Mystery: The Best of 2001

by Jon L. Breen

  “As the hot air cools the balloon will gradually sink back to earth. He’ll only be up for five or ten minutes. If it comes down too fast, he can release one or two of those sandbags on the side to lighten the load.”

  The colorful balloon went up perhaps a hundred feet, easily clearing the top of the mission’s twin bell towers. Ben felt a movement behind him and turned to see Scooter Colt, the gunslinger from last night’s poker game, his right hand resting on the butt of his gun. Ben’s own weapon had been left in Elana’s wagon, and for an instant he wished it were closer at hand.

  “He’s coming down!” someone from the crowd shouted after a few minutes, and indeed the balloon was starting its descent. It drifted off to the north, beyond the church, and the spectators broke into a run to catch sight of its landing.

  Ben was in the midst of the crowd, well behind the leaders, when he rounded the corner of the church and saw at once that something was wrong. His first thought was that Pancho had landed badly, injuring himself, but it was more than that. Old Jud Withers was the first to raise his voice and spread the improbable news. “He’s not here!” he shouted. “Pancho Quizas is gone!”

  He must have fallen out of the balloon’s basket as it descended. There could be no other explanation. And yet, as Ben and the others scanned the landscape, they could detect no sign of him. There were no hiding places on the flat desert terrain, only a few small cactuses incapable of giving shelter to a child, much less a grown man. The balloon had come down about thirty yards from the rear of the mission, and Ben’s first thought was that Pancho had made it unseen to the back entrance. It seemed unlikely, given the distance, but he hurried over to try the door. It was firmly locked.

  “A man doesn’t just disappear,” Ben argued.

  “Perhaps the dust devils have taken his soul,” the priest said.

  “Then where is his body?”

  The wicker basket had landed on its side, overturning the brazier. Nothing else was there except the ropes used to anchor the balloon to the ground. Ben noticed that none of the sandbags had been cut free to slow the descent. It was as if Pancho had wanted to return to earth as quickly as possible. The multicolored airbag, settled in a heap beside the basket, was still exhaling air as it flattened out.

  “You tell me where he is,” Jud Withers demanded of Ben. “You were working for him, weren’t you?”

  “I think we’d better ask his wife,” Ben suggested, seeing Elana hurrying toward them.

  “What’s happened to Pancho?” she asked. “Is he hurt?”

  “He’s disappeared,” Ben told her.

  “Disappeared?” She looked around, as if expecting him to pop out of the ground at any moment. “How could that be?”

  “We don’t know. Did it ever happen before?”

  “Of course not!” She ran over to the wicker basket, righting it as she searched beneath and around it for clues. She lifted a corner of the balloon and peered underneath. Finally she just stood and stared at the sky, as if waiting for him to come down.

  That was when Scooter Colt walked up to join them. “You think he’s still up there, lady? We can find out quick enough!” He drew his six-gun, pointed it at the sky, and started shooting.

  Ben counted six shots before Scooter toppled over backwards, as if from the recoil of his own weapon. Old Jud Withers was the first to reach the body. “God Almighty! He’s been shot! Drilled right through the eye.”

  And that was how Scooter Colt died, in a gunfight with the sky, or with the spirit of Pancho Quizas, who was still floating around up there. Edgar Blaise, the cotton farmer, was the first to scoff at the idea. “How fast a draw is a dead man?” he wanted to know.

  “You haven’t found Quizas’s body yet,” Gert reminded them. “You don’t even know that he’s dead.”

  But the area behind the mission, and the church itself, had been carefully searched and there was no trace of the Mexican balloonist. Elana drove the wagon around and started gathering up the deflated balloon. Ben went over to help her load the wicker basket onto the wagon along with the balloon, though he knew there was little chance now of payment for his work. “Perhaps you could sell this equipment,” he told her.

  “Not yet. He may return. I have faith in the Lord.”

  They’d roused Tucson’s sheriff from somewhere, and he arrived on horseback to look at Scooter Colt’s body. “Who shot him?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” Withers replied. “We were all here but we didn’t see who fired the shot.”

