by Urban Waite
To the east the first light was beginning to show above the mountains, gray as it filtered through the clouds. And as they waited, they could see the clouds beginning to thin and the rain letting up until it became only drizzle on the car windshield.
He looked across at Medina, told him to pull the car forward. When they drew closer, he knew he would tell Ernesto to check the staff houses, while the rest of them went in after the old man who lived inside.
Ray woke in the truck with Sanchez dead beside him. An early blue-toned light spreading across the sky to the east where the clouds had partially cleared in the night and a thin drizzle was now falling. Outside, the desert went on without mercy, gray and flat as a griddle pan, running along all the way to the mountains where the slope rose in waves of pinyon and juniper to the snow-topped peaks.
He’d promised Sanchez a trip north, a way out. But it wasn’t going to happen, and Ray sat there trying to accept the life that he’d chosen. A life that had brought him here, connected him to Memo, and stolen from him anything he’d ever hoped for.
He didn’t know what the day would hold. A slight glimmer of hope that he was still alive, and that there was light enough to walk by. The chance of a new beginning somewhere far out there, meager as it now seemed.
He felt his age. Every muscle aching as the new light spread over the mountains and the air shifted slightly, signaling the day to come. He knew that in an hour the sun would be up over those mountains, beating down on what remained of the window glass, and the metal body of the truck.
Ray sat for a long time in the driver’s seat of the Bronco watching the mountains take shape out of the wet, grainy light. The radio long since dead. With a heavy hand, he eased the door open to feel the cold move in on him off the open land, parting fibers in the shirt he wore, bringing new life as it bristled against his skin.
With his bare feet on the ground, and the sun not yet up over the mountains, he felt cold and alone. The brittle pulse of the wind ran along the land in front of him, and the prick of the drizzle falling everywhere. All along the plain, the dotted shapes of creosote and chuparosa showing in a patchwork of dirt and gray-green vegetation. The receding track of their tire treads, once seen behind them, almost completely taken away by the rain.
All through the night the water had thumped down out of the sky, pouring in through the shattered windows and slicking the seats. The Bronco just sitting there in the open, and Ray knowing that whoever wanted to find him—wanted to find Sanchez—would find them soon enough.
Leaning into the back, he took up the hunting rifle, a thousand-meter scope on the thing and bullets almost two inches in length. Getting up out of the truck, he laid the rifle over the roof, then walked around to the passenger side. He went through Sanchez’s pockets, taking his keys, taking his wallet, taking everything he found.
Ray bent again and took one shoe, then the other from Sanchez’s feet, pulling them from beneath the boy’s heels and then sliding them up over his toes. Now, with both shoes clutched in his hand, he leaned against the Bronco and one by one, measured the soles of the shoes with his own feet, estimating the difference. Both shoes too small. He took from his back pocket the knife he’d used on Burnham’s Chevy seat and flipped it open. Holding each shoe in turn, he cut lines down through the heel material and then slipped them both on. They were a poor fit, but they’d do.
He was cold, hungry, and thirsty. One sleeve missing from his shirt and only his undershirt left to cover his right shoulder and bicep. Trying to move around as much as he could to create warmth, he gathered what he could from the Bronco and set out, taking his direction from the sun and the mountains. The rifle he carried in his hands, the Ruger pressed beneath his waistband to his stomach. He thought how, if he could, he’d come back for Sanchez, but looking out on the desert and the distance to walk, he doubted he ever would.
The drizzle now clearing a little as the sun came on, evaporating the clouds above. Sanchez behind him, sitting there with his pockets turned out and his arms folded across his chest while Ray walked due north, aiming to get as far as he could from the Bronco and all the history that lay within.
The call came early in the morning. Tom left Claire still asleep in his bed and drove out to the old Sullivan house. There had been nothing over the radio, just the familiar buzz of the static as he sat drinking his morning coffee.
He parked his truck off the road behind the county cruisers, cracked the window for Jeanie, and walked the rest of the way up the gravel drive to the house. The first body he saw lay uncovered just at the doorway to the house. Tom paused to look at the old pickup truck sitting on four slashed tires a few feet from the front porch. It was a truck he knew from his time as sheriff. A truck that had belonged to Jake Burnham, though he didn’t know if it did anymore.
He stood there looking at the truck for a long while, thinking. Burnham had been somehow connected to Angela Lopez, and now here was his truck, the familiar dents along the left front panel, the dinged-up paint. Now at the edge of the fender was a silver pockmarking of fresh buckshot where metal had bitten into metal, shaving the paint away.
Whatever this was, whatever he’d stumbled across two days before on the highway and now out here at the old Sullivan house, it was beginning to look much too familiar to Tom. Where was Burnham in all this? Tom looked to where the dead body lay on the porch. Was it Burnham? With the face turned out of sight he couldn’t tell.
