He nodded a greeting and then, as I started to step by, asked, “Much hassle getting over the border and back?”
“Depends what you’re trying to smuggle across,” I said. I didn’t crack a smile, and he blanched, then tried a weak laugh. I fumbled for a cigarette, and when he saw that it wasn’t cuffs I was reaching for, he decided I was kidding.
“Me and the missus are going over tomorrow, unless it’s a hassle; then to hell with it, you know what I mean?”
“It’s no hassle,” I said, and lit the cigarette. “Just follow the rules. Stick with the limits. No problems at all. Very pleasant people.”
“Oh, yeah?” He sounded relieved.
“Yes.” I fed him the usual customs line. “Just remember that our laws are not their laws.” If he read the little Border Patrol pamphlet they’d hand him twenty-five miles south at the Regal port of entry, he’d see it in print.
Joe Tourist looked a little more interested. “You lived in these parts for some time?”
“Twenty years.”
“Much drug running?”
I shrugged. “Same as anywhere along the border. Probably not as much as in Cleveland.” One of his eyebrows shot up, so I must have been close. “Have a pleasant trip.” I took a seat by the window. The lights outside illuminated the interchange, and I watched the traffic for a little while, sipping the tea. If the village was popping off fireworks, the displays were out of view, behind the motel. I enjoyed two minutes of peace and quiet before Tina, the waitress, came to my table to tell me I was wanted on the telephone.
The dispatcher that night, Gayle Sedillos, was efficient. She knew my hangouts, and was as astute as Miracle Murton was stupid. I said, “Gastner,” and she said, “Bob Torrez wants your help with a motor vehicle accident. He called for two ambulances already. County Road 43, one mile south of the lake.”
“I’m on my way.” I left the coffee shop without paying and seconds later 310 spun parking lot gravel and then chirped onto pavement, engine bellowing. Not more than ten seconds later, Torrez was on the radio.
“Three-ten, three-oh-seven. Ten-twenty?”
“Three-ten ETA in six minutes.” That was optimistic, since the lake was twelve miles away. But most of it was open road, and the Ford could sit fat and comfortable at a hundred.
Torrez acknowledged, then added, “Strawberry jam.” He’d been a deputy for five years, and in that time had acquired his share of the graveyard humor that kept us all sane. And I knew what he meant, as did anyone else who knew him even a little and was listening to the scanner. I cussed and backed off a little as I flashed through an intersection, then punched 310 hard up the hill.
The wrecked car had been heading downhill when it shot off the outside of a gradual sweeping curve. As I pulled to a stop, I could see in the glare of my headlights where the tires had first scattered the loose cinders of the shoulder. It was a Firebird, maybe six or seven years old, the kind with the big decal on the hood. One of the emergency units had arrived, but the scanner ghouls hadn’t, so there were no spectators underfoot yet. I heard the wail of other sirens as I scrambled down the bank, my way illuminated by the spotlights from above. The car had been airborne for the better part of 160 feet. Then it hit a rock outcrop and stopped dead, pounded into shapeless junk. The rescue crew was working with the gas-powered jaws and a half dozen wrecking bars. Torrez’s face was pale.
“They ran,” he said to me between breaths. He was working to tear a mangled door ajar. His bare hands and the wrecking bar weren’t going to do the job. “They were up at the lake, and I rolled in. I pulled up behind ’em just to check, you know, and they lit out. I stayed well back, ’cause I didn’t want this to happen.”
“You’re going to have to go in from the other side,” I said, and looked back up the bank.
“They were doin’ at least a hundred, sir. Had to have been.”
I could hear the hot, twisted metal pinging gently as it cooled. “How many?” I asked. The car was partially on its side, nosed into the rock like a big missile. From mangled plastic in front to the tip of its cooling exhausts, the wreck was now no more than ten feet long.
“We’re not sure yet,” Torrez said. “Can’t see nothin’.”
“Christ,” I muttered. I scrambled over rocks and through weeds to where one of the emergency medical technicians worked the power jaws.
“I can reach one here,” he shouted, and other hands took the jaws. He almost had to lie down to see. “A touch more,” he shouted, and the jaws groaned metal a fraction of an inch. “I can see most of it now. Shit.” There was a moment of silence, punctuated only by the idling motor of the jaws. We saw him twist a little, and then I caught a glimpse of light from his flashlight through a small crack.
“How many?” I shouted to him.
“Five,” he replied. “At least I think it’s five.” He wormed his way back out, looking sick. “You’ll have to peel the lid off, Bart,” he yelled. The car had hit so hard that it had folded in the middle. The roof had crumpled in, and I guessed that the top of the fire wall was no more than three feet from the back deck.
The EMTs continued to struggle, and I worked my way back up the bank. Gayle Sedillos had already called Emerson Clark, the coroner, and Detective Estelle Reyes. I made sure one of the deputies was available to help old man Clark down to the wreck scene when he arrived, and then I met Estelle Reyes as her car rolled to a stop. If she was apprehensive, she didn’t show it.
“You need a hand with anything?” I asked as she hauled a briefcase and a small suitcase out of the county car’s trunk. She was a small, slender girl, but it wasn’t her physical strength that I was worried about.
“No,” she said, already looking for the best route down the hill. I let her go, and corralled Howard Bishop into managing traffic and the growing ring of spectators. The scanner ghouls were out in force now. In another ten minutes, there would be no place to park along the shoulder of the road. Most of the curious stood back where we told them, quiet and shocked. Some wanted to know who was in the car, some just wanted to look at mangled flesh.
As the EMTs took the car apart, Estelle Reyes’s electronic flash ripped harsh light into the car again and again. Eventually enough metal was can-openered loose so that we could make some progress. Clark arrived. He was a semi-retired orthopedic surgeon, and a damn good coroner. He stood grimly by, and as the victims were reached, he stepped forward and pronounced them, one after the other, dead. Reyes took more pictures. I could see that figuring out where each one had been sitting before the impact wasn’t going to be easy. In this case, the only obvious one was the driver himself. Not content with the original, he’d bought a new steering wheel at one of those discount houses. The spokes were cheap spring steel. They hadn’t broken, but the spokes had folded forward as the heavy engine drove the column back. It was difficult to pull the kid off the steering column, since the fancy hub of the steering wheel had tangled in the remains of his seat back after crushing through his chest. The EMTs were still working to remove him when I heard shouts up on the road. I glanced up and saw Bishop, illuminated in the headlights, physically restraining Benny Fernandez. I scrambled up the bank.
“Benny,” I shouted over his babbling, “we’re not going to let you go down there.”
“Ricky,” he sobbed, and lunged toward the bank. Bishop hugged him still.
“We’ll do all we can, Benny,” I said, and helped Bishop carry the man away from the shoulder of the road, guiding him toward my car.
Someone came up and started talking to Fernandez, and I snapped, “Get out of here.” I held Benny’s arm. “Get in the car, Benny.”
“They called me at the store,” he said. “They said it was his car.”
“It’s his car, Benny.” I silently cursed the idiot who thought he was doing the man a favor. It’s bad enough when a cop and a priest pound on the door at two in the morning. There was no call for this.