Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  He had not noticed any other vehicles on the way in, or any headlights in the dark of one approaching. That meant the assassin had secreted himself before he’d arrived. Jojola suspected that he was hiding behind a cairn of rocks about a half mile back down the road. You should have noticed where his tire tracks left the main road, he thought, chiding himself for getting lax. Then again, no one told you today was open season on Indian police officers.

  Looking beyond the assassin’s lair, Jojola tensed when he saw a plume of dust rising from the road another mile farther back. It had to be Asher or Marlene and her daughter. They would have to drive right past the shooter. He sprang up and ran for his truck at the bottom of the hill, knowing he was already too late.

  • • •

  Sheriff Asher saw the plume, too, causing him to turn his attention away from the cliff Jojola had been standing on. But he smiled; after all his plan—with a couple adaptations—was working to perfection. One down, one to go, he thought. The boss will be pleased.

  Asher had always been a bully, as a child and an adult. In fact, he’d gone into law enforcement nearly thirty years earlier because he saw the badge as a way of being able to have power over other people. There was nothing quite as satisfying as beating some perpetrator to a pulp while handcuffed in the back of his squad car, unless it was coercing sexual favors from women picked up on shoplifting or bad-check charges in exchange for leniency. As a patrol deputy, he’d readily accepted bribes to tear up speeding tickets, or look the other way to let a drunk driver go. The only difference when he became sheriff twenty years earlier was that he expected larger bribes for ignoring bigger crimes, like drug dealing and car theft. “Them is just the perks of the job,” he’d say when he handed his most trusted deputies their share of the take.

  So when first approached by the men from New York a dozen years earlier to keep an eye on the St. Ignatius Retreat—“make sure there’s no messy investigations if one of our, ahem, clients happens to make a mistake in the community”—he’d asked only one question. “What’s in it for me?” Reporting to O’Callahan, Asher had found, meant easy money—five thousand a month for baby-sitting a bunch of perverts—until this Lichner psycho arrived and started butchering “the little red niggers.” Personally he could have given a shit about the missing boys. “They would have all just grown up to be drunks and troublemakers like their fathers. Nits make lice,” he joked with his deputies. But Lichner hardly bothered to cover his tracks and now the Indian police chief was breathing down his neck.

  Why the man in New York wanted to protect the grotesque priest he had no idea. But while he’d never met the man, or even knew his name, he wasn’t about to question him. He’d had a deputy once who threatened to take his suspicions about the connection between the clients at St. Ignatius and reports of children being sexually assaulted to the media if an investigation wasn’t launched. Two days after Asher warned New York about the threat, the deputy was found at the bottom of the gorge, having apparently jumped from the bridge. The fact that New York had not asked him to take care of the deputy, Asher believed, was a message from the boss…a demonstration of how long his arm could reach.

  The day before when he called O’Callahan, however, the message had been for him to take care of the problem, and he didn’t complain. In fact, he was rather pleased with himself when the components of his plan had fallen together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  First, early in the evening he’d released from the county jail a Taos Pueblo man named Leroy Cinque, a violent alcoholic who’d been arrested by Jojola a month earlier for beating his wife in a drunken rage. Cinque had been on the losing end of a number of run-ins with Jojola in the past and had sworn on more than one occasion to kill the police chief. The latest had been immediately after his incarceration and within hearing of two deputies, who could be counted on to testify to that fact.

  Upon his release, Cinque had been surprised when he got outside and found Asher waiting in his SUV with an offer to give him a ride back to the pueblo. He didn’t like the sheriff or trust him; then again, he didn’t want to offend him either. Cinque opened the passenger side door, but had to move a deer rifle out of the way to get in. “Sorry about that, Leroy, just put it in the rack,” the sheriff apologized.

