Melissa Cutler - Cowboy Justice

Vaughn hated the idea of crawling into his empty bed enough that he only stopped by home for a quick shower after leaving Rachel’s property before holing up in his office with paperwork until three o’clock in the morning rolled around.

At three, he unlocked his safe and added a Sig 229 to his ankle, backup for his S&W side piece. He readied his favorite M4 rifle and added two magazines to his belt. After locking up the office, he made the twenty-minute drive to Tucumcari, where he was meeting the rest of his team. The time had come to transfer Wallace Meyer Jr. from the hospital to the jail.

When he arrived, Deputies Kirby and Molina were already standing guard at the entrance to the hospital’s underground employee parking garage. Reyes patrolled the aisles of cars, his sidearm drawn. Vaughn pulled to the curb adjacent to the elevators and stepped from his car, leaving the engine idling. He adjusted his flak vest and snapped a magazine in place on the M4. He and his team had worked out the details of this transfer days ago, beefing up their usual transfer security so that every single member of his department was involved. If El Diente made an appearance, they were ready for him.

Stratis and Binderman were assigned to transport Wallace Meyer Jr. in his wheelchair via elevator. The parking structure was dead silent as Vaughn and Reyes waited, save for a drain on the east wall, which dripped every thirty seconds or so into a pothole filled with water. He hadn’t noticed until Reyes pointed it out, but now he was counting the time between drips, like some of Reyes’s neurosis was rubbing off on him.

Great.

Vaughn’s radio chirped. It was Stratis.

“We’re at the elevator.”

“Roger that,” Vaughn answered, gesturing to Reyes. Showtime.

Vaughn alerted Kirby and Molina through the radio that they were a go, then opened the back door of his squad car as the elevator mechanism whirred behind the closed door. In another minute, the door opened. Stratis exited first. He nodded at Vaughn, then stepped aside for Junior’s wheelchair, pushed by Binderman. Junior wore a flak vest like the rest of them. Unlike de Luca, though, he didn’t look the least bit nervous or scared.

Vaughn stood outside his closed driver’s side door, surveying the lot along with Reyes while Binderman and Stratis loaded Junior.

Stratis closed the door. “Clear.”

So far, so good.

Binderman abandoned the wheelchair curbside to walk to his squad car, then he and Stratis walked to their respective squad cars as Vaughn slid behind the wheel of his.

He glanced at Junior in the rearview mirror. He looked pale, weak. His hair was plastered flat against his head and the holes in his ears sagged toward his shoulders. “Morning, sunshine.”

Junior grunted. At least he was listening.

Vaughn pulled away from the curb and followed Stratis up the exit ramp, and past Kirby and Molina’s squad car. Traffic was nonexistent. In another five minutes, they’d be at the jail and Vaughn could breathe normally again. Behind him, his teams’ squad cars pulled into view. They drove without lights or sirens, nice and easy through the dark, empty streets.

“We brought the whole gang out to drive your ass four miles, Junior. Are you ready to come clean to me about who you’re working for and where Baltierra is?”

Junior remained silent, staring dully out the window.

Stratis turned left onto the street that led to the back entrance of the jail. Vaughn followed, as did Binderman, Reyes, and Kirby and Molina. Two more miles on a straightaway road until touchdown.

“I’ve got a question for you.”

Junior huffed.

“Shawn Henigin was scoping out the Sorentino place. He stayed there a couple months ago. Any idea why?”

“What do I look like, his mother?”

Vaughn drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Are you using the Sorentino property to move drugs toward Devil’s Furnace?”

“I’m not saying another word without my lawyer.”

“Ah, your daddy trained you good.”

“Screw you.”

He watched through the mirror for Junior’s expression when he said, “We caught up with Henigin yesterday. Did you hear about that?”

Silence.

“Yeah. Personally, I was excited by the opportunity to cut him a deal to flip on you and Jimmy, but he’s not talking.”

“Nobody flips on me.”

He said it with such authority, an alarm sounded in Vaughn’s mind. Junior was the leader of the group, not Baltierra and definitely not Jimmy de Luca. “Especially a dead man.”

Junior didn’t flinch. His eyes didn’t register surprise or remorse. Maybe—and this could’ve been Vaughn’s imagination—they took on a hint of satisfaction.

“It’s too bad about him, really. Freak car accident,” Vaughn continued as he pulled into the jail’s underground parking and prisoner transfer station. “If my gut’s correct, you have better odds of surviving while you’re in my jail than you would on the street, because I have a feeling El Diente’s cleaning house.”

He twisted in his seat to smile condescendingly at Junior, who wouldn’t meet his eye. “That’s who you work for, right? El Diente, the new drug cowboy in town?” He faked speculation, scratching his chin and rolling his eyes to the car’s ceiling. “Hmm. I sure hope he doesn’t get the wrong impression that because I’m on the street tossing his name and your name around together that you flipped on him and gave me his name. I don’t think he’d like that, do you?”

“I’ve got nothing to fear from El Diente.” The way he said it, coupled with the smug look on his face, Vaughn believed him.

“Any time you want to chat about El Diente or Baltierra, you let me know. District attorneys and judges appreciate a man who steps up to help us catch more bad guys. Never know what kind of deal your cooperation might get you.”

A gate closed behind his car, sealing the entrance. Still, Kirby and Molina set up position on the street. Four prison guards met them and waited curbside with cuffs and a fresh wheelchair. He stepped from his car and saluted the guards as he walked around to the passenger side. The guards stepped forward with the shackles and wheelchair.

