by Rex Burns
Wager knew. “Did you find out anything more about Tom’s death?”
“Not much more than we already have. His sons weren’t much help—they hadn’t seen him in years, they said.”
“Did you get in touch with his employer?”
A note of caution came into his voice. Wager’s question was moving beyond professional courtesy into jurisdiction.
“Why?”
“For some lead as to what he was doing up that way without his truck.”
“He didn’t know, Detective Wager. Like I told you, we don’t know much more than we did. But I am working on the case.”
“Can you give me his employer’s name?”
“What for?”
“In case Sanchez has some pay coming. His sons might want to know about it. Did you tell them who he worked for?”
“Well, no. I didn’t think of that—I figured they’d know. Tell you the truth, though, they weren’t too interested in him.”
“I’ll pass it on to them.”
“All right.” He spelled the name and address. It was in Sterling, Colorado, in the northeast corner of the state and about 125 miles from Denver. Wager thanked him and after hanging up the telephone drew little doodles around the name and address. This wasn’t his case, and he had plenty of Denver’s to worry about. It sure as hell wasn’t his jurisdiction, either. But his personal time was his own, and Tom had been a friend.
He left in midmorning of the next day, aiming the Trans-Am up the long, straight lanes of I-76 as it sliced through the rolling, yellow prairie. On the western horizon, the ragged blue shadows of mountains gradually dropped below the sun-baked earth to leave an unbroken circle of sky and treeless land whose early green was felt more than seen beneath last year’s winter-killed grass. It reminded Wager of being at sea, except that the oil-streaked concrete lanes split the yellow-and-blue world into hemispheres where, occasionally, a distant farm with its glimmering buildings and huddled cluster of tiny trees swung past the car. Despite the official fifty-five-mile limit, what traffic there was cruised at seventy, and Wager—finding pleasure in the feel of motion—settled the car into the flow of semi-trucks and salesmen and the occasional tourist who preferred this route to the more scenic swing through the Black Hills.
Sterling was a farm and ranch community as well as county seat, and had a scattering of light industry and the various services that went with it. The ones located near the interchange where he turned off were the restaurants and gas stations that highway travelers wanted; farther in, he passed farm-equipment lots and grain elevators, shopping centers and meat-processing plants, before finding the major cross-town street he looked for. State Highway 14 led out again, west; and beyond a row of towering cottonwoods lining an irrigation ditch, he found County Road W, a straight line of gravel that led from one horizon to the next. Turning, he slowed at the occasional mailbox to read the names. Finally, on one of the mailboxes planted in a dirt-filled milk can that could be lifted on top of the winter snows, he saw the name D. W. Barstow, and a lettered board below it, Shorty Barstow Rodeo Company. He turned and clattered across a rusted cattle guard, balancing the Trans-Am on the dirt road’s center ridge to keep its underside clear of the occasional rock.
The ranch road led up a shallow bowl of prairie that cupped Wager between the dry earth and the heat-paled blue of empty sky. It wasn’t hard to imagine the sudden appearance, on one of the surrounding ridges, of a line of Pawnee horsemen, silent, ominous, as they studied the wide valley below. And Wager felt the tug of wonder that must have led the first Europeans across these grassy seas of rolling earth. The next ridge was right there: gentle and inviting in its incline, mysterious in what it masked from view. Even if you knew that when you got to the top you would see only another broad, treeless valley, you still wanted to go. Because beyond that shallow next trough, only a mile or two, would be another gentle ridge just as inviting, and who knew what might lie beyond that?
He took this thought with him as he slowly steered the Trans-Am up the ranch road to the rim of prairie and tilted over into the next valley. There, along a small twisting cut fringed with a ragged growth of cottonwood and hackberry, sprawled a scattering of ranch buildings and corrals. A windmill flickered slowly beside a large stock tank, and on a small rise behind the two-story farmhouse, Wager saw the ungainly antennas of radios and the broad dish of a television receiving station. As he neared the packed earth of the yard, a yellow dog padded slowly from beside an outbuilding to bark twice and then stand with its head sagging beneath the sun and its tail wagging slowly. By the time he pulled beside a flatbed truck parked near the screened porch, the dog had turned and plodded back to its shady sleep.
