Convenient Disposal

by Steven F Havill

  The bed of trash was heaped below the drop-off, not yet pushed out and compacted as it would be at the end of the week. Balancing on both feet as if she were sliding down an icy hill, Estelle slipped and slid down to the pile. Because the collection represented only two days, the pile of refuse stretched out for no more than twenty yards. She stopped and surveyed the pile dubiously.

  “I think that if I’d dumped somebody here, I’d make a little more of an effort to cover them thoroughly,” she said. “Especially if I owned a bulldozer. I don’t think any of this trash has been spread out yet.”

  “Good-sized pile, though. But I was thinkin’ the same thing.”

  “A sign of confidence, maybe.”

  Torrez flashed light to the far side, where the smooth dirt layer from the week before was still visible. “Could be over there, too. Could be just about anywhere. The only good way to do this is to get Howard up here on one of the county backhoes.”

  “He’ll love that,” Estelle said. She could imagine the stolid Sergeant Bishop on excavation duty, reliving his years as a private contractor.

  Bent in a crouch with the light in one hand and the other reaching out for something to provide stability, Estelle made her way across the pile, heading toward the west wall of the pit. Torrez went east, moving with more assurance. The light from the Expedition’s focused spot hindered as much as it helped forming harsh shadows that hid treacherous footing.

  “Incongruities,” Estelle said aloud.

  “What?” Torrez shouted.

  “Nothing. I’m talking to myself.” She worked her way beyond the highest mound, toward the open soil that covered the previous week’s collection, and in a moment reached the old refrigerator that she had seen earlier in the day. Battered and dented, the fridge lay facedown, just at the edge of the fresh trash. Several pieces of random-sized, rotted plywood had sailed down on top of it. She pushed the wood aside, and rocked the appliance with one foot. “Why aren’t you with the others?” she said.

  Fifteen yards away, Torrez was rooting his way through trash, muttering all the while.

  “Hey?” Estelle called.

  Torrez paused. “What?”

  “Help me turn this over?” She waited until the sheriff had made his way over before saying, “Just one more little thing. Bobby. Why isn’t this in the pile across the way, there? With all its brethren?”

  “’Cause it makes a neat coffin?” Torrez replied. He rocked the fridge tentatively, then grabbed a bottom corner and heaved. With the appliance on its side, they could see that a hasp had been screwed into the door, perhaps when the original latch gave up the ghost.

  “I should be taking pictures,” Estelle said.

  “If the county manager’s inside, I promise I’ll put it back exactly the way it was.” The hasp was latched, secured with the type of staple that passed through a slot and then turned a quarter turn. Torrez pulled a ballpoint pen from his pocket, inserted it in the latch and turned. He then flicked the hasp clear.

  He glanced up at Estelle and grinned. “I wish you could see your face right now.” He didn’t wait for a reply, but worked the door away from the frame, forcing it against the cushion of earth that jammed the hinges. The smell that erupted was ferocious, and even Torrez recoiled back.

  “Christ,” he blurted. Estelle’s pulse was hammering so hard she almost didn’t hear him over her heartbeat. He shined his flashlight inside and grimaced. “Somebody got tired of the family dogs,” he said. “Looks like one, two, three, four of ’em.” He turned his head and grimaced up at Estelle. “You want to take a look?”

  “If it’s dogs, I’ll take your word for it,” she said.

  He screwed up his face, opened the door a little farther, and probed with the flashlight beam. “Nothin’ else.” He kneed the door shut and flicked the hasp. “Who the hell would do something like that?”

  “I don’t know, but they never get charged with murder,” Estelle said. She retreated a step, then froze as she heard what sounded like the metallic rattle of chain in the distance.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “We know who that’s got to be.” Torrez’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “Whyn’t you move out of the spotlight. I’ll go up and have a chat with him. He don’t have to know that both of us are here.”

  Moving out of the glare of the spot was simple enough. Estelle had only to make her way toward the side of the pit directly below the Expedition. Doing so without falling face-first into various stinking crevices, without losing footing on things that slid and squished underfoot, was another matter. On top of that, she realized that no matter where she moved, if she was out of sight from the rim of the pit, she was also denied any kind of tactical advantage.

