Before She Dies

by Steven F Havill

  I turned 310 off the highway and rolled into the Broken Spur’s parking lot. Down the road I could see the blades of Howard Packard’s windmill turning in the light breeze. Sergeant Torrez was right—it was a good place from which to watch the bar’s parking lot.

  A beer delivery truck was angled so that its side roll-up doors faced the building. Nosed into the shade on the other side of the building was a faded blue and white 1976 Ford half-ton pickup. I shut off the county car and got out, immediately wishing I’d worn a warmer coat. The wind was from the west, picking up a little as the sun dipped low.

  The driver of the beer truck saw me first as he wheeled the dolly back for another load.

  “How you doin’? Is Victor in there?”

  He shook his head. “Junior is, though. He’s in the kitchen.”

  I made my way inside, stepping around piles of boxes, a collection of brooms and mops, and scores of aerosol cleaning products—and all the other junk that keeps a place habitable and the health inspectors happy. Junior Sánchez was bending over the sink, snipping fat off chicken carcasses. He straightened up with a hunk of chicken in one hand and large kitchen shears in the other and blinked as I shuffled in.

  “Dad’s not here,” he said without preamble or greeting.

  I leaned against the counter and surveyed the mess he was making. Not the brightest lad on earth, Junior Sánchez was lucky that he had a steady job with Dad. His older brothers had struck out on their own, Juan heading for California last I’d heard and Carlos working at Chavez Chevrolet-Oldsmobile.

  “What are you fixing?” I asked.

  Junior turned and looked at the pile of chicken. “Saturday’s always a big fajita night,” he said, and poked at a thigh with the scissors. “Got to get all these ready.”

  “Are you still showing the games on the big screen in there?” I asked, nodding toward the double doors that swung into the barroom proper.

  “Oh, sure,” Junior said.

  “I might have to come over for that,” I said as smoothly as if I meant it. “When’s your dad going to be back?”

  Junior went back to snipping. “I don’t know. He had to get something fixed for the bathroom. One of the toilets wouldn’t flush.”

  That would be more grim for a busy barroom than running out of fajitas, for sure, I thought. “Well, it’s nothing that can’t wait,” I said. “I was just out this way, and thought I’d see him for a bit. But it’s no big deal. If you happen to think about it, tell him I was here, would you?”

  The kid nodded and I left him to his chicken.

  Chapter 6

  I didn’t hang around to see Victor Sánchez. Karl Woodruff wasn’t going to file a complaint against anybody. He might grumble some, but that would be the extent of it. Tammy was out of jail and no doubt reciting her tale to anyone who would listen, and Sergeant Torrez was off duty until Monday swing shift. Victor wouldn’t see him parked down at Packard’s windmill for a couple of days.

  What was left of the weekend passed uneventfully until late Sunday afternoon when, with the setting sun square in her eyes, Donni Weatherford overcooked it coming off the ramp from the interstate. She was driving a big custom van pulling an even larger travel trailer, and like the rest of her family was tired and cranky.

  The unit apparently began to weave, and Donni’s husband Chad leaned over to provide assistance at just the wrong time.

  The van and trailer crashed off the pavement and reduced themselves to junk through a spectacular tap dance across the tops of the guardrail posts. Chunks of van and travel trailer littered the entire ramp and most of the intersection and underpass below by the time the entire affair came to a shrieking, smoking stop.

  The younger Weatherford generation, including a hysterical teenager named Becky and a sober set of ten-year-old twins tagged Donnell and Donette, were well belted in and unhurt.

  Deputy Paul Enciños arrived at the wreck minutes before I did. When I scrambled through all the junk, I saw that he was trying to talk some sense into Becky. The girl was hanging by her seat belt with a head-on view of a section of bent guardrail. The jagged steel was inches from her face. The side of the van where she’d been sitting was gaping as if hit by a huge can opener.

  Had the vehicle chewed another foot down the railing, Becky would have been decapitated. She was smart enough to figure that out for herself.

