Before She Dies

by Steven F Havill

  “Testy, testy,” Holman grinned. He straightened up a little and watched the roadway. After a minute, he said, “Why is it I always feel like I work for you?”

  I looked over at him in surprise. “Sorry, Martin. I’m tired, that’s all. And old habits die hard.”

  Holman shrugged. “Well, in a way, I suppose I do work for you. I’m elected, you’re not.” He lowered his window an inch and inhaled deeply, holding the air in like someone smoking a joint. He finally let out the air with a monumental sigh. For a moment, I thought that he was going to start rattling on again about the election, but instead he said, “It’s not going to tell us much, even if we do find something.”

  “Anything at all is a piece of the puzzle,” I assured him. “Have you ever tried one of those two-thousand-piece jigsaws, where all the pieces are shaped almost alike? The box top shows a big picture of some Swiss castle or some such? One piece at a time. And if you’re missing one piece, it’s all just that much harder.”

  Holman snorted with disgust. “My daughter talked me into helping her with one of those. It was a picture of a field of horses.” He looked across at me. “About two-hundred damn pieces of blank blue sky, Bill. It took forever, and even then she figured it out just by trial and error.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do here.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Oh yes. It is the same thing, Martin.”

  We reached the Broken Spur Saloon. The parking lot was full, the patrons no doubt taking advantage of having a good story to kick about. I slowed 310 and pulled off the highway. I switched on the spotlight, swiveled it, and played the light across license plates as we idled along the shoulder of the highway. A westbound truck laid on the air horn and passed us so fast the car rocked in its wake.

  “Jesus,” Holman murmured.

  And just beyond the parking lot, as I was pulling back out onto the highway, the sheriff found his missing puzzle piece.

  “Stop,” he barked, and I did so, the patrol car half on and half off the pavement. “Turn the light around this way.” The fender of the patrol car blocked the beam and I backed up. “What’s all that stuff?”

  I craned my neck, pulling myself up against the steering wheel. “The remains of an old sign base, maybe.”

  Holman was out of the car before I finished the sentence. My guess was correct. Hidden in the bunchgrass just far enough off the highway’s shoulder that the mowers wouldn’t hit it in summer was a concrete slab two feet square and a foot thick or more. The sign base rested skewed, sunken into the ground where ants undermined it and occasional careless drivers coming out of the saloon’s parking lot clipped it. One corner of the concrete had spalled and crumbled to pebbles.

  Martin Holman knelt down in the grass and played his flashlight back toward the saloon. The harsh artificial daylight from the parking lot’s single sodium-vapor light washed out the flashlight’s beam, but I could see what excited Holman.

  “Look there,” he said. “You can see impressions in the grass where people have pulled out of the parking lot, driving right over this thing. If you cut the corner more than just a little, bang.” He played the light around the base. “He must have had an old sign up on this at one time.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, and grunted down on my knees. “Enough here to rip up a tire, that’s for sure.” A three-inch spike of naked rebar angled up from the back corner of the pad.

  “Are there traces of rubber on that?” Holman asked, the excitement raising the pitch of his voice so much he sounded like a teenager on his first date.

  “I’m not a human microscope, Martin,” I replied. I sat back on my haunches. “And even if there were, what would it mean? This thing’s been hit a hundred times over the years.”

  “Maybe there’s some kind of match-up we could make with the rubber?”

  I grimaced and stood up. “Martin, think on this, now.” I held up a hand and ticked my fingers. “First, we have the assumption that the disabled vehicle had a flat tire.”

  “Didn’t it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What about the lug wrench?”

  “We don’t know for sure that the wrench belongs to the vehicle in question, Martin. Second, if we assume that the wrench belongs to the vehicle in question, we can further assume that maybe, just maybe, that vehicle was one that was stolen up in Albuquerque—we assume that on the thin basis that the wrench was new and fit the type. Now, we assume even further that if the vehicle had a flat tire, it must have been because of a road hazard.” I shrugged. “Maybe. And then we have to assume that this thing,” and I nudged the concrete slab with my toe, “is the hazard.”

