Bag Limit (5 page)

Chapter Five

I lost a bet with myself. I figured that the first thing Matthew Baca would do after he settled down in the backseat was to squirm his cuffed wrists down around his legs so that his hands were in front of him. That wouldn’t accomplish much, but at least he’d be able to pick his nose. About half the kids that we put into cuffs managed to accomplish that maneuver, and I suppose that every one of them hoped that we’d be surprised as hell, thereby showing us a thing or two, by God.

Matt didn’t bother with that stunt. Instead he lay on his back and let fly at the right side window with both feet.

The safety glass was pretty strong, and for the first few kicks he was off balance and experimenting. I slowed the car and twisted around to look through the heavy steel grille that separated front from back. Matt Baca was a dark, featureless shadow, but he could see my profile clearly enough.

“The last time one of those windows got busted,” I said, “the court made the young man who kicked it out pay a hundred and eighty bucks to replace it. And that’s in addition to all the other charges. You might want to think about that.”

Matt did think about it, for about ten seconds. Reasoning wasn’t on his agenda. He set to kicking again, this time with a vengeance. The
thud, thud, thud
rocked the car. Either he was tuckered from his trek on the mountain, or the soles of his nifty sneakers were too well padded. The window refused to break. His muttered display of colorful language came in short bursts as he sucked in air between assaults on the window.

“Son,” I said, “I’ve never actually seen anybody climb out through a bunch of broken glass while the car was moving,” I said. “Especially with handcuffs on. That’s going to be quite a stunt to watch.”

Maybe young Baca was sober enough by then to imagine himself hanging half in and half out of the window—feetfirst or headfirst didn’t matter much. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

For a couple of miles, the only sound I could hear was his rhythmic breathing. I turned up the volume on the police radio and keyed the mike.

“Posadas County, three ten.”

Enough seconds elapsed that I was raising the mike to repeat myself when Brent Sutherland finally found the transmission bar on the dispatcher’s end. “Three ten, Posadas County.”

“Posadas, three ten is ten-fifteen, one adult male. Request that three oh one ten-nineteen. And give the undersheriff a call. Advise him that his rabbit is in custody.”

There was a moment while Sutherland digested that I was inbound with a prisoner and wanted Deputy Taber’s assistance when we arrived and had to transfer the young hothead in the backseat to a jail cell.

“Ten-four, three ten.”

Jackie Taber’s husky voice added, “Three ten, three oh one copies.”

I clicked the mike a couple of times and hung it back on the radio. What my backseat passenger thought of the cryptic conversation was hard to tell, but whatever he thought, it served as a trigger. He realigned and let fly again. Just as we passed the abandoned mercantile at Moore, the passenger-side back window let loose with an expensive
whump
and a shower of glass.

My first impulse was just to let the little shit lie in his own glass until we reached Posadas. I snapped on the dome light and saw that Matt was continuing his craftsmanlike job of removing the entire window in a hail of stomps and kicks.

A pair of headlights popped into view in the rearview mirror, and I slowed and pulled off on the shoulder, swinging into a dirt lane that was blocked a car-length ahead by a locked gate.

Brilliant red lights blossomed, and at first I thought that Deputy Taber had pulled in behind me. As I got out of the car I caught a glimpse of the horizontal green stripe on a field of white. Two figures got out of the Border Patrol unit, and I recognized the short, blocky driver instantly. His gait reminded me of someone walking across a pitching ship’s deck.

“We saw the feet,” Scott Gutierrez said with a laugh. “Who you got in there?”

“A frisky teenager,” I said, and extended a hand. “You timed it just right.”

Gutierrez crunched my knuckles in a quick handshake and flicked his flashlight toward his partner. “By the way, this is Taylor Bergmann, Sheriff. He joined the crew a week or so ago. We were taking a little tour, showing him the sights.”

“Lots of those,” I said, and shook Bergmann’s hand. “Especially in the middle of the night. I’m Bill Gastner.”

“I’ve heard plenty about you, sir,” Bergmann said, and the tone of his voice left it unclear just what he meant. He turned to watch a truck as it approached from the east, the driver riding the Jake when he saw the red lights flashing on the opposite shoulder. From his confident posture, I guessed Bergmann to be retired military. The truck thundered by in a bow wave of air and a lingering cloud of diesel.

