Before She Dies

by Steven F Havill

  “He’ll respond when he can,” I said, and set the radio on the tailgate beside my leg. In silence we watched, our vantage point fifty feet down the road from where the lines snaked out of the rescue truck’s winch.

  At 3:50, with dawn still hours away, we saw the tiny figures down the hill working around the Stokes litter. The radio beside me barked and I startled.

  “This is Torrez.”

  “Bob, are they about to come on up?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Not too good, sir. They stabilized her as best they could, but it doesn’t look good.”

  “Not conscious?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No sign of any other occupant of the vehicle?”

  “No, sir. And if someone else was in the truck and was thrown out, they would’ve been found, with all the people up and down this thing.”

  “Ask him about the seat belt,” Deke prompted me, and I frowned with irritation at being prompted.

  “Bob, was she wearing her seat belt?” In the dark, on that mesa top, with the yawning talus slope in front of me, the question sounded ludicrous. If our local walkie-talkie conversation could be picked up by an avid scanner-ghoul with a humongous booster, he’d wonder about us for sure. Were we going to write the poor girl a ticket for not buckling up?

  “Affirmative. One of the brackets broke sometime during the crash, but she had the belt on when she started out.”

  Deke Merriam nodded sagely. “Pays to buckle up,” he said, with that curious graveyard humor that we all adopted at times when someone else was hurting the most—or was dead.

  I keyed the radio again. “Bob, you’re going to make arrangements to sift through everything down there come morning?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “I’m going to follow the ambulance on into the hospital, then.”

  “Affirmative. Is Estelle all right?”

  “Busted up some. She’ll be okay.”

  The Stokes litter, with its six-man crew carrying it up behind the pull of the lead line, was already a quarter of the way up the slope.

  I pushed off the tailgate and stood up. “Deke, thanks for the smoke. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. We’ll get all the paperwork to you just as fast as we can crank it out.”

  He grimaced and waved a hand.

  With Tammy Woodruff on her way, I heaved a sigh of relief. Gayle Sedillos was working dispatch, and that meant the girl’s parents had been notified. They’d be at the hospital, waiting. So would half of the world, probably. I wasn’t in the mood to talk with any of them.

  I walked—maybe shuffled would have been a better description—to 310 and edged the car out through the sea of vehicles. The ambulance carrying Estelle would be in Posadas already, but the second unit with Tammy Woodruff would be half an hour behind me. I had some time to think. I idled the patrol car down the county road, windows open.

  I hadn’t taken a formal survey, but I suspected that youngsters who got their kicks out of roping cattle or riding broncs, or even one-ton, evil-tempered bulls, wouldn’t be too excited about strapping on a seat belt when they climbed into their mild-mannered pickup trucks.

  It was hard to picture Wild Tammy carefully arranging her beer cans and whiskey bottles on the seat and floor of her truck, then diligently buckling herself in for the drive up County Road 14. Buckling herself in, guzzling all the way?

  The dark mesa top didn’t offer any answers. I reached the intersection with the state highway and stopped. In the five minutes I sat in the parked car, the stop sign large and gaudy in my headlights, no vehicle passed.

  I knew that I needed to talk with Patrick Torrance, even though we had no direct evidence tying the young rancher with any of this mess. True enough, he’d chased after Tammy, maybe even caught her a time or two. True enough, he’d been at the Broken Spur the night of the shooting, when Tammy somehow had gotten tangled in the barbed wire of her adventures. True enough, Patrick hadn’t been home for a few hours, but at his age and pace, that was frequently the case.

  I took a deep breath and turned out onto the state highway. Patrick Torrance was a nice enough kid. He hadn’t come home last night. Most of the explanations for that were innocent enough. Most of them.

  Chapter 27

  Just west of Moore, a rough two-track road angled off to the north. Ranchers from up north used it once in a while as a shortcut to the feed store at the end of Arturo Mesa, but not often enough to discourage the sage, goat-heads, and kochia from flourishing in the center mound.

