Scavengers (21 page)
The telephone caught Estelle in midstride between refrigerator and cooler. For just a moment, she looked at the instrument as if she could make it vanish before it triggered the answering machine on the fifth ring. She set the bottles of chilled juice down on the counter and picked up the receiver.
“Guzman.”
“Estelle, Tony Abeyta.” The deputy sounded as if he were holding his breath when he talked.
“What’s up, Tony?”
“On December twenty-seventh of last year, Mountain Trails Sporting Goods in Las Cruces sold a forty-four magnum Marlin Model eighteen ninety-four lever action rifle to Eurelio Saenz.”
The silence on the line hung heavy for a few heartbeats. The deputy anticipated Estelle’s question. “The salesman remembers mounting the scope and bore-sighting the rifle for Saenz at the time. He remembers that Eurelio had an old scope with him, but that it was much too big for the rifle. He ended up buying another one that he liked better…the whole package. Rifle, scope, rings, and mounts.”
“Uh,” Estelle groaned. “I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case.” She sighed. “Have you passed word to Jackie yet?”
“No, ma’am. I just got off the phone with Cruces. Jackie’s out on the prairie somewhere, sifting sand.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d get in contact with her first thing. She needs to know what you’ve found out. You have a record of the serial number and such?”
“Mountain Trails faxed me a copy of the ATF form. It’s interesting, though. The salesman I talked to this morning remembers Saenz. He was absolutely sure it wasn’t a straw sale.”
“How would he know?”
“He says that Saenz came in by himself, and looked at several rifles before he decided on the Marlin. In fact, he came close to buying another weapon entirely. The salesman said that Saenz spent more than two hours making up his mind and then selecting the right scope and all. It wasn’t as if he was buying the stuff for someone else. He made some interesting choices.”
Estelle leaned against the kitchen counter. “In what way?”
“The salesman remembers Saenz talking a lot about hunting javelina in rugged country. He didn’t want a high-powered scope. What he was looking for was something with relatively low magnification, but a wide field of view.”
“And he found it?”
“Apparently so.” She heard Abeyta shuffling papers. “He bought a little two-and-a-half power jobbie with a reticule that shotgun shooters like. It’s got kind of a circle thing in the middle with crosshairs that lets you swing on a moving target.”
“A man running for his life across the open prairie certainly qualifies as that,” Estelle said.
“I guess it would,” the deputy said. “And by the way, the salesman didn’t remember one way or the other if the hammer extender was attached or not. He did say that if the store mounts the scope for the customer, they put the extender on as a matter of course.”
“But he doesn’t remember for sure in this case?”
“No, ma’am. He wouldn’t swear to it. He says ‘probably’ is as close as he can come.”
“Did he happen to remember if Eurelio purchased ammunition at the same time?”
“He didn’t buy any. The salesman threw in a twenty-round box as part of the deal. Winchester Western, two forty grain jacketed hollow points. Sarge says that’s the most common round.”
“That doesn’t give us much,” Estelle said. “He would have shot that up in the first five minutes when he went out to try the rifle.”
“His prints weren’t on the shell casing from the truck, by the way,” Abeyta said.
“I’m not surprised. Those were a different brand, as well.”
“Sergeant Mears got a start on the prints before he was called away to the fire, but he’s pretty sure. He was going to get back on it later today.”
“You’re at the office now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Have Gayle put out a bulletin for Eurelio Saenz. You heard he skipped to Mexico?”
“With interesting circumstances is what I’m told.”
“That’s right. And you might as well add Isidro and Benny Madrid’s names to that, too. They’re in on this somehow. Their little heads just show up too often. Anyway, make sure she gets that out ASAP. And then get ahold of Jackie. She needs to know what you found out, and she needs to get a search warrant from Judge Hobart. I’ll be back from Mexico later this afternoon, and we’ll see what we can find. If there’s anyone we can spring free to keep an eye on the
taberna
in the meantime, we need to do that. You might pull Collins for that. Tell him that he’s just to keep surveillance…nothing else. No confrontations, no nothing. I don’t want him walking into the middle of something.”
“No problem. On the bulletin for Saenz, you want A and D?”
Estelle sighed. “My intuition tells me that Eurelio is neither armed nor dangerous, but I wouldn’t bet on the folks he might be with. So yes…I guess he’s earned it,” she said.
“That’s what the sheriff said. And by the way, he’s already requested the warrant. He wants to watch the place in the meantime, so we can use Collins for something else.”
“That’ll work. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Estelle said.
