“Tammy Woodruff,” I murmured. What had Tammy Woodruff been doing out there on State Highway 56 Sunday night? She hadn’t simply gone to the Broken Spur to drink with a boyfriend and had another spat. It went beyond that. Into the darkness of that desolate prairie. And down another goddamned fork in the road.
I ate another chip, the salsa dripping and running down the palm of my hand into my sleeve. Before she had that flat tire, if that was actually what had happened, was she going to turn on Country Road 14, or continue straight?
I pulled a pen out of my pocket and spread the napkin out flat. I was no artist, but the sketch gave me something to do other than spilling more salsa, and it helped organize my thoughts.
If Tammy had stayed on the state highway after she passed the Broken Spur Saloon she would have driven about fourteen miles before she reached the tiny hamlet of Regal. From there, Route 80 headed west toward Bisbee, Arizona. Eastward lay Deming, the border crossing at Columbus, or even El Paso. If Tammy had elected to go straight through Regal, she would have run into a dead end. The new border crossing was a mile beyond the ruins of the Nuestra Senora de Tres Lagrimas Mission. But it was a day entry only-at six P.M., the customs agents swung the gate shut and went home.
If she turned on County Road 14, she’d drive north through seven miles of some of the most desolate country that Posadas County had to offer, including scrambling up the face of San Patricio Mesa. After crossing County Road 27-if she planned to cross it and not turn east or west-she’d drive through the rugged canyon country for three more miles until she came to the gate of the Torrance ranch.
If Tammy was headed out to visit Patrick Torrance, that’s where she’d turn off.
I rapped my pencil on the table and stared out the window. I had enough if’s to keep an entire geometry class busy. But of one thing I was certain. Tammy Woodruff hadn’t been headed for the Torrance ranch to see Pat. That particular cowpuncher was drinking himself sick at the Broken Spur Saloon when all those choices presented themselves to the young lady.
“Excuse me, sir.” The waitress appeared with Don Juan’s specialty, a mammoth platter of calories guaranteed to cure whatever was the matter with me. “Be careful, now,” she said as she settled the creation in front of me. “It’s hot.”
The aroma from the meal drifted up to my nose just as my mental wheels kicked into gear.
Patrick Torrance must have seen Tammy Woodruff at the Broken Spur. The world was just too small for it to be any other way. I chewed the first delectable mouthful and my eyes started to water from the initial blast of chili. Tammy would have seen the young buckaroo’s truck parked there and she would have stopped-and maybe later they’d had an argument and she had gone spinning gravel out of the parking lot, maybe fishtailing a little, maybe cutting a corner, maybe spiking a wheel on an old piece of rebar hiding in the grass.
All that was conjecture. But by the second bit of burrito, I realized what was not conjecture.
When news of the shooting spread to the bar, via a babbling Francisco Pena, the place emptied. That was the ghoul in folks. If there was a little blood, they would turn their heads and gawk. But a lot of blood was an irresistible magnet that would pry even the most dedicated barfly off his bar stool, especially since the cops-living ones, that is-hadn’t arrived yet.
So the patrons of the Broken Spur had adjourned to marvel at all the holes someone had punched in Paul Encinos and Linda Real. They had watched Paul Encinos bleed to death, and were willing to do the same for Linda.
But Victor Sanchez and Patrick Torrance both told the same story. Patrick had not joined the crowd down at the scene of the shooting. He’d stayed at the bar, as if he knew all along what he might find down the road.
My appetite vanished as my pulse raced. If my old slow brain could figure it out, Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s would have clicked hours before.
I pushed myself out of the booth, dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table so that the waitress wouldn’t think that I’d been insulted by the burrito, and hustled outside. The air was cold, with a nasty wind building from the west. If Estelle had driven out early that afternoon to talk with Pat Torrance, she was having a hell of a long conversation with a taciturn cowboy.
Chapter 23
The western side of Posadas County was split by a four-tined fork of major highways. The county couldn’t have afforded to maintain two miles of any of them. The interstate slashed through the county from one side to the other, with one interchange for the village. Two of the state highways snaked into town to converge at that interchange-State 56 headed southwest to Regal and State 17 roughly paralleled the interstate.
Further to the north, State 78 entered the county from the hamlet of San Pasquale to the east, edged around the bottom of the mesa, sped by the airport, and then swung northwest.
If you imagined those highways-three state and one interstate-as the four tines of a fork, then County Road 14 was like a tangled hair connecting the tines at the midpoint.
I drove out State Highway 17, knowing that if I turned south at County Road 14, Herb Torrance’s ranch would be only five miles of jouncing gravel road away. Shortly before seven, I pulled into a narrow lane that passed under an arched, wrought-iron gate. The H-bar-T spread was ten-thousand acres of grazing land leased from the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, tacked onto the original 160 acres Herb’s father had bought in 1920.
If there was a moon that night, it was hidden behind the clouds that earlier had gathered over the San Cristobals and now fanned out across the entire sky. Herb had every light in the house turned on as I approached.
The original Torrance home had burned to the ground on a summer Sunday in 1956, and Herb and his father had done the expedient thing. They’d bulldozed the ashes into a big pit, covered it with topsoil, and planted a garden. The new house, one of those things with too many tiny gables, pitches, and angles, was purchased from the Sears catalog and planted a few yards further up the slope of the mesa.
Estelle’s car was not in the driveway. Herb’s huge pickup, crusted with mud from front grill guard to back bumper, was angled in, crowding his wife’s brown boat of a sedan against the white picket fence. If Patrick’s truck was there, it was hidden out back.
I buzzed down the window and left 310 idling with the radio on when I got out. With all the mesas and canyons, radio reception on this side of the county was uniformly awful, but old habits were hard to break.
Herb had solved the reception problem. Squatting in the middle of his front yard was one of those enormous satellite dishes that allowed him access to 150 channels of what passed for entertainment. By the time I’d let myself through the small swinging gate and skirted the antenna, Herb Torrance was standing in the front doorway, framed by the light.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said by way of greeting. “You’re just in time for some dessert.”
I grunted my way up the six steps to the high front porch and shook Herb’s hand. “How are you, Herb.”
“Fine, fine. Come on in.” He held the door for me but I shook my head.
“I can’t stay. Has Detective Reyes-Guzman been by today?”
Herb frowned and then remembered. “Oh, the young gal. The one who looks like she ought to be in the movies.”
“Right. Has she been by?”
Herb scratched the top of his head like his monumental memory was somehow stuck. “No, not that I know of. The wife was in town most of the afternoon shopping, and I was workin’ in back, in the shop. So, you know, she might have stopped and didn’t think anyone was to home.”