Bag Limit (14 page)
Step into a crowd of people, and sometimes it takes a few seconds to sort out who’s who—and who’s doing what to whom. This time, it was easy.
Even from across the open spaces of what passed for a front yard, I could see Miles Waddell’s red hair. He, Mark Denton, and Ed Johns were standing by the front of Miles’ new truck. I pulled in immediately behind them, missing the back bumper by a hair breadth, and Johns turned slightly to see who had arrived. The others were riveted on the action and could have cared less.
In this case, the action was Herb Torrance and his son Dale…and one of their blue healer pups. Two dozen steps away from the three men, Dale was backed up against the side of the mobile home, pegged there by a father whose face was livid. The dog was frantic, darting this way and that, yapping his fool head off, unsure whether to leap into Herb’s arms, jump on Dale, or bite them both.
I got out of the car just in time to see Herb come up with his right hand, hard. The blow took Dale on the face, a crack that I could hear across the yard. The kid’s head snapped around and for a moment he lost his balance. His right hand swung out against the side of the trailer for support as his feet flailed, one of his boots catching the dog in the face. At the same time Herb’s hand flashed again, and this time Dale sprawled against the trailer’s skirting.
Waddell leaned against the grille of his truck, his arms folded in satisfaction over his chest. He glanced at me as I rounded the side of their truck, and then nodded at Cliff Larson.
“I thought I told you to stay away from here,” I snapped, and Waddell shrugged.
“You took your own fair time getting here,” he said. “And hell, we’re just watchin’.”
As I advanced on Herb and his son, I couldn’t hear what the older man was saying, even if the dog hadn’t been hysterical. It was no yelling match. Herb bent down and grabbed Dale by the shoulder, their faces no more than an inch apart, Herb’s voice a hoarse croak.
“Just hold on there,” I bellowed as I approached. Two strides separated me from Herb’s back when Dale’s foot lashed out and caught his father on the ankle. At the same time, the boy twisted, taking advantage of his father’s loss of balance. Using both hands and feet, Dale scrambled wildly out of his father’s grip. He flailed wildly for traction even as Herb slammed his hand against the trailer to stop his fall.
“Dale!” I shouted, but the boy was a human jackrabbit. He’d gotten his feet under him and sprinted along the side of the trailer, Father in pursuit, blue healer dancing around them. Lame as Herb was from years of winter knees and livestock kicks, he managed a credibly fast sideways lope, his left leg dragging stiffly.
“Eeee haw,” Waddell cried with delight.
I heard Bob Torrez’s vehicle pull in behind mine. If there was chasing to be done, better someone sure of step, fleet of foot, and strong of heart. Waddell and his buddies weren’t about to help, and Cliff Larson would cough himself to death before he ran twenty feet.
For whatever reason, Dale Torrance headed toward the paddock area and the complex of loading chutes. What good that was going to do him wasn’t clear, other than to put some railroad ties between him and his father. Just when he had his father beat in their foot race, something caught the toe of his left boot and he went flying, crashing into the bottom two-by-six face first. The rough wood caught him across the mouth. It must have hurt like hell if he’d been in the mood to notice. But his father was bearing down on him.
Herb slowed enough to scoop up a length of splintered fencing, a chunk of wood about four feet long and maybe two inches square—about twice the size of a broom handle. The dog made a grab for the other end and missed.
Within range of the boy, Herb let fly and I could hear the wood sing. Dale had scrambled to all fours, blood streaming from his mouth. The swat caught him solidly on the rump, a hard
whack
that raised dust from the seat of his pants.
“Sir?”
I turned and saw Tom Pasquale at my elbow. A few yards away, the undersheriff was moseying toward us, in no hurry. Years before, I had heard him tell another deputy that the best way to survive a career of being called to break up nasty bar fights was to “arrive late and arrest the loser.” As sound advice as that might have been, it wasn’t Pasquale’s style.
I held up a hand. “If he starts hitting him in the head,” I said. “Otherwise, they’re having a little family discussion on family property.”
Herb made pretty fair use of that chunk of board, driving his son across the small corral that fed the loading chute. He connected two or three times, and by the second time, the healer decided that if Herb was hitting the kid, it was okay to bite him, too. On the other side of the corral, the dog got a mouthful of jeans just above the boot, and that put Dale off balance. The kid took the opportunity to roll under the fence, dog still tussling.
