Apache Country (15 page)

“David, you better have a good reason for
busting in here like this,” he said, making it jovial, but with the
implicit threat still hanging there. Like, if it was really
important, he was only joking, but if it wasn’t …

Easton let him have it right between the
eyes. “I had a long talk with James Ironheel last night. Off the
record.”

McKittrick reacted exactly the way he
expected. Puzzlement – you broke the rules? – followed by disbelief
– you broke the rules and didn’t consult me?

“And just who the hell said you could do
th—?”

“Listen, Olin,” Easton said, bulldozing the
question aside. “And listen carefully. Last night James Ironheel
told me he saw Joe Apodaca and another man kill Robert Casey and
Adam Twitchell. He was out there at Garcia Flat and saw it
happen.”

His words seemed to paralyze McKittrick with
shock. His skin took on a deathly pallor and his suddenly bloodless
lips moved soundlessly. When he finally spoke his voice was a croak
of disbelief. He shook his head from side to side, no, no, no.

“I don’t believe … I can’t—”

“Olin,” Easton said flatly. “Shut up and
listen.”

In terse sentences he repeated exactly what
Ironheel had told him the night before. When he got through,
McKittrick began shaking his head slowly from side to side again,
as if he didn’t trust himself to speak. Although the
air-conditioned room was cool, there were beads of sweat on his
forehead. Easton could almost see the thoughts running around in
his head like rats in a maze.

“I called Pete Thorne at the Star,” Easton
continued. “Ironheel’s story checks out. They ran a piece two days
ago about the ranch up at Yellow Lake he says he went out to. Some
guy in the music business bought it.”

“I still don’t—”

“Wait,” Easton insisted, not giving him an
inch. He told him about going up to the crime scene, and how, even
though nobody there had even spoken to them, Joe Apodaca had known
exactly where Adam’s body was. While he was laying it all out,
McKittrick stared at him as closely as if he were a hypnotist. When
he spoke himself, his voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“You believe this … this scumbag?” McKittrick
said, his voice a hiss. “Are you off your fucking head? He’d tell
you three guys from an alien spacecraft did it if he thought you’d
be stupid enough to swallow it.”

“I’m not through yet, Olin,” Easton continued
grimly, brushing the objection aside. “Ironheel also told all this
to Jerry Weddle. What he’d seen. Who he’d seen.”

He saw the shock deepen in McKittrick’s eyes
as the implication sank in. The DA drew in a long, deep breath.

“And ... that means ... that’s why Weddle was
killed?”

“What the hell do you think I came over here
for?” Easton snapped impatiently. “If Ironheel is telling the
truth, and I think he is, Weddle was killed to shut him up. Which
in turn means if they find out what he knows, whoever killed Weddle
will try to kill Ironheel.”

McKittrick’s eyes continued to avoid meeting
his. He looked off-balance, like he didn’t know how he should
act.

“You saying you think Joe will try to kill
him while he’s in the jail?”

“Maybe not Joe.”

McKittrick frowned. He was getting it
together. “What do you want me to do?”

“He’s a material witness, Olin. He needs
protection.”

McKittrick went across to the window, looked
out. He was thinking hard and it showed.

“Who else knows about this?” he asked.

“Nobody,” Easton said, surprising himself.
Instinct cautioned him to protect Tom Cochrane. “You, me, that’s
it. I sat up most of the night, trying to figure out what to
do.”

McKittrick looked at the clock. Easton could
almost hear the gyros spinning inside his head, examining
possibilities, assessing consequences. The guy bounced back fast,
give him that. Off balance for a few minutes, but not any more.

“Okay,” McKittrick said. “First question: is
Ironheel safe in the jail?”

Easton had already given that quite a lot of
thought. “Safe enough for the moment,” he said. “Unless ...”

He left the rest unsaid,
and
waited, watching McKittrick turning the
situation over and over in his mind the way a diamond cutter
examines every facet of a stone before deciding how to cut it.
McKittrick was hard to like, but you could almost admire the way he
was getting himself together. He looked up abruptly as a thought
occurred to him.

“What about this second man Ironheel
mentioned? Did he give you any idea who he might be, or who else
might be involved?” he said.

