The Milagro Beanfield War (58 page)

Bernabé cupped Carolina's breast for a moment in a comradely and loving manner, slightly amazed—as always—by its sexy resonant pudding texture, then he kissed her, saying, “Wish me luck,” and departed.

Perched glumly on the front porch, Nick Rael had invisible smoke curling quietly out of his ears when Bernabé arrived. The sheriff overshot where he wanted to park by a few feet, so he jammed the truck into reverse, but it was muddy here and his wheels spun a little; he rocked the truck, dug small holes with the tires, finally managed to go forward, braked, and leaped back; killed the engine; got out.

This performance Nick observed with a jaundiced eye that proclaimed: Asking Bernabé Montoya to investigate this case, or any case, is like asking a pet goldfish to eat a crate of bananas.

“Hey, Bernie,” Nick called sarcastically as Bernabé squucked through the muck. “Don't tell anybody, but your boots are on the wrong feet.”

“I was in a hurry…” the sheriff mumbled, sitting down beside Nick in order to correct the goof. “When did you discover they robbed your place?”

“Thirty seconds before I called you. I just got here, saw they broke the glass in the door and jimmied it open, and I went in and took maybe a five-second look around, then I called you.”

Boots on the right feet, Bernabé heaved up and slouched over to the door. For no particular reason he wiggled the handle, observing “Hell, it still works,” and then he startled the piss out of Nick by kicking in the rest of the glass.

“Hey!” the storekeeper protested. “What'd you do that for?”

“It was already broken. Somebody could of got cut. Now, show me where they took those guns from.”

After Nick, behind Bernabé's back, had derisively crossed himself, he walked around the store, describing the crime. “Well, see, these are their footprints in the sawdust because I swept up last night and put fresh sawdust down. You can tell they came over here and grabbed the handguns, and then went down this row to where the rifles were, see, on all these racks, and then moved over here—”

Bernabé tagged along behind Nick. Leaning against the glass counter in which the handguns had been kept, he sourly contemplated their empty display boxes, then trundled over to the rifle racks where he ran his finger in several empty U-hooks that had held the guns, and blew the dust from his fingers. Likewise, he smeared dust off the half-empty ammo shelf, unconsciously slapping his palm on his pants to clean it, then shook his head.

“You got any idea what time they might of hit this place, Nick?” As he spoke, Bernabé paced between rows, casting his eyes nervously—but actually blankly—about, as if searching for clues.

“I dunno. I leave around eight, you know that. So it hadda be after eight.”

“Yeah.” Bernabé uncorked a wry, despondent smile. “I don't suppose I could get so lucky, like if they just wandered in and stole everything while you were standing behind the cash register smoking a cigar, and gave you their calling cards as they left.”

“Very funny.” Puffing out his cheeks, Nick went up and down on the balls of his feet a few times, cautioning himself to stay cool. He grumbled, “Uh, why do you figure they wanted all those guns?”

“Dunno.” Bernabé quit pacing, he scratched his head. “Way things have been going, though, I got a feeling they ain't gonna use 'em for deer hunting.” He fished unsuccessfully in his pocket for a coin. “Say, Nick, got a dime?”

“What for?”

“I wanna try the Doña Luz pendejo factory again.”

“Use the house phone, for crissakes.”

This time Bill Koontz answered. And about twenty minutes later, after both the Bunny bread and the Coors beer trucks had made their early-morning deliveries to the store, Koontz and Bruno Martínez arrived, bundling sleepily out of their patrol car with a fingerprint kit in tow. Immediately Nick's mom appeared in the Rael front yard and started winging pebbles at the state cops, who paid no attention.

“Shit,” was Bruno's first remark. “Why did they have to shatter the entire front door?”

“Maybe to make it tough to find prints,” Koontz theorized, already powdering the doorknob. “Boy, this thing is an unholy mess.”

Nick Rael cast an Oh-Christ-Almighty-God-Please-Save-Us eye at Bernabé Montoya, who cast an Oh-Christ-Almighty-God-Please-Save-
Me
eye at the floor.

Bernabé's eye bounced on the sawdusted floor about the same time Bill Koontz's eye bounced on that same floor, causing Koontz to exclaim: “Hey—what was there in here doing this job anyway, a fucking army?”

