a little ways off the trail. A big guy, you know. Smelled really bad.”
“How big?”
The girl shrugged. “It was hard to tell. He was laying down. Dead, you know.” She looked at the boy and giggled.
“What did he look like?”
“Like a dead man,” the boy said.
“His face,” Ramsay prompted.
“Who knows?” the boy said. “There wasn’t much of it left. Like something had chewed on it.”
“Gross,” the girl confirmed.
Ramsay levered himself out of the chair. “Think you can take me to him?”
They nodded without enthusiasm.
“You gonna need me anymore?” Orry Yates said.
“Not now, Orry. Thanks for bringing them in.”
They walked out of the small wooden building that served as La Reina County Sheriff’s office. It was built twenty years before as a sales office for an optimistic developer who thought there would be a migration of Los Angeles residents to the mountains. He was wrong.
Orry Yates climbed into the YATES PLUMING truck, waved, and drove off. Ramsay led the teenagers around to the back where the beat-up Dodge wagon was parked. His Camaro had gone to Elise in the settlement. La Reina County could afford only one sheriff’s car, and the deputies were using it.
Ramsay wondered if the dead man was Abe Craddock or Curly Vane. If it was, he owed somebody an apology for mentally placing them in a saloon somewhere. However, if it was one of them, where was the other? An argument? Too much booze and a gun goes off? Better stop building a crime until he had a look at the scene. He kicked the engine of the eight-year-old wagon to life and took off for the old Drago Road.
* * *
Deputy Roy Nevins stopped to pull his uniform pants free from the thorns of a wild blackberry bush. He knew this drill was one big waste of time. Craddock and Vane could find their way around these woods as well as anybody in the county. The only trouble they were likely to get into was when they came back to town and started drinking.
He knew Gavin Ramsay had sent him and Milo out here just to keep them busy. If it hadn’t been for the gung ho trainee, Deputy Nevins would have sacked out in the back of the car until dusk, then gone back and told Gavin there was no sign of Craddock and Vane. That’s what their search would add up to anyway. Zip. Only difference was now he’d get all wet and scratched up from these fucking thorns and his shoes would be ruined.
“Roy!” Milo called unseen from off to the left.
“Yeah?”
“Just checking our positions.”
Yeah, great. Ten-fucking-four. Milo could be a pain in the ass sometimes. But what the hell. He was only twenty. When Roy Nevins was twenty he’d been gung ho, too. The kid might grow up to be a good cop. Not in La Reina County, where a couple of overdue library books was a crime wave. But it was a start. Three months from now the state would put him somewhere else. Nice gentle way to break in as a cop. Not the way Roy Nevins had done it, on the grungiest street in the grungiest section of Oakland.
Roy had been a cowboy back then himself. No more. Now he was sitting on a pension, just putting in his time. Couple more years and he could buy that mobile home down in Baja. Sit around fishing with a cool Carta Blanca in his fist. A man could still live pretty damn good in Mexico for peanuts. Until then he would have to pass the days as comfortably as he could and put up with a certain amount of shit like slogging through these dripping woods.
“Hey!” he yelled in the direction of Milo Fernandez.
“Yo!”
“Let’s take a break.”
Roy stuck a Winston in his mouth and lit it. He eased his broad butt down onto a boulder that looked reasonably dry. Milo Fernandez, neat and slim in his uniform, pushed through the wet underbrush and joined him.
The younger man looked up at the patches of sky, they could see through the thick tops of the pine and Douglas fir trees.
“Not more than an hour of daylight left,” said Milo.
“Yeah.”
“You think we’ll find those guys before dark?”
“Craddock and Vane? No way. Not before dark, not before Easter Sunday. They gotta be lost before we can find them. Those two ain’t lost. Shit-faced somewhere, maybe, but not lost.”
“How do you know?”
“ ’Cause I know them two assholes. Why Betty Craddock wants us to find