Keep an Eye on the Horses

A High Desert Noir-Thriller by: Daniel Woods

Felipe

Gonzo kept looking in the rearview as he drove, releasing one hand from the shuddering wheel and shifting the mirror on its spindly chrome hanger for a decreasingly clear view through the dust beclouded night behind. A jolt rocked the vehicle as he once again failed to miss innumerable potholes littering the stretch of forgotten highway. The rear of the vehicle floated up and down on creaky, age-loosened suspension, bouncing just a little too much under the heavy load packed inside.

Felipe clung to the handle above the passenger door window with one white-knuckled hand, the other alternating between the dash and center console as he sought a third point of anchor after his foot slammed where a brake pedal would be were he driving. “Be careful, man!” he yelled against the clackity roar of the ancient engine. It was a pointless request even if the driver had heard it. They were in deep now, they only had a few hours before sun-up and slowing down would cost precious minutes. “Just watch the road, I’ll get the rear.”

Gonzo only half listened and triverted his attention to the empaled passenger. “How about you just shut the fuck up? I got the wheel, bro.”

All in, it took two and a half hours from Gonzo rolling up outside the stable buildings to the pair finding themselves careening to a stop on the edge of brambly arroyo in the desert nothingness. The mesa dominated the view to their west, stretching northward from their far position at the opposing end of the great, basalt-capped structure. A moment of silence reigned as time caught up from where it had been left behind somewhere outside Galisteo.

“What’re we doing here, Gonzo?” Felipe looked to his colleague’s door pocket instinctively, peering past the man’s crammed-in legs for the olive-tone pistol he knew the man liked to keep there. He couldn’t see it. “You’re fuckin’ spooking me, man. Where are we?”

“Don’t worry, dawg, it ain’t like that.” The driver opened the door and began unfolding one leg to lever himself out of the low vehicle. “Come on, man. Get out.”

Ashe

It had been good while it lasted, the modest pond she had built before putting the finishing touches on her even humbler cabin nearby. It had sustained her for several years, a thriving source of arrowhead roots for boiling with the peppery watercress that grew nearby. Ashe looked at the tall cattails that now arched over her position in the muck at the bottom of what had been her own little natural pool. She would need to cut those now, she thought, they were almost bending under thick, yellow layers of pollen that already needed harvesting, but which was now more crucial than ever. Anything and everything to supplement her already dwindling supplies was welcome. Especially as she now had to worry about rebuilding the northern earthwork dam on top of everything else.

The woman sighed and returned to surveying from her perspective fifteen feet lower than she would have usually. A few shallow pools remained at the base of the eroded dam, the now stagnant water holding steady at just the point where the water had slowed enough to quit cutting through the clay-lined structure. She could see ripples from time to time, tiny colonies of fish jumbled into chaotic, mismatched schools in the ever-decreasing body of water. With a whistle, the homesteader bounded toward them, two buckets half-full of fresh water clenched tightly, their contents sloshing onto her canvas-encased thighs and hips.

Zia, the farmstead’s chaotic, northern New Mexico mutt, bounced around Ashe as she poured the final bucket of fingerlings into the tarp-lined pool she had innovated in the stormy dark that morning; she was surprised and pleased to see it holding water well despite the chaos of its inception. There looked to be young bluegill and striped bass both represented in a now socially disparate environment, their small bodies clinging to their own in distinct pods now they had room to breathe. In the corners, Ashe could see the long, brown bodies of a few channel catfish young trying their best to be their solitary selves despite the openness they now found themselves in. The catfish had been the only fish in the pond when she had first found it in disrepair on her new land almost a decade ago. She was pleased to see them, that they would hopefully have a chance to survive the devastation of their generational home in the intertwining roots of lilies and willow trees.

The old hydroponics system she had rigged out of chipped bathtubs, PVC-pipe, and a bulbous, brass ram-pump from an old irrigation setup proved as effective as ever once she had it cleaned and flowing freely. She placed the fish in their new, hopefully temporary homes and watched them flit about for a while.

“Well, Z,” she spoke aloud, “let’s see what plants we can save too.” The dog panted from where she was already waiting impatiently in the old, brown farm truck.

Her cabin wasn’t much to see, but Ashe was immensely proud of her humble affair. It was small, only one room with three precisely medial windows on each wall to match the central, south-facing doorway. She had intended it to be the first building on her several-deca-acre plot of rolling hills and swampland, and it had been before her advancement to the plethora of other projects she had deemed important in the moment. A larger, multi-room place to call her forever-home was still on the docket, but the collapse of the pond reinforced how it seemed to be perpetually distant in scale and execution. She would get to it eventually.

As it was, her workshop-turned-too-permanent-bunkhouse had adapted well and she loved the coziness it had developed over the years. Indeed, she had long ago traded the towable trailer nearby in favor of the stout log box in the woods – even before it had become the dilapidated toolshed that marked the northern edge of her farming plot. The light beckoned from the antique Glenwood woodstove, the anticipatory cherry glow of coals at rest suffusing the room with an almost ruby light. The six-burner, wrought-iron monstrosity had been a nightmare to get into its position under the side window – had taken two days of stressful chain management and strategic truck-backing through unfinished walls – but it was now the radiant heart of the finished cabin.

Now, the lone homesteader and her perpetually anxious canine sat quietly by the door, enjoying the calm and creeping cool of evening from the slim stretch of surplus lumber she had fashioned into a small porch at the door. The weather had been terrible the night before, some early-season hurricane’s edge cutting a swath through the land. It had felled dozens of trees in addition to overtopping the pond’s constraints, and even in the failing light she could see the damage to her just-flourishing orchard across the way.

It would be a long, tiring Autumn, akin to her first years on the land here. She sipped her tea introspectively, enjoying the cooling wild mint, mild basil, and peppery watercress. She began to draft tomorrow’s day.

