by Rex Burns
Re-creating the scene in the bar, Wager wondered now if the man’s eyes hadn’t been tense with the fear that Wager would keep poking around. Perhaps Tommy had started something he wanted desperately to stop? For his sons’ sakes? For his own?
Those and other thoughts had followed Wager into the short and restless sleep he managed to drop into that afternoon. And they still drifted in and out of his mind as he woke to the buzz of his radio clock and scraped the whiskers off his chin and from around his mustache. Had fear been in Tom’s voice when he called Wager earlier? There weren’t many things on two legs or four that frightened the man. Certainly not the threat of a beating, even one this severe—Tommy had hurt himself as badly when he was rodeoing and, riding hurt, had gone out and gotten busted up again. The threat of a beating might make him grin, but it wouldn’t scare him. The only thing that might frighten him would be danger to his sons. But they weren’t the ones lying in the hospital.
He poured the shift’s first cup of coffee and pushed the nagging thoughts to the back of his mind; today was the first day of the rest of his life, with its own fun and excitement, and that was all Wager was being paid to think about.
On top of the stack of papers lay a memo from Chief Doyle citing a citizen’s complaint from one Wilhelm Strauss, chief administrator for Salida Community Hospital, and concluding in an angry scrawl, “What the hell is this about, Wager?”
He had rolled a sheet of paper into the squeaky typewriter when Max, smelling of fresh aftershave, peered over his shoulder.
“What you got there, Gabe, a dog bite?”
That’s what they called Bulldog Doyle’s memos, the ones that bore handwritten comments in red felt pen. “Nothing serious. Just more paperwork.”
“That’s serious.” Max settled to his desk and its own pile of papers.
Wager was telling Doyle about answering a request from the Colorado State Patrol for identification of an assault victim, and about explaining the false-arrest statute to the hospital administrator, when, beneath the slow clack of his typewriter, he heard the telephone ring and Max’s answer.
“Yes—just a minute please. Gabe, it’s yours.”
“Detective Wager.”
“This is Detective Allen, Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office. Trooper Ingalls said you were the one who identified Thomas Sanchez. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you known Sanchez for a long time?”
“Off and on since I was a kid.”
“All right. Do you have any idea what he might have been doing before we found him?”
“No. He wasn’t a suspect or an informant for me, if that’s what you’re asking. He was a friend who I saw every now and then.”
“All right. Well, we haven’t been able to get in touch with his sons, and I’m trying to put together this picture of what he was doing up this way. Is there anything at all you can help us with?”
“He worked for a rodeo contractor. He might have been on business.” Wager figured it was his turn to ask a question. “You’ve decided this wasn’t an automobile accident?”
“Yeah. The autopsy showed injuries consistent with a beating instead of a car-pedestrian accident.”
“Autopsy?”
The line was silent for a moment or two. “Sanchez died about four-oh-two this afternoon, Detective Wager. Didn’t the hospital call you?”
“No … no, this—No, they didn’t call.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Detective Wager. I understood from one of the nurses that she was going to call and tell you.”
“I didn’t know he was that critical.”
“Well, the doc said he had other injuries—old concussions—I guess that contributed to the death. But the real cause was two blows to the head with a blunt instrument. He never regained consciousness. It’s a homicide.”
“I see.”
“I called down to Conejos County Sheriff’s Office and asked what they knew about him, but all they have is his address on a ranch outside Antonito.”
“Yes … he told me he had a small place there.”
“All right. But he lived alone, and apparently nobody knows much about him at all. And like I say, we haven’t been able to get in touch with his sons. They went up to Montana rodeoing or something.”
“He didn’t see much of them after his divorce.”
“All right. But you see, the Conejos SO found his truck at the ranch. So I figure for some reason he went with somebody who drove him up this way. Unless he had another car. Do you know if he had a second vehicle?”
“I only saw him drive the truck—a blue pickup with a white camper shell.”
“That’s the one, registered to Thomas A. Sanchez.”
“He probably had cash with him. Maybe a lot.”
“Why’s that?”
“He bought stock for the rodeo. And I guess most of that business is done in cash.”
“All right, that fits him not having any wallet. I’ve been thinking it was a robbery.”
“That seems like a long way to take someone just to rob him. What is it, a hundred, hundred and twenty-five miles?”
“Maybe they were scared to dump him near home. They got three or four days down the road before we even knew who he was, right?” The voice paused. “How does this sound to you? Somebody tells Sanchez he’s got some stock he wants to sell and offers to drive him out to see it. Then he robs him and, because Sanchez knows who it is, beats him to death—or thinks he does—and then tries to make it look like a hit-run.”
It was a bit early to draw conclusions, but Wager said what Allen wanted to hear: “That sounds like a good place to start.”
“You got any other explanation?”
