Bag Limit

Chapter Twenty-one

On Friday night, everything had gone wrong for Matthew Baca. Less than eighteen hours later, Dale Torrance was determined to try his luck. I could guess at his mental state-but at least he wasn’t drunk.

Working in Hollywood, the celluloid high-speed getaway artist might have thundered south on County Road 14, the vapor trail of dust from his speeding car snaking down the face of the mesa. Cheek muscles twitching with the easy determination of someone who’d read the script, he’d actually be looking forward to the roadblock down at the state highway.

Maybe the deputy would park in the approved Hollywood roadblock fashion, diagonally across part of the right-of-way so that his unit could be thrown to one side in a theatrical crash that did little more than crumple the speeding thug’s fender. As the car sped by, demolishing the police units in great flaming explosions of inexplicably ruptured fuel tanks, the cops would fire wonderfully ineffectual shots with their shotguns.

I prayed that Dale Torrance hadn’t been paying attention to the movies. Both he and Undersheriff Robert Torrez had paid attention to details over the years on various hunting trips, and they both knew that three miles from the intersection with the main road, a little-used scratch in the sand and rocks forked off to the east.

In my nocturnal wanderings, even I had had occasion to amble along the path-it was little more than that. Once upon a time the trail had provided access to a cattle tank, but the gears and rods in the windmill motor had long since fused together into a hundred pounds of useless iron. Most of the blades had fallen from the fan, and the reservoir below was choked with blow sand.

Hunters used the path regularly. Since hunters used it, over the years they had extended it eastbound in search of wily javelina, antelope, and desert mule deer. After meandering past the windmill for two miles or so, the trail’s route was blocked by a deep river wash. The arroyo’s vertical sides plunged nearly thirty feet.

At one time, before cattle and juniper moved in to the range, there had been water in the Rio Guigarro. Now it roared and carved its path only after a torrential storm. Otherwise the gravel arroyo bed lay dry, a nasty drop below the rolling contours of the prairie.

The arroyo stopped the trail and turned it south. If a hunter squinted and looked in just the right place through the brush and around the various limestone outcroppings that jutted up along the skirts of San Patricio mesa, he could look directly south and perhaps a mile and a half in the distance, straight into the back door of Victor Sanchez’s Broken Spur Saloon.

Dale Torrance may have crested the edge of San Patricio mesa and seen the glint of a vehicle in the distance, parked at the cattle guard just a few yards off State 56.

With that route closed, he’d plunged another mile down the mesa face and taken the trail east. It’s possible that was what he had been planning all along. The maneuver might have worked if Bob Torrez hadn’t hunted these same hills and mesas himself.

Enough dust lingered in the air above the scuffed ground where Dale had hauled the big old truck off the road that the undersheriff, following a half a mile behind, could tell in a heart-beat that’s where the kid had gone.

“Three oh four,” Torrez’s voice said over the radio, “he’s turned east on the base trail. The only place he can come out is the saloon, unless he goes cross-country. Move on over there. Be careful. Don’t press him into something stupid.”

Abeyta acknowledged. By the time Cliff Larson and I made it to the rim of San Patricio, with a commanding view of the valley, I could see the dot that had to be Tony Abeyta’s vehicle pulling into the parking lot of the saloon.

The Ford Crown Victoria for which I had traded the worn-out Bronco was a handful on the loose, downhill gravel. Several times, Larson stretched out a hand to the dashboard for support and once when the front wheels broke loose on a particularly nasty, washboarded switchback, I heard an almost plaintive “whoa” from his side of the car. A touch of the gas busted the back wheels loose and pointed us pretty much in the direction we wanted to go.

“Three oh four, he’s turnin’ south toward you,” Torrez radioed.

“Ten-four. I see him.” All Tony Abeyta had to do was sit quietly in Victor Sanchez’s parking lot and wait for the old pickup to burst up out of the brush.

At one point, we had a clear enough view of the state highway out ahead of us to see the white and green Expedition of the U.S. Border Patrol when it flashed by, eager to join the fun.

