Scavengers (15 page)
“Are you all right?” Debbie Peterson had watched Estelle’s tussle with the door, and as it opened, had heard the undersheriff talking to herself. Estelle, in midgrimace as she massaged the bruised thumb, looked heavenward when she saw the ER nurse. Debbie’s long, angular face softened in sympathy. “I hate that door,” she added.
“Early morning clumsies,” Estelle said. The nurse was balancing an impressive array of medical supplies on a clipboard, in the middle of something that didn’t need an interruption. “I’m fine,” Estelle added. “It’s been quite a night.”
“I’ll say.” Debbie’s gaze inventoried Estelle from head to toe. She saw the grime of the fire scene embedded in the undersheriff’s clothes, and could smell the acrid bouquet. But there were no projecting bones or blood…just the pale complexion of fatigue that the undersheriff’s flawless olive skin couldn’t hide. The nurse nodded down the hallway that skirted the two small emergency rooms and the radiology lab. “Your husband was here just a few minutes ago treating the officer. I think when he finished he planned to go back to the ICU.”
Estelle’s face went blank. “The officer? One of the firemen was hurt?”
“Collins, I think his name is. The one who ran the nail into his hand.”
“Ouch. No, I didn’t know about that. He’s all right?”
“Sure. In fact, he headed back out to the fire.” Debbie adjusted the placement of two of the small bottles on the clipboard.
“And Eleanor Pope—I understand that she was brought in earlier. Can you point me in the direction of her room?” Estelle asked.
“She’s the one who’s in ICU right now,” Debbie said. “You might want to check at the nurse’s station to be sure, but that’s where they planned to take her.” She smiled warmly as Estelle nodded her thanks and started down the hall.
Despite the ruckus at the opposite end of town, Posadas General Hospital was locked in the deep quiet of the predawn hours. The intensive care unit dominated the end of a long hallway out of the heaviest central traffic flow, the double glass doors opening to the ICU nurses’ station.
Dr. Francis Guzman leaned both elbows on the polished wood of the counter with his face cradled by both hands. He appeared to either be asleep or reading the chart that lay on the counter in front of him. A gray-haired nurse whom Estelle didn’t recognize stood behind the counter frowning at the floor, telephone receiver tight against her ear. The nurse saw Estelle hesitate at the door, and beckoned. Francis glanced up as the door glided open.
“Ah, good,” he said. Estelle breathed in the aromas of him as he caught her up in a bear hug. Her aromas were a different matter. “You smell as if you’ve been inside somebody’s chimney,” he said. She managed to free her right hand enough to reach up and move the ballpoint pen in his pocket so that it didn’t threaten her eye as he crushed her against him.
“You’re going to need a fresh set of scrubs,” she said.
“I got lots of those.” He held her at arm’s length and she grinned as he gave her his best critical physician’s scrutiny. “How you holding up,
cariña?
”
“I’m okay. Is Eleanor still here?”
“No, no,” Francis said quickly. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Can we go home now?’ ” He gave her another squeeze and then relaxed his hold. Estelle stood with eyes closed, using her husband as a leaning post. She thumped her head against his chest a couple of times and then looked up at him. “And yes, she’s still here,” Francis said. “And you’re a smelly mess.”
“I know, but I need to see her.”
Francis nodded in resignation. “I don’t think that’s going to do any good,
querida
.” He turned, one hand still on her shoulder. “We’re trying to keep her as quiet as we can.” Estelle started to move off toward the nearest sliding curtain that provided a modicum of privacy for the patient behind it, but stopped when she felt the trace of restraint from her husband’s hand. She realized that the nurse was watching as well.
“What?”
“I brought
Mamá
in with me, Estelle.”
Estelle’s first reflex was to look across the hall toward the small ICU waiting room with its three vinyl-covered chairs and single sofa, but just as quickly she realized what Francis had meant.
“She’s here? What happened?”
Francis rested a hand on his chest, fingers splayed like a spider’s legs. “She was having a little trouble breathing. I wanted to be able to keep an eye on her.”