“I thought about having Ironheel go through
the mug books, but—”

“No,” McKittrick said decisively. “If Apodaca
saw him doing that, he’d want to know why.” He glanced at his
watch. “What we need to do now is get Ironheel out of that jail and
into a Witness Protection Program. The question is, can I rely on
you?”

“To do what?”

“I’ll contact the Department of Justice in
Albuquerque, see if they have a safe house available. It’ll
probably take a couple of hours, but if I can get something set up,
you’re going to have to be ready to run.”

“No problem,” Easton said, not allowing
himself to think about his promise to Jessye.

McKittrick’s eyes were alert now, bright, as
if his brain was in overdrive. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll
set up a meet with the Justice people, then call you, give you a
location. You get Ironheel out of that jail and make the meet. Just
you, nobody else, you understand?”

“Got it.”

“Fine, good,” McKittrick had his confidence
back. He was in command of the situation. “Go back downtown, wait
for my call. Be ready to move.”

Easton nodded. “And ... Joe?”

“We can’t move until Ironheel is in
protective custody,” McKittrick said decisively. “But as soon as
he’s made a statement, I’ll hand the whole thing over to the
Attorney-General’s office or Internal Affairs. What happens after
that will be up to them.”

“I guess.”

Even as he said it, he realized he had made
it sound like he was reluctant for that to happen. McKittrick laid
a hand on his shoulder.

“You cops hate to roll over on each other,”
he said. “I know that. And I respect your feelings. But if Ironheel
is telling the truth, there’s no possible alternative. You’re doing
the right thing.”

Easton said nothing. Somehow McKittrick’s
approval made him feel even worse. He started for the front door
and McKittrick came out with him. Karen was standing in the hall
waiting, her face pale and sulky. She looked like she could piss
ice-water.

“Olin,” she said tightly, making two words of
his name. “We’re going to be late.”

“Shut up, Karen,” he snapped. The pent-up
emotions inside him made his voice crack like a whip. “Just shut
your face!”

His wife’s eyes widened and her mouth made an
`O,’ like a spoiled child unexpectedly slapped. Ignoring her,
McKittrick opened the front door to let Easton out.

“
Be ready
to move as soon as you get my call,” he said. “
If you have
any kind of problem, call me.”

As he went out into the sunlight Easton felt
Karen McKittrick’s eyes burning into his back, hating him for
having witnessed her humiliation. He shrugged. Right this moment
she didn’t dislike him half as much as he disliked himself.

It was around three in the afternoon when Joe
Apodaca came into the SO building, stopped in reception to speak to
Martina, bypassing his own office to come straight through to
Easton’s. He was wearing a white short sleeve shirt, dark tan
pants, and expensive-looking oxblood loafers with thin gold chains
across the instep.

“Where the hell is everybody?” he said.

“We had a few nine-one-ones.”

“Anything serious?”

Easton shook his head. “Nah. Two guys trying
to break into that computer warehouse out on Shawnee Road. Mills
and Everly are checking it out.”

“Cochrane around?”

“He just left,” Easton said, hoping it
sounded offhanded. “What brings you down here on a Sunday
afternoon?”

Joe shrugged. “Might ask you the same
question,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be home playing piano games with
Jessye?”

Easton gestured at the pile of files on the
desk and Joe nodded sympathetically.

“Damn paperwork. You got coffee on?”

“Help yourself.”

The sheriff got a mug off the shelf and
filled it. Easton could feel his eyes watching him. Then the phone
rang and he froze. What the hell did he say if it was McKittrick?
It rang again and Joe frowned.

“You going to get that?”

Easton picked up. It was Grita: could he stop
off at the market and bring home some fresh chilies? He told her
yes and hung up, feeling a cold sweat of relief on the back of his
neck.

“Something bothering you?” Joe said. He
didn’t miss a damned thing.

“Grita,” Easton said. “She needs some
chilies. She’ll scalp me if I forget.”

“Never seen her make you that jumpy,” Apodaca
said off-handedly. He hitched his hip on to a corner of the desk
and sipped his coffee. “How’s Jessye, by the way?”

“Mad at me,” Easton said. “For working
Sunday.”

