Nightzone by Steven F. Havill Page B

Deputy Sutherland as his escort, and trudged over to the second set of power poles. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman was kneeling at the remains of one of the poles, in conversation with Dick Whittaker, superintendent of Posadas Electric. She would pump him for every scrap of information he knew. When she had to testify, she’d know more about power lines and all their accoutrements than most veteran linemen. Whittaker, a stump of a man with prematurely snow white hair that sprayed out from all sides of his baseball cap, rose and offered a hand as I approached.
    â€œI understand you’ve been sleepwalkin’ again, Bill.” The crinkles around his eyes faded. Nobody was much in the mood for humor. “Bobby tells me that you saw all this go down.”
    â€œDon’t we all wish that,” I said. “I saw the flash of the transformer when it hit the ground. And that was from where I was sitting up on Cat Mesa, twenty miles away. That’s it.”
    â€œWell, this son-of-a-bitch used a good, sharp saw. I’d guess a fair-sized one, too, lookin’ at the size of those chips. Creosote-treated line poles aren’t the easiest firewood to take, I’ll tell you that. Your man came ready to do business. Damnedest thing. I tell you what, I’ve known Curt Boyd since he was this big,” and he held his hand at knee level. “Never figured him for something like this.”
    â€œI’ll bet you the farm that Curt was just a bystander,” I said.
    â€œYou think?”
    In all probability, Estelle hadn’t mentioned the accomplice in the speeding truck. She pushed herself off her knees and looked quizzically at the envelope I held.
    â€œYou have a minute?” I asked.
    She nodded. Whittaker swept his flashlight toward the downed transformer. “I’ll see how the boys are comin’.”
    The two of us watched Whittaker make his way around the clumps of cacti and stunted prairie grass, and when he was out of earshot, I said, “Frank passed this on to us. To you, I mean. I’m just the postman.” Estelle read the ad copy, sharing with so many people the odd habit of starting at the bottom, skimming here and there, and finally returning to the top of the copy, her flashlight ambling down the lines of type as she read.
    â€œI wonder if Mr. Waddell has any idea what he’s set in motion,” she whispered. A couple hundred yards away, the rancher was still rooted in place, now with two or three shadowy figures I couldn’t make out.
    â€œWithout a doubt. Small as this county is? I’d like a dollar for every time somebody’s asked me what the hell Miles Waddell was building out here. I tell ’em that as far as I know, he’s erecting an observatory, and the response is usually a scoff of disbelief. ‘He ain’t puttin’ no telescope up there,’” I said, mimicking an atrocious drawl, “‘not with that fancy road.’”
    â€œWhen was the last time you were in this area, sir?” I’d known Estelle since she was a child playing in the Mexican dust, adopted by an aging school teacher, and in all those years, my name had never passed her lips—at least not in direct conversation with me. She chose Sir or Padrino, the latter being the rough equivalent of godfather , which I was to her two boys, Carlos and Francisco.
    â€œAs a matter of fact, yesterday afternoon. This past afternoon. I was doing my daily constitutional, checking out a piece of prairie behind Bennett’s Fort. I told you I found that old revolver? I had to see if there was anything else in the same spot.” The rugged little mesa to the north had captivated my attention ever since I’d found an axe-head there the previous summer that was the right vintage to belong to a homesteader—perhaps Josiah Bennett himself. And with it sprang the intriguing idea that the axe-head might have some century-old blood on it.