“Hey,” Sheriff Torrez said. “You in the air yet?”
“About to be.”
“Okay. Keep me posted. Taber and Pasquale are headed over to Stewart’s place this morning. We’ll see what they turn. Todd Stewart says he’ll cooperate. Me and Mears are hittin’ Scott’s in just a couple of minutes. Gayle put out an APD on Garcia.” Gayle Sedillos Torrez, the sheriff’s wife and the department’s office manager, had taken time off with the arrival of baby Gabe. Now, she found time to occasionally visit the office, where she accomplished more in an hour than most would in a day.
“See if the coach kept a datebook, Bobby.”
Torrez fell silent for a moment, then said, “He’d be one to keep score, wouldn’t he?” He grunted in what could have been frustration. “We don’t know what rock Arthur Garcia is holed up under. Maybe he found a way up to the city.”
“We’ll see about that in just a few minutes.” She felt the aircraft start to drift forward. “We’re taxiing now. An hour up, an hour there, another one back. I’ll be home by eleven. We’ll touch bases then.”
She hung up, and tried to relax as the fancy rocket sled turned to line up with the east-west runway. Miles Waddell sat facing her, a wide grin lighting his features.
“I get such a kick out of this bird,” he said. “Great way to see New Mexico.”
Before she had time to frame an answer, the massive acceleration forced her back into the seat. The climb-out to the west was so steep that Cat Mesa, the massive bulwark north of the village, became little more than a modest lump as it disappeared well below and behind them. The day was perfectly clear, and the view, with the X-Cessna’s sharply swept wings, unobstructed. In what seemed like only a couple of minutes, she caught sight of the wink of Elephant Butte under the glare of the rising sun.
The cabin leveled a bit from its initial impossible angle, but the climb continued as if the Cessna wanted to stick its slick nose out into the black of space.
Somewhere south of Socorro, the ferocious ascent relaxed a little, and Waddell lifted one side of his ear phones. “You can listen to the cockpit chatter on these, if you want,” he offered. “We’re starting our descent to Albuquerque in about eight minutes.”
Estelle looked at her watch, then looked again. Down below, the Rio Grande ribboned south, the verdant farmland boundary just a narrow hint of prosperity against the harsh New Mexico landscape. Far to the east, she caught a glimpse of enormous crop circles, watered by the overhead irrigators.
Waddell leaned forward so he didn’t have to raise his voice. “The kid is in a bad way, the docs tell me.”
Estelle turned away from the window. “It’s frustrating, Miles. At the moment, he’s the one person who might be able to tell us what happened.”
“Might.”
“That’s right. We have no single path that we know we should be following. It’s like a maze. Lots of things that shouldn’t be, but none of them pointing us in an obvious direction.”
“You don’t actually suspect Efrin Garcia of playing a part in the shooting, do you?”
“No. Right now, I think that he’s a case of being a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m interested in what he might have seen or heard. We know now that he was in the area, but we’re not sure exactly when he was there. There’s always a chance that he saw something that could help us…but I don’t hold my breath on that, either. If he saw the killer, if he somehow witnessed the crime…then he’s lucky he’s not dead as well.”
The whine of the jets didn’t change, but the nose relaxed downward a few degrees, and they flashed north, the ribbon of the interstate far below.
“Mr. Waddell, we’ll be touching down in about six minutes.” The pilot’s voice on the intercom was gracious. “You have a ride waiting for you at the Goodman-Banks hangar just southwest of the terminal. We’ll be standing by for the return flight whenever you’re ready.” The “Fasten Seat-Belts” message board chimed just as the engines retarded a bit more and they started a gentle swing to the west.
“A fellow could get used to this,” Waddell said, and pushed his seat-back vertical. They had time for a brief view of the western side of the city, including the landfill, the racetrack, and a scattering of developments before they crossed the river and the interstate and their tires scorched tracks on the runway. Braking hard, they turned off at one of the several intersections and taxied rapidly for what seemed like miles before slowing for a hard turn toward a private hangar.
