He started with mock horror. “You’d do that, Gramps?”
“Certainly. Let them try to feed you. Probably bankrupt the county.”
***
I slept so hard I awoke soaked with sweat, feeling as if I’d been slugged. The old adobe house was dark as pitch, and I turned to stare at the digital clock on the nightstand. By squinting hard and really concentrating, I could make out that it was after ten. I got up, showered and put on fresh clothes. The hall light near the front door was on so that Hewitt wouldn’t stumble over the uneven floor bricks and break his neck. I left it on and went out. The air was velvety soft, black as pitch with no moon and no streetlights on my block. Not a breath of moving air stirred the cottonwoods that formed a thick umbrella over my house.
I slid into 310 and turned on the radio. It was silent. I almost pressed the mike to go 10-8, but decided against it. Miracle Murton was working, and if he knew I was out on the road, he’d do his level best to find something for me to do. Let him live in blissful ignorance…as usual.
Grande Boulevard dropped out of Posadas toward the east, and as I drove 310 out past the lumberyard, D’Anzo Chrysler-Plymouth, Laundromats, junk shops, tourist traps, and motels, and Benny Fernandez’s burger joint right in the middle of them all, I chuckled. There were about ten youngsters lounging around that parking lot, including a group of four who sat on the hood of a big 4-by-4 suburban. Leaning against the fender of that same vehicle, looking at home like the rest of them, was my “grandson.” Maybe he would do some good after all.
In another block, I had proof that the kid worked fast. The village police car idled out of a side street, another part-time patrolman at the wheel. The car was comically wall-eyed, its right headlamp skewed downward. I didn’t want to be on the radio just then, but someone would tell him before the night was over, I was sure. The village was his problem, not mine. The village department was tiny, but the cops were sensitive. We always had to be careful not to step on their turf, unless asked. My plan was to swing east, gradually taking in the top half of the county.
“Three-oh-eight, PCS. Ten-twenty?”
“PCS, three-oh-eight. I’m about three miles up County Road 43, northbound.”
I listened to the exchange with interest. Bob Torrez couldn’t help sniffing around the accident site. He wanted to find something as bad as any of us.
“Ah, ten-four,” Dispatcher Murton said, and there was a long pause while Miracle’s brain churned. Predictably, he then went through the same routine with Howard Bishop in 307. Bishop responded that he was twenty-one miles southwest of Posadas, which meant he was probably cruising through the little hamlet of Regal. Even Miracle Murton could figure out that Torrez was closer to home. “Ah, three-oh-eight, swing around and ten-sixty-two at Chavez Chevrolet-Olds.”
“Ten-four.” As it happened, there was little that we, or any department, could do about the folks who sat in front of their scanners, listening to our dull number routines. With a half-measure of diligent listening, anyone could know with fair accuracy what we were doing at any given time. That in itself wasn’t so bad, unless the person had the scanner in his car, which was illegal but convenient. Only the big metro sheriffs’ departments had good patrol coverage, especially during the night hours. One deputy, or even none, to cover several hundred square miles was not unusual for us.
On impulse, I swung around and headed north, intercepting County Road 43 just as Torrez flashed by. My radio barked twice as Torrez keyed the mike to acknowledge that he’d seen me. And now any chance was better than none. If someone roaming up on the hill was listening to a scanner, he now knew that both deputies were busy and that he was as safe as church. In a few minutes, I passed Consolidated’s mill. The road was deserted. I slowed down to fifteen, punched off the headlights, lowered the windows and turned off the air-conditioning. The radio crackled, and I reached down and turned it off, too. Smooth as silk, 310 purred up the road, and after a minute my eyes adjusted to the faint light cast by the single small bulb on the underside of the left front bumper-a light Holman liked to call my “perpetrator light.” Hell, it was rinky-dink, but it worked. It threw just enough light in this case to catch the orange center line of the macadam road. The quarter-moon was peeking over the mesa, and before long I could make out outlines here and there.
Two miles below the lake, I damn near rear-ended a parked car. I swerved just in time, not so much because they were almost on the highway but because the sudden shape had taken me by surprise. I could see, faintly silhouetted as I went by, two heads merged as one low on the passenger side. After continuing on a few feet, I stopped, knowing that the flash of my brake lights would spring the two apart. I backed up the Ford until my windows were even with theirs and swiveled the spotlight until it bounced off the hood of their car. I could see clearly the two young guilt-washed faces. The girl was Beth Paige, a kid who worked as an office receptionist for the Forest Service. The boy was a stranger.
I looked Ms. Paige in the eye and asked, “Are you all right, miss?”
It was hard to tell in the harsh bouncing glare of the spotlight, but I’m sure she blushed. “Yes, officer,” she said, and managed a sheepish grin.
I wasn’t too bad at reading faces, and hers told me things were fine. “You might find a safer place to park,” I said. The boy nodded, and had the good sense not to retort that it might be safer if I would turn on my headlights. The spotlight snapped off and I cruised 310 on up the road. I glanced in the rearview and didn’t see any motion. No point in appearing too eager to comply, I suppose.
A few minutes later, gravel crunched under the tires as I swung in the lake road. Even if it’s washed with a full moon, there’s nothing much darker to me than an old quarry. That night, there was no full moon. The water was just a dull, black, shadowless hole. With 310 blocking the road, I turned on the spotlight. The beam lanced out and touched rock palisades, water, trees…and shiny metal. The car was parked well back in the shadows, and I wouldn’t have seen it at all with normally aimed headlights. I didn’t linger with the beam, but let it pass on by. Even in the brief flash, I had recognized the car. Without rolling forward, I turned on the radio and reached for the mike.
“PCS, three-ten.”
Gayle Sedillos’s voice cracked back, bless her. She must have come in early, and had taken over from Miracle. I told her where I was and that I would be 11–96 with Yankee Charlie Xray 136. She wouldn’t bother to run the plate, since the number was on a small note on the bulletin board right above the radio.
“Ten-four, three-ten,” she said crisply. “Three-oh-eight, did you copy?”
“Three-oh-eight, ten-four.” Torrez sounded unexcited. “I’m ten-eight.”
I had ten minutes, or less. I was willing to bet my pension, such as it was, that Torrez was more than just “in service.” He would be on his way through town and up County Road 43, covering the ground a whole lot faster than I had. If the two neckers were still parked on the shoulder, his jet wash was just a few minutes away from rocking their locked lips apart.
People park in the midnight timber for several reasons, but only one or two fit Benny Fernandez that night. If he was out cheating on his wife, I was going to be embarrassed and so was he. But I didn’t even consider that the occupants of the Cordoba might include the steely-faced Mrs. Fernandez.
A Forest Service access road allowed me to circle around so that I could park a few yards behind Fernandez’s Cordoba. The duct tape plastered over the patrol car’s dome light eliminated the blast of light when I opened the door. I walked slowly toward the Cordoba, letting my eyes adjust as much as they could. Benny knew I was coming-unless he was blind drunk or dead. And he would have heard me idle up behind him, as quiet as the night was.