The Territory: A Novel (4 page)

“Can I help you?” Josie asked.

“There’s a dead man on my couch.”

Josie stifled a sigh. “Any special reason he’s dead on
your
couch as opposed to someone else’s?”

“Is that cop humor?”

“No. I’d like an answer.”

“None to give. All I know is he’s left a hell of a stain on the couch. Isn’t even mine.”

“The couch?”

“Not the couch or the trailer.”

“Why didn’t you call 911?” Josie asked.

The woman glanced at her watch. “I got ten minutes before I’m late to work. Six to midnight. If I called from the trailer, you guys would have kept me there for hours. I need my paycheck.” She held up a set of house keys. “Make yourself at home.”

Josie ignored the keys. “Do you know the dead man?”

“Red Goff.”

Josie shook her head in shock. The woman smirked.

“How did he die?” Josie asked.

“Gunshot. In the forehead.”

Josie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’re telling me Red Goff was shot in the head inside your trailer?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“Do you know who shot him?” Josie asked.

“I have no idea.” She held her keys up again. “I have to get to work. Can I pick my keys up here when I get off?”

“You have a dead man on your couch, and you can’t tell me why?” Josie let the question hang for a beat, but the woman didn’t respond. “Where do you work?”

“Value Gas.”

“Call your boss. Tell her you won’t be in tonight.”

“You guarantee I won’t get fired after I miss work?”

Josie felt a tension headache starting at the base of her skull. “Is Leona still a manager?” she asked.

The woman nodded.

“I’ll call Leona. She owes me one.”

She sighed loudly and slipped her keys into her shorts pocket.

“I’ll have to take your statement.” Josie gestured for the woman to enter through the swinging half door that led behind the front counter. The counter extended across the front of the office and separated the lobby from the booking and intake area.

Josie turned to face Lou. “Get an ambulance out there and call Otto. Tell him we’ve got a probable homicide and we need him there now. Ask him to secure the scene and call the coroner. Tell him I’ll be there within the hour.”

“It doesn’t take a degree to figure out dead. He ain’t coming back.”

Josie turned to the woman. “Just a precaution. Have to do things by the book.”

“Whatever suits you,” she said.

Josie walked past Lou and led the woman to a desk with a computer that the officers shared for intakes and statements. She pointed to a chair across from the desk and pulled up the form on the computer. “Name?”

“Pegasus Winning.”

Josie glanced up and saw the woman was serious. “Address?”

“I don’t have an address.”

“The address for the trailer,” Josie said.

“There isn’t one. My brother said he never had an address for it.”

“Does your brother have a P.O. box?”

She shook her head. “Nope. He didn’t want mail.”

Josie looked up from her computer. “Work with me here, okay? I need to get out to your place, and you need to get to work.”

“It’s off Farm Road 170, just in front of Red’s place. Use his address. He’s dead, anyway.”

“What’s your relationship with Red?” Josie asked.

“Limited.” She grimaced. “He’d wander down to my place to tell me the world was coming to an end. How I needed guns and dead bolts. Like anyone in their right mind would want what’s inside my trailer. He’d rant about the government and the police state. Then he’d try to get me to go to his place to look at his guns. Show and tell. He was a leech.”

“You’re living in your brother’s trailer?” Josie asked.

“I moved here about three months ago to live with him, but he was gone. He left me a note and said he had to cool off. Couldn’t take the Texas heat anymore. He left me an address to mail the trailer payment each month. That was about it.”

“Think he was in trouble when he left?”

“He’s never been out of trouble.”

*   *   *

Because the murder was committed outside the city limits, Josie had called the sheriff’s department to pass the case off. Technically, it was their jurisdiction, but dispatch had said all their officers were tied up. Josie agreed to take the case. With a budget so tight it barely covered salaries, the two departments often operated out of jurisdiction in order to cover calls. Considering the territorial drama among agencies in some small towns, she took pride in the relationship the city police and sheriff’s department shared in Artemis. She also worked well with most of the Border Patrol agents, and with the occasional Department of Public Safety officer, though DPS rarely showed up so far out of the city.

