She stood, looked down at his face, and sat again. “You’re scared.” It was her way of saying she was scared.
“Yes, Mom, I’m a little scared. I’ll get it sorted out. Don’t worry. Get some sleep.”
Just before daybreak Ogden dressed without showering. He started to strap on his empty holster, but stopped, tossed it onto the high shelf in the front closet. He made some coffee and drank it while he stood in his mother’s kitchen. He held his hand out in front of him to see if he was steady. Not quite. He told himself that he had never liked carrying his pistol, but someone had shot Terry Lowell. Someone out there was dangerous. Ogden went back to the same front closet and found the Colt.32 semiautomatic his father had bought for his mother so many years ago. The so-called hammerless pistol was old, but it had never been fired and so Ogden had no idea if it would discharge now. He loaded seven.380 cartridges into the magazine and slapped it in. It needed oiling, but he didn’t have time. Anyway, if he needed it he hoped it would be for show and not action.
He quietly left the house and drove south toward the pass and to Pilar. His overeagerness had him in the front yard of Cyril Hempel at an inappropriately early hour. He thought it best to wait for some sign of movement or at least seven o’clock before he started knocking. In the draw, the early hour was accentuated by the walls of mountain that blocked out the rising sun. He put his head back on the seat and drifted enough to dream.
Terry Lowell was walking toward Ogden. Ogden was standing on the stream just above the hatchery, far enough away that the hatchery office was out of view. The light of the moon was diffused behind a bank of drifting clouds.
“What are you doing?” Terry asked. The patch sewn to the sleeve of the man’s right shoulder was starting to come away at the top. Threads frayed. Everything was fraying.
“What am I doing?” Ogden said. “What do you mean, what am I doing?”
“Here, with that shovel.”
“You should leave, Terry. Go get in your truck and drive away,” Ogden said. He could feel that his eyes were red. They burned. He looked up and saw clouds moving clear of the ridge. “Really, you should get out of here.”
“What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?” Terry asked again and again.
“Really, Terry,” Ogden said. The water in the stream seemed to slow. A crow landed in a nearby tree and cawed wildly. Ogden pulled his Sig from his holster.
Ogden jumped. He was awake. Light had crept over the top of the mountain and was making the sky pink. A bearded man was looking out through the curtain at Ogden’s rig. Ogden looked at his watch. Seven fifteen.
He got out and walked to the door. The house was little more than a shack. It was set up against a bluff, the huge rock looming over it and making the house look even smaller. There was a rock chimney and a weak pulse of smoke rose out of it. Ogden knocked even though the man had seen him approaching.
“Awful early in the morning,” the man said. He was old, maybe eighty, maybe older.
“Sorry about the hour,” Ogden said. “Are you Cyril Hempel?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m Deputy Walker from the sheriff’s department.”
“What you want?”
“Do you have a son or a grandson, a relative, by the name of Conrad?”
“No Conrad.”
“Do you have any male relatives?”
“I got a spinster sister down in Albuquerque.”
“Male.”
“I got a son named Leslie.”
“Does he ever use the name Conrad?”
“Why would he do that?”
“Is he about six feet, light-colored hair, tattooed? Slightly receding hairline?” Ogden tried to see past the man into the house.
“That sounds like my son, but I ain’t seen him in weeks. But that ain’t unusual.”
“Do you have a daughter? A grandson?”
“Hey,” the man said. “What’s this all about. No, I ain’t got no daughter.”
“And you don’t have a grandson named Willy or Billy or William or anything?”
“I’m not sure I’d tell you if I did, but I don’t, so I don’t have to worry about that. Like I said, I haven’t seen my so-called son Leslie in a couple of weeks.”
“You say that’s not unusual?”
“Not really. He’s a drughead. He’s on that meth and he looks like shit that’s been stepped on. If you find him, arrest him for me and then get him straight and I’ll give you a whole American dollar. What do you say about that?”
“Where does Leslie live?”
“Hell if I know. He’s a druggie, like I said. Where do druggies live? I don’t look for him. I stopped looking for him years and years ago. You should see what them drugs done to him. Find him and shoot him and I’ll give you two American dollars.”
“Do you know a boy named Willy Yates? Do you know anyone named Yates?” Ogden heard someone in the house. “Somebody here with you?”
“My girlfriend. Got a problem with that?”
“Mind if I ask her a couple of questions?”
Hempel turned and called into the house, “Penny, put on a robe and come here. Man’s got a question for you.”
A young, almost pretty woman in her mid-twenties came to the door. She clutched an orange robe close to her narrow frame. Ogden looked her bony face, her green eyes and dark hair, then down at her bare feet. The toenails on her left foot were painted black, the toenails on the right were unpainted.
“Do you know Mr. Hempel’s son?”
“I’ve met him.”
“Do you know where he might live?”
The woman looked at Hempel and back at Ogden. “Not really, but there’s a lab in the hills south of Hondo. I think that’s where he gets his stuff.”
“How do you know that?”
“I hear things.”
Ogden looked at Hempel, could see he was getting irritated. “Thank you, ma’am. And thank you, Mr. Hempel. Again, sorry to bother you so early.”
Hempel slammed the door.
Ogden drove back toward Plata. He was sick of the inside of his truck. Then he thought that it was preferable to the inside of a prison cell. He didn’t call in to the station. They would have called him if he was needed to come back. He drove through town and then aimlessly along the back roads east of Arroyo Hondo. He had a notion of where the meth lab the woman was talking about might be. It was an old Quonset hut that some so-called hippies had lived in during the sixties and early seventies. The meth lab was constantly moving and was operated by a rotating stream of Mexican mafia or so popular lore held. Whoever they were, they were scary, scary enough that they were given a wide berth by local and state cops, not to mention the DEA and their famous impotent war on drugs.
Ogden watched the exterior of the structure from about fifty yards, sitting on the hood of his rig. There was no movement except for a tassel-eared squirrel that ran back and forth between two juniper trees. Ogden slid down to the ground, walked around, and reached into his truck, shut off his radio. He took off his uniform shirt and put on a flannel one he kept in the back bay. He walked along the dirt road toward the building. The place and the area around it were still, quiet. The morning was cool and a breeze made it even cooler. He knocked on the old metal door. It had a rainbow-painted window in the middle of it. He knocked hard, with his closed fist, and the loose glass rattled.
A dark-skinned mustachioed man opened the door and glared at Ogden. He wore a red baseball cap with Carhartt written on it. This man wasn’t a meth user. He wasn’t high and he wasn’t sleepy. He was, as Warren would have said, fit and ready to hit. “What you want?” he asked with an accent.
“Hola, amigo. I’m looking for a white man named Leslie Hempel,” Ogden said.
“Don’t know him.”