The Territory: A Novel (11 page)

Back in Artemis, Josie dropped Marta off at the department. She had one more task to accomplish before heading home that night. Red’s body had been found the day before, and she had not talked with his daughter, Colt Goff, an angry twenty-year-old who was known locally for her support of the liberal left. Josie had interviewed Colt for an evening dispatcher’s position about a year ago, but the girl had refused to unspike her hair or remove her facial piercings. She had given up a six-dollar-an-hour raise from what she made stacking books at the public library.

Colt lived above the Family Value Store in the run-down part of town. The downtown grid of streets in Artemis was shaped like a tic-tac-toe board, with the southernmost horizontal street containing the low-rent businesses and a few apartments. City offices and the more upscale stores were located closest to the courthouse; the nicer homes were a block back, the shabbier homes and cheap apartments were three blocks back, on the fringes of the downtown area. Josie parallel-parked in front of the Family Value Store and walked up a narrow flight of stairs that led from the street to the only apartment at the top of the landing.

Colt answered the door in a pair of red plaid boxers and a man’s V-neck undershirt. She looked bored, but Josie thought it was affected. Her hair was jet black and spiked, but the long spikes drooped around her head like wilted grass. Her face was pierced, with studs in her nose, eyebrows, and tongue, and black eyeliner was smudged under both eyes. She looked like a young woman in need of a good night’s sleep and a bath.

“What took you so long?” the girl asked, and leaned her shoulder against the doorframe to her apartment. “I figured I’d be first on your list of suspects.”

“I’m sorry about your dad, Colt.”

Colt pinched her thumb and forefinger together in front of her eye, looking through the crack between them. “Honestly, I’m not even the teensiest bit sad.”

“Do you mind if I come in for a minute to ask you some questions?”

“I’m good with here,” Colt said.

Josie sighed. “I’m too tired to play games tonight. Let’s just go inside and have a seat and talk about a few things.”

The girl stared at Josie a moment, then turned away quickly, leaving Josie to follow. The small living room was littered with pizza boxes, newspapers, books, dirty dishes, and clothes. With her back to Josie, Colt opened a newspaper and covered the contents on the coffee table as if laying out a tablecloth. Josie wondered what kind of drug paraphernalia lay beneath it.

“When’s the last time you talked with your dad?” Josie asked. She pulled a small notepad out of her shirt pocket and sat on the couch opposite Colt, who had pulled over a chair from the kitchen table.

“About two weeks ago. He stopped by my apartment to tell me my ex-boyfriend, Jessup Lamey, got picked up in El Paso. Thrown in the pokey for possession. It was a sweet conversation. Very loving, as you can imagine.” She rolled her eyes and lifted the newspaper high enough to pull out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

“Do you have any idea who might have killed your dad?” Josie asked.

“Anyone with a gun and half a brain.”

“A little more specific.”

“It’s not like we ran with the same crowd.”

“You don’t know of anyone specifically who would want to see your father killed?”

She cocked her head and pursed her lips with a forefinger on her temple. “Let’s see. Me. My ex. The mayor. The people he called his friends. The people he called his enemies. You.” She gave Josie a half smile. “Because, let’s face it. You don’t mind Red’s gone, do you? He was a pain in the proverbial ass.”

“Can you tell me where you were yesterday from about eight in the morning through dinnertime?”

“Here.”

“Don’t you work at the library?”

“Not yesterday. I was home sick.”

“Did you go to the doctor, talk to anyone throughout the day who can verify your whereabouts?”

“Nope.”

Josie stood from the couch and considered her a moment. “I’ll give you some advice from someone who grew up with a difficult parent. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone. It took me a long time to realize that, for the most part, people don’t judge me based upon my mother’s actions. I have no control over her, and I don’t owe anyone an explanation for her actions.”

The girl’s expression faltered for the first time. “You get my name, right? He named me for a gun. What kind of father names a newborn baby after a gun?”

Josie could think of no adequate response.

“I was nothing but a nuisance to him growing up. I didn’t kill my father, but I’m not going to pretend I’m sad he’s dead.”

