I wondered what Linda Real and Paul Encinos had been talking about as they drove this very macadam twenty hours before. Just kids, I thought. Both of them less than half my age. Kids idling down the highway during a pleasant evening, assuming that come Easter they’d be part of a family gathering, or that they’d be ready for a week’s vacation in June, or that they’d get to see the fireworks put on in the Posadas Village Park on the Fourth of July. I thumped the steering wheel with my fist in frustration.
I looked out across the sweep of prairie, my eyes following the gradual curve of the highway around the base of Arturo Mesa. Two sodium-vapor lights burned brightly and marked the yard and pens of Wayne Feed and Supply, a business that sprawled over a dozen acres.
If you needed a cutter bar for a 1924 Eustice hay-flailer, you could probably find one there. You’d have to tramp out through the creosote bush, cactus, and rattlesnakes to find it yourself on one of the legion of rusting hulks. Toby Sanchez hadn’t bought the business so that he’d have to work.
In another two minutes, I would drive past the empty buildings of Moore, just as Deputy Encinos and Linda Real would have done. I glanced down at the papers beside me.
Deputy Encinos’s patrol log for the evening hadn’t offered much. A photocopy of the last page of that log lay on top of my briefcase.16:06308 starting 98390.816:3810-816:54W/W KGY-399 neg.16:5610-87 Cal Hewlett 10–15 Efren Padilla PCDC17:2510-817:32MVA I-10/NM 5618:18PGH, confer Dr. Perrone, op. Weatherford ng/ba, inf. t/o/t Mears18:3010-7 NSI18:4810-818:5010-19 L. Real19:0010-820:1110-62 Rosalita Ibarra, 579 Serna Place. Animal nuisance t/o/t PPD20:3510-821:0510-62 R. Ibarra, animal nuisance, neighbor threats. Talked with neighbor Saucilito Ortiz, agreed to corral dog. PPD nr21:4010-822:53E. Bustos Ave. ref. afterhours activity. Neg. contact, t/o/t PPD22:5910-8
In his last hours of duty, Deputy Encinos had entered the starting mileage of his patrol car-completely routine. A few minutes later, he’d asked for a wants/warrant check on a license number. There was no hint in his log about whether he had actually stopped the vehicle. The dispatcher’s log had confirmed that he had not.
Cal Hewlett, one of the U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers, had requested assistance in transporting a prisoner, one Efren Padilla, to the county lockup. I knew Padilla. The old man had probably been cutting green pinon again, on the feds’ turf.
At five-thirty-two, Encinos had responded to the Weatherfords’ traffic accident. That had kept him occupied until six-thirty, when he’d eaten dinner at the North Star Inn, the big chain motel near the interstate ramp where the Weatherfords had trashed their van and trailer.
At six-fifty, the deputy had returned to the Posadas County Sheriff’s Office and picked up Posadas Register reporter Linda Real. If she was expecting an exciting night, the first calls didn’t offer a preview. Rosalita Ibarra had been complaining about Sauci Ortiz’s dog for years. She would have complained even if the old man didn’t have a dog. Rosalita and Sauci had been neighbors for sixty years. They’d argued and shouted at each other for sixty years. They loved it. The only thing that made it better was a good audience.
Deputy Paul Encinos had provided the audience. Twice. He’d tried to turn the complaint over to the village cops, but they weren’t buying it…if one or the other of them had been on duty. It must have been the deputy’s first time trying to handle the Ibarra/Ortiz show. Otherwise he would have known better.
The last entry was equally routine. At fifty-three minutes after ten, Deputy Encinos had been directed to East Bustos Avenue. The dispatch log, and Gayle Sedillos’s memory, said the call had come from the manager of Mark’s Burger Heaven, one of the teen hangouts.
The manager had said that kids were driving around behind the fence of the business across the street. She didn’t know what they were up to. She didn’t have much imagination if she couldn’t figure out what two kids in a car wanted with darkness, away from streetlights and prying eyes.
Deputy Encinos had checked and then, at one minute before eleven o’clock, he had called in 10-8, meaning that he was in service and free for assignment. That was his last call.
He and his passenger had then driven to the other side of the county and gotten themselves shot.
I drove through Moore, looking hard at the huge dark blob that once had been Beason’s Mercantile and Dry Goods. Until the vein ran out, folks in Moore had assumed their town was going to grow and prosper, maybe even make mention in the 1920 census. Beason thought so, enough to build the two-story edifice that now stood empty and crumbling.
State 56 was so straight between the back side of Arturo Mesa and the banks of the Rio Guijarro that for two and a half miles a laser beam wouldn’t have strayed from the dotted center line.
After crossing the bridge, the highway fishtailed a little, dipping through the grove of cottonwoods that surrounded the Broken Spur Saloon.
Monday at suppertime would be slow, and a good time to capture Victor Sanchez’s full attention, but I didn’t pull off the highway. I scanned the parking lot as I drove by. There were two pickup trucks, one with a long livestock trailer attached. The trailer was empty. Half of the ranchers drove around with the humongous things permanently attached to their trucks, clanging and banging over every bump in the road. I figured it was a kind of status symbol.
Three miles down the highway was the turnoff to the north-County Road 14, a dusty ribbon that wound up through the prairie and the old lava beds, past windmills and stock tanks, and up over the top of San Patricio Mesa. It had been down that jouncing two-track that Francisco Pena’s old GMC pickup had trundled the night before.
I drove southwest, toward that intersection with the county road. My hands involuntarily gripped the steering wheel tighter as the white lines clicked by. Pena would have pulled up at the stop sign, at which point he would have been able to see the headlights of the parked patrol car a quarter-mile east, to his left.
A dark smudge and some white chalk on the pavement, along with a few trampled weeds on the shoulder, were all that marked the spot. I slowed 310 to an idle. An oncoming car dashed by, no doubt curious why anyone would stop in the middle of nowhere.
Paul Encinos and Linda Real would have had no reason to do so unless another vehicle was stopped along the shoulder of the road.
In another quarter of a mile, I turned right onto County Road 14, and as 310’s front tires crunched onto gravel, the late afternoon sun winked off metal to my left, further up the highway. Someone was parked in a small grove of elms that struggled for life near one of the highway department’s stash of crushed stone.
I continued up the county road for half a mile and then turned around, nearly planting the front wheels of my patrol car in a small arroyo. As I drove back, I opened my window and took a deep breath. Francisco Pena said he didn’t see anything until he actually drove by the scene of the shooting. And true enough, most of County Road 14 ambled up and down through dips and cuts and arroyos, around runty stands of juniper and cholla. The state highway intersection wasn’t visible until I approached within a hundred yards of the stop sign.
At any time during that hundred yards, though, I could see east along the state road. Had there been more than one vehicle parked along the shoulder of the highway, Francisco Pena would have been able to see it.
I hesitated at the stop sign and then turned right. The car I had seen was parked behind a mound of crusher fines, impossible to see eastbound, and not much more than a glint for westbound traffic. I circled the pile, drove around a parked asphalt roller, and pulled up beside the other vehicle.