Always Time to Die

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Even after his heart trouble when he was in his seventies?” Dan asked. “Didn’t that slow him down? It sure ended his career as a politician.”

  “He was plenty spry until a few years ago,” Winifred said. “But after he turned eighty he wasn’t strong enough to wrestle an unwilling woman down to the floor anymore.”

  “Winifred…” Melissa looked unhappy. “No rape was ever proved. It was whispers, that’s all. With a man like the Senator, there was always gossip.”

  Carly looked at Dan, who shrugged and said, “Just one more thing that didn’t make the local paper.”

  “Do the Sneads know who their grandfather is?” Dan asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Melissa said, gripping the coats hard against her body.

  “Do they think they know?” Carly asked.

  “Why?” Melissa said.

  “She’s curious,” Dan said easily, but his eyes were hard, intent.

  “Oh, hell, I’m sure someone told them.” Melissa hugged the coats to her. “Gossip goes around quicker than truth.”

  “Is that why the governor is so touchy?” Carly asked Melissa. “He’s heard the gossip and doesn’t want the truth known?”

  “What truth?” Melissa asked impatiently. “There’s precious little of it in gossip.”

  “You know the old saying about smoke and fire,” Carly said.

  Melissa just shook her head. “The Senator is dead. Let it all die with him. Would it do the Sneads any good to have all the old gossip and lies raked up? They’re grown men and don’t give a damn who their grandfather might or might not be.” She glared at Carly. “Anyway, a wolfer and a felon have no business being in a Quintrell family history.”

  “Castillo,” Winifred said harshly. “This is a Castillo history and the Senator’s bastards have no part of it.”

  “Then why did you want me to—” Carly began, but Winifred talked right over her.

  “That’s what the—” A spasm of coughing shook Winifred, then another and another.

  “You’d better go,” Melissa said, looking worried. She shoved the coats at Dan.

  He took the coats but made no move to leave. He didn’t want to. He had a feeling Winifred was weaker than she wanted people to know.

  “Shouldn’t you call the doctor?” he asked Melissa.

  “He was here today,” Melissa said as she replaced the nasal feed on Winifred’s oxygen. “There’s nothing more he can do except take Winifred to the hospital, and she refuses to go. Unless the governor goes to court and has her declared incompetent to handle her own affairs, there’s nothing anyone can do. Besides, if Winifred wants to stay here as long as possible, who are we to interfere?”

  Winifred kept coughing. Her face was ruddy from effort.

  Carly took her coat from Dan and headed for the hallway. The sound of Winifred’s dry, racking cough followed them to the front door. The door opened and then shut behind them, leaving them in the wind-haunted cold of night.

  Neither said anything.

  Both wondered what Winifred had been trying to tell them.

  CASTILLO RIDGE

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  44

  THE NIGHTSCOPE MAKES IT EASY. GOOD THING. THE COLD IS TAKING THE FEELING out of my hands, and the wind…

  The wind was always a rifleman’s enemy.

  The sniper watched through the scope as Carly and Dan left the house. They got into his truck, but instead of heading toward the road leading back to Taos, the truck turned toward the outbuildings.

  Now what?

  The headlights would blow out the nightscope, so the sniper tracked them with binoculars. They drove past the barn and out the pasture road to the graveyard.

  Well, damn. I had my spot all picked out and they’re going in the other direction.

  Cold, stiff, cursing silently, the sniper watched the truck pull up to the Quintrell family graveyard. As soon as the lights went off, he switched back to watching his target through the nightscope mounted on his rifle barrel. It was more for practice than anything else. The graveyard was just under a mile from the main house, but that wasn’t the real problem.

  The eight-foot-tall wrought-iron fence made shooting really dicey.

  The angle wasn’t great enough for him to shoot over the fence unless the target stood tall and straight away from the fence instead of bent over grubbing around the gravestones on perimeter, right next to the fence. The gravestones themselves were another shooting hazard. Not to mention the trees that had been planted on or near some graves.

  The faint sound of voices lifted on the fitful wind. A flashlight turned on below.

  The sniper went back to night-vision binoculars.

  Finish whatever you came for, get on the road, and circle back around the other side of the ridge to get to the highway.

  He ached with cold. It was time to get it done and move on.

  Come on, come on, hurry up. Make it any harder on me and I’ll kill both of you.

  QUINTRELL RANCH

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  45

  CARLY SMACKED HER HANDS TOGETHER. EVEN INSIDE LINED GLOVES, HER FINGERS were getting cold.

  “I can’t figure out any rhyme or reason for the placement of graves,” Dan said.

  “Usually, the closer to the founder’s grave, the higher the rank,” Carly said. “But Liza’s grave isn’t with her brother’s or her sister’s.”

  Dan dusted snow off the last headstone. “Nope. This one is a memorial stone to a Quintrell who died in the Civil War.”

  “Really?” Carly came over, took a digital photo, and shoved the camera back in her pocket. “Samuel Quintrell. Wonder if he was a brother or a father or an uncle or—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dan cut in. “Winifred only wants—”

  “Castillos,” Carly finished in disgust.