Patrón

Officer Juan Patrón sat on a dusty cutout beside Highway 380. He watched the doppler-speed gun mounted to his dashboard between bites of a green chile cheeseburger from a rundown, smoke-stained bar in nearby San Antonio. The device chirped, ‘65’ flashed a few times in red, the screen went dark once more – a green sedan sailed away into the distance of the desert basin. He took another bite.

‘Unit 06. Are you 10-08?’ The vehicle radio came to staticky life.

Juan looked to the receiver, then his last bite of burger, then the flaccidly tepid fries on the seat beside him. Yeah, he was done. “Unit-06, that’s a 10-04. Ready to go.”

“Copy. We have a Code 3 north of Albuquerque, could use you if you’re close.”

A Code 3? He prayed it wasn’t another event like Santa Fe the year before. “Affirmative. En route.”

Officer Patrón shoved the final bit of his lunch into his mouth, threw the congealing fries and other trash into the paper bag it had come in, and threw on his array of lights and siren. He flung rocks into the chaparral as his cruiser launched into action, flinging around in a tight arc before shooting toward I-25 North.

Sheriff William S. Brady III was a sonofabitch of the first-degree, a real rough stone among the diamonds of his legacy-laden name. He was known for his punch-down humor and a mustache stuck somewhere between explorer-colonialist Sir Richard Burton and Tom Selleck’s Magnum P.I. – it twitched insidiously as his piggy eyes turned toward Patrón’s approaching patrol car.

“Unit 06?” the voice carried no question and preceded an order. Juan turned towards it.

Approaching in lazy strides - bedecked head-to-steel-capped-boot in the latest martial hand-me-downs and warehouse surpluses of the Army and National Guard - a Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office deputy affirmed Trooper Patrón’s intuition. “This is an SO scene, trooper. You’re all on containment.” He pointed to a white-capped, black sedan with flashing LEDs unloading nearby. “Go hook-up with the rest of yours. Gonna want to coordinate pretty far out, I reckon, scene’s a big one.”

No guidance came from the turned back of his own commanding officer Lieutenant McQueen who, upon a look from Juan, appeared to be stone-facing his way through some hortation from the discretely javelina-faced Sheriff. Happy to run around sticking tape to things and flashing his mag-light in the eyes of overly snoopy passersby rather than get any closer to that, the junior officer accepted the deputy’s direction with a nod and a last glance around.

“What’s up Juanito?” the voice of Trooper Perez pierced the insetting gloom of evening. “See the look on McQueen’s face?” she laughed and smiled at her approaching friend, “Ol’ Bill is giving him an earful of some prime-grade bullshit.”

Juan suppressed a laugh and extended his fist to meet her own in greeting. “What’s up Georgie? How’s your shift been?”

“About to turn into overtime, it looks like. I just got off graveyards, man. I can’t be doing this again already!”

“We’re on tape-duty, at least.” Juan hoisted his own for emphasis. “Maybe some traffic?”

They both looked to the barren expanse skeptically.

“Miles from anywhere, bro.” Perez reached through her open window to grab her own tape and flashlight, she looked back at Brady and McQueen a few hundred yards away. “You catch what’s going on?”

Patrón could only shrug. “You were here first. Why aren’t you telling me?”

They received their instructions from the duty sergeant: secure the southwest-quadrant of the investigation area. Signing for a Helix stationary surveillance-drone and retrieving the bright orange case containing the device at a State Police-liveried box truck, they pushed into the brush and chaparral blanketing the dim wilderness.

Manhattan

The 57th Street condo was a portal into the empire of Damien Dusk, the first steps to check one’s compatibility with the choice lifestyle enjoyed by the almost-billionaire and his rotating cast of hangers-on.

It was a journey that began steeped in mystery, a touched elbow at a downtown party leading to a dark sports sedan with tint-blackened windows and a trip down the bright streets of lower-Manhattan. Just as the guest was getting comfortable, darkness descended as the driver pulled sharply into a tight, neat alley between the gargantuan structures of the city-center, aiming for an illuminated rectangle in one of the upcoming side walls.

The marble of the valeted pull-up was blinding in its opulence, the massive squares of stones dwarfing the vehicles, hustling attendants, and gated elevator doors. Those who went up were oft never the same afterwards; coming down both richer and poorer, somehow made lesser and possessing amply more.

Felipe

It had been weeks since Felipe had seen his late-night partner, not since they had pulled up and crashed for the night at Felipe’s mom’s house after that harrowing race through the high desert to the north. They had laid low in the small, pastel pink adobe in Albuquerque’s South Valley for a few days. Then, Gonzo had put everything in his pockets – wallet, house keys, a few loose bolts from his day work in the machining shop – on a reading table, shook Felipe’s hand solemnly, and pulled the sputtering powder blue Mercury backwards out of the cracked concrete driveway after a final word. “Keep an eye on the horses, homie.”

He had never liked Gonzo, thought he was reactive and reactionary, loose with his threats when too in his whisky, but Felipe couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened to the wiry man. Normally he would see him puttering around the expansive ranch property in the bright, new work trucks populating the work garages, would have to suffer his shit-talk while Felipe tried to have a quiet lunch behind the dairy. But now, it was like he never existed.

Who would he even ask about the man? They had only been paired together a few times for the odd job like an escaped bronco or de-electrified boundary-wire, he didn’t know anybody in the workshops. And it was no different in the barns. As the new guy, Felipe hardly knew anyone else’s names yet let alone the accumulated rapport to go asking about the admittedly tweaky machinist.

He looked to the small herd for the thousandth time in the last days. They looked normal as ever, were grazing together on a nearby brushy hill and enjoying the last warmth offered by the late-afternoon sunlight. They certainly weren’t up to anything interesting, let alone weird, and none were missing.

