The dented red beer cooler drew my immediate attention. Looking back, I’m not sure what I expected to find when I lifted the lid. A skinned and butchered deer maybe. Or the feathered carcass of one of the endangered Northern Aplomado falcons so prized by poachers on both sides of the border. Certainly not three disembodied heads turning a moldy green!
When the aroma that shot out of the cooler hit me, I slammed the lid down and promptly contaminated the crime scene by throwing up. Pancho jumped back just in time to keep from getting his boots similarly contaminated.
CHAPTER TWO
BY the time Sheriff Alexander arrived, Sergeant Cassidy was on his feet and word of the shooting had spread through Dry Springs.
Thirty-seven inquisitive souls had gathered in the dirt parking lot. They constituted the town’s entire population, less two kids bussed to school some twenty miles away and Eloisa Rivera, currently visiting her daughter in San Diego. The crowd batted absently at flies and speculated on the identity of the Bear, now covered with an oil-stained canvas, as well as the other three deceased.
I knew most of the folks in the crowd. My team and I had shared beers with the regulars who hung out at the bar and had met the others during stops at the convenience store side of Pancho’s establishment. They pretty much took the Bear’s corpse in stride. Violence has become a fact of life this close to the U.S.-Mexico border. The severed heads fascinated them, though.
Speculation ran rife about who the deceased were and how they’d ended up in the beer cooler. I caught snatches of conversation that touched on everything from the drug wars raging just south of us to a
Silence of the Lambs
–type cannibal with gruesome appetites. I also caught more than one glance aimed at Snoopy. I’d kept mum about
his
taste in snacks but rumors were already circulating. The arrival of a black-and-white spared me a public explanation.
Sheriff Alexander emerged from the cruiser and settled his straw Stetson low on his brow. Like so many in this part of the country, his face is all weathered skin and white squint lines. After greeting Pancho, he turned to me and tipped two fingers to his hat brim.
“Hello, Samantha. What’s with you and corpses?”
He was referring to the decomposing bodies I’d stumbled across while testing another invention last year. Or maybe the rogue FBI agent who ran Mitch and me into an arroyo and got dead as a result. Or the ex-Army sergeant who’d tried to gun down his lover until I threw off his aim.
“I don’t know,” I replied with some feeling, “but I’ve bagged my limit for the foreseeable future.”
Nodding, the sheriff approached the canvas and hunkered down on his heels. He lifted the tarp and studied the Bear for several moments before swiveling around to examine the semiautomatic lying in the dirt a few feet away. The contents of the cooler warranted a longer look before the sheriff turned to the crowd.
“Anyone recognize these people?”
Head shakes all around.
“Anyone besides the lieutenant, her sergeant, and Pancho here see what happened?”
More head shakes.
“All right, then. Y’all go get out of the sun and let me talk to these three.”
A few of the onlookers went home. Most of them crowded into the bar, determined not to miss out on the excitement. Pancho, Noel, and I remained in place.
As you might expect, Snoopy’s role in the sequence of events elicited a disbelieving grunt from the sheriff. He surveyed the SNFIR, its ears drooping in the afternoon heat, and pushed his Stetson to the back of his head.
“You and your team test some weird stuff, Lieutenant.”
“Tell me about it.”
He ruminated for a moment, sorting through our statements and his own impressions of the crime scene. “You say the vic fired first?”
“He did,” I confirmed. “Two shots. One hit Sergeant Cassidy before Pancho, er, took him out.”
“I’ll need to bag that shotgun as evidence, Panch.”
“No problem.”
No problem, we all knew, because he keeps a backup. Or three. Or five. This is West Texas, remember.
“Not much more we can do here until the coroner arrives,” Alexander announced. “I’ll stay with the bodies. Y’all might as well go inside and cool off.”
My radio squawked on my way across the parking lot. I unhooked it from my belt with some reluctance. I had a pretty good idea how the rest of my team would react to this unexpected turn of events. I should. I’ve plunged them into several similarly bizarre situations in the months we’ve been together.
“Lieutenant Spade,” I acknowledged.
“We aren’t receiving signals from SNFIR. What’s going on?”
