Easy Errors

by Steven F Havill

  “He is that. I think he’ll work out all right for us. He just got back from the academy a couple of weeks ago. He did well.” I shrugged. “We give him a gun, badge, and a car and tell him to stay out of trouble until he’s earned some experience.” None of that had worked so well the night before, I thought, but Herb hadn’t asked about the accident—maybe he hadn’t heard about it—and I saw no cause to bring it up. “Did Alice happen to mark the time when she heard all the shooting? You said yesterday, sometime?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I mean, folks shoot out this way all the time. That ain’t nothin’ new. This time was a little different. I mean, so many, and all.” He turned in place. “What are we, about seven-, eight-tenths of a mile from the house? Maybe a little more. And she claims she heard ’em. Enough racket that she knew it wasn’t hunters. But, say, you know better’n me.” He sucked on the cigarette and then talked around the plume of smoke. “The border isn’t what it used to be. Lots of traffic comin’ in that way, and some of ’em aren’t up to much good, if you know what I mean. So she gets nervous. And she figured it wouldn’t hurt to call and have it checked, just in case.”

  It didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. The shooters were long gone, most likely headed back to Albuquerque, or El Paso, or wherever the hell they came from. Maybe it was just a gang of frustrated, soon-to-be-out-of-work miners. Whoever it was, it had been a group effort.

  I didn’t need to pester Alice Torrance about when she made the call. Dispatch would have logged it to the second. The only downside was that if it had been a daytime call, Miracle Murton would have been sitting dispatch, and there was no telling what he might have written down. In any event, he hadn’t passed the complaint on to the deputies.

  Just enough water remained inside the tank that it was a sloppy mess of fragrant vegetation and a handful of now frantic koi. I kept both hands on the stile and paid attention to my footing. Slimy with algae, the steel tank bottom was slick as wet ice. I could tell that my boots wanted to skip out from under me, depositing my avoirdupois on top of the nervous koi. Once standing on the tank’s bottom, I kept my feet still, bending at the waist—which in itself was a trick. The water was still a bit turbid from the young deputy’s efforts, but the sun was just right for prospecting.

  The first slug I found shown bright. I took two steps toward it without shuffling, raising as little silt as possible. The bullet’s nose was deformed, its trip through the thin galvanized metal of the tank side enough to start the mushroom. A silver-tip, and I guessed it at thirty-caliber—just about the most generic bullet on the planet, the sort of thing that would come out of a .30-30.

  I spent fifteen minutes stooped and harvesting until I’d stirred up so much mud even the koi were invisible. Herb watched impassively, elbows resting on the tank rim. He enjoyed one cigarette after another, kibitzing when he thought he saw the wink of bright metal.

  Some of the evidence was just fragmentary, and a few were big old pumpkin rollers, the sort of slugs fired from a .45 automatic. Several large dents showed where rounds hadn’t broken through the tank’s galvanized hide…a humbling experience for some yahoo who thought his hand cannon was a power house. Too bad a ricochet hadn’t bounced back and hit him between the eyes.

  What interested me most was a set of enormous holes, fully forty-four or forty-five-caliber, that had punched through the tank wall as if it had been waxed paper. The group included five shots, the holes tight enough to be covered by the palm of my hand. I made a patient search, but found none of the slugs. Maybe the deputy had already fished those out.

  I took pity on the koi. “You better screw the plug back in and run the mill.” I headed toward the stile. “You’ve got some unhappy goldfish.” Herb fitted the plug, but the wind wasn’t cooperating. The eight-foot Aermotor had been still when I arrived, and remained so. Herb reached in and worked the brake, making sure. The mill groaned a quarter-turn against an errant heat wave and then stopped.

  “It was running yesterday?” I asked.

