Chapter 9 Jennie
The next afternoon, I finally had time to open the drone.
I pulled out my pocket knife and opened the box to find one fully-assembled BisonEye Ultra UAV, matte-black with anti-glare finishing, and an extra set of rotors in case the Hill Country crosswinds took their shot.
It had encrypted transmission, satellite fallback, and real-time target classification by size and heat signature.
The only manual was printed on onion-skin paper, the pages stuck together with a faint industrial tang. I scanned it, then powered the unit. The status lights blinked a bored green. Good.
I toggled the interface on my laptop and dropped in the first set of coordinates, the north boundary, then the creek, then the Coleman edge that wedged against Maddox land.
I set the filters for “large mammals, bipedal, and vehicle” and capped the alert protocol to avoid every flock of whitetails or errant coyote from blowing up my phone.
I headed out to my truck, then drove a little ways down the county road until I was butted up to Coleman land but out of sight of the main ranch.
They didn’t need to know what I was doing.
I set the BisonEye on the tailgate, checked the wind, then hit launch.
The drone spun up, smooth as silk. It lifted straight into the blue and shot east, already mapping a grid.
On the screen, the world peeled open in high-contrast video.
The drone went past the cows, flagging them.
I pressed a few buttons on the app on my phone to tell it to ignore cows.
Then it flagged the movement of a red F250 as it crept along the fence line west of the riverbed.
For the next hour, I let the BisonEye sweep the ranch in concentric rings, each one tighter than the last, each pass dialing down the motion filters.
It was the sort of obsessive overkill that made my brain relax.
If I could make the machines do the watching, maybe I could stop waiting for the world to catch me sleeping.
A couple of times, the drone flagged a “possible human,” but each turned out to be a deer or a twisted fence post. Around noon, I checked the telemetry and found the drone was burning battery too fast. The July humidity turned the air into syrup and forced the unit to overwork to keep altitude.
I set the drone to “glide-and-hover” mode, let it fall to standby, and called it back for recharge.
It came back over the ridgeline, silent and small as a vulture, then dropped onto the tailgate with a carefulness that made me think, not for the first time, that human pilots were about to be as useless as telephone switchboard operators.
I popped in the spare battery, which was thankfully fully charged, and fired off a test run along the creek. The drone hugged the terrain, capturing every gate, every possible crossing, every shadow cast by the live oaks.
Halfway through the next sweep, the drone flagged an anomaly, a heat signature, four legs, over seventy kilos.
At first, I thought it was one of the horses broken loose, but the shape was wrong, and the movement too deliberate.
I zoomed in, waited for the frame to resolve, and saw it, gray, low to the ground, moving in the hour before dusk with the certainty of a thing that belonged here. The wolf. I knew it was real!
I watched it pick its way along the fenceline, head down, oblivious to the eye in the sky.
I felt the pulse of old folklore, the stories my grandfather used to tell about the things that watched from the shadows, waiting for me to slip up.
I wondered if he’d ever imagined those stories would have a starring role in my actual adult life.
The drone followed, unobtrusive, as the animal moved parallel to the boundary, then peeled off and vanished into the brush. I tagged the location, set a route for a follow-up run, and marked it for review.
The far edge of the Coleman property was two miles of nothing on the map. A field for grazing or burning off old grass, flat as a billiard table until it kinked up against a line of thorny brush. That was the border, Coleman on one side, Maddox on the other.
On the monitor, the land unfurled in patchy scrub, a muddy stock tank, a tree leaning away from the prevailing wind. The drone drifted along the edge, caught a couple of wandering cattle and kept going.
I kept the focus tight on the target zone, pinging the motion sensors with every shift in the shadows. Most of what came up was debris, or maybe birds launching from the fence line, but on the third pass, something pinged.
It was a small structure, tucked behind a screen of mesquite and a couple of windbreak trees.
It wasn’t on any of the satellite maps. From the air, it looked like an old feed station.
Three walls still standing, the roof half-collapsed on one end, open to the brush on the other.
I maneuvered the drone in under the overhang.
As the drone circled and stabilized, the software locked onto the rectangular shapes stacked tightly under the overhang.
I’d seen them too many times when I was with the FBI.
Gun crates. Not a hunter’s hoard or a paranoid’s one-off.
This was a professional shipment, black hard cases, identical in size, each stenciled with a label in white block letters.
Even the grainy drone image could pull out the key, BERGARA, SAKO, and the telltale MILSPEC numbers that said this was nobody’s private collection.
My hands were steady, but my guts felt like a gear turning in the wrong direction. I had been looking for chemicals, maybe a cache of pills, or some kind of shady traffic. But this was bigger, worse than I’d imagined.
I did a slow, lateral pan of the area, double-checked the angles.
The structure was camouflaged from every ground approach.
Only the overhead, only the drone, had a clear shot realizing there was a building there.
I adjusted the camera to max zoom and let the drone hover, a silent mosquito above the secret.
On the monitor, the lean-to sat still, waiting.
Part of me wanted to fly the drone straight back, download the footage, and take it straight to the FBI. But this was guns with nothing else. No motive, no supply line, no idea which of the Colemans or even Maddoxes were involved.
I maneuvered the drone to land in a nearby tree, up high and hopefully out of sight. Once it was in place, I cut the active feed, set it to motion-detect, and fixed the app to ping me if anyone got within fifty meters.
As the drone powered down, I sat in the truck, sweat pooling under my knees, and watched the playback.