Walter Hocker was on the ground, his right leg stretched out in front of him, the other twisted under his rump. He was leaning on his left elbow, trying to cradle his right arm. His eyes were partly closed, and as I approached, he opened them and grimaced at me.
“What happened to you?” I asked. There was no blood pumping out onto the sand, so he obviously hadn’t been shot. But his right wrist wasn’t going in the direction it was supposed to.
“Ohhhh,” he said, a long heartfelt exhalation of breath that was part groan, part general commentary on the state of things.
“Sir,” Sergeant Mitchell said, “this all needs some explaining.”
“I can see that. Why don’t you give him a hand up?”
“Nah,” Hocker said immediately and leaned over even farther as if to protect himself from further assault.
“Bob,” I shouted over my shoulder, “call an ambulance.” I knelt down, holding the shotgun’s butt in the sand. Hocker was biting his lip, his eyes now closed.
“Mr. Boyd fired off a string of rounds,” Mitchell said. “We weren’t expecting it. Agent Hocker jumped back and tripped. I think he broke his leg. I heard it pop.”
“My hip,” Hocker said through clenched teeth. “It’s my hip, goddam it.”
I reached out a hand and touched Hocker’s right hand. He flinched backward. “That’s broken,” I said. “Even I can see that. How did it happen?”
“I kicked him,” Mitchell said.
I looked up sharply, first at him and then at Costace. With a grunt, I pushed myself to my feet and stepped over so that I was practically nose to nose with Eddie Mitchell.
“Suppose that I didn’t have to pry this out of you one sentence at a time. Tell me what the hell happened.”
“Mr. Boyd fired a string of shots that startled us. He fired into the bank over there.” Mitchell pointed off to his right. “Agent Hocker startled, twisted, and fell backward and in the process, broke his hip. When that happened, I was the only person actually facing Mr. Boyd. I knew that he had not fired at us, but apparently Agent Hocker thought that he had. Apparently Agent Hocker thought that he had been hit, and apparently Agent Costace thought the same thing. Agent Hocker drew his service automatic and was about to return fire. I was sure that at such short distance, he would hit Mr. Boyd. I didn’t have time for anything else, so I lashed out with my foot. The toe of my boot struck Agent Hocker’s wrist and knocked the weapon out of his hand.”
Mitchell took a breath. “Apparently, in the heat of things, Agent Costace mistakenly thought that both Boyd and myself were assaulting Agent Hocker and himself. He was in the process of drawing his own weapon when I tackled him. We struggled and I was able to successfully pin Agent Costace against the side of the Bronco.” Mitchell stopped again and a faint grin twitched the corners of his mouth. “And then you and Sergeant Torrez arrived.” He paused again. “And that’s what happened, sir.”
I suppressed the urge to break out in laughter only because Hocker was still on the ground, his breath coming in little seething gasps between clenched teeth.
“Just apparently wonderful,” I said and looked across at Neil Costace. I’d known him for a long time and could read from the expression on his face that there was no point in asking for his version of the events.
“Let me find Walt’s handgun,” he said instead.
I stalked over to Boyd and glared at him. He drew on the cigarette, not the least bit impressed. “And what was the point of firing that weapon?”
“And what was the point of them being out here in the middle of the night snooping around my private property?”
“Johnny…” I started to say, but I was so angry that the words just sputtered into silence.
The rancher shrugged and gestured toward his pickup truck. “They were all excited about finding samples of my brass. So I told ’em I had some in the truck, if that’s what they wanted. I guess they thought I meant empties. I’d brought the little two-twenty-three from the house.” He nodded at the weapon that Torrez had taken. “So I took the rifle out of the gun rack and fired off a few rounds.” He shrugged again. “I guess they weren’t ready for that. If they want the gun, you’ve got it.”
“You guess,” I said. “You’re damn lucky you weren’t killed.”
“So are they,” Boyd said evenly. “If your deputy hadn’t been here, there’s no telling which way this might have gone.”
I pumped the shell out of the shotgun and put the weapon back in the vehicle. “The ambulance is en route,” Torrez said, and I nodded.
“Let’s see if we can make Hocker any more comfortable while we wait,” I said.
