Chapter Twenty-two
I ground enough coffee for half a pot, and then wondered if I’d made enough. The aroma of Sumatran beans sent my hand to the cabinet, and I had the cigarette pack in my hand before hesitating. Just one butt, the narcotic habit coaxed. But the pack hadn’t been unzipped, and I knew damn well that if I opened it, one cigarette wouldn’t be the end of it. With a grunt of impatience, I tossed the pack back and shut the door. Maybe tomorrow, after breakfast.
While my seriously pokey coffee maker tried to figure out what to do, I stretched out on the old leather couch down in the library-my own personal rotunda, the circular architecture reminiscent of a kiva. The arc of cherry shelving was a pleasure to the eye and touch, loaded now with my comfortable collection that favored military history. Three volumes lay on the coffee table near at hand, bookmarks indicating that I hadn’t finished any of them.
But my eyelids had concrete blocks attached, and the soft leather reached out and captured me. I tossed my glasses on the table.
This time, the telephone didn’t awaken me. Waiting for it to do so kept sleep at bay. I’d drift off and then jerk awake, unsure whether it had rung or not, then drift off again. Why not just ignore it, one part of the mind suggested. I don’t know what little break I was waiting for, or expecting. Mulling came easy, though, and mulling brought curiosity. There’s at least one advantage of embracing the life of a hermit. Nobody held a clock to my head. The more I thought about the sheriff’s story of the flood, the more my curiosity propped open my eye lids.
“What the hell,” I said, admitting defeat. I heaved myself off the couch. Armed with a Thermos of coffee and proud of myself for leaving the cigarette pack in the cabinet, I left the quiet house. Settling into 310 seemed like the natural thing to do, and with the engine idling softly, I turned the police radio’s volume up and listened to the silence for a few seconds. The county was typically quiet for the early morning hours of this Thursday. That would shortly change as school opened its doors for another season. I thought that the tradition of starting school with only two days remaining in the week was goofy, but they didn’t ask my opinion. Maybe starting with a two-day week gave kids a little hope.
Avoiding town, I headed southeast on State 61. A dozen miles or so would put me in María, a tiny village of two or three extended families with the dubious distinction of having the border fence pass a few yards behind their back doors. The state highway was narrow, without enough traffic to mandate a huge re-engineering job. Little attempt had been made to flatten the road bed, and it followed the ocean waves of the desert. If you went fast enough, you could test the strength of your stomach.
Critter surprises were the norm. Crest a wave and see a family of javalina wandering across the pavement, or an enormous diamondback stretched out on the warm pavement, or a coyote fixed in place by the approaching headlights.
Something like that might have happened to Crystalita Pino that dark night eighteen years before as she approached María from the east. I slowed for the village, passing through the wash of light from the Taberna Azul, so named because of the saloon’s blue door. Paulita Saenz, recently widowed by her husband Monroy’s death from cancer, ran the saloon without fanfare. How she managed to keep such order was a mystery to my department. I could count on one hand the number of times we’d been called to a bar fight. On the other hand, it would take an entire legal tablet to record the number of occasions when illegals had relaxed there before hoofing farther down the road in search of paradise.
Five cars were parked around the building, at least one of them with Chihuahuan plates, a couple others with the characteristic white of Texas. Had I been an ambitious deputy, I might have paused and tossed some plate numbers to dispatch. But I was musing and mulling, and that calls for peace and quiet.
Wally Madrid’s Texaco Station across the street was dark, and the scattering of houses behind it showed a light or two. It was hard to imagine a place much quieter, but a pounding thunderstorm would have dimmed the lights even more eighteen years ago. A mile beyond the village, the road humped up over a little rise, then immediately swung into the approach to the bridge across the San José Arroyo. With concrete buttresses and steel guardrails that left no room for shoulder, the bridge was certainly narrower than any current state standards, and when the traffic flow warranted it, would no doubt be replaced. Maybe they’d remember past fatalities and do something about the curved approaches.