  By taking the two-track, I could circle around first by the Prescott ranch and then by the Torrance ranch without driving through Posadas. I knew of one cattle gate I’d have to fuss with, where one of Gus Prescott’s grazing allotments crossed the two-track. If I remembered correctly, the two-track skirted a windmill and stock tank less than a hundred yards behind Prescott’s trailer.

  The road would be slow going, but apparently even a broken and bruised Estelle Reyes-Guzman had noticed that idle speed was my most productive pace. The digital clock on the dashboard told me it was 4:37, still an hour and a half before dawn. A good time to go calling.

  With the abandoned mercantile building looming large to my right, I turned off the state highway and bounced along for no more than a tenth of a mile before my headlights illuminated a sign that announced End of County Maintenance.

  Dry sage rasped against the undercarriage of the patrol car, touched the hot catalytic converter, and released a pungent bouquet. It was one of my favorite aromas. I had tried to explain it to Martin Holman once, but he’d just muttered something about his sinuses, looked miserable, and asked me to find some pavement.

  After two miles of relatively flat prairie, the two-track plunged down into a sandy-bottomed arroyo. On occasion the Rio Salinas shared that arroyo, but not in late winter.

  I stopped on the lip and turned the spotlight this way and that, convincing myself that the patrol car wouldn’t high-center in the bottom of the arroyo or spin to a stop trying to climb out the other side. I shrugged. If ranchers could haul stock trailers up and out of this thing, the car wouldn’t have any trouble. “Hell, why not,” I said aloud, and nosed the heavy patrol car down into the arroyo.

  Downhill was fine, and the two and a half car lengths across the bottom of the arroyo were almost smooth. The sedan made it halfway up the other side before I realized that idle speed wasn’t going to cut it. I tapped the gas and the car slewed sideways as both back tires kicked sand and fine riverbed gravel. In an instant, instead of riding nicely on the high ground, the tires sank into the softer sandy ruts where trucks and rains had cut deep channels.

  The frame whomped against something hard and the radials chuddered a burrow into the sand. The patrol car halted, skewed with its ass end pointing into space.

  “Well, this is fine,” I muttered, and slammed the gear lever into park. I got out and switched on my flashlight. What I saw didn’t make me feel any better. If I tried to back up, there wouldn’t be enough room to straighten out before the car slipped over the edge. Rocking back and forth would just bury the back tires deeper. I switched off the flashlight and sighed.

  Ernie Wheeler was back on dispatch when I radioed in.

  “PCS, three ten is ten-seven on Moore Road.”

  “Ten-four, three ten.”

  Wheeler had worked for us long enough to accept messages at face value, no matter how bizarre. He knew the county as well as anyone, but didn’t waste time trying to figure out why I might be out of service on that ridiculous little road.

  After a moment though, he did add, “Three ten, do you need assistance?”

  “Negative.”

  I switched off the car, got out, and locked the doors. With the burbling engine killed, the night closed in silent and dark. I huffed up the last few feet out of the arroyo and plodded along the two-track, working hard to plant my feet carefully so I wouldn’t crack an ankle. There was just enough light th
at, if I didn’t look directly ahead, I could make out the road’s path through what little vegetation the cattle hadn’t found.

  After a quarter of a mile, I pulled my jacket closer and hunched my shoulders. The night breeze was raw. Its cold seeped into the crevices, found the thin spots in my clothing, and ran up the hollow of my back.

  The road skirted along the Rio Salinas’s banks. Someone had tried to fence cattle out of the arroyo—God only knew why. Gus Prescott hadn’t bothered to remove the old fence, worthless as it was.

  A quarter mile of posts and wire meandered along the rim of the arroyo beside the road until I reached a spot where, perhaps fueled by a late summer cloudburst, the seasonal stream had gnawed out the bank and collapsed fifty yards of fence. The arroyo yawned black and bottomless to my left, and out of reflex I stepped into the opposite track of the road. If I fell into that pit, no one would ever find me…at least not soon enough for me to care.

  A mile farther on, and just another mile south of State Highway 17, lay Gus Prescott’s ranch. On a spring morning, it would have been a fifteen-minute stroll. In the heat of summer, dodging humorless rattlesnakes, maybe a ten-minute sweat. It took me half an hour that night, stumbling along like an old man with glass ankles.

