house. Then he noticed something else. Part of the bank had crumbled, as if someone had fallen over the edge. Loose rocks had collected at the bottom of the arroyo, near a place where the soft sand had been recently upturned. He thought he saw handprints.
He followed an imaginary line that began at the point of the handprints, passed through the spot where the bank had crumbled, and extended out indefinitely in the general direction from which someone running for his life would have come before stumbling into the arroyo. Soto, perhaps.
“Help me out. My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. What do you see over there?”
Fidel looked in the direction he pointed. He studied the desert terrain. “Is that an old campfire?”
“Where?”
“Right there, to the left of the piñon trees,” Fidel answered.
He walked quickly toward the trees. He, too, spotted the remains of a campfire. A thin wisp of smoke coiled like a ghost over the black embers. As he approached he realized someone had poured water on the fire not long ago. He kicked at the charred pieces of wood that remained, watching the coals underneath begin to spark and recognized the scent of piñon wood.
It was the same smell he’d noticed on Padilla and in the front seat of Soto’s Porsche.
“Look at this,” Fidel said, pointing to a series of indentations in the sandy earth. The indentations were round, about four inches in diameter, and together formed a circle around the fire. The campfire had been located near the center of the circle. To be exact, the campfire had been located near the center of a teepee, which meant that someone had been camping here or holding some kind of ceremony. New Mexico was overrun with New Age types who were always going out in the desert for retreats and ceremonies of one kind or another, New Age religions or practices that he didn’t understand. He hoped it was that, not what he feared.
He squatted down on his haunches to get a better look. Near the fire someone had drawn, then later partially erased, a half circle in the sand.
He dug in the soft sand, carefully scraping away one layer at a time. He quickly found what he was looking for. What he hoped he wouldn’t find.
“Peyote,” Fidel said, when he held up the small brown button about the size of a quarter.
He nodded. “Soto came out here last night to attend a peyote ceremony.”
Fidel looked at him. “Native American Church?”
“Maybe.” He dropped the peyote button in his shirt pocket. “Give me a hand here.”
Fidel helped him up.
He took a bandana out of his back pocket and wiped his damp forehead. He was already sweating and the day was still young.
Overhead the sun scorched the blue sky, unusually hot for late August. He looked back at Padilla’s house and wished he’d remembered to wear his new sunglasses. Beginning to worry, he thought he could feel his eyes fogging up with cataracts. Soon he’d be blind. Then Estelle would say, “I told you so.” He’d have no one to blame but himself.
“So Padilla belongs to the Native American Church,” Fidel said, after a long pause.
He turned, remembering Fidel. “That’s why he didn’t report Soto’s body until this morning—to give them time to pack up the teepee and get the hell out of here.”
“Why would they want to conceal the meeting? The Native American Church is legal—”
He was interrupted by the sound of a distant “crack” and then the zing of a bullet kicking up sand just to their right in the direction of the arroyo.
“Get down!” he yelled, as the two dived into the sand.
Just then a second bullet struck behind them, closer to the house.
Fidel tried to get up.
“Wait!” He grabbed Fidel around the waist and pulled him back down. “Just listen.”
They heard nothing. Just silence. After about a minute, he rose to his knees slowly, looking around at the distant mesas over toward the Rio Grande. He saw no obvious places where a shooter could be situated. The shot was from a high-powered rifle, fired from a great distance. He could tell by the sound.
“Shit,” Fidel said. “I didn’t sign up for this, I’m a fucking news reporter.”
He ignored Fidel, standing up now and looking around for any possible movement on the mesas, a shooter, a vehicle, something.
“Where did it come from?”
He pointed toward the river. “Whoever it was, he’s probably gone now.”
“Yeah, well I’m getting the hell out of here.” Crouching low, Fidel scurried off into the sagebrush like a human crab, heading toward Padilla’s house.
He made a mental note to send someone out later to try and find one of the bullets. Good luck with that.
He frowned. The day was shaping up even worse than he expected. Getting involved with the Native American Church, or some renegade branch of the church, was the last thing he wanted to do.
Technically, Fidel spoke correctly. The courts had ruled that peyote ceremonies were legal if held as official meetings of the church. The legal issue didn’t bother him. Never had.
But having to deal with trigger-happy members of the church did bother him. They were the kind of people who gathered in teepees at night to gobble peyote, a hallucinogenic drug similar to LSD that induced visions of...what? The world of spirits and apparitions? He didn’t even know what to call it, never being one to believe in a spirit world. He was just trying to make sense of the one he inhabited, the physical world. Just thinking about the Native American Church gave him a headache.
He heard Trujillo’s loud, angry voice coming from inside the small adobe as he approached. He hurried inside, hoping he wouldn’t be too late to stop the rough stuff.
Fearing the worst, he breathed a sigh of relief when he found Padilla unharmed. The disheveled little man stood in one corner of his living room where he seemed to be showing Trujillo a finely carved kachina on the mantle above his fireplace. The kachina stood about eighteen inches tall, but brown and gold eagle feathers on its headdress made it appear much taller. The brightly-colored kachina danced in full costume, with a red cloth sash tied around its yellow waist, waving a gourd rattle in its right hand.
“Soto offered me five thousand dollars,” Padilla said. “It’s probably worth a lot more, because it’s a Hemis kachina carved in the nineteen twenties.”
He walked to the fireplace, negotiating a maze of worn sofas and stuffed chairs faded to a dull beige color. The other two men made room for him.
“When was Soto going to buy the kachina?” he asked suddenly. “Before or after the peyote ceremony?”
Padilla’s jaw tightened.
He could see the tension in Padilla’s face.
Trujillo looked puzzled, as if he’d missed something.
“I
