Hermit's Peak

by Michael McGarrity

  “Don’t change the subject. Are you thinking of having a baby?”

  “I’m putting a stud book together, just as a possibility. Your name is on the list.”

  “I’m honored to be considered. But you’d be taking a chance. I’ve never sired any offspring.”

  “You seem to have the necessary enthusiasm for the task.”

  Kerney laughed. “Is this something you’re serious about?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How many names are in your stud book?”

  “I’m not telling.” Sara’s hand traveled below Kerney’s hip to his crotch. “Now, that’s very interesting.”

  She rolled on top of Kerney, and for a very long time conversation ceased.

  • • •

  Carl Boaz saw hoofprints in the snow at the gate when he got back to the meadow late Sunday night. He unlocked the gate, moved the truck through, relocked the gate, and drove to his cabin, wondering who in the hell had been snooping around. He made a quick tour outside with a flashlight, looking for any sign of trespassing. Everything appeared okay.

  Inside, Boaz kept his coat on while he lit a kerosene lamp and fired up the wood stove. Off the power grid, the cabin had no electricity other than what a gasoline generator supplied. Boaz rarely used electricity in the cabin; it was much more important to reserve the power for the greenhouse and the well pump.

  He left the cabin and walked to the greenhouse. From the gate at the top of the meadow, the greenhouse looked like a cheap, thrown-together structure. But hidden from view on the south side, a row of solar panels fed power to a bank of batteries that ran fans and heating coils. The system was so efficient Boaz only needed to use the backup generator after three or four consecutive cloudy days.

  He circled the greenhouse, checked the door locks, looked for fresh tracks, found nothing, and walked back to the cabin. Boaz smiled as he passed the child’s bicycle propped against the porch rail. Wanda the bitch had left it behind when she moved out with her bratty eight-year-old son to return to L.A. He had found the bicycle in the toolshed and decided to use it to give the place a homey, family kind of look.

  The cabin had warmed up nicely. Heavily insulated, it consisted of a large room with two sleeping lofts, a small bathroom off the downstairs kitchen area, and an attached room at the back of the cabin Boaz had built for Wanda to use as a pottery studio. With Wanda gone, Boaz had converted the room into a woodshed. It easily held three cords of dry firewood.

  He shucked his coat, put a tea kettle on the propane stove to heat up coffee water, and turned on the battery-powered shortwave receiver. He liked listening to the BBC Sunday night broadcasts.

  At the table, Boaz studied his sketch of a cornfield that he would plant after the last spring frost. He would move new nursery stock to the cornfield, use the corn to shield the marijuana, and start another greenhouse crop of grass right away. That would more than double his yield in one season.

  In the morning he would dig up the cactus plants in the greenhouse that Wanda had transplanted from the mesa, and start some more marijuana seedlings. There were only twenty cactus plants, but they took up valuable space. He couldn’t believe he’d let the bitch talk him into starting a little cactus garden.

  The teapot whistled and Boaz got up and made his coffee. A BBC newsreader was reporting on a New Zealand woman who grew rare nineteenth-century roses in her garden. He turned up the volume, listened to the batty old lady ramble on about her roses in a down-under accent, and started working on his finances.

  Money was tight, and he wouldn’t see a profit until he could market his product. Every dime he’d made from dealing at colleges in Southern California had gone into his enterprise. The land, the cabin, the greenhouse, the move last year to New Mexico, had cost a lot of money. But if he could make it through the next six months, and get half a dozen more crops in, he would be a rich man.

  Then he would finish his novel.

  He stared at his piece-of-shit Ph.D. diploma from UC Santa Barbara that was nailed to a joist supporting the sleeping lofts. All those years in school, for what? A shitty teaching assistant position in some backwater philosophy department with no hope for a tenure-track appointment. Worthless.

  A truck horn blared from the locked gate—two short beeps. Boaz grabbed his coat and went outside. A full moon and a clear sky made it easy for him to see Rudy’s truck. The headlights were off and the motor was running. It was about time Rudy showed up to pay him some money. He was weeks overdue.

