Double Prey

Chapter Seven

Both the red ATV and its driver lay at the bottom of Bender’s Canyon.

Estelle sprinted back to the Expedition, yanked open the door, and grabbed the mike off the bracket.

“PCS, three ten.”

The five heartbeats before dispatch responded seemed an hour.

“Three ten, go ahead.”

“PCS, ten fifty-five, one adult male.” She looked across through the open passenger door at Bill Gastner, who was standing on the shoulder of the two-track, scanning the arroyo bank. “We’re about four miles off County Road 14 on Bender’s Canyon Trail. An ATV off the road.” The ambulance was at least an hour away.

“Ten four.”

“Ten twenty-one in about three minutes.”

Directly in front of them, the arroyo bank was sheer, the edges crumbling. Gastner pointed to the south. A large juniper, the trunk thick and gnarled, leaned precariously from the bank, its roots fighting for a hold against the continuous undermining of erosion. “Maybe there,” he said. “Maybe.”

The last bout of erosion had been deflected by a root mass, gouging down through the bank to a large projection of rock. Estelle surveyed the bank for a moment, then scrambled down, using the roots as handholds. Hand over hand to the rock step was easy enough, leaving only an eight foot slide down the gravel and sand arroyo skirt to the bottom.

She slid in a shower of sand and gravel, keeping her balance on feet and rump. At the bottom, she stood quietly for a moment, surveying the scene ahead of her.

The motionless figure lay on his face, one leg oddly twisted, his right shoulder smashed against a bald slab of bedrock at the bottom of the arroyo. Estelle recognized the slender form immediately. If Freddy Romero had been wearing a helmet, it hadn’t done much good. It now lay in the sand thirty feet away, the force of the crash fracturing the face shield.

Freddy’s eyes were open, staring at the gravel. The undersheriff touched the side of his neck just forward of where the helmet strap would cut and felt nothing but cold, dry skin.

The ATV, fenders, handlebars and even fuel tank twisted and bent, lay inverted just beyond the body.

Estelle squatted on her haunches for a moment, one hand resting lightly on Freddy Romero’s left shoulder. Then she pulled her cell phone out of its belt holster.

“Gayle,” she said when the dispatcher answered, “We have a fatality here. It looks like Freddy Romero somersaulted his four-wheeler into an arroyo. I’ll need Linda out here ASAP, and Dr. Perrone. And if you’ll contact APD, they’ll make contact with George and Tata for us.”

“Oh, my,” Gayle murmured.

“And you might tell the EMTs that they may have to come in from the north, from State 17, through Waddell’s ranch. I’m not sure their unit will make it in here on the south fork of the trail.”

“Matty Finnegan knows that country pretty well. I’ll let her know. What’s your exact twenty?”

“I would guess about four and a half miles in from County Road 14 on Bender’s Canyon Trail. We’re just a quarter mile or so beyond what they call ‘the window,’ and that’s where the ambulance may have trouble.”

“We’ll find you. Freddy was alone?”

“It appears so.”

“Oh, my,” Gayle said again.

“’Oh my’ is right,” the undersheriff sighed, and switched off the phone. She turned to look back up at Gastner, who stood a step back from the arroyo edge, hands on his hips.

“He didn’t move much,” he said.

“No.” She stepped carefully back, seeing the way Freddy’s left hand had clawed briefly at the gravel, what looked like a single spasm. Slipping her fingers under the young man’s wrist, she felt the characteristic resistance of rigor. “I would guess all night, and then some,” she said. “He was out here yesterday afternoon, maybe. Could have been.” And nobody knew, she thought. We all thought mischief, and here you are, all by yourself.

“I want to see if he hit anything,” Gastner said. “I’ll watch where I walk.”

Estelle stepped back, trying to imagine the final cartwheel of the ATV, and the way its driver would have been flung away. The marks of the machine’s first strike were on the arroyo bottom’s bedrock, a black-tinged slash. She pivoted and looked at the arroyo bank. Where the ATV had swerved over the edge, the arroyo was a dozen feet deep, with a sheer, evenly under-cut bank. Airborne, the machine would have nosed over and down. If Freddy had managed to hang on, he would have been flung forward by the initial impact, then perhaps caught by the ATV on the bounce.

