Strangers (13 page)

“Oh.”

“Glen took better care of it. Cody … well, the engine wasn't ‘hot' enough for him, so he had some things done to it. That racing nonsense again.”

“Where did he get the money?”

“From the job he had his last year in high school, before he went to work at Eastwell.”

“Good job, was it?”

“Warehouse and delivery work for the feed and grain company.”

“Why did he give it up?”

“He thought he could make more money at Eastwell.”

“His uncle get him the job there? Or was it Gene Eastwell?”

“Matt did. Gene Eastwell? Why would you think Cody knows him that well?”

“His name came up. They're not friends?”

“Hardly. They're not socially compatible. The Eastwell boy is at least five years older and as snobbish as the rest of his family.”

“Big fishes in a little pond.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

To redirect the conversation I said, “So you've been sole support of the household since Cody was let go at the mine. Must be hard on you.”

“I'm used to it. Glen's life insurance money helped for a while, but it really wasn't very much.… Well, anyhow, we get along all right. I make enough to pay the bills.”

“Including gas, oil, and tires for the Jeep?”

“Cody uses my credit card, yes.”

“Did he also charge the new electric winch he bought recently?”

“… Winch?”

“You didn't know about that?”

“No. This month's card statement just came and there was nothing like that on it. I suppose … I don't know,” she said vaguely. “One of his friends may have loaned him the money. Or Matt did.”

I doubted that. I considered saying something about the Marlin rifle, decided against it, and let the subject drop and the conversation end. Cheryl looked bewildered, forlorn, sitting there with her hands clasping and unclasping in that little girl way of hers. I felt sorry for her again, sorry for having to question her the way I had been—but not as sorry as I would be if it turned out her son was guilty after all.

 

12

It was late Friday morning when I gassed up the Jeep and then went to look up Max Stendreyer. You got to Lost Horse by heading out Yucca Street onto the Eastwell Mine road, then veering off on a secondary road to the northeast that was unpaved but in fairly good repair. The Jeep's GPS was not much good out here; I was relying on a pair of maps I'd gotten from the local chamber of commerce, a topographical and a tourist guide to ghost towns and other points of interest in the area. On the latter, Lost Horse was described as having nothing to recommend a visit. It had had a short life—born 1903, died 1909—and its century-old remains consisted primarily of mine dumps and rubble.

By the time I reached the second of the dirt roads I needed to take, I had the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere. Rolling, sage- and brush-covered hills, rocky and cactus-strewn flats, dry washes, cinnamon-colored hills and the shadow of a mountain in the far distance, and no sign of life anywhere. An overcast sky gave the emptiness a gloomy, even more desolate aspect. Now and then gusts of a cold wind kicked up little sand devils and shredded the grainy plumes of dust raised by the Jeep's passage.

The second road, angling due east through rough terrain, was in worse shape than the first—an irregular washboard of potholes and juts of rock that rattled and bounced me up and down no matter how successful I was at avoiding the worst obstacles. I passed what looked to be a prospect hole on one of the hillsides, and on another, a long-abandoned mine identifiable by the remnants of a branch access artery and the skeleton of a headframe and a long fan of ancient ore tailings. None of the working mines was out this way. If much gold had ever been mined in this section of the desert, the veins had been stripped long ago.

I'd gone about seven miles by the odometer when the third road appeared, this one even narrower and more rutted than the others and winding up into a group of low, barren hills. According to the ghost town map, this was the road to Lost Horse. There had once been a wooden sign here, but it had been years since it was knocked or shot down; what was left of its rotting, bullet-riddled corpse lay in a clump of sage just beyond the intersection.

The road wound upward on a steady incline, around the shoulder of one of the hills, then dipped down into a section of tableland about the size of three or four city blocks. On the descent you could see where the town of Lost Horse, if you could call it a town, had been laid out toward the far end. It had apparently consisted of two short rows of buildings flanking the roadway; all that was left now were a half-collapsed shack on one side, the front wall of a stone-and-mortar structure on the other. Otherwise, as the guide map had stated, there was nothing but rubble—scattered piles of stones and decaying boards, rust-eaten pieces of sheet metal, the bleached bones of some kind of wagon.

