The Territory: A Novel (30 page)

Kenny provided plenty of banter but no information, and Josie left. He had said he planned to leave the next morning. Josie didn’t like him, but she had no reason to keep him from leaving. As she walked down the hill that ran beside Red’s house toward Winning’s trailer, she saw a black stretch sedan with tinted windows coming down the road, traveling fast. It appeared to be an Infiniti or some other foreign luxury car. All the windows were up, and the car was throwing a wake of dust behind it. Even at a dead run, she couldn’t make it to her car before the sedan reached her. With images of the gunmen from her bedroom in her mind and her adrenaline surging, she pulled her gun and clicked the safety off. Sweat beaded on her upper lip as she considered her next move. She had already called Lou and canceled the call for backup. She remembered she had the key to Red’s house still in her pants’ pocket and fished it out as she ran the rest of the way down the hill beside Red’s and put the key into the sliding door. Bulletproof glass, she thought. The car was heading down the driveway toward Red’s place as she pushed the door open, entered, and locked it again. She stepped back away from the door and knew she could not be seen through the tinted glass.

The car pulled to a stop directly in front of the door as she radioed Lou again to ask Otto’s location. Lou said he had stopped for a stranded motorist, and Josie requested immediate backup from anyone in the area. She told Lou to call Border Patrol and request immediate assistance.

The feeling she’d had at the trauma unit, trapped inside the operating room with gunmen prowling outside, was back.

The driver of the sedan, a muscular white male dressed in a black suit, opened his door and didn’t even bother a glance toward the house before opening the back door. A large well-dressed man with a barrel chest, a dark pockmarked face, and a long, neatly trimmed mustache exited the car. He wore white linen pants and a pale blue linen shirt with a cigar in the pocket. His face was heavily lined below his tinted sunglasses, and his hair was jet black and oiled back in a manner she associated with trouble. Josie figured he was about six foot two and 250 pounds. Two other men, both wearing dark suits, white shirts, and sunglasses, exited after him and converged behind him next to the driver.

Josie spread her feet slightly in a shooter position and held her pistol firmly in her right hand.

The large man smiled and bowed slightly, dipping his head toward her, even though she was certain she couldn’t be seen. She had seen pictures of the Bishop, and she had no doubt it was him.

“Chief Gray? Please, let us have a civil conversation, man to woman. Please.” He spoke loudly, and she could hear his muffled voice through the glass. “Please, you offend me. Your safety is assured. I would never dream of hurting a lady as lovely as you.”

Josie kept her attention focused on the men in front of her and hoped Pegasus and Kenny wouldn’t walk down the driveway into the middle of it.

Josie moved to the right of the door, where she was still protected but could talk more easily. “What are you doing on Red Goff’s property?” she yelled.

“Mr. Goff and I were acquainted. I came to pay my respects.”

“To who?”

He tilted his head, gave a dismissive gesture. “To the place. To the spirit of Mr. Goff.”

The sun was setting, but it was still over ninety degrees. The Bishop looked cool and unfazed in his sunglasses.

“Maybe I was looking for you,” he said.

She felt the familiar burn in her stomach. “I’m listening.”

The Bishop turned from her and faced one of his men. Several seconds later, the cell phone in her pocket rang. She pulled it out of her pocket as he retrieved a cell phone from his bodyguard. It was her police number, a restricted number, and he had access. She opened her phone in spite of her fury.

“Let’s be civil, Ms. Gray. You won’t come out here and talk with me? We’ll talk by phone. You run a nice town here. Good people. You want to keep the town safe. I have no problem with that. Your little town has no interest to me, no—” He stopped, struggling to find the right words. “I want no more than a road into Texas. A simple access, uncomplicated. You and I, we can have a mutually acceptable agreement. I provide you with security, with the tools to keep your town safe. You need guns and weapons, a new jail? I provide that. You need a house with security, a place where you go home at night and feel secure? I provide that. Everyone benefits.”

Josie stared at him and wondered how easily Hack Bloster had sacrificed his principles for this man. How long had it taken Bloster to sign away his career for a pile of blood money?