  Gus Prescott didn’t share Herb Torrance’s ranching success. He ran a small string of mongrel steers, trying to fatten them on good intentions and wishful thinking. But there simply wasn’t enough water on his spread for more than his small herd. Morning and afternoon, he drove a school bus route that earned him a few extra bucks. His wife Gloria cashiered at Posadas Foodmart.

  The apples of their eye were daughter Christine, who would have earned a 5.0 average if such a thing had been offered at Posadas High School and who was sailing through her second year at New Mexico State University, and her twin, Brett, a 20-year-old picture-book cowboy who’d never crossed tracks with the law. I didn’t know much about him except by hearsay.

  The past Friday night, Tammy Woodruff had backed her pickup into Brett’s at the Broken Spur Saloon. Since Brett was under twenty-one himself, I’m sure his mama hadn’t known where he was…or assumed that the lad was just at the saloon to drink soda pop and enjoy an NBA game on the big-screen television.

  At any rate, Tammy’s maneuver apparently was the end result of a tiff between the two kids. The lethal thought had been there, but she hadn’t managed any damage, being too drunk to judge the speed and trajectory of her missile properly.

  Sergeant Torrez had intervened, or who knew what else she might have done. The collision had apparently put the finis to Tammy and Brett’s relationship, and she’d bounced on over in Pat Torrance’s handsome direction.

  Maybe the Torrance ranch was where she was headed, loaded down with booze, when her truck pitched over the edge of San Patricio Mesa. If so, she had decided not to wait for Patrick before beginning the party.

  A fence loomed out of the darkness and I switched on my flashlight just long enough to find the closure side. I managed to open the barbed wire gate without bleeding, and just as I was closing it behind me, I heard the long, plaintive bellow of a cow calling for its calf. The windmill and stock tank were off to my left. Dark forms shifted and I veered away.

  The Prescotts, either through poverty or choice, had elected not to blast their property at night with a sodium-vapor light. They preferred to take their chances with what ever illumination they were given naturally. I kept my flashlight off as I approached the mobile home, knowing full well that the fragrant, soft sand that my boots hit once in a while was not sand at all.

  By the time I reached the spot where Gus Prescott’s old Bronco, his wife’s Pontiac, and Brett’s big dualie ranch truck were parked, I could see that there was a light on somewhere in the bowels of the trailer. I breathed a sigh of relief. Something wet thrust into my hand and I jumped sideways, sucking air. One of Prescott’s dogs looked up at me, wagging furiously.

  “Christ,” I said, and patted the Aussie sheepdog on the head. He dashed off toward the door of the trailer, ready to show me where the food was.

  Gus Prescott answered my knock, his craggy face early morning puffy. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  “Damn,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Mornin’, Gus,” I said. He looked out past me, squinting. The first tracks of dawn were beginning to build in the east, and I pointed my flashlight out past his used car lot. “I walked,” I added.

  “Well, damn,” he said again. He bent his lank, slightly stooped frame so that he could hold open the storm door. “From wheres?”

  “Ah, I pulled a stupid and got myself stuck down in the arroyo.”

  He looked at me with wonder. “You walked from way down there?” I knew that walking more than two pickup truck lengths was wonderment in itself for a rancher. Two miles in the middle of the night damn near rivaled parting the Red Sea in Gus’s miracle book.

  “Yep. Is Brett to home? I was hoping maybe he could give me a pull with that truck of his.”

  “Well, sure.” He beckoned me in. The sheepdog tried to follow, but Gus planted a boot in his path. The dog cringed, spun on his heels, and scampered down the steps. “He’s just gettin’ up. Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”

  “I could use it,” I said. I needed a tow, all right, but just as badly, I needed to talk with Brett Prescott. What I didn’t need was a production. I got one anyway. And maybe it was my predawn constitutional, or maybe it was the peace and quiet of this spot of bare earth so removed from town, or maybe it was just the quiet, friendly, complete way the family included me in their morning rituals, but, whatever it was, the breakfast Gloria Prescott fed us tasted better than anything I’d eaten since God knows when.

