Authors: Philip Caputo
Tags: #Suspense, #Crime, #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #Suspense Fiction, #Sagas, #Action & Adventure, #Fiction - General, #Historical - General, #Widowers, #Drug Traffic, #Family secrets, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Widows, #Grief, #Arizona, #Mexican-American Border Region, #Ranches, #Caputo, #Philip - Prose & Criticism
To me, it sounded like the same old Ben, ever watchful for an attack by his enemies. It was lucky for him, Jeff, and especially the tourists that he didn’t shoot first and ask questions later
.
He did not isolate himself completely. My sister-in-law moved to the ranch with my nephew after Frank was killed. Sally wrote that Ben became a surrogate father to Blaine, teaching him riding, roping, shooting, tracking
.
On a June morning in 1956 Blaine was sitting on a corral fence with two ranch hands watching Ben offer a lesson in horse breaking. The animal was a young stallion with an ugly temperament. Ben had settled him by forcing him to drag a railroad tie around the corral until he’d tired of it and stopped trying to escape. Now it was time for the next step—hazing, by waving a burlap sack in the horse’s face to teach it not to rear and strike
.
Ben entered the corral with the sack. When the horse went up on its back legs, pawing the air with its front hooves, he lunged
forward, waving the sack. He was sixty-six years old, his reactions were slow, his body not as nimble as it once had been. The stallion struck him in the chest, knocking him down, and then rained blows on his head. The ranch hands grabbed lariats and roped the animal. Once it was subdued, they ran to Ben’s aid and saw that there was nothing they could do. His skull had been crushed
.
And so the man who had survived so many perils, who had evaded death at the hands of so many enemies, was killed as his father had been, by a rank horse
.
And so did I, with my husband and two children, return to Arizona for yet another funeral, the last
.
It was held in the community church in Patagonia, which could not hold all who’d come. The mourners flowed into the street, and I overheard the Mexicans among them whispering that it wasn’t a horse that had killed Don Benjamín; it was a diablo, possessed by the wrathful soul of Rafael Quinn. Once more I thought of Rosario’s curse and hoped she now was satisfied
.
There is a strange postscript to this story. I learned a lesson: there are hazards to probing too deeply into one’s family secrets; you may discover some best left undiscovered. After my father’s funeral Sally and I sorted through the things in his house, while my husband cleaned out his workshop, a windowless tin shed where he’d taken up his former hobby, turning out horseshoes, bits, and belt buckles. Tony came in carrying a box and said something like, “Any idea what we should do with these?” He reached into the box and took out two human skulls. One had been embellished: antlers from a spikehorn buck protruded from holes drilled into the crown; the tusks of a javelina boar had been attached to the upper jaw, creating a fanglike effect. The companion skull had not been adorned, though it bore signs of botched attempts. There was a small hole in one temple and a larger one in the other, a jagged puncture slightly bigger than a fifty-cent piece. Its front teeth were missing. “Those might be here,” said Tony, and dipped again into the box to pull out a
kind of bracelet consisting of two thin, braided wires run through a set of gold teeth. All three of us were baffled and disturbed. Tony wondered aloud if my father had been robbing cemeteries. Sally replied, “This is the border. There’s a lot of dead people around here ain’t in cemeteries.”
I learned later that day from one of the ranch hands that Ben sometimes placed the skulls in his window to ward off unwanted visitors. But where
had
he found them? Then I remembered that terrible night in 1931 (described in my earlier letter) when the gunman with the gold teeth had tried to barge into our house
.
The next day I went to Patagonia to talk to Martín Mendoza. He was retired from cowboying, and he and Lourdes were living in a small trailer on Smelter Lane. When I brought up the incident, he said, “Los espectros y los huesos”—The ghosts and the bones. The way he said it gave me goose bumps. I asked what he was talking about. He then launched into a weird tale. In the early 1930s, after he’d quit the ranch and gone to work as a wrangler for the Civilian Conservation Corps, he overheard a work crew speaking excitedly about two skeletons they had come upon in a dry wash while they were clearing trails. From their description of the place, Martín realized they’d found the remains of the two gunmen he and Ben had buried after the fight. Flash floods must have unearthed the skeletons. The skulls on both were missing. The tale spread to other camps and ranches. One night a vaquero rode into the CCC camp on a sweat-lathered horse, reporting that he had fled from a pair of ghosts he’d seen wandering the hills. These phantoms were headless. When Martín heard that, he knew the cowboy had seen the spirits of the gunmen
.
I didn’t believe that ghosts were walking around, but I was very troubled by his revelation that the skeletons were missing their skulls. I asked Martín if he knew how they had come to be sin cabezas—without heads. He didn’t know
.
