Easy Errors

by Steven F Havill

  “Park it right here. It’s going to be a spell.” The driver surprised the hell out of me. No lame “What happened?” or “Is anyone hurt?” comments.

  Instead, he glanced in his rearview mirror and then at me as he said abruptly, “What can I do to help?”

  I looked hard at him, saw a middle-aged, burly guy with a buzz-cut shorter than mine, a guy whose eyes were locked on the dark form of Orlando Torrez’ corpse on down the ramp. From our vantage point, we could look past the victim and see the remains of the Suburban tangled around the pillar. He held up an identification wallet. I hit it with my light and saw that Carl Beason carried a lieutenant’s shield with the El Paso PD.

  “Lieutenant, we need to make sure that no one comes down this ramp.” As I spoke, I flattened myself against the lieutenant’s pickup as Deputy Torrez started to skin past us, keeping my Crown Vic on the pavement, every light ablaze. I held up a hand to stop him.

  “Pop the trunk.” When Torrez did so, I found one of the small yellow tarps, folded tightly in its baggie. I retrieved it, slipped a flare out of the box, and slammed the trunk lid down. I slapped the door. “Everything you need is in the back,” I said to Torrez, but the car was already rolling.

  Beason pulled his Chevy into reverse, the well-concealed wiggle-waggles blossoming in the truck’s grill. “We’ll take care of it,” he said, and backed up the ramp after Torrez. The young deputy would angle the sedan across the exit ramp where it first split away from the eastbound lanes. A tractor-trailer thundered by in the far lane, not bothering to slow down.

  I took the tarp and headed back down the ramp, pausing long enough to cover Orlando Torrez’ body. Five feet away, clear of the tarp and the first bloom of grass on the shoulder, I shoved the flare’s base nail into the ground and snapped the striker against the top.

  By the time I reached the Suburban, Sergeant Payson was walking north, away from the wreckage, to intercept the first rescue vehicle and one of the village patrol units. That confirmed for me that there was nothing we could do for the other two victims, both of whom were trapped either in or under the truck. If one or both had been alive and pumping blood, Payson would never have left their sides. The mere fact that the sergeant was walking to meet the crews told me all I needed to know.

  Payson sent the first arriving village unit up the westbound exit ramp on the far side of the interstate, and as other officers arrived, we would disperse them as we could. I saw Tony Abeyta, one of the village part-timers whom I thought the county should head-hunt away from the village. He’d parked his personal vehicle north of the overpass, helping to block lanes. I winked my flashlight at him, and he jogged over.

  “Stay with the victim.” I nodded back at the tarp. “We’re covered topside, but watch the ramp behind you and don’t turn your back on 56 and 61. No one comes through.” I didn’t wait for questions, but strode back toward the Suburban.

  This wasn’t one of those thirty-miles-an-hour jobs where bumpers, fenders, and a chrome strip or two were dinged and dented. The destruction was catastrophic, with the engine block lying fifty feet north in a puddle of oil, the big Suburban’s frame sheered, the passenger compartment twisted and gaping.

  Elli Torrez had been crushed between the buckled roof and door, sandwiched against the concrete bridge support. I couldn’t reach her to check for a pulse, but the blank, staring eye and cleaved skull told the whole story. Deputy Robert Torrez would carry that as a final memory of his sister.

  The other passenger was somehow locked under the truck. One leg up to mid-calf projected out from the tangle of steel. I couldn’t find a pulse, couldn’t tell if the leg was even attached to a body.

  A small gaggle of rubber-neckers gathered at the north entrance to the overpass, and I suppose that, the budget being as tight as it was, we could have sold tickets.

  I took a deep breath. “PCS, three ten.”

  “Go ahead, three ten.”

  “Make sure the rescue team is headed this way. We’re going to need the jaws.”

  “Ten four. Sergeant Payson already called it.”

  “Good man.”