The seven of us had gravitated toward the corral, and if the fight went on much longer, we’d look like seven spectators at a rodeo. All we needed was to hike boots up on the bottom rail, nestle our elbows on the top, and chew idly on a wisp of straw, observing the action, making sage commentary, and placing side bets on the winner.
Herb was running out of breath, and when Dale went under the fence, the older man hesitated, bent at the waist, heaving and puffing. His face was blotchy, and if he kept it up, somebody was going to be practicing CPR.
Dale, under the fence and with the dog deciding they were playing after all, hesitated long enough to suck in three lungfuls of dust and air. He staggered to his feet and once more set off running, this time around the back of the trailer.
Herb remained rooted, his hands on his knees. He looked over at me and shook his head in disgust.
“You better go after him,” I said to Pasquale, and the young deputy took off like a shot. Dale Torrance had the head start he needed, and he was on familiar territory. He cut around the mobile home and emerged at the other end, in the clear. Two more strides brought him to the door of his truck, and he snatched it open and dove inside.
The diesel lit on the first crank. He pulled it into gear just as Pasquale dashed around the end of the trailer. The old Dodge surged backward in a cloud of dust and exhaust. The back bumper was one of those stout black creations that ranchers weld up out of scrap iron—sharp corners and edges. The bumper slammed into the left front fender of Miles Waddell’s fancy truck, driving the shiny bodywork in until chrome, steel, and plastic molded themselves around the tire and suspension.
The sound of the crash hadn’t died away when the back tires spun another dust storm as Dale surged his truck forward. I saw and heard Tom Pasquale’s hand smack down on the hood, but the deputy could see what none of the rest of us could. He had a straight-on view of the kid’s face. He made the right decision and jumped sideways, the front tire of the Dodge narrowly missing his foot.
“Goddamn,” Waddell said, groping for something intelligent to say. “He backed into my truck.”
“Well, now,” the livestock inspector added. The dual rear tires spewed fountains of dust and gravel as Dale Torrance floored the accelerator, feeding that turbo-diesel for all it was worth. The Dodge spun half a donut and careened through a small knot of juniper sprouts, jouncing airborne as it crashed over the old parent stump.
Undersheriff Torrez had kicked himself into motion, and he sprinted to the idling unit parked behind mine. The Torrance boy drove a beeline for the gate, and Torrez spun the Expedition in its own length, avoiding my car as he did so. He paused just long enough for Deputy Pasquale to grab the door and yank it open.
“Where do you suppose he’s headed?” Mark Denton mused.
“Damn,” Waddell said, watching the chase in wonder.
By this time, Cliff Larson had walked back to the unmarked car, waiting for me. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when we come out here,” he said laconically as I yanked open the door. “You want Herb along?”
“No,” I said. As we shot back out the long driveway, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Herb Torrance was leaning against the fence. The other three were gathered around the front of Waddell’s truck, yanking on the bodywork in an attempt to free the front wheel.
Up ahead, young Torrance’s truck reached County Road 14 and tried to turn south. He was going so fast when he hit the gravel that the truck plowed across the road and into the barditch, bouncing hard enough that a piece of back fender flew off. Torrez had better luck, throwing the Expedition sideways before he hit the county road. He slid the vehicle onto the gravel facing in the right direction.
The two vehicles, a dust storm engulfing the Expedition, hurtled down County 14 nose to tail.
As I straightened the sedan out on the county road, I grabbed the mike off the dash.
“Back off, Robert,” I said, but the undersheriff had already lifted his foot. As the county road changed from gravel to red clay, Torrance’s pickup kicked a plume of dust thirty feet high, like a great vapor trail behind a jet. After a quarter of a mile he’d pulled far enough ahead that Torrez and Pasquale could breathe.
“Well, this ain’t good,” Cliff Larson drawled.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. Some fourteen miles of county road lay ahead of Dale Torrance before he jumped out on State 56. The first handful of miles were straight, relatively level, and fast. Then the road wound up the backside of San Patricio mesa, a narrow, rock-strewn cut not much more than one truck wide. The road snaked up through juniper and brush until it broke out on top, where the mesa was scarred by water-cut arroyos and massive, crumbling fissures in the rimrock. That was the good part of 14. If Dale managed that without crumpling his truck into a ball of tin foil, he still had the final six miles, where the road meandered down the face of San Patricio mesa, switchback after switchback, toward the state highway.
The radio crackled into life, and Torrez sounded as if he were asking for some more fried chicken at a summer Sunday picnic. He’d waited until he’d crested the backside of the mesa, within range of the repeater on the San Cristóbals across the valley.
