Statute of Limitations pc-13

by Steven F Havill

  “Sisneros?”

  “He’s down the hall with Bill. Keep an eye on this one.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How am I supposed to walk,” Hank Sisneros said, finding his voice.

  “You don’t walk anywhere,” Pasquale said pleasantly. “You just lie there and bleed.”

  “Towels,” Gastner called from the hallway. “In the bathroom there on your right. I need some towels.”

  The wall near the hallway and the first bookcase were blood-spattered, and Estelle tried to avoid any of the marks and stains on the polished wood floor as she ducked into the bathroom, emerging with a pile of clean towels.

  “He didn’t duck fast enough,” Gastner said, holding out his hand for a towel. “He tried to break away.” He pressed the towel gently against Mike Sisneros’s chin, his other hand steadying the younger man’s shoulder. The deputy lay with his back against the wall, eyes closed, breathing in short, shallow gasps that burbled blood into the towel from the mess that once had been his chin. “You’re going to be okay, Mikey,” Gastner said.

  “Here,” Estelle said, and reached across with more padding. “Under his head.” It appeared that the bullet had struck from the back, raking across the young deputy’s neck and throat, exploding out through the point of his chin, a grazing shot that had done a spectacular amount of damage.

  Estelle and Gastner knelt silently for a minute, waiting. In the distance they could hear the approaching sirens, a symphony that blended from three different directions. The injured man tried to bring his knees up, and one hand lifted off the floor. Estelle took Mike’s hand in hers, and was surprised at the strength of the grip.

  “They’re on the way, Mike. Just hang on.” As she reached to rearrange one of the towels, she saw more blood dripping on the wood, this time from Bill Gastner. He saw her expression and shrugged nonchalantly.

  “Nicked me through the fat under the arm,” he said. “Got by a corner of the vest, I guess. Not to worry. Hurts like a pup now, but that’s a good thing. Everything works.”

  “How about sitting down,” Estelle said, and Gastner didn’t argue. He slumped back against the opposite wall of the hallway, lifted his left arm, and peered at the damage. Estelle reached across with a towel, but he waved it away.

  “Why bother ruining another one,” he said, and sighed heavily. “That son-of-a-bitch brought Mike over here… they broke in the back. They were waiting for me, Estelle. I came in the house, and they were waiting for me. I guess it was supposed to look like Mike and I took care of each other. Do that, and it sure as shit would look like Mike killed Janet.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He didn’t say a damn thing. He might have, if Mike had given him the chance, liquored up as he was.”

  “I didn’t hear the shots,” Estelle said, cringing at the thought of what had been going on in this house while she’d been checking the pharmacy next door.

  “You could fire a howitzer inside here, and you wouldn’t hear it outside, at least not with you sitting in a car. He just fired the one time, though…when Mikey made a break for it down the hallway. I think he could see I wasn’t getting anywhere with diplomacy. I tried my best.” He shrugged painfully. “That’s when we went hand-to-hand.” He shook his head ruefully. “Tough little squirt, even drunk.”

  The sirens turned into Guadalupe, and in a moment Tom Pasquale reappeared, leading three paramedics. Estelle heard more doors slamming outside, and in a moment Eddie Mitchell and Robert Torrez appeared.

  “Jesus,” Torrez said when he limped into the living room. He moved carefully through the scatter of books and knick-knacks, blood and gore until he was standing near Mike Sisneros’s feet. “How is it?”

  “I think it looks worse than it is,” EMT Matty Finnegan said. In a moment, Sisneros was IVed, gurneyed, and whisked out of the house. Matty turned her attention to Gastner. “Oh, you look good,” she said.

  “Don’t ruin the shirt,” he said.

  “It already is, Bub,” Matty replied. “How many times did he hit you?” She industriously scissored his shirt away from his shoulder. “Oh, nice,” she said, pausing when she saw the damage to the vest. “Now, aren’t you the lucky one?”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Gastner grumbled. His luck had nearly run out when one round skipped past the armpit margin of the vest, plowing a path through the pad of fat under his left arm before being stopped by the back side of the vest.

  Matty bandaged him quickly, and motioned for the second gurney.

  “I don’t need that thing,” Gastner said.

  “Oh, yes you do, honey,” Matty chirped. She had untangled the lines from an IV bag and paused, frowning at him. “You want to fight me for this needle?”

  “No, ma’am.” He relaxed back against the wall, and closed one eye. “My head hurts.”

  “No doubt,” Matty said. “You keep letting people batter it. But we’ll get you all fixed up. You going to mind riding in the same ambulance as Mike?”

