Steven Havill: Out of Season

“Three-ten, PCS.”

I nodded toward the mike. “Take it,” I said.

Linda pulled it out of the bracket and promptly dropped it with a loud whack against the radio console. “Sorry,” she said. “PCS, this is three-ten.”

If Gayle Sedillos was surprised to hear something other than my gruff, monosyllabic radio response, she didn’t let it show in her voice.

“Three-ten, be advised that three-oh-three will be on foot with vehicle disabled. He has a handheld, but it doesn’t have the range to reach the repeater.”

Linda glanced over at me. “Just acknowledge,” I said.

She pressed the mike key and said, “Ten-four, PCS.”

By the time we reached the airport, Jim Bergin had the main hangar open and had pulled his new Cessna 210 onto the apron. The fitful gusts rocked the wings and I grimaced as I parked behind the terminal. It was going to be a rocky ride, even with burrito padding.

“Jim doesn’t have a police radio in the aircraft,” I told Linda, “and the handhelds are useless at any distance and with all the engine noise. We’ll be talking on the aircraft channel, on Unicom, back to the radio here at the airport. I want you on this end, and then you can patch back to Gayle by phone. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” Linda said.

“Just transfer the messages word for word. Don’t get creative.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bergin trotted over toward the car, glancing at his watch as he did so. Short, wiry, and intense, Bergin had eked out a living at the Posadas airport for twenty years. If the place had had to depend on transient av-gas customers for its economic survival, it would have been dead long before. And if Bergin’s survival depended on prompt reimbursement by the county for flights like this one, he’d starve while he waited for the government check.

“I’m kinda worried, Bill,” Bergin said as we shook hands. “They took off about two hours ago, just to do a little local sight-seeing. No radio response. You say one of the deputies has wreckage spotted?”

“He thinks he does, Jim. We don’t know for sure.” I shrugged. “It could be anything. Holman and his brother-in-law might have decided to skip over to Cruces or something like that.”

He shook his head. “I checked to make sure. They didn’t do that.” He looked up at the sky. Thin mares’ tails stretched out from the southwest, their tips shredded by winds aloft. A gust ripped across the apron, pinging sand against the side of the Cessna. “This ain’t going to be fun,” he said.

“Let’s get with it,” I said, and added, “You know Linda Real. She’s going to sit the radio down here, if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure.” He waved a hand toward the mobile home that served as the terminal. “It’s open.”

When Bergin had predicted that the flight wouldn’t be a pleasure ride, I’d chalked that up to his cautious nature. As far as I was concerned, the less time I spent in an airplane, the better, regardless of the weather.

The 210 kicked into life with a hearty rumble, and between its vibration and the constant buffeting of the wind against its flanks, the aircraft felt like a living thing.

We taxied out and I looked down and watched sand and desert litter stream past the tires. The gusts were quartering across the tarmac, and Bergin kept full aileron correction cranked in to discourage the windward wing from lifting.

At the end of the taxiway, he let the Cessna weathervane, and we parked with its nose into the wind while he completed his checklist. When he was satisfied, he plucked the mike off the console.

“Posadas Unicom, this is Cessna four-niner Bravo November Mike departing the active straight-out to the east.”

Linda’s reply was immediate. “Ten-four, November Mike.”

Jim looked over at me. “Ten-four?” he shouted with a grin. “That’s one we don’t hear much.” He let the Cessna idle forward onto the runway, and with the yoke full over to the left to keep the wing down into the wind, he advanced the throttle. The turbocharged engine bellowed and we accelerated hard.

The little terminal building was about one third of the way down the seven-thousand-foot runway, and we were airborne long before that. The first updraft slammed the aircraft, and Bergin kept the climb angle moderate, building speed. I looked down just in time to see the landing gear on my side flop backward and disappear, and for a moment, my heart stopped.

“Where’s the site?” Bergin shouted.

“You know where the Salinas Arroyo forks? Just south of Finnegan’s place?”

Bergin nodded and banked to the north. I would have liked to have had a big, padded grab bar across my lap, like on one of those carnival rides. I sucked in my gut and yanked the shoulder harness tighter, then clamped my right hand on the dashboard.

As we cleared the mesa rim, an updraft kicked the Cessna so hard that we gained a thousand feet. Beyond the mesa, the wind was quartering from the northeast, and we flew crabbed sideways, the pinon and juniper scrub flowing by under my window.

What had turned into a major undertaking for Deputy Pasquale was a matter of minutes for us. The land sloped away from Cat Mesa, leveling out onto the flat, bleak prairie that stretched to the north, broken here and there by sharp outcroppings and vertical lava plugs.

Once clear of mesa influence, Bergin kept a thousand feet of air between us and the scrub below. The occasional herds of cattle ignored us. I could see dust and manure mixed into brown billows, kicked up where the cattle congregated for the night. The earth was bare, ribboned with narrow cattle trails that radiated out from the water tanks and windmills that dotted the landscape.

Off to the west, a clutter of buildings marked the southern corner of Johnny and Edwin Boyd’s place. The Boyds’ Circle JEB Ranch was huge, extending up to the patch of federal lands that split the county line to the north. It was country where ranchers really liked their neighbors…at a distance.

After leaving the village of Posadas, County Road 43 snaked north this way and that, up and around the east end of Cat Mesa. Crossing the ranch land north of the mesa, the road avoided the trap of Salinas Arroyo, just to the west.

Without the wind, the visibility would have been unlimited and someone with sharp eyes could have seen the evening sun wink off Tom Pasquale’s patrol unit the moment the mesa was cleared. But we were flying through tan soup. The elegant, sophisticated Cessna felt like a 1953 Chevy pickup being flogged up a boulder-strewn wash.

“Lots of fun, eh?” Bergin shouted. He wasn’t grinning at my discomfort. “There’s a supply of bags in the pocket behind your seat, if you need ’em.”

“That’s not going to be a problem,” I shouted back as another air pocket shook my teeth and wrenched my spine. “I’m going to need a chiropractor when we’re done. I don’t understand why they went flying in this kind of weather, anyway.”

“Hell of a good question.” He turned to scan a small hummock of oak trees that rocked by under the left wing.

The narrow strip of pavement that the county claimed as Highway 43 drifted to the northeast as the Salinas Arroyo picked up several tributaries. Bergin rested one hand on the dash and pointed straight ahead. “That’s the fork,” he shouted.

The Salinas widened and then, for no apparent reason, divided, with one tine swerving almost due west and the other running due north. Left in the middle was rumpled, inhospitable country with no easy access except for a handful of rough, two-track ranch roads. The main road to the Boyd ranch, County 9010, wandered west from its intersection with the pavement of County Road 43, crossing the Salinas and several other arroyos.