Cori Elena was dressed in the shortest cutoffs I'd ever seen and a tank top with oversized armholes. She stood at the sink, slicing jicama into a bowlful of lettuce, tomatoes and onions. As she bent over, her tank top slid forward, giving me a good profile shot of her left breast. With her in heat, no wonder Jake Hatcher was hanging around like a stud dog.
“Trade!” she said. “You're going to join us.”
“Yeah, thanks. Hi, Jake.”
“Hey, Trade.” Jake Hatcher sat at the table in the seat that I knew was Martín's and that pissed me off. He'd probably been here enough times to know where the head of the family sat, but even if that wasn't the case, he still had no business sitting there. Or even breathing, for that matter.
“Martín, fix her something cool to drink,” she said, reaching for another fork and paper napkin that she handed to me.
Martín grabbed a glass from the cupboard, some ice from the refrigerator and poured me a glass of iced tea. It was the premade stuff, loaded with sugar, but I still managed to suck it down.
Cori Elena handed me the salad to throw on the table and then she brought over a platter of bean burros wrapped in tinfoil. They were just lukewarm, which was fine since we were all too parched to even think about eating a hot meal. I suspected she'd made them earlier that morning and had reheated them in the microwave, then wrapped them in the tinfoil to keep them warm. In the summer, a lot of us avoid turning on our ovens. It just adds heat to heat and doesn't make much sense.
We ate quietly for a few minutes. Finally I couldn't stand it.
“So, Jake, what brings you out our way?” I asked. I avoided looking at him, taking care to concentrate on what was left of my burro.
“I heard that Martín's truck was on the fritz, so I thought I'd stop by and see if they needed anything.”
Sure.
“I told Jake that we were goin' to be taking a trip,” Cori Elena offered.
Jesus, how stupid could she be? Nothing like advertising that they were leaving so the bad guys could come in and nail her before she left. Great thought process this one had, although in truth the brand inspector would have been blind not to have noticed the moving boxes, especially the tall stack in the corner of the room.
“Prego's out of town,” Jake said.
“Right.”
“Chiquita, I forgot to tell you. That screech owl has her babies again.”
“Down along the creek? In the fork?” I asked. It seemed late, but with the drought, that wasn't all that unusual. Some animals weren't having babies at all.
Martín and I had watched this particular owl for years. While many screech owls carved out holes in the saguaros, she always threw a few twigs together—something owls rarely do, as they prefer to take over nests built by other birds—in the fork of a mesquite tree. Usually it worked out, but last year she'd lost her one baby when it fell out of the mesquite and broke its neck.
He nodded. “She's got two this year.”
“I'll check it out.” God, I was going to miss this. Martín and I had been watching wildlife together all our lives, marveling at the animals, their nests and dens and habits and babies. While Sanders and I also shared the same interest, my history with Martín was longer. We could even talk about the things we'd seen together as kids. “I'm going to ride this afternoon, interested?”
He shook his head. “I've got too much to do.”
I didn't press it.
We were halfway through lunch when the phone rang. Cori Elena jumped up to answer it.
While she said “hello,” she quickly reverted to Spanish. She was speaking so rapidly and so quietly that I couldn't make out her words.
Judging from the worried look on Martín's face, though, he knew there was a problem.
Cori Elena took the long cord and disappeared with the phone into the bedroom, leaving the three of us to finish our lunch.
Late that afternoon I caught Dream. He stood, half asleep from the heat, as the flies buzzed us while I saddled him. I put my canteens on my saddle and then rode out through the back gate, across the dry creek. I'd been worrying on and off about what the drought was doing to the water table, but there was no way, short of pulling the well, to see how much it was actually dropping.
We climbed slowly up through the saddle and Dream was wet with sweat before we even cleared the crest. I took it slowly with him, saying to myself, but it's a dry heat. He probably knew the difference too, for when the temperature and the humidity are both high, that's when a horse can get into trouble. His air-conditioning system, designed to make him wet, never gets a chance to dry off in high humidity. This can seriously overheat a horse.
