by Ted Bell
“Go ahead, June. I’m sorry.”
“What I was saying was, I think we maybe caught a break here with the North boy, Sheriff. The boyfriend says he saw somebody. There was a man at the candy counter. Hollis thought he was looking at Charlotte funny. Before the show.”
“Hollis get a good look at him?”
“The unsub?”
Franklin looked out his window a second, eyes searching the blue-white mesquite flats, and then said, “Yeah, June, the unsub if that’s what we’re calling ’em on the TV these days. Hollis get a good look at him? This unknown subject.”
“Says he did.”
“Caucasian?”
“No profiling,” June said.
“June!”
“No, sir. Latino.”
“Awright, June-bug. I’ll be there directly. We’ll have an overnight guest most likely, so turn the cot down and leave a light on at the inn.”
Franklin sat back and pushed both boots hard against the floorboard, stretching his long legs. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat on a horse, he thought, rubbing his eyes. He was at a funny place in his life. Weary all the time, seemed like. Worried when he woke up in the morning. He didn’t used to be like that. Used to wake up with a smile on his face. Well, what were you going to do? Third generation lawman. Maybe law genes could only stand so much law-breaking, is what Daisy had told him one night he couldn’t sleep.
It was the border. His granddaddy, back when he was sheriff, had said something to him once and it stuck. He was talking about a rancher shot dead for moving a fence six feet. Laws were fences he said. That’s all they were.
“A border ain’t nothin’ but a law drawn in the sand.”
A minute later, Homer was back. All by himself and shaking his head in disbelief. He put his hands on the roof and leaned down to speak through the driver’s side window.
“You won’t believe this one, Sheriff.”
“Try me.”
“Nobody home up front.”
“Say again.”
“Wasn’t anybody up in the darn cab.”
“Homer.”
“Sheriff, I swear I ain’t lying. Nobody there.”
“He run?”
“Shoot, I guess. Doors closed, headlights on, transmission in Park. Empty.”
“Let’s take a look.”
Dixon shoved his door open with his boot and climbed out. He stretched, pulling his shoulders backward, his eyes on the far hills to the south. Smoke was curling up from the chimney of a ranch house. Ben Nevis’s place.
He’d allowed a posse to ride south out of there two days ago. A dozen of desperate young fellas from town who wanted to go find their sisters and girlfriends. Idea was, they’d ride down to Nuevo Laredo and see what they could find out about all these missing girls. They were due back yesterday evening and so far nobody had heard word one. Worrisome, to say the least.
The Peterbilt was hissing and steaming when he climbed up on the passenger side running board and tried to look through the windshield. Black glass, like it had mirror inside it. He pulled out his flashlight and put it right on the glass. Couldn’t see a thing. He stuck his head inside the driver’s window and saw Homer’s frowning face on the other side.
“Well, well, well,” Dixon said.
“That’s what I told you, Sheriff.”
“You look back there in his bunk compartment? Maybe he’s just watching a racy video in there and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Yessir, I did check.”
“And he didn’t go out either door.”
“We’d have seen him, Sheriff.”
Dixon removed his hat and ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair.
“There was a lot of dust when he pulled over.”
“I guess he could have run, Sheriff.”
Franklin told Homer to have a look in the glove box. Get his registration. Jot down all the numbers on the VIN plate screwed into the door-jamb.
“Well. He must have run,” the sheriff said to Homer and jumped to the ground. “I’ll go have a look around.”
Dixon did a three-sixty, bending down to look under the trailer a few times, between the axles, and shook his head. Then he walked away from the truck, a few hundred yards into the desert. There was a rocky mound rising to about thirty feet high where he could see the plains better. The wind had come up, and there were scattered tumbleweeds blowing across the highway. There was a sound on the wind, too, but it wasn’t any speed-freak trucker beating feet through the desert.
No. It was horses. Maybe a dozen of them.
Franklin looked up, squinting his eyes, and saw a cloud of dust rising out on the plain.
His posse?
He moved quickly to the top of the hill.