  “Yep, part of the time, anyways. Well,” and he gazed up at the stationary blades, “maybe later this afternoon. That’s the way the wind is, you know. Just the time you want it to blow, everything goes still as hell. If the wind don’t pick up some this afternoon, I’ll bring a tank out. The kids tell me I ought to go for a gas engine.” He shrugged. “Maybe I should. ’Course, then the yahoos would just shoot that.” He scrutinized the handful of bullet fragments that I held out. “Huh?” A stubby index finger moved the collection this way and that in my palm. “Some of those are clean enough you could almost load ’em up again.”

  “I count at least four different guns here.” An obvious little pure lead fragment from a .22 or .22 magnum, the .30-caliber jacketed rifle slug, a .38-caliber pistol bullet, and the big, round pumpkin roller .45. “A regular shooting gallery they had.” I turned and surveyed the grass around the tank and the hard surface cut by the two-track in from the county road. “At least they didn’t leave their brass littered all over the place. Tidy little sons-a-bitches, weren’t they?”

  “What’s in season now, anyway? I didn’t think anything was.”

  “Well, nothing other than water tanks, windmills, and old cars and dumped refrigerators. It’s all pre-season warm-up.”

  “Three ten, PCS.”

  I turned and regarded my aging sedan as if it had spoken out of turn.

  “You can run, but you can’t hide,” Herb observed laconically as I strode over and pulled open the door. I dumped the collection of rifle slugs in one of the center console’s cup holder, and pulled the mike off its clip.

  “PCS, three ten. Go ahead.” A long pause followed, so I repeated myself.

  Nona Salcido, the sheriff’s wife, department matron, and now fill-in dispatcher while Miracle took a break, sounded harried. “Uh, Bill, hang on just a second.”

  I looked over at Herb and took a deep breath to shore up my patience.

  “PCS, three ten,” I prompted. I liked Nona, but she was about as useless in dispatch as Miracle Murton.

  “Ah, three ten, Deputy Torrez needs to talk with you. Are you still out at Herb’s?”

  “Three ten is ten eight at Torrance’s Number Two.”

  “Three oh eight is trying to reach you, but I think he’s out in a dead zone for both the unit and his handheld. He says he can’t read you.”

  “Probably because I wasn’t on the radio,” I said aloud without pressing the transmit bar.

  “Just a second, Sheriff.” Of all her jobs, Nona was the most uncomfortable behind the microphone. On top of that, the ten-code continued to be more of a mystery to her than it was to Miracle. On top of that, she had never accepted that the police radio wasn’t a telephone gossip channel.

  “I think he’s saying that he’s down in Bender’s Canyon.”

  “Ten four.” I looked off in that direction. Three hundred yards would take me through the runty trees and brush to the rim of the canyon. Maybe I could just shout at Torrez. With the characteristic vagaries of our radio system, he could talk to dispatch thirty miles away, but not to me.

  “Three oh eight, three ten.”

  I waited for the radio signals to wrap their way around the landscape, maybe sending a pulse or two down into the canyon. Nothing. I saw movement, and the deputy’s Stetson appeared as he trudged up the incline. He was in no hurry. His hands swung loose at his sides, and every now and then, he’d stop and gaze off at something in the brush. As he approached through the scrub, finally reaching the old two-track, I could see that he was chewing on a stem of grass, Old Farmer Brown himself.

  The possibilities were endless, but the image that came to mind first was of the department Blazer, one of our older vehicles, stuck up to its hubs in the sands of the canyon bottom, a perfect target for the next summer cloudburst.

  He nodded at Herb Torrance and removed the grass on which he’d
been chewing. With the energy reserves of a fit twenty-two-year-old, he was breathing as hard as if he’d been sitting and reading a book.

  “Sir,” he said, “there’s a spot you need to look at.”

  How generic was that? “A spot?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is your unit stuck down in there, or what?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t want to drive in the area any more than necessary.” He spoke as if he were reading his lines from an index card, and his voice was just one notch above a whisper.

  Herb lit another cigarette, and Torrez took a step sideways to move out of the smoke. “You’re welcome to take my truck on down there if you want,” Herb offered. He’d driven one of the ranch trucks, a brute Ford 350 with a cattle-feeder on the flatbed.

