Chapter 17
Despite Winston dragging his feet, we still managed to make it back to the ranch by noon.
Sierra met us on the porch with a wooden spoon in one hand and a dish towel over his shoulder. Pearl shouldered out behind him before the screen door could shut, ears up, tail at half-mast. She made it to the top step and wagged her tail.
"Hey, boys. How was the drive?"
"Not bad." I shut the truck door and tugged up my jeans. "Joe here?"
"At the kitchen table," Sierra said with a nod.
Pearl trotted down the porch steps and went straight to Winston, who was still on the bottom step. She shoved her head under his hand without breaking stride. Winston laughed and crouched to scratch behind her ears.
"He behavin' himself?"
"Course he is. Otherwise, he wouldn't be sittin' at my table.
You know I don't tolerate riffraff and roughhousin' at the table, Ransom.
" Sierra glanced past me at Winston with Pearl now flopped on her back at his feet, four legs in the air, getting her belly rubbed. "There's coffee on if you want it."
Winston didn't look up from the dog. "Appreciate it, Sierra."
I crossed the porch and pushed the kitchen door open. The whole room turned to look at us.
Joe sat on the bench side, his back to the wall, hands flat on the wood. His nose was swollen, both eyes blackened, his split lip stopped bleeding sometime that morning. He looked about as content as a raccoon in a landfill, sipping his coffee.
"Lanza," he said with a polite nod.
I stayed in the doorway. "Joe."
Rafe sat at the head of the table with his reading glasses on and a yellow legal pad in front of him, half-marked. He folded the glasses and set them on the pad.
"Ransom. Winston. Sit down."
I took the chair to Rafe's right. Winston dropped into the seat beside me and stretched his legs out. Joe watched him the whole way down.
"Joe and I have been getting acquainted," Rafe said.
"That's what I was afraid of," I said.
"I think we've got enough dirt on Rex to last two lifetimes now. None of it actionable legally, though." Rafe tapped the legal pad and glanced at Winston.
"In Texas, we have a saying," Winston offered. "If God don't see it, it didn't happen."
"That a Ranger saying or a Valverde saying?" Joe asked.
"Bit of both."
"Never heard it."
"Well, you're hearin' it now," Winston said.
"I didn't come all the way out here to put Rex in front of a judge.
That man's too slippery. Put him behind bars, he'll run the place from the inside.
I don't want that. I want him gone. I'm fixin' to support whatever plan y'all come up with that gets him gone. "
Sierra set a coffee mug down in front of Winston without breaking stride. "So the badge isn't going to be a problem?"
"If it is, you'd better say so now," Rafe said, giving Winston a hard look.
Winston took a long pull of his coffee. "If the badge has any opinions on the matter, it can keep them to itself. I ain't here for the badge. I'm here for me."
"We're in agreement, then." Rafe pushed the legal pad away. "We do this the Pae Saco way."
"I'm just here for the finale," Winston said.
Rafe looked at me. "I want you on this property until it's done, Ransom. No more overnights. No more drives up to Albuquerque. You're here."
"Yes, sir."
"Good."
Joe scraped his fork through the last of his potatoes. "How's your brother, Lanza?"
The kitchen kept moving. The coffee pot sighed on the stove. Sierra didn't turn around.
"Breathing. Same as yesterday." I set my fork down. I picked it back up. I put a bite in my mouth I didn't taste.
"You'll keep your stories about Lanza inside your own head for the duration of your stay at my table, Joe," Rafe said.
"Yes, sir."
"Good."
Sierra set a fresh pot of coffee in the middle of the table between Joe and me. The pot smelled like cinnamon. He'd thrown a stick in it.
"Drink your coffee, boys."
A plate of eggs, potatoes, and sausage landed in front of me, then Winston. Sierra put another in front of Joe.
I picked up my fork. "How's the nose?"
"Hurts."
"Good."
Joe put his head down and ate.
Back when we ran with Dolano and his gang, Joe taught me how to hotwire a truck.
He drove the truck the day Chance got hit by lightning while I worked on my brother in the bed.
He'd called me a pussy until I was old enough to stop being one, and then he stood in the doorway of Dolano's office while I beat Dolano's head in with a tire iron, and he never asked me about it after.
I owed him for some of that. He owed me for the rest. I supposed we were about even, then.
The screen door banged, and the boys came in off the south fence in a wave of dust and noise. The wave broke when it saw Joe. Mateo took the lead, looked at Joe's face, registered exactly what kind of face it was, and didn't say a word.