In his rush to dive off the main county road, Dale Torrance had done a fair job of blocking himself in. Looking ahead toward the saloon, the bulk of the building would block his view of Tony Abeyta’s county unit, and the general roll and rise of the prairie would block the paved highway from view. Others could follow his dust plume with ease, but he would have no way of knowing what lay in wait.

Unless he stopped in just the right spot to watch the twisting trail behind him, he would never have seen Bob Torrez as the undersheriff slammed the back door on Dale’s escape route.

Trying to crawl into the mind of a petrified teenager to understand his actions was futile, but I found myself doing just that. If Dale assumed that all the cops who had been chasing him had been faked out by his clever ruse, then he had to assume that we were at that moment still on County Road 14, closing in on the state highway-with that intersection just a quarter of a mile west of the saloon.

When we reached the pavement, Dale knew we’d have a choice…if he was thinking at all, that is. Would we assume that Dale had headed southwest for Mexico or Arizona, and turn right to follow? Posadas to the left didn’t offer much refuge, and if we didn’t know that the kid had turned on the rough trail, then heading east on the state highway didn’t make much sense.

I grimaced as we jounced over a particularly badly installed cattle guard. “He’s going after the girl,” I said.

“Don’t doubt it,” Larson replied.

“He thinks he’s going to sneak in from the back. He thinks he can hide the truck from the road that way.”

“Got to be,” Larson agreed. “That boy ain’t the sharpest tool in the box.”

“Panic time,” I said, and slowed for the second cattle guard that marked the boundary of the state highway’s right-of-way. “He’s not thinking at all. Even if Christine wants to go with him, where does he think he can go?”

“Maybe he thinks we just don’t care all that much.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, when Bobby dropped back there at the beginning, that thought might have crossed his mind.”

“Three oh eight, three oh four.” The voice in the distance prompted me to reach out and turn up the radio a bit.

“Three oh eight.”

“Three oh eight, he’s stopping behind the bar.”

“Does he know you’re there?”

“Negative. He can’t see the unit.”

“We’ll be there in a minute or so. Let him go on inside, and block his vehicle.”

“Ten-four.”

Once on the pavement I accelerated hard, approaching the saloon from the west just in time to see Abeyta’s unit disappear around the backside of the building.

“Three oh eight, the truck’s parked and the driver’s door is open,” Abeyta said. “He’s gone inside.”

“Ten-four. Just block the vehicle. Don’t go in.”

I slowed to turn into the parking lot and saw a fair-sized convention. Victor’s truck was parked near the kitchen door on the west side, as usual. Since it was late Saturday afternoon, the bar traffic was picking up, with an assortment of vehicles nosed up to the railroad tie barrier in front of the saloon. Last in line was the Border Patrol unit, and I saw Scott Gutierrez leaning casually against the front fender.

My back tires hadn’t left the pavement when the kitchen door burst open. Dale Torrance was doing a fair imitation of flying backward, pursued by Victor Sanchez. The bar owner’s shoulders were hunched for combat. Torrance bounced off the side of Victor’s truck, but he was game. He lashed out a quick blow that caught Victor on the cheek. Whether Victor was stunned or just goddamned surprised that someone would have the guts to hit him back wasn’t clear, but it gave the Torrance boy an opening. He shot back through the door, into the kitchen.

Victor Sanchez found his footing and lunged after him.

“Well, shit,” Larson muttered.

I pulled to a stop beside Sanchez’s truck and even before I was out of the car I could hear the bar owner’s voice bellowing inside, followed by a metallic crash.

Tony Abeyta appeared from behind the building, and I heard the approach of Torrez’s unit, chewing its way up from the arroyo.

“Tony, go around and make sure he doesn’t skip out the front,” I said, and the deputy nodded. “Scott’s out there, too.”

Abeyta broke into a jog toward the front of the building.

“Let’s see what kind of party we’ve got,” I said to Larson, and he nodded dubiously. I agreed with him. It might have been better retirement insurance to wait patiently outside, ready to grab and bag whatever pieces of Dale Torrance sailed out.