Before She Dies

Chapter 24

No lights flickered down in the black hole formed by the curve of the mesa rim. In several places the road skirted the very edge. When the road had been made in the 1930s, the dozer operators must have had fun watching the cottage-sized rocks plunge down the hill, smashing pinon and juniper, shedding chunks, and finally shattering into a million pieces.

Now and then through openings in the trees I could see two lights flickering out on the prairie, far in the distance. One was the Broken Spur to the southeast. The other was so far away I could only catch the flicker out of the corner of my eye-maybe Gus Prescott’s place north of Moore.

I slowed 310 to an idle and buzzed down both front windows. The winter air was dry and cold, the wind strong and steady from the northwest.

“My car’s just ahead of you, in that pinon grove to your right.”

I switched my radio to the car-to-car channel so I wouldn’t blast my side of our curious conversation all over the county.

“And where are you?” I asked.

“Down the hillside about a hundred yards.”

“Shine your flashlight.”

Silence for about six heartbeats followed, and then Estelle said, “I don’t have it with me, sir.”

A moonlit walk would be one thing, but the night was moon-feeble at best. With my heart driven up into my throat by apprehension, I drove 310 as close to the edge as I could and swiveled the spotlight around so the beam stabbed into the darkness. The rock slope plunged down at sixty degrees or better, a long slide of granite and steel-gray tree fragments. Fifty yards down from the road cut a spine of rock outcropping jutted from the talus slope, its form softened by a stand of ponderosa pine and scrub.

“A little to the south, sir,” Estelle said. “By the trees.” I drifted the beam across the slope and into the pines, then worked up toward where the spine first erupted from the slope. I saw motion at the same time that Estelle said, “Right here.”

In the wash of light from the spotlight, I could make out a tiny figure. She waved a hand. I jammed the gear lever into park, stamped down the parking brake, and got out of the car for a better view. The place was enough to give me the willies in broad daylight, much less on a February night with the wind beginning to moan up through the trees.

“What have you found down there?” I asked.

“Nothing right here, sir,” she said.

“Are you all right?”

The hesitation told me she wasn’t, but after a moment she said, “I just sprained my ankle. It’s kind of slow going.”

“So you aren’t all right,” I muttered, and then said into the radio, “How long have you been here?”

“Since about three o’clock.”

I groaned. With my flashlight in one hand and the handheld radio in the other I walked along the edge of the slope, searching for a route down through the rocks. When I was directly above Estelle’s position I pointed the flashlight downhill. She was so far away the narrow beam was lost in the glare of the spotlight.

“I’m going to call rescue, Estelle. Are you going to be all right for a few more minutes?”

“Yes.”

“Are you bleeding?”

Another pause, and then she said, “No. Really, I just sprained my ankle. I can’t put any weight on it, so I can only come up the hill one rock at a time.”

“All right, now listen,” I said, as if she had much choice. “It’s going to take me a while to get down there. In the meantime, just sit still. Stop trying to move. I’ll radio the EMTs, so they’ll be on the way.”

I started back toward 310. “I don’t think you should come down here, sir,” Estelle radioed. I almost chuckled. Hell, I didn’t think so, either. But it would be close to an hour before the EMTs could reach her. A lot could happen in an hour. She’d been stranded on that hillside for half a day. Hurt as she was, her reserves had to be about shot.

“I’ll be careful,” I replied.

“Sir, before you do anything, you need to make sure that the shoulder of the road is secured from the spot just south of where I’ve parked all the way back to where the road goes into the trees.”

“We’ll worry about that later, Estelle. Let me get rescue on the way.”

“Sir…” her tone was sharp enough to stop me in my tracks.

“Go ahead.”

“Sir, all the way at the bottom of this rock slide, a hundred yards below me, there’s a pickup truck, or what’s left of one. I don’t think your light will carry far enough, but if you drive forward and park right behind my car, you may be able to catch a glimpse of it with your spotlight. Don’t drive along the edge any farther, though. You’ll obscure the tracks.”

“A recent wreck, you mean?”

“Yes, sir. I got close enough to see that it was a late model white over blue Ford. I almost got close enough to see the license plate before I fell. I think it’s Tammy Woodruff’s.”

I sagged against the door of 310 for a minute and cursed a long, eloquent string. Then I used the car’s boosted radio to call dispatch. Gayle Sedillos was working, so I only had to say things once. Posadas County Search and Rescue would arrive in forty minutes, close on the heels of a Posadas County EMT unit. I had asked for a silent approach, no lights, no siren. I didn’t want a million extra feet trampling the evidence.

I told Gayle to dispatch Sergeant Torrez. I glanced at my watch. Even if Bob had been waiting with the nose of his patrol car pointed in the right direction, it would still take him nearly thirty minutes to reach us.

I picked up the handheld radio. “Estelle, help’s on the way. How are you doing?”

“All right, sir.”

She didn’t sound all right. My imagination heard her voice fading and distant. I pulled the large first-aid kit from the trunk of the car and slung the strap over my shoulder. With that and a blanket tucked under my arm, I stood on the road, looking down the hill. There was no easy way.

“One rock at a time,” I said aloud, and stepped off the road’s crumbling shoulder.

It would have been a hell of a lot easier without so much belly preceding me. The spotlight from the patrol car created hard, razoredged shadows. Part of the rock was illuminated as brightly as noon, while the backside, the side waiting to receive a foot or hand, was pitch black. The bottom half of my bifocals swam the shadows together until finally, with a curse of irritation, I stopped, snatched off my glasses, and stuffed them in my shirt pocket.