  The painstaking accident reconstruction to follow would shed some light, but the results of the crash looked typical. Careening much too fast, the heavy Suburban had left broad, sweeping skid marks on the exit ramp, rolled once, and then careened across the intersection where the change in vector had collapsed tires and then forced a triple somersault. Its flight had been abruptly smashed to a halt against the concrete bridge support. The driver and Orlando and Elli Torrez would have been flailed about like rag dolls, the crash would not have been survivable, even with seat belts snugged tight.

  “What do you have on the ramp?” Sergeant Payson’s voice was soft over my handheld, using the car-to-car channel that hopefully was a little bit private. He was in the process of directing another village car into position, blocking southbound on Grande, then he turned and walked my way.

  “One ejected.” I kept my voice down. “It’s one of the deputy’s younger brothers. His little sister is in the wreck, pinned against the column.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Just the two in the Suburban as far as you could determine?”

  “Affirmative. They’re both gone. No doubt at all this time.”

  “So most likely three occupants. The tire marks make me think that the Torrez kid was the first one ejected. Maybe yes, maybe no. As soon as you have someone to break free, make sure the whole area is surveyed. All of the triangle, every inch. It’d be hell come first light to find a fourth youngster dead in the weeds a little farther up the ramp.” I took a long, ragged breath. “I put Deputy Torrez up on the interstate, blocking the exit ramp. He doesn’t need to be part of this. The first passerby was a lieutenant from El Paso PD. He’s assisting Torrez now.”

  “Good thing.”

  I stepped aside to allow the fire rescue truck to pull in closer, staying out of the mad scramble of rescue workers who would bring the metal-forcing jaws into play. Payson, satisfied that the streets were blocked, jogged back to join the effort, but paused when he was within earshot without using the radio.

  “I couldn’t see the one jammed under the truck. I tried to find an ankle pulse, but…” He shrugged helplessly. “It’ll be hell gettin’ him out of there.”

  I didn’t need to check the Suburban’s tag. “The vehicle belongs to Willis Browning.”

  “Yep,” Payson said again. And that just about covered it.

  Chapter Two

  The two-year-old Chevy Suburban hadn’t glided out of its eastbound interstate lane onto the exit ramp. The last seconds of its passengers’ lives had been far more violent. The heavy truck had swerved at the last moment, a maneuver so abrupt that the tires had charted their squalling course on the interstate’s asphalt. The driver had overcorrected as he managed to hit the ramp entrance, the big Chevy cutting tire ruts in the right-hand shoulder gravel, two hundred and one feet down the ramp. That started the final tussle between gravity and momentum.

  Essentially, the two-and-a-half-ton truck plunged wildly out of control as the driver ran out of options and skill.

  Four hundred and thirty-six feet down the ramp, the Suburban careened to the left so hard that wheel rims cut grooves in the pavement, rolling the right front tire off the rim. That added enough resistance that the truck essentially tripped over its own feet. It vaulted over, pitching Orlando Torrez out and then crushing him on the roll. At one point, the vehicle went airborne, pirouetting around its right front quarter, then completed two and a half additional rolls before bashing into the concrete bridge support.

  By the time rescue crews pulled the twisted hulk away from the concrete pillar, our audience had grown to a dozen folks, most of them from the Posadas Inn, just beyond the interchange. Two or three of them kept trying to edge closer under the overpass, but they quickly learned that none of us
had any patience for them. They should have stayed in bed, but the draw to see some gore was powerful.

  The county coroner, Sherwin Wilkes, pronounced each of the three victims. Their seat belts were still neatly retracted, unused. That would be noted, of course, but I doubted that seat belts would have accomplished much in a crash as violent as this one. Part of Chris Browning was pinned against the transmission hump by the collapsed steering wheel, and because most of him was more or less in the area that would be occupied by the driver, we decided odds were good that he had been behind the wheel before the crash.

  I’d had the dubious pleasure of issuing a ticket or two to Chris in the past month or so as he delighted in his new driver’s license. By the time the Suburban shot out of control on the Posadas exit ramp, sixteen-year-old Chris Browning had been driving solo for two months.

