No one was behind the short counter on whose glass top rested the bowl of mints and the stack of menus. Under the glass, the light winked on the gleaming collection of fake silver, fake turquoise, and really dead scorpions encased in genuine plastic. I turned left, toward the music. The saloon was darker than the foyer, and I moved slowly, the Loretta Lynn crooning from the jukebox just about the right tempo for my shuffle.
The long bar hosted a handful of customers, all of them men. I slid onto one of the bar stools out of easy talking range from the nearest, and rested my elbow on the bar. The air was thick with smoke, and it smelled good. I had told my oldest daughter Camille that one of the things I was going to do when I retired was take up smoking again. She hadn’t thought the remark was funny.
Two of the tables off to the left were occupied, but at that distance and in the dim light, the figures were little more than muted shapes.
“What can I get you?” The gal’s voice was a pleasant contralto, loud enough to be heard over Loretta, but not enough to jar frayed nerves. I didn’t recognize her, an experience that always surprised me. After thirty years minding the business of a small county, I had grown used to seeing familiar faces around every corner—or under every rock.
“Do you still have some coffee?”
“Sure. Do you need a menu?”
I smiled with surprise, and looked at my watch. “What time is it, anyway?”
“About one-thirty. Plenty of time.”
“Well, then…sure. No, wait. Don’t bother. If you can find a green chile burrito back in the kitchen, that’d suit me fine.”
“Smothered?”
“Sure. Smothered is wonderful.”
She nodded and slipped away, returning in less than a minute with a mug of coffee. She was an attractive kid, and it was pleasant to watch her move.
“Busy night?”
“No, actually, it’s been really quiet,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Really quiet. That burrito will be right up.”
I nodded and relaxed, letting the warm, stuffy air meld into my bones. I realized I had gotten chilly standing out on that mountainside. If I sat in the Broken Spur very long, my eyelids would come crashing down.
True to her word, the bartender arrived in less than five minutes with a pretty respectable green chile burrito—nothing on a par with what the Don Juan de Oñate Restaurant in Posadas served, but fragrant and savory nevertheless.
“And Victor says to tell you that Matt Baca didn’t buy anything when he came in here earlier,” she said as she arranged the hot plate in front of me.
I looked askance at her, and then turned toward the kitchen. The swinging door was closed, but I suppose old Victor could see through the little diamond-shaped window.
“Victor says that, does he?” I tried a small mouthful of the burrito. It was pretty good—just a touch on the wet side, one of those constructions where the chef doesn’t know enough to let the green chile stand alone, but pollutes it with a soup base to turn it into a sauce. “In what prior lifetime did you and I meet?”
She smiled, resting both hands on the lip of the bar. I was willing to bet there was a whole population of old drunk ranchers who stopped by the Broken Spur regularly, just on the off chance that her one-hundred-watt smile would favor them.
“The first time was about three years ago. I was one of the alternate jurors for that Wilton kid’s trial. You testified quite a bit.”
“Sure enough,” I said, not remembering. I remembered the trial, all right, but not the jurors. I looked at her again, and decided that she was in her late twenties.
“And your picture’s been in the paper off and on since then.” She leaned forward a bit and lowered her voice. “You can’t hide.”
“I guess not.” I laughed. “What’s your name? My memory leaks.”
“Christine Prescott,” she said. “You know my folks.”
“Ah, indeed I do. And I haven’t seen either one of them in months. How are they doing?” The Prescott ranch, two miles north of Moore off Route 56, was a tough operation in the best of times. Gus Prescott had never been lucky enough, or positioned just right, to land himself one of the federal grazing leases. Instead he made do with a couple hundred acres of his own. With creativity and hard work, those acres were enough to keep the family right on the line between destitution and poverty.
She hesitated a bit too long and took a deep breath. “Okay, I guess.”
One of the patrons farther down the bar caught her attention, and she excused herself before she had the chance to elaborate. I made a mental note to stop by her parents’ place sometime. I knew damn well that I’d lose that note in the vast brain-pile of the misplaced, ignored, or forgotten—a pile that grew like a huge landfill, swelling every year.
Christine Prescott showed no inclination to gravitate toward my end of the bar for several minutes, but eventually returned to refill my coffee.
Before she had a chance to turn away again, I asked, “You said Matt Baca came in earlier?”
She nodded, but like the good bartender she was, didn’t volunteer any elaboration.
“But he didn’t buy anything?”
“Not for want of trying,” she said, and stepped away to set the coffeepot back on the hot-plate. She returned and stood with her back to the rest of the bar. Her posture said, “You’re going to ask, so get it over with.”
“Was anyone else with him?”
She shook her head. “He came in for just a minute, but he sure didn’t need anything else to drink.”
“Had a little trouble navigating, did he?”
“Just a little,” she said, rolling her eyes with the understatement. “He wanted a twenty-four pack, but I told him no, and he fished out his driver’s license. I guess he thought I was refusing him because he was underage. It took him a while to get it out.”
“So you checked his age and refused him anyway?”
Christine grinned. “No. I never got a chance to see the license. Victor came out of the kitchen, saw Matt, and told him to beat it.”