Above where the town had been, on the largest of the hillsides, was a section of ore tailings and the sagging mouth of a mine. More rubble indicated where long-collapsed mine buildings had stood, and I could make out an upended ore cart and the bent, rusted remains of rails extending out of the mine entrance like a diseased tongue.

The rest of the tableland was dun-colored rock and sandy loam strewn with patches of sage and scattered tumbleweeds. I didn't see any sign of habitation until the roadway leveled out. Then a short, narrow, uphill track that was little more than a scar on the landscape appeared beyond a low hill on my right. Stretched across the foot of it was a heavy chain, and on a flat rock bench at its upper end, I saw as I drew abreast, was an ancient Airstream trailer. I wondered if Max Stendreyer had wanted to live in this kind of isolation badly enough to tow that trailer out here over the bone-jarring roads I'd just traveled, then maneuver it into place on the bench, or if someone else had done the job long ago, abandoned it here for some reason, and Stendreyer had claimed squatter's rights.

The chain was padlocked to a pair of iron stanchions cemented into the ground, an effective barrier arrangement; you couldn't drive a vehicle around it because the rocky earth was irregularly humped on either side. Wired to one of the stanchions was a hand-lettered metal sign, flecked with rust but free of bullet holes: P
RIVATE
P
ROPERTY
. N
O
T
RESPASSING
. K
EEP
O
UT
O
R
E
LSE
! I pulled the Jeep up just beyond the scar, shut off the engine, and stepped out. Despite the sighs and moans of the sage-scented wind, I had an impression of vast stillness; on windless days, I thought, without machinery in operation, living out here would be like existing in a vacuum of sound.

From where I stood I could see most of the area surrounding Stendreyer's home. No vehicle up there, unless it was drawn in close behind the trailer. I stepped over the chain and climbed the scar slowly, with my hands up in plain sight just in case Stendreyer was home after all. No sounds came from the trailer; the only sign of life was a hawk wheeling in thermal updrafts high overhead. As I neared the Airstream I could see piles of scrap iron and other junk along one side: Stendreyer's desert scavengings. In a hollow beyond, a wood and galvanized metal cistern stood in hill shadow—another scavenged item, probably.

I was still alone when I reached the door. And still alone after I knocked on it a couple of times. On impulse I tried the latch. Locked, naturally. And the curtains were drawn tight over the windows. So then I circled behind the trailer, and found nothing there except more junk. All the way out here and he was away someplace. Maybe he'd return soon, maybe he wouldn't. Wait a while longer and see.

I went back down, moved the Jeep thirty yards or so farther away from the track, then walked on into what was left of Lost Horse. No reason for the wandering except restlessness; there was nothing much to see up close that I hadn't seen from a distance. The half-collapsed shack and the stone wall had both been used for target practice on numerous occasions, and behind the shack was the carcass of a small animal, its bones picked clean by carrion birds. That was all there was to see on level ground.

I picked my way upward through fractured rock, past the tailings to the mine entrance. Another lead-riddled sign was propped up there, this one machine-made and probably installed by the Bureau of Land Management: D
ANGER
! D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
. It wasn't really necessary; one look at the bent, splintered, sagging support timbers was enough to keep any sane person from stepping through that yawning hole into the blackness inside.

Still no sign of Stendreyer.

The eerie stillness, the lifelessness of the place had begun to have a depressing effect on me. And I was chilled now from the wind. Back to the Jeep, hurrying. I sat inside, thawing, giving it a few more minutes—wasting them because he still didn't show. Getting on toward three o'clock by then: most of the day wasted. But I might still be able to salvage some of it back in Mineral Springs.

I jounced my way back to the intersection with the second county road, then along there at as fast a clip as I deemed safe. The desert landscape ahead and behind remained empty. At about the halfway point I came around a curve in the hill where the branch artery marked the way up to the first abandoned mine I'd seen. I glanced at the skeletal headframe as I passed—

Flash of light up there, and in the same instant, the side window behind me shattered inward amid a buzz and a thwack of lead slamming into the door opposite.