Wager stepped out of his car into the weight of the sun. He stood for a moment and listened to the small sounds around him: the distant lowing of cattle, the rhythmic squeal of the windmill beyond the house, a zinging hum from some hurrying insect, the slow tick of his cooling engine. They made the larger silence spread until it matched the breadth of prairie, and Wager let himself drift for a few moments into the widening silence. Then he turned and went up the porch steps, his heels clattering on the sun-faded boards and into the welcome shade of the porch.
A girl answered his knock—late teens or early twenties, with dark hair falling in loose curls to her shoulders. She wore Levi’s and a plaid shirt and walked with the stiff knees of a horse rider. “Can I help you?”
“Is Mr. Barstow in? I’m Detective Wager. I called earlier to tell him I was coming.”
“Oh, yes—come on into the office. I’ll tell him you’re here.” She led Wager to a small room in the front of the house and showed him a cowhide chair. The other furniture was a metal desk and matching chair, a manual typewriter on a wheeled stand, and—on one wall—a console with a computer screen, keyboard, and printer. Against the other wall, surrounded by shelves of livestock reference books and file folders, was a radio set. Its on light was a bright green, and Wager could smell a faint mixture of utilitarian odors in the quiet room: leather, tobacco and sliced apple, the slight chemical tang of warm electronic equipment. The girl keyed the microphone twice and then said, “Daddy? Daddy—this is Judy.”
“Go ahead, Judy.”
“That detective is here. The one from Denver.”
“OK—tell him I’m on my way in. I’ll be there in about ten minutes. And Judy, did you hear anything from Earl?”
“Not yet, Daddy.”
“All right. See you in a bit.”
Hooking the microphone on its bracket, she asked, “Would you like some ice tea? Glass of water?”
“Tea would be nice.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
The house was one of those large frame structures that could still be seen on the few farms and ranches near Denver that had not yet been sold for development. Two stories high, one long axis formed the front with its wraparound porch; the other axis led off behind the house like the leg of a T. It held the kitchen and other work areas. Wager bet that tacked onto the kitchen was a glass-walled room with a cement floor, designed for the wife’s potted plants and for the husband to kick off his mud-crusted boots when he came in from the farmyard. In the coolness he could hear the life of the house, a creak of someone moving around upstairs, the startled squawk of a chicken beyond the back porch. From the kitchen came the rattle of crockery. A radio or television noise flitted briefly and then faded, and the distant gurgle of water down a long pipe in the walls was followed by a door shutting and the murmur of voices. The girl came back with a large glass of iced tea. “I forgot to ask if you wanted lemon. We got some if you want it.”
“This is fine. Thanks a lot.”
She smiled and left.
Wager was halfway through the glass when he heard the creak of heavy springs and saw a pickup mounted with wooden cattle barriers lurch into the yard. A stocky man swung out of the cab and crossed the yard with the same stiff-kneed walk as his daughter. A moment later they were shak
ing hands. He was slightly shorter than Wager and had a chest that bulged against his shirt from his collar to his belt; his graying hair was cropped short and stiff beneath the Stetson that he placed carefully upside down on his desk.
“So Tom got killed. He was a good man, and a damn good wrangler. I’m mighty sorry to hear about it.”
“Did the sheriff tell you how it happened?”
“Only that he got hit by a car. Damned hit-and-run.” Barstow lifted the lid of a worn humidor and tamped a couple of pinches of tobacco into a pipe. “Have they been caught? The ones that did it?”
“He’s a homicide victim, Mr. Barstow. He was beaten up and died of blows to the head.”
