Red, Green, or Murder

Chapter Eighteen

The cry didn’t repeat itself, but I’d heard enough to pinpoint it just below my position on the arroyo lip.

“Patrick!” I shouted, probing the light through the brush. “Patrick, can you hear me?” The cry repeated, this time from the left, and I slid down the bank in a cascade of gravel. Something let out a squeak and bounded off ahead of me, and I could hear Pasquale’s SUV jarring up the dirt two-track. “Patrick?” I stood in the center of the arroyo bottom, trying to find a route around a grove of scrub oak that had chosen that precarious spot.

“I can’t…” somebody said, and the words were so clear, so distinct, that they were like grabbing the end of a cattle prod. Finally, my light found him, crumpled behind a Volkswagon-sized boulder, crushed up against a mass of brush. It looked as if a cloudburst’s torrent raging down the arroyo had flung him into that spot, rather than a couple of thugs. The next storm would bury him.

“I heard…” he managed, but the sentence was cut short as I knelt beside him. I knew it was Pat Gabaldon by the stature and the clothing, but certainly not by the face. An enormous hematoma puffed the left side of his head, disfiguring the orbit into a purple mess. That damage hadn’t been enough to satisfy his attackers. A deep, gaping slice began just in front of the ear and extended all the way to the tip of his jaw, and I could see the exposed bone.

“We’re here now, Pat. Just lie still.” That’s all he could do. The effort to cry out had taken his last bit of strength, and I saw his shoulders sag as he slipped into unconsciousness.

Up above and behind me, a vehicle roared into the camp ground at the same time that brilliant red and blue lights pulsed across rocks and trees.

A door slammed, and I could hear the crunch of his boots as the deputy approached my vehicle.

“Thomas, over here in the arroyo!” I bellowed and waved my light so it criss-crossed the tree limbs above my head. As soon as his stocky figure appeared haloed by the revolving lights, I stood up long enough to bark a string of orders.

“We need an ambulance ASAP, and then whatever bandages you have in the unit. Big ones. Some of those big pads. And a blanket.”

“You got it.”

He disappeared and I knelt back down. “Just hang in there, buddy,” I whispered, but there was no response. I touched the side of the young man’s neck, feeling a thin, thready pulse.

Seconds later, Pasquale’s light added to mine. He handed me the blanket, then bent close, keeping the beam out of Patrick’s eyes. He examining the wound even as he tore open the first four inch gauze pad.

“We don’t want to move his head,” I said.

“This’ll help,” Pasquale said, and wormed a fist-sized rock out from under the young man’s right cheek. I backed out of the way a bit. “Make things a little better,” he said, and rested one hand on Patrick’s forehead, gently, just to make a connection. “Can you hear my voice?” He reached around and lifted Pat’s right eye lid as he said that, but gained no response. “He’s out.” The deputy ripped open two more pads and pressed them against the jaw wound. “No easy way to do this mess. How did it happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s use that,” the deputy said, and took the blanket that he’d handed me. “What other injuries, you know?”

“No idea. The hematoma on the eye, and the cut throat. That’s what I know.”

Pasquale ran a hand from the back of Patrick’s skull down the center of his back, then down each leg. “Everything points right.” He stood back, made a quick survey for blood, then shook open the blanket and let it waft down.

The deputy unsnapped the little mike from his shoulder epaulette. “PCS, three-oh-two.”

“Go ahead, three-oh-two.”

“Expedite ten-fifty-five this location. One male, age nineteen, severe head injuries, significant blood loss. Pulse is weak, respiration light and ragged. Victim is unresponsive.”

“Ten-four.”

“And notify three-ten and three-oh-eight that we’ll be inbound with the subject of their earlier complaint.”

“Ten-four.”

Pasquale tucked the radio back into his belt. “It’s going to seem like a long, long wait,” he said.

Indeed it was. Mercifully, Pat Gabaldon was unconscious for most of the forty-five minutes. A groan or two, a spasmodic twitch or jerk, and that was it. The deputy and I kept a running stream of comfort and attention, making sure that if the young man did swim back to the surface, he wasn’t greeted by dismal silence.

