Before She Dies

Chapter 26

When I stepped off the last treacherous rock and onto the solid, comforting gravel of County Road 14, I would have taken a great breath and sighed with relief if I had had the energy. Instead, I settled on the convenient tailgate of one of the search and rescue trucks. I was dirty, unshaven, and had a rent in my trousers-I looked like an old derelict who didn’t have the gumption to face the trash cans down the alley one more time.

The activity was a blizzard around me. I was too tired even to pretend that there was something I could do to help.

The night wind had changed direction, beginning its dawn cycle. This mesa top should have been a beautiful, quiet place. There should have been a potpourri of aromas to enjoy other than diesel and small-engine exhaust. There should have been quiet night sounds other than radios, engines, shouts, shrieks of metal-cutting blades, and the groaning of bending metal forced apart by steel jaws.

Lots of things should have been. Tammy Woodruff should have been home in bed, curled around a good boyfriend, not crunched up and squashed inside the grotesque wreckage of her pickup truck.

Behind me, Deputies Tom Mears and Tony Abeyta tried to make sense of the tracks left by Tammy’s truck. Apparently, she had managed to drive up the winding county road without incident until she reached a point just before the road opened up on top. After rounding a tight, decreasing radius curve, the road passed between a limestone outcropping and a thick grove of scrub oak.

Sprayed gravel and a deep gouge in the trunk of one of the five-inch oaks showed that someone-probably Tammy-had lost it on that corner and strayed into the brush. She’d had time to correct and cuss a couple of times before she broke out on top.

And then, like a straight and true missile, her truck had drifted to the right, with no signs of swerving or correction, until the right front wheel dropped over the rocky edge. Even if she’d been sober, at that point there was nothing she could have done to save herself.

The gouges in the road’s shoulder showed that her truck had executed a slow roll to the right, with the first flip sheering off the passenger-side mirror. Mears found the mirror lying wedged between two boulders within fifty feet of the road. After that, it was impossible to tell exactly what gyrations the vehicle had executed as it tumbled down the talus slope, shedding bits and pieces as it went.

The total distance from last contact with the county road to the truck’s resting spot in the scrub trees at the bottom measured 346 yards. Three and a half football fields. And Tammy Woodruff, twenty-three years old and 105 pounds, had survived it all.

She had to know the circumstances that prompted her lonely drive up County Road 14, but maybe she wouldn’t be able to remember how she’d come to drift that shiny, year-old truck too far to the right. And if she was lucky, she wouldn’t remember a damn thing about that never-ending flight down the talus slope.

A dark, uniformed figure appeared at the side of the truck on which I was sitting. I turned and recognized Deke Merriam, one of the enforcement officers for the Forest Service. This mesa top was their turf, even though the tallest tree on it couldn’t skin twenty feet.

“Why aren’t you down there, Deke?”

He snorted. “Why aren’t you?”

“I was. Well, part way. I saw enough.”

He groped in his shirt pocket and pulled out cigarettes. I watched him light one, and smelled the first waft of smoke that the night air thoughtfully brought to me.

Down slope, a new shower of sparks shot a dozen feet into the air. “It looks like they’re going to have to cut that truck into a million pieces to get her out,” Merriam said.

“Looks like,” I agreed. “It’s wadded up pretty good.”

“What was the deal, anyway? She was speeding, or what? One of the guys said it was the Woodruff girl from town.”

“It was, and we don’t know. She’s got a boyfriend out in these parts.”

“What, on up…” Merriam made gestures toward the north.

I nodded. “Right. One of the Torrance boys.”

“They know about this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“When did this happen? You figure that out?”

I shook my head and leaned an arm on the side of the truck bed. “We just don’t know for sure.”

“How did you happen on it?”

“One of our detectives was out this way.”

Deke Merriam grinned. He knew the size of our department, and knew every soul onboard. We only had one detective. “Estelle found it?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of the night?”

I didn’t bother to tell him that it hadn’t been the middle of the night when Estelle had seen the vehicle. “She was detecting, Deke. That’s what we pay her to do. Detect.”

“All this is tied in with the shooting, somehow, eh?”

Deke wasn’t as stupid as he liked to sound most of the time. “We think so,” I said.

He carefully ground out the cigarette on the tailgate, then walked around, opened the driver’s side door, and put the butt in the ashtray. Perhaps the owner wouldn’t mind.

“I’m surprised she wasn’t thrown out,” he mused, returning to lean against the truck with one boot heel hooked on the edge of the tire tread. “All that twisting and crushing is bound to spring the doors and shatter all the glass. Even the seat brackets can snap off when the cab twists. Maybe she was wearing her seat belt. But hell, even them sometimes fail.”

I looked at Deke for a long moment, musing. “Let me bum one of your smokes, Deke.”

“Why sure,” he said, with generous alacrity. “I thought you quit.”