“Three oh four, three oh eight. Ten-twenty.”
“Three oh four is Abeyta,” I said, and Cliff Larson nodded. He’d pulled his seat belt tight, and for once left the cigarettes in his pocket.
“Three oh eight, three oh four is in Regal. Ten-eight,” Abeyta responded after a moment.
“Three oh four, we need you at the intersection of State Fifty-six and County Road Fourteen. Right at the cattle guard. A red and white Dodge dually is headed your way. Don’t let any traffic northbound on Fourteen, and if he makes it that far, don’t let him out on the highway.”
“Ten-four,” Abeyta said.
“How’s he going to do that?” Larson asked.
“Don’t know,” I said. “He can block the cattle guard easily enough.”
“You think you’ll have any cars left when this is all over?” Larson managed a nervous laugh.
“It’s not the cars I’m worried about,” I said.
On Friday night, everything had gone wrong for Matthew Baca. Less than eighteen hours later, Dale Torrance was determined to try his luck. I could guess at his mental state—but at least he wasn’t drunk.
Working in Hollywood, the celluloid high-speed getaway artist might have thundered south on County Road 14, the vapor trail of dust from his speeding car snaking down the face of the mesa. Cheek muscles twitching with the easy determination of someone who’d read the script, he’d actually be looking forward to the roadblock down at the state highway.
Maybe the deputy would park in the approved Hollywood roadblock fashion, diagonally across part of the right-of-way so that his unit could be thrown to one side in a theatrical crash that did little more than crumple the speeding thug’s fender. As the car sped by, demolishing the police units in great flaming explosions of inexplicably ruptured fuel tanks, the cops would fire wonderfully ineffectual shots with their shotguns.
I prayed that Dale Torrance hadn’t been paying attention to the movies. Both he and Undersheriff Robert Torrez
had
paid attention to details over the years on various hunting trips, and they both knew that three miles from the intersection with the main road, a little-used scratch in the sand and rocks forked off to the east.
In my nocturnal wanderings, even I had had occasion to amble along the path—it was little more than that. Once upon a time the trail had provided access to a cattle tank, but the gears and rods in the windmill motor had long since fused together into a hundred pounds of useless iron. Most of the blades had fallen from the fan, and the reservoir below was choked with blow sand.
Hunters used the path regularly. Since hunters used it, over the years they had extended it eastbound in search of wily javelina, antelope, and desert mule deer. After meandering past the windmill for two miles or so, the trail’s route was blocked by a deep river wash. The arroyo’s vertical sides plunged nearly thirty feet.
At one time, before cattle and juniper moved in to the range, there had been water in the Rio Guigarro. Now it roared and carved its path only after a torrential storm. Otherwise the gravel arroyo bed lay dry, a nasty drop below the rolling contours of the prairie.
The arroyo stopped the trail and turned it south. If a hunter squinted and looked in just the right place through the brush and around the various limestone outcroppings that jutted up along the skirts of San Patricio mesa, he could look directly south and perhaps a mile and a half in the distance, straight into the back door of Victor Sanchez’s Broken Spur Saloon.
Dale Torrance may have crested the edge of San Patricio mesa and seen the glint of a vehicle in the distance, parked at the cattle guard just a few yards off State 56.
With that route closed, he’d plunged another mile down the mesa face and taken the trail east. It’s possible that was what he had been planning all along. The maneuver might have worked if Bob Torrez hadn’t hunted these same hills and mesas himself.
Enough dust lingered in the air above the scuffed ground where Dale had hauled the big old truck off the road that the undersheriff, following a half a mile behind, could tell in a heart-beat that’s where the kid had gone.
“Three oh four,” Torrez’s voice said over the radio, “he’s turned east on the base trail. The only place he can come out is the saloon, unless he goes cross-country. Move on over there. Be careful. Don’t press him into something stupid.”
Abeyta acknowledged. By the time Cliff Larson and I made it to the rim of San Patricio, with a commanding view of the valley, I could see the dot that had to be Tony Abeyta’s vehicle pulling into the parking lot of the saloon.
The Ford Crown Victoria for which I had traded the worn-out Bronco was a handful on the loose, downhill gravel. Several times, Larson stretched out a hand to the dashboard for support and once when the front wheels broke loose on a particularly nasty, washboarded switchback, I heard an almost plaintive “whoa” from his side of the car. A touch of the gas busted the back wheels loose and pointed us pretty much in the direction we wanted to go.
