“You want your camera?”
“Please. And the tarp from the back of the truck.”
Estelle stepped close to the bank, caught the little digital camera and then the packaged blue tarp. She took a moment to thread the nylon camera case onto her belt, then trudged far down the arroyo to the far side, where she could look back at the entire scene.
“He swerved very hard,” Estelle said. “The measurements are going to be interesting.”
“How so?” Gastner squatted a yard back from the arroyo edge.
“How fast would he have to be going to go airborne over that rise, do you suppose?”
Gastner turned and regarded the trail. “Fairly fast, I would think. And then he hit that rock outcropping. Powee.”
“And that turned him to the left.”
“You bet. And over the edge he goes.”
Estelle’s cell phone chirped.
“Guzman.”
“Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. “What do you have?” The sheriff had been in court in Las Cruces, but Estelle could hear traffic in the background.
“We have Freddy Romero, Bobby. He put his four-wheeler into an arroyo off Bender’s Canyon Trail sometime yesterday.” The sheriff digested that in silence. “It looks like the machine crushed him on the bounce,” Estelle added.
“He by himself?”
“Yes.”
“Drinking?”
“I don’t think so. It looks like he jumped a little rise in the trail, you know, like a moto-cross rider might. He managed to collect a rock somehow. The left front tire of the ATV is torn open, and Padrino found the initial strike mark on the rock.”
She heard a long, slow exhalation of breath. “The folks are still up in Albuquerque with Butch,” Torrez said.
“And that’s not going really well. He’ll lose the eye, and that’s if he’s lucky. And por Dios, now this. I asked Gayle to contact APD for an assist. They’ll send over a chaplain.”
“All right. Look, I’m on the interstate right now. I’ll be out there in a bit. I got cut loose early from court.”
“How did it go?”
“A waste of time,” the sheriff replied, without amplification. “I’m just goin’ up the hill out of Cruces now, so it’ll be an hour. How far in are you?”
“We took the trail behind the bar,” Estelle said. “We were following Freddy’s tracks. He parked over on the Borracho Springs road, then drove the ATV over here. We’re just a little bit east of the intersection on Bender’s. Just beyond the window.”
“Be there in a bit.” He rang off without further comment. Estelle pocketed the phone and looked across at Gastner, who now stood with one hip propped against the Expedition’s front fender as he surveyed the country through binoculars.
“There’s a cattle trail on down about a hundred yards,” he called, and lowered the binoculars to point. “You have plenty of cattle tracks in the bottom here, so we can guess there’s another trail up and out somewhere.”
“You don’t have an extension ladder in your hip pocket, sir?”
Gastner laughed. “Wish I did. Look, I’m going to mosey on up here a ways and see what’s to see.”
Estelle continued her photographic survey until she was convinced that no secrets remained in the arroyo itself, then walked back to the ATV. She unpackaged the tarp and snapped it out, then covered Freddy Romero’s body.
She turned her attention to the jumble of bent and twisted plastic and metal. The damage suggested that the four wheeler had burst over the rim of the arroyo and crashed nose-first to the bedrock of the arroyo bottom a dozen feet below. The left front suspension had taken most of the impact, crushed backward and upward so hard that the handlebars had been balled into junk, torn back on top of the rumpled gas tank.
The initial impact had somersaulted the rig, the rack behind the seat pounding into the arroyo bottom and the back of Freddy Romero’s skull. The machine’s final resting place was nine feet from the body, the ATV resting flat on its back, bent suspension turned to the sky like a dead beetle. A large patch of gasoline had leaked out to stain the rock and sand.
Estelle knelt and touched the left front wheel. It was jammed back against the frame and would not spin freely. The damage to the tire began an inch or so toward the rim from the tread. Had the tire struck the rock with its knobby tread, Freddy might have had a survivable wild ride with the bounce.
The undersheriff set the little camera on macro and took photographs of the tear, showing the rock particles imbedded in the rubber. The rock had opened the tire’s sidewall like an enormous, rough can opener right to the rim, where the aluminum was dented and torn.
The force of the impact would have jolted the ATV savagely to one side, and there had been no time for Freddy to correct.
“A hundred yards that-a-way,” Bill Gastner called from the rim. He pointed up the arroyo. “Cow trail makes it easy for you.”
“What else did you find?”
“Well, trajectory, I guess. I’ll show you when you come up.”
“I’m on my way.” Estelle trudged back up the arroyo, wanting to stop and turn around at each step. The last thing she wanted to do was leave Freddy Romero face down in the gravel, ruined and alone.
The cattle always found the easiest route, and over the decades, their hooves cut and packed long, diagonal trails that criss-crossed the arroyo banks, bringing them to shade, to protection from the elements, to the rare standing puddles that remained for a few hours after a cloudburst. Dodging the cow patties, Estelle climbed out of the arroyo. Bill Gastner met her by the two-track.
“You all right?”
“Sure, I’m fine.” She wasn’t fine, and that there was nothing she could do to make things right just added to it. She paused and took a deep breath, surveying the open country. “Freddy was ten when they moved into their house on Twelfth,” she said. “Butch was six.” She let it go at that, knowing that Padrino understood her anguish perfectly.
“Well, this is what he did,” Gastner said. He turned and pointed back up the road, toward the rise that had catapulted the ATV to disaster. Just ahead of where they stood, a wide and deep quagmire, more than just a routine pothole, took up most of what had been the two-track. Fresh tracks had been cut on the side farthest from the arroyo edge. The sink collected runoff and became a rutted and slimy trap in the wet, and when dry, as it was now, presented a deep, jarring axle breaker.
Gastner turned and swept his arm in an arc. “He had a good run through here-flat and straight. He takes the route around it on the left going in, and retraces his route coming out. If he’d been going slower, he might have bounced right through the middle of it just for the hell of it, but not rippin’ the way he was.” Gastner walked across to the arroyo lip. “If he tries to skirt this sink on this side, he’s running too damn close to the edge. Now…” and he interrupted himself and walked across the sink, standing perpendicular to the road and facing Estelle and the arroyo. He held up both arms, pointing in each direction. “Look how narrow that two-track is when it crests that rise, sweetheart. All the rocks and brush, there isn’t much room. And there sure as hell isn’t any room for error. Freddy comes through here, and he’s intending to jump the hill. I mean, he came in that way, didn’t he?” He swept his arms again in an arc. “He comes through here, but he doesn’t want to end up in those rocks and trees there, on the uphill side of the trail, so after this pothole, he’s got to swing back pretty hard.”
“Show me the rock,” Estelle said.
“Sure enough.” She followed Gastner as he plodded up the slight grade. The ATV’s tracks were clear. Both coming and going, Freddy Romero had chosen the same route over this particular rise. At the crest of the hill, there were no ATV tracks. He’d felt comfortable enough that he’d used the little hill as a ramp, both coming and going.