One piece of the puzzle refused to die. Why hide valuables and then booby trap the hiding spots? It didn’t make sense. I wrote it off as a hate crime for a while, but that didn’t stop my thoughts from straying back to the mysterious traps I had encountered. They were meant to kill, that was obvious. But why kill somebody? Surely not to protect their belongings. Finding a body near a booby trap would only lead to an investigation and the investigation would lead to confiscated evidence. And why booby trap something, making it risky to ever retrieve it? I didn’t understand it at all. The mine especially grated on me. I never did see what was in that mine. Maybe the explosion had nothing to do with the traps. The first homestead I found had gunpowder stored under the floorboards. Dirk’s single shot could have been chocked up to bad luck.
“Did you read that journal we found?” I finally asked Rusty.
“Only a small portion of it. It isn’t easy to read. It was written with a fountain pen and the cursive is bad.”
“Whatever happened to it?”
“I’m not telling. If you have asked this many questions about it you’re curious enough to read it and the information in it is best left in the past.”
Rats. I thought it might contain a clue.
I even visited Agnes. But she was scared to talk about it. She thought anything she said would be used against her. I guess I really can’t blame her. I did read her her rights.
Finally, out of boredom and desperation to close the case in my own mind I went back to the homestead that started it all.
I drove to the nearest parking spot and followed my old route to the homestead as early in the morning as possible. Snake wrangling was getting old. This time I only found one large rattlesnake but it made me leery about entering the crawl space again. I wore old clothes that I wouldn’t mind throwing away afterwards just in case the crawl space was as awful as the last time I saw it.
The crawl space looked like something out of a horror movie. Dried snake blood still covered a large area. The skin and entrails had dried and hardened. I noted the clean spot in the middle where I had been sitting when I had to shoot the snake. Luckily, I was not squeamish. A little dried snake blood was not much of a turn off.
I lowered myself through the hole, sat cross legged on the ground, and looked around before turning on the flashlight, and pulling the boards over the hole. I shined the flashlight across the boxes wondering where to start.
I opened the box that I found the map in. I thought I might have missed something important. The first time I was in a hurry and just looking for anything to get me started, so I could assume there was something more in the box. I remembered to pass over the commercially made maps. I watched for the little hand drawn ones. There were several more detailed maps of the individual properties. But they didn’t show me anything I hadn’t already seen in person, that is until I worked my way further down the stack. I found a small map of a single property. The layout of the property didn’t match any of the others I had seen. It had a hill nearby and I recognized the name of the hill. I thought about the lay of the land in that area. I had tracked there in the past. Like many desert areas animal tracks showed up easily in the desert sand there. A small community had grown up at the foot of the hill. I just wasn’t sure where this property fit into the layout with the other ones out there.
I hesitated to go there. People who lived outside of town frequently did so because they wanted elbow room and they didn’t appreciate strangers nosing around where they didn’t belong. The police frequently had trespassing calls out there.
Oh, what the heck, I thought, the worst that would happen was I’d get caught, the police would be called, I’d tell the officers I was out tracking, they would believe me and tell me to go home, so I’d do it.
I drove to the hill. That was the easy part. After I stopped the car and took a look around, though, I didn’t see any structures that fit the map. I knew the house on the map could have been reduced to a single foundation and that the foundation would not be visible until I was very close to it, so I began walking around in the desert between the houses and the hill. Rabbit and lizard tracks abounded. The rabbit tracks especially. The lizard tracks exhibited the typical herky-jerky tail swipe and claw mark configuration. I noticed the lizards were mostly very small ones. A typical lizard track had a four inch tail drag and the claw marks were a little over a finger’s width apart.
In the distance I noticed a light green house. Under the eaves the green was darker telling me the house was painted long ago and the light green had faded in the intense sun. Like many houses in the area there was no fence. A shed stood in what would have been the corner of the back yard. It, too, was faded and weathered. The door hung slightly crooked. There was a vent on the roof to provide air circulation inside. A failed garden was taped off beside the shed. Nothing worthwhile would grow here. There were only a few withered plants inside the plowed area. The rest had been pulled and discarded. I didn’t see any recent tracks inside the garden area.
I avoided the house and walked a wide circle around it. A dog barked and the curtains at the sliding glass back door jerked around as the dog jumped against the curtain. I steered away from the house in case the owners let the dog out.
The next house was tan and could have been yellow in the past. This house had a rough wire fence. The dogs that ran the fence line could have easily jumped out, but they didn’t. They didn’t have to. They were shepherd mixes and appeared to be very capable of keeping strangers away from the house.
