Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mason
“ C an’t believe more heads have gone missing,” Jackson muttered under his breath. “We’re starting to look like we ain’t got our shit together.”
“That’s because we ain’t got our shit together,” I snapped, ignoring the warning look from Ron in the passenger seat. I had picked up our mentor while we headed out to talk to another rancher, John Calvin. He had a small place—only a few hundred acres—but he had lost twenty head of cattle in the last twenty-four hours.
“We’re gonna figure this out. I just find it so strange they’re staying here in the county instead of branching out and stealing cattle across the state.”
“You think there’s any connection to the rustling that happened in the nineties?” I asked, not having been old enough to really remember the events at the time. I mean, yeah, I did remember them, but I wasn’t working as a cop yet .
“I don’t know if there’s a connection. You’re talking about thirty years passing. I know that the Lowe place took a heavy loss during it though.” Ron hesitated, and I could tell the wheels were turning in his head. “Feels like that was a different time. There wasn’t all this talk of development going on, you know what I mean? For some reason, I just can’t let that go.”
“Me neither,” Jackson and I said in unison.
“But at the same time,” I added, choosing my words carefully. “I don’t know why the hell a developer would be going through the hassle of stealing cattle. That’s a tall order, and no white-collar worker like Graham is gonna know how to pull it off.”
“Maybe not,” Jackson hummed. “But what if he’s just taking advantage of the situation? Maybe they’re not connected, necessarily—but they could be in cahoots now.”
I let out a heavy sigh as I turned onto the old, narrow gravel road that led to Calvin’s ranch. “I don’t know. That sure seems like a stretch.”
“But so does all these damn cattle that have gone missing.” Jackson leaned back in the backseat of the Bronco, folding his arms across his chest. “I think that in and of itself just don’t make any sense out here.”
“Yeah, ranchers are gonna start taking matters into their own hands,” I said wearily, already having heard a group of them talking about it in the café. I made it a point to stop in every morning to see Emma—that was the best I could do at the moment with all this shit going on…
And I was trying to help Lucas at the ranch.
Well, and keep an eye on Jess and Cody.
I inwardly shuddered at the thought, pushing it away. I had no desire to think about the two of them right now .
Ron sighed. “We just need to catch ‘em. All that patrolling around the Lowe place has moved them off, but I’m worried once we move off and start patrolling the other places, then he’s gonna get hit again.”
And he can’t handle another hit.
I stayed silent as we turned into John’s driveway; him and his wife were waiting for us on the front porch. It was a meager little farmhouse, not much to the whole place, really.
And it broke my heart to see the older couple facing any kind of trouble.
“Good morning,” I greeted them as I slid out, grabbing my cowboy hat and fixing it to my head.
“Morning,” John said, his voice full of the same defeat written all over his face. He was pushing seventy, and while he was in great health, today, he looked more fragile and elderly than usual.
“Those cattle were our retirement,” Annie, his wife, snapped, folding her arms over her chest. Her gray hair was in a braid down her back, and she donned a dress that reminded me of the pioneer days.
“I’m real sorry about what you’re going through,” I said, keeping my tone cool and sympathetic as I climbed the porch steps. Jackson and Ron were behind me, but they were staying quiet. I didn’t mind doing all the talking, but from the looks of the two, they weren’t gonna make for an easy report.
“I just wanna know what the hell you’re doing to catch these guys,” John cut in, not even acknowledging my apology. “I ain’t go no insurance on those cattle, and I get that y’all are working hard and only got so many resources?—”
“But do your damn job!” Annie cut in, her voice sharp like a knife. “I’m sick and tired of being the target of a bunch of no good, low life thieves.”
“Now, Annie,” Ron finally said from behind me, putting his hands up and motioning for her to simmer down. “We know that you’re real upset about your cattle going missing, and we’re working on it. Whoever is behind this is sophisticated.”
“Probably the same ones that hit us thirty years ago!” She bellowed, shaking her head so hard her braid bounced against her shoulders. “Y’all didn’t catch ‘em then and you probably ain’t gonna catch ‘em now. Just a waste of our damn time.”
Jeez, she’s a cantankerous old lady.
“I can’t make a report if you just keep going on like that,” I said, leveling with John, who seemed to be my only rational choice of conversation. “I need to get all the information that you can think of for this. Why don’t you tell me about what happened? Don’t hold anything back.”
Annie snorted, rolling her eyes. “My god, you people are useless.”
“Oh, just go in the house, Annie,” he finally snapped at her, pointing at the door. “You runnin’ your mouth ain’t gonna help nothing.”
I ignored her as she stormed inside, pulling out my notebook and waiting for him to continue.
“Sorry about her,” he grumbled, plopping down in his rocking chair. “She’s just mad that we lost one of her favorite cows. Bottlefed her as a little thing back when the grandkids still had time to hang around with us.”
