Chapter 8 I Want It All
EIGHT
I Want It All
Hutch
Hutch not only took the time to read Mabel’s application, since the unreasonable woman wanted to adopt Moxie as well as Tonks, he also took the time to introduce them and see if that was going to be a fiasco.
It wasn’t.
There was a lot of sniffing and eye contact, but the biggest problem Mabel was going to have was Tonks wanting to play, and Moxie not.
Fortunately, cats could get to high ground and dogs could learn.
He returned them to their cages, said goodbye to the staff and set about doing the next thing on his agenda.
This meant, out on the road, he kept a lookout, checked his mirrors and noted, not unusually, CR 10 was deserted.
So he slowed at the spot he’d scoped out earlier, pulled his truck off the asphalt and into the trees until it couldn’t be seen from the road.
He’d been trained to cover any possible eventuality, so after he got out his gear, he pulled the camo net from his truck bed and covered the vehicle with it.
Only then did he tug on the camo fleece and the army drab knit cap to cover his hair. He loaded up with his gear and started his hike.
From where he parked, it was quite a way, all of it uphill, to the stony bluff that gave the area in Fret County the name of Stony Bluff.
He hiked behind the chalky stone until he knew he was where he needed to be.
Only then did he partially climb the bluff, then scope his next position.
There was a rise in the rock about ten meters away.
Crouched, he hustled to it until he was behind it. Once in place, he dropped to his belly and used the balls of his feet and his elbows to position behind the rocky rise.
He got his long-range binoculars out, popped the lens caps, put them to his eyes, did some adjusting and settled into the mental space of reconnaissance, ticking mental notes.
At the southwest end of The Lion and The Lamb compound, precisely, just inside the entry to it, a very long car port housed eight trucks, not all dual cab, but most of them were.
There was a tarred log perimeter fence surrounding the whole encampment. Hutch’s estimation: a good eight feet tall, spike tops. The only break was at the drive that would lead out to the road, and at the road there was a gate that had two signs Hutch had seen countless times over the years.
No Trespassing.
And…
Private Property Keep Out.
Even so, he saw locked egresses cut into their log fortress, and one of them led toward Mabel’s place.
They’d cleared a good deal of the original owner Mr. Flannery’s land to get their open space and that fence, and the old man, who had spent eighty years of his life on that land, doing it since birth, caring for it, protecting it, had to be rolling in his grave because of it.
A massive supply of firewood was stacked along the south perimeter.
But with that amount of fence built from logs, that firewood didn’t come from Flannery’s land, which somehow Lars Enstrom got deeded to him in Flannery’s will, even if the man wasn’t blood and Flannery’s real kin pitched a series of legal fits about it.
Unless they made more on their jam and bread than Hutch suspected, they had to be poaching lumber.
It was slim for Harry to get a lock on, but it wasn’t nothing.
Hutch kept cataloging.
Fifteen houses, all the same, looked prefab and portable, no obvious order, seemingly scattered around the center of the space, but all of them surrounded what looked to be a church, if the steeple was any indication.
At a guess, Hutch would say the houses were, at most, twelve hundred square feet. Walkways spiderwebbed between them, the church and the outbuildings.
Northwest end of the space, a massive pole barn. Huge.
He’d seen some of the men on CR 10 riding ATVs. Since they weren’t covered and kept outside, that was likely where they kept them.
Between the pole barn and the big cattle barn on the northeast side of the property, a large pigsty and a heavily protected, also large, chicken coop. He counted at least twenty chickens outside the coop, roaming and pecking.
At the back of the property, fallowed fields, though there were some squash vines and sunflowers still yielding, along with some chicken-wire-covered rows of what looked to be late-planted carrots, kale, beets and spinach.
Electrical lines ran to all the structures, including the truck port and the chicken coop.
That said, all the houses had a thin wisp of smoke coming from stoves or fireplaces.
There were fruit trees. He could identify apple, pear, cherry and peach, and there were blackberry brambles that were part of the protection around the chicken coop.
There was a solid, fortified, steel shed in the southeast corner, with a heavy-duty lock on the door that was concerning.
There were men about, twelve individuals at Hutch’s count, but according to the smoke, each house was in use.
