Free Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini

hologram, everything three-dimensional yet not quite real. Still Life with Ghost Ranch. The stillness was so complete the click of the car door as he shut it had a loud, brittle quality.
    The gate was secured with a length of heavy chain and a padlock, both relatively new. A hand-lettered sign on the gate post read: NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT OR ELSE! A hundred yards beyond, in a hollow that ran out into a sage flat, were the ranch buildings: small, squatty house shaded by tamarisk trees, a low-roofed structure with a wire enclosure at one end, a shed not much larger than an outhouse (maybe it was an outhouse), and at the edge of the flat, a barn and the remains of a corral, a windmill, and a huge galvanized water tank. The windmill lay broken on its side, collapsed or blown over or pulled down. He couldn’t see the well from up here; it must be behind the house.
    The heated air was thick with sage spice and the creosote odor of greasewood; it ignited a burning sensation in his lungs. Breathing shallowly, he climbed over the gate and made his way down the track, his shoes creating little scraping sounds on the hard earth. Halfway down something startled him by jumping out from behind a yucca tree and darting away through the desert scrub. Jackrabbit. He saw it stop, its great ears lifting and falling like semaphores, then run again and vanish.
    The ranch yard was littered with tumbleweeds and wind-gathered debris; he crossed it slowly toward the house. Board and batten, with a roof of weathered shingles, a narrow porch across the front, a tangled growth of prickly pear at one end. If it had ever been painted, the last vestiges of the paint had long ago eroded away. All of the glass in the front windows had been broken out. The front door hung lopsidedly inward on one hinge; one of its panels was splintered, as though it had been rammed or kicked in. The entire facing wall was riddled with holes, but it wasn’t until he was within a few yards of the porch that he recognized them as bullet holes. Somebody—more than one somebody—had fired dozens of rounds at the house, handgun or rifle or both. As if trying to kill it.
    The bullet holes, the eerie stillness, the lifelessness of the place opened an odd hollow feeling inside him. Sweat ran down into his left eye, smearing his vision; he wiped it away. The sun was like a weight on the top of his bare head, the back of his neck. He wished he’d had the sense to stop at one of the stores in town and buy a hat of some kind. He wasn’t dressed at all right for this country. Stranger in a strange land.
    The boards creaked when he stepped onto the porch; the rusted hinges creaked when he pushed the door farther inward so he could pass through. The living room was empty of furniture, the bare-wood floor littered with dust and drifted sand, broken glass, rodent droppings, and dead insects. A quick look into each of the other four rooms told him the house had been completely stripped. All that was left were a few shelves, a broken chemical toilet, and an ancient claw-foot tub in the bathroom. Vandals? John T. Roebuck? Dacy Burgess?
    Outside again, he heard the faint, faraway throb of a car engine on the valley road. Except for his footfalls as he walked around to the rear, it was the only sound. White noise that enhanced rather than disturbed the stillness.
    The well was a circle of native stone set between two of the trees. A hand-operated pump had been used in place of a windlass; but the pump had been torn loose and battered with something like a sledgehammer until it was a mangled lump of metal. Scattered around it were bits of stone and mortar that had been beaten off the well itself. He moved a few steps closer. A fitted wooden cover still sat in place over the well opening.
    His stomach began a faint kicking. The cause was not what had been done to the well but what he’d been told about the murder of Tess Roebuck and its aftermath. Heinous, Hoxie had called it. God, yes.