Pounded into fragrance by the heat during the day, the prairie collected back its vapors when the sun set and the air lost its heat. I breathed deeply, savoring it all. The Blazer ticked gently as it cooled, parked with engine off, windows open, and police radio turned to a whisper.
About five miles southwest of Posadas, New Mexico 56 passed by the remains of Moore—a couple old wooden buildings long since wilted into disuse, an abandoned truck or two, the remains of a 1924 Moline tractor with steel wheels that I had once considered salvaging for restoration.
Just west of Moore, the highway bridged the Rio Salinas, a broad dry wash that in thirty years I’d never seen carry water. The grandly named arroyo formed the western border of Arturo Mesa, and I had bumped the truck up an abandoned two-track on the flank of the mesa until I had a view of the highway below.
To the northeast, the village lights shimmered in the last haze of the dwindling summer heat. To the southwest, the San Cristobals formed a massive featureless block against the darkening sky. Lights from a few ranches were sprinkled in between. Traffic on the interstate coalesced into a Morse code of lights running east-west, with few drivers bothering to swing off the highway at the Posadas interchange.
Arturo Mesa was a grand place to sit and watch, listen, and think. As the evening passed, I could no longer see the state highway below me. It remained yawning, featureless black until a set of headlights meandered through the curves east of Moore and then vanished southwestward, followed by amber taillights.
The restaurant’s Burrito Grande worked its wonders, and I shifted position, leaning heavily on the center console. A cigarette and a cup of coffee would have tasted good. I hadn’t bothered to bring the remains of the pot I’d brewed, and I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in six years.
With comfortable drowsy detachment I watched a pair of head-lights approach Moore from the northeast. The vehicle slowed and its lights swept across the broad black front of the Moore Mercantile building. A spotlight beam lanced out, darting down the flank of the building toward an old stone barn favored by high school kids for an occasional beer party.
The spotlight winked out and the car idled around and then backed in beside the mercantile. Headlights switched off. Odds were good the vehicle was one of ours. The state police didn’t spend much time on our county’s low-profit roads, preferring instead the bustle of the interstate with its high-speed traffic. If it was just some jack-lighter with a spotlight unit screwed to the wind-shield frame of his car, then he’d picked a poor place for nighttime game.
From where he was parked, the deputy had a commanding view of State 56 in both directions, a clean sweep for radar. My undersheriff, Robert Torrez, rarely ran traffic unless it was within line of sight with a bar where he could nail drunks, his personal passion. The only other deputy on duty was Thomas Pasquale.
“All right,” I said aloud. The highway was a pretty good route for whatever fishing the deputy was trying. By taking NM56 rather than the interstate, truckers could cut some time on their runs to some of the communities in eastern Arizona. The road was fast except for the pass through the mountains down through Regal. And for the heavy loads, there weren’t any of those pesky weigh stations where logbooks could take a beating.
For the tandem car business, those Mexican used-car dealers who purchased units in the United States and towed them across the border, 56 was a convenient route in the daytime if they wanted to cross into Mexico at Regal or at night, when the towing was cooler and easier on high-mileage engines, heading into Arizona for a morning crossing at Douglas.
As I waited, old-fat-dog comfortable with the night breeze starting to take a chill, the first set of headlights was local. Even from a mile away, I could hear the jingle and rattle of the empty stock trailer, towed behind a big diesel pickup truck with running lights across the top of the cab.
The truck wasn’t speeding, and the patrol car parked in the shadows never stirred. In the next ten minutes, three more vehicles drove by, all well under the speed limit. Not a murmur broke radio silence.
I frowned. Sitting there in the dark was fine with me. I was two months away from seventy years old, well fed, just about devoid of ambition, and lacked any significant hobbies that might draw my attention away from watching for shooting stars or smelling the fringe sage as its soft tips roasted against the Blazer’s catalytic converter. It made sense that I’d plunk down and watch the world go by for want of anything better to do.
