Jack Hopper and the Joe Tank Crew
Thursday morning. Bertie's White Mountain Cafe & Donuts on Deuce of Clubs.
Jack Hopper sat at the corner table with coffee and a view of the door he always kept. The place smelled like bacon grease and sugar. Two kids had their faces pressed against the donuts display glass like it was Christmas, breath fogging the window while their mother pretended not to notice.
The breakfast crowd moved around him. Short stacks. Scrambled eggs. Somebody’s too-sweet cologne competing with the donuts and losing.
He was halfway through the sports section when Daisy walked in.
She had her phone in her hand and the look on her face that meant breakfast was going to wait.
“Melissa Nicole Perkins,” she said, sliding into the seat across from him. “Linden Valley Arena. She called me ten minutes ago.”
Jack set the paper down.
“Three horses missing since yesterday. Cowboys started rolling in Wednesday night for the team roping season opener. Big event. Forty-some rigs parked out there already.” Daisy wrapped both hands around his untouched coffee. “They’re finding empty stalls in the morning. No noise. No fuss. Just gone.”
“How many horses total on the grounds?”
“Sixty, more by Friday for sure.”
Jack looked out the window at Deuce of Clubs. A feed truck rumbled past. The strip of small storefronts sat quiet in the morning light, OPEN signs flickering on one by one.
“What about Sheriff David Clouse?”
“Melissa wants it quiet. She’s got a full weekend of entry fees on the line. Word gets out, people pull their horses and go home.”
Jack stood up. Put two dollars on the table for the coffee he hadn’t touched. “Let’s go.”
Linden sat seven miles west on Highway 260. Blink and you’d miss it. A bend in the road, some pines, an elementary school and a few scattered structures. Perkins Cinders sat on the right side of the highway. Pale rock piles. Dust. The grind of machinery already going at this hour.
Just past the quarry, a dirt road cut back into the pines. A quarter mile in, the trees opened up and Linden Valley Arena spread out in front of them.
Jack heard it before he saw it. The bawl of a steer being worked through the chute. A horse blowing hard through its nose. Somewhere a kid laughing and a dog barking back. The radio was going near the trailers and competing badly with all of it.
He opened the truck door and the full smell hit him. Manure and hay and horse sweat and diesel. Arena dirt warming up in the morning sun. Coffee from somewhere. Someone frying something nearby.
Cowboys moved horses from rigs to stalls, checking gear, wrapping legs, talking in that low unhurried way that meant they’d done this a thousand times. Kids chased each other between the trailers. A woman pushed a stroller across the uneven ground with one hand and held a coffee in the other. Near the check-in, a couple of kids worked a roping dummy, missing more than they caught and not slowing down.
Melissa met them at the gate. She was blonde with the kind of smile that probably lit up a room on a good day. Today wasn’t a good day. The smile was there but it was working hard. Her eyes moved constantly across the grounds, scanning trailers, counting heads, doing math she didn't like.
“Third one this morning,” she said. “Bay gelding out of stall fourteen. Owner doesn’t know yet.”
“Any noise? Anybody hear anything?” Jack asked.
“Nothing. Whoever’s doing this knows horses. They’re not spooking them. Walking them out quiet.”
Jack looked at the layout. Two arenas, open ground, pines pressing in on three sides. A lot of places to come and go without being seen.
“Back fence line?”
“Checked it this morning. Nothing obvious.”
Daisy was already scanning the grounds.
Jack looked back at Melissa.
“You got a dog on this property?”
She almost smiled for real. “Cinder,” she said. “He’s around somewhere.”
They found the dog by the food shack where a woman was setting up for the day, moving fast through a counter crowded with supplies, like she was already behind and catching up. Her name tag caught the light when she turned. Robyn Garvin Esparza. Dark hair, straight with a little wave to it, that had no business looking that good at eight in the morning.
Cinder was a blue heeler, low to the ground and built like a keg. Gray and black mottled coat, one ear up, one flopped. Missing his front right leg. He moved on three like he’d never needed the fourth.