There was a total of seven of the animals in Felipe’s barn on the hillock above. All were mottled-brown and -grey Appaloosa ponies, leopard-spotted mares of moderate size and temperament who enjoyed the wheatgrass and little bluestem which grew along the property’s expansive southern edge.

“Keep an eye on the horses.” He mumbled to himself, pitching another load of crushed hay and trampled manure into the waiting wheelbarrow outside the paddock he worked. What about them?

Platte

Special Agent Rhonda Platte looked at the scene marring the igneous landscape of the Valley of Fires. A long gully, reaching like a scrabbling finger down a bank and into the sprawling flat of the Tularosa basin; a faded robin’s egg blue sedan with the key still turned and the gas tank empty; a desiccated body wrapped in shredded bits of mattress lining.

The wasteland sun glared as it had for hundreds of millennia, parching anything nonnative to the ancient seabed into either keen exploiters, or the easiest of meals for the adaptable. It looked like those of the latter group had done their work on the form: crooked, X-shaped marks in the dirt and across the top of the body showed roadrunners had spent time here recently, picking at the slim remains between visits from the odd coyote or opportunistic turkey vulture.

Platte squatted, leaning closer and poking at the mattress lining with the tip of a gold-and-ebony pen produced from a blazer pocket. That was interesting, they were strips of all manner of lengths, divvied in such rough manner that tearing was more likely than any sort of cutting. They had been attached to the shirt still clinging to the body in tatters, woven into small holes pierced in the fabric or attached with whatever odd bits of clips and pins they had scavenged somewhere. Imagining it as a whole, it was almost a sort of cape. Standing and pivoting, the special agent looked about the larger scene more generally.

The abandoned vehicle sat perched above from her perspective in the arroyo, door open as it had been found and at an angle that suggested it had almost skidded down onto her current position. She already thought that curious before sliding down the crumbling bank to look more closely at the body. Despite the occasional wind and near-constant wind in the basin, the vehicle’s tracks were still visible where it had skidded to a halt above, the front wheels turning leftward to whip the hood around in a short J-stop. Someone had abandoned the vehicle without regard for it, based on the lone key sticking in the ON-position of the ignition. The still open door could suggest they did so in a hurry or panic.

Had that been this person? She looked down at the crumpled, dissembled form at her feet. Had they jumped from the car and run directly into a twenty-five-foot ravine? Looking for a femur or tibia and not seeing either scattered about somewhere, she couldn’t say if maybe they had broken a leg on the way down. Looking at that drop, it was possible that a sprained ankle could result at the least from a slip. What would happen to someone who fell in? What if they jumped into the deeper section where she stood now?

Taking a deep breath of the dry, dusty air, she went to pull herself up the rope she had anchored to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office cruiser parked a few dozen yards down the ravine where the bank was a little more forgiving. Forensics was on the way, she had plenty to keep her busy in the meantime.

Ashe

The rebuilding was going well. A long dry spell following the storm had done much to make the land more manageable; the thick, clay pond bed resetting once more from a gluey consistency and into something crumbly and compactable - fit for manipulation by the small machines Ashe had scavenged over the years.

She had lost much fill in her dam to the torrent of the over-topping, the earthwork now largely hollowed out to the cracked-boulder and gravel base layer in a distinct V-shape across the northern edge of the basin. It had been a rookie mistake – she knew in hindsight – to just hope the amateur drainage channels she had dug and lined with flagstones would be enough manage any overfill into the pond. She hadn’t considered culverts or diversion pipes, hardly thought about inflows versus outflows in more than the roughest terms. It had really only been a matter of time.

But she had learned in the time since, visiting the local library to pick up a few books and videos on dam engineering and, more importantly, dam failures. She needed to build a proper way for water to move past the dam.

This began with a trip into the neighboring property of an eccentric, commonly absent old man whose land wrapped around hers to the west. He had left the management of his overgrown grazing land to a caretaker who, among other indecencies, had developed a habit of placing traps throughout the property. Ashe assumed this was for the minks and martins which sometimes setup a colony in the area, the manager selling furs in the local black market. While this practice was abhorrent in itself, it had had another effect which was more pertinent to the current project: it had often trapped the increasingly rare beaver clans up the tributary.

When she had discovered the practice last year, Ashe had begun making regular trips onto the property to trip the traps she knew of. A few she had tried to hide or destroy, but she hadn’t wanted to make her actions known to the unscrupulous man. This time she had no such reservations.  Using a combination of bolt-cutters and a blow torch, she set upon every trap she could find upstream.

If the neighbor or his land manager ever noticed, she never heard about it. And based on the progress upstream, whomever it had concerned had gotten the message.

Her work had been rewarded with the slowing and eventual stopping of the creek still feeding the pond despite the drought. Somewhere up the valley, the beavers had found a niche previously too risky to colonize.

As such, her work on the earthworks proceeded at a brisk pace, her dozer-digger combo making easy work of the malleable soil. She rebuilt up slowly, working the clay layer back up the side of the dam and further compacting it into an impermeable skin for the structure as it filled in higher.

She trenched out the old ‘overflow’ channels, placing instead a pair of steel culverts which she had found washed up on her land further down. Wherever they had originated, the now served as her secondary and final defense against another disaster for the ecologically substantial body of water – placed side-by-side and at a level just below the top of her almost finished repair works. She figured with her new knowledge and improved napkin-math that they would be more than sufficient for another storm of any magnitude, so long as the beavers were allowed to continue their work higher up the valley.

Another addition absent in her first design was a small structure at the inside base of the dam called a core channel. This trench about six-feet deep and to the closest impermeable layer below, spanned the entire length of the earthen mound before being filled back in with clay and compacted back down. This was a crucial oversight she couldn’t have foreseen at the time, a geologic seal on the base of the dam which prevented seepage like a gasket on a jar lid. In the long-term, this meant that the great mass of water couldn’t push against and through the bottom of the dirt, gravel, and clay mound, couldn’t undermine and collapse it with little to no warning or provocation.