“She’s sleeping peacefully now,” the nurse said. The woman rounded the end of the counter and held out a hand toward Estelle. A small spray of delicate paper flowers obscured a portion of the staff name tag, but Estelle could read
Sadie McC
and then
RN
. As if her soles had been welded to the floor tiles, Estelle stood motionless. Francis saw the darkness gathering on her face and sighed.
“
Querida
, I wanted her here so I could keep an eye on her. That’s all. With both of us out on call, I didn’t want to put Irma in that position. Your mother was having a little respiratory discomfort, and I had to be here. You were out at the fire, and I just thought it would be easier. It’s as simple as that.”
“There’s nothing simple about ending up in ICU,” Estelle snapped, and instantly regretted the outburst. She closed her eyes and shook her head in apology, leaning her weight against him as she felt Francis’ arm.
“Come on,” he said gently.
Even though she knew it would not be so, Estelle had recoiled from the vision of Teresa Reyes lying helpless—intubated, IVed, and sedated, completely at the mercy of this sterile place despite the woman’s wishes to the contrary. Francis pushed the privacy curtain to one side, and she saw her mother sleeping like a child, tiny and curled on her side. The clear plastic oxygen tube curled from her nose up around her ears, lost in the halo of wiry gray hair.
The analytical side of Estelle’s brain understood perfectly well that, at age eighty-two with a failing heart, congested lungs, and the soaring blood pressure of brittle arteries, Teresa Reyes’ hold on life was precarious at best. Still, that portion of Estelle’s brain that entertained dreams of Pancho Villa’s tree and the recollection of her mother’s voice on the peaceful Mexican air of her childhood refused to accept the inevitable.
“
Hay una gran distancia la que va de ayer a hoy,
” she whispered, and then found herself wishing that she could remember the exact circumstances when her mother had said that to her for the first time.
A great distance between yesterday and today
. The analytical clock said that great distance happened in an infinitely small time, the click between midnight and a heartbeat afterward. What did the clock know?
“She accepted medication?” Estelle asked.
“After I explained exactly what I was giving her and why. If we can relieve her lungs a little, she’ll be more comfortable.” Estelle lowered the security railing on the side of the bed and sat on the edge, acutely aware of how perfectly white the linens were in contrast to her smudged clothing. Her left hand rested lightly on her mother’s hip. “She’s not interested in anything else,” Francis added.
Estelle nodded. After a long moment, she said, “That’s why she’s been talking about Mexico lately.”
“
Sin duda.
”
With her right hand, she squeezed her husband’s feeling his warm, comfortable grip. “Can she go home?”
“Sure. When either you or I are there. Otherwise, we’re going to have to find a nurse to be with her. We can’t ask Irma…”
“No,” Estelle agreed quickly. “That would be unfair.”
“She’ll probably sleep through morning. Until then, we’ve got the extra bed space here, and we might as well take advantage of some of the strings that I can pull. And by morning, maybe the world will calm down a bit.”
“Unlikely,” Estelle said.
“It’s that bad?”
“Probably worse,
oso
,” she said with a sigh, and stood up, careful not to jostle the bed. She bent over until her lips were brushing Teresa Reyes’ ear. “
Mañana, Mamá. Vamos a ir a casa.
” She straightened and touched a finger to her mother’s cheek, then turned to Francis. “I need to see Eleanor Pope.”
“I don’t think she’s going to tell you much,” Francis said. He led Estelle deeper into the sanctum of the ICU to where the monitors kept track of Eleanor Pope’s sagging functions. A great mound of a woman, Mrs. Pope lay wired and tubed, her round face slack-jawed, her ragged breath whistling in and out without the interference of her dentures.
“Ay,” Estelle sighed.
“We were able to stabilize her a little,” Francis said. “But we’re at the hoping for a miracle stage now.”
“She hasn’t been the recipient of too many of those.”
“Mrs. Guzman?”