“I did. Two years ago.”

I took the book of matches he offered and thoughtfully peeled one off. The cigarette filter tasted chemical and sterile between my lips, bringing to mind the odd image of the ball of cotton a nurse uses to patch a hypodermic needle hole in a patient’s arm. I lit the match, held it for an instant, then snapped it out. “Ah, maybe later,” I said, and put the cigarette in my pocket.

“Tough hombre,” Deke said.

“Yeah, I’m tough, all right. Thanks just the same.”

Sergeant Torrez had already passed some initial information to me via the handheld. The wreckage, he said, despite the lapse of time between the crash and its discovery, still smelled like a liquor store to which someone had taken a baseball bat.

We knew something of Miss Woodruff’s drinking habits. She drank until she was lit-that seemed to be the girl’s standard operating procedure. If there was nothing else pressing to do, she’d drink herself unconscious.

With a grunt I reached around and slid Estelle’s handheld radio out of my belt holster and keyed the switch.

“Torrez, Gastner.”

I waited for ten seconds and then heard two quick bursts of squelch that told me Bob had heard me, had found a quick moment to reach around and tap his mike key a couple of times, and then had gone back to work.

“He’ll respond when he can,” I said, and set the radio on the tailgate beside my leg. In silence we watched, our vantage point fifty feet down the road from where the lines snaked out of the rescue truck’s winch.

At 3:50, with dawn still hours away, we saw the tiny figures down the hill working around the Stokes litter. The radio beside me barked and I startled.

“This is Torrez.”

“Bob, are they about to come on up?”

“Affirmative.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Not too good, sir. They stabilized her as best they could, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Not conscious?”

“No, sir.”

“No sign of any other occupant of the vehicle?”

“No, sir. And if someone else was in the truck and was thrown out, they would’ve been found, with all the people up and down this thing.”

“Ask him about the seat belt,” Deke prompted me, and I frowned with irritation at being prompted.

“Bob, was she wearing her seat belt?” In the dark, on that mesa top, with the yawning talus slope in front of me, the question sounded ludicrous. If our local walkie-talkie conversation could be picked up by an avid scanner-ghoul with a humongous booster, he’d wonder about us for sure. Were we going to write the poor girl a ticket for not buckling up?

“Affirmative. One of the brackets broke sometime during the crash, but she had the belt on when she started out.”

Deke Merriam nodded sagely. “Pays to buckle up,” he said, with that curious graveyard humor that we all adopted at times when someone else was hurting the most-or was dead.

I keyed the radio again. “Bob, you’re going to make arrangements to sift through everything down there come morning?”

“Affirmative.”

“I’m going to follow the ambulance on into the hospital, then.”

“Affirmative. Is Estelle all right?”

“Busted up some. She’ll be okay.”

The Stokes litter, with its six-man crew carrying it up behind the pull of the lead line, was already a quarter of the way up the slope.

I pushed off the tailgate and stood up. “Deke, thanks for the smoke. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. We’ll get all the paperwork to you just as fast as we can crank it out.”

He grimaced and waved a hand.

With Tammy Woodruff on her way, I heaved a sigh of relief. Gayle Sedillos was working dispatch, and that meant the girl’s parents had been notified. They’d be at the hospital, waiting. So would half of the world, probably. I wasn’t in the mood to talk with any of them.

I walked-maybe shuffled would have been a better description-to 310 and edged the car out through the sea of vehicles. The ambulance carrying Estelle would be in Posadas already, but the second unit with Tammy Woodruff would be half an hour behind me. I had some time to think. I idled the patrol car down the county road, windows open.

I hadn’t taken a formal survey, but I suspected that youngsters who got their kicks out of roping cattle or riding broncs, or even one-ton, evil-tempered bulls, wouldn’t be too excited about strapping on a seat belt when they climbed into their mild-mannered pickup trucks.

It was hard to picture Wild Tammy carefully arranging her beer cans and whiskey bottles on the seat and floor of her truck, then diligently buckling herself in for the drive up County Road 14. Buckling herself in, guzzling all the way?

The dark mesa top didn’t offer any answers. I reached the intersection with the state highway and stopped. In the five minutes I sat in the parked car, the stop sign large and gaudy in my headlights, no vehicle passed.

I knew that I needed to talk with Patrick Torrance, even though we had no direct evidence tying the young rancher with any of this mess. True enough, he’d chased after Tammy, maybe even caught her a time or two. True enough, he’d been at the Broken Spur the night of the shooting, when Tammy somehow had gotten tangled in the barbed wire of her adventures. True enough, Patrick hadn’t been home for a few hours, but at his age and pace, that was frequently the case.

I took a deep breath and turned out onto the state highway. Patrick Torrance was a nice enough kid. He hadn’t come home last night. Most of the explanations for that were innocent enough. Most of them.