The file didn’t give away much. He sorted photos, scrutinizing their faces one by one.

Georgie Rymer, Floyd’s brother. Wire-thin, pouched eyes, gaunt features with a bovine expression. According to the notes Georgie was a hopeless heroin addict who’d been in and out of institutions. In the photo he stood hollow-chested over his string bass, used up, a mere bookmark to indicate the place where a man had once been.

Theodore Luke, the drummer, perched heavy on his throne behind a set of drums and cymbals: a thick muscular grotesque, his face averted in all the photos. It was a disfigured, wrecked face, the result of a childhood car crash and inept plastic surgery.

Mitchell Baird, guitar: a newcomer, shown only in the most recent of the stills. He stood, a bit awkward, off to one side of the bandstand, aware he was still an outsider. Mitch Baird was twenty-three, the youngest of them. Chunky, sandy-haired, nice-looking in a varsity way: an aimless college dropout from a decent family. Orozco’s stringers had traced him easily. He had drifted into trouble, joining a folk-rock band in New Mexico, getting busted at an afterhours party for possession of marijuana. First offenses usually rated suspended sentences but Mitch Baird had been unlucky: he had drawn a stiff-necked superior court judge who’d imposed a six-month sentence on him. Evidently a junkie in prison had steered him to the Rymers and he had joined the band a month or two ago in Tucson.

The only picture of the fifth member of the gang was a blurred old snapshot from a small-town junior high school album. She had been fourteen, looking eighteen; she was twenty-four now. Her name was Billie Jean Brown. The snapshot made it hard to tell; she looked plump, an unattractive girl with colorless hair and large breasts, a pouting mouth, small eyes set close together. Her relationship to the four men in the band was uncertain and if she belonged exclusively to any one of them it had escaped Orozco’s detectives. Possibly a groupie—community property, a camp-follower passed from hand to hand by the four musicians.

What sort of eerie luck had brought these five to kidnap Terry Conniston at just the right point in time to create an advantage for Oakley?

Orozco came up from the barn. The car swayed when he got in. He closed the door and wiped his face, and held one hand palm-out toward the blast of the air-conditioner. “Feels good.”

“You didn’t find anything.”

Orozco opened his right hand. In the palm were two objects: an inch-long piece of black-rubber tubing and a folded packet of oilpaper the size of a paper matchbook.

Oakley said, “Heroin?”

“I guess.”

Oakley took the oilpaper from him and had a look. “Yes.”

“Dorty stuff,” Orozco said. “Why you figure they lef’ it behind?”

“They wouldn’t have had any more use for it, would they?”

Orozco shrugged. Oakley said, “What’s that other thing?”

“Strip of rubber insulation from a wire.”

“Electric wire?”

“Yeah. Maybe they had ignition trouble with one of the cars.”

“That tells us a lot,” Oakley grumbled. “All right, let’s put more men to work in Mexico. They must have left a trail.”

“Cost you more money,” Orozco said. “Pretty soon you’ll use up enough to cover the whole damn ransom.”

“That would take twenty years. A half million dollars, Diego?”

“Okay. Listen, Carl, we got to have a talk about the ranch.”

“Conniston’s ranch?”

“It ain’t Conniston’s now.”

“That’s right. It’s mine.”

“It ain’t yours,” Orozco murmured. “It belongs to them chicanos.”

Oakley put the big car in gear and rolled into the central powder of the street. “I’ve got other things on my mind, Diego. Some other time.”

“We been hearing that for a honnerd years—‘some other time.’”

“We’ll talk about it when we get this business settled.” The tires crunched pebbles; the air-conditioner thrummed softly. The Cadillac gathered speed on the road going north, laying back a plume of dust. Oakley had a sour pain in his stomach. He kept wondering about the three who had survived, the three who had got away with the five hundred thousand dollars. Had they gone in a bunch or separated?

And what of Terry Conniston?

C H A P T E R Two

For Mitch Baird it began not with the kidnaping but with the liquor store incident.

Mitch had been nervous all day. The band had been out of work for two weeks and he had joined only a few weeks before that, and a trio was easier to sell than a quartet, and if anybody had to be sacrificed, he’d be it. He needed a job and jobs were hard to find.

Mitch drove the old Pontiac into the shopping center lot and parked in front of the liquor store. Floyd Rymer said, “Let’s just stop in a minute and get a bottle of tiger sweat.” Floyd got out of the car and walked inside and because it was too hot to sit in the car Mitch followed him in.

There were two customers in the place, a man and a girl, not together. Floyd Rymer looked at each of them, looked at the clerk, and stopped to browse a Cutty Sark display, waiting for the customers to leave. Mitch looked out the window, thinking it might be a good idea to quit before he got fired. Pull up stakes and try somewhere else—San Francisco maybe, or Las Vegas.

He picked at the front of his shirt, pulling it loose from his chest and enjoying the store’s frigid air-cooling. Outside it was a sultry August evening, thick with sweat. The low sun threw shards of painful brightness that drenched the shopping center in deep surrealist hues. A light traffic of air-conditioned cars, windows up, whistled along the boulevard, pulling in and out of gas stations, car lots, pizzarias, Fat Boy drive-ins. Nothing moved very fast; the hour before sunset was the worst time for driving. Tucson was laid out east to west and driving the boulevards put the blinding sun in everyone’s eyes. If you weren’t driving into it you were driving into fragmented reflections from the brittle chrome and plate glass that lined the strip city’s thoroughfares.

One of the customers, a potbelly in a T-shirt, counted his change and wedged a six-pack of beer under his arm and left. The other customer, the plump-hipped girl with hair in curlers, was having a sotto voce conversation with the pimply counter clerk. The clerk said something gruff; the girl turned to leave. She stopped at the door and said, “Now don’t be late pickin’ me up, hear?”

“Sure—sure.”

The girl reached for the door handle. Her glance went by Floyd Rymer, stopped, went back to him—an automatic female appraisal. Floyd had that effect on them—it annoyed Mitch, it heightened his feeling of being left out of something important. Mitch was not bad-looking; why should the girl look twice at Floyd but not at him?

Floyd’s amused self-assured eyes met the girl’s; the girl sucked her lip and looked awkwardly away. She hurried out, hips churning.

The clerk said, “How about the boobs on her?”

Floyd said, “Big tits make them look like cows.”

“That’s your opinion. How’re you makin’ it, Floyd?”

“Alas,” said Floyd, and spread his hands before him.

“I’ve been expecting you to drop by.”

Floyd smiled with his teeth and shaped his right hand into a mock pistol—thumb up, index finger pointed at the clerk, the other fingers curled back. “It’s time, Leroy.”

The clerk’s acned face shifted toward Mitch: “What about him?”

“He’s with me.”

Mitch said, “What?”

Floyd ignored him and wagged his pistol-finger at the clerk. “Empty it out, Leroy.”

The clerk edged behind the cash register and hit the No Sale key. The drawer slid open with a tinkle and clack. Floyd said, “Have a look out the window, Mitch, see if anyone’s coming this way.”

“I don’t—”