Final Payment

Chapter Twenty-six

As she slid down out of the truck, Estelle saw that Tom Pasquale was slumped sideways, supported by his left shoulder ground into the dirt. He tried to stretch out his right leg, but his left was crumpled under him. There was no sign of his bike. She wanted to sprint across to him, but at the same time couldn’t shake the feeling that other eyes were watching.

She scanned the scrub undergrowth around them, trying to separate forms from shadows. Farther on, the county road curved out of the scrubby trees, sweeping back out into the open prairie to parallel the arroyo whose cut grew until it could engulf a full-sized truck and still leave room for thunderstorm runoff. It was the sort of jumbled terrain that offered a good vantage point to watch passing traffic from a dozen places.

Slipping her phone in her pocket and unsnapping her automatic, the undersheriff crossed the road and approached Pasquale. His eyes were now closed. At one point, she froze in her tracks as she heard the clanking of bicycle chains. Above them, three riders appeared, cycling along the ridge. She knelt beside Pasquale and saw that blood soaked his left hip, staining his spandex shorts to the knee. His left hand was pressed tightly into the pocket of his hip, just below the beltline.

“Damn, that hurts,” he murmured. “The son of a bitch shot me.” He opened his eyes and tried to lean to the right, looking down at himself. The motion drained his face to pasty gray.

“Let me see,” Estelle said, and he let her lift his hand, grimacing as she did so.

“This is embarrassing,” he whispered.

“Oh, sí,” Estelle said. “I’m deeply embarrassed. You just sit still.” The hole in the bright blue polyester of his shorts was tiny-it would have been unnoticeable had it not been marked by oozing blood. “Ooze is good,” she said. “No gushers. This is it?”

“That’s it,” Pasquale said dubiously. The “it” was enough. There was no way to tell what damage the bullet had caused inside, but there were no spurting arteries. Shattered bone, most likely. It didn’t take a howitzer to mangle a hip joint.

Sitting back on her haunches, she kept one hand on top of his, feeling the shaking in his body. With her free hand, she hit the auto-dial on her phone, and was relieved when Gayle Torrez answered promptly.

“Gayle, we need an ambulance on Fourteen, six miles south of Seventy-eight, just a half-mile beyond Torrance’s abandoned windmill. And send backup.”

“Hang on,” the sheriff’s wife said, and Estelle waited while the efficient dispatcher made sure the rescue unit was rolling before she asked more questions. “Okay. There’s an emergency unit at the checkpoint on the state highway. They’re on the way. What have you got?”

“I think Tapia shot Thomas,” Estelle said. “It looks like the bullet is lodged in his left hip. That’s all I know at the moment. I don’t know where the shooter is.”

Pasquale clamped his other hand over hers. “Hey, I know Tapia shot Thomas,” he said. “And check behind us. Down in the arroyo. I think Hansen’s dead.”

Estelle stood up and in two steps could see down into the deep arroyo cut. Two bikes and one body lay on the rough arroyo bottom, bare rock where rains had washed away the loose sand and gravel.

“Can you hang on a minute?”

“Yes.”

Estelle turned and beckoned to Leona. “Bring the kit that’s in the back,” she called. Making no move to plunge down into the arroyo, she scanned the terrain all the way to where the arroyo skirted the buttress of the hill to the east, and then to where the cut in the prairie circled around where they now stood, following the road.

“I saw Tapia swing at him first,” Pasquale said. “I was just coming down the hill, around that corner back there, when I saw him swing. Hansen went off the bike, and Tapia was headed toward him when I tackled ’im. Maybe he didn’t see me comin’, maybe he just didn’t care. I hit him pretty hard, and he went down. We went at it pretty hard. Damn, he was strong. I thought I had him, and I heard his ankle pop. That’s when he got me off-balance, and I went off into the arroyo. That was that.”

Pasquale heaved backward as a bolt of pain shot through him, then slowly relaxed. “Christ.” He panted for a moment, and his grip on Estelle’s hand was like a vise. “Didn’t hurt at first. Fallin’ in the arroyo knocked the wind out of me. And then he had the gun on me. He shot Hansen, then me. He tossed the bikes in the arroyo. To someone ridin’ by, it’d be all cleaned up.”

“Which way did he go then?”

“Up this road, behind us. I heard him start the bike. He went the same way you guys came down.”

“We didn’t pass him,” Estelle said.

“Dozen routes he could have taken,” Pasquale said. “There’s that fork down by the other windmill; there’s trails all over. He could see you coming and just pull off into the trees until you went by. One thing-he isn’t going to ride hard. I think he’s got a busted ankle.” He grimaced and then tried a smile of satisfaction. “I hit him pretty hard. Knocked him right over the motorcycle. That had to hurt.”

Far in the distance, the thin wail of a siren cut the air.

“Three-ten, three-oh-eight.”

Estelle pulled the handheld out of its holster. “Three-ten.”

“I’m about eight south. What’s the deal?”

