Left Hanging (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

THE NIGHT’S RODEO had been over for hours. We rolled right up to the entrance.

I’d tried to persuade Tom and Mike that I should come alone, since Watt had said he had something to tell
me
because he
didn’t hold with that sort of thing.
He wouldn’t elaborate on the phone. Said he’d tell me when I came. Paycik said no way was I doing this alone. Burrell said his truck was behind my car, and he wasn’t moving it. Paycik drove all of us in his four-wheel-drive.

The number of protestors had swelled with the Fourth of July nearing and the news coverage of Landry’s death. But they were clearly off-duty, sitting in rackety lawn chairs around small fires contained in cut-off barrels. Some were roasting marshmallows.

In the prime spot closest to the gates were the familiar faces of the original group. I waved.

Mr. and Mrs. Gray-Hair waved back with smiles. Ellie and Pauline, the protestor previously known as Ms. Blue Hair, gave me nearly identical scowls. Roy Craniston gave me the finger.

As we pulled past the protestors, a small truck heading out slowed to clear the gates.

“Vicky and Heather,” Mike said from the driver’s seat.

I turned, caught a glimpse of mother and daughter looking straight ahead, not acknowledging us or any protestors.

Mike pulled into a spot between a rusted pickup and a motorhome that out-swanked the presidential palace of several countries I’ve been in.

“Stay in the car, you two,” I ordered as I reached for the door handle.

“No way,” Burrell said from the back seat.

“There are lots of people around. I’ll be fine.”

“Wonder if Landry thought that,” Mike contributed.

“Watt won’t show himself, much less talk to me, with you two lumbering along.”

“You said he sounded like he’d been drinking,” Mike said grimly. “Lowers inhibitions.”

“So he’ll talk more. Which is exactly what happened with you, right, Burrell? Watt’s your source you don’t trust on the bribe.”

“Yeah.”

“See?”

“Alcohol can also lower other inhibitions,” he added.

“See?” Mike retorted.

“Oh, c’mon, Evan Watt?”

“Hey, he took part in Landry’s sleazy dealings with women a number of times we know of. Who knows what else he did. And this place is emptying out fast.”

“I’ll be fine.” If Watt talked, we’d have absolute confirmation that Landry set up these women. I got out. They each did the same. “This is ridiculous. Do you have any idea the places I’ve been?”

“With a camera crew and bodyguards,” Paycik shot back.

Not always. I started off, and they started behind me like big, cowboy-hatted shadows.

I stopped, hissed, “Stay back. Don’t let him see you,” and started again.

“Do not get out of our sight,” ordered Burrell.

Watt had said to meet him by the concession stand. Just this side of it were the easternmost pens, with an alley left between them and the grandstand structure. The animals from this first tic-tac-toe column were gone, likely back in their distant, more spacious pens for the night. Their odor lingered, no doubt from agricultural byproducts. Judging from some faint sounds, animals remained in pens farther to the west.

I turned my back on the pens, focusing on the concession stand.

Watt had said he had something to tell me—needed to get it off his chest was how he’d put it. My logic said it was not to confess to murdering Landry. My logic said Watt was not dangerous. My heartbeat wasn’t convinced.

The wait didn’t help. I must have stood there half an hour—or at least ten minutes.

Maybe he’d seen my bodyguards, though I couldn’t see them in the shadows.

Maybe he’d changed his mind.

Maybe he’d had more to drink and wasn’t mobile.

Maybe—

I heard something behind me. Not close. I spun around, staring toward the sound. Through the shadows, I caught a glimpse of motion, down close to the arena. Something moving slowly, even stealthily, from east to west, probably along the open path between the pens and the arena chutes. I moved cautiously into the more deeply shadowed alley, with the grandstand on my left and the empty pens on my right, heading toward the arena, closing in on the figure.

It stilled, and so did I. Waiting.

It started again. If there’d been an aisle leading to the west that paralleled the figure’s path, I would have followed it, but there wasn’t. Our paths were at right angles, but I was moving faster, cutting the distance.

I was maybe twenty feet away when the figure seemed to look up the alley. I stopped, not wanting my motion to catch attention.

The figure moved again. A slant of light from a distant security pole gave me a second’s impression of size, shape, and walk. Possibly Evan Watt. Or not.

I’d started moving when the figure’s head jerked around—toward me? I couldn’t tell. And I didn’t stop to consider it, because the figure was running to the west. I ran, too. Down the rest of my aisle, a right-hand turn to follow the figure along the corridor between the chutes and pens. My flats slid on the dirt, as they had at Newtons’ ranch. I should have worn my still stinky shoes.