The voice on the other end belonged to Dr. Brian “Rocky” Balboa, our nervous little twitch of a test engineer. Rock’s a good guy. Mostly. But he can be a major pain in the bohunkus when it comes to following prescribed test protocols.
“We’ve run into, uh, a glitch.”
“Glitch?”
Amazing how a single echo can convey so many nuances. I heard instant wariness, incipient dread, and more than a touch of resignation.
“Noel and I are at Pancho’s,” I explained. “There’s been a shooting and . . .”
“A shooting! Are you okay?”
“I am, but Noel was wounded.”
“They’re at Pancho’s,” I heard Rocky shout to the rest of my team, his voice spiraling up two full octaves. “Noel’s been shot.”
Wincing at the shrill screech, I tried to assure him Sergeant Cassidy was up and walking and pooh-poohing his mosquito bite. Didn’t work. Rock tends to get a tad agitated. When
really
excited or nervous, he also tends to expel gas. Big, noxious bloopers that can clear a room in ten seconds flat. I gave silent but very fervent thanks we were communicating via radio.
“We’re on our way,” he informed me in a rush.
“Wait, Rock. You don’t need to . . .”
Too late. He’d slammed the radio down. I heard the sounds of a small stampede and resigned myself to the imminent arrival of the rest of my team.
THEY weren’t long in coming.
Our test site is just over ten miles from Dry Springs. Noel and I had been scuttling through the backcountry for hours on our ATVs, chasing Snoopy over hill and dale. Our fellow team members jumped into one of the vans we use to transport supplies and equipment and hit the tarmac. They arrived at Pancho’s mere moments after the county coroner’s team, which had drawn all interested spectators outside again.
I have to confess I was glad to see my troops. Despite our individual idiosyncrasies—and we have many!—the five members of FST-3 have more or less bonded. More, when our tests and evaluations are going well. Less, on those infrequent occasions I attempt to exert my authority as team leader.
That’s the thing about being a second lieutenant. People have a hard time taking you seriously. Especially braniac civilians like Dennis O’Reilly, Rocky Balboa, and Penelope England. With his frizzy orange hair and black-framed nerdo glasses, you would think O’Reilly would be the one with a credibility gap. Or Rocky with his owl-eyed stare and thin, twitchy shoulders.
No one ever questions Pen’s credibility, however. And not just because of her two PhDs and ability to deliver long, detailed lectures on almost any subject. Dr. Penelope England is Earth Mother incarnate. Calm and placid and sturdy in her Birkenstocks and multilayers of natural linen. True, she has a tendency to skewer her lopsided, salt-and-pepper bun with whatever implement is handy. We once spent hours searching for a soil moisture probe before we thought to check her hair. Also true, she has a neighing laugh that makes everyone within hearing distance wish fervently they weren’t.
But Pen wasn’t laughing when she piled out of the van with Dennis and Rocky. Her thick-soled sandals sent up little puffs of dirt as she and the others rushed across the parking lot.
Pancho noted their arrival and ambled over to join us.
Editorial aside here. I’ve recently become aware there might be something going on between Pen and Pancho and have yet to recover from the shock. Nor have I heard anything definitive from my sexy Border Patrol agent, who promised to check out rumors Pancho left behind at least one wife, possibly more, when he decamped from Mexico an unknown number of years ago.
Supposedly, that’s how Pancho lost his eye. Or one version of the story, anyway. Some swear his angry wife gouged it out after catching him with another woman. I certainly wouldn’t blame her if she had. I’d come pretty darn close to mayhem myself after catching Charlie “Bonehead” Spade in the same nauseating circumstances.
But others contend Pancho got poked in the eye during a riot after a soccer match. Whatever the cause, there’s no getting around the fact that the eye
not
covered by a black patch lit up when it spotted Pen. I noticed the gleam, but none of the other team members did. They had totally focused on the blood staining Sergeant Cassidy’s ABU pants.
The rusty splotches pursed Pen’s lips. Rocky swiped a nervous palm across his thinning sandy hair. O’Reilly turned pale and hooked a finger in the neck of his black T-shirt stamped with the image of his hero, world chess champion and weirdo supreme Bobby Fischer.