  The sheriff, whose name was Morton, seemed annoyed at being disturbed on a Sunday afternoon. “Can’t you handle this, Padre?” he called out to the mission priest. “This is your day, not mine.”

  “I can bury him,” Padre Paul replied. “That is all.”

  “All right.” Sheriff Morton could see some sort of investigation was necessary. “Who all is carrying a gun?”

  “No one but the dead man,” Withers said.

  “I have a gunbelt in the wagon,” Ben volunteered, “but I wasn’t wearing it.”

  “Let’s see it,” the sheriff said, examining the dead man’s gun. “There are five shots fired from this one.”

  “I counted six,” Ben told him. “One must have been the shot that killed him.” He brought his gun from the wagon to show Sheriff Morton it was fully loaded.

  Padre Paul cleared his throat. “There were dust devils in the air at the time, Sheriff. They seemed to rise up with his balloon.”

  “You’re telling me he went up but he didn’t come down?”

  “That’s right,” Ben agreed. “When we couldn’t find him, Scooter said he must still be up there. He drew his pistol and started firing at the sky.”

  “And the sky fired back,” another voice said. It was young Gert. She had her guitar slung over one shoulder and she plucked at the strings as she sang:

  “Scooter was his name, it wasn’t Tex,

  He came here lookin’ for that old Mex.

  He fired his gun right at the sky,

  The sky fired back ’cause it ain’t shy.

  Now Scooter is dead and that’s a shame,

  No one here will remember his name.”

  She finished the song with the lyrics barely audible. No one applauded because that didn’t seem right. When she headed back to her wagon, only Ben followed.

  Later, at Custer’s Café, he asked her, “What did your song mean?”

  “I made it up. Does it need a meaning?” She picked up her guitar and started to strum it.

  “The second line: He came here lookin’ for that old Mex. What does it mean?”

  “Just what it says, I guess.” Her face was as stony as it had been during the poker game.

  “Are you saying that Scooter Colt came to Tucson to kill Pancho Quizas?”

  She shrugged. “I guess so. When he came here from Texas a few weeks back he was askin’ questions about Pancho. Did any of us know him? Had he been flyin’ his balloon around here?”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Sure, we’d heard of Pancho and his balloon. Everyone in these parts had heard of him. He usually came through here in September. I guess Scooter decided to wait for him.”

  “What made you think he wanted to kill Pancho?”

  “Well, he kept wearin’ that gunbelt in a city where hardly anyone else does. He was expectin’ he’d need it.”

  Ben pondered that. “Where had he been staying, these past few weeks?”

  “Out at Edgar Blaise’s cotton farm,” Gert answered. “He was working there.”

  In the morning, Ben rode out to the Blaise place and found the farmer weighing bags of freshly picked cotton. He was dressed like one of his workmen, and bore little resemblance to the natty gentleman who’d shared the poker table with Ben Saturday night. “Looking for work?” he asked as Ben dismounted.

  “I might be, but not today. I wanted to ask you about Scooter Colt. He was working for you, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah, for a few
weeks. I always need extra people at harvest time.”

  “I’ve been in the Arizona territory before but I never knew you grew cotton around here. Did settlers bring the plants from Texas?”

  “Could be. More likely it came up from Mexico. They say the Indians there have been raising cotton for centuries.” He hoisted the bag off the scale and handed it over to a workman, making some jottings on a pad. “What do you want to know about Scooter?”

  “Some say he was looking for Pancho Quizas so he could kill him.”

  “I guess there was bad blood between them, all right. Did you catch the look on Scooter’s face when Pancho walked into Custer’s Café the other night?”

  “I missed that,” Ben admitted.

  “Scooter told me one night that Quizas cheated him on a business deal involving some Mexican horses. He’d paid the Mex some money and the horses were never delivered. Quizas claimed the Texas Rangers intercepted the horses at the border, but Scooter suspected he’d sold them to somebody else and kept the money from both transactions.”

