“There’s plenty of time. Where are the keys?”

“On my key ring. In the ignition of my car.”

“Okay. Be right back.”

And she was gone. Theo heard some pounding and what sounded like safety glass being shattered. In a second Molly was back in the doorway. She tossed the keys on the floor near his head. “Can you get to those?”

“Can you unlock me?”

“Uh, I’d rather not right now. But you’ll be able to get to those eventually, won’t you?”

“Molly!”

“Yes or no?”

“Sure, but…”

“Okay. See ya, Theo. Sorry about your car.”

And again she was gone.

As he scrambled in the dirt to get to the keys, he was still troubled about the unwarranted wave of horniness that had overtaken him. Could it have been set off by the handcuffs? Maybe he’d been into bondage all these years and never even knew it. Although when he’d been arrested right before Sheriff Burton had blackmailed him into becoming constable, he’d spent almost two hours in handcuffs and he didn’t remember it being an espe-cially erotic experience. Maybe it was the death threat. Was he turned on by the thought of being shot? Man, I am a sick individual, he thought.

In ten minutes he was free of both the handcuffs and the dogging thoughts of sex and death. Molly, Joseph Leander, and the house trailer were gone, and he stood before the ruins of his Volvo with an entirely new set of questions nagging him. The roof of the station wagon was now mashed down to level with the hood, three of the four tires were blown, and on the ground, all around the car, were the tracks of what had to be a very, very large animal.

There were two trails that had matted down the grass leading away from the shed and over the hill. One, obviously, was the track of a person. The other was wider than the dirt road that led into the ranch.

Theo dug into the Volvo for his gun and cell phone, having no idea what to do with either of them. There was no one to call—and certainly no one he wanted to shoot. Except maybe Sheriff John Burton. He searched the area, found Joseph Leander’s gun, and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. The keys were still in the red four-wheeler, and after a minute of measuring the ethics of “borrowing” the truck against having been kid-napped, handcuffed, and almost killed, he climbed into the truck and took off across the pasture, following the double trail.

Gabe and the rancher stood over the pulverized remains of the Holstein, waving flies away from their faces, while Skinner crouched a few yards away, his ears back, growling at the mess.

The rancher pushed his Stetson back on his head and shuddered. “My people have been running dairy and beef cattle on this land for sixty years, and I ain’t never heard or seen anything like it, Gabe.”

His name was Jim Beer. He was fifty-five, going on seventy, leathery from too much sun and stress, and there was a note of the sad lonely under everything he said. He was tall and thin, but stood with the broken-backed slouch of a beaten man. His wife had left him years ago, driving off in her Mercedes to live in San Francisco and taking with her a note worth half the value of Jim Beer’s thousand acres. His only son, who was to have taken the ranch over, was twenty-eight now and was busy getting thrown out of colleges and into rehabs all over the country. He lived alone in a fourteen-room house that rattled with emptiness and seemed to suck up the laughter of the ranch hands, who Jim fed in his enormous kitchen every morning. Jim was the last of his breed, and he would forever trace the beginning of his downfall to an affair he’d had with the witch who once lived in Theo’s cabin at the edge of the ranch. Cursed he was, or so he believed. If the witch hadn’t run off ten years ago with the owner of the general store, he would have been sure the mutilated cattle was her doing.

Gabe shook his head. “I have no idea, Jim. I can take some samples and have some test run, but I don’t even know what we are looking at here.”

“You think it was kids? Vandals?”

“Kids tip cows over, Jim. These look like they’ve been dropped from thirty thousand feet.” Gabe knew what appeared to have happened, but he wasn’t willing to admit it. There wasn’t a creature alive that could have done this. There had to be another explanation.

“So you’re saying aliens?”

“No, I am definitely not saying aliens. I’m not saying aliens.”

“Something was here. Look at the tracks. Satanic cult?”

“Damn it, Jim, unless you want to be on the cover of Crackpot Weekly, don’t talk that way. I can’t tell you what did this, but I can tell you what didn’t. This was not aliens, or Satanists, or Bigfoot on a binge. I can take some samples and run some tests and then maybe, maybe, I can tell you what did this, but in the meantime, you should call the state ag guys and get them out here.“

“I can’t do that, Gabe.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t have strangers running around on my land. I don’t want this gettin‘ out. That’s why I called you.”

“What’s that?” Gabe held up a finger to hold his place in the conversation, then looked to the hills: the sound of an engine. In a second a red four-wheel-drive pickup appeared on the hill headed toward them.

“You’d better go,” Jim Beer said.

“Why?”

“You’d just better. Nobody’s supposed to be on this side of the ranch but me. You need to go.”

“This is your land?”

“Let’s jump in your truck, son. We need to go.”

Gabe squinted to get a better look at the truck, then waved. “That’s Theo Crowe,” he said. “What’s he doing in that thing?”

“Oh shit,” Jim Beer said.

Theo pulled the truck up next to Gabe’s, skidded to a stop, and crawled out. To Gabe, the constable looked pissed off, but he couldn’t be sure, having never seen the expression on Theo before. “Afternoon, Gabe, Jim.”

Jim Beer looked at his boots. “Constable.”

Gabe noticed that Theo had two pistols stuck in his jeans and was half-covered with dust. “Hi, Theo. Nice truck. Jim called me out to take a look…”

“I know what that is,” Theo said, tossing his head toward the mashed cow. “At least I think I do.” He strode up to Jim Beer, who seemed to be trying to sink into a hole in his own chest.

“Jim, you got a crank lab back there turning out enough product to hype all of Los Angeles. You wanna tell me about it?”

The life seemed to drain out of Jim Beer and he fell to the ground in a splay-legged sit. Gabe caught his arm to keep him from cracking his tailbone. Beer didn’t look up. “My wife took a note for half the ranch when she left. She called it in. Where else was I going to get three million dollars?”

Gabe looked from Jim to Theo as if to say, “What the hell?”

“I’ll explain later, Gabe. I have something I have to show you anyway.” Theo pushed Jim Beer’s Stetson back so he could see the rancher’s face. “So Burton gave you the money so he could use your land for the lab.”

“Sheriff Burton?” Gabe asked, totally confused now.

“Shut up, Gabe,” Theo snapped.

“Not all of the money. Payments. Hell, what could I do? My grandfather started this ranch. I couldn’t sell off half of it.”

“So you went into drug dealing?”

“I ain’t never even seen this lab you’re talking about. Neither have my hands. That part of the ranch is off-limits. Burton said he had you in the cabin to keep anyone from coming in the back gate. I just run my cattle and mind my own business. I never even asked Burton what he was doing out there.”

“There million dollars! What the hell did you think he was doing? Raising rabbits?”

Jim Beer didn’t answer, he just stared at the ground between his legs. Gabe held his shoulder to steady him and looked to Theo. “Maybe finish this later, Theo?”

Theo turned and walked in a tight circle, waving his hands in the air as if chasing away annoying spirits.