The sedan’s tires thumped on the tarred expander strips, and I coasted across the bridge, continuing on for a tenth of a mile before U-turning and then pausing on the shoulder. If Larry Zipoli had actually seen the girl’s truck leave the highway, he could have been as much as a quarter of a mile behind her.
The concrete abutment showed a large, weathered scar on one corner, about eighteen inches above the ground-maybe from the Pino girl’s truck, maybe from any one of a hundred accidents before and since. I stopped and planted the spotlight beam on the abutment. Somehow, the girl had drifted far enough to catch it with her left front fender. To do that, she would have had to wander completely off the pavement, perhaps asleep at the wheel. Brakes locked in panic, she would have frozen as the truck skidded and then tipped wildly.
Easing the car farther onto the shoulder, I turned on the four-ways and found my flashlight. The night was bright, cozy warm, a hint of breeze, every star ever lit now on display in the heavens, the half moon bright enough that the desert features took on some character.
The San José was a dry ditch. I stood just beyond the abutment and played my flashlight down, trying to imagine the roar of millions of gallons of chocolate water, all the floating crap caught up to be flooded into Mexico. Crystalita Pino would have had that view in full stereo as her truck plunged over the brink, sinking its headlights into the boiling soup.
I swung the beam up the arroyo. Twenty-five feet wide at the bottom, a dozen feet deep, the arroyo would have carried a powerful torrent. The noise would have been a cacophony. No one thinks in a situation like that. I turned the light to the bridge. The concrete abutments provided lots of ways to snag a vehicle before the water finally snatched it away. In the dry of late summer, a vast collection of tumble weeds and their kin had been stuffed under the bridge by the wind. Immediately under the highway, the concrete was sloped and smooth. I could imagine that the water could have flung Larry Zipoli and the two girls around the back of the tipping truck, and somehow he’d managed to scramble to a point where the water kept him pinned against one of the vertical pillars, waiting in desperation.
Hell of a hero, I thought. Hell of a hero. Even Larry himself probably couldn’t explain exactly how the event had been choreographed. No thinking about how to do the impossible, he’d just done it, unthinking, in the best hero’s tradition. Sometimes it all works out, sometimes not. This time, he’d won.
I snapped out my flashlight and trudged back to the car. The coffee smelled wonderful as it gurgled out of the Thermos, and hit the Cigarette NOW! switch really hard. Leaning on a convenient fender, headlights illuminating the bridge ahead of me, I contemplated and sipped coffee. Tires make a lot of noise, and I could hear the approaching eastbound car even before it slowed for the village. In a few minutes, it crested the rise and slowed when the driver saw the cop car on the shoulder. The cop himself made quite a picture, fat and lazy with a cup of coffee, leaning on the front fender and admiring the heavens.
“Taxpayer’s money,” the driver might have mumbled. I lifted a lethargic hand in greeting and watched his taillights fade off to the east before they disappeared behind a rise.
Someone so heroically wired that he could slam his own truck to a stop, then plunge down into a raging torrent to save two petrified girls, enduring the pounding of the water and the bruising of the concrete until yet another pair of hands helped him up the abutment-hell of a guy. And yet years later, Larry Zipoli, that incredible man of action, had sat in his road grader like a lump while someone walked toward him with a
rifle and put a bullet through his head. No dive for cover, no hand raised in protest.
I refilled with Sumatra, thought about that some more. Eighteen years can force a lot of changes in a man.
Next time we enjoyed a thunder boomer that stretched from cloud to ground in an unbroken gray wall of rain, I was going to drive down to this arroyo and watch the water. Maybe I should write a letter to the right bureaucrat up in the State offices. New Mexico liked to name things after heroes, and might mark this the Larry Zipoli Bridge-provided that the memory wasn’t smeared along the way.
Coffee drained from cup and bladder, I settled back in the car and saw that midnight had come and gone. I was as awake as if someone had blown reveille.
