The City of Rocks

by Don Travis

  Paco Rael danced next to his friend, his attention totally devoted to the small, raven-haired woman who swiveled her hips like she was doing flamenco. There is something almost hypnotic about watching line dancers. The men do their own thing in unison—more or less—while the women perform their dance, which is often different from, but oddly complementary to, their male counterparts’.

  I tripped down the steps and took a small table near the dance floor. A waitress caught my order of Long Island iced tea, and I settled back in the chair to watch the goings-on. Both Kurtz and Rael were accomplished dancers. When the music ended to a round of applause and a few yippie-ai-yos, the foursome made its way across the floor to a table almost directly opposite mine. They drank and talked and laughed while I debated crashing the party.

  Before I came to a decision, a busty brunette walked up behind Bert, leaned over his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek. He stood and embraced her, after which she greeted the other three with identical busses. She stayed only a few moments before waving good-bye and walking off.

  As she broke free of the crowd and walked past my table, the band struck up a lively tune. I lurched to my feet and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and gave me the once-over.

  “Excuse me, miss. Would you take pity on a lonely stranger in town? One dance is all I ask.”

  She gave a bemused smile. “I think I can spare one.”

  “Thank you. My name is BJ.”

  “Okay, BJ, but I won’t dance with you unless you promise to tell me what BJ stands for.”

  I returned her smile. “Fair wages for such arduous work. I don’t line dance, but I can handle the fast two-step the trio’s playing. When we’re on the dance floor, I’ll whisper the awful truth in your ear so no one else can hear. After I swear you to secrecy, of course.”

  She gave a low, throaty laugh and allowed herself to be led onto the floor. As soon as we began to move to the music, she told me her name was Laura Dowlinger and demanded payment.

  “BJ stands for Burleigh J.”

  “Good Lord! Did your parents hate you?”

  I took that to be an involuntary response and laughed. “No. It was my granddaddy’s name, and the granddaddy before him.”

  “Oh. A family name. I guess that makes it okay, then. But that’s only half payment.” She arched an eyebrow.

  “Oh, you mean the J. Well, back when I had a military ID, it read MIO.”

  “Middle initial only. My brother’s Army.”

  “Good for him, but he’d be better off in the Corps.”

  “You were a Marine?”

  “Semper Fi. I’m surprised you accepted my invitation to dance.” I gave her a spin, bringing her closer into my arms.

  “Why? You’re a handsome man.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, and you’re right pretty yourself. But that’s not what I meant. I’m surprised your dance card isn’t all filled up.”

  She fluttered a hand on my shoulder. “In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have dance cards around here. And if we did, these bozos would try to play poker with them. That’s all they know how to do with cards—of any kind.” She glanced up at me. “Albuquerque? Denver? You don’t have a Texas drawl, so I’m guessing north.”

  “Right the first time. Albuquerque. I’m just down here temporarily on a job.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “I work for an insurance company.”

  “Well, fair warning. I don’t need any.”

  I laughed. “I don’t sell it. But if you wanted a great big policy, I’d probably have to make sure you aren’t a dangerous criminal or on your deathbed before they wrote it up.”

  “Oh my goodness.”

  “You saved my life, I want you to know.” We did another spin. “I don’t know a soul here except for those two guys over there.” I nodded toward the Kurtz table.

  “Who? You mean Bert and Paco? Are they buying insurance?”

  “I know them from elsewhere.” Did her muscles stiffen beneath my touch? “I spent a little time down on the Lazy M,” I explained casually. It had not been my imagination. The tension went out of her at my explanation. Had she thought I was DEA? “I guess they’re pretty well-known around these parts.”

  “Everybody knows those two.”

  “I’m surprised Bert doesn’t go to Lordsburg to play. Or over the border.”

  “Oh, he does that all right. If he wants to go on a real binge, he heads for Palomas. When he’s on his schoolboy behavior, it’s Lordsburg. But if he’s only feeling a little wild, he comes to Deming. He has that whirlybird, so it doesn’t take much longer to get here than it does to the other two places.”