Astonished, Bruno added, “Jesus. They did so much shuffling and scuffling we'd never get a decent footprint. Looks to me like somebody ran twenty head of buffalo through here just to destroy the evidence.”

Bernabé cleared his throat once while ambling nonchalantly onto the front porch. There his eyes met his own pickup, and he was staring at this vehicle feeling uncomfortable, though unable to ascertain the reason for his disquiet, when Bruno Martínez sauntered out the front door and articulated the reason for Bernabé's discomfort:

“Oh for the luvva Mike,” Bruno complained. “Who's truck is that? No, wait a minute, lemme guess. That's your truck, Bernie?”

“Yeah, that's my truck.”

“Nick's back door is still locked,” Bruno said quietly, “which means they must of parked in front.”

Koontz joined them, incredulously surveying the damage that Bernabé, by parking in the mud, getting stuck, rocking his vehicle, sideslipping and whatnot, had done.

“Well, that's that,” Koontz said quietly.

“Yessir. That sure is that,” Bruno echoed. “You sure can't say that isn't that, not unless you're crazy.”

Colored blue, Nick proceeded shakily to one end of the porch and sat down, placing his head in his hands, staring dismally at the muddy mess caused by Bernabé's pickup.

“Okay,” Bernabé mumbled, seating himself at the porch's other extremity: “I fucked up.”

“But good,” Koontz observed.

“It was early in the morning,” the sheriff explained, knowing that for Milagro there could not be a more feeble excuse.

“On top of everything else you let those deliverymen carrying bread and beer tromp all over the store?”

“He even
helped
them,” Nick groaned.

Later, state police reports from the capital confirmed that the only legible fingerprints in Rael's store belonged to Bernabé Montoya. “And they literally coated every surface,” Bill Koontz said with a relish, “the way flies coat hot horseshit.”

And so the stolen guns and ammunition became just one more event in the Miracle Valley beanfield war that would never be explained. In due course conflicting rumors claimed the theft had been engineered by Horsethief Shorty (acting for Ladd Devine) or by the state police themselves, in order to deprive Milagro's more humble (and more militant) citizens of their God-given constitutional right to buy and bear and flaunt and discharge all manner of lethal instruments in the no-holds-barred shooting conflagration which was certain to break out soon.

*   *   *

The last job James (“Dust Devil”) Vincent ever did for the state police was the dynamiting of the Milagro District Forest Service Headquarters.

He was recruited to do this job, not by Kyril Montana, but rather by some other higher-up undercover police functionaries who had decided Montana's approach to the whole affair was much too conservative.

Of course, the state police's undercover wing was not dynamiting the Milagro District Forest Service Headquarters just for kicks, or just because of an intragovernmental feud either, but because they planned to pin the job on Joe Mondragón, thus railroading him into disgrace, jail, or worse, and ending once and for all the dangerous game people were playing up there.

The plan was simple enough, and James Vincent and a friend, Leroy Middleton, carried out the first stage of it without a hitch. Arriving in Milagro at 3:00
A.M
. on a very dark night, they immediately steered onto the narrow dirt lane leading past Joe Mondragón's house and the many ramshackle outbuildings surrounding it. Cruising slowly into Joe's territory, these two shady operators cased the outbuildings for about fifteen seconds, then, braking the car, Middleton pointed and James Vincent jumped from the car and heaved twenty bundled-together dynamite sticks into an open lean-to structure crammed with junk.

Back in the car, as they proceeded stealthily on, both men suffered brief grim giggle fits, an understandable reaction, as the provocateurs were very keyed up, about to be rich, and not a little surprised at how easy it had been, up until now, to earn their loot.

About five minutes later, however, they aborted the caper. Afterward, James Vincent could not figure out for the life of him what happened. But it had to do with the careless handling of a blasting cap which somehow exploded while he was setting two dynamite sticks alongside the cement foundation of the Forest Service headquarters. And this explosion—which immediately atomized three fingers on James Vincent's right hand—caused both Vincent and Leroy Middleton to panic.

In fact, almost simultaneously with the blasting cap's roar, Leroy Middleton jammed the car into low and, minus his partner, hauled ass, nearly clobbering James Vincent on the way out. After that, the deserted saboteur staggered around the plaza area bellowing the word “Shit!” at least two hundred times before Granny Smith and Bruno Martínez, who had received an anonymous phone tip fingering Joe Mondragón, squealed into the plaza area, almost flattening the dazed and bleeding Vincent. Granny braked; and Bruno jumped from the car, gun drawn, just as Harlan Betchel, toting a shotgun, came running from his house behind the Buck-A-Fish trout pond.

