Ground Money (17 page)

Within a short walk, a small, rocky stream cut through the sandstone to join the nearby Dolores River. There were trout in the stream, Rusty Volker had told him, but the water was muddy now with spring runoff, and you had to use bait rather than flies.

“How much of the stream’s on your land?” Wager asked. The two men had sat at the kitchen table in the ranch house groping for something to talk about while Jo and her old friend, Dee, giggled like schoolgirls and kept going from one corner of the house to another as they thought of something new to look at. Wager didn’t talk horses or cows, and Rusty wasn’t more than politely interested in the Denver Police Department. They were both relieved to find fishing.

“About a mile—it winds around a lot.”

Through the wide glass behind the sink, Wager could see a distant level valley blue-green with sagebrush. But here, closer to the barn-red buildings of the ranch, the land was broken into low hills that showed ledges of red and yellow and orange sandstone. They were dotted with piñon and cedar and juniper that reached only a little higher than a horseman’s head. It was like the caprock country down in New Mexico, and the land could fool you because it looked so level when you gazed across it toward the snowy peaks of the La Sals. In reality, it was cut by ravines and canyons that all tended to drift west toward the deeper cut of the Dolores River, and every now and then, from some sudden bluff, you realized that you were high up on a mesa’s eroded surface and that the land stepped in vast ledges down and away toward Utah.

It seemed odd to have the sky open up in that direction. In Denver, the western horizon was blocked by the Rockies, and the palest skies were seen over Kansas, Here, the pale edge of the sky was in the southwest, over desert country; and beyond the horizon’s curve the earth seemed void except for the occasional glimmer of distant, scattered mountain peaks. The whole world seemed to slope toward California. Which, he guessed, it did—if the Colorado River was any measure.

“Is it stocked?” Wager asked.

“The Forest Service stocks it upstream in the national forest.” He grinned, drawing the skin tight around a long and bony jaw. “But some of them manage to get down this far.”

“This looks like pretty thin grazing land.”

“It is. You figure an average of forty acres a cow. And then they walk off a hell of a lot of weight going for water. But we could still make a go of it if it wasn’t for the damned government. I swear those people back in Washington are doing their best to ruin as many ranchers as they can.”

“Hard times?”

This was a subject that interested Rusty even more than fishing, and he leaned forward, the creases around his mouth coming back. “Damned hard. I just hope we can hang on till something changes for the better.”

“Are the other ranchers having troubles, too?”

“I don’t know anybody who isn’t. The price of equipment, feed, fuel, medicines—hell, they’ve all gone up and up. And so have the damned imports. Now BLM wants to raise grazing fees, and we just can’t get the beef prices to cover it all anymore. It’s a wonder everybody just don’t sell out and let them all become damned vegetarians.”

“Help must be pretty expensive, too.”

“Hell yes! When you can get it. And decent help you might as well forget about. Even the damned Mexicans are starting to ask minimum wage.” He glanced at Wager. “Of course, I don’t mind paying them—they know what a day’s work is. But by God now the government wants me to start checking birth certificates or something. All I want to know is if a man can do the job. If he can, I’ll hire him, and to hell with those people back in Washington.”

“You don’t have any hands working now?”

“Two. They’re good boys, and I keep them on most of the year: old Henry and Joaquin. But come roundup, you take whatever you can get and you’re happy to do it.”

“Do most of the ranches do that? Hire a few hands full-time?”

Rusty nodded. “Unless they have enough family to do the work. Dee and I haven’t got started in that line yet.”

“How many ranches are around here?”

“Oh, six in this end of the valley. Another five up north. Not as many as there used to be.”

“Is the T Bar M nearby?”

“Sure is. About twenty, twenty-five miles by the highway; a lot closer by horse. It’s down on the Dolores below Rimrock. That’s one of those that’s give up and sold out.”

“The ranch is sold?”

“A couple years ago. Somebody named Watkins bought it. Old Tyler McGraw, he just said to hell with it and sold out. Can’t blame him. I’m not going to if I can help it, but I sure can’t blame anybody who does.”

“It’s a cattle ranch?”

