“That’s a possibility,” I said. “Bob Torrez will probably swing down this way.”
“Oh, yes.” He stopped with one hand on the first gate picket, remembering something. Maybe it was a moment of parental concern, perhaps felt more strongly when he was sober. But he shrugged off whatever the thought was and headed for the house. He walked like a man of eighty-five, even though I knew he was younger than me.
Across the street, two dogs had waited long enough. Convinced that we were now headed in the opposite direction and were no longer a threat, the mutts set up a rhythmic yapping.
The Bacas’ front door wasn’t locked, and even in the harsh-shadowed light of the headlights I could see its delightful rhomboid shape. It was the sort of authentic Z-braced territorial door that would fetch a mint in an Albuquerque antiques shop, the nailheads square and rough, drizzling little tongues of rusty stain down the gray wood.
The lintel was low, no more than an inch over my head, and I stood five feet ten only if I straightened my sore back and threw my shoulders out of joint. If Bob Torrez came charging through that door without paying attention, the rough wood would catch him right in the chin.
“There’s a light here somewhere,” Sosimo muttered, as if the furnishings of the front room hadn’t been rooted in the same spots for the past forty years. He found the switch, and as the sixty-watt power flooded the room in pale yellow, I saw that it wasn’t just pillows that contoured the old sofa along the south wall.
Matt Baca lay stretched out facedown, his head buried in an old comforter. One hand was curled down beside him in one of those postures only possible when deeply asleep.
“Well, he’s here,” Sosimo said, and paused, uncertain of what to do next.
Since young Matt was half a century or so younger than I was, and in far better shape even when drunk, I thought it prudent to take advantages as they presented themselves.
“Don’t bother to wake him,” I said as Sosimo took a hesitant step forward.
“Oh, no,” he said, as if the idea had never crossed his mind. “You two go ahead and talk all you want,” and he turned toward the door to the left of the sofa, just beyond his son’s feet.
I reached around under my jacket and slipped the handcuffs off my belt. The curled right arm I didn’t worry about, since the weight of Matt’s body would keep it pinned until I was ready for it. I stepped across to the sofa, reached down and took his left wrist and pulled it around behind his back, slapping the cuffs on as I did so. He managed a disoriented “Whuh?” as I snicked the cuffs on his right wrist.
“Now you didn’t say…” Sosimo started, but let it trail off.
Matt startled fully awake, twisting so violently that he pitched himself onto the floor, landing hard on his left shoulder. With the resiliency of youth, the maneuver didn’t prompt so much as a grunt.
“Just take it easy, Matthew,” I said. Earlier, by the time he found his way home and passed out on the sofa, he’d hiked a good deal of the liquor out of his blood…enough that he’d remembered to kick off his Nikes. I toed them toward him. “Put on your shoes.”
He muttered an expletive and pushed himself up until he could sit on the sofa, eyes locked on me.
“You’ve had quite a night,” I said. He didn’t make a move, so I indicated the shoes. “Put ’em on.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?” he said, and the venom was pretty good for the hour and the circumstances.
“Don’t care.” I shrugged. “If you can’t manage, then Robert can carry you out.”
Matt’s eyebrows darted together and he glanced at the open door. He could see the headlights of my car, and little else. But his expression made it clear that Matthew Baca didn’t want to deal with his cousin, Undersheriff Robert Torrez. He scrabbled the nearest shoe upright and stabbed his toes into it, stamping it on with practiced ease.
“Do you have your driver’s license on you?” Matt hesitated. “I need to see it.”
He leaned sideways and managed to pull his wallet from his back pocket. I reached over and took it. “Where’d you buy the booze last night?” I asked.
“I didn’t buy nothing,” Matt Baca said.
“Oh, sure,” I agreed pleasantly. The wallet included seven dollars and a valid New Mexico driver’s license that showed a sullen Matt Baca and a birth date of December 13, 1982. I slipped the license into my shirt pocket and handed the wallet back to Matt.