  As Estelle made her way toward the sheer east side, Torrez crossed directly toward the slope below the apron. Even as he started up, the embankment so steep that he practically had to climb on all fours on the diagonal, Estelle heard the truck approach and saw the sweep of its lights across the top of the pit.

  As Torrez worked his way up toward the rim, Estelle tried to move up toward the rubbish pile, in a moment standing directly below the back bumper of the Expedition. She heard no words exchanged. From her vantage point, it appeared as if the sheriff had lost his footing as he neared the lip of the pit. The movement was accompanied by a loud thwack and a shout of pain. Before she could fully comprehend what had happened, she saw Torrez careering backward down the steep slope.

  Standing in the dark protection of the sheer bank side, Estelle’s first thought was to dive toward the flailing Torrez, thirty yards away. Almost immediately, her foot stabbed hard into something sharp and she fell heavily, her chin crashing against metal. Agonizing pain shot through the side of her face and she tasted the hot coppery salt of blood.

  Before she could regain her feet, eyes tearing, she saw a man’s form appear near the edge of the pit. Only partially illuminated by the truck’s headlights, he held something in each hand, and Estelle recognized Don Fulkerson’s burly figure. Torrez spun headfirst into a pile of trash bags at the bottom of the slope, and at the same time, Fulkerson dropped the object in his left hand and brought the other to his shoulder.

  The report was sharp and staccato as he rapped off three quick shots. One of the rounds whined off into the darkness, and at the same time she heard Torrez gasp an oath. He leaped through the pile of trash ahead of him awkwardly, rolling head over heels into a dark cavern.

  Fulkerson stepped first one direction and then another, unsure of his target. Estelle fumbled with her own Beretta at the small of her back. As she did so, Fulkerson raised the rifle again, taking a step to his left. Estelle braced as best she could, blinked to try and clear her eyes, and fired a rapid string of five shots, the reports coming so fast they blended together into one sustained echo.

  Rearing backward in surprise, Fulkerson stumbled away from the pit. Unsure if she had hit him, Estelle took one step away from the bank, aimed almost straight up, and fired twice at the spotlight on the side of the Expedition. Glass shattered, raining down on her head. The pit plunged into darkness.

  She held her breath, moving in slow motion, one foot at a time. She was twenty yards or more from the slope that would lead her either up and out of the pit, or allow her to cross to Torrez. Above her, Fulkerson’s pickup still idled, its headlights illuminating the back of the Expedition. Estelle hesitated. What was he doing? If he found a flashlight, he could stand back from the edge of the pit out of her range, and with the beam and then a bullet, find where Torrez lay, farther across behind the highest peak of refuse.

  Flinching at the sharp metallic snap, she popped the partially expended clip out of the Beretta and slipped it in her back pocket. She pushed the full replacement, heavy with fourteen rounds, into the weapon. Even as she did so, the night cracked open with a new sound.

  The big Cat’s diesel cranked only briefly before the engine caught. “Oh, no,” Estelle said, gasping, and before she could take more th
an two steps or predict what Fulkerson might do, the answer came in a tearing crash of bending metal and shattering glass. The dozer had been parked parallel to and fifteen feet from the edge of the pit. Bob Torrez had parked the county truck between the dozer and the pit edge, with only inches to spare.

  Fulkerson pivoted the dozer hard to the right, the blade slamming into the Expedition at the right rear passenger door. A cascade of dirt exploded down from the rim of the pit as the dozer bashed Torrez’s patrol unit sideways. The back tires dropped over the edge first, and Estelle yelped and dove to her right, trying to scramble out of the way. The dozer thundered under full throttle as it spun on its own tracks, catapulting the Expedition over the edge.

  Hands and feet flailing, Estelle felt for an agonizing moment that she was swimming upstream through rapids like an injured salmon. Immediately behind her, the Expedition hit the bottom of the pit with a resounding crash, landing on its side like a huge, crushed beetle. Something sharp flew up and smacked Estelle in the right hip so hard that she crashed forward on her face.