As I rode, I wondered about the telephone call that Cori Elena had taken. After she answered the phone, we didn't see her again. I figured the call probably had something to do with Carmen Orduño, but after lunch I'd left along with Jake Hatcher. I knew I'd get the story later, and while I suspected that he would too, we played the charade, pretended nothing was wrong, and left the bunkhouse together.
As I rode across the mesa I was struck by the extreme fire danger. Some of the national forests had already been closed to horses, for fear that sparks from their metal shoes would start a fire.
It wouldn't take much to incinerate the entire desert, as dry as it was. While the cattle had chewed a lot of the grass down, there was still plenty to spark a brushfire. Worrying about it wasn't very productive though. We did what we could around the ranch, keeping the weeds down and the grass clipped along the perimeters. In a pinch, a helicopter with a bucket could pull water out of the pond—they'd done it before. Still, in a severe drought, the brushfires could rage out of control for days. In Mexico, some had already been burning for months, spewing their smoke across the border.
My one consolation was that Catalina State Park, which adjoined my grazing leases to the south, had placed a moratorium on campfires. Of course, that didn't discount all the happy campers with cigarettes or the mavericks who would go ahead and light a fire anyway.
I headed toward the Coronado National Forest, running into a few groups of Brahmas with their calves. They were still bedded down in the shade under the mesquite trees, waiting for the temperature to drop lower before they headed off for water. The babies I saw were all branded and the heifers ear-tagged, so it looked like we hadn't missed too many of the calves on roundup.
I also ran across a few groups of dries—cows that hadn't calved—and I stopped long enough to place their ear tag numbers in my leather tally book. My calf percentages were taking a hit with the drought, and many of my reliable cows, the ones that never missed having a calf a year, were now in the dry group.
An hour or so later I made my turn south, heading to the fence line and then riding through a few canyons before dropping back into the Cañada del Oro. I had just hit the creek and was crossing it when I spotted Sanders riding up from the park.
“Hey, what are you doing out here?” I hollered.
“They called, said my shorthorns were down there at the campgrounds again.”
“Didn't find them, huh?” It was obvious since he wasn't pushing any cows. Sanders ran some shorthorns in with the Vaca Grande herd, and losing cattle in the park was a problem for both of us. For years the park fence had been down and the cows had the run of the place. When the new fence went up, people cut it and left gates open. It didn't take the cattle long to find the breaks and they'd end up in the park where the grass was always greener—at least in their minds.
“I'll try again in the morning.”
“Martín says that screech owl's kids hatched out. I'm heading there now.” I took a long drink of water from my canteen and then, since I was so close to the ranch, let some of the cold water trickle over Dream's neck, hoping it would help cool him off.
We rode up a small sandy tributary and found the little brown ear tufted screech owl sitting on a limb beside her decrepit nest, which was rider level in the fork of an old mesquite tree. She was small, like mos
t desert screech owls. In another of Mother Nature's grand plans, these owls are usually smaller than their northern counterparts, since their heat loss increases with the decrease in size. Two white, fuzzy hatchlings with enormous dark eyes stared at us, unblinking, while their momma snapped her mandibles together making a noisy clicking sound, clearly unhappy at our attention.
We were sitting quietly on our horses, silently admiring the owlets when all of a sudden something swift and fast flew close to our heads, buzzing us and startling the horses.
“Poppa,” I said, although I really couldn't tell. Sometimes even owls have trouble telling themselves apart. Still, it was a reasonable assumption as we watched another small brown owl fly up to a high limb across from the nest where he studied us with big angry eyes. We left.
We hadn't ridden very far when Dream suddenly shied and ducked away from a mesquite tree on my right.
“Snakes,” I said to Sanders, an unnecessary warning since he had also pulled his horse up.