The hangar doors gaped. The pilot slowed the jet’s taxi to a crawl, and Estelle felt the nose wheel trundle over the door’s bottom track. The engines spooled down to silence, and she saw that a white crew-cab pickup truck waited off to one side inside the open hangar, just far enough inside to be out of the sun.
Waddell reached out and handed a card to Estelle. “I know you have one of these, but just in case. When your business is finished, away we’ll go. You won’t have to wait on us.” He rose from his seat and watched as the pilot made his way to the door release.
The Cessna was nosed halfway inside the hangar, the engines and tail assembly brilliant in the morning sun. As Estelle stepped out into the cool shade of the hangar, she felt the gentle bump as the tow bar was attached to the nose gear. The pilot touched her elbow as she made the final step down to the hangar’s polished concrete floor. His name tag labeled him as PD Ackerman.
“That was a very smooth landing,” she said. “Thank you.”
He grinned. “I learned to fly in a Luscombe before the military got a hold of me.” He left it to Estelle’s imagination to figure out what a Luscombe might be, but she had seen a Luscombe 8 that Posadas manager Jim Bergin had owned—a tiny two-seater with high wing and manners that encouraged a gentle touch on the controls. Ackerman nodded across the hangar toward the parked pickup truck. A trim young woman waited by the front fender. “Marion will take you wherever you need to go, ma’am. When you’re ready to return, just tell her. We’ll be ready to roll the minute you arrive back here.”
He escorted her across the gaping hangar as if she somehow might get lost in the intervening hundred feet.
“Marion, this is Posadas Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman,” Ackerman said. “We’re on a round-robin without much downtime.” Marion’s grip was firm and professional. Just as the doors of the white Ford F-250 sported Goodman-Banks logos, so did her pressed white shirt and the ball cap that tried to keep her thick blond hair in some sort of order. Her ponytail reached nearly to her slender waist.
“Marion Banks,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sheriff. Did you have a good flight?”
“Just a little pokey.”
Marion blinked, and then beamed. “It is amazing, isn’t it?” She glanced at her watch. “But not bad. Not too pokey.” She reached out and opened the truck door. “I understand we’re headed to UNMH?”
“Yes, please.” Estelle looked back toward the plane. Rather than accompanying them, Miles Waddell was striding toward the back of the hangar, where a series of doors lead to offices and lounges. As she slid into the pickup, Waddell turned, grinned at her, and touched the brim of his Stetson. Estelle reflected that the rancher, now rancher/developer, was losing no time in getting used to this lifestyle. She wondered if he would enjoy meeting Derwood Trevino, Angie Trevino’s father with the quick and deep wallet. Miles might not be impressed, but Derwood? Certainly.
“I appreciate you doing this,” Estelle said as the girl guided the truck out of the hangar and headed for the frontage road at the posted speed limit plus twenty.
“Anything to get out of the office,” she said. “And I’m standing in for my dad. He wanted to meet you, but he couldn’t spring himself loose. So you have me.”
“And your dad is…?”
“I’m sorry. I thought maybe you had met him. Paul Banks? He’s half of the Goodman-Banks team.”
“And I’m delighted. How long have you worked for the firm?”
“My second
week.” She smiled again. “I’ve been away at Caterpillar in Peoria for a while, trying to learn all there is to know about the parameters of digital wear indicators.” She raised an eyebrow at Estelle as she maneuvered deftly through traffic. “Sounds exciting, huh?”
“Anything can be exciting in the right circumstances.”
“Well, one way to make money is not to spend it needlessly,” the girl said. “If you have an app on your computer that tells you that the drive links on your D-9 are close to failing, it makes a lot more sense to fix it while it’s ambulatory than have it sit crippled in the field.”
“An ambulatory D-9. I like that. So your background is in engineering, then.”
“BS, MS, Purdue.”
Estelle laughed. “You’re overqualified as a chauffeur, but I appreciate it. I assume you’ve met Mr. Waddell?”
