One Perfect Shot

by Steven F Havill

  “Tony Pino’s sister,” I said. “And her daughter. Zipoli saved ’em both.”

  “That’s right. Saved them both, jefito. There’s all kinds of newspaper clippings about it, you know.”

  “I would think so.” The rush of publicity would have been intense, but would fade with time just as quickly. And eighteen years was damn near long enough for a new generation who would never have heard of the rescue. The whole frantic, panic-filled night, with the roar of rampaging water and the bellowing of the storm, would become unimaginable, the stuff of old legends.

  I had arrived in Posadas county the year after, and might have heard mention of the rescue, might have heard someone say, “Yeah, hell of a storm. Some guy rescued a couple girls down by María that night. Quite a deal.”

  Quite a deal, indeed. Larry Zipoli had taken a job with the county shortly thereafter, even before the grateful Tony Pino had become highway superintendent. Years floated by, and even when the man had grown into an irresponsible lush, Tony Pino hadn’t been able to lift a hand against his behavior…behavior maybe even sparked by that impossible night. Larry Zipoli had certainly been a true hero, but his nightmares afterward—after he’d had time to think about it—might have been epic.

  Larry and Marilyn had been married at the time, their youngest daughter maybe six years old. “Interesting that Marilyn didn’t mention the episode to me,” I said.

  “That was a long, long time ago,” Eduardo said, his voice soft like a good storyteller wrapping up a fable. “Maybe she doesn’t like to think about what might have happened.”

  “Like her husband staying sober and fit after the incident, finding satisfaction leading the Fire Department’s Search and Rescue Squad,” I said without much sympathy.

  “Or swept down the arroyo,” Eduardo added, just in case I might not have thought of that by myself.

  “So Pino sees his debt to Larry Zipoli as beyond settling. Is that what we’re supposed to think?”

  “That could be, Jefito.”

  “Well, the debt’s settled now. I’m sure Tony feels badly for Marilyn, but there’s not much he can do for her. Where does Pino’s sister live now, by the way?”

  “Well, that’s the sad thing. She got married to a fellow in Lordsburg. And this time it was a snowstorm over by Show Low. A semi jack-knifed on the interstate and burned, and that was that. She and her husband and the two kids. Along with a couple from Indiana. That was about five years after the night in María. Just a real sad thing, Jefito.”

  I suppose that Tony Pino had his reasons to be uneasy when I walked out of his office with Larry Zipoli’s records. Why people feel they have to do what they do is always a challenge to figure out, but it was obvious to me that Tony didn’t want Zipoli’s reputation smeared—nothing to overshadow that daring, selfless episode.

  “Marilyn had filed for divorce, Eduardo.”

  “Ay. I didn’t know that.”

  “Zipoli was providing alcohol to some of the local youngsters. Most of the time on the trips to Elephant Butte. Driving the boat under the influence apparently wasn’t uncommon.”

  “And the park police never caught him, I guess?”

  “Apparently not. It’s a big lake, and not very many of them. He was lucky.”

  “And we never caught him either,” Eduardo said philosophically. “Why didn’t she just take the boat keys away from him?”

  “One of life’s great mysteries, Eduardo. Sometimes wives can’t be that assertive.”

  He fell silent again. “So what now, Jefito?”

  “I wish to hell I knew. There’s an interesting connection that I want to check, but I don’t hold out any great hopes. You know Mike Zamora?”

  “Sure.”

  “He was the one who brought out the new hydraulic hose to Zipoli at the road grader. It’s also interesting that Mike’s brother Louis hangs out at the Zipolis from time to time, working on the ski boat. That’s where I’ll go with it tomorrow. Talk to some of the kids, see what little tidbits I can shake out.”

  “It’s a small town, Jefito.”

  “Well, maybe I can make that work for us. These little connections make me nervous, Eduardo. It’s likely that Mike Zamora is one of the last people who saw Larry Zipoli alive.”

