Sulfur Springs

  “If she finds it. Big if.” He tugged at his long, gray beard. “That beating you took must mean she’s still gunning for Peter.”

  “I think she’s still mighty interested in getting those old claims that are in his name, still banking on big mining coming back to Coronado County. But I’m also thinking more and more that it’s possible she wants to make certain Peter doesn’t file a claim on the mine where Rodriguez has his stockpile. She might even be thinking that maybe Peter’s already stumbled onto the cache of drugs.”

  “You say you found Peter. Did he say anything about that drug stash?”

  I shook my head. “But Marian doesn’t know that.”

  Sylvester pulled at his long beard and thought awhile. “Might be she’ll never find those drugs. Might be Rodriguez didn’t stash nothing in the claims she or Peter filed on. That’s all public land. Anybody could wander in. But there’s plenty of mining was done on private property, legal and illegal. A lot of those workings, just small operations, even I don’t know about.”

  I could hear the distant rumble of thunder now and knew that Sylvester and I would have to break up our little war council soon.

  “So, somebody tipped off Rodriguez to the rendezvous Peter had with them illegals, and somebody tipped off Marian and White Horse, too,” Sylvester said. “Same person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Got a speculation who that might be?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Sylvester said, “We better get our asses off this high ground before that storm hits. Do me a favor. You come up with any answers, you let me know. I got myself a score to settle, too.”

  He headed to his own truck. I waited until he was well out of sight, then started down out of the mountains just as the first big drops of rain began to splat against my windshield.

  * * *

  I drove to Cadiz in a downpour. With each flash of lightning, the mountains around me jumped out in a blaze of white. I cruised past the church and slowed to a crawl. I had to lower the window to make out the statue through the rain. The ribbon I’d tied was gone and in its place was a different ribbon. I kept going, parked a couple of blocks farther on, then hoofed it back to the church on foot. I was soaking wet, but I didn’t care. The ribbon meant news of Rainy, and I wanted that like a man dying of thirst wants water. I untied the ribbon and used the skeleton key Michelle had given me to open the church door. Inside under the cross on the altar, I found a note. I read simply: SAME TIME. SAME PLACE. They were block letters, but even so I could tell they hadn’t been written in Rainy’s hand. It was Mondragón who’d left the note.

  I sat in the first pew, relieved that Rainy was safe, and that Peter was, too. Also Juan and the others who’d walked a thousand miles looking only for freedom from violence and constant fear. I hoped that they’d finally found a permanent sanctuary. But I also felt empty and alone. Self-pity, I knew. I missed Rainy, missed her terribly, missed her smile, her laugh, her touch, her warm, dark eyes, her long braid that fell across my chest when we made love. She was with Mondragón now, a man who’d shared everything with her in exactly the same way I had, and then some, because he’d fathered her children. When you’d given your heart deeply to another person, even if things didn’t work out, did you take your whole heart back? Or did you leave a part of it with the other? I wanted to ask Rainy what she still felt for this man who was movie-star handsome and rich as Croesus and who’d come to the rescue of us all.

  A bit of ancient, Native wisdom that has always stood me in good stead: In every human being there are two wolves constantly battling. One is love and the other is fear. The wolf that wins the battle is the one you feed. Always the one you feed.

  I was feeding the wolf of fear. I knew that. And I knew that the best way to end this wallowing in doubt and self-pity was action. I called Jamie Sprangers.

  “I want to talk,” I said. “But only with you.”

  “Where and when?” he said.

  “Now. I’m at the parsonage in Cadiz.”

  “I’ll be there in ten.”

  “Bring beer,” I said.

  I walked across the street, unlocked the parsonage, and went inside. The air conditioner was running, and wet as I was, it chilled me. I changed into dry clothing, then took a towel to my dripping hair. I’d just finished when Sprangers knocked on the front door. He’d brought beer, Leinenkugel’s.

  He held up the six-pack. “From your neck of the woods, right?”

  We sat in the kitchen and drank brew.

  “I’ve got a significant dossier on you now, O’Connor,” Sprangers said. “You’ve got some Indian blood in you.”

  “Ojibwe,” I said. “One-quarter. My grandmother Dilsey was true-blood Iron Lake Anishinaabe.”

  “And your father was a cop. A county sheriff. Died in the line of duty. Is that why you wore a badge?”

  Rain channeled down the panes in gray streaks, and the thunder outside was a relentless cannonade.

  “Part of the reason,” I said. “But I believe the things he believed, and that’s also part of the reason.”

  “My dad was a cop, too. Texas Ranger. Thirty-five years. He’s retired, but ask him and he says retirement feels more like a prison sentence. He’d love to be back in uniform. There’s something about the badge, you know?”

  “I know.” I sipped my beer. It was ice cold. Perfect. “Why the Border Patrol?”

  “My grandparents are from Chihuahua. Moved to Texas when my mother was a little girl.” He saw me studying his features. “I know. I look as Mexican as you do Indian. But I think you’ll understand this. I’m Border Patrol because I want the people who are trying to get into this country, people like my grandparents, to be treated fairly. I’m not CBP to keep them out. I’m CBP to keep them safe.”

