The Wolf Path
A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #4
Judith Van Gieson
THE WOLF PATH
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1992 Judith Van Gieson.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by other means, without permission.
First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO.
All Rights Reserved.
Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-460-7
Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9487-5
Cover photo © Cynthia Kidwell/Shutterstock.com
For Eamon Dolan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the New Mexico ranchers and biologists who were so willing to share their time and points of view and who might prefer to remain anonymous; attorney Alan M. Uris, my legal advisor; Kevin Lancaster and Romulus and Remus at the New Mexico Supreme Court Law Library; wildlife experts Stephen Bodio and Daniel Malcolm; New Mexico experts Art Judd and Tasha Mackler; my trusted readers Dick Cluster and Irene Marcuse; wolf advocate Dan Moore; Nick Allison, my eagle-eyed copy editor; Alfredo Lujan for checking my New Mexico Spanish; Claire and Richard Zieger and Lincoln Hansel for keeping me abreast of wolf news; and Dora Atkinson for putting me up (and putting up with me) in Santa Fe. Any errors in this book are the author’s own.
A special thanks to Pamela Brown and Shaman for introducing me and so many others to wolves and for starting me on the wolf path.
Some of the places in this novel exist, others are products of the author’s imagination. None of the characters represents or is based on any person, living or dead, and all the incidents described are imaginary. As of this writing the lobo does exist in captivity in the United States and possibly in very limited numbers in the wild in Mexico. Every effort has been made to be accurate about the lobo, government policy concerning the lobo and public attitudes toward the lobo.
The Wolf Path
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
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MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON
1
IT WAS 104 where I live, in the Duke City, Albuquerque. Heat vapor flattened the hulking gray mountains and made them shimmer. Cars heated up on the interstate, boiled over and fell off. Outside my office a thistle bloomed with poisonous purple vigor. Inside, the swamp cooler wheezed and tried to create the ambiance of a Carlsbad Cavern. The skirts of my secretary, Anna, were rising daily. The clothes of my partner, Brink, wrinkled. When the temperature reached 105 I expected Anna to show up in shorts, and Brink not to show up at all. We sat in the Hamel and Harrison Building, our frame stucco law office on Lead, drinking iced coffee for breakfast—it was too hot for huevos rancheros, too hot for green chiles, too hot for Red Zinger tea, too hot for law, too hot for order, too hot for people.
“Jeez, getta look at this,” said Anna, skimming the Journal’s front page. “Someone saw God in a flour tortilla.”
“Happens every summer,” I said.
“And it got so hot in Phoenix yesterday,” she continued, “they had to close the airport. The planes couldn’t get off the ground.”
“How hot is that?”
“A hundred twenty-two.”
“Shit.”
“Once it’s over a hundred what difference does it make anyway?” Brink’s fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows humped—they do that when he asks a question. “It’s only a matter of a percent, just a degree.”
“Yeah? And what’s the difference between life and death, reason and insanity, happiness and drugs?” I asked him. “Just a degree.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” said Anna. “You had a call yesterday from March Augusta.”
“Yesterday?”
“You’d already gone home.”
“Right.” I got up, went into my office, closed the door, lit a cigarette and opened the window where we’ve installed wrought-iron bars to keep us in and them out. Swampy hot air mingled with desert hot air, but thinking about March had a cooling effect. The last time I had seen him was in November in Fire Pond, Montana. Snow was on the ground and it had gotten cold, but not as cold as it would get. March was a former client, an environmentalist who had been accused of murdering a poacher. He has a great voice, a Western voice, a voice with a lot of space and time in it.
“Neil Hamel,” he said, when I got him on the phone. “How the hell are you?”
“Pretty good. I hope it’s cooler up there.”
“One-oh-two in Fire Pond yesterday.”
“A hundred and two in Montana?”
“Makes you wonder about global warming, doesn’t it?”
“I do my part. I never use hair spray and I don’t drive an air-conditioned car, either.”
“I have some good news. Katharine is pregnant.”
“How nice.”
“And we’re getting married.”
“Married? Well. Congratulations.” You had to expect that sort of thing from men you were attracted to: they got married and they had kids. Happens all the time. They’re in motion when you’re standing still. Well, whenever I get a twinge of marriage envy, I remember what another Katharine, Katharine Hepburn, said: “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.”
“How’s your friend?” he asked.
“The Kid? He’s fine.”
“Good. The reason I’m calling, Neil, actually, is to ask your help for a friend of mine, a guy I knew years ago in California. He was pretty radical in those days and the federal government had a file on him a foot thick. He’s straightened out now, gotten interested in wolves, and he has an educational program where he travels around the country with Sirius, a young timber wolf. There’s a plan in New Mexico to try to reintroduce the lobo, the Mexican gray wolf, near Soledad. Juan’s going to be down there next week giving his program.”
“Juan? Is he Hispanic?”
