Bitter Recoil

Chapter 17

The corpse lay on his face, arms and legs outstretched like he’d been bashed to the ground by a giant club.

A bloodstain the size of a dinner plate soaked his denim work shirt. The shirt was old and faded, with plenty of rips here and there, the kind barbed wire would tear when a man’s a little careless ducking through fences.

I stepped closer. The seven small holes in the center of his back weren’t from barbs…and they were grouped tightly enough that I could have covered them with my hand.

Without moving my feet I twisted around looking for spent shell casings. There were none. I walked backward the way I had come, trying not to disturb the arroyo bottom. A half dozen times I thought I had found a shell casing, but it was only the sun winking from the quartz-loaded stream gravel.

At the juniper I turned around. Downsteam, the ambulance crew was just making preparations to load Cecil Lucero’s body on the gurney. I whistled sharply. Estelle Reyes-Guzman must have read the urgency on my face, because she got off her knees where she’d been photographing the.22 rifle and walked up the arroyo to meet me.

“I don’t think this is a simple hunting accident,” I said.

“Why? What did you find?”

“There’s another corpse, just around the corner. And he didn’t fall on his own gun.”

“Shot?”

“Yes.”

“For sure murder?”

“No doubt. Seven times in the back. That’s tough to do by accident.”

“Son of a bitch,” Estelle breathed. It was the first time I’d ever heard her curse. She touched my elbow. “Lead me up there. I’ll walk in your tracks.”

***

“That’s Kenneth Lucero,” Buddy Vallo said.

“Cecil’s brother?” Estelle asked.

Vallo nodded. “Younger brother.” Buddy pointed, holding his arm out straight like he was pointing a rifle. “You can see their truck from here.”

I stepped over to where he was standing, just where the arroyo turned south. Sure enough, for several feet the banks didn’t block the view.

“Maybe seventy yards,” I said. “Any kid with a scoped rifle could do that or better.” I looked at Estelle. “Hell, even I could shoot like that.”

Francis Guzman pulled up Kenneth Lucero’s shirt. The bullet holes were small and dimpled inward. “Right through the spine, at heart level,” Francis said, pointing at two of the small holes.

“That explains why he dropped in a heap,” I said. “Just like tagging a rabbit in midhop.” I knelt down. “Twenty-two caliber, you think?”

Guzman nodded. “Not much bleeding. No through-and-through. That’s what I would guess.”

“And the rifle downstream is a semiautomatic,” I said.

“There’s still one bullet in the clip of the rifle and one in the chamber,” Estelle said. “The clip’s capacity is ten.” She turned to Buddy Vallo. “It could have happened that way. Cecil could have shot his brother and then fell and shot himself by accident. That would account for all the rounds.”

“If the gun was fully loaded in the first place,” I reminded her.

She squinted against the sun and harsh sand. “We need to find those shell casings.”

I asked Vallo, “Was there any animosity between the two brothers? Anything that might have led to this?”

He pushed out his lower lip and frowned. “Maybe. Brothers fight sometimes.” I was about to add that a fight between siblings usually didn’t result in murder, but Vallo added, “And they were both chasin’ the same girl.”

He half grinned at the irony of it. “I don’t think she was interested in either one of ’em. She was a white girl.” He said it as if that explained everything. He hadn’t spent much time in society outside Isidro Pueblo, where you never could be sure who-or even what-was going to experiment with matrimony.

Estelle asked, “Who’s the girl?”

“Lucy Grider. She lives on that ranch on the way to Encinas.”

“Where the hell is that?” I asked. The girl’s name hadn’t registered.

“About six miles. Where the state road forks, south of the pueblo? You go east. It’s a little village up that valley. She’s the sister to one of the boys you pulled off the mesa yesterday.”

I turned and looked with surprise at Estelle. She’d sat down abruptly on a hummock of sand. She took off her Stetson and dropped it crown down beside her. “Kelly Grider’s sister,” she said. “I don’t believe this.” She looked up at me. “Waquie and Grider were killed together. Now these two. They both chased Grider’s sister.”

“They hung out together off and on,” Vallo said.

“The four of them?”

“I’ve seen them together.”

“I would have liked to have known that,” Estelle said, more to herself than anyone else. But she knew as well as I that the information would have come out in due time. None of us had been at leisure the past thirty-six hours to survey the county, picking up leads. “Have you seen anyone else with them?” Estelle asked, and Vallo shook his head. Old man Waquie had said five in the truck…maybe he’d miscounted. Or maybe the fifth one had been Cecilia Burgess.

Estelle took a deep breath. “All right. We’ve got the daylight. I want this arroyo swept clean. I want those shell casings. And anything else. Paul, go back the way we came, start at the truck, and, really carefully, work along the top edge of the arroyo to this spot and even beyond. Then do the same on the other side, just in case. Buddy and I will work the body and this area.”

She turned to me. “Sir, would you dust Lucero’s truck? The print kit is in the trunk of the car.”

“You bet. Are you going to call Pat Tate?”

“After a bit. We’re on the reservation, and it’s Buddy’s case. It’s up to him.” She raised an eyebrow at Vallo.

“Let’s see what we find,” he said. “Maybe this is as far as it goes.”

Stranger things had happened, of course. But I think the same scenario was going through my mind as Estelle’s. That little International Scout was small enough that a man could hide it pretty easily…especially on a mesa as thickly timbered as Quebrada Mesa. And if there’d been friction between the Luceros and Grider over the latter’s sister, who the hell knew.

If Cecil Lucero was cold-blooded enough to use his own brother for target practice, he’d have had no trouble arranging a trip for two friends over a cliff-and then snapping a neck afterward.