She got up and walked to the helmet. Its wild paint scheme was only moderately scratched, the face shield broken but still in place. Retracing her steps, she then crossed to the ATV and saw the mangled rack behind the driver’s seat and the broken plywood carryall bolted to it. The butt of a.22 rifle, still tangled in its scabbard, projected out from under the vehicle.

One hard bounce, and then the ATV had taken Freddy from behind, smashing his head into the ground. If he’d been able to kick free during his high dive, like some of the wild riders he’d surely watched on television, he might have escaped with a broken leg…or neck.

“Left front?” Gastner called.

Estelle pushed herself to her feet and regarded the ATV more closely. Sure enough, the left front tire was flat, the only damaged tire of the four. A ragged cut tore the sidewall all the way to the inner rim. “Yes.”

“Yeah, well,” the former sheriff said with resignation. “He launched over this little rise and drifted a little bit to the left…just enough to collect a piece of sharp rock. That would have jerked him out of control. He was really whistling Dixie, though. There’s a dozen feet of road here with no tracks, where he got that thing airborne over the crest of the hill.”

“Freddy, Freddy,” Estelle whispered to herself. Of course the boy would have been riding too fast. To an adventuresome kid, that’s what powerful ATVs were for.

She stood quietly, sunshine warm on her shoulders, no breeze reaching the shelter of the arroyo bottom to sweep away the aromas of violent death.

“You want your camera?”

“Please. And the tarp from the back of the truck.”

Estelle stepped close to the bank, caught the little digital camera and then the packaged blue tarp. She took a moment to thread the nylon camera case onto her belt, then trudged far down the arroyo to the far side, where she could look back at the entire scene.

“He swerved very hard,” Estelle said. “The measurements are going to be interesting.”

“How so?” Gastner squatted a yard back from the arroyo edge.

“How fast would he have to be going to go airborne over that rise, do you suppose?”

Gastner turned and regarded the trail. “Fairly fast, I would think. And then he hit that rock outcropping. Powee.”

“And that turned him to the left.”

“You bet. And over the edge he goes.”

Estelle’s cell phone chirped.

“Guzman.”

“Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. “What do you have?” The sheriff had been in court in Las Cruces, but Estelle could hear traffic in the background.

“We have Freddy Romero, Bobby. He put his four-wheeler into an arroyo off Bender’s Canyon Trail sometime yesterday.” The sheriff digested that in silence. “It looks like the machine crushed him on the bounce,” Estelle added.

“He by himself?”

“Yes.”

“Drinking?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like he jumped a little rise in the trail, you know, like a moto-cross rider might. He managed to collect a rock somehow. The left front tire of the ATV is torn open, and Padrino found the initial strike mark on the rock.”

She heard a long, slow exhalation of breath. “The folks are still up in Albuquerque with Butch,” Torrez said.

“And that’s not going really well. He’ll lose the eye, and that’s if he’s lucky. And por Dios, now this. I asked Gayle to contact APD for an assist. They’ll send over a chaplain.”

“All right. Look, I’m on the interstate right now. I’ll be out there in a bit. I got cut loose early from court.”

“How did it go?”

“A waste of time,” the sheriff replied, without amplification. “I’m just goin’ up the hill out of Cruces now, so it’ll be an hour. How far in are you?”

“We took the trail behind the bar,” Estelle said. “We were following Freddy’s tracks. He parked over on the Borracho Springs road, then drove the ATV over here. We’re just a little bit east of the intersection on Bender’s. Just beyond the window.”

“Be there in a bit.” He rang off without further comment. Estelle pocketed the phone and looked across at Gastner, who now stood with one hip propped against the Expedition’s front fender as he surveyed the country through binoculars.

“There’s a cattle trail on down about a hundred yards,” he called, and lowered the binoculars to point. “You have plenty of cattle tracks in the bottom here, so we can guess there’s another trail up and out somewhere.”