  Holman rose to his feet and stood head down. Maybe he was thinking, maybe he was crying. Maybe he was just plain flummoxed.

  “And then we have to assume,” and I leaned on the word, “that if all the other puzzle pieces are what we think they are, that this thing managed to gouge a brand-new, steel-belted radial in just such a fashion that it held air for roughly two miles.” I pointed off into the dark. “Two miles that way, until the driver was forced to stop and deal with it.”

  “But can’t we match rubber fragments?” Holman persisted.

  I grinned in the darkness. Martin was game, I had to give him that. “No, sheriff, we can’t. In the first place, the rubber compound that makes up a given line of tires—a given batch regardless of size—is all the same. A match wouldn’t tell us anything. In the second, far more important place, we don’t have a damn thing to match to. We don’t have the suspect’s vehicle.”

  Holman squared his shoulders and turned toward the patrol car. “Yet,” he said with finality.

  Chapter 16

  The first five rings of the telephone merely enhanced a ridiculous dream. The first jangle came as my son Kendall was waiting patiently while his wing commander argued with me about the weight of an airplane. It wasn’t an airplane that either he or Kendall was preparing to fly, but it was parked in the way. Why the weight was important was anyone’s guess. Why I was on my son’s aircraft carrier was also a mystery.

  The wing commander heard the second ring and said something about the operations’ Klaxon and that we’d better settle this problem before we had four incoming jets land in our laps.

  I argued, somewhere between the third and fourth ring, that there was no point in doing anything until we knew the weight of the aircraft. Kendall stood off to one side, occasionally gazing out across the blue, calm Caribbean, not interested. That irked me, since it was an airplane that belonged to his squadron. And then I awoke with a start.

  The phone rang again. The two-inch, glowing digital numbers on the nightstand clock announced 3:16 A.M. I rested on my elbows for a moment and let the phone ring three more times. I’d fallen into bed at one-thirty after dropping Martin Holman at his home. Dispatch knew where I was, so I groaned and reached for the receiver.

  “What?” I said, not the least bit cordial.

  “Sir,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, and her husky voice sounded loud in the dark, predawn silence of my ancient adobe house. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “Uh,” I said, and lay back down, the phone buried in the pillow. “I guess I dozed off for a little bit. What’s up?”

  “Sir, I’m down at the hospital. It looks like Linda Real might be gaining some strength.”

  I frowned in the dark, trying to remember all the pieces. “She’s awake, you mean?”

  “Not yet, sir. But a few minutes ago, one of the nurses said something to her, and she responded. She murmured a few sounds in response.”

  “Did you get a chance to talk with her?”

  “She can’t talk, sir, and she drifted off again. Francis said that’s normal. But she’s close to the surface now, sir.”

  I pushed myself upright and swung my feet over the bed. “Did you have a chance to process the wrench handle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And?”

  “Several clear prin
ts, sir. I’m going to have Tony Abeyta run it up to the state lab later today. Maybe they’ll find something I missed. It’s going to be time-consuming to separate the prints, though.”

  “Separate?”

  “If it’s a new vehicle, sir, then there’ll be prints of the factory worker who put the wrench in the kit, in addition to the person who used it.”

  “It won’t be hard to trace the Detroit end, or wherever that thing was made.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you make any comparisons?”

  “Just one, sir. I checked Victor Sánchez’s prints more out of curiosity than anything else. We’ve got them on file. No match.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said. “If Victor Sánchez ever kills someone, there’ll probably be a hell of an audience. By the way, Holman thinks he found the road hazard that ruined the tire.”

  “Oh?”

  “A chunk of concrete near the Broken Spur. It’s got a piece of rebar sticking out of the side.”

  Estelle caught the tone of my voice and said, “And you don’t think so?”

