Steven Havill - Prolonged Exposure

I got up and walked to the window. “She makes a deal to part with the youngster. We don’t know how she did; we don’t know the circumstances. We know that her ex-husband, Paul Cole, came to Posadas under false pretenses, so only an idiot would ignore his involvement. It couldn’t happen under Andy Browers’s nose without him knowing, so he’s in on it, too.”

“A real crop of woodchucks you got here,” Costace said.

“They make a deal with Madrid. The time comes to deliver the boy, and someone backs out. Mama, maybe.”

“Touching,” Costace said.

“Maybe they took some money in advance to secure the deal. They know they have Madrid at the motel, waiting. They figure, Hey, what the hell. Give him some other kid.”

Costace rubbed his face. “Do you have some reason to believe they’d know about the Guzman child? Why would they choose him?”

“Sure,” I said. “His mother’s high profile in this town, as is his father. And his picture was just in the local paper, in a big play they gave the search efforts.” I rummaged on my desk and found a copy of the Register . “Here it is.”

Costace frowned and examined the newspaper at some length. “Handsome boy,” he said finally. “But I can just see the look on Madrid’s face when they come trooping into his motel room with Francis Guzman, Jr., in tow.”

“And so the argument,” Holman said. “In all your dealings with Madrid, is he usually armed?”

Costace held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t dealt with the man myself. And he’s a slick one. He’s no strong-arm, if what I hear is right. Sure, he might carry a knife, but the fastest way to get yourself nailed at the border is to be carrying a concealed weapon. No, guys like Madrid come and go slick as an oil spill, because they know what attracts attention.”

“Why would he fight, then?”

“Well,” Costace said, “if they already had a down payment and didn’t want to return it, then he might get just a little testy. Depends on who he was facing, and what they were trying to pull on him. It’s all just speculation.”

“That’s all we’ve got,” I said. “There was blood all over the motel room, and considerable blood in the truck and Browers’s house.”

“He got in a couple good licks, then,” Costace said. “They shot him twice?”

“That’s right,” Holman said. “The coroner told me tonight that the preliminary shows two twenty-two-caliber wounds. One in the side, one in the back. He lived for about twenty minutes.”

“End of his argument,” Costace said. “And now your good folks have discovered how easy it is to go from foolproof plan to royal fuckup.” He stood up and pushed the chair back against the desk. “Did you find any money in the motel room, Sheriff?”

Holman shook his head. “Nothing. Not even Madrid’s wallet. There were a couple of car-rental papers. That’s all.”

“Then your folks are running around with a bundle of money that doesn’t belong to them, and they haven’t delivered the goods, either. Someone down south isn’t going to be too happy, but there isn’t a hell of a lot they can do, either.” He glanced at his watch, as if we’d used up his allotment of time. “If what we’ve been thinking is true, then you can figure it out as well as I can. If I were them, I’d get rid of three things.” He held up three fingers, then bent the index. “First is the bleeder. He’s hurt bad, maybe dead. There’s a lot of empty desert out there, so that’s no problem.” He bent down the second finger. “The second is the Guzman child. Without that little kid, they’re just a nice family. And finally, they’ve got to dump that RV. They bring top dollar in Mexico, so if they can slip across the border, they’ve got a chance.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You been in touch with Naranjo, I imagine?”

“Trying,” I said.

He nodded. “There’s some good news in all this,” he said.

“I’d like to hear it,” I replied.

“Well, if Madrid had the boys, I’d bet even money that you’d never see them again. He knows how to slip in and out of Mexico clean as the wind. He’s got contacts, and he knows who to pay. But Madrid’s dead. You’re dealing with a bunch of wild-eyed amateurs. Who knows what they’re thinking, or what their logic is? You wait long enough and they’ll drive themselves right into a dead end. They can’t come back. They can’t cross at Regal. The Border Patrol’s looking for ’em every foot of the border, and they don’t have Madrid’s savvy or contacts.”

“Maybe that’s good news, and maybe it isn’t,” I said, and eyed Costace. “At least one of those two little boys is excess baggage at this point. And as you say, it’s a big desert out there.”

Most of that night, Jim Bergin’s Piper Archer moaned in high, lazy circles over Posadas County, spotting headlights. State police took care of the interstate-the interchange at Posadas was blocked, and any vehicle coming on or going off was searched.

We concentrated on two possibilities. First was the notion that they might have ditched the mammoth RV for a more sensible vehicle. If that was the case, then officers manning roadblocks needed to check every vehicle-and they did, with mind-numbing regularity.

The second option was that they might keep the RV, knowing its intrinsic worth on the black market if they ever successfully reached Mexico-or, for that matter, a dozen different chop shops scattered across the Southwest that might specialize in such monsters.

“See, the problem is,” Martin Holman said, “the average person just doesn’t look very closely.” We were trying to do just that, me driving and Martin looking closely . “Remember that Ditch Witch that the telephone company had stolen right off a job site last year? Machine, trailer, the whole works. Never found it.” He turned to find the large handheld spotlight. “You see some guys working out in the field with a backhoe, or Ditch Witch, or jackhammer, whatever, you don’t stop and walk out and ask for proof of ownership.”

“How true,” I murmured.

“We assume that the people using the equipment own the equipment. It’s that simple. Besides, we can assume they had a choice.”

“A choice of what?”

“They could have taken Browers’s truck in the first place and left the RV behind. That they didn’t do that indicates to me that they want that RV. It’s worth a lot of money in the right places. His old pickup truck isn’t.”

I idled 310 up to the fence of the Consolidated Mining boneyard. High up on the mesa side overlooking the village, the abandoned mine and equipment yard rivaled the landfill for Posadas County’s shot of ugly. The gate was heavy steel and chain link, with barbed wire on top. The lock was a length of inch chain with a massive lock inside a plate-steel lock cover. Everything was in place.

Nevertheless, Holman buzzed down his window and swung the beam of the portable spotlight across the vast acreage of mining detritus. Nothing that could have been a disguised RV stood out.

“Turn down the dump road so we can check that tin building,” he said. “My bet is that they just drove out of the county and went on their way. They had darn near two hours head start, with no blocks, nothing. By the time we knew something was up, they could have been halfway to the crossing at Douglas-Nogales.”

He switched off the light and glanced at the dashboard clock. “And from the time the boy first went missing to when we knew the RV was involved was almost three hours, and that is enough time to get across.”

“We’re just going to have to trust that the federales got word to Naranjo and he has his side locked up,” I said. “There are far fewer roads down there than up here.”