I glanced over my shoulder at the gun in the window rack—a Remington twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip, like the one McQuaid had taught me to use. Tom was also wearing his sidearm holstered on his right hip. He was ready for whatever came next, I thought, but he wouldn’t get to use his weapons today. Nobody was going to the mat over a pair of roosters, so we could both relax.
Tom’s truck was equipped with a two-way radio. When we left Maude’s house, he had asked the dispatcher to run a make on Gibbons. Now, she radioed back. The man had two priors: a misdemeanor domestic violence and a Class C misdemeanor for shooting a deer from a public road. “What have you got on him today?” she asked.
“He stole two chickens,” he said, in answer to the dispatcher’s question, then: “C-h-i-c-k-e-n-s. As in Kentucky Fried.” He glanced at me. “Sorry,” he said, cutting the mic. “Poor choice of words.”
I could hear the dispatcher laughing.
Tom clicked the mic again and said: “No joke, Phyllis. One of them is supposed to be worth twenty-five hundred dollars, maybe more if he gets to be a regular daddy. The other one is a little girl’s show rooster. They were lifted from the poultry tent at the county fair last night.” He gave our location and asked, “Who’s patrolling out here today? Where is he?” Then: “Good. Give Roy my destination. ETA: five minutes.”
“Do you always check on the backup?” I asked as he keyed off the mic and replaced it.
“I’m cautious,” he said, “especially this far out in the country.” He didn’t say, And especially when I have a civilian riding along, but I knew he thought it. I was a liability.
“Where is he?” I asked. “Roy, I mean.”
“About fifteen minutes away from our location,” he said. “Available if we need him.” He jerked a thumb to the left, where a gravel road dead-ended into the county road. “Out here, you never know what you’re going to bump into. A couple of months ago, Roy and I closed down a meth cooker at the end of that road. Arrested two guys and a woman, all three of them armed. There’s more of that going on in these hills than people think.”
“How’d you happen to find them?” I asked curiously.
“A tip. A neighbor’s bull got out and he was repairing his fence. He just happened to smell the acetone they were using to polish the red coloring out of their product, and recognized it. The meth heads had moved their mobile lab to the back of the property to get it as far from the road as they could, thinking that would be safe. But they backed it right up against the neighbor’s fence line.” He grinned. “This ain’t the Wild West some folks think it is.”
“Wild enough,” I said, glancing back down at my cell phone, where I had brought up Google Earth. The image showed dark green wooded hills and ravines cut into the limestone, with a few patches of open meadow, the road twisting like a narrow white ribbon through the valleys and along the crests. The houses were scattered like miniature Monopoly pieces across the rugged terrain. Seen from the satellite, this part of the Hill Country was a wilderness, only thinly populated.
“The place is about two miles ahead,” I added. “On the right.” It was nearly nine now. The sun had risen high enough to feel warm through the window, and Tom turned up the truck’s air-conditioning. It was going to be another bright, hot day, with humid air streaming up from the Gulf. By noon, the temperature could easily be in the upper nineties. I hoped we’d have those chickens in custody by then—or that they were in a place with good ventilation. Chickens die of heat stroke even easier than people.
In a few minutes, Tom slowed. The numbers on the rusted, tilting mailbox—1116—told us that we had arrived, and he made a sharp right turn. The house itself was at the end of half a mile of rutted caliche lane, marked by several large No Trespassing signs. The lane wound through a section of overgrazed pastureland, heavily infested with broomweed and prickly pear cactus and dotted with mesquite trees. The house at the end was small, with weathered siding, a narrow porch across the front, and a rusty metal roof. Off to the left was a pen enclosing a mama goat and several kid goats, a couple of black Barred Rock hens scratching around them. In the yard, I saw a compact tractor with a hydraulic loader on the front end and a cultivator on the rear. An older-model black Chevy pickup was parked in the driveway—a ranch truck, judging from the mud on the rear tailgate and the bales of hay and sacks of feed in the bed. Gibbons, I thought, was a homesteader.
Tom pulled up and stopped close behind the Chevy. “Stay with the truck,” he said, “unless I tell you different.” He shut off the ignition and pocketed the keys.
“But, Tom—” I began.
“That’s an order, China.” His face was stern. “I doubt that there’ll be trouble over a couple of chickens, but there’s no predicting. I don’t want to have to explain to my friend McQuaid how I managed to get his wife shot up.”
“Ridiculous,” I muttered, but I didn’t press the point. Tom knows his business, and anyway, he’s the law. I just wanted to get this over with and get Caitie’s rooster back—and the black rooster, too, of course. And Tom was right. This wasn’t a drug bust or a high-profile arrest. Gibbons was just a guy who had a yen for an expensive all-black rooster and thought he could get one for free. I had my fingers crossed that retrieving the
