“Victor,” I said by way of greeting.
He stood for a minute regarding me, hands locked in the folds of his much-used apron.
“What you doing, drinking that stuff this time of night?” he asked, and jerked his chin at the coffee. “You ought to take something to help you sleep.” I knew that it was as close to humor as Victor Sanchez was apt to drift.
I laughed and pushed the remains of the burrito to one side. “That was good, by the way.”
“Sure it was good,” Victor said. He was a squat, homely man with heavy facial features to match his rounded, muscular shoulders and thick waist. He brought the faint, cloying aroma of the greasy kitchen with him.
“You want to know about Matt Baca, you go ask Matt Baca,” he said.
“There’s not much I need to know about him, Victor,” I said. “I know he stopped by here not too long ago, and was refused service. Either he was intoxicated, or underage, or both. It doesn’t matter.”
“Did he get hurt, or what?”
“No, he’s all right,” I said. “No big deal.”
He rested a beefy hand on the bar. “You guys can put a man out of business,” he said.
“Not likely, Victor. You’ve been here, what, thirty years?”
“Sure. But now we got your man sitting up the road there, all the time. Hell, he might as well sit his ass right in the parking lot, you know? Bad for business.” He shook his head slowly. “Bad for business.”
I knew that Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s pet peeve was drunks. He had lost a younger brother to one years before, and I knew that on occasion, as he had this night, he prowled within easy reach of intoxicated saloon patrons as they staggered out into the parking lot. Counting the four establishments in the village of Posadas that sold liquor, there were nine licensed hot spots in all of Posadas County. In the course of a month, I listened to enough radio traffic to know that Torrez didn’t single out the Broken Spur Saloon as his prime target. But there was no point in arguing statistics with Victor Sanchez.
“Cheer up, Victor,” I said, and fished a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. “After the election in another couple of days, Bob will be too busy to sit on his ass anywhere.”
“How come you didn’t run?” Sanchez asked, and the question caught me by surprise. I didn’t figure Victor for the type who would get away from his diced onions and chicken tenders long enough to concern himself with politics. I couldn’t imagine that he cared one way or another why I had chosen to retire.
I handed the ten bucks to Christine Prescott and waved away the change. “Because I’m old and tired, Victor. That burrito and coffee will give me just enough energy to get home and into bed.”
I zipped up my jacket and thrust my hands into its pockets. “The undersheriff is a good man, Victor. He’ll do a good job.”
“We’ll see about that,” Victor said.
Chapter Four
When I left, the Broken Spur was shutting down for the night. I should have shut down too, but my system had other ideas. Sosimo Baca, his wild son, and two daughters lived in Regal, and the dead of 2:00 AM that Saturday morning seemed like a perfect time to idle through the tiny village to see who was still burning the candle at both ends. When times are dull, it’s easy to start inventing tasks like that, easy to think they might be productive.
There was always the off chance that Matt would be trudging down the state highway, no doubt sobered by his mountain romp. But State 56 was quiet. I crested the pass and started down the long, serpentine curves toward the intersection with what locals called “the Douglas Road,” the state highway into Arizona-and beyond that, the village of Regal.
Regal was no more than a dark spot out of range of the arc lights that blasted the days-only border crossing gate a mile south of the Catholic mission, La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora.
The town settled on the humps and bumps where the southern feet of the San Cristobal range rose out of the prairie. Maybe sixty people lived there, depending on how many illegals were napping in the church at any given moment. Once or twice, we’d made the gentle suggestion to Father Bertrand Anselmo or various church elders that locking the church at night might be a modern thing to do, and make our job a little easier. An eyebrow or two was raised at such a suggestion, and that was that. I didn’t pursue the matter, since a modern lock on an ax-hewn door would have been its own form of sacrilege.
West of the church, a number of arroyos cut through the village, and the dirt streets dipped down into them as they wound from property to property, around shacks and woodpiles and clotheslines and derelict trucks.
If a modern community planner had tried to make sense of Regal, the first thing he probably would have done would be to straighten out lot lines and establish street right-of-ways. And then developers could hang cute street names-picturesque, tourist-pleasing tags like Palo Verde Lane, Rincon del Sol, or Calle Encantada.
But such was not the case. If any community planner had ever lingered within the boundaries of Regal, he was probably buried behind someone’s doghouse with a rude juniper cross marking the spot.
The village had gradually grown into a wonderful hodgepodge as the families grew. The scuff in the dirt that led from house to shed had deepened and widened with the years, and when a son wanted to build his own home, the foot trail between generations had taken on the formality of a two-track. And that had been extended babies later, winding around this barn or that house until Regal’s maze of lanes and byways held the village together like a fisherman’s net.
I suppose most of the kids who lived there held the place in contempt, champing at the bit, eager to get out into the real world-a place far dirtier, noisier, and uncaring than their quiet Regal homes, despite any shortcomings.
A hundred yards before the driveway to the church, I turned right onto a lane where a small wooden sign proclaimed SANCHEZ with a little black arrow. Victor had lived in Regal once, now preferring the mobile home that was tucked behind the Broken Spur Saloon. His brother Edgar still called Regal home…along with half a dozen other Sanchez relatives.
I knew roughly where Sosimo Baca lived, and I idled the county car along as the dirt lane meandered westward, sometimes passing so close to the front of a house that I could have reached out a hand and streaked the living-room window.
Driving no more than two or three miles an hour, I rounded the corner of a rambling adobe whose front porch corner post had been nicked a time or two by careless bumpers, and damn near ran into a dark figure trudging along the road. He carried a wooden walking stick and had already begun the process of seeking higher ground, but by narrowly missing a mailbox on the left, I was able to swing around him.
I didn’t know Sosimo Baca well, but I recognized his face in the glare of the headlights as he turned to ponder this intrusion into his quiet, dark, no doubt well-lubricated world. Stopping the car, I rolled down the window on the passenger side.
“Good morning, sir,” I said. He was wearing a dusty, earth-colored coat that blended perfectly with the dark shadows of Regal.
“Now who’s that?” he said, stringing out the last word a little bit in an accent that was rich and thick.
“Bill Gastner, Sosimo. We met a time or two, a while back.”
“Oh, yes.” He stepped closer and I could see that the walking stick was carrying a lot of weight. He transferred his left hand to the roof of the car. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, just out. Can’t sleep.”
“Yes.” The single word carried so little inflection that it could have run the gamut of meaning from “me too” to “oh, sure, I know you’re up to something.”
“Mr. Baca, we need to talk with your son.”
“Mateo?”
“Yes. He’s got himself in a little trouble.”