by DaveKearns
"Has anyone questioned Ray yet?" I asked.
"Collins said they tried to find him yesterday afternoon. Apparently Ray didn't show up for work. They went by his house a few times but he wasn't home. They don't know where he is."
"That's interesting," I said. "Yesterday morning I followed Ray and his pal Marty out of town on the highway towards the quarry."
Sandy's eyes got big. I stopped her before she could jump to conclusions. "It was just a coincidence," I said. "We were both speeding, and a patrol car passed me and pulled Ray over instead. A couple of hours later I was driving back into town and Ray's car was still sitting on the side of the road, empty. I thought maybe they'd had car trouble or been picked up for drinking and driving. But I went out that way last night and the car was gone."
"What time did you see the patrol car pull him over?" she asked.
"About 8:30, maybe."
"I don't suppose you got a look at the driver of the police car?"
"No. I'll lay you even money it was Bullard, though."
"It's possible," she said. "There are a dozen other officers who work the day shift, though. I'll check the impound lots. Maybe Ray did have car trouble. Or maybe he was arrested and the car was towed and I just didn't hear about it."
"Worth checking," I said.
She leaned back in her chair and rolled her head from side to side. I could hear popping noises coming from the muscle tension in her neck.
"Has anybody searched Ray's house yet?" I asked.
"Collins said they were going to get a search warrant today."
"If they find an expensive camera, I'd be interested in hearing about it," I said.
"Why?"
"Brick's camera gear is missing. I think Brick had something on Ray, maybe pictures of something Ray was into. I think Ray broke in and took the camera gear, and Bullard came by later to clean up Ray's prints while you were giving me a ride back to my hotel."
"I don't remember any evidence of a break-in when I went through the house."
"Bullard didn't mention that to you, huh? When I got into the house, one of the screens was pulled off and the lock on the opened window was broken. I think maybe Ray was the one who broke in. It could have been Marty, too."
"Who's Marty?" she asked.
"Marty Broad Eagle," I said. "He was in the car with Ray when I got a flat and Ray gave me a ride to the gas station. I think those two hang out together."
"If you don't buy the theory that Ray wanted to get even with Brick for Brick ratting him out for being lazy, what's your thinking about the grudge between Ray and Brick? What could Brick have taken pictures of that would be so dangerous?"
"I don't know. Evidence of something. Maybe it was about Ray tossing a load of copper ore, but that doesn't seem like a big enough deal to have caused all this. The manager at the quarry told me that someone broke into Brick's locker at work, too. That makes me think someone was hunting for something they wanted badly." I thought about the roll of film in my pocket. I didn't intend to turn the film over to Sandy until I had a copy of my own.
"I agree," she said. "But what's the connection with Bullard? I just don't get it. Why would he wipe down the prints? That’s serious, serious stuff. He could go to prison for that." She was deep in thought. I watched her roll the coffee cup between her palms, warming her hands against it. It was still cool in the kitchen from the previous night.
"Maybe Brick had something on him, too," I said. Sandy wasn't listening. She was thinking about her mounting suspicions that her boss was involved in something that was making people die and disappear.
I watched her for a few moments, itching to get the film developed.
She put her coffee mug on the table and stood up. "I better be going," she said. She had a troubled expression.
"Thanks for telling me what’s going on," I said.
She nodded. "You’re welcome," she said. "This bullshit with Bullard is giving me heartburn."
I followed her to the door and watched her walk down the driveway to the squad car. She eased the car away from the curb and rocketed away down the suburban street. I closed the door and checked the time. It was after ten a.m., and I started looking for my car keys again. Then I realized that she had taken the photocopy of Ray's personnel file with her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I drove over to the mall and parked close to the entrance. The mall had been open for just a few minutes, and the only cars in the lot were employee cars parked at the perimeter.
I went inside the big glass doors. Across and to the right, sandwiched between a jewelry store and a maternity clothes store, was the photo shop Michelle had told me about. A chain screen suspended from the ceiling hung halfway across the entrance to the one hour film developer shop. I sat on a bench across from the store and waited for the shop to finish opening.
I could see a short, dark-haired man wearing a yellow blazer inside, putting change in the cash register and checking the settings on the machine that developed film. The man finished his preparations and turned a crank by the entrance that pulled the chain screen the rest of the way up. I waited until he was back behind the counter before I went into the store.
"I have some film I'd like to have developed," I said. I pulled the roll of film from my pocket and put it on the glass countertop.
The man picked up the container and made a face. The container still smelled like dead fish. He pulled the lid off and slid the metal roll onto the counter.