  “So he plays a calmer game when he’s in his own backyard?”

  “You got it, cowboy.”

  “If he’s looking for a semiwild party, can we expect some fireworks tonight?”

  “Not necessarily. I mean, he doesn’t tear up the place every time he shows up.”

  After the dance, Laura agreed to let me buy her a drink. I had apparently turned on a switch when I mentioned Bert Kurtz, because that’s all she wanted to talk about as we sat at the little table and sipped alcohol. Her bobbed brunette hair picked up the strobe lights as she spoke. Laura was a pretty woman with high, smooth cheekbones and a generous mouth. She told me she and Bert had dated a few years back, but the relationship went nowhere, so she broke things off. Reluctantly, I gathered.

  She reinforced what I already knew of Millicent’s son: a hard worker, a hard drinker, and a hard fighter with a love-’em-and-leave-’em attitude.

  She knew a little about Paco as well. They had also gone out together a couple of times, but it didn’t take. She attributed it to the fact she was as tall as he was, something that bothered him, although it didn’t matter to her. She went light about providing personal details. She painted Rael as a cipher—everyone knew him, but no one knew much about him, especially his life across the border. I suspected this vagueness was behind the nervousness I noticed on the dance floor when we first talked about the two men. Maybe because of his border straddling, she mentally connected Paco with the drug business. Or perhaps she knew something.

  I kept probing, trying to elicit that something, until she took her leave, pleading she had to go to work early tomorrow morning. I had the distinct impression she would have welcomed me in her home had I been interested. After she left I wandered across the floor to the Kurtz table. Paco spotted me first. His quick frown turned into a fast smile.

  “Well, lookie who’s here. Hello, Mr. Vinson.”

  “Hello, Paco. I told you to call me BJ.”

  “Right, BJ. This here’s Babs. It’s really Barbara, but everybody calls her Babs.”

  “BJ,” the petite, dark woman said softly, acknowledging my existence. The J came out something like “Zhay.” Cute rather than pretty. Pert nose, sparkling eyes, small ears, and a gently pointed chin.

  Bert rose and shook my hand. “Howdy, BJ. This one’s Veronica. She won’t let me call her Ronnie, so I guess we’re stuck with Veronica. Right, honey?” He gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  Veronica, who insisted on remaining Veronica, was pretty. Something only a little short of lovely, actually. She reminded me of a Swedish blonde with golden skin. But her twangy acknowledgment of my greeting was pure Texas.

  Introductions done, Bert offered me a seat and insisted on buying me a drink. I switched to a mug of the local lager. More than one Long Island iced tea would have put me in the danger zone.

  The night stretched out longer than I planned, but after three or four more dances, the women decided to repair their makeup. Paco tagged along to make a stop at the men’s room, leaving Bert and me alone.

  “Okay, BJ, what’s up?” He leaned forward over the table and fixed me with a brown-eyed stare.

  “Can’t put much by you, can I?” I touched the button on the recorder hanging on my belt without much hope it would pick up anything other than the noise of the nightclub. “I’ve t
urned up something kind of disturbing and wanted your take on it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did you know your mother placed a sizeable bet on a duck race down in Florida? A bet with a forfeiture clause. Do you know what that means?”

  “It probably means the insurance company will claim she got rid of Quacky to cover her losses. But hell, she’s made more money on that duck than she’ll ever lose. How much is the bet?”

  I returned his stare. “A quarter of a million dollars.”

  Even in the semidarkness of Lena’s Nightclub, I saw the flush rise up out of his collar and creep over his startled features.

  Chapter 12

  A CONFIDENTIAL investigator’s job is to collect facts, not to spin the meaning of them, although I’ve been known to violate that concept a couple of times. Once the $250,000 bet with the Florida real estate developer surfaced, I could have filed a report that would make Del’s friend at the insurance company very happy and allow me to claim my assignment was over. But in my eyes that would be a job only half-done. I needed to talk to Millicent again, and I didn’t want to do it by telephone. The mileage log on this case was beginning to look like the state’s budget deficit this year.