On the other end of the scale, Thomas Pasquale was twenty-six years old and as close to a perpetual motion machine as a human could be. From his hero, Undersheriff Robert Torrez, he’d adopted the habit of prowling the county’s nethermost reaches, never content to orbit the village for the easy pickings. He had put the department four-wheel-drive Broncos in some of the damnedest places, more than once walking back.
Parking in the lee of an abandoned building beside a dull state highway didn’t sound like the Thomas Pasquale I had come to know…at least not if he was parked there for long.
I picked up the cell phone and pressed the auto dialer.
“Posadas County Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Wheeler.”
“Ernie, what’s Pasquale’s twenty?”
“Hang on, Sheriff.”
I reached out and turned the radio up just a bit.
“Three oh three, Posadas, ten-twenty.”
The reply was immediate, and if I’d been a few hundred yards closer, I probably could have heard it directly.
“Posadas, three oh three is ten-eight on Fifty-six, at Moore.”
“Ten-four. PCS two five one.”
Wheeler came back on the phone. “Sir…”
“I heard,” I said. “Thanks. Everything quiet?”
“Except for the Sissons, I guess so.”
“The Sissons?”
“Jim and Grace Sisson. They’re at each other again. The undersheriff’s been out there a bunch today, the last time just a few minutes ago.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Talk to you later.”
I dropped the phone on the seat and watched a double set of headlights coming up from the south. One of the lights turned off about where the Broken Spur Saloon sat in the dust, and the second set continued on toward us.
In a few moments I could see the running lights on top, marking the hulk of a tractor trailer rig. The exhaust note was that of a big diesel wound tight, and it burped only slightly as the truck dived down across the Rio Guigarro just two miles west. The truck hit the flat, laser-straight stretch between the two rivers, the reports of its exhaust bouncing off the hills.
“Not a mile under seventy,” I muttered. If Pasquale was running radar, the trucker was dead meat. In a blast of sound, the rig flashed through Moore, and I heard the exhaust note change just a touch—the right timing as the trucker’s headlights picked up the sheriff’s star on the door of the patrol unit. The trucker evidently wasn’t impressed, because he swept on by without even a tentative touch of the brakes. Maybe the driver figured what the hell, he’d been nailed and that was that.
No red lights blossomed, and the patrol unit remained locked in the darkness beside the old building.
“Huh,” I grunted. For another ten minutes both of us sat in the stillness. Then the lights down below flicked on, and I watched the patrol car pull out onto the highway and cruise southwest for no more than a hundred yards before turning north on the narrow, rough two-track that cut across the rugged prairie. I’d driven that two-track myself a number of times and had gotten myself stuck on it once. Other than a couple of ranches, there wasn’t much to see.
After two miles of skirting the Rio Salinas, the two-track would fork, with one track angled west again, eventually emerging behind the Broken Spur Saloon. The other track continued north until it was sliced to a stop by the interstate right-of-way fence.
From my perch high on the mesa I watched the lights of Pasquale’s unit dip and bob. They vanished at a spot where I knew the two-track crossed the Salinas and then emerged on the other side, sweeping a yellow fan across the open prairie. At that point, he punched them off, and the vehicle disappeared as if it’d been levitated off the planet.
“Huh,” I said, and started the Blazer.
Picking my way in the dark wasn’t something that my bifocaled eyes were good at any longer. Between the starlight and a sliver of moon, I could creep down the rock-strewn incline off the mesa. Four or five more vehicles passed by on the highway before the Blazer thumped down the last few yards and drove across the bunchgrass south of the pavement.
Once on the highway, I turned left and idled toward the Broken Spur. I’d covered no more than a mile when a set of headlights blasted up behind me like a ballistic missile. First the night was dark except for my own lights, and then I was illuminated without warning…as if the driver had come up from behind with his lights off and then, a few yards behind my vehicle, snapped them on.