  As the last body was loaded into the ambulance for transport, I turned to see Deputy Torrez trudging down the exit ramp. He stopped for a couple of seconds at the spot where his brother had died. I saw officer Abeyta say something to him, and Torrez just shook his head. After a moment, he continued on toward me. By now, we had three officers up top to keep him company—Lieutenant Beason had stayed through the whole mess, now joined by K.C. Woodard, a young New Mexico State trooper, and our own Deputy Tom Mears. Ideally, they would have sent eastbound traffic across to the other side, making both east and west single-lane traffic. The center median had its own hazards, though, and they’d settled on closing down the right-hand eastbound lane of the interstate a quarter of a mile before the exit ramp, eliminating any possibility of someone darting through.

  “I’m sorry you had to ride right into the middle of this,” I said to Torrez. “In a few minutes, the sheriff and I will want to go on over and talk with your folks. You need to be with them. They’ll probably want to go to the hospital. Do you want to ride to the hospital first, with the ambulance?”

  He shook his head, just a quick little jerk as if I’d struck him. He started to say something, and had to try twice. “We got a witness up…” He left the rest of the sentence go. “Mears wants to know if you’re ready to talk to ’em.”

  “A witness? Absolutely.” Deputy Mears could have used his own handheld to contact me, but rightly decided that giving young Torrez something physical to do was the better strategy…even if it meant walking by the chalked outline of his little brother one more time. As well, Mears clearly understood the importance of not blabbing details over the airwaves, to be monitored by anyone with a scanner.

  Among the various investigators clustered around the wreck, I saw the burly figure of the boss, Sheriff Eduardo Salcido. The sheriff was a close friend of the Torrez family, and I knew he’d want to deliver the devastating news himself. He’d link up with Father Bertrand Anselmo, and the two of them made a formidable pair.

  “Check in with the sheriff, and then go with the ambulance.” Torrez stood as if planted there. He shook his head again, and his voice was a whisper. “I need to know what happened.”

  “I understand that. So do we all.” The sickening aroma of blood, body wastes, and alcohol clearly told me what had happened—those and the evidence of the Suburban’s out-of-control, tumbling plunge down the ramp. “Right now, your family needs you more, Robert.” He lived in a modest single-wide mobile home on the lot adjoining his family’s, off of MacArthur, just blocks away. Had the elder Torrezes been sitting out on their porch, they might have heard the wreck that killed their children. “Do you know where the kids were coming from?”

  “They said Lordsburg.”

  “Lordsburg?”

  “Some 4-H deal.”

  I glanced at my watch as I saw one of the EMTs make a move to close the first ambulance’s rear doors. “The sheriff will want to talk with you.”

  “Yep.” He wiped at his left eye, but made no move to join the crowd at the ambulance. “Both gone,” he whispered and shook his head. “Look, sir, I need to know. Before I go home to talk with the folks.”

  The young man was right. Despite so much obvious evidence of a classic roll-over/ejection as a result of excess speed, there was so much that we didn’t know. “Let’s see what your witness topside has to say, then,” I agreed.

  My car was still on duty up on the interstate, and in silence Robert Torrez and I trudged up the incline, past the flares and cones and signs and flashing lights and then on west along the interstate’s shoulder for a hundred yards to a silver-colored Cadillac with Ohio plates. An elderly man was outside the car, leaning against the driver’s door, arms folded across his chest, watching the officers direct the sporadic traffic.

  “This is Mr. Riley Holmes.” Torrez’ voice was little more than a husky whisper…and he didn’t have to check his notebook to recall the name.

  Holmes wanted to look twenty years younger than he probably was, the skin pulled so tight around his angular tanned face that it looked as if someone was holding him up by his hair…except his hair was clearly manufactured by someone else. Gravity was working on his belly, and he made an effort to suck in the gut. I extended a hand. His grip was moist and soft.

