Nothing But Trouble Page 13

  Kerney wondered if his take on the death of Fidel’s agent was all wrong. Was it possible that the murderers had had no intention to leave their victim in the middle of the highway with ligature marks on his wrists? Had he fallen out of the van, as Officer Sapian had suggested? And if so, did the driver fail to stop because he or she had seen Kerney rubbernecking at the side of the road almost within shouting distance of where he would find the dying agent, and didn’t want to chance turning around to retrieve the body?

  The more Kerney thought about it, the more he seriously questioned his initial analysis of the crime. Why would the killers deliberately dump the body of a man they knew to be an undercover cop on a highway to be found? Wouldn’t it be better to simply make the agent disappear altogether and avoid becoming hard targets as cop killers?

  Agent Fidel had told him a corrupt ex-policeman in Mexico ran the immigrant smuggling operation, possibly aided by some dirty Border Patrol officers. Bringing the feds down around his head by dumping the agent’s body would be the last thing a coyote would want to do.

  There were two ways to test the theory: either find and take statements from the people who were in the panel van, or inspect the rear door latch on the vans owned by Walter Shaw and Jerome Mendoza, the motor transportation officer, to see if either was defective. Locating the smuggler’s clients might be hard to do, but checking out the rear door latches to the panel vans shouldn’t be difficult.

  Services ended at the Baptist church on the outskirts of town, and the number of onlookers swelled, bolstered by ranch families and a few folks from nearby Hachita who’d come by to watch the happenings. One of the people was Ira Dobson, the water works manager Kerney had met at the smelter. He was dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meeting best: a pair of blue jeans with razor-sharp creases, a starched white long-sleeved Western shirt, and a pair of polished black cowboy boots.

  “Have you signed up to work on the film?” Kerney asked.

  “Not me,” Dobson replied. “I’ve got enough to do without taking on any more responsibilities.”

  “I understand the Granite Pass Ranch borders the company’s property,” Kerney said.

  “Pretty country,” Dobson allowed. “It runs for a far piece along our eastern flank.”

  “Do you know the Jordans?” Kerney asked.

  “Good people,” Dobson said with a nod.

  “Yes, they are,” Kerney replied. “I grew up on a ranch outside of Truth or Consequences that neighbored their old spread.”

  “Then you know that Joe’s a smart old boy. He’s had me over for supper a number of times, mostly to pick my brain about water conservation. I’ll tell you this: He may be long in the tooth, but he sure keeps up with the latest ranching practices.”

  “What has he done?”

  Dobson described how Joe used solar power to pump water at his remote wells, covered stock tanks with evaporation barriers, used almost indestructible truck tires as water troughs in his holding pastures, and had protected several artesian springs in the foothills by fencing off the streambeds and restoring the riparian habitat.

  “He’s saved hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every year,” Dobson added, “recharged the aquifer, and has reduced his pumping costs. He hasn’t had to dig deeper wells, install larger pumps, or spend a lot of money on erosion stabilization. It’s damn smart ranch management.”

  Dobson looked over at Usher and his team standing in the middle of the baseball diamond next to the empty outdoor swimming pool. “What are they going to be filming here?” he asked.

  “A country music concert,” Kerney replied. “Free to the first five hundred or so people who show up.”

  “Now, that I’ll have to see,” Dobson said, breaking into a grin.

  “Do you know Walt Shaw?” Kerney asked. The motor vehicle and background check he’d asked for on Shaw had come back clean.

  “Walt is as solid as a rock,” Dobson said. “He showed up in the Bootheel about the same time I did. Grew up in Virden on the Gila River Valley near the Arizona border. It’s a Mormon ranching and farming community. He once had kin living there, but they’ve all passed away. He owns a house he inherited that he uses as a getaway, mostly during hunting season. I spent a weekend with him up there tracking mule deer bucks in the Big Burro Mountains. Neither of us had a darn bit of luck.”

