Coming up on the bend Watchman hooted twice and listened for an answer; there was none and he put the car dead-slow into the bend, lugging it in second. Hairpin was hardly a word for it; the road virtually doubled back on itself along a steep downward tilt.

He glanced to his right through the windshield, halfway through the turn. Something glittered at him from the tumble of rocks four hundred feet below.

He braked, stopped, set the emergency, got out and walked to the lip of the bend.

The tracks showed where it had gone over. For a moment he had lost sight of it but he found it again by taking two slow side steps; the sun winked off the broken glass and that drew his eyes.

The battered steel had crumpled a great deal and was not very different in color from the drab rocks around it. What had made him stop the car was the square-cornered shape of the tailgate, sticking up at an odd angle. The cab had been crushed almost flat and one wheel, complete with tire, lay twenty feet away on a flat rock.

It had come to rest more or less right side up but it had tumbled several times getting there. Various impacts had squashed the whole thing and twisted it into the proportions of a wrecked buckboard wagon.

Victorio walked up to his shoulder and made sounds in this throat.

Watchman glanced back at the tracks where the wreck had crumbled two pieces of the edge going over. There was no guardrail.

Victorio said, “Shit. He sure as hell didn’t get out of that alive.”

“Let’s go down and have a look.”

“I wouldn’t leave my car right there. Next guy comes around the bend’ll push you right over to join the pickup down there.”

Watchman moved the Volvo fifty feet farther down the road and then they started looking for a way to get down into the gorge on foot.

10.

He’d seen them worse. The head-ons on the limited access highways, like the one that had wiped out Maria Three-persons. But the pickup was bad, bad enough.

The door had come off halfway down the mountain and got stuck between boulders. Evidently Jimmy Oto had flung himself out of the opening in a desperate plunge but the pickup had toppled over on him and then slid on down to the bottom. Oto’s body was barely recognizable.

“Dear sweet God,” Victorio muttered. Watchman looked away. Victorio swung violently away and soon Watchman heard him retching in the rocks.

He peered into the crushed cab. All the glass had burst; shards of its glittered everywhere. The roof had squashed the steering wheel. The column stick seemed to be in the second-gear position, which was where it would be, going around that bend.

Victorio came slowly over. “Sweet sweet God … what are you looking for?”

“How long did he live up here?”

“I don’t know. Most of his life.”

“He knew that bend, he could have cornered it blindfolded,” Watchman murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m looking for evidence that it wasn’t an accident.”

11.

Somebody might have been waiting in a car. Heard the pickup coming and lunged forward from the concealed side of the bend, and shoved the pickup right over the edge. It could have happened like that. If it had there would be traces of car paint somewhere. He examined every exposed surface but there was nothing but rust and raw broken steel and the mottled grey paint. The nonfunctioning tail-light was still intact, improbably. The rear bumper and fenders hadn’t taken too much punishment.

Victorio said, “Why would somebody want to do that on purpose?”

“I don’t know. But it’s too much of a coincidence.”

“Hell he was always a reckless son of a bitch.”

“He never got this reckless before. Why today?”

“Why not today? Everybody dies.” Victorio buried his face in the crook of his elbow and wiggled his head, rubbing his eyes on the cloth. When his arm dropped away he looked stunned.

“Have they got a phone up here?”

Victorio didn’t respond. Watchman stood up and spoke louder. “Any phones up here?”

Victorio shook himself. “No. No phones, no electricity. Hell they’ve only got one well for the whole village.”

Watchman looked up across the canyon bottom but Cuncon wasn’t in sight from here. There was a mound of pocked massive boulders and it was a hundred feet or more up to the bottom of the earth-cut through which he’d had his glimpse of the settlement from the high road. Here there was nothing but rocks and weeds and the twisted remains of Jimmy Oto and his old pickup truck.

Victorio said, “He won’t tell us much now, will he.”

“That’s why he’s dead.”

“What?”

Watchman knew it in his guts but there was no way to explain how.

Victorio took two paces toward him. He looked baffled. “You trying to say Joe wiped him out to keep him quiet?”

“How would I know?” Watchman almost snapped it. He turned away and got down on his back and slithered underneath the rear corner of the pickup; it was the only corner that still left enough clearance to crawl under, and that was only because it was propped up on a twofoot boulder.

The drive shaft had telescoped against itself and burst. The two halves of the front axle had jabbed themselves into the ground at odd angles and the engine had fallen through the frame to lie on the rocks. There was no sign of the tail pipe or muffler; they had to be somewhere up on the cliff. The shattered oil pan had made a viscous puddle behind the engine and Watchman could see the socket of one headlight where it lay on the ground like a severed eyeball. The fuel tank was bent and dented but it hadn’t burst and there had been no fire; there must have been a slow leak somewhere because he could smell the fumes. They weren’t strong enough to alarm him.

The cable that ran from the emergency-brake handle to the rear wheels had frayed and burst; one end of it lay curled near Watchman’s nose. That was mechanical; he was looking for the hydraulics and he found them and traced the hoses up along the base of the cab, crawling an inch at a time through a space that barely accommodated his shoulders. He was acutely conscious of the possibility of the wreck slipping off its uncertain moorings and pinning him beneath; he moved with great care.

It was not inspiration; the logic was that if the truck hadn’t been pushed it must have been disabled, either by accident or by design, and when a vehicle was going to have to negotiate mountain roads the best and easiest shot was at the brakes or the steering. He expected to find a cut brake hose.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing under there? This thing’s perched like a golf ball sittin’ on a wobbly tee.”

He pulled himself back with elbows and toes and slid out from under. When he sat up Victorio was making exaggerated brow-mopping and mouth-whooshing gestures of relief. “Man I’ve had enough coronaries for one day. Don’t do that.”

Watchman moved his feet under him, got up and went around to the front of the wreck. Victorio trailed along. “You didn’t find anything, did you?”

“Not what I expected to, no.”

“That mean anything?”

“Find me something to pry this up with.” He was trying to lift the hood but it was wedged fast.

“Uh—shouldn’t we report this to the police?”

“I am the police. See if there’s a jack handle or something back there.”

Victorio went around back. Watchman got down on his knees and bent low with his cheek along the ground, trying to look up past the end of the broken axle under the fender. He couldn’t see much and what he could see was twisted beyond belief.

The brake hoses were pretty mangled under the frame but there were no indications that they had been tampered with. A knife would have left a neat cut and the only breaks he’d seen had been jagged, traceable to the crushing and ripping the truck had suffered during its long end-for-end tumble.