The restaurant at the bottom of the road that led up to the Douglass cabin was still closed. There had been no rain for a couple of days and so the dirt road showed no obvious sign. He studied it for a while, trying to discern a track that might have been different from the usual pickup or dually, but he was not only wasting his time, but stalling.
Ogden stopped about a quarter mile from the bend in the road next to the cabin. He got out, took his pistol from its holster, and walked the rest of the way. Patches of fog hung in the firs.
There was a flash of white through the trees. He crouched low and approached. There was a white van parked in front of the cabin. Beside the van was a red mid-seventies Cadillac. He thought about running back to his truck, but recalled the truck had no radio in it. He felt the pressure of time. He pulled out his cell phone and, as he suspected, there was no signal.
There was no one near the vehicles. He crept up behind the van and looked inside. It could have been the one he’d been inside in Denver, but he didn’t know. He could see that the Cadillac was empty as well. He walked up to the house, his years of MP training in the service coming back to him. He glanced in through a side window and saw no one. He circled the house and satisfied himself that it was empty. Then he did what he had been trained to do. He did nothing. He squatted and listened. He moved through the woods and stopped again. Again. Then he smelled cigarette smoke. Voices came next, floating on the thin air. The sounds came from the stream that flowed through the woods down the mountain to finally join with the Red River. He sneaked through the trees, dragging his boots through the damp ground cover to be quiet. He heard a woman’s voice, then a man’s. The man’s voice was angry or at least harsh. He could not make out what was being said. He moved closer and saw them. Three people. Two men and a woman standing by an old shed, a derelict structure set high on the bank beside the stream. The sun was cracking the clouds and beginning to penetrate the forest. Ogden could see that one of the men indeed had only one hand and in it he held a revolver instead of a hammer. The other man grunted and worked, digging and scrapping under the shed. From under the shed’s floorboards he pulled a box. The second man was not as big as the man with one hand, but he looked plenty rough. His hands were filled with the box, so at least he was not holding a gun.
“Is that it?” One Hand asked.
The second man removed the lid and looked. “Money.”
“Is it all here?” he asked the woman.
The woman looked strange in the woods, out of place in her bright yellow, spaghetti-strapped sundress.
Ogden studied them. He had a thought to go back to the cabin and wait, but then thought better. If they planned to kill Carla Reynolds, they would do it there, deep in the woods. He moved closer, found a nice fat tree, and put himself behind it. He raised his weapon and pointed it at the man with one hand.
“Would you please drop the pistol!” he shouted, feeling a pang of embarrassment at his politeness.
“What the fuck?” One Hand said.
“Now!” Ogden shouted.
The man raised his weapon, finally seeing Ogden’s arm.
“Now!”
Ogden fired. He’d never liked the 9mm. It just didn’t have the stopping power of a.45, but he caught the man in the upper right chest and he went down fast. He moved from behind the tree. The second man had dropped the box and held his hands ridiculously high above his head.
“Don’t shoot,” the second man said.
“Facedown!” Ogden shouted. The man quickly complied. “You, too,” he said to the woman. “Get down.” He pointed the pistol at her. “Facedown.”
Ogden stepped slowly closer. The man with one hand was lying faceup in a shallow part of the stream. Ogden could see he was alive. He picked up the.38 and stood there for a few seconds, collecting himself, trying to bring his pulse down.
Ogden patted down the man on the ground and satisfied himself that he was not armed. “Okay, stupid,” he said to the man. “You get up and carry your buddy.”
“Carry him?”
“Over your shoulder.” He told the woman to get up. “You, grab the box.”
Ogden followed ten paces behind them as they all marched through the woods back to the cabin. About thirty yards from the cabin Ogden saw movement and then the big shape of Bucky Paz. Ogden called to him and then he saw Warren as well.
“You okay?” Bucky called out.
Ogden realized that firing his pistol had aggravated his injured shoulder and suddenly, the adrenaline worn off, it ached terribly. “I’m fine. Never better.”
Ogden was sitting in the kitchen in his mother’s house. His arm was again in a sling. She had placed a sizeable breakfast on the table in front of him and was demanding that he eat. He ate a few bites and put down his fork.
“Twelve thousand dollars,” he said.
Eva Walker said nothing.
“Three lives for twelve thousand dollars. I mean, I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I guess it wasn’t about the money.”
“What was it about then?”
“That, I don’t know. Power, maybe. You know what, Mom?”
“What’s that?”
“People scare me.”
“They should, son.”
THE SHIFT
Ogden was pressing his way through brush along the Red River. The Red was a river in name only, being little more than ten feet at its widest, where he stood. In the spring the river could seem pretty formidable near its confluence with the Rio Grande, but it was late summer now, August, and the water was low. No one was fishing where Ogden now prowled and this occurred to him as his reason for being there. Up here in this low water there might be a good-sized trout in a pool or holed up behind a boulder, but mostly there were little trout, cagey and easily spooked. He crawled through dry weeds and cast from behind cover. He was using tiny size 22 midges and cinnamon ants bounced off the grassy bank and having pretty good luck, catching one and putting it back before sneaking up on another spot. He hiked back out after a few hours and drove south to the trout hatchery. There he sat on a grassy hill and ate his Stilton cheese sandwich. He stood there and stared down at the parking lot of fish. He finally settled on a gentle slope to have a bite. He watched a man and a boy standing on the pedestrian bridge over the fish ladder about thirty yards away.
“Hey, Deputy,” a man said, sitting down on the ground beside Ogden. It was Terrence Lowell, a game and fish patrolman.
“Terry.”
“How’s business?”
“Slow, thank god.”
“You don’t believe in god,” Terry said.
“How do you know?”
“Your shoes. They’re on the correct feet.”
Ogden laughed. “Well, we’re the only two nonbelievers in this county, you know.”
“I’d bet there’s another one.”
“You mean the Protestant guy over in Arroyo Hondo.”
Terry stared at the man and the boy. “How long have those two been standing there?”
“They were there when I got here. That makes it at least half an hour. The man has been back to his pickup a couple, maybe three, times.”
Terry nodded. Ogden ate the rest of his lunch. Another ten minutes passed.
“You went to the warden academy in Texas, didn’t you?” Ogden asked.
“Yep. Austin.”
“Then why are you here? I don’t mean that in a rude way.”
“Because that was Texas and this is New Mexico. What about you? Where’d you get your so-called training?”
“United States Army military police, I’m ashamed to say.”
“Why’s that?”
“People can say all they want about supporting the troops to make themselves feel better about having other people fight and do their dying for them, but the army is not full of our best and brightest. That just ain’t so.”