“I couldn’t catch her,” Gutierrez said. “I remember that. I couldn’t catch her.” He took a deep breath, very slowly. “I remember the look on her face.”
“She’s going to be fine.”
“Walsh?” It wasn’t “Dad,” or “my stepfather,” or anything else that might be tinged with affection.
“He’s dead, Scott.”
He lifted his hand again, then let it drop on his stomach. “How?”
“Heart attack. We found him just a few feet from where the shots were fired.”
“He shot twice,” Gutierrez said. “Really fast. I heard the snap of the first one. Right over my head.”
“Then what happened?”
“Before we could move, he shot a second time. The bullet hit the rock.” He stopped and seemed to be marking time, his index finger tapping the sheets. “I thought that it hit Connie. She kinda jumped. She lost her balance. I couldn’t grab her.”
“She’s going to be all right, Scott.”
“She went right over backward.”
“He shot again, though. Do you remember that?”
“Oh, yeah. I remember that.” He fell silent again and I watched as he lifted his right hand as if in slow-motion. He carefully ran his finger under the edge of the bandage on his right cheekbone. “Uh,” he said and took another deep breath.
“Do you want me to ask the nurse to get you something?”
“No.” He lowered his hand to the automatic morphine dispenser’s plunger that was clipped to the bed rail. He didn’t press the button. “I could see…see that he was trying to line up again, and I dove off to one side.”
“Did you try to shoot back?”
“No.” His left hand lifted an inch off the sheets. “I didn’t even think about that. Can you believe it? I didn’t even remember I had a damn rifle in my hands. And then it felt like somebody hit me in the nose with a baseball bat. I couldn’t see, I didn’t know what the hell…” He pulled his right hand away from the morphine dispenser.
“Do you remember dropping your rifle?”
“No. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember much else, except I couldn’t see where to go.”
I reached out and touched the back of his hand, just a couple of fingers, just enough to make contact. “Why did he do it, Scott?”
“Because Connie was going to quit.”
“Quit what?”
“She was making fake licenses for him.”
“Driver’s licenses, you mean?”
“Yes. Like the one Matt Baca had.”
“He told you this?”
“No. Connie did. She told me last week what she’d done. That she’d run one once in a while for Walsh. He paid her eight hundred bucks. He lines ’em up down south, in Acuna. They come up here when she’s working by herself. She’d help ’em with the test, whatever they needed.”
“Fake addresses?”
“Yes. And especially commercial tickets. You’d be surprised…” He stopped suddenly. His right hand moved halfway to his face and stopped. “Jesus,” he breathed. “You’d be surprised how many truckers down in South Texas live in Posadas, New Mexico.” He made a little snuffling sound as if the laugh had been stopped short, followed by a groan of pain.
“I don’t understand about Matt.”
“She made him a fake license.”
“For eight hundred bucks? You’re kidding.”
“No. No money. She was hot to trot as far as he was concerned. For a little while, anyway. Then she got nervous, and realized that Matt was going to really screw things up if he wasn’t careful.”
“And she told you this when?”
“Last week. She was scared, sir. Walsh had a good thing going. An easy place to get the right paperwork.”
“Why did he do it?”
“Money for one thing. For another, it was easier to sell ’em a car if they’re citizens. A lot of ’em wanted it registered in this country.”
“Banks fall for that?”
“No. It was used cars and trucks. He carried the papers. Right at the dealership.”
“So Connie panicked and told you about all of this?”
“Right. I thought maybe I could just nose around, you know, and straighten things out. I guess I thought wrong.”
I felt a presence behind me and heard the curtain. I turned to see the nurse hovering. “Give us just a few more minutes, all right?” She retreated after closing the curtain. Scott took another deep, careful breath. “Walsh was coming up here to go hunting. He’s done that for a long time. This time, though, he probably figured to calm Connie down. Tell her she had nothing to worry about. And then the thing with Matt happened. She flipped out when she heard about it. And then Matt’s father on top of it.”
“Were you involved in that?”
“Yes. I saw Sosimo walkin’ on the road. I thought maybe I could go in and get the license back. I didn’t count on old…old Sosimo having a thing about the U.S. Border Patrol.”
“You mean he didn’t let you in?”
“Oh, he accepted the ride, and he let me in the house. I had to promise to drive him into Posadas so he could get his old truck. But when I asked him if I could look for Matt’s license, he went ballistic. We struggled a little, but it was mostly me just trying to calm him down. He lost his balance and broke the window in the back door, and then he popped. That was it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this?”
“I thought there might still be a chance to find that license. If I had that, then there was no evidence for you guys against Connie. But you told me you’d found it, so…” His right hand moved slightly in lieu of a shrug. “But she heard what had happened down in Regal, and went off the deep end.”
“With all that, you decided to go hunting anyway.”
“Sir, it’s the truth. We figured that we’d get out of town, just the three of us, and work it out. We’d just explain to Walsh. We didn’t have to involve any of the authorities. I told Connie…” He stopped and raised his hand to his head. “Jesus, this hurts,” he whispered. “I told Connie that I’d just lay the cards out on the table. The license deal was over. He’d stop pushing Connie about it, and I wouldn’t go to the authorities.”
“He didn’t go for that?”
“He would have. It was Connie who couldn’t handle Matt’s death, and then the old man’s dying on top of that. It’s just something that she couldn’t handle. It was obvious to me. It would have been obvious to Walsh.”
“So he thought a hunting accident was going to work?”
“Stupider things have been done, sir. He must have seen the two of us arguing, and took a chance. I think he wanted to hit her, but it worked out even better than he planned. He knew he didn’t hit Connie, so now he could say that she fell. He’d nail me, and that’s it. Self-defense.”
“But you never fired.”
“No. He could have climbed up to where we were, and fired my rifle a couple of times. He could have done that.”
“Had his heart been in it,” I said. I stood silently for a while, looking down at the young man. “Scott,” I said finally, “somebody’s going to ask this. It might as well be me.” The silence lingered for another few seconds.
“Walsh said that he saw you push Connie off the rocks. That he heard you two arguing. He saw you push her, and he then yelled at you. We know you didn’t fire your rifle. But what about Walsh’s claim that you pushed your sister?
Scott Gutierrez remained silent.
“How would you answer that, Scott? If Dan Schroeder puts those questions to you?”
He lifted his right hand, making a pistol out of his thumb and index finger. “I didn’t push my sister off that rock, sir. If everyone thinks I did, then I wish this had been a couple of inches farther back.” He put his index finger to his skull just above the ear and dropped his thumb. When I didn’t respond immediately, Gutierrez stretched out his right hand toward me. I took it, and his grip was surprisingly strong.
“You haven’t talked to Connie yet, have you?”
“No. I haven’t. She’s in Las Cruces. It’s going to be a while.”
“Oh, Christ,” he murmured.
I gave his hand another squeeze. “You hang in there, Scott. Give us a chance to work this thing through.”