A couple of minutes after nine, I stopped at the Posadas Inn near the interstate interchange southeast of Posadas. They had a coffee shop and, with one exception, miserable food. Their iced tea, though, was rich and dark and delectable. I strolled inside. A guy in electric-blue Bermudas was at the register paying his bill, and he looked me up and down with interest.
He nodded a greeting and then, as I started to step by, asked, “Much hassle getting over the border and back?”
“Depends what you’re trying to smuggle across,” I said. I didn’t crack a smile, and he blanched, then tried a weak laugh. I fumbled for a cigarette, and when he saw that it wasn’t cuffs I was reaching for, he decided I was kidding.
“Me and the missus are going over tomorrow, unless it’s a hassle; then to hell with it, you know what I mean?”
“It’s no hassle,” I said, and lit the cigarette. “Just follow the rules. Stick with the limits. No problems at all. Very pleasant people.”
“Oh, yeah?” He sounded relieved.
“Yes.” I fed him the usual customs line. “Just remember that our laws are not their laws.” If he read the little Border Patrol pamphlet they’d hand him twenty-five miles south at the Regál port of entry, he’d see it in print.
Joe Tourist looked a little more interested. “You lived in these parts for some time?”
“Twenty years.”
“Much drug running?”
I shrugged. “Same as anywhere along the border. Probably not as much as in Cleveland.” One of his eyebrows shot up, so I must have been close. “Have a pleasant trip.” I took a seat by the window. The lights outside illuminated the interchange, and I watched the traffic for a little while, sipping the tea. If the village was popping off fireworks, the displays were out of view, behind the motel. I enjoyed two minutes of peace and quiet before Tina, the waitress, came to my table to tell me I was wanted on the telephone.
The dispatcher that night, Gayle Sedillos, was efficient. She knew my hangouts, and was as astute as Miracle Murton was stupid. I said, “Gastner,” and she said, “Bob Torrez wants your help with a motor vehicle accident. He called for two ambulances already. County Road 43, one mile south of the lake.”
“I’m on my way.” I left the coffee shop without paying and seconds later 310 spun parking lot gravel and then chirped onto pavement, engine bellowing. Not more than ten seconds later, Torrez was on the radio.
“Three-ten, three-oh-seven. Ten-twenty?”
“Three-ten ETA in six minutes.” That was optimistic, since the lake was twelve miles away. But most of it was open road, and the Ford could sit fat and comfortable at a hundred.
Torrez acknowledged, then added, “Strawberry jam.” He’d been a deputy for five years, and in that time had acquired his share of the graveyard humor that kept us all sane. And I knew what he meant, as did anyone else who knew him even a little and was listening to the scanner. I cussed and backed off a little as I flashed through an intersection, then punched 310 hard up the hill.
The wrecked car had been heading downhill when it shot off the outside of a gradual sweeping curve. As I pulled to a stop, I could see in the glare of my headlights where the tires had first scattered the loose cinders of the shoulder. It was a Firebird, maybe six or seven years old, the kind with the big decal on the hood. One of the emergency units had arrived, but the scanner ghouls hadn’t, so there were no spectators underfoot yet. I heard the wail of other sirens as I scrambled down the bank, my way illuminated by the spotlights from above. The car had been airborne for the better part of 160 feet. Then it hit a rock outcrop and stopped dead, pounded into shapeless junk. The rescue crew was working with the gas-powered jaws and a half dozen wrecking bars. Torrez’s face was pale.
“They ran,” he said to me between breaths. He was working to tear a mangled door ajar. His bare hands and the wrecking bar weren’t going to do the job. “They were up at the lake, and I rolled in. I pulled up behind ’em just to check, you know, and they lit out. I stayed well back, ’cause I didn’t want this to happen.”
“You’re going to have to go in from the other side,” I said, and looked back up the bank.
“They were doin’ at least a hundred, sir. Had to have been.”
I could hear the hot, twisted metal pinging gently as it cooled. “How many?” I asked. The car was partially on its side, nosed into the rock like a big missile. From mangled plastic in front to the tip of its cooling exhausts, the wreck was now no more than ten feet long.
