Stuart Woods: Santa Fe Edge

“Yes.”

“Do you think she started sleeping on her usual side, then shifted to your side?”

“I’ve never known her to do that,” Hanks replied.

“Did you see the gun?”

“Yes, it was on the floor beside the bed, and the bedside-table drawer was not quite closed. That’s where I keep the gun.”

“Did your wife know it was there?”

“Yes, and she knew how to use it.”

“What sort of gun was it?”

“It was a Colt Government.380.”

“Loaded?”

“I kept it in the drawer with the magazine in and a round in the chamber, cocked, but with the safety on.”

“Were you expecting trouble?”

“I had a burglary right after the house was finished,” Hanks replied. “I suspected it was somebody who worked on the house.”

“Tell me about that.”

“It was a Saturday afternoon. I went out to the Santa Fe flea market, gone about two hours, and when I came back I went into my dressing room and found a jewelry box turned upside down. I was missing a Rolex watch, a couple pairs of cuff links and my old wedding ring. I was divorced at the time.”

“How did they get in?”

“I believe by the bedroom door opening to the outside. I had put the alarm on but hadn’t locked the house. The transom window over the door was open, and it turns out that deactivates that part of the alarm, something I didn’t know before. I think the guy came in through that door, went straight to the dressing room, emptied the jewelry box and got out in a hurry. There’s a dirt road that cuts across my property behind the house, and he could have driven in there without being seen.”

“Any luck on recovering any of the stolen items?”

“None at all. And I believe the man who shot my wife came in and left the same way. If he’d left by the front door I would likely have passed him on the way to the house. As I walked into the bedroom I heard a car drive away behind the house, and when I looked out I saw some dust raised, but the car wasn’t in sight.”

“Do you know why the police arrested you?”

“They said because my fingerprints were on the gun. But it was my gun, so you’d expect that.”

“I’ll represent you, Tip,” Eagle said, “and I think I can probably get you bail. How much equity do you have in your house?”

“It’s paid for. Am I going to be able to continue playing golf? I have to make a living.”

“I’ll try, but maybe not. But you’ll be able to practice. I’ll need a retainer of fifty thousand dollars against my hourly rate and expenses.”

“I can raise that and reasonable bail,” Hanks said. “How much do you think that will be?”

“Maybe a couple of hundred thousand.” Eagle looked at his watch. “You’ll probably be arraigned within the hour. I’ll see you in the courtroom.”

The two men shook hands, and Eagle left. This one didn’t look so tough, he thought.

Barbara Eagle Keeler was taken by a female guard from her cell in the El Diablo Prison for Women, east of Acapulco, Mexico, handcuffed and delivered to the office of Pedro Alvarez, the warden of the facility. It was not her first trip there.

She had been imprisoned now for nine weeks after a trial of one hour and ten minutes and a jury deliberation of half that, and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison for each of three attempted murders, the sentences to run concurrently. One of the attempted murders had consisted of Barbara’s severing with a straight razor the penis of a young man who turned out to be the nephew of a captain of police in Acapulco. This had proven an unfortunate choice of both victim and technique, and had ensured her conviction by an all-male jury, who, upon hearing the young man’s testimony, had, as one man, crossed their legs.

Before leaving the Acapulco jail for El Diablo, Barbara had been raped repeatedly by the captain and a couple of his subordinates, as the nephew had watched, but the young man had not been allowed to cut up her face, as he had wished to do.

“It is more difficult in prison for a beautiful woman than an ugly one,” the captain had explained. “You will be avenged often.”

The captain had spoken without taking into account the animal cunning that reposed in this particular woman. Barbara had survived an awful second marriage to the murderer of her first husband. She had been convicted as an accessory, though she had not known of the man’s intentions, and had served a sentence in a New York State prison, where she had been schooled in female-on-male violence and other criminal activity by other inmates and where she had been interviewed by the Santa Fe attorney, Ed Eagle, on the subject of her criminal sister, who had been married to a Hollywood film producer with a Santa Fe home.

Upon her early release, due to a court order after a lawsuit concerning prison overcrowding, Barbara had made her way to Santa Fe, where she had looked up Ed Eagle and, in fairly short order, enticed him into marriage.

A few months later, she had made off with a large sum of his money, and, after an extensive search by two clever private detectives, she had been lured aboard a yacht in La Jolla, California, and transported to a spot in Mexican waters a few miles off Tijuana, where, by previous arrangement, the police had boarded the yacht and arrested her for the three attempted murders, two of which victimized the private detectives.

Upon transfer to El Diablo, she had established herself among her fellow prisoners as someone who would not be fucked with, as she would have put it, without violence being perpetrated upon her assailant. At the same time she had preserved her appearance and her physical fitness, and she had made it her business to be noticed by the warden, Capitán Alvarez.

Alvarez lived with his very plain wife in an apartment adjacent to his office, and Barbara had learned that the wife sometimes traveled to Acapulco to visit her mother. Twice Barbara had been ordered to Alvarez’s office, where he had raped her.

Barbara had accepted this stoically, even letting the man believe she enjoyed it, because she knew that if she fought him, he would kill her-or have it done by the guards. Now his wife was in Acapulco again, Barbara had learned through the prison grapevine, and she was back in Alvarez’s office.

The capitán was, perhaps, six-two and three hundred pounds.

“Get naked,” he had said to her, forgetting to say “please.”

He had removed her handcuffs, then closed and locked his office door. He poured himself what was, apparently, not his first shot of tequila of the morning and sipped it while he watched her undress.

Barbara had done so without hesitation, and had even managed to be alluring during the process. Alvarez had dropped his pants, sat down on his office sofa, taken her by the hair and pulled her to her knees, where she did what was expected of her. Such was her skill that it did not take long for him to reach a successful conclusion. He sagged sideways onto the sofa and, after a few minutes of her caresses, fell asleep, snoring loudly and breathing tequila into the close atmosphere of the small room.

Barbara did not waste time putting on her clothes. She went to the interior door she believed led to his quarters, opened it as quietly as possible and entered the apartment.

It consisted of a living room with a dining area, a bedroom and a bath. There were bars on the windows of the living room and bedroom, but an exploration of the bathroom revealed a small window over the toilet that had not been fitted with bars. She stood on the toilet seat and unlatched the window, which swung outward. She found herself looking a dozen feet down into an alley, which ran off a larger street to her left that a sign revealed to be Camino Cerritos. Directly across the street from the alley was an establishment named, on a large sign, Cantina Rosita.