Twice Buried by Steven F. Havill Read Free Book Online Page A

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    “The ladies at the post office were a little upset this morning. Your revolver made them nervous.”
    “ ¿ Porque? ” His voice was the lightest of whispers.
    “Maybe because you dropped it? They said you did.” He nodded and said nothing. I mentally sent out a distress call to Estelle Reyes-Guzman. English was as awkward for Reuben as Mexican was for me. Our conversation was never going to slip into that easy gait where men speak their hearts. “Would you do me a favor and not wear it into public buildings, Reuben? Maybe even leave it at home? ¿ A casa? ”
    He shrugged again and set his beer bottle down near the sink. I did the same. “If you need anything, will you call me?” I realized how stupid that sounded the instant I said it, but Reuben Fuentes had the good grace not to say, “I would call you, Señor , if I had a telephone.”
    I stepped toward the doorway. The sunlight was harsh after the cool shadows of the house. “Can I stop by every couple days to check on you?”
    He shrugged. “ Si quiere .” He held onto the doorjamb as I stepped away from the cabin. “You know,” he said, “it took me almost two hours to bury those dogs.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you’d let me help.”
    “The soil is pretty hard. Lots of rocks. They could have helped, but they didn’t.”
    “Who could have helped?”
    “ Hijos .”
    “What kids?”
    “On the road, you know. They were on the—” he stopped and pantomimed holding onto handlebars.
    “Motorcycles? Motorbikes?”
    “ Si . The two of them. They saw me digging. They could have helped.”
    Reuben was living in the wrong century. If he expected two youngsters out from town on a lark to stop, hop a barbed wire fence, and offer manual labor, he was more senile than I thought… especially if they recognized him. Even saying “Good morning” to an old, smelly, gun-toting legend like Reuben Fuentes was the stuff of which Truth or Dare games were made.
    “You didn’t recognize them?”
    He shook his head and waved a hand again.
    “Do you think it was kids who killed the dogs? Maybe on a dare? Something like that?”
    He shook his head immediately, reinforcing my impression that he had a culprit already in his shaky sights.
    “I really wish you’d let us help you, Reuben.”
    “You tell Estelita to come visit,” he said, and I knew our conversation was over.
    I thanked him for the beer and settled into the seat of the patrol car, cussing myself for being such a gutless wonder. I should have pushed him into a chair and struggled my way through his language and mine until he understood that we could help him find the son of a bitch who killed his pets. All he had to do was tell us what he knew.
    And then I realized, as I turned around and headed the patrol car out the two-track, that he understood me perfectly well. I was the one who didn’t understand. Reuben Fuentes didn’t want my help.

7
    The lane from Reuben Fuentes’s cabin to the county road was six-tenths of a mile. During the long minutes it took me to negotiate that distance without ripping out the oil pan of 310, my county car, I tried to formulate a short list of people who might have killed the old man’s dogs.
    Reuben’s only neighbor, Herb Torrance, lived in the ranch headquarters four miles down the county road. His cattle roamed the countryside, maybe even grazed on property leased from Reuben. I didn’t know for sure. But all three of the little dogs banded together wouldn’t amount to much more than a fly strike on Herb’s Brangus cattle.
    I ruled out a casual passerby as the culprit, and that conclusion didn’t require much brilliance.
    Few people cruised this end of the county except during hunting seasons, and no seasons were open now. More probable, local kids might have been responsible for the killing of the dogs. To hear Glenn Archer talk, such behavior wasn’t beyond his tribe.
    More than once during the past year our department had gotten wind