¿Quién sabe? Maybe the ghosts the vaquero sees are looking for their heads. I don’t know.”
I then asked if he remembered that one of the men had gold
teeth, and he said he did. He’d seen them in the light of a flashlight when they were loading the bodies onto the truck. Then I asked—hesitantly, I might add—if he or my father had cut off the heads and taken the teeth. I recall that he was shocked, that he drew back, grimacing. “No, señora! I would be afraid to do such a thing! No, we do nothing but bury them.”
I had one final question: “And you said it was in 1933 when the workmen found the skeletons?”
Martín wasn’t sure. About then, he said
.
So the skulls had been in Father’s possession for more than twenty years, secreted away somewhere. He had gone out to that arroyo at some point between the gunfight and the time the remains were discovered and decapitated them. Why? A manhunter’s trophies? Had he become so anesthetized that he saw nothing barbaric in this desecration? I assumed he had not taken his artifacts out of their hiding place until after my mother’s death. I assumed further that that was when he did his creative work, extracted the teeth, affixed the horns, the tusks. The holes in the temples of the one had not been the result of bad workmanship; they’d been made by his bullet long, long before
.
Ghosts and bones. Well, that’s all Ben Erskine is now, his bones in the ground, his ghost stalking the corridors of my memory. I can only add that there were too many corners in my father’s “hard and isolate” soul that I cannot penetrate and frankly don’t wish to
.
Sincerely yours
,
Grace Castle
34
W
AS SOMETHING OUTSIDE?
Samantha’s barking woke Castle at a postmidnight hour. He shook off his grogginess, got his spotlight and revolver from out of the bed-table drawer, and went outside. A full moon, so bright that the trees cast daylight shadows, almost made the spotlight unnecessary. As he swept it back and forth, a pair of eyes glittered in the beam like electrified emeralds; then he made out the squat, shaggy form of a javelina. He stepped off the porch and waved an arm. The animal fled.
“Only a pig,” he said to Sam, returning inside. She padded after him into the bedroom, where he put the spotlight and the pistol away. Unable to get back to sleep, he read Seneca till his eyes grew heavy, then turned off the lamp.
The alarm buzzed at six. He and Blaine were going to truck a few culls to the Wilcox livestock auction today. These cows were, in Blaine’s description, “nondoers,” heifers that had failed to calve. Two weeks had passed since the shooting, the media hoopla was over, and Castle’s life had reclaimed normality, or a decent facsimile of it. There were emotional aftershocks; the things he’d witnessed that day reeled in his mind, a kind of videotape that played and replayed. Blaine, to all appearances, was unaffected. It wasn’t that Castle had grown tenderhearted about a drug smuggler. He simply thought that shooting someone at point-blank range, actually seeing him die, would change a man forever.
After dressing, he topped up a travel mug with coffee and walked over to Miguel’s trailer, circling around the electric fence erected to keep deer and javelina out of his vegetable garden. Gerardo and Elena having gone to Chandler to visit one of their daughters for the weekend, Miguel was going to help load the culls and accompany Blaine and Castle to the auction. The Airstream door was ajar. Castle tapped on it, calling, “Hola, Miguel.” Receiving no reply, he walked in and found it empty, the fold-down bed unmade. Miguel must have awakened early and gone to ranch headquarters on foot, which was odd; his experiences crossing the border had given him a distaste for walking anywhere when he could ride.
But when Castle arrived at the main house, no one answered his knock. Monica’s car was in its usual spot alongside the house, but Blaine’s truck was missing. Could they all have gone on to Wilcox without him? No, because the cows were in the corral, the stock trailer parked next to it. He tried the kitchen door. It was locked. He went around to the front door, which was open, and stepped inside. The hall light was on and Blaine’s Luger lay on the floor. He charged into their bedroom, then ran out and searched the barn and toolshed. No one. He slumped against the corral boards, trying to think of what accounted for their disappearance. A logical reason. The windmill squealed, an unsettling sound, like a small animal caught in a trap. The dogs. Blaine’s Australian heelers—why hadn’t they barked when he pulled up? They always did. He left the corral and looked in the backyard. No dogs. Then, passing around to the side of the house, he noticed a paw sticking out from behind a front wheel of Monica’s car. Bending down, he grabbed a hind leg, which was stiff as a pipe and cold to the touch, and when he dragged the dog out from under the car, he couldn’t tell which one it was because half its head had been blown off.
