Before She Dies (2 page)

Chapter 2

The sight of Sonny Trujillo, broken, bleeding, and in handcuffs, was enough to sober both sides. Glen Archer asked if I thought the game should be canceled, and I said no—hell, they might as well finish the stupid thing.

No one asked why my revolver had failed to fire. Maybe they hadn’t had the muzzle-eye view I had had. Maybe they hadn’t seen the hammer snap back and then forward.

By ten, the floor was clear, the teams were facing the toss, and Sonny Trujillo was in the county jail with every charge imaginable—and even some that weren’t—levied against him. Patrolman Pasquale had wanted the honor of booking the woodchuck. Why he thought paperwork was exciting I didn’t know, but I told him to have at it and that I’d be back in the office after the game to write up a statement.

That would give the doctor time to clean up Trujillo’s messy face and make sure that he wasn’t bleeding to death from my sock to his nose.

I watched the last few minutes of the game in relative peace. Posadas finally put that dog to bed, rolling up a forty-point margin.

The gym emptied at 11:05 and I breathed deeply as I walked toward 310, trying to purge popcorn fumes from my lungs. A second county car had pulled in behind mine, and Sergeant Robert Torrez got out when he saw me trudging down the sidewalk.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“I made sure Trujillo was behind bars, then I came on up,” he said. “I thought I should kinda stand by close.”

“The next one’s yours, bud.” I watched as the Wittner buses rolled by. There were no heads sticking out of windows, no shouts, no errant fingers. They hadn’t even stayed long enough after the game to take showers. It was going to be a delightful ride home.

“You want me to follow them out of town?” Torrez asked.

“Nah, they’ll be all right. No point in encouraging all the story-tellers. It’s going to be bad enough as it is.”

“Is it true what Pasquale said happened?”

I looked at Torrez and raised an eyebrow. “That depends on what he said.”

“That Trujillo had your gun.”

“That part’s true.”

The deputy had the good grace not to ask how I’d managed to lose the weapon in the first place.

“And he said you broke Trujillo’s finger when you wrenched the gun away from him.”

“That’s also true. And then he took a swing at me and broke my glasses. I punched him in the face. That ended that. Except I’ll probably end up being sued for fifty-million dollars by the son of a bitch’s parents.”

Torrez leaned against the front fender of his car. “Dang,” he said, as close to cursing as he was apt to come.

“What else did Pasquale say?”

“That he didn’t know as he’d have had the nerve to reach out and grab the weapon the way you did.”

I gathered the six cartridges and pulled them out of my pocket. “It’s pretty easy when you know the gun’s not loaded, Robert.”

Torrez stared at the ammunition and then a slow grin spread across his face. “Oh,” he said.

“Oh, is right. Did Pasquale remember to call someone to check Trujillo? To set his finger and stop up his nose?”

Torrez nodded. “Dr. Perrone was just finishing up with him when I left to come down here.” He managed to keep a straight face when he added, “Pasquale said someone from the newspaper was there and photographed the whole thing.”

“Yes.” The last of the traffic was clearing the lot. I stepped down off the curb and unlocked 310. “We can always hope she ruins the film in processing.”

Torrez grinned again. Levity wasn’t one of his strong suits, and two smiles in one evening was something of a record for him. “I guess Sheriff Holman will have all kinds of strokes tomorrow, then.”

“Serious ones,” I said. Martin Holman was as sensitive about bad press as any politician facing an election year could be. But something in the deputy’s tone made me pause. I pulled the handheld radio off my belt and tossed it on the seat of 310. “Is there something else I should know, Roberto?”

“Estelle is down at the office processing Tammy Woodruff.”

“For what?”

“DWI and assault.”

I settled back against the fender of 310 and folded my arms across the top of my ample belly. “You issued the DWI?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the young lady became upset?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

I leaned forward slightly and squinted. “I don’t see any damage, Robert.”

“A little scratch here,” he said, fingering his left earlobe. “That’s about it.” Tammy would have had trouble reaching Torrez’s earlobe, much less damaging it.

“And for that, you tacked on an assault charge?”

“Uh, no, sir. She broke one of Linda Real’s cameras.”

“Linda was with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought she was at the game.”

“That must have been someone else, sir. Maybe Frank Dayan.”

I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. Linda Real had been with the
Posadas Register
for four years. I’d grown to like and trust her. And I’d assumed it was her behind the camera that evening. I hadn’t made a point to look closely.

