Land of Entrapment Read Online Free PDF Page A

neck.
    Nothing out of the ordinary, though I ended up ratcheting a few strands of fencing tighter.
    By one o’clock I had nearly finished with the last stretch. Jim munched on some nearby grass while I adjusted the tension on a lower strand. I had spent most of the morning thinking about Melissa and what she had asked me to do. I hadn’t heard from her since the break-up, and all of a sudden, here she was. Still, Melissa was pretty diligent about things. If she felt there was any other way to deal with this situation, she would have done so. I was sure of that. And she didn’t call me or try to e-mail me. She drove down and talked to me in person, even though we had ended on bad terms.
    I pulled my gloves off and clicked my tongue at Jim. “Let’s get the hell outta here, buddy.” I climbed aboard and steered him toward home. He didn’t need any extra urging. At the barn, I removed his saddle and blanket and rubbed him down as he munched on what Grandpa called “horse chow.” I made sure the saddle was clean and wiped off before I slung it over the sawhorse in the corner and then I stood and watched Jim eat for a while.
    If Megan was mixed up with white supremacists—
    and from what Melissa told me, it sounded like she was—what were the options? Megan was twenty-one.
    She could run with any group she wanted as long as she wasn’t doing anything illegal. Melissa, however, suspected that this group was on its way to doing something scary. Well, so what? Why was it my problem? I wasn’t involved with Melissa anymore. I didn’t owe her a damn thing. Not after the shit she pulled with Hillary. I sat on a bale of alfalfa and absently chewed a stalk while I tiptoed through that corner of my mind.
    My cell phone rang. I stood so I could pull it out of my pocket and check the number. “Hey, Detective Gutierrez,” I answered, rolling the r’s with extra inflection. “¿Como estás, mi amiga bellisima? ”
    Chris laughed. “Esa, you crack me up. Spanish and Italian in one sentence. What the hell do you call that?”
    “Italish.”
    “That’s why I keep you around. Ten years and counting. Jesus. You’re my longest relationship.”
    I laughed. “Holy hell, you’re right. That’s my longest, too. Why don’t we just get married?”
    “What, and ruin a perfectly good friendship?” she countered, though the warmth in her voice was palpable.
    “Good point. Promise me you’ll reserve a spot on your porch for me and my rocking chair.”
    “And a pan of green chile lasagna.” Before I could respond, she continued. “Got your message last night but got in too late to call you. What’s up?”
    I exhaled slowly, settling into a more serious mode. “Melissa showed up yesterday.”
    Long pause. “There? At your grandpa’s?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What the hell for?” She sounded more puzzled than pissed. Chris didn’t have much love for Melissa after the break-up, but she never directly insulted her.I dug the toe of my boot into a bale of straw.
    “Megan’s gone missing and Melissa thinks she’s with her boyfriend.”
    “And you’re supposed to care because—?”
    “Her boyfriend seems to be a neo-Nazi.”
    Chris didn’t respond for a while. When she did, she was using her “just the facts, ma’am” tone. “And Melissa wants you to come back to Albuquerque to help her find Megan.”
    “And that’s why you’re the detective,” I said dryly.
    “So presumably in the discussion she outlined why no other course of action would work.”
    “She’s pretty thorough, as you know.”
    Chris remained quiet, but I knew she was thinking that Melissa was using any excuse to contact me.
    “It’s been three years,” I pointed out. “She didn’t contact me before this. I don’t think it’s about hooking up again.”
    “I’ll leave that to your judgment, esa. What are your feelings about it?”
    I paused, watching Jim munch. What exactly were my feelings? “She needs some help. And it took a lot for her to