“No thanks.”
“What’s with Zeigler?” Fulkerson asked. “I assume that’s who you’re looking for. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cop cars roamin’ around the county.”
“I don’t know what’s with him,” Estelle said. “I wish we did.”
“You think someone dumped him up here?” The crow’s-feet around his sparkling blue eyes crinkled, and he winked-an expression that appeared now to be more of a tic than amused conspiracy.
“We’re checking every place we can think of,” Estelle said pleasantly. “You wouldn’t believe some of the nooks and corners of this county that we’ve found in the past day or so.”
“You know what I think?” He lit the cigarette with a strike match, popped expertly with a thumbnail. “I think he’s in Mexico.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“What makes you think that, sir?”
“Well, you think of the opportunity,” he said, his round, ruddy face settling into an expression of satisfaction, pleased that he should know the answers. “You think of all the money that guy handles in the course of his job.” He inhaled deeply. “That’s a heck of a temptation, don’t you think?”
“I suppose it could be.”
“Damn right.” Fulkerson arose, stretched up, and brought down the thermos. He unscrewed the cup and cap and poured. “You sure?”
“No thanks, sir. I’m not much of a coffee drinker.” A light aroma other than coffee, creamer, and sugar drifted out to Estelle’s nostrils.
Fulkerson spun the thermos cap back on, tossed the container back into its bed, and settled back against the dozer. “So that’s what I figure. Cut and run.” He took a thoughtful sip. “Mexico’s just only over the hill, right? I guess you know all about that.”
“Somehow I can’t picture Kevin Zeigler down in old Mexico,” Estelle said.
Fulkerson shrugged. “You never know what someone like that is going to do.”
“I suppose not.”
“’Course, nobody asks me.” He sipped the coffee, looked appreciative, and winked at Estelle again. “I keep tellin’ the president, there, you know, ‘Before you go doing something stupid, you just ask old Don, here.’ He never does.”
Estelle touched the toe of her shoe to the bulldozer’s track. “Tell me, then. What do you think happened?”
Fulkerson relaxed back and took a longer pull of the coffee, exhaling smoke at the same time through his nose. “Well, you know…it’s hard to say. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he just up and skipped. Like I say, there’s lots of opportunity.”
“But there aren’t bags of loose currency just lying around the county building, sir. Everything is done with purchase orders and checks.”
He looked at Estelle with sympathy at her lack of understanding. “There’s always ways, little lady. There’s always ways.”
“Did you happen to see him in the past couple of days?”
“Sure.” Fulkerson ground out the cigarette against a steel track cleat. “He come up here Tuesday early. And after that, we were all at the county meeting, wasting the rest of the day.”
“Do you remember what time he was here that morning?”
“Just after I got here. It’d be about seven-ten or so.”
“But you’re closed on Tuesdays. Did he drive up here for any particular reason?”
“Well, Tuesday was the commission meeting. I was up here getting some paperwork ready. Miss Ziggy had requested some facts and figures, and I guess he thought I might forget to bring ’em along. So he stopped by.”
“Miss Ziggy?”
Fulkerson’s face lost some of its Santa Claus innocence, and he let his smirk explain the nickname.
“And then he left with the paperwork, and that was it?”
“Yup.”
“Huh,” Estelle said, and shook her head. “You didn’t see him at any other time after that, other than at the meeting?”
“Just at the county meeting. You were there.” He winked.
“Did the two of you meet back here over the noon hour?”
Fulkerson frowned, his face wrinkling as if to say, “What, are you nuts?” “If he showed up here, he had the place to himself,” he said. “I had better things to do.”
“I noticed that the commissioners dumped the agenda item about the landfill,” Estelle said. “That was Mr. Zeigler’s brainchild, wasn’t it?”
“You can say that again,” Fulkerson said fervently. “What a goddamn waste of money that little boondoggle would have been.”
“So you don’t agree with him, then.”
“Sheeeit,” Fulkerson said with considerable disgust. “That’s the last thing a little county like this one needs is some outsider company running the landfill. Ziggy’s a fan of consolidation, ” he said, emphasizing the word as if it were a whiff of sulfur dioxide. “Stream line everything. Like the village giving up its police department. Now he’s got his hands on that. You just watch, young lady.” He winked knowingly. “You be careful of that one.”
Estelle watched an old, battered dump truck wheeze across the soft earth toward the growing pile.
“Why don’t they just back up to the pit and dump it in?” she asked, and Fulkerson turned to follow her gaze.
He laughed. “You give a jackass a chance to do something stupid, and he will, young lady. If we let ’em back up to the pit, sure as hell someone’s going to go too far.” He shrugged at the inevitability of it all. “It’s just easier to doze the pile into the pit at the end of the day than have to chain someone’s ass out of there.”
“Ah-I didn’t think about that.”
“We keep a watch on ’em, just the same. You tell ten folks where to go and where to dump, and nine of ’em will do like you say.”
“And then there’s number ten,” Estelle said.
“You got that exactly right.” He winked.
“I’d better let you get back to work,” Estelle said. She handed Fulkerson one of her cards. “Just in case.”
“Best of luck to you,” he said. “You need anything else, you know where we are.”
Instead of returning to her car, Estelle walked the fifty yards to the north edge of the pit, taking her time across the deep ruts chewed by the dozer. She reached the edge and looked down. Ravens working the pile ignored her, talking to each other about their discoveries, occasionally flapping up and out to perch on the boundary fence or soar off toward the mesa.
The landfill was no place for a retired bulldozer with no muscle, she reflected. The pit appeared to be about a hundred feet wide and perhaps three or four hundred feet long. The dozer had bladed at least twenty feet deep, right down to bedrock. Dirt from the original excavation had been pushed up and out the opposite end into a respectable mountain that, when the trench was full of refuse, would be bladed back as fill and cover.
At the moment, the pit had swallowed a tiny fraction of its capacity. Maybe it would be months before Fulkerson had to gouge another trench parallel to this one. She knew that the county owned nearly a thousand acres, enough to bury trash for a long, long time.
Estelle thrust her hands in her pockets, paying attention to the edge of the pit. Far in the bottom where it had bounced clear was a baby carriage. From a distance, there appeared to be little wrong with it. Estelle wondered if it would appear on Fulkerson’s table at the Las Cruces flea market.
The aroma from the pile was moderate, but as the sun baked and fried, and by the time the dozer pushed a blanket of soil over the week’s offerings, the effluvia would pack a punch.
The sides of the trench were neatly cut and perfectly vertical. In two places, Estelle saw telltale gouges where someone-the one out of ten-had backed too close, crumbling the edge. Most of the refuse was bagged household trash, but Estelle could see where a few customers had managed to ignore directions. A handful of tires were mixed in with the rest, instead of making it to the recycling pile. An old refrigerator, facedown in the dirt, had been pitched in before either Bart or Don could direct it toward the appliance mountain. Twenty feet from the growing pile, a huge tree stump had crashed into the pit and rolled to a stop.