Death Song (2 page)

Riley returned to the starting line, where he donned protective eyewear, loaded his weapon with live ammo, put extra magazine clips in the pouches on his belt, and waited for the instructor’s signal to go. When it came, Clayton tracked Riley’s progress with binoculars. After Riley finished, the instructor inspected the targets, tallied the score, and gave Clayton a thumbs-up sign. Then he moved Riley over to the adjacent stationary target range and tested him with the shotgun. Once live firing ceased, Clayton joined the instructor behind the firing line while Riley went downrange on the handgun course to pick up his spent brass.

“Good shooting,” the state cop said, handing Clayton the paperwork. Riley had qualified as an expert marksman with both his department-issued 45-caliber semiautomatic and the twelve-gauge pump shotgun.

“Excellent,” Clayton said as he slipped the signed paperwork into Riley’s training file, went downrange, and gave his new deputy the good news.

Riley smiled slightly as he dumped his spent brass into a rusty coffee can. “I thought I did okay.”

Clayton nodded. “More than okay. Let’s head back to the office. Sheriff Hewitt will want to talk to you.”

Riley feigned a worried look. “Am I in trouble already?”

Clayton laughed and shook his head. “No, he just wants to give you his traditional pep talk before he cuts you loose on patrol.”

“The new guy speech?” Riley asked as he slipped a fresh magazine into his .45.

“Exactly.”

Riley holstered his weapon. “Thanks for your help this week.”

“Not a problem. Welcome to the Lincoln County S.O. I think you’ll do just fine.”

Riley laughed. “Believe me, I’m glad to be here.”

On the drive to the sheriff’s office in Carrizozo, the county seat, Clayton glanced at the dashboard clock. It looked like he would actually keep his promise to Grace to get home on time, so he could look after Wendell and Hannah while she attended an evening meeting of the Mescalero Apache Tribal Council.

Grace ran the child development center on the reservation and was scheduled to give her annual report and submit a budget request for additional funding. She’d been working hard on the project all week long.

In Carrizozo, Clayton took Riley into Sheriff Paul Hewitt’s den of an office and sat quietly while Hewitt gave the new deputy his spiel about teamwork, the importance of the chain of command, his vision of community policing, and other weighty matters. The meeting ended with Riley amiably agreeing to work a double that evening to cover for an officer who’d called in sick.

Hewitt held Clayton back after Riley left. In his fifties, Hewitt was serving his last term as sheriff and would retire when it expired. He sat behind his big desk, kicked back in his chair with his cowboy boots up on the desk, rubbed his chin, and shot Clayton one of his patented “give it to me straight” looks.

“You’ve had Riley under your wing for a week. What do you think of him?”

“He’s solid, levelheaded, and intelligent,” Clayton said. “Takes direction and supervision well. The only question I have is why he never made any rank at his old job.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“Yeah. He said he likes patrol duty, likes being on the street, doesn’t care much about moving up the chain of command, especially after being a top sergeant in the military.”

“Do you buy it?” Hewitt asked.

Clayton shrugged. “Why not? Don’t you?”

“It’s possible,” Hewitt said as he paged through the training report Clayton had assembled on Riley and the personnel records that his previous employer, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, had sent down. “He got solid performance evaluations in his old job and was promoted to deputy three, which is equivalent to a corporal’s rank.”

“Did you talk to the Santa Fe County sheriff about Riley?” Clayton asked.

Hewitt closed the paperwork and got to his feet. “Yep, and he reassured me that I wasn’t getting a reject or a screwup from his department. Said he was sorry to lose him. So let’s hope Riley works out, likes it here, and stays with us.”

“That would be nice,” Clayton said.

“Don’t you need to get home so Grace can go to an important meeting or some such?”

“Affirmative,” Clayton said, rising to his feet.

Hewitt grinned. “Well, then, get the hell out of here, Sergeant, so I don’t have to pay you any more overtime this week. Enjoy your days off.”

Clayton threw Hewitt a quick salute on his way out the door, dumped his files into his desk drawer, locked it, went to his unit, and started home to the Rez.

