Red, Green, or Murder

by Steven F Havill

  Heading south on State 56, I dialed Herb once again. This time, the phone call caught him in the hospital’s coffee shop, and I could hear the clanking of dishes in the background. Without surprise, Herb accepted the news that the cattle were safely pastured, but he was as puzzled as I was that they had gotten loose in the first place, with the dog then left to his own devices.

  “I have Socks in custody,” I said, and Herb chuckled half-heartedly at the joke. “I’m headed back to your place,” I added. “I’m thinking that Pat went home to change and is headed your way right now in his own pickup. Somehow, we just missed each other along the way.”

  “Might,” Herb said. “Might do that. You didn’t cross paths, then.”

  “I took north 14, daydreaming about other things,” I said. “That’s where the Sheriff’s Department caught up with me. Patrick would have hauled the cattle around on the state highway, and gone back that way, too.”

  “Huh,” Herb said. “He wouldn’t go off and leave the dog, though.”

  “I can’t imagine that he would,” I agreed. “And by the way, not that it’s any of my business, but who’s drilling the water well just north of your place? On the backside of the mesa? I saw Paulson’s rig parked out there just beyond your fence line.”

  There was a brief silence while Herb caught up after my abrupt change of subject. “Oh, that,” Herb scoffed. “Well, he ain’t got much of a start yet, I don’t think. He’d like to find water there, but if he does, he’ll drill deep enough that it’ll come out of the ground speakin’ Chinese.”

  “Who’s he drilling for?”

  “That’s another of Waddell’s schemes,” Herb said. “It’s kind of a picturesque spot back in there, you know. And there’s some cold air seepin’ out of the rocks enough that one of the folks from the BLM thinks that maybe there’s a wing of the cave under there. Hell, I don’t know. Or care.”

  “A little speculation going on, then,” I said. Miles Waddell was the Newton rancher from whom Dale Torrance had borrowed the cattle.

  “Yep. I guess old Miles thinks that if he develops a well, then come time for the BLM to work a land swap with him, it’ll be worth more. He’s probably right.”

  “I didn’t know that he owned that piece.” It surprised me that Herb hadn’t fought just a little bit to own the property himself.

  “Don’t think he does. Not yet, anyways. George Payton did at one time, but I don’t know about now. Him and me talked about it some. Sure hated to hear about George’s passing, I can tell you. Anyway,” he said, sounding as if he didn’t want to pursue that line of conversation any further, “are you headed down to the ranch now?”

  “I thought to check on Pat,” I said. “And return the dog.”

  “Well, yeah,” Herb said, voice brightening. “We’ll appreciate that. Old Socks, he’s worth about three good men.”

  I rang off, tried Pat’s number once more, and slowed as I passed the Broken Spur Saloon. No rig, no answer. The pup’s front paws danced a little tattoo on my front seat as we passed the bar. He’d been there before, no doubt locked in the cab while the humans did their thing inside. A half mile farther, I turned onto the county road and headed north toward the H-Bar-T. In fifteen minutes of jouncing and dust, I had my answer.

  The heeler’s agitated dance increased tempo as I swung in under the modest decorative arch over the gate. By the bunk trailer, Pat’s ten year-old Chevy truck was parked under a water-stressed elm. I pulled the SUV to a stop and reached out to rest a hand on the top of the heeler’s head. “Give me a minute,” I said, but he was ready to go. I managed to squirm out of the truck and block his exit, mindful not to slam his eager nose or sloppy tongue in the door.

  Two minutes confirmed that the cattle truck wasn’t parked behind the house, or over behind the boys’ mobile home, or anywhere else hidden from immediate view. Herb Torrance’s place was dead quiet. I stood hands on hips, thinking of the possibilities, then dialed Herb again. This time, the phone rang nearly a dozen times before he answered.

  “Herb,” I said, “I’m sorry to keep bugging you. How’s Dale?”

  “Well, they’re going to keep him at least overnight,” he said.

  “That’s standard,” I said. “The surgery went all right?”

  “Well, they think so.”

