The Territory A Novel - By Tricia Fields Page 0,16
from the shooting at the Trauma Center had stabilized and was ready for questioning. Martínez was working on fingerprints and hopefully a positive identification from NCIC or DACS, the National Crime Information Center or Deportable Alien Control System. Josie thanked him and told him she would be at the jail by noon the next day to interview the prisoner.
Before Josie hung up, she asked, “What’s the story with your deputy, Hack Bloster, and the Gunners?”
“Bloster’s too intense for his own good. He’s a gun nut, but he’s a good cop. He’ll walk into a shit storm without a second thought. He’s good with border issues.”
“He showed up at Red’s tonight, off duty. He threw his weight around. Wanted to know why your department wasn’t conducting the investigation.”
“It doesn’t surprise me. I’ll talk to him.”
“Remind him a little professional courtesy goes a long way.”
THREE
Josie pointed her jeep toward the sun, just a red bump on the darkening horizon, and drove with all four windows down, listening to Johnny Cash sing a live version of “Folsom Prison Blues.” She attempted to focus her thoughts on the winding gravel road that led to her house in the foothills of the Chinati Mountains, but the image of Vie Blessings praying on the hospital floor imprinted like a watermark over everything. The wind would not clear the vision of the young surgeon, still in his blood-splattered scrubs, crying into his hands outside the clinic after it was over. And she could not erase the thought that she knew would invade every nightmare for the next month: We are losing our town to mercenary killers.
As Josie was cresting a hill sloping into a patchy field of prairie grass and mesquite, her eyes were drawn to her home ahead. Its pink stucco walls glowed each night at sunset. The house was a simple rectangle with a deep front porch held aloft by hand-hewn pecan timbers. Two low-slung chairs, one for her neighbor, Dell Seapus, and one for her, faced the panoramic view of the endless Chihuahuan Desert that stretched out beyond the Rio and deep into Mexico. Behind her house, the Chimiso Peak, a rocky crag in the midst of the Chinati Mountain range, was visible.
Chester, a brown and tan bloodhound, lay on the porch in front of her door, head on his front paws, his ears draped across the floor like a head scarf. Josie knew he would not raise his head until she stood in front of him, hand outstretched to scratch behind his velvet ears. She smiled, rolled her windows up, and shut the jeep off. She’d asked Dell to stop in and feed the dog last night while she was away from home. Dell would never admit it, but he loved the dog as much as Josie did.
She unlocked the front door and followed the hound inside to a living room painted a buttery yellow and filled with rustic Southwestern furniture, Navajo Indian blankets, and more benches and chairs that Dell had carved from fallen cedar and pecan trees off his ten-thousand-acre ranch. The seventy-year-old bachelor’s ranch was tucked into the foothills behind her house. Josie had come to know Dell shortly after joining the police department nine years ago. He had been robbed at gunpoint in his barn, where two horse thieves had loaded five of Dell’s prized Appaloosas onto a trailer and taken off. After a four-week investigation, Josie tracked the men to New Mexico and returned the horses unharmed. Her detective work had established her as a first-rate cop in town and won her a loyal friend in Dell.
Josie had spent quite a bit of time at Dell’s ranch over the course of the investigation and fell in love with the desert. Dell deeded her ten acres of land on the front end of his property, and she built her home with the trust money she had received as a child when her father was killed in a line-of-duty accident. She moved from Indiana at the age of twenty-four to escape her mother and begin a new life. A year after moving to Artemis, she moved into the first place that had ever felt like home to her. Dell claimed to always have her back, and she did not doubt him.
Josie unstrapped her uniform belt and hung it on a hook just inside her pantry door, stuck a bag of popcorn in the microwave for dinner, and walked back to the house’s only bedroom, barely large enough to hold her