  Once Cinque was in the car, the sheriff offered him a bottle of tequila “for what that bastard Jojola did to you…interfering between a man and his wife…sorry there was nothin’ I could do ’cept get you out a week early.” The former prisoner had accepted the apology and chugged a quarter of the bottle, not sure how long the sheriff’s largess would last. He’d reluctantly offered the sheriff a drink, but Asher turned him down. “Nah, I’m on duty. That one’s all yours.”

  As they drove, Asher explained that he was working on a case to implicate Jojola for “stealing from the tribe.” Where Cinque came in, he said, “is I need someone on the inside, so to speak, to keep an eye on him, see if he makes any large purchases.”

  Cinque smiled, although he had only a few teeth so that it mostly looked like a gaping hole in his head. He liked the idea of getting back at Jojola, and took another long swig on the bottle, then another, until he’d finished it and passed out as was his habit.

  Asher drove him out into the middle of the desert on the western side of the gorge and rolled him out of the vehicle. The sheriff had then driven his SUV to where he’d left Cinque’s old white Ford pickup truck hidden in a gulley several miles away. He pulled on a pair of gloves, took the rifle back out of the rack, and then switched vehicles. Driving back across the gorge bridge to the eastern side he’d turned north on the road that ran parallel to the gorge.

  Picking his spot for an ambush several miles onto reservation land, he’d hidden Cinque’s truck behind the rock cairn so that it wasn’t visible from the road. Then he’d found himself a comfortable spot to hunker down with his Thermos of coffee and the old deer rifle that now had Cinque’s fingerprints all over it.

  The original plan was to wait there until Jojola drove up the road in the morning with the Ciampi woman. Then, when he couldn’t miss, he’d blow the Indian’s brains out. The woman would try to run, but there was no place she could hide. He laughed out loud at the vision of her terrified dash down the road in the moments before the bullet hit her, too.

  Asher would then return in Cinque’s truck to where he left his own vehicle and switch again. Next, he would “discover” the murders as he arrived—just like his message to the police station had said—to work with Jojola on the homicide cases. With his help, his deputies would note the tire tracks of the killer’s vehicle leaving the scene, tire tracks later traceable to Cinque’s truck. The then-disabled truck would be discovered on the other side of the gorge, along with the deer rifle with the fingerprints confirming Cinque’s guilt.

  A massive manhunt would ensue led by the fearless sheriff of Taos County, who would personally come upon the crazed Indian trying to escape across the desert. Cinque could be expected, though it hardly mattered, to have the worthless piece of shit .22 caliber pistol Asher had tucked into his belt. Whether he pulled it or not, as there would be no witnesses, he would die in a hail of bullets from the sheriff’s own Colt .45 Peacemaker. Why the governor would probably give him a medal for catching the murderer of his former comrade in arms.

  Asher was pleasantly fantasizing about the award ceremony and the speech he would give when Jojola nearly ruined the whole thing by arriving early. It was too dark to risk a shot and then try to find the woman. Asher had no choice but to let the vehicle pass. He was therefore relieved when it turned off the road a half mile beyond his position.

  As the sky grew light enough to see, he’d watched Jojola on the cliff—doing some sort of Injun mumbo-jumbo—for a while unsure of the Ciampi woman’s location. But as the day grew brighter still, he could see his target’s vehicle parked down near the road, and it was soon apparent that no one else was in the car or with the police chief. That’s when he decided he w
ould shoot now, and figure out what to do about the woman later. Maybe with Jojola gone, she’d run back to New York. Let them take care of her.

  It was a perfect setup, he thought, as he settled the gun on a rock and looked through the scope. The Indian was silhouetted against the sky as he put the crosshairs on Jojola’s head, let out his breath slowly, and squeezed the trigger. The 30.06 had a powerful kick and so he couldn’t be sure, but it almost seemed to him that just as the gun bucked, his target moved. But then he’d seen Jojola fall and was sure he’d hit him. He was about to rise and go check on his victim when he turned and saw the plume of dust from an approaching vehicle. Got to be the woman, he thought. He trained the scope on the cab and saw that there were two figures. Isn’t that sweet, she brought her ugly daughter. He shifted his position so that he would have the shot he’d anticipated the night before.