  “Let’s try the lower half of the graveyard.”

  Carly looked toward the section of the graveyard reserved for ranch workers. “Are you saying that some of the employees had higher ‘rank’ than the Senator’s daughter?”

  “If we’re talking about my grandmother, yes,” Dan said as he walked the length of the ghostly white fence. “I’m guessing that Liza was lucky to be buried here at all. Probably wouldn’t have been, but the Quintrells didn’t want to make any fuss that would attract more attention to Liza’s sorry life.”

  Carly moved the flashlight over the modest gravestones that paralleled the fence. “These are all Isobel’s cousins or retainers or whatever.”

  “Same difference. Back then, the whole family—distant cousins, in-laws of cousins, in-laws of in-laws—followed the money. Isobel had it and Andrew Quintrell made it grow. Once the Senator got into politics and increased his connection to the Sandovals through Sylvia, he kept the money growing.”

  “You’re so cynical.”

  “It’s my middle name.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “It’s better than Warden.”

  “Warden?”

  “My middle name.”

  Bright as moonlight, Carly’s laughter floated up into the darkness until the wind caught it and swept it away.

  After poking around the fence, Dan knelt near it and rubbed wind-driven snow off a headstone. The grave that had been set apart from even the distant family who worked on the ranch.

  “Here we go.” His voice was matter-of-fact. He could have been talking about the weather. “Elizabeth Isobel Quintrell, 1936 to 1968.”

  “Thirty-two years old,” Carly said. “What a waste.”

  “She must have liked her life well enough.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “She didn’t do anything to change it.”

  Carly looked at the silver and darkness of the grave. “Maybe she couldn’t.”

  “Such a tender soul.” Gently he touched Carly’s face with a cold gloved fingertip. “She never tried, Carolina May. Not even once.”

  “She didn’t deserve to be murdered.”


  “No one does, but it happens just the same. You want a picture of this headstone?”

  Carly knelt and waited for the autofocus to wake up and get its job done. Light flashed once. She viewed the image, approved it, and turned the camera off again.

  “Do you suppose Susan Mullins was buried here? She was a longtime employee, after all.”

  “And her daughter was probably the Senator’s bastard.”

  “That, too.”

  Dan and Carly continued down the fence, searching for depressions in the snow cover that would indicate earth sagging into a grave when the coffin gave way to a combination of time and water. Other than an occasional Sandoval and two Sneads, Dan and Carly didn’t find any names they recognized.

  The wind flexed, stretched, ran cold between the white metal bars of the fence.

  Carly stood and looked at the moon-silvered ridgeline that loomed a few hundred yards away.

  “What were you doing up there?” she asked. “It was you, wasn’t it, the day the Senator was buried?”

  Dan followed her glance to Castillo Ridge. “Me, my dad, and one of the Sneads. Jim probably. Blaine isn’t that good on the stalk.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Dad and I parked off the highway and climbed up the back side of the ridge. There’s an old trail there. Hunters use it a lot. So does their prey. Anyway, Dad and I watched the whole thing from up there. Neither of us noticed anyone, but when we started walking out, I saw where there were some tracks. Someone else had been up on the ridge with a dog, watching the burial.”

  “And you think it was Jim Snead?”

  “He’s the only one I know of who can get close to me without giving himself away. I have good senses.”

  “Is that why you keep looking up toward the ridge?” she asked. “You think he’s up there now?”

  “I’ve felt watched a few times since we left the house. Then it goes away. Probably just the wind making branches move.”

  “Or Jim Snead looking down from the ridge?”

  “Maybe,” Dan said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And as soon as Dan had Carly in a warm, safe place, he was going to climb the ridge and backtrack, assuming the wind and shifting snow didn’t cover everything before he got back here from Taos.

  If he was alone, he’d have climbed that ridge the first time his neck started itching. But he wasn’t alone.

  “Can the ridge be climbed from this side?” Carly asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “Not if you have good boots.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “What?” Dan said, not believing what he was hearing.

  “I want to climb the ridge and look out over the valley and see the ranch in moonlight and darkness, the way it must have looked a hundred years ago.”

  He listened to his inner senses, found nothing that was worth arguing over, and gave in. “I’ll break trail.”

  CASTILLO RIDGE

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  46

  THEY’RE COMING RIGHT TOWARD ME.

  Quickly the sniper thought about shooting angles and avenues of escape. He should go to ground and wait for them to drive around the back of the ridge. That was the plan.

  That plan hadn’t called for freezing his ass off while the two of them photographed graves and took a midnight hike up Castillo Ridge. If he had to wait much longer, he’d be too cold to shoot straight. Then somebody could die instead of just bleeding a lot all over the snow.

  It wasn’t that he minded the killing itself; like everything else, it got easier with practice. But a fatality was always investigated more thoroughly than a simple “accidental” shooting.

  They were still coming toward him. Any closer and he’d have to use his eye rather than the scope. As it was, he couldn’t see more than one or two square inches of the target at a time.

  Finally Carly and Dan veered away, following the informal trail horses and cattle used in the summer when they were turned loose to graze.

