One Perfect Shot

Chapter Four

By the time darkness made more work at the scene impossible, we had a disappointingly short list of evidence. I didn’t want the grader moved until we’d had time for a fresh survey in the morning, and there was a single good shoe print and tire mark that I wanted to cast off the north shoulder.

A yellow crime scene ribbon wouldn’t be adequate to keep the curious at bay, and believe it-when word spread, half the town would take a drive out to the site, hoping to catch a glimpse of some blood and the gruesome bullet hole. Maybe we could boost the county budget by charging admission…maybe for an extra contribution we could even include a stop by the morgue.

I left Deputy Scott Baker at one end of Highland Street with village part-timer J. J. Murton at the other. I promised Baker that he’d have relief, but Murton could sit there all night as far as I was concerned, a job just about perfectly matched to his skill levels.

While Mears processed film, Bob Torrez hung over Dr. Clark’s shoulder waiting for the rifle slug to be removed, and Deputy Howard Bishop led Evie Truman through her formal deposition, Sheriff Salcido and I cruised the neighborhoods off Hutton that evening, doing what both of us did best.

Only four houses graced Hutton on the outer fringes of the village, and of the four, only one resident had been home. Julie Sanchez worked the night shift at the Posadas Inn down by the interstate, and she rented the little bungalow on Hutton because it was cheap and far from the roar of interstate truck traffic. She hadn’t even noticed the road grader, hadn’t heard its gutteral diesel, hadn’t heard a gunshot. Loud as either might have been, a radio or television on inside the house would blanket the sound. Our luck didn’t improve, even when we scouted through the modest little homes east of Hutton, or south toward Twelfth Street. That left all the neighborhoods to the south, to Blaine and beyond.

“You know how much noise a high powered rifle makes?” Salcido asked rhetorically. “And por díos, not a soul hears it.” He shook his head in wonder and popped his seat belt off so he could stretch his burly torso. He preferred to ride, and I didn’t mind being chauffeur. As we drove south on Twelfth, he nodded at the parking lot of the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant.

“I’ll buy dinner,” he said. “You got to take advantage of that.” The offer wasn’t unusual. One of Eduardo’s favorite management techniques was taking his people out to dinner or lunch. One on one with a deputy was good strategy. “You’re the one I really want to talk to,” was the obvious message. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

“You’re standing Maria up again?”

“She’s in Cruces with our oldest daughter. Another baby, you know. I’m a grandfather again.” He shook his head in wonder. “That’s number six for those two.” He looked across at me. “Like rabbits. You think they’d figure out what causes that condition.” He accented each syllable of the word in the most Mexican way and then laughed gently. “Six, now. Bautizos, birthdays, Christmas…Jefito, they’re going to break me.”

Not many folks shared our enthusiasm for such a late dinner, and the restaurant was nearly deserted. The booth’s bench suspension was comfortably broken down, and we settled in with the mammoth basket of chips and salsa that Arlene Aragon presented.

“You two are out on the town?” she quipped, and the sheriff wagged an eyebrow at her.

“What time do you get off?” He tried to sound lecherous but managed instead to sound more like a concerned grandfather.

“Midnight,” Arlene laughed. “That’s way past your bed time, viejo.” All she needed was a nod from us both to take the order. Years before, it was Eduardo Salcido who had introduced me to the Don Juan’s flagship offering, the Burrito Grande, one of those nonsensically-named dishes that could put you right under the table if not approached carefully. The “big little burro” had been my favorite ever since. It helped me think, and if I hadn’t been such a damn insomniac, it might even have helped me sleep. It had certainly padded my waistline.

Salcido regarded a chip critically. He nibbled off one corner so he could dip it in the salsa without breaking it. “Me and Tony spent half an hour over there with Marilyn. She’s having a hard time.”

“I would think so.”

“She couldn’t give me a single idea about what happened. She said Larry hadn’t argued with anybody…nothing.”

I didn’t reply, and Salcido added, “They have four grown kids, you know. All over the place. Just like you.”

“They’ll be able to come home to be with her?”

“I think so. Her youngest daughter was coming in from Albuquerque tonight.”

“And not a thing that she could think of, eh? Larry had anything going on in his life that she knew about? You said no arguments, but Christ, everybody has something in their life that’s rubbing ’em the wrong way.”

Salcido made a face. Maybe the salsa wasn’t hot enough. My forehead was popping out in beads of sweat, but the sheriff seemed immune to the potent chile.

“She’s not in condition to even think about it right now,” Salcido said. “This thing really came out of left field, Bill. That’s my impression.” The sheriff loved to linger his tongue around those syllables.

“A random potshot.”

“Hell of a potshot, jefito. Somebody that would do a thing like this…they’re sick in the head. “ Arlene Aragon reappeared, but not with our dinner. She held spread fingers up to her ear to indicate telephone, and then pointed at me.

“We’ve been found,” I groaned, and slid out of the booth.

“Over under the register,” Arlene instructed. She didn’t tell me who it was. Neither the sheriff nor I had told dispatch where we were, one of those liberties you take when you’re the stud duck. But anyone with half a brain would know.

I picked up the receiver. “Gastner.”

“Sir, we got something kind of interesting goin’ on.” Bob Torrez’s quiet voice prompted me to shift the phone a little so I could hear him. “When you’re finished up there, were you planning to stop back here for a few minutes?”

“Here being the office? Yes, I was. The sheriff and I are feeding our faces.”

“No rush. We’ll be here.”

“What did you find?”

“We got the bullet, sir. It penetrated the victim’s skull for about seven inches. Didn’t touch the bone at the back. It’s.308 caliber and used to be a flat-nose 170 grainer. That last is kind of a guess, but that’s what I think it was.”

“All right. That’s common enough, unfortunately.” The.308 diameter included a vast gamut of rifle cartridges, from the ubiquitous.30–30 on up through all the.308’s, 30–06’s, and the plethora of.30 caliber magnum cartridges. Dozens of the pesky things. Life was never simple.

“Not like this one, sir. We got a slug that doesn’t show rifling marks. Not a lick. And it was yawing like crazy.”

“Yawing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How would that happen?”

“Don’t know.”

“Old and worn rifling, I suppose?”

“That was my first thought. But this one has no rifling tracks on it. Like it was fired from a smooth-bore. Like a shotgun.”

“Really. You know of such a thing?” A blizzard of questions fogged my brain, but a public phone in the restaurant wasn’t the appropriate place to pursue them.

“Nope. I’m workin’ on the possibilities.”

“Good enough. Give us a few minutes.”

It’s possible to gobble down a burrito grande in “a few minutes,” but the results wouldn’t be pretty. The sheriff and I made good use of the time and the calories to mull every possibility we could think of. Nothing made sense.