I had wanted to cross the talus slope for a better view of what was happening down below, not to be dragged up the hill. But I realized that what the kid said made sense. They needed me down at the wreck about as much as they needed another broken leg. I stopped and looked up the hill. Those hundred yards were leagues.
“Shit,” I said. “You think they’re going to call a chopper?”
“No, sir.”
I leaned against a rock with my hands on my knees. “Too windy?”
“Yes, sir. For a while I thought they might, but not with the wind gusting to twenty knots. It’s just too risky.”
We’d progressed far enough past the spine of trees that I could see the wreck site down below. The image was surreal, with the artificial white light bathing the gnarled pinon and juniper. A cascade of sparks shot into the sky as the steel-cutting saw chewed into the pickup carcass, and I could hear the scream of it echo off the mesa wall behind us.
“She’s been crushed in that thing for maybe two days, Curtis.”
“That’s what I heard. It’s a miracle that she’s alive at all. I guess that’s another reason Sam won’t ask for a chopper. The odds are pretty stacked against her. It doesn’t make it a good gamble to risk a helicopter crew on a night like this.”
I took a deep breath and pushed myself upright. “Let’s get this miserable job over with, Curtis.”
“Yes, sir. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
I chuckled in spite of myself. “No, Curtis, I’m not feeling all right. Just stick close.” It wasn’t the climb I dreaded so much. Or another sleepless night. It was facing two old friends and telling one of them that his daughter was smashed to pieces…and telling the other that every circumstance pointed right down his son’s tracks.
Chapter 26
When I stepped off the last treacherous rock and onto the solid, comforting gravel of County Road 14, I would have taken a great breath and sighed with relief if I had had the energy. Instead, I settled on the convenient tailgate of one of the search and rescue trucks. I was dirty, unshaven, and had a rent in my trousers-I looked like an old derelict who didn’t have the gumption to face the trash cans down the alley one more time.
The activity was a blizzard around me. I was too tired even to pretend that there was something I could do to help.
The night wind had changed direction, beginning its dawn cycle. This mesa top should have been a beautiful, quiet place. There should have been a potpourri of aromas to enjoy other than diesel and small-engine exhaust. There should have been quiet night sounds other than radios, engines, shouts, shrieks of metal-cutting blades, and the groaning of bending metal forced apart by steel jaws.
Lots of things should have been. Tammy Woodruff should have been home in bed, curled around a good boyfriend, not crunched up and squashed inside the grotesque wreckage of her pickup truck.
Behind me, Deputies Tom Mears and Tony Abeyta tried to make sense of the tracks left by Tammy’s truck. Apparently, she had managed to drive up the winding county road without incident until she reached a point just before the road opened up on top. After rounding a tight, decreasing radius curve, the road passed between a limestone outcropping and a thick grove of scrub oak.
Sprayed gravel and a deep gouge in the trunk of one of the five-inch oaks showed that someone-probably Tammy-had lost it on that corner and strayed into the brush. She’d had time to correct and cuss a couple of times before she broke out on top.
And then, like a straight and true missile, her truck had drifted to the right, with no signs of swerving or correction, until the right front wheel dropped over the rocky edge. Even if she’d been sober, at that point there was nothing she could have done to save herself.
The gouges in the road’s shoulder showed that her truck had executed a slow roll to the right, with the first flip sheering off the passenger-side mirror. Mears found the mirror lying wedged between two boulders within fifty feet of the road. After that, it was impossible to tell exactly what gyrations the vehicle had executed as it tumbled down the talus slope, shedding bits and pieces as it went.
The total distance from last contact with the county road to the truck’s resting spot in the scrub trees at the bottom measured 346 yards. Three and a half football fields. And Tammy Woodruff, twenty-three years old and 105 pounds, had survived it all.
She had to know the circumstances that prompted her lonely drive up County Road 14, but maybe she wouldn’t be able to remember how she’d come to drift that shiny, year-old truck too far to the right. And if she was lucky, she wouldn’t remember a damn thing about that never-ending flight down the talus slope.
A dark, uniformed figure appeared at the side of the truck on which I was sitting. I turned and recognized Deke Merriam, one of the enforcement officers for the Forest Service. This mesa top was their turf, even though the tallest tree on it couldn’t skin twenty feet.
“Why aren’t you down there, Deke?”
He snorted. “Why aren’t you?”
“I was. Well, part way. I saw enough.”
He groped in his shirt pocket and pulled out cigarettes. I watched him light one, and smelled the first waft of smoke that the night air thoughtfully brought to me.
Down slope, a new shower of sparks shot a dozen feet into the air. “It looks like they’re going to have to cut that truck into a million pieces to get her out,” Merriam said.
“Looks like,” I agreed. “It’s wadded up pretty good.”
“What was the deal, anyway? She was speeding, or what? One of the guys said it was the Woodruff girl from town.”
“It was, and we don’t know. She’s got a boyfriend out in these parts.”
“What, on up…” Merriam made gestures toward the north.
I nodded. “Right. One of the Torrance boys.”
“They know about this?”
“I don’t think so.”
“When did this happen? You figure that out?”
I shook my head and leaned an arm on the side of the truck bed. “We just don’t know for sure.”
“How did you happen on it?”
“One of our detectives was out this way.”
Deke Merriam grinned. He knew the size of our department, and knew every soul onboard. We only had one detective. “Estelle found it?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of the night?”
I didn’t bother to tell him that it hadn’t been the middle of the night when Estelle had seen the vehicle. “She was detecting, Deke. That’s what we pay her to do. Detect.”
“All this is tied in with the shooting, somehow, eh?”
Deke wasn’t as stupid as he liked to sound most of the time. “We think so,” I said.
He carefully ground out the cigarette on the tailgate, then walked around, opened the driver’s side door, and put the butt in the ashtray. Perhaps the owner wouldn’t mind.
“I’m surprised she wasn’t thrown out,” he mused, returning to lean against the truck with one boot heel hooked on the edge of the tire tread. “All that twisting and crushing is bound to spring the doors and shatter all the glass. Even the seat brackets can snap off when the cab twists. Maybe she was wearing her seat belt. But hell, even them sometimes fail.”
I looked at Deke for a long moment, musing. “Let me bum one of your smokes, Deke.”
“Why sure,” he said, with generous alacrity. “I thought you quit.”
“I did. Two years ago.”
I took the book of matches he offered and thoughtfully peeled one off. The cigarette filter tasted chemical and sterile between my lips, bringing to mind the odd image of the ball of cotton a nurse uses to patch a hypodermic needle hole in a patient’s arm. I lit the match, held it for an instant, then snapped it out. “Ah, maybe later,” I said, and put the cigarette in my pocket.
“Tough hombre,” Deke said.
“Yeah, I’m tough, all right. Thanks just the same.”