After an unusually wet summer and fall, winter in New Mexico had failed to materialize. From December on, the days had been unseasonably warm and no measurable moisture had fallen. The mountains were bare of snow, and last summer’s lush grasslands were now straw-colored tinder fields ready to explode into raging wildfires caused by a lightning strike, a careless smoker, or campfire embers kicked up by the wind.

Clayton took his favorite route home, driving the road that crossed the river by the old stone stables of Fort Stanton, an authentic nineteenth-century U.S. Army fort where General Blackjack Pershing had once served as a young officer. He passed the maritime cemetery where some World War Two German POWs were buried, and navigated a series of curves to the top of the mesa, where two dark and heavily forested mountain ranges filled the horizon east and west, sharp against a clear, cloudless sky.

A regional airport on the mesa served mainly private planes. Most of the rest of the tabletop land was state and federal, which kept the real estate developers at bay. But in the grassland valleys, vacation homes and five-acre ranchettes dotted the landscape, and on the private land near the town of Ruidoso, high-end gated communities with homes on million-dollar-view lots peppered the mesa.

Touted by the local politicos as evidence of a growing local economy, more subdivisions to serve the upscale vacation home market were in the planning stage. But Clayton didn’t think that building second and third houses for very rich boomers benefited the area in any meaningful way.

The sun, bright in a cloudless sky, hovered at the tip of the Sierra Blanca Mountains. Clayton lowered the visor to cut the intense glare and reached for his sunglasses. When he glanced up, a deer attempting to hurdle the hood of his unit slammed into his windshield.

Clayton stomped hard on the brakes as the animal’s front legs shattered the glass. The impact bounced the deer onto the roof, and Clayton heard the emergency light bar rip free and clatter to the pavement. Through the rearview mirror Clayton saw the deer thud onto the highway.

He peered as best he could through the shattered windshield, veered back into his lane, and ground to a stop at the side of the road, thankful that there had been no oncoming traffic. Shaken, he got out and walked to the animal. It was a buck with large ears and a white tail tipped with black that identified it as a mule deer. Clayton guessed it weighed about 350 pounds. It was mortally wounded: Blood streamed from its ears and mouth, and bone splinters jutted through the torn muscle and ligaments of its legs. The buck tried to lift its head, and the effort made it convulse in spasms.

Clayton stepped back, unholstered his .45 semiautomatic, chambered a round, and steadied his weapon. The animal’s eyes blinked rapidly at Clayton just before he put it down with a bullet in the head.

Back at his unit, he assessed the damage to his vehicle. The hood and roof were caved in, the windshield and emergency light bar were destroyed, and a mangled right front fender had chewed up and shredded the tire right down to the rim.

He got some emergency road flares, put them on the highway to warn oncoming traffic, and called dispatch on his handheld radio to report the incident.

Paul Hewitt broke in on the transmission before dispatch could respond. “Clayton, are you all right?”

“Ten-four, Sheriff,” Clayton responded. “But I’ll need a tow truck at this location.”

“Affirmative,” Hewitt replied. “We’ve got personnel rolling to your twenty.”

“I’m standing by,” Clayton said as he disconnected. The sun had dropped behind the western mountains, and dusk had started to deepen. He went to his unit, got more flares, put them out, and then stood by the deer carcass with a flashlight to guide the occasional car around the scene.

Department policy required the state police to investigate any accidents involving on-duty sheriff’s personnel, and Clayton knew it would take a good amount of time for the officer to conduct the investigation once he was on the scene. It didn’t matter that it was clearly a no-fault incident; every detail would be done by the book because it involved another cop.

Clayton glanced at his watch. Even under the best of circumstances it would be several hours before he could get home. There was no way he’d be there in time to look after the children while Grace attended the tribal council meeting. He called her on his cell phone, explained what had happened, reassured her that he was unhurt, and gave her the bad news.

“Don’t worry,” Grace said. “I’ll find someone to look after the children.”

“Call my mother,” Clayton said.

“I’m sure she’ll be glad to help out. Are you certain you’re not hurt?”

With his flashlight Clayton waved a slow-moving car around the deer carcass. “Not a scratch, but my unit is a mess and I’m gonna have to hitch a ride home.”

“How did you manage to run into a deer?” Grace asked.

“You’ve got it reversed,” Clayton replied. “The deer ran into me.”