“Mr. Medrano, you may have bargained with others in my town, but you won’t bargain with me. I abide by the rules, and I enforce them. I won’t negotiate with you. You can cross the border legally in Presidio, just like all the other Mexicans.”

He smiled with condescension and wiped a handkerchief across his forehead. “You give up your town’s security, just like that? No thought to what this could mean to your citizens? Life can be a very dangerous proposition when you have no protection.”

“This may work in Mexico, the veiled threats and intimidation, but it doesn’t work here. I have the United States government, the Border Patrol, the Department of Public Safety, ICE, ATF, and every law enforcement agency along the border ready to provide us protection. How many of your clan did you lose this past week to us? Two killed, how many in jail? A dozen now?” She paused and stared at him through the glass. “Turn your car around and head south. We don’t want you here.”

He tensed. The men flanking him seemed to recognize the insult and shuffled their feet, all taking a step forward. It was like watching a pack of dogs react to the alpha male.

Medrano leaned to one side and spit on the ground. “To see your animal go missing, your man friend disappear. To watch your house in flames. These would be tragedies for you to experience like you have already cursed my family. You killed my father in your hospital—allowed a man to shoot his body to unrecognizable pieces of meat as you personally watched and did nothing. You killed a friend. Shot him in cold blood in your hospital.”

She lowered her voice to little more than a whisper as she tried to calm the anger in her throat. “I want you out of here. Now.” Josie knew she could do little in response to his threats. Lou had told her Border Patrol was thirty minutes away, Otto another five to ten minutes. She was outnumbered.

“You are a beautiful woman. You are wasting yourself on this small drama. You have eyes made for bigger dreams than this.” His expression had tightened; his words didn’t match the vicious look on his face.

She closed the phone.

The Bishop turned from her and raised both arms in the air to the men standing behind him and walked toward the car. Josie turned, tripped over a stool by the door, and ducked as gunfire exploded onto the door. After several seconds, it stopped. The glass, unbelievably, was still intact.

From the kitchen, Josie could still see the men outside. Medrano said something in Spanish and laughed. The men behind him laughed as well and shouted something toward the house that she was glad she couldn’t interpret.

Medrano pointed a finger at her and yelled, “You will regret this day, Ms. Gray. Have no doubt about your mistake.”

SIXTEEN

After the latest threat from the Medrano clan, Otto convinced Josie to take an early supper break at the Hot Tamale to cool off and regroup. Border Patrol had met her and Otto at Red’s house, and they were writing up the report and processing the scene. Otto stopped to talk with a retired schoolteacher who wanted to gripe about a parking ticket while Josie ordered and found a table in the corner. If she had laid her head down on the table, she would have been asleep within minutes.

Vie Blessings sat down across from Josie, squinted her eyes, and winced. “You don’t look so good.”

Josie shrugged.

“Things calmed down any?”

Josie found that everywhere she went lately, people asked for an update, which usually translated to a request for assurance that the violence was over.

She shrugged again. “Not enough.”

Vie leaned into the table, and Josie could tell something else was on her mind. “I hate to ask this. I know how busy you all are right now, but someone has set up a camper back behind our place. Smokey told me to mind my own business, but I wondered if you couldn’t drive by sometime and check it out?”

“Is the camper on your land?”

“No. It’s on government property. You know where we live? Out behind the mudflats?”

Josie nodded.

“There’s maybe half a dozen houses back in there, but the land across from us is all federal grazing. I don’t want some squatter setting up camp for good. Now there’s a trailer set up there, too.”

“Doesn’t your land bump up against Red Goff’s place?”

Vie pursed her lips and squinted. “Sort of. There are a couple miles of federal land that separate our place from Red’s land. Smokey always said we were either the safest people in Texas, or the stupidest for living next to that guy.”

“Do you know if the person is a local?”

Vie squinted, her expression uncertain. “No clue. I’ve never actually seen the person staying back there. I don’t know if someone’s living there or just storing something.”

Otto finally walked over to the table, and Vie stood.

“You two be careful out there.”