  Paul and I popped her seat belt and helped her out. She grabbed my arm so hard with her sharp little fingers that I thought I was the one who would end up bleeding.

  The twins and Mrs. Weatherford were trying to divide their attention between Becky and the man who’d caused the whole thing. Their dither was understandable. Chad Weatherford had been pitched clear of the mess, hitting a section of the steel guardrail and fracturing his right thighbone in about eighteen places.

  With Becky and the twins safe, Donni Weatherford concentrated her efforts on hubby, giving her something to worry about other than the junk pile she’d made of their vehicle and their vacation plans. Through tears, she told me the family had been heading for San Diego, a long haul from home in Davenport, Iowa.

  I didn’t ask her how she managed to check her kids out of school in the middle of February.

  The ambulance arrived. Chad’s leg was field dressed and he was strapped onto a gurney for the four-minute trip to Posadas General Hospital. One of the EMTs and I assisted Donni, making sure she didn’t break anything or become tangled in any of the equipment when she climbed into the ambulance.

  Deputy Tom Mears played taxi and took the youngsters to the hospital in his patrol car. Mrs. Weatherford thanked me profusely, as if she had first thought that we might leave her kids by the shoulder of the highway, battered, stranded waifs.

  By the time I returned to the office and made a few phone calls, it was pushing seven. My stomach was growling, having been ignored all afternoon. I needed to stop by the hospital and if I then took time to go home to clean up and change as well, I’d risk being so late for dinner that I’d miss several courses. Estelle and her family would have to take me as I was—something they were used to.

  Donni Weatherford was considerably more composed when I found her in the hospital’s tiny snack bar. I gave her the telephone number of the local insurance agent and recommended a motel that would put a courtesy car at her disposal.

  I’m sure the kids thought being marooned in Posadas, New Mexico, was high adventure. That would wear thin in a day or two.

  At 7:09, I walked through the front door of the Guzman’s modest adobe on South Twelfth Street. The aroma of Mexican food as only Estelle could cook it made me slobber.

  “We just finished,” Francis said as he held open the door.

  I stopped short, rested my palm on the butt of my revolver, and frowned at the young surgeon. “You’re finished, all right.”

  He grinned and waved me in. “We’re glad you could make it,” he said. “Aunt Sofie was looking forward to seeing you again.” He paused for just a heartbeat and added, “We weren’t, of course.”

  I hesitated. I’d forgotten the Guzmans had company—proper company no less. I held up my hands, sure that I still smelled of spilled gasoline. “You’ll have to take me as I am. I didn’t have time to go home and get all prettied up.” I shed hat and coat and then gun belt. “Where’s the kid?”

  “In the dining room, making a mess,” Francis said. “Come on in.”

  Francis Guzman Jr. was belted in his high chair; he was old enough to pound out percussion with a spoon but not so old that all the food found its way with regularity to his mouth.

  Estelle and Francis’s aunt emerged from the kitchen and Estelle greeted me with a hug.

  “You’ll have to excuse the aroma,” I said. “We had a mess on the interstate and I smell like gasoline and highway flares.”

  “Serious?” Francis asked.

  I shrugged, dismissing the incident.

  “You remember Sofia from the wedding,” Estelle said, taking me by the e
lbow and guiding me around the kid, who was making a multicolored mess of his food.

  “Of course,” I said. Sofia Tournál smiled warmly and extended her hand.

  “It is so nice to see you again, sheriff,” she said. Her voice was husky and thickly accented. She must have been lost in the crowds of Guzman relatives during the wedding, for I would certainly have remembered her otherwise. Five years or so younger than my own sixty-three, the Guzman family resemblance was strong. When she smiled, which was often, the angular planes of her face softened. I had a feeling those features could just as easily form impressive storm clouds as well.

  “I’m glad you could visit,” I said.

  She nodded. “I was so sorry to have missed the bautizo—the christening—for the child,” she said, and smiled. Her teeth were perfectly even. If tooth genes from each side of the family joined forces, the kid would never see an orthodontist. “It was very kind of you to host it, padrino.”

