had been Zozobra before saying, “I don’t know what the fire would have done to the bones.”
Liz stood up and called over to the Protectores, “Hey, how hot would the fire have been last night?” They looked at her blankly and didn’t answer. She shrugged and whispered to Gil, “Big fricking help.”
“It’s not their fault,” Gil said. “Those guys actually have nothing to do with Zozobra. The whole thing is run by the Kiwanis Club as a fund-raiser. The only thing the Protectores do is sit around the fire all night to make sure there aren’t any sparks. Then in the morning they clean the trash up. They consider it a way of protecting the sanctity of fiesta, which is what they are all about.”
“You know a lot about this,” Liz said.
“Too much,” Gil said.
Liz sighed, sat back on her heels, and said, “All right, so Zozobra is mostly made of paper and wood, so the fire wouldn’t have been that hot. Maybe like a thousand degrees. It would have had to be about fifteen hundred degrees to melt off flesh.” She stopped for a minute before saying, “Look, all I can tell you is the skull was probably dry when it ended up here, but where it was before that . . . I just can’t narrow the time of death down more right now. This kid could have died yesterday or fifty years ago.”
She stood up and dusted off her pants before saying, “This is Santa Fe. Cars don’t rust and bodies don’t rot.”
“Hey, you. It’s time to go,” Lucy said to the lump in her bed, as she pulled on her combat boots and laced them up. She tucked her navy blue fire department T-shirt into her black pants and clipped her pager on her belt.
The man turned over and smiled at her, saying, “I bet you don’t even remember my name.”
Lucy sighed. She just wanted him gone, so she said in one breath, “Your name is Nathan. You moved here five years ago from Pennsylvania. Your mom’s a Realtor. You haven’t talked to your dad in ten years, and your only sister is coming to visit in two weeks. The best job you ever had was working one summer as a heavy equipment operator for the Forest Service. And, oh yeah, you work at the Cowgirl to make ends meet, but your true passion is art because you like the creative process. Now get the hell up.”
“How did you remember all that?”
“I’m a reporter. I pretty much just interview everybody when I meet them. It’s a habit,” she said.
“Wait. I thought you were a waitress, and you worked at someplace downtown . . . or something. The only thing I know about you is that your name is Tina.”
Lucy had forgotten she’d used her one-night-stand cover ID with him. “You know, Nathan, I’m really boring, so that about covers it,” she said. “Now, you have to go.”
“Why are you wearing an EMT uniform?”
“Nathan,” she yelled. “Get up and get out. I have to go. Lives are at stake. Or at least the life of a car is at stake.”
She pulled him off the bed and rummaged around for his shoes and shirt, which she threw at him. He started to put on his pants, but she said, “There’s no time for that.” She pushed him outside in front of her as he pulled his T-shirt on.
She locked her door in the faint twilight as he struggled with his pants, saying, “At least let me . . .”
“Sorry. Good-bye.”
She jumped in her car and pulled out of her drive while calling herself into service on her EMS radio that was bolted onto her dashboard. She popped a mint into her mouth. She had to stop herself from looking back at Nathan and checking him out in his state of undress.
She wanted to speed through her neighborhood of old adobe houses and cottonwood trees, but the roads here were old—too old to accommodate more than one car. That made getting to and from her house a constant lesson in patience as other drivers stopped and started in the narrow lanes. This morning was quiet, so she quickly made it out into the world of real streets that had proper crosswalks and bike lanes.
She was at the fire station a few minutes later, having broken many a speeding law. She opened the passenger door of the ambulance, which had PIÑON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT written in reflective paint on its