Loose Cannon

By Lynn Stansbury

Paz Hernandez, beautiful and passionate, a physicians assistant and leader in the Latino community of southeastern Colorado, wants to know why two of her doctor friends from her missionary days in Central America were killed and why a third is now fleeing his country and begging her for help. But she never gets to ask him. Even as she prepares to hide him at her isolated canyon-country ranch, they are both gunned down in the ranch yard by an unknown assailant.

The obvious suspect is Pazs husband, Matt Ewan, a local Anglo known for his drinking and violent, secretive past. But Ewan has the perfect alibi: he claims he was changing a flat tire for the daughter-in-law of the most powerful man in the region, a federal judge whose younger brother is very obviously running for president of the United States.

So who is this Dr. Jillian Cannon who Ewan says can vouch for him, and why hasnt she turned up? What does she have to hideor to hide from?

In the end, everyone swept into the maelstrom of Paz Hernandezs passion for justice must decide where their loyalties lie and whether the soul of a man running for president is worth more or less than the life of an ordinary man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462032662

Lynn Stansbury

Lynn Stansbury is a community medicine physician, researcher, and novelist. Crossing the Divide grew from a time when her husband was stationed at what was then Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center, in Denver, and she was running the Colorado Black Lung Program. They now live in Seattle.

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Copyright © 2011 Lynn Stansbury

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-3267-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-3266-2 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/1/2011

Contents

Prologue

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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24.

Epilogue

Prologue

About noon on the day that Paz Hernandez died, she got her great aunt Lupe off the commode and tucked into bed in the nursing home, kissed the old lady on the cheek, waved to the staff RN down the hall, and drove off to find lunch before she headed home. Home was a hundred miles north and east, up over Raton Pass and out across the Comanche National Grassland toward Los Rios, Colorado. Paz was a physician’s assistant and, one way or another, related to most of south-eastern Colorado and the northern edges of New Mexico. Chores like checking on Great Aunt Lupe were routinely left to her, however that might play hell with her professional life. She pulled into a space in front of the Mexican bakery and cafe run by a distant cousin of her mother’s and saw a new silver-grey dualie pickup pulling away, the kind of truck driven by men who haul a lot of stock or big egos. She didn’t see the driver, but she recognized the vanity license plate, and that surprised her. She calculated times. He was awfully early. If he meant for her to follow him, he was out of luck. She was going to stick to the plan. Besides, she was really hungry and needed about a gallon of coffee.

Half an hour later, feeling a lot better, and with a take-away bag of sandwiches, oranges, and bottled water, she headed north. At the northern edges of Trinidad, she left the Interstate and picked up US 350/160 where it runs along the south banks of the Purgatoire, the Picketwire to local Anglos, El Purgatorio in Spanish, The River of Souls Lost in Purgatory. The highway crossed the river, following the line of the railroad. Wherever the road dipped into a wash, a car could be hidden until you were right on it, but the feeling was of a vast privacy. Before she would lose the last bit of connection from Raton, Paz pulled out her cell phone and speed-dialed her cousin Margarita in Los Rios, where she had left the kids. She reported on the old lady’s condition to Margarita, mediated a lunch-time argument between her daughter, aged eight, and her son, who at five already thought his opinion rated higher than his sister’s, and then rang off.

The road headed down into a deep, boulder-strewn arroyo. In the narrow midday shadow cast by the biggest of the boulders, a man sat on the ground watching her approach. She slowed. He stood up. She looked at him carefully. He was dressed like any other Mexican field laborer abandoned by the roadside: jeans, broadcloth shirt, straw hat. Up close, he didn’t fit the part. Fine-boned, pale-skinned, he could have been any forty-year-old, upper-class Latino. Looking at him, she didn’t remember him specifically. The other two, the ones who had been killed, had been her friends. She pulled over and rolled down the passenger side window.

In Spanish, she said, You need a ride?

You are very kind, the man said carefully, as if reciting coded lines, his eyes searching her face like fingers holding a key in that moment before the tumblers give and the lock shifts. She wondered if he remembered her. I am waiting for family.

I’ll do, Paz said. Something indefinable passed across the man’s face, a softening around the eyes like hope or relief, both quickly suppressed. Hop in. The man opened the door slowly as if still in doubt. He slid in beside her. Paz nodded to the bag of food as she pulled back on to the road. Take what you want. You must at least be thirsty.