“No, Detective Allen, I don’t.” Not anything with substance, at least. And the sheriff’s officer wouldn’t find much time for Wager’s vague suspicions. His interest lay, as it should, in digging for the facts surrounding the act itself—locating any witnesses who might have seen Tom with anyone on that day, any reports of a suspicious vehicle, or anyone seeing erratic behavior at the time of the beating. Allen was interested in evidence that would stand up in court, and his would be the slogging chores of interviewing potential witnesses, showing Tom’s photograph to hundreds of people, tracing down any threads he came up with. “Do you want me to try and locate his sons?”
“All right, that would be nice, you being Sanchez’s friend and all. Like I say, Trooper Ingalls called the ranch where you said they were working, but they hadn’t got back yet from Culbertson, Montana. So far as they know, he’s still alive.”
“She called today?”
“Right. The guy she talked to said they were going to stop at the Leadville rodeo before coming back to the ranch.”
“Leadville, Colorado?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Wager. He hung up, his hand resting heavily on the telephone.
“What’s the matter, Gabe?”
Wager looked up, the old familiar weariness of death making the flesh on his bones heavy and lax. “A friend died.”
“I’m sorry.” Max’s head shook slightly. They both knew how little could be said, and less done. “You want a cup of coffee, partner?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Max probably took a long time; Wager didn’t know. With a start, he noticed the full cup at his elbow and sipped at the already cool liquid. Tom was dead and that was it—all of the man’s life and energy and guts, all the things that he had meant and that Wager had admired and seen again as he sat there—all that was gone. And it seemed as if part of his own past was gone, too.
CHAPTER 6
“THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE still hasn’t gotten in touch with them?”
Jo’s voice interrupted the silence that had filled the Trans-Am when they entered the crowded Eisenhower Tunnel, where the echoing grumble of car and truck exhausts trembled the closed windows. A flashing red sign warned “Steep Grade—7%
Next Six Miles,” and told trucks to use low gear. They then were back into the hot sunshine at almost two miles of altitude, and before them the valley opened to show a corner of distant Lake Dillon and the clusters of resort communities around its shores. On the horizon, a blunt monolith shouldering up beneath a tattered cap of snow, Buffalo Mountain marked the Tenmile Creek valley and the road up to Leadville. South of Buffalo Mountain, the serrated peaks of the Tenmile Range were hazily reflected in the blue of the lake, and almost out of sight they could make out the pale streaks of ski runs carved through the black pines coating the mountains’ flanks.
“Not to tell them that he died, no. The Highway Patrol called about the accident, but he wasn’t dead yet.”
“It seems ironic, doesn’t it? They had just really found each other.”
Ironic or related. Or maybe the gods took over when people hadn’t punished each other enough—but it was Wager’s bet that the gods didn’t have all that much work to do. “Yes.”
“Did Detective Allen tell you anything about the killing?”
“Just what I’ve told you. He thinks it was the result of a robbery.”
“And you don’t?”
“It could be—that explanation shouldn’t be ruled out, anyway. But it could have something to do with the boys, too.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” Wager glided into the left lane to pass a slow truck whose exhaust crackled with the engine’s back pressure. “Then, again, it could be something different. Right now there’s not enough evidence for any motive.”
She watched the semi-truck drift back past the window as Wager threaded the Trans-Am through the heavy traffic of late spring and past one of the startlingly steep truck escape ramps that marked the long descent. “Do they ever use those?”
Wager glanced at the narrow strip of soft sand rising like a ski jump between the trees. “Every now and then. It beats going off the other side.” He nodded at the ravine that plunged out of sight beyond the eastbound lanes of I-70. The far mountain was marked by the bald and rock-littered scrapes of snowslide paths that had uprooted the pine and aspen below tree line.
“Now that would really scare me,” said Jo. “Riding down this hill in a runaway truck with no brakes, and hoping to hit that little bitty ramp at seventy or eighty miles an hour!”
“I don’t know anyone who does it for sport,” said Wager. “Not yet, anyway. Not like riding bulls.”
“That’s about the same.” She shook her head. “Give me something I can have a little control over, something with a steering wheel or reins.”
“I enjoy riding you when you’re out of control,” said Wager.
“Well, thanks a hell of a lot, cowboy. You’d better enjoy it, because that’s the only prize you’re going to win.” She added quickly, “And don’t start describing your technique.”
“‘… out where a friend is a friend …”’
“You’ll be a real hit at the rodeo.”
The highway leveled off at Silverthorne and the traffic tangled as feeder lanes led north and south to the increasingly congested towns that dotted the valley. On the lake, moving slowly in the light breeze, white triangles of sailboats glided in front of the surrounding mountains; all around this end of the lake, like fragments of row houses, condominiums stepped up the lower slopes of the hills. The road stayed crowded as it circled past the dam and the Frisco turn and through the narrow gulch that led to Copper Junction. There the four-lane freeway banked past another large ski resort toward Vail, taking most of the cars and trucks with it, and Wager turned with relief onto the narrower state highway that led over Fremont Pass to Leadville. It was there, at another small rodeo, that he hoped to meet Tom’s sons. Regardless of how close to or distant from their father they were, the man was dead now, and they had a right to hear that from someone who cared about him, instead of from an official voice on the telephone.
And besides, Wager had a question or two for them.