The two Mohave rattlesnakes underneath the tree had their coontails entwined. The Mohave is one of the most lethal snakes in North America. Its venom can be almost twenty times as toxic as that of the Western diamondback. The good news is that it only zaps you with about a sixth of the venom that the average diamond-back will. You do the math.
It didn't take a Dr. Ruth to figure out what was happening. They were blatantly involved in a sexual act. Of the thirteen species of rattlesnakes found in the United States, we have eleven of them right here in Arizona. Which translates into the possibility of finding some of them going at it from the middle of March to the end of October, so it's not all that unusual to catch them en flagrante delicto. Although it was a bit late for the Mohaves.
“Wonder how long they been doing it,” Sanders said.
I laughed. We both knew about that. Rattlesnakes rarely make love for less than an hour or two and usually it's longer—like six to twelve hours. Some have them have even been known to go at it for twenty-four, which probably results in a lot of rattlesnake headaches.
We sat on the horses and watched the snakes for a few minutes. They were oblivious to us, so intent were they on their lovemaking.
I looked at my watch for effect. “I think they've been at this for, oh, about sixteen and a half hours.” Of course I had no way of telling that, which Sanders knew.
“I've been wondering what I wanted to come back as,” he said with a chuckle as we rode off.
“You'll have to grow another one,” I suggested, for the rattler has two penises, known as hemipenes and located in the tail, although only one is used at a time.
Seeing the snakes made me think of Abby and J.B. out on their romantic tryst in the Baboquivaris. If he'd wanted to kill her, couldn't he have found a place closer to home? Then I immediately dismissed the speculation, since the Baboquivaris, from a killer's standpoint, were ideal. Far enough away that no one from the Brave Bull or La Cienega would see them and remote enough that the chances of encountering a stranger would be rare.
Hell, a killer could have taken all night to kill Abby if he'd wanted to. But then that brought me back to J.B. If someone had killed Abby other than her husband, where was J.B. when it was going on? Why hadn't he saved her? Had he really been that drunk, or had he also been drugged?
I wondered if that had happened how long the drug would stay in his system and made a mental note to myself to check it out.
28
THE SUN WAS JUST GOING DOWN WHEN I RODE THROUGH THE back gate. Blue, Mrs. Fierce and Petunia all greeted me. Their duty done, the dogs proceeded to play their favorite game, Hump Dog, while Petunia rooted around in the dirt.
Dream, still a bit unsure of the pig, cast a wary eye on her as she wandered in and out of his legs, looking for nonexistent truffles.
After unsaddling the Arabian, I led him over to the hose and began squirting him so his wet sweat wouldn't dry and leave patches of salt on his hide. I paid particular attention to his hind legs above his hocks, a natural settling place for body salts. If this area isn't hosed off, the salt can actually scald the horse, causing him to eventually lose his hair.
While I can't say that the gelding was thrilled with his bath, he put up with it. Once I finished with his body, I took a wet sponge and wiped his face and behind his ears and then reached for the flat metal sweat scraper. Running it first across his rounded sides, I moved on to his neck, rump and legs as the water slid into the metal groove and then off the horse and onto the dry, thirsty ground.
Once I'd finished with these ablutions, I turned Dream loose in the pasture with Gray. He wasted no time in trotting off a ways, then dropping and rolling in the soft sand. He stood and shook, resembling something out of a military school mud roll. When he dried, he wouldn't look like he'd been ridden at all.
I quickly threw alfalfa to the horses, then scattered scratch for the ducks and dumped dry dog food in the dogs' pans. I whistled softly for Petunia and let her onto the screened porch, where I reached into a plastic garbage can, scooped up her pig chow and filled her bowl.
I had poured my canteens half full of water and was putting them in the outside freezer so they would form into solid ice chunks for my next ride, when Martín appeared at the screened porch door.
“Bad time?” he asked.
“Nope.” I closed the freezer door. “I was just going to get a beer. You want one?”
