The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (45 page)

Emerson said,
“War educates the sens
es, calls into action the willnto actiowil"+0”

It’s a good thing I’m not a soldier. Having a gun pointed at me neither
educate
d
my
senses
nor called me to action. It petrified me.

“
Out that
way
,”
he said
,
motioning again with the gun towards a door at the back of the room. Since he was waving with his can
n
on/pointer for me to go first, I decided as soon as I exited the door, I would turn left and run for it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do tha
t
because I was unconscious
w
hen I passed through that door. Or maybe it was a different door. All I know is the door was the last thing I saw before a sudden explosion of pain.

I woke up as he was dragging me along a path that was all too familiar
. I was hogged tied, and I thought my
lips and nose were
about to be ripped off b
y the rough basalt grave
l
on the path to th
e cliff d
w
elling.

I spat the dirt out of my mouth when
we
got to the dwelling and said, “Why are you doing this?”

His lips were as dark as his beard. “
I saw you down here digging. I was standing on the ledge watching you.”

So that was
why
the sand and gravel fell on me. “You drove my Bronco away.”

“You left it running,
puto
.
Because of you, I had to dig up Carlos. I had to worry about
face=
the cops finding out he was dead.
And
about the
m finding out about the stuff
I took from here. So now I won’t have to worry, because you’ll be dead. Neat,
huh
? You’re the only outsider who knows about this place. And now you’ll be buried in it.”

A sinister sm
ile crept across his face. “Buried. Yeah. I like
the sound of that
. Why waste a slug on a shrimp like you. I’ll just throw you in the hole and shovel dirt on your sorry ass.”

The good news was my heart was now working, and it was racing like it should have been in light of what it had just heard.

“You won’t get away with it,” I said, proving that when peop
l
e are in tight
spots, they do indeed say stup
i
d things just like in the movies. “I’m not the only outsider
who
knows about this place.”

He stopped to think for just a second. “Yeah? Who else knows?”

“A friend of mine.”

“What’s his name.”

“I’m not going to tell you. But if you let me go, I promise not to tell the police what happened here.”

He laughed. “You won’t b
e
telling anyone anything. And before I’m through with you, I’ll have the name of that friend.”

He tu
rn
ed the gun so that he was holding it by the barrel with the grip sticking out li
k
e a hammer.

I de
c
i
d
ed my best ch
a
nce – as rotten as it was – was to see if I could somehow roll myself o
ff
the ledge.
Even if I didn’t survive the fall,
i
t was better than being beaten and buried alive.

But he had me tied too tight. He knelt down next to me and raised
the pistol butt.

I closed my eyes.

A shot rang out
,
and he
screamed
in pain.

Yes!
I said to myself.
The stupid bastard has accidentally shot himself because he was holding the gun backwards.

H
e stood up and turned around. The gun was on the ground next to me
where he had dropped it. I tried to nudge it over the cliff using my head since my arms were tied.
I was not quite close enough to move it.

I looked up at him. Blood was flowing from his right arm, but no
t
fast enough to suit me. I wanted a waterfall of it. I wanted him unconscious. Actually, I wanted him dead.

He reached down for the gun
with his left hand,
and a second shot rang out just as he touched the pistol.

Yes!
H
e’s shot himself again.
Then I thought,
H
ow can a hunting guide be so incompetent with a gun
?

Then I heard a voice from above. An angelic voice. I
t
was not telling me I had miraculously been spared. It was
n’t even speaking to me. It
was coming from the ledge above and was
speaking instead to
Alonso Castillo Maldonado
and saying,
“
You move a muscle and I’ll
b
low your balls off.”

That Susannah is a hell o
f
a shot with a coyote rifle.

47

“It was like one of
Annie Oakley
’s stunts in
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show
,” I said to Martin. “First she shot his right arm. Then when he tried to pick up the gun with his left hand, she shot that arm too.”

“Two for two,” he said, tipping his Tecate can in her direction. “That’s good shooting.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And that’s why he took
what she said so seriously
and stood the
re
as immobile as a marble statue.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ’
You move a muscle and I’ll blow your balls off
’
.”

Martin gave tha
t little involuntary wince
men experience when something of that nature is mentioned.

I turned to Susannah. “I never knew you were such a crack shot.”

“
It was no big deal, Hubie.
I was only thirty feet away. Matt, Mark and I practice with
Coors
beer cans at a hundred yards.”

“You can hit a beer can at a hundred yards?”

“Matt and Mark can hit the can. I hit the little picture of the waterfall on the label
of the can
.”

“How did you know they’d be down in that
c
liff
d
welling,” asked Martin.

“I saw
The Hunt
ing
… No,
I don’t think I’ll call him The Hunting Guide any longer.
I think I’ll call him
El Raton
. I need to practice my Spanish. I saw his jeep leave by the trail in front of his house with what I thought was someone lying down on the back seat. I
figured
it was Hubie, so I followed him, staying way back so as not to be spotted. When he turned east off the road, I
guessed
he was headed to the cliff dwelling. I’d been
there
twice, so
I
took
off across country in the general direction and got there
in the nick of
time
. I saw the jeep and just hoped I wasn’t too late. I grabbed the coyote rifle and
ran
to the edge just as
El Raton
was
lifting his arm to club
Hubie with his gun butt.”

Martin looked at my face
then back at her
. “Too bad you didn’t get there before he
d
id it
.”

“She did
,” I said
. This happened when he dragged me over a basalt trail.”

alatinotyp. This Ouch.”

“What I don’t understand,” Susannah said, “is why you went to his house to begin with.”

“Because I’m an idiot.”

They looked at each other and nodded.

“Thanks. What happened was I finally thought about the obvious. The second time I was there,
I
had gone over the entire surface of that dwelling with a rebar, inserting it every six inches. It slid in easily. The soil was not compacted. But I never hit a single artifact. There was one shard the first time, but none on the second visit. No
animal skin,
no arrowhead
s
, no flin
t, no worked stone, no broken metates, nothing
, zip,
nada
. In over twenty y
ears of digging, I’ve never encountered a site so totally picked clean.”

“But how did you know it was
El Raton
?”

“I didn’t. I suspected him because, being a guide, he’s always exploring out in the wilds
so
he
would know about it.
More importantly,
h
e had a connection with the guy
I thought had been buried down there
. A
nd
finally
because he looked like a dangerous felon.”

“I was with you until that last one,” Susannah said.
”You steal pots, and no one would say you look like a dangerous felon.”

Then she
took
another
look at me and said, “Well, they might say that the way you look now.”