He looked at Jack once. Decided something. Fell in beside him without being asked.
Robyn watched from behind her counter. “He doesn’t do that with everybody.”
“Lucky me,” Jack said.
Across the grounds at the check-in table near the announcer’s booth, a woman worked through entry forms for the cowboys like she meant to get ahead of it. A couple of empty coffee cups sat off to one side. Blonde, on the shorter side, with the kind of tan that came from years of outdoor work and didn’t apologize for it. She had a smile that probably stopped conversations when she turned it on.
Right now she wasn’t smiling.
“Dark colored truck,” she said before Jack finished asking. “Older. No markings. Came through the back access road around four this morning. I thought it was a late arrival.” She paused. “There was another one Wednesday night. Different truck. Same type.”
“Same driver?”
She shrugged. “I’m Karah Flake, by the way.”
“What time did the Wednesday truck come through?”
She blinked. “Around midnight.”
Jack thanked her and started on the fence line. Cinder worked ahead of him, nose down, moving in long arcs through the grass. Jack walked the full south fence. Nothing. Walked the east fence along the tree line. Nothing there either. He checked the back access road. Tire tracks, but the ground was too hard to read them clean.
An hour in and he had nothing useful.
He stopped. Looked around. A steer bawled in the chute and a gate clanged and somebody whistled sharp from across the arena. The smell of manure was stronger back here near the catch pens. A cowboy led a big gray horse past without looking at Jack. Two more sat on a fence rail drinking coffee and arguing about something that had happened in Payson.
Nobody paying attention to a rabbit walking fence lines.
Cinder had drifted back toward the second arena. He was standing at the far corner, nose up, one ear cocked.
Jack walked over.
The heeler didn’t wait. He turned and pushed into the tree line, threading through the juniper on three legs without slowing. Jack followed, branches pulling at his coat, the ground sloping down under the pines. The noise of the arena faded behind them. The bawling of the steers went with it. Then just the wind in the ponderosas and Cinder moving through the brush ahead.
Cinder stopped at the edge of a dry wash. He stood rigid, staring into the trees on the other side.
Jack crouched. Hoofprints in the soft creek bank. Multiple sets. Some older. Some fresh enough that the edges hadn’t dried yet.
He looked at Cinder.
Cinder looked back at him.
“Good boy,” Jack said.
The heeler was already moving again.
They found them camped in the tree line above the wash. Three coyotes, lean and dust-colored, wearing clothes they’d slept in. A makeshift rope corral held five horses back in the trees. Two more were tied to a juniper.
Seven horses. Not three.
Jack recognized the one out front. Decker. Tall for a coyote, calm, piece of hay between his teeth. Jack had heard the name before the way you heard certain names in small towns. Passed between ranchers at feed stores and fuel stops. The Joe Tank Crew. Horse traders who didn’t deal in horses they owned. They ran their operation a few miles southeast of here, deep in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.
His two crew members were another matter. Tico was eating beef jerky and watching the wrong direction entirely. Burl had somehow gotten his boot caught in a rope and was working quietly to free himself before anyone noticed.
Decker saw Jack first. Took him in slow. “Hopper,” he said. “Heard you’d gone quiet.”
“I did. People keep waking me up.”
Tico dropped his jerky. Burl got his boot free and immediately stepped on the loose end of another rope.
“Seven horses,” Jack said. “You’re a few miles outside your territory. Things that tight up at Joe Tank?”
Something flickered across Decker’s face. There and gone. “Can’t prove these aren’t mine.”
“I can.”
Decker’s easy manner slipped one notch. “You’re one rabbit.”
“That’s what the last crew said.”
Something moved behind Decker’s eyes. He’d heard about the ferrets. Maybe about Easter too. Word got around in small communities. “This isn’t connected to any of that,” he said carefully.
“No,” Jack agreed. “This one’s all yours.”
Decker nodded once.
Tico came left. Burl came right, which was optimistic given his history with ropes.
It went sideways when the horse spooked.