The match paused above the pipe bowl. “Tom? Tom didn’t fight. Not anymore, anyway. Hell, all he ever drank was beer.”
“Did he work for you long?”
“Almost fifteen years. And he never got into any trouble in all that time.” He shook out that match and lit another, the flame bobbing down toward the tiny hiss of the bowl.
“He was still working for you when he died?”
“Sure. He was one of my top livestock scouts. Harder’n hell anymore to find good bucking horses. I don’t know how Tom did it, but he could come up with the rankest stock in the business. We had five of his picks go to the National Finals in the last four years—Mean Velvet and Velvet Whirlwind won Top Stock for saddle broncs.” Barstow’s head wagged. “I’m going to miss Tom. So is rodeo—he knew his horses.”
“Was Tom on a scouting trip when he got killed?”
“I don’t know about that. Down near Salida, was it?” The pipe was going now, and Barstow leaned back in his chair.
“Yes.”
“Could’ve been. We don’t get many horses from there, but he might’ve heard about one and gone over to look at it.” He explained, “They turn up in the damnedest places.”
“Is there a lot of money involved in rodeo stock?”
“A lot? Well, I’m a medium-sized outfit and I got fifteen, eighteen million tied up in livestock, equipment, and personnel. The big outfits, the ones that have their own arena crews and sound equipment and announcers and clowns and all … well, yeah, you can say there’s some money in it.”
“Did Tom carry a lot of money when he was buying horses?”
“Oh—I see what you’re getting at. You think he was robbed and killed?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Yeah, I reckon it is. Hell, that’s nothing new out this way, is it? But if that’s the case, they must’ve killed him before they robbed him, because Tom wasn’t likely to just smile and hand over his money.” The pipe stem emphasized the words. “He didn’t like to fight—but he could.”
“So he was carrying a lot of cash.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know. But you’re right, a lot of sellers do want to get paid in cash so they can beat the goddam IRS, and I don’t blame them. Don’t know how much longer that’ll last, though. Now they’re trying to make me fill out a goddam form on every damned head of livestock I transfer. But he wasn’t buying for me.”
“He wasn’t?”
“Not unless he had a line on a really top horse. I got my strings filled for the rest of the season. Bulls are something else—we’re always after bulls, because there’s so many rides them. But I got my horses. Unless, like I say, he heard of a real champion. But he didn’t tell me about it if he did.”
“Was he scouting for anyone else?”
“He signed on with me.”
“And you weren’t buying.”
“No. Tom would have to get the money from me to buy, and I didn’t hear from him.”
“What work did he do when he wasn’t buying?”
“Driver. He was supposed to drive some bulls up to Belt, Montana, on the twentieth. That’s about when it happened, wasn’t it?”
“He was found the night of the eighteenth.”
“Well, when he didn’t show up, I have to admit I cussed him some.” Barstow’s voice dropped to a rumble. “Poor old Tom, and me calling him names you wouldn’t believe. I should’ve known—it was the first time in fifteen years he didn’t show up when he was supposed to. I should’ve known.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Tell you in a minute.” He anchored the pipe in his teeth and reached for a desk calendar and wet his thumb on a grimy sponge sitting in a little glass cup. Then he flipped back through leaves that were filled with notations. “The fifteenth. He came in with some head I bought off Beutler and Son down in Elk City, Oklahoma. Unloaded and went on down to his place.”
“He drove the semi down to his ranch?”
“No—took that back to town. That’s where my depot is.”
“Did he seem any different? Worried in any way?”
Barstow settled forward on his desk, his pale eyes narrowing, and he puffed and tried to remember. “He did have something on his mind, yeah. But he didn’t say what it was. Tom wasn’t the kind to bring his troubles to anybody if he didn’t have to.”
“Did he say anything at all? Can you remember what he said?”
“Let’s see, now—he just said he had to get on down to his ranch. I told him he could stay over here in the bunkhouse—hell, he was going out again in four days—but he said he wanted to get on home.”
