Privileged to Kill

15

While the others waited, I finished a dinner fit for a condemned man, and then spent time over coffee, hashing out a battle plan with Estelle. Francis Guzman even spent the better part of ten minutes with us before adjourning to the living room to play with his son. That ten minutes was something of a record for him.

The battle plan should have been simple enough. My brain was clear, the paths of action seemed limited to a handful. The first order of business was to find out who had kept Maria Ibarra company the evening of her death.

What I hoped, of course, was that we’d visit Jan’s Pizza Parlor on Bustos and Second, or maybe the Pizza World over on North Fifth, and find out that Maria had been seen with person X, and then we’d go arrest the son of a bitch for failure to report a death. That’s not what happened.

The Guzmans’ nanny, Irma Sedillos, she of the chililess baked chicken recipe, showed up at the house around eight that evening for the night shift. The kid seemed perfectly attuned to his parents’ bizarre life, accepting their sudden comings and goings with complete aplomb. He obviously loved Irma and accepted her as a third parent-probably because she was noisier than he was.

“I can’t watch,” Estelle muttered as she closed the door on the kitchen. Neither could Francis. The good doctor had locked himself in his study, nose deep in a stack of medical journals. Irma and the kid were about to do the dishes. I didn’t bother to ask what kind of team the two of them would make. Irma had to be capable of some magic, though, since the two of them had done dishes many times before and the Guzmans didn’t yet eat off paper plates.

After a third cup of coffee, I worked up enough gumption to move out of my chair. We decided to hit Jan’s Pizza Parlor first, for no good reason other than that it was the more popular of the two nightspots. With an out-of-town game, business would be slow. There was no reason for this game to be any different from other contests. The cavalcade of cars and trucks that traditionally followed the Posadas Jaguars’ game bus out of town would have been long and vocal. The ruckus in the local eateries would start about midnight, when everyone returned.

I drove the Blazer home to its garage with Estelle following in the patrol car. Even as I swung the heavy door down, I could hear a siren far in the distance. Estelle swung 310 into my driveway and I hustled over to the patrol car.

She started to step out. “Do you want to drive, sir?”

“Go ahead,” I said, and slid my bulk into the passenger side, simultaneously reaching for the radio’s volume knob. The damn thing was turned so low it was an unintelligible mumble and I frowned at Estelle. “Wonderful gadgets, these radios,” I said.

“It’s a pedestrian accident at the corner of Pershing and Bustos,” Estelle said. “Bob Torrez is coming in, but he’s about twelve miles west. The ambulance is already en route.”

“Where’s the P.D.?” I asked, but the radio answered my question.

“Posadas, P.D. will be ten-ninety-seven.” I could hear the excitement in Officer Thomas Pasquale’s voice, and his radio was picking up enough background noise that I could hear the wail of his patrol car’s engine as he flogged it down one of the village’s quiet streets.

“Ten-four, P.D.,” our dispatcher said, calm as ice. He didn’t ask Tom Pasquale where he was, or why he was predicting that he would arrive at the scene before he actually did. Ernie Wheeler took life as it came. Instead he added, “P.D., did you copy three-oh-eight?”

“Ten-four. I’m on North Twelfth. E.T.A. about a minute,” Pasquale said, and I wished that he would leave the damn radio alone and put both hands on the steering wheel.

I keyed the mike and told Posadas dispatch that we were responding as well. The ambulance had a block and a half to travel from the hospital to the reported accident site. If Officer Tom Pasquale was on North Twelfth, he had approximately half a mile to cover. We were three quarters of a mile south.

We flew through the same intersection where I’d run the red light earlier in the evening and immediately saw, one block west, the ambulance parked at the south curb of Bustos, near the sidewalk at the intersection of Bustos and Pershing. Two other vehicles were parked nearby, and a small crowd had gathered. Tom Pasquale’s village patrol car was nowhere in sight.

“Swing around and block eastbound,” I said needlessly. Estelle was already in the process, neatly shielding the accident scene from incoming traffic-including Officer Pasquale, if he ever showed up.

Several people were clustered around a figure lying at the base of a utility pole, but they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the patient. Instead, they were all looking off to the west, and one of them was pointing.

We pulled to a halt and beyond the crowd, fifty feet farther east and well across the intersection of Pershing, close to the curb, was what had once been a bicycle, crushed to junk. The street was strewn with debris. The light was not good, and I wouldn’t have immediately recognized the bicycle even if it hadn’t been reduced to scrap.

As I got out, one of the well-wishers shouted, “I think you got another accident down there!” He gestured toward the west. “We heard a hellacious crash, and the siren stopped.”

