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headlights as he turned to ponder this intrusion into his quiet, dark, no doubt well-lubricated world. Stopping the car, I rolled down the window on the passenger side.
    “Good morning, sir,” I said. He was wearing a dusty, earth-colored coat that blended perfectly with the dark shadows of Regal.
    “Now who’s that?” he said, stringing out the last word a little bit in an accent that was rich and thick.
    “Bill Gastner, Sosimo. We met a time or two, a while back.”
    “Oh, yes.” He stepped closer and I could see that the walking stick was carrying a lot of weight. He transferred his left hand to the roof of the car. “What are you doing?”
    “Oh, just out. Can’t sleep.”
    “Yes.” The single word carried so little inflection that it could have run the gamut of meaning from “me too” to “oh, sure, I know you’re up to something.”
    “Mr. Baca, we need to talk with your son.”
    “Mateo?”
    “Yes. He’s got himself in a little trouble.”
    Sosimo moved his right arm so he could rest the walking stick against the door of the car, supporting himself. “You know that boy,” he said after considerable thought. He turned and looked off to the east. “You know, I was just over at Ibarra’s place.”
    “Is that right?”
    “They got a good thing with that cider this year.”
    “I bet.”
And you’ve sampled more than your share
, I thought. “Are you expecting Matt home tonight?”
    He turned back and peered in at me. “Well, I don’t know. He took the truck, you know.”
    “Right. It’s in Posadas.”
    “Well, then, that’s where he is,” Sosimo said slowly, and patted the roof of the car as if he was sorry that I was so slow-witted.
    “Sosimo,” I said, “Matt wrecked a friend’s car up on the pass. He was driving a vehicle that didn’t belong to him, and ran into another car. The kids are all right, but he took off running.”
    “You don’t say so? He’s pretty good at that.”
    “Yes, he is. I thought he might have hoofed it down here since then.”
    “Well, you know…he might have. But I haven’t been home, you know.”
    “You mind if we check?”
    “No. You can do that.”
    “Get in and let me give you a lift. You can point me in the right direction.”
    “That sounds good,” he said, and it took him a long moment to find the door latch. When he settled into the seat, his stick caught in the door, and I waited patiently while he extricated it.
    “There,” he said, after the door slammed. His fragrance filled the car. I left his window down and lowered mine as well.
    “So that cider’s a pretty good brew, eh?” I said as I pulled the car into gear.
    “It sure is. It sure is.” He rocked forward a couple of times to add emphasis. “That Lucy Ibarra, she makes pretty good cider.”
    I wondered if Lucy Ibarra’s husband had been home during the sampling, but that was none of my business until the whole crowd started shooting at each other.
    “Right here,” Sosimo said. We had driven no more than a hundred yards and awakened a couple dogs. Sosimo could have walked the distance in the time it took him to get in the car.
    The Baca place was one of those adobe houses that had shed its plaster long ago. The faces of the individual adobe blocks were rounded and contoured by age and weather to a soft brown weave that no modern building material could match.
    All but one of the
vigas
had busted or rotted off flush with the wall, but other than that, the place was tidy, squat, and square, ready to dust off the worst that southwestern weather could throw at it, whether it be broiling sun or driving west winds that moved Arizona dust into Posadas County.
    “The light’s not on,” Sosimo said. “You can park right here.” The “right here” was a vague wide spot on the shoulder of the road that put my door right against the old juniper limb-wood of Baca’s fence. I stopped half in the roadway so I could open my door.
    “They’ve all gone to bed,” Sosimo said