“Right.”
“I remember. I once gave one of my sons an old truck that didn’t have a plate, and we had to go through the whole rigmarole. Why else would someone steal one?”
“Hell, I don’t know. So they could drive a vehicle on the highway without goin’ through the DMV, I guess. You tell me.” He paused to take a breath. “You’d stop a vehicle on the highway if it didn’t have no license plate, right?”
“Sure.”
“What about if it had one of these?”
I held up my hands. “Not unless there was a traffic violation of some sort, or some other reason to be suspicious.”
“Right.”
“Nick, who has access to these temps?”
He snorted and thumped his fist on the arm of his chair. “Every goddamned person in the building, one way or another. I mean, they aren’t kept in a vault or anything. Shit, most of the time, they’re lying right here.” He tossed the pad of permits across to the narrow bookcase that rested against the wall beside his desk.
“And your office isn’t locked?”
He made a snort of derision that I took as a “no.”
“You know, you were tellin’ me that the deputies stopped a late-model pickup truck. And your gal, there, the one who got all mucked up…”
“Linda Real.”
“Yeah. She recalls seeing a temporary in the back window. Now, is that permit going to be mine? When you and your posse haul somebody’s ass in for that shooting, is the whole world going to come down on me? God, that pisses me off.”
I ducked his questions, since he knew the answers as well as I did. “Who buys these things for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who actually goes over to the DMV office and picks up the new permits. The new pack. Or packs. Whatever.”
“Well, hell, whoever is free. Me, Rusty, Manny, Carlos. Becky goes down sometimes. You know. Whoever. It’s not like going to Fort Knox or anything. It’s just another one of those goddamned errands. Paper, paper, paper. Remember when you could just give a man his money and walk off with the car?”
I laughed gently. “Now they just walk off with the car.”
“Shit. That ain’t funny.”
“We’ll look into it, Nick. I don’t know what to tell you, unless we get lucky.” I removed a page from the legal pad and jotted down the missing numbers. “If these show up somewhere, we’ve got a starting point. We’ll get ’em on NCIC.”
“Do you want me to kind of snoop around here? See what I can find out? I mean hell,” and he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper, “I ain’t got that many employees. I ought to be able to turn something.”
I held up a hand. “Not yet. Don’t do anything.” I had a mental picture of Nick pulling a tremendous magnifying glass out of his coat pocket as he sifted through his building. “Don’t talk to anyone about this at all.” This time, I lowered my own voice. “And I mean no one, Nick. Let us try and fit it all together.” I stood up and folded the piece of paper with the temp numbers. “And by the way, in the small world department, remember the Weatherfords?”
“How could anyone forget. I thought those noisy kids of theirs were going to camp out in my showroom.”
“They got as far as Weatherford, Oklahoma.”
“The first day? That ain’t bad.”
“No. To Weatherford, period. Their new Suburban was stolen right out of the motel parking lot.”
I don’t know what reaction I expected from Nick Chavez, but it wasn’t the one I got. He froze in his seat, and then his eyes narrowed ever so slowly. He leaned one elbow on the edge of the desk and cupped his jaw in his hand with his fingers covering his mouth. I suppose it was one of those gestures with which a psychiatrist would have a heyday.
“What?” I asked.
“You know,” he said through his fingers, “I saw that Suburban.”
My pulse kicked up ten notches, booting my already impressive blood pressure skyward. “When?”
“Goddamn, I saw it.” He lowered his hands and sat up straight. “I thought I was crazy, and didn’t think much about it earlier. But goddamn it, I saw it.”
“When?”
“I was coming to work, and I saw it go through the intersection of Grande and MacArthur. I was startled, see, ’cause this one was absolutely identical to the one the Weatherfords bought here. I mean absolutely. It even had the goddamned temporary tag in the back window, because I looked in my rearview mirror and saw it. And I remember thinkin’ to myself, ‘I thought they left, but maybe not.’ Maybe they decided to stay another day. Except she wasn’t drivin’ it.”
“Who was?”
“Beats me. I didn’t get enough of a look.”
“What time, Nick?”
He closed his eyes. “I got here at five minutes before eight. I looked, ’cause I needed to talk to the service manager, and he always walks through the door at eight sharp, like he’s some kind of digital freak. So, subtract from there. MacArthur up to here is about a minute and a half, give or take. So, seven minutes before eight, maybe.”
I did some mental calculations. If the thieves had taken the Suburban at midnight, eight hours averaging fifty miles an hour would see four hundred miles-and that wouldn’t see them to Posadas. But if they took the lightly traveled back roads, like Route 70 across the Texas panhandle, they could average much faster with ease. It was possible.
“You really think it could have been their truck?”
Nick shrugged. “How many can there be with a paint job like that in this area?”
“Why…” and I stopped. I had planned to ask why the car thieves would bother bringing the unit back to Posadas, but the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to tumble together.
“Nick,” I said, rising from his comfortable seat, “you’re going to be here all day?”
“Sure.”
“Keep this conversation to yourself, all right?”
“Goddamn right.”
“If this works out the way I think it will, I’ll buy that,” and I pointed at the Blazer on the showroom floor.
Chapter 32
Victor Sanchez watched me pull into the parking lot of the Broken Spur, but he didn’t stand on ceremony. He walked inside using the side door and let it slam shut in my face.
I followed him into the utility room beside the kitchen.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“You snakebit or something?” I said. The utility room was neater than the last time I’d seen it. Victor continued unloading the sacks of paper products that he’d brought in from his truck.
“I’m busy,” he said, his back still turned to me.
“Then I’ll wait until you’ve got a minute,” I said pleasantly. I leaned against the edge of one of the prep sinks and crossed my arms over my stomach. Victor ignored me. While he muttered and arranged-and rearranged-his dry goods, my eyes drifted around the room.
There was nothing unusual, nor did I expect there to be. That’s why what was obviously a rifle barrel arrested my gaze. The gun stood behind the back door, in company with several old brooms and a squeegee-mop. I pushed away from the sink, walked over, and hefted the antique. It was an old junker, one of those single-shot break-open things that cost about $49.95 when they’re new.
I pushed the lever and the breach opened. It was loaded. I slipped the little.22 shell out and turned it this way and that in my hands. It would do to kill a jackrabbit who made the mistake of holding still, or maybe a rattler by the back door.
“That ain’t the gun that killed the deputy,” Victor said.
I turned and looked at him, the shell in one hand, gun in the other.
“I can see that,” I said.
“Leave it loaded.”
I put the cartridge back in the gun and set the weapon down in the corner.
“I got five minutes,” Victor said. “What do you want? Where’s the girl?”
“The girl?”
“The one who works for you. The detective. Reuben’s niece.”
“She’s in the hospital with a broken leg.”
“That’s too bad,” Victor said-and he said it about the same way he’d say, “cut up this bunch of celery.”