The Last Ranch Read online

  He’d given her the willies. Her instincts warned her that he was dangerous. Did it have something to do with Matt, or was he one of those monsters who raped and murdered women, or kidnapped and molested young girls like Ginny? She could think of no other reasons why a complete stranger would behave in such a threatening way.

  Anna Lynn decided not to bother Matt about it, but she’d keep a watchful eye out for the soldier with the angular, mean-looking face and long scar below his cheekbone. She turned on the radio just in time for the hourly news broadcast and joined Ginny at the table. After lunch and a nap they’d go to see Matt again and visit with his doctor. She wanted to know exactly how to care for Matt after his return home.

  2

  Two days after his surgery, Dr. Beckmann discharged Matt from the hospital with strict orders that he was to be under Anna Lynn’s constant care throughout his recuperation, up to and including the fitting of his new eye. She wrote out instructions for Anna Lynn to follow, warned Matt against strenuous physical activity, and gave him appointments for follow-up visits at the hospital.

  Eager to go home, Matt’s only demand was that he be allowed to recuperate at the ranch. Anna Lynn readily agreed. Aside from her own Mountain Park farmhouse, she loved no place better than the 7-Bar-K headquarters perched on the remote eastern slope of the San Andres Mountains overlooking the Tularosa.

  At the ranch, Matt’s spirits continued to improve so much so that Patrick, who filled his free hours doting on Ginny, thought Matt was finally pulling out of the dark funk that had settled over him since his army discharge. Patrick even went so far as to suggest to Anna Lynn that it would do Matt a world of good if she gave up or rented out her Mountain Park farm and moved permanently to the ranch with Ginny. When she asked if this brilliant idea was his or Matt’s, he stammered something about it being a darn good notion nonetheless and huffed off to care for two of his old ponies, who lulled, fully retired, in the near pasture next to the corral.

  Over the years Anna Lynn had warned Matt that she neither wished to marry nor live full-time with any man. Having learned that arguing about it made no difference to her firmly held point of view, Matt hadn’t said a word about making their relationship permanent. Nonetheless, he seemed to be enjoying Anna Lynn’s constant attention, companionship, and care, and she’d noticed the lovely little spark of sexual tension that had been missing between them for so long had returned.

  For Anna Lynn, the week had been so pleasant she’d come to realize that almost being a wife was actually quite enjoyable. It also struck her that she’d spent more time sharing a bed with Matt, and more time in his company, than with any other man ever. He’d truly become the love of her life. The ironclad truth of it warmed her heart. And to cement matters, Ginny, who loved Matt almost as much as she adored Patrick, had been acting as though she’d stepped into the midst of her natural family. Anna Lynn had never seen her happier.

  She made no mention of her private thoughts to Matthew or Patrick. But the idea had begun to rattle around in her head that perhaps she should reexamine her need to preserve her fiercely held notion of independence at all costs. She’d lived by that one rule for so long the idea of possibly changing it was simultaneously appealing and disquieting.

  By the end of his first week home and their return from his initial follow-up appointment with Dr. Beckmann, Matt’s restlessness caught up with him. In a voice that brooked no argument, he announced to Anna Lynn that it had been too long since the small herd of mares and foals pastured in a mountain meadow had been looked after. He suggested an outing by wagon to the high country cabin in the San Andres, and proposed that they ask Patrick to come along to keep an eye on Ginny and her pony.

  The idea thrilled Anna Lynn. She asked him to put off the journey for a day so she could prepare a picnic basket for the trip up to the cabin, assemble groceries she needed for meals while they were there, get clothes and bedding packed, and put together a kit of bandages and ointments for the treatment of Matt’s eye. He agreed without complaint, but said he’d wait only one day.

  When she told Ginny they were going on an adventure to the cabin and she’d be allowed to ride her pony there, she whirled and skipped around the kitchen table like a pint-size tornado and wanted to leave immediately. Patrick curbed her exuberance with chores in the barn that included brushing and currying Ginny’s pony, Peaches, in preparation for the trip.

  That night on the veranda, Anna Lynn complimented Matt for his wonderful idea. “Everybody’s so happy you suggested it,” she added.

