Blood Sweep (3 page)

“Okay. I'm going to take just a minute and swing past his place. Camille is fretful. Then the bank, then Leona in my office.” She took a deep breath. “Is there anything else on the horizon?”

“It's been a long, boring day,” Wheeler replied.

“Did the sheriff happen to mention that he would attend the meeting with Leona later today?”

“I saw him for a minute or two when my shift started, then he went out. Lemme see.” Estelle could picture Ernie twisting to look at the staff
in-out
whiteboard. “Doesn't say. When he comes in, I'll remind him about it.”

“Good. Because the county manager might have some questions for him.”

Chapter Three

Bill Gastner's spreading adobe hunkered under clusters of scruffy trees and one or two towering cottonwoods trying to compete with a pair of giant elms, a place Estelle referred to as a “Badger Den.”

The undersheriff pulled into the graveled driveway, the crunch of tires loud on the stones. Nosing the county car up to the garage, she switched off the engine and out of habit sat for a moment, windows down, feeling the summer heat waft in with a bouquet from the thick hedge of creosote bush by the front door. Thirty percent humidity hardly qualified as muggy, but the overcast was a welcome relief from the usual five or six percent.

“Hey!”

Estelle froze. The single word had been so faint that had she merely rustled her clothing, she wouldn't have heard it. As it was, she had no sense of the direction from which the exclamation had come. She waited another few seconds and then got out of the car, closing the door without clicking the latch.

“I'm in…the garage.” This time, she recognized Bill Gastner's voice, heard the strain of vocalizing only two words at a time.

“
Padrino?”
She tried the lift handle, but the door was held secure by the electric opener's mechanism.

“Go through the house,” he said. “The…” and he hesitated. “Front door is open.” His voice was a faint rasp, and then just a little stronger as he muttered, “God damn it.”

“I'll be right there.” Even as she turned toward the front door, she pulled the cell phone from her jacket pocket. The pleasantly musty air from the old house greeted her as she touched the speed dial.

“Ernie, I need an ambulance at Gastner's. I don't know what the deal is, but get 'em rolling. I'll be back to you in a minute.”

“Roger that,” Wheeler responded, “We got…” but the phone was already back in Estelle's pocket. The undersheriff turned right off the foyer, through a small bedroom that now stored the old man's collection of “perfectly good” cardboard boxes, to the hallway and the door to the garage. The door was ajar, and she reached in and snapped on the overhead lights. One of the bulbs worked, enough to cast deep shadows around the shiny red Dodge Durango SUV.

“Hey.” Gastner's voice was small and rusty.

Between the SUV and the collection of boxed and unboxed junk that had bred over the years, and the rows of shelved paint cans whose contents had crusted, there was at best eighteen inches of clearance to sidle along the vehicle on the driver's side, the space in deep shadow. In that shadow lay an even darker shadow, securely wedged, head toward the rear wheel.

“Open the goddamn overhead door,” Gastner whispered. “The remote is on the visor. Damn button by the door doesn't work.”

Estelle had already started to slide past the truck's projecting mirror. She was five foot seven and slender. Gastner was an inch shy of six feet, rotund and beginning to stoop a little with age. How did he manage? One of her boots touched something.

“Don't be walking on me.” He tried a half-hearted chuckle. By awkwardly straddling the fallen man's legs and sliding along the side of the truck, she was able to reach inside the cab to the visor and push the garage door remote. With a rumble, the door started up. The surge of fresh air stirred the other body odors of a man too long down.

The blast of daylight was harsh, and in the distance Estelle could hear a siren.

“Help is on the way,” she said, bending low to rest a light hand on his shoulder. “Are we going to be able to help you up?”

Gastner lifted his left hand just clear of the floor in protest. His face was inches from the back wheel, legs awkwardly crumpled toward the front of the truck.

“I think I broke my goddamn hip,” he growled weakly. “Hell, I
know
I broke it. So here I am.”

She reached over and took his left hand. His fingers were cool, and he returned her touch with a gentle squeeze.

“Concrete floor is damn hard.” He tried to shift his head. Estelle slipped out of her khaki jacket, wadded it into a small pillow, and lifted his head just enough to be able to slide it under.

“What brought you by?” His voice was a raspy whisper.

“Camille called a little bit ago,” Estelle replied. “She'd tried to reach you, but here you were.”

“Here I was.” He suppressed a cough. “Here I was. I heard the damn phone. She doesn't give up, you know.”

The ambulance turned off Grande onto Escondido, charged past the trailer park, and swung into Guadalupe, backing into the driveway beside Estelle's county car. Matty Finnegan was first out, crash kit in hand.

