Or had he been killed by Porter Naumann, just to seal the case shut. Dalton figured he would never know.
One truth remained: Porter Naumann was the man in the long blue coat. The killer brought in to make sure Consuelo Goliad died in the accident. That’s what Naumann did for years, before being reassigned to Burke and Single. Fremont’s unit were not trained killers. But in this case they needed one and Langley had provided.
Dalton had read and reread Barbra Goldhawk’s notes on the accident. It had been witnessed by hundreds of people. A man named Lewis Dolarhyde, one of the witnesses, told the Colorado state police that he had seen a man, a large middle-aged white male, tanned and muscular, with blue eyes and a prominent, sharply beaked nose, very well dressed, wearing a long blue overcoat, coming out of Consuelo Goliad’s wrecked Jeep. The description matched Naumann perfectly.
Consuelo Goliad’s neck had been snapped, and the EMS crew had noted that there were glove marks on her cheeks, marks still visible in the coating of explosive residue from her deployed air bag. One hand on the cheekbone, the other under the victim’s ear. Set yourself, two or three hard jerks, down and up and down again — a broken neck. Any strong man, any man trained to do it, could accomplish it in seconds.
He pulled out the fax sheet and held it up to the beam.
While he was staring down at the fax, Horsecoat pushed himself off the bank and came over to look.
“Where’d you get that?”
Dalton ignored the question. “What else did you find in this truck?”
“A big bag, full of papers. And some broken bits of pottery.”
“Where is this stuff now?”
“The papers were all rotted. I tried to thaw them out, but they just turned into mush. What I could read was all numbers — groups of numbers — so I just took them out to the trash and dumped them.”
“Where?”
“Big dump site back of Comanche Station. Covered over years ago. Gone. Long gone. Sorry.”
“There’s a big peak, in the Front Range. You can just see it from here. Way off in the southwest, but it stands out. What’s it called?”
“That’s Culebra. Fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Maybe more. Biggest peak in southeastern Colorado. We Comanches call this Culebra country. Snake country. Who did this drawing?”
“Moot Gibson.”
“He drew that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“About three months ago.”
“That’s Peyote, you know, in the center. But Pinto would never have let him draw something like that.”
“Why not?”
“You never name the roadman.”
“The roadman? The priest?”
“Yes. His real name is a secret. A sacred secret.”
“Is Pinto’s name here?”
Horsecoat tapped the sheet. “Yeah. Here… and here.” He touched the word “hidden” and the word “struggle.”
“That’s his name,” he said, speaking in a whisper.
“Pinto? His given name is Daniel Escondido.”
“‘Lucha’ was the name he took when he was sixteen. Like you say, his original name was Daniel. He named himself Lucha. Lucha is Spanish for the struggle. For the fight. And Escondido means—”
“Hidden.”
“Yes. That’s his clan name. They got it from the Mexicans, for killing so many of them and then just slipping away into the grass.”
“What does this word mean? ‘Deadead’?”
“I guess that’s for Pinto.”
“Deadead means Pinto?”
“No. It means DEA Dead. It’s for those three federal agents who disappeared. Why they sent Pinto to jail. The DEA agents. Pinto liked to say that when they came down here they were DEA and when he left them they were DOA. He strung them up to a big old cottonwood over there by the Huerfano. Naked. Even the woman. Sliced off their eyelids and let the sun roast them. The woman lasted the longest, only because Pinto gave her water. Pinto used her a lot, so Bill Knife says, while she was hanging there, because it made him feel happy to hear her crying like that, her begging not to die, offering him whatever she could think of, praying for mercy. She did stuff to him, took him every which way, at the end Pinto says she told him she really loved him and would never ever tell the cops on him, but she died anyway. Pinto loves to hear people do that, asking for mercy, crying, saying they’ll fuck him, suck him, do whatever he wants, whiny, pitiful, sorry shit like that. Pinto says he likes to breathe in the souls coming out of people while they’re dying, says he can taste them on his tongue, breathe them in like sage smoke. It makes him smile. We used to go look at their bones when we were kids, but Bill Knife scared us off, told us never to go back there again, that it was a dead place, full of angry unhappy spirits.”
The look on Dalton’s face must have been more revealing than he intended, because Horsecoat shrugged his thin shoulders, raised his hands: “I know. I know. That’s what Pinto does.”
Dalton folded the paper up. “Let’s go.”
“Where we going?”
“Back to Moot’s grave. To wait for Pinto.”
“Man, we can’t do that. I can’t be there.”
“Why not? You said he’d come for you?”
“Yeah. He’ll come for both of us.”
“You’re part of his church. He won’t hurt you.”
Horsecoat shook his head. “You don’t know him. Pinto’s crazy. If he thinks I talked to you like I did, he’ll kill me too. Bill Knife says Pinto has maggots in his head. I can’t be here, man. Really. I can’t be here.”
“Then go.”
Horsecoat looked around the arroyo, and then back at Dalton.
“I can leave?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have the Ruger? Just in case Pinto doesn’t believe me?”
Dalton racked the slide, clearing the magazine, and handed the weapon over. Horsecoat clutched it to his chest, as if it were a talisman that could really save him from something like Pinto. He knew that handing the kid a gun was an insane thing to do. Dalton didn’t really care. He was half-mad already. He was the walking dead, and in the land of the half-mad, the walking dead is king. Besides, if the pistol gave Horsecoat the courage to go find Pinto, then it was worth the risk.
“How do you know I won’t just go tell Pinto where you are?”
“I think that’s what you should do. Maybe he’ll let you live. You go out there and find him and tell him I’m here waiting.”
“And you’re just gonna sit there? Let him come for you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re a dead man.”
“Yes. I’m a dead man. You tell Pinto that a dead man wants to see him. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Now go.”
Horsecoat stared at him for a time, and then turned and ran, vanishing into the sweetgrass. Dalton heard the hissing of his passage through the dry grass, the thud of his running boots. After a while this faded to nothing and then there was only the faint ticking of the truck’s engine cooling and the deep slow beating of his own heart.
Full night; Dalton alone by the rock mound.
Irene lying asleep a few yards away, her side heaving, twitching in a dog’s dream, her paws jerking as if she were chasing prey. The pickup truck engine had cooled enough to stop ticking long ago. The cold wind had increased, slicing down out of the Rockies, out of Culebra Peak, the jagged knifelike crest of the mountain cutting a black slice out of a sky filled with stars, filled with the wide, slowly undulating pink curtain of the Milky Way. The sweetgrass was hissing and tossing in the wind and a silvery light lay on the land. The air was sharper, colder, carrying the promise of snow.