Just as quickly, the driver backed off half a dozen car lengths, and I could see the boxy silhouette of the Bronco. I reached out and squeezed the mike’s transmit button a couple of times and after a second or two got two barks of squelch in return.
Picking up the mike, I said, “Three oh three, three ten on channel three.” That put us on car-to-car, and I added, “I’d like to talk to you a minute. The parking lot of the Broken Spur will be just fine.”
The saloon was remote but a favorite watering hole for local ranchers and anyone else who wanted weathered wood and crushed black velvet ambiance. The owner, Victor Sanchez, and I had enjoyed an uneasy truce since the night Victor’s oldest son had died from a bullet through the heart, fired by Victor himself.
A few minutes later Pasquale and I pulled into the parking lot of the Broken Spur, surrounded by a swirling cloud of dust. Three pickup trucks, including one with an empty stock trailer, were parked in the lot, along with a large camper with Michigan plates.
Pasquale turned around so his vehicle was pointed at the highway, parking window-to-window with mine.
“Quiet night,” I said. He grinned a little sheepishly, a handsome kid with an easy smile and a broad, open face. The small scar over his right eye was a persistent reminder that I’d been his roadblock to joining the sheriff’s department. He’d earned the scar by flipping his village patrol car over in the middle of Bustos Avenue, flying low to beat the deputies to a routine call. At the time he’d been a part-timer with the village, and he’d been trying hard to redeem himself ever since.
He’d done a pretty good job. Only once in a while did I wish that I could wave a magic wand and age him through his long-lasting adolescence to a good, solid forty or so.
“What are you hunting?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I saw your vehicle up on the side of the mesa and wondered who it was and what they were doing.”
“Sharp eyes,” I said.
He shrugged. “I saw the moonlight glint on your vehicle, and so I pulled into Moore and sat for a little bit, like maybe I was running radar. I just kinda sat there and watched for a few minutes.”
“I see.”
“None of the ranchers are workin’ that area up there, so…” He let it trail off. If he was curious about what I had been up to, sitting out in the dark by myself, he didn’t let it show.
“How many Mexican tandems go through here in a week?” I asked. “You care to guess?”
“You mean the used cars going to Mexico?” He puffed out his cheeks. “Dozens, I’d guess. I see ’em all the time.”
“Their paperwork always in order?”
Pasquale looked nonplussed. “I guess so, sir. About the most often I talk to ’em is when they’re broke down at the side of the road. And that happens a lot. I figured they’ll be checked pretty close at the border, so I don’t mess with ’em. Should I be on ’em?”
I shook my head. “Just something that came to mind,” I said. I watched a rancher emerge from the Broken Spur Saloon, walking with the exaggerated care of someone just this side of blind, staggering drunk. He looked over, saw the two county cars, and lurched to a stop, then turned around and retreated back inside.
I figured we had about two minutes before Victor Sanchez roared out to chase us off his property with his predictable “bad for business” diatribe.
I pulled the Blazer into gear. “When you circle back through Posadas, stop by the office. I want to show you something.”
“You want me to come in now?” he asked, and a tinge of worry crept into his voice.
I waved a hand in dismissal. “No. Later. Just when it’s convenient. I’ll be there most of the night. I’ve got a bunch of paperwork I need to do.”
That was true. I had paperwork, and I needed to do it. But I had not the slightest intention of spending the night staring at budget figures.
No matter what my intentions might have been, they flew out the window when I was still five miles southwest of Posadas. My phone chirped, and I damn near drove off the road before I found the thing. The little cellular unit had been in my hand not more than ten minutes before, but when released it tended to dive to the depths of whatever pile of junk covered my car seat at the time.
A trace of urgency had crept into Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler’s voice.
“Sir, Bob’s responding to a call over at Sisson Plumbing and Heating. He said to have you meet him there.”
“Domestic dispute?” I asked.
“Uh, he’s not sure. But it looks like there’s a fatality. Emergency is over there now.”
“I’m on my way.” I tossed the phone on the seat and concentrated on the winding dark road.
