by Bart Paul
We stopped after a bit to let the horses blow. Across the streambed we could see a hole in the bank with a yellow warning sign and a big mound of sandy orange mine tailings.
“Even in dry years,” Sarah said, “there’s at least some flow coming down the canyon this early in the season. I guess Hoyt was on to something.”
“Where does this streambed drain?”
“About half a mile north of where we parked,” she said, “it hits the ditches on the Hoffstatler ranch.”
“How much further to the actual spring?”
“Another mile or two.”
“Why’d they call it False Spring?”
“It’s historically intermittent.” She looked me over then. “It’s just not very dependable,” she said, “as springs go.”
“So how long have we been in Nevada?”
“Since before we got out of the truck.”
We rode on a while longer. I was looking at the road and any signs of traffic.
“Who uses this other than four-wheelers and bottle hunters?”
“Probably miners and woodcutters,” she said. “Just like in the old days.”
“Not a lot of call for heavy water use, then.”
“Nope.”
I got off my horse and handed him to her so I could study the ground. There were all sorts of tire tracks both old and fresh. Some looked like Berglund’s four-wheeler, and some were new to me. I walked ahead a bit and Sarah followed. A wind picked up out of nowhere and we put on our jackets. I looked around at the ridges. If anyone was up there, we’d be hard to miss. Sarah watched me pull the Remington from the scabbard and pop the magazine and load it with the rounds from my shirt pocket.
“What do you think?” she said.
“Busy place. Been a Dually truck up here. And a couple of four-wheelers.”
I slipped the loaded rifle back in the scabbard and got mounted. Up ahead we could see where the hills were burned clean to the sand, leaving black stumps and not a trace of new growth. I looked back and saw the creekbed thick with willow in the damp spots. On the right we saw a larger mine with falling-down, corrugated sheds against the bluff and part of the hoisting works still standing. Rusty bits of machinery lay scattered in the wash. Beyond the mine the road ran through a muddy pond the length of a truck, then curved to the left and dipped down out of sight. Sarah pointed up a steep draw filled with willow and wild rose all the way to the ridgetop.
“There you have it,” she said. “False Spring.”
Tall grass grew around the puddle and a steady trickle of dirty water oozed into it from above. The fire in the canyon had burned right to the willows’ edge. On the downhill side of the draw was a piñon-covered rise cut by a jeep track that climbed into the trees and disappeared. For the first time we saw bits of human trash along the road. A white paper sign on a stake said that the area up the jeep road was a federal mining claim, but the spaces for names, addresses, and boundaries were all blank.
“Springs are usually fresh and clear,” Sarah said. “This runoff looks vile.”
I could see bits of scattered small animal bones near the water’s edge. A dead crow barely broke the black surface of the puddle.
“Smells funny, too. Maybe they’re using chemicals for mining.”
We rode past the claim notice and up the jeep track. Human sign was everywhere now—empty cans of beans and fruit and salsa, plastic water bottles and cellophane wrappers, beer cans and boxes of rat poison. And we saw what might’ve been blood. I bent down and looked at a dried smear in the grass about half a foot long. Sarah handed me a ziplock from her cantlebag and I tried to gather what I could on the blade of my skinning knife. It had been sticky and goopy, like calf snot, but dried hard.
“Human?” Sarah said.
“Can’t tell.” I bagged it as best I could without touching it, then handed it up to her. “Could just be rabbit guts.”
She wrote on the ziplock with a Sharpie. The jeep track climbed another hundred yards, then crested a ridge. From there a game trail covered with human tracks dropped into the willows.
“Tommy,” Sarah said. She pointed ahead.
I saw a cross made of white pipe about three feet high at the top of the ridge just off the two-track. White-painted two-by-fours made a kind of enclosure on the ground, and inside the enclosure were shotgun shells, Bic lighters, and plastic flowers arranged like some sort of shrine. Or like a grave. Sarah got off and handed me her mare as she knelt down to read a little wood sign about the size of your hand.
“‘Wendy Hammond.’ That’s all it says.”
“There are Indian graves scattered all around this country, especially near creeks and springs, but that’s no Indian name I ever heard.”
“And no Indian grave,” Sarah said. “It could just be a local’s joke.”
“Or a warning.”
She got back on her horse. We followed the trail down into the thick willows where there was the rank smell again and the ground was torn and muddy from what looked like four-wheelers. With the heavy growth we couldn’t see far in any direction. The wind in the branches made moving shadows on the mud.
“Pretty,” Sarah said, “but creepy.”
“No argument here.”
“I thought for a sec I saw somebody moving back up there,” she said. “Probably just my eyes playing tricks.” She rested her rope hand on the butt of her pistol.
“Funny how wet it is here and how little flow there is downstream.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Funny.”
We pushed through another fifty feet until the thicket opened up. The willows had been chopped down and hollowed out to make a big clearing that you couldn’t see from the road. In the opening we saw a generator, gas cans, Wal-Mart sleeping bags, more trash and toilet paper scattered everywhere, plastic chairs, a half-collapsed wall tent with a hole burned in it, blue tarps, and black plastic water lines with the smell of wet earth mixing with the smell of human shit. We saw rows of holes and then scattered plants along the edge of the clearing that hadn’t been ripped out by their roots yet, and smaller clearings cut in the willows beyond where we could see. Above us on a rise was a dam made of boulders smeared with rough concrete. It was a crappy-looking job, but it held back a small pond. Scum floated on the surface and more black plastic hoses gravity-fed the plants that had been growing downhill.