I could hear a siren far in the distance, but it would take the softly sprung ambulance a while to reach us—and I didn’t envy Hocker his ride back into town. Costace had retrieved Hocker’s gun, and he stood beside the vehicle with it in his hand, looking disgusted.
“Did you find the brass you wanted?” I asked and Costace nodded.
“I showed Mr. Boyd one of the samples that you collected over at the windmill. He said it was probably his. He says the last time they were out here shooting the two-twenty-three was during his son’s spring break from college.”
“And he doesn’t know how the casings got there, does he?” I said.
“No, he doesn’t.”
Johnny Boyd didn’t move an inch from his spot by the hood of the Bronco. He leaned against the vehicle patiently, and the only sign of nerves was his lighting of one cigarette after another. We made Walter Hocker as comfortable as anyone with a fractured hip and wrist could be, and in due course, the ambulance winked its way into the narrow canyon.
When it left, I took Eddie Mitchell by the elbow. “Well, that’s that,” I said. “Let’s have us a little conference over at my unit.” Neil Costace fell in step with Bob Torrez, and I let them go ahead, my hand still on Mitchell’s arm. I pulled him to a stop.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” I said quietly. “I’m not sure you had to kick quite so hard, but that was quick thinking.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“We could have had a real tragedy.”
Mitchell nodded and looked uncomfortable.
I grinned. “You think you’re going to get this kind of excitement working for Burkhalter?” A ghost of surprise flicked across Mitchell’s face. “He’s content, by the way, to wait until this whole mess is wrapped up before you sign on with him.”
“That’s good, sir.”
“For us, it is. I’m hoping you’ll reconsider, of course. But I’ll understand if you don’t.” I patted his arm once more. “I want to show you something.”
We joined the others, and Johnny Boyd lit his tenth cigarette.
“Now that we’ve had our fun for the evening, there’re two things I want to ask you, Johnny,” I said as I walked around to the passenger door of the Bronco. I reached inside and pulled out the tangled piece of aluminum that included the letters of the Bonanza’s registration. I held it so that the headlights caught it. “What do you suppose this is?”
Boyd reached out and took the crumpled metal in both hands, turning it this way and that. “From the airplane, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He tapped the aluminum. “Registration letters. What else am I looking at?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
He frowned, the smoke from the cigarette curling up into his eyes. He cocked his head and studied the metal. “That’s all I see.”
“Those letters mean anything to you?”
He looked up at me askance. “No. Should they?”
“Nothing at all?”
This time he removed the cigarette and turned a bit so that more light bounced off the white metal. “Well, I guess I could tell that this airplane wasn’t United States registry. We use numbers. Canada, Britain, some of the others use all letters like this. And you said Holman’s brother-in-law was from Canada, so I guess I’m not surprised.”
“How do you happen to know that?”
“Know what, Sheriff?”
“That many foreign aircraft carry only lettering. No numbers.”
Johnny Boyd laughed shortly. “When my son was growing up, we had so damn many model airplanes hanging from the ceiling and parked from every flat surface that his mother about had a conniption every time he’d bring home another one. That and buying one flying magazine after another. “A man’s bound to learn a little something from all that.”
“So if you’d seen this aircraft flying low overhead, your first reaction would be what?”
“Just what do you want to know, Sheriff?”
“I want to know what your first reaction would be.”
“I’d wonder how the hell some Canuck got himself lost in New Mexico.” He drew deeply on his cigarette. “And if I saw him crash into a mountain, I’d call you and let you sort it all out.”
“You wouldn’t think it might be a state aircraft?”
“Why would I think that?”
“Unusual lettering?”
“It’s not unusual, Sheriff. It’s Canadian.”
“But you didn’t know that until after the fact.”
Boyd took the cigarette out of his mouth and carefully ground it out on his boot heel, then reached for another. Patiently, as if he were issuing a critical set of instructions, he said, “Sheriff, do you remember a month ago when the governor stopped in Posadas? He and the highway commissioner flew into the Posadas airport. You remember that? Then they went to some luncheon?”
“I remember. Sheriff Holman attended. I didn’t.”
