Page 7
"Do you know where he went?" I ask. My voice stays level because this is what I do.
Brenda shrugs. "South, someone told me. Ranch work. He used to pick up summer work on Tom Eldridge's place, back when Eldridge's boy still ran cattle with him." She closes the notebook and tucks the pencil behind her ear. "Circuit people talk, and they talk to me because I've been here longer than most of them have been alive. If you're looking for a steer wrestler who doesn't want to be found, start where the pavement ends." She turns back toward the gate. "And tell him his saddle's getting dusty."
Once I’m back in my truck, I check my laptop for anything new. Torres has matched Vic Sutton. Brenda Foster has given me a name.
The drive west toward Deming eats the remaining afternoon. South of town, the highway narrows into two lanes that cut through scrub desert under a sky going orange at the edges. Then the pavement ends and the road turns to packed dirt and gravel that pings off the undercarriage. The Florida Mountains rise to the east, their outlines going dark against the last of the light, and the air through my open window carries creosote and the fading heat of a long day.
According to the county plat, Eldridge's ranch sits at the end of a dirt track that curves around a low mesa before straightening for the last stretch. I'll take that stretch slowly, because showing up fast on a ranch road at dusk gets you shot in this part of the country, and Carrick has every reason to be watching.
Eleven miles south of Deming, I slow before the turn and check the assessor’s photograph clipped to the folder on my passenger seat. Single-story ranch house. Detached bunkhouse. Cattle pens behind both. The parcel continues south into enough empty acreage to swallow a truck.
I tap Torres’s number through the truck speakers.
“Tell me you found something,” she answers.
“Tom Eldridge owns the property. Working cattle ranch, taxes current, no recorded sale or lease.”
“Eldridge live there?”
“The tax correspondence goes through his son in Tucson.” I steer around a washout deep enough to take my front axle. “The father still owns the cattle operation. The son moved years ago.”
“And Carrick?”
“Brenda Foster says he worked summers on this place before prison. He knows the owner and the ground.”
A low mesa rises ahead, and the road bends toward it. New fence runs along the shoulder, the first of Eldridge's wire.
The fencing is recent, wire strung tight on fresh cedar posts. The runs are straight enough to have been built by hands that knew the trade before they knew anything else.
“No payroll records,” Torres says.
“A rancher paying a temporary hand in cash wouldn’t generate any.”
“You think Eldridge is hiding him?”
“I think Eldridge needs his fences fixed and Carrick needs a place where nobody asks for a Social Security number.”
The road drops into a shallow drainage. Steep banks rise on both sides, high enough to conceal a vehicle from the highway. On the satellite images, the channel runs south until it meets a county road near Columbus.
Carrick would have seen that the first day.
“Nearest neighbor?” Torres asks.
“Six miles. No cellular tower with a clean line to the house, no public road through the parcel, and only one visible approach from the north.”
“Friendly country.”
“For a man who knows how to leave it.”
I reach back and check the pistol behind my right hip. The holster sits flat beneath my jacket, invisible unless someone knows where to look.
Torres hears the movement. “You’re armed.”
“Morgan Engel has a New Mexico carry permit.”
“Morgan Engel also has a habit of finding suspicious losses on isolated ranches.”
“Exactly. An insurance adjuster who drives alone onto properties like this without a weapon would be the suspicious one.”
