He looked sharply at me. “No kidding?” He patted the Velcro and pumped the bulb, slipping the earpieces of the stethoscope into his ears. I waited until he had finished.
“You need some rest,” he said. “Meds?”
“Meds are home, where they belong,” I said.
He grinned and shook his head. “A couple of them are important,” he said. “We need to keep your pressure somewhere below the boiling point. Are you still taking the heparin?”
“I have no idea what’s what,” I said. “I took a couple of aspirin earlier. I know what they are.”
Francis Guzman listened to my heart and other places where blood still gurgled, then raised one eyebrow at me.
“You ought to be home,” he repeated. “Was the aspirin for pain, or discomfort?”
“I’ve been catnapping here. And the coffeepot was empty, so I had a couple of aspirin instead.” Francis shook his head, but I waved off another complaint. “There are more important things to do just now than worry about my shitload of medications, Francis.”
He wrapped up the cuff and slid it back in his pocket. “I’ll give Camille a call and tell her which ones to express deliver to you, padrino.” He stared down at my telephone for a moment, as if expecting it to ring. “So Tiffany Cole wanted her ex-husband to take custody of their child. That’s interesting.”
“According to wife number two, or three, or whatever she is, Tiffany Cole has her own share of troubles. She blames them all on the child. And after looking at her house earlier, I can well agree. There’s not a lot of love evident there.”
“Do you believe what the FBI agent said earlier? About this being part of a deal to-what, sell children?”
I saw no point in beating around the bush with the young physician. “I think it’s simpler than that. If it was some kind of ring, or cult, there’d be more children involved. We’d have heard of more cases. I think someone was willing to pay for a child as a quick means of adoption. South of the border, it would never be traced, or if it did arouse official interest, a little money under the table would take care of it. I think Tiffany Cole, screw loose or not, changed her mind at the last minute. There was a slipup somehow, and she ended up with too much time to think about what she was doing.”
“And tried to substitute my son.”
“Yep.”
“What if that’s not what happened?”
I got up and faced Francis Guzman. I reached up and put a hand on each one of the good doctor’s shoulders. “Francis, we’re all guessing. You know that. Until something breaks, all we can do is dig, dig, dig. Every time we open a little channel of information, we make some progress. We don’t know for sure what happened, but we’re starting to get a little glimmer of the ‘why.’ And that’s a plus on our side.”
“The weather’s getting worse.”
“Yes, I know it is.” We stood and looked at each other helplessly.
“I’ll be at the hospital if you…” Whatever Francis was going to say trailed off as Ernie Wheeler, dark circles under his eyes, thrust open the door.
“Sir, telephone for you on two. It’s Herb Torrance.”
“It’s who?”
“Herb Torrance? Out on Fourteen.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back,” I said. I knew the old rancher well, having bailed his wild-haired son out of more than one jam.
Wheeler persisted. “Sir, he says he’s got Francis.”
I spun around and grabbed the phone. The damn thing slipped out of my grasp and crashed to the desk.
“Herb, you there?” I bellowed when I managed to fumble the receiver to my ear.
“Sheriff, I need me some help out here.” My heart nearly sailed out of my chest. “My son found this little boy.”
“Is he all right?”
“No, he’s busted up pretty bad. He was tryin’ to catch him, see, and he slipped and fell.”
“Who fell? Your son or the boy?” Francis’s face went pale. “Herb, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I’m sayin’ my son found that little boy we was all lookin’ for up on the mesa.”
“Cody Cole, you mean.”
“I guess so, ’cept I thought the Cole youngster was a…white kid, you know. I thought I read he was blond. My son says this one looks like maybe some wetbacks lost track of him.”
“Oh shit,” I muttered. “Is the boy all right?”
“I guess he’s fine. My son ain’t. I took him over to the house. We’re going to have to take him to town.”
“Where’s the boy?”
“He’s out there on the side of the ledge, up behind our west stock tank. That’s where my son seen him. He was trying to get him down, and the boy wouldn’t pay him no attention. I told the boy just to leave him be. I didn’t want someone blamin’ us if he got hurt.”
“We’ll be right there.”
“Just come to the front gate. I’ll take you back there.”
I hung up. “What?” Francis said, his eyes wide.
“It sounds like they found your son,” I said, and then grinned. “They can’t catch him.”
Chapter 39
As we turned westbound on Bustos to head out of town, we could see the leaden gray sky stretching flat and featureless. Dr. Guzman sat in back, behind the security screen. Estelle was silent, eyes fixed outside.
The thermometer on the bank hovered at forty-one degrees, and I had visions of little Francis Guzman standing out in the middle of the prairie in his bunny jammies, shivering, while old Herb Torrance and his sons tried to rope him.
Herb Torrance’s ranch wasn’t exactly in the hub of all Posadas County activity. We drove west out of the village on 17, the old state highway that roughly paralleled the interstate. Twenty-one miles later and, I’m sure, an eternity for Estelle and Francis, we reached the intersection of County Road 14, the ribbon of gravel that ran north-south down the west side of the county, connecting the east-west state roads like a strand of angel-hair pasta laced across the four tines of a fork.
The route brought Andrew Browers to mind. If anyone knew these roads, it was he. Paul Cole wouldn’t know one county lane from another.
The H-Bar-T ranch included more than ten thousand acres, mostly leased from the feds, land that tourists looked at and then remarked about in their various strange accents. “Gee, Elvinia, there ain’t nothing out here but cactus.” There was more, of course, since cattle couldn’t live on cactus. A little stunted bunch of grass here and there explained why Herb needed to lease ten thousand acres for two hundred head of rangy steers.
And somewhere out here, according to Herb, was a little three-year-old boy. I’m sure Estelle and Francis were asking themselves the same string of questions that ran through my mind. Why wasn’t the child inside Bea Torrance’s snug kitchen, drinking hot cocoa with the other five Torrance children? If cowpunchers could maneuver and catch rangy steers charging through prairie scrub, why couldn’t they catch a three-year-old?
Five miles of smooth gravel later, I turned into the H-Bar-T driveway, under the wrought-iron arch that featured a bull chasing a cowboy through yucca.
Herb Torrance stepped out of his front door, crossed the porch, and headed down the steps to meet us even as we pulled under the arch.
He waved us to park beside an enormous crew-cab dualie and 310 was instantly surrounded by four yapping dogs, those variegated blue-and-black things that chase sheep. None of them bit when we got out of the car, and Herb lit a cigarette so he’d have something in his hand when he talked to us.
For the first time since I’d known him, Herb Torrance didn’t invite us inside for coffee. I wouldn’t have been able to hold the damn cup, anyway-a combination of joy that my godson might be all right and anger that a bunch of adults hadn’t been able to corral a three-year-old.
“We’ll take my truck,” he said. “Wife’s taken Patrick into town to have his leg looked at. Rory’s got the Jeep. You might make it in car of yours, but you’re apt to get ’er stuck.” He grinned at me as I grunted up into the cab. “Make ’er? I heard you been under the weather some, Bill.”