Estelle turned at the sound of her name. Nurse Sadie McC leaned past the curtain, one hand raised as if asking permission to speak.
“We’re done here,” Estelle said.
“No, I don’t mean to interrupt,” Sadie said. “There’s a woman waiting for you out in the hall. She wanted to make sure that you knew she was here.”
“I’ll be just a minute,” Estelle said, and the nurse nodded and left. “There’s a chance Mrs. Pope might be able to talk to us later in the morning?”
Francis held up both hands in a shrug. “We just don’t know.” He pulled the curtain closed. “When she was brought in, she was no longer lucid. Right now, her circulation system has basically collapsed. Her kidney function is nil. Things don’t look good.”
“I’m not sure what she could tell us even if she were alert,” Estelle said. She ran both hands through her hair in frustration. “All we know is that it appears that her son was monkeying with the propane furnace when it exploded. We’d like to know why.”
“Because it didn’t work properly?”
She shot Francis a withering glance. “You’re hired,
oso
,” she said. They reached the nurse’s station, and through the glass partitions that formed the ICU, Estelle could see the waiting room across the hall. Pauline Saenz sat on one end of the short sofa, an unlit cigarette in hand. She saw Estelle and jammed the cigarette back into her purse, then stood up and walked into the hall to meet her.
When Estelle walked out of the ICU, Paulita Saenz pulled the cigarette back out of her purse as if she intended to use it as a weapon. She held it by the filter and jabbed it in Estelle’s direction. “When was the last time I saw you?” A large-boned, angular woman, she stood a head taller than the undersheriff. She would make a formidable bartender.
Estelle remembered Paulita’s husband, Monroy, as a short, stumpy man who had driven a dump truck for the county. A combination of alcohol and diabetes had killed him, leaving Paulita with a young son to raise. The lean, darkly handsome Eurelio apparently enjoyed the best genes from each parent.
Estelle extended her hand and waited while Paulita regarded it. Finally the woman shifted her grip on the cigarette to accept the greeting. “I think I was in the Taberna Azul with my Uncle Reuben ten or fifteen years ago, Mrs. Saenz,” Estelle said. Paulita’s eyes narrowed as she ran through her own mental calculations.
“And not since then,” Paulita said with just a hint of recrimination.
“No. Not since then.”
“Reuben’s been gone for five years now.”
Surprised that the woman should have Reuben Fuentes’ memory on such fresh recall, Estelle wondered what the relationship between the old man and the Saenz family might have been. She remembered the tavern as a dark, musty, cool place, and could visualize little more. Over the years, sheriff’s deputies had responded to the inevitable bar fights at the
taberna
, but Estelle had never had occasion to go. In fact, it had been fully twenty-one years before when, as an eighteen-year-old, Estelle Reyes had stepped into the tavern and searched the dark corners until she had found Reuben. She had no recollection of the purpose of the errand, or what had happened after that.
Whatever Reuben’s relationship to the Saenz family had been, beyond that of a casual customer at the bar, no doubt it was as evanescent as Estelle’s own relationship with the ancient Reuben Fuentes, a man who was actually her mother’s uncle…and thus her own adoptive
great
-uncle.
“Yes, ma’am. Reuben passed away in 1996,” Estelle said.
“And your mother, she’s living with you now, isn’t she?” Paulita asked with just a light shade of triumph. The tendrils of information from her bartender’s grapevine were impressive.
“Yes, she is.”
“He’s a good-looking man.” The non sequitur caught Estelle by surprise until she turned and saw that Paulita was looking through the glass partitions of the ICU. Dr. Francis was shaking his head while Sadie McC appeared to be questioning something from the clipboard chart. Paulita didn’t wait for confirmation. Instead she turned abruptly and walked to the waiting room, saying over her shoulder, “I heard that you’re the sheriff now. That’s what they were telling me.”