  I believed him, trusted him, and it felt good. “That’s all Peter wants, too,” I said.

  “I understand. But he’s still tied up with Rodriguez somehow.”

  “It’s all a ball of snakes.”

  He put his beer bottle down on the kitchen tabletop. “I’m listening.”

  I explained how I saw things: Marian Brown’s connection with White Horse and her part in the drug trade through Coronado County; her desire to be rid of Rodriguez; the control she wielded over the town cop Sanchez; her manipulation of Royal Diggs to get White Horse to do her dirty work; the old claims she’d been filing and the stashed drugs she was probably hoping to find in one of the diggings. He listened without interrupting.

  When I finished, he looked away and studied the rain-streaked windows awhile. “It all fits,” he finally said. “We’ve had a good idea that Royal Diggs is behind the dealing out of Paradiso. He’s the cock of the walk out there. We’ve also had our eye on Sanchez, figuring that unless he was stupid—and I’m not convinced he isn’t—he knew about the drugs being trafficked and was probably on the take. Brown, she’s a new wrinkle.”

  “If you suspected Diggs, why didn’t you move on him?”

  “Not enough evidence. And he’s not the kind of guy who’s going to break if you sweat him. With Sanchez, we figured at some point he might become useful to us and we didn’t want to tip our hand. Rodriguez is the one we really want to nail.” He tapped the tabletop with his fingers, thinking. “But Brown.” He nodded, as if the idea appealed to him. “We know that Rodriguez has been diversifying, financially. We think some of the money is being laundered through Coronado County. Maybe Brown’s responsible for that. She’s a woman used to dealing with large sums in her land transactions. The last couple of years, she’s put an enormous amount of cash into building that expensive bunch of houses up on the mesa above Cadiz. Could be the money that bankrolled her development came from south of the border, out of Rodriguez’s pocket.”

  “If that’s true, why get rid of Rodriguez? He’s the hand that feeds her.”

  Sprangers drank some beer while he thought about that. “Like you say, maybe she’s looking for the stockpile of drugs we’re
all interested in. She finds it and has the contacts to move it, she’s got millions. But it might also be she understands that if you throw in with a scorpion like Rodriguez, you’re going to get stung eventually. Maybe she’s afraid of him. If you know the cruelty he’s capable of, you’d be foolish not to be scared. And maybe this, too. If we’re right about her laundering money for him, we’re talking big money. With Rodriguez out of the picture, maybe she has more control over what she’s invested in his behalf. It’s a stretch, I know, but I think it’s worth pursuing. I’ll put my people on that.”

  “There’s one thing that still troubles me a lot,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Somebody told both White Horse and Rodriguez about Peter’s rendezvous in the desert.”

  “Brown,” he said, as if it were obvious.

  “But how did she know?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody in Bisonette’s organization leaked it to her.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I’ll work on figuring out Brown,” he said. “You work on the mole in Bisonette’s group. We got a deal?”

  I held up my beer and we clinked bottles to seal the agreement.

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  There was a long wait ahead before my meeting with Rainy and Mondragón. I ate a Reuben at the Wagon Wheel. While I sat near the front window, I watched the storm play itself out over Cadiz and move to the west. With night, the sky cleared to a sea full of stars and a few floating islands of residual black clouds. On my walk back to the parsonage, I watched the heavens above the mountains to the east begin to silver with a haze from the glow of the not-quite-risen moon.

  As I passed the church, I had an overwhelming impulse to spend a few minutes in the comfort of the little sanctuary. I unlocked the door and went in. The air inside was stuffy but had been cooled significantly by the passing monsoon. In the pitch dark, I turned my cell phone on and used the flashlight app to locate the candle Rainy and Mondragón had burned the night I first met them there. It was still sitting on the altar rail where she’d left it, along with a small box of wooden matches. I lit the candle and sat in the front pew.

  Because the earth itself is one great spirit, every inch of it is sacred. Beneath the asphalt parking lot in New York City is ground no less hallowed than the ground beneath Notre Dame, or under the pines and spruce of the Northwoods. But there are places that remind us of the sacredness, and at that moment, the little sanctuary was one. I sat in the frail glow of the candlelight and closed my eyes and let my spirit connect with the calm of that quiet place.

  Maybe it was because I’d stepped out of the flow of events, or maybe it was just the clarity that can come in moments of calm, but I began to make connections, to understand a little better how the threads were fitting together to form a web in Coronado County.

  I heard the scrape of the old church door sliding open, and I turned. What I saw was no less surprising than if the Virgin Mary herself had been standing there.

  “You a religious person? God-fearing?”

  The big man came slowly into the drizzle of the candlelight, a gun in his hand, an oddly bemused look on his face. His head was shaved bald and he had tattoos everywhere. On a finger of his right hand was a big silver ring shaped like a skull.

  “I think of myself more as a guy on a spiritual voyage,” I said. “My religion is just the boat I happen to be traveling in.”

  “O’Connor. That’s Irish. You Catholic?”

  “I am,” I confirmed. “What about you, Royal? Are you a religious person?”