“We’re not sure yet,” Torrez said. “Can’t see nothin’.”
“Christ,” I muttered. I scrambled over rocks and through weeds to where one of the emergency medical technicians worked the power jaws.
“I can reach one here,” he shouted, and other hands took the jaws. He almost had to lie down to see. “A touch more,” he shouted, and the jaws groaned metal a fraction of an inch. “I can see most of it now. Shit.” There was a moment of silence, punctuated only by the idling motor of the jaws. We saw him twist a little, and then I caught a glimpse of light from his flashlight through a small crack.
“How many?” I shouted to him.
“Five,” he replied. “At least I think it’s five.” He wormed his way back out, looking sick. “You’ll have to peel the lid off, Bart,” he yelled. The car had hit so hard that it had folded in the middle. The roof had crumpled in, and I guessed that the top of the fire wall was no more than three feet from the back deck.
The EMTs continued to struggle, and I worked my way back up the bank. Gayle Sedillos had already called Emerson Clark, the coroner, and Detective Estelle Reyes. I made sure one of the deputies was available to help old man Clark down to the wreck scene when he arrived, and then I met Estelle Reyes as her car rolled to a stop. If she was apprehensive, she didn’t show it.
“You need a hand with anything?” I asked as she hauled a briefcase and a small suitcase out of the county car’s trunk. She was a small, slender girl, but it wasn’t her physical strength that I was worried about.
“No,” she said, already looking for the best route down the hill. I let her go, and corralled Howard Bishop into managing traffic and the growing ring of spectators. The scanner ghouls were out in force now. In another ten minutes, there would be no place to park along the shoulder of the road. Most of the curious stood back where we told them, quiet and shocked. Some wanted to know who was in the car, some just wanted to look at mangled flesh.
As the EMTs took the car apart, Estelle Reyes’s electronic flash ripped harsh light into the car again and again. Eventually enough metal was can-openered loose so that we could make some progress. Clark arrived. He was a semi-retired orthopedic surgeon, and a damn good coroner. He stood grimly by, and as the victims were reached, he stepped forward and pronounced them, one after the other, dead. Reyes took more pictures. I could see that figuring out where each one had been sitting before the impact wasn’t going to be easy. In this case, the only obvious one was the driver himself. Not content with the original, he’d bought a new steering wheel at one of those discount houses. The spokes were cheap spring steel. They hadn’t broken, but the spokes had folded forward as the heavy engine drove the column back. It was difficult to pull the kid off the steering column, since the fancy hub of the steering wheel had tangled in the remains of his seat back after crushing through his chest. The EMTs were still working to remove him when I heard shouts up on the road. I glanced up and saw Bishop, illuminated in the headlights, physically restraining Benny Fernandez. I scrambled up the bank.
“Benny,” I shouted over his babbling, “we’re not going to let you go down there.”
“Ricky,” he sobbed, and lunged toward the bank. Bishop hugged him still.
“We’ll do all we can, Benny,” I said, and helped Bishop carry the man away from the shoulder of the road, guiding him toward my car.
Someone came up and started talking to Fernandez, and I snapped, “Get out of here.” I held Benny’s arm. “Get in the car, Benny.”
“They called me at the store,” he said. “They said it was his car.”
“It’s his car, Benny.” I silently cursed the idiot who thought he was doing the man a favor. It’s bad enough when a cop and a priest pound on the door at two in the morning. There was no call for this.
“The hospital,” Benny said, pathetically hopeful. “They’ll take him to the hospital, won’t they?”
“Yes. Maybe you should go there and wait. I’ll have Deputy Bishop take you down.”
He made for the door handle, and before he could pull it, I snapped down the electric locks. “Benny, let the deputy take you down. You’re in no shape to drive. I’ll make sure one of the other officers takes your car down for you.” He slumped a little, then nodded, beginning to give up. I flipped on the PA switch of the radio. “Deputy Bishop,” I said, and thirty feet away, Howard turned around. I waved him over. “Would you drive Mr. Fernandez down to Posadas General? I’ll handle things up here.”