  As he watched the truck drive toward the spot closest to the edge of the gorge, Asher had a new thought. Refocusing the scope on the front driver’s side tire, he squeezed off his second shot and was rewarded when the tire disintegrated and the truck veered for the cliff’s edge.

  The driver fought for control, taking the truck into a skid that had it facing 180 degrees from the direction it had been traveling when it came to a stop. But the passenger side tires were too close to the edge, which gave way and the truck slowly rolled over into the gorge.

  Although pleased with his shooting, Asher couldn’t see what happened to the truck once it fell. He figured the occupants would be dead at the bottom of the cliff—two more of Cinque’s victims—but decided he would make sure before returning to finish off Jojola if necessary.

  • • •

  It was close, but Marlene and Lucy weren’t dead quite yet. The truck had rolled over one and a half times on a steep slope but came to rest—at least for the moment—against an ancient low-lying piñon tree that had chosen a small rock outcropping above a sheer eight-hundred-foot plunge on which to live its life. The truck was tilted on the slope at such an angle that Marlene was hanging from her seat belt, while Lucy was pressed against the passenger side door. For the moment they were okay; however, the piñon was already losing the battle against gravity and the pressure of the half-ton truck. It creaked and popped under the weight while a steady stream of rocks and pebbles eroded around its base and fell into the chasm.

  • • •

  The predicament was a far cry from the pleasant early morning drive they’d embarked on an hour before. They’d been bouncing along in a comfortable silence, content to watch the sunrise and enjoying just being near each other while lost in thoughts regarding the men in their lives.

  As the sun bathed the desert in a soft gold, Marlene realized how much she’d grown to love that country. Absently, she wondered what chance she’d have of dragging Butch out of Manhattan and replanting him in Taos. She tried to imagine him the gentleman rancher, or maybe a country lawyer, while she painted and grew more gray, wrinkled, and eccentric with each passing year. But the image of him in a cowboy hat and boots quickly dissolved into the more familiar picture she had of him in a suit and tie, off to do battle with New York’s criminal defense lawyers, and she knew any ideas of him relocating were futile.

  It was a sad thought. There was a time she’d thought her particular brand of insanity would drive them apart. But now that she felt she might be climbing up a little farther on the ladder to mental health, she wondered if the positive change would be just as dangerous to their marriage. So much of her healing she attributed to what she’d discovered in New Mexico, and she wasn’t sure she could ever live in Manhattan again.

  She had taken Jojola’s advice and no longer tried to make the ghosts of her past go away, and in doing so, found them to be easier to live with. Sometimes they glared at her from the streets and corners of the village she’d created, but at least she was no longer exhausted by the effort to keep their faces out of her mind. If they made their presence too immediate, she simply passed them by as she would have unsavory characters on the streets of New York.

  The strategy wasn’t fail-safe, especially at night when she was troubled by a recurrent dream that her sons were being stalked by an enormous shadow while the bad men of her village smirked and laughed. But the New Mexico sunrise had a way of making even the worst dreams recede and seem less threatening. She’d even started to learn to forgive herself for acts that had troubled the conscience of the former Sacred Heart schoolgirl, recognizing that in many instances if she hadn’t acted, greater evil would have been done. In other cases, where the use of force had been less well defined, all she could do was accept that there might have been another way, but there was no going back, only forward with the resolve to do better. But in one odd way, coming to terms with her conscience regarding her past made it that much more clear that the greatest hurdle was ahead, seeking forgiveness from herself and her husband for what she had done to their marriage.

  Thinking of Butch made her also consider her feelings for the other adult male currently starring in her life, John Jojola. She found it strange to feel so close to a man without a desire to go to bed with him. With Billy, the sexy dog handler of Long Island, the attraction was purely physical. But with Jojola the attraction was friendship and something beyond.