"Twelve exposures. Black and white. Slow-speed stuff. How soon do you need it?"
"Can I get it in an hour, like the sign says?"
"I'll run your film through first. It should be ready in about 45 minutes. What about prints?"
I hadn't thought about that. "What kinds do you have?"
He gestured at a display on the wall. "All sizes," he said. The pictures ranged from billfold size to 8 by 11. I didn’t know what was on the roll, but I figured that bigger would probably be better if there was any need for detail. "Eight by eleven is fine."
"Very good," the man said. He had a gold crown on one of his lower front teeth that shined when he smiled. He keyed the purchase into the register.
"That will be 20 dollars."
I pulled my wallet out, and realized I only had a hundred and ten in cash left. I added the pictures to my swelling credit card bill. The man in the yellow blazer pulled a stub off a film development packet and handed it to me.
"It'll be ready by eleven for sure," he said.
"I'll be back for it."
The man nodded and took the film over to one end of the film developing machine. It was the size of a walk-in closet, with large black reels, cables, and gears on the outside of the beige box. It made a pleasant humming sound.
I walked back out into the mall. A discount store and a fruit smoothie shop were close by. I went to the discount store to look around in the sporting goods section. I looked at the camping and fishing gear for a few minutes without any real desire to buy anything. I worked my way towards the counter in the back and checked out the displays of sunglasses. My old pair had scratched lenses, and they didn't seem to be dark enough to cope with the glare in New Mexico.
"These are glacier glasses," a kid working in the sporting goods section told me. "The leather on the side keeps wind and stuff from blowing in your eyes."
The lenses were incredibly dark. They looked well suited for the desert where blowing sand might be a problem, and where the glare was overpowering in the afternoon. "Do you have much of a problem with glaciers around here?" I asked.
The kid stared back at me across a counter full of guns, puzzled. "Forget it," I said. "I'll take a pair." I had thirty minutes to kill.
I eyed the pistols under the glass countertop. "I'd like to take a look at the automatic and the snub nosed revolver."
The kid used a key on his belt to unlock the cabinet. He pulled the two pistols out and laid them on a padded red velvet rectangle on top of the glass.
> I picked up the automatic. It was a gun metal blue Ruger .38. It had a comfortable, solid feel. I popped the clip out, checked the action, and slid the clip back in. I held it at arm's length, aiming at the wall behind the counter. "How many rounds does it hold?" I asked.
"Six in the clip, one in the chamber," the kid said, looking around, bored. He seemed to value the prospect of selling a $400 gun equally with the prospect of scratching his scalp.
I lay the automatic on the countertop and picked up the revolver. It was a short-barreled .44. I flipped the cylinder to the side and looked at the five gigantic slots for bullets. They were each big enough to take a small cigar. The barrel was barely two inches long, but it was perfect for blasting someone at short range. I closed the chamber and hefted the thing. The grip seemed small for the size of the bullets. "How many rounds does this one hold?" I asked. The kid knew I had just looked at the chambers. He checked my expression, trying to decide if I was stupid or just being annoying.
"Five," he said. He held up the fingers on his hand to provide a visual aid.
I lay the gun on the countertop and fingered the tag on the gun. $320.
"Seems like a lot for the guns."
"You could try a pawn shop, I guess." The kid's patience with me was at an end. He was ready to go flip through one of the wrestling magazines at the front of the store, I guessed.
"You're quite a salesman," I said, "but I'll leave the guns here. I'll take the glasses, though." I put them on and gave him a big smile. The kid ignored me and rang the sunglasses up. I put them on my charge card and I made it a point to whistle as I walked away.
I still had ten minutes to kill before I went back for the film. I sat at the fruit smoothie shop and worked on an orange drink, concocting theories about what was on the film. Pictures of police pay-offs? Pictures of killings? Pictures of Ray, Marty, and Sgt. Bullard splitting a six-pack on a pile of stolen copper ore?
The mall was surprisingly busy at 11:00. There were lots of people coming in to have lunch at the restaurants in the mall. Mothers shopped with their pre-school age children. I looked into the faces of these people and recognized something I found missing in myself, a sense of ordinary belonging and ease. I felt disjoint from my previous life in Oklahoma City, but I had no desire to return there. I found myself powerfully drawn to Michelle and to staying in Alamogordo, in spite of my brother's murder.
I finished my drink and went down to the film shop to collect my pictures. They were ready on time, but I waited until I got into the car to open the packet. I ran the windows down, pulled the pictures from the packet, and laid them in my lap.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The first couple of pictures were of the desert at dusk. The shots reminded me of the dunes at White Sands. One shot was of a snake making its way across smooth sand, highlighted by an ink-black shadow on one side.