Bishop nodded, and Fernandez was gone before they started to bring up the body bags. The thought struck me later that Benny hadn’t even asked if his son was dead. And like a gutless wonder, I had avoided being the one to break the news. No more parents showed up at the site. But by then, Bishop would have found a telephone and called the names to Gayle, and she would have started lining up the appropriate clergy.
At eighteen minutes after two, Les Atawene backed up his big diesel tow truck so that the rear duals were within a foot of the embankment. Bob Torrez and I cleared the crowds back.
“Damn it, aren’t any of you folks sleepy yet?” I shouted at a group of stubborn ones. “Why the hell do you make us work around you!” One of them persisted in standing in the wrecker’s way, and Les tapped the air horn. The guy said something obscene, and I heard it. “Just run over the son of a bitch,” I barked at Les. The man flashed his middle finger at me, but he stepped out of the way, so I ignored him. Les hauled the heavy cable down to the wreck and saw right away that he had problems. If he hitched on to the only part of the car that was completely in the clear, about all he’d pull up the bank was a ruptured rear quarter. He stood and looked for a minute. The big wrecker’s floodlights made it artificial noontime. He and his boy finally circled the cable completely around the wreck, from front to back, top to bottom. When the winch began to tighten, the cable pulled the wreck together into one not-so-neat ball. But it stayed together, and up the hill it came, groaning and twitching and smoking like some living thing.
As the mess crept up the hill, I saw Estelle Reyes crouching low, looking inside the car. She probed with the flashlight, then waved the beam quickly up the hill at Les. “Stop it a minute!”
Les did, patient as ever. “Careful around that, miss,” he called. “Everything’s kinda loose.”
“You better believe that,” I heard Estelle Reyes say. She stood up, face impassive, and waved a hand. “Okay, pull it another foot or so, and stop.” She glanced around and caught my eye, then put her left hand in the crook of her right elbow and closed that arm tight, catching her hand between forearm and biceps. For a minute, I didn’t understand, but then I nodded. It had been a while since I’d given blood, but I’d done the same thing when it was over, holding the small gauze pad in place over the needle hole. The tangle of metal lurched a little bit and stopped again. Estelle Reyes conferred with Torrez, and then she reached for the wrecking bar that Torrez still held. She worked intently, wrenching and prying, and Torrez stood back and watched. The whole ball of metal shook. When a piece of bodywork curled open just right, she took more pictures—she must have been on her fifth roll. She stopped taking pictures and scrambled up the bank. “No, not yet,” she shouted when Les moved a hand toward the winch controls.
“Let me borrow your slicker, sir,” she said to me. In the sixteen months she’d been with the department, she’d never called me anything but that. Not Bill, not Gastner. Just “sir.”
“Is there very much?” I asked.
“A kilo, maybe.” She took the folded rain slicker that I dug out of the trunk of 310.
“Grass?”
“No.” She raised an eyebrow and shook her head. “It must have been under the front seat originally.”
“With that kind of impact, it could have started out anywhere.”
“True.” Estelle Reyes took the slicker back down the hill, and I went with her this time, standing between her and the spectators. She made the transfer slick and fast, then backed away, holding the small bundle under her arm. “We’ll have to take the car apart bolt by bolt. I’ll have Les put it down in one of his bays. That way we can have a little security.” She sounded as confident as a ten-year veteran.
Shortly after three, Estelle Reyes was satisfied that she had gleaned all she could until morning. She had an exhaustive inventory of personal effects. She had photos of skid marks, dirt tracks, grease blotches in grass, bent metal, and torn people. She was a methodical worker, and used a 35-mm with tripod, flash, filters, the works. A goddamned artist. And after each shot, she stopped to make notations in her field book. The rest of us, including me, did as she asked. And now, because the little package had changed the complexion of the crash, Estelle was extra careful.
