All The Way Down

by DaveKearns

  ''On his way to the hospital. Would you step over here for a minute? Don't touch the car." He took my forearm in a heavy grip and led me over to the car. I could see that the marks on the side of the car were from a shotgun blast. The headrest and the top of the driver's seat had been blown off. The inside of the windshield and the dash were covered with a sticky, blackening mess.

  I pulled free of Bullard's grip and turned away from the gore as police lights strobed across the scene, painting everything in surreal colors of red and blue.

  Chapter Four

  "I'm going to need to ask you a few more questions," Bullard said. "Mind coming with me to the police station?"

  "All right," I croaked.

  I felt Michelle's hand on the small of my back. "Are you okay?" she asked.

  I nodded dully.

  "I'll follow you to the station," she said.

  Bullard led me over to one of the police cars and told me to ride in the front. The fact that Brick was gone and that I could have been driving my car that night was sinking in. I wondered if it had been Cal behind the wheel of my car. The image of his head exploding all over the interior of the Camaro made me swallow hard.

  I doubted that Michelle could keep up with Bullard's driving, but I turned in the seat and checked to see if she was behind us anyway. I braced myself against the door as we rounded a corner. Bullard pushed the car hard enough to make the tires squeal a little at every turn.

  When we arrived at the police station, sodium lamps mounted on the face of the brown, two story building lit the handful of cruisers and civilian cars in the lot. I followed Bullard inside through double doors. His desk was one of a dozen desks in the main room of the ground floor of the police station. He waved me to a straight-back metal chair beside his desk, which was clear aside from a notepad, an ashtray, and a 3x5 picture of him standing in the snow beside a large cougar he'd shot.

  "Want a cup of coffee?" he asked.

  "Yeah. Thanks."

  Bullard walked to the pot and returned with a pair of coffee mugs. Mine was white and had a big chip out of the lip like it had been dropped. I took it and held it with both hands.

  "Mister Harper, may I see your driver's license?"

  I put the coffee on the desk and pulled out my wallet. I handed my laminated driver's license to him. Bullard took it from me and began copying my address down.

  "Is this address current?" he asked without looking up.

  I stared at Bullard's flat top haircut. His scalp reflected a healthy pink in the fluorescent light.

  "Yeah," I said. I took a sip of the coffee. It was scalding and tasted corrosive.

  He was still writing, head down. "Delorean. That’s an unusual name."

  "That’s what I hear," I replied.

  He handed the license back to me.

  "What are you doing here in Alamogordo?" he asked.

  "My brother died after a wreck out at the quarry yesterday. Guess it was my turn tonight."

  Bullard leaned back in his chair. The springs in the chair creaked under the load. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and watched me while he lit one. He exhaled through his mouth before tossing the pack on the desk.

  "Your brother was the truck driver. Brick I think his name was."

  "Bricklin. That’s right."

  "So far as I know, what happened to your brother was an accident," Bullard said. "Do you know different?"

  "What are the odds that his wreck and what happened to my car are unrelated?" I said.

  "Well," Bullard said, "I don’t speculate on things like that. I read the report on your brother's accident. Either he fell asleep at the wheel or the truck got away from him. It happens."

  I pointed at the pack of cigarettes. Bullard said to help myself. I picked up his lighter. It had a rattlesnake on it with a red stone where the eye would be. I shook a cigarette from the pack, lit it and took a pull from it. I held the smoke for a moment and let it out slow. I had managed to go several weeks without a cigarette and this one ranked up there with the best. It seemed to cover the taste of the coffee, which was a plus.

  "Were you close to your brother?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Had you been in touch with him recently?"

  "No."

  "How were you contacted?"

  "Brick gave my name as a reference when he hired on at the quarry. They called me."

  "And you do what for a living?"

  "I track people down who steal money from banks."

  "Like a bounty hunter? No offense, but you don’t look like someone who could take down bank robbers for a living."

  "The people I hunt took money from banks through bad loans or fraud. They don’t steal the money at gunpoint."

  "Are you armed?"

  "No. I haven’t needed a gun so far. Usually I just find the people who took the money and the police make the arrest."

  "Okay. I got it. Are you working on anything right now? Anything in this area?"

  "No. I’m just here because of what happened to my brother."

  "And you’re staying where?"

  "At the Sunrise Inn."

  Bullard nodded to himself, settling something in his mind. Then he brushed some ash from the legs of his pants and exhaled as he spoke. "I’m not going to say that it isn’t possible that your brother’s accident and what happened to your car tonight are connected, but I doubt it. This is a friendly enough town, but we see things like this along the highway from time to time. Likely it’s the result of the driver of your car giving someone the finger, or looking at someone else's girlfriend too long at a stop light. You’ve got out of state tags on your car, and the way your car’s built it looks like it would get a lot of attention from other drivers. Who knows?"