  “Let’s hope so. Look, I’m at your place right now. Pat hasn’t been here yet. His own truck is still here. Yours isn’t.” I reached out and patted the hood of the veteran Chevy. It was cool. “His truck hasn’t been used.”

  “Huh,” Herb said.

  “Was he planning to go somewhere today with your rig? Pick up some hay, maybe? Livestock feed?”

  “Hadn’t planned on it.”

  “A load of railroad ties, maybe?”

  “Nope. We was going to move the cattle, and then go on over to Bender’s Canyon to replace an old boundary fence. We got about a quarter mile stretch over there that needs work. But I don’t think…”

  “He’d take your truck for that?”

  “Well, sure. Not with the trailer, though. Can’t get through the canyon trail haulin’ that son-of-a-bitch.”

  I walked toward the white, prefab workshop on the far side of the house. The doors were open, and I could see the reels of new barbed wire and a pallet of metal posts. “The wire and posts are here in the shop,” I said.

  “Then there’s that,” Herb said. “Look, he may have had some errand of his own that he took a mind to do. He’ll show up.”

  “He wouldn’t drive your rig to Cruces, I don’t think.”

  “Oh, hell no. That rig’s a diesel-suckin’ hog with that stock trailer hooked on behind. Bad enough without it. No, I don’t think he’d do that. You got the dog, though?”

  “I do.”

  “Just put him in the boys’ trailer. They never lock the place, and old Socks, he’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said. “My best to Annie.” I switched off, and aimed an expletive at Pat Gabaldon for being so thoughtless. Despite Herb’s suggestion, I wasn’t about to dump the dog in the bunk house. The Torrances wouldn’t be back from Cruces until who knew when. If Pat was on a fling somewhere, the abandoned heeler would take the butt end of it. On the off chance that luck would change, I tried Pat’s phone again, with no response. Ambling back across the yard to my truck, I tried to come up with some stroke of genius, but drew a blank. Tearing out a page from my notebook, I jotted a message to Pat and stuck it under the windshield of his truck, then made another copy and clamped it in the screen door of the mobile home.

  Socks was clearly upset, just a click on the down side of berserk, when I returned to the SUV. He wanted out of this strange cab so he could herd something. I reached back for the Thermos cap again and gave him another shot of water, but he was too distracted to enjoy it. None of this was the way his world worked, and his distress was pitiful.

  As I headed out the Torrance’s driveway, my phone rang, and I snatched it off the seat, the sound and the motion setting the furry dervish off again, his tongue spray spotting the inside of the windshield, the dashboard, and my right forearm.

  “Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. “Gayle said you had a question.”

  “Hey yourself,” I replied. “And yes, I do. As a matter of fact, I have several questions at the moment, Robert.” Socks was headed for my lap, and I nudged him back across the center console.

  “Where are you now?”

  “At the moment, I’m at Herb’s ranch. Just now leaving.” I quickly explained about Dale Torrance’s adventure, and Bobby made a little grunting sound that translated as, “Why do I need to know all this?”

  “Actually, my original question that I mentioned to Gayle was about the property just north of Herb’s place, but I already found out the answer to that one. That’s not what’s on my mind at the moment, either. Right now, I’m trying to find Pat Gabaldon,” I said. “I have his dog.”

 
“His dog?”

  “Yes. His heeler.” I gave the sheriff an abbreviated version of the puzzling events up on Cat Mesa, and he listened without interruption. “I can’t imagine Pat being so careless, is all.”

  “Huh,” Torrez said. “Did you check to see if he went on down 26 to cut some firewood or something like that?” Forest Road 26 ran along the rim of Cat Mesa.

  “I didn’t see tracks,” I said. “I also have to admit that I didn’t look that way more than a glance.”

  “Yeah, well. He might have done that. He’s still drivin’ that rig of Herb’s?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Not too easy to hide that,” the sheriff reflected. “He’ll turn up. You told Collins to keep an eye out?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you’re keepin’ the dog?”