The Sheriff’s Department needed convertibles…at least they needed to buy one for me. As a distant second best, I lowered all four windows and let the prairie waft through as I motored-dawdled-back toward Posadas. State 61 morphed into Grande Boulevard as I passed under the interstate, and as 310 drifted along under the ugly wash of the street lights, I wondered, for the millionth time, why the village wasted so much money trying to beat back the darkness. After all, any burglar worth the name could afford a good flashlight.
Grande T’d into Bustos, and I swung west, even though the Don Juan de Oñate at Bustos and Twelfth would be closed. North on Twelfth, up and over the steel bridge across the flood control ditch that once had been an attractive arroyo, and through the neighborhoods bordered by Hutton. In a few minutes I found myself drifting the car to a stop, lights out, at the intersection with Highland, right where J.J. Murton had been parked when I lifted his badge, and just about where another car had been seen by Hugh Decker earlier in the day.
I was sure that the southwestern breeze here carried a bouquet subtly different than down at the arroyo. On Hutton, the air picked up urban scents-diesel, ragweed, irrigated and mown lawns, full dumpsters, the dust from dirt lanes. For a moment, I considered my newly refined sense of smell a gift, a reward for abstaining from corrosive cigarette smoke for seventy-two hours. Or an imagination in high gear, fueled by the beans of Sumatra.
As I got out in the quiet of the night, I pushed the door against the latch until I heard the sharp click. It seemed important not to have to hear the rude slam of a door. The intersection was unmarked by a stop sign, just a dirt T scraped in the desert. I shot the beam down Highland. The road grader with the hole punched through the windshield had been driven back to the yard. Nothing remained to catch the flashlight beam, not even a curious coyote.
The rumble of a big V-8 drew my attention, and I turned to see the dim shape of the car approaching on Hutton, headlights off. The patrol car eased to a stop behind mine, and I ambled back to greet my visitor. Eddie Mitchell disembarked, nudging his own door shut without even the click. That reminded me why I liked this burly easterner who had adopted our county. He didn’t talk a whole lot, but he seemed always in tune with his surroundings.
“Evening, sir.”
“Spectacular,” I said. I craned my neck back and looked at the heavens again, enjoying the vast spread until I felt the satisfying little pop of neck vertebrae relaxing into place. “Are you doing any good?”
“Some. There’s a group of kids downtown who ought to be home by now.”
I nodded across the field toward the nearest houses. “Hugh Decker claims he heard a single gun shot at three minutes after two, and then looked across his fence to see a car parked here, with a single individual walking back to it from the direction of the road grader.”
“Two oh three, sir?”
“Exactly. He checked his watch when he heard the gunshot. He didn’t recognize the person, though, or the car, or anything else. Just distant images.”
“But a car, not a pickup?”
“That’s what he says.”
“Color?”
“Medium to dark.” Just enough moon and starlight touched the young deputy’s face that I could see the ghost of a smile. “Yeah, I know-it’s the kind of vehicular description we all dream about,” I added wryly. “But it’s something. I don’t know what the hell what, but it’s something.”
“Is the chick coming on board?”
The question shifted tracks so fast that I was left on the siding for a few seconds. “The chick?”
“Your ride-along earlier today.”
“Ah. Miss Reyes. The chick. Yes, it looks that way. The sheriff offered her the job, anyway. Maybe after all this, she’ll have second thoughts, although I hope not. She’s one bright young lady.” Chick.
“Interesting.” His stony expression wasn’t exactly aglow with approval, though.
“I’m sure that you had the opportunity to work with some female patrol officers in Baltimore. The chicks.”
“Yes.” The reply was flat and noncommittal.
“She’d be our first, other than in dispatch.”
“She’s workin’ to be a patrol deputy, you mean?”
“Sure. I think it’s about time that Posadas joined the twentieth century, don’t you?”
“She’s a little on the petite side,” Mitchell observed.
“Maybe we’ll put her on a weight lifting program to bulk her up a little. We’ll find out how she does the first time that she has to respond to a bar fight.” That earned a flicker of a smile.
