Cool Hand (31 page)

SATURDAY

Sycamore Ranch lay about halfway down the side of the hill, in a small, steep-sided canyon formed around a lazy creek. The main compound was four pink-roofed buildings in a square around a shady courtyard. A couple of SUVs were parked neatly in front. To the right of the ranch house, there were wooden barns and outbuildings.

A hundred yards beyond the ranch, the small arroyo meandered down the bottom of the valley. There was flowing water in it now, but the ground told me that this place got dry.

Regardless of that, between me and the ranch there was an orchard, laid out on terraces stepping down the hill; I could see lemon and cherry, fig, orange and lime. I was peering through the leaves of a creosote bush, so any citrus smell or anything else that might have drifted up was masked by the acrid resin. There was a white-painted water tower about two hundred yards to my left on the ridge line. I guessed that served the orchard.

There were no corrals, no sign of herd animals and no obvious farm machinery. It was no working business; apart from the fruit trees, this was just a house.

A cool wind blew and the sun shone.

Peaceful. Still.

Except for the vultures. The early arrivals were fighting over a body in the courtyard.

We’d approached the ranch by a dirt road that dog-legged this hill. I’d had Tullah stop when I spotted the vultures circling lazily, and I’d climbed up to check before we drove around the hill.

Tullah slipped in beside me, keeping behind the bush. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was still learning.

Savannah and Claude were waiting in the Hill Bitch. That wasn’t good, exposing them like that, but we’d run out of options.

What had happened?

Was Diana in the ranch?

I lifted the binoculars and began slow sweeps of the buildings, looking for anything out of place, any hint of someone waiting. I wanted to run down there. I wanted to scream. The thought of getting so close, beating all the odds of finding Diana, and then being too late was like ice in my heart.

But a little closed canyon, one road in and out, no one around for miles. It was shouting ‘trap’ at me.

That cold feeling spread to my spine and lifted hairs on my arms. I swung the glasses up to have a look at the water tower.

It was too perfectly placed. It had line of sight on the road as it curved around the hill, it overlooked the whole hilltop, the orchard, the house, the stream and the hill on the opposite side of the stream. A perfect place for a sniper.

In the shadows beneath the cylindrical body of the water tank, there was a second platform, almost invisible until you really looked. Just enough space for a couple of people to lie down and maintain a great 360 degree lookout.

It had been built for the purpose, and I was right; it would have been a great place to post a sniper. All of us would have been dead, but it was empty today.

Okay. Missed it on the first pass. Not at your best. Put it behind you.

I couldn’t make any more mistakes like that.

So why might someone spring a trap without posting a guy with a rifle in the water tower?

What if they hadn’t had time? They were still in the ranch?

I turned my attention back to the valley below.

The courtyard door to the main house was open, shifting with the breeze.

There was something wrong about the scene, something beyond the ugly contrast of peacefulness and death, unused sniper posts and open doors, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Anything you can do to tell me if there’s anyone alive down there?”

Tullah shook her head. “What about your bracelet?”

“Nothing at the moment, but I always worry about how it works.”

She smiled.

“I’m going down,” I said finally. “I need you to watch from here. Keep an eye on the road as well.” I handed her the binoculars and checked my cell. One bar of signal.

Damn.

Amateur hour. We needed tactical headsets, and full assault gear. And while I was at it, a squad of Ops 4-10 and one of those silent recon drones. I had a shotgun and a cellphone.

Suck it up.

I made sure Tullah knew which cell I was using.

“Call me if anything changes,” I said.

“Be careful.” She was worried, but she took the glasses without arguing and copied my slow sweep over the ranch and the outbuildings.

I hefted the shotgun and slunk over the ridge, staying low and moving quickly. The orchard beckoned; it would give me some good cover as I approached the house.

It was where I would have set a trap. Then again, I’d have had a sniper in the water tower.

Unless, maybe, I wanted to lure someone down into the ranch and capture them.

I slithered down into the cover of the trees and checked all around me.

There was nothing there, other than relief from the smell of creosote bushes.

I slipped through the trees and down the hill. My view of the ranch was obscured, and I had to trust Tullah to see what I couldn’t, ahead of me.

Crouched at the lower edge of the orchard, I still had another twenty yards to the corner of the first building. And now the smell of the orchard and the creosote plants on the hillside couldn’t mask the insidious smell of death.

It wouldn’t have been there yet for a human, but I was relying on my wolf senses.

I tried to block out the death and focus on the rest.

The marque was House Romero; we’d found Oscar Jaworski’s House. But it was just the scent. The marque’s other component, the
feeling
of a presence, simply wasn’t there.

Didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone else here.

Pressure was growing on me to act.

I sprinted across to the closest part of the building and trotted down the side, glancing in windows as I went past.

Stopped. About halfway down I could make out one body in a room. Two in the next. Still silent. And still no other scents or marques.

I went on. Down at the end, I tried a door. It was unlocked.

Booby-trapped? Someone waiting?

Got to keep moving.

Pressing myself against the wall, I pushed the door open.

Nothing. No explosions, no reactions, no movement at all apart from the vultures.

This was starting to stretch my nerves like violin strings. I’d have almost welcomed an attack.

Stupid thought.

I went in and began to work my way through, room by room, sprinting down corridors where I had no cover, whipping myself around corners and into rooms.

