With the windows down despite the dust, she drove up and around the small mesa, then braked hard as they dipped across an arroyo, clawing and chewing rocks up the other side. A helpful sign, riddled with generations of bullet holes, announced: County Road Maintenance Ends, 5 Mi.
“I have to ask,” Leona said, hanging on tightly as they charged up and out of the arroyo. “Why ever not just come into the country like a normal tourist, this assassin person? Why all the risk with this night flying business?”
Estelle didn’t answer for a moment, instead concentrating on avoiding a series of frame-bending ruts that yawned eighteen inches deep in the prairie. Once more on sharp rocks as the road took on a steep rise dead-on, she replied, “For one thing, border checks are tighter than they used to be. If a weapon turns up, he’s dead meat. Anyway, we’re assuming that he has business north of the border. Otherwise he wouldn’t show up here. But it works for him. If he killed the PDC accountant and his family in Mexico, he runs the risk of having those authorities on his tail. This way, everything is in the United States. He finishes his business here, skips south, and he’s home free.”
“Ah. I’m not smart enough for this.”
“And maybe just because it suited his sense of fun,” Estelle added. “And it gives him a tie to Hector. Another bond. That might be of use later. Who knows, maybe he’s training the little weasel.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Leona sighed. “We’re talking about a different species here.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” the undersheriff said. “But you may be dead-on right.”
Driving as quietly as a jouncing two-ton vehicle could manage on a dirt road, they crested the top of the rise. She had slowed to thirty miles an hour, with emergency lights off. As she drove and listened, Estelle tried to recall the intimate details of the country-how the road twisted, how the sweep of vegetation flowed up on the high ridges where the cattle rarely strayed.
For a hundred yards, they drove along a low ridge. They could see all the way south to the San Cristóbals, and to the north, Cat Mesa. The road then swept down in a graceful, fast curve to an abandoned windmill and the remains of a stock corral.
Twisting left, the county road left the meadow and skirted a conglomeration of old fence lines that converged from several directions. Turning to hard gravel and emerging limestone outcroppings, the route climbed back into the scrubby trees. The next two turns were so tight that Estelle slowed to a walk, keeping the Expedition away from the jutting rocks on the passenger side, and the growing drop-off on hers. She glanced at her watch. The cyclists would be flying on this section of the race, rougher for a four-wheeled vehicle than for a bike.
Out on top again, the road ran along the spine of the little wrinkle in the prairie and, craning her neck, Estelle could see back down to the windmill. For a hundred yards or so, they drove straight north, and then the road turned sharply to the left and downhill, switching back to slope down toward the next meadow. As she rounded the right corner, mindful of the drop-off once again on Leona’s side, she caught sight of a figure wearing the colorful garb of the race. Not leaning against his bike, not sitting on a rock or a stump, Tom Pasquale was collapsed awkwardly in the dirt at the very edge of an arroyo, the drop-off directly behind him. His legs were buckled under him, his back leaning against the fresh dirt cut where a road grader’s blade had trimmed the road two weeks before, cutting a ditch to the arroyo.
The county truck slid to a stop and it was only when Estelle opened the door that she saw Pasquale’s right hand lift. He didn’t look up, but his signal for her to stop was clear enough. For just an instant, he held his hand palm toward her; then the fingers curled, his index pointing up the hill behind him.
Estelle froze, eyes scanning the sparse and runty timber. After a few seconds, she leaned back into the truck. “Stay in the vehicle,” she said as she tripped the shotgun release.
Chapter Twenty-six
As she slid down out of the truck, Estelle saw that Tom Pasquale was slumped sideways, supported by his left shoulder ground into the dirt. He tried to stretch out his right leg, but his left was crumpled under him. There was no sign of his bike. She wanted to sprint across to him, but at the same time couldn’t shake the feeling that other eyes were watching.
She scanned the scrub undergrowth around them, trying to separate forms from shadows. Farther on, the county road curved out of the scrubby trees, sweeping back out into the open prairie to parallel the arroyo whose cut grew until it could engulf a full-sized truck and still leave room for thunderstorm runoff. It was the sort of jumbled terrain that offered a good vantage point to watch passing traffic from a dozen places.
Slipping her phone in her pocket and unsnapping her automatic, the undersheriff crossed the road and approached Pasquale. His eyes were now closed. At one point, she froze in her tracks as she heard the clanking of bicycle chains. Above them, three riders appeared, cycling along the ridge. She knelt beside Pasquale and saw that blood soaked his left hip, staining his spandex shorts to the knee. His left hand was pressed tightly into the pocket of his hip, just below the beltline.
“Damn, that hurts,” he murmured. “The son of a bitch shot me.” He opened his eyes and tried to lean to the right, looking down at himself. The motion drained his face to pasty gray.
“Let me see,” Estelle said, and he let her lift his hand, grimacing as she did so.
“This is embarrassing,” he whispered.
“Oh, sí,” Estelle said. “I’m deeply embarrassed. You just sit still.” The hole in the bright blue polyester of his shorts was tiny-it would have been unnoticeable had it not been marked by oozing blood. “Ooze is good,” she said. “No gushers. This is it?”
“That’s it,” Pasquale said dubiously. The “it” was enough. There was no way to tell what damage the bullet had caused inside, but there were no spurting arteries. Shattered bone, most likely. It didn’t take a howitzer to mangle a hip joint.
Sitting back on her haunches, she kept one hand on top of his, feeling the shaking in his body. With her free hand, she hit the auto-dial on her phone, and was relieved when Gayle Torrez answered promptly.
“Gayle, we need an ambulance on Fourteen, six miles south of Seventy-eight, just a half-mile beyond Torrance’s abandoned windmill. And send backup.”
“Hang on,” the sheriff’s wife said, and Estelle waited while the efficient dispatcher made sure the rescue unit was rolling before she asked more questions. “Okay. There’s an emergency unit at the checkpoint on the state highway. They’re on the way. What have you got?”
“I think Tapia shot Thomas,” Estelle said. “It looks like the bullet is lodged in his left hip. That’s all I know at the moment. I don’t know where the shooter is.”
Pasquale clamped his other hand over hers. “Hey, I know Tapia shot Thomas,” he said. “And check behind us. Down in the arroyo. I think Hansen’s dead.”
Estelle stood up and in two steps could see down into the deep arroyo cut. Two bikes and one body lay on the rough arroyo bottom, bare rock where rains had washed away the loose sand and gravel.
“Can you hang on a minute?”
“Yes.”
Estelle turned and beckoned to Leona. “Bring the kit that’s in the back,” she called. Making no move to plunge down into the arroyo, she scanned the terrain all the way to where the arroyo skirted the buttress of the hill to the east, and then to where the cut in the prairie circled around where they now stood, following the road.