Jack had Tico handled and was turning toward Burl when the bay gelding nearest the corral fence yanked its lead free and bolted. The loose rope swung wide and caught Jack across the chest and suddenly he was moving whether he wanted to or not.
The horse took off through the trees at a dead run.
Jack went with it.
The ground blurred. Branches. Rock. The edge of the wash coming up fast. He got one hand on the lead rope and tried to find his feet but his feet had other ideas. He went through a juniper that had opinions about it. Then a patch of scrub oak. Then something with thorns that he’d be finding in his fur for a week. A tumbleweed caught him across the face and decided to come along for the ride. Then another one. The wash was right there, four feet down onto dry creek rock, coming up fast.
Then Cinder blew past him.
Three legs. Full speed. The heeler cut out wide and got ahead of the horse, then turned hard and planted himself directly in its path. Seventy pounds of muscle. One ear up, one flopped. Three legs and a look on his face that said he wasn’t moving.
The horse had a thousand pounds on him and was running scared and Cinder stood there anyway.
The horse broke hard to the right.
The rope went slack. Jack let go and hit the ground rolling and came to rest against a boulder at the very edge of the drop. Six inches from open air.
He lay there. Looked up at the sky. Ponderosas. Blue. A hawk turning slow circles.
He had burs in both ears. Burs across his coat. Burs in places he didn’t want to think about. A tumbleweed was somehow still attached to his left elbow. He pulled it off. Another one was matted into the fur behind his head. A juniper branch had deposited what appeared to be an entire season’s worth of debris down the back of his collar.
Cinder sat five feet away watching him like it was none of his business.
Jack picked a thorn out of his nose. Found the boot. Put it back on. Stood up slowly and checked that nothing was broken.
“Not a word to anyone” Jack said.
Cinder looked away like he hadn’t seen a thing.
Jack limped back into camp looking like something the forest had chewed on and spit back out. Decker was still there. Tico was zip-tied to a juniper with his own lead rope. Burl had managed to get himself tied to the same tree from the other side.
Decker looked at Jack. At the dirt. The scratches. The boot that wasn’t quite on straight. The bur still stuck to his right ear that he hadn’t found yet. “You look like you lost.”
Jack brushed a bur off his sleeve. Looked at him.
“Other guy.”
Then he hit him.
Decker sat down hard in the dirt.
Cinder walked over, sniffed him once, turned around and headed toward the horses to herd them back to the arena.
Jack followed.
By noon the horses were back in their stalls. Melissa stood at the gate watching the last one led in. The smile had come back. Not the working-hard version. The real one.
She didn’t say anything. Just nodded once.
Robyn offered Jack a vanilla soft-serve ice cream through the food stand window without being asked.
“Got chocolate?” Jack asked.
“It’s broken.” Robyn set it down on the counter. “Rabbits,” she muttered as she shut the sliding glass window.
Kara looked him over from her check-in table. At the scratches. The dirt. The bur still riding his ear. She turned the full brightness of that smile on him for just a second. “Rough morning?”
“Fine,” Jack said.
She went back to her entry forms.
Daisy drove back toward Show Low while Jack watched the highway.
“Decker say anything useful?” she asked.
“Didn’t ask.”
“Jack.”
“He’s Joe Tank. Small operation. Opportunist.” Jack drank his coffee. “Whoever’s running the bigger network doesn’t use coyotes.”
Daisy was quiet a moment. “Harlan.”
“Maybe.”
The highway ran straight through the pines. Perkins Cinders in the rear-view mirror.
“Sheriff’s going to want a statement,” Daisy said.
“Tell him the horses turned up. Trespassers cleared out.”
“And Decker?”
“Zip-tied to a juniper in the wash with his crew. Someone will find them.”
Daisy looked at him. “You left them tied to a tree.”
“Comfortable tree.”
She shook her head and drove on.
Jack reached up and pulled the last bur off his ear. He looked at the side mirror. Somewhere back in those pines a three-legged heeler was already back on patrol. The horses were in their stalls. The weekend ropers would never know how close they’d come.
The season opener event would go on as planned.
That was enough.
Show Low stays quiet most nights.
Not all of them.