  “It was a lot of fun. My pleasure.”

  “I’m sure it was. Had my husband not been ill…” She let a turning of the hand suffice for the rest.

  “I thought we’d let the kid eat first, and then turn him loose so we can eat in peace,” Estelle said quickly.

  “The kid,” Sofia said softly. The tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened as she bent down to make a face at the youngster. He responded with an explosive laugh that sprayed applesauce on his aunt. She didn’t flinch. Compared to the splattered, smeared youngster, I was clean as the driven snow.

  Dinner was one of those wonderful affairs that lasted all evening. After an hour, the kid decided we were too dull for his world. He sat in the middle of a sea of randomly shaped wooden blocks in the living room, building only he knew what. Each time the block tower toppled, he would shriek with delight. In twenty minutes, he toppled, too, curled in a tight ball on the sofa.

  I had no desire to talk shop or recite an endless, tedious compendium of law enforcement war stories, but Sofia Tournál’s curiosity was that of a true lawyer. She probed, she prodded, she delved…and always she listened with her dark, thick eyebrows furrowed slightly in concentration.

  Finally, with a hand delicately over her cup to halt the fifth refill of Estelle’s potent coffee, she looked across at me. “So, tell me…” and she rested her other hand against her cheek as if preparing for a long answer. “What do you think of Estelle’s decision, then?” She raised one eyebrow.

  “Decision?” I asked. “To go back to school, you mean?”

  Sofia turned as Estelle came back from the kitchen. “Maybe you have not discussed…” she started and then let the comment linger. I could see that Estelle was on the same mysterious wavelength. She knew exactly what Sofia Tournál was talking about, and I didn’t have a clue.

  “I haven’t talked about it with him yet, tía. Just with you and Francis.”

  I sat back and folded my hands on my belly.

  “Well,” Sofia said. “This is a man who is used to being in the very center of things.” She beckoned to Estelle to sit back down. “You should discuss your decision with him, certainly.”

  “Certainly,” I said, amused.

  Estelle concentrated on the tablecloth for a full minute, tracing the lace design with the handle of a spoon. Neither Francis nor Sofia said a word. We waited. Finally Estelle chuckled. “This is harder than I thought, sir.”

  “Oh? What’s harder? Fill me in. What’s the big mystery?”

  She looked up at me, her clear, olive skin framed by raven black hair. But it was the eyes that as always drew my attention to Estelle—black, bottomless, calm, and assessing.

  “I’ve decided to run for sheriff, sir.”

  The room became so still I could hear the kid’s muttery little breaths in the next room.

  It was Sofia who broke the silence. “This must be quite an adventure, don’t you think?

  Adventure wasn’t the first word I would have chosen, but I desperately wanted to say the right thing when I opened my mouth.

  “Instead of law school, or in addition to?” I asked.

  “Before, maybe,” Estelle said. She frowned. “If I do, that is.”

  I sat forward. “What do you mean, if you do? You just said you’d decided.”

  She grinned sheepishly. “That still changes from minute to minute, I guess. There are still some very important things I haven’t worked out in my mind.”

  “For instance?”

  The telephone in the living room jangled and Francis got up swiftly to answer it. I wasn’t sure that Estelle had heard it.

  “I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position,” she said.

  I laughed. “You mean during the election or afterward, when I have to work for you?”

  She started to say something and then stopped, looking up at Francis. I twisted around. “It’s Gayle Sedillos, sir. She needs to talk with you,” he said.

  I felt like ten tons when I pushed myself upright and away from the table. “Hold that thought,” I said to Estelle. “This will only take a minute. They can live without me for one evening.”

  The kid stirred fitfully as I walked past him, so I kept my voice down when I picked up the receiver. “Gastner.”

  Gayle’s voice was artificially starched. “Sir, a civilian just called in to report a shooting involving one of our deputies. Tom Mears and Howard Bishop are on their way out now.”

  “Who was involved?”

  “Deputy Enciños, sir.”

