She gave in finally and told the dispatcher that we would be ten-seven.
We heard: “Four-o-six, do you copy?” Al Martinez acknowledged. We reached the adobe, and Francis Guzman’s Isuzu was in the driveway. I stepped out and level ground felt good. What felt even better was the cool, dark interior of the adobe.
Estelle walked quietly to the bedroom, looked inside, and then turned to me, holding her hands up on her cheek, like a kid sleeping. Francis was home and zonked. She showed me the tiny guest room-about the size of an Amtrak sleeping berth.
“Don’t go anywhere without letting me know,” I ordered, and Estelle grinned.
“No, sir.”
Then I surprised myself. My head hit the pillow, my nose enjoyed the faint aroma of clean cotton for a few seconds, and I fell asleep. My dreams were a restless jumble at first, but then I dreamed that Nolan Parris was helping Daisy Burgess build stinkbug traps.
Chapter 16
I slept soundly until about four that afternoon. A car door slammed and I opened one eye and looked at my watch. Other than that I didn’t move.
What the hell. Nothing was going to happen up on Quebrada Mesa. That sorry patch of ground was sealed tight. Sheriff Tate’s staff had notified the victims’ next of kin. The medical examiner in the city would release the bodies to the families when every last t was crossed and i dotted. And Estelle didn’t need to worry about Nolan Parris…he wasn’t going anywhere.
I stretched and found a new ache. In the distance I heard a telephone ring and then quiet voices. I rolled onto my back and covered my eyes with one arm. Maybe we’d have a quiet dinner and go to bed early. We’d see Parris in the morning.
By then the Social Services office would be open and Estelle could turn Daisy’s case over to them if Parris balked about custody. That sounded pretty good. I enjoyed the illusion for another two minutes.
At six minutes after four a knuckle rapped on my bedroom door.
“Yo!” I called. I put my hand behind my neck and raised my head a little. The door opened and Estelle looked in. I was surprised to see she was in uniform. “What’s up?”
“There’s been a hunting accident over on the west side of the pueblo. The pueblo police asked us to assist. You want to come?”
“Sure,” I answered with more enthusiasm than I felt. I swung my feet off the bed and pulled on my boots, shoved the clip of the slip-on holster over my belt, and wondered for a minute where the hell I’d put my hat. I got up and walked out into the living room.
“Here,” Estelle said, holding the Stetson out to me.
“This means no dinner again, doesn’t it?”
“We’ll catch something,” she said cheerfully. “Anyway, we won’t be long. It’s not our case. We’re just assisting Buddy Vallo.”
I got into the car and noticed that Francis Guzman’s Isuzu was gone.
“Is Francis already out there?”
Estelle nodded.
“Who was it? Do you know?”
“No. Paul Garcia called dispatch and asked for me. That’s all I know.”
“You get tangled up in reservation jurisdiction, and you’ll be there forever,” I muttered.
“Well, they have only two officers,” Estelle said. “Buddy is chief…he’s Mary Vallo’s husband…Francis’s nurse? And Buddy has one assistant who works nights. Sometimes that’s not enough.”
I didn’t bother to remind her that there was only one of her for the entire northwest end of the county.
We skirted what looked like the main residential area of Isidro Pueblo. There wasn’t an extra square inch of packed dust to spare. Low, brown adobes that had been settling into the hard earth for centuries lined the single-track roadway.
Estelle slowed down. There were lots of children and they watched us go by with eyes wide. We headed for the river.
The crossing was one of those upside-down bridges where the engineers make a concrete dip through the riverbed. When the river is rolling, nobody crosses. It’s that simple. I could have jumped across the trickle of water that day.
The road turned south, following the river for a quarter of a mile before turning west again around a series of rolling hills that formed the base of Chuparrosa Mesa.
I relaxed as we poked along at forty miles an hour on a road designed for ten. The road forked again, one path going up through the hills. Estelle took the other, keeping to the flatland. We angled away from the river toward the vast, open country that stretched virtually unblemished to the Arizona border. The patrol car crested an abrupt rise and bounced down hard enough to scrape the undercarriage.
The road ran along the rim of a deep arroyo, and up ahead I saw Guzman’s Isuzu, Paul Garcia’s Suburban, and a white Chevy Blazer with government plates. Well off the road, its wheels less than a yard from the arroyo edge, was another vehicle, an old and battered International Scout.
We slid to a stop. So deep was this erosion cut that I couldn’t see the bottom until I stepped out of the car. Fifty yards up the arroyo I saw the officers. Estelle’s hand-held radio crackled.
“Estelle, there’s a spot behind you guys where you can get down into the arroyo. If you walk up the far side, you won’t disturb anything.”
Estelle waved a hand. We found where both Paul, Francis, and the Indian cop had slid down through the loose sand, and we followed their tracks up the arroyo bed.
The body was lying facedown, close to the arroyo side, with fresh sand from the edge both under and on top of the corpse. He was an Indian, maybe eighteen or twenty, broad-shouldered, and husky bordering on fat.
Estelle stood on the opposite side of the arroyo and looked first at the body, then at the area. I know she would have preferred that everyone had stayed well away until she had arrived, but the damage had been done. The Indian policeman watched us but made no move to walk over to meet us.
“Hello, Buddy,” Estelle called, and he nodded a greeting. He was of indeterminate age, moon-faced, and short. My first impression was one of great patience. I guess he’d have to be patient, working law enforcement in an area the size of an average cattle ranch. I’d have been bored to pudding in a month. He stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the arroyo bank, watching the doctor.
Francis Guzman knelt just beyond the corpse’s feet, waiting for Estelle’s undivided attention.
“What killed him?” I asked, walking across the arroyo.
“A single gunshot wound under the chin,” Guzman said. When he saw Estelle step closer, he stood up and gently pulled the corpse’s shoulder, rolling the body just enough so that we could see the weapon underneath. It was one of those stubby little.22 auto-loaders.
“See the hand?” Francis asked. The man’s index finger was still in the trigger guard and was twisted awkwardly.
When the victim had fallen, he’d clenched onto that rifle out of reflex. He’d have been better off to drop it. Sometime during the fall, probably when he’d crashed to the arroyo bottom, he’d jerked the trigger.
The small bullet had torn into his throat on the right side of the Adam’s apple. He’d bled profusely from the mouth, and Guzman added, “It angled up…almost straight up. Through the roof of his mouth and into the brain.”
“It looks like he fell when the edge of the arroyo caved in,” Estelle said.
“That’s what I guessed,” Buddy said. I squinted at his name tag and read Rupert Vallo.
“Who called it in?”
“I found him myself,” Paul Garcia said. He was on quite a roll.
Estelle looked sharply at him. “What were you doing over here?”
When she said that, the corner of Buddy Vallo’s mouth twitched just a little. Indian pueblos were sovereign, each with its own police department. We were careful not to trespass on their turf unless asked. Their lead agency for the serious stuff was the Federal Bureau of Investigation-and who the hell wanted to mess with their paperwork.