The Sinister Pig - 15 (22 page)

Winsor waved Diego out of the folding chair in which he had been sitting, moved it over in front of where Bernie sat on the table, and seated himself.

“Who is your superior? Name and position.”

Bernie managed a smile. “If you’re thinking of my Customs Patrol Officer uniform, thinking of the Border Patrol, then the name is Ed Henry, and he is supervisor of the unit I was loaned to, to do some checking into things—such as this. But if you’re thinking of my actual boss, my superior in the Drug Enforcement Agency, I don’t intend to tell you until we have some sort of arrangement.”

Winsor digested this a moment. Said: “Why not?”

She shook her head. “Hate to say this but I’m not sure either one of us could trust him. Henry either, for that matter.”

Winsor took a silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket, opened it, and leaned forward to offer one to Bernie, who shook her head.

He held out the case to Budge, then withdrew it, laughing. “Budge doesn’t smoke, either, but I keep trying to tempt him,” Winsor said. “He wants to live forever.” He took one himself, snapped on the lighter built into the case, inhaled deeply, and blew out a cloud of smoke.

“What do you think of what this young lady says, Budge? Does it make sense to you?”

[208] Budge had been watching Diego, who had been watching Winsor, expecting to be offered a cigarette. When he wasn’t, his expression hardened.

“Sounds sensible,” Budge said.

“Why?”

“Because ninety percent is better than a hundred, if you have to go to prison to keep the hundred.”

Winsor stared at him. “I think you’re forgetting that assignment I gave you.”

The pig trap where Diego was standing began whistling. “What’s that?” Budge said, and got up from his chair.

“It’s the pig signal on top of the pipe there,” Diego said. “The pressure sets it off. It tells you another pig has arrived in the trap.”

“I’ve got to see how that works,” Budge said. He pressed in against Diego, who was turning the handle on a pipe marked“slowdown valve.” The whistling died away. Budge slipped the pistol from Diego’s pocket, felt Diego’s body stiffen, said,
“Bueno, bueno,
calm yourself,” into Diego’s ear. “Remember, we go together.”

He slid the pistol under his belt, hidden by his jacket flap.

“What are you doing?” Winsor asked.

“I guess we have another of our sinister pigs arriving,” Diego said.

“Budge turned to Winsor. “You want it taken out?”

“They’ll be coming along regularly now,” Winsor said. “Let Diego do it. I want to know if you’re ready to handle your job.”

“Just about,” Budge said.

“I don’t like the way your mind’s started working. All [209] this hesitation. Is it because this is such a good-looking young lady? Maybe your macho brainlobe is heating up. If we let this woman out of here, even if she’s totally bought and paid for, how the hell can you ever rest easy again.”

After saying that, Winsor shifted in the chair. The rifle resting on his lap shifted with him, its barrel turned now toward where Budge stood, leaning against the table. “We turn her loose, then she’s just one more damned thing out of control. We buy her, how long does she stay bought?”

Bernie, who had been watching Budge as he walked back from the pig trap, had shifted her attention to Winsor. She sat now, pale and silent, with her eyes half closed.

“She’s a federal officer,” Budge said. “From what she told you, she must have been assigned to us, more or less. If we kill her, it’s going to be a top-priority case for the FBI and the DEA and everybody else. They’ll never stop coming after us until they get us.”

Winsor chuckled, shook his head. “Budge, there’s a lot of things you just don’t understand. The cops at the bottom do what the people on top tell them to do. You heard about that man shot up on the Navajo Reservation. Did I tell you that he became officially the unfortunate victim of a hunting accident.” Winsor was grinning. “I guess it was a hunting accident, in a way. The Mexicans shot him because they thought he was hunting this pipeline project of ours. Now our friends in Washington tell us he was actually trying to find out who’s been stealing all that Indian oil royalty money.”

“If you’re thinking of making Miss Manuelito a hunting accident it won’t work. She doesn’t look much like an oryx.”

Winsor’s face was flushed. “Knock it off, Budge,” he [210] said. “We’re thinking of doing it just like you did Chrissy. Except you don’t have the chloroform this time, and you’ll drop her body out over the mountains instead of the ocean.”