Ashe was frankly surprised it hadn’t happened to the initial dam based on her recollection of her then-primitive engineering knowledge.

The plants and fish had survived well in the managed ecosystem she had thrown them into. A few had even taken to laying eggs in the nooks and crannies of the rocks supplied them and now Ashe was dealing with multiple generations and a rather cramped set of fish tubs. The catfish in particular seemed to thrive. Not having to work for a living and being fed regularly on scraps direct from the chef’s kitchen, they had grown fat and lazy in their enclosures and now not even shying away whenever the farmer came to check on them. One in particular, a one-eyed, long-whiskered monster Ashe had taken to calling Charlie, even took the initiative to meet her at the waterline for his meals.

Palm Beach

The South Palm Beach mansion was an opening embrace in Mr. Damien’s magnificent holdings. It was the true introduction, the advancement from casual, high-rise dinner to private beach induction.

The triple-paned, frameless glass door may as well not been there at all - a floating, unhinged thing gliding inward with the slightest motivation, both obscuring and emphasizing the grandness beyond.

A sea of beige and marble welcomes, plush cushions and severe, hard-edged tables. Recycled bamboo has been split and compressed into chic flooring beneath crystalline varnish. Windows to the rear stretch infinitely, unleashing the room to feel the palms and gardens and beachfront beyond.

Those who come to this place are joyful and primed, ambitious and invigorated. They are new, have vaulted over a tangibly unseen hurdle and are confident in their ability to conquer the next.

They stay for not an evening, but for three or four days. They soak in the sun and browse the taupe-toned library’s ample selection of rarity, salaciousness made ambiguous in the passage of time.

The way back is dimmer now - further and less conceivable.

Patrón

Officers Patrón and Perez had gotten off easy, even if they weren’t exactly sure of how. Since the events on the mesa, almost every officer which had been present had transferred, been fired or placed on administrative leave, or had simply quit altogether. Only the two of them had been spared the spectral hand currently hovering over the ranks of the New Mexico State Police.

“It’s got me bugging out, man.” Perez finished stuffing a rapidly disintegrating birria-taco into her already overfull mouth. “We’re talking, what? Catrón, Mills, Gieger, and Esperanza?”

“Don’t forget Graham.” Juan sipped on his cold drink and looked at the sparse traffic passing by on the boulevard’s wide, eight-lane span. “More than the usual turnover, that’s for sure.”

“And I can’t even get ahold of Eddie. They said he was transferring up to some station in Ohio, but that was months ago. Not a peep.”

If friends were already rare within the high-pressure crab bucket of law enforcement in the state, Eddie Graham had been one that young Perez and Patrón had been able to call close. They had gone to the State Police Academy in Santa Fe together, managed to survive the brutal first year after being formally inducted. To not hear from him was curious, if not concerning.

“Maybe the transfer didn’t go through.” Juan offered. “He was talking about moving to New Jersey, moving there with the family after bonuses. Maybe that’s what he did.” It seemed unlikely that he would setup shop somewhere and not reach out – they had shared more than one holiday together over the last couple years – but he wasn’t going to voice that to the more action-oriented Perez. He changed the subject.

“Hear about that guy they found near ‘Zozo?” The woman’s eyes locking on him showed he had her attention.

“No. What’ve you got?”

“Apparently it was some narcotraficante out of El Paso, dude called ‘Cruise’ who shuttled shit up from the border.” Patrón emphasized the omadanym with the traditional air-quotes and pulled out his notebook. “Felipe Ortiz. Twenty-three when last seen by his mom three years ago. Apparently spent time with horses when he was younger?” He shrugged and Georgie rolled her eyes.

“Get to the good stuff, bro.”

He did. “Found in an arroyo north of Carrizozo by local SO who called State who then called Feds. Signs of exposure and deprivation despite the advanced state of decay, obviously at that location for a while but not sure whether that is the place of death or he was moved there.”

Juan took another sip and a bite of his burrito. He couldn’t help but keep her on a string when she made it too easy, was so eager for the chismé. The officer took a last look at the surrounding area from the umbrella-shaded seat by the small Mexican food joint. He leaned in. “Rumor from Lincoln deputies is that the investigating agent said something about the timeline not making sense – that the car and body don’t add up in her mind.”

“And the mattress dress or whatever?”

“Mum on that. Apparently the ‘cape’ description from before is valid, but no word on what it was for.” He paused again, for himself this time.

“Well?” Perez prodded his own interest this time. “You’re the brainy one, what do you think?”

“He was naked beyond the bit of shirt he attached the lining material to, right? …why?”

“Heat stroke?”

 “That’s my thought.” Patrón confirmed with a nod. “Probably Special Agent Platte’s too, if I had to guess.”

“You got her name?” She raised an eyebrow at her friend. “Scandalous much?”

Juan couldn’t stifle a laugh but remained serious. “You know I did. Who else do we call when one of us ‘transfers’ next?”

Felipe

The barns had given way to the warehouses more than a year ago, the pitchfork and wagon traded for the steering wheel and shifter of a retired Army logistics truck. Like most job transfers these days, it had been one of convenience than desire, a three-scale upgrade in pay and a hell of a lot less grinding manual work.

As far as Felipe’s perspective, it had looked like a cushy enough gig: pick up the truck from the ranch warehouse, drive it west towards the eastern flank of the Sandia Mountains, and return with whatever supplies had been delivered to the airstrip out there. Sometimes he was sent into nearby Moriarty for lumber, other times down Interstate-40 and into Albuquerque for an afternoon at the wholesale and equestrian supply stores.