  Gloria was just as lean as her husband, her hair now steel gray. Her movements were deft and sure and graceful. The trailer was close to twenty years old, but looked like it’d been built the week before. She had kept it simple, with no taste for knickknacks or other fuss.

  In one of those moments when nature works just right, Brett Prescott had inherited all the right genes from each parent. He had his mother’s intense, intelligent green eyes and his father’s shock of thick, reddish hair. And no amount of braces ever produced teeth as perfectly straight as his.

  Once his mother had seated herself at the breakfast table, it was by some unspoken command that Brett became the waiter, refilling the coffee cups—always his mother’s first—or fetching an ashtray for his father and himself. He talked just enough to be polite, and he called his father “sir.” I liked the kid.

  I could sense that both Gloria and Gus Prescott wanted to ask about the tragedies that were the talk of the town, but they skirted that conversation, careful to remain polite and gracious at a distance. I didn’t volunteer to feed the grapevine, and I didn’t tell them that we’d just pulled Tammy Woodruff’s remains up a goddamned cliff.

  Instead, we talked circles around all those troubles, hitting the weather past, present, and future, the condition of the range, the possibilities of the Washington folks raising the grazing fees on allotment land, even the record of the Posadas Jaguars. Eventually, I wrapped my hands around a third cup of coffee, leaned my forearms on the table, and looked at Gloria Prescott.

  “This was wonderful, ma’am,” I said. “I haven’t been able to relax like this in days. I need to get stuck more often, I can see that.” I watched the smoke curl up from the tip of Gus’s cigarette. His fingers were yellow from the nicotine, and between him and Brett, the ashtray was filling rapidly. “If I could talk Brett into giving me a hand for a few minutes, I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Gus glanced at his watch. “I guess you got yourself plenty to do, sheriff.” He pushed himself away from the table and got to his feet. “Brett, the chain’s in the toolbox of the Bronco. I was usin’ it yesterday to help Stubs move that pump.”

  Both husband and wife escorted me to the door of the trailer. “I banged up my hip some earlier, or I’d go o
n down with you,” Gus said.

  “No need,” I replied quickly. “The car’s not really stuck. I just don’t have room to back up, and she’ll spin herself in deeper if I go forward. A little pull is all it’ll take.”

  “Well, have at ’er.” He shook hands with me. “Old Brett there’s a good hand. He’ll get you squared away. And come on back when you can sit a spell.” His faint smile told me that he had a good enough notion why I’d headed his way in the middle of the night, but it was plain that he trusted his boy.

  “I appreciate it,” I said, and the sheepdog escorted me to where Brett waited by the big pickup. We rumbled out of the yard and I started to get out when Brett stopped at the gate.

  “Let me get it, sir,” he said, and in a heartbeat he was out of the truck. He sprinted to the gate, snatched it open, and dove back into the truck with an alacrity that startled me. Just as quickly, he drove the truck through, stopped again, and repeated the procedure. I looked out the back window and saw the reason for his haste.

  Thirty head of cattle had left the area near the stock tank and were herding toward the truck, eyes locked intently on the vehicle that they knew, deep down in their slow bovine brains, held the morning feed.

  “They’ll sure crowd the truck if you ain’t careful,” Brett said, and grinned. “’Specially this time of day. They’re smart. They don’t ever bother Mom’s car or even the Bronco.”

  We jounced across the prairie with the truck lugging along in fourth gear, valves rattling and screaming for a downshift that never came. The youngster apparently felt that once in top gear, the truck should stay there until the day’s work was done. We reached the arroyo and Brett braked to a stop. He frowned.

  “Well, that don’t look too bad.”

  “It isn’t,” I said. “Just a little pull.”

  The chain was long enough to loop through the steel nerf bars on 310 that were welded to the frame under the front bumper, and Brett flipped the other end around the ball hitch of the truck. I started the patrol car, put it in drive, and breathed on the gas while the kid idled the pickup truck forward. And that’s all it took.