“Frank, huh,” I said. Dayan was an unknown quantity, fresh out of the home office in Omaha, Nebraska, taking the reins after the
O&N Newspapers
chain had purchased the
Register
. It was hard to imagine anyone moving from a metro area like Omaha to dusty, brown, deserted Posadas.

“So let me get this straight. You stopped Miss Tammy for drunken driving and Linda was with you.” Torrez nodded. “And Linda reared up with her camera and started snapping pictures. So Tammy flipped, not quite so drunk she couldn’t imagine her little freckled face on the front page of the
Register
.”

“Well, no, sir. Linda remembers what you told her about riding along on patrol just for the opportunity to take embarrassing pictures of the public, sir. While I was talking with Miss Woodruff, Linda decided to go into the Broken Spur and get a bag of chips or something. Miss Woodruff saw her, knew who she was, and off she went. She wasn’t thinking too straight, sir.”

I rubbed my face. It was going to take an hour to shower off the gymnasium fume residue. “You were at the Broken Spur when this happened?”

“I stopped Miss Woodruff just as she was pulling her truck out onto the highway from the saloon’s parking lot.”

I groaned. “You were coming in toward town, or what?”

“No, sir. I was parked. Just down the highway. I was backed into that little dirt road that leads down to Howard Packard’s windmill and stock tank.”

“Watching the bar.”

Torrez nodded. “I can see the doorway pretty good through binoculars.”

“Of course,” I said wryly. Every deputy I’d ever known had his own “specialty,” and worked it hard. Bob Torrez was from a family of twelve, and he’d lost both a younger brother and sister one night seven years before when a car in which they were passengers missed the interstate ramp and slammed into an abutment. The driver, a sixteen-year-old neighbor, had been so soused he hadn’t been able to start the car without assistance.

That had been the deputy’s rookie year, and from then on, his random checks of local liquor establishments and their patrons had been unrelenting. Sheriff Holman fielded more than a few complaints, and it was to his credit that he shrugged most of them off.

“Tammy Woodruff is no juvenile, Robert,” I said.

“No, but she staggered so bad she almost didn’t make it to her truck. And then when she started up she backed into Gus Prescott’s horse trailer.”

“Any damage?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’ll sort itself out, I’m sure,” I said. “Did Victor see this?”

“If he did, he didn’t come out.”

“That’s a plus,” I said and got into 310. Victor Sánchez owned the Broken Spur Saloon and Trading Post. He’d made it a point more than once to tell me that if my deputies didn’t stop harassing his patrons he’d file suit. He was hot air, of course. Judging by the way most scuffles ended in the Broken Spur, he was more apt to pop somebody with a wrecking bar.

And this arrest was going to test even Martin Holman’s sense of fair play. Karl Woodruff, Tammy’s old man, was a nice enough guy, running his RxRite Pharmacy cleanly and professionally through good times and bad. He supported the Posadas County Sheriff’s Office to the hilt, and that included keeping Sheriff Martin Holman in office.

I could imagine the headline Monday afternoon:
Republican Committee Chairman’s Daughter Busted—Sheriff Fires Undersheriff and Deputy
.

Hell, I wasn’t paranoid, but it was shaping into a great week.

Chapter 3

I arrived back in the office shortly before midnight. A small thermonuclear cloud over the building wouldn’t have surprised me, but instead, the old place was quiet. Every car we owned was in the lot beside the brick building. With everyone inside and busy, it was a hell of a good time to bust a bank or rob Wayne Feed and Ranch Supply.

I considered parking the county car, climbing into my Blazer, and going home to bed. That would have been a waste. I’d lie there and stare at the dark ceiling, mumbling to myself, and wishing I were somewhere else. I’d found over the years that the best cure for insomnia was just to keep plodding along. Eventually I’d collapse into a ten-minute nap.

The office door opened just as I reached the top step. Linda Real—her last name pronounced like the Spanish
Camino Real
—looked out, saw me, and smiled. She was pretty, with black hair cut short in a pageboy. The odd hours mixed with junk food snacks were beginning to show around her waistline. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up in ten years being as wide as she was tall. She was holding a camera in one hand and her notebook in the other.

“I thought your camera was broken,” I said.

“Backup,” Linda replied. Her smile was immediate and radiant—too damn radiant for the middle of the night.

“And I thought you had the flu,” I said to Deputy Howard Bishop. He towered behind Linda, face like a big basset hound, somber and now just a little pale.

He held the door open as I shouldered past. “I was feelin’ a little better, so I decided to come on in,” he said.