The job came with a full-time bungalow along the ranch’s southern borders which provided spectacular morning views and more than adequate privacy for those so-inclined. For the young man moving from the heart of local New Mexico and the ever-protective embrace of his mother’s bosom, it had been a bit of a downside. There was no easy food and loud nights out here – not on the ranchland at least. He couldn’t just call up his friends for a night downtown, depend on his mom to have a warm plate of tamales, frijoles, and tortillas always waiting for him in the oven. Nor could he enjoy the long walks through University of New Mexico’s public campus, the free classes he took part-time after work before.

The work calls in the inkiest hours of morning hadn’t been better. It wasn’t unusual, Felipe knew, he had seen all manner of activity on late-nights or an early-morning emergency callout in the past. Things were always churning out here, something was always in some state of planning, development, or building. Just another demand of the job. And what was he going to say, that he had a flat tire and couldn’t make it in?

Then came the morning he was called back to the stables rather than the garage; when he had grabbed a stale donut, poured a particularly bad cup of coffee in his thermos, and led ten strong Appaloosa mares to the airstrip in the high desert of New Mexico.

The journey was something akin to magical, a flight of rainbow lights and emphasized sensation at the head of a train of dwarven figures atop effervescently bespeckled ponies, leading from the wasteland darkness and toward the beckoning mansion on the hill side far away.

Platte

Special Agent Platte stood rigid behind the door of her federal vehicle. The sun beamed down upon it, turning its silver-metallic finish into a glaring annoyance in the corner of her eyes. It threatened to blind her, misguide the service weapon clenched in her palm just when she needed it most. A chirp to her left broke her contemplation.

MARTIN GALLEGOS. OPEN THE DOOR AND STEP FORWARD WITH BOTH HANDS VISIBLE AND ABOVE YOUR HEAD.

The megaphone attached to the armored truck rumbling nearby repeated itself once more with a trademark squawk for punctuation. Platte looked to it through eyes squinted even behind dark shades. She had seen the capabilities of the Black Bear assault vehicles in action in D.C., Philadelphia, Austin, and Chicago, there was little to match it when it came to breaking a hostage or lock-in situation. It surprised her that such a vehicle had become so ‘surplus’ as to have trickled down to the meager needs of the Torrance County Sheriff’s Office. It was no question why they had paid the time and diesel to lug it out here - if not for the adventure of the ordeal, at least they could record it as in-use when cuts came in the future. Against the trailer at the business end of its extended ram, it might as well have been a shotgun aimed at a piñata.

They had been out here for near an hour already, shouting and threatening to crush the door of the isolated single-wide in the depths of unincorporated Torrance County. The needed warrant for the property had allegedly been on the way to the judge before she even left her Albuquerque office. All it had had to do was go down a couple floors and over a building, yet some five hours later here they sat. The works, as usual, were gummed up in the slower pacing characteristic of the Land of Enchantment.

“We’re going to have to breach if we want more than scraps of evidence.” Platte pulled her lapel mic closer to her mouth to be heard over the shrill shouting of the bullhorn. “We need to either find an excuse or convince our buddies here to stand down with the truck.”

Across the property and similarly stationed to his colleague behind a decaying farm tractor, Agent August Klem nodded an affirmation to her words. Taking two steps back to the refuge offered by the bulk of the wheelless machine and hunkering where it was sinking obliquely into the barren landscape before keying on his own radio.

“Yeah, heard on that. Maybe a walk around back?”

“Got deputies back there, don’t they?”

“They do…” A weighted pause piqued Platte’s interest. “…but they aren’t sharing comms. We don’t know what they’re seeing-”

“-or necessarily trust they would say anything if they did.” She finished the thought for him, their information-sharing earlier that morning had resulted in little new to her investigation outside the name Gallegos and a strong feeling that members of the local Sheriff’s Office couldn’t be fully trusted. “Go ahead, August. Keep me up-to-date.”

The climax of the standoff came in spectacular fashion just as Kemp began his shuffling sprint across the dusty yard and toward the corner of the structure. Tripping at the last moment, he slammed into the trailer.

There was a resounding crunch of metal as the man barreled into tin siding, a crash as the impact collapsed the skirting into a pile of shattered plastic about his crumpled form.

The trailer erupted. First three lone shots from within, then several hundred from the law enforcement arrayed without.

University of New Mexico Hospital in central-Albuquerque was a grim environment no matter how many hundreds of millions they pumped into the thing. You couldn’t make a place like this anything other than what it was any more than you could transform a frog into a prince, could never chrome, LED, and background music away the despair that all but oozed from the sanitary linoleum flooring.

One of the characteristically joyless lights hummed to itself above Rhonda Platte. Her lapels were wide, baring her neck to the chilled air while she leaned her head backwards. The back of the plastic-cushioned chair was uncomfortable, lower than it should have been in the way of all such chairs and round in the way that cut into your spine and middle back if you dared get too comfortable. She opened her eyes and sat up with a sigh.

To her right, Agent Kemp lay in induced calm with a thick wad of red-spotted bandage wrapped around his bald forehead. He had collided with the aged outer shell of the manufactured home hard enough to not only collapse the material, but to make contact with a stud contained therein. The resulting head injury had left him with severe brain swelling and a likelihood of long-term recovery somewhere in the realm of zero-percent.

His badge/federal ID, wallet, phone, and keys were all atumble in a metal bowl beside his bed, waiting for the unlikely day they proved useful to the man once more. Platte pondered the FBI card where it peaked from the mass. All in the name of the service.

After the chaos of the moment, three other officers had also been injured. None were serious – nothing like this – but two had been local boys on loan to the county, and from the sound of it a hubbub was being made in the higher offices about the type of work Albuquerque Police were being contracted out to do.

The trailer had become a cheese grater of incomprehensible scale under the assault of the assembled agencies, the sought after Martin reduced to a leaking bag in the cheap bathtub he had thought sufficient fortification. Whatever evidence was in there, it would take months at least to sort out, let alone trickle down to her hands.

She might not have to worry about it, word was that US Customs & Border Control had taken an interest were coming to town. La Migra were coming to town.