“You don’t have an extension ladder in your hip pocket, sir?”

Gastner laughed. “Wish I did. Look, I’m going to mosey on up here a ways and see what’s to see.”

Estelle continued her photographic survey until she was convinced that no secrets remained in the arroyo itself, then walked back to the ATV. She unpackaged the tarp and snapped it out, then covered Freddy Romero’s body.

She turned her attention to the jumble of bent and twisted plastic and metal. The damage suggested that the four wheeler had burst over the rim of the arroyo and crashed nose-first to the bedrock of the arroyo bottom a dozen feet below. The left front suspension had taken most of the impact, crushed backward and upward so hard that the handlebars had been balled into junk, torn back on top of the rumpled gas tank.

The initial impact had somersaulted the rig, the rack behind the seat pounding into the arroyo bottom and the back of Freddy Romero’s skull. The machine’s final resting place was nine feet from the body, the ATV resting flat on its back, bent suspension turned to the sky like a dead beetle. A large patch of gasoline had leaked out to stain the rock and sand.

Estelle knelt and touched the left front wheel. It was jammed back against the frame and would not spin freely. The damage to the tire began an inch or so toward the rim from the tread. Had the tire struck the rock with its knobby tread, Freddy might have had a survivable wild ride with the bounce.

The undersheriff set the little camera on macro and took photographs of the tear, showing the rock particles imbedded in the rubber. The rock had opened the tire’s sidewall like an enormous, rough can opener right to the rim, where the aluminum was dented and torn.

The force of the impact would have jolted the ATV savagely to one side, and there had been no time for Freddy to correct.

“A hundred yards that-a-way,” Bill Gastner called from the rim. He pointed up the arroyo. “Cow trail makes it easy for you.”

“What else did you find?”

“Well, trajectory, I guess. I’ll show you when you come up.”

“I’m on my way.” Estelle trudged back up the arroyo, wanting to stop and turn around at each step. The last thing she wanted to do was leave Freddy Romero face down in the gravel, ruined and alone.

The cattle always found the easiest route, and over the decades, their hooves cut and packed long, diagonal trails that criss-crossed the arroyo banks, bringing them to shade, to protection from the elements, to the rare standing puddles that remained for a few hours after a cloudburst. Dodging the cow patties, Estelle climbed out of the arroyo. Bill Gastner met her by the two-track.

“You all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine.” She wasn’t fine, and that there was nothing she could do to make things right just added to it. She paused and took a deep breath, surveying the open country. “Freddy was ten when they moved into their house on Twelfth,” she said. “Butch was six.” She let it go at that, knowing that Padrino understood her anguish perfectly.

“Well, this is what he did,” Gastner said. He turned and pointed back up the road, toward the rise that had catapulted the ATV to disaster. Just ahead of where they stood, a wide and deep quagmire, more than just a routine pothole, took up most of what had been the two-track. Fresh tracks had been cut on the side farthest from the arroyo edge. The sink collected runoff and became a rutted and slimy trap in the wet, and when dry, as it was now, presented a deep, jarring axle breaker.

Gastner turned and swept his arm in an arc. “He had a good run through here-flat and straight. He takes the route around it on the left going in, and retraces his route coming out. If he’d been going slower, he might have bounced right through the middle of it just for the hell of it, but not rippin’ the way he was.” Gastner walked across to the arroyo lip. “If he tries to skirt this sink on this side, he’s running too damn close to the edge. Now…” and he interrupted himself and walked across the sink, standing perpendicular to the road and facing Estelle and the arroyo. He held up both arms, pointing in each direction. “Look how narrow that two-track is when it crests that rise, sweetheart. All the rocks and brush, there isn’t much room. And there sure as hell isn’t any room for error. Freddy comes through here, and he’s intending to jump the hill. I mean, he came in that way, didn’t he?” He swept his arms again in an arc. “He comes through here, but he doesn’t want to end up in those rocks and trees there, on the uphill side of the trail, so after this pothole, he’s got to swing back pretty hard.”