  Concern for this fifty-pound bundle of worried muscle and slobber wasn’t surprising. Heeler pups didn’t come cheap in the first place, and the hours spent training them to do something constructive added to the investment. I had no illusion that Pat Gabaldon thought of Socks as a study in economics—the nineteen-year-old cowboy and the energetic heeler were simply pals. Had it been the dog who suffered a broken leg instead of Dale Torrance, Patrick’s world would have come to a stop.

  “I guess I am,” I said. “I don’t want to leave him tied up or shut in the trailer. I doubt that Herb and Ann will be back from Cruces until late tomorrow. Maybe even later.”

  “Well, suit yourself,” Torrez said, sounding characteristically unsympathetic. “Lemme know.”

  “I’ll do that.” During the conversation, Socks had settled down, facing me with both front paws hanging over the center console. As I switched off the phone, he pushed himself back up, looking expectant. “It would be much, much easier if you would talk,” I said. My eyes had started to itch from dog dander, and I was ready to give Victor Sanchez another try.

  Chapter Nine

  Just before six, I pulled into the parking lot of the Broken Spur Saloon. Victor’s little place was a haven for local ranchers and a watering hole for folks heading north and south—the last chance to tank up before crossing the Mexican border, and the first place for northbound folks to celebrate their arrival in the United States.

  Five vehicles had collected in the lot, with a sedan sporting Michigan plates pulled up to the self-serve fuel pump island that Victor had installed the year before. The rest were local trucks, and I tucked the Trail Blazer in at the end of the line beside electrician Roy Ocate’s overstuffed van, leaving Socks with a view of the open prairie on his side.

  I left the engine running with the air conditioning on full blast, cracked three of the windows a couple of inches, and lowered the passenger front window far enough that Socks could stick his muzzle out comfortably, but not squirm his shoulders through. I locked the door, depending on my Swiss cheese memory to recall the entry code for the door’s touch pad when the time came.

  A clutter of projecting ladders, pipes, vises, and whatnot sprouted from Ocate’s vehicle, and I skirted those and made my way across the graveled parking lot. Victor Sanchez eschewed air conditioning, and with good reason. Even on the hottest days, his saloon was a dark, cool cave, the thick adobe walls an effective fortress against the outside world. I entered and paused for a moment, letting my eyes adjust.

  “Hey, there’s the Man,” Gus Prescott called. The rancher was sitting with Ocate near the end of the bar, both of them enjoying a long-neck. The trouble with being a retired cop with decades of memories was that I had learned more nasty little secrets than I really needed or wanted to know. One of the reasons Gus Prescott was a marginal, hard-scrabble rancher was that he spent way too much time curled around a bottle. His daughter Christine—the target of Dale Torrance’s randy infatuation that led to rustling—was working behind the bar, and that certainly put her in an interesting position with the old man. A sociologist or psychologist would have had a field day.

  “Gents.” I nodded at Christine, a strawberry blonde who looked as if she should be center on a college volleyball team…lithe, muscular in a fetching way, gorgeous clear complexion that she didn’t ruin with gunk, and her thick hair swept back in a ponytail. She had tried New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, but my theory was that she worried too much about her old man and chose to work at Victor’s so she could be near at hand.

  She nodded an affectionate greeting at me, held up the coffee urn and raised an eyebrow. “Or ice tea?”

  “You bet,” I said. “The coffee’s fine.”

  I watched her pour, and as the mug slid across the bar, she glanced at me and asked, “How’s your day going, sir?”

  My response was automatic and not entirely truthful. “Well, fair, I guess.” I didn’t want to talk about George Payton, and I didn’t want to talk about the dog currently panting out in my truck, since to do that I’d have to talk about Herb’s cattle roaming free and then about Dale going to Cruces for surgery—I could be stuck reciting gossip all afternoon. “Has Pat Gabaldon stopped in this afternoon? I have some paperwork that I need to give him.”

  “Pat? I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t hang out here much.”

  “I think he’s runnin’ errands for Herb,” Roy Ocate offered. “I seen him headed toward town in Herb’s rig a while back when I was headed for Regál.” A short, rotund man in dark green work clothes, Ocate regarded his watch. “Jeez. It’s been that long…”

  “What time was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, goin’ on three, four hours now,” Ocate said in wonder. He looked down the bore of his beer bottle. “I guess I need to be headin’ on up the pike.” He rose from the stool. “Gonna miss dinner if I don’t.” I already had.