FIVE

Dawn came slowly with the sun hidden behind a thick wall of clouds. The gray sky faded into the desert floor with no horizon line. Looking out her kitchen window that morning, Josie thought the day could have passed for January instead of mid-July. Clouds billowed around Chimiso Peak, causing the slow sloping mountain to appear massive. Josie let her gaze drift from the window to the small framed black-and-white photograph sitting on the kitchen counter: the only picture she had of her family. The photo was taken on a boat, with her mom and dad sitting on the backseat, Josie sitting on her father’s lap, both his hands resting on her shoulders. All three smiled widely at the camera, squinting into the sun. Josie couldn’t remember the day, but she loved the idea that she had once been part of a happy family.

Her father had been shot during a routine traffic stop after just five years as a trooper with the Indiana State Police. Josie had been eight. At twenty-seven, her mom had lost her protector and provider. She never took over that role herself.

Josie picked the photo up and placed it facedown in the kitchen drawer. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she didn’t want her mother coming to her home and seeing the picture on display. She dreaded the visit but had resigned herself to the fact that it would happen.

Josie twisted the can opener and poured out half a can of peaches into a bowl. As she ate her breakfast standing at the counter, she opened her cell phone and dialed Macon Drench, got him out of bed, and asked if she could stop by his home on her way to work.

Josie used her cell phone to clock in with Lou and drove the back roads past the mudflats, a long-ago dried-up lake bed that turned to mud during the summer monsoon season, then through the craggy Chinati Mountain pass north of town. The mountains in Arroyo County appeared larger and more imposing because the land between them was completely flat, with only spare sections of native grass and occasional patches of trees and scrub brush. The land looked to Josie as if a giant mountain range had split and separated, like the continental drift on a smaller scale.

Drench’s home sat at the base of the mountains and was surrounded on either side by ponderosa and piñon pines. The steel and glass house was made up of three rectangular boxes stacked haphazardly on top of one another, extending up the side of the mountain. The excavation work alone had cost half a million dollars because of the equipment trucked in from El Paso for months on end. But the final effect was stunning, and among the pine trees, the villa could have passed for a home in Aspen, Colorado. Josie was looking forward to seeing the house. She’d heard stories but never been inside.

She parked her jeep in a spot sheltered in the pines and saw Drench standing beside the reflecting pool in front of his home. A formidable six foot five in cowboy hat and boots, often sporting leather chaps, he was dwarfed by his monstrous house.

“How do, Chief?” Drench called.

He had the ability to make a slight acquaintance feel like an old friend. Josie had talked with him on a few law-related matters through the years but had never felt intimidated by his wealth or position as the town’s founder.

She made her way around the granite boulders that had been dropped along the front walkway to look like a rockslide. The reflecting pool was surrounded by smooth black granite slabs flecked with white and gold that caught the light despite the cloudy day.

“Sorry to wake you this morning,” she said.

Drench waved her inside. “No worry. Come on in. Haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

Josie followed Drench into a vast minimalist space constructed primarily of concrete, glass, and steel. The couches were concrete slabs covered in gray and blue cushions. The space looked cold and uncomfortable, like she had fallen through a crag in an iceberg.

Drench noticed her look and smiled wryly. “Have you ever met my wife?”

“No, sir.”

“This is her floor.” He looked around the room with a wry smile. “She’s a fine woman, but a little chilly.”

Drench walked toward an angular stairway consisting of wide slabs of concrete that twisted up to a second floor; the middle box that was visible from the road. Thick floor-to-ceiling windows surrounded the room, large fur rugs were scattered about the space, and overstuffed black leather couches and armchairs encircled a bar and a fireplace on the other end of the room. Drench walked to the bar, where he poured two cups of coffee from a carafe.

“Gladys buys this stuff from the Andes. We could feed a family of four on what she spends for coffee. But it’s damn good.”

Josie sipped and admired it, although she thought it tasted burnt.

“What brings you to the hinterlands so early in the morning?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard about Red Goff?”

“That I have.”

“I’m hoping for a little perspective on Red. Everyone we’ve interviewed hated the man. I haven’t found anyone upset by his murder. Makes it a little hard to narrow the focus.”

