everything else?" I asked, irritable about being startled by every distant moo.
"City-raised," Leonard Tallgrass commented to Ric as we crouched in a cornfield bordering the grazing land we were "watching."
What you can "watch" crouching in corn plants in the dark of night is zero.
"Me too," Ric said in defense of my city-girl history.
"You? City-raised? Naw." Leonard Tallgrass had spoken. "You've got an inside-the-Beltway D.C. manner and you'll never tell me what or why, but you were used to living out-of-doors young."
I knew Ric would leave Tallgrass's pronouncement unanswered, so I broke the lengthening silence.
"Say, guys. I still don't get what we're doing in a cow pasture in the dark of night, or what you've been 'looking into' on the rural scene. Or why you were so interested in the footage Slo-mo Eddie got of the cow mutilation scene here."
I'd returned Dolly to the Thunderbird Inn from Our Lady of the Lake to find Ric, Tallgrass, and Quicksilver waiting, all ravenous. After a fast-food dinner, Tallgrass wanted to eyeball my TV station tape of this very scene, then get the two-footed members of our party appropriately garbed for a nighttime "operation."
So here we were two hours later in the dead of night. At least the nighttime temps dipped to a tolerable seventy degrees and the Kansas humidity was low. I couldn't believe that my quashed TV story on cattle mutilations was of such interest now, although the enlarged clawed tracks I'd noticed at the original scene had looked mighty bear-like on my laptop.
"Now that we know their route," Tallgrass told Ric, "I figure the herd will be ambling our way in twenty minutes or less."
"Somebody's driving them hard," Ric said. "They'll probably get here in ten to twelve minutes."
"Herd?" I asked. "Nobody herds cows overland these days. Aren't we laying a trap for the rotten teenaged cow mutilators? Probably half-breed vamps who've never gone mainstream and are living off livestock."
A weed was shifting in the night wind right under my nostrils, so I gave up the knee-creaking crouch and let myself fall back on my rear. Ric's fingerless workout gloves grabbed my wrists to pull me up again.
Ric and I had outfitted our designer jeans for unexpected night surveillance with work boots and long-sleeved black cotton shirts from Western Werehouse. My size eight boots weren't broken in. The stiff leather would chaff my ankles raw if I maintained this classic crouch position any longer.
"She okay?" Tallgrass asked softly.
"'She' is fine," I whispered. "I may not be Annie Oakley, but I got you guys back to the same field I'd filmed two months ago."
"Yes, you did, scout," Ric answered. "Any pasture where several cows have been mutilated and some officious Fed shows up to kick out the local media is prime scouting material."
"That was weeks and weeks ago," I objected. "A lot of weather has been over this field since."
Tallgrass snorted. "You got that right. Especially lately. Wichita's been having excessive 'weather' for early summer. Doesn't matter. When blood is shed, the earth remembers."
I shivered a little, even though it was a perfectly temperate night. Crickets chorused their approval all around. We could occasionally hear the almost metallic rustle of birds of prey briefly silhouetted by the nearing three-quarter moon, looking like a mottled football, in the dark sky above.
The guys had their night-vision, bone-finding field binoculars glued to their sinuses. They radiated teamwork and concentration for the hunt. What exactly they were hunting other than cows, they'd been seriously tight-lipped about telling me, but all our faces wore swaths of cammo paint.
I couldn't blame them. I was along to share the cramped discomfort they reveled in only because Quicksilver was doing the real scout-work somewhere out there. Also, I'd been pursuing broken threads of my past all day on my own in Wichita and wasn't keen on spilling the unpromising details when the male contingent had been finding out serious shit.
Obviously, Ric's FBI assignments and later freelance consulting work had brought him far north of the Mexican border. And Leonard Tallgrass was about as "retired" as the Energizer Bunny. Comparing the taciturn Tallgrass to something pink relieved my boredom and all-over outdoor itches and made me smile.
"Don't show your pearly whites on point unless you're going to use them," Tallgrass grumbled in my ear.
Damn. He didn't miss a thing.
"What about those funky tracks in the field?" I whispered into Ric's ear.
"Yes," he said.
Okay, so we weren't here to share, but pounce. On someone or something.
A moment later I heard rustling in