  “I’d be honored,” Gastner murmured.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Hank Sisneros groaned from his puddle on the floor as the gurney whisked past him with his son’s quiet form lashed on board, followed almost immediately by former sheriff Bill Gastner.

  “Second unit is on the way,” Matty Finnegan said. She knelt beside Sisneros, glancing dismissively at the blood around his handcuffed wrists and the obviously dislocated thumb. She cut away his trousers, revealing the nasty blue-black-rimmed hole just behind his right kneecap, and the quarter-sized exit wound that had torn right through the large posterior ligament at the back of the joint. “You just lie still,” she said unnecessarily, but there wasn’t a lot of warmth and nurture in her tone.

  Estelle Reyes-Guzman knelt beside the wounded man, and reached out with a towel to dab a bit of blood that threatened to run into his eye. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just charged up a long flight of stairs.

  “Why Janet?” Estelle said. He looked up at her quickly, but didn’t reply. “After all these years, did you think that she was going to tell someone about you and her? About that night in the car when the chief stopped you?” His eyes narrowed, but he was concentrating too much on the pain to speak, pain that was quickly chasing him sober. He let his weight carry him over on his left side until his forehead was touching the floor.

  “What did Bill Gastner ever do to you?”

  “He had to know,” Sisneros mumbled, but it was obvious he was having trouble forming the words. Between the slosh of alcohol in his veins and the shock from the ruined knee, it was surprising he was coherent at all. “All the old guys. They talk. They was all set to gang up on me. She woulda told ’em.”

  “She? You mean Janet?”

  Hank gurgled something unintelligible and then tried to straighten up. “I tried to explain it all to her. All she had to do was help me a little bit. Just a little bit. But she was too good for that….”

  “Estelle?” She turned and saw Bob Torrez standing near the front door. “Bill wants to talk to you before the ambulance takes off.”

  She rose quickly and went outside. Gastner’s gurney was still on the gravel as the EMTs loaded Sisneros.

  “I don’t think he’s going to say much,” Gastner said, when Estelle appeared at his side. “This part’s simple. Like I said, he figured that it would look like Mike and I took care of business. That would really fix the blame for Janet’s death on Mike.” He shrugged. “He tried to talk Janet into helping him, but she wouldn’t do it. I think…I think…that maybe she threatened Hank. If he didn’t leave her alone, she was going to Mike with the whole story about what happened when she was a kid. That’s as far as I got with him. He isn’t much for conversation.”

  Gastner reached up and touched his own forehead. “Something’s really loose up here with him,” he said. “Then Mike made a break for it, and that set him off. I got damn lucky, that’s for sure.”

  “It all goes back to
that night in 1990,” Estelle said. “It has to. When Chief Martinez caught him and Janet together. She was in the car with him.”

  “That might be, but Christ…,” Gastner said, and he reached up and patted her hand as he felt his own gurney start to move. “Keep digging. Statute of limitations ran out on that sort of monkey business a long, long time ago.”

  She went back inside just as the second ambulance arrived. The bandaging that padded Hank Sisneros’s wrecked knee was brilliant red, soaked through. His face was ashen with shock, his eyes half-closed and glassy. Sheriff Robert Torrez stood nearby, impassively watching the man try to find a less-than-agonizing way of supporting his battered body.

  “They’re going to need the cuffs around front for the gurney,” she said, and Torrez nodded.

  “We can do that.” He started to bend over, and Estelle touched his elbow.

  “Let me,” she said. She bent close to Hank Sisneros, smelling his fetid breath, smelling the alcohol, smelling the blood. For several seconds, she just stared into his bloodshot eyes. “Why did you dump her?” she asked finally, her voice not much more than a whisper.

  Sisneros was having trouble focusing, and his head lolled with each panting breath. Estelle reached out and caught him by the chin, forcing him to look at her. “Why did you dump her in the arroyo, Hank?”

  A quick jerk of his lips might have been a smirk. “Hell,” he mumbled.

  “Why, Hank? Why did you do that?”

  “Figured she might as well be with her old man,” he said, and Estelle froze in place, her hand still locked on his chin, trying to force his eyes to focus on hers. “That’s where he ended up.” He coughed violently. “What’s good enough for him is good enough for the likes of her.”

  “What’d he say?” Torrez said from behind her.

  For a moment Estelle remained kneeling, supporting Hank Sisneros under the chin. Then she pulled her hand away, and the weight of his head ruined what little balance he had. He sagged back to the floor, weight against his cuffed wrists.

  “I know where Brad Tripp is,” she said.

