Orlando shrugged. “Sure. I really don’t know who Bernardo dates. Is Bernardo like a suspect or something?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s this guy investigating, anyway?”
“The mesa homicide. He thinks he has an ID on the victim.”
“No shit?”
“It might be a good idea for you to cool it with Bernardo for a while.”
“I don’t see Bernardo much anyway.”
“Keep it that way until things settle down.”
“Is that all?”
“Are you still planning to move to Albuquerque when school gets out?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound so sure about it today.”
“I gotta go.” Orlando took an awkward step backward and his daypack banged against the door frame.
“Watch it, champ,” Gabe said with a grin. “Don’t hurt yourself. Maybe we can talk about it some more tonight.”
Orlando nodded and smiled nervously.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Then get out of here. I’ll see you later.”
“Later.”
Outside, Orlando threw the daypack in the backseat of his car and cranked the engine with a shaky hand, praying that there was still a way out of the shithole he was in.
• • •
Before leaving Tucson, Sara had tried to reach Kerney by phone without any luck. She left a message on his machine, letting him know she was returning to Santa Fe, packed hurriedly, gave Susie a big hug, and hit the road. The image of Susie’s approving smile stayed with her until she reached the city limits.
Sara enjoyed driving late at night. She could wrap herself in a cocoon, let her mind wander, and see where her thoughts took her. Tonight she kept thinking of Kerney and how she felt about him.
The hours it took to reach Santa Fe felt like minutes as she pulled to a stop in front of Kerney’s cottage. His truck was there but his unmarked state police unit wasn’t. Disappointed, she looked at the dashboard clock and realized he was probably at work.
She let herself in with the key Kerney had given her, expecting Shoe to greet her at the door with his tail wagging and the sneaker firmly in his mouth. The dog was nowhere to found, and all the pet supplies were gone from the kitchen.
Shoe’s absence made her worry about both Kerney and the dog. Had Shoe run off or died? Had Kerney decided not to keep Shoe in spite of his genuine affection for the animal?
The answering machine blinked and Sara played back the messages, hoping Kerney had left one for her. Aside from her message to him and a call from a woman named Ruth Pino there was nothing else on the machine.
She went into the living room, tossed her jacket on the couch, thought about calling Kerney at work, and dropped the idea. She was too tired to think straight. A hot bath and a nap were in order. She picked up her bag and walked into the bedroom.
Without Shoe, the place felt empty.
• • •
There wasn’t much left to the old settlement on the Gallinas River, just some partial stone and adobe walls, rusted pieces of tin roofing, a few sagging fence posts, and occasional piles of junk, including broken beer bottles and trash left by kids who partied at the site.
The river’s floodplain had created a channel no more than three feet deep and fifty feet wide. Spring runoff filled much of the eroded streambed. Cows grazed close to the water near a locked gate on the far side where the dirt road ended.
As far as Bernardo knew the place didn’t have a name. It had been settled and abandoned several times since the nineteenth century and was now part of Arlin Fullerton’s Box Z spread.
He leaned against the hood of Uncle Roque’s truck and watched the cows slosh their way through the water toward a low soggy bottom where spring grasses had greened up. His tío had gone to a spring stock sale in Roswell and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. That left Bernardo with the truck and all the time he needed to meet with Orlando.
He hoped Orlando would show so he wouldn’t have to go looking for him. He heard the sound of tires on gravel, turned to see Orlando’s car topping the low hill, and waved as the vehicle slowed to a stop. Orlando got out and walked to him.
Bernardo gave him a friendly smile.
“Man, you’d better have a good story we can use,” Orlando said.
“First, tell me what the cop asked you.”
“He asked me if we went cruising together last year in Ojitos Frios. I told him no.”
“What else?”
“He wanted to know if you knew Luiza. I told him I didn’t know who you were dating.”
“Did he say anything about her being missing?”
“No.”
“Then he’s just fishing.”
“I think he knows who she is. My dad said Kerney has a possible ID on the victim.” A thought flashed through Orlando’s mind. He stared at Bernardo.
“What?” Bernardo asked.
“How did he put us in Ojitos Frios?”
“Somebody saw us in my grandfather’s truck.”
“Did you tell him we were there?”
“I said I didn’t remember.” Bernardo tore open a pack of cigarettes and quickly lit up. “He’s probably questioning everybody who knew Luiza. Don’t get all bent out of shape. We’ll get our shit together and it will all be cool.”
Something clicked in Orlando’s mind. “But he’s doing a background investigation on you. Asking who your friends are. Where you were last April. If you knew Luiza. That means you’re a target.”
Bernardo exhaled smoke and laughed. “Did you learn that cop shit from your old man?”
“You knew Luiza, didn’t you?”
Bernardo shrugged. “Yeah, I knew her.”
“She never wanted to party with us that night, did she?”
Bernardo smiled. “I had to convince her.”
“You meant to rape her all along.”
Bernardo didn’t respond.
“Do the cops know that you knew her?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean squat.”
Orlando shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re a fucking suspect.”
“So what?” Bernardo ground out the smoke with the heel of his boot.