“Have you met Bob Torrez yet?” I asked, and Bergmann shook his head. “With any kind of luck at all, after next Tuesday, he’ll be the new sheriff.” The three of us chatted for a few minutes as if Matt Baca didn’t exist.

And while we talked, not a peep issued from the backseat of my car. Young Matt had the brains to appreciate how the rules of the game had changed.

Gutierrez stepped to the busted window and shined his flashlight in Baca’s face. “Hey, my man,” he said pleasantly.

“Why’d you break the sheriff’s window?”

Baca didn’t answer. He blinked into the light and lay perfectly still—the first thing he’d done right all night. Gutierrez turned to me, still keeping the light in the boy’s face. “What’ve you got him on?”

“Oh, a number of things,” I said. “No big deal. He rammed my car, for one thing.”

Gutierrez stepped back and swung the light along the unmarked Ford’s flanks. “Not this one,” I added. “This is his second wreck for the night.”

“A leg tie or two would fix that,” Gutierrez observed, and I shrugged agreement. The flashlight swung back into Baca’s face. “We were going to hit Tommy’s in Posadas for a sandwich anyway. Let’s throw him in the back of our unit and we’ll drop him off for you. That way he won’t sue you for making him sit in a pile of busted glass.”

“I’d appreciate that.” I stepped to the back door and opened it. “Matthew, time to change wagons. Slide on out of there. And you might want to be careful of the glass.”

The kid took his time, and as he swung his legs out, Gutierrez said, “And that unit is brand-new, kid. You so much as breathe on it, we’ll take you out into a field somewhere and leave you there.”

Gutierrez was about my height and outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds, no mean stunt in itself. But his was youthful brawn. Bergmann was the better part of six feet three with a wonderfully ugly face that would have looked right at home in a barroom brawl. It was reasonable to assume that the three of us could handle a half-stoned kid who weighed maybe one-forty dripping wet.

None of us knew what was going through Matt Baca’s head. Because another vehicle was coming, this time from the west, and because the driver was slow to change lanes to give us a wide berth, both Bergmann and Gutierrez hesitated. Matt Baca hadn’t stood up yet, and Scott Gutierrez was in the process of pulling a couple white nylon ties from his back pocket.

Baca lunged out of the backseat of the car, driving hard against my right hip with his shoulder. That didn’t move me much, but it spun him around so that he lost his balance, back-pedaling away from me. If he hadn’t been cuffed, he could have just extended one hand as he went down, using it as a pivot.

Instead, his flailing body danced backward away from the door and my frantic grasp. The oncoming vehicle wasn’t a tractor-trailer, and it wasn’t burning up the pavement. Maybe the driver’s gaze was attracted by the blinking red lights, and not the shadows beside the vehicles. His front bumper and Matt Baca merged with an awful thump. Because the kid had already started a downward sprawl when the truck hit him, he had no chance.

So quickly did the collision happen that the driver didn’t hit his brakes until the front tires, undercarriage, and rear duals had finished the job of pulverizing the young man. Then, amid billowing clouds of blue tire smoke, the truck skewed across the oncoming lane and plunged into the soft sand of the shoulder, finally jarring to a halt with its left front fender thrust through the highway right-of-way fence.

I didn’t want to take the handful of steps that would carry me to Matt Baca’s side. Bergmann and Gutierrez were quicker. The thought came to me unbidden that Sosimo Baca’s last contact with his son had been when they were both drunk. Odds were good that Sosimo would wake up with a pounding head Saturday morning and not even remember that I’d been in his house the night before, that I’d taken his son away. I wondered what Sosimo’s last sober memory of his son would be.

Chapter Six

Travis Hayes had been on his way to Posadas, about a third of his nighttime food-service delivery route completed, when Matt Baca staggered backward into the path of Travis’ International. The truck’s violent slide into the sand had scattered Jorgensen’s Blue Label Dairy Products around the inside of the rig’s reefer unit like small, frozen missiles.