March laughed, a good sound, muffled by a thick red beard that I remembered well. “No, but he calls himself Juan Sololobo. Like I said, he’s from California. Did you know, by the way, that Sirius is the Wolf Star, the brightest star in the sky?”
“No.”
“The Pawnees thought the wolf came out of the spirit world in the southeastern sky every night and crossed the Milky Way, only they called it the Wolf Path.”
It was the kind of thing March would know. He’d told me once that Venus was bright enough to be visible during the day but that most of us had lost the ability to see it.
He got back to his business. “Juan has to have a permit to keep a wild animal in every state he visits. Sometimes officials hassle him over this, particularly if they are antiwolf. If they decide the permit is incorrectly filled out, they could confiscate Sirius. It’s happened before with other wolves and Juan’s a bit paranoid. I was wondering if you would mind going down there to help him out with the permit and just be around if he has any trouble. There’s a lot of antiwolf sentiment in Soledad.”
“I don’t suppose he’s the kind of guy who goes looking for trouble?”
“He’d probably say that trouble went looking for him.”
Well, if there were no people like that there’d be no work for people like me.
“I told him what a
good job you did representing me,” March added.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“What exactly did this Sololobo do in his radical days, anyway? Kidnap heiresses?”
“Robbed a couple of banks. People who robbed banks back then were radical, remember? Now they’re the presidents and CEOs.”
“And guess who’s paying for it? How does Sololobo know the federal government has a file on him?”
“One of his ex-wives got it through the Freedom of Information Act. So, will you go?”
“Well…” I said.
“Don’t worry about the money; Juan can afford it. He figures lawyers’ fees into the cost of doing business.”
“Well…” I said it again.
“Have you got something else on?”
I flipped through my calendar—divorce, divorce, real estate closing, divorce. “Not much.”
“Well?”
“March, it’s 104 here, it was 122 in Phoenix yesterday. Soledad is practically in Mexico. It will be an oven.” For once in my life I didn’t feel like going anywhere.
“Neil, you’re not gonna let a little bit of heat scare you off, are you?’’
“I didn’t say that.”
“Good. Then you’ll go?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“Give me one good reason why you won’t do it.”
I had a reason, but a good reason? “Oh, all right,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“Great. Juan’s first wife, Jayne Brown, has a ranch near Soledad—that’s J-a-y-n-e, by the way. Juan’s going to be staying there and there’s plenty of room for you, too.”
I took a look at my clock, which told me I had a closing to go to five minutes ago. “Nice talking to you, March.”
“You, too, Neil. Juan will be in touch about when and where to meet him, but you’ll let me know how it all works out, won’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
******
The Kid and I spent the evening on my deck at La Vista Luxury Apartment Complex watching cumulonimbus building up over the Sandias and sipping Jell-O shots. Jell-O shots are a summertime favorite in the Duke City, a mixture of Jell-O and an appropriately flavored liquor: orange Jell-O and Cointreau (or Cuantro, as it’s spelled around here), lemon with vodka, lime with triple sec and tequila (a.k.a. Margarita shots). It’s a way of having your Cuervo Gold and eating it, too. They’re dessert and cocktails together, forget about the dinner. I served them in wineglasses and we sucked them down. As the day came to a close, the clouds darkened, the cicadas screamed, the beat went on, a primitive, insistent undercurrent that was omnipresent in this summer of $15,000 car stereos that pulverized the pavement. It was music that I didn’t listen to so I didn’t hear lyrics, only beat, not a heartbeat, just a beat, a deep, dark, summertime beat.
"Kid, how many people can there be out there with $15,000 car stereos?” I asked him, since he was an auto mechanic and knew about these things.
The Kid shrugged. “When they’re that loud, Chiquita, it doesn’t take very many.”
That was true. We live in a time in which virility is measured by the things boys are able to buy or steal: the boom of a bass, the power of an amp, the speed of a car, the caliber of a gun, the air in a shoe. Music had become a weapon. Maybe it had always been a weapon, but technology had ratcheted up the escalation, as I recently heard a general say. Technology had made one man’s pleasure or power trip or stereo everybody else’s pain. It made me think of Jell-O and a simpler place.
“Kid,” I said, “remember March, the guy I defended in Montana?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“He called me today.” The Kid waited. I told him the news. “He’s getting married and they’re expecting a baby.” The Kid nodded as if to imply that was good for them. “He has a friend he wants me to represent who educates people about wolves. The friend is going to be in Soledad with a wolf next week giving his program and March is expecting some problems about a permit.”
“Is he going to be there?”
“Who? March?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Just the friend and his ex-wife.”
“Soledad is very near the border, Chiquita,” the Kid said.
I cut him another shot of Cuervo green, plopped it in his glass. “You’ve been there?”
