Scavengers

by Steven F Havill

  “A John Doe.”

  “Ah, one of them.”

  “Found dead with a gunshot wound to the head and facial damage where someone pounded his teeth to pieces with a rock.”

  “Huh. Anybody we know?”

  “Not yet.”

  Gastner chuckled. “You’re a wealth of information, sweetheart.”

  “We just don’t know much yet, Padrino. Jackie Taber is working through a lead or two. We’ll see what she turns up.”

  “Jackie’s coming along pretty well, isn’t she? I was always impressed with her. A good, solid cop.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “So can you fit in a few minutes tomorrow? It’s got to be in the morning, though. Fairly early.”

  “That’s not possible for Linda, then. She and Jackie are planning to be out at the MacInernys’. They need the early sun. I’ll swing by, though. Just what is it that we’re taking pictures of?”

  Gastner hesitated. “It’d be easier just to show you.”

  “Is eight too early?”

  “Eight would be just right. Why don’t I pick you up. We’ll do breakfast. It’s a great way to start the week.”

  Estelle grinned. For Bill Gastner, padrino, or godfather, of her two children, retirement from the Sheriff’s Department hadn’t brought a change of habits. For him, the day was half over by eight o’clock, and he’d no doubt be on his second breakfast…maybe third, depending on how much of the night before he’d been up and prowling the county. For him, insomnia was more of an old friend than an affliction.

  “That sounds good, sir,” she said. “Take care of yourself.” She switched off the phone, trying to conjure up a clear picture of Eleanor Pope’s place at the end of Escondido Lane, almost on the southern outskirts of the village. She knew the property ran right up to the tall board fence that marked the back of Florek’s Auto Wrecking yard. Beyond that, she drew a blank—particularly about what Eleanor and Denton “Woody” Pope might be doing that would attract the attention of the New Mexico livestock inspector.

  Chapter Five

  The village of Posadas, seat of a New Mexican county with fewer residents than an average suburban shopping mall on a busy Saturday, nestled against the southern skirts of Cat Mesa. Twenty miles south, the San Cristóbal mountains formed an east–west buttress between Posadas County and northern Mexico.

  The rise of Cat Mesa and the spread of the border mountains molded a giant funnel for the prevailing west winds that bent the range grass into permanent tawny arcs with all the seed heads flagging eastward.

  When she stepped outside that Monday morning, Estelle Reyes-Guzman felt the chill of the wind even as it bucked and swirled around the protective mass of her Twelfth Street home. Although the temperature hovered in the low forties, and before noon would break sixty that late February day, the open, windswept prairie east of the village where Linda Real and Jackie Taber were working would live up to its bleak reputation.

  A battered white Ford four-wheel-drive pickup truck with state government plates was parked at the curb in front of the Guzmans’ home. The faded spot on the passenger door’s paint marked where the magnetic New Mexico Livestock Inspector’s shield usually was affixed. Bill Gastner watched Estelle approach, then leaned across the seat, yanked the door handle, and shoved the passenger door open.

  “Hey, there,” he said.

  “Good morning,” Estelle replied, not altogether sure that it was. She slid the heavy camera bag on the floor in front of the seat and clambered up into the high-slung truck. Something as simple as getting into a vehicle had become a major effort, and Estelle puffed out her cheeks and shook her head. “Sorry about yesterday.”

  As she settled onto the seat, Gastner hunched forward with both hands on the steering wheel, regarding her critically. “Nothing to be sorry about. You’re moving kind of slow this morning, too,” he said.

  She leaned back and let her hands relax in her lap. “Twice as fast as yesterday, though.”

  He pulled the truck into gear. “Y Mamá?”

  Estelle nodded. “She asked this morning if we could drive down to Tres Santos sometime soon. That means she must be feeling better.”

  “That might be kinda good for her,” Gastner said. “To get out and about like that. Is someone staying in her old place down there?” Compared to the tiny Mexican village where Teresa Reyes had spent her entire life and where Estelle had spent her childhood, Posadas was a metropolis. In Tres Santos, Teresa Reyes’ four-room adobe house nestled under a grove of unkempt cottonwoods. One stump, close to the riverbed, bore so many carved initials and signatures on the smooth, iron-gray wood that it had become something of a historic directory.