  Without an instant’s hesitation, Fulkerson jarred the dozer to a halt, then maneuvered abruptly to the left, the tracks sending up a plume of dust in the headlights of the still-idling pickup truck. The ponderous machine clanked around the pickup truck, swinging toward the pit. Even as he turned the machine, Fulkerson switched on its lights. It became a six-eyed beast, the four lights on top of the cab frame washing the scene when the massive blade shielded the beam of the two headlights in the grill.

  For a moment, the lights aimed straight out, far above the bottom of the pit, and as she struggled to her feet again, Estelle’s first thought was that Fulkerson was going to use the dozer for cover until he located them and finished the job from a safe range with the rifle. Because of that, she was unprepared for what he did next.

  The dozer reached the edge of the steep slope. The blade dropped, the engine throttled back, and with a squealing of dirt-filled rollers and brakes, the huge machine started down. The slope was so steep Estelle would not have thought the maneuver possible.

  From her right, a series of flashes burst out of the dark as Bob Torrez cut loose with his .45 automatic, but unless one of the rounds got lucky and struck Fulkerson, he might as well have been throwing rocks. Like a stuntman hanging onto his horse’s reins with one hand and firing with the other, Fulkerson used the flashes to locate Torrez and cut loose with another five quick rounds from the rifle.

  Still clutching her handgun but with her flashlight lost somewhere in the trash, Estelle’s fight-or-flight instinct was to plunge out of the pit ahead of the clanking machine so that she couldn’t be cornered. But the dozer bore down on her, lights blazing over her head, before she could turn. Knowing that she could never outrun the machine, she instead lunged off to her left, aware that she was cornering herself behind the crushed Expedition and the steep banks of the pit. Fulkerson had only to brake, pivot right, and crush her to jelly.

  Fulkerson was intent on Bob Torrez, and as soon as the machine hit the bottom of the slope, its blade dug into the trash and then surfaced like the bow of a ship in heavy seas. The brakes squealed as he turned to the left. For a moment, his broad body, perched high on the seat, was silhouetted against the lights.

  Estelle fell to her knees and held the automatic in both hands, trying to find some sort of sight picture in the haze of tears and blood. She hardly felt the recoil as it punched her hands. The empties spewed out of the Beretta in a stream until the slide locked back. The bulldozer continued inexorably. Dumping out the empty clip, Estelle rammed the second full one into the gun and slammed the slide into the battery.

  The dozer rumbled away from her, its slow, ponderous course fixed on Torrez’s position. Before she could bring her sights to bear again, she saw flashes from off to the side, five, six, perhaps seven rounds. One of them ricocheted off something and screamed over her head to smack into the bank above her.

  The figure of Don Fulkerson had sagged to one side in the seat, but otherwise appeared undeterred. The dozer crossed the sea of garbage diagonally and dug the corner of its blade into the pit’s far wall. Estelle heard the engine note change with the force of the impact, and for a moment dozer and dirt cliff appeared to tussle. Then the blade broke loose, and the machine veered right and clanked down the length of the pit.

  When it became obvious that Fulkerson wasn’t going to spin the dozer in its own length and charge back at them, she shifted position, trying to pick her way in the darkness. She fell hard again, letting out a strangled cry that she bit off in frustration.

  “Let him go!” she heard Bob Torrez shout.

  Rising to her knees, Estelle shifted the Beretta to her left hand and dug the cell phone out of her jacket pocket. The face was dark, and with her thumb she could feel the smashed plastic. The mutter of the bulldozer’s diesel, in concert with the rhythmic, steady clanking of its treads, continued down the pit. Estelle stopped, breathing hard, watching. Away was good.

  Reaching the slope up at the far end, the dozer lurched onward, climbing the mountain of dirt. Its lights stabbed up into the sky as it climbed. Estelle saw that as it neared the top, Fulkerson had attacked the pile too far to one side. The right tread dropped off the ramp, and for just a moment it high-centered on the pile until its tracks swam it forward enough that it slid sideways.

