Before She Dies

Chapter 15

If kids wanted a dismal place to party, the narrow space behind the Chavez Chevrolet-Oldsmobile back fence was certainly it. Between the chain-link and the ragged edges of Arroyo Cerdo were fifty feet of sand, goat-heads, creosote bush and bunch-grass…mixed with debris and junk that the wind had brought in, or that Chavez’s mechanics had tossed over the fence from time to time.

Inside the eight-foot, barbed wire topped fence a row of vehicles waited for repairs that would probably never be made, or waited to surrender vital parts so some other junker could waddle a few more miles. As we walked along the fence, I noticed that several of the stripped vehicles were newer models than my own Blazer.

“Now this inner gate is locked all the time,” Nick said. He fumbled with a large set of keys.

I surveyed the eight-foot-high chain-link fence. “The person who called in the complaint from across the street wouldn’t be able to see back here. The building is in the way. She just said that there was vehicle traffic.”

“Kids,” Chavez said, as if that covered all the sins of the world. “They can pull in off the street, sneak around here, and be out of sight.” He pointed at the tire tracks outside the fence.

He opened the gate and motioned for the sheriff and I to follow. “The service manager opens this each morning,” he said. “That way the four back service bay doors can be opened and we can drive vehicles straight through, out and around.” He made a circular motion with his hands.

I grunted and turned slowly, surveying the yard. “Nothing,” I said to myself.

“Pardon?”

“I said, ‘nothing.’ There’s nothing here that tells me a damn thing.”

“I wish we knew who the deputy talked with,” Holman said. “That would answer a lot of questions.”

“It might,” I replied dubiously. “We have no connections, Martin. None. We can assume either way-that what Deputy Encinos did here had something to do with the later shooting, or that there is no relationship.” I shrugged. “You take your choice. Nothing either way.”

“Who called in the complaint?” Nick asked.

“Across the street. The Burger Heaven’s night manager. She called to say that she saw kids driving around behind this building.”

“Then all they could do is park outside the service yard fence,” Nick said. “They’re not going to climb over the barbed wire.”

“Who talked to the manager?” Holman asked.

“Tom Mears. He said that she couldn’t identify what kind of vehicle was involved. She was busy, the light was bad, it’s a hundred yards distant…”

“But she took time out to make the call to police,” Holman said. I looked at him with mild surprise. Given another four-year term, he might turn out to be as cynical as the rest of us. There was hope yet.

We dropped Nick Chavez back at his house after extracting the standard promise that if anything cropped up he’d give us a call. I wasn’t optimistic. Unable to let go, I drove back to the car dealership and pulled into the lot.

“Now,” I said, looking at my watch. “It’s ten-fifty-three. I’ve just checked out the lot, found nothing, and called the PD to inform them.”

“All right,” Holman said. “What do we do for six minutes?”

“Suppose we just sit here. Suppose the deputy and Linda Real were just talking. About what, we don’t know. But they’re sitting in the dealer’s lot, watching what little traffic there is, and chatting. They finish their conversation, and Encinos calls ten-eight.”

“So they drive twelve miles west on State Fifty-six.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked.

“Why not?”

I glanced at my watch. “The deputy’s shift ends at midnight. It’s already eleven. So to give himself time to finish up paperwork and so forth, he’s only got a few minutes. It’s been an interesting shift. He assisted at the Weatherford crash on the interstate, and he may want to talk with Mears about that report. He’s had two domestic dispute calls, and the odds are good that a third one might come in before the night’s over. So it makes sense, both from timing and need, that he’d tend to stay central-that he’d stick close to town for the last few minutes of his shift.”

“But instead, he headed west.”

“Right,” I said, and pulled 312 into gear. “He heads west. It’s just about eleven, dead up. Driving at moderate speed will bring him twelve miles out on State Fifty-six in fifteen to twenty minutes.”

“Maybe he wanted to stop at the Broken Spur for something.” Holman’s face brightened. “Or maybe Linda did. Remember, she’d been there just the night or two before. With Torrez.”

“Then why did they drive beyond the saloon, Martin?”

“I don’t know.” He slumped in the passenger seat and watched the night slide by. “Maybe a patron left there drunk, and the deputy decided to follow him.”

“Follow a drunk? Not for three miles before he pulls him over. Maybe a thousand yards.”

“Maybe he was just trying to make sure he got home all right.”

“Martin, if one of your deputies does that and I find out about it, he can go earn a living flipping burgers. The only place they’d better be escorting drunk drivers is into the backseat of the patrol car.”

Holman shot a quick glance at me. “It was just a thought.”

“Watch the highway and the right-of-way for junk,” I said. “Remember? If the theory is that something ruined a tire, then that’s what you should be looking for.”