There wasn’t any point in tying up the air waves with more questions. I couldn’t do any good from five miles away. But before I’d traveled two of them, I saw the red lights behind me, and in a few seconds Deputy Pasquale’s Bronco passed me, wound up tight.
His spotlight beam lanced out ahead, probing the side of the highway for sets of eyes that might wander into his vehicle’s ballistic path. I eased off and let the youngster charge on ahead. If we were responding to a fatality, the victim would patiently wait for us all.
I drove back into the village of Posadas from the south, ducking under the interstate. The lights of travelers flashed overhead, on their way to points east and west, oblivious of our emergency. A mile farther, the first significant street off Grande to the right was MacArthur.
Despite what tourists might think after viewing Pershing Park, assuming that MacArthur was yet another tribute to military might, the street was named for Peter MacArthur, the second mayor of Posadas. The first mayor, Fred Pino, had been shot before he’d managed to accomplish enough to earn a street name.
MacArthur wound in a wide loop around the southeast quadrant of the village, encompassing a residential area of aging mobile homes, a neighborhood that blended into a scattering of businesses as it approached Bustos Avenue, the major artery running east-west through Posadas.
Sprawled on the southeast corner of MacArthur’s intersection with Bustos was Sisson Plumbing and Heating. Jim Sisson had lived in the county his entire life, the son of Granger and Mary Sisson, ranchers who’d tried their best to run a successful cow-calf operation in the middle of the sage, creosote bush, and cacti. They’d managed after a fashion until 1967, when their pickup truck hadn’t rolled out of the way fast enough and a southbound Union Pacific freight train had pounded it to tangled junk at a crossing near Alamogordo.
Their son, Jim, hadn’t thought much of the ranching life and had opened his business in the village about the time I’d started with the Sheriff’s Department in 1966. He’d married Grace Stevenson, rescuing her from her fate as the only daughter of the local Methodist minister and his wife. Only Jim and Grace knew what they saw in each other. They’d been festering along for more than three decades.
Grace was blessed with a razor tongue and an astonishing lack of tact. Like the one step forward, two steps back dance, the Sissons’ list of customers pulsed up and down, first because they were attracted by the mild-mannered, courtly Jim and then repelled by Grace when it came time for billing or complaint.
Over the years the “Jim and Grace Show” had become something of a department joke. Their scraps were legend. When it came to Grace, Jim put his courtly manners to one side. He could swing a calloused hand as fast as anyone, and Grace retaliated just as promptly.
About the time their relationship would deteriorate to the hurling-hard-and-heavy-objects stage, or maybe when one of them was thinking of reaching for a shotgun, they’d solve their problems by having another kid. That would cool things down for a while, and Sisson Plumbing and Heating would flourish and grow.
Their prefab home looked across the street at Burger Heaven and diagonally across the intersection at the Chavez Chevy-Olds dealership—a hell of a view.
The house was surrounded by various outbuildings and shops and a mammoth collection of junk—at least it all looked like junk to a nonplumber like me. Jim Sisson had purchased his first backhoe in 1968, and the worn-out carcass of that machine and of every other he’d ever owned since then were parked along the back of the largest shop building.
I was sure that when Sisson replaced someone’s swamp cooler he always kept the corroded shell of the old one, probably “just in case.” Just in case what, I didn’t know.
The board fence around Sisson’s enclave was six feet high, but I could see the emergency lights winking from two blocks away. A fair-sized crowd of rubberneckers had assembled, all of them standing in the middle of the street gawking toward the Sissons’ property, spectators to an event that everyone in town had known would come one day or another.
Deputy Tony Abeyta, who wasn’t on the duty roster for the evening but had jumped in response to the call anyway, had parked his patrol unit across the Sissons’ driveway, beside a yellow ribbon that stretched from the corner downspout of the house across to the high wooden fence.
