Before She Dies

Chapter 2

The sight of Sonny Trujillo, broken, bleeding, and in handcuffs, was enough to sober both sides. Glen Archer asked if I thought the game should be canceled, and I said no-hell, they might as well finish the stupid thing.

No one asked why my revolver had failed to fire. Maybe they hadn’t had the muzzle-eye view I had had. Maybe they hadn’t seen the hammer snap back and then forward.

By ten, the floor was clear, the teams were facing the toss, and Sonny Trujillo was in the county jail with every charge imaginable-and even some that weren’t-levied against him. Patrolman Pasquale had wanted the honor of booking the woodchuck. Why he thought paperwork was exciting I didn’t know, but I told him to have at it and that I’d be back in the office after the game to write up a statement.

That would give the doctor time to clean up Trujillo’s messy face and make sure that he wasn’t bleeding to death from my sock to his nose.

I watched the last few minutes of the game in relative peace. Posadas finally put that dog to bed, rolling up a forty-point margin.

The gym emptied at 11:05 and I breathed deeply as I walked toward 310, trying to purge popcorn fumes from my lungs. A second county car had pulled in behind mine, and Sergeant Robert Torrez got out when he saw me trudging down the sidewalk.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“I made sure Trujillo was behind bars, then I came on up,” he said. “I thought I should kinda stand by close.”

“The next one’s yours, bud.” I watched as the Wittner buses rolled by. There were no heads sticking out of windows, no shouts, no errant fingers. They hadn’t even stayed long enough after the game to take showers. It was going to be a delightful ride home.

“You want me to follow them out of town?” Torrez asked.

“Nah, they’ll be all right. No point in encouraging all the story-tellers. It’s going to be bad enough as it is.”

“Is it true what Pasquale said happened?”

I looked at Torrez and raised an eyebrow. “That depends on what he said.”

“That Trujillo had your gun.”

“That part’s true.”

The deputy had the good grace not to ask how I’d managed to lose the weapon in the first place.

“And he said you broke Trujillo’s finger when you wrenched the gun away from him.”

“That’s also true. And then he took a swing at me and broke my glasses. I punched him in the face. That ended that. Except I’ll probably end up being sued for fifty-million dollars by the son of a bitch’s parents.”

Torrez leaned against the front fender of his car. “Dang,” he said, as close to cursing as he was apt to come.

“What else did Pasquale say?”

“That he didn’t know as he’d have had the nerve to reach out and grab the weapon the way you did.”

I gathered the six cartridges and pulled them out of my pocket. “It’s pretty easy when you know the gun’s not loaded, Robert.”

Torrez stared at the ammunition and then a slow grin spread across his face. “Oh,” he said.

“Oh, is right. Did Pasquale remember to call someone to check Trujillo? To set his finger and stop up his nose?”

Torrez nodded. “Dr. Perrone was just finishing up with him when I left to come down here.” He managed to keep a straight face when he added, “Pasquale said someone from the newspaper was there and photographed the whole thing.”

“Yes.” The last of the traffic was clearing the lot. I stepped down off the curb and unlocked 310. “We can always hope she ruins the film in processing.”

Torrez grinned again. Levity wasn’t one of his strong suits, and two smiles in one evening was something of a record for him. “I guess Sheriff Holman will have all kinds of strokes tomorrow, then.”

“Serious ones,” I said. Martin Holman was as sensitive about bad press as any politician facing an election year could be. But something in the deputy’s tone made me pause. I pulled the handheld radio off my belt and tossed it on the seat of 310. “Is there something else I should know, Roberto?”

“Estelle is down at the office processing Tammy Woodruff.”

“For what?”

“DWI and assault.”

I settled back against the fender of 310 and folded my arms across the top of my ample belly. “You issued the DWI?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the young lady became upset?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

I leaned forward slightly and squinted. “I don’t see any damage, Robert.”

“A little scratch here,” he said, fingering his left earlobe. “That’s about it.” Tammy would have had trouble reaching Torrez’s earlobe, much less damaging it.

“And for that, you tacked on an assault charge?”

“Uh, no, sir. She broke one of Linda Real’s cameras.”

“Linda was with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought she was at the game.”

“That must have been someone else, sir. Maybe Frank Dayan.”

I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. Linda Real had been with the Posadas Register for four years. I’d grown to like and trust her. And I’d assumed it was her behind the camera that evening. I hadn’t made a point to look closely.

“Frank, huh,” I said. Dayan was an unknown quantity, fresh out of the home office in Omaha, Nebraska, taking the reins after the O amp;N Newspapers chain had purchased the Register. It was hard to imagine anyone moving from a metro area like Omaha to dusty, brown, deserted Posadas.

“So let me get this straight. You stopped Miss Tammy for drunken driving and Linda was with you.” Torrez nodded. “And Linda reared up with her camera and started snapping pictures. So Tammy flipped, not quite so drunk she couldn’t imagine her little freckled face on the front page of the Register.”

“Well, no, sir. Linda remembers what you told her about riding along on patrol just for the opportunity to take embarrassing pictures of the public, sir. While I was talking with Miss Woodruff, Linda decided to go into the Broken Spur and get a bag of chips or something. Miss Woodruff saw her, knew who she was, and off she went. She wasn’t thinking too straight, sir.”

I rubbed my face. It was going to take an hour to shower off the gymnasium fume residue. “You were at the Broken Spur when this happened?”

“I stopped Miss Woodruff just as she was pulling her truck out onto the highway from the saloon’s parking lot.”

I groaned. “You were coming in toward town, or what?”

“No, sir. I was parked. Just down the highway. I was backed into that little dirt road that leads down to Howard Packard’s windmill and stock tank.”

“Watching the bar.”

Torrez nodded. “I can see the doorway pretty good through binoculars.”

“Of course,” I said wryly. Every deputy I’d ever known had his own “specialty,” and worked it hard. Bob Torrez was from a family of twelve, and he’d lost both a younger brother and sister one night seven years before when a car in which they were passengers missed the interstate ramp and slammed into an abutment. The driver, a sixteen-year-old neighbor, had been so soused he hadn’t been able to start the car without assistance.

That had been the deputy’s rookie year, and from then on, his random checks of local liquor establishments and their patrons had been unrelenting. Sheriff Holman fielded more than a few complaints, and it was to his credit that he shrugged most of them off.

“Tammy Woodruff is no juvenile, Robert,” I said.

“No, but she staggered so bad she almost didn’t make it to her truck. And then when she started up she backed into Gus Prescott’s horse trailer.”

“Any damage?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’ll sort itself out, I’m sure,” I said. “Did Victor see this?”

“If he did, he didn’t come out.”

“That’s a plus,” I said and got into 310. Victor Sanchez owned the Broken Spur Saloon and Trading Post. He’d made it a point more than once to tell me that if my deputies didn’t stop harassing his patrons he’d file suit. He was hot air, of course. Judging by the way most scuffles ended in the Broken Spur, he was more apt to pop somebody with a wrecking bar.

And this arrest was going to test even Martin Holman’s sense of fair play. Karl Woodruff, Tammy’s old man, was a nice enough guy, running his RxRite Pharmacy cleanly and professionally through good times and bad. He supported the Posadas County Sheriff’s Office to the hilt, and that included keeping Sheriff Martin Holman in office.

I could imagine the headline Monday afternoon: Republican Committee Chairman’s Daughter Busted-Sheriff Fires Undersheriff and Deputy.

Hell, I wasn’t paranoid, but it was shaping into a great week.