I was guessing the gray house used to be blue. There was no fence and no barking. A set of antlers was mounted at the peak of the garage, which was separate from the house. A green car sat in front of the garage. It was an old car. In a former life it was known as The Thing. I had only seen a few in my lifetime and I had asked Old Frank, our ranch foreman, what they were when I was a teenager. Old Frank knew everything, but when he said it was The Thing I had to look it up. Sure enough, there was a car called The Thing. I didn’t blame the car manufacturers one bit for opting for The Thing as a car name. That’s just what they looked like.
The house was quiet. The car looked content just sitting there. The curtains didn’t move. The breeze even seemed to cease. Usually there is a constant breeze, if not a howling wind, in the desert. I tried to remember if I had felt a breeze at the other houses but I hadn’t paid attention. I was even tempted to back track and see if the wind had just vanished or if the glowering gray house just had that effect on people. I stood waiting for a breeze but it remained still.
As I passed the gray house the land sloped downward. At the bottom of the hill a small arroyo ran through the desert. It was only a few feet wide and a motorcycle track ran up the arroyo, obviously this was a dirt bike path to some place more interesting to visit. I followed the arroyo a little bit until it turned. Then I noticed something made of rock behind the hill. I cut across the base of the hill and discovered a house made of rock. The roof was long gone and the windows had been bashed in years ago. The door had graffiti scrawled on it, though it didn’t seem to be any of the gang symbols I remembered from training. He door creaked when I moved it. On the backside somebody had painted a picture of Waldo. I ran into pictures of Waldo every once in a while on bridges, fences, trees and now doors and I smiled every time. Good old Waldo.
After my previous experience with rocks and the things they could hide, I was wary. I knew not to stand directly in front of anything that I tested. Whether it was pistols, or rifles, or rat traps, the traps only had a small area where a person was in real danger. However that area was the most natural one for anybody looking for something. It was rather awkward testing all the rocks without standing in front of them. I kept my eyes open for any hints, like the arrow in the bookcase. I stomped around on the foundation listening for wobbly spots that might indicate a loose brick or empty space underneath. Stomp, stomp, stomp, cachick. Shit. That cachick was not a wobbly brick. It was a gun cocking.
“Figured you’d show up eventually,” a gravelly voice said. “Didn’t expect someone like you till I saw the news. Thought it would be someone older.”
“Come out where I can see you,” I said.
“HAR har har,” he laughed bitterly and then broke into a hoarse cough. “Most people ask me to turn away. Damn son a bitches. Only perfect people are allowed in public these days.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” I said trying to engage him in conversation. Dang, what did they say in that crisis negotiation class I took? Schroeder suggested I attend it since trouble seems to occur everywhere I go. “What’s your name?”
“Aint no concern of yours,” he said.
“Okay, well, then why am I being held at gunpoint?” I asked.
“Because,” he said as he stepped into the house. He wore a bandana over his face like a bank robber but I could tell he wasn’t going to rob a bank. He squinted at me and the bandana shifted with the slight movement. “It’s payback time.”
He was slightly on the tallish side, and fat from lack of exercise. He needed a haircut and shave. His clothes were old. He didn’t care anymore what he looked like.
“I haven’t done anything to you,” I pointed out.
“You have.” He spat on the ground and I wondered how he knew the exact angle to miss the point of the bandana. “You been to nearly all the other settlements. I saw you on the news. You’re sharp. Gotta give you that. Which means I gotta be extree careful.”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I was just tracking in the area and noticed the ruins. Ruins of houses are interesting, but if this is your property…”
“Shut up! You are not here just for the heck of it. You caint get me to believe that for one stinkin’ second. You might have made yourself scarce and avoided the cameras but they did show the ‘young woman’ who found the other stores.”
He was growing angrier. It was when his temper flared that I noticed the bandana fit his face wrong. It hung just above his cheekbones and interfered with his vision. Then I realized why it hung so oddly. The man had no nose!
“So,” I said. “How do you fit into this mystery? I am only here wondering why the stores were booby trapped. It didn’t make sense to me to set up a trap that would only draw more attention to the belongings being hidden.”
“I don’t care about them damned Kingsleys,” he growled. “Nor about them Packards. I don’t want no part of their treasures and belongings and stuff. But they’s coming back. Some day. And when they do they’re payin’.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For this,” he spat as he pulled down the bandana. I was glad I had figured out the reason he wore it. I was surprised by the extent of the injuries but maybe being in the Marines and police reserves had hardened me a bit. I wasn’t repulsed by his face. I cringed inwardly imagining the pain and heartache the man had endured, but I managed to stay focused on the situation and not the disfigurement.