“Terrific,” Sarah said. “Goddamn pot farmers.” She scrunched her nose and pointed up at the pond. “This dammed-up mess is the actual False Spring, for what it’s worth.”
“Explains why Hoyt’s water disappeared.”
“And now Hoyt’s disappeared,” she said.
“Yeah. Looks like whoever farmed this bailed in a hurry.”
“Maybe that’s who I saw down there in the trees.” She was only half kidding.
“You get those spent cartridges to agent Fuchs last night?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I put them and the beer can in an evidence bag and told Mitch I found them around Dad’s porch when I was re-checking the crime scene. Told him I’d texted Fuchs to pick them up from him.”
“I guess even Mitch can’t screw that up.”
“Mitch loves the forensic stuff,” she said. “He thinks he’s Mister CSI.”
“I never asked you—I know you told Kip I was coming, but how did the husband actually know you contacted me in Georgia?”
“He snoops on my phone,” she said.
The cold breeze ruffled a blue tarp in thick wild rose. That woke the horses right up. I stepped down into the goop, pulled the .270, handed my horse to Sarah and walked closer. I stopped when I saw the bottoms of cheap boots sticking out and could see the soaking wet cuffs of the pants. I pushed the edge of the plastic tarp away from the body with the rifle muzzle.
“Is it Hoyt?” she said.
“No.”
It was a Mexican-looking guy, kind of heavy and maybe forty years old lying on his back. His face was crusted with blood and he stunk bad.
“It should,” Sarah said. “I’ll call Mitch while you think up a story for Nevada deputies of what the hell I’m doing up here.”
“You’re helping me look for Hoyt on your day off, remember? Like any other civilians.”
I hunkered down, watching her study the whole clearing from the back of the mare as she pulled her radio from her belt. In spite of the mess and the stink and the mud, you could see it had been a really pretty place once, with the willow and rose and a few elderberry and the spring flowing clear under the pale sky. I peeled the tarp the rest of the way off the body.
“Holy crap. Call for a medevac.”
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“This guy’s still alive.”
Chapter Eleven
I heard Sarah tell the dispatcher in Piute Meadows to get hold of the Douglas County sheriff in Nevada and have them line up both an evac chopper and emergency medical personnel. Her dispatcher must have given her grief, because Sarah said sort of testy-like that we would need a response damn fast as we’d stumbled on a crime scene with a bad casualty, and that Hoyt Berglund was a possible missing person, and Mitch should know about both ASAP. Sarah gave our general location and said that she’d radio back in a few minutes with specifics once we got the guy stabilized.
I squatted down and studied the muck and growth around where the Mexican lay and saw a bright bit of wire about as thick as a guitar string tied to a stout willow a foot off the ground. The wire stretched tight from behind where I was standing to just inches from the guy’s boots. Then I heard Sarah’s bay mare step just to the side of me in the mud.
I started to yell Sarah’s name but only heard the shotgun blast and felt the rush as Sarah’s mare scrambled, running and falling sideways, covering a quick thirty feet to the edge of the clearing. The sorrel jumped back, scared from the muzzle blast, and followed the mare. I saw the Mexican’s eyes open wide for a second and saw Sarah land on her left side with the mare on top of her, then she disappeared as the horse thrashed to gain its feet. I stumbled to her through the muck and grabbed the mare by her get-down rope, calming her as best I could. Sarah rolled to her hands and knees and took inventory for broken bones and buckshot. Where the mare had finally fallen at the edge of the willows was rough dry ground and Sarah had landed hard. I saw her feel for her pistol.
“Jesus, baby, are you hit?”
She gave me a strange look when I called her that and didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry. I was just afraid …”
She didn’t say anything for a second. “It’s okay,” she said. “What happened? Who’s shooting?”
“Nobody. Just a trip wire. A booby trap. You okay for a second?”
“I’m … fine.”
I led the mare and caught the colt and tied them both to a couple of piñon outside the spring, keeping my eye on the ground for more traps. The mare had a little blood on the back of her left front pastern. It looked like she’d got a foot over the wire. I took a bottle of water from Sarah’s cantlebag and a pair of fence pliers from her saddle sheath, gave Sarah the water, and scouted around.
The trip wire had looped through a ring nailed into a burned piñon stump then doubled back to the willow. The end of the wire was wound tight around the trigger of a Mossberg 12 gauge braced and tied between two wooden stakes, with the cut-down stock butting against the stump, the muzzle pointing toward the Mexican’s boots. One of the stakes had been pulled loose by the mare, and the wire was slack now. I put on my gloves and took the pliers, cut the trip wire and unwrapped it from the trigger.
“Careful,” Sarah said.
“Your mare got her foot over that wire and yanked the setup just sideways enough so we didn’t all get gutted. We were right in the line of fire, otherwise.”
