Jack Hopper and the 14th Tee
Show Low, Arizona. Late July.
Monsoon season. Hot enough to make the ponderosas look tired. Storm clouds built over the Rim every afternoon and threatened rain that usually didn’t come.
Jack was in the back corner of the Bagel Box just about hidden behind his newspaper, working through a plain bagel and a black coffee. He sat with his back to the wall and a view of the door, the way he always did. He wasn’t hiding exactly. He just preferred it when people couldn’t find him.
Daisy found him anyway. She always did.
She came through the door with someone Jack didn’t recognize. He glanced at the empty seats at his table and moved his newspaper to cover them. It didn’t work. Daisy slid it aside and sat down like it was her table.
“Jack, this is my friend Lynsi MacGregor.”
Linsi sat down and got straight to it, which Jack appreciated. Someone had been hitting the irrigation lines on the Cabin Course at Torreon Golf Club.
“Three times in two weeks,” she said. “Clean cuts. Looks professional. Dozens of feet of copper feeder line gone each time.” She shook her head. “Caleb, the manager up there, is losing his mind. Two more hits and they’ll have dead grass on six, eleven, and fourteen before the first player tees off.”
“Isn’t Torreon where the mailboxes cost more than Daisy’s truck?” Jack said. “Why should I care?”
Daisy gave Jack a look. “Don’t start.”
Linsi looked at him for a second. “It’s not just Torreon,” she said. “It helps local high school kids. Gives them a real chance. Big tournament in twelve days. Matthew Bantly runs it. He’s been pushing it all year and somebody’s out there tearing it up—”
Daisy held up her hand. She said only one name: “Scratch Moran.”
The ceiling fan turned slow overhead. Nobody at the other tables was paying any attention.
“Scratch Moran,” Jack said, “is in Florence.”
“Was,” Daisy said. “He got out in April. Early release.”
“Good behavior,” Jack said, like he was trying the words out to see if they made any sense. They didn’t.
He thought about the warehouse in Snowflake. The cut fencing. The whole mess it had taken to put Scratch away in the first place.
Jack stood, left two dollars on the table, and walked out.
Caleb Blass was the general manager at Torreon, stocky and broad through the shoulders, the kind of thirty-something who looked like he’d been outside every day of his life. He’d been awake since four in the morning and wanted everyone to know it.
He walked Jack through the damage on hole seven without slowing down. Professional sod cuts, the right depth, no wasted motion. They knew what they were doing. Half-inch copper feeder line, forty feet of it, gone without a trace.
Jack found the drag marks in the tree line ten yards off the cart path. Three sets of prints in a soft patch of dirt near a root, one of them a wide webbed-boot print he recognized.
“They went out through there,” Jack said.
“How do you know?” Caleb asked.
“It’s where I’d go.”
Sheriff David Clouse showed up around eleven with a deputy who had a notebook and not much else to do. He looked at the trench, looked at his clipboard, and looked like a man who had too many other things going on.
“Stolen ATVs in Pinetop. Couple of open cases from the Fourth of July,” Clouse said. “I can't park someone on a golf course every night over copper lines. Give me something I can work with.”
“Scratch Moran,” Jack said.
The deputy stopped writing.
Clouse looked at the trench for a long moment. “Moran’s in Florence.”
“Moran got out in April.”
Clouse took that in. Then he shook his head. “Don’t make my paperwork worse,” he said, already turning away.
Scratch Moran had been running the Gopher Gang for years. Copper, mostly. Irrigation lines, electrical conduit, anything metal they could pull out of the ground and sell. They worked fast and clean. Never left much behind. The Snowflake job was the one time they slipped up. Somebody talked. Scratch went to Florence and the gang went quiet.
Now he was out. And apparently back to work.
Jack made some calls from Daisy’s truck at Fool Hollow and talked to a man named Beggs who knew most of the back-channel copper business in Navajo County. Beggs said Scratch had been camping somewhere near the National Forest boundary south of Torreon for the past few weeks. Keeping a low profile. Watching the course.
Twelve days before a major tournament. Two championship courses full of copper infrastructure running under every fairway. That wasn’t a coincidence. That was a plan.
Jack went back to Torreon after dark. Daisy dropped him off just off Highway 60. He went through the trees on foot. The course was quiet, the fairways silver under a half-moon, the only light coming from a few homes and a lone distant lamp on the corner of a street.