I started to say that I wished he’d felt better about four hours before, but thought better of it. He still looked like he’d have helped more by staying home in bed. “Isn’t Tony Abeyta on tonight anyway?”

“Yes sir, but he can’t come in until about two,” Bishop said. “And Bob’s all tied up, so…”

“Take it slow, then,” I said. “And Linda?” The young reporter had started across the parking lot toward the patrol car. She stopped and turned around. “If you get tired,” I called, “don’t hesitate to go home.” She cheerfully waved a hand.

“Something’s wrong with that girl,” I muttered, and Bishop nodded solemnly.

“Yes, sir.”

Linda Real spent at least fifty hours each month riding with either us, the village police, or the Fish and Game Department, and we’d long since grown accustomed to her pleasant, smiling, ever-present face. Why she did it was a mystery to me. Little ever appeared in the paper about what we did that couldn’t be gleaned in five minutes each morning from the dispatcher’s log. Maybe she was husband hunting.

Or maybe she and her boss were lying in wait for that perfect, Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of cops at work. I remembered punching Sonny Trujillo in full glare of somebody’s flash. That wasn’t the kind of publicity I wanted, no matter what the prize.

Detective Lieutenant Estelle Reyes-Guzman was waiting in my office with half a dozen file folders spread out on my desk. She looked up from one of them as I walked in. A ghost of a smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.

“What’s everybody so damn happy about?” I said. “Real just went out of here like somebody’s slipped her a big scoop.”

“Busy night, sir,” Estelle said. “Maybe she smells the front page.”

“Just what I needed to hear,” I said. I tossed my hat on a chair. “Let me find some coffee.” Estelle waited patiently while I found a cup that wasn’t crusted over. The coffee was just the way I liked it—about four hours old and beginning to form an oil slick on top.

I was annoyed that someone had called Estelle in the middle of the night for this nonsense. Tammy Woodruff could sleep off her intoxication like anyone else.

“Who called you down?” I asked as I walked back into the spacious clutter that was my office. I set the cup down on the edge of the desk, well away from the avalanche of paperwork on the other side.

“No one,” she said, and held up a folder. “Francis took the kid down to see my mom earlier today.” I grinned at the slang reference to her son. I had called little Francis Guzman Jr.
The Kid
ever since he’d been born. If I was still alive when he turned twenty-one maybe I’d try something else, but for now, the tag suited him just fine. And I didn’t have trouble remembering it. Estelle glanced at her watch as I took the folder from her. “Yesterday, I mean. And then Francis is going to bring his aunt up for a visit.”

“Which one of many aunts is this one?” I could keep track of Estelle’s family easily enough. Her mother, tiny, wrinkled, and independent, lived across the border in Tres Santos in the same miniature adobe house that Estelle’s grandfather had built nearly a hundred years before.

But Estelle’s in-laws populated Old Mexico from one end to the other, an endless assortment of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts—the entire gamut. Francis Guzman was the sole U.S. citizen in the family, but that distinction was more of an oddity for the Guzman clan than an accomplishment.

“His Aunt Sofia,” Estelle said, her own accent making the simple word elegant.

“I don’t know her, I guess.”

Estelle shook her head. “You met her at the wedding. She lives in Veracruz. Francis has always been one of her favorites. When we were married, she came to Tres Santos for the wedding. You might remember that she was the lady who spent almost the entire time sitting and talking with my mother?”

“Ah,” I said. “The lawyer.” I remember her vaguely, remembered how stiff and starched she’d been at first. Maybe she shared a little of the apprehension others of the Guzman clan might have felt about Francis, the successful surgeon, marrying this only daughter of an ancient Chihuahuan peasant lady. The patrician noses hadn’t been out of joint for too long, as I remembered.

“Right. She’s retired now. Her husband died a couple of years ago.” Estelle began gathering up papers. “She spends most of her time traveling around Mexico, visiting the new generation.”

“Why didn’t you go down with Francis, then? What are you hanging around here for?”

“I have an exam Monday, or I would have gone along.”

“An exam? In what?”

“Economics. And by the way—we need a statement from you on Sonny Trujillo.”

I took the folder she held out. “Aren’t you supposed to be home studying or something? I thought college students stayed up all night, cramming for exams.”

Estelle grinned and got up, vacating my chair. “I’m caught up,” she said. “I’ll do a little review this afternoon, before the gang arrives.”

Of course she was caught up. Someone who could manage a family that included an active one-year-old, a physician husband, and an aging mother living in Mexico—as well as part-time work for us—wouldn’t let studying for a college class slow her down.