Josie followed Winning’s 1980s Cadillac Eldorado to her trailer. The car was the size of a boat with a mottled black and gray paint job. Josie thought it was one of the ugliest cars she had ever seen. She followed Winning down Farm Road 170 west toward Candelaria, a ghost town and dead end for the 170. After the Mexican Revolution ended, the cavalry pulled out and the city had faded. Josie had once talked with an old rancher who raised his family in Candelaria back in the seventies. He said there were no border issues back then. People crossed the river at will and traded basic goods among the small towns. Families were buried on both sides of the river. Josie gazed out across the Chihuahuan Desert and tried to imagine the freedom and lack of fear that families like that once felt.

Winning was living alone in one of the most remote places in the United States, down the lane from Red Goff, a man rumored to have an arsenal of several hundred guns, including high-powered rifles and automatic weapons. Josie had no doubt that Winning knew more than she was telling, but Josie needed to deal with the dead body before the heat destroyed it. Just as important, Goff’s house had to be inventoried and locked before the vultures ransacked it for the rumored arsenal.

As the leader of the Gunners, a right-wing group of Second Amendment nuts who thought guns would solve the world’s ills, Red was known throughout West Texas. He was an arrogant hothead. Before he turned into a hermit, Josie would occasionally roust him from various Democratic rallies for shouting obscenities and causing a public disturbance. Josie had gathered intelligence on Red’s organization, the Gunners, for years. They had too much firepower to let it get into the wrong hands.

Ten minutes outside Artemis, Josie followed Winning down Davis Pass, a gravel road prone to washouts. The drive stirred up a thick layer of white desert dirt that recoated the ocotillo and prickly pear cactus that dotted the roadside. Large boulders, gray green agave, juniper, and Spanish daggers marked the white, sandy foothills for miles. The Chinati Peak could be seen in the distance, a grand backdrop to the ramshackle trailer propped up on two dozen cinder blocks in the rocky dirt. Josie wondered what kept the trailer from washing away in a heavy downpour.

Otto’s Artemis PD jeep was parked out front, the navy blue paint barely visible under the nearly permanent layer of dust. The jeeps were a perk of the job: four-wheel drive, no-frills, stripped-down retired army models capable of driving anywhere, on road or off. Otto stepped out of the trailer as Pegasus parked her Eldorado beside the jeep and got out of her car looking angry and hot. Her car windows were down, and Josie figured she had no air-conditioning.

“It’s Red Goff in there, sure enough,” Otto said with a frown as Josie stood and slammed her door shut.

He smoothed down the flyaway gray hair on top of his head. Otto weighed forty pounds over the department limit for patrol work, but it had never been an issue. He had served as chief of police for twelve years before giving it up for a slower pace. He was still an excellent officer, slow and methodical.

“Murder or suicide?” Josie asked.

“There’s a nice piece of irony,” Otto said. “Gunshot through the head. Unless he’s been moved, angle’s wrong for suicide. Five hundred guns in his closet to save him from the government, and what do you want to bet one of the other gun crazies shot him?”

Josie introduced Otto to Winning, who still looked hot and annoyed.

“Let’s go over this again. What time did you get off work?” Josie asked her.

Winning rolled her eyes. “My shift ended at seven o’clock this morning. I got home at seven fifteen. I took a shower and went to bed.”

“You slept here all day long?” Josie asked.

“Yep.”

“A guy gets shot on your couch and you don’t hear it?” Josie asked.

“Nope.”

“You might want to lose the attitude. You’re a suspect for murder on a pretty short list.”

Winning laughed. “A short list? The guy’s threatened to kill half of Texas, you included. You got more suspects than you can count.”

“Difference is, he’s lying on your couch,” Josie said. “Now, tell me how it is a man gets shot in your trailer and you don’t hear it.”

She scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. “If I knew, I’d tell you. Maybe someone shot him with a silencer. Maybe they shot him while I was in the shower with the music up.”

“You have a stereo in the bathroom?” Josie asked.

Winning walked to the trailer and stepped inside her front door. Josie followed her up the stack of cinder blocks that made for a front stoop and entered the trailer. Otto had propped the door open, but the heat was stifling.