“Testy, testy,” Holman grinned. He straightened up a little and watched the roadway. After a minute, he said, “Why is it I always feel like I work for you?”

I looked over at him in surprise. “Sorry, Martin. I’m tired, that’s all. And old habits die hard.”

Holman shrugged. “Well, in a way, I suppose I do work for you. I’m elected, you’re not.” He lowered his window an inch and inhaled deeply, holding the air in like someone smoking a joint. He finally let out the air with a monumental sigh. For a moment, I thought that he was going to start rattling on again about the election, but instead he said, “It’s not going to tell us much, even if we do find something.”

“Anything at all is a piece of the puzzle,” I assured him. “Have you ever tried one of those two-thousand-piece jigsaws, where all the pieces are shaped almost alike? The box top shows a big picture of some Swiss castle or some such? One piece at a time. And if you’re missing one piece, it’s all just that much harder.”

Holman snorted with disgust. “My daughter talked me into helping her with one of those. It was a picture of a field of horses.” He looked across at me. “About two-hundred damn pieces of blank blue sky, Bill. It took forever, and even then she figured it out just by trial and error.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do here.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Oh yes. It is the same thing, Martin.”

We reached the Broken Spur Saloon. The parking lot was full, the patrons no doubt taking advantage of having a good story to kick about. I slowed 310 and pulled off the highway. I switched on the spotlight, swiveled it, and played the light across license plates as we idled along the shoulder of the highway. A westbound truck laid on the air horn and passed us so fast the car rocked in its wake.

“Jesus,” Holman murmured.

And just beyond the parking lot, as I was pulling back out onto the highway, the sheriff found his missing puzzle piece.

“Stop,” he barked, and I did so, the patrol car half on and half off the pavement. “Turn the light around this way.” The fender of the patrol car blocked the beam and I backed up. “What’s all that stuff?”

I craned my neck, pulling myself up against the steering wheel. “The remains of an old sign base, maybe.”

Holman was out of the car before I finished the sentence. My guess was correct. Hidden in the bunchgrass just far enough off the highway’s shoulder that the mowers wouldn’t hit it in summer was a concrete slab two feet square and a foot thick or more. The sign base rested skewed, sunken into the ground where ants undermined it and occasional careless drivers coming out of the saloon’s parking lot clipped it. One corner of the concrete had spalled and crumbled to pebbles.

Martin Holman knelt down in the grass and played his flashlight back toward the saloon. The harsh artificial daylight from the parking lot’s single sodium-vapor light washed out the flashlight’s beam, but I could see what excited Holman.

“Look there,” he said. “You can see impressions in the grass where people have pulled out of the parking lot, driving right over this thing. If you cut the corner more than just a little, bang.” He played the light around the base. “He must have had an old sign up on this at one time.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and grunted down on my knees. “Enough here to rip up a tire, that’s for sure.” A three-inch spike of naked rebar angled up from the back corner of the pad.

“Are there traces of rubber on that?” Holman asked, the excitement raising the pitch of his voice so much he sounded like a teenager on his first date.

“I’m not a human microscope, Martin,” I replied. I sat back on my haunches. “And even if there were, what would it mean? This thing’s been hit a hundred times over the years.”

“Maybe there’s some kind of match-up we could make with the rubber?”

I grimaced and stood up. “Martin, think on this, now.” I held up a hand and ticked my fingers. “First, we have the assumption that the disabled vehicle had a flat tire.”

“Didn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“What about the lug wrench?”

“We don’t know for sure that the wrench belongs to the vehicle in question, Martin. Second, if we assume that the wrench belongs to the vehicle in question, we can further assume that maybe, just maybe, that vehicle was one that was stolen up in Albuquerque-we assume that on the thin basis that the wrench was new and fit the type. Now, we assume even further that if the vehicle had a flat tire, it must have been because of a road hazard.” I shrugged. “Maybe. And then we have to assume that this thing,” and I nudged the concrete slab with my toe, “is the hazard.”

Holman rose to his feet and stood head down. Maybe he was thinking, maybe he was crying. Maybe he was just plain flummoxed.

“And then we have to assume,” and I leaned on the word, “that if all the other puzzle pieces are what we think they are, that this thing managed to gouge a brand-new, steel-belted radial in just such a fashion that it held air for roughly two miles.” I pointed off into the dark. “Two miles that way, until the driver was forced to stop and deal with it.”

“But can’t we match rubber fragments?” Holman persisted.

I grinned in the darkness. Martin was game, I had to give him that. “No, sheriff, we can’t. In the first place, the rubber compound that makes up a given line of tires-a given batch regardless of size-is all the same. A match wouldn’t tell us anything. In the second, far more important place, we don’t have a damn thing to match to. We don’t have the suspect’s vehicle.”

Holman squared his shoulders and turned toward the patrol car. “Yet,” he said with finality.