Outlaw Mountain

It was a tough call. On the one hand, a man’s life might be at stake. On the other, a conviction. “We’d better go check,” Joa

Ten minutes later they were standing in front of Clete Rogers’ modest tin-roofed house. It was a white clapboard affair that clearly dated from Tombstone’s mining heyday. On three sides the house was surrounded by a thicket of agave. Some of the cacti had done their century plant performance, leaving behind long skeletal stalks that still held shriveled and blackened seed pods while all around a new generation of tiny plants sprouted from the hardened earth.

Seeing the dying cacti gave Joa

Joa

Joa

“I guess we’d better break it,” Ernie said.

“Let’s try the back door,” Joa

The back of the house contained a shaky but fully enclosed utility porch. The door with its horizontal panels dated from the same era as the one at the front of the house, but here the etched glass had long since been replaced by a single pane of ordinary window glass.

“Break away,” she told Ernie. “At least this one won’t cost as much when it comes time to replace it.”

Seconds after shattering the glass, Ernie unfastened the inside latch, opened the door, and let Joa

With Joa

While Joa

The bedroom was crammed with furniture. Not only did it contain a bed, a huge mirrored dresser, and a nightstand, it also held a frail cherry-wood dining room table that evidently functioned as a desk. Here there were papers-neatly stacked and/or assigned to folders. In the middle of the desk sat a computer, an old desktop model that looked old-fashioned and clunky even to Joa

“What?” she asked.

“Come around here and look. The screen’s so bad that you’ll have to stand directly in front of it before you’ll be able to read it.”

Joa

“Sorry for what?” Joa

“Doesn’t say.”

“What does that sound like to you?” Joa

“Well,” Ernie said. “Taken with our suspicions about what happened to Alice Rogers, my guess would be it’s the begi

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Joa

The pickup was not only unlocked, it was also empty. The single-car garage, most likely built in the era of the Model Ts, was too small for the whole of the truck to fit inside. Only the front hood and fender nosed into the garage’s darkened interior. At the front of the garage the two officers found a series of wooden shelves, sagging under burdens of neatly labeled boxes and paint cans. Paint and boxes, but no sign of the missing Cletus Rogers.

Back out in the yard, Joa

“Good,” Ernie replied. “That makes two of us.”

From the moment Joa

“I’m going to walk around a little,” she told Ernie. “You don’t need a search warrant for that.”

Tombstone may have been the Town Too Tough to Die, but the same couldn’t be said for municipal infrastructure. Within three blocks on either side of the main drag, thin layers of long-ago-laid asphalt had now reverted to potholed gravel trails. As Joa

In the desert, a circling buzzard carries its own ominous message of death and dying. Sighting in on the bottom of the bird’s lazy circle, Joa

The fully clothed body of a man lay sprawled face-down on the bottom of the deep end of an empty swimming pool. There was no question about whether or not he was dead. Joa

“Ernie,” Joa

Moments later, the detective came huffing down the hill. “What is it?” he demanded as he caught up with her. “What’s going on?”

“Call Dispatch and cancel Search and Rescue. I’m pretty sure we’ve found Clete Rogers.”

For Joa

Alice Rogers was dead and now so was her son. What does it take, Joa