  “Where have you been, man?” Boaz asked as he climbed over the gate and approached the driver’s door.

  “Working,” Rudy replied through the open truck window.

  “You want to come in?”

  “Can’t stay.”

  “Did you bring my money?”

  “Yeah,” Rudy said, as he raised the pistol from his lap and blew a third eye through Boaz’s forehead.

  4

  Up early, Gabe Gonzales made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table reviewing his completed reports. It was much too soon for Orlando to be awake, and the house was quiet.

  Theresa, his ex-wife, had forced Gabe to buy out her equity in the house, a Victorian built by his grandfather on a street behind the Las Vegas Public Library. It took Gabe a second mortgage to do it, and he was still paying on an earlier loan used to renovate the house after his grandfather had sold it to him.

  He had his eye on a lieutenant’s vacancy that would ease some of the monthly pressure to pay bills. Orlando was on a full scholarship at the university and worked a part-time job to cover his personal expenses, so having him living at home wasn’t much of a burden. But Gabe still walked around most of the time with a nearly empty wallet.

  He looked at the clock on the kitchen stove, picked up the cordless phone, and called Officer Russell Thorpe at home.

  “Wake up, rookie,” Gabe said when Thorpe answered. “I need you to run some paperwork down to Chief Kerney in Santa Fe. Pick it up at my place.”

  “Then what?”

  “Since you’ve just volunteered to work on your days off, call me when you get back. We’ll do one more sweep of the mesa. I still think we may have missed something.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Thorpe picked up the reports, departed, and Gabe headed out. He took the paved road past the county detention center and followed it to where the pavement ended. Several miles in on the dusty dirt road he passed through San Geronimo.

  Once a prosperous ranching community, in the late nineteenth century the village had spawned Las Gorras Blancas, the White Caps. It was a secret militant organization of Hispanic ranchers determined to drive out the Anglo settlers who had encroached on the old Mexican land grant with the help of corrupt politicians.

  Wearing white hoods to conceal their identities, Las Gorras Blancas raided at night, burning barns and haystacks, ripping down fences, and shooting the land grabbers’ livestock. They staged midnight rallies on the Las Vegas Plaza, circulated petitions to the citizens, and even had a leader elected to the territorial legislature. But they couldn’t stop the bleeding away of the land to the Anglo newcomers, and by the turn of the century much of it was gone forever.

  Gabe thought about the recent rise in property crimes and wondered if, a century later, a modern version of Las Gorras Blancas was riding again. It was worth thinking about; land prices were climbing and the few old Hispanic families left in the valley were having a hell of a time paying their property taxes. Maybe somebody had gotten pissed off enough to start ripping off the latest wave of Anglo immigrants.

  The morning sky changed from hot pink to flat gray as the sun broke above the horizon and disappeared behind a low, thick cloud.

  Chief Kerney had asked Gabe to check out the owner of the cabin to the north of his property. He turned onto the dirt track that led to Carl Boaz’s cabin in the meadow. Finding out about Boaz had been easy. His property had been added to the fire department response grid map after the cabin had been b
uilt. Supposedly, Boaz lived there with a girlfriend and her young son.

  If Gabe hadn’t been driving a 4 x 4 state police Ram Charger, he would have stopped and walked in—the road was that bad. He made the last turn near the top of the hill and saw two crows sitting on the top of a steel gate. Above, several more circled lazily at low altitude. He looked at a mound on the ground, and looked again.

  He got out, walked to the mound, and bent over it. A dead man looked up at him with blank eyes. Cold nighttime temperatures had left the body covered with frost. The bullet hole in his forehead was perfectly round, and his face was tattooed with pinpoint hemorrhages from powder burns.

  He’d been shot at very close range. Gabe put on a pair of plastic gloves, tilted the body slightly, searched the back pockets for a wallet, found it, and looked for a driver’s license. Issued by the state of California, it identified the dead man as Carl Boaz.

  Gabe stayed low, keyed his hand-held radio, and called in the crime. The crows didn’t move from the gate until he returned to the vehicle. Then they hopped away a few yards and perched on the top strand of the wire fence.