  “I reckon it is a good one,” he allowed with a slight smile. “And those mares and foals do need looking after.”

  “You seem to be more your old self,” she ventured, reaching for his hand.

  Matt nodded. “I didn’t realize how deep a hole of self-pity I’d dug for myself. It took a while to climb out of it.” He suddenly laughed. “But I still have a hole to deal with, except now it’s the one in my head. I tell you, it’s a strange feeling to have an eyeball gone missing.”

  “It must be, but you’re handling it wonderfully,” Anna Lynn replied. Every day she applied ointment and put a fresh bandage over Matt’s eye socket as Dr. Beckmann had ordered, and it was strange and somewhat unsettling to see the empty space where his left eye had been. She wanted to tell him how brave he was but instead added, “You’ll have a new eye soon, and then you’ll look just fine.”

  “Not soon enough,” Matt groused.

  Originally his new eye was to have been ready in three weeks, but swelling from the surgery had made Dr. Beckmann extend her estimate of how long it would take. Now it would be four weeks until Dr. Beckmann made the cast for the eye, and another three weeks to get the finished eye back from the lab.

  “She did apologize for the delay,” Anna Lynn reminded him.

  “She’ll learn fast in the army it’s all about hurry up and wait.” He leaned against the veranda railing and watched the first hint of moonlight crest the Sacramento Mountains. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Okay,” she said as she pressed against him and whispered conspiratorially in his ear. “I have an idea. What would you say to a little hanky-panky, if I did all the work so that your head wasn’t jarred by any sudden, strenuous physical activity?”

  Matt slid his hand around her waist. “Well, it would be ungentlemanly of me to refuse such a polite request,” he whispered in return. “But you’ll have to be very gentle with me.”

  Anna Lynn nibbled his ear. “I think I can manage that.”

  Through the open living-room window they could hear Patrick reading Ginny the magazine story Gene Rhodes had written about Matt’s mom, Emma Kerney, making a hand on a cattle drive back in the old days. “Do you have a place in mind?” he added.

  Anna Lynn smiled seductively, grabbed his hand, turned on her heel, and led him toward the veranda steps. “A horse blanket spread on some hay in the barn will do nicely, Sergeant Kerney.”

  ***

  By the dint of hard experience, Pvt. Fred Tyler thought himself to be cautious and cunning. In the old days, before prison, he’d always looked at all the angles before pulling a heist, doing a burglary, or strong-arming some drunken idiot stumbling out of a saloon. Until the day he encountered Matthew Kerney, Tyler had never been arrested or charged for a crime. So for starters, he wanted to make absolutely sure that the Matthew Kerney he’d wheeled out of post-op was the right guy before he embarked upon taking his revenge.

  One look at Kerney’s discharge papers slipped to him by a buddy in personnel proved he hadn’t been mistaken. Kerney had been born in the same house in Las Cruces where Tyler had waited on a cold, cheerless morning to rob him, only to wind up with the stuffing knocked out of him, arrested, sent to prison, and deprived of over ten years of freedom.

  But Kerney’s army records raised some questions Tyler needed answered before he hatched a plan. Enlistment paperwork
showed him entering the service as a single man, and there was nothing in his file showing he’d gotten married while on active duty. Also, the only life-insurance beneficiaries on Kerney’s GI policy were his father, Patrick, who lived at the 7-Bar-K Ranch along a state road east of the village of Engle, New Mexico, and a minor child, Virginia Louise Hurley, living with Anna Lynn Crawford at a PO box address in Mountain Park, New Mexico. Although Captain Beckmann’s medical-chart entry showed Kerney’s authorized visitors were his wife, Anna Lynn, and his daughter, Ginny, Tyler now had doubts about who they really were.

  He wondered if Kerney was simply shacking up with the woman and her kid. If so, did Kerney truly give a damn about the skirt and her brat? Did he care enough about them that seriously punishing the woman and little girl would cause the suffering Kerney deserved? And what was making the kid a beneficiary on his life insurance policy all about? Was little Ginny blood kin? Was the woman an in-law or something? Was she like some war widow related to Kerney by marriage? Tyler needed to know more.