“Who did that to you?” I asked as compassionately as I could.
“Rufus Packard. Nine seventeen p.m. on July eighteenth nineteen hundred and sixty-two. On a rare cloudy day. Right in the face.”
The fact that he remembered the date and time after so many years was bad news. This man was bitter and his anger had been kindling for fifty years.
“You’re too young,” I said.
“Taint. He done it to a kid! Dropped outa school! Never held a job!” Bammm! I jumped to the side. “Folks are scared of me!” Bam!
“I’m not related to Rufus Packard,” I said. “You’ve got no reason to hate me.”
“You’re undoing all my hard work. Sooner or later I was going to catch me a Packard.”
He stepped forward, an old fashioned western style revolver pointed directly at my chest. It reminded me of old cap guns, but this was no cap gun. He’d proved that already. I wondered if he found it at one of the homesteads.
“I’ll leave,” I said. “I don’t have to find any more of the stores.”
“Liar! If you were going to stop you wouldn’t be here now! You’ll bring in the po-lice to undo all my work. If I let you go I bet you bring them back here.”
He took another step closer.
“What’s your name?” I tried again. One thing we did learn in training was to look for ways to identify with the other person. People respond better if they hear their name.
“Quit school because they called me Pinocchio. Kids ran away from me,” he spat. “Those days plastic surgery was brand new. Nobody had it done, cept movie stars and rich folks.”
“Look, I know it wasn’t easy, but you can’t blame Ru…” Bam!
Okay, maybe he could. He only had three shots left. Maybe I could get him to waste his bullets.
“Since you seem determined to kill me anyway, how many other houses like this are there?” I asked.
He pointed the gun at me and lurched forward.
“I’m guessing two,” I said. “You’d save one more of these sites in case I found this one.”
He stopped as if he should have thought of that, then scowled. “This is the only one I can keep close tabs on. Now how would you like your nose? Inside your head?”
“You really think you can hit my nose?” I asked. “Shooting me isn’t going to fix your problem. You’ve let Rufus…” Bam! “Ruin your life. Your lack of friends, schooling and job were a result of your decisions, nothing…” Bam! “more.”
He was down to one bullet and that bullet had my name on it. So far his shots were simply to scare me but it didn’t work. The fewer bullets there were in his gun the safer I was.
“No one person can ruin your life, except you,” I said expecting him to fire the last shot.
“Says who, you pretty little wench?” He said as he got in my face. My usual move for this situation wouldn’t work on this guy. I was known for my right hook, but he didn’t have a nose to break. I decided it was going to hurt but maybe it would rattle his brain a little, so I brought my right fist up into his jaw as hard as I could. He roared some intelligible sound and raised his hands. He grabbed me around the neck. I twisted and ducked to the right.
I had a rifle across my back but apparently he hadn’t seen it. I hate shooting people. The only thing I hate worse than shooting people is when they shoot at people I know. I had killed men in self defense but it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. My training said to shoot him. My heart cried, “No!” My analytical mind said that my rifle could be used in a multitude of ways, but then it argued that it could also be used against me. I was putting way too much thought into surviving. I had survival instincts that superseded in times of trouble. Instinct was the way to go. When I twisted away from him I put some distance between us and I let Dangerous Tracker Woman take charge. She whipped the rifle around and cocked it in one motion.
“You’re underestimating me,” I said. “Drop the gun and kick it this direction.”
He stood there numb from shock at the way the tables had turned.
“Drop the gun and kick it this way,” I said again with a little more force. “Now!”
“That thing ain’t legal,” he said as he gawked at my rifle.
“Drop it!”
“How’d a little thing like you get a gun like that?”
“I’m going to tell you one more time to drop your gun. If you don’t do it I’ll make you drop it. Where would you like it? In the hand? Maybe you’d like an ear pierced? Now. Drop it.”
He was scared. When he got scared his mouth started up.
“Is that an automatic?”
“Drop it on the count of three,” I said as I took aim. “One… two… three.” Please drop it, please… I aimed the rifle at the gun and pulled the trigger. The pistol spun out of his hand and he jerked in surprise.
“Semi,” I said, “and even my permits have permits. Now spread eagle on the floor.”
He amazed me when he actually did what I told him to. I frisked him taking away his wallet, a pen, and a handful of spare bullets. There was still one bullet left in the pistol.
“You planted all those booby traps hoping to kill yourself a Packard?” I asked.
“Took me months. The waiting was the hardest part. Them Packards… I know they’ll be back one day.”
I took that as a confession so I got out my cell phone. I disguised my voice.