He ignored the question, which he tends to when his past comes up. “The wolves that lived down there are the Mexican wolves, the lobos,” he said. “They are smaller than the wolf of the north. There are not many left. I hear them sometimes in the Sierra Madres when I was a boy.” What he was doing in the Sierra Madres as a boy I didn’t know. As far as I did know the Kid grew up in Mexico City, one of numerous offspring of a Chilean father and an Argentine mother, political exiles who disappeared from their country before their country disappeared them. Any extra money he had went back to Mexico still. The Kid threw his head back, faced the sky and howled, a long, eerie cry that was one of the loneliest sounds I’d ever heard. A dog across the arroyo answered back, a dog in La Vista answered him—and this was supposed to be a pet-free complex.
“They have lobos here, you know, in the Rio Grande Zoo,” the Kid said when he’d finished howling. “They had four pups in the spring. You want to go there Sunday to see them?”
“To the zoo? On a Sunday?” Zoos reminded me of my childhood and were not among my favorite places.
“Why not?” he said.
We stayed outside a little longer and watched the storm build. It appeared from where we sat to be moving slowly, a formation of rain marching from high country to low, from Rio Arriba County to Otero, from the Sangre de Cristos to the Soledads, from I-25 to I-10. The lightning came first and fingered the Sandias, stabs of light, white, gold, violet bolts hitting the mountain peaks in an electric dance. In a good summer storm—and this was one—the bolts connect in the atmosphere with horizontal flashes. One powerful surge circled the sky. Once the thunder kicked in, it made car speakers seem irrelevant, puny, monaural. The thunder pounded, the rain came fast and hard. The ground doesn’t absorb rain in this part of the world; it repels it. In fifteen minutes Civic Plaza would be ankle deep in water, the diversion channels built to control flash flooding would be full and churning and some drunk would likely fall in. The rain crossed Tramway, marched down Wyoming. When it hit Montgomery we went inside, closed the windows and got into bed. The cruising cars rolled up their windows or went home, the thunder and lightning headed south, but the rain lingered. The Kid went right to sleep—he always does—and there was nothing to listen to but the sound of much-needed rain. It felt like a night when bad dreams might not get through the rain, when I wouldn’t be reaching for guns in the nightstand or fighting off nightmares of killers like I had been all summer. I went to sleep too.
******
The Kid and I don’t get out together often. We don’t have a social life and a circle of like-minded friends. Usually when we’re together—and that had been every night lately—it’s dinner at my place, then bed. On the nights the Kid worked late playing the accordion, it was just bed. As I’m used to seeing him up close in my living room, deck or bedroom, I forget what he looks like from a distance to the rest of the world. He’s tall, long-legged, skinny as a street dog, with thick black curls. El greñas, the mophead, they say where he comes from. In the winter he fades but in summer his skin has a warm glow and his hair becomes electric. He was holding it in place with a red José Cuervo bandana that he’d folded into a cholo roll. As we walked through the zoo a whole lot of women turned to watch him go. It was enough to make me wonder what I looked like. Had the Kid changed, I asked myself, or did he have some magnetism I’d never noticed before? There was something quick and determined in his walk, the way he held his head, some quality of alertness that attracted attention.
Even without staring women I’ve never been crazy about zoos. They remind me of grammar school with no recess, marriage with no possibility of divorce
, a life sentence in a padded cage. I don’t like being on the inside looking out or the outside looking in. I didn’t much like childhood either. Zoos are tough when it’s 70 degrees, worse when it’s 102, but that’s exactly what it happened to be when the Kid and I got there Sunday on a vapor lock of a day, a day when your car had to sit and let the gas fumes settle for a half-hour before it would even think about starting up again. The heat made me want to shear the fur from the llamas, remove the polar bears from their chlorinated pool and get them to an arctic floe, go home and crank up the air conditioner.
The Kid led me through a latticework passageway that the sun had burned into a maze of patterned illusion, past the booths selling Kodak, popcorn and pink cotton candy that looked like fiberglass insulation with sugar, on to the place where the lobos lived. We stood on a rise and watched them through a window in their fence. From a nearby cage some South American condors, black vultures with a long wingspan, humped their wings and watched us watching them. The lobos had a large enclosure, bounded by a high coyote fence and shaded by cottonwoods. They were native New Mexicans until they were eliminated from this state. The heat didn’t bother them. They were shedding their fur in large clumps and they paced the enclosure relentlessly, wearing vegetation to dust. They looked like medium-sized dogs, with white markings around their faces and dogs’ long noses, but they didn’t act doglike; there was something uncompromisingly wild in their pacing and their yellow eyes.
“Mira,” the Kid said. “E1 lobato.”
He pointed toward a mound in the center of the pen, where a pup tugged at an adult caregiver. In a wolf pack only the alpha pair breeds, I knew, but all the wolves participate in raising the young. Three lobos were pacing, the adult and pup stood on the mound, more were resting at the back of the pen in the shade of the cottonwoods, but I couldn’t tell how many. They had a way of slipping in and out of vision even when they were standing still.
“You are lucky,” the Kid said. “People don’t get to see the niños very much.”
“You’ve been here before?” I asked.
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