The Survivors Club

Bert must have sensed her disapproval, because he said, “Pat’s allergic to dogs. I don’t know what you think we should have done.”

Then he disconnected.

Tess looked at the bowls sitting in the sink, and thought how fortune can change at a moment’s notice. One minute the dog had an owner who apparently adored her. The next, she was in the dog pound, facing death.

Tess hadn’t liked the Scofields before. Now she disliked them even more.

Danny was in the hallway. “What was that?”

“Bert took Hanley’s dog to the pound.”

“Oh? That was quick.”

It wasn’t her job to like the survivors of a homicide. Her job was to serve justice.

Her job was to get the bad guys. As she stepped out onto the walkway for some air, a cool breeze hit. Down at the far end of the building, she saw a young man holding a bag of trash coming down the steps. He headed out across the parking lot to the Dumpster.

Nobody heard or saw anything. Some people had known Hanley to say “hi” to, but he was so recent to the apartments that he had made little, if any, impression.

Tess stared out at the freeway, trying to figure out what an old man like George Hanley would have to do with drug runners or coyotes.

Thirty rounds fired from a rifle—probably an AK-47, the weapon of choice for all of them—Sinaloa, Alacran, Zetas, the Javelinas—and he’d been shot from five feet away.

Why use so much firepower on an old man?

“So, what you think, guera?”

“You know what it looks like.”

Danny nodded.

The killer or killers had left footprints—mostly sneaker prints, called “running w’s” because of the tread. There had been no attempt to cover up the footprints, because whoever killed Hanley didn’t care. Whoever killed Hanley had left the casings—all thirty of them—because he didn’t care.

He wasn’t covering up anything.

In fact, it was just the opposite.

Whoever did this appeared to be making an example of George Hanley. Everything played into that—the thirty rounds, the spent casings, the footprints all over the place, and God knew, there were probably fingerprints, too— somewhere. More than that, there was the duct tape on George Hanley’s mouth—to shut him up.

Don’t talk. A message.

“What do you think about the duct tape?” Tess asked Danny.

Danny kept his eyes forward, tracking the tractor-trailer rigs slowing down on the freeway for the exit. Their engines growling through the gears. “My guess, the guy put it on him after he was dead.”

Tess agreed. She thought the tape had been affixed to Hanley’s mouth as an exclamation point.

“I think the guy who killed him was ready for him,” Danny added. “Maybe caught him by the doorway and walked toward him, shooting.”

That was how Tess saw it, Hanley being pushed back by the hail of bullets and falling into the wall of the ruin.

Then whoever killed Hanley drove his car to a ravine a half mile down the road from the ghost town, rolled it to the edge, pushed it over, and torched it. Accelerant had been used. Tess made a note to ask any ranchers or squatters in the neighborhood if they saw the fire the night before. No one had called it in, but the people around here minded their own business.

The object of this kind of killing was to terrorize. But who was there to terrorize in this situation?

George Hanley was a retired cop who owned a dog and gave tours of Credo. What would anyone in a group like Alacran or Sinaloa want with him?

“Plata o plomo,” Danny said.

Plata o plomo. Tess had heard the popular narcocorrido before—a song that glorified the drug runners and cartels. Plata o plomo was the choice in Mexico: silver or lead. Go along with us and you will be paid handsomely; go against us and you will get bullets.

A wind sprang up out of nowhere, blowing sand across the empty parking lot and making the yellow tape shiver. Then it was gone. Another semi shifted down, the sound familiar in the west and comforting. Tess glanced at Danny. “How’s Theresa?”

“Nada. The doc might induce labor if it goes on much longer.”

“Fingers crossed,” Tess said.

“One way or the other, guera,” Danny said. “You know what they say: what goes in’s gotta come out.”

The warped humor of Danny Rojas.

CHAPTER 5

They split up. Danny would be testifying at a homicide trial just before lunch, and would probably be gone for most of the day.

Tess followed Ruby Road to the end of the blacktop and her plain-wrap Tahoe clunked over the washboard road. It was a long, bone-jarring drive.

This was Border Patrol country. It was rare for Santa Cruz County to send anyone out here—certainly not on patrol. She was alone.

She passed the gate to the ghost town of Credo on the left. The gate was a continuation of wire fence. A wire loop held the gate and the fence post together. The ranch gate could be unlooped and dragged across the road to make way for cars.

Tess noticed a van from the medical examiner inside the fence. She decided to come back when they were gone. When she went back to the crime scene she wanted quiet and a chance to think. She drove around the bend and up another hill.

Around another bend there would be a couple of trailers and an even more primitive camp.

Tess slowed at the sight of an old travel trailer backed into a rocky hill. It sat on a spur off an old ranch lane. Thirty yards beyond the trailer, where the road bottomed out in the streambed, a couple of tree-limb posts were strung with two strands of wire across the wash. Tess noticed that tin cans had been stuck on top of the limbs, and they’d been shot to pieces.

The travel trailer was shaded by a camo tarp. The sixties seemed to be a theme here: a faded Game & Fish truck, pale green, stood out front, the emblem painted over. A campfire ring and a makeshift table made out of scrapwood kept a cheap kitchen chair company under the tarp.

There was a stake and a chain, too—for a dog.

She had a bad feeling about this, partly because of the way the place looked, but also because of Danny’s Blade Runner comment.

As Tess pulled up, the trailer door squeaked open and a tall tanned man stepped out.

Two things she noticed right off the bat: First, he was really tanned.

The second thing: he was armed with a Winchester repeating rifle.

And it was aimed at her vehicle. “What do you want?” the man yelled.

Tess took him in: he was tall and the color of beef jerky. Gray-blond hair in a ponytail. Flip-flops.

He wore a dirty guayabera shirt and nylon running shorts circa 1970.

“Who the hell are you? What do you want with me?”

Tess buzzed down her window and said, “Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. I want to ask you about a fire the day before yesterday.”

He lowered his rifle an inch. “Fire?”

Tess kept her hands up and palms out. “May I get out of the car?”

“Stay where you are!”

Tess had parked diagonally to the clearing, so if she got out, the engine block of the SUV would be between