“Oh, good,” Gastner murmured. “My favorite.”

Always bubbly cheerful, Matty set down her gear and wormed her way along the truck to Gastner's head.

“What did you
do?”
she said. “This is no place for a nap.”

“I tripped over my own goddamn feet,” Gastner managed. “I couldn't catch myself. I think I broke my right hip.”

As he spoke, Matty surveyed the tight spot.

“How's the pain?”

“Morphine would be nice.”

“How long have you been here?” She grimaced at the aroma.

He cleared his throat. “Since yesterday afternoon. I think you better just tip me into a hole and bury me. Of all the goddamn times for the bowels to work…”

Matty murmured in deep sympathy, and half-turned toward her partner, Doyle Maestas. “IV, board, the whole thing. And we gotta get this out of here.” She rapped a knuckle against the slab side of the SUV.

“The keys are in it,” Gastner said. “But I think my right foot…is under the front tire.”

“Oh, now don't worry about that. We'll just back out right over it.”

“Thanks, sweetheart.”

Matty stood up and turned to Estelle. “Hop in there and back this boat straight out. I'll make sure we don't squish any vital parts. We need room to work.”

Estelle hustled to her own vehicle, started it, and spun it out of the way.

Returning to the garage, she slipped through on the passenger side and maneuvered over the center console to the driver's seat. Only months old, Gastner's SUV still offered the showroom smell, making for an interesting potpourri. It started instantly with a heavy-engined rumble.

“Okay, now I have to move this foot just a little bit,” she heard Matty Finnegan say. “Slowly now, just an inch or two. Let me do all the work.” Gastner sucked in a sharp breath and muttered an oath. “Okay, Sheriff. Straight back, nice and smooth.”

Foot hard on the brake, Estelle pulled the gear selector into reverse. The truck twitched.

“Slooooowly,” Matty said. “We don't have any extra room down here.”

Estelle eased off some brake pressure and the SUV glided back on the smooth concrete.

“Let's get that elbow tucked in just an inch or two,” Matty said. In another moment, the Dodge was clear, wheels on the gravel of the driveway. Making sure she had left room for the EMTs and their gurney, Estelle switched off the SUV.

Back in the garage, she could see that Gastner was lying on his right side, crammed against several boxes, the remains of a power mower, and his collection of empty paint cans. Moving him out on the floor so that he could lie flat was going to be agonizing.

“We want an IV right now,” Matty said. “What time yesterday did you fall?”

Gastner closed his eyes. “Since just after four.”

“p.m.?”

“Of course p.m.”

“'Cause you're
never
up and about after dark, right?” Matty quipped. She bent down and looked him in the eye, a hand lightly on his forehead. “So you've been sacked out here for something like eighteen hours, huh?”

“Yep.”

He kept his eyes closed as she went through the string of vital checks. “We're going to give you a sedative to take off the edge,” Matty said, “and no, it's not morphine. But it's pretty good stuff anyway. But then we'll get you hydrated up.” As she prepped the IV, she studied Gastner's face. “Are you still on the heart meds?”

“Uh huh.”

“Don't be so grumpy. That's a yes?”

“Yes.” He took a long, slow breath, as if marshalling his energy. “The three bottles are in by the bathroom sink. Estelle knows where they are. And, no. I'm not too good at remembering to take 'em.”

Matty cranked her head around so she could look up at Estelle. “Would you? They'll want them at the hospital.”

“You bet.” And sure enough, the bottles of blood thinner, anticholesterol, and statin meds were lined up in the bathroom, along with half a dozen others. Beside those was an unmarked and unfilled plastic seven-day meds organizer. She swept the entire collection into a large zip bag.

As she returned to the garage, Estelle heard Matty chide, “You know, I always expected to find you diving headfirst off some boulder, a thousand miles out in the boonies.”

“Me too,” Gastner whispered. “Good way to go.”

“But that's the way these hips happen,” Matty added cheerfully. “My mom broke hers when she turned to pick up a dish towel. Tripped over her own feet.” She held the IV bag out to Estelle. “You hold that while we work him onto the back-board?”

“There's nothing wrong with my back,” Gastner groused.

She knelt beside him and touched his cheek. “This isn't going to be any fun, but we gotta do it, okay?”

“Have at it.” His speech was already slurred a little from the sedative.

With Estelle holding the IV with one hand and preventing an avalanche of garage junk with the other, Matty at his legs and Doyle Maestas at his shoulders, they worked Gastner away from his bed in the boxes. By the time he lay flat on the back-board, a sheen of sweat soaked his forehead. He kept his eyes tightly closed. Matty checked his vitals again, and then glanced up to see a Sheriff's Department unit slide to a stop on Guadalupe.