  He crouched behind the open door and scanned the meadow with binoculars. Approaching the cabin would be risky. He would have to cover at least a hundred yards of open space from the gate to the cabin. There might be an armed hostage taker barricaded inside one of the structures with captives.

  He saw no movement, but stayed put for a few minutes before getting a tarp out of the back of the 4 x 4 and covering the corpse. He didn’t want crows feasting while he waited for backup.

  He called for assistance, positioned himself at the rear of the vehicle where he had the most protection, and kept scanning the cabin and greenhouse. All the preliminary work—photographing, measuring, and evidence collection—could wait until he was sure the area was secure.

  The crows flapped lazily off the wire, circled above him, and cawed. There would be no free lunch for them today.

  • • •

  Kerney’s bedroom phone rang. He reached for it and checked the time: it was seven o’clock. He listened to the dispatcher’s report, asked for a helicopter to stand by, and hung up.

  “What is it?” Sara asked as she sat up in the bed and pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

  “Cold?”

  “No, modest.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you going to tell me or not?”

  Kerney looked at Sara, wondering how she could look so sexy on such little sleep. They had stayed awake and talked through most of the night, catching each other up. Kerney now knew about the firefight in the DMZ that had led to her meritorious promotion, and the Distinguished Service Medal. Kerney thought the honors were richly deserved.

  “A homicide at a cabin near my property,” he said. “Want to go with me?”

  “Doesn’t that sound romantic?” Sara said as she stretched out and put the pillow over her head.

  “Is that a no?”

  Sara muttered something.

  “What?”

  Sara took the pillow off her face. “I’ll pass. I’m going back to sleep and then I’m going shopping. I haven’t bought any new clothes in almost two years, and I need a few things to wear. Besides, I drove straight through from Cheyenne yesterday, just to get here last night.”

  “Do you want me to find you another tour guide for the day?”

  “Are you trying to pawn me off to somebody else so soon?”

  “No way.” Kerney sat up and swung his legs to the floor. “I’ll leave you a key and be back in time to take you out to dinner.”

  “Pick a nice place to eat; I plan to be dressed to kill. Are you in a hurry to leave?”

  “The chopper will wait for me.”

  Sara kicked off the bedcovers.

  “Not sleepy anymore?”

  “Not that sleepy,” Sara replied. “Come here.”

  Kerney saluted and followed orders.

  • • •

  Several hours into the preliminary investigation of Carl Boaz’s murder, Gabe saw the chopper carrying Chief Kerney come over the mesa and land in the meadow. From the porch he watched Kerney walk toward him. He limped badly for a few steps before smoothing out his gait.

  Gabe knew Kerney’s knee had been shattered in a gunfight with a drug dealer. It had happened some years ago when Kerney was with the Santa Fe PD. It wasn’t the only time the chief had used deadly force. In high-risk situations, the man knew how to keep his cool and survive.

  In his twenty years as a cop, Gabe had never been under fire. He wondered how he’d stack up if he had to put it on the line.

  Gabe had assigned Russell Thorpe the job of receiving evidence and recording the personnel entering the crime scene. He watched Thorpe intercept Kerney halfway across the meadow and hold out a clipboard with a sign-in sheet. Kerney signed it and spent a minute talking to the officer before moving on.

  Down at the greenhouse, Ben Morfin, the district narcotics agent, was conducting an inventory of marijuana plants. He was at one thousand and counting.

  “Bring me up to speed, Sergeant,” Kerney said when he reached Gabe.

  “Carl Boaz, age thirty-five, died last night from a single gunshot wound to the head, fired at close range. There are no wants or warrants on the victim and no record of any arrests. Boaz held a doctorate in philosophy from a California university. Seems he dropped out of academia and went into organic gardening, specializing in the commercial cultivation of marijuana.”

  Kerney raised an eyebrow. “How much?”

  “When the tally is done, I’m guessing it will exceed two thousand plants. It could be a seven-figure cash crop.”