  The sheriff made a little humming noise. “That family has lived here for a long time, Jefito. The Zamoras.”

  “That makes a difference?”

  Eduardo chuckled. “It’s just the way it is, you know. They’ve been here a long time, lots of things happen.”

  “That’s an interesting motive, Eduardo. Lots of things happen. I can hear the defense attorney telling a jury that.”

  “They’ll hear some pretty strange things.” He sighed. “I don’t know. It’s frustrating. You’ll let me know what you find out?”

  “Of course. How’d your day go?”

  “Well, interesting, I guess.” He fell silent for a moment. “I got this bee in my bonnet about that place, you know.”

  “What, out on Highland?”

  “Sure. I got some little questions, and it isn’t clear how to find out the answers, you know. You either got the killer driving around, looking for a specific target, or you don’t…you got a chance thing. If he’s looking for Larry Zipoli, how does he know where to find him? I mean, Zipoli works all over the county with that grader. How are you going to know, unless you have the county jobs schedule. I got to wonder.”

  “Someone like Mike Zamora would know, obviously.”

  “Hijole, I hate to think that. I tell you what…let me go talk with Mike come morning. Just sit down with him and see what he has to say. That okay with you?”

  Eduardo Salcido hardly needed to ask my permission, but I could see the advantages. I made Mike Zamora’s boss nervous, Eduardo didn’t.

  “Is there anything you want me to tell Tony when I’m out there?” the sheriff added.

  “Not a damn thing,” I said. Eduardo Salcido’s roots were lifelong in the community, and like crabgrass, there was no way of knowing just where the tendrils went. “We need to know everything that Mike Zamora saw and said when he talked with Larry Zipoli out at the work site. If Zipoli seemed worried about anything—apprehensive, watchful, that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t think he ever saw it coming,” the sheriff said.

  “Not until the last seconds,” I replied. “That’s what we have to wonder. Did he know why the trigger was being pulled.”

  For a few minutes after I hung up the phone, I wondered what it was that Sheriff Eduardo Salcido had actually wanted…other than trying to figure out what rocks I was turning over when he wasn’t looking. But that was something I admired about Eduardo. He could accept almost anything with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders. I could imagine him arresting his own grandmother—were the wonderful woman still alive—and saying as he snapped the cuffs closed, “Well, abuela, I sure hate to do this.”

  It was easy to understand why Tony Pino had every reason to be upset and apprehensive. He would worry about that personnel folder and what I might do with it, and I doubted that it had anything to do with Larry Zipoli’s memory, or with protecting the grieving widow. The superintendent himself would never survive an exposé in the Posadas Register. Tony’s own gross negligence was clear in this case, and the superintendent knew it…enough so that he probably invented scenarios of me turning the records over to the local paper, even though that would never happen.

  He should have fired Larry Zipoli years before. But if he thought that the sheriff would intercede on his behalf during an investigation, he didn’t know the sheriff very well.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I ground enough coffee for half a pot, and then wondered if I’d made enough. The aroma of Sumatran beans sent my hand to the cabinet, and I had the cigarette pack in my hand befo
re hesitating. Just one butt, the narcotic habit coaxed. But the pack hadn’t been unzipped, and I knew damn well that if I opened it, one cigarette wouldn’t be the end of it. With a grunt of impatience, I tossed the pack back and shut the door. Maybe tomorrow, after breakfast.

  While my seriously pokey coffee maker tried to figure out what to do, I stretched out on the old leather couch down in the library—my own personal rotunda, the circular architecture reminiscent of a kiva. The arc of cherry shelving was a pleasure to the eye and touch, loaded now with my comfortable collection that favored military history. Three volumes lay on the coffee table near at hand, bookmarks indicating that I hadn’t finished any of them.

  But my eyelids had concrete blocks attached, and the soft leather reached out and captured me. I tossed my glasses on the table.

