Dead Weight

Chapter Five

Pounded into fragrance by the heat during the day, the prairie collected back its vapors when the sun set and the air lost its heat. I breathed deeply, savoring it all. The Blazer ticked gently as it cooled, parked with engine off, windows open, and police radio turned to a whisper.

About five miles southwest of Posadas, New Mexico 56 passed by the remains of Moore-a couple old wooden buildings long since wilted into disuse, an abandoned truck or two, the remains of a 1924 Moline tractor with steel wheels that I had once considered salvaging for restoration.

Just west of Moore, the highway bridged the Rio Salinas, a broad dry wash that in thirty years I’d never seen carry water. The grandly named arroyo formed the western border of Arturo Mesa, and I had bumped the truck up an abandoned two-track on the flank of the mesa until I had a view of the highway below.

To the northeast, the village lights shimmered in the last haze of the dwindling summer heat. To the southwest, the San Cristobals formed a massive featureless block against the darkening sky. Lights from a few ranches were sprinkled in between. Traffic on the interstate coalesced into a Morse code of lights running east-west, with few drivers bothering to swing off the highway at the Posadas interchange.

Arturo Mesa was a grand place to sit and watch, listen, and think. As the evening passed, I could no longer see the state highway below me. It remained yawning, featureless black until a set of headlights meandered through the curves east of Moore and then vanished southwestward, followed by amber taillights.

The restaurant’s Burrito Grande worked its wonders, and I shifted position, leaning heavily on the center console. A cigarette and a cup of coffee would have tasted good. I hadn’t bothered to bring the remains of the pot I’d brewed, and I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in six years.

With comfortable drowsy detachment I watched a pair of head-lights approach Moore from the northeast. The vehicle slowed and its lights swept across the broad black front of the Moore Mercantile building. A spotlight beam lanced out, darting down the flank of the building toward an old stone barn favored by high school kids for an occasional beer party.

The spotlight winked out and the car idled around and then backed in beside the mercantile. Headlights switched off. Odds were good the vehicle was one of ours. The state police didn’t spend much time on our county’s low-profit roads, preferring instead the bustle of the interstate with its high-speed traffic. If it was just some jack-lighter with a spotlight unit screwed to the wind-shield frame of his car, then he’d picked a poor place for nighttime game.

From where he was parked, the deputy had a commanding view of State 56 in both directions, a clean sweep for radar. My undersheriff, Robert Torrez, rarely ran traffic unless it was within line of sight with a bar where he could nail drunks, his personal passion. The only other deputy on duty was Thomas Pasquale.

“All right,” I said aloud. The highway was a pretty good route for whatever fishing the deputy was trying. By taking NM56 rather than the interstate, truckers could cut some time on their runs to some of the communities in eastern Arizona. The road was fast except for the pass through the mountains down through Regal. And for the heavy loads, there weren’t any of those pesky weigh stations where logbooks could take a beating.

For the tandem car business, those Mexican used-car dealers who purchased units in the United States and towed them across the border, 56 was a convenient route in the daytime if they wanted to cross into Mexico at Regal or at night, when the towing was cooler and easier on high-mileage engines, heading into Arizona for a morning crossing at Douglas.

As I waited, old-fat-dog comfortable with the night breeze starting to take a chill, the first set of headlights was local. Even from a mile away, I could hear the jingle and rattle of the empty stock trailer, towed behind a big diesel pickup truck with running lights across the top of the cab.

The truck wasn’t speeding, and the patrol car parked in the shadows never stirred. In the next ten minutes, three more vehicles drove by, all well under the speed limit. Not a murmur broke radio silence.

I frowned. Sitting there in the dark was fine with me. I was two months away from seventy years old, well fed, just about devoid of ambition, and lacked any significant hobbies that might draw my attention away from watching for shooting stars or smelling the fringe sage as its soft tips roasted against the Blazer’s catalytic converter. It made sense that I’d plunk down and watch the world go by for want of anything better to do.

On the other end of the scale, Thomas Pasquale was twenty-six years old and as close to a perpetual motion machine as a human could be. From his hero, Undersheriff Robert Torrez, he’d adopted the habit of prowling the county’s nethermost reaches, never content to orbit the village for the easy pickings. He had put the department four-wheel-drive Broncos in some of the damnedest places, more than once walking back.

Parking in the lee of an abandoned building beside a dull state highway didn’t sound like the Thomas Pasquale I had come to know…at least not if he was parked there for long.

I picked up the cell phone and pressed the auto dialer.

“Posadas County Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Wheeler.”

“Ernie, what’s Pasquale’s twenty?”

“Hang on, Sheriff.”

I reached out and turned the radio up just a bit.

“Three oh three, Posadas, ten-twenty.”

The reply was immediate, and if I’d been a few hundred yards closer, I probably could have heard it directly.

“Posadas, three oh three is ten-eight on Fifty-six, at Moore.”

“Ten-four. PCS two five one.”

Wheeler came back on the phone. “Sir…”

“I heard,” I said. “Thanks. Everything quiet?”

“Except for the Sissons, I guess so.”

“The Sissons?”

“Jim and Grace Sisson. They’re at each other again. The undersheriff’s been out there a bunch today, the last time just a few minutes ago.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Talk to you later.”

I dropped the phone on the seat and watched a double set of headlights coming up from the south. One of the lights turned off about where the Broken Spur Saloon sat in the dust, and the second set continued on toward us.

In a few moments I could see the running lights on top, marking the hulk of a tractor trailer rig. The exhaust note was that of a big diesel wound tight, and it burped only slightly as the truck dived down across the Rio Guigarro just two miles west. The truck hit the flat, laser-straight stretch between the two rivers, the reports of its exhaust bouncing off the hills.