The riders were tightly bunched about a half-mile away. Headed right at him at full gallop. Ben’s ranch, where they’d left from, the stables were just up the road a piece. Well. The boys were a full day late but at least it looked like they’d all come back safely. When he’d sent them off, he hadn’t so sure about the thing at all. It was dangerous down there, real dangerous. All he knew was, he had to do something for those girls.
He’d have ridden down with them if he hadn’t been so worried about his town.
There was a full-blown war raging on this border. An invasion. Illegals and drugs both. All hell had broken loose down in the little border town of Nuevo Laredo. Lots of people on both sides had died in the crossfire. Two Border Patrol Agents had been gunned down here in the last six months. Couple of tourists, too, who’d gotten lost after crossing over the International bridge at Laredo. Pretty bad. He’d heard a rumor they were sending some fellas down from Washington to look into it. Well, it was about time.
Way past time.
Apparently Laredo PD had found a stash of IEDs under the bridge. Improvised explosive devices, just like the ones used in Iraq to kill Marines. Al-Qaeda on the border? He’d heard crazier things in his life.
The Mexican border was flat broken. And nobody had a clue how to fix it. Ranchers and Minutemen wanted to put up a 2,000-mile-long fence. Money was pouring in, people wanting to put fences on their property. Nothing made sense any more. A border was a border. Any fool knew that. Folks in Washington just looked the other way. Didn’t want to upset anybody. Give Texas back to the Mexicans without firing a shot. That’s what was happening to his state.
But not to his town. Not if he could help it.
He had no idea if it was Mexican narco-gangbangers or even dirty Federales behind all these abductions. Or, even if the young ladies had been spirited away to Nuevo Laredo bordellos. But Nuevo wasn’t a bad place to start looking, he knew that for sure. It was the most lawless town on either side of a lawless border. Not that that was saying much these days.
Something had spooked the horses. Maybe one of the riders had seen him standing up here on a hill. Anyway, they’d changed direction and now the posse was headed right for him.
He couldn’t understand why they were riding so bunched up like that. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Even in the cold moonlight they were still just a tight black mass kicking up a single dust-cloud behind them.
“Sheriff? I hear horses.”
He’d been concentrating so hard on the strange spectacle he hadn’t even heard Homer coming up the hill behind him.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Dixon said, turning back to the horses. Homer looked and a wide grin broke out on his face.
“The posse! Sheriff, if it ain’t about time!”
“They look funny to you, Homer?”
“What do you mean, Sheriff?”
“I don’t rightly know. They’re riding all bunched up.”
“I see that. Something else is wrong.”
“Something sure is strange, isn’t it? No, I got it. They ain’t got their hats on, Sheriff.”
“I reckon that’s it, all right. No hats. I knew something was wrong.”
The posse had galloped
to within a thousand yards.
“Sheriff, you know—something really ain’t right here. I’m gonna tell you that right now. It just ain’t natural the way they’re riding those horses—”
Homer raced down the hill, fast as he could, and his words were lost in the wind along with his hat. He was running hard on an angle that might bring him a little closer to the oncoming posse. Suddenly, the horses veered left, once again, now directly toward the sheriff up on the hill. Twelve horses galloped right by Homer flying flat out. The deputy turned his head, mouth wide open, watching ’em pass him by.
Franklin’s brain processed it before his eyes did. Why it was that his posse looked so strange in the moonlight. He stared after them until he couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. He turned away and gazed up at the moon, thinking about what he’d done, sending those boys down there like that.
The boys on those horses were all dead.
Ever last one of them he’d sworn in, all riding straight up in the saddle, deader than doornails.
How’d they stay up in the saddles? Their hands must have been tied to the pommels. Their boots lashed together tight under the girths to keep them all sitting bolt upright like that.
Homer was right. Not one of them was wearing his hat.
Because not one of them were wearing his head.