I saw the figure in front of me.

And then I didn’t.

I kept moving, now just past the end of the arena, reaching the spot where I thought I’d last seen him.

Straight ahead was the truncated wooden arch structure and the police-taped crime scene. To the left were the timed event boxes attached to the western end of the arena. To the right was another alley parallel to the one I’d come down, this one with pens on both sides. On the alley’s east side, the pens were empty, on the west side, judging by the sound, animals were being held.

I had nothing to go on. Nothing. No movement. No sound, except the animals. Surely they would’ve reacted to an interloper.

I’d lost him.

Then I heard it. Clanking that announced something was happening with a section of portable fence. It came from the alley to my right, back among the pens. I ran toward the noise.

I spotted a figure ahead, atop fencing that formed the right boundary of this alley. It turned toward me, then dropped out of sight on the far side, into one of the empty pens.

“Watt! Evan Watt! Wait! I want to talk to you.”

I reached the same spot and started up the fence, catching glimpses of the figure running diagonally across the pen.

From my perch, I saw that portable panels blocked the end of the alley that usually opened up to the rest of the grounds, creating a deadend. I also saw the figure reach the far fence and start climbing. The narrow-waisted back and cowboy hat stood out as a darker silhouette against the sky’s faint lightness for an instant.

I dropped into the empty pen and ran. Climbing the far fence, though, I saw the figure’s diagonal path across the next empty pen now angled back toward the alley, completing the first zig of a potential zig-zag route.

I followed. But I was losing ground. My flats gave me no purchase on the ground or the panels’ rungs.

Climbing as fast as I could, I spotted the figure at the fence on the far side of the alley. So not zig-zag. What was he doing?

I dropped from the fence back into the alley. This time, my tired legs sent me stumbling forward and down hard on my knees. I scrambled up, refusing to consider agricultural byproducts left by previous passers-by as I brushed off my hands without slowing my angled route toward where the figure disappeared.

I heard a metallic clank from behind my left shoulder and some distance back down the alley, like someone messing with panels, followed by yelling in an unidentifiable voice.

But that didn’t hold my interest long. Because then I heard something else.

Something living and breathing. Breathing with a low, asthmatic rumble.

Something on the move and headed right toward me.

I ran.

DAY SEVEN

WEDNESDAY

Chapter Thirty-Three

I DIDN’T TURN my head, because I didn’t need to see them to know what was coming at me. I heard them and smelled them. I also felt the vibrations through the ground as their hooves hit.

By instinct I started running toward my destination—the spot where the figure had disappeared.

Two steps in, and a shout came from my right. “Elizabeth! This way!” Mike.

I caught a glimpse of two figures silhouetted atop the fence farther down the alley and on the right side.

“Here!” came a second voice. Tom.

Even as I turned toward them, trying to run despite the thick, slippery ground, one figure dropped down, no longer silhouetted.

“Here!” shouted Tom again. Closer.

His hand closed around my arm, swinging me almost off my feet, toward the fence.

“Up! Climb up!”

I grabbed for a rail, tried to get a foothold, but my shoe slid off it. Tried again. Got up one rail, a second.

The thunder came nearer and nearer.

From above, I felt Mike pulling my arms and shoulders. A hand on my butt pushed me hard, and I was hooked over the top rail.

Mike grabbed my leg and pulled it over and around, shifting my center of gravity. Now if I fell off the fence, I’d fall into the empty pen, not the alley.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I panted. “But—”

He was gone. He’d dropped down into the empty pen. Tom was still in the alley with the bulls.

And now I could just barely see, from my position hanging over the top rail like a useless old rug, that he stood with his back to me, waving both arms—one extended by his cowboy hat—and shouting. He was a good three feet away from the fence.

“Tom! Get out of there!” I shouted. It was lost amid the other sounds. “Tom!”

The first bulls came up, shifting away from the human waving and shouting. But I’d seen video of Pamplona. Not all the bulls would be that polite. And as the bulk of them reached this spot there wouldn’t be anywhere for them to shift to.

“Tom!”

Another voice shouted his name, too. “Tom! Now!”

Tom seemed to launch himself at the fence. Not at the section where I still hung, but the next one nearer to where the bulls were coming from. He didn’t make any effort to climb. Why didn’t he climb? He had to—

“Up!” I shouted—I saw a dark mass coming—“Tom!”

For an instant, the fence seemed to disappear, then I heard a slam, felt the reverberation through the rail I still clung to, and he was gone. Nowhere.