“Not a mile under seventy,” I muttered. If Pasquale was running radar, the trucker was dead meat. In a blast of sound, the rig flashed through Moore, and I heard the exhaust note change just a touch-the right timing as the trucker’s headlights picked up the sheriff’s star on the door of the patrol unit. The trucker evidently wasn’t impressed, because he swept on by without even a tentative touch of the brakes. Maybe the driver figured what the hell, he’d been nailed and that was that.

No red lights blossomed, and the patrol unit remained locked in the darkness beside the old building.

“Huh,” I grunted. For another ten minutes both of us sat in the stillness. Then the lights down below flicked on, and I watched the patrol car pull out onto the highway and cruise southwest for no more than a hundred yards before turning north on the narrow, rough two-track that cut across the rugged prairie. I’d driven that two-track myself a number of times and had gotten myself stuck on it once. Other than a couple of ranches, there wasn’t much to see.

After two miles of skirting the Rio Salinas, the two-track would fork, with one track angled west again, eventually emerging behind the Broken Spur Saloon. The other track continued north until it was sliced to a stop by the interstate right-of-way fence.

From my perch high on the mesa I watched the lights of Pasquale’s unit dip and bob. They vanished at a spot where I knew the two-track crossed the Salinas and then emerged on the other side, sweeping a yellow fan across the open prairie. At that point, he punched them off, and the vehicle disappeared as if it’d been levitated off the planet.

“Huh,” I said, and started the Blazer.

Picking my way in the dark wasn’t something that my bifocaled eyes were good at any longer. Between the starlight and a sliver of moon, I could creep down the rock-strewn incline off the mesa. Four or five more vehicles passed by on the highway before the Blazer thumped down the last few yards and drove across the bunchgrass south of the pavement.

Once on the highway, I turned left and idled toward the Broken Spur. I’d covered no more than a mile when a set of headlights blasted up behind me like a ballistic missile. First the night was dark except for my own lights, and then I was illuminated without warning…as if the driver had come up from behind with his lights off and then, a few yards behind my vehicle, snapped them on.

Just as quickly, the driver backed off half a dozen car lengths, and I could see the boxy silhouette of the Bronco. I reached out and squeezed the mike’s transmit button a couple of times and after a second or two got two barks of squelch in return.

Picking up the mike, I said, “Three oh three, three ten on channel three.” That put us on car-to-car, and I added, “I’d like to talk to you a minute. The parking lot of the Broken Spur will be just fine.”

The saloon was remote but a favorite watering hole for local ranchers and anyone else who wanted weathered wood and crushed black velvet ambiance. The owner, Victor Sanchez, and I had enjoyed an uneasy truce since the night Victor’s oldest son had died from a bullet through the heart, fired by Victor himself.

A few minutes later Pasquale and I pulled into the parking lot of the Broken Spur, surrounded by a swirling cloud of dust. Three pickup trucks, including one with an empty stock trailer, were parked in the lot, along with a large camper with Michigan plates.

Pasquale turned around so his vehicle was pointed at the highway, parking window-to-window with mine.

“Quiet night,” I said. He grinned a little sheepishly, a handsome kid with an easy smile and a broad, open face. The small scar over his right eye was a persistent reminder that I’d been his roadblock to joining the sheriff’s department. He’d earned the scar by flipping his village patrol car over in the middle of Bustos Avenue, flying low to beat the deputies to a routine call. At the time he’d been a part-timer with the village, and he’d been trying hard to redeem himself ever since.

He’d done a pretty good job. Only once in a while did I wish that I could wave a magic wand and age him through his long-lasting adolescence to a good, solid forty or so.

“What are you hunting?” I asked.

“Well, sir, I saw your vehicle up on the side of the mesa and wondered who it was and what they were doing.”

“Sharp eyes,” I said.

He shrugged. “I saw the moonlight glint on your vehicle, and so I pulled into Moore and sat for a little bit, like maybe I was running radar. I just kinda sat there and watched for a few minutes.”

“I see.”

“None of the ranchers are workin’ that area up there, so…” He let it trail off. If he was curious about what I had been up to, sitting out in the dark by myself, he didn’t let it show.

“How many Mexican tandems go through here in a week?” I asked. “You care to guess?”

“You mean the used cars going to Mexico?” He puffed out his cheeks. “Dozens, I’d guess. I see ’em all the time.”

“Their paperwork always in order?”

Pasquale looked nonplussed. “I guess so, sir. About the most often I talk to ’em is when they’re broke down at the side of the road. And that happens a lot. I figured they’ll be checked pretty close at the border, so I don’t mess with ’em. Should I be on ’em?”

I shook my head. “Just something that came to mind,” I said. I watched a rancher emerge from the Broken Spur Saloon, walking with the exaggerated care of someone just this side of blind, staggering drunk. He looked over, saw the two county cars, and lurched to a stop, then turned around and retreated back inside.

I figured we had about two minutes before Victor Sanchez roared out to chase us off his property with his predictable “bad for business” diatribe.

I pulled the Blazer into gear. “When you circle back through Posadas, stop by the office. I want to show you something.”

“You want me to come in now?” he asked, and a tinge of worry crept into his voice.

I waved a hand in dismissal. “No. Later. Just when it’s convenient. I’ll be there most of the night. I’ve got a bunch of paperwork I need to do.”

That was true. I had paperwork, and I needed to do it. But I had not the slightest intention of spending the night staring at budget figures.