Otto took her place at the table and reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled out a little plastic bottle of Visine and pushed it across the table. “Better take a shot,” he said.

Josie let the drops fill her eyes and sighed, wiping the tears from her face with a napkin. She filled Otto in on her conversation with Vie.

“Let’s run out there after supper and check it out,” Otto said.

She also told Otto about her visit with Kenny Winning.

“You think he might be the camper?” he asked.

“It would put him right behind his own trailer and Pegasus. He could make it through there with four-wheel drive easy. If he were walking, I’m guessing it’s a little over a mile from where Vie was talking about.”

“Why not stay at his own trailer, then?”

She shrugged. “He’s been here for a week and we didn’t know it. Sounds like a pretty good plan. There wasn’t a vehicle at the trailer today, other than Pegasus’s Eldorado. I wish I’d thought to ask him where he was staying, and where his car was, but it didn’t click with me until just now.”

After a massive burrito, coffee, Coke, and two doses of Visine, Josie felt as if she might survive the shift. The waitress cleared the plates away and Otto paid the bill while Josie started the jeep to get the air conditioner blowing cool. Otto finally got into the passenger seat carrying chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

The mudflats were located north of Sauly Magson’s property about three miles from the river. The land around Sauly’s and up into the mudflats was the greenest area in Artemis. Prairie grasses covered the ground, not just in clumps as in the rest of Artemis, but in thick swaths of green that rustled in the never-ending wind. Natural springs and mountain runoff kept the area green most of the year, a nice change of pace in the desert. Vie and Smokey’s place was located on a road that wound through the hills and the grass. A house dotted the road every half mile or so. Red’s place and Winning’s trailer were north of the mudflats by another mile, where the land turned suddenly barren and bereft of color.

Josie pulled her jeep along the edge of the road and looked across the field. Otto pointed out a camper set up a half mile away, barely noticeable down the slight embankment. Viewed from a distance, the grass was silken and feathery and moved in gentle waves in response to the breeze. But walking through the three-foot-high blades of grass left thin cuts along any exposed skin, which burned for hours. Josie knew that fact was moving through Otto’s brain at that very moment.

She pointed toward the camper. “No tire tracks. If the owner of the camper approached from this road, the grass would still be mashed down in places. He had to have come in from behind Red’s place.” Josie looked over and found Otto staring out his side window, drumming his fingers on his thighs. “Feel like taking a walk?”

“Not really.” Otto opened his car door and affixed his radio to his gun belt. “You owe me a Coke when we’re done.”

“Deal,” she said, and got out to follow him.

The temperature had dropped into the eighties, and while Josie thought the light breeze and temperature were ideal, she knew Otto would be sweating. The sunset to their right was still high, but the reds and oranges were already spreading out like spilled paint.

After a five-minute walk through a field, they came upon a campsite with a ten-foot pop-up camper facing toward them. The camper was fully extended, its closed door facing a small fire pit with a coffeepot lying on the ground beside it. A ten-foot pull-behind U-Haul trailer, most likely hauled by a pickup truck or SUV, was to the right of the camper. Otto pointed out the bumper sticker on the back of it that identified a local rental company. Josie pulled her cell phone out and dialed the number.

“Loan to Own. This is Cammie speaking.”

“Hi, Cammie. This is Chief Josie Gray with the Artemis Police. How are you today?”

The young girl was chirpy and helpful. Last year, Josie had stopped her three times for a blown headlight and finally followed her to a local auto parts store, where she helped the girl change the broken light. Cammie recognized Josie and thanked her again for helping her with the light, then said she would be happy to look up the plate number.

After several minutes of waiting on hold, Cammie came back on the line and said she’d found the number Josie gave her from the back of the storage unit. Josie wrote down the specific rental information, then thanked her and asked her to keep the information confidential.

“Dr. Fallow,” she told Otto after she’d hung up.

Otto raised his eyebrows. “Why would Paul Fallow need to set up a camper, rent a trailer, and then hide them both out here?”

Josie smiled. “Here’s the kicker. He rented the trailer the same day Red Goff was killed.”