Bag Limit

Chapter Five

I lost a bet with myself. I figured that the first thing Matthew Baca would do after he settled down in the backseat was to squirm his cuffed wrists down around his legs so that his hands were in front of him. That wouldn’t accomplish much, but at least he’d be able to pick his nose. About half the kids that we put into cuffs managed to accomplish that maneuver, and I suppose that every one of them hoped that we’d be surprised as hell, thereby showing us a thing or two, by God.

Matt didn’t bother with that stunt. Instead he lay on his back and let fly at the right side window with both feet.

The safety glass was pretty strong, and for the first few kicks he was off balance and experimenting. I slowed the car and twisted around to look through the heavy steel grille that separated front from back. Matt Baca was a dark, featureless shadow, but he could see my profile clearly enough.

“The last time one of those windows got busted,” I said, “the court made the young man who kicked it out pay a hundred and eighty bucks to replace it. And that’s in addition to all the other charges. You might want to think about that.”

Matt did think about it, for about ten seconds. Reasoning wasn’t on his agenda. He set to kicking again, this time with a vengeance. The thud, thud, thud rocked the car. Either he was tuckered from his trek on the mountain, or the soles of his nifty sneakers were too well padded. The window refused to break. His muttered display of colorful language came in short bursts as he sucked in air between assaults on the window.

“Son,” I said, “I’ve never actually seen anybody climb out through a bunch of broken glass while the car was moving,” I said. “Especially with handcuffs on. That’s going to be quite a stunt to watch.”

Maybe young Baca was sober enough by then to imagine himself hanging half in and half out of the window-feetfirst or headfirst didn’t matter much. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

For a couple of miles, the only sound I could hear was his rhythmic breathing. I turned up the volume on the police radio and keyed the mike.

“Posadas County, three ten.”

Enough seconds elapsed that I was raising the mike to repeat myself when Brent Sutherland finally found the transmission bar on the dispatcher’s end. “Three ten, Posadas County.”

“Posadas, three ten is ten-fifteen, one adult male. Request that three oh one ten-nineteen. And give the undersheriff a call. Advise him that his rabbit is in custody.”

There was a moment while Sutherland digested that I was inbound with a prisoner and wanted Deputy Taber’s assistance when we arrived and had to transfer the young hothead in the backseat to a jail cell.

“Ten-four, three ten.”

Jackie Taber’s husky voice added, “Three ten, three oh one copies.”

I clicked the mike a couple of times and hung it back on the radio. What my backseat passenger thought of the cryptic conversation was hard to tell, but whatever he thought, it served as a trigger. He realigned and let fly again. Just as we passed the abandoned mercantile at Moore, the passenger-side back window let loose with an expensive whump and a shower of glass.

My first impulse was just to let the little shit lie in his own glass until we reached Posadas. I snapped on the dome light and saw that Matt was continuing his craftsmanlike job of removing the entire window in a hail of stomps and kicks.

A pair of headlights popped into view in the rearview mirror, and I slowed and pulled off on the shoulder, swinging into a dirt lane that was blocked a car-length ahead by a locked gate.

Brilliant red lights blossomed, and at first I thought that Deputy Taber had pulled in behind me. As I got out of the car I caught a glimpse of the horizontal green stripe on a field of white. Two figures got out of the Border Patrol unit, and I recognized the short, blocky driver instantly. His gait reminded me of someone walking across a pitching ship’s deck.

“We saw the feet,” Scott Gutierrez said with a laugh. “Who you got in there?”

“A frisky teenager,” I said, and extended a hand. “You timed it just right.”

Gutierrez crunched my knuckles in a quick handshake and flicked his flashlight toward his partner. “By the way, this is Taylor Bergmann, Sheriff. He joined the crew a week or so ago. We were taking a little tour, showing him the sights.”

“Lots of those,” I said, and shook Bergmann’s hand. “Especially in the middle of the night. I’m Bill Gastner.”