“No problem,” Abeyta said again. Estelle disconnected and stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand, the lighted buttons inviting use. After a minute, she took a deep breath and hung up. Irma Sedillos had taken the two boys on an expedition up the arroyo behind Twelfth Street, and the house was quiet. Her mother had traded her rocker for the living room sofa, and she napped peacefully, curled under the old afghan, the oxygen tubes trailing down to the canister on the floor.
Estelle retreated gratefully to the bedroom. Despite the earlier shower, she could still smell the various aromas of the long night. For what seemed like an hour she stood in the shower, the hot spray pounding the aches out of her body and the steam clearing her sinuses.
She stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped in a large white towel, to find her husband stretched out on the bed, eyes closed.
“Your mother’s got the right idea,” he said. “Smartest one in the bunch.”
“I didn’t hear you come in,
querido
.”
He opened one eye. “Any good news?”
“Depends on the definition of
good, oso
,” Estelle replied.
Francis lifted a hand toward her, and Estelle moved to the edge of the bed. “No new corpses would be a start,” he said. He slipped his hand through the folds of the towel and rested his hand on the flat of her belly.
She turned slightly toward his hand and sat down on the edge of the bed as Francis made room. “We’re pretty worried about Eurelio Saenz,” she said. “He’s skipped across the border with a couple of men, probably the Madrid brothers—and maybe not voluntarily, either.”
“That could be the last you’ll see of him.”
Estelle didn’t reply, but she knew that Francis was probably right. He reached up and ran a finger under a tangle of damp hair, frowning.
“I wish there was more we could have done for Eleanor Pope,” he said. “But her system just decided that enough was enough. Not twenty minutes after you and your mother left.”
Estelle stretched out beside her husband. She put both hands over her face, her palms muffling her words. “Do you happen to know what kind of insurance she had?”
Francis laughed. “Ah, no.” He lifted up one of her hands and looked deeply into her right eye. “That’s an official-type question, isn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“One of the hospital bookies can tell you,” he said. “I didn’t give it a thought.”
“Um.”
“But you don’t need to do that right this minute,” he added. “It can wait.”
“And you need a shower,” she said.
“You were in there about a week. Did you leave some hot water?”
“Probably not. You should have come in.” She rolled over to snuggle against him. “We could warm some up, couldn’t we?”
He grinned. “That would be nice.”
Teresa Reyes straightened in the seat, leaning forward slightly. She pointed at a scar on the steep hillside ahead.
“I remember when they blasted that,” she said. “I think all the adobes settled this far…” She held her hands several inches apart. Fluorite had initiated outside interest in Tres Santos shortly after the First World War, adding a dimension to the economy and culture of the tiny village that was a mixed blessing. Many of the miners’ shacks still stood, most little more than piles of weathered boards pimpling the hillside.
“They haven’t mined for years, though, have they?” Estelle asked. She could remember taking considerable delight in exploring the forbidden shafts, cuts, and holes in the mesa sides, looking for crystals that people with no imagination had earlier deemed worthless.
“No. They’re all gone now.”
Before the gray-brown hills and mesa flanks began to show the effects of haphazard boring and blasting, Tres Santos had concentrated on its central blessing—the Río Plegado.
River
might have been an exaggeration. The Plegado’s trickle of water followed a circuitous path down the flanks of the limestone hills, through the
bolson
of the valley before finally disappearing underground.
After the brief flurry of the mines, residents of Tres Santos had subsisted from the fields irrigated by the Plegado and by the artistry of two extended families of wood-carvers—Roman Diaz, his eight children and their families, and the nine progeny of his father-in-law, the late Domingo Eschevarria. Eschevarria had been the first to understand that the thick, contorted stumps of Chihuahuan desert shrubs were the well-spring for a world of whimsically carved creatures. Tourists bought them by the hundreds, as fast as the Eschevarria and Diaz chisels could turn the figurines loose from the tough, gnarled wood.
Situated six miles from the border and on the main hard-packed dirt and gravel road to Janos and the interior, Tres Santos was a tourist’s delight. Remote enough to be Old Mexico, the village gave tourists the impression that they might be the very first to have discovered the place. The dirt road wound down into the small valley, itself just enough of a depression in the desert that the horizon was always within reach.
The galleria of cottonwood, elm, and stunted walnut followed the river, and the lane itself crossed the water in a half dozen places, the flow rarely wide enough to splash both front and rear tires simultaneously.
The invention of the automobile had had at least one marked impact on Tres Santos. Over the years, derelict autos had been dumped into the river, forced up against the eroding banks on the outside of strategic bends. The automotive riprap worked pretty well until a cloudburst upstream created a bulldozer of chocolate-colored water powerful enough to rearrange the whole mess.