“That was a state plane that brought them. You want to know the registration? I was driving up the highway when they took off, and I watched ’em because it’s kind of a pretty airplane. A jetprop Commander. And the registration is right on the tail.”
“And you remember it?”
“One-four-four NM.” He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. “With the N that they carry coming first. N-one-four-four New Mexico. Don’t take my word. Hell, no one else does. Check it out. N-one-four-four New Mexico.”
I put the torn piece of aluminum back in the Bronco. The other officers stood by silently, waiting for some cue from me. “Johnny,” I said, “did George Payton call you tonight?”
As if the word “call” was a prompt, the phone on the front seat chirped. Torrez reached in a long arm and answered it. He listened for a moment, then said, “No. Everyone else is just fine. Tell her that he’ll be home in a few minutes. The sheriff is talking to him just now.”
He switched off and tossed the phone back on the seat. “Your wife called the office,” he said to Boyd. “She heard shots and was worried.”
Boyd nodded and turned his attention back to me. “Yes, George called me.”
“Did he tell you that federal agents had been at his shop inquiring about your firearms collection?”
“Yes.”
“He called me first, to ask if he should cooperate,” I said. “I told him that he should.”
“What’s your point?”
“Did he tell you that they were planning to come out here?”
“Yes.”
“And so you decided to meet them, with a loaded assault rifle in your truck.”
“There’s always a loaded rifle in that truck, Sheriff. One kind or another, it doesn’t matter. And if you’re asking about the weapons, I figure any man with an ounce of education ought to be able to look at a list of firearms and put two and two together.”
“Meaning what?”
“Did you look at the list?”
“I’ve got it right here in the truck.”
“Well, get it. Let me shed some light.”
I did so, and he spread the paper out on the hood. “Hold the flashlight here,” he said. “Now look. Look at these handguns and you tell me what you see.”
“Several types and calibers of semiautomatic handguns.” I adjusted my glasses and reread the list. And that’s when it struck me like a mallet between the eyes. “Walther P thirty-eight and nine-millimeter Luger. Those are German. Colt 1911 forty-five. That’s ours. Tokarev for the Russians, Nambu for the Japanese. Beretta, Astra…” My voice trailed off.
“Probably doesn’t surprise you that my son’s a history major, does it?”
“And I assume that the fully automatic weapons follow the same pattern? That’s a hell of a collection.”
“It will be. What he wants is a collection of all the major light arms that were issued to soldiers during the major conflicts of the twentieth century.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“Damn near impossible, but he’s got a start. I told him that if that’s the kind of collection he wanted to make, he’d best get at it. Some of that material is going to be pretty dear in a few years. Or illegal. I admit, I found out that it’s easy to get caught up in all this.” He laughed, the first real humor I’d heard from him in days. “I even put off buying a new pickup truck this year. That’s how bad it gets.”
“And your wife hasn’t divorced you yet,” I said.
Boyd looked puzzled. “He’s her son too. That’s how we look at it. I just didn’t expect this kind of trouble, that’s all.”
“One last thing,” I said and opened my briefcase to find the photographs I’d brought along. I found the one of the intersecting fence lines and handed it to Boyd. “Where’s this spot?”
He looked hard at the photo and then squatted down in front of the Bronco so that the headlights gave him daytime.
“Huh,” he said and turned the picture over. “That’s got to be over by what we call William’s Tank. There used to be a windmill there years ago, but it went dry, hell, back in the seventies. Dick Finnegan took it out and put it over near his trailer.”
“So this is on Finnegan’s property?”
Boyd nodded. “Yeah. I recognize this fence line now. And this here is where he thought about digging a new dirt tank. He borrowed my little dozer for a day or two, then gave up. Said there wasn’t any bottom to the gravel.”
“So if I wanted to get there, how would I do it?”
Boyd stood up. “Just take this road back toward the highway. When you hit the trail that heads down south into the back of the mesa—where he’s working on that spring—you go about a mile on that. This is off to the west there a little bit. There’s what’s left of a two-track that will take you over that way.” He looked at the photo again. “Why this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then took a calculated risk. “Martin Holman took that photo on the day of the crash.”