If there had been heavy traffic, Hayes might have been the second fatality, because he launched himself out of the cab and dashed onto the highway without a glance left or right, only to be grabbed in a bear hug by Bergmann.

“My God,” Hayes cried, “I didn’t see him. He just…”

“We need you to stay back, sir,” Bergmann said.

“He just…” Hayes repeated, and tried to take a step toward the shapeless lump on the pavement. As I approached from the other side, the steel of the handcuffs winked in the headlights of the Border Patrol unit. One of the cuffs was empty and flung wide.

There was no point in feeling for a pulse, but Gutierrez did anyway. Reeling as if someone had punched me, I made my way back to my patrol car and rummaged for the mike.

“Posadas, three ten.”

“Three ten, go ahead.”

On automatic pilot, the words that would summon the troops spilled out. Deputy Taber estimated her ETA at six minutes, with Undersheriff Torrez right behind her. The ambulance would take twice that long. As far as Matt Baca was concerned, there was no hurry.

I slumped back in the seat and waited. Mercifully, the highway was deserted, as if the world were recoiling in hushed silence. One of the federal officers found a black tarp and highway flares, and the other moved the Border Patrol unit so that it completely blocked the eastbound lane, lights flashing.

I watched the amber numerals on the digital clock on the dashboard, but after a while even they drifted out of focus. My gaze was fixed somewhere out ahead, through the windshield and off across the dark prairie toward the south.

“Are you all right, sir?”

Startled out of whatever world I’d been in by the soft voice and a gentle hand on my left shoulder, I turned and looked up into Bob Torrez’s face.

“No…I mean, I’m fine,” I said, and shook off the mental cobwebs. The first word out of my mouth had been the accurate answer. I hadn’t seen Torrez drive up, but now the area was practically daylight in a brilliant symphony of flashing lights that captured half a dozen moving shadows.

“Deputy Taber is taking a statement from the truck driver,” Torrez said. “What he says jibes pretty much with what Gutierrez and his sidekick say happened.”

“I’m glad everybody goddamn agrees,” I said, and pushed myself out of the car. “How the hell long have you been here?” An ambulance was backing up carefully toward the black plastic-covered lump, the vehicle’s tires straddling the center line. A hundred yards to the east, another set of red lights blinked where Taber’s patrol unit blocked the highway.

“Just a couple of minutes.”

I don’t know why that irritated me, but it did. I had the mental picture of them all tiptoeing around me, careful not to disturb the old man sitting off by himself. What the hell did they think I had been doing, writing memoirs with a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hanging from the door handle?

I leaned against the rear fender of my car and watched the paramedics try to decide which part of Matt Baca’s remains to lift first onto the gurney.

“Baca had his feet out of the car when Officer Gutierrez walked back to his unit,” I said. “For a few seconds, I was the only one immediately beside the kid. He bowled into me, and twisted, and I wasn’t fast enough to grab him. He took a handful of steps, lost his balance, and went backward out into the high-way, right past the back of the car, here.” I patted the back fender of the unmarked Ford, and then lowered my voice. “The driver of the truck hadn’t pulled over to the left very much. And he didn’t spike the brakes until after he hit the kid.” I took a deep breath, and my fingers groped at my shirt pocket where I used to keep the cigarettes. “Just like that. I don’t think that the driver ever saw him. He certainly didn’t have a chance to swerve or brake.”

Torrez nodded and watched the paramedics. “Sosimo is home now?”

“Yes. He’s drunk to the world, but he’s home. I suppose the two girls are too. I didn’t see them when I went in after Matt.”

“Somebody’s going to have to let them know,” Torrez said. “When we get things cleaned up here, I’ll go on down there.”

“No hurry,” I replied. “If you woke up Sosimo now, he wouldn’t remember a thing. Let him sleep it off.”

“Hell of a deal.”

“Yes, it is. And I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I haven’t come up with any answers.” I turned and faced Torrez. “Number one, up on the pass, what’s the first thing Matt did after his car rammed into mine?”

“He bolted.”