  Estelle remembered long, patient sessions as a child, rubbing the faint older markings with paper and pencil, trying to decipher them. Her favorite had been an ornate PV polished by the years of wind and weather until the serifs that ended the strokes were just a hint in the wood. Below the initials was the ghost of a date, and Estelle had stroked the paper with the smooth graphite until she was sure that it read 1911. Her active imagination conjured up a burly Pancho Villa standing in front of the cottonwood, six-gun strapped to his waist, sun hot on his shoulders, penknife in hand, its sharp tip delicately nipping at the gray wood. At that time, her young mind hadn’t seen the sense of admitting that the initials could just as easily have been carved by Pablo Vallejos, who had lived across the river behind the school, or Porfirio Villanueva, who for more than three decades had managed one of the copper mines.

  “You remember the Diaz family?” she asked. “They live next door to Mamá ’s?”

  “Sure.”

  “Roberto, the oldest son, was renting Mamá ’s for a while. He and his wife. But they moved to Juarez.”

  “Your mother lived in that little place for a long, long time.”

  “Her whole life,” Estelle said wistfully. “That makes an even eighty years. And then one morning she trips doing something as simple as emptying a pan of water out the back door, and there goes the hip.”

  “God,” Gastner grunted. “The thirty-five years that I’ve been in this town seem like an eternity. I can’t begin to imagine eighty years looking up at the same bedroom ceiling.”

  “Maybe it’s a comfort in some ways,” Estelle said. “I think that’s why she wants to see the village again. It brings back memories for her.”

  “I suppose it would.” He glanced across at her. “How about you?” She looked quizzical. “Do you miss it ever?”

  “Mexico, you mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tres Santos will always be a special place for me.” She looked off through the passenger window as they approached Bustos Avenue, the truck grumbling along as if they had the whole day to waste. A jogger could have lapped them, but Estelle had long ago become accustomed to Gastner’s sense of pace. On rare occasions, she had ridden with him when the patrol vehicle screamed at over a hundred miles an hour. But far more often, she had seen the value of his idling, as she called it—drifting along with the windows down, listening to his county.

  She turned and looked at him. “There are times when I miss it, of course. When things get hectic around here, sometimes the yearning to head south of the border is pretty strong.” She smiled, but didn’t elaborate. Bill Gastner was well aware of her past—orphaned at age two and taken in by Teresa Reyes, then forty-six years old, a childless widow.

  The little black-haired, black-eyed child, her native blood echoed in the angular planes of her face, could as easily have become a ward of the church, destined for one of their orphanages. But something about the sober, quiet child had touched Teresa Reyes’ heart.

  She sighed. “I’d like the boys to have more time down there. With Mamá, if possible. They love talking with her. Especially Carlos. There’s something between the two of them that’s very private. A world all their own that’s a mystery to the rest of us.”

  Gastner laughed. “He’s a chip off his mother’s block.
And I’ve known your mother for what…twenty years? She sure as hell is a mystery to me, too.” They moseyed out into the intersection of Twelfth and Bustos, with Gastner hesitant to turn east on the main drag. Directly across the intersection, a large, flat-roofed restaurant dominated the corner. Estelle knew exactly what was on her old friend’s mind. “Have you eaten something?” he asked.

  “Sure. Irma held me hostage until I did. She’s worse than a mother hen. But if you need to stop, go ahead.”

  “You need to listen to Irma once in a while. And no, I’m all set. I ate a couple of hours ago.” He waited for an eastbound vehicle to pass and lifted a hand in salute as the other driver waved at him.

  As he turned the truck onto Bustos, Estelle saw the quick, perhaps wistful glance that he shot toward the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant. The place was his favorite haunt. She knew that to pass up a second smothered burrito grande before tending to business was something of a feat for him. After another ten blocks, they turned south on Grande Boulevard, heading toward the interstate exchange at a pace that, had there been a rush hour in Posadas, would have earned impatient gestures and glares. “Anything new on Mr. Doe, by the way?”

