The Chief spit and drew his sleeve across his mouth. “’Parently not.”
We stood in silence for a long while, staring out in the direction Pete had gone. The only sounds were the desert at night, the ticking and cooling of our vehicle engines, and his occasional spitting. As we waited, the first shimmer of pre-dawn light appeared in the eastern sky.
“Where the hell can he go?” the Chief finally muttered. “Nothin’ but desert and rocky steppes to the north, now. I ’spose he could cut east or west and backtrack, but does he even have enough gas in that thing to make it anywheres?”
I didn’t answer.
The Chief sighed and we waited some more.
Thirty minutes later, Wes Perez and John Calhoun rumbled up in the big Ford truck, hauling the horse trailer.
I blinked. “You’re kidding.”
The Chief glanced at me. “’Bout what?”
“We’re going after him on horseback?”
“Listen, rookie,” the Chief said, “you think you can follow his trail in the Explorer? He ain’t gonna git far on that dirt bike. When that craps out, he’ll be on foot. I want to get him before the sun does.”
I’d been a cop in our little town for three years, but the Chief still considered me a rookie. I figured that wouldn’t change until he hired someone new. Maybe never, seeing as how I wasn’t a son of La Sombra.
Wes climbed out of the truck and headed for the trailer. John exited the passenger side, moving gingerly. His iron gray hair was combed impeccably and even his jeans were sharply creased.
“Give Wes a hand,” the Chief ordered. “Unless you want to stay here with the trucks and I’ll take John along.”
I shook my head and walked away. Riding in the heat wouldn’t do old John any good. I didn’t dare suggest we give El Paso PD a call or the County Sheriff or even the Texas Rangers. The Chief didn’t believe in outside help.
John put on his hat and tucked it into place. “Carl,” he nodded.
“Mornin’, John.”
“Fine day for a posse.”
I gave him a weak smile and went to the back of the trailer.
Wes led the Chief’s white gelding down the ramp. He met my eyes and nodded his hello. His deep brown skin seemed almost black in the pre-dawn light.
Wes and I unloaded all three horses, saddled them and made sure the canteens were filled. The Chief’s saddlebag contained a GPS device and a cell phone. When we were finished, I led my red roan and Wes led his mount and the Chief’s to where the Chief and John stood, engaged in palaver.
The Chief took the reins from Wes without a thank you and looked around at all of us. “They took that cowboy to the hospital in El Paso. It don’t look like he’s gonna make it.” He had himself a spit while we mulled that over. Then he continued, “John will stay here with the vehicles. He has the other cell phone. We’ll follow Pete’s trail. Simple as that.”
Nothing was simple on the border, but I couldn’t tell the Chief that any more than I could tell him that four-wheelers would do the job better than horses.
We swung up into our saddles. The sun peeked over the eastern horizon. I figured Pete had a good two-hour head start on us.
The trail was easy enough to follow. The knobby tires of the dirt bike tore up the desert ground. Wes rode in front, appointed as scout. I don’t remember him ever saying anything about having special abilities in tracking, but he was at the front anyway. The Chief was in charge of this expedition, so he wasn’t going to do it. And I was the rookie, so that left Wes.
The morning sun crept over the horizon and within an hour, my shirt was soaked through with sweat. We fanned out instead of riding in a column so that we didn’t have to eat the dust kicked up by the horses’ hooves, but desert sand still lightly caked my face. Wes rode silently, his head tilted to the left and watching the ground.
The Chief followed, ignoring me. When his cell phone chirped, his gelding whinnied and started, so he had to bring the horse under control before he could flip open the phone.
“Yeah?” Silence. Then, “All right.” He turned off the phone and replaced it in his saddlebag. “That New Mexico cowboy didn’t make it,” he said, not looking at either one of us.
No one replied. I took a slug of water from the canteen. It was already warm and brackish.
We found the dirt bike an hour later, dumped unceremoniously in a shallow arroyo. By then, a light wind had kicked up and the footprints leading away from the Kawasaki were partially wiped away.
The Chief uttered a curse and looked at his watch.
Wes turned in his saddle and looked at me. “How tall is Pete?”
I shrugged. “Five-ten or so.”
He pointed at the footprints. “He’s got a powerful stride here. It’s controlled, too. He’s not panicking.”
“How the hell can you tell that?” the Chief asked. “Or are you part Apache, too?”
I winced a little. The Chief considered me a rookie, but I think he considered Wes a necessary evil, a concession to the Hispanics in town.
Wes ignored the jibe. “I can tell from the distance between his steps.”
The Chief glanced down at the sandy bottom of the arroyo. “Maybe he’s running. Maybe he’s frantic.”
Wes shook his head. “The footprints look different when someone runs. There’s a more powerful impact with the ground. The print is more ragged at the heel and the toe. And there’s more distance between the steps.”
The Chief eyed him and the footsteps a moment longer. Then he spit, wiped and shrugged. “Walking or running, won’t be long ’fore we catch him now.
“Unless the tracks disappear,” I muttered.
“What’s that?” the Chief asked me.
“I said, unless the tracks disappear.”
The Chief grunted and spurred his horse forward.
Twenty minutes later, we came across a small waterhole. Wes dismounted and walked around, eying the bank carefully. He spotted something and pointed. “Alla. Someone knelt in the mud next to the water.”
I walked my roan over. Two shallow impressions were in the mud, right where he pointed.
“How long ago?” the Chief asked.
Wes shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m Apache or something.”
The Chief scowled. I hid my smile behind my horse’s broad neck.
Wes knelt and sniffed the water. “It’s good.”
We watered the horses and rested a few minutes. Wes and I wandered around the water hole until we found Pete’s tracks.
“Still north,” I muttered. “Where’s he going?”
Wes shrugged. “If we called El Paso, they might be able to get us a helicopter. Maybe from the Army or something. Then we’d find him quick.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and if manure were music, we’d have a mariachi band.”
Wes grinned beneath his mustache.
“Let’s mount up!” the Chief barked at us.
We rode for another hour, but the wind kicked up, erasing the footprints in front of us. The Chief spurred us to a trot, but we couldn’t outrun the wind.
Wes finally reined up to a stop. “No good,” he told the Chief, squinting.
The Chief grunted a curse and spit. “He’s been heading due north. We could just ride.”
Wes shrugged. “We could. But if he hooked to the east or west-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” the Chief waved his comment away, then cursed again.
I scanned the horizon. There was naught but desert and hills, arroyos and ravines. A man could go anywhere out here and get nowhere.
“We’ll need to be relieving Earl back at the Tres, anyway,” I said, trying to mitigate the turn of events. “the crime scene has to be processed.”
The Chief said nothing.
We waited until the Chief had stewed long enough to spit, wipe, and curse again, before wheeling his horse around and heading back to John and the trailers. Then we followed.
Some small towns are boring enough that stories about a barroom murder would be on page one of everyone’s mind for months or years. In La Sombra, miles from the Rio Grande and old Mexico, death was common enough to brush the news aside after a few weeks. Ranchers shot and killed illegals crossing their property pretty regularly. The DEA and Border Patrol put a violent end to drug runs. Coyotes packed their human luggage too tight in the heat and lost a few poor souls on almost every smuggling trip. Death was everywhere. So after a month or so, people stopped talking about Pete and the cowboy from New Mexico. But they didn’t forget.