“Sosimo,” I said, “your son is charged with leaving the scene of an accident, providing alcohol to minors, driving under the influence, and half a dozen other things. The best thing for you to do is to come down in the morning and have a chat with Judge Hobart.”
“The judge,” Sosimo said.
“That’s right. The judge. We’ll have a preliminary hearing about nine o’clock. Unless you want me to wake Judge Hobart right now. He’s apt to be a little sore if you did that.”
“No,” Sosimo said.
“And you’re not in any shape to talk with him now anyway.” I stepped toward Matt and took him by the left elbow. “The boy will be safe in the county lockup until morning.”
“So you’re going to drive up there now,” Sosimo said.
“Yes,” I said. Sosimo looked like he wanted to say something else, but waved a hand. The whole thing was too much for his cider-laced brain. “You have a good night,” I said, and turned Matt toward the door. He shuffled along, letting me steer him into the glare of the lights.
I opened the back door of the Ford and he ducked inside before I had a chance to say, “Watch your head.”
It was only as I was turning the car around on the narrow lane that he said, “Where’s Bobby? I thought you said he was out here.”
“Apparently not,” I said, and Matt Baca settled back and ran through his entire four-letter vocabulary in both Spanish and English.
Chapter Five
I lost a bet with myself. I figured that the first thing Matthew Baca would do after he settled down in the backseat was to squirm his cuffed wrists down around his legs so that his hands were in front of him. That wouldn’t accomplish much, but at least he’d be able to pick his nose. About half the kids that we put into cuffs managed to accomplish that maneuver, and I suppose that every one of them hoped that we’d be surprised as hell, thereby showing us a thing or two, by God.
Matt didn’t bother with that stunt. Instead he lay on his back and let fly at the right side window with both feet.
The safety glass was pretty strong, and for the first few kicks he was off balance and experimenting. I slowed the car and twisted around to look through the heavy steel grille that separated front from back. Matt Baca was a dark, featureless shadow, but he could see my profile clearly enough.
“The last time one of those windows got busted,” I said, “the court made the young man who kicked it out pay a hundred and eighty bucks to replace it. And that’s in addition to all the other charges. You might want to think about that.”
Matt did think about it, for about ten seconds. Reasoning wasn’t on his agenda. He set to kicking again, this time with a vengeance. The thud, thud, thud rocked the car. Either he was tuckered from his trek on the mountain, or the soles of his nifty sneakers were too well padded. The window refused to break. His muttered display of colorful language came in short bursts as he sucked in air between assaults on the window.
“Son,” I said, “I’ve never actually seen anybody climb out through a bunch of broken glass while the car was moving,” I said. “Especially with handcuffs on. That’s going to be quite a stunt to watch.”
Maybe young Baca was sober enough by then to imagine himself hanging half in and half out of the window—feetfirst or headfirst didn’t matter much. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
For a couple of miles, the only sound I could hear was his rhythmic breathing. I turned up the volume on the police radio and keyed the mike.
“Posadas County, three ten.”
Enough seconds elapsed that I w
as raising the mike to repeat myself when Brent Sutherland finally found the transmission bar on the dispatcher’s end. “Three ten, Posadas County.”
“Posadas, three ten is ten-fifteen, one adult male. Request that three oh one ten-nineteen. And give the undersheriff a call. Advise him that his rabbit is in custody.”
There was a moment while Sutherland digested that I was inbound with a prisoner and wanted Deputy Taber’s assistance when we arrived and had to transfer the young hothead in the backseat to a jail cell.
“Ten-four, three ten.”
Jackie Taber’s husky voice added, “Three ten, three oh one copies.”
I clicked the mike a couple of times and hung it back on the radio. What my backseat passenger thought of the cryptic conversation was hard to tell, but whatever he thought, it served as a trigger. He realigned and let fly again. Just as we passed the abandoned mercantile at Moore, the passenger-side back window let loose with an expensive whump and a shower of glass.
My first impulse was just to let the little shit lie in his own glass until we reached Posadas. I snapped on the dome light and saw that Matt was continuing his craftsmanlike job of removing the entire window in a hail of stomps and kicks.