  Kerney’s service jacket had contained the citations for the medals he’d won in Sicily. Included was a copy of an army press release about his exploits overseas, which made him out to be a hero. All that hero stuff about Kerney annoyed Tyler. Maybe he’d been lucky in battle, but there was no way he could’ve stood up to ten years living with cold-blooded cons at the state prison. On the inside, he would have either been shanked or made somebody’s bitch within a month. The thought of Kerney being violated by some hairy goon soothed Tyler’s irritation about his war record. The one-eyed hero wasn’t a hard case like the badasses Tyler had gone up against in the pen. He’d still be locked up serving a life sentence if the screws had been able to prove he’d killed the con who had mangled his foot with a claw hammer during a brawl in the prison wood shop.

  Because of weekly medical appointment postings, Tyler had no problem keeping track of Kerney’s follow-up visits with Captain Beckmann. He always came accompanied by the woman, which made Tyler wonder who looked after sweet little Ginny. And aside from Kerney’s old man, were there other people in the picture at the ranch he needed to know about?

  Although he was sure Kerney hadn’t recognized him, Tyler made it a point to steer clear of him and the woman on his appointment days so as not to jar any recollection from the past. Once, as he hurried by pushing a wheelchair-bound patient, he saw them from a distance outside the Ophthalmology Building. The woman turned and looked back in his direction, but Tyler had been too far away to be recognized. Besides, he figured they’d only met briefly one time and she probably didn’t remember him at all.

  Nurse Raine Hartman, who’d become friendly with Kerney and the woman during his time in post-op, told Tyler that they always came to town a day before his scheduled appointments and stayed at a motor inn downtown. She didn’t know which one. Tyler almost asked if she knew who cared for their little girl while they were gone from home, but decided against it. Too many questions might raise suspicions as to why he was so interested in Kerney, and he’d be hard-pressed to give a plausible reason other than he wanted to permanently ruin the SOB’s life.

  Determined to learn what he could from a distance about Kerney’s home ground, Tyler visited the post library to consult an atlas and study road maps. From what he estimated, Kerney’s ranch was about a hundred miles north of El Paso and forty miles west of the village of Tularosa, off a state highway that ran through the San Andres Mountains to Engle—another small settlement in the desert along the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. Good news in terms of not having to travel very far.

  In the library stacks he also located an official US Government Land Office book from the 1930s that contained a foldout map showing all of the state of New Mexico’s federal, state, tribal, homestead, and private landholdings. The 7-Bar-K Ranch was clearly marked on a big swath of land along the east slope of the San Andres Mountains. He could see by the contour lines on a Geologic Survey topo map that the ranch ran from the Alkali Flats on the Tularosa Basin into deep, tangled canyons and up rugged mountain peaks.

  Tyler knew absolutely nothing about ranching, but he could tell from the maps that Kerney owned a whole lot of land, and people with that much property usually had things worth stealing. The possibility of coming away with some good loot made it all the more appealing to take a close look-see at Kerney’s ranch, as well as find out more about Anna Lynn Crawford’s digs in Mountain Park. Once he knew all the players and saw where and how they lived, then he’d decide what move to make. What he needed now was time to reconnoiter and the money to pay for it.

  Tyler thought about going AWOL, but ditched the idea as plain stupid. That would only serve to put the MPs on his tail. Instead, he’d do it legit and take some accumulated leave. As a buck private, he earned fifty dollars a month and was down to a ten-spot in his wallet with three weeks to go before pay call. He’d borrowed from a sergeant in the motor pool once before who lent money at 20 percent interest per week compounded. How much more moolah he needed depended on when Kerney was scheduled for his next visit.

  After hours, when the offices in the Ophthalmology Unit were empty, he slipped into Beckmann’s office and flipped through her appointment book. A note in her neat script showed Kerney was scheduled to be fitted for his glass eye in two weeks. That was perfect. It was SOP for patients getting glass eyes to be held over an extra day to make sure everything fit. That would give Tyler even more time to poke around the 7-Bar-K Ranch.

