“Damn,” Waddell said, watching the chase in wonder.
By this time, Cliff Larson had walked back to the unmarked car, waiting for me. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when we come out here,” he said laconically as I yanked open the door. “You want Herb along?”
“No,” I said. As we shot back out the long driveway, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Herb Torrance was leaning against the fence. The other three were gathered around the front of Waddell’s truck, yanking on the bodywork in an attempt to free the front wheel.
Up ahead, young Torrance’s truck reached County Road 14 and tried to turn south. He was going so fast when he hit the gravel that the truck plowed across the road and into the barditch, bouncing hard enough that a piece of back fender flew off. Torrez had better luck, throwing the Expedition sideways before he hit the county road. He slid the vehicle onto the gravel facing in the right direction.
The two vehicles, a dust storm engulfing the Expedition, hurtled down County 14 nose to tail.
As I straightened the sedan out on the county road, I grabbed the mike off the dash.
“Back off, Robert,” I said, but the undersheriff had already lifted his foot. As the county road changed from gravel to red clay, Torrance’s pickup kicked a plume of dust thirty feet high, like a great vapor trail behind a jet. After a quarter of a mile he’d pulled far enough ahead that Torrez and Pasquale could breathe.
“Well, this ain’t good,” Cliff Larson drawled.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. Some fourteen miles of county road lay ahead of Dale Torrance before he jumped out on State 56. The first handful of miles were straight, relatively level, and fast. Then the road wound up the backside of San Patricio mesa, a narrow, rock-strewn cut not much more than one truck wide. The road snaked up through juniper and brush until it broke out on top, where the mesa was scarred by water-cut arroyos and massive, crumbling fissures in the rimrock. That was the good part of 14. If Dale managed that without crumpling his truck into a ball of tin foil, he still had the final six miles, where the road meandered down the face of San Patricio mesa, switchback after switchback, toward the state highway.
The radio crackled into life, and Torrez sounded as if he were asking for some more fried chicken at a summer Sunday picnic. He’d waited until he’d crested the backside of the mesa, within range of the repeater on the San Cristobals across the valley.
“Three oh four, three oh eight. Ten-twenty.”
“Three oh four is Abeyta,” I said, and Cliff Larson nodded. He’d pulled his seat belt tight, and for once left the cigarettes in his pocket.
“Three oh eight, three oh four is in Regal. Ten-eight,” Abeyta responded after a moment.
“Three oh four, we need you at the intersection of State Fifty-six and County Road Fourteen. Right at the cattle guard. A red and white Dodge dually is headed your way. Don’t let any traffic northbound on Fourteen, and if he makes it that far, don’t let him out on the highway.”
“Ten-four,” Abeyta said.
“How’s he going to do that?” Larson asked.
“Don’t know,” I said. “He can block the cattle guard easily enough.”
“You think you’ll have any cars left when this is all over?” Larson managed a nervous laugh.
“It’s not the cars I’m worried about,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-one
On Friday night, everything had gone wrong for Matthew Baca. Less than eighteen hours later, Dale Torrance was determined to try his luck. I could guess at his mental state-but at least he wasn’t drunk.
Working in Hollywood, the celluloid high-speed getaway artist might have thundered south on County Road 14, the vapor trail of dust from his speeding car snaking down the face of the mesa. Cheek muscles twitching with the easy determination of someone who’d read the script, he’d actually be looking forward to the roadblock down at the state highway.
Maybe the deputy would park in the approved Hollywood roadblock fashion, diagonally across part of the right-of-way so that his unit could be thrown to one side in a theatrical crash that did little more than crumple the speeding thug’s fender. As the car sped by, demolishing the police units in great flaming explosions of inexplicably ruptured fuel tanks, the cops would fire wonderfully ineffectual shots with their shotguns.
I prayed that Dale Torrance hadn’t been paying attention to the movies. Both he and Undersheriff Robert Torrez had paid attention to details over the years on various hunting trips, and they both knew that three miles from the intersection with the main road, a little-used scratch in the sand and rocks forked off to the east.
In my nocturnal wanderings, even I had had occasion to amble along the path-it was little more than that. Once upon a time the trail had provided access to a cattle tank, but the gears and rods in the windmill motor had long since fused together into a hundred pounds of useless iron. Most of the blades had fallen from the fan, and the reservoir below was choked with blow sand.
Hunters used the path regularly. Since hunters used it, over the years they had extended it eastbound in search of wily javelina, antelope, and desert mule deer. After meandering past the windmill for two miles or so, the trail’s route was blocked by a deep river wash. The arroyo’s vertical sides plunged nearly thirty feet.
At one time, before cattle and juniper moved in to the range, there had been water in the Rio Guigarro. Now it roared and carved its path only after a torrential storm. Otherwise the gravel arroyo bed lay dry, a nasty drop below the rolling contours of the prairie.
The arroyo stopped the trail and turned it south. If a hunter squinted and looked in just the right place through the brush and around the various limestone outcroppings that jutted up along the skirts of San Patricio mesa, he could look directly south and perhaps a mile and a half in the distance, straight into the back door of Victor Sanchez’s Broken Spur Saloon.
Dale Torrance may have crested the edge of San Patricio mesa and seen the glint of a vehicle in the distance, parked at the cattle guard just a few yards off State 56.
With that route closed, he’d plunged another mile down the mesa face and taken the trail east. It’s possible that was what he had been planning all along. The maneuver might have worked if Bob Torrez hadn’t hunted these same hills and mesas himself.
Enough dust lingered in the air above the scuffed ground where Dale had hauled the big old truck off the road that the undersheriff, following a half a mile behind, could tell in a heart-beat that’s where the kid had gone.
“Three oh four,” Torrez’s voice said over the radio, “he’s turned east on the base trail. The only place he can come out is the saloon, unless he goes cross-country. Move on over there. Be careful. Don’t press him into something stupid.”
Abeyta acknowledged. By the time Cliff Larson and I made it to the rim of San Patricio, with a commanding view of the valley, I could see the dot that had to be Tony Abeyta’s vehicle pulling into the parking lot of the saloon.
The Ford Crown Victoria for which I had traded the worn-out Bronco was a handful on the loose, downhill gravel. Several times, Larson stretched out a hand to the dashboard for support and once when the front wheels broke loose on a particularly nasty, washboarded switchback, I heard an almost plaintive “whoa” from his side of the car. A touch of the gas busted the back wheels loose and pointed us pretty much in the direction we wanted to go.
“Three oh four, he’s turnin’ south toward you,” Torrez radioed.
“Ten-four. I see him.” All Tony Abeyta had to do was sit quietly in Victor Sanchez’s parking lot and wait for the old pickup to burst up out of the brush.
At one point, we had a clear enough view of the state highway out ahead of us to see the white and green Expedition of the U.S. Border Patrol when it flashed by, eager to join the fun.