“Look at it this way: It’ll give you a chance to work things out. You can’t leave something like that unresolved.”
“Thank you, Doctor Phil.”
Mickey said, “Who’s this Hunter Kincaid?”
Hondo said, “She’s a friend of ours. Grew up in a town about twenty miles from Ronny and me. She and Ronny became quite the item last year while we were working a case, then they developed some problems that have to be worked out so we can all be friends again.”
“She’s a Border Patrol Agent?”
“Yeah, lives in West Texas. Good officer, too.”
I said, “A hell of a shot. Deadly, not someone you want mad at you.” I looked at Hondo as I spoke.
Mickey said, “I’d like to meet her. You know, Bob had optioned a script a couple of weeks ago that’s about the Border Patrol. It’s called Ninety Notches, and of course he would play the lead.”
“Ninety Notches?”
Mickey pretended she was holding a pistol and she pointed at the grip. “You know, notches for the men killed in gunfights?”
If somebody lived through ninety gunfights and put notches in a pistol grip, there wouldn’t be enough wood left to make a decent toothpick. The last person I’d read about who was vain enough to put notches on their gun was General Patton, and that had been when he was a young lieutenant with Pershing on their futile campaign into Mexico to find Pancho Villa.
Hondo said, “Sounds like an academy-award winner to me. That Bob is a genius at picking quality scripts. Big sense of realism with that one.”
Mickey nodded her head, “That is exactly what he said: ‘A movie about the realities of the border.’” As Mickey looked around you could see her mind returning to the realities of the present. She said, “What about Bob? He’s not going to throw his favorite bike off a cliff. So what do we do now?”
“Why don’t we go up there and take a look. There may not be anything to see, but we won’t know if we don’t look.”
“What about Bob’s bike?”
“We’ll tell the sheriff’s office about it when we call and have them bring it out. We can’t take four bikes back without a lot of trouble.”
We waved good-bye to the women and Mickey made push-down motions with her hands, saying in a loud, slow voice, “Stay-o...here-o.” The women looked at her with eyes so big they reminded me of owls.
Hondo touched Mickey on the shoulder and as she looked at him, he shook his head and said, “No.”
Hondo led us out of the draw and back up the trail. We reached a spot that came within fifty or sixty feet of the bluff. Hondo led us through the brush on a hand-wide trail made of flattened grass and broken twigs all the way to the edge of the bluff, where we looked down at the tops of the trees below. Just past the trees, the canyon deepened by five or six hundred feet. No sign of the women or their camp was visible.
I looked around, but the grass was so thick that nothing distinctive showed. I had my head down, focusing on the ground near the edge when Mickey squealed so loud I jumped and almost went over. “It’s Bob’s!”
I went to her and looked over the edge, then got to my hands and knees to grip the rock. Heights and me do not get along. Hondo came up behind and tapped the sole of my shoe with his toe, making a ha-ha gesture of kicking me off.
“That’s not funny,” I said. I think my voice quivered, but I’m not sure because I couldn’t hear over the thudthudthud of my heart.
“You need to relax, let that tension flow out of you.”
A laugh a minute, that’s Hondo. He hopped over me to the edge and walked along it like walking across a gym floor. He spotted it at the same time I did. A purple fanny pack, exactly like the one Mickey wore, hung up on a small bush growing out of the bluff twenty feet below the rim.
I started to say something to Hondo, but he had disappeared. As I got to my feet, Mickey screamed near my ear, “Don’t fall!” My heart whanged against my ribcage.
“Don’t do that.” I said. She was biting her fingers and pointing down the edge of the cliff. Hondo was free-climbing down the rocks like a spider, with nothing but a pair of cotton shorts between him and a hundred foot fall to rocks.
We watched him, with Mickey clinging to me the way a baby spider monkey clings to its mother. I was beginning to worry about the circulation in my arm when Hondo reached the fanny pack, picked it up, put it over his arm and neck like a bandoleer, and started up. He came up faster than he went down. When he topped out, he handed the fanny pack to Mickey. His fingers left pale dusty prints on the purple cloth. Mickey opened it and moaned. “It’s his. It’s really his. What do we do now?” She looked like she was going to cry.
“Let me take a look,” I said. She handed it to me and I squatted down, dumping out the contents on the pale yellow grass. There was a stick of strawberry Chapstick, a granola bar, a half-full box of Tic-Tacs, a money clip with the initials B.L. holding a half-inch thick stack of folded hundreds, a cheap pen from a Motel Camino Real with an address in East LA, some scraps of paper, a Leatherman pocket tool, and two flint arrowheads.
“Chumash,” Hondo said.
“What?”