I pushed open the door to 109 with the toe of my boot. Sheriff Martin Holman was leaning against the wall next to the window, his arms folded across his chest, threatening to crease his impeccable blue suit. His head was tilted in his characteristic “I’m listening closely” expression, and Dr. Francis Guzman was ticking a series of points off on his fingers. Standing near the door was a singularly bored-looking Deputy Howard Bishop.
Bishop turned and saw me and grinned, looking heavenward at the same time.
Holman held up a hand to halt Francis in midsentence as he saw us enter.
Bishop glanced at Pasquale and said, “Cut yourself shaving?” Pasquale had the good sense not to rise to the bait.
I took Bishop by the elbow and steered him toward the door. “We need a vehicle with fresh damage to the right front, and scrapes where it’s missing flat-black paint…like maybe a grill guard on a pickup. Find it for me, all right? Coordinate with Mitchell and Torrez.”
“Yeah, now wait a second,” Holman said, and strode across the room toward Estelle and me. Wesley Crocker was lying in the bed, watching the action with keen interest. He sure hadn’t had this much entertainment up north when he’d been digging postholes for Thomas Lawton. The crow’s feet around his eyes were deep against his tanned, leathery skin. He didn’t look like a patient.
Having been missing most of the day, I thought it best at that moment to let Holman finish one complete sentence.
“I wanted the deputy here, just in case,” Holman said. He glanced at Estelle and almost immediately flicked his eyes back to me. “I called him in here. I know everybody is tired and working triple time, but it just seemed like a good idea. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” I asked. Martin Holman spent most of his time fighting with the county commissioners over budget, something he was good at. He knew as well as I did how desperately shorthanded we were. The last thing we needed was one of our deputies sitting in a hospital room guarding the bedpans…especially when every one of the officers hadn’t slept in a day.
“Well,” Holman said, and waved a hand in desperation at my stupidity. “If someone tried to kill Mr. Crocker once, what’s to stop them from trying again?”
For a long moment, I looked at Martin Holman. He’d recently given up his gold-rimmed aviator glasses for contacts, and I would have sworn that he’d ordered the shade called “intense blue.” And despite the long day, his hair was still perfect. The gray in his sideburns had crept upward, level with the tops of his ears-just right for the campaign. Next to him, Estelle Reyes-Guzman looked about sixteen.
“First of all, Sheriff, we don’t know if it was a deliberate assault on Mr. Crocker.”
“Well, who’s going to just drive up on the curb and hit a pedestrian who’s walking along, minding his own business?”
“Anyone who isn’t paying attention,” I said. “And then they panic and leave the scene. It happens all the time.”
“But it could have been an attempt.”
“I suppose so. But what we need right now are officers out in the field, looking for the vehicle in question.”
“I still think that we should leave a guard.”
I inhaled as if I were sucking on a foot-long Cuban cigar and then let it out slowly, finding myself without the energy to argue. “Whatever,” I said, and walked over to Wesley Crocker’s bedside. “How are you?”
“Just a little sore, sir. The good doctor here worries too much.”
A ghost of a smile touched Francis Guzman’s face. “He’s got a badly torn ligament in his right knee,” he said, “and a broken right index finger.” Crocker held up the offending digit, now encased in an aluminum splint. “We’ve immobilized his knee with a cast, but we may have to go in and staple things back together. We’ll see.”
Wes Crocker frowned, but I doubted that it was the treatment, or even the pain of the injury, that worried him.
“How long is he going to need to stay here?” I asked.
Guzman rested a hand on the bed frame. “Just overnight. When someone his age takes a tumble like that, we want to make sure. I want to hold him for observation, just in case.”
And then what? I thought, but I didn’t say it. Instead I moved closer to the head of the bed and looked hard at Crocker. “And you didn’t see the vehicle?” I asked him.
“No, sir. I sure wish I could tell you what it looked like, but no, sir, I didn’t see it.”
Estelle Reyes-Guzman padded around to the other side of the bed, and Wes Crocker’s eyes tracked her as if she were coming toward him with a hypodermic needle.
“What did you hear?” she asked.
“Well,” Crocker said, and hesitated. “Nothing unusual, I guess.”
“The vehicle wasn’t particularly loud?”
“No, ma’am. In fact, maybe that’s why I never turned around. There was no reason to.”
“What about afterward, as the vehicle was accelerating away?” Estelle asked.
Crocker grinned sheepishly. “I was too busy goin’ end over end to notice, ma’am. But there wasn’t any big roar, or anything like that. I remember hearing the bike gettin’ all mangled. That was a hell of a screech, excuse the language. But it was.”
“What are the chances the vehicle is local?” Holman asked, and I glanced at Estelle.
“I suppose the chances are better than average,” I replied. “There isn’t much traffic on the interstate this time of year and this time of day, and few of them get off at Posadas to drive around our celebrated downtown.”
“What I meant was that if the vehicle is local, we shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. How many cars and trucks are there in town, anyway?”
“Probably only a thousand or two,” I said. “And now you know why I’d rather Deputy Bishop wasn’t tied up here.”
“I can stay here,” Thomas Pasquale said. He had spent the time standing quietly just inside the door.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.” It wasn’t the first time I’d saddled Pasquale with chair duty, but this was the first time he had volunteered.
I turned to Holman. “Give me ten minutes to talk with the officer”-I nodded at Pasquale-“and then I’ll be back down at the office. We’ll spread all the parts out on the table and see what we have.”
Holman nodded. “What about Mr. Crocker?”
“What about him?”
The sheriff grunted an impatient monosyllable and thrust his hands in his pockets. “When he’s released? Tomorrow morning, maybe?” He turned to Francis Guzman and the doctor nodded.
“Probably,” Francis Guzman said.
Holman turned back to me and raised his eyebrows. “Released to what? Where’s he going to stay? With you?” He meant it as a joke, of course.
I’d lived alone for more than a decade. I had never taken in a stray dog or cat, and I didn’t leave my porch light on at Halloween. Except for Francis and Estelle, I could count on one hand the number of people who’d spent more than a minute inside my front door. I treasured the deep, dark silence of my old house. I wasn’t about to break old habits and play nursemaid to a vagrant with a busted leg.
And so I was as surprised as anyone else when I said, “If it comes to that.” It was about as gracious an invitation as anyone was going to get.
17
We sat in the little conference room just kitty-corner from the nurses’ station. From there we could see down the hallway beyond Wes Crocker’s room…not that I expected to see a cadre of hit men in ski masks suddenly plunge out of the janitor’s closet at the end of the hall.
I pushed a cup of coffee across the table toward Thomas Pasquale. “You probably would do better with a stiff bourbon right now, but this will have to do.”
He accepted it without relish, but the Styrofoam cup gave his nervous fingers something to play with even if he wasn’t addicted to caffeine.