The Road to Santa Fe

by Norman Zollinger

Overview

Enrique "Rick" Garcia, district attorney in the small New Mexico county of Chupadera, is a man of principle, a strange breed in the rough-and-tumble politics of his state. When he is tapped to run for governor, he will learn just how rocky the road to Santa Fe really is.

He has a mortal enemy in Stanford Brown, a wealthy rancher Garcia convicted of manslaughter. From his prison cell Brown promises revenge on his former college football teammate.

All through his campaign Garcia has been guided and encouraged by Ashley McCarver, an attorney and state Democratic Party operative. Ashley's relationship to her candidate evolves from campaign manager for a man she admires into an abiding love for him. Garcia, still haunted by the suicide of his wife, at first sees in Ashley only her professionalism and encyclopedic knowledge of state politics, but the election draws the pair inexorably together: after Garcia's political triumph the two marry.

Meanwhile, Stanford Brown, freed from prison through a gubernatorial pardon granted by Garcia's predecessor, begins to unfold an elaborate and cunning plot to have his rival impeached. Will this attempt to jeopardize Garcias political life become a serious threat? And will this shadow from the past cement or destroy his burgeoning relationship with Ashley?

Meticulously researched by a master historical novelist, The Road to Santa Fe demonstrates Norman Zollinger's skill in creating three-dimensional contemporary characters. He also brings to life the complicated behind-the-scenes machinations of the strange world of New Mexico politics.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466847262
Publisher:	Tom Doherty Associates
Publication date:	05/27/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	295,818
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Norman Zollinger of Albuquerque, New Mexico, recipient of the Owen Wister Award from Western Writers of America for lifelong contributions to Western literature, is author of such Forge novels as Not of War Only, Chapultepec, and Meridian.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Enrique Tyndall Garcia gave up trying to get back to sleep, rolled over, and looked at the time.

The digital alarm clock read 4:33.

After a night such as the one through which he had just tossed and turned, churning the bedclothes into a Gordian tangle, he always felt as if he had not slept a single second. But he must have slept some; he had dreamed the same dream again.

As with all such dreams in the last year and a half, last night’s remained deadly static and monochrome…and as bad as any of them. Not that he had sensed any particular threat or danger in the dream; he might have even preferred a nightmare with Prometheus’ eagle ripping at his chest to the usual debilitating weakness the dreams brought.

He could take some small comfort from the fact that the dream no longer attacked every third night as it had at first after Kathy died. Although more infrequent now, it had lost none of its awllike, piercing intensity when it did come, stabbing at him last night exactly as it had in the beginning.

In the dream everything was fogged a cloudy, pewter gray. Kathy, leaving the house and wearing the black Mexican ball gown he had bought her in Guadalajara on their honeymoon, carried her suitcase out to a black car with an interior hidden by that damned dark-tinted glass he despised. He tried to follow, but found he could not open the storm door she had shut behind her, no matter how hard he wrenched at the handle or hammered at the aluminum frame. He called, but she did not even turn her head.

After she reached the car waiting in the driveway, and put her bag in its trunk, she stepped to the door on the passenger’s side and finally looked back at him. He opened his mouth to beg her not to leave, but could not force a sound through his lips. Standing by the car she looked pathetic, frail—her slim face, wearing the faintest of smiles, seemed wan and drawn—but in some dark way even lovelier than in life.

She shook her head, opened the car door and got inside.

He could not see the driver, but he knew him. He tried to call to him, too, but not even his name would come.

The car backed out of the driveway, turned into the cottonwood-lined street, and was lost to sight where the road snaked past the ancient and winter-dry irrigation ditch. All was vacant silence and stillness for a moment.

Then the rest of the dream leaped into motion, became a shapeless cloud of swirling, choking dust as black as soot, as if big, slabsided Cuchillo Peak on the eastern horizon had somehow blown itself apart and settled its powdered stone on top of him.

Two nights after Kathy died the dream had started and, even though some details differed slightly, it still ended exactly the same, with its smothering load of black dust and irrational but even blacker guilt.

In broad daylight it was easy enough to persuade himself that he had not been at fault and nothing he could have done would have changed the end. His intellect told him that what had happened that night would have happened sooner or later. Kathy had carried the seeds of death in her character and her psyche long before they married. He knew he was right and guiltless…in the daytime…at high, bright noon. But at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning, in the empty, silent super-dark, that rational mind did not so much as put in a brief appearance.

There was one blessed thing about last night’s dream: It had ended sharply and completely. They did not always do that.

Copyright © 2002 by Virginia S. Malone

Editorial Reviews

Posthumous novel from Zollinger (the huge and well-received Meridian: A Novel of Kit Carson's West, 1997), much admired for his historical fiction and for his writer's workshop in Taos. Much of his work appeared in mass-market paperbacks, this being his third hardcover for Forge. Rick Garcia, district attorney of Chupadera County, New Mexico, a widower whose wife Kathy committed suicide via carbon monoxide in their garage, has been asked to run for governor. Will the road to Santa Fe be as clean as his race for district attorney? His campaign manager is also an attorney, Ashley McCarver, from Albuquerque, who admires Rick's honesty and later becomes his lover. When they first meet, Rick is prosecuting a manslaughter case involving the deaths of three children from drinking river-water carelessly poisoned by a local mining operation, while Ashley has come to Black Springs for a civil suit and represents Candy Tanner, a single mother whose brain-damaged baby's delivery was botched by a young Pakistani doctor. When Rick wins his case, Ashley's father grills him, then prompts him to run for governor. Rick agrees, but soon finds that his chances of winning rather bleak, though not as bad as when he ran for district attorney. Winning the manslaughter case, as well as a further prosecution led by Rick against wealthy mine-owner Stanford Brown, puts Rick's childhood friend Brown in prison, and, from his cell, Brown plots vengeance. Once Ashley marries Rick, only her political genius can help him fight the savage scandal that breaks out. Though he was halfway through a sequel to Meridian, Zollinger's farewell finds him in top form and with a lively grasp of the law.

Kirkus Reviews