  He found Maurice Michelet, the motor-pool sergeant, in his barracks room hosting a poker game, and arranged to borrow thirty bucks in two weeks, which would cost him over forty when the loan came due on payday. He’d worry about being almost tapped out then. If he had to, he’d do some stealing on base and fence the merchandise in Juárez.

  In the morning after breakfast, before reporting to his duty station, Tyler stopped by the company HQ, filled out a leave request, and turned it in to First Sgt. Leland Childs.

  “You just want five days, Tyler?” Childs asked, flicking his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray on his desk. He was tall, skinny, and had an acne-scarred face along with a sour disposition. “What for?”

  Tyler shrugged and smiled slyly. “I got a skirt coming to see me. That’s all the time she can spare from her factory job in California.”

  Childs grunted and signed the request. “Don’t get so nookie-whipped you forget to come back. You’re due for a stripe next month.”

  Tyler laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want to mess that up, Sarge.”

  Childs grunted and handed Tyler the form. “What are ya standing there for? Your leave doesn’t start for two weeks. Go to work.”

  Tyler grinned and turned on his heel. Two weeks couldn’t pass fast enough.

  ***

  The day before Matt and Anna Lynn were to leave for Fort Bliss, a corporal in an army jeep from the Alamogordo Army Air Field ground to a stop at the ranch house, knocked on the open door, asked to speak to Matthew Kerney, and handed him a sealed envelope.

  “Is this the check I’m owed for the two dead ponies the flyboys killed?” Matt asked, waving the envelope at the young soldier standing on the veranda, looking miserable, uncomfortable, in perfect health, and no more than nineteen. Matt had no sympathy for any able-bodied GI sitting out the war stateside.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Cpl. James Barko replied with a nod to a woman who had joined Mr. Kerney on the veranda. He’d driven from the airfield to the ranch in a hot car with the windows down, and his face was crusted with dust and his uniform shirt damp with sweat. “I was just told by my lieutenant to bring this to you right away.”

  The enclosed telex message from Dr. Beckmann read:

  Due to an unexpected problem, your appointment tomorrow is rescheduled for 8 AM, June 6. The laboratory shipped a green eye instead of blue. My apologies for the mix-up.

  Capt. S. Beckmann, MD, USA Medical Corps

&
nbsp; William Beaumont Hospital

  Fort Bliss, TX

  Matt laughed and handed the message to Anna Lynn. “Seems our trip to Fort Bliss is delayed until June sixth.”

  Anna Lynn scanned the telex and said, “You’re taking it lightly.”

  Matt shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “One green and one blue would be an interesting combination,” she suggested.

  “Certainly eye-catching, wouldn’t you say?” Matt said.

  Anna Lynn suppressed a giggle and smiled at the young soldier, wondering why Matt hadn’t shown the boy, who looked decidedly nonplussed by the exchange, any hospitality. “Can I get you a cool drink?” she asked him.

  “No thank you, ma’am,” Corporal Barko replied, desperate to depart. Born and raised along the Delaware Bay, he hated the desert, the heat, the dryness, the absence of water, and the boredom of New Mexico. He also hated the army that sent him to such an awful place. “Do you want to reply to the message, sir?” he asked Matt.

  “Nope, just tell your general or whoever is in charge of the flyboys to pay me for my two dead ponies.”

  “I’ll pass that along, sir.” Barko nodded again to the woman, retreated to the vehicle, and quickly drove away. In the pasture, the tires of his car threw a billowing cloud of dust that veiled a horseback rider approaching at a fast trot.

  “Now what?” Kerney asked, trying to identify the rider.

  Anna Lynn searched Matt’s face. “Why were you rude to that boy?”

  “I wasn’t rude, just unsympathetic.” Through the diminishing dust cloud, Matt made out Al Jennings Jr. approaching on his gelding. “Al Jr. has come calling and I don’t think he’s got good news.”

  ***

  Al’s news wasn’t good. Someone in a vehicle had busted through the gate to the 7-Bar-K high pasture where Matt was grazing his mares and foals and scattered them onto the desert scrub of the Jornada west of the San Andres. Al rounded up two that had strayed onto his land, but the rest were nowhere to be seen. From the tracks he’d found, it had probably happened about a week earlier.