Cal knew as soon as he pulled up in front of his own ranch that something was very wrong. And it had nothing to do with the fact that Jesse was refusing to speak to him either. It was more to do with the strange eighteen-wheeler parked out in the wet field almost beyond his line of sight from the front yard of the ranch house.
It was still raining hard. The sky was pitch-black. Any light that might have come from the full moon was utterly hidden behind the clouds. There was no help to be had right now. And perhaps it might have made more sense to go investigate in the morning, except for the fact that stolen cattle and horses had been appearing and disappearing all over the Hernandez property for the last month.
The Hernandez Land & Cattle Company could not afford to have any more doubt thrown on the ownership of their livestock. The doubt in the mind of the inspectors and officials in the region had already cost the company a lucrative contract. Or rather, it had caused the delay of the announcement of who had actually won the contract. Cal refused to let the problem get worse.
With that in mind, he flung the gearshift of his truck into park. He shut off the engine and bolted from the driver’s seat. There was a four-wheeler sitting right inside the machine shed. Cal straddled the ATV and pressed the start button. He reached for the helmet hanging on the right handle. The rain was going to make it impossible to see anyway. He might as well try to save himself a face full of water.
The ATV roared to life, and Cal shot out of the machine shed as though he were chasing a fire. He needed to get down there and see what was going on before the truck decided to try and exit the pasture. The sheer stupidity of a semi-truck in a wet pasture was not lost on him. He wouldn’t be surprised if the guy just point-blank tried to say he was lost.
The wet grass shot up around the four-wheeler’s tires. Mud and debris covered Cal’s calves as he raced toward the truck. The diesel engine was humming, which meant the truck was running. But what was it doing there?
“Hey!” Cal shouted.
He could see someone getting out of the truck. In fact, there were two people in the vehicle. They weren’t familiar, but the weather was bad enough that Cal wouldn’t have been able to recognize his own brothers out here.
“Hey!” Cal waved his hand at the men. “What the hell are you doing? You’re going to tear up my…”
Cal was too late to stop what was coming. The diesel engine went from a low hum to a thundering rumble. As Cal rode his four-wheeler up to the truck, it lurched into motion. That movement was short-lived however. The wet grass soon became water-soaked clay as the vehicle bogged down almost immediately in the pasture.
Stopping the four-wheeler directly in front of the engine, Cal looked up at the cab of the truck and waited. They could not just sit in there and expect nothing to happen. Could they? The rain began to taper. Thank God! Perhaps they weren’t going to drown after all.
The pattering of water on Cal’s helmet stopped. He reached up and pulled it off. Lifting it above his head, he waved it back and forth in front of the truck until he finally heard the driver’s side door open. The truck was humming still, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
“Hey!” the driver called down to Cal. “We’re lost. We got off the road we were headed down, and now I can’t get out of here to deliver this stock.”
“Oh, really?” Cal tried not to laugh out loud. It was pretty much exactly as he’d expected. “I can get a tractor to pull you out, but I’m not going to do it until morning. I’m not ripping up my pasture just because you took money from Paul Weatherby at the Flying W to deliver a bunch of livestock that doesn’t belong to one of us.”
“Huh?” The guy looked totally confused.
Cal pointed to the trailer. “Where are you supposed to dump the stock?”
“Oh. Uh.” The man was rubbing the back of his neck.
The misting rain began to pick up just a little. There were tiny drops falling once again, but the clouds were breaking up. Soon there would be enough moonlight to see what logos were all over that truck. Cal had a feeling there was a big fat W somewhere on that trailer.
“Yeah. I figured,” Cal shouted. “So, basically, you’re supposed to dump this livestock on my property. Did you pick it up here?”
“Man, I just do the driving, all right?” The trucker was looking distinctly uncomfortable. “I don’t know where it comes from. You don’t argue with Weatherby.”
Cal cocked his head. “You on probation?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because Weatherby has a habit of hiring guys to work for the Flying W who are on probation for minor offenses. Then he twists their arm and puts them in uncomfortable situations.”
“Oh.” The guy seemed to be trying to decide something. He ducked back into the cab, and Cal could hear a heated discussion between the two men. Finally, the driver popped back out onto the gas tank of the semi-truck. “I don’t know where these came from. I didn’t pick them up. My co-pilot says they came from here. He was riding shotgun on that trip too.”
“Let me have a look!” Cal shouted.
He dismounted the four-wheeler and tried not to curse as his boots squished in the muddy grass. Cowboy boots could handle some wet weather. Beyond that, they got as slimy and gross as the ground they were standing on. Cal squelched his way around the truck toward the side of the trailer. He grabbed the sides and peered in. The stench was odd. It didn’t smell like the usual livestock hauler. There was something almost acidic about the warm air rolling out of this thing. Cal chocked it up to the extreme rain, but regardless of whom these animals belonged to, they needed to get out of here. The rolling white eyes of the cattle inside could have belonged to any ranch on the front range or perhaps anywhere in the West. There were some steers and some calves. But then Cal caught sight of a huge bull with a crooked horn.
“Brutus,” Cal grunted. “Son of a bitch!”
Brutus was one of their ranch bulls and had a very strong track record of throwing some pretty spectacular bucking stock. Cal hadn’t spotted him in the pasture for the last few days but had figured that was more due to the recent bout of wet weather. The bull tended to hole up in a nice warm draw where he wouldn’t get his lazy hide wet. Apparently, that wasn’t quite what had happened.
Cal jumped away from the trailer. He didn’t care what else was in there. He wanted that bull. Losing Brutus would be a very bad thing for the ranch. Cal went to the back of the trailer and began pulling pins. It was wet and gross, and he did not care to imagine how much muck he was getting on his gloves. But this was most certainly his stock. He could leave them in this pasture for tonight and have the ranch hands move and sort them in the morning. The biggest thing would be recording the event so that Cal could not be accused of having stolen stock on his property.