Her career with our department had taken its share of wild turns. Now she worked part-time, on-call in our detective division. She was our detective division. There had been a time when Martin Holman had wanted to expand the department, including at least three detectives. The county would have liked the idea if someone else could have provided the money. No one ever did. Holman, ever the smooth
político
, compromised by promoting Estelle from sergeant to lieutenant…with a promised increase in pay. We all knew what “promised” meant.

I sat down and opened the folder with one hand while fumbling for a cigarette with the other. I had quit smoking a year before, but the action was still automatic. I found my glasses instead and put them on. One earpiece was still crooked, and I grunted as I tried to bend it back into shape without snapping the fragile hinge.

“Need some tape?” Estelle asked.

I ignored her suggestion. “What about Tammy Woodruff?” I asked.

“Her father said to leave her in jail until morning. He’ll see about it then.”

“Good man.”

“And Sheriff Holman called.”

“I bet he did.”

“He got a call from Victor Sánchez again.”

“About Sergeant Torrez?” I tossed the folder on the desk and leaned back, glad for the minute to relax.

“He said that if Bob didn’t quit harassing his customers, he’d take on the deputy himself.” Estelle grinned. “Either that or he’s going to file suit.”

“Hell, same old tune. Tell him to try ’em both,” I chuckled. “Why not. Victor needs something to make his life a little more interesting. Mopping up spilled beer must get pretty dull after a while.”

Estelle moved toward the door. “Is there anything else you need tonight, sir?”

“Hell, no. Thanks for taking care of the Woodruff girl for us. They could have called in Aggie Bishop just as easily.” Deputy Bishop’s wife worked occasionally when we needed a matron.

“The flu, sir,” Estelle said, and I made a face.

“Any word on your truck, by the way?”

“No, sir.” She shrugged. “I’m sure it’s long gone.”

“You guys didn’t even have it long enough to scratch the paint,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Estelle replied. “Francis backed into the fence down at mother’s.” She smiled ruefully. “But they stole it anyway.” Even with a dent, the thieves had gotten a hell of a deal. The big two-tone blue Suburban had had less than a thousand miles on it. The Las Cruces police had been sympathetic and diligent. But the truck was gone, driven out of the mall parking lot while the family was shopping.

“Next time, maybe you should buy something about twenty-five years old,” I said. “Then nobody wants it.”

“I suppose,” Estelle said. “If you need me for anything, I’ll be home.” She paused in the doorway. “Why don’t you come over for dinner Sunday night?”

“What are you having?”

Estelle cocked her head and frowned at me in mock exasperation. She knew my see-food diet habits as well as anyone. “Seven o’clock. We’ll expect you.”

I waved a hand. “Give your aunt my regards if something comes up,” I said.

“Sir…” she said, and left the rest hanging. Living by myself, I had developed that sort of independence of clock and calendar that irritated more rational minds. Estelle knew better than to fight it.

After she left, I settled back with my paperwork. My mood improved, as I took grim satisfaction in knowing that Sonny Trujillo would be stone sober for some time if Judge Hobart’s colors ran true to form at the preliminary hearing.

And Tammy Woodruff would wake up jail-cell sober in a few hours. I had no doubt that her father would put her on the straight and narrow. At least he would try to. But Tammy was no child anymore. I had no intentions of getting myself involved in that family fight. An hour later, I left the office.

Shortly after 2 A.M. that Saturday, I pulled off Guadalupe Terrace into the driveway of my adobe house, buried under gigantic cottonwoods in an old quarter of Posadas south of the interstate. The place was rambling, dark, and quiet. No sounds filtered through the two foot thick walls.

In the kitchen I made myself a cup of coffee, drank a third of it, and then went to bed. The musty old bedroom pooled all the aromas that were a comfort to me into a potpourri that should have put me to sleep. And they did, for one blissful hour.

At 3:46 A.M., the telephone jangled me awake. For a moment I lay quietly, eyes open wide like one of those jungle lemurs. I answered on the fourth ring.

“Gastner.”

“Sir, this is Gayle Sedillos.” Our dispatcher waited a moment for that to sink in.

“What’s up, Gayle?”

“Sir, you really need to come in. We’ve got a real problem with Sonny Trujillo.”

I snapped fully awake and sat up in bed with a grunt.

“What do you mean?”

There was a slight pause, about four heartbeats’ worth. “He apparently choked to death in his cell, sir.”