  With its weight shifted in the one direction in which the massive machine was the most unstable, the dozer executed a slow roll onto its side, then continued all the way over onto its top until the windowless framework of the cab crushed flat. Without enough momentum to continue the roll, it slid on its top for a foot or two, the tracks still methodically turning. Upside down and jangled, the diesel uttered a strangled cough and died. The headlights continued to burn, lighting the prairie north of the landfill.

  “Good shot,” Torrez said from somewhere on the other side of the rubbish pile.

  A flood of relief turned her joints to pudding. “Are you okay?” Her words came out as little more than a croak, and she coughed and tried again.

  “Nope,” Torrez said conversationally. “But I’m a hell of a lot better than he is. How about you?”

  “I’m okay. Don’t move, then. I’m coming over.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  A light stabbed toward her. “Leave it off,” she said. “I can do better without it.”

  “That son of a bitch ruined my truck.” He coughed and from her vantage point it sounded painful and liquid. “You got your phone?” he asked.

  “It’s broken.”

  “Well, shit, that’s good.”

  “Yours?”

  “It’s in the truck,” he said.

  “We’re a pair,” she muttered.

  “Just go up and use the one in Fulkerson’s office. He won’t mind.”

  “That’s the next stop.”

  “Just go ahead and do that,” Torrez said. “I’m okay. I think I got the bleedin’ stopped.”

  “Turn on the light now,” Estelle said, and this time she saw that Torrez’s location was only a small mountain of trash ahead. The light reflected through the skeleton of an old set of box springs.

  Bob Torrez lay on his side, curled awkwardly. “This is a good thing to hide behind,” Estelle said. “This is going to stop a bulldozer, all right.”

  “Hey, I didn’t choose it,” Torrez said, then sucked in a breath. “Be careful where you step.”

  “He hit you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he hit me. Goddamn son of a bitch.”

  “Let me have the light.”

  Torrez didn’t relinquish it immediately. “Go use the goddamn phone and get us some help.” The beam crossed her face. “Jesus, what’d he do, drive right over the top of you?”

  “I’m fine. Let me have the light.”

  He slid it toward her, and Estelle could see that he wasn’t moving his right arm. She gripped the light and he flinched. “Son of a bitch swung that pipe at me, and I broke th
e swing with my arm.”

  “Broke is right,” Estelle said. His right wrist angled off in a creative, anatomically impossible direction.

  “And then when I went down the hill, I caught my leg on something.” She played the light down, but stopped at the blood soaking the back of his trousers.

  “More than caught,” she said. “He shot you through the butt.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “And your leg’s broken.”

  “Yep. Go use the phone.”

  “I need to see if I can stop that bleeding.”

  “Just go find the phone. My goddamn ass will wait.”

  Estelle stripped off her jacket and wadded it as neatly as she could. There was no way to pad everything. The rifle shot had entered on the right side just behind Torrez’s hip bone and punched through, exploding out the left cheek, leaving a nasty walnut-sized hole. There was no flash of bright arterial blood, but internal damage could be massive. Torrez’s face was already gray and chalky.

  “I’ll be right back,” Estelle said. “Just hang on.”

  “Like I said, I ain’t going anywhere.” Estelle started to stand up, but Torrez grunted in protest. “I need the other clip.”

  He fumbled and found the .45 automatic, holding it up in his left hand. With a grimace, he pressed the clip release. “It’s somewhere around here.”

  Estelle pulled the loaded clip out of his belt, took the heavy automatic and slammed the clip in, then released the slide. “The safety’s on. Don’t shoot yourself.”

  “Just in case the rats start comin’ in,” he said weakly, and it didn’t sound as if he were joking. “Don’t be takin’ your time, now.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s right hand stroked across the top of William Page’s shoulder as the two of them watched the four EMTs starting up and out of the landfill pit. The rescue team made their way carefully, the gurney carrying Kevin Zeigler’s body between them. Page stood quietly, but Estelle could feel the trembling and tension, as if he were ready to bolt.