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Rancho Arroyo had been the brainchild of Ozzie Dobbs Sr., a developer from the southern part of the state, who had taken the opportunity to buy the cheap land adjacent to the dump that happened to have views of the eastern slope of the Bighorns. Ozzie Sr. had quietly passed about two and a half years ago, and the reins had gone to his son, Ozzie Jr., who had been making a public case for having the junkyard/ dump moved again. Geo Stewart was having none of it.
    Mike Thomas’s tidy, picturesque ranch was over a couple of ridges from my cabin, and whenever Martha and I had driven by Mike’s place, my late wife had looked at it wistfully. He’d sculpted it as meticulously as he did his statuary, with hand-hewn logs, crafted doors, and an artist’s eye. It made me want to hate his guts, but he was too nice a guy. Geographic proximity made him an interested party in what was, southeast of town, the makings of a modern range war.
    All this history clattered through my mental projector and slapped the tail end with the sculptor’s voice. “Walt, those people are a hazard.”
    I tried to rethread the film. “Yep, but thank goodness it’s mostly to themselves.” I smiled back at him to let him know that my preoccupation wasn’t personal. “Hey, Mike, can you show me your hands?”
    He looked puzzled but held up a full complement of digits.
    We continued on our way, and I remarked to Sancho with my most determined investigative face. “We call that detecting.”
    He didn’t laugh like he used to.
     
     
    We drove into the driveway of the Stewart family’s big house, careful to avoid the mailbox lying in the roadway, and took the cutoff leading to the junkyard’s double gates, which were across from the dump’s drive-on scales.
    The combination junkyard/dump was in an old gravel quarry, and the cliffs at the back of the place rose to almost a hundred feet. Even though you could see row after row of antiquated vehicles to the left and mound after mound of trash to the right, it wasn’t a bad spot.
    Geo’s incongruous-looking office, an art-deco structure that had been salvaged from the city pool and still a startling, if peeling, turquoise with white circular windows and rounded trim, was straight ahead. If you looked hard enough, you could still see the darker paint where the letters that spelled SNACK BAR had fallen off.
    The Classic was parked by the scales along with a phalanx of tow trucks, all from different decades, but no one seemed to be around.
    “Pull over here and park it.”
    He did as I requested without comment. It was possible he was dreading the rest of the long winter even more than I was and that his words were also gone to Nebraska with the wind.
    I took a sounding. “How’s Marie?”
    It took a moment, but the words slowly surfaced. “More tired than she was when she was pregnant.”
    “I bet.” I had thought about telling him a few months ago how tiring it would be when the little rascal was out and about but had decided to keep that nugget of wisdom to myself. “How’s Antonio?”
    He continued to look at the zigzag patterns of snow, his face away from me. “He sleeps . . . sometimes.”
    “It can get a little wearing.”
    I watched his breath on the window. “What?”
    “Babies, they can get a little wearing.”
    He still didn’t move. “Yeah.”
    “Have you figured out whose he is?”
    He sat there until he turned his head far enough forward so that one eye drifted my way. “What?”
    I leaned against my door, readjusted my old .45 so that it wasn’t poking me, and looked at the Basquo. “All right, what’s on your mind, Sancho.”
    He contemplated the Remington twelve-gauge locked onto the transmission hump, and we sat there listening to the dry rhythm of the wind gusts as they pushed against the outside of the truck. His voice sounded like it was coming out of a barrel. “I’m thinking about going back to corrections.”
    Santiago had started his law enforcement career in