“Damn right he bolted. He didn’t wait two seconds to see if his friends were hurt, or to see who he hit, or any of that. He just flat ran. And it looks like he ran all the way home, too. When I got to the house, he was crashed out, dead to the world on the couch. Flat busted.”

“Did you have any trouble with him?”

“That’s what I’m getting at,” I said. “I had the cuffs slapped on him while he was still asleep. For a little bit, he was pretty belligerent, but when I mentioned that I might have you carry him out to the car, he just calmed right down.”

“We’ve had our share of run-ins in the past.” He hunched his shoulders as if the cold was beginning to seep through his jacket. “You may remember that he was the one who fell down the stairs a couple of years ago, back when the juvenile cell was on the second floor.”

“I’d forgotten that. He took a swing at you then, as I recall.”

“Sort of.”

“Well, whatever the reason, the peace and quiet didn’t last. About the time we passed the saloon, maybe a little later, he starts kicking the glass. Now what the hell is he going to do when it breaks? The door’s locked, so he can’t get out.”

“Maybe he hadn’t figured that part out,” Torrez said.

“Maybe not. But he worked away at that window until he popped it. And then when he had another chance to bolt, he took it.” I shook my head in disgust.

“What did he say to you? Anything at all during the drive?”

“Just a colorful vocabulary.”

“Anything to the two officers?” He nodded toward Gutierrez and Bergmann, who were in conference with Jackie Taber and the truck driver.

“Nope. He didn’t say squat from the time I woke him up until this. Other than cussing me and my ancestors. And you and yours. Half of it was in Spanish. Probably all the good stuff.” I stood up straight and tried to stretch the kinks out of my left arm. “Why did he run, Bob? Like you said before, we know where he lives.”

“There’s no telling what goes through their heads, sir. Especially when they’re half-blasted. Something that seems dumb as shit to you or me makes perfect sense to them. At least we know where Matt bought the booze.”

“We do? Where?”

“I talked to Tommy Portillo. He remembers that Matt stopped by the convenience store shortly before ten. Beer and a couple of pints.”

“Tommy knows better than that,” I snapped. “Jesus, he’s got kids who go in there all the time, and we’ve never had a complaint of sales to minors. I always thought he was one we didn’t have to worry about.”

“He maintains that Matt had a valid ID that showed he was twenty-one, going on twenty-two. He says that he doesn’t know Matt all that well, so he glanced at it, saw that it was all right, and let it go. Matt’s one of those kids who could pass for anything between fourteen and legal.”

“Like hell it was a valid ID.” I pulled the driver’s license out of my shirt pocket and handed it to Torrez. “I took this out of his wallet. He had this and seven bucks. The license says he turns nineteen in December.”

Torrez nodded his head slowly. “He would have been nineteen on the thirteenth of December.” He tapped the plastic card against his thumbnail. “Portillo didn’t look very closely.”

“Shit,” I said. “Damn right he didn’t look close. Either that or he can’t read, the dumb son of a bitch. I can’t believe he’d do a thing like that. Hell, he knows what kind of a heller your cousin is…he has to.” I grimaced in frustration. “And he couldn’t look out his own damn store window and see a carload of kids? Where the hell does he think the booze is going, anyway?”

“He said the car was parked over on the side, where the newspaper vending machines are. Portillo said he glanced that way, and when he couldn’t see anything, didn’t pursue it. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Terrific. He doesn’t see much, does he. Did you check whether there was anything else Matt was carrying? Something I might have missed in the wallet? It’s possible he had some other form of ID that he was using…something that a store clerk like Portillo would accept.”

“We’re looking, sir. Taber’s working on that.”

“Let’s see what she’s got.” I pushed myself away from the car and glanced down the highway. It was long and dark, stretching away empty in both directions.

The ambulance pulled away, and the driver of the truck waited by his vehicle, his back to the road and one arm thrown up and resting against the massive hood and front fender, face buried in his coat sleeve. Bergmann stood beside him, talking to what didn’t look like much response. Gutierrez intercepted us as we walked out on the asphalt.

“This is a real mess,” he said. “Tell you what we’d like to do, Sheriff, if you’re about through with us here. We’ll go on into Posadas and stop by the S.O. and write you up a deposition. You’ll be wanting that, am I right?”