Last night he’d gone to dinner at Kelly’s and there’d been nothing left for them to follow, the two of them sitting out there on the swing set thinking it through. Already, in a way, discussing the death of the boy in the hospital like something in the past without an answer. Now they had Burnham’s truck sitting on four slashed tires.
Tom stepped over the imprint of a tire tread and stood watching the scene. The blurred outlines of footfalls and tire tracks everywhere in the sand, not a single one of them clear enough to make a reliable cast from. About thirty feet out from the house, Tom watched where the young deputy knelt over the body of a man on the ground. Pierce took a photo, advanced the film, then stood and met Tom’s eye.
“Got the call from Sheriff Kelly this morning,” Tom offered.
“I saw you at the hospital yesterday,” Pierce said, stepping back from the body to shake Tom’s hand. “Edna said you might be around.”
Tom knelt over the body. Mexican. Two bullet holes to the head. “Someone is a very good shot.”
“There’s another inside with a hole right between the eyes,” Pierce said, something breathy and full of wonder in the way he said it. Like a young boy running to tell his parents something fabulous he’d seen.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Tom said.
“Me neither,” Pierce said.
“You got two bodies, then?”
“Three. There’s one up on the porch, looks like he was trying to get in through the door but he never made it.”
“Any of them a skinny, old white man with a big, flat-brimmed Stetson?”
“Huh?”
“Just testing a theory,” Tom said. He looked back at the four slashed tires on Burnham’s pickup.
Tom said a quick good-bye to Pierce when he saw Kelly move out of the house, meeting her as she came off the porch. “What do you make of it?” Tom asked.
“It’s hard to make anything of it,” Kelly said. “I’m dead tired over this whole thing. I spent the night hanging out i
n the office, watching a snoring Andy Strope through the bars. My mind certainly wasn’t ready for a morning like this.”
“These morning calls are getting to be a regular thing between us, aren’t they?”
“I hope not,” Kelly said. “Have you ever seen anything like this? I sure haven’t.”
Both of them had turned and were looking at the man laid out on the porch. Nearby, Tom saw the top of the other man’s head inside the doorway. There didn’t seem to be any door at all on the frame.
“Three bodies,” Kelly said. “Over a hundred holes in this house, and not one gun.”
They walked up onto the porch and Tom knelt and examined the dead man, Mexican like the other. “What type of ballistics did you get back on Gil Suarez?”
“Hunting rounds, big ones, .308s.”
“You find any .308s yet?”
“No. Not a single one,” Kelly said. “As far as I can tell each of these men was shot with a nine-millimeter.”
“A .308 would certainly have done more damage,” Tom said. He looked from the body to the wood around the door. The wood siding looking like a billion termites might be living inside the house. “Shot this one right through the wall.”
“I saw that,” Kelly said.
“You see Burnham’s truck out there?”
“I didn’t like the look of it either.”
“So where’s Burnham? You know he works for Dario, and I doubt he was the one who shot all these men.” Tom took a pen from his pocket and opened the dead man’s jacket up so he could better see where the bullet had gone in. “Eli wants you to keep this thing quiet, but I just don’t see how you can anymore,” Tom said.
“I don’t . . .” Kelly’s voice drifted off, she was looking at Burnham’s truck now and just shaking her head.
“These men aren’t local,” Tom said. “I’ll tell you that now. What brought them here is what you’re going to need to find out, and I think you know who you need to talk to.” Tom let the man’s jacket drop back down onto his chest. The shirt underneath still wet with blood and the pen now slightly red at its tip.
Kelly moved her eyes back to Tom. The slight click and advance of Pierce’s camera buzzing in the background. “You mean Dario?”
“I don’t know who else. Burnham makes the connection, it’s not that hard to follow after that.”
“We don’t have anything solid on Dario,” Kelly said. “Honestly, Tom, it’s a horrible thing to say but after what happened with Angela Lopez it’s a sensitive matter.”
“The only person being sensitive about that is Eli.”
“He’s scared, Tom. Looking at these men here, shot up the way they are, I don’t blame him.”
“Whatever this is,” Tom said, “it’s nothing you can let slide anymore.”
“I know that—I know that better than most, but I can’t just go asking these types of questions without proper cause.”
Tom smiled a bit. “I see a whole lot of cause around here, Edna. Too much. In fact, you might start thinking about calling in some help on this. DEA, Border Patrol, even the state cops.” Tom looked down at the body again and then looked back at Kelly. “Strange how when a man moves to a small town and tries to keep his business quiet, it just becomes everyone else’s business in the process. You know what Dario’s been doing these last couple years, the whole town knows, but I messed that up for us all and now everyone wants to look the other way.”
Tom stood. He walked over for a better view of the man inside the doorway. A single shot right between the eyes. A shot Tom knew Burnham couldn’t make even if he was standing five feet away.
He turned and looked back at Kelly. “You want to go through this with me?”
