“Check it.” I looked around him, sweat running between my shoulder blades, and gaped at the clear cut area. In that area were neatly tarped mounds. The clearing was perhaps twenty yards across and nearly inaccessible from this side. But if one were coming downward where the grasslands began to climb and change into more rocky terrain, it would be an easy pick-up spot. “Told you!”
I rolled my eyes. He grabbed my head and gave me a loud smack of a kiss before scampering down off the fir tree like a red squirrel. I fell in behind him, wishing I’d thought to bring a gun. If I had spidey senses like Peter Parker, it would be vibrating madly. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to stash whatever was under those tarps out here. Those same people could be nearby. I pulled out my pocketknife just in case. A shadow moved over us. We both looked up to see a turkey vulture soaring gracefully over us.
“Bad sign?” Will asked. I shrugged. “You’re a Native American. Aren’t you versed in bad signs from nature?”
“Fuck all the way off.”
He snorted, winked, and then jogged to the nearest tarp. With a flourish, he tossed it back. Knife in my palm I blinked in shock at the amount of shit stashed out here. All manner of stolen goods, from clothing to building supplies to tools. Chainsaws, ropes, toolboxes, small engines, tack, tractor parts, fishing gear, archery targets, bags of feed, you name it.
“My hoodie!” Will shouted as he pawed through a trash bag of used clothes. “This is the hoodie that got my ass nearly fired and sent back to jail!” He waved the dark blue hoodie with an anime show logo in the air.
Stunned but not so shocked that I didn’t reach for my cell phone in my back pocket. It was nearly dead. It would have been totally dead if not for the fact that I’d done lots less reading over the past few days than I normally would. Sucking cock had been a lot more enjoyable than Socrates’ theory of citizenship.
“Put everything back,” I said then started snapping pictures of the area and uncovered items. “The hoodie too.”
Will looked like he wanted to argue, but he did as told, shoving his sweatshirt back into the bag of stolen clothing. He started recording us as we hustled around, cataloging what we could. Half the stolen goods were from our ranch, but a goodly amount was from Hollow Wind because the ranch logo was stamped on their possessions much like our ranch, and the rest I had no idea. We peeked under a large blue tarp, hoping to find the missing dino bones, but only found two rusty Arctic Cat snowmobiles circa 1978 or something. They were rough.
“We need to get back to the ranch and call the sheriff,” Will stated after recovering the snowmobiles. “Wait? Was it me that just said to call the cops? Fuck, Yellow Horse, you’re rubbing off on me.”
I liked the thought of that, so I stole a fast kiss. Getting back to our ATVs was just as precarious as it had been climbing to the stolen goods. We were both gouged and bruised and bloodied, but we were also feeling a kind of high. Maybe we’d just discovered something that would be a help in breaking up the thievery ring that seemed to have insinuated itself into our ranch. Tapping our coordinates into GPS, we rode off hell bent for leather. We were both so high on the rush of discovery that when we pulled up in front of Nate’s cabin, the two of us were falling over each other to be the one to relay the info to Nate. Imagine my surprise when my grandfather opened Nate’s door instead of the foreman.
“About time you showed up,” Kenruh said, his brown gaze flickering to Will at my side then back to me. “I have something I need to talk to you about. It’s important.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. And shit. Fucking Shep McCrary.