I saw the passenger side window buzz down and I switched off the engine of the patrol car.
In the distance I could hear oncoming traffic, so I waited until it shot past-a single late-model sedan with New Mexico plates. The tire noise faded and that wonderful, heavy silence of the open prairie settled once more.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman looked across at me. From the lack of radio traffic, she knew as well as I did that our roadblocks sealing Posadas County had produced nothing but expense and inconvenience.
I wasn’t particularly surprised to find her parked in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but the sound of night winds, coyotes, and rare traffic for company. As a little kid growing up in northern Mexico, Estelle Reyes had probably been the sort to seek out a dark corner for private moments.
I conjured up a mental image of her as she might have been twenty years before and saw a tiny, thin six-year-old waif sitting with her back against a cool, dark adobe wall, arms folded around her knees, skinny elbows jutting out. Under the mop of black hair were those two incredible eyes looking out at the world, contemplating, evaluating.
“What have you decided?” I said, and even though a vehicle’s width and more separated us, my quiet question sounded like a shout.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman didn’t answer for a long moment, but finally she shifted a little in her seat and said, “I think you and I need to go over and talk with Victor Sanchez, sir.”
Chapter 11
During the twenty-four hours since the shooting, a dozen cops of one stripe or another had talked with Victor Sanchez. The owner of the Broken Spur Saloon and Trading Post was no charmer in the first place. Quick-tempered, beady-eyed, his saloon was his own private hot rock under which he lurked.
And as Sergeant Bob Torrez had discovered in days past, Sanchez evidently felt he was the target of cops who had nothing better to do than harass an honest business man. I was certain that Sanchez had sold his share of liquor to intoxicated customers over the years. And I was sure that he didn’t check IDs as closely as he could have. But I went into his saloon that evening just as sure as I could be that he had nothing to do with the murder of Paul Encinos and the wounding of Linda Real.
I didn’t know what Estelle had in mind. She probably could have earned a good living as a high-stakes poker player with her inscrutable face. She’d tell me what she was thinking in her own good time-I’d learned that over the years.
Neither Estelle nor I had had the chance to talk with Victor Sanchez since the incident. Other officers had interviewed the man, and according to their reports, the saloon owner knew no more than the rest of us.
But Estelle was chewing on something, and a few minutes of peace and quiet in a dark, cozy saloon wouldn’t hurt. Whatever the owner’s rattlesnake personality, the Broken Spur provided infinitely more creature comforts than parking behind a gravel pile along the highway.
We drove into the saloon’s parking lot and I parked 310 beside a blue Dodge three-quarter-ton pickup whose bottom half was armored with inch-thick, sun-dried caliche. A blue Queensland healer pup stood guard in the back over a rubble of ranch tools, oil cans, and half a dozen partial spools of barbed wire.
As I got out of the patrol car, the dog stood on two of the full wire rolls like a king of the mountain, looking down at me.
“I would think that would hurt,” I said, and the dog lowered his head and beat the air into a frenzy with his tail. Either his paw pads were tough or he was too stupid to mind the barbs.
Estelle parked her unmarked car beside 310. She got out and stood for a minute, listening, looking, surveying the parking lot. The pickup that belonged to Victor Jr. was parked beside the building in the shade of several elm saplings. On the other side of the Dodge and the healer pup were three other vehicles, two local and one with California plates. Beyond that, parked diagonally for easy exit, was another ranch truck hitched to a twenty-foot-long livestock trailer.
The Broken Spur Saloon and Trading Post was cave dark, and our eyes, tired from a day of squinting into the New Mexico winter sun, were slow to adjust.
I stepped in the door and stopped next to the cigarette machine. Across a faded, scuffed Mexican imitation of a Navajo rug was a glass counter full of belt buckles, packets labeled as rattlesnake eggs, porcelain figurines, and other detritus that must have attracted tourists now and then. Maybe if I had to live in some place like Cleveland I’d get a kick out of showing my friends the New Mexico scorpion encased in plastic that I’d bought “right down there near the border.”
My gaze drifted up to the zoo of antelope trophies gathering dust on the dingy white plastered wall. Two big buck pronghorns kept musty vigil over a piece of plywood framed with braided rope. The plywood displayed a collection of “Barbbed Wire of Posadas County.” There must have been fifty varieties of rusted wire tacked to the mount, with some dating back to the late 1870s when they were first patented. By the 1940s, most of the county ranchers had decided it wasn’t so much barbed wire that they needed for successful cow-calf operations as it was rainfall.
“Two for dinner, sir?”
I hadn’t heard the girl approach, and I turned with a start. The hostess smiled pleasantly, her plump, acne-scarred face framed by long, curly black hair. She was the kind of kid who probably didn’t turn many sober heads now, but when she reached fifty she would have grown into her features. Her gaze shifted from me to Estelle and back again.
“Is Victor here?” I asked.
“Mr. Sanchez? Let me go see.”
The bar was through a doorway to the left. To the right was a small dining room. Straight down the hall was the kitchen, and the hostess headed that way. Estelle browsed the foyer and then stepped briefly into the bar. I didn’t follow. The tobacco smoke would be thick and I didn’t need the temptation. The cigarette machine behind me was bad enough.
I saw the hostess stop in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the doorjamb as if she weren’t allowed to trespass. After a minute’s earnest conversation, she recoiled a step and Victor Sanchez appeared, a large carving knife in one hand and a bunch of celery in the other. He looked out at us and then waved the celery in dismissal. He disappeared and the hostess turned and smiled at us hopefully, maybe thinking that we’d see the obvious and leave.
I remained rooted under the Barbbed wire, so she padded back down the hall, her head down in that “please don’t kill the messenger” posture she’d probably learned early in this job.
“Mr. Sanchez said he can’t talk with you now.”
“Ah, busy night, huh,” I said. The girl nodded, her face brightening with the hope that I wasn’t going to be as cranky as I looked.
I stepped past her and walked down the hall toward the kitchen. The hostess didn’t object or offer to present me to his highness. She murmured something to Estelle and then vanished into the bar to deal with customers she understood.
The kitchen smelled of Saturday night’s fajitas, grilling hamburger, and cleaning compounds. Victor Sanchez was working at the cutting board, chattering the celery into slivers with the knife. He looked up and saw Estelle and me standing in the doorway. He stopped cutting.
“I said I was busy.”
“I see that,” I said.
Sanchez was a squat man, beefy through the shoulders with short, muscular arms, thick wrists, and powerful, stubby-fingered hands. He tipped the board of celery into a bowl and turned toward the stove.
“You want something to eat?”
“No, thanks. I guess not.” I did, but Sanchez was fixing something that looked and smelled like chicken soup, and as far as I was concerned, that was health food.