  I heard heels striking the linoleum of the police station floor and looked over my shoulder. Michelle had her purse under her arm and was coming towards us. She said hello, pulled up a chair from another desk and sat down by me. Bullard watched her with an appraising eye. I took a final drag off the cigarette and ground it out in the overflowing ashtray. There was an uncomfortable silence while Bullard watched me.

  "Do you have any idea what happened?" Michelle asked Bullard.

  "Well, Ma’am," Bullard began, "the man driving Mister Harper's car was injured by a shotgun fired from another car. Our officers are trying to locate witnesses now. Your friend here seems to think that there's some sort of vendetta against his family."

  Michelle looked at me with wide eyes.

  "Mister Harper," Bullard continued, "have you had any disagreements with anyone since you arrived in town?"

  "No."

  "Has anyone threatened you?"

  I thought about Ray's behavior that morning. Unfriendly, yes, but not threatening. "No," I said. I rubbed my eyes. It felt as if I had sand under the lids.

  "All right then," Bullard said, "I don't see any reason to assume that what happened tonight was directed at you, any more than there's reason to think your brother's death wasn't an accident. Coincidences actually do happen. The results haven't come back from your brother’s autopsy, but they don't expect to find anything except injuries from the wreck."

  I could see that I was wasting my breath. "Fine," I said. "Am I free to leave now?"

  "Yes you are," he said. "We'll need to keep your car as evidence until we can sort out who fired the shotgun at it and why. I'll be in touch as soon as we know more."

  Michelle waited until we were outside in the parking lot to say anything.

  "Did you find anything out before I got there?" she asked.

  "The police think my family is a lightning rod for random catastrophes. That was about it."

  We climbed up into Michelle’s Jeep and she got us out of there. I had my head against the window for a while. I just wanted to lean against something and close my eyes. I felt her hand rub my arm, or maybe I was imagining it. I was vaguely aware of getting into my hotel room and collapsing on the bed in my clothes. Then I was
out.

  Chapter Five

  I woke to the sound of pounding at the door. Bright sunlight was coming in through the thin drapes. I checked the clock on the night stand on the way to the door and it said it was two in the afternoon. I pulled the door open as far as the chain would allow and a housekeeping woman stood outside the door with a cart stacked with linens. "I'm still sleeping," I told her. She nodded and said something in Spanish. I didn't understand her, so I pointed at the bed and shook my head. She nodded, smiled, and rolled her cart away. I closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to remember what had happened last night.

  The message light on the room telephone was flashing. I picked up the phone and pressed "0."

  The receptionist at the front desk told me that there were two messages for me. The first was from Michelle. She had left her phone number for me and asked me to return her call. I found a pen and pad in the desk and had the receptionist read me the number again. The second was from Dean Elliott at the quarry, saying that he would be there until five if I wanted to pick up Brick's car or talk about Brick’s insurance policy.

  I did several sets of pushups and sit-ups, using the elevation of one of the chairs in the room to increase the resistance. Then I took a shower and dressed in jeans, a red and white University of Oklahoma T-shirt, and jogging shoes. I dialed Michelle's number and she picked up on the third ring.

  "Hello?" she said.

  "Michelle, this is Del."

  "Hi, Del, how are you?"

  "Better. Thanks for all your help last night. I was pretty wiped out." I could hear another woman's voice in the background on Michelle's end of the connection.

  "You're very welcome, Del. Do you still need a ride out to the quarry to pick up Brick's car? Dean mentioned that he’d talked to you about it."

  "Right," I said. "I do. I can take a cab if it's too much trouble."

  "Oh, no problem," she said. "I'll be there as soon as I can. It'll probably be about forty-five minutes or so."

  "Thanks, Michelle. See you then."

  I slid the room key and Brick's keys into my jeans pocket. I took a good look at Brick's watch. It wasn’t an expensive make, but it was nice looking and matched his style: thick with a heavy metal wristband and chronograph dials on the face. There were scratches on the side of the watch, but it had survived the accident. I put the watch on. The second hand ticked smoothly around the dial.

  I tuned around on the television set until I found a cable channel that ran ads for local businesses but played music. Then I opened the drapes and sat on the edge of the bed, watching the traffic go by. I was hungry, so I took a handful of change from the night stand and went down to the snack machines to get a soda and a small bag of peanuts.