After assuring themselves that Noel wasn’t in immediate need of a transfusion or—this from Pen—a cup of specially infused herbal tea, they peppered us with questions.
“What happened?”
“Who’s under that canvas tarp?”
“Is he the one who shot Noel?”
Before I could answer, Dennis O’Reilly angled his head and peered through his inch-thick lenses. “What’s the coroner removing from that beer cooler? Is that . . . ?” His eyes bugged out. “Good God, is that a
head
?”
“It is,” I responded, sincerely hoping I wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene again. “One of three inside that cooler.”
Dennis, Rocky, and Pen gaped at me, then Pancho, then me again. Pen was the first to recover.
“Really, Samantha.” She patted my shoulder sympathetically. “You certainly have a propensity for landing in the most unusual situations.”
Unusual was her way of describing them. I’d go with freaky.
We watched the proceedings until the heat got to us, then I secured Snoopy in the van and we all trooped inside the bar. If you ever want to assault every one of your senses at the same time, just plunge from the bright light of a May afternoon into the perpetual gloom of Pancho’s bar. All kinds of scents flavor the air. Stale cigarette smoke predominates, although you can always catch a whiff of the green chili stew Pancho brews daily. The music alternates between salsa and country. Both sound equally tinny coming through ancient speakers strung with drooping wires. Flyspecked neon abounds, but it’s the wall art that drops most newcomers’ jaws.
Centerfolds from decades’ worth of
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Editions cover every vertical surface. Most of the ceiling, too. The regulars are used to the decor. We don’t even notice all those near-naked thighs and chests. What I
did
notice, however, was the sheepish grin on Pancho’s face when he reached under the stained oak counter and produced a china teapot. It had roses on it, I saw with disbelief. Pink ones.
“I spotted this at an antique shop over to San Angelo,” he informed Pen as she settled on a bar stool. “It’s got a strainer thing inside it.”
Those of us regularly subjected to Dr. Penelope England’s herbal concoctions could have told him the piece he extracted and held up for her inspection is called an infuser. Pen merely smiled her approval.
“It’s lovely, Pancho. Thank you for thinking of me. Do you still have any of the lemongrass and sumac blend I brought you?”
“Sure do. Want me to brew you a pot?”
“Yes, please.”
While he fussed with tea leaves and hot water, Rocky, Dennis, Noel, and I did a collective gape. We get beer in bottles or tequila shooters in cloudy shot glasses. Pen gets pink roses.
Suspicion confirmed. There’s definitely something going on between those two. I’m not sure I really want to know what, though.
I picked up my beer with an odd, disconnected sense. Here I sat, surrounded by swimsuit models and tables topped with chipped Formica while Pancho brewed tea in an antique china pot and the county coroner bagged a corpse and three severed heads outside. Things don’t get much stranger than that.
OR so I thought. The arrival of a round-faced, profusely perspiring reporter less than five minutes later gave the weird screw another twist. He stopped dead just inside the door, as did most first-timers. His mouth went slack, and you could almost hear his vertebrae pop as he craned his neck to take in the decor. While he surveyed the scenery, we surveyed him.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or -three. Below the waist, he wore sensible boots and jeans. Above, a not-so-sensible navy blazer and pale yellow shirt with a button-down collar. The patch on the blazer’s pocket identified him as a member of Channel Nine News. The sweat dripping from his chin told me he’d already surveyed the scene in the parking lot.
Tearing his gaze from the wall art, he searched the gloom and made tracks for the bar. “Excuse me. Are you Lieutenant Spade?”
I glanced down at the name tape stitched above my uniform pocket. Glanced back at Junior Reporter. Arched a brow.
“Maybe.”
I’d learned the hard way to watch every word around the media. Even my most innocent statements have a way of coming back to bite me in the butt. That could be doubly true in this instance, given that I was in uniform and had my hand wrapped around a dew-streaked beer.
“I’m DeWayne Wilson, Channel Nine News.”
He thrust out a hand. I’m wary but not totally without couth. I let him encase my bottle-dampened palm with his sweaty one. The niceties over with, we both surreptitiously swiped our hands on our pants legs.