“It’s okay! It worked.” It was Mike. Below me, catching me around the middle, half lifting, half assisting me down.

“Tom?”

“He’s right here.”

And he was. Standing in front of me. The faint light adding caverns to that Abraham Lincoln face no longer shadowed by a hat brim.

“Lost my damned hat,” he said.

I sat down. Hard.

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” Not the first time I’d said it.

My knees were doing a decent job of holding me up. Now. Mike had wrapped his arms around me and hauled me up from the ground earlier, and I hadn’t objected that he hadn’t let go right away, leading me to the open area just past the pens, with the rodeo office diagonally to our right and the permanent fence Mike and I had sat on diagonally to our left.

My hands shook slightly. My breath wasn’t even. I refused to consider the agricultural byproducts that my senses told me clung to my jeans. Although some of the smell might have come from the bulls now peacefully milling in the fenced-in alley behind us. They needed a breath mint the size of Lake Michigan.

A half dozen new figures had arrived, apparently drawn by the noise. They asked if everything was okay, offered help, and demanded to know what happened. Most appeared to be cowboys staying on the grounds in vehicles parked on the far side of the open area. I didn’t recognize any. Certainly none was Evan Watt.

“When you took off,” Mike said, with disapproval vibrating in his wonderful TV voice, “we lost you for a while. It was only when we heard the fence rattling that we realized where you were.”

That must have been the illusive figure’s noise
 . . .
which also stirred up the bulls. Started to stir them up.

“Someone shouted,” I said.

“We heard,” Mike said grimly. “Tom kept the lead bulls to the other side, to give you a chance to get up. Once we had you out of there, I went and undid the fastenings between the next two panels and swung one side in—didn’t want to do the near end, because the bulls would’ve streamed out. But doing that end meant they’d have to make a U-turn to get out.”

I put a hand on the nearest arm of each of them. “You—you both
 . . .
You two were—” I couldn’t get anything else out.

Mike put his hand over mine and squeezed.

Tom leaned forward and said, “You ever take off like that again, and we’ll leave you to the damned bulls.”

Paycik laughed.

I snatched my hands back, but Burrell and Paycik were saved from more when shouts reached us from opposite directions.

Two figures were coming toward us from our left, from the direction of the arena, coming up the next open aisle among the back pens. And they were shouting something about the bulls.

A lone cowboy was coming from the direction of the rodeo office to our right. He had more ground to cover, and his shouts weren’t words yet.

“What about the bulls?” demanded Tom of the figures coming from the arena.

“The gate that should’ve kept them out of the alley is wide open. Wide open!” As he neared, I recognized the irate speaker as Oren Street. “Never should have been that way. Never seen it that way. Don’t know why it would be that way. It was like somebody swung ’er open and ran off. Never seen anything like it, I tell you. And then to have the end blocked off that way—it’s crazy.”

Tom asked a technical question about the gates, but my mind had jumped ahead.

Two people working together? Or was the figure I’d chased innocent—at least of this—and the bull-looser had grabbed the opportunity. Had the target been me? Or the running figure? Was that why the figure was running?

Street’s words caught my attention again. “Bulls shouldn’t’ve been there at all. Watt was supposed to have moved ’em on back. I heard the regular contractor give him the job. Don’t know what’s wrong with that no-good, broke-down excuse of a cowboy. Even if it wasn’t my bulls this time, there’s no trusting him anymore. I’m telling you right now. Evan Watt—”

“. . . Evan Watt!” came the shout of the cowboy approaching from the right, just now near enough to hear. He shouted more, but it was lost among questions and comments by the gathered cowboys.

“Quiet!” Mike commanded in a voice that needed no microphone. “What about Watt?”

The cowboy, coming to a panting stop, got out, “Needs help. Zane said
 . . .
get help.”

“Where?” came from all the cowboys.

“Behind office. Trees. Creek.”

Mike started in that direction. Tom grabbed the newcomer by the arm and followed, demanding, “Show us.”

The rest of us strung out as our speed—or lack of it—dictated. Having already put in an all-out sprint, along with fence-climbing tonight, I was at the back of the pack.

Past the rodeo office, the scene resembled an anthill in the dark. Figures ran toward a large dark shape near the trees where Linda and I had sat this evening. Other figures, who must have heard the alarm first, were now running away from the trees, apparently going after more help.