“Oh, look at this,” she said. “We've got the cavalry. You're such a lucky guy.” Deputy Brent Sutherland got out of the car and walked quickly to the garage.

“Hip,” Matty said succinctly to him. “And you couldn't have timed it better.”

She glanced at the deputy. “You're the guy with all the muscles, so you take the head end. Doyle at the other, and fly-weight me hovering.” She looked at Estelle. “And you're set with the IV. Let's do it.”

“How about lunch first?” Gastner whispered.

“You'll get lunch, all right,” the EMT said. “A nice bag of potions at the hospital. And maybe if you
really
behave yourself, some morphine-diluted applesauce.”

“You're a cruel woman,” the old man whispered.

Despite Gastner's two hundred twenty pounds, the trio managed the lift as if they were using hydraulic assist, and then with a web of straps to hold the boarded patient secure to the gurney, wheeled him out to the ambulance. Matty took the IV from Estelle and affixed it to its stainless tree. “You're going to follow us in?”

“You bet. I'll secure the place and be right behind you.”

She stepped back and watched as they buttoned up the ambulance.

“Anything you want me to do?” Deputy Sutherland said. Estelle turned to him and shook her head.

“Thanks, Brent. Any surprises in court?”

“No problemo. The sheriff has something going on out at Waddell's, though. Pasquale is headed out that way.”

If only it was
no problemo
here, Estelle thought, unable to imagine how long those eighteen hours must have seemed for
Padrino,
trapped on that chilly concrete floor. She snugged the SUV back inside, then methodically closed up Bill Gastner's house and garage. She dropped his key ring in the center console of her car, and sat back. She slumped as the urgency released. She needed to call Camille, but she would do that from the hospital, when she knew the full scope of the patient's condition.

Instead, she called Posadas State Bank. Dennis Mears had stepped out, Rosie told her, but she knew that the bank president was planning on meeting with Estelle in just a few minutes. “And if it's really, really important, I'm sure that Mr. Mears can find
you,”
Rosie said.

“I'll be at the hospital, if you would ask him to stop by there,” Estelle said.

Rosie sucked in a breath. “Oh, dear. I hope nothing…”

“Me too,” Estelle said, and let it go at that.

Chapter Four

The field-dressed antelope carcass weighed no more than sixty pounds. Torrez carried it over his left shoulder, the damaged rifle in his right hand, and by the time he reached his truck, the sun had burned through the overcast, with the temperature hovering in the low nineties. The large cooler in the back, protected by an old, musty tarpaulin, had been untouched. With deft dismembering and wrapping, he managed to stow the entire carcass. He rearranged the bags of ice to cover the game, and made sure the lid was firmly latched before jerking the tarp back in place. He took a deep breath, regarding the truck.

“Shit,” he said aloud. The hood sure enough
was
open. Instead of rounding to the front of the truck, he backed up, retracing his steps until he was twenty paces away. The gravelly dirt on the side of the road bore a number of vague prints, but with some imagination, they told the story. They'd be laughed out of court as evidence, Torrez knew. He guessed that someone had pulled in around his truck, parking ahead of it. The single set of boot prints, deep in the heel and smooth-soled, headed directly to the driver's door. One of them was clear enough that a casting might be possible.

The driver's door hadn't been locked, so it would have been easy to open it and pull the little hood latch handle—it was one of the few accoutrements of the truck that still worked as it should. The tracks then retraced the route to the front of the truck. From five yards away, Torrez could see that the man had stood in front of the old truck, perhaps fumbled for the release, and jerked the hood open, fighting against the bent metal and the dry hinges. To what end?

Careful to avoid scuffing existing tracks, Torrez slipped his fingers under the edges of the hood and lifted. The hinges squawked. For a few seconds, he saw nothing amiss. “Huh.” He bent his head to one side. Sure enough, the high tension wire from distributor to coil, both tucked at the rear of the engine under the air cleaner housing, was missing. “Ain't that clever,” he said. It was a simple, surefire technique. He dug out his phone.

“Posadas County Sheriff's Department, Wheeler.”

Torrez's handheld police radio was in the glove box, but he was loath to blab over the air.

“Pasquale made contact yet?”

“That's affirmative, Sheriff. Sutherland is headed that way, too, now. It's a white Ford, 2013 model, Arizona license November…”

“I don't need that. Look, I ain't got wheels. Someone needed my coil wire more'n me.” He turned and gazed down the road at an approaching contractor's rig—headache rack, side rail tool boxes, mini-crane swung tight in the back. “I need Guzman and her camera out here asap. That's one thing.”

