Chapter 4
Three weeks later
Perry let the county SUV creep along a dusty, narrow street. This was not one of his favorite areas to patrol, but it was in his territory, and he usually found something to deal with. Once, Fuego de Oro had been another mining camp. That was probably at least seventy-five years ago. Now it was a shantytown where the down-and-out camped. When they had been displaced from Esperanza, the folks who did not get jobs elsewhere came here. They patched up the crumbling adobes and cobbled together huts from the ruins of older cabins and shacks. A ragtag mixture of older Latino couples and the less ambitious of their children and grandchildren, along with some real riffraff that preyed on them, had claimed the dead town.
The old company at Esperanza had allowed people
