Francisco Ramirez pointed to Clayton’s forehead. “You’ve been bleeding.”
Clayton touched his head. At the hairline he felt a thick glob of congealed blood. He couldn’t remember bumping into anything. “Mind if I clean up?”
Francisco pointed to the passageway. “Go ahead, Sergeant. I bake my own bread and have two loaves in the oven. Would you like some with your coffee when you return?”
Clayton’s stomach rumbled in hunger. “That would be great.”
After getting away from the cop, Brian Riley ground the Harley to a stop on the paved road that led to Santa Fe and considered his options. If he drove to town on the frontage road or tried to get on the Interstate, chances were good the police would swarm all over him. That was if the guy who had chased him really was a cop.
Brian decided he couldn’t risk finding out. He turned left and took a country road that climbed the mesa, wound through woodland and pastures, and hooked up with a highway miles south of Santa Fe. At the top of the hill, the pavement turned to dirt, and Brian had to downshift the Harley to power his way through wet snow two feet deep.
A few miles down the road, where the forest gave way to rangeland, Brian paused. Up ahead he could see snowdrifts piled four feet high against the fences. If he made it to the highway south of Santa Fe, it would be a long, cold ride, and he wasn’t sure he could do it without warmer clothes and maybe some food and water to carry with him.
Last year when he’d stayed with his father and stepmother, Tim had let him use the truck to explore the mesa, and Denise had let him ride one of the horses along some of the lightly traveled Forest Service roads. On this stretch of the country road there was a good deal of privately owned land. On horseback Tim had investigated some of the ranches that were hidden away and posted to keep trespassers out. If he remembered correctly, there was one such ranch house deep in the woods where the rangeland ended.
He rode on, fighting to keep the Harley upright as the tires sought traction through the drifts. He found the turnoff and kept going through the virgin snow. His dad had told him the small ranches were summer operations only, and so far there was no sign of any recent traffic on the ranch road. The last rays of a weak sun were at his back and the forest had dimmed to dusk when the small ranch house, closed up and dark, came into view.
Brian skidded to a stop near the steps to the front porch and got off the Harley, his muscles aching from the exertion of riding the bike through the deep snow. He took a long look around before knocking on the porch door. An old truck parked by the barn was covered with snow, the sliding barn doors were padlocked, and there were no animal tracks in the empty corral.
He looked carefully at the house. In the gathering dusk he couldn’t see anything behind the windows. The porch door was locked. He thought about using his elbow to break the glass and decided against it. He found a wrench in the glove box of the old truck and used it to smash the glass.
Once inside, Brian realized how really cold he was. He stumbled over a chair and ottoman, found a lamp on a side table, and turned it on. The front room served as a kitchen, dining, and sitting area. It had a wood cookstove next to a kitchen sink that got water from a hand pump. The place looked like something straight out of the old two-reel Western movies that were sometimes shown on late night television.
In a wall cupboard above an empty refrigerator that had been turned off for the winter, Brian found a good stock of canned and packaged foods. He went to the kindling box next to the cookstove and got a fire started before looking around the rest of the house. There was no telephone or television, but a tabletop radio sat on a shelf next to a stack of
An old but serviceable heavy barn coat with a good pair of insulated gloves stuffed in the pockets hung on a wall peg in the small back bedroom. In a rickety handmade chest of drawers next to a twin bed on a cast iron frame were some rolled-up socks and several tattered wool sweaters. Underneath the sweaters Brian found a pistol in a holster. It was a loaded Smith & Wesson revolver. He put the holstered gun in a bundle made up of the barn coat, the gloves, a pair of socks, and a heavy sweater and carried it into the front room, which had started to warm up. In front of the cookstove he stripped down to his underwear, hung his wet jeans, shirt, and jacket over the two wooden chairs near the small kitchen table, put his shoes close to the stove, and dressed in the dry socks and the wool sweater with the barn coat draped over his shoulders.
At the sink he used the hand pump to fill a pot with water and put it on top of the wood stove to boil. In the food cupboard he found a package of macaroni and cheese, a jar of instant coffee, and some restaurant-size sugar packets. In another cupboard there were mugs, plates, several pots, and some eating utensils.
As soon as the water boiled, Brian cooked the macaroni, mixed in the cheese sauce, and wolfed it down, sipping heavily sugared coffee with each bite. When he finished, he put the dirty dishes in the sink and looked out the window. Snow pelted against the glass. He could hear the wind howling, and the sky was a sheet of solid leaden gray.
It was no time to be traveling. He added some wood to the cookstove, mixed up another cup of instant coffee, and settled into the overstuffed chair. If he hadn’t gotten up early at Beaner’s and turned on the television, he wondered what would have happened to him. It had been a shock to see his Harley in the parking lot of Stanley’s apartment building as a TV reporter talked about the double homicide. In that instant, he knew Stanley was dead and he was next, so he packed and bolted.
What Brian didn’t know for sure was why somebody wanted him dead, or why Tim, Denise, and Stanley had been killed. Inspired by the spy novel at Beaner’s, he’d told him and his dealer friend Duffy that he was being chased by foreign spies. But who was it really?
He’d found the money by accident in an old well house on his father’s property where he liked to go to smoke dope in the evenings when Tim and Denise were home and keeping an eye on him. It was in a locked briefcase hidden under some boards behind a rusted water pump.
After breaking the case open, he had stared openmouthed at the stacks of U.S. dollars, a pouch containing gold coins, and three passports issued by foreign governments to Denise under different names.
He had inspected the old coins but had taken only the fifty thousand U.S. dollars. Counting on the snowstorm for cover, he’d come back today to see if the briefcase was still in its hiding place, to get the coins. But it was gone, which meant someone was killing anyone who might have known about it.
But why murder Denise? After all, the foreign passports in the briefcase had been issued to her under false names, which meant she’d probably hidden it in the well house in the first place. Was she some kind of government agent his dad had met when he was in the air force? Had he been killed because he knew about her past or had helped her do something illegal? And why had Stanley and a police officer been murdered? How did the killer even find out about Stanley?
Brian checked his clothing. His jeans and shirt were dry enough to wear. He dressed in front of the stove, thinking he’d spend the night and then figure out what to do after the storm passed. He still had almost five thousand dollars left from the fifty and that could get him to Mexico, where he could hide out.
He sat back down in the easy chair, with the holstered pistol in his lap. The old house was creaky and drafty, and there were mice scurrying in the walls. He was half-asleep when he heard the sound of footsteps on the porch. He raised his head, opened his eyes, and saw a man standing in the doorway holding a rifle.
Brian fumbled to release the strap that secured the revolver to the holster, and as he yanked the pistol free the man pointed the rifle and shot him between the eyes.
Chapter Ten
The bullet from Clifford Talbott’s bolt-action rifle splattered blood and brains against the back of the easy chair. The perfectly centered dark red hole above the dead man’s eyes made him look like a fallen Cyclops.
With shaky hands, Talbott lowered his Remington, walked to the kitchen sink, put the rifle on the counter, and promptly threw up.
During a lifetime of hunting, Talbott had killed untold numbers of varmints, a dozen or more coyotes, brought down his fair share of buck deer in season, bagged an occasional turkey, and had once taken a trophy-size elk, but he’d never before shot and killed a person, much less even pointed a gun at anybody.
He stayed bent over the sink for a long moment with his back to the dead man, smelling the stink of his vomit as he washed it down the drain with the hand pump, wishing he could just as easily wash away the last five minutes of his life.