Estelle eased the van out of the fourth river crossing and turned sharply right, bouncing up and out of the riverbed. A high adobe wall greeted them. “I don’t want to talk to anybody,” Teresa said as they neared the gate. Ceramic letters over the arch announced
Casa Diaz
, and Estelle saw three vehicles in the driveway close to the portico. The one nearest the road was a familiar tan Toyota 4-Runner with government plates. “Maybe later,” Teresa added.
Estelle understood her mother’s reluctance to lay on the horn, bringing her neighbors out in force. The Diaz family, from the sixty-five-year-old Roman and his wife Marta, down through all eight children to little Tinita, included twenty arms powered by an endless need to embrace and hug, with back-slapping and rib-nudging thrown in.
If Teresa was to enjoy a few quiet moments at her former home, it would have to be before the village knew of her presence. And once the Diaz family knew, the rest of the community was sure to follow.
They drove along beside the high wall, following the curve of it toward a grove of aging cottonwoods whose roots were just a bit too far from the current riverbed. The trees looked as if they were patiently waiting for a spring flood to change the course of the Plegado back to their benefit.
Teresa Reyes’ home was basically four rooms with a screened porch across the back. The tree nearest the front door had grown until its roots crushed upward against the stone foundation, sending large cracks radiating up through the wall, around the narrow, deeply cased window, and up to the vigas. Estelle turned off the lane, drove across the close-cropped weeds of the yard and stopped as close to the front door as she could.
“This place,” Teresa said enigmatically. Estelle glanced across at her mother. Teresa propped her chin on her fingers, elbow on the door rest. She regarded the little building. The crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes deepened.
“It’s held up pretty well,” Estelle said. Except for a brief time when it had been rented by one of the Diaz sons and his bride, the place had been standing empty for three years. When Teresa had fallen at the back porch step and broken her left hip, she had moved from Tres Santos to Posadas. And when her daughter’s family had gone to Minnesota for a brief interlude, Teresa had traveled with them.
“What do you want to do with it?” Teresa asked.
The question took Estelle by surprise, but she knew that her mother didn’t mean the cosmetic cracks in the plaster, the cobwebs, or the mouse turds.
“I haven’t thought about it,” she said. “And it’s not my decision.”
“I talked to Roman last week,” Teresa said. She pointed to the north. “Those trees over there died. You can see the school from here now.” Sure enough, the small cinderblock building that housed the current iteration of the district school stood bleak and gray at the end of a field of rusting derelict cars. “It was better before the river took it out,” she said, referring to the small, neat adobe building where she had taught for close to forty years before the Plegado had gotten angry after a cloudburst and straightened out a bend or two.
“What did Roman say?” Estelle asked. The telephone was among the many modern luxuries, gadgets, and annoyances that Teresa eschewed. Its impersonal nature somehow offended her. No telephone lines ran to the tiny house standing before them, and Estelle could imagine how serious Teresa’s concerns must have been to prompt her to make a telephone call to Roman—and an international call at that.
“About the house?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Teresa said, and shrugged. “It’s something that has to be decided sometime.”
“What do
you
want to do with it,
Mamá
? ” She could see by the expression on her mother’s face that there was no easy answer, and she didn’t pursue the question. She pulled the door handle. The aroma of weeds crushed under the tires of the van was pungent. Her mother sat quietly. Estelle took a deep breath, trying to place herself on this tiny patch of dried Mexico. As a child, the valley had seemed limitless, the stream in constant conversation with itself, the hills studded with secrets. The squat, square adobe house was snug and cool, the supply of companions constant and close at hand. That was a different lifetime.
Even though the van was now parked a scant thirty miles south of Posadas, Estelle had visited her mother’s house in Tres Santos no more than a half dozen times in the past three years—and more out of courtesy to the Diaz family, who kept an eye on the place, than anything else.
“Do you want to go inside?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Teresa said. “The dust will make me cough.”
“Let me go see,” Estelle said, and stepped out of the van. Three steps carried her to the shade of the small front porch, itself no more than four feet deep and eight feet long. Estelle looked at the cracks in the plaster finish that she and her husband had applied five years before. She rested her hand on the warm adobe and looked up at the web-tangled eaves. She could smell the soft musty aroma forced out of the adobe blocks by the high February sun. The front door was without lock or metal latch. A carved block of wood turned into a slot in the jamb, snugging the door against the frame. The gray wood had shed most of its paint. She ran her hand over the sunflower that her great-uncle had carved in the slab wood and saw that traces of yellow enamel still clung to the petal impressions.