“It’s my fault,” she said. “It’s the first thing I should’ve looked for.”
“It’s the fault of the pricks who did this, not you.”
I used her pliers to free the 12 gauge from the stakes, then looked it over. With its short barrel and stock, it made for a pretty handy street-sweeper sort of weapon. I shucked the shells and put them in my jacket pocket, then leaned the shotgun against the stump.
“How you doing?”
“I could use whatever’s in that flask you brought.”
I went over to the horses, snugged up their knots, and pulled a silver flask from the saddle pockets. It was engraved with the name of my unit and my initials and had been a gift from Captain Cruz. But whiskey is whiskey.
Sarah sipped some Wild Turkey and caught her breath. We tended to the wounded guy as best we could, cleaning up his mouth and nasal passages, looking for any other wounds, sitting him up enough so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood and snot and getting him warm and hydrated without trying to move him. He was shivering now but still pretty much out of it. He couldn’t talk, but he could swallow a bit and we’d both seen worse. When we got him squared away, Sarah hobbled after me over to the horses and I pulled off my saddle. She looked me in the eye and put her hand hard on the back of my neck for a quick second, and just nodded, like the two of us were okay again—at least for now.
I checked the cut on her mare, then took the folded Navajo from off my saddle pad to wrap the guy. I was cinching back up when Sarah called me over. She’d limped up the slope into the piñon. I thought she’d found another booby trap.
“Look here,” she said. She was standing next to a nylon camp chair with Tecate cans and cigarette butts scattered all around.
“The hell?”
I stood close, looking where she was looking. There was an opening in the trees that gave us a view down the canyon and of the road curving away for more than a mile. Up-canyon a little rise hid the road. Beyond that we could see it twisting out through the burned-over country until it disappeared.
“You found their lookout.”
“They sure could’ve spotted us coming,” she said. “Maybe I did see somebody moving down in the trees.”
We were studying the country when we heard a motor off in the distance.
“If that’s the medevac chopper,” she said, “they sure got airborne fast.”
“Sounds more like a plane.”
We scanned the sky until we saw it—a little single engine reddish-colored thing with an overhead wing dipping down as it cruised east over the mountains up above us.
“Where do you think it’s heading?” she said.
“No clue.”
“Anyway,” she said, “false alarm.”
We walked back down past the horses to the guy and wrapped my saddle blanket around him best we could. I hate to say, I kept the tarp between his rank jeans and that nice Navajo. I didn’t want to have to burn it when we were done.
“Hoyt must have surprised some bad characters yesterday,” Sarah said. “You think he’s in trouble, don’t you.”
“Oh, yeah. Lethal or not, he’s definitely in trouble.”
She looked at the guy on the ground. “I guess this one was just the cheese in the mousetrap.”
We sat on our jackets on either side of him in the willows so he could sense he wasn’t alone. Sarah radioed in our exact location. She had to cool her heels while her dispatcher tried to reach the right folks in Nevada.
“There’s sandwiches in my cantlebag,” she said to me.
I brought the food and some water bottles and waited for her to finish. Then we ate a little. The mess and the smell and the gurgling sounds from the Mexican didn’t do much for our appetites. It was almost noon when we found him. It was pushing one when Sarah got radioed from a Nevada deputy that the chopper was airborne and he was close behind.
“I’m going to walk down to the road and find a landing spot,” she said. “Then I’ll guide them in.”
“I’ll go. You’re all stove-up.”
“I want to get out of this place,” she said. “It gives me the creeps.”
She stood up and stretched, w
obbly and sore from her wreck. Then she disappeared into the willows on her way to the jeep track.
She was gone four or five minutes when I heard her scream.
I hustled to the horses and jerked the .270 from the scabbard, then pushed out of the willows and down the hill. I got close to the road and called her name.
“Tommy,” she said back. Her voice came from up the road. It sounded weak and terrorized.
I slopped across the edge of the muddy pond on the road, then climbed up around the bend. Sarah stood with her back to me on a flat spot on the road, her hands at her chin and her hat on the ground. I could hear her hyperventilating. Twenty feet beyond her was the burned-out shell of a pickup. I put my hands on her shoulders and she turned and hugged me hard. She gasped and sobbed and tried to talk all at once.
“It’s Dad’s,” she said. “Dad’s truck. And he’s inside.”
It was Dave’s new Ford, or what was left of it. The truck Mitch and Sarah and the FBI had all been looking for. She said my name over and over, then just collapsed on the road. I knelt and held her as best I could until she was breathing steady.
“Let me go look.”
She nodded, and I got up and walked to the truck. It was facing up-canyon, away from us, but already I could see where the heat had distorted the steel. Any rubber or plastic was long gone, and with the tires just smoldering black marks on the dirt the whole truck looked smaller. Through the back of the cab I could see the body behind the wheel. It looked smaller, too. I circled to look at the corpse up close. It was burned to the bone, and it leaned to the side like there wasn’t much left holding it together—like it had been dead a thousand years. I walked around to the front to look in where the windshield used to be. The skull was all caved in where the nose and mouth had been, and it had a bullet hole smack in the middle of the forehead.