He nodded and I stepped into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and retrieved two cold Coronas, a lime and a couple of chilled Mountain Oyster Club pewter mugs. I opened the bottles and carefully poured the beer into the frosty steins and then carved up the lime, squeezing a healthy dose into each mug before finally throwing the rinds in for good measure. Petunia was nudging my leg, telling me it was time for her to go back outside and join her girlfriends.
I handed a cold mug to Martín and we stepped back onto the porch. I opened the door and watched Petunia trot out, wiggling her rear end in gleeful anticipation of rejoining Blue and Mrs. Fierce. Maybe she was just saying, “Goody, goody, guess what I got and you didn't?” The dogs had never shown any true interest in her food, which is not to say that they would not have been interested in her as food had she been roasted. Which, I suppose, is an indictment of a lot of friendships.
Although the sun was fading, it was still hot, so I flipped the overhead fan to high as we settled into the pigskin chairs. The breeze from the fan rolled over us, shrouding us in lukewarm air. At least it kept us dry.
“So, what's up?” I asked.
“She's dead.”
I knew he was talking about Carmen Orduño.
“I kind of thought that she might be,” I said. The first sip of iced beer from the cold mug was heaven. “That was the call?”
He nodded and drank his beer.
“She was found in an old dump outside of Magdalena.”
I waited.
“Shot.”
I still waited.
He took a deep breath. “A couple of her fingers were broken.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes, both knowing what that meant. Someone had wanted to get information out of Carmen Orduño. That someone was probably Rafael Félix and the information most likely had to do with Félix's missing money. Money he somehow attributed to Lázaro Orantez's widow, who was no doubt at this moment bebopping around the bunkhouse. Was I being too unkind? She might have been shattered with the news of her friend's death. After all, she hadn't come out of the bedroom after receiving the call.
“Maybe you better move to town until the truck is fixed,” I said. “In a motel or something. I can run you all in tonight.”
“No. I've got too much to do here.”
“Martín, for God's sake, those people could kill you.”
His strong brown fingers caressed the raised MO symbol—the behind of a well-hung bull—on the side of his beer mug. “If I went to town, how would they know? They could still come here, and then you and Dad would be here alone.”
&
nbsp; Frankly, that thought had occurred to me. I was of the opinion that the more people around, the merrier. Hell, Jake Hatcher was even beginning to look good. Now I knew how Bowie and Crockett and the boys felt when new blood rode through the gates of the Alamo. Then I remembered the fat lot of good that did them and I didn't feel all that encouraged. “You'll be leaving anyway, what difference does it make?”
“Don't think I don't feel bad about that.”
“I know you do.”
He took a long pull on his Corona.
“They say she'd been dead awhile.”
Like many things, I imagined that forensics in Mexico was not quite as up-to-date as ours. It would probably take longer to post the body than it would in our country.
“So if she gave them any information, they would have had it for some time.”
“Exactamente.”
We finished our beer and I jumped up and got two more bottles from the fridge. Popped the caps off and poured them into the mugs. As I settled back into my chair, the only sound between us was the hum of the ceiling fan. That was one of the things I was going to miss when Martín left. The silences. Silences that only blossomed when you were either very uncomfortable with someone or very, very comfortable with him.
Damn, but I was going to miss him.
I didn't sleep very well that night. I kept expecting Félix and his men to come storming the Vaca Grande in their quest for Cori Elena. When I wasn't up prowling the house, peeking out windows, I tried to go back to sleep. But that didn't work either, for I kept thinking about Abby being drowned in the stock tank and her doctor getting slaughtered in his own carport. It seemed like danger was everywhere, floating around me like some inexplicable aura. Just before three in the morning I was so exhausted that I finally fell asleep.
The old Pueblo Stockyards runs an auction every Friday morning. I'd come before it started in the hopes of being able to talk to J.B.'s friend Tommy Renner, but the large volume of consigned cattle made that impossible. About as close as I'd been able to get to him was to see his straw cowboy hat floating above the pens as he went about the business of moving and sorting cattle.
Rode Hard, Put Away Dead Page 17