  “No, that’s fine, thanks just the same. A walk will do me good.” I lifted a hand in salute. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  Once clear of the cattle-stamped flat around the windmill’s tank, the trail eased down a gentle slope through the scrub. With their feet near the canyon floor, an errant elm or two thrived, providing nice pockets of shade. The trail was not a thoroughfare. Every now and then, I saw a partial bootprint, but there hadn’t been enough foot traffic to carve a dusty trail, even from Herb’s cattle, which would enjoy the shade as much as humans would. After a hundred yards, I saw the walls of smooth sandstone ahead of us, yellow in the morning sunshine.

  Our trail switched to the right to avoid a jumble of boulders, and Torrez stopped. He’d evidently driven back out to the county road from the windmill site, then up the passable trail into the canyon proper. We didn’t walk that far, but I could see the white top of his parked Blazer down below.

  I hadn’t been prepared to see a yellow crime scene tape, but there it was, strung across the trail and circling an area about half the size of a tennis court.

  Without comment, Torrez ducked under the tape, and immediately stopped, one hand holding the tape up a little. “Just over there by that mesquite.”

  I turned and surveyed the hillside. The target of his interest wasn’t hard to find. He’d pushed an evidence flag into a soft patch of earth, the red of the flag bright against the tawny rocks. The muted brown of the gunstock was clearly visible.

  Torrez didn’t move, and neither did I. If you find something as interesting as a firearm abandoned in the boonies, odds are good that there’ll be other items of interest along with it, forcing the list of questions to grow. Sometimes, the answer is painfully simple. Posadas County had hosted its share of suicides over the years, and usually the victim was found clutching the gun of choice—or at least lying beside it.

  The last thing we wanted to do was walk through an area of question with careless size twelves, destroying critical evidence.

  “Did you take photos yet?” I asked.

  “Some.”

  From where I stood, it appeared that the gun had most likely been leaning against the unruly growth of a creosote bush, then fell over. I could see no immediate reason why anyone would drop the gun in that particular spot. I looked down at my feet and then let my eyes follow the faint track up the grade. “You walked over to it?”

  “Right along there.” Torrez indicated the trace of a path that ended with the evidence red flag.

  “You didn’t pick it up.” That would have been most people’s reaction, I was sure.

  “No, sir.”

  “You still have your camera?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to walk over to the evidence flag. I want a photo when I’m about halfway there that shows both me and the flag. To show the route we took.”

  He nodded.

  I didn’t walk…I ambled, taking care to keep my boots on rocks when I could, my hands in my pockets. I counted the steps, and after only ten, I could see the outlines of the gun clearly. I stopped and turned back to Torrez. “You know, I don’t like coincidences one little bit.”

  I shook my head and continued on until I was looking down at the M-1 carbine, its thirty-round banana magazine securely in place.

  The night before, we’d found an empty rifle case in Willis Browning’s wrecked Suburban, the rifle case that usually contained his personal military relic. My first thought, when I’d seen the empty case, was that Willis had changed his mind about letting his son go solo in the truck with the gun along for the ride. Teenagers were a curious bunch.

  But why not just take the case out of the truck? That didn’t make sense, either.

  The rifle hadn’t been in the wrecked truck because, I was already willing to bet, it was lying out here under the stars. Which meant that the kids had been here. I was jumping to conclusions, though. Coincidences do happen.

  I beckoned the young deputy. “Scrunch yourself down there and tell me who manufactured that thing.”

  “Winchester, sir.” His answer was immediate, without the need to scrunch.

  “But you didn’t pick it up?”

  “No, sir.”

  I sighed. “How many of these can there be in one small, rural county?”

  “It’s Browning’s, sir.”

  I looked at him. “It looks like it, but tell me why you’re so certain.”

  “Before he bought it from George Payson last spring, I looked at it a few times at the gun shop.”

  “You were thinking of buying it?”

  “Yep.”

  “But…”

  “The back sight ain’t original, and somebody buggered up the front barrel band screw. Easy to fix, but Payson had the price jacked way up.”

