Sergeant Torrez had already passed some initial information to me via the handheld. The wreckage, he said, despite the lapse of time between the crash and its discovery, still smelled like a liquor store to which someone had taken a baseball bat.
We knew something of Miss Woodruff’s drinking habits. She drank until she was lit-that seemed to be the girl’s standard operating procedure. If there was nothing else pressing to do, she’d drink herself unconscious.
With a grunt I reached around and slid Estelle’s handheld radio out of my belt holster and keyed the switch.
“Torrez, Gastner.”
I waited for ten seconds and then heard two quick bursts of squelch that told me Bob had heard me, had found a quick moment to reach around and tap his mike key a couple of times, and then had gone back to work.
“He’ll respond when he can,” I said, and set the radio on the tailgate beside my leg. In silence we watched, our vantage point fifty feet down the road from where the lines snaked out of the rescue truck’s winch.
At 3:50, with dawn still hours away, we saw the tiny figures down the hill working around the Stokes litter. The radio beside me barked and I startled.
“This is Torrez.”
“Bob, are they about to come on up?”
“Affirmative.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Not too good, sir. They stabilized her as best they could, but it doesn’t look good.”
“Not conscious?”
“No, sir.”
“No sign of any other occupant of the vehicle?”
“No, sir. And if someone else was in the truck and was thrown out, they would’ve been found, with all the people up and down this thing.”
“Ask him about the seat belt,” Deke prompted me, and I frowned with irritation at being prompted.
“Bob, was she wearing her seat belt?” In the dark, on that mesa top, with the yawning talus slope in front of me, the question sounded ludicrous. If our local walkie-talkie conversation could be picked up by an avid scanner-ghoul with a humongous booster, he’d wonder about us for sure. Were we going to write the poor girl a ticket for not buckling up?
“Affirmative. One of the brackets broke sometime during the crash, but she had the belt on when she started out.”
Deke Merriam nodded sagely. “Pays to buckle up,” he said, with that curious graveyard humor that we all adopted at times when someone else was hurting the most-or was dead.
I keyed the radio again. “Bob, you’re going to make arrangements to sift through everything down there come morning?”
“Affirmative.”
“I’m going to follow the ambulance on into the hospital, then.”
“Affirmative. Is Estelle all right?”
“Busted up some. She’ll be okay.”
The Stokes litter, with its six-man crew carrying it up behind the pull of the lead line, was already a quarter of the way up the slope.
I pushed off the tailgate and stood up. “Deke, thanks for the smoke. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. We’ll get all the paperwork to you just as fast as we can crank it out.”
He grimaced and waved a hand.
With Tammy Woodruff on her way, I heaved a sigh of relief. Gayle Sedillos was working dispatch, and that meant the girl’s parents had been notified. They’d be at the hospital, waiting. So would half of the world, probably. I wasn’t in the mood to talk with any of them.
I walked-maybe shuffled would have been a better description-to 310 and edged the car out through the sea of vehicles. The ambulance carrying Estelle would be in Posadas already, but the second unit with Tammy Woodruff would be half an hour behind me. I had some time to think. I idled the patrol car down the county road, windows open.
I hadn’t taken a formal survey, but I suspected that youngsters who got their kicks out of roping cattle or riding broncs, or even one-ton, evil-tempered bulls, wouldn’t be too excited about strapping on a seat belt when they climbed into their mild-mannered pickup trucks.
It was hard to picture Wild Tammy carefully arranging her beer cans and whiskey bottles on the seat and floor of her truck, then diligently buckling herself in for the drive up County Road 14. Buckling herself in, guzzling all the way?
The dark mesa top didn’t offer any answers. I reached the intersection with the state highway and stopped. In the five minutes I sat in the parked car, the stop sign large and gaudy in my headlights, no vehicle passed.
I knew that I needed to talk with Patrick Torrance, even though we had no direct evidence tying the young rancher with any of this mess. True enough, he’d chased after Tammy, maybe even caught her a time or two. True enough, he’d been at the Broken Spur the night of the shooting, when Tammy somehow had gotten tangled in the barbed wire of her adventures. True enough, Patrick hadn’t been home for a few hours, but at his age and pace, that was frequently the case.
I took a deep breath and turned out onto the state highway. Patrick Torrance was a nice enough kid. He hadn’t come home last night. Most of the explanations for that were innocent enough. Most of them.
Chapter 27
Just west of Moore, a rough two-track road angled off to the north. Ranchers from up north used it once in a while as a shortcut to the feed store at the end of Arturo Mesa, but not often enough to discourage the sage, goat-heads, and kochia from flourishing in the center mound.
By taking the two-track, I could circle around first by the Prescott ranch and then by the Torrance ranch without driving through Posadas. I knew of one cattle gate I’d have to fuss with, where one of Gus Prescott’s grazing allotments crossed the two-track. If I remembered correctly, the two-track skirted a windmill and stock tank less than a hundred yards behind Prescott’s trailer.
The road would be slow going, but apparently even a broken and bruised Estelle Reyes-Guzman had noticed that idle speed was my most productive pace. The digital clock on the dashboard told me it was 4:37, still an hour and a half before dawn. A good time to go calling.
With the abandoned mercantile building looming large to my right, I turned off the state highway and bounced along for no more than a tenth of a mile before my headlights illuminated a sign that announced End of County Maintenance.
Dry sage rasped against the undercarriage of the patrol car, touched the hot catalytic converter, and released a pungent bouquet. It was one of my favorite aromas. I had tried to explain it to Martin Holman once, but he’d just muttered something about his sinuses, looked miserable, and asked me to find some pavement.
After two miles of relatively flat prairie, the two-track plunged down into a sandy-bottomed arroyo. On occasion the Rio Salinas shared that arroyo, but not in late winter.
I stopped on the lip and turned the spotlight this way and that, convincing myself that the patrol car wouldn’t high-center in the bottom of the arroyo or spin to a stop trying to climb out the other side. I shrugged. If ranchers could haul stock trailers up and out of this thing, the car wouldn’t have any trouble. “Hell, why not,” I said aloud, and nosed the heavy patrol car down into the arroyo.
Downhill was fine, and the two and a half car lengths across the bottom of the arroyo were almost smooth. The sedan made it halfway up the other side before I realized that idle speed wasn’t going to cut it. I tapped the gas and the car slewed sideways as both back tires kicked sand and fine riverbed gravel. In an instant, instead of riding nicely on the high ground, the tires sank into the softer sandy ruts where trucks and rains had cut deep channels.
The frame whomped against something hard and the radials chuddered a burrow into the sand. The patrol car halted, skewed with its ass end pointing into space.
“Well, this is fine,” I muttered, and slammed the gear lever into park. I got out and switched on my flashlight. What I saw didn’t make me feel any better. If I tried to back up, there wouldn’t be enough room to straighten out before the car slipped over the edge. Rocking back and forth would just bury the back tires deeper. I switched off the flashlight and sighed.