He opened Junior’s door with a flourish, then stepped aside to let the guards have access. “Welcome to your new home, son. On behalf of the Quay County Sheriff’s Department, I hope you enjoy your stay.”

* * *

“Rachel? You need to take a look at this.”

Ben stood in the dry canal, leaning against the grate that separated the canal sections. He’d pried off the lid to the electronics and was attempting to open the flow valve. He’d sworn to her he was mechanically minded and could most likely fix it without calling in an electrician, but he’d been working for over an hour in the hazy glow of early morning, and it looked to Rachel like all he’d accomplished was coating himself in a thick layer of sweat and dust.

Rachel stood a half acre away, shoveling muck onto the embankment so that once they started the water flow, the debris wouldn’t get snagged in the grates and create a dam. It was hard work, and now that the sun had crested the land to the east, the temperature was climbing. According to Rudy, the air would touch ninety-five degrees or more. In other words, the labor and heat were the ideal remedy for the foul mood Vaughn had left her in the day before.

“Did you figure out why you’re having so much trouble?” she called.

“Yes. It’s a little tough to get a flow valve working if it’s not actually a flow valve.”

Huh? Propping her shovel against the canal wall, she slogged to where Ben stood. “What do you mean? What else could it be?”

The air around Ben stunk, like a dead animal was rotting in a nearby bush. The entire flow mechanism had been removed and sat on the embankment. Where it had been sat a dark, square hole that disappeared into the earth. “Ugh. That smell is something awful.”

“The machinery was tampered with so that it looked like a flow regulator, but when I pried the vents off, I could tell right away that’s not what it is.”

“Go on.”

He leveled an earnest gaze at her. “You’re not going to believe me, but it’s a swamp cooler.”

“What? That’s crazy.”

“Rachel, ma’am, I know machines. This is a swamp cooler.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

Squinting into the sun, he shrugged. “Beats me. Who had access to it around the time the canal stopped pumping?”

“Only me and my dad. Technically, Jenna had access too, but she never had the temperament for farm work.”

“Any farmhands?”

“No, by then we’d let them all go.”

He scratched his head under his hat. “I can’t see any reason why a farmer would tamper with his own equipment, especially something as important as the main irrigation canal. Especially to go to the trouble of jury rigging a swamp cooler to look like a flow mechanism.”

“I’m telling you, Ben. You have to be wrong about this. What good would a swamp cooler do out here in the middle of nowhere? There’s nothing to cool.”

Ben looked at the canal. He stomped the heel of his boot against the concrete. “Could be my imagination, but that sounded hollow.”

Rachel threw up her hands. “Oh, now there’s a secret room underneath the canal. Great theory. Where’s the door?”

Rubbing his chin, Ben looked around. Rachel followed his gaze. In the dirt adjacent to the canal sat the covered box of the pump that took water from the canal into the field. The second Ben zeroed in on it, Rachel’s stomach dropped. A nagging voice told her he was on to something, despite how preposterous the idea was.

Ben pulled himself out of the canal, then offered his hand to Rachel. She accepted his help and followed him to the pump.

He pulled the lid off the box, and Rachel expected to see a hole or a hatch, but all she saw was the pump.

“Nice try,” she said.

He squatted and tinkered with some of the parts, his brow furrowed in concentration. Then he stood, wiped his hands on his jeans, and pulled the entire pump system up while Rachel gasped in shock.

The tops of the pump valves and tubes had been bolted to a steel plate. They weren’t connected to anything. A façade. Beneath it, a hole that disappeared into darkness. And it stunk so bad of chemicals and rot that Rachel’s eyes watered and her stomach threatened to unload its contents. As a born-and-bred farm girl, she’d spent her life around unpleasant smells, so turning her stomach was a tough ticket to sell.

What have you done, Dad?

From his back pocket, Ben grabbed a flashlight and pressed it into her hand. “I suppose we ought to look inside.”

She wanted to say no. She wanted to say, Cover it up and let’s pretend this doesn’t exist, but there’d been too many secrets on this farm already, and she’d had enough. She dropped to her belly and peered into the space with the flashlight.

The walls were lined in concrete and angled toward the canal.

Too numb to think, she stood and handed the flashlight to Ben. He lay flat and ducked his head inside. “Any ideas why it was built?” he asked. “Maybe a fallout shelter or something?”

Rachel hugged herself and looked at the clouds on the horizon. “He wasn’t the type of man to see a need for a fallout shelter. He was more of an eternal optimist type.” Then again, she was beginning to feel like she didn’t know him well at all. Her hair stood on end. Something was wrong. Never mind the whys of it—when would he have had the opportunity to build an underground passage, complete with swamp cooler, without Rachel knowing? It would’ve taken at least a week and a whole construction crew, depending on the size.

It hit her in a flood of memory. After the water stopped in this field and the alfalfa crop died off before it was ready for harvest, her dad had put her to work in the fields on the east side, and when she’d made noises about getting back to the west side fields to fix the canal, he’d sent her to a week-long agriculture convention in Colorado. She’d crowed that they couldn’t afford it, and that the money would be better spent fixing their irrigation system, but he’d been adamant, and she’d dreamed of taking a vacation for years, so she went along with it.

But still, wouldn’t she have noticed when she returned that the ground around the canal was disturbed?

Maybe the structure was older than she was assuming.

“This canal runs the entire western and southern length of our farm. My dad built it when I was a kid to replace the antiquated system his father had used since the early fifties. I wonder if this is the only hidden set-up like this.”