The next two pictures were taken in near darkness. They showed headlights coming from the highway and into the desert. In the first picture, the lights seemed so far away that I wondered why Brick had bothered to take them. In the next one, I understood. The headlights were on the front of one of the quarry trucks. The truck seemed to be about a hundred yards away.
In the next shot, the truck was parked facing back towards the highway with its headlights off. The sky must have been clear that evening because the moonlight seemed to reflect off the salt flats, making the outline of the truck quite clear.
The next shot was of the quarry truck dumping its load on the flats. In the one after that, I saw what appeared to be about twenty men standing around the truck. Some men had what looked like large bags at their feet. Others appeared to be wearing backpacks. "Where the hell did these people come from?" I wondered. I guessed that they had been hiding behind the dunes in the previous pictures.
The next picture showed several people climbing the ladder that went up the side of the truck to the top of the bed. The final shot showed the truck driving away, and the people and bags were gone. The pile of dumped copper ore was left in silhouette. The message was clear: the people showed up, got in the truck, and were hauled away. I was thinking hard about the pictures while I drove back to Brick's house. I called Michelle when I got inside.
"Michelle, I need some help from you," I said.
"What's that?" she asked.
"Brick took pictures of the desert on that roll of film I found. Looks like some shots of one of the quarry trucks, too."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really. Could you help me figure out where the pictures were taken if I showed them to you?"
"Sure," she said.
"Maybe I could come over and meet you in the parking lot," I said.
"Okay. I'll see you a few minutes after noon. I'm going to have to go, Del," she said. "I'm late for a meeting."
"Okay, see you then."
I sat at the kitchen table looking at the pictures, trying to pick out any faces on the men with the bags. It was too dark and the men were too far away. The license plate of the truck was unreadable, as well.
I drove over to the quarry and used Brick's card key to get into the parking lot. I pulled into a slot and shut the engine off just before noon.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I sat in the car and flipped through the pictures, trying to find anything I'd missed the first couple of times I'd looked at them. I started the engine and turned the air conditioning on. It was too hot to wait with the windows down.
A couple of minutes later Michelle tapped on the window of my door, startling me. I reached across and pulled the handle to open the latch on her door. She came around to the passenger side and climbed in. I handed her the pictures and watched her face as she flipped through them, looking at the pictures intently. I tried to read the expression on her face. Finally she handed the pictures back to me.
"It could be one of two things, Del. Either it's illegal immigrants or it's a mule train."
"What's a mule train?" I asked.
She pointed at the picture of the men milling around the truck. "See the backpacks and bags?" she said. "Maybe they're full of cocaine, heroin, who knows? The border patrol has caught enough people trying to bring big loads in trucks and cars that now the drug dealers have groups of men carry the stuff across the border through the desert. They call them mule trains. Immigration and D.E.A. don't look in the desert as hard as other places."
Something clicked in my mind. I thought of the immigration roadblock.
"They're riding in the quarry trucks to bypass the immigration roadblocks and the city," I said. "Once they get to the other side of the city, they're past all the checkpoints."
She nodded. "It looks like it to me. Del, these people will kill you if you get in their way. The border patrol finds bodies along the border sometimes. It’s not a joke." I heard her, but I wasn’t listening.
"Can you tell where these were taken?" I asked.
She went through the pictures again, slowly.
"I'd say about three miles west of here on the north side of the highway. I think this background here is the San Andres range, that mountain over there." She pointed at the huge range that bordered the Western edge of the White Sands missile range. "Are you going out there to look around?" she asked.
"I'm thinking about it."
"What would you look for?"
"I don't know," I said. "Whatever Brick was looking for." She nodded, understanding. We were silent for a few seconds.
"I don't know what to tell you, Del. I know you don't want to back off, but these people will kill you if they know you're watching them or looking for them. You could wind up like Brick."
I didn't say anything. I felt something hardening in my gut like cold rocks. She looked at her lap and shook her head slowly. "I need to be with Rosalie tonight. Will you come to dinner at my house?"
"What time?"
"Six thirty."
"Six thirty it is."
I leaned across the console towards her and we kissed, but she felt
tentative and remote to me. She pulled away and I could see a single tear on her cheek.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I just have the feeling that I'm going to lose you, too," she said. Then she got out of the car and walked back towards the building.
Chapter Thirty
I drove west on the highway for a while before I found what I was looking for. About four miles west of the intersection where the quarry road met the interstate, a faint set of large tire tracks left the highway and headed north across the hardened desert surface.