  “I thought Pancho was strictly a showman, traveling around with his balloon.”

  “He and his wife couldn’t live on that, not even by selling advertising space on their balloon.”

  “Did you ever hear Scooter say he wanted to kill Pancho?”

  “He said the next time they met it would be his six-gun did the talking.”

  Ben nodded, watching Blaise lift another bag of cotton onto the scale. “What do you think happened to Pancho yesterday?”

  The cotton farmer shrugged. “Padre Paul thinks the dust devils got him. I’m more of a practical sort. I don’t think Pancho was ever in that balloon. He let it go up and come down without him. He was hiding in the crowd somewhere and when Scooter started shooting he shot back.”

  “He was in the balloon’s basket when it went up,” Ben insisted. “I was right there, releasing the moorings.”

  “Then somebody else shot Scooter, maybe Pancho’s wife.”

  Ben couldn’t remember where any of them had been at the moment of Scooter’s death, but he was pretty sure no one was facing Scooter when he fired at the sky. The sky fired back, Gert had sung. Maybe it had. “Did anyone else have a motive for wanting Scooter dead?”

  “He told me last week he pulled Jud Withers’s daughter into the stable one night and she told him if he ever tried that again she’d shoot him, but that was just talk.”

  “Jud has a daughter?”

  “Sure. Gert Withers, the one who plays the guitar and sings. Her mother’s dead; Jud is her father.”

  When Ben rode back into town that afternoon, Gert was nowhere in sight. Jud Withers was at the bar in Custer’s Café, as usual, describing Sunday’s strange shooting to anyone who hadn’t yet heard about it. When he took time out to order a beer, Ben slipped in next to him. “You never told me Gert was your daughter.”

  “Never asked me, did you?”

  “If Scooter was bothering her, that might have been reason enough for a father to shoot him.”

  “Gert fights her own battles. She doesn’t need my help.”

  “Has Pancho’s body turned up yet?”

  Withers shook his head. “Padre Paul says he went straight to heaven, says it was a miracle.”

  “It might have been. Has Elana left with the wagon yet?”

  “She needs the sheriff to say it’s all right. He’ll probably let her go soon unless Pancho’s body turns up.”

  There was only one place to go after that. Ben rode out to the San Agustin Mission once more. Padre Paul was talking to some Mexican women out front, enjoying the cooling breeze on a warm day. “It’s Ben Snow, isn’t it?” he asked as Ben dismounted and led Oats up to the group.

  “That’s right, Padre. We’re still baffled by what happened yesterday.”

  “You mean the miracle?”

  “Well, yes.” He glanced skyward. “I was wondering if I might go up in one of your bell towers to get a better view of the land.”

  “Certainly. I’ll take you up there.”

  Ben followed the priest into the church, which was filled with the glow of votive candles. “This building is one hundred and sixteen years old,” he announced proudly, “and the mission itself has been on this location even longer. You can see the grime on the walls from all these candles the faithful have lit over the past century.”

  He unlocked a small door to the right of the entrance and led the way up a winding stairway to the bell tower. The view was spectacular, with the flat land stretching to the distant mountains, broken only by a few low trees and stately cactuses. But Ben realized at once that from this angle the rear of the church probably would have obscured the spot where the balloon came down.

  Padre Paul seemed to read his disappointment. “You were thinking that Scooter Colt might have been shot from this bell tower.”

  “The thought crossed my mind. He was looking toward the sky when he fired his pistol.”

  “No one was up here, not Pancho Quizas nor anyone else.”

  “Where were you, Padre?”

  “On the ground with the rest of you.”

  “Then you can’t be certain no one was up here.”

  “The doors to this tower and the other one are kept locked at all times. There were too many instances of children climbing up here.”

  They went back downstairs and Padre Paul locked the tower door behind them. Ben left the mission and rode away with a wave of his hand.