  It was interesting to her that between Jojola and Father Dugan, the priest she was closest to in her own faith, she found the former to be almost more spiritual. Dugan was a great friend, as well as a good and moral man whom she’d entrusted with millions of dollars without a second thought that he might be tempted to take the money and run. But perhaps due to the location, Jojola seemed more in touch with that side of himself, even if she didn’t buy into everything about talking coyotes and eagles that carried prayers to heaven. Then again, if she was ever going to believe that such things could happen, it would have had to have been in New Mexico with such a guide.

  He just had such a different way of looking at the world. Once, while hiking along the rim of the gorge, they’d been overtaken by a passing rain shower. When it was gone, she’d looked at what she thought of as a gray and brown desert and noted how barren it remained. He’d told her to look again. “Think small,” he said. That’s when she noticed the tiny flowers that seemed to have magically appeared with the rain. White ones, yellow, purple, and pink—most so little, hardly the size of her pinkie fingernail, that she hadn’t noticed them against the immensity of the rest of the landscape. Yet now that she knew they were there, she saw how they carpeted the ground in soft colors for miles in every direction.

  “They’re so delicate,” she said with delight.

  “Think so?” he answered again. “Pick one.”

  Marlene stooped to do as told, but carefully drew her fingers back when pricked by the plant’s thorns. “Another Indian trick,” she grumped, sucking on the injured digit.

  Jojola laughed. “The price we pay for misperceptions,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t see beauty because it’s not slapping us in the face and demanding we pay attention. And sometimes, those things we find beautiful, or think of as fragile, may not be as harmless as they look.”

  “Couldn’t you have just told me that,” she sulked, “my finger hurts.”

  “Some lessons are best learned the hard way,” he replied with a smile. “The point is that each person creates their own reality for the world. You saw a harsh, barren landscape, until you really looked; then it was filled with tiny delicate flowers, which then turned out to be quite capable of protecting themselves. It’s sort of like those photographs you saw of President Nixon in the village. To you, and maybe most of the United States, he was a villain, but to us he was a hero. And in that light, maybe you perceive yourself to be a bad person, but someone else—like me, or maybe someone who would have been hurt if you weren’t who you are—sees you as heroic.”

  Marlene had paused and smiled when he said that, amazed as always that his compliments were so sincere and without expecting anything in return. B
ut a troubled look passed over her face. “I wonder if this killer perceives himself as being on the right side. The rituals and the rosary beads…maybe he thinks he’s working for God. Just like I’ve been able to tell myself that the men I’ve killed deserved to die because they were on the wrong side.”

  Jojola looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. “Perhaps, but what is right and what is wrong isn’t determined by the individual but the community that he lives in. The community says that murdering children is wrong—it doesn’t matter what his perception of it is.”

  “But society says that if I shot a man, even if I knew he’d committed a crime, without due process and without feeling that I was in immediate danger, that I am wrong, too.”

  “In theory, yes,” Jojola said. “We all understand that a community cannot function with a vigilante justice system. But that’s on paper…and how we want things to be in a perfect world. But who among us protests when the CIA sends a drone plane to fly a missile into some alleged terrorist’s tent. He’s certainly not been given due process by our legal standards; he may not have even been designated as an enemy combatant. But someone played judge, jury, and executioner. But does anyone complain? No…because we are afraid, especially since 9/11. We might pay lip service to the Constitution, but we sometimes actually want someone to take charge. We want someone to skirt the edge of the law, and take care of a problem that everyone knows is a danger, but that the legal system—with all its checks and balances—has not been able to cope with. As a law officer, I cannot say I condone it. But I certainly understand it, and if I find this man who kills my people’s children then I will be such a person, too.”

  Marlene had looked at her friend. I’ve used the same reasoning, and it nearly destroyed me, she thought, and yet he seems so comfortable with his beliefs. What is the difference? “So when you’ve killed him,” she said, “where will he fit in your village?”