He sneered. “What, you lining your pockets now at my expense?”
Ignoring him, I said, “The money will go to a local women’s shelter.” I leaned back in my chair, giving him a hard stare. “My patience only goes so far. You need to keep that in mind before you go spouting off your mouth again.”
Later that night Daisy and I did an Internet search for local dog trainers. If she was going to hang around the department during the day, I wanted to make sure she behaved. There was only one that I could find in this area, and I called him, only to learn that he was booked up for two months. He said Daisy and I both would get one-on-one training, and I liked that. I gave him my name and contact information, and asked him to put us on his schedule.
The next day my detective and I were going to rescue Beauregard, the prized bull. “You know where we can borrow a truck and horse trailer?” I asked Gene.
“Yeah, why?”
“So we can take Beauregard home.” I couldn’t stop my smirk when his eyes widened.
“You know where he is?”
“Pretty sure I do.”
It took him a few hours to return with the truck and trailer. “Where to, Chief?” he said after Daisy and I were loaded up, her in the back and me in the passenger seat.
“You know where Granny lives?” I thought Gene’s eyes were going to pop out of his head.
“Hamburger’s ma?”
“One and the same. Head for her place.” I hoped I was right or I was going to look like a fool. Granny lived twelve miles from the Scroggins’ farm, not too far a distance for a loose bull to roam. I didn’t think so, anyway.
“Okay, here’s the scoop,” I said. “On the same day Beauregard went missing, two people on the path to Granny’s called in a report of a bull in their yard, but by the time an officer arrived, there was no sign of any bull. Then the following day, Granny’s closest neighbor, Clyde Anderson, complained about a bull trying to get to one of his cows. Anderson ran it off with his shotgun, firing over the bull’s head.”
“How did no one know this?”
“Hard to believe, but Moody apparently never connected Scroggins’s Beauregard to the errant bull.”Errantwas definitely a good word for Beauregard. “Moody got the call, but the bull was gone by the time he arrived. A week later Anderson reported that he’d seen the same bull following Granny around like a puppy.”
“And you know all this how?”
“Because I stumbled on Moody’s report from Anderson, which he was either too lazy or too stupid to connect to Beauregard.” I shouldn’t be slamming one of my cops to another, but whatever. It wasn’t like Gene didn’t already know and agree with me. “Moody did go talk to Granny. According to what she told him, she’d raised the bull, and he took her at her word.”
Gene snorted. “More like she promised him a lifetime supply of moonshine if he’d go away and forget what he saw.”
“That occurred to me.” Gene turned onto a rutted dirt road. Every tree in sight had a NO TRESPASSING sign on it. Underneath many of those signs were ones that said, TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
“Getting a little nervous here,” I said, wondering if I was about to get in a shoot-out with a crazy old bull-stealing lady.
Gene laughed. “She’ll have a shotgun pointed at us when we pull up, but she’s not stupid enough to shoot the police chief and his detective.” He eyed the dog poking her face between us. “New uniforms, raises, a police dog. Can’t wait to see what you give us next.”
My detective was trying to calm me down, so I decided to take him at his word that I didn’t need to draw my gun. “Going to be hard to top all that,” I said. “My bag of tricks might be empty.”
He snorted. “Somehow I doubt that.”
Since I was still working out the details, I decided not to mention the SWAT team I was considering creating. Even though we were a small town, there should be a team trained for hostage situations.
The lane we drove on was overgrown with weeds, some a good three feet tall. We went around a curve, passing bushes that probably hadn’t been trimmed in years, if ever, and the house—cabin was more like it—came into view. The place was run-down and looked as if it could fall in around the inhabitants at any minute. An old refrigerator lay on its side in the yard, and a nasty-looking fabric couch was on the sagging porch.
“People actually live here?”
Gene nodded. “There are places like this all in these mountains. People who don’t want to be bothered.”
I had no intention of bothering any of them as long as they didn’t break the law. Not a minute after we pulled up, Granny came around the side of the cabin, pointing an ancient shotgun at us, a big, black bull following her like a loyal puppy.
“That’s Beauregard,” Gene whispered reverently.
I prayed that Granny didn’t shoot me.