“And Matt didn’t argue with him?”
“Well, he started to, but you know how Victor can be.”
“Indeed I do.”
“Victor told him, ‘I don’t care whose ID you got. You just go away.’ I guess he and Matt’s dad have known each other for years.”
“And Matt left after that?”
“Yep. And the chase was on.” She smiled and pointed at the single window that faced the highway, most of the glass area taken up by the bright neon tubes of the beer logo. “We saw the red lights.” The smile faded. “And then later the ambulance went by, and then the tow truck. Was that Matt? I assumed that it was when I saw you walk in.”
I nodded. “They’re all right. There were three of them in the car. No big deal.” I was sure that none of the teenagers would have agreed with my assessment. I turned to see Victor Sanchez emerge through the kitchen’s swinging door. Wiping his hands on his apron, he ambled up behind the bar, pausing to say something to each one of the patrons. But I knew exactly where he was headed.
Christine Prescott saw him too, but didn’t make a show of being busy, and didn’t step away.
“Victor,” I said by way of greeting.
He stood for a minute regarding me, hands locked in the folds of his much-used apron.
“What you doing, drinking that stuff this time of night?” he asked, and jerked his chin at the coffee. “You ought to take something to help you sleep.” I knew that it was as close to humor as Victor Sanchez was apt to drift.
I laughed and pushed the remains of the burrito to one side. “That was good, by the way.”
“Sure it was good,” Victor said. He was a squat, homely man with heavy facial features to match his rounded, muscular shoulders and thick waist. He brought the faint, cloying aroma of the greasy kitchen with him.
“You want to know about Matt Baca, you go ask Matt Baca,” he said.
“There’s not much I need to
know about him, Victor,” I said. “I know he stopped by here not too long ago, and was refused service. Either he was intoxicated, or underage, or both. It doesn’t matter.”
“Did he get hurt, or what?”
“No, he’s all right,” I said. “No big deal.”
He rested a beefy hand on the bar. “You guys can put a man out of business,” he said.
“Not likely, Victor. You’ve been here, what, thirty years?”
“Sure. But now we got your man sitting up the road there, all the time. Hell, he might as well sit his ass right in the parking lot, you know? Bad for business.” He shook his head slowly. “Bad for business.”
I knew that Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s pet peeve was drunks. He had lost a younger brother to one years before, and I knew that on occasion, as he had this night, he prowled within easy reach of intoxicated saloon patrons as they staggered out into the parking lot. Counting the four establishments in the village of Posadas that sold liquor, there were nine licensed hot spots in all of Posadas County. In the course of a month, I listened to enough radio traffic to know that Torrez didn’t single out the Broken Spur Saloon as his prime target. But there was no point in arguing statistics with Victor Sanchez.
“Cheer up, Victor,” I said, and fished a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. “After the election in another couple of days, Bob will be too busy to sit on his ass anywhere.”
“How come you didn’t run?” Sanchez asked, and the question caught me by surprise. I didn’t figure Victor for the type who would get away from his diced onions and chicken tenders long enough to concern himself with politics. I couldn’t imagine that he cared one way or another why I had chosen to retire.
I handed the ten bucks to Christine Prescott and waved away the change. “Because I’m old and tired, Victor. That burrito and coffee will give me just enough energy to get home and into bed.”
I zipped up my jacket and thrust my hands into its pockets. “The undersheriff is a good man, Victor. He’ll do a good job.”
“We’ll see about that,” Victor said.
Chapter Four
When I left, the Broken Spur was shutting down for the night. I should have shut down too, but my system had other ideas. Sosimo Baca, his wild son, and two daughters lived in Regal, and the dead of 2:00 AM that Saturday morning seemed like a perfect time to idle through the tiny village to see who was still burning the candle at both ends. When times are dull, it’s easy to start inventing tasks like that, easy to think they might be productive.
There was always the off chance that Matt would be trudging down the state highway, no doubt sobered by his mountain romp. But State 56 was quiet. I crested the pass and started down the long, serpentine curves toward the intersection with what locals called “the Douglas Road,” the state highway into Arizona—and beyond that, the village of Regal.
Regal was no more than a dark spot out of range of the arc lights that blasted the days-only border crossing gate a mile south of the Catholic mission, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora.
The town settled on the humps and bumps where the southern feet of the San Cristóbal range rose out of the prairie. Maybe sixty people lived there, depending on how many illegals were napping in the church at any given moment. Once or twice, we’d made the gentle suggestion to Father Bertrand Anselmo or various church elders that locking the church at night might be a modern thing to do, and make our job a little easier. An eyebrow or two was raised at such a suggestion, and that was that. I didn’t pursue the matter, since a modern lock on an ax-hewn door would have been its own form of sacrilege.
West of the church, a number of arroyos cut through the village, and the dirt streets dipped down into them as they wound from property to property, around shacks and woodpiles and clotheslines and derelict trucks.
If a modern community planner had tried to make sense of Regal, the first thing he probably would have done would be to straighten out lot lines and establish street right-of-ways. And then developers could hang cute street names—picturesque, tourist-pleasing tags like Palo Verde Lane, Riñcon del Sol, or Calle Encantada.