As I neared the trees, stumbling over unlit and uneven ground, I heard engines behind, and headlights came on from trucks being driven toward the center of activity. So that must be what people had been running to do, to bring trucks to provide needed light. I changed my path to get out of the way for the first truck. Its lights showed the back of an old pickup with a camper shell at the center of activity.

A figure froze at the left edge of the light. A man in partial light, maybe twenty feet in front of me, went to his knees at the pickup’s bumper, shouting something about
out
, his head turned toward that frozen figure.

Then the figure moved. Slipping away into the darkness.

A second truck adding its light made the man at the bumper identifiable as Oren Street and made sense of his motions—he pulled at something stuck in the tailpipe, struggling in the shadow cast by his body.

“Help me with this! I can’t seem to get the duct tape off.” he called. His earlier shout must have been a plea for help to get the thing out of the tailpipe—a hose, I realized, and started reaching for my phone as I jogged closer.

Stan Newton passed Street by, shambling toward the driver’s door, but Cas stopped. Stared for a heartbeat, then knelt beside Street.

Against a backdrop of confused calls of “Get him out! Get him out!” and conflicting orders, another truck pulled in with its headlights pointed at the front of the old pickup. It illuminated Grayson Zane and Mike heading toward the passenger door. A sound had me wondering for a split second if it had started to rain. No. Glass shattering. They’d broken the passenger window.

Zane reached in. The door opened.

I pulled up, hitting 911 on my phone.

RICHARD ALVARO proved he knew his community that night. He went where the people were. He established his incident room in an unused office near the hospital waiting room. Every soul who’d been on the rodeo grounds, along with a couple dozen more Sherman residents, showed up in the waiting room. It looked like a convention of black cowboy hats.

Alvaro also proved he was a humanitarian by letting me go home to change and shower before questioning me—but only after getting initial information from Mike, Tom, and me that we’d been together for all but a brief time.

“And we heard her floundering around for some of that,” said Burrell.

I was too tired to even glare at him.

Even that alibi didn’t prevent Alvaro from having Deputy Shelton drive me home and wait in my living room while I showered and changed. He also let me put out fresh water and food for Shadow, since I didn’t know when I’d be back.

Shelton put all my dirty clothes in paper bags, which was more than a little creepy. But I couldn’t fault Alvaro for being thorough.

When we came back to the hospital, Jenks was getting into his KWMT four-wheel-drive. He
was
in Fine’s doghouse to be called out at this time of night for a few general shots.

Under those circumstances, it was considerate of him to first ask me how I was before complaining about the crappy assignment.

Inside the waiting room, I saw Heather and her mother had arrived, sitting across from Stan Newton. Needham Bender was taking notes as he talked with a man I recognized as a rodeo committee member. Linda Caswell had been there when I left and was still there, along with Street, Zane, and all the others.

As Shelton and I came in, Cas Newton entered from the opposite side with a tray of Styrofoam coffee cups. I crossed the room to intercept him before he got in amongst the chairs and couches.

“Was it you?” I demanded.

“Was what me?” This kid didn’t lie worth shit. No wonder Heather had known he was cheating with Pauline.

“Who led me into the ambush.”

“Ambush? I don’t know anything about—”

“You were skulking around the pens, and you ran when I called to you.”

“No,” he said.

“Thanks. I’ve got all I need.” I pivoted and went to where Mike had made room for me on a couch.

His raised eyebrows asked the question.

“He says no, but he’s lying. He was the runner,” I said just above a murmur. “Probably heading for a visit to his little friend.” Who was not present, I realized. “But probably not involved with the ambush.”

In an equally low voice, he said, “Richard’s talking to Tom now. No update on Watt.”

But it was no secret what had happened to him, not with a dozen and a half witnesses who’d seen the set-up as they helped get him out.

He’d been found in the locked cab of his pickup, with a hose roughly duct-taped to the exhaust pipe and fed in through a back window.

Breaking the passenger window and dragging him out to fresh air might have saved his life—too soon to tell—but it would have been moot if the pickup hadn’t run out of gas and stopped pumping carbon monoxide into the cab before it was spotted.

The truck was spotted by Grayson and the messenger cowboy I now knew was named Bucky. Bucky had just arrived in Sherman, having driven in from another rodeo. They’d encountered each other near the office and were passing the time of day—or night—when Zane spotted the pickup, off by itself. He’d ordered Bucky to get help, and he’d run to the pickup.

“Why?” I asked Alvaro, when I was called in to give my account after Burrell.

“Why? No, never mind that. I’m asking the—”

I overrode his objection. “Why did Zane treat it as an emergency immediately?”

“It
was
an emergency.”