There would have been shell casings. And the bullets themselves, the ones they dug out of Carey’s dead flesh. That would have been something, at least. But what he wondered—and here he was, following a wide beaten path uphill through the bracken at the feet of the trees, the morning still, nothing moving and nothing sounding off, not even birds—was just what caliber those casings and bullets had turned out to be. Were they from a handgun? A revolver? An old wood-grip .38 or .45 some scoop-faced son of a bitch kept tucked in his waistband like a Hollywood cliché? Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges. Or something else. Something else altogether.
The only sound was the trickle of the stream, no wind in the trees and that eerie absence of birdcall, as if the place had been poisoned, as if the Zetas were just over the next rise with their human mules and their booby traps and their carbofuran. He never had found out what happened that day when they’d lost sight of the white truck and Carey phoned 911—there was nothing in the paper and he could only assume the Mexicans had gone off on a side road somewhere and waited an hour or two before doubling back. It was nothing to the cops. They had a whole lot on their hands and if every 911 call about people brandishing weapons didn’t have a scripted ending, so much the worse. But it was quiet. Too quiet. Quieter than any forest he could remember. He pricked up his senses. The air was damp with a funk of rot, of moss and mold and things breaking down, and underneath it the smell of water bubbling up out of some dark place. He forced himself to move slowly, step by step, studying the shadows where they deepened in clots of vegetation, listening hard, as if the perpetrators would be anywhere within ten miles of here—what did he think, they were going to kill somebody and then come back and lick the blood off the rocks? After a moment he went down on one knee to peer into the stream and see if he could detect any life there, nymphs, water boatmen, minnows as dull and gray and natural in these waters as the brick-red platys were in theirs. The water was pellucid. He saw nothing, not even a water strider.
He continued on up, the trees standing silent, the bushes increasingly beaten down and the ground raked over as he came closer to the dun scallop of rock where the spring emerged from the side of the mountain. There was a tree down just in front of the pool the spring made, cover for anyone lying in ambush, but then why would there be an ambush in this place? There was no plantation here, that was obvious. The trees were dense, closed in, the sunshine minimal. It was a water source, of course—they needed water, and they were known to divert whole streams as well as run drip lines hundreds of yards out into their makeshift clearings where they’d sacrificed the trees for the greater good of profit and criminality. What if—and he was speculating now—Carey had come upon a couple of them checking out the location or even laying out plastic tubing to take the water down to the road, to a catchment there or a tank in the back of a brand-new white Ford XLT pickup with all-terrain tires?
But no, that didn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t have shot him—that would only bring attention to themselves, bring the heat. They might have cursed, might have made a crude gesture or two and spat out a garble of Spanish and English—Spanglish—to proclaim their innocence, We are hikers, se?or, only hikers, and then gone on their way. To avoid the confrontation the way they had the day he and Carey had followed them to a standstill. They didn’t want to kill anybody, not unless someone got too close to the growing operation, either by design or accident, and even then the better part of them—the mules—would just melt away into the undergrowth when the DEA or the sheriff’s department pulled a raid. Who wanted to be a hero? Who wanted the attention?
No, that wasn’t the answer, that wasn’t the answer at all. He was standing there on the very rock, the smooth clean water-burnished slab of granite where they’d found the body—the chalk marks there still—and if he was studying the grain of the rock for bloodstains it wasn’t out of idle curiosity or morbidity or even a desire to mourn a friend. There was a mystery here, a puzzle he had to solve for himself before Rob Rankin and his forensics team did, and it was tied up with that fear, the nameless fear that was mutating now into a named fear, named and punishing and inadmissible.
Suddenly, and he didn’t quite know why, he was calling out his son’s name. “Adam?” he shouted, obliterating the silence. “Adam, are you out there?”
PART VIII
Ukiah
24.