“Christ, you look awful,” he said.
“I think the next person who tells me that is going to get punched,” I said. I pushed past his bulk and patted him on the arm at the same time. “Hewitt’s out of surgery. The nurse says it will be at least six hours before we can see him.”
“The best we could hope for,” Chief White said slowly. “His parents are on their way from Tucson.”
I nodded. “I’m going to go across the street to the motel and spend some of the county’s money for a bed,” I said. “Give me a call if anything changes. Otherwise I’ll be back around suppertime.”
***
The walk revived me a little…just long enough to attend to chores. Half a block down the main drag I bought a pack of underwear and a pair of socks at an Army-Navy store. At the motel, I talked the taciturn desk clerk into having the maid run my uniform across to the one-hour dry cleaner’s. I called Posadas and filled Holman in.
“Bill, hang on a minute,” Holman said at one point. “Estelle wants to talk to you.”
Her voice was soft on the phone, and I had to concentrate to hear. “If you fly down with Sprague tomorrow, talk with him about his daughter,” Estelle suggested. “She overdosed in January of last year. His wife apparently left him a couple months after that. The interesting thing is that according to a couple of people I talked to, one of Darlene Sprague’s best friends was Jenny Barrie.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody.”
“I just think it’s interesting that Doc Sprague’s daughter OD’d, and then one of her good friends dies, involved with drugs as well.”
“You’re saying Barrie is our connection?”
“No, I’m not. It’s just something, that’s all. It might be interesting to lead the doctor that way, and see what he says.”
“I’ll see,” I said.
“The sheriff wants to talk to you again. Hang on.”
The connections clicked and then Sheriff Holman said, “Bill, I’m making a request of some of the other people that we set up an interagency task force here. We thought we could take the simple, limited approach, but it didn’t work. I think a mass undercover operation might flush something out.”
“It might.”
“You don’t sound overwhelmed with enthusiasm.”
“Not right now, I’m not. I’m too damn tired to think straight.”
“Well, when you get back here, we’ll talk about it.”
“Fine. Tomorrow, probably.” We rang off and I headed for bed. With all its heavy curtains, the motel room was dark as night, and I burrowed in. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes later that the phone rang.
I had been sleeping so hard that I jerked almost upright. Four rings later I managed to find the damn thing.
“Uh?”
“Sheriff Gastner? Chief White.”
I rolled on my back and stared up into the darkness. “Yes.”
“Art Hewitt died a couple minutes ago.”
For several seconds I didn’t say anything. Finally I shifted the phone and mumbled, “Did his parents ever make it up from Tucson?”
“They were with him.”
“Okay. I’ll be over in a minute.” I hung up and rolled my legs off the bed until I was sitting. I dialed the front desk and asked that someone check on my uniform. The puzzled desk attendant replied that it had been placed at my door some time ago. I retrieved the bundle and tossed it on the bed. Then I went to the heavily curtained window, pushed the draperies aside a little and looked outside. I was stunned to find the street lights on and the sky inky.
I let the draperies fall and found the light switch. My watch said nine thirty-seven. I stared at it and then muttered something profane. A few minutes later I was dressed. I buckled on my Sam Browne belt and glanced in the mirror. I saw an aging cop with bags under his eyes. That didn’t concern me. I was thinking about the son of a bitch who had brought that kilo of cocaine into Posadas. The death of five kids I blamed on him. And Benny Fernandez. Now Art Hewitt. “You got seven, you bastard. No more.”
The hospital seemed a lot quieter when I walked in for the second time that day.
Chapter 13
It was shortly before midnight when I returned to my motel room. The desk clerk looked up, saw me and reached into the cubbyhole for room 207.
“The gentleman who telephoned said to be sure you got this,” the clerk said helpfully, and I took the small message. It was from Sprague.
Sheriff: I’ll be flying back to Posadas first thing in the morning. Leave a message for me if you want a ride. Flight time anytime after 9 A. M. Plane is at Sultan Flying Service at the Inter-national. Sorry about Hewitt.
“He made me read it back to him word for word, so I know it’s right,” the desk clerk said. For the first time I noticed how young he was…probably a high school kid earning a few extra bucks.
“Thanks,” I said. I handed him five dollars. “And thanks for getting it right. It was important. And will you set up a wake-up call for seven-thirty?”
“Sure thing.” He tucked the money away and wrote out a time note to stick in the slotted board behind him.
I called the Hilton and left a message for Sprague that nine o’clock would be fine. After more than an hour of tossing and turning, I fell asleep. I awoke only once, apprehensive as hell about nothing. I lay still, listening. Normal street traffic rumbled up and down Central Avenue. In the distance, a jet thundered off to the west. By turning my head slightly, I could see the faint glow of my watch. Four-sixteen. The air-conditioner kicked on. About time, I thought. The room was stuffy, the air filled with the cloying aroma of that gunk that room maids spray in an effort to make things smell better than Calcutta streets. My mind drifted from one thing to another, and the outside world began to fade a little. The wake-up call interrupted a dream in which Harlan Sprague was vehemently telling Posadas Airport manager Jim Bergin that cracked aircraft engine pistons could be detected with a stethoscope, if only Bergin would take time to listen carefully enough.
***
I watched the mountain just west of Socorro slide by smoothly. “There are towers on top of every mountain in the southwest,” I said, and Sprague laughed shortly.
“Seems like it, sometimes, doesn’t it.”
“As long as we clear them all.” There was little cause for concern. The Cessna obviously had power to spare, and Sprague was evidently not the sort to buzz treetops. I turned from the window and winced a little. I pulled at the knot of my tie and took a deep breath. The discomfort, nothing more than an annoying fullness that seemed to settle behind my sternum, subsided after a few seconds.
“You all right?” Sprague asked.
I nodded. “So the conference was a bust, huh?”
“Total,” Sprague said. “A new low in boredom.” He heard something through his headset and said, “Mike Bravo one seventy-eight.” Immediately he reached forward and changed radio frequencies, then took off the headset and put it on the floor just in front of his seat. “Some peace and quiet,” he said. “If I can’t find Posadas in this kind of weather, something’s wrong. I get tired of all the yammering.”
The sky was magnificently clear, cloudless and the sort of deep blue that always made me think that some of the black of outer space was leaking through. We made a slight turn and then the Cessna settled into a straight course for Posadas. We sat without conversation for another ten minutes, each caught up in our own thoughts, content to watch the rumpled geologic oddities of New Mexico slide by.
“He never regained consciousness, did he,” Sprague said. I just shook my head. Sprague puffed out his cheeks and let out the air in a loud sigh like a leaky tire. “At least he didn’t suffer.” I didn’t respond to that. I could have said that lying in the wet grass of a village park with his insides torn to pieces was pretty close to my definition of suffering. And who the hell knows what the unconscious, or semi-conscious, mind thinks as first one set of synapses and then another shuts down. It sure as hell ain’t party-time, Doc. But I didn’t say any of that, because Sprague didn’t deserve it.