One of the village’s part-time patrolmen, Chad Beuler, detached himself from a group of half a dozen gawkers and waved a flashlight at me. Chief Eduardo Martinez hadn’t arrived, but at 9:30 we were well past his bedtime. Beuler, a beanpole with a receding chin who kept twitching his shoulders as if his undershirt was binding his armpits, shook his head in deep frustration as he stepped to the curb and intercepted me.
“We got us a hell of a mess,” he said, and waved the flashlight again. The beam caught me in the eyes, and I lifted a hand to ward it off. “Now you-all just step on back,” he barked toward the gathering of folks on the sidewalk. None of them appeared to be moving in any direction, forward or back, but Beuler liked to make sure. He walked ahead of me toward the ribbon.
He turned to face me, still walking—not a bad feat. If I’d tried it, I’d have been flat on my back. “The undersheriff is in there,” he said, indicating the narrow driveway that ran between a slab of fence and the side of the house. “It’s a hell of a mess.”
“Thank you,” I said, and slipped past, ignoring the four people who tried to talk to me at once.
“And I think a couple of the bigwigs are inside the house,” Beuler called after me.
I walked along the dark side of the house toward the artificial daylight of the well lighted backyard and shop area. As I passed under a frosted window, I could hear voices inside, one of them tight and distraught and trying to piece a sentence together around sobbing gulps of air.
At the back corner of the house, Tom Pasquale’s Bronco was parked bumper-to-bumper with one of Bob Torrez’s personal pickup trucks, a faded red-and-black hulk with two spare tires chained in the back to the ornate iron racks.
I could hear the heavy, clattering idle of a diesel engine, and as I made my way past the vehicles I caught a glimpse of Torrez’s towering bulk as he walked around the back of a large yellow backhoe. In the instant that my attention was diverted, my toe caught something hard, sharp, and immovable, and I stumbled hard, landing on one knee, driving the palm of my left hand into the sharp gravel that covered the driveway.
With a string of colorful curses, I pushed myself to my feet, the shock of the fall hammering my joints and making the lights dance. I stopped, brushed myself off, and took several deep breaths, realizing that I wasn’t looking at just one machine. There were two, the backhoe parked butt-to-butt with a huge front loader, like a beetle backed up against a scorpion. With no breeze, the cloying sweet odor of diesel exhaust hung thick as it chuffed out of the rear tractor’s stack.
“Sir?” Deputy Pasquale appeared from out of nowhere at my elbow.
“What have you got?” I asked. Once out of the tangle of shadows cast by the house and the vehicles I could see just fine, and I snapped my flashlight off and thrust it in my back pocket.
“Over here,” he said, and almost made contact as he reached out toward my elbow. It was a simple-enough gesture of assistance, the sort of thing I’d do if I saw a little old lady startled to a standstill by the sudden rush of the automatic doors at the supermarket.
I stepped around the large yellow bucket of the front loader and stopped short. “Jesus,” I said.
Jim Sisson appeared to have managed one of those incomprehensible accidents that would be difficult for Hollywood stuntmen to reproduce. And like most accidents, it had probably started simple.
The left back tire and wheel had been taken off the disabled front loader, and the machine’s axle was supported by a terrifying collection of wooden blocks and old boards, along with the single hydraulic jack. The tire and wheel were lying several feet away, the cleated tread just inches from the wall of the shop. The backhoe bucket of the second machine was poised overhead, a length of heavy chain hanging from its teeth. Underneath the tire, head scrunched up against the building at an unnatural angle, one leg grotesquely kicked out, was Jim Sisson.
Robert Torrez had been kneeling beside the building, near Sisson’s head, in company with two EMTs. He pushed himself to his feet. “Don’t touch that,” he snapped as Tom Pasquale bent down as if to poke at the huge rubber tire.
The undersheriff stepped gingerly around the machinery and approached me. “It looks like he was lifting the rear wheel off one machine with the backhoe of the other, sir. Somehow the chain slipped. He’s dead, for sure. Skull’s crushed, and his neck must have snapped like a twig.”
