Dead Weight

Chapter Twenty-two

By the time I pulled into my driveway, it was 1:15 in the morning. The thermometer that hung by the garage door read sixty-one degrees, the air cooled as it swept down from the rumbling thunderheads over the San Cristobals. That was the only benefit we were going to get, other than an occasional display of pyrotechnics as lightning lit the tops of the clouds.

I went inside, and it was only as I was shouldering the massive carved front door closed that the wave of exhaustion rolled over me. I sat down on the Mexican banco and leaned my back against the cool adobe wall, hat held in both hands in my lap, both feet flat on the Saltillo tile of the foyer. I closed my eyes.

The comfort of a pot of fresh coffee was out in the kitchen, a mere two dozen paces away. Perhaps better yet, my tomb-quiet bedroom was just around a couple of rounded adobe corners. That presented a choice, though, and choices took energy. So I just sat, letting the peace and quiet of the night and my home seep into my tired joints.

That was the worst decision of all, since I promptly dozed off. I started awake and would have sat bolt upright on the bench if I could, but every joint felt as if some sadist were tapping the bone with a sharp-pointed hammer.

I pushed myself away from the wall and squinted at my watch, too tired even to curse my string of bad habits. The watch said 2:55. “The hell with it,” I said to the house, and struggled upright. My feet knew every wrinkle and hump in the tile, and without turning on any lights, I let them shuffle me to the bedroom. As I entered, I could smell the fresh linen. That meant that the day previous had been Wednesday, sure enough, and Jamie, my patient housekeeper, had been hard at work.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, tossed my hat toward the large wingback chair that I knew waited in the corner, swung my feet up and lay back, and prepared to let the cool fragrance play its magic.

That’s all it took to complete the wake-up process. The weights slid off my eyelids and I lay staring at the spot in the darkness where the ceiling should be. As a last effort, I took off my glasses and laid them on the nightstand. All that accomplished was to turn the crisp three-inch numerals of the digital clock into an amorphous red fuzz.

I knew exactly what was going to happen. I’d lie there, wide awake, initially taking some comfort in just stretching out. Eventually, some bone or muscle would twinge, and I’d shift position, beginning the endless flip-flopping that would finish with me rearing out of bed in disgust.

That cycle hadn’t started yet, and I lay still, enjoying the silence. The longer I lay there, the more alert I became. In the narrow confines overhead, between the original dirt roof and the new composition structure added years later, some small animal scuttled back and forth. The beast didn’t have the nimble, delicate toe dance of a mouse but was more determined and draggy. I imagined it to be a skink, and every time the small lizard stopped, I tried to predict his course for the next move. I was wrong half the time.

Over to the left, a cricket announced himself, and I waited for the skink’s course to change in pursuit. The two creatures seemed oblivious of each other.

“Ah, well,” I muttered, and reached out to turn on the light. I found my glasses and swung off the bed, determined that if I couldn’t sleep, at least there were better things to do than listen to a lizard draw trails in the dust.

In her own sweet way, Jamie had left other traces of her weekly visit. The coffeemaker in the kitchen fairly sparkled, and a fresh filter rested in place. I set the machine to doing its job while I showered and shaved.

At 3:45 with a full, steaming mug of coffee in hand, I stepped out of the house into the black velvet of the predawn.

Traffic on the interstate was light, with just a few truckers pounding some night miles into their logbooks. By the time I’d driven north under the exchange and idled into the village proper, even those sounds had faded to a distant hiss of tires and thump of diesel engines. I turned onto MacArthur and let 310 slow to an idle with the headlights off.

I sipped the coffee as I inched along, looking at each house in turn. I knew most of the residents and found it hard to believe that not one of them, on that quiet July night two days before, had heard anything unusual as up at the end of the street the life was crushed out of Jim Sisson.

As I continued around the long, gentle bend that took the street due north toward its intersection with Bustos, I saw the county patrol unit parked two blocks south of Sisson’s place on the opposite side of the street. I let my car roll up behind it, drifting to a stop with just the faintest murmur of tires on curb grit.

I could just make out the silhouette of Deputy Jacqueline Taber’s head, but the streetlight was too far away for more than that. I got out of 310, and even the sound of the door latch was loud.

As I walked along the left rear flank of the Bronco, I saw Taber’s head move ever so slightly, and then an elbow appeared on the doorsill.

“Good morning, sir,” she said.

“Yes, it is.” I looked inside and saw that she had what appeared to be a book or magazine propped up against the steering wheel. The only light inside the vehicle was the single tiny amber power indicator on the police radio, and she wouldn’t have been able to read anything by that even if it were held right up against the page.