Budge stared at Winsor, saying nothing, thinking of Chrissy, aware that Winsor was studying him, knowing what he would have to do, knowing it was absolutely inevitable.

“Well,” Winsor said, “let’s get with it. He turned toward Diego. “Diego. Bring me Officer Manuelito’s pistol.”

Diego looked rattled. “Ah, well, I don’t have it no more.”

“Where the hell is it then,” Winsor said. “We’re going to need it. Shoot her with it. Make it look like another accident. A woman who didn’t know how to handle a—”

Winsor’s mouth remained open, but a sudden, and apparently terrible, thought stopped the words. He jerked his head around. Stared at Budge. Shouted: “Son of a bitch!”

What was happening was a blur of action. Winsor was swiveling in his chair, snarling an obscenity, cocking the rifle, swinging the barrel toward Budge. Budge was snatching Bernie’s pistol from his belt, his expression saying that he knew he’d waited a fatal second too long.

Bernie screamed something that might have been “No!” and kicked frantically at Winsor’s rifle.

Winsor, still cursing, slammed the rifle barrel against her head, and then back at Budge as he pulled the trigger.

But now it was Winsor who was a fatal split second late.

Dashee’s racetrack-braking technique sent his pickup into a sideways slide and produced a fountain of dust over Bernie’s vehicle and the adjoining building.

“She’s in the car,” Chee said. “I can see the back of her head.” He was out of Dashee’s truck before it stopped, pulling on the handle of Bernie’s car door, shouting at her. She unlocked the door, looked up at him. One of those white medical-kit bandages was taped over her forehead, and below it there was blood on her face. She was crying.

“Bernie,” he said. “What happened. Are you all right?” He reached in for her, helped her out, pulled her to him in a crushing hug. “I’ve been scared to death,” Chee said. “I’ve been terrified.”

“Me too,” Bernie said, her voice muffled against his shirt. “I’m still shaking.”

“Oh, Bernie,” Chee said. “I was afraid I’d lost you. What happened to you here? Why are you crying.”

[212] Bernie produced a sort of a choked-off laugh. “That will take a long time to explain,” she said. “And you’re about to crush me.”

He relaxed the hug, but just a little. “Who did that to you?” Chee said, voice grim. “Someone hit you. We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

“How did you find me here?” Bernie said. “And why were you looking for me.”

“Because I love you,” Chee said. “Because I want to take you home where you’ll be safe.”

“Oh,” Bernie said. She returned the hug, and then she was crying again.

Dashee’s voice interrupted this. “Hey,” he shouted. “We’ve got a dead man in here.”

Dashee was standing in the open doorway of the shed, pointing in. “He’s on his back on the floor. Looks like he fell off a chair.” He leaned through the doorway, looking inside. “Blood on the floor, too. And a rifle. Looks like I may have myself my very first homicide as a Federal Bureau of Land Management Security Officer.”

Bernie released her hold on Chee and slumped backward onto the car seat, shaking again.

“It’s all right, Bernie,” Chee said. “It’s OK. Take it easy for a while.”

Dashee was hurrying up. “Yeah, Bernie. And then tell us what happened.”

“It was awful,” Bernie said. “The man who was supposed to kill me, he didn’t want to do it, and he had gotten my pistol from the Seamless Weld man somehow, and so Mr. Winsor was going to shoot him, and—” She was crying again.

[213] “Stay here with Bernie,” Chee said. “And call for some medical help. I’ll go in and take a look.”

What he saw was as Dashee had described it. A well-dressed, stocky, middle-aged man sprawled on his back beside an overturned chair. Chee squatted beside him. Shot in the chest, but the blood that had spread from under him obviously must have come from the exit wound. What he could see was already drying. He scanned the room quickly, noted the pipeline mechanism, noted the row of sacks filled with a white substance, noted the dirty yellow ball on one end, the screw cap beside it, and the white sacks still jammed inside.

Leaphorn had it right, Chee thought.
Naturally, Leaphorn had it right.
The contraption of pipes grown out of the floor was a trap for pipeline-cleaning pigs. And a pressure-release mechanism on its top was whistling— probably a signal another pig was arriving. The ball on the table must be a pig and its guts, now spilled, was probably cocaine. Enough to overdose a thousand users. Quite a pig.