Homer was coming slowly back up the hill, his eyes on the ground in front of him. When he got to the top he stopped and looked up at Franklin. Tears he couldn’t hold back were streaming down his cheeks. Couldn’t blame him. Homer had gone to Prairie High with half the kids in that posse. Played football with most of them. Hell, he knew these boys and—
“Sweet Jesus, Sheriff.”
“Let’s go call this in, son. You come with me. We’ll do what we can for them. I don’t want anybody else to see ’em like this.”
“This is real bad, Sheriff.”
“Yes it is.”
But they couldn’t leave. They stood and watched the headless horse-men disappear. Twelve horses thundered across the highway, the gruesomely dead boys suddenly flashing bright in the brassy yellow beams of the semi.
They started down the hill toward their cruiser.
Both looked up, startled. The big Peterbilt roared again and then the whole rig lurched forward and just took off down the highway. Franklin figured it was doing about a hundred thirty miles an hour when it disappeared down over the ridge.
The sheriff didn’t see anybody behind the wheel when it went roaring by, upshifting gears, loud and fast. Like Homer had sworn, there was nobody driving the truck.
11
DRY TORTUGAS
T he seaplane flared up and splashed down on the clear blue water, her silvery pontoons throwing out foaming white water on either side. She was an ungainly thing, a Grumman G-21 Goose, painted an unusual shade of light blue, not quite turquoise and not quite any other shade Stoke had ever seen.
Mick Hocking called her the Blue Goose.
On the Goose’s final approach, Stoke had been able to get a closer look at Fort Jefferson. The place hadn’t changed much in forty years. A huge octagonal fortress built out of brick and taking up most of a tiny little island out in the middle of nowhere.
The U.S. Army had built it to guard the southern approach to the Gulf of Mexico. The year it was built, it was declared obsolete. Somebody’d invented an artillery round that could go through six feet of solid brick. The Army had abandoned the place and later turned it into a prison. Dr. Mudd, Stoke knew, the guy who’d fixed John Wilkes Booth’s leg, had done hard time here. Union soldiers had found his house by asking everyone in town the same question.
“Is your name Mudd?”
It took about twenty minutes to moor the seaplane at Fort Jefferson wharf, throw their gear in the old man’s fishing boat, and get underway to the site. Stoke stood up on the flying bridge of the boat with Sharkey and Luis Sr., who was at the helm. It wasn’t one of those modern tuna towers that looked like a jungle gym. This was an oversized solid wood structure, part of the whole wheelhouse it was sitting on top of, reached by a ladder down to the cockpit.
Luis Sr. was planted at the wheel. He stood with his bare feet wide apart. His gnarled feet and thin brown limbs looked like roots growing into the deck. He was an older, skinnier version of his son. He didn’t have a lot to say and what little he had was in Spanish. Old man had a pint of Graves XXX grain alcohol in his sagging back pocket. Took a pull every now and then, a little eye-opener, no harm done, a simple fisherman who liked to tend his own lines. Man had a tan so deep, he looked like he’d been cured in brine. Stoke liked him.
“Doesn’t talk much, does he?” Stoke asked Luis.
“Only if he has something to say.”
Luis Jr. had a map out, talking to his father, and suddenly the boat angled hard to port, and began chugging along on a westerly course at about ten knots.
Stoke understood enough Español to know an airplane had gone down right around here a couple of nights ago. Went right over Luis’s head apparently because when he told Stoke about it, his face screwed up and he made a ducking motion when he got to that part. Had no lights on, Luis had said, none, and it was a dark night.
Sounded pretty druggy to Stoke, but he didn’t say anything to the old man.
Anyway, so it sounded like the old man had seen it go into the water. It had sunk quickly, before he could reach it, and no survivors. Stoke had asked what kind of plane. “DC-3,” Luis Sr. had said, sounding very sure. It was an airplane he seemed to know, but of course he would, living down here. Air Pharmacy, Stoke figured, flying bricks of cocaine and bales of marijuana, but still he kept his mouth shut. Didn’t want to hurt the old guy’s feelings.
Stoke had seen some scuba gear below. Sharkey told him the plane was lying too deep to free dive. This was fine with Stoke. It was a good day for diving, not a cloud in the sky. The highly reflective sandy white bottom helped a lot.
