Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

They were a crew of kids. Not little kids but, you know, guys in their twenties. They were wearing jackets to deal with the cold, though you could see that some of them were wearing very little underneath, and they all looked pretty grubby. It was hard to get a good view of them, but one of them was standing still while the others were hunched over, searching around the campsite and the trees in the grove.

“There’s nothing fucking here,” one of them said, frustrated. It was dark, but I could see that he was skinny, almost skin and bones, and he scratched at his face as he spoke. Aw shit , I thought, meth heads .

There were four of them looking around, while the fifth one stood there on his phone, texting someone, the blue light illuminating his face as he stared intensely down at it. His fingers were flying over the screen. “It’s gotta be here somewhere! They said he hid it in the forest, and this is where he died. It’s gotta be here!”

“Probably stashed it in a fuckin bank or some shit,” one of the other ones muttered, a woman. Something shifted near me, and I had to glance over to the left, making sure it wasn’t some meth head sneaking up on me. It was a jackrabbit, holding still, its nose twitching and its breathing heavy.

I let out a small breath of relief. That’s when the rock cracked across the right side of my face.

One of them didn’t have a flashlight. He’d been hiding in the woods, I guess, keeping a lookout for, well, someone like me. The world went white for a second as I hit the ground, and my gun scattered out of my hands. With the sound of a scuffle, the meth heads started to panic, hollering and clumping up in the clearing. The one with the rock kicked me in the side, before crawling on top of me and lifting the rock over his head. He wasn’t huge, though his eyes were wide and blank.

I reached for my gun, but couldn’t get it in time. Instead I pressed the button on my Maglite and swung the beam up into the kid’s face.

He was missing some teeth. He hissed, the light blinding him. I swung my Maglite up again and clocked him in the face, getting him off me.

“Nick, what the fuck is going on?”

“Forest Service, get down on the ground!” I barked, a little more thickly than I liked, reaching around for my gun as Nick moaned on the ground, holding his face. I fired it into the air.

Unfortunately, this didn’t get them down on the ground; instead, they booked it toward their cars. I could hear their engines going by the time I staggered up and cursed, grabbing Nick. At least one of them wouldn’t get away.

A few hours later, I was discharged from the hospital and got a ride to my sister Dolores’s place. She works for the state, and has a house in Santa Fe. My side hurt as I walked, and I had a bandage over my head. The scalp had bled like a stuck pig. The doctors said I wasn’t concussed, which was a blessing. I still dropped into sleep like a cliff rock into the Coyote Creek.

The next morning, late, I woke to a call from my boss telling me to check my e-mail. The cops had gotten an autopsy done on Redmond, and they wanted some insight. When I read through the report, Dolores’s coffee in hand, things clicked together, and I knew I had to get moving — and quick. I grabbed the book out of my truck; Alicia had been nice enough to send two other rangers to grab it for me. I sat down at the table and flipped around, making notes on a pink Post-It. The circled page numbers. The squared page numbers. Circles latitude, squares longitude. GPS coordinates. Redmond hadn’t been out looking for the Katzenberg treasure — he’d been burying treasure of his own.

It can take awhile to get something like this done officially, so I called it in to the other law enforcement officials in the field to go out and see if they could find anything at those coordinates. Then I went off to talk to Mary O’Shaughnessy.

When I pulled up in front of the $2 million house, she was getting into a black Audi, a leather satchel in the front seat.

“Going for a trip, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy?” I asked, getting out of my truck. I still had my bandage on and didn’t look or feel great.

“Mr. Apodaca!” She forced a smile. “I was thinking of visiting Eric, after our conversation yesterday...”

“Without your buddy Nick? Did they mention to you that we grabbed him?” I said. Not subtle, maybe, but my head hurt, and I was ready to get this weird-ass situation done.

“I don’t know...”

“Come off it, O’Shaughnessy,” I said, trying not to let too much anger show. “You had some contacts of yours go out looking for something at Redmond’s death site last night. Meth heads, probably the sort of people who come out of Farmington, cutting petroglyphs out of the Bisti Badlands, so you can sell them out of your collection? But Redmond had something you wanted, something he wasn’t selling to you... but he gave you a look, a tease. And here you are, all the money you’d ever want, and he’s keeping something from you. And it made you mad, so maybe your Farmington boys drop by his hotel to make a suggestion. That spooks him, and he runs off to the forest. That’s where you met up with him again.”

Mary was hard to read when she was in her own gallery with her tea and cream. Now, she was almost shaking as I laid out my story.

“That’s the last thing I can’t figure out. Why’d he meet with you again? Did you tell him you had the cash? Or did you offer him the Katzenberg treasure?”

Her lip was trembling. “Mr. Apodaca, I don’t know what—”

“Regardless of how you did it, you got close, and in the cold, you offered him some tea. The toxicology report noted the presence of Doxylamine succinate in Redmond’s bloodstream. I happen to know that one by heart; I use sleeping pills sometimes and that was one that I’d had to stop because my job puts me at high elevations. Did you mean to kill him, Mary? Or was that just a happy side effect?”

Her eyes blazed at me, suddenly, and I thought about the movies. This was where the gumshoe gets shot, right, or there’s some sort of dramatic confession. Instead, she just said, “Well, I’ve never been so insulted. Really, the nerve! Accusing me of drugging some lunatic? You’ll hear from my lawyer tomorrow, Mr. Apodaca, and I hope you’ve enjoyed your career, because I’m sure you won’t have a job this time next week.”

“Your wheels are a little dirty, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Same kinda red dirt out at El Porvenir. ”

She turned and went to get into her car, and that’s when she saw the cop car down the road.

“As a federal official, I do have to make reports to local authorities regarding investigations. You understand,” I said, as the officer walked over, a pair of handcuffs in hand.

That was three days ago. I hear she’s already out on bail. Apparently the FBI has some questions regarding how she acquired some of her rarer items, so that has complicated things for her at least, but Katzenberg is already on the warpath about how things have “been handled.” I’m off the case, since I’m not a cop, but I’ll probably have to testify, if that’s worth anything.

As for the Redmond treasure, the boys brought it to me to look at. It was an arrowhead and, according to the notes Redmond had in his book, he thought it was a Clovis-era artifact. The last auction for one of those guys hit $138,000, so it wasn’t nothing he got killed over.

I took the arrowhead down to my buddy Laura at the Indian arts college. She’s out of the Tesuque Pueblo, but majored in anthropology before taking up sculpture. She’s one of the experts in identifying archaeological artifacts in New Mexico, according to the Internet. News to me; my sister met her at a party awhile back, they’re pretty close.