Short Cut to Santa Fe Read online

  “In the professional accounting business,” said Harriet quickly. “Now that everyone’s finished their income taxes, poor John can take a holiday.”

  It didn’t occur to them to ask Harriet what she did.

  Gary stood looking at them in silence. He was holding his weapon across his body, in one of those relaxed but vigilant stances, and suddenly Harriet was swamped in flickering memories from her childhood. Memories of television news programs, with their images and words alternately boring and terrifying her. Men in camouflage dress, stalking through the trees, holding weapons just like that one; fires blazing up; and ultimately the terrible knowledge that this was real. The people on the tiny screen in her father’s study were dead. Really dead. And then there were the nightmares. Ghosts in black and white with hands that burned reaching out to pursue her through the forests of her childhood and the comfortable streets of home. That was all that she had taken from the turbulent sixties, a nightmare, and it was standing in front of her right now.

  “I just have a couple things I’d like to say right now,” said Gary, in that soft voice that made her shudder. “We’ve heard a lot of words in here, all real interesting, and probably some of ’em even true, but I know at least one of you is lying, and I aim to figure out which one. My little brother here is going to go out and bring in all the bags stored in the hold and you’re going to claim your own bag and then we’re going to search it. Because someone on this bus is carrying something worth close to a million dollars, and that million dollars is owed to us, and we aim to find it tonight. And if we don’t, we’re going to start killing people. One at a time. Not that we specially want to, you understand. But it works. People are just a little more cooperative and honest when they think they’re going to be next.”

  “And when you find it, whatever it is, then what are you going to do to us? I like to be prepared.” This was Teresa, sounding almost bored.

  “Don’t you worry about that. We’re just going to leave you here. It’s not so far away from help. You can send someone back by the road. We have our own plans for getting out of the country, so we’re safe. All we want is our money, in whatever form it’s been turned into.” His voice was silky and confiding, like a snake slithering along the dirt. “Anyone want to tell us, and save us all a painful search?”

  Chapter 5

  It was an evening of growing enlightenment for the state troopers called in to search for two missing children. The dawning realization that there was no need to find and interview a driver of a regularly scheduled airport bus from Albuquerque who had dropped two children off on the road to Taos came to them in the middle of a long and patient conversation with Joe and Samantha Rogers. With a certain amount of annoyance, directed silently at Joe and Samantha, and a professional embarrassment at being caught leaping to conclusions, the Albuquerque detachment called off the search for that nonexistent person, restructured their ideas, and returned the problem to Santa Fe. And Taos. Since the whole thing started here and went to there, so to speak.

  “Why are you so sure the children got on the bus?” asked Ed McDowell. His grievances went beyond annoyance and embarrassment. He had been dragged away from his wife and family in Santa Fe, and Friday night movies with pizza, because his ability to coax information out of terrified and hysterical parents was legendary. “Just because they were supposed to catch the bus, and they’re good kids? Because even the best behaved kids can miss planes, or not catch buses. And you know that kids never react the way we think they’re going to. They don’t worry about themselves. Not until it’s way too late. They just worry about your reaction. Only it never seems to occur to them that you’ll be frightened for them, not mad at them. You know—they stop to buy some candy, and there’s a lineup, and bang—they’ve missed their flight.” The soothing voice went on, giving them a chance to think, tossing up ideas for them to reject.

  “Rodriguez,” he called over to the man from Taos, “have we heard from Dallas? Did the kids get on the plane?” It was, after all, his district.

  “I’ll check,” said Rodriguez.

  “No, no—you’ve got it all wrong,” said Joe. “I know our kids. They can do things like that—especially if both of them get interested in something. Usually Caroline keeps an eye on the time, but you can’t count on it. But, you see, I called Charlie. Charlie Broca at the airport. We know him, and he knows the kids. He said they got off the plane and onto the bus. We have this arrangement with Archway Tours. If they have a plane flying in from Dallas and a bus going up to Taos—and they do Fridays—they’ll take the kids along for free. There’s almost always room, because they’re hardly ever fully booked. On purpose. They charge so much that they don’t want to crowd people into the bus. In return we give them a better deal on one of their special tours. And Bert—the Archway driver—he knows the kids, he knows us, everything.”