But such was not the case. If any community planner had ever lingered within the boundaries of Regal, he was probably buried behind someone’s doghouse with a rude juniper cross marking the spot.
The village had gradually grown into a wonderful hodgepodge as the families grew. The scuff in the dirt that led from house to shed had deepened and widened with the years, and when a son wanted to build his own home, the foot trail between generations had taken on the formality of a two-track. And that had been extended babies later, winding around this barn or that house until Regal’s maze of lanes and byways held the village together like a fisherman’s net.
I suppose most of the kids who lived there held the place in contempt, champing at the bit, eager to get out into the real world—a place far dirtier, noisier, and uncaring than their quiet Regal homes, despite any shortcomings.
A hundred yards before the driveway to the church, I turned right onto a lane where a small wooden sign proclaimed SANCHEZ with a little black arrow. Victor had lived in Regal once, now preferring the mobile home that was tucked behind the Broken Spur Saloon. His brother Edgar still called Regal home…along with half a dozen other Sanchez relatives.
I knew roughly where Sosimo Baca lived, and I idled the county car along as the dirt lane meandered westward, sometimes passing so close to the front of a house that I could have reached out a hand and streaked the living-room window.
Driving no more than two or three miles an hour, I rounded the corner of a rambling adobe whose front porch corner post had been nicked a time or two by careless bumpers, and damn near ran into a dark figure trudging along the road. He carried a wooden walking stick and had already begun the process of seeking higher ground, but by narrowly missing a mailbox on the left, I was able to swing around him.
I didn’t know Sosimo Baca well, but I recognized his face in the glare of the headlights as he turned to ponder this intrusion into his quiet, dark, no doubt well-lubricated world. Stopping the car, I rolled down the window on the passenger side.
“Good morning, sir,” I said. He was wearing a dusty, earth-colored coat that blended perfectly with the dark shadows of Regal.
“Now who’s that?” he said, stringing out the last word a little bit in an accent that was rich and thick.
“Bill Gastner, Sosimo. We met a time or two, a while back.”
“Oh, yes.” He stepped closer and I could see that the walking stick was carrying a lot of weight. He transferred his left hand to the roof of the car. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, just out. Can’t sleep.”
“Yes.” The single word carried so little inflection that it could have run the gamut of meaning from “me too” to “oh, sure, I know you’re up to something.”
“Mr. Baca, we need to talk with your son.”
“Mateo?”
“Yes. He’s got himself in a little trouble.”
Sosimo moved his right arm so he could rest the walking stick against the door of the car, supporting himself. “You know that boy,” he said after considerable thought. He turned and looked off to the east. “You know, I was just over at Ibarra’s place.”
“Is that right?”
“They got a good thing with that cider this year.”
“I bet.” And you’ve sampled more than your share, I thought. “Are you expecting Matt home tonight?”
He turned back and peered in at me. “Well, I don’t know. He took the truck, you know.”
“Right. It’s in Posadas.”
“Well, then, that’s where he is,” Sosimo said slowly, and patted the roof of the car as if he was sorry that I was so slow-witted.
“Sosimo,” I said, “Matt wrecked a friend’s car up on the pass. He was driving a vehicle that didn’t belong to him, and ran into another car. The kids are all right, but he took off running.”
“You don’t say so? He’s pretty good at that.�
��
“Yes, he is. I thought he might have hoofed it down here since then.”
“Well, you know…he might have. But I haven’t been home, you know.”
“You mind if we check?”
“No. You can do that.”
“Get in and let me give you a lift. You can point me in the right direction.”
“That sounds good,” he said, and it took him a long moment to find the door latch. When he settled into the seat, his stick caught in the door, and I waited patiently while he extricated it.
“There,” he said, after the door slammed. His fragrance filled the car. I left his window down and lowered mine as well.
“So that cider’s a pretty good brew, eh?” I said as I pulled the car into gear.
“It sure is. It sure is.” He rocked forward a couple of times to add emphasis. “That Lucy Ibarra, she makes pretty good cider.”
I wondered if Lucy Ibarra’s husband had been home during the sampling, but that was none of my business until the whole crowd started shooting at each other.
“Right here,” Sosimo said. We had driven no more than a hundred yards and awakened a couple dogs. Sosimo could have walked the distance in the time it took him to get in the car.
The Baca place was one of those adobe houses that had shed its plaster long ago. The faces of the individual adobe blocks were rounded and contoured by age and weather to a soft brown weave that no modern building material could match.
All but one of the vigas had busted or rotted off flush with the wall, but other than that, the place was tidy, squat, and square, ready to dust off the worst that southwestern weather could throw at it, whether it be broiling sun or driving west winds that moved Arizona dust into Posadas County.
“The light’s not on,” Sosimo said. “You can park right here.” The “right here” was a vague wide spot on the shoulder of the road that put my door right against the old juniper limb-wood of Baca’s fence. I stopped half in the roadway so I could open my door.
“They’ve all gone to bed,” Sosimo said as he levered himself out of the car. “Me too,” he added with a grunt. He reached the front gate and stopped. “If he’s not here, maybe you can come back tomorrow.”
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