Thomas Blackhorse's Arc

Chapter 14 of 17

Thomas stood in the empty yard and listened. The windmill squeaked on the downstroke. Nothing else moved. Pablo's truck sat with the door open. Juanita's house sat with its door open. Two open doors and no people meant they had left together, one way or another, and he had minutes to guess which way. He went back inside. The tipped chair. The pulled cord. A smear on the floorboards that led to the kitchen and stopped at the back door. Not much blood. Enough to drag a foot through. He crouched and touched it. Tacky, not wet. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. He stepped onto the back stoop. Two sets of tracks in the dust. One heavy, dragging. One steady behind it. The steady set pressed deeper on the right. Someone carrying weight on that side. A shotgun, held low. The tracks went toward a metal shed sixty yards off. No vehicle missing from the yard that he could see. She had not driven out. She had walked him somewhere on this land. Thomas drew his pistol and moved along the fence line. The squeak of the windmill covered his boots. Halfway to the shed he heard a man's voice, low and steady, the way Pablo talked to his wife on the porch. Then a second voice, quieter, cutting under it. He came around the shed with the pistol up. Pablo sat against the wall with his shotgun across his knees. Blood ran from his hairline into his beard. His hands shook on the stock but his finger was off the trigger. Ten feet in front of him, Juanita knelt in the dirt with both hands flat on their thighs. The hood was down. A cut ran from their ear to their jaw where Pablo had hit them with something. A tire iron lay between them. "He wouldn't shoot," Juanita said, not turning. "I told him to. He wouldn't." "Shut up," Pablo said. His voice broke. "She keeps talking about my girl." "Pablo. Look at me." Thomas kept the pistol on Juanita. "Ray signed the warrant at nine. It's done. You shoot her, you go away, and Maria buries two." Pablo's mouth worked. He looked at the shotgun like he didn't remember picking it up. "Set it down," Thomas said. "On the dirt. Slow." Pablo set it down. Thomas moved in and kicked the shotgun back, then the tire iron. He put a knee between Juanita's shoulder blades and cuffed them with the plastic ties from his jacket. They did not fight. They laughed once, short, and then went quiet. He called Ray from the shed wall with his knee still on Juanita's back. Deputies were twelve minutes out. Pablo cried without sound against the metal. Thomas had her. He also had a father who would need a lawyer, and a woman in cuffs who had not yet said one word about where the girl was buried.