“Joshua Hills Police Department how may I help you?”
“I’m hearing gun shots near my house! Lots of gun shots! Can you send an officer out here? I usually hear them far away but these sound like their in my back yard!”
“Yes ma’am and do you have an address?”
I guessed at the number based on the layout of the town. I knew the nearest street because I had driven it to look for places to track. They sent an officer after I added, “And please hurry! I’m scared and alone!”
I flipped the wallet open and checked my prisoner’s ID. Calvin Kingsley. One of the land wars survivors. I stood over Calvin with my rifle aimed and ready.
“Why’d you change your voice?” Calvin asked.
“Because they know my voice,” I said.
“Ha, how would they know your voice?”
“I… uh… I’m married to one of their detectives and I’m a reserve deputy. Now I want you to get up slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them and walk toward the street. We’re going to wait nice and findable for my backup to arrive. Up. Hands up.”
Maybe I learned a thing or two from my encounter with Agnes.
He got up slowly and stood with his hands over his head. “To the street,” I said. “Don’t run. I can take you down with one shot. Your pistol has fired five so you’ve proven to be a threat.”
He began walking, glancing back forlornly at his pistol.
“Don’t worry, the police know what to do with that,” I said.
As we walked between the houses, the dogs charged the fence again. Calvin steered toward the gray house. The breeze was still and the air felt leaden.
“Away from the house,” I instructed. The farther we were from the house the less likely he was to bolt. “Farther.”
The dogs lunged and barked. When we were as close to the dogs as we were going to get Calvin lunged.
“Dino! Rocky! Git her! Git her!”
“Hold it right there!” I yelled at Calvin. The black and tan dog jumped over the fence.
“Git her! Bite her!” he yelled at the dog. It stood beside Calvin growling. Its ears were back but its tail thrashed back and forth rhythmically. Calvin began backing away.
“Stop where you are! Keep your hands up!”
When the second dog saw the first dog getting in on some action it, too, jumped the fence. Calvin stood there waiting for the dogs to take action and distract me. The dogs stood bristling before me, barking and wagging. I kept Calvin at gun point.
“They must think I have a snack,” I said. “Keep walking.”
“But…”
He turned and the dogs began running circles around us barking up a storm.
“It isn’t very nice,” I said to Calvin. “Sacrificing your neighbor’s dogs just to get away from the police. I’ve killed a dog with nothing but a hunting knife, but these dogs don’t deserve to die. They’re just acting.”
The dogs frightened me but I had to put up a brave front if I was going to get Calvin to cooperate. I hoped that didn’t include shooting his neighbor’s dogs. It wasn’t too long ago that I was attacked by fighting dogs, so Dino and Rocky unnerved me a bit. I wanted to run, but I knew I couldn’t. To run would invite a chase and Calvin would get away.
Calvin turned and walked toward the street. He knew his time was severely limited. Off in the distance we could hear sirens, but the officers still had to find us. Calvin looked desperate. The dogs still barked, though only in warning. Suddenly Calvin turned around and charged straight at me. I should have shot him. I should have. But I didn’t. He grabbed the gun and tried to wrestle it loose from my grip. I hung on for dear life.
“Cal… it’s no use! They’re almost here!” I yelled.
With a wild yell he pulled up on the weapon lifting me off my feet. I gripped the rifle, swung my feet forward and let my weight pull the gun down. I slid between Calvin’s legs pulling him into a spectacular flip. He landed on his back with an oooff! I twisted the gun loose and stood over Calvin a total mess, hair flying, covered with dust, dogs barking.
The first black and white pulled to a stop and the officers jumped out. There I stood, Calvin at gun point, the dogs barking at the action.
“We had a report of shots fired,” Big John Jankowski said.
“Six. Five for him. One for me. Just one. I counted.”
“How was your day today?” Rusty asked when he found me in the kitchen after work.
“Oh, so so,” I said. “Why?”
He leaned against the wall and watched me work.
“There’s a story going around the station.”
“Oh?”
“Something about you capturing a felon.”
“Oh, that must have been Calvin Kinglsey,” I said.
“Hon…”
“I told you my day was so so. It didn’t rate even a so so until Big John showed up. But it turned out okay.”
“His gun looks like a prop from an old west movie.”
“Thanks.”
“So it’s true?”
“Uh, yeah. Sorry.”
He smirked. I thought I was going to get a sound scolding but he smirked. “Cook enough for three. Chase was curious enough to make the drive. He wants to track it.”
Cassidy Michaels, Dangerous Tracker Woman, and dinner cook. I guess I could live with that.