  I decided to undertake the trip without letting anyone know I was on the way. I took I-10 west out of Deming and caught Hwy 81 south at Hachita and headed down toward Antelope Wells—where there are neither antelope nor wells. I kept an eye out for the ranch helicopter but saw no sign of it. Either Bert got underway early, or else he had cut across Mexican airspace, but either way he was probably already home or well on the way.

  His shock at my revelation at the club had been profound. A quarter-of-a-million-dollar loss would impact the family ranch operation in a significant way. Mother and son were headed for a showdown with blood on the floor. Hyperbole, of course. Hopefully.

  At high sun, I turned down the gravel road to the ranch house. As soon as the house came into view, it was obvious something was going on. Vehicles littered the front yard, mostly pickups, some with extended cabs and dual rear wheels—vehicles made for hard driving over rough territory. Some sported ranch brands on their sides. It looked like a meeting of the local cattlemen’s association.

  On a hunch, I did not ring the doorbell but detoured around the side of the building toward the back. Halfway there I heard the growl of voices, angry voices. I rounded the corner and came to a halt. A broad, shaded patio spanned the length of the building. Approximately a dozen men and a couple of women perched on padded outdoor chairs and lounges. Millicent and Bert sat at a glass-topped table littered with bottles of booze, apparently presiding over the group. Everyone’s attention was centered on a stubby, pot-bellied man with wisps of white hair and a very big voice.

  “I already spent ten grand on fixing the fences and cleaning up after the bastards. Before the year’s out, they’ll eat up all my profits and leave me in the hole… again.”

  Aha, this was a meeting to address the ranchers’ problems with immigrants trespassing on their property.

  “Tom, we’re all in the same boat,” Bert said. “That’s why I asked everybody to meet here. We can’t count on the Border Patrol. We can’t count on any of the Feds. Locals either. We gotta take things into our own hands.”

  “Hell, Bert, what can we do? All my boys already tote iron, but that’s just for protection. Ain’t a man on my spread that ain’t been shot at or threatened. On my own land!”

  Bert spotted me and laid a hand on his mother’s arm. As soon as her gaze focused on me, she bounced out of her chair.

  “BJ, what are you doing here?”

  “Needed to talk to you again, but I see you’re in the middle of something.”

  She turned to her guests. “Folks, this is Mr. B. J. Vinson. He’s a private investigator out of Albuquerque. Maybe he has some thoughts on this subject.”

  She introduced me around. The man who had been speaking turned out to be Tom Blackthorn, the owner of a large spread to the south of the Lazy M. The others were all ranch owners or managers as well. Then I listened while Bert explained.

  The Boot Heel ranches bordering the state of Chihuahua were in a state of crisis. This area was one of only four major stretches of the US-Mexico border not fortified with electronically monitored steel fencing. As Millicent had noted on my last visit, the strands of barbed wire and the occasional obelisks actually marking the border were funneling the illegal smuggling activity right through their property. “Like herding cattle through a pasture gate,” as Tom Blackthorn put it.

  To a man—and woman—these ranch owners were facing ruinous expenses from fouled water supplies, break-ins and thefts, litter, rustling, and the slaughter of livestock—not to mention coming across the occasional corpse of some poor immigrant. Cut fences were an expected way of life now. One rancher reported a windmill toppled and another burned, acts of vandalism. Whenever confronted, the traficantes escorting these trespassers displayed weapons threateningly or actually fired on the cowpunchers. The flood of drugs and illegal immigrants upset the delicate ecosystem of the Chihuahuan desert. The heavy presence of the Border Patrol and militia groups that sometime showed up put an additional burden on the land.