  I bent down with my elbow on my knees, moving my head to bring the right tri-focal zone into play. Sure enough, Joe Hobby had tightened the barrel band screw more than a few times with an ill-fitting screwdriver, making marks as individual as fingerprints. The after-market rear sight had been tapped into place with something only slightly less weighty than a sledge hammer. “The sight still isn’t right, and the screw’s still buggered.” I straightened up. “Now just suppose.”

  Torrez regarded me silently. I was delighted that he hadn’t just charged in and snatched up the gun. He’d seen it, and instantly took the time and effort to treat the area that included the rifle as a potential crime scene. The lad had paid attention during evidence classes at the academy.

  “It won’t take long to confirm it, but suppose you’re right…suppose that it is Willis Browning’s rifle. I find it hard to believe that he would have carried it here. I mean, with his weight, he can hardly maneuver on level, smooth ground. I talked to him briefly out at the wreck site, and I didn’t ask him about the gun. I mean, I knew about the empty gun case found in the Suburban and all, but…” I heaved an irritated sigh. “I was more concerned with other things.”

  I straightened up and surveyed the terrain. “It’s easy to understand why kids come out here. It’s a gorgeous place. Nice spot to go picnicking, nice spot to go do whatever it is that kids do nowadays.” I looked back down at the little carbine. “And a nice spot to go shooting.” I glanced sideways at the deputy. “Windmills and water tanks and such. So why leave the M-1 here?” Torrez had no answer for that, and didn’t attempt to venture something profound. “You scouted around the area a little bit?”

  “Not yet. As soon as I saw the carbine, I taped off the immediate area, then tried to call in.”

  “So much for hi-tech radio technology.” I glanced down at his feet. His leather boots were still damp. “Herb doesn’t have a clue who might have shot up his property. Did you find anything interesting? He says you went wading.”

  “I picked up sixteen pieces of .30 carbine brass from a spot about thirty paces north of the tank. New issue, Winchester-Western.” He pointed at the carbine on the ground with his chin, Indian style. “Didn’t find no .30 carbine slugs in the tank itself.”

  “But lots of other stuff,” I said. “I have a few
pieces to add to the collection. Interesting that there are no other empties. I mean, somebody shot the hell out of that tank and did a little work on the windmill itself, and not just with an M-1 carbine. I saw the work of three or four separate guns.”

  It wasn’t a comment that demanded a reply, and Torrez didn’t make one. “I’m guessing the obvious possibility…the kids were here. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

  “This ain’t Lordsburg,” the deputy observed. “I never thought that they went there anyways.”

  “The canyon is a popular spot. The carbine here ties them to it.” The water-polished rocks were perfect for free climbing, and grottos, caves, and shelves had been cut over the eons to make attractive party rooms. The lack of casual passersby and the limited access to the canyon itself meant that no one was going to walk into the middle of ongoing recreation.

  “The Prescott kids are out here all the time. Them and the Torrances and their buddies.” Torrez nodded to the northeast. “Just follow the canyon for a couple miles and it about runs right into Prescott’s front yard.”

  “And you can come in on the two-track from the county road, just like you did. You don’t have to go through Torrance’s ranch. And…” I turned at the waist, looking down slope, “they could have driven out that way, then taken the county road north and jumped onto the interstate at the interchange. A straight shot into Posadas that way.”

  “Fastest way,” Torrez said.

  “The other alternative is take the county road south, and take State 56 into town. Either way.” I shrugged. “So what spooked ’em? Assuming they were here. What spooked ’em enough to drop the carbine and hightail it back toward town?” The obvious answer was going to be an uncomfortable one for Bob Torrez, so I voiced it for him. “If Orlando suddenly had an asthma attack, and the kids didn’t know what to do, that would account for the panic.”

  “Elli would know what to do.” His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  When Torrez fell silent, I added, “The kids would want to get him out of here, get him to medical help. It’s a frightening thing. Elli might have known what to do, but she might not have had the wherewithal to do it.”