The other door of the van opened and her mother waved a hand. “Just go ahead,” she called. “I might get there, and I might not.”
By the time Teresa had managed to get out of the vehicle, Estelle was at her elbow.
“I can do this,” Teresa said.
“I know you can,
Mamá
. But the last time you were here, you broke your hip.”
“If I do that again, just roll me in the river and let it go at that.” She stopped with one hand on the van’s front fender, the other on her walker. “You wouldn’t think that ten feet is such a distance.” She pointed a finger to the north without releasing her hold on the walker. “You remember all the time you spent in that little village you built down in the trees?”
“Sure.” The fist-size adobe houses, with roads, fields, gardens, and various other fortifications, lasted until one of the infrequent rains melted them into amorphous lumps, ready for urban renewal…or until Frederico Diaz conducted a raid from
his
town farther upstream.
“Francisco and Carlos would be right at home there,” Estelle said. “I’d like to go look at the Villa stump before we go.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s still there.” Teresa nodded at the front door. “Let’s see if there are any surprises.”
Estelle knew exactly what she meant, since the little house offered protection for all kinds of creatures, and even a brief term without human interference made the zoo’s residency all the more likely. Estelle stayed at her mother’s elbow until they reached the door. The wooden latch lifted effortlessly.
Teresa wrinkled her nose at the strong odor of skunk. “Probably nesting under the floor,” Estelle said.
“Well, he can have it, then,” Teresa said, waving a hand in dismissal. She turned away. “There’s nothing there anyway.” Estelle pushed the door fully open and stepped across the threshold.
“It would be good to air it out for a while,” she said. “Let me get the back.” She crossed the tiny living room and kitchen and pulled the brass bolt to open the back door. The rush of cool air brought the scent of cottonwood leaves.
“It’s not so bad,” Teresa observed. She stood in the front door, both hands on the walker, nodding. A simple white kitchen table remained, along with two straight chairs and a small braided rug in the living room. Various nails projected from the wall, some supporting shadows. An unadorned crucifix hung by the front door.
Estelle looked into the tiny bathroom and bedroom, both neat, tidy, and vacant.
Teresa shuffled to the nearest chair and sat down carefully. “I was born here, you know,” she said.
“I know,
Mamá
. And I know you always loved it here.”
“That a house should stand so long.”
“That too,” Estelle laughed.
“I’m as old as the hills now.”
“Not quite.”
“I feel like it, sometimes.” Off in the distance they heard someone’s voice raised, but couldn’t distinguish the words.
Estelle sat in the other chair, elbows on her knees. “I brought some munchies along,
Mamá
. Are you hungry?”
Teresa shook her head. She was smiling, and pointed out the door. At the same time, Estelle heard the pounding of feet on the earth outside. In a moment, a teenager appeared in the doorway, a hand on each side of the jamb as if holding herself back from catapulting inside.
“Tinita,” Estelle cried, and was out of her chair and to the door in three steps. She wrapped her arms around the young girl in a ferocious hug and swung her off her feet. “Look at you,” she said, finally releasing the girl to arm’s length. Tina Diaz blushed. “
Mamá
, look at this one.”
Teresa Reyes stretched out both hands to Tina, who had been greeted into uncharacteristic silence.
“I didn’t know you were coming down today,” Tina said when she’d caught her breath. “You didn’t tell us!”
“Secrets, secrets,” Teresa said. She sat holding Tina’s left hand in both of hers. “And you didn’t tell me that you’d grown into such a beautiful woman.”
Tina ducked her head. “
Papá
said he saw your van drive by. He’s talking with
Capitán
Naranjo. The
capitán
stopped by for lunch.” She beamed at first Teresa and then Estelle. “He asked if you would come to the house.”
“Which ‘he’,” Estelle almost asked.
“Oh yes,” Teresa said. “But just for a moment, Tinita. We’re tired, and we need to return to Posadas. This police officer here,”—she winked toward Estelle—“she’s more busy than any five people. I’ve taken too much of her time already today.”
She pulled her coat more tightly around her frail body. “I need the sun,” she said. “This house has winter in it.” She pushed herself out of the chair. “Why don’t you help me out to the car,
hija
,” she said. “My daughter has a couple of things she needs to look at, and then we’ll be along. You can tell
el Capitán
that she won’t be late for their meeting.”
She turned and smiled at her daughter. “Sometimes young hearing in an old head is a nuisance, don’t you think?”