“Not much else to do with this land. Sure as hell can’t grow anything on it. And with beef prices what they are …” He shook his head. “There’s no way out—you hang on and starve or you give up.” His eyes, too, went to the kitchen window and the open, empty land beyond. “I’m not giving up.”

“But somebody bought McGraw’s ranch.”

“Yep. And I guess they’re sweating and cussing with the rest of us now.”

“Have you heard anything about the ranch since Watkins bought it?”

“Heard anything? Like what?”

Wager shrugged. “How they’re doing. What they’re doing.”

“No. Never met Watkins. Dee and I drove over a month or so after we heard the ranch was sold—went over to introduce ourselves to the new neighbors. But the only one there was the cook. He said everybody else was out on the range. We left our telephone number, but they never called back. That doesn’t seem very friendly, but with a new ranch and all, they were probably real busy.” He sipped his coffee and eyed Wager. “You seem pretty interested in them.”

“A friend of mine has a couple of sons working there. I thought I’d go by and say hello while I was over this way.”

“Oh. Well, as far as I know, they’re doing about as good as the rest of us. If you want to, you can take the horses over—makes a nice day’s ride. You just cut over to White Creek Draw about ten miles north; it’s a good trail.”

Wager smiled. “That’s worth thinking about.”

Jo and Dee came in still laughing about someone they remembered from barrel-racing days. Dee was a short, blond woman whose face was starting to get taut and dry like her husband’s; she still had an athletic body, and her hands always seemed to touch someone on the shoulder or arm or back. It had been obvious since they drove up how happy she was to see Jo, and that pleasure included Wager even if, on occasion, she didn’t quite know what to say to a big-city detective.

In the moment of silence before she thought of something, a gust of hot wind from the Utah desert whistled emptily against the window screens. “Let me get you some linens and blankets.” She patted Wager on the shoulder and disappeared again.

Jo, excited and happy, started talking with Rusty about which horses they could use. Wager half listened and nodded when he was supposed to and thought about the Sanchez boys and the autopsy report in the glove compartment of his car. Max had called yesterday evening to say it was in, and Wager picked it up on their way out of town this morning. Its form differed from the DPD style, but it gave him a clear picture of Tom’s body and the cause of death: brain injury resulting from two blows at the back of the head, both of which fractured the skull and depressed it enough to indicate a cylindrical weapon about two inches in diameter—like a piece of pipe. A long list of scars and healed injuries was sketched in until the doctor got tired of detailing them and simply started saying “previous injury” and the general location. The most interesting part of the report to Wager was the indication of fresh scrapes and cuts along the knuckles and fingers: Tom had used his fists. There were new bruises on his forearms, too, which indicated defense wounds—the kind a man got when he fended off an attack with his bare hands. Additional abrasions on the elbows and shoulders and back indicated that he had been thrown or dragged across a rough surface like a road bed. Those last wounds still had dirt traces in them and probably came when he was shoved from the moving vehicle. Whether or not he was still fighting when he was thrown out, the autopsy couldn’t say; but from the lack of grit and dirt in the cuts on his hands Wager guessed the man was already knocked out and no longer a threat to whoever was with him in the car. If they wanted to, they could have stopped and dumped him; but they didn’t, and they got what they were after, a dead man.

The toxicology section showed no trace of alcohol, which wasn’t surprising since he had been in a coma for days before he died. Nor was there much else in the report that seemed to be of help. What it boiled down to was that Tom went willingly with some people, then fought with them, then was clubbed unconscious, searched, and thrown from the moving vehicle. What was not indicated was a planned homicide—when a murderer plans the death of a victim, he doesn’t give him the chance to fight back. It also indicated more than one person: a driver and one or more to thump on Tom. He was old, but he was tough and quick and wiry, and whoever he lit on had his hands full until he—or an accomplice—landed a couple of blows to the back of Tom’s head. If the driver alone had done all that, the car would have been parked and Tom wouldn’t have bounced and rolled off the pavement and onto the road’s shoulder.

Dee came back with a stack of sheets and towels and blankets, handing them to Wager to take out to the Trans-Am. She also gave him instructions about how to turn on the gas at the propane tank and where the master switch was for the electricity.

“There’s no TV down there, but we have a dish and the reception’s real good. If you want to come up this evening and watch, we’ll be real glad to have you.”

