“I suppose not.”
“And since your unit was parked perpendicular to the highway, it wouldn’t appear to matter which back door of your car you chose to use. There was no ‘off-road’ side, in this case.”
I held up both hands by way of answer. We could play the “what if” game all day, and it wouldn’t change things.
Schroeder took a deep breath. “We may file against…what’s his name?” He lifted up one of the pad’s pages. “Mr. Haynes. It’s pretty clear to me that he acted in a less than prudent manner, even though he was given ample opportunity to do otherwise.”
“If you’re asking my opinion, I’d prefer that you let it go,” I said.
“The skid marks show that when he finally did slam on his brakes, his right side tires were less than three feet from the white line on the right side of the road. That means that his outboard tires hadn’t even kissed the center line. He never pulled over.”
“I know that. But we see that all the time. Some folks tend to let their cars drift toward what they’re looking at. Anybody who walks along the side of the highway will tell you the same thing. Half the time, oncoming traffic drifts toward the pedestrians as the driver looks their way.”
Schroeder’s gaze drifted up from the legal pad and he regarded me with interest for several seconds. “You think this is your fault, don’t you.”
“It is my fault, Counselor.” I shrugged. “I should have had my hand on Baca long before he exited the vehicle, before he started to stand up. I should have been fully blocking the exit route from the vehicle. I wasn’t.”
Schroeder’s eyes didn’t leave mine. “Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, isn’t it?”
“Sure is.”
Schroeder appeared to be doodling concentric circles on his legal pad. “What did the other two kids have to say for themselves?”
“The deputies are talking to them this morning. Toby Gordan has a mouthful of stitches, so we might not get much out of him for a little while.”
“What’s your theory?”
“About?”
“Why the kids spooked,” Schroeder said. “And why every chance he got, the Baca kid tried to take off.”
“For one thing, we’re pretty sure that he had a fake driver’s license. Tommy Portillo-the owner of the convenience store on Grande-saw it, and sold him some beer earlier in the evening. Later on, when he wanted to buy some more at the Broken Spur, Baca was about to pull it out to show the bartender. But Victor Sanchez kicked Matt out of the bar before the deal went through. The gal who was bartending never saw the license.”
“Why would Sanchez kick him out, no questions asked, unless he knew him, and knew how old he really was?” Schroeder said. “He probably borrowed someone else’s license and pasted his own picture over the top of the other. Kids try that all the time, and sometimes it works if the clerk really doesn’t give a shit.”
“Portillo says it was a real license.”
“He has every reason to want to be convinced of that,” the district attorney said. “He knows that if the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board comes down on his head, it’s going to cost him a bundle in fines and lost business. He’s not going to admit to making a mistake. But this is all penny-ante stuff, Sheriff. I’d like to know…”
He stopped in midsentence as the door behind him opened without even a perfunctory knock. I looked up in irritation, but caught my tongue when I saw Gayle Torrez’s face.
“Sir, Bobby just called from Regal requesting another officer. From Baca’s.”
For a moment, my brain refused to register what she meant. “Who’d he send down there?” I said, rising to my feet. “Is he on his way now?”
She shook her head. “No, sir. I mean, it’s Bobby. He called from there. Tom Pasquale was in the office, so I sent him. Howard Bishop is up north, but he’s on his way down, too.”
“What now?” Schroeder said, twisting in his chair so he could see Gayle. I knew exactly what he meant. In the seventeen years that Robert Torrez had worked for the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, he had never asked for assistance. Not once. Not for bar fights, family quarrels, or rabid dogs. Usually, it was his own hulking figure that arrived, to provide backup for another grateful deputy.
I charged out of the office, and it was only as I was slamming the unmarked car into reverse that I noticed that Dan Schroeder had piled into the passenger side, yanking his seat belt tight.
Chapter Ten
I saw the wink of red lights as Sergeant Howard Bishop approached the corner of Bustos and Grande from the north, skirting around Pershing Park. I accelerated hard, plunging our car out of the county building’s parking lot onto southbound Grande. In another block, Bishop’s unit blew by us as if we were parked.
“Christ,” Schroeder muttered and grabbed the padded dash. Bishop drifted the county car into the oncoming lane to pass a couple of panicked tourists whose idea of responding to emergency lights was to jar to a stop in the middle of the street. I passed on the right, and then both of us cleared the little knot of traffic and headed southwest on State 56.
“Find out where three oh six is,” I snapped, and Schroeder fumbled the mike out of its bracket.
It had been twenty-one years since he’d left the state police for law school, but he managed to clear the mental cobwebs.
“Three oh six, three ten. Ten-twenty.”
We waited for half a dozen heartbeats and then I heard Tom Pasquale’s tense voice. “Three oh six is coming up on Moore.”
There was no way to wave a magic wand that would vaporize the miles. Regal was twenty-six miles southwest from the intersection of Grande and State 56 at the outskirts of Posadas, and even at a hundred miles an hour that was a long sixteen minutes.
I could picture several scenarios in Regal, none of which would take sixteen minutes to play out. I reached over and took the mike from Schroeder. “Three oh eight, do you copy?”
Silence followed, but all that meant was that Torrez wasn’t standing beside his car, or within reach of a radio. We were all more apt to use the cellular phones if we had the time, keeping our business off the public airwaves. I lifted the mike again, but Gayle Torrez’s voice beat me to it.
“Three ten, be advised that three oh eight has requested an ambulance at the residence. They’re on their way.”
I glanced at Schroeder, and then acknowledged the message. “Gayle, contact any Border Patrol or state police that might be in the immediate area.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” the district attorney said when I was finished, and pulled his seat belt tighter.
From the pass through the San Cristobals twelve minutes later, we could look down at the tiny village of Regal, and off to the south I could see the ruler-straight line that was the international border fence. The border crossing was open, and if an agent was available, he’d be only seconds away from Torrez’s location.
As we came down off the pass, a thin veil hung over Regal, a haze that was equal parts fragrant wood smoke and dust kicked up by traffic on the narrow, winding dirt lanes. The dust plumes led right to Sosimo Baca’s scruffy little adobe on the west side of the village.
When I had arrived at Sosimo Baca’s place the night before, there had been room for another vehicle to pass by on the dirt lane if I parked carefully, snugged in close to the fence. Now the west side of Regal was a goddamn parking lot, beginning just after “porch corner,” where the road nicked around someone’s front porch so close that over the years the corner column had collected a fair sample of automotive paint chips.
“This is going to be a mess,” Schroeder muttered.
I saw flashing red lights off to the left, where Tom Pasquale had taken a shortcut through first a backyard and then across a shallow arroyo, sliding his Bronco to a stop by a collection of rotten poles and sticks that might once have been Sosimo Baca’s back fence.
Weaving and dodging fenders, we managed another fifty yards before the road was corked by a fancy diesel pickup truck, last in line behind several other vehicles. Two men stood by the pickup’s front bumper, in animated discussion. Beyond the truck and a row of seven other vehicles including one with the green and white U.S. Border Patrol logo, I could see Sergeant Bishop’s patrol car. He had managed to skirt off to the right through a neighbor’s side yard, narrowly missing a chain-link enclosure that housed a pair of frantic yellow mutts. A board fence had stopped him within a dozen yards of Torrez’s Expedition, parked with its nose just east of Baca’s gate.