Orlando turned to walk back to his car.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m splitting. I can’t live with this shit anymore. I’m done with it. It’s over, Bernardo.”
Bernardo grabbed Orlando by the arm. “Are you going to snitch me off?”
“I didn’t say that. Let go of me.”
“Are you?”
Orlando yanked Bernardo’s hand off his arm and pushed him away. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll let you know when I decide.”
“That’s not good enough, Orlando.” Bernardo put his right hand in his back pocket and grabbed the handle of his sheath knife.
“Live with it,” Orlando said.
“Can’t do it, bro.” Bernardo pulled the knife, took two steps, drove the blade under Orlando’s rib cage, and ripped up to find the heart.
Orlando grunted once, his mouth open like a feeding fish, his eyes already empty.
Bernardo pulled the knife free and watched Orlando’s blood pump out of his body as he fell to the ground. He’d read somewhere that during Vietnam the Communists would castrate dead Americans, stick their dicks in their mouths, and sew their lips together, to scare the soldiers who found the bodies. He thought about doing it to Orlando but decided not to bother. No one was ever going to see him again.
He stepped over to Orlando and slit his throat. He wanted the body drained of blood before he hauled it to the truck. When the blood flow turned to a slight trickle, he dumped the body in the truck bed and covered it with hay bales he’d brought along. Using a shovel, he dug around the sticky, deep-red blood pool, turning the soil until dry earth covered the ground.
Uncle Roque had told him to finish grading the r
oad to the line camp, and get the dozer back to the Box Z. From today on, anybody who used that road would be driving over Orlando’s bones.
Some of Orlando’s blood had squirted on his hand. Bernardo sniffed it as he drove away. It smelled good.
11
At the start of his shift, Russell Thorpe checked to see if the APB on Alarid’s truck was still active. Alarid hadn’t been spotted, so Thorpe got on the road to Santa Rosa. If he could pick up Alarid, it would be a significant collar.
He found Sergeant Melendez at the reception counter in the Santa Rosa substation reviewing daily shift reports. Thorpe introduced himself and told Melendez what he was looking for and why.
Melendez rolled his eyes, said there were countless places to hide a tractor trailer rig where it would never be found, and finally suggested that Thorpe do a close patrol of Puerto de Luna, a settlement ten miles southeast of Santa Rosa.
The road to Puerto de Luna hugged the edge of a low butte at the far side of the river valley until it reached a sweep of pasture and farms that bordered both sides of the river. Thorpe crossed the bridge into the village and did a quick patrol. There wasn’t much to the settlement: an old church with an adjacent cemetery, a fenced-off, abandoned one-room schoolhouse, a flat-roofed modern building with a brick facade that served as a community and senior citizen center, and several occupied houses made up the heart of the community.
He stopped at a road sign that told of the village’s former status as the county seat, and its most notorious visitor, Billy the Kid, before cruising south to the end of the pavement. The road turned to gravel where two converging mesas pinched the valley close to the river, the streambed hidden behind thick bosque. He spotted several old semitrailers near barns and outbuildings, but it was clear they’d been stationary for years.
He worked a series of dirt roads, visually checking each ranch and farm that came into view, until he was a good ten miles south of the village.
Melendez had warned him not to get his hopes up, and Thorpe now understood why. As he crisscrossed and skirted buttes, mesas, arroyos, and canyonlands on rutted tracks that seemed to go nowhere, he realized that he could spend days in the boonies, find nothing, and still have hundreds of places left to search.
Back in Puerto de Luna, he stopped at the community center and talked to a cook and her elderly male assistant, who were in the kitchen preparing a midday meal for senior citizens.
“Do either of you know Lenny Alarid?” Thorpe asked as he watched the stout, middle-aged woman ladle food into a white Styrofoam container and hand it to the old man.
“I don’t think so,” the woman said.
The old man put the container into a portable warming cart and waited to receive the next meal.
“Do you know him?” Thorpe asked him.
The old man shook his head.
“He’s a truck driver,” Thorpe added.
“Lots of people around here drive trucks,” the cook replied, holding out another meal.
The old man closed the lid and slid it into the cart. The thick veins in his liver-spotted hands were blood red under a thin layer of translucent skin.
“A semitruck,” Thorpe said. He described Alarid’s tractor trailer rig.
“Never saw it,” the woman said
“I have,” the old man said.
“Where?” the cook asked before Thorpe could get the question out.
“At Perfecta Velarde’s barn. The truck was there yesterday when I delivered her meal to her.”
“Did she have any visitors?” Thorpe asked.
“Yes. Her daughter and son-in-law. The daughter’s name is Gloria. I didn’t meet the man.”
“Do you know Gloria’s married name?”
The old man shook his head. “But she lives in Anton Chico.”
“Where is Perfecta’s place?”
“On the highway to Santa Rosa. The truck is parked next to the barn.”
“I didn’t see it on the way in.”
“You can’t. A hill blocks it from view. You have to be driving back to Santa Rosa to see her place from the highway.”
“How far?” Thorpe asked.
“Two miles. It’s just before the road curves around the mesa. You’ll see it.”
“Thanks.”
