Chapter 4

I set out from the house as the sun was sinking behind the West Mesa ... though what they call a mesa here in Albuquerque would be a bluff anywhere else. The low silhouettes of the Albuquerque Volcanoes were black against the sunset sky, and further west Mount Taylor – the sacred Turquoise Mountain to the Navajos – lifted its three peaks even higher.

I drove the Blazer down to Nob Hill and parked in the lot behind the Nob Hill Shopping Center – wondering how on earth I'd managed to find an open spot there. It wasn't that I thought I'd find my answers in Nob Hill, though I didn't think I wouldn't find them there either. I learned long ago that whether it was Holmes or Spock who said that it's a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts, it's true. I had no facts, except the fact that the minivan the shooters had used had to be stolen, so I wasn't going to theorize about where along Central I'd find what I was looking for.

But I could pretty well guarantee that trolling Central would be helpful. For decades Central, especially certain stretches of it, has been Albuquerque's seedy strip. In his Bubba Mabry novels Steve Brewer calls it "the Cruise," and though I've never run across anyone else who used the term, it gives you an idea of the kind of place it is.

I've been in Albuquerque since 1992. I've got scores – probably hundreds, if I decided to count 'em all – of contacts down there, pimps and prostitutes, drug dealers and drug users, thieves and fences, liars and con artists, women who looked 50 and weren't yet 30, children who claimed to be 18 and might be only three years younger, even people I truly believed either had killed and raped or would do so if they got the chance. When you work in crime, you've got to use the sources available – you just aren't going to learn anything about an armed robbery by talking to the nuns in a convent on the good side of town.

I started walking west. Most of the lowlifes along Central know me – to see, if not to speak to. Many of the prostitutes in particular are friendly with me, since they're in a "people business" and have to at least act friendly if they're going to make money. I could hardly go 50 yards without someone speaking to me.

I wasn't looking for prostitutes, though. Just as bakers know baking and electricians know electricity, and can't do each others' jobs or even say much about them, so prostitutes have their narrow field of vision and don't know much outside their nightly grind. I wanted gang members.

I'd been at it for 20 or 25 minutes when I came across someone I knew. He was huddled in the shadows where a street light was off, and it looked like he was passing drugs to someone – certainly the other person passed money back.

I stood back and waited. It didn't matter who I was, if I interrupted a drug deal I could get myself shot to pieces. When the other person had slipped into even deeper shadows and vanished, I walked slowly forward, letting my heels knock loudly on the sidewalk. I can be utterly silent in my boots when I need to be, but I didn't want to surprise this guy – all gang members are ready to shoot, it's part of their psychopathic machismo, but I knew this character enjoyed shooting people.

He looked toward the sound, recognized me, and strutted toward me. "Hey, Vaquero, ¿cómo estás esta noche?" My nickname down on Central is Cowboy, and he was using the Spanish equivalent.

"Estoy trabajando." Then I switched to English, for my Spanish is limited. "You doin' okay?"

"Hey, D-Bullet's always doin' okay, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"Well, I would if you'd say it," I told him. Most of the time I ignore that verbal tic, but I'd known this guy long enough that I could get away with it. "I got a question for you."

"Yeah?"

"A white minivan, stolen, someone used it in a drive-by in the Heights."

"Hey, I heard about that. Why'd they ice that huero, anyway?" The slang Spanish word for "white person" is, in New Mexico anyway, huero. The rest of us say "Anglo."

"Beats me, Bullet. But I'm gonna find out – or at least I'm gonna find who did it."

"You on the case, man?"

"Yeah."

"I thought you didn't do no home-i-cides." He exaggerated the pronunciation of the long word.

"I don't. But this guy'd been in my office five minutes before. I'd turned him down, he'd gone downstairs ... and someone dropped him right underneath my window. This one's mine."

He shrugged, the overdone shrug of the gang member. He was in motion all the time, his hands and arms in the stylized gestures gangbangers use, his head bobbing, he feet shuffling on the sidewalk. He was wearing a Denver Broncos jersey that came to the middle of his thighs, and a pair of denim shorts that hung down almost to his ankles and would, I knew, be nearly falling off under his jersey so that his boxers would be very visible. His gang was los Mustangos, the Broncos, which is why the Denver teams colors were his. He might not be armed, but I wouldn't have been willing to put money on it.