The Cruz kid behind him did.
"Aw, hell. What happened to you?"
"Cruz," Sierra said from the stove mildly.
"Sorry, Sierra. But seriously."
Joe scanned the boy from head to toe.
"Prison happened to my face," Joe said. "You should be thankful you wound up here instead of there."
"Which prison?"
"Los Lunas."
"My uncle did a stretch at Estancia."
"Sorry to hear it."
"He said the food was bad."
"It was."
The Cruz kid nodded, satisfied, like the introduction was now complete on terms he understood. He dropped onto the bench two seats from Joe and started in on his eggs. Mateo took the seat between them without being asked. He stuck his hand across the table at Joe.
"Mateo."
Joe shook it once and let go.
The other boys filled in around them, plates coming down, chairs scraping, somebody at the far end of the table arguing with the kid next to him about whether a horse named Pancake had thrown a shoe yesterday or the day before.
Sierra dropped a wooden spoon flat on the counter with a crack that ended the argument without anybody having to look up.
My phone buzzed against my thigh. Then again. Then a third time, in a sustained stutter that meant the chat was already on fire.
I tilted the phone up just enough to read.
Cruz
new guy looks like he lost a fight with a hay baler
Mateo
he's sitting two feet from you
Cruz
AND
Linc
who is he
Cruz
idk but boss is staring at him like he wants to either hug him or shoot him
Cruz
maybe both
Cruz
I'm shipping it
Mateo
cruz STOP
Linc
name?
Cruz
joe
Linc
joe what
Cruz
idk linc do I look like fucking the warden
Mateo
Joe Dancing. los lunas. four years. assault.
Linc
copy
Cruz
wait HOW DO U KNOW THAT
Mateo
I listen
Linc
cruz be cool
Cruz
I AM cool. coolest one here. ask anybody.
I scrolled past the rest. Down the table, Cruz was eating his eggs left-handed with his right thumb still going under the edge of the bench.
Mateo had his phone face-down beside his plate but his eyes flicked to it every six seconds like clockwork.
Two seats down, somebody — couldn't tell who without turning my head — was wheezing into his coffee.
I locked the screen.
Across the table, Joe put another bite in his mouth and didn't look up. He'd clocked the buzzing. He didn't know what it was about and was pretending he didn't care, which is the same thing prison teaches you to do with anything you can't control.
Linc came in from the porch with Fenix behind him. Fenix paused in the doorway with one hand braced on the frame. He stopped, and he shuddered.
"What's wrong, birdie?" Linc asked, frowning back at Fenix.
Mateo's fork paused halfway to his mouth. The Cruz kid set his coffee down. Sierra didn't turn around from the stove, but his shoulders went a particular kind of still.
Joe set down his fork.
Linc took Fenix's hand. "Come sit with me."
"There are spirits," Fenix whispered. "Stuck to him."
Fenix's hand came off the doorframe one finger at a time. Then he bolted. The screen door banged behind him.
Linc went after him. Sierra caught his arm at the stove.
"Let him."
"Sierra."
"I said let him."
I pushed back from the table. "I'll go."
I grabbed my hat off the hook and pushed out through the screen door before anybody could say anything else.
The afternoon had gone yellow. Wind picked up off the mesa, and I stood on the porch a second to figure out which direction Fenix had gone.
He could have run for the cottonwood by the creek, or the bunkhouse, or the south fence line where Linc usually walked him when he got like this.
None of those were where Fenix went when he was actually scared.
When Fenix was scared, Fenix went underground.
I cut around the side of the main house toward the root cellar.
The door was propped open with the same rock that had been holding it open the day Linc and Fenix laid Castillo out down there, which was about the time I'd given up trying to make sense of how Fenix decided what was sacred and what wasn't. The light from inside was wrong for an oil lamp, low and orange, flickering.
Coyote's voice came up the steps before I made it to them.
"... salt first, in the corners. Always the corners. Mama said the corners were how they got in. You put the salt down and you say her name three times and they have to stop where the salt is, they can't cross it."
I slowed up at the top of the stairs and put one hand on the doorframe.
Fenix was sitting on the dirt floor with his back against the stone shelf where we'd laid Castillo, knees pulled up tight.
Coyote was cross-legged in front of him with Nimue draped across his shoulders like she was paying attention too.
There was a candle on the floor between them, a small pile of what looked like rock salt next to Coyote's knee, and a sprig of something green that I was pretty sure had come out of Sierra's herb pots without permission.
"Whose name?" Fenix said.