  “Mr. Holmes,” I said. “Undersheriff Bill Gastner.” I ducked my head, looking in at the woman in the passenger seat, blond and attractive in the soft dome light. Perhaps a trophy wife, perhaps a daughter. Perhaps a secretary. “I understand you folks may have some information for us.”

  Holmes let the door close all the way and reached forward to touch the driver’s side rearview mirror. It was hanging limp, the stem broken and the glass shattered. A shallow swipe about three feet long gored the elegant body paint near the mirror, with traces of blue paint showing up nicely.

  “To my way of thinking, this is about as close as you can come,” he said. “Damn idiots.”

  I stepped back and surveyed the car’s slab flanks. No other damage was apparent. “Just the mirror and the scrape?”

  He nodded.

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Just back a few miles. Maybe ten.” Holmes said. “I saw this truck comin’ up on us real fast, and for a minute I didn’t think he was going to pull out into the passing lane at all. Well, then he did, like a crazy man. And he sheers on by and whack, there goes my mirror.” His hands did a dramatic dance to illustrate. “I feel the lurch of the sideswipe. The he swerves left again and kicks dust from the left-hand shoulder, and I thought he was going to dump it right there in the median.” He waved on down the road. “This is as far as he got?”

  I didn’t respond to that, and instead asked, “Can you describe the vehicle for me?”

  “’Course I can. Chevy Suburban, two-tone blue. Nice clean truck, looked spanking new. New Mexico license, but I’ll be damned if I could catch the number. He was rippin’ by just too fast.”

  “When he swiped you, how fast were you going?”

  Holmes hesitated. “Cruise was set right on eighty, Sheriff. Yeah, I was goin’ a little bit fast, but a nice quiet night like this?”

  “And he blew right by you?”

  “I’d estimate he was cookin’ close to a hundred. Maybe a little more. Didn’t know those trucks could even go that fast. And I think it was kids. The one was turning around, kneeling on the passenger seat like he was trying to reach something in the back. I just caught a glimpse…that’s all I saw. I think they had the dome light on, but I’m not sure. And then they were gone.” He slapped his hands together, the one grazing the other.

  “You stopped?”

  “Well, sure. I pulled off at that little rest stop just west of here? Nothing but two garbage cans and a wide spot on the shoulder. I checked out the damage, and the wife, she suggested I take a photo of it, for the insurance, you know. So right away I dug the camera out and did that. I needed the time to let my nerves settle. Hell of a thing. All the while, I was hoping that one of you highway patrol boys would happen by so I could report it all, but my G
od, this stretch of country is empty. I didn’t have anything to clip the wires on the mirror, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll just let ’er hang. And about the time we were pulling back onto the highway, here comes a state trooper, flyin’ low. That’s when we figured, you know? That’s why we stopped when we saw all the lights.”

  “We’re glad you did, Mr. Holmes. I’m going to have one of the officers take a statement from you and your wife, along with all your information.” I bent down and looked at the woman.

  “I’m Eloise.” Her lower lip trembled.

  “Eloise, if there’s anything you can remember, we’ll want to hear it.” I straightened up and said to Mr. Holmes, “If you’d round up your license, registration, and insurance, I’d appreciate it. And the deputy will want photos of your car’s damage as well. We’ll make arrangements to have your film processed. You may have information in the background of the photos that we’ll need.”

  “You bet. Anything to help. It was a fresh roll, so there’s nothing on it that we need. You’re welcome to it.” His face wrinkled a little. “They went off the edge down there or something? It’s a bad one?”

  “As bad as it gets,” I replied. “Can you guestimate where you were when you were sideswiped?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I mean you could pinpoint the spot?”

  “Oh, yeah. He hit us, and then I saw the blue rest stop sign. I mean, just right together. I just had time to slow down and turn off.”

  “That’s good. One of the officers will want to document that location with you. There will be some debris there…bits of the mirror rim and so forth…they’ll pinpoint the point of the original collision for us.”