HOWLERS by Kent Harrington Page A

his daughter. “Why?” he asked.
    “I think she’s doing it to get your attention, that’s all.”
    “Well, she’s got it. Keep trying to break through, okay?” He smiled at her. “I have to go to work.”
    “I’m glad you’re dating,” his daughter said unexpectedly. Lacy turned the horse around and started up the road toward the barn in the snow. She seemed completely un-crackable, completely beautiful. She had her mother’s power and confidence, he thought, watching her.
    “Let’s get Sharon a new saddle for her birthday,” Quentin shouted.
    His daughter turned around. She was smiling. “Good idea!” She waved. “Hey, did you see that big flash of light last night?”
    He nodded.
    “What was it?”
    “A meth lab blew somewhere, probably.”
    Lacy looked at her father as if she were going to tell him something, but decided not to. She turned around instead and led the horse back into the barn.
    “You might as well stay until Founder’s Day,” he yelled. Quentin thought she’d heard him, but she hadn’t.

    The Phelps ranch was an original homestead. Like the Colliers, the original Phelps had given up panning for gold and become a cattleman during the Gold Rush. Quentin closed the door to the patrol car and looked down the empty, snow-covered single-lane county road. He walked down the icy verge and stood in front of a dirt road that led into the Phelps’s property. Fifty feet down, a series of fallen trees blocked the road and made it completely impassable by car.
    Quentin shook his head and smiled. He walked to the mailbox nailed to the once-white fence. It was overflowing with mail. He pulled off his gloves and emptied the box, putting the envelopes and junk mail between his gun belt and his jeans.
    He heard a car horn. A new black Range Rover pulled out from the bed-and-breakfast’s private road a half-mile down. It turned toward Quentin. A hand shot out from the driver’s side of the Rover and waved as it approached. The sheriff waved back. He watched the fancy highly-polished jeep come toward him. Quentin unzipped his jacket and stuffed a parcel that had been sitting on top of Chuck’s mailbox under his jacket, then walked over to the Rover that had stopped in the middle of the road, white steam coming from its exhaust.
    Quentin knew the man behind the wheel, Todd Cooley. The man was wearing one of those expensive full-length leather coats city people could afford. Cooley’s sunglasses were hanging off his neck. His black hair was greased straight back; he looked like he’d just climbed out of a barber chair. He had on a cowboy shirt from the Sun Dance catalog made for “real cowboys” that cost a hundred dollars and no real cowboy could afford.
    Cooley was an accountant in San Francisco and looked it, but dressed like a cowboy when he came up to the mountains. Cooley and some wealthy partners had bought a hundred acres and built the “Country Bride Inn and Spa,” a luxury bed-and-breakfast next door to the Phelps ranch. Since the accountant had bought the property from Chuck there’d been nothing but problems between Phelps and his new neighbors.
    “Sheriff, good morning. I’m glad to see you,” Cooley said.
    “Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”
    “I had to call A.T.F, Sheriff. I just wanted you to know. In case, well, in case there’s a problem when they come out to talk to Phelps. Maybe you should be here, too.”
    Quentin heard the words A.T.F. and froze. He didn’t like Cooley, and he didn’t like federal agents much—especially the DEA, staffed by paramilitary gunslinger types, who were always heavy-handed and patronizing when it came to dealing with the locals. (He’d heard a rumor that some of the DEA in Sacramento had partnered up with the bad guys, too.) And he certainly didn’t like the idea of some Federal agents from Sacramento picking on Chuck Phelps, who was a close family friend.
    Great, that’s all we need , Quentin thought.
    “Why, for God’s sake?”