  Kerney had half a mind to ask Dobson about Mendoza, who worked as a part-time security guard at the smelter, but decided to leave that to Ray Bratton, the young Border Patrol agent who was scheduled to go undercover as a film-crew apprentice when shooting began. Instead, he talked about deer hunting with Dobson.

  When Dobson finished reminiscing about a more recent, successful hunt, he made his excuses and left. If Kerney had his geography right, Virden was just a few miles east of Duncan, Arizona, where Johnny had gone to check out the rodeo grounds for the film.

  Earlier, Johnny had called from Duncan with the news that the location was available and could be rented for the film. To fit in a change to the scouting schedule, Charlie Zwick had arranged for the caterer to pack sack lunches so the team could eat while they traveled to the rodeo grounds, which were about an hour away by car.

  Kerney caught Usher’s attention as he was leaving the ball field and asked if he was needed for the remainder of the day. In a hurry to move on to the next shooting-script location, Usher shook his head, thanked Kerney for his help, and said he would see him when filming got under way.

  In his truck Kerney located Virden on a state highway map. A secondary road that branched off from the main highway to Duncan led straight to the settlement along the Gila River Valley. He decided to make a quick run past Mendoza’s house to see if the panel van was there, before moving on to the Granite Pass Ranch and then to Virden.

  At the house a man he took to be Mendoza was washing the Motor Transportation squad car in the driveway. As Kerney drove by, a younger-looking man exited the house and climbed into the driver’s seat of the panel van parked at the curb. Kerney waved at the men and kept going, wondering who the young man was and whether or not he should just drop the whole thing and leave it all up to Agents Fidel and Bratton to figure out. The cop in him said no.

  On the highway to the ranch Kerney thought about the Jordan family. Joe and Bessie came from frontier stock. Bessie’s ancestors had arrived soon after the Civil War to take up ranching along the Rio Grande River near the military outpost of Fort McRae, now submerged under the waters of Elephant Butte Lake, a man-made reservoir built in the early twentieth century. Joe’s grandfather had migrated west to El Paso in the 1880s and made his money in banking before buying a huge tract of land on the Jornada, east of the Caballo Mountains.

  Joe had inherited not only the ranch but a majority ownership of the bank his grandfather had established in Truth or Consequences. Why had Joe sold both interests, taken a job as president of a savings and loan in Deming, and bought a ranch in the Bootheel?

  Until now Kerney hadn’t given it any thought. He’d been away from his boyhood home for so long, the comings and goings of people he’d known in his distant past hadn’t concerned him. But in retrospect the question had importance. The Jordan family had been part of the social, political, and economic fabric of the Jornada for generations. What would have prompted Joe and Bessie to pull up stakes from a place where they had such deep roots?

  Did it have something to do with Johnny or Julia? Kerney doubted it. Both had been long gone from home at the time of the move to the Bootheel, Julia finished with college and living on her own, and Johnny competing on the pro rodeo circuit.

  At the ranch the gate was closed but unlocked and no one was around. As the son of ranching parents Kerney knew that Sunday wasn’t necessarily a day of rest. There were simply too many chores that needed constant or immediate attention: salt licks and feed to be put out, broken machinery to be repaired, cattle to be moved to new pastures, a calf with a broken leg that needed to be tended to—the list was endless. It wasn’t al
l that unusual for a rancher to send the family off to church services, if he could spare them, and stay behind to get the work done.

  He decided to drive to the new corral to see if Shaw had his day hands working. He arrived to find Joe Jordan supervising the men, who were nailing galvanized wire mesh fencing to the corral. Kerney was familiar with the product; he’d used it for his paddock at the Santa Fe ranch. It kept horses from damaging legs or hooves on the posts and cross poles and absorbed the animals’ impact without cutting their coats or causing abrasions.

  Shaw was nowhere to be seen, nor was his panel van. However, Bessie sat in Joe’s pickup truck, reading a book. She saw Kerney, smiled, and motioned him over.

  “Will you go and tell that husband of mine to stop working and take me to Las Cruces like he promised?” she asked.

  “Where’s Walt Shaw?” Kerney asked.