Dario stood in Gus Lamar’s living room, looking over the pictures the old man had up on the mantel. Behind him, Medina waited in the living room doorway, a submachine gun hanging off his shoulder, while César and Carlos stood to either side of the big lounge chair, their hands held down on Gus’s shoulders, fixing him in place.
“Help you?” Gus asked. He’d been asking the same thing for the better part of a half hour, wearing his sleeping clothes, his white hair mussed, and a coarse growth of silver all over his cheeks and neck. Dario hadn’t spoken a word to him yet. He stood examining one of the pictures over the mantel, the face he saw there, angular like the old man’s but darker.
“You’re the father?” Dario said. “Ray’s father.” Drawing the name up out of memory, the name he’d read on the side of the prescription bottle.
Gus glanced from Dario to the set of pictures as Dario reached a hand out to take the picture down.
He was careful with the picture frame, using his sleeve, not wanting to leave any fingerprints. “I’m a friend of your son’s,” Dario said.
“I know who you are,” Gus said. “You’re not a friend of Ray’s.”
“No? Maybe not, but I know some about you, too, and I’m guessing you could tell me a little about Ray if you needed to.”
Gus bucked a little in the seat and the men forced him down again. “You want to tell me why you thought you could just let yourself in?” Gus said, looking around the room at Dario, before moving his eyes across to Medina. “I haven’t talked to my son in ten years, and anything you know about him at this point is more than I’ve heard in a long time.”
Dario put the picture back on the mantel. He was careful about how he placed it, lining it up just as it had been. When he drew his hand back, he brought with him the heavy weight of the .45 he’d left sitting up over the mantel. The old man’s eyes immediately fixed on the gun in Dario’s hand. A slight smile flattened on Dario’s lips as he saw the old man tighten up, and the reality sink into him. “If I tell these men to take their hands off you, you promise not to do anything stupid?” Dario said.
“I’m not making any promises,” Gus said.
Dario’s smile only grew bigger. He nodded to the two men holding Gus in place and they stepped back, taking their hands from his shoulders. “Let’s start again,” Dario said. He took a seat in the chair across from the old man, crossing one leg over the other and laying the gun across his thigh, his finger resting over the trigger guard. “You know me and I know you, and all I’m really after here—the reason we’ve come and we’re all visiting you in your house this morning—is the answer to one simple question.”
“I can’t help you,” Gus said.
Dario looked up at the pictures on the mantel again. He pulled back his sleeve and checked his watch. “You know your son is very good at what he does. He has a real talent. The only problem is that he’s very stubborn.”
“Stubborn?”
“He doesn’t see that it’s all over for him in this town,” Dario said. Behind, the front door opened and Ernesto walked in. He paused for a moment, looking to where Gus sat in the chair, before Dario waved him over. He’d found four of the staff houses empty, but the fifth looked to have someone living in it. Dario turned back to Gus. “Someone is missing?”
Gus didn’t say anything.
Dario raised the .45 off his leg and pointed it at Gus. “Should we see who comes running?” He gave the trigger a pull and the gun bucked in his hand, releasing a sound loud as thunder and the cloud of gunpowder to go with it. In the wall over Gus’s head, a hole the size of Dario’s thumb could be seen in the plaster.
“Jesus!” Gus said. “I’m telling you I haven’t seen Ray in ten years, I don’t know where he is now. If he’s i
n town, I don’t know it, and he didn’t stop by to say hi.”
Dario could feel his patience running thin. He was tired and he’d given this man every chance he was going to get, but now it was all coming to a head. “Who is living out back?” Dario asked again.
“My brother-in-law.”
“Who?” Dario snapped.
“Luis, he’s a regular at your bar. He’s probably sleeping it off somewhere, I don’t know, I don’t keep track of him.”
Dario turned to look at Medina. “Yo lo conozco,” Medina said, telling Dario he thought the man worked up the road, two miles away at the Deacon place, raising cattle. Dario turned back to look at Gus. “I’m trying to help you out here,” Dario said. “I’m trying to help you but it doesn’t seem like you want to be helped.” Dario signaled for Ernesto, and when Ernesto came close, Dario told him to go outside and watch the front.
When Ernesto had gone, Dario said to Gus, “The man who just left lost his brother last night. I asked him to leave so that we could talk in confidence. Because of Ray his brother is dead. He’s likely to kill you when he comes back in here, and I’m likely to let him if you don’t have something for me pretty soon. Because the way this is going to work is not going to be pleasant, and it’s not going to be short, and no one in this room will help you.” Dario looked the old man over, trying to decide how he had taken it. The old man’s face was thin and drawn. The cheekbones showing just below the eyes and a look of hate crossing his face for a moment, then going away again as Dario called for Ernesto to come back in.
Dario nodded toward Carlos and César, and the two men came forward again and put their hands down on Gus’s shoulders. They were holding him still when Ernesto came forward and Dario told him to begin.