  “And Charlie said that he actually saw the kids get on the tour bus?”

  Joe Rogers had stared at McDowell in horror. “Christ almighty,” he’d said. “I never thought—”

  “What?” What was left of Samantha’s voice had come out in cracked whisper.

  “He said something about what else would they do? And they weren’t at the airport when he locked up. I thought it was a funny way of putting it.” He had stared into the distance, like a man who sees hell opening up in front of him. “He always tells us that he makes sure that nothing happens to the kids and that they get from the plane to the bus personally. We gave him a pretty generous Christmas gift to make sure he does.”

  Charlie Broca had been easy enough to find.

  His wife had looked at the two men on her doorstep. “Come in,” she had said. “You wanna see him, go look.”

  The remark had had an ominous flavour to it.

  It was a little house, with a dark hallway running straight through to the kitchen, and a narrow staircase going up to an even smaller second floor. Mrs. Broca ushered them through a door on their left into a small, square living room, where she had been sitting with a glass full of amber-coloured liquid and a pitcher of more of the same beside it, watching the late movie. “Have some tea,” she had said. “I put mint and lemon in it. You’ll need it.” She had poured two more glasses and handed them to the wary officers. “Here.”

  McDowell took a mouthful and set the glass down. “Thanks, ma’am, but we really have to see your husband.” He was quickly developing one of those suspicions that he should have posted someone to watch the back of the house while Mrs. Broca distracted them with tea. He listened hard for the sound of footsteps and of windows opening, but the house was already noisy with what sounded like faulty machinery.

  “What’s it about?” Mrs. Broca had asked. She didn’t sound upset or suspicious. Just tense and resigned.

  “Two kids got lost, and we think they were at the airport for a while. We need to know if Mr. Broca saw them.”

  “The Rogers’s kids? He saw them, all right.” Then she had led them out of the living room into the narrow hall and through the next closed door to their left. She had flicked on an overhead light and revealed a dining room, with a polished circular table and chairs, and shiny cabinets filled with plates and glasses. Shoved up against a double door that led to the living room was an old leather couch.

  The sound that McDowell had heard from the living room and dismissed as a faulty air-conditioner was now both loud and recognizable. It was someone snoring—a snore that was enveloped in such a wealth of disgusting smells that McDowell, caught unawares, gagged. Sprawled on the couch was the source of all the noise and stench. Rye, vomit, urine. This was Charlie Broca.

  “I was going to clean him up tomorrow,” Mrs. Broca had said. She might have been referring to a kitchen floor. “But if you want him tonight, I’ll do it right away. We have a bathroom under the stairs. It has a shower.”

  She had turned abruptly on her heel and left the room. The sound of
water running formed a pleasant distraction to the noises made by Charlie. The two troopers retreated out into the hall and stood awkwardly about. In a minute or two she had been back. “It’s ready. Cool but not ice-cold. You can keep him in it longer that way and that’s better.”

  Then she had walked over to the couch and slapped him across the face. Hard. “Get up, Charlie. Move.”

  He grunted and stopped snoring.

  “Quick,” she said, pulling him to a sitting position. “On your feet.” And miraculously, she had yanked him to his feet. “Take one arm each and steer him into the bathroom. I’ll go ahead.”

  Rodriguez looked disgusted, but grabbed one upper arm, McDowell got the other, and they shuffled him rapidly after his wife. She pulled aside the shower curtain and unceremoniously shoved him in. Clothes and all. “Stay in there, you miserable bastard,” she yelled into the running water. “Stick your head under the water. You’re filthy. You’re absolutely disgusting.”

  She had turned back to them. “I don’t know. He’s pretty bad, but there’s one thing, he got rid of a lot of it, so he should sober up faster.”