Eventually-it seemed like hours rather than minutes-we heard the approach of the heavy diesel emergency unit as it turned onto the county two-track.

“Three-oh-two, Rescue One is just leaving the highway. You’re at the campground?”

“That’s affirmative. Pull beyond my unit. We’re all the way in the back.”

“Ten-four.”

With Patrick Gabaldon’s future entirely out of my hands, I stepped away, making room for the two EMTs and the bulky gurney. Matty Finnegan, half-way down the arroyo slope with her bulk of equipment, paused to look hard at me.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and then added to the deputy, “I’ll be at my truck.”

Neither Bobby Torrez nor Estelle would call me while I was in the middle of this mess, but they’d be waiting for an update. Sure enough, Estelle answered her phone after the first ring. She listened without interruption until I was finished.

“Why there, I wonder.”

“Maybe they’d been there before,” I said. “Maybe they saw the campground sign and figured it was their last chance before the border. I don’t know.”

“Patrick wasn’t able to speak?”

“No. We have a long, long list of unanswered questions, sweetheart.” Tom Pasquale and the two EMTs appeared at the lip of the arroyo, maneuvering the gurney to the ambulance. “They’re about to pull out. I’ll be inbound with ’em as soon as Tom and I secure the radio.”

“That’s good. Bobby and I are here at the hospital, if you’ll meet us there,” Estelle said. “Some interesting developments.”

“I’m not sure I can stand any more interesting things.” I switched off and waited for the ambulance to leave. Pasquale approached, an aluminum clipboard in hand.

“The phone, sir?”

“We need your camera and tape first,” I said.

“The Sheriff wants to keep an eye on this until we have the chance to sweep the area,” he said, not looking altogether enchanted with that thought. “I’ll just secure the road right at the highway. Taber comes on at midnight.”

“I know it’s a mess,” I said, “but if there’s a shoe or boot print to be had, we’ll want it.”

Holding the idiot end of the tape measure, I made my way back to the piñon on the slope.

“Ninety-seven feet, four inches,” Tom shouted.

“Not a bad toss.” I waited as he rewound the tape, and in a moment he appeared at my side. I turned the light on the tree, illuminating the little phone.

“Well, hell,” he said. “This is amazing. How’d you do this stunt?”

“I dialed his number,” I replied. “No rocket science involved.”

“Jeez.”

“I want photos of it in place, and then put it in an evidence bag without touching it. I’ll take it with me. The sooner we can process prints, the better.”

“You’re shitting me,” Thomas said, still in wonder. “How’d you find it, did you say?”

“I could hear the ring tone.”

“Well, damn. That’s pretty neat, sir.” Shaking his head, he retraced his steps to his unit and fetched the bag. A good deal taller than I, Pasquale had no trouble tipping the phone into the bag using the end of his ball-point pen.

“Why would they throw it?” the deputy asked. He handed me the sealed bag.

“That’s one of the interesting questions.”

The dust from the ambulance still hung in the night as I bumped my way out of the canyon back to the state highway. I ambled along in my best think mode, arm out the window, slouched against the door, letting my mind roam. There was certainly no hurry, now that Patrick was in good hands. But that forty-five minutes of deep thought during the drive back to Posadas produced no epiphanies-just more fuming and fretting.

Part of my uneasiness was worrying about Patrick’s injuries. Part of it was wondering what Herb Torrance was going to do, working into the fall months without the only two ranch hands he had. I’d call him from the hospital after I’d talked with Estelle and Robert. But the dark of that night kept reminding me that we didn’t know what kind of cold-blooded freak we were dealing with.

It was seeing the undersheriff’s Crown Victoria parked outside of the hospital’s emergency room’s double doors that added another round of bleak thoughts to my mood. It seemed a year rather than eighteen hours since I’d stood in George Payton’s kitchen, looking down at the end of a life and the loss of an old friend. Estelle had promised “interesting developments” in that case, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hear them.

I parked behind Estelle’s car, making sure I was clear of the ambulance lane. Ignoring all the instructional signs that guarded the staff only emergency room entrance, I went inside, grimacing at the strong wall of artificially cooled and perfumed air and the bright lights that had no regard for the natural time of day.