The corpse was lying on the couch with a hole in the center of his forehead and three dried blood rivulets that ran down the side of his nose and right cheek. His face was covered in stubble that matched the gray of the military haircut on his head. Red’s eyes were open and vacant, the old arrogance extinguished.

Red Goff had been a thin man, standing about five feet five inches, but in the heat of the trailer, his face and arms were already beginning to bloat. It gave him a distended look, as if he were reflected in a fun house mirror. He wore black polyester dress pants and a white button-down shirt that was pulled up on one side, exposing a pale, hairy stomach that somehow looked more obscene than the bullet hole through his head.

The couch was up against a wall in the living room, the only room to the left of the front door. To the right was a small dining room and kitchen.

Pegasus pointed down a short hallway through the kitchen. “Bathroom and bedroom are down there.”

Josie entered the bathroom and saw a duffel bag–sized stereo perched on a wooden shelf on the wall facing the shower. She pushed the power button, and the Kinks blasted out from the speakers. She turned it off. She stepped back out into the hallway and saw that Red’s body couldn’t be seen from the hallway area in the back of the trailer. The couch sat behind a four-foot-by-four-foot half wall that separated the front door entryway from the living room.

“Satisfied?” Winning asked.

“Otto?” Josie called. “Give me twenty seconds, then shoot off one round.”

Josie ignored Pegasus standing in the hallway and shut the bathroom door. She turned the shower on and pressed the power button on the stereo to hear a head-splitting
La-la-la-la Lola.
Ten seconds later she heard a dim pop, but if Winning had been singing with the music, she could have missed the sound. Her bedroom was to the right of the bathroom, so she could have taken her shower and gone to bed without seeing the body.

Josie opened the door.

Winning cocked her head but said nothing.

“It’s pretty flimsy. What time did you take your shower?” Josie asked.

“Seven thirty.”

“Exactly?”

“I get off work at seven. I come straight home. Drink two or three shots of tequila. Depends on how bad the shift was. I take a shower, brush my teeth, and go to bed.”

“You lock your door when you’re home?”

Winning pulled a rubber band off her wrist and ran her fingers through her sweaty, tangled hair to pull it into a loose ponytail behind her head. “Can I at least turn the air-conditioning on? I turn it off when I leave for work. I can’t even breathe in here.”

Josie nodded toward the living room and watched Winning walk by the body on her couch, grimace down at it, then turn the wall unit at the end of the room on high.

Otto had come back into the trailer and was on one knee by the couch, getting a carpet sample. He cursed as sweat dripped from the end of his nose and onto the plastic evidence bag in his hand.

“It already smells in here. Can’t you get him out?” Winning asked, her nose wrinkled in disgust.

“The coroner should be here soon. We’ll get him out as soon as we can. Let’s step outside,” Josie said.

Outside, Pegasus led Josie to a small picnic table under a clump of gnarled cedar trees that offered a surprising amount of shade from the setting sun. “I can give you a glass of well water that tastes like nails, or you can have a beer,” Winning said.

She crossed her forearms in front of her and leaned on the picnic table. Josie noted the sprinkling of freckles across her nose and high, pronounced cheekbones. She was prettier than she let on.

“Nothing, thanks,” Josie said. She pulled out her steno pad and opened it. “Do you lock your doors when you come home, Ms. Winning?”

She smirked. “One swift kick’s all you need. Red claimed Kenny used to padlock the door. I can’t see why.”

Josie studied her for a moment. “Back at the office, why did you need to give me the keys to your trailer if it wasn’t locked?”

Winning tilted her head and paused long enough to consider the question, or her answer. Josie couldn’t tell.

“Don’t you think it was wise to lock the dead man inside until the police could get here? You wouldn’t want the body tampered with, would you?”

Josie gestured toward the trailer. “How did Officer Podowski get inside?”

“Beats me. Have to ask him. Probably the extra key under the mat.”

“You ought to consider being more careful with who has access to your trailer.”

Winning shrugged.

“Can you think of anyone who would want to break in?” Josie asked.

“Nope.”

“Have you made any enemies since you moved here?”