“Did you call Linda?”
Torrez nodded. “She’ll be here in a minute.” He beckoned. “So will Perrone,” he added, referring to Posadas County Coroner Alan Perrone. “Step around this way.”
I did, catching a glimpse of a figure in the partially open back door of the house. It was Deputy Abeyta, and he no doubt had his hands full keeping the stream of people from flooding out into the yard. At the same time, I heard a serious of deep, heavy barks. The family dog, eager to leap out into the backyard with the rest of us, tried to shove his broad head between Abeyta’s legs. The deputy reached out and swung the solid back door shut.
I stood with my hands in my pockets, looking at what was left of Jim Sisson. “Christ almighty,” I murmured. “Why the hell don’t you get him out of there?” But a closer look made it clear why there was no frantic activity to free Jim from his predicament. The man’s skull had been pulped.
“If he hadn’t swung it so close to the wall, he might have had a chance,” Torrez said.
The wheel and tire, complete with bolt-on weights for added traction and probably loaded inside with calcium chloride for even more weight, had struck the wall of the shop and then slid down, crushing Sisson in between. His skull had slammed against the corrugated steel of the shop siding until it cracked like an eggshell, and then he’d been pushed downward, his neck bent so that his chin was driven down into the hollow behind his collarbone.
Dark rubber streaks marked the steel siding, tracing the tire’s path as it slid downward. Blood puddled on the cement under Sisson’s head.
“Look here, sir,” Torrez said, and he knelt beside the tire. He beckoned me close and dropped his voice. “Right there.” He played his flashlight under the tire, illuminating what little space remained.
“What am I looking at?”
Torrez reached out and touched the smooth concrete of the shop apron with a ballpoint pen. “Rubber marks. From the tire tread. Between these and the marks on the wall, I’m thinking we can backtrack and pretty much tell just what happened.”
“What happened was that the goddamn tire fell on him and crushed him,” I said. “He was working by himself?”
“Apparently so.”
“Jesus,” I muttered, wondering what spat had driven Jim out of the house at that hour to seek the comfort of his machines. “Is Mrs. Sisson inside?”
“Her and a mob,” Torrez said. “Half the neighborhood, I guess. Tony tried getting a preliminary statement, but it’s rough going. We’re going to have to talk to her after a bit, when things calm down. It’s a zoo in there right now.”
“I can imagine. Does anyone have a clue about what Jim was trying to do? Was he just trying to change a goddamn tire or work on the brakes or what?”
Torrez reached out with his boot and touched the front loader’s tire. “This one is flat, so I assume he wanted to work on it. We don’t know for sure. Neither does his wife. She said initially that she was watching television. Jim was out back, working in his shop. According to one of the neighbors, they’d had a rough day. I’ll vouch for that. I was over here three times. Lots of shouting. Tom Mears is working on that angle.”
“So what else is new,” I grunted. “Where would we all be without nosy neighbors? And Grace said that Jim was alone out here?”
Torrez hesitated, and I looked up at him. His response wasn’t much more than a whisper. “That’s what she said.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
Torrez reached out and lightly tapped the big tire with the toe of his boot again. “This doesn’t look like a one-man job, sir.”
I gazed at the two machines. “Stranger things have happened, Robert,” I said. “It’s jury-rigged, that’s for sure. He wanted to lift the tire, so he tried to do it with the backhoe. Something slipped, like where he had the chain hooked, and he got down to work on it. The damn thing nailed him. In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like—one man trying to do something by himself that he shouldn’t have been. And he was in a foul mood to begin with.”
“You’ll be at the office later?” The way he said it sounded like he’d dismissed my logical scenario.
I nodded. “I’m just in the way here. Let me know if you need anything.” I indicated the idling tractor. “And you might as well shut that thing down. Make it easier to hear and breathe both.”
Torrez glanced at his watch. “Dr. Perrone will be here in a minute. Then we’ll clear things up. There’s no hurry.”