Redstone

The Elk Mountains retreat provided Mr. Dusk a sort of intimacy which is difficult to replicate in the more urbanized cities and towns of the American East. With acreage expanding into hundreds of acres of intertwining fir and pine groves, cradled in the quaking aspens of McClure Pass to the west, it is a spectacle unattainable for any but the most important and influential.

It is a naturally warm place, anointed in the rich gold, amber, and chestnut-hues of lumber well-aged in the smoke and scent of mountain life. It’s central cavern of a great room swallows one whole, offering the comforts of well-loved leather nestled in hand-carved wood.

The rooms are as spacious as the land, as varied as the characters which roam the halls. A kitchen in unused lavishness, an expansive deck on forty-foot tilts over the mountain. A plush bedroom fit for two here, a Scandinavian bathroom for six there.

There are few who know of this place, almost none who could find it through the trees, valleys, and backroads. It offers a release, time away from what is a truly unbearable burden; a place for introspection, free of social maneuvering.

Ashe

A name had crept back into the life of the homesteader, a fizzy sound heard between twists of an AM-radio knob. It was one she thought long-forgotten, attached to a face of monstrous impression she had endeavored to scrub from her dreams. A place was haunting her, a memory metamorphosing from dust and smoke and terror.

Things had stalled on the farmstead, construction grinding to a halt with the late-season monsoon. Luckily, the repairs on the dam were holding with the sudden influx, the outflow system proving itself capable of processing both the downpour and the now-meager creek filtering through the swamplands growing upstream. She took pride in the effort as she looked at the new issues at hand.

Her first attempts at re-habitating the original plants of the pond had been a disaster, all exposed to the new water dying away within a week of their planting along the bank. The problem, she was realizing, was that her little pond was actual a great thermal mass of pristine water from the forest mountains to the east. Where her old pond had had seasons and seasons to accumulate sunshine – had developed a temperature which could sustain its tiny ecosystem in all its complexity – this new body of water would freeze anything she put into it. A jump in one day had assured her of this. She didn’t know how, but she would have to house the fish and plants in the greenhouse before the first frost. Maybe next year they could go back to their home in the summer.

Ashe looked to the weedy, overgrown garden near her home. When had it gotten so bad? She had to admit to herself that she was getting overwhelmed by the constant urgency of the pond rescue effort.

Food wouldn’t be an issue, not yet anyway, she had squirrelled away plenty for the proverbial rainy day. What was worrisome was the potential for the plants to go feral and lose production in the coming weeks. She would have to do that before dealing with the fish stowed away in a lean-to by the creek.

The fish. She would have to cull the bluegill at least, they were threatening to smother one another already, crushing the honeycomb of small nests in the sandy gravel of the pool-bed. She could envisage the males flitting about below – even if she couldn’t see them anymore for the most part – frantically attempting reconstruction in the hopes of an ill-advised attraction from the ladies shoving about above. She was skeptical the larger holding tank would be a sufficient long-term solution.

It would all have to wait until tomorrow, she resolved. One day wouldn’t hurt and what she really needed was a night truly free of work. She grabbed her bike from its hangers, offered an unenthused Zia a seat in the basket affixed to the rear, and ultimately rode off alone down the winding trail which would ultimately lead her to town.

Whether the dog had changed her mind or simply preferred the more direct course she could take directly through the dense woods, she was awaiting Ashe’s arrival at a small wooden sign that marked the departure from the trail and onto the township’s well-developed bike lane network. Together, they departed for a slow course to the Historic District.

Dinner was succulent and a taste of what she had been missing. She enjoyed a braised rabbit stew, flavors of her childhood intermingling alongside a yearning for the days of late-Spring when the wild hares would explode across her acreage once more. The hasenpfeffer was a welcome greeting to the coming colder months the flavors of juniper and thyme, fatty smoked bacon and onions caramelized to the color of roasted walnut. She thought of Christmas, the preceding falling of the autumnal leaves. Already she could see the early-season yellowing of the quaking aspen high in the Colorado mountains of her imagined memory.

She bought a small, olivine glass bottle of warming apple brandy from a Mainstreet spirits-distillery hidden behind a recued nineteenth century façade. It went with her, Zia, and a bar of strong dark premium chocolate spotted on the way out the door for a walk along the wide beach which had first attracted colonists to the area hundreds of years before. It had always been a place for her to think, the gentle lapping of the waves on the fine sand always offering her the greatest clarity when the crunching of her footsteps fell into its tempo.

Her world was coming apart at the seams. The careful crafting of a decade slowly unraveling around her and threatening to pull her backwards. It was overwhelming, more than three months of care suddenly looking small compared to what was coming next. If she was this behind on all her ongoing maintenance projects now, what would that look like after winter came and pummeled the land in snow? She could get lucky, could get a dry season which mostly freezes everything into a solid mass for a few months. Would that be better? She wasn’t so sure.

The night came to its end in what must have been closer to morning than evening. The bottle drunk, a warmness locked inside that came from more than just quality spirits, she began the not-too-long walk back up to the trail. The natural ranging about of Zia had been tempered by a day of adventure and she paced slowly alongside giving the basket sidelong glances as they walked. She wasn’t exactly subtle. With a dramatized sigh and a smile, Ashe lifted the pushy canine into the bike’s basket and continued along.

The answer, it turned out, had been close the entire time. It presented itself from the forested darkness along the trail, an abandoned railway spur from a time when lead- and silver-mining had been common in these parts. Ashe pushed her bike and dog through the thin trees and toward the orange wall in the woods.

The locomotive and its six attendant carts had sat untouched for something like seventy years – a relic of the compounding factors thrown upon the American people by the Great Depression and Dustbowl years. They had been abandoned, lost in some debt-transfer or corporate foreclosure, forgotten by whoever once owned them. Relics left to rot.