  “I was an altar boy,” he said. “Mass every Sunday.”

  “Still attend?”

  “Spent three years in Iraq. Killed every belief I ever had about God.”

  “What do you believe in now?”

  “Myself.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Lonely world.”

  “I like it that way.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Been waiting for you.”

  “Alone?”

  Diggs smiled. “A little bird told me you’re planning on taking me down.”

  “I’m going after White Horse. I understand they operate out of Paradiso. And I understand you’re the big man out there.”

  “Mister, I am Paradiso.”

  “So, going to beat me up again?”

  “This time I plan to shoot you. Just get rid of your nosy ass.”

  “You might want to hold off on that.”

  He stood like a big, square chunk of boulder and waited for an explanation.

  “Could be that the man who shot you in the parsonage is waiting outside to shoot you again,” I said.

  His free hand moved toward his side where there was a little mounding under his T-shirt, probably bandaging from the wound Mondragón had inflicted, which though clearly not lethal, must have caused him a good deal of trouble. Then he barked a laugh as if he caught on that I was bluffing.

  “One more thing,” I said. “You’re being played. Kill me and you’ll be dead, too, before you understand who’s playing you and why.”

  The tattoo that crawled up his neck and the side of his face was a long green rattlesnake. He cocked his head, and the rattler moved as if alive.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “You and White Horse and your ambush out there in the desert. You probably think that was only about getting rid of Rodriguez and that pesky Bisonette kid. You really had the wool pulled over your eyes on that one.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Not while you’re holding a gun.”

  He considered the issue. He had me by sixty or seventy pounds, none of it doughy, and stood a good five inches taller. To him I was an old man. I’m sure he figured that if he had to, he could break my spine like it was a dry twig. I figured he was probably right.

  His T-shirt was black, with a white skull across the front. He lifted it and slipped the gun—a big one, maybe a Desert Eagle—into the waist of his jeans.

  “So talk,” he said.

  “For a guy who prefers to live off the grid, there are sure a lot of people interested in you.”

  “Like who?”

  “DEA, Border Patrol, Coronado County Sheriff, Carlos Rodriguez, Marian Brown. And that’s just for starters. Some of them want to see you behind bars. Some of them want you dead. And one of them is playing you like you’re her little puppet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You move drugs through Paradiso. That doesn’t seem much of a secret out here. Along the border in Coronado County, Carlos Rodriguez controls everything illegal that comes across. Also not much of a secret. You must have known who you were out there to kill in that desert ambush. So I ask myself, why would you shoot the man supplying you with product? The best answer I can come up with is that someone else had promised to supply you, probably more cheaply, if you got rid of the competition. So she convinced you to use White Horse to do her dirty work. How am I doing so far?”

  “You got about thirty seconds before I blow you away.”

  “She promised you product. She must have proven that she could supply it. What was it? Cocaine? Meth? Marijuana?”

  He thought about whether to answer, then, probably because he figured on killing me, he said, “Cocaine.”

  “Did you ever ask yourself how she was able to do that? I’ll tell you how. Rodriguez has a huge stash somewhere in Coronado County, millions of dollars’ worth, and I think Marian Brown knows where it is. With Rodriguez out of the way, she gets the stash.”

  “If that’s true, why would I mind killing Rodriguez? I don’t see how she played me.”

  “You and White Horse do her dirty work, she tosses you a few bones, but she keeps the lion’s share of the profit. Like I said, millions.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “My intel is better than yours.”

  His pallid blue eyes squin
ted, then he said, “Bullshit. How would she know about this stash, if it even exists?”

  “Sylvester’s been helping her locate old mining claims. You probably know that. It’s why you killed his mule. Punishment or maybe a warning not to help Bisonette anymore. I think her initial interest was in controlling access to any land that might be worked when mining comes back to this area. But I think she stumbled onto something in one of those old diggings.”

  “The stash,” Diggs said.

  “And I have just one question, Royal. Why should she get all that money and you get only bones?”

  I’d clearly offered him a new perspective. He kept squinting as he rolled all this speculation around in his head. “Your intel,” he finally said. “Who’s supplying it?”

  “A variety of sources. We communicate in an interesting way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We leave notes for each other.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  I stood up from the pew. He loomed over me, threatening, but didn’t go for his gun. I moved past him, through the gap in the altar rail and up to the altar itself. He followed me. I stood before the cross, whose brassy surface gleamed like gold in the candlelight.

  “I was an altar boy, too,” I said. “For me, there’s still something a little mystical about being up here.”

  “You’ve never seen your friends blown to pieces.”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Well?”

  “We leave the notes under here,” I said, lifting the cross with both hands. The base was heavy.

  His blue eyes settled on the white altar cloth, which was empty. In that moment of his distraction, I swung the cross, base first, and caught him where the rattlesnake crawled up the side of his face. He staggered back. I swung again, and the snake spit blood. Diggs stumbled, flipped backward over the altar rail, and the back of his bald head hit the stone floor with a dull, heavy thud. He lay still, a rivulet of red blood running from his temple and glistening in the candlelight.