Finally, the car was gone, the debris collected. When Detective Reyes was sure she needed no more pictures of the scene, she held up her hands. “All right,” she said. “We can secure this area until morning. Daylight might find us something. Torrez or somebody needs to stay with the car. Locking it up isn’t enough. I’ll get down there when I can.”
“He’ll be there until Encinos relieves him. Eddie Mitchel is going to sit out here.” Stealing from other shifts and double-timing was all we could do.
“And Bishop went to the hospital. I’ll call him so he can put a lid on things down there. I should be back out about seven,” Estelle Reyes said. Then she hesitated. “Before I go to the hospital, I’m going up to the lake for a quick look. Won’t do much good in the dark, but you never know. Oh, and you might tell Mitchel to sit out of sight. Maybe just up the hill by the water tank. He might turn up something interesting. You never know. Somebody might be worried about their package.”
“Fine,” I said. “Be careful. And make sure your radio is on.” We watched the rest of the traffic pull away.
“It’s going to be a mess,” Estelle said. “And all those poor kids.”
“You’d better believe it. And we better be damn sure we don’t make any mistakes. When we find out where that shit came from, I have a feeling some folks in this town will advocate a return to lynching.”
“Maybe we should donate the rope.” It was a line from a joke, but there was no humor on Estelle Reyes’s pretty young face.
Chapter 3
Sheriff Holman wasn’t a cop. He spent his time playing politics and working innocuous civil cases, something he actually did pretty well. But that night he did something else that clicked my estimation of him up several notches. The dispatcher, Gayle “Wondergirl” Sedillos, had called him as soon as she knew that the crash was a multiple fatal. Holman left a small party he was hosting and drove to the office. He stayed out of our way, but when it came time for someone to notify next of kin, he took that job on himself, chauffeuring clergy here and there until the stunning message had been delivered to the four households that still remained innocent of grief.
He met with me, Estelle Reyes, and Bob Torrez around noon the next day, and he was serious. No veiled sex jokes to make Estelle blush, no cracks about my age, no ethnic jokes meant to rib Bob Torrez, who had a thin skin that way.
“Let’s have it in order, short and simple,” he said to me. I nodded at Estelle, who shifted in her chair, smoothed her khaki skirt, and flipped open one of the manila envelopes she carried.
“All right, this is what we’ve got. Four of the five kids in the car were eighteen. One, Hank Montaño, was a minor. Ricky Fernandez was driving. I think Tommy Hardy was riding shotgun. Pretty sure. Jenny Barrie was sitting left rea
r. Hank Montaño was sitting center rear. I’m pretty sure Isabel Gabaldon was sitting right rear.”
“Why do you say ‘pretty sure’?” Holman asked quietly. He held a pencil poised over a blank legal pad.
“I think what happened…” Estelle paused, searching for the right description. “I’ve heard that strange things happen sometimes in wrecks, Sheriff. In this case both Hardy and the Gabaldon girl were crushed up under the dash. Whichever one was riding in the back would have been forced past the front seat, between the seat and the collapsing door. I still need to get some details from the medical examiner. But I’m pretty sure. Both of his shoes were up front, for instance. Only one of hers was. Things like that.”
Holman shook his head slowly, looking as if he wanted either to say something or vomit. He settled for, “Go on.”
“There is evidence that Hardy may have turned off the ignition key.”
“He what?”
“Turned the key. The driver never would, I don’t think. Not at that kind of speed.”
“What did the speedometer say?”
“Zero,” Estelle said. “It didn’t break at speed. Maybe it wasn’t working. But trajectory and skid marks tell us that the car was doing well over a hundred. It had almost a quarter mile of straight road to wind out, and a big engine.”
“So the kid riding shotgun got scared?”
“Maybe,” Estelle said. “If Ricky Fernandez knew what was under the seat, he had good reason to panic when he saw the gum balls in his rearview mirror.”
“Maybe he just thought he could get away,” Holman said dubiously. “Hell, kids run from cops all the time. If they have a motorcycle, they usually succeed.”
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