“Oh, several times.” She beamed. “What a character. You know, as soon as he heard about this project, my dad told Bayard Goodman that we had to win the bid, whatever it took. I think it was building the narrow gauge out from the village to the facility that intrigued my dad the most. That and Mr. Waddell’s insistence that every step of the way…every step, we tip-toe. He didn’t want the land ripped up any more than necessary. And you know, it’s funny. We’re a big company, but for this one? We’re almost not big enough. We’ve had to search out some specialists.”
She turned the truck deftly into the driveway of the hospital, a place where there was no apparent easy parking. “You’ve been here before?”
Estelle nodded. “Too many times.”
“Oh, no. Not as a patient, I hope.”
“Both sides of the bed.”
“Ah…I’m sorry. Then you know where you’re going. I’ll wait for you in the front lounge after I find a place in the shade to park.” She fished out a business card. “That’s my cell. Just buzz me when you’re ready to leave. Or if something unexpected comes up and you need a ride somewhere else.”
“Marion, thank you. This is wonderful. I won’t take long. I really need to get back to Posadas.”
“Great. Me too. I’m flying back with you folks. I look forward to hearing your take on this whole thing. This project of Mr. Waddell’s.”
Chapter Thirty-two
The university hospital was rush-hour busy, but Estelle chalked it up to her own culture shock. Five people in Posadas constituted a traffic jam. Here, everyone appeared to be going somewhere altogether too fast, and at the same time urgently talking with someone on a handheld gadget.
A girl tagged as Melanie at one of the information desks looked hard at Estelle’s belt hardware and then asked to see her credentials. Seeing that this visitor wasn’t with APD, Melanie took her time reading the ID and commission card, then handed them back without comment. She pulled a small map over, and like a desk clerk at a motel telling a patron where to find the room, penciled the route through the various rabbit warrens. This time she smiled as she handed the map to Estelle. “Have a good day.”
“You bet.” In due course, the undersheriff reached bed 3-C in the intensive care unit. Other than various beepings from a fleet of monitors, the place was spooky quiet, with people talking in hushed tones.
A woman whom Estelle took to be a senior nurse, gray hair wound into an old-fashioned bun, stocky and efficient in her movements, was adjusting a drainage tube that issued from Efrin Garcia’s thin, bruised chest just below a long incision, the stitches like miniature railroad cross ties wrapping around the ribs on his left side. Adelle Sturges, RN, straightened up with a satisfied, “There.” She turned to see Estelle standing by the foot of the bed.
“Hello, whoever you are.” She gave Estelle a quick up and down survey. “Give me a minute to fix his dressings.” She tended to the task, and in a moment Efrin lay quiet, freshly bandaged, intubated and sheeted, hooked to at least half a dozen machines that all agreed: the boy was alive.
Estelle extended her hand. “I’m Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman from Posadas County. I really need a few minutes with Efrin, if that’s going to be possible.” Ms. Sturges’ handshake was perfunctory but firm.
“Oh, my sweetie is doing just fine.” The nurse grabbed a handful of sheeted toes and waggled them from side to side affectionately. If Efrin was doing fine, he didn’t summon up the energy to agree, or open his eyes, or cause a little twitch in the monitor feeds. He looked very much like an overly thin, beaten kid who hadn’t decided whether or not to step through death’s door.
Estelle picked up the chart from the end rail of the bed. Nurse Sturges didn’t appear to think much of that. Her mouth went prim and tight, one hand now protectively on Efrin’s forehead.
“Elbow, spleen, various contusions and abrasions. One twelve-point-seven-centimeter laceration behind the right ear, possibility of a mild concussion.” Estelle glanced up after reciting the chart and surveyed the wreckage. Sure enough, bandages covered the right side of Efrin’s head, his ear hardly a bump under all the mummy wrappings. His left arm was cocked awkwardly in its fiberglass cocoon.
“What’s the surgical schedule on the elbow?”
“I think you should talk with Dr. Chabra on that,” the nurse said. And then, as if embarrassed to be stonewalling, she added, “I know they haven’t done any surgery on it yet, because of the issue with his spleen.”
“He’s off transfusions now?”
“As of earlier this morning. But my goodness, what a time he had.”
Estelle read the notes that reported, in their typical multi-syllabic style, that a fractured rib had lacerated the spleen.