A pair of headlights popped into view in the rearview mirror, and I slowed and pulled off on the shoulder, swinging into a dirt lane that was blocked a car-length ahead by a locked gate.
Brilliant red lights blossomed, and at first I thought that Deputy Taber had pulled in behind me. As I got out of the car I caught a glimpse of the horizontal green stripe on a field of white. Two figures got out of the Border Patrol unit, and I recognized the short, blocky driver instantly. His gait reminded me of someone walking across a pitching ship’s deck.
“We saw the feet,” Scott Gutierrez said with a laugh. “Who you got in there?”
“A frisky teenager,” I said, and extended a hand. “You timed it just right.”
Gutierrez crunched my knuckles in a quick handshake and flicked his flashlight toward his partner. “By the way, this is Taylor Bergmann, Sheriff. He joined the crew a week or so ago. We were taking a little tour, showing him the sights.”
“Lots of those,” I said, and shook Bergmann’s hand. “Especially in the middle of the night. I’m Bill Gastner.”
“I’ve heard plenty about you, sir,” Bergmann said, and the tone of his voice left it unclear just what he meant. He turned to watch a truck as it approached from the east, the driver riding the Jake when he saw the red lights flashing on the opposite shoulder. From his confident posture, I guessed Bergmann to be retired military. The truck thundered by in a bow wave of air and a lingering cloud of diesel.
“Have you met Bob Torrez yet?” I asked, and Bergmann shook his head. “With any kind of luck at all, after next Tuesday, he’ll be the new sheriff.” The three of us chatted for a few minutes as if Matt Baca didn’t exist.
And while we talked, not a peep issued from the backseat of my car. Young Matt had the brains to appreciate how the rules of the game had changed.
Gutierrez stepped to the busted window and shined his flashlight in Baca’s face. “Hey, my man,” he said pleasantly.
“Why’d you break the sheriff’s window?”
Baca didn’t answer. He blinked into the light and lay perfectly still—the first thing he’d done right all night. Gutierrez turned to me, still keeping the light in the boy’s face. “What’ve you got him on?”
“Oh, a number of things,” I said. “No big deal. He rammed my car, for one thing.”
Gutierrez stepped back and swung the light along the unmarked Ford’s flanks. “Not this one,” I added. “This is his second wreck for the night.”
“A leg tie or two would fix that,” Gutierrez observed, and I shrugged agreement. The flashlight swung back into Baca’s face. “We were going to hit Tommy’s in Posadas for a sandwich anyway. Let’s throw him in the back of our unit and we’ll drop him off for you. That way he won’t sue you for making him sit in a pile of busted glass.”
“I’d appreciate that.” I stepped to the back door and opened it. “Matthew, time to change wagons. Slide on out of there. And you might want to be careful of the glass.”
The kid took his time, and as he swung his legs out, Gutierrez said, “And that unit is brand-new, kid. You so much as breathe on it, we’ll take you out into a field somewhere and leave you there.”
Gutierrez was about my height and outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds, no mean stunt in itself. But his was youthful brawn. Bergmann was the better part of six feet three with a wonderfully ugly face that would have looked right at home in a barroom brawl. It was reasonable to assume that the three of us could handle a half-stoned kid who weighed maybe one-forty dripping wet.
None of us knew what was going through Matt Baca’s head. Because another vehicle was coming, this time from the west, and because the driver was slow to change lanes to give us a wide berth, both Bergmann and Gutierrez hesitated. Matt Baca hadn’t stood up yet, and Scott Gutierrez was in the process of pulling a couple white nylon ties from his back pocket.
Baca lunged out of the backseat of the car, driving hard against my right hip with his shoulder. That didn’t move me much, but it spun him around so that he lost his balance, back-pedaling away from me. If he hadn’t been cuffed, he could have just extended one hand as he went down, using it as a pivot.