  “Is he like this often?” asked McDowell. If he was, then they were talking to some sort of saint. Or masochist.

  “Never,” she’d said. “That’s why I was so shocked.”

  “But you seem to be so good at—” At that point it had occurred to McDowell that this was not a skill that most people want to be known for.

  “My father was a lush,” she’d said. “And so was my oldest brother.” Suddenly a dam had broken, and her terse responses had expanded into an unstoppable flow of speech. “There ain’t nothing in this world about putting drunks to bed that I don’t know. I swore I’d never marry a lush, and I told Charlie that. I knew when I married him he wasn’t a drinking man, and he’s stayed that way, but tonight, I don’t know what happened. He just opened a bottle someone gave us once and started. And he kept talking about the twins.” She was leaning against the wall, looking exhausted and overwhelmed. “It’s not what you think either. I know him, we’re close. When he buys magazines and hides them in the cellar, they’re all these huge-breasted cows, that’s what they are. Not little kids. Whatever he knows about those kids, he never did anything to hurt them. Anyway, I drove out to pick him up, and we did the airport together—I often do that—and that was just after the twins would have left on the tour bus. He’d never have had time to do anything.”

  A gurgling sound was issuing from the shower. Mrs. Broca stuck her head back around the curtain. “Strip, you miserable bastard. Everything. Leave it right there.”

  A mumbling protest testified to the efficacy of Mrs. Broca’s remedies.

  “Do you think we’re likely to get anything out of him tonight?” asked McDowell, turning to his partner.

  “If we take him to the hospital, they can liven him up a bit,” said Rodriguez. “Then we bring him back and start filling him up with coffee, we’ll get something in a couple of hours, maybe. That’s better than waiting until morning.”

  Mrs. Broca dragged the miserable creature out of the shower and began drying him off. “Hold him up,” she instructed the two officers, and disappeared. She returned with a pile of clean, pressed clothes and in an amazingly brief period of time they were looking at someone with a white face, red eyes, and wet hair, but dressed in a clean checked shirt and jeans. He still wobbled, but he was capable of walking.

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs. Broca,” McDowell had mumbled, embarrassed. “And if it hadn’t been so important, we wouldn’t have done this to you.”

  “You’ll bring him back when you’re finished with him?” she’d asked. There had been the ghost of tears in her eyes. “Or call me and I’ll come fetch him.”

  Neatness was apparently not a life priority for Wayne and Gary. Every suitcase, bag, canvas bag, and container belonging to anyone on the bus had been opened and dumped and searched through. The contents were spread over the seats, on the floor, and tossed over the seat backs. Wayne complicated the search by fastening triumphantly on every gold chain or dinner ring he came across, convinced that he had found the pot of gold and demanding that his brother assess his new find.

  Gary lost his temper on the fourth chain. “For chrissake, Wayne, we are looking for something worth close to a million bucks, not some two-bit chunk of tin. Understand?”

  “It looked real valuable,” said his brother sadly. “Maybe what we’re looking for was already on the bus when we got here,” he suggested, eyeing the fabric of the seats.

  “Wayne, maybe you gotta be stupid, but do you have to try to prove it to the whole goddamn world? Whatever it was came on the plane from Dallas, so how could it have been hidden in the bus?”

  “Maybe someone got to the bus earlylike.”

  “Yeah. Maybe someone did. Remember who?”

  Wayne subsided into silence. The passengers repacked most of their despoiled belongings and fell into a sullen lethargy. Diana Morris sank farther and farther away from the unpleasantness around her. Jennifer Nicholls sat on the floor beside her, holding a cup to her lips, and moistening them whenever she could rouse her to something close to consciousness. Her concentration on the woman was so intense that she seemed unmoved by their common danger. The children had collapsed into sleep, huddled against each other like wretchedly tired, cold puppies. Just after midnight, Gary snapped that he couldn’t breathe, that there was no goddamn air in the bus, and Wayne opened the front door, allowing in waves of night air. Suellen Kelleher, who had also escaped into childlike slumber despite the commotion around them, stirred restlessly and burrowed in closer to her husband.