“Three oh four, he’s turnin’ south toward you,” Torrez radioed.
“Ten-four. I see him.” All Tony Abeyta had to do was sit quietly in Victor Sanchez’s parking lot and wait for the old pickup to burst up out of the brush.
At one point, we had a clear enough view of the state highway out ahead of us to see the white and green Expedition of the U.S. Border Patrol when it flashed by, eager to join the fun.
In his rush to dive off the main county road, Dale Torrance had done a fair job of blocking himself in. Looking ahead toward the saloon, the bulk of the building would block his view of Tony Abeyta’s county unit, and the general roll and rise of the prairie would block the paved highway from view. Others could follow his dust plume with ease, but he would have no way of knowing what lay in wait.
Unless he stopped in just the right spot to watch the twisting trail behind him, he would never have seen Bob Torrez as the undersheriff slammed the back door on Dale’s escape route.
Trying to crawl into the mind of a petrified teenager to understand his actions was futile, but I found myself doing just that. If Dale assumed that all the cops who had been chasing him had been faked out by his clever ruse, then he had to assume that we were at that moment still on County Road 14, closing in on the state highway—with that intersection just a quarter of a mile west of the saloon.
When we reached the pavement, Dale knew we’d have a choice…if he was thinking at all, that is. Would we assume that Dale had headed southwest for Mexico or Arizona, and turn right to follow? Posadas to the left didn’t offer much refuge, and if we didn’t know that the kid had turned on the rough trail, then heading east on the state highway didn’t make much sense.
I grimaced as we jounced over a particularly badly installed cattle guard. “He’s going after the girl,” I said.
“Don’t doubt it,” Larson replied.
“He thinks he’s going to sneak in from the back. He thinks he can hide the truck from the road that way.”
“Got to be,” Larson agreed. “That boy ain’t the sharpest tool in the box.”
“Panic time,” I said, and slowed for the second cattle guard that marked the boundary of the state highway’s right-of-way. “He’s not thinking at all. Even if Christine wants to go with him, where does he think he can go?”
“Maybe he thinks we just don’t care all that much.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, when Bobby dropped back there at the beginning, that thought might have crossed his mind.”
“Three oh eight, three oh four.” The voice in the distance prompted me to reach out and turn up the radio a bit.
“Three oh eight.”
“Three oh eight, he’s stopping behind the bar.”
“Does he know you’re there?”
“Negative. He can’t see the unit.”
“We’ll be there in a minute or so. Let him go on inside, and block his vehicle.”
“Ten-four.”
Once on the pavement I accelerated hard, approaching the saloon from the west just in time to see Abeyta’s unit disappear around the backside of the building.
“Three oh eight, the truck’s parked and the driver’s door is open,” Abeyta said. “He’s gone inside.”
“Ten-four. Just block the vehicle. Don’t go in.”
I slowed to turn into the parking lot and saw a fair-sized convention. Victor’s truck was parked near the kitchen door on the west side, as usual. Since it was late Saturday afternoon, the bar traffic was picking up, with an assortment of vehicles nosed up to the railroad tie barrier in front of the saloon. Last in line was the Border Patrol unit, and I saw Scott Gutierrez leaning casually against the front fender.
My back tires hadn’t left the pavement when the kitchen door burst open. Dale Torrance was doing a fair imitation of flying backward, pursued by Victor Sanchez. The bar owner’s shoulders were hunched for combat. Torrance bounced off the side of Victor’s truck, but he was game. He lashed out a quick blow that caught Victor on the cheek. Whether Victor was stunned or just goddamned surprised that someone would have the guts to hit him back wasn’t clear, but it gave the Torrance boy an opening. He shot back through the door, into the kitchen.
Victor Sanchez found his footing and lunged after him.
“Well, shit,” Larson muttered.
I pulled to a stop beside Sanchez’s truck and even before I was out of the car I could hear the bar owner’s voice bellowing inside, followed by a metallic crash.
Tony Abeyta appeared from behind the building, and I heard the approach of Torrez’s unit, chewing its way up from the arroyo.
“Tony, go around and make sure he doesn’t skip out the front,” I said, and the deputy nodded. “Scott’s out there, too.”
Abeyta broke into a jog toward the front of the building.
“Let’s see what kind of party we’ve got,” I said to Larson, and he nodded dubiously. I agreed with him. It might have been better retirement insurance to wait patiently outside, ready to grab and bag whatever pieces of Dale Torrance sailed out.