Still with that look of mystified relief, as if he still couldn’t quite believe that he was here and this was real, the man explored the plastic bag, taking out a bottle of water and an orange. He peeled the fruit and pried apart the sections with deft, unexpectedly clean hands, a surgeon’s hands. The gold-and-spice scent of orange peel exploded around them. Are you taking me to Denver?

Not today. It’s too far, like this, in the middle of the day, unless I’d made arrangements in advance. I didn’t get the call you were actually on your way ‘til almost seven this morning. Had to dump my work schedule and the kids. She shrugged. Not a big deal. I’m always having to go down to Raton on the spur of the moment anyway, so everybody’s kind of used to that. She smiled at him and saw, even through his fear and bone-weariness, the little fire kindle behind his eyes. She liked knowing she could still do that to a man. Don’t worry. The ranch is isolated, remote. She smiled again. "No migra." Migra was the local jargon for imigración, the Border Patrol. You could stay for years, and no one would know the difference. That was true enough. Ranch life did that to women, dried them up and blew them away like old cottonwood leaves tumbling along a canyon floor. She liked the feel of driving fast in her new car with this elegant refugee beside her. She laughed out loud and slowed to make the turn from the highway onto the county road.

Another fifteen miles or so across the grasslands, she turned off again, this time onto a private road that angled to the right beside two mailboxes. One mailbox was built of stuccoed adobe, big as a dog house, with a tile roof. The other was metal and rusting out at the corners. She pulled up beside the metal box, pulled out a handful of envelopes—bills, junk mail—and tucked them in the car door pocket. Just beyond the mailboxes, she turned again, this time to the left onto a dirt road headed due east, toward the Purgatoire canyon.

The car rattled along, the rear-view mirrors filling with pink adobe dust, and the land opened out on either side, khaki and grey-green, baked pale by the afternoon sun and spotted with dark clumps of cholla cactus. Paz said, There is something that I want you to do for me.

The man seemed to have passed into that anesthetic state that comes from exhaustion and someone else taking charge at last. His head turned slowly to her voice.

She went on. I want you to write down everything for me. Everything. From the beginning. A glance showed her his face locked down again in sudden fear. Or we can just record it, like an interview, if that’s easier for you.

The man shook his head. Maybe.

He didn’t say when it’s safe. Maybe she should not be pushing him, but she didn’t have much time to get the whole story. She’d leave him at the safe house in Denver tomorrow, and with luck, a day later he’d have crossed into Canada.

It’s important to record what you know, she said, glancing from the road to his face. She sounded like a pre-school teacher. She didn’t mean to. Maybe endless days of earnest conversations with children and patients did that to you. I have Cesar and Julio’s data, the real data, that Cesar gave me years ago. And I have an idea what happened next. But I need to know for real. I need to know what happened to them. I am the only other person who has seen their data. That was true enough for now. You must believe that I will use it in the right way. And only when you’re safe.

She wanted to sing, sing and dance in a great circle skirt like a blanket of a thousand flowers to the music of a trumpet and guitars. This is it. This is what it’s about: to do even just one thing that makes your life worth having been lived, something more than just being a successful breeding animal, something that will have made the world even just one step better than it was before. They tried to buy me off. Pendejos. Dickheads. Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a living stream.

The road crested the lip of a deep arroyo and bent to the left, winding down an eroded cliff face. The home ranch nested at the bottom. There, a bend in the creek supported an oasis of willows, tamarisk, and cottonwoods and the original one-room adobe with its log and weathered shingle extensions, barn, sheds, and corrals. Let’s get you some real food and a bath and some sleep, she said. Then we can talk more.

The clock on the dashboard read two o’clock. She had to check in with Margarita about the kids. She also wanted to talk to her husband. He was in his prowling phase, late summer days spent alone, quartering the ranch looking for trouble: strays, bad fence, late calves, windmill trouble, anything better seen to in warmth and sun rather than rain and snow. He usually returned for a while in the middle of the day to get out of the worst of the heat, but his pickup and horse trailer were not in the yard. The only reason they broke even was good hay range and his Army retirement—her paycheck from the clinic bounced more often than not—but they did okay. This land was his life, born and bred and come home to now after another life elsewhere. Generally he stuck to it, making surprisingly few demands on her beyond sex and food. Sometimes, she thought he found her energy and activism entertaining, like another man might find television or computer games. There was always the wry smile, as if his experience had been in another dimension, somehow more real than hers.

Paz pulled her car into the row of farm equipment and vehicles that marked off hard-packed earth driveway from hard-packed earth yard. Well, this ought to get his attention. She might even be able to con him into making the drive to Denver for her. Relieved at the thought, she smiled at her guest: This is it. Not fancy. But clean and dry. She got out and headed across the yard to the house. She noticed that Matt’s cow dog had not come out to greet her. The puppies must have come. She would have to check the barn after she saw to her guest.