“Ten-fifty-five, Pasquale is down. Be advised that he thinks the suspect fled north. He didn’t pass us, so he’s either cut off on back trails or took shelter somewhere to let us pass. He’s on the dirt bike, but I don’t hear it, so he’s not pushing it. And Tom says he may be hampered by an ankle injury.”

“What about Hansen?”

“He’s here in the arroyo. I’m headed that way now. Hang on.”

“Ten-four. Lemme know ASAP.”

“You gotta be kiddin’,” Pasquale murmured as Leona knelt beside them.

“Hush,” Estelle said. At the sight of the blood and torn shorts, Leona’s heavy blond eyebrows furrowed into thunderclouds. In short order, she had a hefty pad of gauze, and deftly pressed it into place. “Can you move the hip?” the county manager asked Tom, and the young deputy made a face.

“Hurts too much to try,” he said.

“Do you think it’s broken?”

“Don’t know. I think so.”

“Can you feel your toes?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, that’s good.”

“Can you stay with him for a few minutes?” Estelle asked, and Leona nodded.

“Surely.”

“I’m going to check down in the arroyo,” she said. “The ambulance will be here in just a few minutes.” As she stood, the bike racers appeared, clattering around the switchback. She stood up and as they began to slow, waved them to a stop.

“Did any of you see a man on a dirt bike?” she asked. “Headed northbound? A red bike. Older guy.”

All three shook their heads in unison, eyes glued to the fallen Tom Pasquale. “Is he going to be all right?” one of them asked.

“We’re fine,” Estelle said, motioning for them to pass by. “An ambulance is on the way. Be careful and stay on the road.”

In a moment, the riders disappeared, taking advantage of the relative smoothness of the open meadow down below.

Even a single stride from the arroyo edge, the sides were so sheer that Estelle could not see the bottom. Careful to avoid the scuff marks in the dirt, she stepped past Pasquale and Leona and carefully approached the edge. Ten feet deep at that point and twice that wide, the arroyo had started from the smallest head-cut up on the flank of the hill, and only a single storm would have been necessary to wash out the soft earth.

Chet Hansen lay in the arroyo bottom, flat on his back, staring sightlessly up into the blank blue sky. He still wore his helmet, but the wreckage of his lower face canceled out any expression. His fancy bike, apparently undamaged, lay in the arroyo bottom a few feet beyond, invisible from the road. Tom’s machine had been hurled a dozen yards upstream.

Without taking another step, Estelle turned in place, and a dozen paces to her right saw a hefty piece of piñon limb wood, about a foot longer than a baseball bat and uniformly steel gray. Swung hard at a bike rider, it would have been lethal.

The undersheriff walked along the arroyo’s edge until she found a spot where she could slide down, then walked back along the bottom. Reaching Hansen, she knelt and placed a finger on the side of his neck. As she did so, she noticed the single hole just above the bridge of the victim’s nose. The strike with the limb wood had caught Hansen flush in the mouth, shattering teeth and jaw. The blow would have been so incapacitating that he would never have seen the final bullet coming.

She keyed the phone again, and waited for three rings until Gayle could answer.

“Gayle, we’ll need the ME out here,” she said. “And I need anyone else you can spare.”

“Okay. Stand by.”

“Affirmative.” But standing by was the last thing she wanted to do. Tapia was cunning. She granted him that much. That Pasquale had taken a bullet in the hip was no accident. Tapia knew that a wounded Pasquale required more manpower than a dead man. One shot, just enough to put the young man out of commission, and requiring another person or two to care for him.

Estelle stood up, turning in place. And where had Manolo Tapia gone? Bob Torrez was northbound on the county road, but Tapia could have seen his vehicle approaching and hidden with ease. She had been southbound. Tapia had avoided them. But to what end? The Mexican border lay twenty-five miles south. Any of a dozen routes would take him there, but no matter which way he went, pavement or dirt, there were only two gateways through the San Cristóbal Mountains to Mexico-one over Regál Pass directly south of her current location, or through the flimsy, barbed-wire border fence at María, on the east side of the county. They could slam those two doors shut easily enough.

How much did Tapia know? Estelle squatted silently by Hansen’s lifeless body. “What did you do?” she whispered. There had been a violent settling of accounts here. In a terrifying instant, Hansen might have recognized Tapia-maybe not. He would have seen the cudgel hefted and swung so swiftly that ducking away was impossible.

Had Tom Pasquale not seen the incident, Hansen’s corpse might have lain in the arroyo for hours, perhaps even days. Tapia was an opportunist, but as cunning as he might be, what did he know about Hector Ocate, the boy in custody? Would Tapia head back to the village? Back to old man Estrada’s house? Was he assuming that the boy would fly him to Mexico?

Estelle’s pulse hammered in her ears. For days, they had assumed that the killer was putting miles behind him, that the trail was growing colder by the hour. And now those days and miles had been reduced to a scant handful of minutes. She found herself holding her breath, listening for the high-pitched snarl of a dirt bike.