“Any activity at all?”

“No, sir. Not for a couple of hours. Not even a stray dog since…” She stopped, then clicked on a small flashlight, with most of the beam blocked by her hand. “About two-oh-five.” Before she snapped the light out, I saw that it had been a sketch pad that she’d been holding. “That was about an hour and forty-five minutes after I parked here, sir. After that, no traffic, no pedestrians, no nothing.”

“Well, I suppose that’s good news. I don’t know. Has anyone been by to give you a break?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then, here I am.” I patted the door. “Go get yourself some breakfast or something.” I pointed toward the pad. “What are you drawing?”

“Oh, just sketches,” she said. “It’s a habit of mine.” She picked up the pad and handed it to me.

“In this light, I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said. I turned the pad to catch what illumination there was from the streetlight and still saw a meaningless jumble of lines and shadows. I pulled the small penlight out of my shirt pocket and snapped it on. “Wow,” I murmured. Her “sketch” was a fantastically detailed, shaded rendering of what she was looking at through the windshield-the end of MacArthur Avenue and its intersection with Bustos, all drawn in careful perspective, as if the viewer were floating about twenty feet above the street.

“Amazing,” I said. Deputy Taber had caught the silence and cover of night in her artwork, complete with what might have been a furtive figure lurking beside the Sissons’ fence. “Who’s this?”

The deputy shrugged and smiled. “When I saw the pedestrian come around the corner from Bustos, she and her dog just sort of walked into the picture.” I looked closer. Sure enough, a hair-thin pencil line connected the human to the shadow of a dog.

I snapped the light off and handed the pad back to her. “Hidden talents,” I said. “I’d like to see this in decent light. How the hell can you tell what you’re drawing in the dark?”

“Actually, once your eyes adjust, there’s really quite a bit of light, sir. Enough for this, anyway.”

Oh, sure, I thought. “Do you do people, too? Faces and such, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“That’s nice to know.” I regarded Taber for a moment. She’d joined our department as a transplant from Las Cruces six months before, one of the last people that Martin Holman had hired before he’d been killed in a plane crash in April. I also imagined her as the sort of gal who would have come off a farm in Nebraska somewhere…square through the shoulders with about as much taper to the waist as a refrigerator, hair no-nonsense short, a plain, round face that could split open with a fetching grin. Whatever the urban social scene of the city had been, it hadn’t agreed with her.

Something about Posadas did, though, and she seemed to take quiet satisfaction in working the graveyard shift. As far as I knew, she hadn’t taken much ribbing from the other deputies about being the only female patrol officer on the force-partly because she did such a damn good job and partly because Estelle Reyes-Guzman had broken that particular ice for our department long ago.

She started the Bronco and I stepped away. “Who was the pedestrian, by the way? Did you recognize him?” I asked.

Deputy Taber paused with her hand on the gearshift. “It was a woman, sir. She lives right there,” she said, twisting and pointing, over her shoulder. “Number 512. Tabitha Hines. I believe that she works at the grocery store. I didn’t see her come out of the house, so I assume she walked the dog up the roadway behind the houses, then returned on the street.”

“Ah, Taffy,” I said and nodded. “She’d have to be a fellow charter member of the Insomniacs Club of America. What kind of dog was it, not that it matters?” I laughed. “This is all a test of your keen artist’s eye, Jackie.”

“It appeared to be a chow, sir. The light’s not the best, but it was either a chow or husky. Short, blocky, tail over the back. I couldn’t be sure of the color.”

“From this distance, I couldn’t have been sure it was a dog,” I chuckled, then added, “or a person, either, for that matter. What time is it now, by the way?”

“Four-oh-one, sir.”

“She’ll be heading off to work in a little bit.”

The deputy didn’t respond to that earth-shaking information, and I patted the side of the Bronco. “I’ll holler at you if I need anything. You might take a swing down 56 if nothing better crops up. I assume you know about our friendly letter writer.”

“The letters about Tom Pasquale? Yes, sir, Undersheriff Torrez told me. He said you were taking care of it, but he suggested the same thing.”

“Keep an eye out,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything to it, but you never know.”

She nodded and pulled the Bronco into gear, then U-turned in the street, letting the truck’s quiet idle pull it away. I stood on the sidewalk for a while, listening to the neighborhood as the sound of Taber’s unit faded.

After a moment, I returned to my car and got the larger flashlight so that I’d have a fighting chance to miss stepping in the piles left by Taffy’s chow.