The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (44 page)

“Really?”

“Yep. I learned that from Cactus Truesdell who had a scar on his cheek where he shot out his tooth.”

“Oh brother. You still believe that?”

“That may not
be how he got the scar, but it’
s true there was no beard on it. I saw that with my own eyes.
”

“Or your o
wn
ice.”

I chuckled at that and said,
“Right. So The Hunting Guide l
ied. The truth
is
that he’
s
probably
the one who booby-trapped the wood.
And he grew the beard so that he could say there was a scar under there. He didn’t know beards don’t grow on scar tissue.
”

“
So it was
Carlos
who took the wood
.”

“He had no electricity. He was probably on the verge of freezing to death. He takes a few pieces of wood. Then the wood blows up. What do you imagine he thought?”

“That God was punishing him for
taking the wood
. And that The Hunting Guide would come after him.
But he had no money. Where did he go?
”

“I don’t know.
La Viuda de
Zaragosa
told me h
e
had three sisters and three brothers, all of whom were quite a bit older than Carlos. He was evidently a
late
surprise child like me. The siblings had all moved away by the time
Carlos
took his first confession. But maybe one of them
lives in a nearby village. Or m
aybe Carlos hitchhiked to Albuquerque. Or maybe he was eaten by a bear. After all, the story I’m telling you is ninety percent conjecture.”

“Yeah, but it makes sense. Is there any way we can confirm it?”

“Maybe someone could track down his siblings and find out what they know. But we don’t have the means to do that.”

“The police could do it.”

I sighed.
“He’s
been listed as missing for
six months
,
and they haven’t looked for him. Why would they do it now?”

“Because he’s been murdered.”

“We’ve already been over that. There is
no proof that he was murdered.”

“What about the fact that The Hunting Guide lied to the police?”

“I guess they could confront him with that, but what good would it do? He could just say it turned out to be a superficial wound, and it healed.”

“Maybe they could use rubber hoses to make him confess.”

I frowned at her and she laughed.

We sat in silence for a while.

“This is frustrating, Hubie. You finally come around to my view that there was a murder and you even know how it happened, but there’s no way to prove it.”

“Luring someone into participating in a mock crucifixion is not murder.”

“It isn’t
mock
when someone dies
. If it isn’t murder, it should at least be negligent homicide or something.”

“Either way, the police
don’t have sufficient
reason to act.”

“So we just go home and forget it?”

I shrugged.

She started the engine.

“Go to the church,” I said.

She laughed. “Why? You want to make another confession?”

“No, I want to ask Father Jerome
how to contact
the woman
who
gave him that pot. I’d like to get another one by her if she will let me have it on consignment. She does good work. I might make a few bucks retailing one of her pots.
”

“Too bad you can’t go back to that cliff dwelling and find a pot for frea pot foe.”

“I tried that before I discovered the body was missing
, remember?
”
I shook my head in disbelief. “In all my years of digging, I’ve never seen a place with absolutely nothing buried. Two trips there and all I got was one me
as
ly shard.”

“I guess they were a
tidy tribe, Hubie.”

She drove to the church.

I was deep in thought. Not about confession or the woman who made the pot, but about why the soil in the cliff dwelling contain
ed
almost no record of human habitation and why it
was not compacted
. W
hy it was
so easy to push the rebar in when I searched the entire area with no results.

“Are you going in?” she
finally
asked
.

“What? Oh, yeah.
A
nd after I
find out about the potter,
I’m going to ask Father Jerome
where The Hunting Guide lives. I want to pay him a visit.
”

The potter was surprised and happy that I wanted one of her pots and didn’t hesitate to give it to me on consignment.

The Hunting Guide’s house
was set back off the road facing a trail against a hill
.
Susannah stopped about fifty yards from the house, and I used the crutches to circle around to the door.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I wasn’t.

46

&nHbsp;

He was even meaner looking than I remembered.
And there were no bald spots in his beard.

“Yeah?” he said, blocking his front door
.

“Father Jerome told me you lived here,” I said, trying to put things on a friendly footing by mentioning the loca
l
priest. “I was hoping to hire you as a guide.”

He looked me up and down with disdain. “You don’t look much like a hunter.”

“I’ve never been hunting. That’s why I need a guide. I don’t know how to go about it.”

“Then why do you want to do it?”

“I like the taste of elk.”

He stood there staring at me as if
wondering
whether he wanted to hire himself out to this tenderfoot at his door. It took him a long time to decide.

He finally stepped back from the door and said, “Come in.”

He closed the door and said, “Wait here.”

He went into another room and came back with a gun.
It was then
I realized I was in deep elk
excrement
.
Because even a greenhorn like me knows you don’t hunt elk with a pistol.

“This way,” he said, motioning me into the room where he’d gone to get the gun. There were a lot of other ones in there, all rifles. There were also shelves of artifacts.

Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a reason why he would point a pistol at me if he didn’t intend to kill
me
. He was bigger and stronger than me by far and didn’t need a pistol to make me do whatever he wanted me to do.

In fact, he didn’t even need a pistol to kill me. I was certain he could do it with his bare hands. But a pistol would be easier.

The reason I was thinking about this was because if there with hiswas any possibility that his intent
was
to teach me how to shoot a pist
ol or scare me or do something
other than kill me,
I didn’
t want to risk
running and have him shoot me because I was running
just as Billy the Kid shot
Deputy James Bell
because he was running
. I know that’s not the sha
r
pe
st
r
easoning I’
ve ever done, but it’
s what I was thinking.

I thought of Billy the Kid’s letter to Lew Wallace in which he said, “
I would not like to be killed like a dog unarmed.
”

If I decide, I thought to myself, that he’s definitely going to kill me, I d
on’t
want to just s
t
and
here
and be execut
ed. I want to dash for the door
or leap
through a window.

What I just told you might give
you the impression
I was a cool customer, calculat
ing
his intent and my op
tions
while staring down the
barrel of a 45 or a 32 or a six-
and
-
a
-
half. I don’t know one gun from another.
I
would
say
this one was definitely not a Saturday night special. This was a whole week’s worth of gun.
say>

So let me correct any misimpression that I was cool
l
y reasoning. Becau
s
e I wasn’t. I
w
as re
a
soning,
bu
t
not calmly. It was amazing
I cou
l
d
think at all since
my hear
t
had stopped beating. I know your heart is supposed to race in the face of dange
r
, and that’s what normally happens to me w
he
n I climb higher than the third rung
o
n a ladder. But in this case, my heart just stopped beating. Which didn’
t matter
.
B
ecause if
it
had pumped a bunch of blood to my lungs, the
blood couldn’t have t
aken in any oxygen because I
a
lso wasn’t breathing. All my organs seemed to have shut down. There was an eerie silence, a slowing d
o
wn of time. It was like I was already dead.

Of co
u
rse he didn’t kill
m
e. If he had
,
I wouldn’t be telling you abo
u
t that bazooka in his hand and the bizarre physiological effect
s
it had on me.