Drench squinted and looked out a wall of plate glass into the smoky sky. “Red and I go way back. He was friends with my brother, Samuel. We all went to the same grade school and high school, but he and Sam were three years older. I took off to make my fortune in Houston, and Red stayed back. He’s seen some terrible things. Red’s daddy was gunned down and killed by Mexican coyotes sneaking a group of illegals across. They’d stopped at his farm to camp for the night and use water from the stock pond. Red’s dad confronted them, tried to run them off, and they killed him. Red never got over it.”

Josie shook her head. “He never saw guns as a danger. Even though his own father was killed with a gun.”

Drench raised his right hand as if swearing on a Bible. “No, ma’am. Guns don’t kill. People do. Red’s doctrine.”

Drench pulled a barstool out for Josie and she sat. He sat on the stool beside her and sipped at his coffee.

“Red started working as a field hand the year his daddy died, and he worked hard physical labor every year after. He blamed the illegals for his family’s tough life. And he blamed the government for doing nothing about the problem. Police, too. Growing up, his three sisters relied on him as a father figure. His mother died from a heart attack just after his daddy.”

“No family money that you know of? No inheritance or insurance from way back to support him?” Josie asked.

“Red married an acid-tongued barmaid when he was in his thirties to help him with the farm, but she took off on him. That was Colt’s mom. Red didn’t have a plug nickel.” Drench frowned, his gaze fixed on the desert beyond his home. “He raised his daughter in a house filled with hate. I worry about that girl quite a bit.”

“So, how does a man with no money have an arsenal of several hundred guns and bulletproof glass?” she asked.

Drench leaned on an elbow and gave Josie a half smile. “I wondered that myself. None of those yahoos he ran around with has that kind of money. Bunch of men with overactive testosterone production, if you ask me. I don’t know where Red got his money, but I’d imagine whoever took off with that batch of guns knows something about his murder.”

“I understand you own the land in front of Red’s. Is that true?”

Drench smiled. “That pissed Red off to no end.”

“He ever try and buy it from you?”

He laughed. “Offered me five times what that land was worth. I wouldn’t take it. He was a fun one to get mad. I never once saw him raise a hand, but he sure could cuss a blue streak. Gladys always said he had the Napoleon complex. I just think life slapped his chops one too many times.”

“Do you rent out the trailer at the bottom of the property?” Josie asked.

“Yep. Kenny Winning. Although his sister’s living there now. He’s a nice-enough kid.”

“Think Kenny had any reason to kill Red? His sister said they hated each other,” Josie said.

Drench smiled again. “That was my fault. I gave that kid land to set his trailer on just to tick Red off. Kenny worked for me for a while doing odd jobs. Handyman stuff. He was a good kid, honest, dependable, but real skittish. Never stayed in one place too long, like he was being chased.” He pointed a finger at Josie. “Come to think of it, that kid was dating Colt for a while. Red’s daughter.”

“How long did they date?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It wasn’t anything serious. Couple months, maybe.”

“Think he’d have had any reason to kill Red?”

Drench bit his lip. “I can’t imagine it.”

“What do you know about Hack Bloster?”

Drench looked down at the bar and traced the wood grain with his finger. “This is between me and you?”

“Of course.”

“I think he’s a dirty cop. I had my eye on that kid ever since he moved to town. He worked for me, digging wells for about six months. I always had a hard time getting a straight answer out of him. I even told Red to steer clear of him. I told him he was insane for ever letting him join the Gunners. Red thought Bloster would give legitimacy to the group just because he’s a cop. A gun and a badge don’t make you legitimate.”

“You have anything concrete on Bloster? Anything to back up your suspicions?” she asked.

“Nothing but a bad feeling.”

*   *   *

Pegasus Winning sat on the picnic table under the pecan trees and stared at the tattoo on her forearm: a constant reminder of the man who had sliced her open and left her to bleed on the dirty linoleum floor in their kitchen. The tattoo had been done just a month before he sliced her, a blackbird with a ribbon dangling from its beak. The inscription on the ribbon read,
Death do us part
. The inscription was his idea, the crow hers.