  “Did you happen to notice if anyone was with him?”

  Ocate paused, wallet in hand. “Didn’t. Nope, I sure didn’t. He mighta had, but,” and he shrugged. The kitchen door opened and Victor Sanchez emerged, three platters expertly balanced. He headed for the table by the window and left two plates there with the tourists, then angled across behind the bar and slid the third platter in front of Gus Prescott.

  “You want anything else?” Victor said to me. He glanced at my coffee, maybe to see if I’d taken advantage of the creamer and sugar. He carried the aroma of the kitchen with him like a personal cloud but must have been in a fair mood, since he didn’t just say, ‘What do you want?’

  “No, thanks, Victor. This is fine. I just stopped by, still looking for Patrick.”

  Sanchez clacked his heavy ring against the edge of the counter. “All right, then,” he said, and turned to head back toward the kitchen. I hadn’t asked him a direct question, so he hadn’t offered an answer. The Broken Spur was as discreet as a Swiss bank.

  “Herb was going to take some cattle up on the mesa,” Gus Prescott said, exploring the meal in front of him. This was one of Victor’s specialties, an open-face burger and a generous mound of French fries smothered under a vast sea of chile sauce, melted cheese, lettuce, onions, and tomatoes. The dish might lack the fine touch of the food from Fernando Aragon’s Don Juan, but it still provided enough flavor, calories, and aftereffects to last a long day. The rancher raked a load of fries through the cheese and sauce and forked them into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “I was thinkin’ I might apply for a lease up there next year.”

  Gus wouldn’t, but he’d think about it. His daughter filled a mug of coffee for him without being asked, perhaps heading off another beer, and then took the coffee out to the tourists. She had perfected not listening to bar chatter unless it was directed at her and demanded a response. Watching Gus eat wasn’t going to accomplish much, and I drained my coffee.

  When his daughter returned, I said, “Christine, if you happen to see Patrick, would you ask him to give me a call?”

  “You bet, sir.”

  “Roy says that he saw Pat in the Torrances’ rig earlier. Did you happen to be looking out?”

  “No, I sure
wasn’t,” she replied quickly. She’d have to either step outside, or walk into the adjoining little dining room to accomplish that. The bar itself was a windowless cave. I patted Gus on the shoulder. “Talk to you later, Gus.” With professional interest, I glanced at Gus’ plate and saw that Victor’s chile had a heavy scattering of seeds, par for the diced stuff that comes from a big #10 can from the food vendors—hot enough to fry the inside of the mouth, the seeds guaranteed to light up unsuspecting diverticuli.

  And that stopped me short. Earlier in the day, an idea had crossed my path, and then just as promptly had been forgotten.

  Leaving the saloon, I’m sure I carried the cacophony of aromas with me, because Socks launched into another dance, his piercing bark greeting me as I opened the door of the SUV. He would have enjoyed a beef burrito, hold the cheese, sauce, and garnish.

  Before leaving the parking lot, I jotted a quick note to myself so I wouldn’t forget again, then called Herb Torrance. The rancher sounded weary when he picked up, and even more so when I reported that I hadn’t crossed paths with his employee—or his truck and trailer.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m headin’ back this evening. Annie’s staying the night here with her cousin, so that works all right. I was hopin’ that I could depend on Pat to feed the horses and such, but if he ain’t showed up…”

  “Haven’t seen him,” I said. “I left notes for him both on his door and on his truck. Socks is still with me.” I reached out and stroked the dog’s smooth head.

  “Well, look, I’ll pick him up when I get to town,” Herb said. “You going to be home?”

  “Probably at the Guzmans’,” I said. “Give me a call and I’ll meet you wherever it’s convenient. How about the sheriff’s department parking lot?”

  “That’ll do it. Thanks, Bill. I appreciate it. Did Pat pay you for the permit?”