Russell keyed the radio as he left the community center and made contact with Art Garcia.
“You were supposed to be back a half hour ago,” Garcia said after acknowledging Thorpe’s call.
“I may have located Alarid’s truck.”
“When will you know for sure?” Garcia asked sarcastically.
Thorpe took the first turn after the bridge at sixty miles an hour. “About one minute.”
“Standing by,” Garcia said.
Thorpe floored his unit along a straightaway, braked through a gradual curve, saw Perfecta’s barn and Alarid’s rig, and slowed down. “Truck in sight.”
“Can you positively ID the rig?”
“Give me a minute.” Russell rolled to a stop, reached for his binoculars, and focused on the lettering on the driver’s door. “It’s Alarid’s. He’s got the trailer un-hitched from his cab. Looks like he’s planning to leave it here.”
“Give me an exact location.”
Thorpe snapped off directions into the microphone. “What should I do if he tries to leave?”
“Stop him when he gets on the highway. If nobody moves, stay put. Sergeant Melendez is responding. ETA ten minutes. Sergeant Gonzales is rolling now. Good work, Thorpe.”
“Ten-four.”
Smiling to himself, Russell parked his unit, left the engine running, and scanned the farmhouse. All looked quiet. As he lowered the binoculars, his radio crackled and Melendez’s voice came over the speaker.
“ETA five minutes. Is everything cool?”
“Roger that. Nothing’s moving. Do we have a search warrant?”
“Not yet. Art Garcia is en route to magistrate court.”
“Ten-four.”
Melendez clicked off and Russell settled back to wait.
• • •
Lenny Alarid watched the cops from the living room window. For twenty minutes, two police cars had been parked at the end of his mother-in-law’s driveway. At first Lenny told himself the cops were just taking a break and shooting the shit. Now his gut ached with the feeling that he was about to be busted.
Lenny didn’t think of himself as a criminal. He wasn’t a wife-beater, a drunk, or a bad-ass, and he’d never been in jail. He was forty-eight years old and had spent most of his adult life on the road, hauling whatever he could on a for-hire basis. Only a fraction of his runs consisted of hauling stolen merchandise, but the work netted him the biggest portion of his income. Without it he’d be scraping along, driving a piece of shit rig, trying to live on 15,000 dollars a year.
He took his eyes off the cops for a moment and glanced at his truck. A top-of-the-line model with a sleeping compartment and all the accessories, it had set him back over 150,000 dollars. It was midnight blue with stainless steel grillwork, a chrome bumper, custom running lights at the top of the cab, primo mud flaps, and fancy cherry red pinstriping. It was his pride and joy. But with the cargo in the box, it was about to become a big time liability.
He snorted and rubbed his belly where the gas pressure had built up. He was about to get hammered by the cops because of Rudy Espinoza’s stupidity. If he hadn’t murdered Carl Boaz, the cops wouldn’t be here.
He switched his attention back to the cop cars just as another unit drove up, and Lenny knew for sure his goose was cooked.
Gloria, his wife, stood by his side nervously biting a fingernail. She knew exactly how he made his money. He’d married Gloria eight years ago when she still had a slender figure and a young-looking face. Then she hit forty and her body got wide, her face got fat and her arms got flabby. Lenny didn’t care; he was no prize himself.
“Are they coming here?” Gloria asked.
“What do you think?”
&
nbsp; “Don’t snap at me.”
Lenny grunted.
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Can’t we leave?”
“They’ll just stop us on the road.”
“Think of something.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe they’re not here for us.”
“Yeah, right,” Lenny said. “See the cop standing behind his car. He’s got binoculars trained on the house.”
The senior citizen meal delivery van came down the highway with a turn signal blinking. The cop with the binoculars halted the vehicle, talked to the driver for a minute, and sent him on his way.
“We’re screwed,” Lenny said. “Take your mother to the kitchen.”
“I don’t want to go to jail, Lenny.”
“You don’t know anything about my business, understand? Tell them you came along for the ride to keep me company, and don’t know nothing.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll get a lawyer.”
A fourth patrol car drove up.
“Shit!” Lenny said.
“Is it time for my meal?” Perfecta asked.
Lenny grimaced in the direction of his mother-in-law, who stood in the middle of the living room, her hands clasped on the rails of a walker. A stroke had left her partially paralyzed, and her mind was mostly mush. She barely knew who she was. Except when Gloria came to visit, the old lady had a live-in assistant, who cost Lenny a pile of money to employ.
“Take her into the kitchen,” Lenny repeated, just as the phone rang.
Gloria picked it up, listened for a moment, and held it out with a shaky hand.
“I hope they bring me lamb chops and peas today,” Perfecta said. “And peaches.”
Gloria gave Lenny a scared look, went to her mother, and walked her through the kitchen door.
“Yeah,” Lenny said into the phone.
“This is Sergeant Gonzales with the New Mexico State Police, Lenny. Who is inside the house besides your wife and mother-in-law?”
“Nobody. What do you want?”
“We’re here to serve a warrant. I want you to step outside the house and stand in plain view with your hands where I can see them. Are there any guns in the house?”
“No.”
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