Ashe ran her hand against the corroded steel cladding. It felt incredibly solid. “Ah. Now that’s an idea.” She considered the light tinkling sound coming from somewhere behind the mass, the small creek which ran through the forest and down onto her modest plot.

Zia panted, looking between Ashe and the crooked engine with the sort of confusion that doesn’t warrant actually getting up about it.

The plan was ambitious, another of her half-engineering, half-craft solutions. She was going to heat the pond.

Perez

Wherever Juan was, he wasn’t picking up.

“Answer the fucking phone, Juanito.” Georgina Perez slammed her phone onto the Formica countertop, thought better of it, and whipped the device against the padded headboard of her bed. She wanted to howl.

He had disappeared without a word. Returning from that raid-gone-wrong in the boondocks somewhere, not saying much of anything for two days, then… gone. Officially, he had taken a ‘voluntary leave of absence’ and had been reporting concerns with his ‘mental health’ for some time. If true, he had taken ‘falling off the map’ to a dramatic – and hurtful – level for Perez.

The sun blazed against the reflective concrete and heatsink asphalt of Las Cruces, the city radiant against the geologic insulation of the jagged Organ Mountains to the east. Perez stretched in the baking heat, rolling her shoulders after the long drive south and breathing deep of the scents of exhaust, old deep-fry oil, and the disassociating humidity of a nearby petting zoo. It wasn’t much, but it was ‘home.’

She had gotten word a clinic here, a lead on her now months-missing friend from a surprising source: a rather pissed off and iced out Fed on her way to a transfer somewhere in Wyoming.  Now, the building stood before her, vacant on a street empty enough to make her unmarked cruiser conspicuous. Whatever had been here – clinic or otherwise – was gone to the point of windowless decay. Inside, she could see the exposed girders and I-beams which still composed the internal skeleton of the structure. To her, it looked more garage or workshop than clinic. She double-checked the address, first one her phone GPS, then on the bright numbers still visible against long-faded sage paint. She was in the right place.

The internals revealed little to the probing of her heavy flashlight. It was definitely a machining shop of some sort, of a vintage that suggested it had become outdated and dysfunctional sometime in the Nineties. A ripped and chewed on copy of Modern Machine Shop suggested as much, its head displaying the journal’s edition as ‘January 1993 Issue.’ There was no mailing address attached, it could have showed up by any number of ways. Perez pushed forward.

There had been nothing in the building, the offices and break room, tool shop and storage bay all stripped far past the copper in the walls. It was a shell in the most literal form, the late-afternoon breeze from the south shifting metal siding against slowly disintegrating bolts and rivets. Pushing out the backdoor and into the long, rectangular yard that stretched at least an acre from the building, she expected it would be much the same here. She pushed onward nonetheless.

The vehicles packed together and in various states of disassembly emphasized the overnight closure of the shop for Perez; the make and models of car – names like AMC Eagle, Geo Metro, and Plymouth Voyager – confirmed it had closed at some point in the mid-Nineties. She stared bewildered at the wood paneling of the trapezoidal van in front of her. How had that ever been popular? She remembered the bubbly car her Auntie had driven when she was just a kid. It had had the same paneling, and that had been in like 2003. Had she even seen another car like that since? She couldn’t be sure.

It wasn’t the flaky, faded license plate which grabbed the officer’s attention, it was the car to which it had once been affixed. It didn’t belong. She approached what was a newer model of vehicle among the hunks of stripped steel and aluminum which surrounded it. A white truck, its more recent vintage made clear by the still clear-coated paint and LED tail peeking from behind shattered plastic windows. She kicked the metal rectangle from its dust cover with a dragged boot, skidding it into the waning sunlight alongside a couple tumbling screws.

Perez paused as it came to a halt and stared at the object. Pulling out her phone, she took a picture of the yellow-and-red license plate, the latter paint almost entirely faded on the raised letters and numbers it served to highlight – it wasn’t hard to read nonetheless:

‘LAND OF ENCHANTMENT’ proudly impressed, two letters and four digits likewise stamped across the metal’s middle– An old New Mexico farm and ranch plate.

Felipe

Felipe drove down the dusty road at speed, his truck easily soaking up the many holes and ruts which had always characterized this stretch of backcountry. He had fucked up and he knew it, the ghosts of the diminutive figures catching up after uncountable desert horse rides. He looked in the rear-view, couldn’t see anything through the roiling clouds of dust kicking up behind his grabbing tires.

To his left and buckled into the passenger’s seat was a young man he didn’t really know, some kid he had been told to pick up for help with the day’s work. Something was wrong with him, he kept looking over and side-eyeing Felipe.

A rock in the road was too much for the modern suspension and jolted the truck vertically in its travel. Had they not been buckled in, the occupants would have likely slammed into the roof headfirst. In the bed of the truck where things were much less secure, a dull thudding and the crashing of steel tools rolling about could be heard, a dusty mattress appeared briefly in the mirror.

He shouldn’t have taken those pictures inside the Big House, should have known he couldn’t get away with it. They were always watching; no matter where you were on one of the properties, someone was always watching. But he had had to, hadn’t had a choice after the pieces began to fall into place around him – once the true horrors became too real to ignore.

A call to help pull a stalled truck from the main drive and the granted request to use the bathroom inside had been the final confirmation the man needed, the obscene nature of the small room into which he accidently stumbled enough to make him consider a death at his own hands on a nightly basis since. His complicity, his ability to compartmentalize the oddity of the place haunted him.

He was right in the end, the trip into the desert coming within hours of his posting the photographs to seven news organizations alongside the FBI, Department of Justice, New Mexico State Police, and Santa Fe County Office of the Sheriff. It wasn’t a moment after the engine shook to a halt that the passenger opened fire on the man to his left.

Galisteo

The Ranch was the crown jewel, Dusk’s personal imperial core. Spanning more than ten-thousand acres in the pristine high desert landscape of central New Mexico, it was both sanctuary and executive capital.