The old adobe was the front part of the house. A little porch faced east, sheltering the door and providing scaffolding for a climbing rose. The porch was deeply shadowed at this time of day, and even the shadow was scrambled by the tangle of the rose bush. Paz was halfway across the yard before she saw the figure standing there.

Matt? Even when she saw the rifle, she wasn’t concerned. Her husband routinely carried a rifle on his rounds, and there were other guns in the house. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the barrel as it swung across the man’s body toward her like a tunnel with an oncoming train. She said, What kind of stupid—?

The report of the rifle was huge, like a blow. A split second passed before she understood that the blow was real, a choking jolt that threw her backwards. The other reports came more dimly, with a confused sensation that must be pain and more jolts from the front and another from behind as she hit the ground. The last thing she saw was the blue of the afternoon sky. The last thing she knew was the sound of the gun, again and again and again.

1.

HALF a mile farther along the county road toward Los Rios and not too long after Paz Hernandez turned off and stopped to pick up her mail, another woman stood beside an old green Volvo station wagon at the edge of the road. The car’s left front tire was flat, and the woman had done her share of cussing and wondering what-the-hell. Now she stood beside the car, hands in the hip pockets of her jeans, gazing off to the west as if caught by the view, hung between worlds. For the first time since heading west four days ago, she could see the mountains shimmering on the horizon like the promise of heaven. And knew why she hadn’t come back here for all these years. You could love a place too much. You could love anything too much. She pulled off her glasses, cleaned them meditatively with the hem of her t-shirt, still gazing off to the west, then replaced them carefully on her face.

So if the Archangel Gabriel had appeared just then to announce that she was about to be offered the opportunity to be deputized as avenging angel for one Paz Hernandez, she would have heard him out sympathetically and suggested referral to a specialist in psycho-pharmaceuticals. Jillian Cannon was a physician, a widow, and the mother of a teenaged son and would have said of herself that the avoidance of unnecessary risk was her only mission in life. At fifty-three, she was thin and fit and her hair—short-short for about a week now, fashionably spiky, and still feeling very odd—was only just beginning to grizzle to a satisfactory lupine gray. She prescribed appropriate medications for her patients as needed and largely avoided medications herself. Even driving solo from the edges of DC to this scrubby corner of southeastern Colorado rather than flying had its own logic, a therapeutic dose of unobligated time in which to steel herself for her re-introduction into the bosom of her dead husband’s family, who were neither Bushes nor Kennedys but not for their lack of trying.

She didn’t get the Archangel but Abraham, her heeler mutt, leaning out the back window and whining at her. You are not a large help, she said, stroking his face. A heavy pickup roared past, swinging out into the center of the road to avoid the parked car, buffeting them with the speed of its passage. Abraham sneezed, and Jillian looked up and down the road. And this isn’t a particularly useful place to change a tire. She got back into the car. At least not and survive the experience. Abraham perched in the space between the front seats and licked her ear. She laughed and gated him back with her elbow. Thank-you, my man. I’m sure my ears are a disgrace. But I’ve got other things on my mind right now.

Two hundred yards up the road, a line of old cottonwoods marked an arroyo south of the road angling left toward the Purgatoire drainage. A pickup with a horse trailer was pulled off there, suggesting a gap in the fence and a culvert across the drainage ditch. It also suggested the conjunction of men and horses, always a good sign in Jillian’s world. She could imagine worlds, indeed, had lived in some, where men on horseback were the equivalent of men with guns in jeeps and helicopters. But that was then and there, and this was here and now. She started the motor, eased the car up the road, and pulled in under the shade of the cottonwoods behind the pickup. The back gate of the trailer was down. No one seemed be around. Calling Triple A was logical but not efficient, and even here so close to what was going to pass for home for the next ten days, the less time she spent visibly alone by the side of the road, the better. Jillian pulled out her phone. There was just enough cell coverage to leave a message that she’d had a flat and would be getting in late.

A quarter of an hour later, she stood back from her labors with the lug wrench and knotted one hand in frustration into her hair. Then she pulled her hand away and looked at it. It was filthy. Crap. So much for sophisticated new look. She let the breeze churning the cottonwoods dry the sweat on her face and reviewed her complete lack of progress with the tire. Terrier-like determination is all very well, but just now an extra six inches of leverage and fifty pounds of muscle—or even just gravitational advantage—would have been useful. And of course now she had lost fifteen minutes not waiting for Triple A. Crap, she said again.