“I’ve heard plenty about you, sir,” Bergmann said, and the tone of his voice left it unclear just what he meant. He turned to watch a truck as it approached from the east, the driver riding the Jake when he saw the red lights flashing on the opposite shoulder. From his confident posture, I guessed Bergmann to be retired military. The truck thundered by in a bow wave of air and a lingering cloud of diesel.

“Have you met Bob Torrez yet?” I asked, and Bergmann shook his head. “With any kind of luck at all, after next Tuesday, he’ll be the new sheriff.” The three of us chatted for a few minutes as if Matt Baca didn’t exist.

And while we talked, not a peep issued from the backseat of my car. Young Matt had the brains to appreciate how the rules of the game had changed.

Gutierrez stepped to the busted window and shined his flashlight in Baca’s face. “Hey, my man,” he said pleasantly.

“Why’d you break the sheriff’s window?”

Baca didn’t answer. He blinked into the light and lay perfectly still-the first thing he’d done right all night. Gutierrez turned to me, still keeping the light in the boy’s face. “What’ve you got him on?”

“Oh, a number of things,” I said. “No big deal. He rammed my car, for one thing.”

Gutierrez stepped back and swung the light along the unmarked Ford’s flanks. “Not this one,” I added. “This is his second wreck for the night.”

“A leg tie or two would fix that,” Gutierrez observed, and I shrugged agreement. The flashlight swung back into Baca’s face. “We were going to hit Tommy’s in Posadas for a sandwich anyway. Let’s throw him in the back of our unit and we’ll drop him off for you. That way he won’t sue you for making him sit in a pile of busted glass.”

“I’d appreciate that.” I stepped to the back door and opened it. “Matthew, time to change wagons. Slide on out of there. And you might want to be careful of the glass.”

The kid took his time, and as he swung his legs out, Gutierrez said, “And that unit is brand-new, kid. You so much as breathe on it, we’ll take you out into a field somewhere and leave you there.”

Gutierrez was about my height and outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds, no mean stunt in itself. But his was youthful brawn. Bergmann was the better part of six feet three with a wonderfully ugly face that would have looked right at home in a barroom brawl. It was reasonable to assume that the three of us could handle a half-stoned kid who weighed maybe one-forty dripping wet.

None of us knew what was going through Matt Baca’s head. Because another vehicle was coming, this time from the west, and because the driver was slow to change lanes to give us a wide berth, both Bergmann and Gutierrez hesitated. Matt Baca hadn’t stood up yet, and Scott Gutierrez was in the process of pulling a couple white nylon ties from his back pocket.

Baca lunged out of the backseat of the car, driving hard against my right hip with his shoulder. That didn’t move me much, but it spun him around so that he lost his balance, back-pedaling away from me. If he hadn’t been cuffed, he could have just extended one hand as he went down, using it as a pivot.

Instead, his flailing body danced backward away from the door and my frantic grasp. The oncoming vehicle wasn’t a tractor-trailer, and it wasn’t burning up the pavement. Maybe the driver’s gaze was attracted by the blinking red lights, and not the shadows beside the vehicles. His front bumper and Matt Baca merged with an awful thump. Because the kid had already started a downward sprawl when the truck hit him, he had no chance.

So quickly did the collision happen that the driver didn’t hit his brakes until the front tires, undercarriage, and rear duals had finished the job of pulverizing the young man. Then, amid billowing clouds of blue tire smoke, the truck skewed across the oncoming lane and plunged into the soft sand of the shoulder, finally jarring to a halt with its left front fender thrust through the highway right-of-way fence.

I didn’t want to take the handful of steps that would carry me to Matt Baca’s side. Bergmann and Gutierrez were quicker. The thought came to me unbidden that Sosimo Baca’s last contact with his son had been when they were both drunk. Odds were good that Sosimo would wake up with a pounding head Saturday morning and not even remember that I’d been in his house the night before, that I’d taken his son away. I wondered what Sosimo’s last sober memory of his son would be.