After fifty feet, I was breathing hard. I stopped and peered ahead. Somehow, Estelle’s tiny figure, a little lump against the gray of the rocks, didn’t look any closer.

I slid the radio out of my belt holster. “Be patient,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

I took a deep breath and leaned against a rock, shifting with a grunt when one of its razors dug into my elbow. “How did you know it was me driving by?” I asked.

Even the lousy metallic filter of the radio couldn’t completely wash away the soft warmth of her voice. “No one drives the way you do, sir.” She didn’t elaborate.

It took another twenty minutes for me to descend, one rock at a time, to within conversational distance of Estelle. I took another short breather. This time, Estelle’s voice drifted over the rocks without radio delivery.

“I’m sorry for all this,” she said.

“Me, too,” I replied, and promptly stumbled as a small, angular rock turned under my foot. My arms flailed as I windmilled for balance and the handheld radio went flying off into the darkness. I cursed and dropped into a crouch to shift my center of balance downward. “No worry,” I said, breathing in gasps. “What’s an eight-hundred dollar Motorola more or less.” I flipped the beam of my flashlight back and forth, but didn’t see the radio.

With one hand uphill as a prop and the other clutching the first-aid kit and blanket, I stumbled the final yards to Estelle’s position. She was sitting with one leg drawn up, arms clasped around her knee, and the other leg stretched out downhill.

“Jesus,” I said when the beam of the light touched her face. Her left cheek, eye, and forehead were a mass of sticky, dried blood. She held up her right hand defensively as I reached out to push her hair to one side, then held still while I examined her head. “No blood, huh,” I said. “That’s quite a gash you’ve got there above your eyebrow.”

“I did an Olympic-quality cartwheel,” she said, and managed a lopsided grin.

“Did it knock you out?”

She shook her head once from side to side. “I wish it had. It would have hurt less. I did a pretty good job on my right ankle. That’s why I fell. A rock turned, and I pitched off-balance down-hill.”

I swung the flashlight down. She was wearing blue jeans and a black version of the sturdy waffle-soled oxfords that nurses wear.

“Great hiking shoes, doll,” I muttered.

“I didn’t plan any of this, sir.”

“Let me look,” I said, and even a gentle touch that was only enough to move her jean cuff upward brought a flinch. I was no orthopedist, but I knew in what general direction a foot hanging off the end of an uninjured leg should point. Hers didn’t.

“Nah, it’s not sprained,” I said, then added, “busted into a million tiny pieces, maybe. But definitely not sprained.”

“That’s good news.”

I stood up and watched as she slowly brought her right arm back up around her knee, her hand holding her left arm just above the elbow.

“Arm, too?”

She nodded wearily. “I caught my left elbow on a rock. It’s all right. Just hurts.”

The EMTs were on the way, and I didn’t want to make a mess for them. The only painkiller in the first-aid kit was aspirin, and Estelle was far beyond the aspirin level. After tucking the blanket around her shoulders, I sat down beside her. “The folks will be here in just a minute,” I said, and even as I did I could hear the howl of a big V-8 working its way up County Road 14.

“That sounds like Bob Torrez,” Estelle whispered.

“You can tell all of us by how we drive?” I put my arm around her shoulders and she leaned against me.

“You idle,” she said. “I think you’re the only person who’s driven every road of this county at an idle.”

“That’s my best thinking speed,” I said. I lifted my flashlight and pointed it downhill, but the trees on the rock spine blocked my view. “The truck’s on the other side?”

“All the way at the bottom,” Estelle said. “On its top.” She tried to shift position and a little gasp escaped. “I was within fifty yards of it when I fell, sir.”

I looked at Estelle in astonishment. “You managed to climb this far back up with a busted ankle, cracked head, and bent elbow?”

“I didn’t want to spend the night, sir.” She turned her head and looked up the hill. “Another couple of hours and I would have made it.”

“Yep,” I said. “That would have been a long couple of hours.” I flashed my light downhill again. “You think it’s Tammy’s truck?”

“I’m positive, sir.”

“How did you see it?”

Estelle sat forward, resting her back. “I decided I needed to talk with Pat Torrance. I was driving up the county road really slowly…”

“Idling?”

“Yes, sir. I saw tracks going off the shoulder of the roadway. Nothing deep. No skid marks or anything. Just straight and true.” She imitated the trajectory with her right hand. “So I stopped and got out. I didn’t see it right away, but when I walked along the road a bit, I could just see the glint of shiny paint. The tailgate is facing uphill.”

“And so you decided to climb down and check.”

“Yes, sir. At three in the afternoon, it didn’t look so steep.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, if she’s in it…”

“I think she is, sir. Just before I fell, I saw what I think was a piece of colored cloth. That’s when I got excited and didn’t pay attention to where I was putting my feet.”

“While we’re sitting here waiting, here’s another grim thought for you to consider. I’m here because I drove out to the Torrance ranch myself. Nobody had heard from you, and I figured that was the most likely place to look.”

“That’s where I was going.”

“True enough. I talked to Herb Torrance. Among other things, he hasn’t seen Patrick since sometime yesterday.”

The rumble of Bob Torrez’s patrol car bounced off the side of the mesa as the vehicle emerged from the trees and slowed to a stop in the middle of the road. He switched on the red lights briefly, creating a psychedelic pulse against the surrounding rocks and trees.

“If Pat Torrance is involved in some way,” Estelle said slowly, “then the odds are good that either he put that truck down there, or…”

“Or he’s in it,” I finished for her, standing up.

Estelle thumped her right fist against the flat surface of the rock. “Damn, damn, damn…” she groaned, and I knew what she meant. Being left out of the chase was more painful than any fracture.