Castle had not smoked a cigarette since his freshman year at Princeton, but he craved one now. His brain had shut down, a kind of mental power outage, and he imagined nicotine would light it up again. Wait. Blaine smoked. He burst into the house, going straight to the bedroom, where he began pulling drawers open like a burglar in a hurry. He found a fresh pack in the night table, tore it open, shook out a cigarette, and lighted it off the kitchen range. Sucking in the smoke, he nearly fainted. He sat down at the kitchen table and took a second, shallower drag. It did not have the dizzying effect of the first.
The fog of panic began to clear. Blaine, he remembered, never went anywhere without his cell. Castle dialed it from the kitchen phone and flinched when he heard its musical ring tone coming from inside the house. He ran toward the sound and found the cell phone on the desk in the office. Calling 911 seemed the only thing to do now. He was thinking of what to say to the dispatcher when his own cell phone rang. The caller ID flashed
UNKNOWN CALLER.
Maybe it was Blaine, phoning from another number. He answered.
“This is Mr. Castle?” asked a strange female voice.
“Yes,” he answered in a shaky voice. “Who is this?”
“Don’t be silly. Let me tell you something. We have Erskine and his wife in custody. They are in perfect health. If you want them to stay that way, you will do what we say.”
He didn’t respond. His throat felt as narrow as a straw.
“Do you want them to stay healthy or not?” the woman said. “Let me tell you something else. We have already killed one guy. It would be no problem to kill these two. Do you want that to happen?”
“Who is this?”
“Shut up and listen. Erskine owes us two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but he doesn’t have the money. You do. We know you do. You are a rich man. Right now, do you hear me? Right fucking now you are going to start getting this money. The banks close at five o’clock. You will have this money by that time, in cash. We will call you again and tell you what to do with it, so keep your mobile on. Is there anything you don’t understand?”
“No … I …”
“Listen. Do not do anything stupid, like call the police. If you do something stupid, any stupid little thing, however insignificant, Erskine and his wife are dead. Maybe you don’t believe me, so let me tell you one more thing. The guy we killed was Miguel Espinoza. Erskine is a tall, skinny man, his wife is named Monica, and she has blond hair and blue eyes. Do you believe what I’m saying to you, Mr. Castle?”
He croaked a yes.
“Five this afternoon,” the caller said, and the connection went dead.
Castle stood in dazed immobility. He felt like a pedestrian who had looked both ways at an intersection and, seeing no traffic, stepped out into the street only to be struck by a bus. A quarter of a million dollars. How could he be expected to withdraw a quarter of a million dollars in a few hours? In cash. It made no sense. Why, if the kidnappers wanted money out of Blaine, would they have abducted Miguel? Could they really have murdered him? Could this be a hoax? No, of course not. They had his cell number. Blaine or Monica must have given it to them.
Sickness assails those leading the most sensible lives … retribution the utterly guiltless, violence the most secluded…
He’d read that passage only last night, once again, and once again had forgotten misfortune’s power to impress itself on those who allowed themselves to forget it. He could not pardon himself this time. He had lived on the border long enough, had certainly seen enough to know that life on the line was precarious. Anything at any moment, all things were possible. He got into his car and returned to his—ha!—sanctuary, armed himself with the Smith and Wesson, kenneled Sam in the back, and drove off.
At first he intended to go to the San Ignacio’s bank in Tucson and arrange for a wire transfer of $
250,000
from his account in New York; but then he had second thoughts. A transaction like that would be a very red red flag. Questions would be asked, and answering them would take a lot more time than he had.
H
E TURNED AROUND
and drove to Tessa’s ranch, checking in his rear and sideview mirrors to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. He didn’t want Tessa mixed up in this horror, but Blaine and Monica were her friends; she had to be told. Besides, and perhaps uppermost, he needed to talk things through, to figure out what to do.
At first she reacted as if she’d been struck, but then she heard him out calmly and poured two whiskeys and told him to sit down and go through everything again.
“Do you have it?” she asked, sitting beside him in her living room. “It’s a dreadful question, but if it’s not even possible to come up with the ransom, we have to think of what you’ll say the next time they call.”
“Sure I’ve got it, but I might as well not have it,” he replied, and then explained why.
“What if you say that? That their demand is impossible to meet?”
“What do you suppose they’ll say?” Castle scoffed. “Oh, all right, get as much as you can, any old amount will do? Those people must be crazy, thinking I can just withdraw a quarter of a million in cash in a few hours.”
They sat without talking, staring into space, Then Tessa said, “You don’t have any choice. You have got to call the police.”
“That woman sounded like she meant what she said. No cops.”
Tessa got up and grabbed her portable phone and placed it in his lap. “We have to assume the police will know what to do. You don’t. I don’t. We don’t know who’s got them or where they are. We’re totally blind. You have to take the chance.”