  ***

  At first light on Monday morning, the cavalcade of vehicles, including a county dump truck pulling a flatbed trailer and backhoe, rumbled out of Highland Court to the arroyo, stopping short of the two county sheriff’s units that were parked near the edge.

  Within an hour, the jumble of old cars, appliances, and other informal flood-control structures had been spread out and separated, and the first traces of human remains had been discovered under the massive rump of what had once been the inverted ’57 Oldsmobile “chrome king.”

  “It wasn’t being caught with Janet that bothered Hank,” Estelle said as she stepped to the edge of the arroyo and looked down at the gravesite. “Maybe Janet had an inkling what happened to her father, maybe not. But Hank figured that with the records being opened up and reviewed, and with Janet dating Mike, the whole sorry mess would come to light somehow.”

  She looked across at Bob Torrez. “The old guys would remember too much,” she said. “Or maybe he thought that Janet knew more than she did. Whatever it was, I think Hank Sisneros started stewing that if the records came to light, everything would lead back to Brad Tripp’s disappearance. He didn’t care about Janet. When Eduardo Martinez collapsed, Hank heard about it. He was at the motel, in town figuring to talk to Janet one more time. I’m willing to bet what happened to Eduardo is what gave him the idea. One down and a couple more to go. Eduardo and Bill Gastner are the only two old enough to remember anything. With Eduardo gone, knock off Bill Gastner and Hank would be home free…especially if he could get his hands on the records that he was so sure existed, and especially if he could focus blame on a son he didn’t care enough about.”

  “That’s why he wanted the keys,” Torrez said.

  “One brilliant idea that didn’t work. He thought that he could get into the sheriff’s department conference room himself, maybe.” Estelle turned to gaze back down the dirt lane. “Or more likely,” she said, “he was trying to talk Janet into one last favor for him. It’s a possibility that Brent or one of the other dispatchers wouldn’t pay a whole lot of attention to her if she came into the building.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” Torrez scoffed.

  “He might have thought it would. If he thought Eduardo had kept a file on that incident between Hank and Janet, then what’s to lose? Janet might have been just as happy to see the file go away as anyone.” She shrugged. “That’s a thread cut, Bobby. If nothing about Hank’s little recreation with Janet came to light, then the odds are better that nobody is going to wonder about another drunk who just skipped town one day. Nobody cared enough about Brad Tripp to wonder one way or another. It reminds me of the vagrants we see working the interstate interchanges with their ‘gimme money’ scams. Who’s going to miss them if they don’t turn up one exit farther down the road?”

  “She wouldn’t do it,” the sheriff said.

  “Evidently not. He took her key, thinking that she might have stashed some records or something in the apartment.”

  “That didn’t work, either.”

  “No, it didn’t. If Hank had known more about the chief’s recordkeeping habits, he wouldn’t have bothered in the first place. The odds are that if Hank Sisneros had just stayed in Deming, and kept out of his son’s affairs, none of this would ever have come to light. Monica Tripp thought her father had just left them. It wouldn’t surprise me if Janet thought the same thing.”

  “Well, he did leave ’em, so to speak,” Torrez said. “I wonder if Brad Tripp found out about his daughter and Hank.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it was just a continuation of a fight over a piece of decorative fencing mowed down by an old dump truck. When Hank sobers up, he’ll talk.”

  Torrez made a wry face. “Don’t bet on it. He ain’t that stupid. It’s one thing to have a body,” and he nodded over the arroyo edge where Tom Mears and Eddie Mitchell were working with Dr. Alan Perrone. “It’s going to be somethin’ else again proving what happened here.”

  “Hank Sisneros doesn’t have to know that,” Estelle said. “When he knows that we have Brad Tripp’s remains, he’ll sing.” She watched as Linda Real maneuvered for another shot as Mitchell rearranged the body bag to collect the pathetic jumble of bones and rotted clothing.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Hank managed to accomplish exactly what he was trying to avoid.” She turned away. “Have you been in to see Mike this morning?”

  “No,” Torrez said. “Not yet.”

  “He’s going to need some company. I was going over now for a little bit.”

  “You’re going to take the deposition from Bill?”

  “Yes. Later today. I want to let him get some rest first. He took some nasty thumps, and he was floating in sedative last night. Plus he’s irritated at being stiffed for dinner.”

  “As long as you’re headed that way, take care of him, too,” Torrez said, nodding behind them toward the street. Estelle turned to see Frank Dayan’s little blue compact car turning onto the dirt. “He finally has his big story on a Monday morning.”

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  Steven F. Havill

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