“Her uncle’s that old guy who lives out by the Torrance ranch?”
“That’s him. Her great uncle, Reubén Fuentes.” That Eddie Mitchell knew not only about Reubén but also that Estelle Reyes was his niece told me that either the deputy was most observant-which he was-but also that the staff had been discussing our new hire-and that didn’t surprise me.
“The old man who wears a gun most of the time.”
“That’s him. You’ve met him a time or two?”
Mitchell nodded. “Tonight he was at the Handi-Way, coming out with a brown bag. My concern was more for the four or five kids in the parking lot, not him. He was walking steady enough. Warm as it is, he’s still wearing gloves. He a closet cat burglar or something?”
I laughed. “There’s no telling these days, Eddie. I can guess what was in the brown bag, though. And he’ll be all right until he cracks the bottle. When he gets into that, we can all hope that he’s safely at home.”
“Might have been potato chips,” Mitchell said.
“Oh, sure thing.”
He shrugged and scanned the lights to the south. “The saloon in María is quiet tonight?”’
“Like a church.” I turned and smiled at him, amused that he’d known where I’d been. “Somebody reported me?”
“No, sir. I saw you heading south on 61. There’s not much else down that way.”
“I’m just out prowling, Eddie. I can’t sleep, so I might as well do something instructive. It helps me think.” I looked up at those wonderful heavens again. “And I think I’ll burn some more of the taxpayer’s gas. I’ll be down in the southwest corner of the county if you need anything.”
“Dispatch wants me central, so I’ll be going in circles for a while.”
“Cheer up, my friend. There are some village departments so tiny that the cop has a patrol beat about eight blocks long. He sees every cat and dog twenty times a shift.”
“I’ll take that over Baltimore,” Mitchell said, and once more I wondered what his circumstances had been in that big city. His records, references, and reviews had been nothing but exemplary for the four years he’d been a flatfoot there, but he’d evidently generated no love for the place or the job.
“What time did you see Señor Fuentes at the convenience store?”
“Just a little bit ago. Maybe fifteen minutes. He’s driving that battered white Chevy LUV.”
“I’ll head down his way, I think,” I said, and beamed the flashlight across the open prairie toward Highland once more. “That’ll give me time to think about all this. There’s something we’re missing here, Eddie. When you figure out what it is, let me know.”
“Yes, sir,”
he said. And who knew. Maybe over the next seven or eight hours, some flash of brilliant intuition would light up his night sky.
Clear as the night was, what I really wanted to do was cruise along without headlights, enjoying the incredible star display as I drove south. Along State 56, there were long stretches where not a single modest porch light polluted the darkness, where I could see the loom of mesa against the heavens and the star-touched tawny of the prairie. With the windows open, what better elixir could there be.
But Posadas County didn’t pay its undersheriff to spend his time ruminating on the state of the universe overhead, or the fragrance from sage, gramma and creosote bush. So I drove with my headlights on, the damn radio on, my thinking cap on.
Chapter Twenty-three
Reubén Fuentes was a crusty old fellow, seemingly indestructible, battered and brown and wrinkled, reminding me of someone from an earlier century. Some of his escapades south of the border were legendary, and why he wasn’t currently rotting away in a Mexican prison was something of a wonder-except that the Mexican authorities who mattered turned a blind eye to this old guy who preferred to work on the Mexican side, where the language and the law came easy.
But he worried me a little, since in the modern age of mobile phones, computers, credit cards, and just too damn many people, Reubén Fuentes stood out in powerful contrast. He didn’t bathe as often as someone standing next to him in the grocery store checkout might have wished, and the habitual revolver tucked in the ancient leather holster made folks nervous.
He lived with no telephone, no television, and a minimal number of what most of the rest of us considered necessary amenities. I’d had a cup of coffee at Reubén’s place on more than one occasion, and knew that he still brewed the stuff in an old metal pot where the grounds just settled down through the water. Nice crunchy stuff. It complimented his well water, what there was of it, which was as hard as the granite sand through which it passed.
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