  Then the lights began to flicker and dim. “Now what’s happening?” said Gary.

  “I imagine your battery’s dying,” said Kevin Donovan helpfully.

  “Get the goddamn bus started again, Wayne,” said his brother. “We got to keep the lights working.”

  “We’re on empty,” Wayne whispered. “I think we shoulda filled it before we got to the airport.”

  “Switch batteries. Use what we’ve got,” said his brother impatiently. “There’ll be some fuel in there, even on empty.”

  “I don’t know how to switch batteries in this thing, ’specially when I can’t see what I’m doing,” muttered Wayne. But he started the bus. The sleeping passengers stirred and muttered and sat up again.

  In fifteen minutes or so the engine spluttered and died. Soon the lights began to show signs of weakness. They dimmed, went out, glowed themselves into a temporary afterlife, and then, very, very slowly, faded away. They reminded Harriet of the Cheshire cat, disappearing and leaving nothing behind but a faintly illuminated filament.

  “Stay where you are.” Gary’s voice penetrated the darkness. “We’ll finish this search as soon as day breaks. And believe me, we’ll shoot anyone who tries to get away. The rear door is locked and that means you’ll have to climb over us to get out.” He paused. “You might want to consider what we’re looking for,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “At sunrise, we take the first person out and shoot him.”

  Someone gasped and a frightened silence fell over the bus.

  But the height of any emotion can only be maintained for a certain period of time in absence of outside stimulation; gradually soft rustling noises filled the night, as the exhausted passengers settled down in their seats again and—with some exceptions—fell into slumber.

  It was close to 4 a.m. before they got a coherent story out of Charlie Broca. “I’m so sorry,” he said at last. “Yesterday was an awful day. I always do Friday nights—I don’t mind, usually—but last night everyone was yelling, and raising hell, and nothing was coming in on time. But you don’t want to know all this, do you? Just that I was tired, and Helen was coming to pick me up, and I thought we’d go out for dinner somewhere—there’s a neighbourhood Mexican place—” He stopped again, as if he real
ized that no one was interested in his eating habits either.

  “And then what happened?”

  “The Archway Tours plane came in, finally. That was the last flight expected in. And there was a strange bus driver—but I didn’t realize that at first. I don’t know what’s happened to Bert. He always drives. Bert’s a great guy—” He blinked them into focus. “And I saw Caroline Rogers talking to this lady, and then finally Stuart comes in—they’re a little late, but I’m not worried, because I know Bert would never leave without the kids. Of course I never knew it wasn’t Bert. And then suddenly I see the driver get on the bus—and it was a guy I didn’t recognize—and the door shuts and the damned bus takes off.” He stopped dead, as if he suddenly wound down.

  Rodriguez handed him fresh coffee.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Sorry. I just feel so— Well—I could see us having to drive the twins to the hotel after Helen came to pick me up, because I couldn’t just leave them there, could I? Friday nights at the hotel are always crazy—Joe and Samantha can’t leave the dining room. And then this lady who was talking to Caroline, she starts going on about them missing the bus, and her husband comes over and asks me what in hell is going on, and I get mad and say something about not being responsible for kids playing around and missing buses, and he says since he’s going to Taos he might as well take them himself. So he picks up his suitcase and she picks up the kids’ suitcases and they all go off in his van.”

  “Mr. Broca, did you see the van?”

  Charlie blinked. The lids dropped over his bloodshot eyes. His head drooped onto his chest.

  “Mr. Broca—wake up. Did you see the van?”

  His head snapped up and his eyes opened wide. “Chevy van, cream-coloured, one, maybe two years old, Missouri plates. Didn’t get the number. Guy was tall, wife skinny, about five six.” His head fell onto the table, just missing the coffee, and he was out. The time was 4:25 a.m.