Still, Stoke was getting worried. A lot of these damn flyboy druggies ended up as ocean bottom-nappers out here. More than you’d think. Old airplanes, usually chicken-wired DC-3s, flown by shitty bush pilots smoking dope. Finding a planeload of soggy cocaine and a couple of dead Colombians floating inside was not going to make his day. He motioned to Shark and they went back to the stern.
“What you think about this being a DC-3, Sharkey? Drug mule kind of airplane, right? We ain’t DEA, we’re not in that business, man. You know that. I hope you didn’t bring me down here for some damn drug shit or—”
Sharkey looked hurt. Chin down on his chest.
He said, real low, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Shark, come on, man, it’s a DC-3! You know what that means. You got to tell me again why I’m down here.”
“My father told me he saw a plane go down right next to a little island. I was down here, man, in the Marquesas. On a visit. I didn’t see it go down, but I dove on this plane myself.”
“Yeah? And?”
“I called you, didn’t I?”
“I’m not interested in drug runners.”
“It’s not drugs. I don’t know what it is, but no drugs.”
“You sure about this.”
“Stokely, you got to trust me, man, I’m on the team. Come on. Let’s get the tanks. I’ll show you.”
“Over there by those mangroves?”
“That’s it.” Sharkey made a slashing motion across his throat. Luis Sr. hauled back on the throttles and the old boat slowed and stopped in about sixty feet of water. There was no wind, and the boat settled into a gentle rocking motion.
“Muchas gracias, señor,” Stoke said, smiling up at the skipper. The old guy looked down from the helm and smiled back. Nice smile. People spend their whole life on the big blue ocean, it gives them something you just can’t find on solid ground. Peace, maybe.
There was a tiny island with nothing on it but thick mangroves and sea grapes. Just a spit sticking up out of the water, maybe a couple of hundred yards long and maybe fi
fty feet across. Some debris had floated up inside a small cove, a pool of emerald green water washing up on the white sand. Stuff had gotten hung up in the roots inside the cove. It looked recent. Kind of thing you might see after a plane went down. Stoke thought he saw movement over in the mangroves out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked he didn’t see anything.
Probably a big heron or an osprey doing a little fishing. Could even have been a cloud of skeets moving around back in there. He’d go check out the debris after he’d seen the plane. See what had washed up.
“I got to saddle up, amigo,” Stoke said.
Sharkey grabbed one tank and handed it to Stoke, then picked up a second one.
“Where you think you’re going?” Stoke said, looking at the one-armed man.
“Down to the plane,” Sharkey said, “You don’t think I’d let you go down there alone, do you? The plane is sitting in a very precarious position. Edge of a shoal. You get inside and she shifts a foot or two, you kiss your ass good-bye.”
“You want to come, you come on. But don’t worry your ass about me, Luis. I was born alone. I’ll go out the same way.”
STOKE FELT the cold inrush of sea into two layers of wet suit and started down, the twelve pounds of weight on his belt and his tank helping him descend through all the bubbles. The world suddenly turned off-blue and dark. The visibility was okay, though, good enough to see what he saw. Below the thermocline, down around forty feet, it would get a lot colder and a lot darker.
But they’d gotten lucky.
The plane, one wing sheared off, was hung up on a narrow shelf of limestone in about thirty feet of water. The whole shelf was only a few yards wider than the fuselage. One hundred yards farther east and she would have slipped down into a deep trench.
Stoke gave Sharkey the OK signal and saw him return it. He checked his dive watch and then continued his descent toward the airplane, looking back now and then at Sharkey. It was interesting to see how you went about swimming down here with only one arm. Sharkey seemed to do just fine, considering.
It was a DC-3, all right, intact except that the port wing was completely gone and the whole nose and cockpit were pretty smashed up, meaning it had come in at a very steep angle. It was a very old airplane, unpainted, and there were no exterior markings at all. Just some blackened aluminum on the fuselage where the engine must have caught fire.