  “Not a thing. At least not that I’ve heard,” Estelle said. “Linda and Jackie were going out there first thing this morning.”

  “Theories?”

  Estelle grinned. “It’s probably a shorter list to assume what didn’t happen.”

  “That’s generally the way it is, more often than not.”

  “And by the way, what is it that we’re doing this morning?” she asked.

  Gastner frowned and shook his head. “We’re going to stop by Cameron Florek’s first. He’s got a problem with Eleanor Pope’s goats, among other things.”

  Estelle laughed. “With her goats?”

  “This is serious stuff, sweetheart,” Gastner said with mock severity. “The goats are just the tip of the iceberg, though. Have you ever actually been in Florek’s?”

  “Ah…no.”

  “Cameron Florek has eight acres of automotive history behind that fence of his. And that fence is part of the problem. He has the misfortune of sharing a property line with Eleanor Pope.” He glanced at Estelle. “But you know that already. Cameron’s complaint started when he found several of Eleanor’s goats inside his wrecking yard.”

  “I remember a tall board fence that circles the place. The goats are getting through that somehow?”

  “Apparently it’s more complicated than that. Mrs. Pope is aiding and abetting.”

  Estelle’s left eyebrow drifted up and Gastner laughed. “Florek maintains that he drove the goats out a couple of times, and blocked all the likely places where he figured the critters were getting in. But despite his best efforts, they continued to trespass, and so he went back and looked more carefully. Someone—he says Eleanor or her son—had pried the nails out of one of the fence boards so that it worked like a kitty door.” He swung his hand back and forth. “The goats were free to come and go as they pleased.”

  “And they were eating all his valuable license plates and fenders?”

  Gastner shot a quick glance across at Estelle. “I can see you’re not taking this case with the seriousness it deserves,” he chuckled. “These are weighty matters.”

  “Sorry, sir.” Estelle replied. “So you want a photograph of a goat chewing on a wrecked 1955 Oldsmobile? Is that it?”

  “There you go again,” he said, and held up an admonishing finger. “What’s sort of interesting in all of this is that the goats are not why you and I are visiting Florek’s Wrecking Yard.”

  “I was beginning to think that maybe you had too much free time, Padrino. ”

  “I wish. No, see, Cameron Florek doesn’t really care about trespassing goats…they probably help to keep the weeds down, anyway. If that were the extent of it, he never would have called me in the first place.”

  They drove under the interstate, and in another quarter mile Estelle saw the tall board fence around the acres of wrecking yard. What passed for zoning in the village required the fence to shield the public’s tender eyes from the eight-acre sea of decaying metal, plastic, and rubber…a fence that for most of its vast length was uglier than the scenery it obscured.

  Near the entrance, an array of several thousand hubcaps had been tacked to the fence in wonderful patterns—so many hubcaps that village teens had long since given up trying to steal them all. It would have been a life’s work to pry the entire collection loose.

  On the opposite side of the entrance gate was Cameron’s collection of license plates—rows and rows, decades and decades, every state and several foreign countries represented.

  Parked in front of the fence was a vehicle welded together out of a vast conglomeration of mismatched parts. Looking like something out of a sci-fi film about Earth after the great atomic war, it sported a cow-catcher on the front, what appeared to be a large caliber howitzer on the roof, and rear fins made from what could have been parts from a retired corn harvester. Giant chrome exhaust stacks sprouted aggressively from the hood, in counterpoint to the four tires that had been flat for so long that the rims dug into the sand. The road warrior was evidence that even the busy Cameron Florek had spare time to devote to the pursuit of fine art.

  Gastner pulled the truck through the front gate. Cameron Florek emerged from the battered Airstream trailer that served as his office. His coveralls had once been a natty, uniform Carhart brown. Over the seasons, they’d faded and been stained and patched to a perfect camouflage pattern for a wrecking yard. His giant beard splayed outward from a round face, combed meticulously into a great bib that hung off the bottom of his chin. Estelle grinned. Cameron Florek would look good motoring down the highway on a chopper, the wind lifting and caressing his beard.