“Weatherby made a big mistake this time,” Cal muttered. “Brutus is eight years old. He’s been on this ranch since he was born, and everyone in the damned county knows he belongs to us and isn’t for sale.”
The thought actually cheered Cal up. Maybe this was the turning point in the whole mess. The first wave of stock clattered and slid down the ramp as they exited the livestock hauler and headed for the grass. It was obvious that this stock had come from the Hernandez ranch. They didn’t wait one single second between getting off that trailer and heading for what would be dry land in the trees on the north side of this home pasture. Their progress looked a bit unsteady and perhaps even drunk. There was no telling how long the poor bastards had been on that trailer.
“Hey!” The trucker looked as though he were trying to avoid getting off the truck. He hung as far out of the cab as he could as he tried to spot Cal. “What are you doing?”
“This is my stock!” Cal told him. The last calf exited the upper tier, and Cal prepared to open the bottom of the hauler. “You’ve got one of my prize bulls in there.”
“Oh.” That seemed to mollify the trucker. The guy was probably just hoping he wasn’t going to get in trouble at this point. “So, you want them here, then?”
“Hell yes!” Cal growled. “I’m not letting that Flying W bastard mess with my bull any more than he already has.”
Cal grumbled to himself about asshole ranching neighbors and the indignity of not being able to turn your back on your stock lest it disappear. Finally, the steers on the lower level of the truck bolted from their confinement and headed up the hill after the others. This was going to be a hell of a mess in the morning. These thefts had always been random. It was as if Weatherby were trying to cast doubt on the ownership of every single variety of stock that was bred on the Hernandez property. At this point, Cal could only be glad that Brutus was a very mellow bull. There were no actual cows in there to drive him crazy, and he was pretty tolerant of calves as long as they didn’t try to steal food from what he considered his due.
Brutus was the last one off the truck. He lumbered down the ramp and hit the ground with a grunt and a lurch that nearly sent him to his knees. Cal wished he had a halter or something to catch the critter. He wanted to look him over. The bull looked a little odd. But Brutus knew where the warm dry spots on the ranch were just as well as the other stock. In moments, he was wandering away toward the hill with his head swinging side to side and his bent horn brushing the tall grass beside him as he staggered toward fresh forage and a dry place to hole up for the night.
Cal closed up the truck. There was still that niggling problem about getting the stupid thing out of his pasture. He was taking it for granted that the trucker hadn’t taken down half of Cal’s fence on his way in. Cal was thinking they’d used the back access road and then just decided to try and unload here before turning around. Then the weather had turned bad, and the plan hadn’t quite gone the way they’d expected.
That was when Cal really started thinking about the eighteen-wheeler in his pasture. He banged on the driver’s door. The window went down this time, and in the dim light of the dash, Cal was certain that he’d never seen the driver before in his life.
“You’re all clear,” Cal told the man.
The guy actually looked relieved. Maybe he knew more than he was letting on and wasn’t exactly on board with his participation. Who knew? “Good. So, this is your stock, right?”
“I’m sure of it. Yes.” Cal cocked his head. “Want to tell me how you knew that I was unlikely to be here right now?”
“What?” The man looked alarmed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You got a call telling you to drive an eighteen-wheeler over the boundary line between the Flying W and the Hernandez ranch. Right?”
“Uh. Yeah. It was the best way off the back of the Flying W. Over the cattle guard between the ranches. You know?”
“Yeah. I do know.” Cal snorted. He was so sick of this shit with Weatherby. It was going to end even if Cal had to do it the hard way. “So, tell me when you got the call.”
“I don’t know. Five thirty?”
Cal felt sick to his stomach. Paul Weatherby of the Flying W was a dangerous adversary for many reasons. One of them was that he was a captain with the Denver Police Department.
“That bastard was listening to the scanner,” Cal muttered to himself. “He knew my father was rushed to the hospital. He knew I would be gone. It was a perfect opportunity that he just couldn’t afford to let slide.”
But Cal hadn’t played by the rules. He had decided not to stay at the hospital. He’d driven to Denver, but then he had come right back to the ranch. He was glad now that he’d avoided the urge to stay in Denver. He belonged here. The city could do well enough without him.
Cal pointed at the driver. “You wait until it clears enough for you to see where you’re going. Then you get your truck back on that road and head over to Flying W territory. And for your information, the Flying W does not have legal access to the Hernandez side of that road. They take their cattle out the other side of their ranch. They’ve done it that way for sixty years. You got it?”
“I got it!” the driver yelped. “We’ll go. Just as soon as I can get my wheels moving.”
“You got chains?” Cal asked suddenly.
The trucker looked confused. “Chains?”
“Yeah. Snow chains.” Cal waved his hand at the tires on the rig. “I suggest you put them on and get your ass out of here before I change my mind and decide I’m going to use you, your rig, and your friend as evidence against Paul Weatherby.”
Cal didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. The expression on the driver’s face was enough. He would go home, and he would report his trip a success to his boss. That was all that mattered. Cal didn’t really want to destroy the life of some poor trucker who was serving out his probation in what was probably a hell of Paul Weatherby’s making. Cal wanted Paul. He wanted the Flying W on its knees. He wanted that place to go under, and he wanted to pick it up for a song at the bank sale just because he could. Then he would divide it up into tiny little plots of land and sell it to hippies wanting a piece of the front range for their weekend cabins. That was going to be Cal Hernandez’s revenge for all of the bullshit he’d had to put up with since he’d been old enough to know what Paul Weatherby and the Flying W were.