The rodeo arena was just west of town beyond the newer homes that had spread out during another mining boom. Unlike Leadville’s old downtown with its scattering of false fronts and turreted stone buildings put up in the nineteenth century, this area could have been a suburb of Denver. It had curving streets and cul-de-sacs and split-level homes offering a choice of three basic designs. On almost every block, for-sale signs were hammered into the thin lawns, indications that the latest boom was over and another bust had come. First gold, then silver, and now molybdenum. The only outside money came from tourists, now, during the brief two months without snow, and a series of red-white-and-blue signs made sure that few escaped the route to the rodeo.
“That wind is cold!” Jo shrugged into her parka as they left the car and trailed after a family toward the ticket booth. Despite the sun that glinted off the snow on the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, Wager’s cheeks tightened and he had to blink against tears that the dry, icy wind stung from his eyes.
“I’d hate to be riding today,” said Jo.
“Is it worse in the cold?”
She nodded. “It’s easier to get hurt when your muscles are stiff. Men and animals both.”
The stands were placed facing away from both the wind and the afternoon sunlight that glared against the freshly raked dirt. Wager led Jo to a sheltered corner down near the arena barrier where the wind could not be felt as much. In a few minutes they were unzipping their parkas as the sun baked the crowd and the wooden planks, and drew out the odors of old lumber and animals and tobacco that reminded Wager so much of the rodeos he’d gone to as a kid.
“John’s number forty-eight. I can’t find James listed.” Jo’s finger slid down the names of competitors mimeographed on a loose sheet of paper inserted into the middle of the program. “Didn’t they say both of them would be here?”
“They” was a man’s voice Wager had talked to this morning when he called the T Bar M and asked for Tom’s sons.
“What about?”
“It’s an emergency. Is James or John available?”
“No. If you’re calling about their daddy being hurt, I already been told.”
“The boys haven’t called the ranch?”
“What for?”
Because a ranch manager might be interested in the place. But all Wager said was, “Do you know where they’ll be staying in Leadville?”
“No.”
It wasn’t much of a conversation and even less help; the man’s slow voice offered nothing more, and Wager, deciding it was none of the man’s business, did not tell him about Tom’s death. He just said thank you and hung up.
Jo looked up from the program as a small band with a big drum started thumping out music from somewhere at the far end of the bleachers. Around them swirled a steady stream of excited faces and a large number of straw cowboy hats. “Do you want to go to the arena office? They might be here by now.”
Wager nodded, and they elbowed their way beneath the clatter of heels thudding on the planks above. A haze of dust sifted down, swirled up again on eddies of wind, and settled on their parkas. The announcer’s voice filtered through the crowd to welcome everyone to the first rodeo of the Lake County Jamboree Days, and the band started building up to the music of the Grand Entry. The office was a small trailer resting on cinder blocks and partially fenced off by wire mesh. A gap in the fence let them through, and Wager, looking out of place without a cowboy hat, joined the line waiting to get into the small office.
“Heyo, Dobie! What the hell you doing at this thing?”
“Picking me up some beer money. You bull riding today?”
“Bulls and barebacks, both. You seen Hugh around?”
Wager’s turn came to shuffle up the board steps into the cramped room, where a sweating man chewed an unlit cigar and wrote in tiny print on a yellow tablet. “What you need?” The man raised his voice against the sudden cheer from the crowd and his bloodshot eyes glanced curiously at Wager.
“I’d like to leave a message for
John Sanchez.”
“Sure—message board’s over there. Next!”
Four or five contestants were peeking over shoulders trying to read the pieces of paper crowded on the small square of corkboard. Wager tore a leaf from his notebook and reached in to tack it up, then worked his way back out again.
Jo, waiting, caught his eye and pointed. “He’s over there—behind the trailer.”
Through the figures hurrying as the announcer’s voice ran over the last notes of the National Anthem, Wager caught a number 48 armband as it began to wink out of sight behind the steel bars of a portable stock pen and the bulky, restless animals it held. “John—John Sanchez—wait a minute!”
The face turned, puzzled.
“Just a minute, John!”
Sanchez saw him and paused, then the face said something to someone out of sight, and then it came toward Wager.
He nodded hello, his eyes touching Jo and then settling back on Wager.
“Can we talk somewhere quiet?”
“What about?”
“Your father.”
“What about him?”
“He’s been in an accident. A bad one.”
From beyond a wooden gate leading to the chutes a voice called, “Sanchez—hey, Johnny, you’re up!” And on the other side of the stands a clatter of loud applause and stamping boots swelled with the band and the announcer’s voice.
“All right—La Hacienda after the show. It’s south of town a mile or two. I got to go now—they’re calling my number.”
Jo watched the man trot away in a stiff stride. “He didn’t seem very upset.”
“They weren’t very close. You saw that when we talked to them before.”
“Still, he didn’t even ask how badly Tom was hurt.”
It could have been because he had his mind on the rodeo and his ride coming up in a few minutes. Or perhaps because he figured Wager would tell him soon enough. Or maybe he already knew.