  He lifted a hand in salute when he recognized Bill Gastner, and the livestock inspector pointed toward the back of the yard. Florek nodded and went back inside the Airstream, apparently seeing no point in offering an escort service.

  The lane that Gastner chose through the meandering rows of automotive carcasses was narrow, and Estelle watched the flow of vehicular history with fascination until they pulled to a stop in front of a Nash Ambassador.

  Estelle looked at the forlorn heap, the teeth in its grill shed of all their chrome like an old man who’d spent his long life eating, drinking, and smoking all the wrong things. “It’s hard to imagine that car sitting on a showroom floor,” she said.

  Gastner grunted, “My father owned one, can you believe it?” He nodded at the camera bag. “Do you need a hand with the camera gear?”

  “No. I can manage.”

  “It’s not too far, but there’s so much shit in the way that we have to hoof it.”

  “I can’t wait. Beware of the goats,” she said as she slid out of the truck. Bill Gastner hadn’t revealed the actual reason for their visit to Florek’s, but Estelle could see that he was enjoying himself. And she knew that if their expedition hadn’t been important, even for the most obscure of reasons, he wouldn’t have bothered her.

  “Goats are the least of our problem,” Gastner said. “They’re just the admission ticket.” She followed him through the maze of dead cars and trucks until they reached an area where the vehicles were stacked three high. He stopped and stood still, hands thrust into his pockets. “There’s no easy way through this goddamn mess, so you be careful. If there’s an earthquake tremor or a sonic boom, run for your goddamn life.”

  “I’ll just follow you, Padrino,” she said. Bill Gastner had recently celebrated his seventy-first birthday, and spry wouldn’t have been the first word Estelle would have chosen to describe his movements. At that particular moment, she was glad of it. Thirty pounds overweight, with bifocals that he’d worn for ten years but never gotten used to, Gastner stepped with methodical care, often punctuating a lapse of balance with colorful expletives reminiscent of his early years in the Marine Corps. More than once, he reached out to pat a thrusting fender, a
nd whether it was to restore balance or just a moment of private reminiscence, Estelle couldn’t guess.

  After working their way back through another decade of cars, they reached the tall, weathered board fence that marked the rear boundary of Florek’s Wrecking Yard. Set tightly edge-to-edge when they’d been first nailed into place thirty years before, the six-foot tall boards had shrunken over the years, leaving a half inch gap between.

  “The spot I want is right beside that old dump truck,” Gastner said, pointing to his right. The Diamond Reo truck was doing a fair job of sinking into the sand, its stripped remains bleached by the New Mexico sun and rusted to an even reddish-brown patina.

  He picked his way along the truck’s hulk to a spot where the rear of the frame was snugged up against the fence. “Box seats,” he said. With one hand on the fence boards, he stepped up onto the frame with a grunt. He extended a hand to Estelle. She rested the camera bag on the truck’s brown skeleton and stepped up beside Bill Gastner.

  Feeling like a little kid outside the fence at a baseball game, Estelle leaned against the warm wood. A dozen yards from the fence, five goats looked up at her, their eyes noncommittal and jaws idly oscillating. Eleanor Pope’s dwelling was one of those interesting affairs that had grown over the years into a hodgepodge of angles and alcoves. What had started out as a single twelve-by-sixty mobile home was now two trailers, joined in a T, with a framed addition budding out of the middle, its roof somehow tarred onto the metal of the trailers. If it didn’t rain, it didn’t leak.

  A vast collection of outbuildings filled the acre behind the house, together with half a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums lying on their sides. Two of the ones closest to the fence had wire mesh over the open ends. Estelle frowned. “What’s in the drums?”

  “Rabbits,” Gastner muttered. He nodded off to the right. Meeting Florek’s fence at a right angle was a row of metal-roofed sheds, each with a fair imitation of a two-by-six framed half door. “Here. Take a close look at the sheds.” He held out a small pair of binoculars. Estelle took them and adjusted the focus and spread until the images jumped into sharp detail.