  This time, the telephone didn’t awaken me. Waiting for it to do so kept sleep at bay. I’d drift off and then jerk awake, unsure whether it had rung or not, then drift off again. Why not just ignore it, one part of the mind suggested. I don’t know what little break I was waiting for, or expecting. Mulling came easy, though, and mulling brought curiosity. There’s at least one advantage of embracing the life of a hermit. Nobody held a clock to my head. The more I thought about the sheriff’s story of the flood, the more my curiosity propped open my eye lids.

  “What the hell,” I said, admitting defeat. I heaved myself off the couch. Armed with a Thermos of coffee and proud of myself for leaving the cigarette pack in the cabinet, I left the quiet house. Settling into 310 seemed like the natural thing to do, and with the engine idling softly, I turned the police radio’s volume up and listened to the silence for a few seconds. The county was typically quiet for the early morning hours of this Thursday. That would shortly change as school opened its doors for another season. I thought that the tradition of starting school with only two days remaining in the week was goofy, but they didn’t ask my opinion. Maybe starting with a two-day week gave kids a little hope.

  Avoiding town, I headed southeast on State 61. A dozen miles or so would put me in María, a tiny village of two or three extended families with the dubious distinction of having the border fence pass a few yards behind their back doors. The state highway was narrow, without enough traffic to mandate a huge re-engineering job. Little attempt had been made to flatten the road bed, and it followed the ocean waves of the desert. If you went fast enough, you could test the strength of your stomach.

  Critter surprises were the norm. Crest a wave and see a family of javalina wandering across the pavement, or an enormous diamondback stretched out on the warm pavement, or a coyote fixed in place by the approaching headlights.

  Something like that might have happened to Crystalita Pino that dark night eighteen years before as she approached María from the east. I slowed for the village, passing through the wash of light from the Taberna Azul, so named because of the saloon’s blue door. Paulita Saenz , recently widowed by her husband Monroy’s death from cancer, ran the saloon without fanfare. How she managed to keep such order was a mystery to my department. I could count on one hand the number of times we’d been called to a bar fight. On the other hand, it would take an entire legal tablet to record the number of occasions when illegals had relaxed there before hoofing farther down the road in search of paradise.

  Five cars were parked around the building, at least one of them with Chihuahuan plates, a couple others with the characteristic white of Texas. Had I been an ambitious deputy, I might have paused and tossed some plate numbers to dispatch. But I was musing and mulling, and that calls for peace and quiet.

  Wally Madrid’s Texaco Station across the street was dark, and the scattering of houses behind it showed a light or two. It was hard to imagine a place much quieter, but a pounding thunderstorm would have dimmed the lights even more eighteen years ago. A mile beyond the village, the road humped up over a little rise, then immediately swung into the approach to the bridge across the San José Arroyo. With concrete buttresses and steel guardrails that left no room for shoulder, the bridge was certainly narrower than any current state standards, and when the traffic flow warranted it, would no doubt be replaced. Maybe they’d remember past fatalities and do something about the curved approaches.

  The sedan’s tires thumped on the tarred expander strips, and I coasted across the bridge, continuing on for a tenth of a mile before U-turning and then pausing on the shoulder. If Larry Zipoli had actually seen the girl’s truck leave the highway, he could have been as much as a quarter of a mile behind her.

  The concrete abutment showed a large, weathered scar on one corner, about eighteen inches above the ground—maybe from the Pino girl’s truck, maybe from any one of a hundred accidents before and since. I stopped and planted the spotlight beam on the abutment. Somehow, the girl had drifted far enough to catch it with her left front fender. To do that, she would have had to wander completely off the pavement, perhaps asleep at the wheel. Brakes locked in panic, she would have frozen as the truck skidded and then tipped wildly.

  Easing the car farther onto the shoulder, I turned on the four-ways and found my flashlight. The night was bright, cozy warm, a hint of breeze, every star ever lit now on display in the heavens, the half moon bright enough that the desert features took on some character.