  The sniper began to breathe a little more easily as the targets got farther away. When he realized they were going to climb all the way to the top of the ridge a few hundred yards from him, he sighted in and recalculated the angles.

  Then he smiled. If they stood and admired the view, it’d be a piece of cake.

  Confident again, the sniper held position except for his eyes. He looked away from his prey, barely tracking them with his peripheral vision. Animals, even civilized ones like people, often sensed a direct stare.

  And from what he’d learned about Dan Duran, that boy was barely housebroken, much less civilized.

  CASTILLO RIDGE

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  47

  CARLY FOLLOWED DAN ALONG A TRAIL ONLY HE COULD SEE. WIND FOLLOWED THEM, pushing and pulling and distracting. She shivered, then ached. And she remembered Dan’s leg.

  “Okay,” she said. “This is far enough. I can—”

  “My leg’s fine.”

  “Tell me again that you’re not a mind reader.”

  “I’m not a mind reader.”

  “Why do I so not believe you?” she muttered.

  “I haven’t a clue. And stop rolling your eyes.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I heard them.”

  She snickered and slogged along behind him.

  Dan heard, and smiled. He was following the trail as much by instinct as by eye. Animals weren’t stupid. They took the easy way, around boulders and clumps of small trees, twisting and turning, slowly gaining altitude. People were mostly too impatient to be smart. They just plowed straight up a slope like there was a stopwatch on them.

  In places the going was easy. The land was nearly bare of snow, swept by the wind of all but a compact crust of snow. That same wind filled the hollows and creases with the kind of icy powder that drew people from all over the world to the high ski slopes near Taos. In the skiing scheme of things, this side of Castillo Ridge was a nonstarter. It was too windswept for snow really to accumulate anywhere but in ravines, and too rocky in the narrow ravines for safe skiing. The other side of the ridge had thicker snow because it was somewhat sheltered from the prevailing wind by the ridge itself. Rocks were mostly buried in snow. Piñons and cedar grew to real size, and true pines had a foothold on the dry land.

  Dan wondered if the trail he and his father had beaten through two feet of snow almost a week ago was still visible or if it had been buried by new snow.

  Just before Dan skylined himself on the uneven ridge, he stopped and searched the moonlight and darkness for any change, any movement, anything that could explain his occasional, uneasy sense of being watched. Like now. Someone was watching him.

  You’re paranoid.

  You say that like it’s a bad thing.

  “What caused that?” Carly asked.

  “What?”

  “That grim little smile.”

  “I was talking to myself,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Paranoia.”

  “Was this a general or a particular conversation?”

  “Particular.”

  She waited.

  He didn’t say anything more.

  “Sometimes getting you to talk is like pulling hen’s teeth,” she said.

  “Hens don’t have teeth.”

  “That’s what makes them hard to pull. What form did this paranoia take?”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m being watched,” he said calmly.

  Carly’s breath came out in a long plume. “Me, too. Usually it’s in an old house. So I’m paranoid, too?”

  He laughed softly and finished the last few yards up to the ridge, pulling her along behind him. “You’re something else.”

  “And that something is paranoid?”

  “No, Carolina May. That something is—”

  Suddenly Dan staggered back and away from her, yanking her with him as he went down the far si
de of the ridge.

  The sound of rifle fire cracked like edgy thunder down the valley.

  A snow-buried ravine broke Dan’s fall. He hit bottom hard enough to make his head spin.

  “Dan? Dan!”

  Carly skidded to her knees and started clawing snow away from his face. Some of the snow looked black and shiny.

  Dan’s eyes opened and he groaned. “Bastard missed.”

  “It doesn’t look like it from here,” she said tightly. “You’re bleeding.”

  “And you aren’t. He missed.”

  “You’re hurt. Let me help you up.”

  When she started to stand, Dan pulled her down into the uncertain shelter of the ravine and put his lips against her ear. There was snow in her hair, and her scarf was more off than on her head.

  “Quiet,” Dan murmured, finally starting to think past the ringing in his ears. “He might be coming back to finish the job. I sure hope so.”

  Only then did Carly see that Dan had eased off a glove and drawn a gun. She hadn’t even known he was armed. She shivered with more than the cold, though the cold was bad enough to make her shake. It felt like a vampire drawing warmth and life out of her.

  You asked for it, she told herself. You could have quit the job and you didn’t. Dan paid the price. Now suck it up and deal.

  She would rather have run screaming into the night, but refused to leave Dan behind. Since he wasn’t going to leave voluntarily and was too big to carry, she was stuck lying in the snow watching him bleed and knowing the bullet had been meant for her.

  Carly bit the inside of her mouth, hard, then harder, until the urge to scream died to a whimper she couldn’t stifle. Her mouth tasted of salt and fear.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Dan murmured against her ear.

  She turned her head to him and breathed, “Bullshit.”

  His grin flashed white against the bloody shadows of his face.

  Dan and Carly lay quietly while blood from a scalp wound ran down his face into the snow. She packed snow against his head, hoping to reduce the bleeding. It helped, but not enough.