“What question did we ask you?” Costace said quietly. “Just if you’d heard anything. We didn’t ask if it was you who fired that shot.”
Boyd flushed crimson and clenched his mouth shut so tight that his lips were two white lines. Hocker gestured toward the living room. I looked that way and realized that the agent could see the large gun cabinet from where he was sitting. “Mind if we take a look at your firearm collection?” he asked. The request was pleasant enough, conversational, but Johnny Boyd had heard enough.
He stood up and as if in slow motion, turned and set his coffee mug down on the counter by the sink. He looked out the window, eyes narrowed and jaw muscles so tight I could see them clench from across the room. His hands gripped the counter, and he turned without releasing his grip, looking at Hocker over his left shoulder.
“I guess what you can do is pack up and get off my property,” he said. “You can get yourselves out of my home, and you can get yourselves off my land.”
I heard quiet voices, and then Estelle appeared in the kitchen doorway. She stopped there, watching Boyd.
“Johnny-” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“There isn’t a thing more we need to say to each other, Sheriff. Just pack up your friends and get on out.”
Hocker sighed and pushed himself to his feet. “Mr. Boyd, you have to realize that in the course of an investigation like this one, we’re forced to dig out answers wherever we can.”
Boyd released his grip on the counter and turned around. “Well, you just go dig somewhere else. Can’t say as I’m surprised. Took you two goddam years, but you managed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hocker asked.
“You just get,” Boyd snarled ignoring the question. His face was flushed and his anger had set his jaw to quivering.
“You know as well as I do,” Hocker said, “that if we have a bullet fragment, we’ll be running some ballistic comparisons. That includes your firearms. I can get a warrant if I have to, but we’d prefer-”
“I don’t give a good goddam what you prefer, Bucko,” Johnny said. “The next time you want to come on this land and talk to me, you make sure you have that warrant. And if it isn’t signed by Judge Hobart, then you better get it signed by him.”
Hocker shrugged, still glacially calm, and started to cross the kitchen toward Estelle.
Neil Costace took a final sip of his coffee and grimaced. “I’d think that you’d want to do all you could to prove you-”and that was as far as he got. Boyd pushed himself away from the sink and took two steps, bringing himself nose to nose with the FBI agent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hocker’s left hand drift down toward the gun under his jacket.
“I don’t have to prove a goddam thing,” Boyd snapped.
“Neil,” I said gently, “let’s let these folks be.” The two men stood as if frozen, Boyd glaring with white spots of anger on his cheeks, Neil Costace unflappable.
“Thanks for the coffee,” Hocker said. “We’ll be in touch.” He slipped past Estelle, and I waited until Costace and Boyd had unlocked eyes and Costace left the kitchen.
“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got a murder on our hands. You know as well as I do that the investigation is not going away. Now, if you know something, you tell me.” He didn’t reply. “You hear me?” His only response was to pull another cigarette out of his pocket. The hand that held the lighter shook.
I turned to Estelle and motioned toward the front door. Johnny Boyd’s voice stopped me. “I’ll be talking to you later, Sheriff,” he said. “Give me some time to calm down, and then we’ll see.”
I knew that was the best I could hope for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Walter Hocker agreed that he’d take a tour of the crash site with Vincent Buscema after the two had had a chance to talk in private. That was fine with me. It would keep them busy for a few more hours, and keep them off of Johnny Boyd’s back.
I had a feeling that Boyd’s reaction was as much to the federal authority as to anything else. I didn’t know what he’d meant with the comment about it taking the agents two years to figure something out, and it hadn’t been the time to push the point.
I hadn’t told him about the cause of the crash when I’d had the opportunity, and now he had heard the message loud and clear that the federal agents, at least, included him in the pool of suspects. If he was innocent, and at that point I was sure he was, becoming the target of an investigation would be enough to send his blood pressure off the scale.
I couldn’t imagine Johnny Boyd taking potshots at a passing airplane. Almost certainly he carried a rifle in at least one of his ranch trucks, and I had no doubt that he could drop a coyote in its tracks at a couple hundred yards. But firing at a pesky, circling airplane was another matter altogether.
As we drove away from the ranch, I turned to Estelle, whose only contribution to the conversation as we left the ranch house had been a quiet “Thank you” directed at Maxine Boyd. “So, what did she tell you?” I asked. “And that was nicely done, by the way.”
“She’s worried, sir,” she said. She didn’t look at me, but concentrated on the gravel road, her black eyebrows knitted.
“She has good reason to be, after that exchange,” I said.
“No, not about that. She’s really upset about trouble brewing between her husband and Richard Finnegan.”
“Really? Trouble how?”
Estelle took a deep breath. “Apparently Richard Finnegan has a grazing allotment from the Forest Service for a piece of property on the back side of Cat Mesa. There’s no more grass there than anywhere else, but there is a productive spring on the allotment. Finnegan wants to pipe the water over to one of his major stock tanks. Remember those rolls of black-plastic pipe that we saw by Finnegan’s barn?”
“Sure. But that’s got to be a hell of a distance. And pipe isn’t cheap. So what’s the argument?”
“Simple, as ever, sir. There’s a corner of the Boyd ranch that’s situated right in the way. If Finnegan can’t run the pipe across Boyd’s property, then it means going up an escarpment and out of the way over the east. A lot more distance, and going up the escarpment means that he couldn’t use gravity flow. He’d have to pump.”
I frowned. “And so…what’s the argument? Are you saying that Johnny won’t let Dick Finnegan run a few yards of black plastic across his property?”
“He will,” Estelle said. “But he tried to cut a deal with Finnegan to use some of the water in exchange for letting the pipe go across his land.”
“And Finnegan objected to that? Is he out of his mind?”
“Maybe. The last argument they had, and I guess from what Maxine was saying, it was right in the Boyds’ front yard, was that Dick Finnegan maintained that he can’t afford the extra pipe it would take to go around Boyd’s property, or pay for a pump, and that there isn’t enough water to serve both their needs. He’s being held up, he contends.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What’s the old saying out here-there are more friendships broken over access to water than anything else?”
“Except in a wet year,” Estelle said. “Then it’s over alcohol.”
“And this is what Maxine wanted to talk to you about?”
Estelle nodded. “She’s afraid that the two of them will exchange more than words sometime. She said that her husband has a hot temper and so does Dick Finnegan.”
“No kidding,” I said. “By the way, did she happen to say which stock tank Finnegan wanted to run the pipe to? Was it the one at the block house, by any chance?”
“She didn’t know. And we didn’t have long to talk. I did ask her, though, if she knew anything about someone up in this part of the county impounding wildlife.” Estelle slowed for the Newton cattle guard and at the same time, glanced in the rearview mirror. The dark Suburban still followed us at a discreet distance.