The buildings all connected, all the way around the courtyard. The bedrooms were luxurious, the living rooms wide and airy, storerooms neat. The kitchen could have catered for a small army. The dining room would have seated thirty.

The only sound came from my footsteps and my pounding heart.

I could barely breathe. Any second I knew I’d find Diana.

Room after room.

Five bedrooms had bodies in the beds. Some of them had been shot while sleeping. Others had leaped up when someone came in. There was no difference in the end result. Athanate and kin, male and female, dead and tangled in bedclothes.

Whoever had done this had struck last night, probably in the early hours of this morning, in almost complete silence.

This was Jaworski’s secret retreat. Why no bodies outside, apart from the one in the courtyard? Had he felt so secure, he’d posted no guards? Or had they betrayed him?

Either way, he’d made a huge miscalculation and it had cost him everything.

He was there, the only one I recognized, in the huge living room—surrounded by bodies, dried blood splatter, the smell of death and violence. And flies.

There was no one alive in the ranch.

And no Diana.

There was no cellphone signal either.

I needed the exercise to clear the images out from behind my eyes and the smell from my nose. I ran up the hill back to Tullah, picking out the rocky parts where I got good traction.

“No one alive down there,” I panted when I reached the top. “I want Claude on that platform underneath the water tower, watching the road. If he sees anything, he runs as fast as he can down to the ranch. You and Savannah come around in the car. I need both of you.”

Back in the building, I paced through the main rooms again. Clouds of flies swirled up as I passed. It was worse, going back in.

And I found one I’d missed before. Unlike the others, the woman had realized what was happening. She’d tried to hide underneath a solid desk in a study. They’d found her, and shot her where she’d knelt, curled up in a ball.

I took pictures of every body with the cellphone. All of them were Romero Athanate or Romero kin. All killed with gunshots.

Some of them had been killed by being shot in the head as they lay wounded.

I went into a bathroom and closed the door.

The water was cold on my face, shockingly cold.

I stayed bent over the sink. I didn’t want to look in the mirror.

In Ops 4-10, I’d had to deal with death on every mission. Ours. Theirs. Some I remembered; I made myself remember them. The others had begun to blur into a mass. I stopped seeing them. When I left the army and set up as a PI, I’d decided to make a rule: no killing unless completely unavoidable. It had worked for a while. It had brought me back to a place where lives mattered.

Now I was feeling the blindness coming back. I’d killed Nagas on Coykuti Mountain and Warders in Albuquerque. I could argue I had no options, but I’d felt nothing. Today, I’d just walked through a building full of dead bodies and all I could feel was relief that Diana wasn’t one of them.

The rest hadn’t meant anything to me until I found the woman in the study.

Was this normal? What did
normal
mean for me?

I splashed more water on my face, and after that, I took towels and scented gels, creating a mask to breathe through. I opened every window and door as I went back out. As soon as we left, the vultures and smaller scavengers would come in.

I cleaned everywhere I’d touched.

Then I went out to where Tullah and Savannah waited with the truck.

“They’re all House Romero, and they’re dead,” I said to Savannah. “You don’t want to go inside, but I need to know some names, or if you recognize faces.”

I held up the cellphone. She didn’t want to look at it.

“It might help us figure out who did this and why. Think you can handle it?”

Her face was pale and her mouth pressed into a thin line. She nodded jerkily.

I gave her the cellphone and she started to go through the pictures.

“I’ve seen him before,” she said on the fifth picture. “I’m not sure of his name.”

Then she went on to a couple more. Tears sprang up in her eyes.

I looked at the picture. The woman who had died in the study.

“Sienna,” Savannah said, the tears sliding out the sides of her eyes. “Sienna kin-Romero. She was kind to me.”

Romero’s own kin.

She wiped her face angrily and went on. She didn’t know any of the dead in the other side rooms.

The main cluster of bodies was in the central living room, a huge, glass-fronted space that projected out onto a stone patio.

She knew more of them.

Lying beside Oscar Jaworski was Charles Romero himself, the leader of House Romero, former Panethus Athanate House of New Mexico.

Now, the leadership of House Romero had been eradicated. The last man standing was Amaral and he didn’t look to be keeping the name Romero.

When Savannah finished her task, she staggered away to lose her breakfast.

Tullah looked as pale as Savannah.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I fastened the towel mask over her nose to cut down the nauseating smell. “I need you to see something.”

“I know,” she said. “I can feel it, too.”

“Close your eyes. You don’t need to see the rest.”

She obeyed and I guided her back through the horrors of the massacre, into the main living room and then down a short side passage to another room.

Just outside the door to the room, a Romero Athanate lay face down. He had a 9mm Sig automatic, still neatly holstered on his waistband. He’d been shot twice in the back.

I maneuvered Tullah past the body and into the room.

It was the center of that feeling of wrongness I’d felt, even up on the top of the hill. A feeling like the Aztec temple in the barn out at Bow Creek ranch. An evil feeling.

The room itself was a large guest bedroom overlooking the patio. It had views down to the creek. There were closets and a bathroom on one side. There were no bodies here. A vase of sweet-scented jasmine and lilies stood on the side of a vanity table, fighting the smell from the rest of the house. There were chairs around a coffee table and unfinished soft drinks for a small group. The bed was made. The only other sign of occupancy was a small rolling suitcase beside the bed.