  Bessie closed the book and put it on the dashboard. “I suspect he’s in Virden. He tries to get up there once a month to check on his property. Normally, Julia fills in for him when he’s gone, but she’s on her way to Tucson to attend a bull sale tomorrow morning. But these boys have worked for us before and they certainly don’t need any supervision.”

  Kerney tipped his hat. “I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.”

  Bessie touched him arm before he could walk away. “Back when you and Johnny were young, I’d hoped he would go to college with you and Dale Jennings.”

  “I guess it wasn’t what he wanted.”

  “What he needed was to be with friends who were steady and reliable and not so easily swayed by his shenanigans.”

  Kerney smiled. “That’s kind of you to say, but I don’t think anyone could have held Johnny back when he was feeling his oats.”

  “You’re probably right,” Bessie said, patting Kerney’s hand. “Go tell Joe Jordan if he doesn’t get over here soon, I’m going to Las Cruces without him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He stepped off toward Joe, who was busy watching the hands stretch out a two-hundred-foot roll of wire.

  “Is the boss getting restless?” Joe asked, as he shook Kerney’s hand and nodded toward his wife.

  “You could say that,” Kerney replied. “She’s threatening to leave without you. When does Walt Shaw get back?”

  “Probably late evening. Why, do you need him for something?”

  “I was hoping to get a tour of the water conservation measures you’ve put in place on the ranch. Ira Dobson told me a bit about what you’ve done, and I’d like to profit from your experience.”

  “I’d show you around myself,” Joe said, “if we weren’t going to town.”

  “Perhaps some other time,” Kerney said. “It’s generous of you to give Shaw the day off with so much work to do.”

  “Walt takes maybe a day a month to himself,” Joe replied. “I’m not about to say no when he needs to get away.”

  “Will he stay on after Julia takes over the ranch from you?” Kerney asked.

  Joe looked a little surprised by Kerney’s question. “She told you that? Well, I guess it’s no secret. She pretty much has taken over already, but I like to kid myself that I’m still in the ramrod of the outfit. Walt will stay on. Otherwise Julia would have to give up her place in Tucson, and she’s not about to do that. She likes her city life too much to let go of it completely.”

  “Would you mind if I took a look around on my own?” Kerney asked.

  “Not at all,” Joe said. He paused to watch as the men cut a section of the wire fencing and began attaching it with brads to the post-and-beam corral. “Make yourself at home. Just remember to close the pasture gates behind you.”

  After Joe and Bessie left, the day hands took a break, hunkering down to smoke cigarettes and drink some water. The welcome coolness of the cloudy morning had given way to a blistering sun, which felt uncomfortable in the humid air left behind by the rain squall.

  Kerney talked with the men for a time, and once they learned that he ranched on a small place up in Santa Fe County and had known the Jordan family all his life, they loosened up noticeably. Mike and Pruitt, the two cowboys who’d stopped on the highway after the border agent’s body had been dumped, wanted to talk about the incident. Kerney obliged but kept his narrative of the event short.

  He learned that the two men bunked together in a rented house in the town of Animas, and worked as stock haulers and heavy equipment operators when they weren’t hired out on the area ranches.

  He asked Mike, a muscular six-footer in his thirties, about the problem of illegal immigrants crossing the border.

  “The government would have to post an army down here to stop them,” he said. “We see the crap they leave behind everywhere. Back-packs, clothing, water bottles—you name it.”

  Pruitt, who had the upper body of a weight lifter and carried a few extra pounds around his waist, nodded in agreement. “Hell, if you had the time, you could track them cross country all the way to Deming.”

  “I didn’t see much evidence of that when I was out here yesterday,” Kerney said.

  “They make a beeline for the smelter smokestack,” Mike explained. “They call the warning beacon on it the Star of the North.”

  “I heard about that,” Kerney said. “But you’d think with Antelope Wells close by, it would draw more people crossing the border through this ranch.”

