In his own car, he could observe events and then call in the troops if need be. But folks expected that a marked police car would respond in an appropriate fashion-and not next week. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared if the good sheriff had ridden a palomino horse through downtown while he was dressed only in his Stetson. But the bizarre deaths of Maria Ibarra and Manny Orosco had trashed all of our normal circumstances.
I considered driving east and baby-sitting, but the last thing I wanted was for Vanessa Davila to slip back home, grab her bag, and head for Mexico.
Radio traffic was slow. Deputy Howard Bishop plodded his way around the county without a word. In sharp contrast, Eddie Mitchell’s clipped eastern accent kept the dispatcher busy with routine license plate checks. He was fond of driving through the parking lot of a restaurant or bar and reeling off plate numbers of vehicles he didn’t recognize for NCIC checks.
A few minutes before midnight, I heard both Bishop and Mitchell call in their mileage to dispatch and request that the gasoline pump be turned on. Any blockhead with a scanner knew then that the county was lying quiet and wide open.
Tom Mears went on duty a couple of minutes later, and dispatcher Erie Wheeler went home, replaced by T. C. Barnes, a former county highway department employee who’d managed to smash himself in the tailgate of one of the county’s dump trucks. He was slow, steady, and as dependable as they came. He worked nights part-time for us while his wife worked at the hospital.
After Tom Mears’s initial radio check, the county went quiet…so quiet I found myself wondering if the paint had dried yet on my kitchen window.
At 12:32 A.M., Martin Holman’s voice startled me.
“PCS, three-oh-seven. We’ve got an MVA just west of the Bar N B gate.” He sounded reasonably sure of himself. Maybe he’d rehearsed.
“Ten-four, three-oh-seven,” Barnes said. “Are you requesting an ambulance?”
“Ten-four, PCS.”
“And three-oh-eight, did you copy?”
I could hear the roar of Mear’s car in the background as he keyed the mike. “Ten-four, PCS.”
I looked across at the dark mobile home, weighing my options.
“Three-oh-seven, this is three-ten.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when Holman answered. I could hear his siren in the background. “Three-oh-seven.” He was breathing hard.
“Martin, what have you got there?”
“Three-ten, it looks like somebody went off the road just past the Baca place. They hit one of those big boulders. The school bus is stopped, too. We’re going to have the whole cavalcade here in a minute.”
“Shit,” I said and then keyed the mike. “Three-oh-seven, three-oh-eight is on his way. He’s about six minutes out. Was the bus involved in the accident?”
“I don’t think so, three-ten.”
“If the bus wasn’t involved, make sure that the occupants stay inside the bus. Inside the vehicle.”
“Ten-four.”
“If the bus was involved, make sure that all oncoming traffic is blocked, and that ambulatory occupants are escorted away from the bus, and away from the highway. No stragglers. Keep them in a tight group.”
“Ten-four, three-ten.”
The rest would have to depend on Sheriff Holman’s common sense. I pulled my car into gear and cursed again. We didn’t need a mess just now. We’d taken a step forward by discovering that Vanessa Davila existed. Now we were running backward.
I accelerated out onto Grande Avenue and turned on my emergency lights. The street was deserted, and I straddled the center line, giving myself all the choice there could be.
The town seemed to drag on forever until I broke free on County Road 43, heading up the hill toward the intersection with the state highway. The road was wide and clear, and I accelerated until an out-of-round front tire began to shake the steering wheel.
State Highway 78 split the northern part of the county as it came in from the northwest, dropping down past the airport and out toward the tiny hamlet of San Pasquale to the east. Ned Baca’s Bar N B Ranch straddled the county line, something that I’m sure drove the assessors of the two counties nuts.
Just west of Baca’s front gate, State 78 plunged down through a series of roller-coaster spills as it paralleled the dry washes and arroyos cut deep into the limestone and sand. No cow with any brains grazed there. It was colorful, bleak country-the kind of place where tourists pulled off the road to snap panoramic pictures to send home to Aunt Minnie to prove that, by God, they’d been where other people weren’t.
I crested a hill and saw a sea of headlights leading down into one of the deeper draws. It looked as if every car in Posadas County was linked nose to tail, forming an enormous westbound traffic jam. Leading the parade were the running lights of two school buses, and behind the buses were the winking emergency lights of a patrol car.
Deputy Mears had faced the same impressive confrontation, and he’d pulled to a stop squarely in the center of the highway. I pulled up behind him, turning my car diagonally across the highway.
With heavy flashlight in hand, I got out of the car and trudged down the pavement.
With a sigh of relief, I saw that the two school buses were undamaged. In fact, despite the awesome display of rubberneckers, the accident appeared to involve a single late-model pickup truck that had tangled with a boulder the size of a house.
Tom Mears was working inside the cab of the pickup truck with three other men, and Martin Holman was doing his best to hold a light for them. Stub Moore, the driver of one of the school buses, was standing by the door of the first school bus, and I hurried over toward him. They sure as hell didn’t need me in the way over by the wreck.
“Did you see this, Stub?”
A sea of eager faces craned from the bus, and I motioned for Moore to close the door of the bus. He did, and then said, “Yep. They passed me a ways back, before the Baca place. In fact, it was about where the sheriff was parked. They wasn’t going all that fast. And they was a ways ahead of me by the time we got here. But it looked to me like they might have fell asleep. Just kind of drifted off to the right, and then pow.” He smacked his fist. “Right through the fence and into that rock.”
“No swerve or anything?”
“No, sir. Just drifted over, like I said.”
“Who was it, do you know? Did you recognize the vehicle?” I turned and looked ahead toward the wreck. The vehicle was a tangle, resting at odds with the boulder and the highway. It had hit solidly and bounced sideways.
“I’d guess it to be the Wilton boy’s truck.”
I grimaced. Who was in the truck didn’t matter just then, and I stepped back away from the bus and scanned the long line of traffic. “All right. Look, let’s get you out of here.” I paused as an ambulance crested the hill from Posadas. “As soon as that ambulance has parked, pull your bus as far over to the left as possible and walk it on by.”
“You got it.”
And as the buses passed, every face was pasted to a window. In another minute, Eddie Mitchell arrived in civilian clothes, and I gratefully passed traffic control off to him. Within three minutes, the spectators were gone and the deputies had room to work.
From the first tire marks off the pavement, the pickup truck had traveled 151 feet before it struck the corner of the limestone boulder’s flat face. There were no skid marks, no indication that the driver had yanked the steering wheel. Like a guided missile, the vehicle had tracked straight and true.
After being unlucky enough to fall asleep, the driver had bargained with fate pretty well. The pickup was less than a year old, with all the options. The air bag in the steering wheel had deployed just right and his seatbelt and shoulder harness had been snug. From all appearances, the truck had been traveling nearly sixty miles an hour when it had struck the rock, but the driver had been pillowed enough that the collapsing cab hadn’t cut him to pieces or crushed him to pudding.