  “Well, I think he’s jumping at the first thing he sees. Yes, here’s an object that could wreck a tire. To make the jump to proving it’s the object is just that…a jump.”

  “Especially since we don’t know for sure that that’s what happened,” Estelle said.

  “That’s about the size of it.” I stood up beside the bed. “Give me about ten minutes to pull myself together and I’ll be down.”

  “That’s probably not necessary, sir. Anything else can wait.”

  “Hell, I can’t sleep the night away, Estelle. Hang in there for a few minutes and I’ll relieve you.”

  ***

  I arrived at Posadas General and padded down the silent hall past the snack bar and gift shop that the auxiliary operated, past the small waiting area for radiology, stopping finally at the nurses’ station. A young lady looked up through the Plexiglas partition and saw the apparition of an old fat man in a red-checked flannel shirt and gray trousers. Except for the absence of a white beard, I probably looked like an off-duty Santa Claus.

  “Hi,” she greeted me. Her name tag said she was Peggy Hadley, LPN.

  “Everything quiet?”

  “Very, sir.” She smiled a snaggletoothed grin that was as charming as it was crooked. “At this time of night, everything is always quiet.”

  She leaned forward so she could look down the hall toward the double doors leading into intensive care. “Miss Reyes-Guzman is down there with Linda, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  Someone had carried a heavy Naugahyde chair in from the separate ICU waiting room across the hall and found a corner for it among the tubes, machines, adjustable tables, and IV stands. Estelle was curled up in the chair like a little kid, sound asleep. I had three seconds to stand in the doorway before she opened one eye and looked at me.

  “Hey there,” I whispered. But it wasn’t Estelle’s unfolding from the chair that drew my attention. Under the white sheet of the bed, Linda Real’s right foot moved.

  I heard soft footfalls behind me and turned as Helen Murchison entered the room. She shot a tight, begrudging smile my way and then concentrated on her patient. Helen was dean of the old school of nurses, flinty, efficient, and brooking no nonsense from physicians, patients, or visitors.

  She’d been one of my own nurses after surgery three years before. I’d received the best of diligent care, but I didn’t remember much sympathy. Maybe that was because once I had told Helen that beneath her crusty exterior beat a heart of stainless steel.

  I heard a faint, distant sound, a single syllable that sounded like an owl’s first tentative hoot half a mile away through the woods.

  “Is she awake?”

  Helen had absorbed all the information the machinery had to offer in a single, cursory glance. Now she bent close to Linda, one hand light as down on the girl’s right cheek. I noticed with surprise that Helen’s knuckles were twisted and swollen with arthritis. It seemed unfair somehow that someone like her would get old the same as the rest of us.

  Linda’s right eye was open, but unfocused. As Helen continued to touch her cheek and whisper encouraging nothings, Linda closed her eye again and after a moment reopened it, this time looking directly at the nurse.

  “How’s she doing?” I whispered.

  “She’s a brave girl, this one is,” Helen said, her back still to me. She held Linda’s right hand in her own and turned to face me. “She’s not going to be able to talk to anyone, you know. For some time. You should all go home and get some rest.” She sniffed her disapproval. “The gathering of the living dead,” she said. “You’re all so tired you can hardly think straight.”

  “Can she hear you?” I asked, stepping close to the bed. Linda’s right eye looked at me from the depths of a dark hollow, haloed by bandages and oxygen tubing. As if in answer, she blinked once. Her eyelid reopened so slowly I was afraid it would stall at half-mast.

  “Linda, can you understand me?” Again the blink. “Let me hold her hand,” I said to Helen, and she surrendered what felt like a tiny, fragile, child’s hand, all its energy and vitality gone.

  I bent close and my back twanged in protest. I stood hunched, my knees braced against the side of the bed. Linda’s good eye scanned my face. She was probably trying to figure out just what kind of nightmare she was having.