  “You don’t know what happened?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “State 56, one mile east of County Road 14.”

  “We’re on our way.” I started to hang up the telephone, but Gayle’s urgent voice stopped me.

  “Sir…”

  “What is it?”

  “I think Linda Real was with him as well, sir.”

  Chapter 7

  An ambulance’s red lights winked in my rearview mirror as we passed under the interstate exchange on South Grande Boulevard and started to slow for the sweeping right-hand turn onto State 56. As I accelerated 310 out onto the highway, Estelle turned up the radio slightly, hunching forward as if to prompt the electronic signals.

  “Three oh seven, PCS. Ten-twenty.”

  Gayle Sedillos’s voice on the radio was crisp, almost mechanical. Estelle reached for the microphone and held it in her lap, waiting.

  I could envision Howard Bishop reaching over to grope for the microphone without taking his eyes from the highway as it hurtled past.

  “Uh, PCS, three oh seven is about a minute out. I just passed the Broken Spur.” Deputy Bishop’s voice was soft, almost hushed. He was eight miles ahead of us with Deputy Mears close on his bumper.

  “No traffic,” Estelle said. Our headlights drilled a tunnel into the black prairie.

  I didn’t respond. I concentrated on the highway. The drowsiness following a heavy meal had vanished with Gayle’s voice on the telephone. The black macadam of the state highway stretched out in front of the county car, a ribbon that grew narrower as we accelerated into the night.

  For several seconds, the only sound was the bellow of our car’s engine. And then the dam broke.

  “PCS, three oh seven is ten-ninety-seven.” I tensed and gripped the wheel until my knuckles were white. Maybe whoever had called had sucked up one too many drinks at the Broken Spur Saloon and had gotten the story all wrong. Maybe it was a false alarm, a practice run where we all got to drive like crazy people with red lights and sirens and then got to laugh about it afterward.

  We wound up through the esses that curled around the base of Arturo Mesa and then flung down the other side, to cross the Rio Salinas and flash past the tiny ghost town of Moore. I caught a wink of red far off in the distance to the southwest.

  “Three ten, three oh seven.”

  Estelle responded in less than a heartbeat. “Three ten is just coming up on the Broken Spur.”

  “Three ten, is th
e ambulance right behind you?”

  “Affirmative.”

  In another minute, as we shot past the saloon, I saw a group of half a dozen people standing in the parking lot, clustered around a cattle trailer and a fleet of pickup trucks. They were on their way to provide an audience, no doubt.

  Two minutes later we crested a slight rise, turned a corner to the right, and came face to face with a parking lot in the middle of the state highway. I swore and braked hard. A civilian was standing in the oncoming lane waving a flashlight frantically, thinking perhaps that I was blind.

  I stopped 310 diagonally across the double yellows so it blocked both lanes. Up ahead I could see Mears’s and Bishop’s patrol cars, one slightly ahead and one behind a third county car that was parked almost off the pavement. Half a dozen other vehicles were parked on both sides of the highway, and a circle of people nearly hid Deputy Enciños’s patrol car from view.

  I recognized rancher Howard Packard as I stepped out of the car. “Stay back here and make sure no one else comes through except emergency vehicles, Howard,” I said, and pointed back toward town. “Stay back behind my car.”

  Estelle was two paces ahead of me, walking down the center of the road, her hands thrust in her coat pockets. Ahead in the glare of a spotlight I saw that both doors of Enciños’s patrol car were open.

  I pushed my way past several curious, taut faces and knelt beside Howard Bishop. His huge frame was folded awkwardly as he tried to pump and breathe some life back into Paul Enciños.

  “Any pulse?”

  “No,” Bishop said between grunts.

  “The ambulance will be here in less than a minute.” I didn’t need to tell Bishop that his efforts weren’t going to do Paul Enciños any good. Whoever had assaulted the deputy had used a shotgun and used it more than once.

  “Sir…” Mears called across the car. I rose and made my way around to the other side. “I don’t know what to do, sir,” Mears said when he looked up and saw me.