“He didn’t say why?”
“No.”
“Is there anyone he might have spoken to? Anyone he was close to?”
Barstow’s head wagged. “You can ask down at the depot, but I don’t think so. Tom’s like a lot of the boys—he went his own way.”
“Did he ever speak of his family or his sons?”
“He did mention them. In fact, he went out to see them—out on the Western Slope, I think. He said they were into rodeoing. He was proud of it.”
“This was before or after the trip to Oklahoma?”
“Before. He went out there for a couple days and then came back and had the run to Elk City, then went home.”
“Did he say how his visit went?”
“No … come to think of it, he didn’t say word one about the boys when he got back. Just made his run and went home.”
“Did he ever mention the T Bar M ranch?”
“The T Bar M?” The man thought back, his broad thumb with its thick, ragged nail scratching at the bristles under his chin. “I can’t place it. I don’t think I ever heard of it. They deal in rodeo stock?”
“I don’t know. It’s the ranch his sons work on.”
“Oh. No, I never heard of it.”
Wager tried one more general question—did Barstow know of any reason why Tom might have been killed—and heard the answer he expected. He got the address of the company depot in Sterling and thanked Barstow for his time, then left the coolness of the large old home for the glaring heat of the prairie.
As he drove, Wager tried to pull some tentative conclusions out of what Barstow told him. One of the clearest was that Tom had not been relieved but worried by whatever he found at the T Bar M. A second one—still hazy—was that he had been killed by someone who promised him something or by someone he knew. Someone, anyway, who could talk him into the long drive from Sterling to Antonito, and then get him in a car and drive north to Salida. Maybe. There were still a lot of maybes, a lot of things he needed answers for, and he might as well start.
Wager caught sight of a public telephone in the corner of a cut-rate gas station and angled the Trans-Am out of the noisy truck traffic that followed the state highway through town. Punching in his travel and access codes, he added the number of the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office. Defensive or not, Allen was still a cop; he was supposed to want to put the bad guys behind bars. The telephone was picked up on the first ring, and Wager asked for Detective Allen. When the familiar voice answered, he said, “This is Detective Wager, DPD. I’m calling about the Sanchez homicide again.”
“There’s not a damn thing new since yesterday, Detective Wager.”
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br /> “That’s not exactly why I’m calling. I just talked to Sanchez’s employer up here in Sterling.”
“Oh?”
“He doesn’t have much to add, but he did say that Tom was not on a buying trip for him. Any money he had would have been his own.”
“All right. But that could still be enough for someone to rob him.”
“He also said that Tom was worried about something before he went home on the fifteenth. But he didn’t know what.”
Somewhere on a neighboring line a tiny voice buzzed dimly. “Do you have any idea what it might have been?”
“I think he was worried about something his sons may have been involved in. But that’s pure guesswork. I’d like to find out for sure.”
“I don’t remember asking for your help, Detective Wager.”
“And I don’t remember saying I could do a better job than you can. But maybe I can save you some time and legwork up at this end of things.”
Like a mosquito, the blurred voice rose and fell. Allen was silent, and Wager could imagine a mental coin tumbling through the air. It came up heads. “Did Sanchez say anything to you about his sons?”
“Only that he was worried about them. He thought they might have been running around with the wrong bunch.”
“When was this?”
“A couple weeks before he was killed.”
“Why in hell didn’t you tell me this before?”
“As far as I know, his sons are clean. I didn’t find a thing when I checked them out. That’s what I told him.”
“And as far as I know, Wager, I’ve got a robbery-homicide by person or persons unknown. I don’t need any half-assed, farfetched theory thrown in to screw things up!”
“The man was my friend, Allen. He asked me to help him and then he got killed. I’m not saying you’re right or I’m right—all I’m saying is this is a possibility and I’m asking for some information from you so I can check it out.” He added, “If I find anything, it’s all yours—call it interdepartmental cooperation.”
“What kind of information?”