  The San José was a dry ditch. I stood just beyond the abutment and played my flashlight down, trying to imagine the roar of millions of gallons of chocolate water, all the floating crap caught up to be flooded into Mexico. Crystalita Pino would have had that view in full stereo as her truck plunged over the brink, sinking its headlights into the boiling soup.

  I swung the beam up the arroyo. Twenty-five feet wide at the bottom, a dozen feet deep, the arroyo would have carried a powerful torrent. The noise would have been a cacophony. No one thinks in a situation like that. I turned the light to the bridge. The concrete abutments provided lots of ways to snag a vehicle before the water finally snatched it away. In the dry of late summer, a vast collection of tumble weeds and their kin had been stuffed under the bridge by the wind. Immediately under the highway, the concrete was sloped and smooth. I could imagine that the water could have flung Larry Zipoli and the two girls around the back of the tipping truck, and somehow he’d managed to scramble to a point where the water kept him pinned against one of the vertical pillars, waiting in desperation.

  Hell of a hero, I thought. Hell of a hero. Even Larry himself probably couldn’t explain exactly how the event had been choreographed. No thinking about how to do the impossible, he’d just done it, unthinking, in the best hero’s tradition. Sometimes it all works out, sometimes not. This time, he’d won.

  I snapped out my flashlight and trudged back to the car. The coffee smelled wonderful as it gurgled out of the Thermos, and hit the Cigarette NOW! switch really hard. Leaning on a convenient fender, headlights illuminating the bridge ahead of me, I contemplated and sipped coffee. Tires make a lot of noise, and I could hear the approaching eastbound car even before it slowed for the village. In a few minutes, it crested the rise and slowed when the driver saw the cop car on the shoulder. The cop himself made quite a picture, fat and lazy with a cup of coffee, leaning on the front fender and admiring the heavens.

  “Taxpayer’s money,” the driver might have mumbled. I lifted a lethargic hand in greeting and watched his taillights fade off to the east before they disappeared behind a rise.

  Someone so heroically wired that he could slam his own truck to a stop, then plunge down into a raging torrent to save two petrified girls, enduring the pounding of the water and the bruising of the concrete until yet another pair of hands helped him up the abutment—hell of a guy. And yet years later, Larry Zipoli, that incredible man of action, had sat in his road grader like a lump while someone walked toward him with a rifle and put a bullet through his head. No dive for cover, no hand raised in protest.

  I refilled with Sumatra, thought about that some
more. Eighteen years can force a lot of changes in a man.

  Next time we enjoyed a thunder boomer that stretched from cloud to ground in an unbroken gray wall of rain, I was going to drive down to this arroyo and watch the water. Maybe I should write a letter to the right bureaucrat up in the State offices. New Mexico liked to name things after heroes, and might mark this the Larry Zipoli Bridge—provided that the memory wasn’t smeared along the way.

  Coffee drained from cup and bladder, I settled back in the car and saw that midnight had come and gone. I was as awake as if someone had blown reveille.

  The Sheriff’s Department needed convertibles…at least they needed to buy one for me. As a distant second best, I lowered all four windows and let the prairie waft through as I motored—dawdled—back toward Posadas. State 61 morphed into Grande Boulevard as I passed under the interstate, and as 310 drifted along under the ugly wash of the street lights, I wondered, for the millionth time, why the village wasted so much money trying to beat back the darkness. After all, any burglar worth the name could afford a good flashlight.

  Grande T’d into Bustos, and I swung west, even though the Don Juan de Oñate at Bustos and Twelfth would be closed. North on Twelfth, up and over the steel bridge across the flood control ditch that once had been an attractive arroyo, and through the neighborhoods bordered by Hutton. In a few minutes I found myself drifting the car to a stop, lights out, at the intersection with Highland, right where J.J. Murton had been parked when I lifted his badge, and just about where another car had been seen by Hugh Decker earlier in the day.