“Show me the rock,” Estelle said.

“Sure enough.” She followed Gastner as he plodded up the slight grade. The ATV’s tracks were clear. Both coming and going, Freddy Romero had chosen the same route over this particular rise. At the crest of the hill, there were no ATV tracks. He’d felt comfortable enough that he’d used the little hill as a ramp, both coming and going.

“I think that he just overcooked it,” Gastner said. “He comes up here and ramps off, maybe a little crosswise after skidding around that sinkhole. If he does that, if he’s not absolutely goddamn straight, then he’s heading toward the left side of the trail. And pow. Right there.”

Two dozen feet from the crest of the rise, just after the ATV had slammed down, a shower of gravel and broken rock marked the first contact. A sharp-edged limestone rock the size of a wide-screen television had been dislodged from the ridge. Gastner bent over and pointed at the bright aluminum traces, and the black scuff of rubber. “Pow,” he said again. “My guess is that with this catching the left front tire, he just loses it.” He straightened up. “I mean, what’s he got here between the trail and the arroyo?”

“Maybe four feet.”

“Exactly. And with an exploded tire, the rig doesn’t turn like it should. He doesn’t even have the time to grab the brakes.”

“So tell me something,” Estelle said. “Why was he over here? Why on Bender’s Canyon Trail?”

“Because.” Gastner shrugged.

“Just because?”

“That’s what Freddy Romero does,” he said. “Or did.”

“Why park on the Borracho Springs road, and then ride all the way over here?”

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“He found the cat skeleton earlier this week, in a cave up in the mountains somewhere. I’d think he’d be attracted back there. Maybe that’s what he planned originally when he parked where he did. For some reason, he changed his mind.”

“That’s not four-wheeler country,” Gastner observed. “Not that I spend a lot of time trying to haul my fat carcass up that trail, but from what I remember, the only way you’d get a mountain bike up there, let alone a four-wheeler, would be to hang it from your shoulder while you hike.”

“Bobby will be here before long,” Estelle said. “It’ll be interesting to hear his take on all this.”

“Anyway, it was Freddy, remember,” Gastner said. “He drives out somewhere and parks, off-loads the damn ATV, and goes raring and tearing around the countryside. Who knows where or why.”

Estelle lifted the camera and peered through its tiny viewfinder at the trail that swept down off the little rise to cross the dry mud flat. “Nothing will show,” she said to herself.

“What’s to show?”

“Well, there isn’t a lot of traffic on Bender’s Canyon Trail. A rancher now and then.”

“You’d be surprised. Herb Torrance gets this way regularly and Miles Waddell, off and on. Maybe Gus Prescott, although why I wouldn’t know. His property is to the east of here. Then there’s the hunters, the bird watchers, and people who just don’t know where the hell they are…”

“Who turned around back at the homestead?”

“Can’t tell you. And those turn-around tracks could be days old. Even weeks. We haven’t had any rain now in at least that long.”

“Which is longer?” she asked. “To turn around and go back out to 14 that way, or continue on the trail, loop around this mesa, and come out on the State 17 farther north?”

“Six of one. If I remember right, the north end of the trail, where it loops around the backside of the mesa behind Waddell’s ranch, is actually in more open country. It’d be smoother, I’d think. Except in rainy weather, maybe.”

“Huh.” Estelle shook her head in frustration. “What puzzles me is why Freddy didn’t just drive his pickup down the state highway for another two miles to the intersection with County 14, and park there to off-load his four-wheeler. If he’d done that, we probably would have run into each other. Park there, then go exploring. Why park at Borracho, two miles in from the highway, then have to drive the ATV along the highway to the saloon, then…on and on, Padrino. I just don’t understand what he was doing.”

“For one thing, he probably caught sight of the cop car, and figured he’d get a ticket for driving on the highway. So off he scoots, where you couldn’t follow even if you wanted to. Other than that, I don’t have any idea. When you crack the teenage mind, a Nobel is yours, sweetheart.”