  I still felt drugged from sleep, but the cola felt okay in my stomach. The lump of keys in my pants pocket reminded me that I would be going by Brick's house that evening to start the process of going through his belongings. I picked up Brick's wallet and pulled the driver's license from it. My brother's face smiled back at me, relaxed and full of confidence. When I had identified the body at the morgue, brutal lacerations and bruises made it almost impossible to recognize him. It jarred me to think about it. The address beside the picture showed 941 Guerrero. I put the license inside my wallet and waited.

  Michelle knocked on the door a few minutes later. She wore blue jeans, low-heel red pumps, and a shiny sea-green short sleeve shirt. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a pony tail. She looked fantastic.

  "Hi," she said.

  "Hi, yourself. Thanks for helping me out with the ride." I switched off the television set.

  "You're welcome." She looked at the can in my hand and the empty wrapper from the peanuts on the dresser. "You’ve had a nutritious lunch, I see."

  I held up the can and laughed. "All the quality two dollars can buy," I replied.

  "Would you like to stop on the way for something to eat?" she asked.

  "Yeah. A hamburger would be great," I said.

  I closed the door to the motel room and checked to make sure that it was locked. We got into Michelle's Jeep and headed south through town. The air conditioner kept the interior of the car from melting in the afternoon heat.

  "Have you heard anything from the police?" she asked.

  "No. Not so far."

  "God," she said, shivering for a moment.

  "I think what happened to my car last night was actually directed at me, and that there's a good chance that Brick's death wasn't an accident."

  "I hope that’s not true," she said. "I'm sorry. I don’t know what to say."

  We stopped at a drive-in restaurant and Michelle talked to me while I ate. She gave me a little more detail about how she met Brick. She had worked at the quarry for a few months. Dean Elliott, the quarry manager, was a friend of her mother's. When she had to quit graduate school, Dean had offered Michelle a job. He had started her as an administrative assistant, and then gotten her involved with personnel and bookkeeping matters. She was grateful for the opportunity. She had met Brick when he came into her office to arrange to have his paycheck deposited directly into one of the local banks.

  Michelle stopped speaking and gave me an odd look. "Isn't that Brick's watch you have on?"

  "Yes," I said.

  She was silent for a few seconds. "I gave that watch to Brick as a present," she said. "Did you know that?"

  I shook my head. "No," I replied. "I’m sorry."

  "You don't feel funny about wearing it?"

  "Not until now."

  Her expression was troubled. "Would you like it back?" I asked.

  She looked down. "No. Forget it."

  I finished my lunch in silence. After the car hop picked up our tray, Michelle backed away from the restaurant and merged the Wagoneer with light traffic. She drove with both hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. Finally, I saw the muscles in her arms and shoulders relax. She seemed like she had come to some sort of resolution, but she was still silent.

  We were past the air base and White Sands National Monument. The immigration patrol had a roadblock going in the oncoming lanes. Red rubber cones were set up in the passing lane, packing traffic down to one lane. A dozen cars, pickup trucks, and semi trucks sat in a queue, waiting to be inspected. At the head of the line, a tired-looking gray sedan sat with its trunk open. One officer looked in the trunk while another questioned the driver.

  The green immigration bus had occupants this time. I could see a few people sitting inside through the wire welded over the windows. I guessed that it must feel like an oven in the bus and I imagined myself sitting on one of the hot vinyl seats, waiting to be driven back across the border and dumped out.

  Another official stood at the back of the line of cars with a shotgun in his hand, the barrel of the gun pointed at the sky and the butt of the gun resting on his hip. One of the trucks from the quarry was sitting at the back of the line. The guard pointed at the driver of the quarry truck and then made a circular motion with his free hand to waive it around the roadblock.

  "Looks like they caught some people today," I said.

  "They'll be back before long."

  "It doesn't slow them down?"

  "In Mexico, they have nothing. Here at least they have a chance of making a living. Some of them send money home to their families to keep them going. A bus ride back across the border isn't going to make much difference. It’s just a short interruption to someone who’s really determined."

  She slowed the car and turned onto the quarry road. I sunk back in the seat and thought about Brick's car. We had built up the engine on it together during my last summer of college. The body of the car was already in good shape; it just needed new paint and a few rust spots fixed. The engine and transmission were another story. The previous owner had baked the engine by ignoring the temperature light when the thermostat had stuck closed, and the pistons seized up when the oil boiled. The starter just made a loud clicking sound when we tried to start
the car.

  When we bought the car, we had it towed to the driveway of the rent house we shared. It was one of the special Ford XL GT sedans built in 1969. The engine was a 429 cubic inch monster that put out 360 horsepower. I read car magazines avidly when I was growing up, and I could quote the ads for the Ford XL by rote. One of the ads called the car "The Velvet Brute." The ads were right. The car had a smooth ride, the interior was roomy and comfortable, and the engine had enough torque to pull tree stumps out of the ground.