One was welcome to explore here, open to push into the boundaries to explore the rough sandstones, irritating brambles, and decompressing natural hot springs of the rough land. It was a manufactured communing with nature and a return to roots, an interloping with flighty pronghorn, inquisitive prairie dogs, and stalking pumas.

The people here were of a nature which promoted cementation, needy for cash and proud of their ability to mind their own affairs. The hiring had been easy, of labor both physical and political. The development had been fast, red tape worth a decade moved aside without insurmountable complaint.

The land was open, a place of deep secrets and ravines. The things which happened here had always been that way – in some way or other. It was a home of predators, a place with an expedited expiration date attached for the unwary or over-nosey.

There were those who came, staying for a weekend or a month or a season; there were those who came for a night and never left again.

Ashe

The woman was tall and formidable. Her hair dropped down past her shoulders and was kept in control by a loose ponytail tracing her spine’s gentle curve. She wore heavy duty clothing in olive drab and trim brown boots fit for both work and distance, a costume Ashe thought reminiscent of those worn by the likes of Border Patrol and Immigrations Enforcement agents but without all the usual bells and whistles. It made her uneasy.

They had been staring at one another for close to three minutes, the homesteader from where she stood next to her once-more-flourishing pond and the intruder from her position near the hiking trail into town. They had been frozen since, both holding absolutely still until the other made a move or indication. It was Ashe who broke first.

“Who the fuck are you and what are you doing on my land?” she shouted, hoping for once that someone might be nearby to overhear. “Something I can help you with? You lost?”

The bug-infused silence was ominous, loaded. Then the figure held up both hands, one with a slim pistol of the sort common amongst law enforcement, and a dusty piece of glinting yellow metal with red markings contained in a large bag with a telling red label printed across it.

Murders in the high desert. Police injured and assumed corrupt. The story Trooper Georgina Perez told would have been fantastical had it not been so brutal a recitation of Ashe’s past.

“You have to give me something, Ms. Jordan.” The trooper was all but pleading. “I-”

“I don’t go by that name. I’ve told you that already Trooper Perez.”

“Georgina. Please.” Perez ameliorated and pivoted once again. “Look, I’m not saying you’re involved in any of it. I just know your name – your old, legal name – came back when I started looking into the documents for the vehicle we found.” She took a sip of the cool herbal tea her host had provided, appearing to introspect as they shared the cramped seating on the small porch. “I’m just trying to understand why it connects, to get enough for a property warrant to finally squeak past the judge’s chamber.”

“So you’re here ‘officially,’ Ashe did the air-quotes, “I’m on-the-record?”

“If possible. As far as Command knows, I’m on paid mental health leave at the hot springs up here.”

This struck Ashe. “What does that mean?”

“That I came to ask what you know and, if possible, for your help.”

Ashe had extended the hospitality of her bungalow to include the curious state trooper currently unpacking a rucksack in the small yard outside. She had agreed to share the full story, everything she knew in exchange for room and board. It had been an easy trade.

Now, they enjoyed the fruits of her labors on the pond, sharing a meal and arrayed around the stone-lined firepit in the center of the yard. They cooked as they talked, spicing and stuffing the fish the farmer had been cleaning when she spotted the intruding woman, and tucking  them whole into an envelope of coals taken from the sleepy oven inside.

It was a balmy evening, the humidity clinging to the ground as evening rolled over the land. The smells of the fish filled the air, the scents of fresh water mixing with lemony sumac and salted lime, smokey paprika and earthy turmeric, all pushing past the crackling skin roasting under the intense heat. The protein was joined by generous bundles of husk containing gemstone corn; the inner kernels of pink, purple, blue, and green becoming plump with steam and caramelization. A salad of ever-abundant watercress, roasted cattail spikes, wild rice, and lotus leaves filled out the meal; alongside the tea, adding holistic freshness of rhizomes, leaves, stems, and flowers to an already rich meal.

Food had been what had originally attracted Ashe to the estate known as the Ranch, the lush greenhouses there offering culinary opportunities completely unique to almost any chef on the continent. The orchards were well-tended and designed, fostering thick-skinned Jaffa oranges from Palestine and imported Lebanese pomegranate trees alongside groves of piñon, chokecherry, and black cherry. The houses and hotboxes produced year-round – a flood of Romanesco cauliflower, Landrace squash, Rattlesnake beans, cucamelon, Aji peppers, and Chinese tatsoi.

It was the job of a lifetime, an opportunity to not only cook the best ingredients, but to feed and schmooze the most influential names in the country and abroad. An introductory tenure to the ways of the highest echelon. Compared to her work running a catering operation out of her dad’s kitchen and a broken-down food truck, it had been a dream come true.

Alongside the accoutrement which would quickly become trivial – room, board, transportation – the job had come with other perks as well, lavish vacations in island paradises punctuating journeys into the harshest environments to find exotic ingredients, materials, and ideas. Extended adventures in the insulating bubble of power on display.

But as all such things do, it had come with the cost of witnessing such influence, being privy to machinations that exceed any low cook, ranch hand, or gardener. She had seen horrors enacted on people, young women torn at by greedy, naked men in isolated back bedrooms. More than once she endeavored a distraction as a work crew shuttled out covered wagons of materials as ‘did repairs’ on some obscure corner of the estate.

The day had inevitably come when Ashe had had to escape, had made a decision to flee into the night during a fuel stop at O’Hare International Airport. Heading west, she stripped herself of an old identity named Haley Jordan, finally stopping at place where she called herself ‘Ashe.’

Now, there were the same disappearances and distances she had observed in her own days on the property three-decades ago – a crafted web of murder, misdirection, and malignant corruption. At the center of it all, a dusty agriculture plate following thirty-five years and a dozen farm trucks – a line tracing all across New Mexico from a place called Roberts Ranch.

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