The men were friendly. There were smiles, calls, huddled conversations.
The women…
Hutch drew in breath and focused on them.
Drab dresses, button-up from the waist, high-necked, long sleeved, no adornment.
None at all. The four women who were out wore the same dresses, in colors of brown or gray.
No bonnets or shit like that, or aprons, but each woman had her hair severely scraped back and arranged in a bun at her nape.
No alteration of this, say, bun up at the crown or ponytail.
All the same. Also identical sensible, low-heeled, black boots were on all their feet.
Now they didn’t call greetings, smile or chat.
They went about their business in the gardens, the cattle barn, a house, the church, heads bowed, in a hurry.
Hutch took a lot of time surveilling the space, saw another man come out of a house, strolling like he had all day and stopping to talk with three other guys, two more women scampering from the church to some houses, one with a baby on her hip.
The cold and wet of the stone had long since leaked through his jeans and fleece before Hutch saw all he reckoned he was going to see. Even if his body had stiffened up, he ignored it, and using the same movements, he scuttled back on his belly until the bluff hid him from sight.
He rolled to his ass, capped the binos, put them in their case, and got off his ass.
He had a long hike to his truck.
He could do it thinking while he got his body moving. The wet mist had permeated his hair and jeans and was beginning to penetrate his fleece.
He had to start trucking and warm up.
On his walk, he thought, and it wasn’t lost on him the world was fucked up, and it was getting worse, not better.
He understood checking out, because he’d done it himself, in his way.
He could see the lure of the challenge of self-sufficiency. He’d eaten eggs fresh from the coop, there were none better. Blackberries fresh from the vine, the same.
Having good honest work to do every day that provided for you and your family was never something any man should have a problem with, even if you chose the backbreakingly hard way to go about it.
Whittling a fine point on the simple life, he could see, had its merits.
“This shit wasn’t that,” he muttered to the trees.
For the men, maybe.
Then again, he hadn’t seen a one of them doing a lick of work.
No smiles and chatter from the women?
Heads bowed, zero eye contact, rushing around, doing shit like they’d be whipped if it didn’t get done?
That shit was fucked up.
Topping that, they had trucks, ATVs, electricity; they weren’t roughing it entirely.
But just like Hutch had never seen a woman outside The Lion and The Lamb, obviously he’d never seen one on an ATV or in a truck.
The shit that made life easier, or even fun, was for the men.
Apparently, it was just shit for the women.
He didn’t have to work hard to understand what the lion referred to, or the lamb.
Taking that further, jam and bread, and he didn’t give a fuck how good your pies tasted, were not going to buy you fifteen prefab houses, a pole barn, trucks, ATVs, build you a church and that shed, not to mention milk cows, pigs, chickens and whatever furniture and other shit they had in those houses.
Hutch didn’t know if Flannery not only died with land, but also with money.
From town talk, Hutch did know the man’s family went balls to the wall to beat that will.
But, if town talk about the perpetual legal battle was correct, the people who inhabited that land before the Flannerys were Native Americans.
After well over a hundred and fifty years on that property, the loss of it to some stranger, who apparently helped the old guy out in his later years, and got one hell of a reward, was going to be a blow.
So maybe Flannery had money too.
Either that, or more hinky shit than what was already hinky was happening on that patch.
He made his truck, pulled off the camo net, stored it, opened his truck, stowed his gear and got in the cab, jacking up the heat.
He waited behind the tree line until he saw no cars in the distance in either direction, and only then pulled out.
He drove into Mabel’s drive, even knowing she’d had plenty of time to get down to the feedstore and back. If she was home and didn’t like what he was about to do, she could follow him around and ream his ass, but she’d be doing it while he did what he had to do.
Her sweet red pickup wasn’t in the front of the cabin or the carport.
Not a surprise.
If you drove into town, even if it was for a quick errand, you found other errands to run to make it worthwhile to drive into town.
Hutch ignored the tightness in his chest when he saw she wasn’t home, parked, got out, and did what he had to do. Namely walking the perimeter of the woods to see if he could find tracks or surveillance cameras.
He found tracks all right, in the south wood, and they were not a woman’s.
Fortunately, he didn’t find cameras.