  “Linda,” I whispered, “can you squeeze my hand?” The response was the slightest flexing of the fingers, a tentative experimentation. And then a second, definite squeeze. “That’s the girl. Linda, I need to ask you a couple questions. Just a couple. Can you do that? Squeeze my hand once for yes. Don’t squeeze at all for no. All right?”

  For an agonizingly long minute, there was no response. But then a single squeeze came, as if she had to concentrate every undamaged fiber of her body for that one action.

  I sensed Estelle’s presence on the other side of the bed, heard a faint snick, and knew that Estelle had turned on her tape recorder.

  “Linda, do you know who I am?” The squeeze came immediately, and this time her grip didn’t relax, but held my hand. Her index finger flexed and traced a line on my palm.

  “Do you know where you are, Linda?” Her index finger flexed.

  “Linda, do you know what happened to you?” Even old, crusty Helen held her breath. The index finger flexed, and this time her fingernail pressed into my hand. She closed her eye and I could see the fine muscles of her cheek twitch. She held her finger pressed into my palm for a full minute, and even in that tiny motion, the anger was translated clearly. She opened her eye again and a tear had welled up and now bathed the lower lash.

  “Linda, you’re telling me that you do know what happened. Do you know who shot you?”

  The question hung there in the room, punctuated by the soft hum of one of the monitors on the wall behind us. Her index finger didn’t move.

  “Linda, did you understand what I asked you?” The stab of her finger came instantly. “You do understand, but you don’t know who shot you?” She blinked and her fingertip remained still.

  “Linda, did Deputy Enciños stop a vehicle out on the state highway?”

  No.

  “It was already stopped? Perhaps disabled?”

  Yes.

  “Did you recognize the disabled vehicle?”

  Yes.

  I looked up at Estelle, but she didn’t return the glance. Her dark eyes were locked on Linda Real’s face.

  “Linda, you said you recognized the vehicle. Was it from Posadas?”

  Hesitation, then yes.

  “It was local, you’re saying. Was the person who shot you in that vehicle?”

  No.

  “The person was not in that vehicle? Not in the disabled vehicle?”

  No.

  “Linda, was there a second vehicle?”

  Yes.

  “Was the second vehicle parked across the highway?”

  Yes.

 
“Was it there when the deputy first stopped?”

  No.

  I paused and straightened, grunting audibly. Linda’s finger touched my palm, and I smiled at her. Her eyelid was at half-mast and I knew she was about to slip off into her drug-washed slumberland.

  “Linda, do you know who was in the first vehicle?”

  I didn’t think I was going to get an answer, but finally it came, a faint, light finger touch.

  “You do know who was in the car?”

  “Was it someone we know?” Linda’s hand lay limply in my old paw, unresponsive.

  “She’s drifted off,” Helen said, and her crusty voice was softened to a whisper. I stood there for a minute holding the kid’s hand, thinking. The small click of Estelle’s recorder startled me, and I looked across the bed at her.

  “How do you figure,” I said, and placed Linda’s hand on the sheet with a final pat. But Estelle was already collecting her purse and heading for the door.

  “Thanks, Helen,” I said, and I caught Estelle by the elbow just outside the swinging doors of the ICU.

  “What are you thinking,” I asked her.

  “Would you stay with her, sir? She may come around again in a couple hours. She needs to see you, sir. She needs to see a familiar face.”

  I nodded. “Sure, I’ll stay.”

  “And if you find a writing pad, sir. A legal pad, maybe. If she can hold a pencil, maybe she can write a name for us.”

  “And you?”

  “Sir, if Linda knows the person involved, then the fingerprints on the lug wrench will match something we have in the file.”

  “If that person has a record for anything, yes. And that’s a long shot.”

  “Maybe, sir, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The person who Linda recognized is involved, sir. Somehow. Otherwise, we would have found a third body out there, too.”

  “There are any number of ways someone could have slipped away, Estelle.”

  “But if they were just an innocent bystander to a homicide, then they would have contacted us. Or someone. No one watches two people get shot and then just drives away.”