“This is not the license that Baca showed me.”
“I can’t remember which side of the bed I’m supposed to get up on most of the time,” I said gently. “After a quick glance, there isn’t a chance you could be mistaken?”
“No, I mean this isn’t the one. And I look, you know? I mean, I really do. Not just a glance.”
“All right.” I kept my tone noncommittal.
“This is the old style. Here.” He handed it back to me. “The license that Matt Baca showed me earlier tonight was the new kind.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his own wallet, then extracted his license. “Like this. I got this on my birthday last month.” He held it up so I could see it.
“The new style,” I said, as if we didn’t deal on a routine basis with the licenses issued by the Motor Vehicle Division.
“The new ones-with all those state seals on them. They kinda shimmer, like.”
“Uh-huh.” I tapped Matt Baca’s license against my thumb. “He showed you a brand-new license. That’s what you’re saying?”
Portillo nodded. “That’s why I came in. First, the undersheriff stopped to talk to me…I guess it was about midnight. And then later I heard about…” He let it trail off with a helpless wave of his hand. “When I talked to Torrez, you didn’t have the kid in custody yet, is that right?”
I nodded.
“When I heard about what happened, I knew that you guys would be wanting to talk to me again. But believe me-if I’d thought that Matt Baca was underage, I wouldn’t have sold him the liquor.” He shrugged helplessly. “I just wouldn’t. I wanted to come in and tell you that.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” I said. “Did you happen to notice his date of birth?”
“I remember that it was before this date in 1980. You know, that’s how we do it. Just has to be before…” He let it drift off, realizing that he was lugging coals to Newcastle.
“But you don’t remember the year that was on the license?”
“No. Seems to me that it was ’79. I don’t remember for sure. I mean it was close to that, but as long as it’s before 1980 what’s the point of paying attention, if you know what I mean.”
“Did you happen to notice the date of issue?”
“Date of issue?”
“It’s on the license, in small print.”
“I didn’t notice that, no.”
“It had his picture, though?”
“Yes.”
“Same one as this?” I held up Baca’s license.
Tommy Portillo leaned close and squinted. “No.” He settled back in the chair. “It wasn’t the same picture.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” I said, and leaned my head back against the chair again. “That’s something to go on, anyway.”
“I just wanted you to know. It was nagging at me, you know? You know how that goes?”
“Oh, yeah. I know how that goes.”
“I think maybe I can go home now and get some sleep.”
“I appreciate this, Tommy. I really do. We may want to talk to you again.”
“Anytime, Bill. Just anytime.”
After he left, I put Matt Baca’s license back in the small, tagged evidence bag. My intuition told me that Tommy Portillo was telling the truth. He had good reason to make any attempt to cover his ass, especially now, with a fatality involved-however tangentially.
A second license explained the boy’s reaching for ID in the Broken Spur. If Tommy Portillo was correct, Matt Baca had been about to show the bartender his freshly minted license. Victor Sanchez stopped the game before it had even begun.
Victor was no threat to Baca-he might not honor the bogus license, but he wouldn’t report the kid, either. The kid was free to go elsewhere. It made sense that he’d head for home, where Sosimo was known to keep a bottle or two. But when the red lights blossomed as the trio left the Broken Spur, Matt Baca had reason to run. His cousin, the undersheriff of Posadas County, knew exactly how old he was.
Having the fake license was one thing. Explaining where he got it was another story entirely.
Chapter Eight
I spent a couple of hours drafting my own written explanation of the night’s events. It was a simple enough incident, and ordinary circumstances would have required just a few minutes to whack out the necessary paragraphs of the deposition, beginning with the collision of Matt Baca’s car and my own.
“Ordinary circumstances” would have been if the incident had happened to someone else. As it was, I lingered over every sentence, letting my mind search and sift, looking for something that might strike a spark. I knew exactly why the kid had been mangled by the delivery truck. He was fast, I was slow. It was that painfully simple. Discovering why he’d decided to run in the first place wasn’t so simple.
Later in the morning, one of the deputies would have the chance to talk at length with Jessie Montoya, the young lady in the backseat. And maybe Toby Gordan would be able to mumble a few words past his stitches. The rules of the game had changed since I’d last seen those two kids-there was no need now for them to worry about protecting Matt Baca, or even saving face in front of their friend.
Whether or not Matt had told them where he got the license was another question. I was confident that he had, since humans are notoriously blabby when they’ve done something stupid of which they’re inordinately proud. I was sure that if Toby or Jessie knew, they’d tell us.
Shortly after five that Saturday morning, I finished the affidavit and walked out to dispatch. The deep, predawn hush included the Public Safety Building. Gutierrez and Bergmann, the two Border Patrol agents, had long since left, Deputy Taber was somewhere in the county prowling the shadows, and dispatcher Brent Sutherland was trying his best to remain alert as the adrenaline rush from earlier in the night wore off.
“Dig out your seal, would you?” I asked, and Brent looked grateful for something to do and eager for an excuse to use his freshly minted Notary Public commission. A few minutes later, as I slid the notarized statement into Taber’s mailbox, I said, “I’m going home, Brent.” At the same time, I leafed through the messages taped above my name…the same messages I’d ignored earlier and that were now stale as day-old toast.
One didn’t require a response, and a second recorded that Cliff Larson, the district livestock inspector, had called at 9:30 Friday evening. “What did Cliff want, did he say?”
“No, sir. He said that it could wait until today sometime. I gave him your cell phone number, but I guess he didn’t call.”
“I guess not. And Frank?” Frank Dayan, the publisher of the Posadas Register, had called shortly after 10:00 PM-a good hour before all the action started. No doubt Frank would be gnashing his teeth that we’d been inconsiderate enough to make important news a week before his next issue hit the street. A central joy in his life was beating the big-city dailies to the hot stuff. I was sure that most of the time, the metro papers didn’t know they’d been scooped…or care.
“He didn’t say, sir. Just that it wasn’t important.”
“Huh,” I grunted. “If it’s not important, why do these people pick up the phone in the first place. One of the mysteries of life, I suppose.” The fourth note, recorded in Brent Sutherland’s careful printing, said that Dan Schroeder, the district attorney, had called from his home in Deming at 2:55 AM to tell me that a meeting at 9:00 AM was just fine with him.
“The DA doesn’t waste any time, does he?” I muttered.
“Sir?”
I waved the note. “The DA.”
Sutherland looked a bit uncomfortable. “The undersheriff said I should call him because of the fatality,” he said. “Because it involved us.”
“Not us,” I said laconically. “Me. And both you and the undersheriff did the right thing, and nine AM is just fine.” I crumpled the note and chucked it in the trash basket. “Like I said, I’m going home for a couple of hours. Is there another vehicle handy? I’ll try my best to keep it in one piece.”