“Yes. I’d appreciate that.”

“No problem. Starting Sunday, I’ll be on leave for a while, so we might as well get this all wrapped up right now.”

I nodded. “Thanks. Beyond the deposition, I don’t see any reason to tie you guys up with this mess. Enjoy your days off.”

“I’ll be around, though, if you need anything else. My step-father’s visiting from down south, and him and me and my sister are going to get in a little deer hunting down this way.”

I shook my head in frustration. “If you figure out in a sudden burst of inspiration just what the hell happened here, you let me know.”

Gutierrez frowned. “We just aren’t ever going to know.” He reached out a hand and I took it. “You take care, now.” I knew he was right. Maybe the red lights on the Border Patrol unit had spooked the kid. Maybe it was the three of us standing around, jawing. Maybe if I’d just driven on into Posadas without stopping, the worst-case scenario would have been a few shards of glass to pick out of Matt’s hair. Who the hell knew?

Bergmann strode across the road, and when he reached us, he stepped so close that I could smell his cologne. “You’ve got a basket case over there, Sheriff. I wouldn’t leave him alone, if I were you.”

“I don’t intend to, thanks.”

Deputy Taber had expended the better part of two rolls of film, and Gutierrez raised a hand toward her. “All right to move it?” he called, pointing at the Border Patrol unit. The deputy nodded, holding up the camera to indicate that she had all the photos that she needed.

When the two feds had left, I walked over to Taber. “About wrapped up?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I wanted to roll a few more measurements, but that will only take a minute.”

“Did you find any kind of ID other than this?” I handed her Matt’s driver’s license. “I took this from him at the house. It was in the wallet, along with a few bucks.”

She pulled her clipboard out from under her arm and thumbed the laminated license under the clip. “The wallet itself and the contents of his pockets are bagged, if you want a look. They’re over in my car.”

I shook my head. “Nothing else? No other ID? No other driver’s license? Nothing like that? Something that has a different D.O.B.?”

Taber shined her flashlight on the license I’d given her. “Looks like December thirteen, 1982.”

The undersheriff leaned close so that he could scrutinize the license. “And that’s the right one. The family Bible never lies, sir,” Torrez said.

“So either Portillo was lying, or the kid had another ID with him. One that we haven’t found. Maybe back at the house.”

“We’ve never had trouble with Portillo before,” Torrez said. “But I guess there’s always a first time.”

“First and last,” I muttered. “What the hell is the point of asking for an ID, and looking at it, if you’re not going to enforce the date?” I held out a hand. “Let me take that license. I’ll see how well Portillo reads.” Deputy Taber hesitated for an instant, then unclipped the license and handed it to me. “Thanks.” I slipped it into my pocket, took a deep breath, and stepped over to the truck driver.

He lifted his head out of his arm, but didn’t meet my gaze. In the psychedelic light from the various sets of flickering roof racks, it was tough to read his expression.

“I’m Sheriff Gastner,” I said. “We haven’t had a chance to talk yet.”

“God, I wish you could have grabbed him,” the man said, and as he turned a bit more, I could see his face was wet.

“You and me both,” I said. “These things happen sometimes.”

“I couldn’t stop. I didn’t even see him until just before…”

“I know that,” I said. “Right now, my concern is getting this rig out of here, and you safely into town.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“You’ll be able to drive?”

“I guess so.” He tried a faint chuckle. “We’ll see.”

“Undersheriff Torrez can drive the rig in for you. That might be better. You can ride in with the deputy.”

He shook his head and backed away from the truck. “No, that’s all right.” He took a couple of steps until he was even with the big chrome bumper, looked down, and then jerked his head up. He turned his back to the truck. It was too dark to see anything, of course, but just the idea of what had happened was replaying in his mind—and would continue to do so for months, sneaking back to jar him awake in the night, or to make him wince in the middle of a meal or the middle of a movie.

“Do you need me for anything else?” he asked.

“The deputy has everything,” I said. “If she needs any additional information, she’ll give you a call. She’ll want you to sign a formal deposition when she finishes, but that’ll be later today.”