  He went back into Tucson to the sheriff’s office and found Elana there, getting ready to leave. Her wagon was already stowed with Pancho’s balloon and other gear. Ben offered to accompany her back across the border but she declined. “I have an uncle there who will meet me,” she said. “Thank you for your kindness.” She gave him the ten dollars he’d been promised.

  “Someone told me Scooter Colt was looking for Pancho because of a horse-trading deal that went bad.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I doubt if my husband even knew the man.”

  There was little more to say. “I hope we’ll meet again under better circumstances,” he told her with a tip of his Stetson. Then he went inside to see the sheriff.

  “Nice woman,” Sheriff Morton said, lighting up a Mexican cigar. “Can’t figure out what happened to her husband.”

  “Or who killed Scooter Colt.”

  “Or that either,” the sheriff admitted.

  “Have you examined the body?”

  “I guess the undertaker examined him more than I did.”

  “I was wondering about the angle of the bullet. Could he have been shot from above, while he was looking at the sky?”

  “No, the undertaker tells me it looks like he was shot from below. But that doesn’t mean anything since they all say he was looking up when the bullet hit him. Somebody in the crowd just got off a lucky shot and nobody saw who did it. We’ll probably never know.”

  “Did he have enemies?”

  “Let’s put it this way. Scooter Colt made mighty few friends in the short time he was here. Wearing that gun in town turned folks off right away.” His eyes flickered on Ben’s own holstered revolver. “We’re moving into the twentieth century here.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You going to be around long?”

  “Not too long. I think I’ll be riding on soon.”

  Ben ate supper at Custer’s Café and listened for a time to Gert Withers’s songs. Her father was starting another poker game up front and asked Ben to sit in, but he declined. It was getting dark when he mounted Oats and headed south out of Tucson. He knew that if he rode fast he’d be able to overtake Elana’s wagon before it reached the border.

  He saw the lanterns first, just after sundown along the road to Nogales. Elana seemed surprised to see him and reined up the horses as he drew abreast of her. “What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come for Scooter Colt’s killer,” Ben told her.

  “And you th
ink that I did it?”

  “I know you didn’t do it. Pancho Quizas is alive and well and hiding in your wagon. He killed Scooter Colt.”

  * * *

  The collapsed balloon rose up then, and there was Pancho beneath it, pointing a deadly little derringer at Ben’s head. “If I have to kill you, I will,” he said.

  “Before you pull that trigger, aren’t you curious as to how I knew?”

  “Mildly,” the balloonist admitted. “What mistake did I make?”

  “No mistake. Even Padre Paul thinks you were whisked away by a dust devil. But I was seeking a more natural explanation for your disappearance. You had to be in that basket when the balloon took off because I saw you myself from just a few feet away. You couldn’t have jumped or fallen from it without people seeing you. Therefore, barring the supernatural, you had to have been in it when it landed.”

  “The basket was empty.”

  “But not the balloon itself,” Ben told him: “It hung down almost over that wicker basket when it was inflated. As the air cooled and the balloon began its descent, you must have seen Scooter Colt on the ground waiting for you, his hand on the butt of his gun. There was only one place to hide. Obscured by the balloon’s own deflation, you hoisted yourself inside it, until you were completely hidden from view as it landed. It must have been a bumpy landing but you froze there on the ground, letting the fabric of the balloon settle down around you.”

  “He was going to kill me,” Pancho said. “I knew he was. I had to hide somewhere.”

  “So when he started firing into the air you feared he might shoot at the deflated balloon too. As I noticed earlier, shapes could be seen even through the thick cloth of the air bag. You saw him shooting, and you fired one shot through the balloon with your little derringer.”

  “You knew I was armed?”

  “I didn’t see a weapon, but I considered the possibility you might carry a derringer under your coat. The sheriff told me the bullet seemed to come from below, and I figured you were the only one who could have done it. Shooting like that from inside the air bag, no one saw the muzzle flash of your gun. Elana must have known you were hiding there when she went to load the balloon onto her wagon, but once again all that deflated cloth hid your movements until you were on the wagon.”