Estelle followed her into the room and chose one of the corner chairs. “Bob Torrez is sheriff, Mrs. Saenz.” She saw the furrow on the woman’s forehead deepen, perhaps perplexed to learn that her source of information was faulty. To the general public, the distinction between sheriff and deputy was often fuzzy at best. “Do you feel comfortable talking here, or would you like to go somewhere else?”
“It doesn’t matter where we talk,” Mrs. Saenz said, and her tone took an edge. “I want to know why my son is in jail. And I want to know why he didn’t call me.” She rummaged in her purse, found a lighter, and despite the numerous signs throughout the hospital admonishing to the contrary, lit the cigarette.
“Have you been to the Sheriff’s Office yet, Mrs. Saenz?”
“They told me you might be down here.”
“They didn’t allow you to see Eurelio?”
Paulita rolled the cigarette this way and that, watching the embers burn and shed. When she spoke, her voice sank to a whisper. “He didn’t want to see me.”
“There may have been a misunderstanding, Mrs. Saenz. With the fire at the Pope place, we’re terribly shorthanded at the moment. If the dispatch deputy was by himself, he wouldn’t have had the time to arrange a meeting with your son for you.”
“My son didn’t call me,” Paulita said, in no mood to discuss fires or someone else’s misfortune. “His girlfriend came and told me.”
“That would be Ms. Benevidez?”
Paulita nodded. “And she didn’t know why Eurelio had been taken off to jail. She said it didn’t make any sense at all. They were drinking a few beers, that’s all. Having a nice drive in that old truck…”
Estelle indicated one of the vinyl-covered chairs, and Paulita Saenz sat down. She reached out, folded down the corner of the cover of one of the news magazines on the coffee table in front of her, and ripped it off. With practiced skill, she folded the slip of paper into a small dish. She tapped the ash off her cigarette and placed the makeshift receptacle on the table. “So maybe you can tell me.”
Estelle settled back against the hard plastic of the chair. Even at a perfectly temperate seventy degrees, the air of the hospital felt close and warm. It would have been welcome just to let her eyes close and rest her head back against the wall. “Paulita, I’m sure you’re aware that we’re investigating an incident involving the death of two men. Their bodies were found out on the prairie, north of Maria.”
“Everybody’s heard about that. Eurelio had nothing to do with that.”
“I hope not.”
Paulita frowned again, looking hard at the undersheriff. She prided herself on reading the faces of her customers at the Taberna Azul but this young woman sat quietly, hands folded in her lap, so calm, so serene, so controlled. Estelle Reyes-Guzman could have been sitting at the table in the back of the
taberna
, those same hands holding four aces with a mounded pot, and she would have given away nothing.
Paulita opened her mouth to say something but stopped at the sound of footsteps in the hallway. They weren’t the almost inaudible padding of a nurse’s soft shoes, or the shuffle of a custodian guiding a dust mop, but were heavy and rapid.
Deputy Tom Pasquale appeared in the doorway. “Hey,” he said by way of greeting and rested his hand on the doorjamb. He’d shed his firefighting gear and slipped into jeans and a T-shirt, incongruous with the black Sheriff’s Department coat. “Mrs. Saenz, how are you?” Paulita let a nod suffice. Estelle saw the deputy’s eyes quickly inventory the woman, from the lit cigarette to the outlines of things in the pockets of her own bulky coat. “Did you need me for anything?” the deputy asked, and Estelle realized that she was so tired she didn’t really know the answer. The clock across the hall had ticked to 4:01
AM
.
“I don’t think so, Tom. We’re going to have to regroup after everybody gets some rest. The sheriff will be back, and we can see where we stand.”
Pasquale nodded, still regarding Paulita Saenz.
“I appreciate your checking,” Estelle said. “I think Mrs. Saenz and I are going to go on over to the county building and see her son for a few minutes.”
“You’re the one who arrested him,” Paulita said to Pasquale, not bothering to add the “and it’s all your fault” that her tone so clearly implied.
“Yes, ma’am,” Tom Pasquale said.
“He had nothing to do with those two men.”
Pasquale nodded, but said nothing.
“Do you know why he doesn’t want to talk to me?”
