The Big Dark Sky (86)

Oil-stained rats squirmed and wriggled through the tightly packed equipment in the engine compartment. As many as a dozen rats had stripped the insulation from the wiring, gnawed apart the fan belts, worried loose as many connections as they could find. Holes had been eaten through the battery casing from which acid dripped, and two rodents lay death-frozen in convulsive configurations, with plumes of blood-streaked yellow foam issuing from their open mouths. As one, the living vermin raised their slick heads and turned their eyes on Joanna, and she knew that one entity regarded her from those many eyes, the secret friend who was not her friend anymore.

Wyatt slammed the hood shut, and without a word, Joanna went to the control pad and raised the roll-up door.

They met at the threshold, where wind-driven rain snapped against the concrete floor. In the driveway, the Range Rover faced them, the hood raised. Scattered on the pavement were spark plugs, torn fan belts, wires, the preheater hose, the oil-pan cap . . .

A creature far bigger than rats had served as an avatar to tear at the most vulnerable elements of the engine. She thought of her father being thrown from his frightened horse—or dragged out of the saddle to be eviscerated. Either that long-ago executioner or its kin had descended from the high hills tonight, and it was surely nearby in the storm, waiting to be used for bloodier work than disabling a Range Rover.

Wyatt stepped into the rain, evidently to have a closer look at the damage that had been done to the SUV.

“Get back,” Joanna warned. She hurried to the control pad to close the door before some beast might lunge inside and the garage become an abattoir.





75


Vance Potter, who managed Rustling Willows for Liam O’Hara, had spent most of the day at home in Buckleton, doing paperwork, which he enjoyed every bit as much as he enjoyed dental surgery. Numbers didn’t give him trouble; he could keep the books of the ranch better than he kept the Lord’s commandments, though he tried harder on the latter than on the former.

In the late afternoon, Edna, his missus and best friend, got in one of her Food Network moods. Judging by all the noise coming from the kitchen, an entire crew was busy filming an episode of Iron Chef in there. Soon the noise was accompanied by mouthwatering aromas that made it impossible to care about ranch maintenance costs.

On and off all day, he had been thinking about Wyatt Rider, out there at Rustling Willows since early the previous afternoon. He had expected the detective to call him with this and that question, but had heard nothing from him.

When at last he and Edna sat down to a glorious dinner, the conversation eventually turned to the O’Hara family, how they came for their first stay at the ranch and departed hurriedly, in fact seemed to flee, days before they were scheduled to leave. As Vance had shared with Edna previously, he more often than not felt watched when he was at work on the ranch. Eventually it had seemed to him that animals were intrigued by him there as they were nowhere else. A crow, ignoring others of its kind, sometimes followed Vance for an hour or two, winging from fence post to tree branch to roof gutter as he moved about on various tasks. Frequently, he’d seen a coyote observing him from a distance. It didn’t appear to be engaged in stalking behavior; but for a species that tended to shy away from human beings, it was strangely bold. And it wasn’t always the same coyote, as though an entire pack of them must be curious about him. He’d experienced similar encounters with deer and raccoons. He had told only Edna about the mysterious interest in him that Nature’s creatures seemed to have at Rustling Willows. No one but Edna was likely to believe him so readily; he was not even certain of what he’d witnessed or of what it meant, if it meant anything at all.

When this talk of surveillant Nature led to the subject of Wyatt Rider and what he might be hoping to discover at the ranch, what Liam O’Hara might have assigned him to investigate, Edna was surprised to hear that the detective had not contacted Vance even once since meeting him the previous day. “Honey bear, whatever does a private investigator do if he doesn’t investigate, and how can he investigate if he doesn’t ask questions, and who on Earth is there to ask questions of other than your own self when it comes to Rustling Willows? Doesn’t it worry you a mite that you haven’t heard from this man since you left him there yesterday?”

So it was that Vance went to his home office and tried to call the cell number on Wyatt Rider’s business card and then the landline at the ranch, only to be told in both cases that neither number was in service.

Edna was of a mind to call the sheriff’s department and ask a deputy to swing by Rustling Willows to check on Mr. Rider. However, Vance Potter wasn’t easily alarmed, nor was he accustomed to asking others to see to things that were his obligations. In spite of the hour and weather, and though he would have liked to follow his heavy dinner with an equally heavy sleep, he geared up for the rain and set out in his Ford pickup for the ranch.





76


Kenny Deetle wanted the black Suburban to be a Ferrari. He drove it hard, maintaining speed on long slopes, navigating curves just a few degrees short of a disastrous roll. Although he finessed better performance from the hulking SUV than its maker would have thought possible, he proved incapable of vehicular alchemy. The Suburban wasn’t transmuted into an Italian sports car. Which was a good thing, considering that a Ferrari was built almost as close to the pavement as a skateboard and wouldn’t have been able to ford the occasional flooded swales in the roadway where as much as two feet of rainwater gathered like a series of moats.