Instead, his flailing body danced backward away from the door and my frantic grasp. The oncoming vehicle wasn’t a tractor-trailer, and it wasn’t burning up the pavement. Maybe the driver’s gaze was attracted by the blinking red lights, and not the shadows beside the vehicles. His front bumper and Matt Baca merged with an awful thump. Because the kid had already started a downward sprawl when the truck hit him, he had no chance.
So quickly did the collision happen that the driver didn’t hit his brakes until the front tires, undercarriage, and rear duals had finished the job of pulverizing the young man. Then, amid billowing clouds of blue tire smoke, the truck skewed across the oncoming lane and plunged into the soft sand of the shoulder, finally jarring to a halt with its left front fender thrust through the highway right-of-way fence.
I didn’t want to take the handful of steps that would carry me to Matt Baca’s side. Bergmann and Gutierrez were quicker. The thought came to me unbidden that Sosimo Baca’s last contact with his son had been when they were both drunk. Odds were good that Sosimo would wake up with a pounding head Saturday morning and not even remember that I’d been in his house the night before, that I’d taken his son away. I wondered what Sosimo’s last sober memory of his son would be.
Chapter Six
Travis Hayes had been on his way to Posadas, about a third of his nighttime food-service delivery route completed, when Matt Baca staggered backward into the path of Travis’ International. The truck’s violent slide into the sand had scattered Jorgensen’s Blue Label Dairy Products around the inside of the rig’s reefer unit like small, frozen missiles.
If there had been heavy traffic, Hayes might have been the second fatality, because he launched himself out of the cab and dashed onto the highway without a glance left or right, only to be grabbed in a bear hug by Bergmann.
“My God,” Hayes cried, “I didn’t see him. He just…”
“We need you to stay back, sir,” Bergmann said.
“He just…” Hayes repeated, and tried to take a step toward the shapeless lump on the pavement. As I approached from the other side, the steel of the handcuffs winked in the headlights of the Border Patrol unit. One of the cuffs was empty and flung wide.
There was no point in feeling for a pulse, but Gutierrez did anyway. Reeling as if someone had punched me, I made my way back to my patrol car and rummaged for the mike.
“Posadas, three ten.”
“Three ten, go ahead.”
On automatic pilot, the words that would summon the troops spilled out. Deputy Taber estimated her ETA at six minutes, with Undersheriff Torrez right behind her. The ambula
nce would take twice that long. As far as Matt Baca was concerned, there was no hurry.
I slumped back in the seat and waited. Mercifully, the highway was deserted, as if the world were recoiling in hushed silence. One of the federal officers found a black tarp and highway flares, and the other moved the Border Patrol unit so that it completely blocked the eastbound lane, lights flashing.
I watched the amber numerals on the digital clock on the dashboard, but after a while even they drifted out of focus. My gaze was fixed somewhere out ahead, through the windshield and off across the dark prairie toward the south.
“Are you all right, sir?”
Startled out of whatever world I’d been in by the soft voice and a gentle hand on my left shoulder, I turned and looked up into Bob Torrez’s face.
“No…I mean, I’m fine,” I said, and shook off the mental cobwebs. The first word out of my mouth had been the accurate answer. I hadn’t seen Torrez drive up, but now the area was practically daylight in a brilliant symphony of flashing lights that captured half a dozen moving shadows.
“Deputy Taber is taking a statement from the truck driver,” Torrez said. “What he says jibes pretty much with what Gutierrez and his sidekick say happened.”
“I’m glad everybody goddamn agrees,” I said, and pushed myself out of the car. “How the hell long have you been here?” An ambulance was backing up carefully toward the black plastic-covered lump, the vehicle’s tires straddling the center line. A hundred yards to the east, another set of red lights blinked where Taber’s patrol unit blocked the highway.
“Just a couple of minutes.”
I don’t know why that irritated me, but it did. I had the mental picture of them all tiptoeing around me, careful not to disturb the old man sitting off by himself. What the hell did they think I had been doing, writing memoirs with a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the door handle?
I leaned against the rear fender of my car and watched the paramedics try to decide which part of Matt Baca’s remains to lift first onto the gurney.
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