“Not a clue,” the deputy said. “Maybe he’s afraid you’re going to whup on him some.” He smiled engagingly, but Paulita was in no mood to share the humor. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
“Maybe that’s what I ought to do,” she said.
“Mrs. Saenz, let’s go over to the office,” Estelle said. “Maybe we can straighten out a few things with Eurelio.”
“Jackie’s on the road,” Tom Pasquale said as Estelle pushed herself to her feet. Jackie Taber was one of the few deputies who didn’t have a volunteer firefighter’s rig hanging at the fire house. “She said she’d stay sort of central until everything quiets down.”
“That’s fine.” She turned to Paulita Saenz. “Let me poke my head in and check on
mi mamá
one more time before I leave. I’ll meet you right at the office by the dispatcher’s desk in just a few minutes. Then we’ll talk to Eurelio.”
Paulita crushed out the cigarette. She gathered the makeshift ashtray and crumpling it carefully into a tight ball. “Now you—” She started to say, and stopped. Her face softened and she extended her free hand toward Estelle. “Teresa…she’s in here?” She motioned with her head toward the ICU beyond the wall of the waiting room. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“She’ll be fine,” Estelle said. That wasn’t the informative answer that Paulita obviously expected. Estelle touched the woman’s waiting hand. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”
Tom Pasquale stepped out of the doorway to let her pass, and she squeezed his arm quickly. “Thank you.” Her lips formed the silent words, and Tom nodded. “Did you get a chance to look at the information that the sheriff sent?”
“Haven’t had a chance,” Tom said. “I was thinkin’ of doing that right now. How’s Mrs. Pope, by the way?”
Estelle shook her head. “One in a million, maybe.” The deputy grimaced. He watched Paulita Saenz as the woman made her way down the polished tile of the hallway.
“You’re all right with her?”
“She’s fine,” Estelle replied.
“Apparently she was rip-roaring when she came into the office. Brent made the mistake of telling her where you might be. I chewed his ass for that.”
“That’s all right. She’s a mom, you know. Moms go off the deep end now and then.”
Tom Pasquale waved a hand in salute as Francis Guzman opened the door to the ICU and held it, obviously waiting for Estelle. “She’s going to be all right?” the deputy asked. “I didn’t know your mother was here.”
“She’ll be fine,” Estelle said. “I’ll be at the office in a few minutes. You might hold Paulita’s hand for a while until I get there so she doesn’t have the chance to work herself up again.”
“She’ll pass out from the smell,” Pasquale said, looking down at himself. “I need a shower.”
“Not just you,” Estelle laughed.
Other than the soft tick and hiss of machinery that ministered to Eleanor Pope, the ICU was silent. Standing at the foot of the hospital bed where Teresa Reyes slept peacefully, Estelle slipped her arm around her husband’s waist and leaned her head against the heavy muscle of his upper arm.
“I’m not ready for this,” Estelle whispered.
“Don’t get yourself all worked up. She’s doing a lot better,” Francis said. “She really is. I want to make a change or two in her meds, and that’s going to make a difference. She’ll be back to her old self in a day or two.”
Estelle sighed. “She’s going to just keep getting older, isn’t she?”
Francis laughed, quick to bite off the sound. He squeezed the base of Estelle’s neck affectionately. “Good thing we aren’t, huh.”
“I feel about a hundred and six,” Estelle said.
“But you’re not going straight home to bed, are you?”
She ducked her head in resignation. “Sort of straight.”
“Circuitously straight,” Francis said, and swept the privacy curtain closed as they stepped away from the bed.
“And you don’t think there’s a chance that we’ll be able to talk to Mrs. Pope later today?”
Francis paused with his hand on the door to the hallway. “Unlikely,
querida
. Unlikely today. Or any day. That would be my bet. Her system just isn’t tough enough to take that kind of insult.” He shrugged. “Of course, she may surprise us all. There’s always that.”
“I’m too tired for surprises,” Estelle said. “But I’ll take that one.”