“Ah, sir…”

“And then have somebody swing by the Dick's Auto Parts and pick me up a coil wire for a '68 Chevy half ton, 350 box engine and bring it the hell out here. We got a good set of tracks out here, so before Pasquale lets that truck go, we need to take a look at its tire prints.”

“Sir, the undersheriff is going to be tied up for a while. It looks like Bill Gastner managed somehow to fall in his garage. Broken hip, for one thing. I don't know just what the deal there is going to be. They're transporting now.”

Bob Torrez pushed his cap back and frowned. “Okay. Look, get both Taber and Linda on the road, then. I'm going to need photos, and
I
sure as hell ain't going to do it with this Mickey Mouse phone camera. And tell Pasquale to handle that end. How many in the truck?”

“One, sir. Arizona registration on the truck, a Dominic Olveda, current Arizona license, negative twenty-eight.”

“New-issue license?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have Pasquale hold him until I get there.”

“You want him arrested?”

“Not yet. Just make sure Tom holds him until I get there.”

“Hope he's not just a tourist.”

“Then we'll all apologize.”

Torrez switched off, then immediately hit the speed dial to reach his undersheriff.

“What's up with Bill?” he said without salutation as soon as the call connected. There was a pause as Estelle Reyes-Guzman took time to make the mental switch.

“Hip,” she replied. “Somehow he got his feet tangled and fell in his garage. He got stuck on the floor beside his truck…he was there since yesterday afternoon, Bobby. Like eighteen hours or more.”

“Well, that ain't good.”

“No. He's lucky it was August and not January.”

“You got everything you need?”

“I think so. This is going to be one of those wait and see things. I'm sure they'll transport, but I don't know yet whether Cruces or Albuquerque. Can you take my meeting with Leona this afternoon at three?” She asked the question more than half in jest, already knowing the sheriff's answer.

“County manager will just have to wait,” he said with surprisingly even temper. “Look, I'm going to be occupied out here for a little bit. Taber will handle the meeting if you're not free by then.” He caught himself. “Scratch that. She'll be busy out here. Wake up Mears. He can do it.”

“We'll see,” Estelle replied. “What do you have going?”

“I had a good shot at a buck, and then someone took a long-range rifle shot at me just after I fired. Missed me, but wrecked my rifle scope. And then I find out that he stole the coil wire off my truck to give himself a little extra time. Pasquale might have him stopped down on 56 right now. Sutherland's on his way down, too, and I got Taber and Linda comin' out here. Lots of tracks, maybe prints. We'll see. We're going to need pictures.”

“Is this likely somebody you had talked to before?”

“Don't know. I didn't see him parked down on the road, or hear him before the shot. Just one round. I was kinda startled and fell backward, so maybe he thinks he got me.”

“
Kinda
startled,” Estelle repeated dryly. “I would think so. Okay. Let me know. I can break from here if I have to, but this doesn't look good for
Padrino.
You're sure
you're
all right?
”

“
Yep. Catch you later.”

Phone pocketed, he walked over to the juniper and found a spot in the shade. The contractor, driving slowly with his windows open, drifted his rig to a stop beside Torrez's truck, then pulled past it when he saw Torrez.

“Need some help, Sheriff?” Carl Bendix peered back at the pickup's partially raised hood. “Miles told me you might be out here huntin' today. Any luck?”

Torrez shrugged. “Runty buck is all. I'm just waitin' on some folks now. How's your project comin'?”

Bendix, rotund with a shaved head under his blue cap, shifted in the seat uncomfortably as Torrez finally rose and approached. “You know,” he said, “We're going to be out on this goddamn mesa project for
years.”

“That's a good thing, ain't it?”

The contractor shrugged in resignation. “Damn hot place to work, if you ask me. Could fry an egg on them rocks when the sun comes out.” He nodded at Torrez's truck. “What's the trouble?”

“Coil cable.”

“Give you mine, but it's a Ford. Then
I
could sit in the shade all day.” Bendix laughed.

Torrez slapped the truck's window sill in dismissal. “That's okay. I got one comin'. You take it easy.”

“You betcha.”

Taking a wide circle around his truck as the contractor pulled away, Torrez opened the passenger side door. The door hinges groaned, and not for the first time, Torrez reflected that it would be convenient if the door locks actually
worked.
Nothing in the glove box had been disturbed. The twelve-gauge shotgun in the rear window rack was still latched in place. The full gas can in back was bungeed tightly in front of the fender well. The rest was junk, not worth the taking.

“Just to give yourself a little time,” the sheriff muttered.