A man’s voice behind her said, Want some help? She jerked around. A pretty little sorrel mare stood hardly a dozen yards behind her. The rider sat with his hands crossed comfortably on the saddle horn, as if he had been sitting and watching for some minutes, his approach muffled by the deep sand of the arroyo and the clatter of wind-tossed leaves. Like the pickup and trailer, the man looked hard-used but basically sound and serviceable. Not unlike herself, she knew. And the mare was beautiful, clean and healthy. Dried sweat rippled her shoulders, but she wasn’t breathing hard. Ears forward, she reached out her head with well-bred curiosity.

Abraham whined. He stood stiff-legged on the back seat of the car, staring rigidly out the open door at the man and the horse. Not even his tail moved.

She said to the dog, Thanks for alerting me. She looked back at the man on the horse, and if the man was the Archangel Gabriel, she didn’t recognize him. She did always recognize a man she would be willing to go to bed with. Or would have been, back in the far gone days when she still believed she might get more out of a casual encounter than a sexually transmitted disease. She said, Why would you possibly think I needed help? It only took me fifteen minutes to get the first nut off. At that rate, it should only take me another hour to get this sucker changed.

The man dipped his head so that his hat brim hid his face for a moment. The hat was a Vietnam-era olive-drab boonie, faded now to mud gray and frayed around the brim. If he had worn his hair in a long gray ponytail and tattoos on his bare forearms, he could not have sketched for Jillian a more recognizable history. He looked over at her again but made no move to get off his horse. When I hit the ground, does your dog go for me or my horse?

Probably neither. Abraham’s herding instincts don’t seem to have kicked in yet. He does get upset about people grabbing at me, though. He’s even gotten after my son for doing that.

The man’s head dipped again. Point taken. He dismounted in a single smooth motion and stood for a moment with one hand on the mare’s shoulder. Then he hunkered down, reached out one hand, and called to the dog.

Abraham hopped out of the car and paced over to the man, head down, tail wagging.

She said, So much for the guard dog gig.

The man grinned, and his long, leathery face lit up as he played with the dog. Got one just like him. Nothing like her with cattle. Made her stay home today, though. Pups due.

He tied the mare to the trailer, pulled off her gear, and hung it over the tailgate of the truck. Then he came back and stood looking down at the wheel.

You got in trouble by jacking it up before you loosened the lug nuts. Even so— He picked up her lug wrench and then set it down as if it were breakable. From the back of his truck, he pulled out a heavy, broad-footed jack and a lug wrench to match, let the wheel down, and started to work on the lug nuts. Jillian’s medical specialty was occupational medicine and ergonomics, so she had some clinical justification for a close observation of the muscular arch of back and shoulders under the man’s t-shirt, the splint-and-brace effect of shotgun chaps across a tight butt, the appreciable lack of overhanging gut, the deft play of long sinewy hands and wrists on heavy tools. She stood off to one side and a little behind him, out of his line of view, arrayed in the clinical face and disengaged body language of her craft. Dealing with men in awkward spaces was also something of a life-time specialty.

He set the spare onto the lug bolts. You’re a long way from home.

At the nod to her out-of-state license plates, the recognition that she was not local, all of Jillian’s threat-receptors flipped to red alert. Paranoid, perhaps. She recognized both a hair-trigger instinct for survival and a reluctance to think ill of this man. She said, pleasantly, as she might have to a patient, In a sense. I’m also David Braun’s widow. So in a sense, I’m home, too. He looked around at her, and so she added a wry smile. The Braun name could be taken various ways around here.

He turned back to re-setting the lug nuts. Not yet. BC land starts where we share the turn-off. This is still my land. BC was Bent’s Claim, the imperial Braun family holdings, and the abbreviation was, she knew, occasionally used less reverentially. His voice still had the correct and polite diction of a certain level of field-grade officer, but she didn’t have any doubt as to where he stood on the Braun issue. He tapped the hubcap back on, stood up, took off his hat and wiped his face with the back of his forearm. There was a time, he said, When David Braun was my best friend. He dropped the hat back on his head. A hell of a long time ago, though. He turned abruptly, carried his own tools back to his rig, untied the mare’s lead rope, and walked her onto the trailer.

Relieved, grateful, a little confused, Jillian whistled Abraham into the car and slid in after him. She worked the car around so that she was headed out toward the road, with her open driver’s side window facing him