He found a spot near the twelfth green and settled in to wait. He was good at waiting.
Just before one in the morning, three headlamps appeared in the trees south of fourteen. They moved slow and careful along the cart path, stopped at the tee box, and got to work. The big one in the middle moved like someone who had done this a hundred times. Wide shoulders, deliberate, no wasted steps.
Scratch Moran.
Jack waited until they had the sod open and the line exposed. Then he stepped out of the trees.
“Long way from Florence, Scratch.”
The two smaller gophers spun around. One grabbed a pry bar. The other did the smart thing and stood perfectly still.
Scratch straightened up slowly. He looked at Jack the way he looked at most problems, like he was doing the math on it. “Hopper,” he said. “Heard you’d gone civilian.”
“People keep scheduling things,” Jack said. He nodded toward the pry bar. “Put it down.”
It took a second. Then he did.
It might have ended there. Scratch was doing the math and getting to the right answer, and Jack could see it happening. But the one who had put down the pry bar picked it back up, which was a decision, and lunged, which was a worse one. Jack sidestepped, caught his arm, and sat him down hard in the turf. The second one came in low. Jack took a shot to the ribs he would be feeling for a week and sent back two that finished the argument. Both of them were on the ground now, thinking things over.
Scratch rolled up his sleeves. “Should’ve stayed retired.”
What happened next was not something Jack would ever discuss in any detail. Scratch was bigger than he remembered and the knee was older than it used to be, and somewhere in the third exchange Jack went down on one hand in the bent grass of the fourteenth tee box, which was soft and well-maintained and, under different circumstances, quite nice.
He was working on a new plan when something moved at the edge of the tee box.
A shape in the dark. Big. Slow. Coming in from the tree line with the unhurried confidence of something that had no idea a fight was happening and no interest in finding out.
It was large, black and white, and it had apparently been grazing its way across the golf course for a while before it reached the fourteenth tee and found a gopher standing in the middle of it.
The cow did not care for this. It lowered its head and kept walking at the same slow pace, which was not fast by any measure, but was fast enough when you were not expecting it and were already mid-sentence.
Scratch Moran went sideways off the tee box like a bag of clubs someone had decided not to carry anymore.
The cow walked to the center of the tee box, looked at nothing in particular, and started eating.
Jack got up slowly. Scratch was lying in the rough, staring at the sky with the expression of an animal who had just been hit by a much larger animal and was still catching up to that fact. Jack walked over and looked down at him. Scratch looked up at Jack. Then at the cow. Then back again, as if he suspected Jack had arranged this somehow.
Jack considered that a little unfair.
“Stay out of Torreon,” Jack said. “Find somewhere else to work.”
Scratch said nothing. The cow pulled up another mouthful of the green and chewed it slowly, very pleased with itself.
Caleb was at the maintenance shed at sunrise with two coffees. Jack told him to put motion sensors on the south tree line between twelve and sixteen, and to use the tournament security budget to do it. Caleb handed over the second coffee without argument. He didn’t ask about the hoofprints on the fourteenth tee. Some things were better handled with sod and silence.
Jack found Daisy by the highway. She had a bag from Bertie's White Mountain Cafe & Donuts on the seat and handed it over when he got in. Blueberry muffin, still warm. She drove back toward Show Low while Jack watched the trees go by.
“Scratch say anything useful?” she asked.
“Didn’t get to it.”
“Jack!”
“There were complications.”
She looked at the grass stain on his knee. The way he was sitting with his ribs tilted away from the door. “What kind of complications?”
“Agricultural,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment, then looked back at the road and decided not to ask.
“You think Scratch getting out early is connected to the rest of it?” she said after a while.
Jack thought about Vance Eller in the alley behind the Bison Bar. About Red Whisker saying we ain’t the only ones out here. About the way every one of these jobs had been timed perfectly, targeted at something that mattered to the town. That was not a string of bad luck. That was somebody calling the shots.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I think it’s connected.”
Daisy was quiet for a moment. “Harlan.”
Jack didn’t answer. Show Low came up through the trees at the bottom of the hill and the morning went on like it always did.
Caleb got his motion sensors. Scratch Moran didn’t come back.
Somewhere out past the edge of what Jack could see, someone was already planning the next one.
The City of Show Low stays quiet most nights.
Not all of them.