Chee rushed out into the sunlight. “Did you contact anyone? Are they sending an ambulance?”

“Bernie had already called the New Mexico State Police,” Dashee said. “And she called her dispatcher. They said they’d sent a helicopter.”

“Who hit you?” Chee asked. “Was it that man in there?”

“Where’s his car?” Dashee asked. “What in the world happened?”

“Did you shoot him, Bernie? What happened to your pistol?”

[214] “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Bernie shouted. “If you two will just shut up, stop asking questions, and be quiet, I’ll try to tell you.”

And she did. Starting with climbing on the car hood to look through the window and being surprised by three men.

“Three men!” A loud exclamation, jointly emerging from Chee and Dashee, both of whom were leaning against the car, looking down at her.

“Three,” Bernie said. “The one in there. He’s the one who hit me. His name is Winson, or Winsor, or Willson, or something like that. Winsor I think it was. He was the boss of the other two. He’s the one who hit me and he’s the one who said I had to be killed. One of the others—a big tall man, looked like an athlete, sort of red hair, sort of looked like an Irishman, but he spoke Spanish, and Winsor said his name was Budge C. de Baca, like that old Spanish family in New Mexico—anyway, he worked directly for Winsor, and from what Winsor said, he had assigned Budge the job of killing me.”

“Killing you? Killing you?” Chee said.

Bernie ignored him. “The other one was wearing army fatigues and his name was Diego de Vargas and he spoke Spanish, too. And that bunch of pipes—”

“Bernie,” Dashee said, “where are those two men? Are they armed? Do they have your pistol? Did they drive away? Where did they go?”

“They went away,” Bernie said. “And I don’t know where my pistol is. And do you want to hear this or not?”

“Sorry,” Dashee said, and looked repentant.

So Bernie told them what happened in the shed, [215] about the yellow round ball arriving, the sacks of cocaine taken out of it, and about the big man whispering to her that she should tell Winsor she was with the DEA and that she could be bribed. And all the rest of it, skipping back to report how de Vargas had taken her pistol but somehow Budge had gotten it.

“And then when Budge acted like he wasn’t going to kill me, and was telling Winsor they couldn’t get away with it, then Winsor told him to do it like, like ...” Here Bernie’s voice faltered. She paused a moment with her hands over her face. Then went on. “Like they had killed some woman named Chrissy, by throwing her out of an airplane into the ocean. Except they would throw me out over the mountains down in Mexico.” She paused again, then hurried through it. “Then Winsor cocked his rifle and swung it around at Budge, and I was sitting there on the table right beside his chair, and I kicked at his arm and he hit me with the rifle.”

Bernie stopped, looked at Chee and then at Dashee. Both seemed to be holding their breath, silent, waiting.

“Then, he shot, right beside my ear. Or maybe they both shot. And the next thing I knew I was lying on the table with one of those bags under my head, and Budge was using a handkerchief or something to stop the bleeding on my cheek and asking me how I felt, and it was then he said he didn’t kill Chrissy.” She stopped, looked at them, awaited the next question.

“Bernie,” Chee said. “I want you to stop being a policeman. I want you to do something safe. I want you to marry me. I’ll get rid of that trailer and we’ll find a nice house and—”

[216] And Dashee said, “Damn it, Chee, hold that for later. Let Bernie tell us where those two bastards went. They’re getting away.”

And Bernie said: “Oh, Jim, I don’t want to be a policeman anymore.”

And Dashee said: “But where did they go? They’re driving off somewhere right now. Getting away.”

“I don’t know where they went,” Bernie said. “While Budge was getting the blood off of my face he was talking to Diego de Vargas. Talking about flying. They would fly down to some place in Mexico. He had left this woman down there. Chrissy. To keep her safe from Winsor. He said he was in love with this Chrissy, and would go down there and marry her, and then they would take her somewhere Budge had friends, and Vargas could sell the airplane and they would both start over. And, I don’t know, I was trying to listen but I was feeling dizzy, and I was still scared, and they were talking mostly in Spanish. It was confusing.”