Castle could not believe his own words as he reported what had happened to Sheriff Rodriguez, whom he’d called out of a meeting. Afterward he heard only the sound of Rodriguez’s breathing.
“Sheriff?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Where are you right now?”
Castle told him.
“Did you notice anyone following you?” Rodriguez asked.
“Not that I saw.”
“Okay, stay where you are. It’s possible they have the San Ignacio eyeballed. If they see people show up there, they’ll probably carry out the threat.”
“People?”
“Me, for one. The FBI, for another. Kidnapping is for the FBI. I’m going to contact their Tucson office as soon as I hang up. It’s real, real important for you and Miss McBride to keep as calm as you can. Don’t talk to anybody else about this till we get there. I mean absolutely nobody.”
“But Rick, their son—”
“Let us handle that. Stay put, keep quiet.”
B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
a law enforcement convention had assembled in Tessa’s living room: Rodriguez; a paunchy, bespectacled Border Patrol agent named Gomez (who reminded Castle that they had met before); and two FBI special agents, one lugging a case loaded with telephone recording devices and other electronic equipment. The sheriff and Gomez, wearing plain clothes, had arrived in an unmarked car, the FBI agents in what looked like a delivery van, which they parked in Tessa’s hay barn.
One of the FBI men, with thorough formality, introduced himself as Ralph Inserra, senior resident agent of the Tucson Resident Agency. A lanky man with a widow’s peak of black hair and a sallow complexion, he spoke in the flat tones of the Midwest. Straight away he assured Castle and Tessa that the FBI’s first priority was to secure the safe release of the hostages.
Hostages
. The word reverberated. Blaine and Monica were
hostages
.
“We’ll do all we can to get them out,” Inserra continued. “We’ve got every available agent assigned to this case, fifty of them.”
“Fifty!”
Castle’s scalp prickled. “What if they’re spotted?”
“I assure you, they won’t be. The kidnappers won’t know we’ve been called in.” Inserra broke out a notebook. “I’ve got to get the background.”
While the other agent plugged a voice-activated recorder into Castle’s cell phone, installed a wiretap in Tessa’s phone, and set up a small satellite dish, Inserra took a chair and quizzed Castle. Was the caller male or female? Female. Did she speak with an accent? No. Did he hear any other voices or sounds in the background? No. Were there any signs of forced entry or a struggle at the Erskines’ house? No—except for Blaine’s gun, it looked as if the kidnappers had been let in. How about the trailer? No signs there, either. Did Castle touch anything? Yes. Doorknobs, drawers. Did the caller say anything that might have given her location away, anything unusual?
Castle thought for a while. “She did say ‘mobile.’ To keep my mobile on, meaning my cell. Most people would say your cell phone.”
Inserra and Gomez looked at each other. “Could be significant. An American would have said cell phone, a Mexican might call it a mobile. But you said you didn’t hear an accent?”
“No.”
“I know of one female who’d pull off a thing like this who doesn’t talk with an accent,” said Gomez, standing alongside Rodriguez by the fireplace.
“Let’s not try to identify a suspect just yet. One thing at a time,” Inserra said, somewhat annoyed. He turned to Castle. “We’re going to try something. When they call, tell them you can’t hear them on your cell and ask them to call back on the number here.” He motioned at the technician. “It’ll be easier to trace the call if they’re calling from a landline. But my guess is that they’re calling from a prepaid cell. We can try pinging the call. What I mean is, if the cell towers are within a reasonable range of here, we can at least get a general idea of where they’re calling from. The important thing is for you to keep them on the line as long as you can, find out as much as you can.”
Castle nodded dumbly as the agent produced from his briefcase a sheet of instructions on how to keep the kidnappers on the line and to pry as much information from them as possible. “Negotiating points,” he called them. He asked Castle to study them, but the words blurred on the page, and reading glasses didn’t help. The technical wizard, meanwhile, finished hooking up his equipment. Tessa went around serving coffee, as if she were the hostess at a neighborhood gathering. The veneer of normality made the situation feel all the more abnormal. She sat down next to Castle, taking his hand. Her palm was damp, and so was his. They waited.
Castle’s watch read three minutes to five when his cell rang. The same woman’s voice. He said he couldn’t hear her and would she please call him back at another number? He gave it to her.
“You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” she said. “You want something bad to happen?”
“If you want the money, you’ll call me back,” he replied, fighting to keep his voice steady. Then, his chest fluttering, he broke the connection. In a few moments the other phone jangled. Inserra donned a headset and jacked it into the recorder to monitor the call.
“You better not be fucking around, Castle,” said the woman. “Have you got the money?”