“Still, you killed Bambi’s father,” Grace whispered in mock seriousness.

Clayton laughed. “Please don’t tell the children.”

“Never,” Grace replied. “I’ll see you when you get home.”

“Good luck with the tribal council.”

“Thanks. Your dinner will be warming in the oven.”

Clayton disconnected. He could see flashing emergency lights approaching from both directions. From the west, a volunteer fire department EMT unit slowed and stopped on the shoulder of the road, and two men hurried toward him. From the east, two S.O. units ground to a halt. Paul Hewitt and Tim Riley dismounted their vehicles and moved quickly in his direction.

There were more flashing lights coming down the highway from Ruidoso, probably the state cop and the tow truck. Or a state game-and-fish officer. Or whoever, Clayton thought as he groaned inwardly. For the next several hours he would be on the receiving end of a police investigation, which was never a happy prospect, especially for a cop.

Clayton apologized to the dead buck before Sheriff Hewitt and Tim Riley drew near. He was truly sorry the animal had died for no good reason.

It was a hell of a way to start the weekend.

After making sure with his own eyes that Clayton was unhurt, Paul Hewitt stayed at the scene with his sergeant until the state police officer’s investigation had been wrapped up, the dead buck had been removed from the roadway, all other emergency personnel had departed, and the tow truck operator had winched the disabled unit onto the flatbed and driven away.

In the back of Hewitt’s vehicle, a 4×4 Explorer, Clayton had stowed all of his personal gear and the department-issued equipment he’d cleaned out of his unit. The two men sat in the Explorer and watched the blue flashing emergency lights of the tow truck fade down the highway into the night.

“Have you had enough excitement for one day?” Paul Hewitt asked as he cranked the engine to his unit. “If that buck had come through your windshield, chances are good that I would be on my way to tell your wife that she had just become a widow.”

“That scared the bejesus out of me,” Clayton replied.

Hewitt laughed and put his unit in gear. “Me too, and I wasn’t even here. Let’s get you home.”

“Yeah,” Clayton said. “Good idea.”

On the drive, the two men fell silent. Weary from all the explaining he’d done at the crash scene, Clayton appreciated the quiet. Hewitt came to a stop in front of Clayton’s house—a house that the sheriff had helped to rebuild some years back after a killer with a vendetta had blown it up in an attempt to murder Clayton and his family. It sat on a wooded lot a good ways in from the highway that ran through the reservation, but not too far from the village of Mescalero.

“The place is looking good,” Hewitt said, eyeing the single-story house with a pitched roof that now sported a covered porch he hadn’t seen before.

“It’s coming along,” Clayton said as the porch lights came on.

“I like the new porch,” Hewitt said.

“It took a bunch of my days off to finish it,” Clayton replied.

“Do you need a hand with your gear?” Hewitt asked.

Clayton opened the passenger door. “No, I’ve got it.”

Hewitt nodded.

“Thanks for the ride, Sheriff,” Clayton said.

Hewitt nodded again. “Not a problem.”

Clayton gathered up his gear and carried it to the house. The front door opened and Grace stepped outside with Clayton’s mother, Isabel. Clayton put his gear down and embraced the two women. The children, Wendell and Hannah, both in their pajamas, scooted out the front door and joined the family hug.

Paul Hewitt honked the horn once and drove away, happy—considering the alternative—to have been able to deliver Sergeant Clayton Istee home safe to his family.

Covering 4,859 square miles, Lincoln County was almost three thousand square miles larger than Santa Fe County, where Tim Riley had served as a deputy sheriff for six years. He was glad the population difference between the two counties was even more staggering. Home to about fifteen thousand permanent residents, Lincoln County had roughly one tenth the population of Santa Fe County and a much lower crime rate. Riley liked the idea of living and working in a place where folks were mostly law-abiding and the pace of life was a good deal slower.

When Tim had broached the subject of applying for the Lincoln County S.O. job to his wife, Denise, he’d expected her to dig in her heels and say no. Born and bred in Santa Fe, she loved living close to her siblings and her nieces and nephews. But surprisingly, Denise had backed Tim’s decision all the way, asking only that they return to live in Santa Fe sometime in the not-too-distant future.