Jo asked if they wanted the rent now, and Dee hesitated, then nodded firmly. Rusty looked away as Wager counted the bills into her hand. She shoved them quickly into the hip pocket of her jeans.

“I’ll be down later to see how you’re getting along,” she said; and Wager eased the Trans-Am along the sandy ruts that wound out of sight between the knobby, tree-dotted hills.

It had taken them about an hour to unload groceries from the car and to stock the refrigerator and cupboards, Jo happy with the sense of domesticating the place and even Wager shared the feeling that it was somehow theirs. They emptied their suitcases into the squeaky drawers of one of the old dressers, and Jo found a large blue coffeepot for heating and pumped up a stream of icy well water and filled it. Wager, nosing around the back of the cabin, followed a dim trail down to the creekside. A fringe of high weeds lined the stream bank, and his approach scared a large heron from a wide pool that formed against an overhanging cliff of sandstone. He watched the bird rise swiftly and then glide to gain speed and escape by skimming near the roiling water. Then he climbed a low rise where the sparse grass thinned to a crumbling shelf of wind-sculpted rock that lifted higher than the piñons about it. From here he could see the distant glimmer of snow on a bulge of mountains to the west—the La Sal range over in Utah. And to the south a single mountain rose out of a level, hazy plain: North Peak with its own coating of snow. Beyond that, by fifty or a hundred miles, were the broken eruptions of the San Juans, fourteeners whose snow showed the crumpled blue of sheer faces and knifelike ridges. To the east, gradually rising to form a long, wavering line across the sky, timbered ridges and cliffs lifted into the snowfields of the distant Uncompaghre Plateau; and closer lay a flat, treeless valley where sagebrush darkened the gray soil in broad, pale shadows. North, like sentinels facing each other over miles of windy space, receding thrusts of mesas showed the earth’s old crust where the ancient river that was now the Dolores had carved its way toward the Colorado. Over it all was a cloudless blue sky as large as any Wager had ever seen—as large and as empty, and it dwarfed even the wide span of empty land that spread between the distant shining peaks.

Between the high plateau of the east and the purple canyons where the Dolores and its feeder streams twisted out of sight to the west were mesas and fingers of rocky earth and sudden, thousand-foot-high escarpments of red-and-yellow stone cut by gulches and draws and valleys. Covered with the piñon and juniper that grew wherever a root could anchor itself against the wind, the draws and canyons formed isolated worlds guarded by steep walls. It was down into them that hunters went for desert sheep and deer, for elk and turkey and bear. But that was a sport that no longer interested Wager; he had not shot animals since he left the Marine Corps. Nor did he want to, anymore.

A screen door slammed at the cabin, and Wager raised a hand to show Jo where he stood. She joined him and also gazed out across the wide sweep of ridges and valley and headlands of ancient caprock. “It’s not the kind of scenery most tourists would like, is it?” she asked. “It has grandeur … but it’s lonesome. Even the sunlight seems lonesome.”

“So does your friend Dee.”

“She says she’s not.” Jo shook her head. “But I think she is and doesn’t know it. She keeps talking about having children.”

“They don’t want any yet?”

“They’ve tried, but I guess they can’t. I didn’t ask what the problem was.”

Overhead, an eagle angled sharply across the blue toward a mesa’s craggy face. There was so much earth and sky that the trees looked stunted, and every mark of humanity seemed limited and temporary as if it, too, could be swallowed. Carried on the wind like a distant moan, a cow’s call drifted toward them.

Jo was right. It wasn’t the kind of territory most tourists would flock to—no lakes or nearby mountains, no ski runs or plastic villages, no national monuments or striking rock formations. Without much tourism, with most of the mines long played out, only farming and ranching were left. If a man didn’t make a living connected in some way with ranch life, he moved on. And from what Rusty said, even that was threatened.

“It’s an empty country,” said Wager. “I like it.”

“So do I,” said Jo. Then she poked his ribs with a thumb. “It’s good horse country, too.”

It took Wager a couple of days to begin riding with some of the ease and smoothness that Jo had. The new corral and barn behind the Volkers’ ranch house were painted dull red and trimmed neatly in white, and the corral fences had been whitewashed to give the ranch a well-kept feeling.