Finnegan buried them?” I asked.

“Sure enough did.” He took a long, shuddering breath and held it for several seconds, finally letting it go with a little gasp. “I guess I had the bad luck to happen on him just as he was finishing up. About three weeks ago. I came over to fetch some tools from that toolbox up on the dozer. I didn’t see much, but I saw enough. Saw part of the car roof, and through the back window, or where the back window used to be. Saw a hand.”

“Did Finnegan see you?”

“He did. Don’t think he knew that I saw the hand. Told me it was an old junker and that he was gettin’ rid of it long as he had a hole. I made the mistake of sayin’ something like ‘Pretty fancy paint for an old junker,’ and he told me to just forget it. Then I said something like, ‘Looks like you’re gettin’ yourself quite a herd of antelope boxed in here,’ and I guess that was the wrong thing to say, too. He got all huffy and told me to mind my own business.” Edwin took another deep breath. “Pond, hell. That’s what he was doing, is burying that car, and whoever was in it.”

“The pond didn’t make any sense from the very beginning,” Estelle said. “For one thing, he’d already scavenged the windmill pump, and so digging a new pond without the pump didn’t make sense. And he’d started his project to run pipe from the Forest Service spring on Cat Mesa to a stock tank that’s almost a mile east of here.” She looked at me and shook her head. “It didn’t make any sense that he’d all of a sudden spend his time digging a hole for a day or two, way over here, and then just as quickly give up.” She turned back to Edwin. “Do you know who might have been in the car, Edwin?”

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.”

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.