Read Online Hotshots by Judith Van Gieson - Free Book Online Page B

gentle priest, and a priest might be more acceptable to her than a counselor in a business suit. Black robes had been around the reservation for a long time. Ortega had been so kind that I suspected a bad cop was lurking outside the door and would come in next to attempt to browbeat a confession out of me, but nobody did. I didn’t feel any guilt myself, but that didn’t mean I had nothing to confess. Mike Marshall’s blowup on the mountain wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with the Forest Service yet.
    The doctor came back, examined me again, told me I could leave in the morning and to quit smoking. That seemed easy enough now, but who knew how long the feeling would last.
    I called the Kid at the shop and could hear his parrot, Mimo, squawking in the background. “Where are you?” he asked.
    â€œIn the hospital in Oro.”
    â€œ Híjole! What happened?”
    â€œI got caught in a forest fire on Thunder Mountain.”
    â€œAre you all right, Chiquita?”
    â€œI’m okay,” I said. “I’m going to be released tomorrow. Could you pick me up in the morning?”
    â€œI can come now if you want.”
    â€œTomorrow’s okay.”
    â€œI’ll leave after work tonight.”
    â€œThanks, Kid.”
    â€œDe nada,” he replied.
    Later Eric Barker called. “We are so glad you weren’t injured,” he said.
    â€œMe, too. Did you get out all right?” I asked him.
    â€œMike saw the flames on his way down the mountain. We drove out in his car and called the Forest Service.”
    â€œRamona Franklin rescued me, you know.”
    â€œI heard,” said Eric. “You’ll call us when you get back to town?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    ******
    There are several roads that will get you from Oro to Albuquerque. They’re all scenic, they all take about the same amount of time. The northern route passes through the small towns of southern Colorado that rely on the resort trade for survival. It crosses the border into Chama and Tierra Amarilla, towns that rely on hunting and beauty for their survival. It’s been said that the business of northern New Mexico is poverty, and the towns there are known to be suspicious of outsiders, even outsiders with Spanish surnames. But that could be changing. A latte bar, I’d heard, was opening in Chama. The Hispanic route passes through two national forests; much of it is high and green.
    Another way passes through Indian country, which has its own allotment of poverty and beauty. The beauty here is in the big blue sky and the streaked red cliffs that reveal different levels of color and time, a white year, a red year, a year of rain, a year of fire. The Indian route goes through a number of the smaller reservations: Southern Ute, Jicarilla Apache, Jemez, Zia, Santa Ana. It misses the big one, the Navajo Nation, but it’s still the road northern Navajos would take to get to Albuquerque. It’s the road Ramona Franklin must have taken between her two lives. I owed her my life; I wanted to understand her better.
    â€œLet’s go home through Aztec and Cuba,” I said to the Kid when he got to my hospital room.
    He made a face, his second. The first had been when he saw how wasted I looked. “Why you want to do that?”
    â€œIt’s pretty,” I said.
    He shrugged. “Any way you go is pretty.”
    â€œThere’s a good restaurant in Cuba. I’ll take you to lunch.”
    â€œWe can get there from Abiquiu.”
    â€œI want to go Route 44.”
    â€œI don’t like that road.” I knew why—nobody drove NM 44 unless he didn’t know any better or had no choice—but the Kid told me anyway. “Es el camino de la muerte,” he said. The highway of death, one of New Mexico’s infamous slaughter alleys. You couldn’t blame it on the weather or on the curves. It rarely snowed or rained on Route 44. In many places the