“Anything more on the Weddle thing?”

“Cochrane talked to the Twitchells. Didn’t
get anything.”

“What about RPD?”

“I was just about to call Henry Sanchez when
you came in.”

Apodaca held up a hand. “Okay, okay, I’m in
the way,” he said.

“Joe!” Easton protested. “I just got in
myself. Let me call Henry and I’ll get back to you.”

Apodaca nodded and went out, taking the
coffee with him. Cochrane had been right, Easton thought. He and
Joe really didn’t know each other any more. Somehow time and the
changes in both their lives had eroded the closeness that had
developed between them back in the early days when he first joined
the Sheriff’s Office, when Joe was doing the job Easton had
now.

Right from the start Joe Apodaca had gone out
of his way to give him a much rougher ride than most rookies got.
Mostly, he imagined, because of the Easton “tradition.” His
grandfather Robert Perry “Rip” Easton had been a Riverside law
enforcement officer back in the 1890s, when the legendary Pat
Garrett and John Poe were still around to be compared with.

Rip Easton and his family – he was one of six
children – had come to New Mexico from Lampasas, Texas, when there
weren’t more than four hundred souls living in Riverside. He had
served the city first as its constable, then chief of police,
sheriff, justice of the peace, and finally, judge. His photo still
hung in the City Council chambers. He was one of the
mildest-mannered men you ever met, Easton’s father told him, and he
never bothered anyone. Unless, he added as a chilling rider, they
bothered him.

“You better live up to your name, Easton, or
I’m going to bust your butt,” Joe had warned him. “Your minimum
performance level will be set at excellent. Good won’t even
count.”

He had meant it, too. But Easton had been
young then; at that age you can eat the world and come back for the
moon. He had made Officer of the Year four years straight and
promotion to sergeant in the process. The following year, the same
year he and Susan got married, Joe ran for sheriff and won. He
turned out to be a good choice. Nobody’s man but his own, they
said. But behind the pragmatic exterior the sheriff presented to
the world Easton had detected a suppressed anger. And as he got to
know him better he learned enough about Joe’s background to guess
its origins.

Joe Apodaca’s father had been a construction
worker, one of the many brought in by the Macco Company in 1960 to
build the silos when Riverside’s Air Force Base was selected as a
support facility for nine Atlas ICBM launch complexes. For a while
it was like the Gold Rush in and around Riverside, but round the
clock construction to meet skin-tight deadlines created pressures
that ended in disaster. Early in 1961 a thirty-ton Lorain crane
fell to the bottom of the completed shaft of the liquid oxygen
complex. The explosion of its fuel tanks killed six workers and
injured nineteen more. Max Apodaca was among the dead.

Joe was seven when it happened. There was no
insurance. Marge Apodaca had to sell their neat house on South Lea
and move with her three sons to a rundown frame shack on the
shabbier end of Jefferson near Melendez Park. Living in the
Hispanic quarter –to the cops it was and always would be
“Chihuahua” – the boys had to hang tough and get street smart real
fast, and it cost. James, the oldest, was fatally knifed in a
rumble between the Mexican Virgins and his own gang, the Pirates.
Robert took the Timothy Leary route, tuned in, turned on and
dropped out. Joe alone made it through high school. After he
graduated, he spent a year at the Academy before becoming a deputy
in the Artemisia PD. He had been a cop ever since.

Through the window Easton could see Joe on
the phone. He thought of all the times Alice Apodaca had cooked
supper for him, how he and Joe would take their food outside and
eat on the little bench he’d built around the trunk of the pecan
tree in the backyard, drinking beer and talking shop. He had
sometimes wondered, even then, why he was the only one in SO who
was close to Joe. Only now did he understand how that must have
looked.

The phone rang. It was McKittrick.

“Can you talk?” he said.

“Go ahead,” Easton told him, closing his
office door.

“I got hold of Mack Pepper at DOJ. He’s
pulled out all the stops and okayed immediate funding. They’ve set
up a meet. Ironheel will go into a WPP tonight.”

“My God, that’s amazing,” Easton said. “When?
Where will it be?”

“How well do you know Rio Alto?”

“Try me.”