I had been shot at enough times in my life to know immediately what had happened, but the suddenness of it caused a reflexive stab of my foot on the brake pedal. The Jeep slewed sideways. I was turning into the skid when the second bullet burned a sparking furrow across the hood. I think I would have regained control even when the third bullet spiderwebbed the passenger side of the windshield, except that the right front tire struck a jut of rock at the road's edge and blew the tire with a loud pop, like a belated echo of the unheard rifle shots.

The front end tilted down, the bumper smacked into some other obstacle that caused the rear end to break loose and the Jeep to lift and lean farther sideways. There was nothing I could do to hold it then. I had just enough time to brace myself with both hands tight on the wheel before it went all the way over, skidding on the passenger side.

The impact banged my head into the console with enough force to throw my vision out of whack. There was the screech of torn and abraded metal, then the noise stopped and the slide ended with a bucking jolt and shudder—some part of the front end striking another obstacle and binding up against it. I was all right except for the crack on the head and the blurred vision, but I wouldn't have been if I hadn't been wearing the seat belt.

I hung there at an angle, wagging my head until I stopped seeing double. There had not been any more shots, but that didn't mean the shooter wasn't still on the hillside with the Jeep lined up in a rifle scope. I had the fleeting wish that I'd brought the .38 Bodyguard with me, even though a handgun wouldn't be much good at long distance, but I hadn't because it had seemed like a bad idea. Flat-out wrong on that score. I fumbled the keys out of the ignition, then unbuckled and twisted around and raised my head high enough for a cautious look through the tilted driver's-side window.

Nothing to see anywhere near the abandoned mine. And no more shooting.

I stayed put for a time anyway, letting my rage cool and my pulse rate steady. Then I got the door open, lifted it partway, and held it there like that for a few seconds. Nothing happened. I poked my head out briefly. Still nothing. Gone? I thought.

Well, dammit, I couldn't stay here like this all day. I shoved the door all the way up, braced it with my shoulder, and hauled myself up and out in a fast scramble. As soon as I hit the ground, I stumbled around to cover behind the Jeep. Dead silence, and no movement anywhere that I could see. Yeah, he was gone.

All right. Either he was a lousy shot, or more likely, he'd put those three bullets exactly where he wanted them to go—the Jeep the target, not me. But I didn't believe it had been a random act of violence. The shooter had to have known who was driving, and that indicated a deliberate warning: quit digging around in the local manure pile, or suffer the consequences.

Max Stendreyer? Or somebody else?

Straightening, I took a long look at the Jeep. What I could see of the right side was badly crumpled, with major damage to the blown tire and front wheel rim and axle. Undrivable, even if I could manage to shove it upright. Maybe even totaled, those three bullets killshots after all. And me stranded here in the middle of nowhere. My cell phone was in my jacket pocket; if it had been damaged, or if I couldn't pick up a signal out here, it was a hell of a long walk back to Mineral Springs.

But it didn't come to that. The phone worked all right and the signal was clear enough when I called the sheriff's department number I'd written down in my notebook. I asked for Joe Felix, but he wasn't there, so I told the deputy who'd answered what had happened and where. He said he'd send somebody out right away. Make it the sheriff, if possible, I said, but he either ignored me or was already in the process of breaking the connection.

I walked around a little, working out some stiffness caused by the crash, keeping a watchful eye on the hillside just in case. Only a short clutch of minutes had ticked away when I spotted a cloud of windblown dust churned up by an oncoming vehicle. Pretty soon the vehicle itself came into sight—pickup truck, not a sheriff's department 4x4. The driver slowed as he neared where I was standing next to the wrecked Jeep, drew up and stopped abreast.

The pickup was a newish Ford, one of those big high-suspension jobs, its dark-red paint job dirt- and dust-streaked. When the man behind the wheel lowered his side window, I was looking at fifty years or so of hard living—sun-darkened, hollow-cheeked, beard-stubbled face, yellowed teeth inside an almost lipless mouth, long hair rubber-banded into a ponytail. A kind of feral suspicion lurked in deep-sunk eyes that gleamed as black as polished agates in the cold gray daylight. I also had a clear look into the cab behind him. Below the rear window were two weapons mounted on gun racks, a scope-sighted rifle and a pump shotgun.