“A lucky young man,” she said, and slid the chart back in the keeper. Advancing up the bed, she put a hand on Efrin’s right knee, leaning close until her face was only inches from the boy’s. “Efrin, are you with us yet? Can you understand me?”
His shallow breathing hiccoughed.
“You’re going to be okay.” She hesitated, choosing her words carefully, aiming at what the boy would want to hear, not couched in threats. “No one is going to get even close to your mural while you’re here, Efrin. Mr. Waddell is so proud of what you’ve done. He showed it to us last night.”
His black eyebrows twitched a little.
“He wishes you well, and wants to stop by to see you a little later. Maybe that’s silly, huh, Efrin? Maybe after all this, the last thing you care anything about is some unfinished mural up on the mesa. But we all want to see it finished, Efrin. We want to see you finish it. And then we want to see you go on to even bigger projects.”
His lips moved, and he lifted his right arm ever so slowly, carrying the array of tubes with it. He turned his head slightly and reached across to itch the corner of his left eye. His lips moved again as his hand relaxed onto the sheets.
She watched his eyes, and saw that they appeared to focus.
He groaned and flexed one knee. “What happened at the school, Efrin?” Estelle’s mouth was no more than two inches from Efrin’s bandaged right ear. “We know you weren’t able to finish the panel.” When there was no response, she added, “Tell me what happened that night. Tell me how it happened.”
“He pushed the ladder.” Efrin Garcia’s voice was surprisingly strong, then regressed into scarcely a whisper, as if someone had turned down a rheostat. “He came out and saw me and yelled at us.” He hiccoughed again. “I fell, I broke my arm. I got…” he pulled a long, shuddering breath. “all tangled up in the ladder.”
“You said, ‘yelled at us.’ Who was with you, Efrin?”
With no indication that the boy had heard her, Estelle leaned closer, reaching around his head to caress his cheek, to keep his head from lolling away from her. “Who was with you, Efrin?”
Still no response.
“He drifts in and out,” the nurse said.
Efrin’s eyebrows furrowed again. “He never liked me ’cause of my…” That was as far as he got before his eyes first refused to focus, then closed as he drifted off.
Even as Estelle straighten
ed up, Efrin jerked, and his eyes opened briefly. “She saw what happened,” he rasped. His mouth lolled, and his eyes remained open just enough to expose the bottom arch of color of his irises. He drifted away from the unfinished thought. She witnessed? Who was she?
“Has he had any visitors?”
“Just his mom,” the nurse said. “She flew in with him, and has been here the whole tour. All yesterday, all last night. I talked her into going down to the ICU lounge just a bit ago for a nap.”
Ms. Sturges sighed and patted Efrin’s left ankle as she surveyed the monitors. “Rest is what he needs, at this point. The lounge is just down the corridor to the right if you want to visit with her.” She frowned hard at Estelle. “And the same applies to you, Sheriff. You look beat.”
Estelle smiled at the mothering. “Time for all that,” she said.
***
Eustacia Garcia had appropriated the entire yellow couch, her shoes neatly stowed on the floor at one end and a hospital-issue blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Estelle felt a wash of sympathy when the woman turned slightly to look at her. Despite being up all Thursday night, followed by a long, sleepless day on Friday, then a second restless night, she was finding rest elusive.
“Mrs. Garcia, do you remember me?” For years, the woman had worked at Trombley’s Pharmacy, and when that business had closed, Eustacia Garcia had moved one door south on Grande to Posadas Home Builder’s Supply, selling nuts and bolts instead of pills and potions. A husband hadn’t been in her life for a dozen years.
Her face screwed up with the effort of swinging her body from prone to sitting, and she mashed the blanket in one corner of the couch, then held out a limp hand. She allowed her fingers to be pressed, but offered nothing in return. She looked at the badge holder on Estelle’s belt as if surprised to find out that the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department might take an interest in her son.
Black eyes in a round face—that would be the description that Estelle would find most apt for Eustacia Garcia—regarded the undersheriff wearily. “Did you see my son?” Her face was unlined, but puffy.
Come Dark Page 24