“Don't kill me!”
James Vincent screamed.
“I'm on your side!”

“Holy cow!” Bruno shouted. “Look at his hand!”

“Let's get this poor bastard to the clinic fast,” Granny said.

“Who is he?” Bruno wondered, ushering Vincent into their vehicle.

“I don't know who he is, but I know who he ain't. He ain't Joe Mondragón.”

“Radio Emilio to call Trucho and tell him what happened.”

“First go check if there's dynamite over by the headquarters.”

Harlan Betchel, who had been standing there, mouth agape, asked, “What happened?”

“If I knew, Harlan, would I—” And then suddenly something registered in Granny Smith's brain, a warning, an instinct telling him to order everybody to wait just a goddam minute here—

“I got it!” Bruno called, running back. “Two sticks, that's all!”

“Harlan,” Granny Smith said, “you're a witness. You better come right down to the station.”

“Sure, Granny, if you say so. But I got to put on my shoes. I—”

“Fine, Harlan. You do that. But move your tail, hear? And Harlan, don't tell anybody, huh? Do all of us a big favor: no phone calls, nothing; just don't tell anybody. Put on your shoes and jump in your buggy and open-throttle that car down to Doña Luz as fast as you can. Okay?”

“Yes … sure … fine.”

“Come on,” Bruno urged, working to get a tourniquet on James Vincent's arm. “Let's make tracks.”

Signal light flashing, they were speeding down the highway at eighty miles an hour when Bruno said, “Wait a minute, you better slow down, look, up ahead—hey! What's with that guy? Jesus, Granny—STOP!”

Leroy Middleton, having just survived unscathed a ninety-mile-an-hour crash during which his car had sailed almost twenty yards through the air and then rolled over thirteen times, staggered like a blind drunk onto the highway directly into the path of the oncoming patrol car, which swerved and screeched to a halt, then reversed and backed up to where the would-be victim stood swaying. Bruno jumped out and grabbed his shoulders, shoving him into the car.

“Radio Emilio,” Granny said. “Tell him to wake Doc Gómez and open that clinic!”

The dispatcher took the call, then informed them: “By the way, Trucho is having a fit. He says lay off Joe Mondragón, and if there were any witnesses get them out of that town and down to headquarters here ten times faster than on the double. That's a direct quote, that ‘Ten times faster than on the double.'”

“We're gonna drive these guys to the clinic, Emilio, then we'll be in. Harlan Betchel should be down. Hold him there if you have to shoot him to do it. Call Koontz and order him to get his ass in like it was on fire!”

James Vincent babbled, “Don't kill me, don't kill me, please, I'm really on your side—” Then he fainted.

Leroy Middleton groaned, “Oh boy, this is the living end, this is really the cat's pajamas, this is sweet, oh this is really
dynamite,
oh we did it, we're gonna get a
medal
for brains.”

“What the hell is going on?” Bruno demanded.

“Oh you wouldn't believe me if I told you. You really wouldn't.”

They arrived, with James Vincent alive but very pale, and both men considerably shaken, at Doña Luz headquarters about an hour later. Bill Koontz was there; so was Harlan Betchel.

Koontz, who'd had an incredibly scary confab with Xavier Trucho in the capital, said, “I think everybody better siddown. It's gonna take me a little time to explain this, see, but all of us here are gonna have to get things very straight, because if we don't, if any of this ever gets out … and that means you, Harlan, and me, and you, Granny, and you two boys there, Mr. Vincent and Mr. Middlesex—”

“Middle
ton
…” the getaway driver whined.

*   *   *

Four days later, while rummaging in an outbuilding for a hose that wasn't so moth-eaten it looked like a sprinkler system, Joe Mondragón discovered the dynamite bundle meant to pin the Forest Service explosion on him. Of course, Joe understood immediately that this dynamite had not just fallen from heaven in order to increase the personal wealth and power of Joe Mondragón, all-around handyman and bean farmer par extraordinaire. In fact, putting two and two together—even though (miraculously) no word as yet of the blasting cap incident had reached his ears—Joe had a pretty good idea that he at least ought to go tell Bloom about his discovery and ask for some legal advice.