  “Is there any tie-in between Boaz and the skeleton on the mesa?”

  “Just the dog so far, Chief. There’s a snapshot in the cabin of Boaz, his ex-girlfriend, her son, and the dog you found on the mesa. Want to know the dog’s name?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Buster.”

  Kerney laughed. “Are you making this up?”

  “No way.”

  “I guess every kid should have a dog named Buster, no matter who he lives with. Tell me about Boaz’s ex-girlfriend.”

  “Her name is Wanda Knox. She moved back to California about a month ago, and started writing Boaz letters telling him he was a self-absorbed asshole. She also wanted him to ship Buster and her son’s bicycle out to the coast. Boaz kept a journal, Chief. He sold drugs at Southern California colleges before he decided to go into the production end of the business. I’ve got a list of his dealers and his contacts.”

  “DEA will like that.”

  Gabe nodded in agreement. “Boaz also noted in his journal that somebody by the name of Rudy owed him four hundred dollars. No last name. I think Rudy may be a local; the entry was made six weeks ago. There’s an earlier entry from last September showing that Rudy paid Boaz the same amount.”

  “For what?”

  “Unknown, but I have my suspicions. I found the route the poacher took to haul the wood out. It comes right through the meadow. I think Boaz gave the poacher access to the clear-cut area and got paid for it.”

  “Boaz didn’t cut the wood himself?”

  “His truck tire tracks don’t match up with any of the impressions we found on the route. Also, there is no evidence that he hauled wood out to cut and split here—no chips, no sawdust, no bark. At least not in quantity.”

  “So we need to find Rudy.”

  “Do you want me to start canvassing?”

  “Not yet. Give me Wanda’s current address before I leave. I’ll ask the California authorities to locate and question her. Maybe she knows who Rudy is, and how to find him.”

  “Can I give you some questions for Wanda to pass along to the California police?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I’d like some help, Chief, if you can spare the manpower.”

  “Two agents will be up from Santa Fe in the morning, and I’ve already cleared it with your c
aptain to assign the district narcotics officer to work with you. They’re yours as long as you need them.”

  “Thanks. Do you want the tour?”

  “I do.”

  “There’s something I want to show you in the greenhouse. Boaz had a little cactus garden, separate from his marijuana crop. Just a single, small variety of twenty plants. I’ve never seen it before. Neither has the narcotics agent. We think it might be used to produce some exotic type of hallucinogenic.”

  “Lead on,” Kerney said.

  • • •

  By noon Sara was completely burned out on the frilly, fringed, beaded, cutesy, embroidered western fashions she’d seen in virtually all of the downtown boutiques near the plaza. The streets were filled with late-season skiers, clumping around in their boots and parkas with half-day ski passes dangling from jacket zippers, busily shopping Santa Fe.

  Several blocks away on a side street in a lovely old brick Victorian house, she found a clothing store that had what she wanted: simple, elegant silk tops in earth-tone colors, a wonderful full-length, long-sleeved brown dress with a high neckline that looked very sleek when she put it on, and new designer jeans that made her look equally slinky. After so many months in starched fatigues and tailored military uniforms, the fabric felt satiny and sensual against her skin.

  She didn’t wince at all when she paid the bill, although the prices were outrageous. It was her treat to herself for two years of doing without in South Korea. She asked the sales clerk where she might buy some sexy lingerie, and got directions to a nearby store along with a knowing smile.

  “You’ve got that right,” Sara said as she picked up her bags and walked away. The woman’s laugh followed her out the door.

  At the lingerie shop, she took her time and came away with some tasty little items that were comfortable to wear yet decidedly provocative. She made her beauty salon appointment just in time, and spent a wonderful hour letting Patrick somebody-or-other pamper, condition, and trim her hair.

  Back at Kerney’s apartment, Shoe met her at the door, sneaker firmly in his mouth, tail wagging, still looking mangy as hell. She gave him a scratch under the chin, and he followed her into the bedroom. She dumped the packages on the bed and checked the alarm clock on the nightstand. Kerney wouldn’t be back for hours.