Diego sighed, shook his head. “My boss, he’s a miserable bastard. But I hear even worse stuff about your chief.”
“Believe it.”
“I heard he is so connected he could get you deported by just saying the word,” Diego said. “I heard they’d like to lock you up in Guatemala. If your patron speaks to the right people they haul you off to jail.” Diego shook his head. “I’ve seen those Guatemala lockups, man. You want to avoid that experience.”
Budge didn’t respond. He adjusted something on the instrument panel.
“You never know about gossip,” Diego said. “They say bad things about me, too.” He shrugged. “Some of them are true. How about you?”
“Well, I know my patron could give me some serious trouble if he wanted to do it.”
“Maybe he’s doing that right now,” Diego said. “Getting us in serious trouble, I mean. He says that woman who has been snooping around here is probably in the Border Patrol just to find out what we’re doing. I mean the one in the picture they’ve been handing around. I think the plan is to have her killed.”
Budge made another slight flight instrument adjustment, thought a moment, made a decision.
“Diego, I’m going to get very serious now. And tell you some things. The first is, I think you’re right. The second is, you and I are going to be lucky if we get out of this situation like free men, alive and well. And the third is, if that woman gets killed by anybody, we’re going to be the ones hanged for it. Just us. Not anybody who told us to do it.”
Diego sat silent for a long moment. And when he spoke his voice was very low. “What are you telling me?”
“That man sitting behind us, he thinks he has had this all arranged to perfection. His cocaine comes flowing through the pipe from Mexico. No more Border Patrol problems. It gets unloaded very simply, goes from his ranch here right into Phoenix, and then into the big-city markets, pure profits. A flawless plan. Absolutely no way anything could possibly go wrong. But you and I, we have already seen it hasn’t been flawless.”
“You mean the man killed up north. That’s true. We hear now that was a mistake. I don’t like mistakes.”
“Especially, I don’t like mistakes that might get me in prison. Or get me killed.”
Diego stared straight ahead, thinking. Then he glanced at Budge, his expression wry.
“You’ve been in the U.S. of A. a long time. The patron”—he nodded toward Winsor behind him—“he seems to think you can kill this woman cop and get away with it. What do you think about that.”
“I don’t know what he thinks. But I think that if we kill her, he has it figured out so he’ll get away with it. But if he has it figured right, she is a federal cop. The federals will catch us, wherever we go. Not give up until they do. And then they either kill us or we die in a federal prison somewhere. And, of course, that’s exactly the way he hopes it will work out. He wouldn’t want us around anymore.”
Diego sighed. “Yes,” he said. “It would be true also among those where I’ve always worked.”
“The way it happens in Washington, my patron is rich and powerful, and his roomful of lawyers and very important friends let the police know that our rich and powerful boss is innocent. He just came out here to shoot an African antelope for his trophy room. And he had me put his special trophy hunting rifle back there in the storage place to show them evidence that that’s the truth. And then he says he was betrayed by two low-class scoundrels who already are wanted by the police.”
“Yes,” he said. “That sounds like it would be in Mexico too.”
“I think there is a way out of this for us,” Budge said.
“Tell me,” Diego said.
Winsor’s voice intruded:
“Hey, Budge,” Winsor said. “There’s the ranch up there ahead. You guys knock off that Mex gabbing and pay attention to business. You think that strip looks safe enough?”
“I’ll lose some altitude and circle,” Budge said. “Why take chances.” He flew over the Tuttle Ranch headquarters, the big tile-roofed ranch house, and the row of mobile homes where the hired hands lived, the barns, the stables, the horse pasture, the stock tank with its connected windmill. He studied the landing strip. It was a straight and narrow black band pointing into the prevailing winds. It looked blacker than he remembered, apparently recently stabilized by a fresh coating of oil. The windsock on the pole atop the little hanger reported a mild westerly breeze was blowing. He was low enough to see the nose of the ranch’s little Piper backed into the hanger and to recognize that the dark blue sports utility vehicle parked beside it was a Land Rover.
He turned to look at Winsor. “See anything there you don’t want to see?”
“No. How about you?”
“Looked good,” Budge said, and banked again, completing the circle, leveling off toward the southwest into the landing approach position.
“When we get on the ground, you can leave most of that luggage stowed away. We won’t be here more than a few hours. But I want you to get out that pet rifle of mine, and the gear that goes with it. We’ll take that along when we go out to the pig trap.”
“Pig trap?”
“Pipeliner lingo,” Winsor said. “The pig’s what they call the thing they push down through the pipeline to clean it out, or find leaks, so forth. That gadget you saw on the pipeline at the old smelter, that’s where they put the pig into the pipeline. It’s the pig launcher. When they get the pig where it’s going, they divert it out of the line into a pig trap.”
“Now you’re going to tell me why you’re taking your rifle to the pig trap,” Budge said.
“Going to shoot me a scimitar-horned oryx for my trophy room,” Winsor said. “And maybe I’ll also help you with that job I assigned to you.”
“Killing the cop?” Budge asked. “That woman in the picture? How are we going to find her?”
Winsor laughed. “That’s all arranged,” he said. “Her duty this morning is to drive out to the back gate of the Tuttle Ranch and go take another look at that construction site where she took all those photographs.”
“Oh,” Budge said. He felt sick. Stunned. He’d underestimated Winsor again. He’d thought there was no practical way he’d be expected to find that woman, and he’d dreamed up the scenario he’d been giving to Diego in the hope of forming some sort of alliance if he needed one. He’d thought Winsor was simply exercising his macho bravado. That this problem would go away. But Winsor had found a way to make the nightmare become real.
“When you’re working for me, Budge, you don’t leave things to chance. You arrange things. Like I had them put a big old tarp in the back of the Land Rover. Big enough to keep a trophy-sized oryx head from bleeding all over the upholstery. Plenty big to hold that little cop until we fly her back over the Mexican mountains and drop her off.”
23
Sergeant Jim Chee had no trouble awakening before dawn in the motel at Lordsburg. He had hardly slept. He couldn’t guide his self-conscious into any of those calm, relaxing reveries that bring on sleep. Instead he listened to Cowboy Dashee, comfortable in the adjoining bed, mixing his snoring with an occasional unfinished, undecipherable sleep-talker statement. Some of it was in English, but since he never finished a sentence, or even a phrase, that was as incomprehensible to Chee as when his muttering was in Hopi.
Before five a.m. they were dressed, checked out, and down at a truck stop beside Interstate 10. Cowboy ordered pancakes, sausage, and coffee. So did Chee. But he didn’t feel like eating. Cowboy did, and between bites, studied Chee.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked. “Worried, or is it love sick?”