Ernie Wheeler was back on dispatch when I radioed in.
“PCS, three ten is ten-seven on Moore Road.”
“Ten-four, three ten.”
Wheeler had worked for us long enough to accept messages at face value, no matter how bizarre. He knew the county as well as anyone, but didn’t waste time trying to figure out why I might be out of service on that ridiculous little road.
After a moment though, he did add, “Three ten, do you need assistance?”
“Negative.”
I switched off the car, got out, and locked the doors. With the burbling engine killed, the night closed in silent and dark. I huffed up the last few feet out of the arroyo and plodded along the two-track, working hard to plant my feet carefully so I wouldn’t crack an ankle. There was just enough light that, if I didn’t look directly ahead, I could make out the road’s path through what little vegetation the cattle hadn’t found.
After a quarter of a mile, I pulled my jacket closer and hunched my shoulders. The night breeze was raw. Its cold seeped into the crevices, found the thin spots in my clothing, and ran up the hollow of my back.
The road skirted along the Rio Salinas’s banks. Someone had tried to fence cattle out of the arroyo-God only knew why. Gus Prescott hadn’t bothered to remove the old fence, worthless as it was.
A quarter mile of posts and wire meandered along the rim of the arroyo beside the road until I reached a spot where, perhaps fueled by a late summer cloudburst, the seasonal stream had gnawed out the bank and collapsed fifty yards of fence. The arroyo yawned black and bottomless to my left, and out of reflex I stepped into the opposite track of the road. If I fell into that pit, no one would ever find me…at least not soon enough for me to care.
A mile farther on, and just another mile south of State Highway 17, lay Gus Prescott’s ranch. On a spring morning, it would have been a fifteen-minute stroll. In the heat of summer, dodging humorless rattlesnakes, maybe a ten-minute sweat. It took me half an hour that night, stumbling along like an old man with glass ankles.
Gus Prescott didn’t share Herb Torrance’s ranching success. He ran a small string of mongrel steers, trying to fatten them on good intentions and wishful thinking. But there simply wasn’t enough water on his spread for more than his small herd. Morning and afternoon, he drove a school bus route that earned him a few extra bucks. His wife Gloria cashiered at Posadas Foodmart.
The apples of their eye were daughter Christine, who would have earned a 5.0 average if such a thing had been offered at Posadas High School and who was sailing through her second year at New Mexico State University, and her twin, Brett, a 20-year-old picture-book cowboy who’d never crossed tracks with the law. I didn’t know much about him except by hearsay.
The past Friday night, Tammy Woodruff had backed her pickup into Brett’s at the Broken Spur Saloon. Since Brett was under twenty-one himself, I’m sure his mama hadn’t known where he was…or assumed that the lad was just at the saloon to drink soda pop and enjoy an NBA game on the big-screen television.
At any rate, Tammy’s maneuver apparently was the end result of a tiff between the two kids. The lethal thought had been there, but she hadn’t managed any damage, being too drunk to judge the speed and trajectory of her missile properly.
Sergeant Torrez had intervened, or who knew what else she might have done. The collision had apparently put the finis to Tammy and Brett’s relationship, and she’d bounced on over in Pat Torrance’s handsome direction.
Maybe the Torrance ranch was where she was headed, loaded down with booze, when her truck pitched over the edge of San Patricio Mesa. If so, she had decided not to wait for Patrick before beginning the party.
A fence loomed out of the darkness and I switched on my flashlight just long enough to find the closure side. I managed to open the barbed wire gate without bleeding, and just as I was closing it behind me, I heard the long, plaintive bellow of a cow calling for its calf. The windmill and stock tank were off to my left. Dark forms shifted and I veered away.
The Prescotts, either through poverty or choice, had elected not to blast their property at night with a sodium-vapor light. They preferred to take their chances with what ever illumination they were given naturally. I kept my flashlight off as I approached the mobile home, knowing full well that the fragrant, soft sand that my boots hit once in a while was not sand at all.
By the time I reached the spot where Gus Prescott’s old Bronco, his wife’s Pontiac, and Brett’s big dualie ranch truck were parked, I could see that there was a light on somewhere in the bowels of the trailer. I breathed a sigh of relief. Something wet thrust into my hand and I jumped sideways, sucking air. One of Prescott’s dogs looked up at me, wagging furiously.
“Christ,” I said, and patted the Aussie sheepdog on the head. He dashed off toward the door of the trailer, ready to show me where the food was.
Gus Prescott answered my knock, his craggy face early morning puffy. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Damn,” he said by way of greeting.
“Mornin’, Gus,” I said. He looked out past me, squinting. The first tracks of dawn were beginning to build in the east, and I pointed my flashlight out past his used car lot. “I walked,” I added.
“Well, damn,” he said again. He bent his lank, slightly stooped frame so that he could hold open the storm door. “From wheres?”
“Ah, I pulled a stupid and got myself stuck down in the arroyo.”
He looked at me with wonder. “You walked from way down there?” I knew that walking more than two pickup truck lengths was wonderment in itself for a rancher. Two miles in the middle of the night damn near rivaled parting the Red Sea in Gus’s miracle book.
“Yep. Is Brett to home? I was hoping maybe he could give me a pull with that truck of his.”
“Well, sure.” He beckoned me in. The sheepdog tried to follow, but Gus planted a boot in his path. The dog cringed, spun on his heels, and scampered down the steps. “He’s just gettin’ up. Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”
“I could use it,” I said. I needed a tow, all right, but just as badly, I needed to talk with Brett Prescott. What I didn’t need was a production. I got one anyway. And maybe it was my predawn constitutional, or maybe it was the peace and quiet of this spot of bare earth so removed from town, or maybe it was just the quiet, friendly, complete way the family included me in their morning rituals, but, whatever it was, the breakfast Gloria Prescott fed us tasted better than anything I’d eaten since God knows when.
Gloria was just as lean as her husband, her hair now steel gray. Her movements were deft and sure and graceful. The trailer was close to twenty years old, but looked like it’d been built the week before. She had kept it simple, with no taste for knickknacks or other fuss.
In one of those moments when nature works just right, Brett Prescott had inherited all the right genes from each parent. He had his mother’s intense, intelligent green eyes and his father’s shock of thick, reddish hair. And no amount of braces ever produced teeth as perfectly straight as his.
Once his mother had seated herself at the breakfast table, it was by some unspoken command that Brett became the waiter, refilling the coffee cups-always his mother’s first-or fetching an ashtray for his father and himself. He talked just enough to be polite, and he called his father “sir.” I liked the kid.
I could sense that both Gloria and Gus Prescott wanted to ask about the tragedies that were the talk of the town, but they skirted that conversation, careful to remain polite and gracious at a distance. I didn’t volunteer to feed the grapevine, and I didn’t tell them that we’d just pulled Tammy Woodruff’s remains up a goddamned cliff.