Estelle gazed at me from across the table, her chin resting in her hand. She slowly shook her head from side to side, as confused as I was.
A car pulled in the driveway and the few rapidly evaporating gastric juices I had sprang into action. “She’s back,” I said, and grunted to my feet. I opened the door and saw not Sofia Tournal with fried chicken but Sheriff Martin Holman, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear.
“I got it,” he yelped, and bounded up the steps.
“Come on in,” I said as he charged past into the house. I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“Gayle said you’d be here, so I figured that I’d…”
“Good, good,” I interrupted him. “Come on in.” I directed him to the dining room. “Now, what have you got?”
“The tires,” Martin Holman said. He straightened his shoulders, pleased with himself. “The cast taken in front of the patrol car? Easy as can be.” He dug a paper out of his pocket. “LT235/85R by 16E all seasons.”
“Brand?”
“A good match to General, Bill.”
I sat down with a thump. “Well, that’s too bad,” I said, and was amused at Sheriff Holman’s immediately crestfallen expression.
“No, I mean it’s great that you’ve got a positive ID. I was hoping that maybe it’d be a brand that someone here in town sells. Maybe some neat little local thread like that.” I shrugged. “No such luck.”
Holman shook his head. “Generals are one of the tires that come as standard equipment on dozens of vehicles.”
Estelle leaned across the table and Holman handed her the paper. “A big tire,” she said. “From a truck of some kind. Like the lug wrench, sir.”
Holman grasped the back of one of the dining room chairs until his knuckles turned white. He rocked the chair this way and that and I looked up at him, curious. He was enjoying himself, and after a minute said, “But there was something else.”
“Oh?”
“The tires were brand-new. I mean brand-new.”
Both Estelle and I regarded Holman with interest. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. The little mold dinguses that stick out weren’t even worn off.” Holman didn’t bother reminding us that he’d spent fifteen years selling cars and should have learned enough to be able to tell a new tire from an old one.
“Wouldn’t they wear off just in a mile or two?” I asked.
Holman shook his head. “Not the ones that stick out sideways into the tread channel. Thousand miles or so, probably. I think you’re looking for a new vehicle.”
“Then it fits,” Estelle said.
“What fits?” the sheriff asked.
Estelle handed him the bag with the wrench inside. “We found this out there, sir.”
“A lug wrench?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s brand-new.”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s it. We are dealing with someone who was driving a brand-new truck of some kind. Pretty unusual to have a flat tire right off the bat.”
“But it happens. Maybe they hit something in the road.”
Holman stood up, excited. “It’d have to be something big enough to really slice the sidewall. Just running over a bottle, or board, or something like that wouldn’t do much to a brand-new steel-belted tire. It’d have to be a pretty good road hazard of some kind.” He headed toward the door.
“Martin…where are you going?”
He stopped short. “I was going to take a drive out that way, scan along the shoulder of the road.”
I beckoned him back. “If you’re going to do something like that, you need to call dispatch and see if Gayle can spring a deputy free to go with you, Martin.” His face went that wonderful blank that told me the proper synapses in his brain had failed to fire. “Until we nail this thing down, no one is roaming out in the boonies by themselves at night.”
“Oh,” he said. By the tone of Holman’s voice, a bystander would have guessed that the sheriff was a freshly hired rookie, not the top dog.
“But there’s something you need to do first. Howard Bishop was making a blanket check through NCIC for stolen vehicles or any other wants. You might shag Nick Chavez back down to his office and start him helping you on a trace of dealers in the South-west who might have had inventory stolen off the lot.”
“That should be covered by NCIC, shouldn’t it?” Holman asked.
“It should be, sir,” Estelle said. “But it’s possible that something was missed.”
Holman looked pained. “You think that the vehicle involved was taken from some dealer’s lot?”
“It’s just as likely as being stolen from an individual’s driveway,” I said. “We’ll cover all the bases.”
Holman shook his head. “I’d think those new ones, with all the antitheft devices and all, would be tough to steal.”
I glanced at Estelle and smiled with sympathy. “They got yours, right? Right out of the airport parking lot. No broken glass, nothing.” I shrugged and leaned back in my chair. “There’s a ready market for trucks, sheriff-especially the carryall class like Suburbans, Explorers, RamChargers…anything with lots of room and four-wheel drive.”
“In Mexico, you mean,” Holman said.
“That’s right. And as fast as engineers think up antitheft devices, the thieves come up with a slick solution.”
Estelle frowned. “And we might not be dealing with auto theft at all, sir. That’s just one trail we’re following. It could have been a dozen other things.”
“Like what?” Holman asked.
Estelle took a deep breath. “The deputy might have run into a felon who got nervous. Maybe on the run from somewhere else…anywhere else.” She held up her hands in frustration. “We’ve got the entire continent to choose from. Or maybe Paul stepped into the middle of something else, like a drug deal going down.”
“Out there?”
“Why not? Sir, remember that guy last year who landed his twin-engined plane on the only straight stretch of County Road Fourteen? That was two hundred kilos right there.”
“But you caught him,” Holman said, as if that settled that.
“We didn’t catch him, sir, the Forest Service did. And only then because the pilot snagged a wingtip fuel tank in a juniper thicket when he was trying to turn around. If he hadn’t been delayed with that mess, all the Forest Service would have found was a cloud of dust.”
I heard another vehicle in the driveway and recognized the wheezy exhaust note of Estelle’s little sedan. “Have you had dinner yet?” I asked Holman. He shook his head. “Then sit a minute and have a piece of chicken. It’ll help you think. It’s going to be a long night, Martin.”
Holman didn’t look happy. He had been raring to go, to gallop out into the night. He didn’t like hearing that we were operating like a frustrated posse, hunting for pony tracks after a buffalo herd had already thundered by.
Chapter 13
Not so many hours before, Linda Real had smiled at me from across the Sheriff’s Department parking lot as she walked toward the patrol car, lugging her camera bag, notebook, and God knows what else reporters carry. And then the last time I’d seen her, on that Sunday night when she should have been on her way home from a date with a nice, friendly kid who knew how to behave himself, she was a torn, bloody rag doll.
Now, lying at the mercy of all the hissing, clicking intensive care gadgetry, she seemed tiny, frail, childlike. Her head was bandaged with the exception of her right eye and cheek. Drip tubes stabbed into the back of her right hand. Her left hand was curled at the wrist, as if she were trying to hold on to something.
Holman, Estelle, and I had arrived at the hospital shortly before nine that Monday evening. We entered through the back service entrance, and outside the double doors of the intensive care unit I was relieved to find only the village cop who was working security.
Standing beside the hospital bed, I watched what I could see of Linda’s face and wondered where she was.