“Christ,” I said, and Estelle ducked back into the car to call dispatch. She’d take care of the radio, and Bob Torrez would be inbound in minutes. I turned my attention to the figure on the sidewalk.

Wesley Crocker grinned sheepishly as I knelt down. I had to brace one hand on the utility pole to steady myself.

He wasn’t bleeding from every orifice, no bones jutted grotesquely through torn clothing, and his limbs hadn’t been twisted or smashed into obscene angles. Still, even I could see that he was pale and shaky, despite his attempt at good cheer.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

I moved to one side so that the ambulance attendant could work his magic. Crocker tried to push himself upright and grimaced, and Miller Martinez, the EMT, placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Stay put, sir. Let us do all the work.”

Crocker turned his head so he could see me. “I fell off my bike, good sir.”

“I can see that,” I said. “You must have been doing ninety miles an hour.” He grinned and then sighed as the two EMTs lifted him onto the gurney and strapped him in. “Did you see who hit you?”

He shook his head. “I surely didn’t. I never heard a thing.” He grinned. “I wasn’t paying all that much attention, either, I confess.”

I glanced over my shoulder, and then back at the bicycle. “Whoever it was came up behind you?”

“Yes, sir.”

I stood at the back door of the ambulance, and the EMT gave me a few more seconds.

“Did you see the vehicle?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even after it hit you?”

“Especially not then,” Wesley Crocker said, and managed a chuckle. “I was headed ass over teakettle.”

“Were you on your bike?”

“No. I was pushing it. I guess that’s what saved me. The bike was on the street side of me. I don’t think I would have been hurt much at all if I’d managed to miss that utility pole. That thing’s on the hard side, sir.”

“We need to go, Sheriff,” Miller said, and I nodded.

“Once more, though. Wesley, the vehicle came from the west, is that right? It came down Bustos from the west?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it continued on down Bustos, or did it turn on Pershing here?”

“I couldn’t swear either way, sir, but if I was to guess, I’d say it went on down the main drag, there.”

I nodded. “We’ll catch up with you at the hospital. Don’t worry about any of your stuff.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about any of that, sir. I just don’t think I need to bother the folks at the hospital for a few bruises.”

“Sir…” I turned as Estelle touched my arm.

“What’s going on?”

“It looks like Tom Pasquale flipped his vehicle down the street. Right at the intersection of Twelfth and Bustos.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes.”

“Ernie Wheeler said the manager of the Don Juan just called. The patrol car is on its top right in the middle of the intersection. Chief Martinez just arrived, and Torrez will be there in a minute.”

“Is Pasquale hurt?”

“Apparently not, sir.”

“Then let’s get busy here. Let the chief call his own tow truck.”

I suppose I should have felt more solicitous, but I wasn’t in the mood. We cleared away oglers, and Eddie Mitchell arrived to help secure the area so we could see what the hell we had. Then I sent him out to look for a vehicle with a freshly crumpled fender.

We didn’t have much. The first clear tire scuff mark showed on the curb about thirty feet west of the corner of Bustos and Pershing. Whoever had been driving the vehicle let it climb the curb on the south side of Bustos, then ran along it for just a few feet, gathering up the bicycle and flinging Wesley Crocker against the utility pole.

The bike had gotten snarled up with the vehicle, which finally spat it out across the intersection.

I played my flashlight over the remains of the bicycle. “After all those miles, some jerk does this,” I muttered.

Estelle Reyes-Guzman unlimbered her camera. She knelt down and pointed with the tip of her pencil. “Lots of flat black paint on the bicycle, sir.”

“Yep,” I said. “Whoever did this is going to show some battle scars. Any other paint souvenirs that you can see?”

She played the light this way and that. “Lots of black. Some bright metal scrapes. We can go over it better down at the shop, with some decent light.” She handed me a small plastic object. “And we have this.”

It was the plastic trumpet portion of a deer whistler, those little gadgets that folks stick on their cars and trucks to warn deer out of their path. The thing was broken off at the base.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or from some other vehicle. Bag it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the street was clear and we were as finished as we would ever be.

I leaned against 310, my arms folded over my belly. “We still don’t know if it was intentional or not,” I said.

Estelle shrugged. “It could have been someone who just wasn’t paying attention. They panicked and ran.”

“Could have been,” I said.

“Do you want to drive down the street?” She indicated westward, and I remembered Tom Pasquale.

“I’m not sure I want to see it,” I said, then added, “and sure as hell, Pasquale doesn’t want to see me.” I looked at Estelle and grinned. “Let’s go see.”