I nodded, my heart squeezing with sympathy for them. “I’m real sorry about it. We’re gonna canvas the sale barns for your brand. I don’t have a lot of hopes for finding them—we haven’t found the others—but I’ve let the USDA know, and they got people on the ground. I thought about hitting the sale north of town on my own this weekend. I’m tired of losing all these cattle.”
“Yeah, my sons are heading down here from Wichita Falls. She wasn’t wrong, you know. The cattle we run is our retirement. It’s how we keep food on the table.” John slumped his shoulders. “I might have to go down and get a job workin’ at the grocery store as a bagger if we can’t get them back.”
“Nah, we’ll find them,” Jackson said, taking a step forward. “I’ve helped you out here for years, baling that north pasture.”
I shot him a warning glance. The worst thing we could do was make promises that we couldn’t keep—and right now, that was what Jackson was doing. “We’ll do the best we can,” I added, forcing a smile.
John furrowed his thick white eyebrows beneath his faded green John Deere ball cap. “Yeah, we’ll see. Anyway, I went out to check them this morning, and they weren’t there. We got a total of about fifty head, and twenty-one of them are gone. I don’t know when they went missing.”
“But you fed them yesterday evening? And they were all there?” Jackson asked, leaning against the porch rail.
John nodded. “Yeah, and we was runnin’ late, too. Annie and I didn’t get ‘em fed til right about seven-thirty.”
“And you didn’t see anything that seemed out of the norm?” I asked, glancing around their place. It was mostly cleared pastureland with minimal woods. It wasn’t the best hit when it came to needing some cover.
He took a deep breath, appearing to be in deep thought. “I didn’t see nothin’ out of the norm. Everyone was actin’ the way they should be. I can’t think of anything that we thought was off. I drove the whole place, too. They cut the fence down on the east side of the property. I guess they ran them right out the damn ditch and into a trailer. Had to have been a big one, too.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek as I jotted down the information he gave me, making note to go take some pictures of the scene.
These are some sneaky motherfuckers.
“And you know what I thought was real weird about it?” John suddenly perked up, scratching his chin.
“What’s that?” I asked, my pen hovering over the notebook.
“There were some teenagers running up and down the road like hooligans yesterday evening,” he grunted, shaking his head. “They was the reason that we didn’t go out and feed till real late.”
The mention of teenagers didn’t really mean anything to me, really. They drove like idiots up and down the dirt roads all the time. Hell, I did it, too, as a teenager. But, I wrote it down, anyway.
“You know who it was?” Ron asked as I wrote.
“Nope, sure don’t. I don’t know any of the young people these days. They’re all just a bunch of lazy fellas though. They wouldn’t know a hard day’s worth of work if it smacked ‘em over the head.”
I chuckled. “You’re probably not wrong about that.”
“Yeah, I know I’m not,” he snapped. “That’s why people go around and steal people’s cattle, too. They’re just a bunch of lazy dumbasses who don’t know how to work hard, buy their own land, and take care of their cattle.”
“They take the easy way out,” I agreed, nodding my head. “They’ve been doing it for years. They don’t wanna work hard, they just want to reap the benefits of someone else’s hard work and money spent.”
“Yeah, that’s the truth,” Ron remarked. “But we’re trying to get to the bottom of it. These guys are good, John. They show up, leave barely any evidence behind, and then I got no clue where they’re taking them. We run the brands with the USDA, and nothing has hit the system.”
“Maybe they’re branding over them,” John said, folding his arms across his chest. “You know that happens anyway sometimes. If they’re as sophisticated as you say, they know how to avoid brand inspections at the sales. They’re probably just rebranding and changing everything. Maybe they got their own brand or ranch name they got ‘em under.”
“Probably, but we gotta find some of the cattle in order to know any of that,” Ron replied, removing his cowboy hat and wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead. “I just don’t know what to do if the USDA ain’t finding them.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Any of your cattle have any specific markings? Other than brands? Everyone else who has been hit runs big operations with too many head to really know. I mean, yeah, they gave me the ear tag numbers, brands, and some of the markings, but they were mostly black Angus. You run a mix.”
“I do,” John said, before pushing himself to his feet. “Let me go get Annie. She knows these cows. They left the bull.”
We waited for him to disappear inside, their voices tense and muffled as they talked about it. I exchanged glances with Ron and Jackson, all of us staying quiet. After a long couple of minutes, John and Annie reappeared on the porch.
“My cow, Bessie,” Annie said, her voice much softer than it was initially. “She was one of them that got stolen. She’s got real unique facial markings. See,” she held out a picture of a red colored cow with a strange white hook right between her eyes.
“Can I take this?” I asked, looking up at her. “I can make a copy and bring this one back to you, if you’d like.”
She nodded. “Whatever it takes to find her.”