  Mike shrugged. “I don’t know why the coyotes don’t use it that much. But if they did, Walt Shaw would run them off in a hurry. He doesn’t let anybody on the ranch he doesn’t know personally.”

  The men went back to work and Kerney left, heading south toward the barn where he’d seen Shaw and his unknown associate unload the van.

  On the one hand Shaw’s protectiveness about the ranch made sense; trespassers were never welcome on private land. On the other hand Shaw’s desire to keep strangers off the ranch might serve the alternative purpose of keeping certain activities hidden.

  At the barn Kerney took another look again for an entry point. But daylight made no difference and he found none. He studied the tire tracks left behind by the van and followed them south along the ranch road. Soon the valley widened and he came to a fenced pasture that held over three hundred well-fed Angus heifers and calves, along with a few bulls that had been separated from the herd into a smaller paddock. The herd was clustered around a water trough and a nearby solar panel on a metal stanchion that supplied electricity to a well pump.

  Kerney passed through the gate, closed it behind him, and crossed the pasture. Drawn by the sound of his truck the cows raised their heads, got to their feet, lifted their ears, and followed behind in a slow trot until it became clear no feed would be set out.

  Through another gate Kerney continued south. In the distance he could see the faint outline of a fence that ran east and west across the wide valley, which he took to be the ranch boundary. He stopped and consulted the maps he’d bought in Santa Fe as part of the research he’d done on the Bootheel. He located his position on a Bureau of Land Management map of New Mexico that showed all federal, state, local, tribal, and privately owned land in the state and saw that he’d crossed over into the Playas Valley.

  He looked up from the map through the rear window and saw the faint beacon of the Star of the North twinkle on and off. He switched to another map that showed the immediate area in greater detail. Clearly marked on it, no more than three miles away, was a landing strip.

  Previously, Kerney had paid the map symbol no mind. It was not uncommon for larger spreads in remote locations to have landing strips. Big ranchers frequently used small fixed-wing airplanes to check on livestock, inspect fence lines, access range conditions, or occasionally ferry in needed equipment and supplies.

  He put the maps away and scanned the land in front of him. There was no evidence of human habitation on the valley floor or in the hills and mountains that bracketed the basin. There were no telephone poles, electric lines, or microwave towers that would require maintenance or repair, and there wa
s no sign of a landing strip on the north side of the fence that cut across the valley.

  Kerney put the truck in gear and followed the tire tracks in the ruts of the dirt path until he reached the fence, where the tracks swung toward Chinaman Hills, a low-lying, bleak rise that bumped out of the valley. Before he reached the hills, the tracks veered south again, passed through a gate, turned east, and took him directly to the landing strip.

  Kerney got out of the truck and looked around. On the bladed, packed dirt surface he could see fresh tire impressions from the nose and main landing gear of a light aircraft. Multiple sets of footprints led him to the spot where the vehicle had been parked, suggesting several trips had been made back and forth to load cargo. Although he wasn’t certain, Kerney didn’t think the landing strip was on the Jordan ranch. He walked around the strip in a wide circle and found a rutted dirt road that showed no signs of recent traffic and cut east across the valley toward a windmill. He went back to the truck and drove along it until he came to a locked gate that barred his passage. He climbed over it and read the posted sign attached to the other side of the railing. The landing strip was on the Sentinel Butte Ranch.

  Kerney had seen enough. He checked his watch. If he hurried along, he could still make the drive to Virden, snoop around for a bit, arrive in Santa Fe by midnight, catch a few hours’ sleep, and get to work on time.

  Back at the new horse corral Kerney spotted Shaw talking to the day hands and stopped for a little friendly conversation. Shaw greeted him cordially and asked if he’d enjoyed his tour of the ranch.

  “I’ve never seen desert grassland look so good,” Kerney replied.

  “It’s been a lot of hard work to bring the rangeland back to where it should be,” Shaw said with smile, “and it never would have happened without the coalition.”

  Kerney asked about the coalition, and Shaw explained that the area ranchers had agreed to make grassland available to each other in exchange for creating land-use easements that prohibited subdivision.