  Now the Lazy M and its neighbors were contemplating forming their own resistance group to fight the growing problem. One of the owners claimed to have enough influence to get cowboys from each of the outfits sworn in as county deputies.

  “Gentlemen… and ladies,” I said when they ran down and looked to me for a reaction, “this is outside of my area of expertise, but it strikes me that if you have enough influence to deputize your help, you surely have enough juice to get some official aid with the problem. Sometime back our governor, along with other border chief executives, sent troops from the National Guard to patrol the border. Perhaps you can prod him into doing it again. Your cattlemen’s association likely has the ear of your congressional delegation. I’d be sure those avenues were fully explored before putting your help, your families, and yourselves at risk by armed confrontation.”

  “We’ve done all of that. Every last thing you suggested,” Bert said. “We get a few more Border Patrol in the area for a while, and then it dies off again. We need something to let the bastards know we mean business.”

  “Now, Bert,” his mother said, “maybe we should listen. There’s a virtual war going on over there, and we don’t need to import it over here.”

  One of the other owners, a man introduced as Pierce Chavez, spoke up. “Hell, Mud, if the Mexican Army and National Police are giving them fits down there, it’s exactly the time to shut down the highway to the North Forty-Eight.” Chavez, a portly man in his fifties with a two-day beard, looked more like one of his own cowpunchers than a prosperous rancher. He munched a dead cigar, perhaps from agitation. Or maybe it was his way of chewing tobacco.

  “How are you going to compensate your hands’ families when one of them gets himself killed in a shootout with the traffickers and coyotes?” Millicent asked.

  Chavez stuck to his guns. “Same way we do it when they get killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A little insurance and the rest out of our pockets. I’d sooner go broke that way than this.”

  “Well, speaking for the Lazy M, I don’t want any part of it.”

  An angry murmur went around the group. Somebody uttered a particularly nasty vulgarity—the other woman present, I think. And then I understood. This wasn’t Millicent’s meeting; it was Bert’s. He’d called the group together to discuss their mutual problem, and now his mother had sabotaged him.

  “What’re you planning on doing, then?” Blackthorn demanded.

  “Mending fences, moving my livestock to acreage across the highway, and watching out for my own fanny until Washington gets the message and does what they oughta done all along.”

  “Mud Hen, you know full well what it’ll take to get them assholes to moving. They’ll wait until some poor rancher’s whole family gets massacred,” Chavez
said.

  “Any volunteers?” Millicent asked.

  If she intended to break up the meeting, she’d found the perfect way. The group streamed into the house and out the front door like a herd of puckish buffalo. I heard Bert assure some of them his mother would come around. Within sixty seconds flat, Millicent and I were alone on the patio.

  “Okay, what’s going on?”

  She leveled her opal gaze on me a moment before responding. “What are you going to recommend to the insurance company?”

  “I don’t recommend. I report facts. Can I take it Bert told you I’ve found the two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar bet with the forfeiture clause?”

  “Yes, and when that shithead Hank Grass hears about it, you know he’ll make a recommendation. My claim will be denied. I’ll not only lose my sweetie-pie, I’ll lose a lot of money too.”

  “You can always sue. You need an attorney before you do anything else.”

  “Even if I win, that’ll just cut my losses in half. The lawyer will take the rest of it.”

  “Then—”

  A tornado interrupted me. Bert stormed out of the house and stood in front of his mother, seriously invading her space.

  “What the hell was that?” he demanded. “You agreed to the meeting. We’ve planned it for a week, and then in one minute, you cut me off at the knees. Why?”

  Millicent motioned to me. “You heard what the man said. He made—”

  “Oh no you don’t! You can’t blame this on BJ. He started off saying he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. You just latched on to his idiot suggestions to do what you wanted to do all along. What I want to know is why?”

  Despite being called an idiot, I was interested in her answer. But she just rehashed the argument that it was too dangerous to pit their armed men against the smugglers’ armed men. Then she firmly terminated the conversation and started inside.