Privileged to Kill (17 page)

26

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I breathed. “Let me see that.” I went down on one knee, at considerable price, and got close. The truck had originally been metallic blue—a bright, deep tone a squirt or two lighter than royal blue. The primer under the blue was gray. Nothing else on the truck was black, flat or otherwise, except that one smear.

The pickup had been hit at one time or another by something carrying a coat of black paint. One sharp dig was visible in the metal. The rest of the impact had been obliterated by the later damage done by the rock outcropping.

“What hit him?” I said.

Estelle smiled, a rare thing in itself. She put one hand on my right elbow and ushered me along toward the front of the wreckage. “Right here, you can see the mounting bracket, sir. Or what’s left of it. It’s easier to see on the other side where there was less damage.”

“A grille guard, you mean?” And that’s exactly what she meant. The mounting brackets were bolted to the frame. The right side bracket was twisted and ruined like the rest of the hardware that had lost the fight. The mount on the driver’s side was still in one piece, flat black paint and all.

“It’s been recently removed,” Estelle said. “On this side you can see the wrench marks. They scuff the black paint, and the marks haven’t been there long enough to collect road dirt or rust.”

“We don’t pay you enough,” I mused. And then, because it was easier, I let myself slump back until I sat down on the hard, cold concrete. “What you’re leading me to think is that this is the truck that smacked Wes Crocker.”

“I’ve considered that,” Estelle said. She knelt down on one knee and rested her right hand on the bottom rim of the undamaged left headlight. Her fingernails rapped a quiet dance on the glass of the light. “Everything fits, even this.” She reached out and for a moment her body blocked my view of what she was doing. When she turned around, she held out a small object to me.

I reached out and took it. The little black plastic trumpet was as undamaged as the headlamp. “A deer whistler,” I said. “And let me guess. The other side is missing one.”

“The other side is missing, period,” Estelle said. “There’s no way to even tell anymore what piece of metal held the little plastic mounting bracket. We didn’t get that lucky.”

I dug out my notebook and rearranged myself on the floor so I could attend to flipping the pages without toppling over. “Wes Crocker was hit sometime around eight P.M. yesterday,” I said. “It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t fit the timing of the events. This pickup truck hit the rock at thirty-two minutes after midnight.”

Estelle nodded and waited.

“And so,” I said, “if they were going to a night football game that started at seven all the way over in Sierra Linda, why would they still be in town at eight?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“If the two boys had decided to go to the game, they would have been out of Posadas long before that in order to be in Sierra Linda in time for the kickoff.”

“That’s if they decided to go to the game, sir. Only one of them was in school yesterday.”

“Which one was that?” I asked.

“Dennis Wilton, sir. He was one of the front office aides.”

I frowned and looked back through my notes. “I didn’t write that down.”

“There was no particular reason you should have, sir,” Estelle said. “You did remind Glen Archer that you didn’t want students handling material that we asked for. The Wilton boy was the student aide who photocopied the parking permit list for us.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said, more in irritation at my memory than anything else. “And Ryan House was absent from school yesterday?”

“Yes, sir. He was.”

I leaned back and put both hands on the cold concrete floor behind me. “Let’s assume again that this is the vehicle in question…its passenger misses the day in school, its owner doesn’t. So we assume that sometime in the afternoon, the two boys get together, for whatever reason.”

“That’s easily done, sir. Dennis Wilton only attended classes until noon. He normally works from one to six every school day at Guilfoil Auto Parts.”

“All right, so he even has time to go to work yesterday.”

“He didn’t, though.”

“You checked?” I asked, knowing it was a waste of breath. Estelle nodded. “So the pair link up sometime in the afternoon, perhaps. We don’t have a clue what they did between the time Dennis Wilton left school and the time of the encounter with Wes Crocker. If that happened at all, we can then suppose that they hightailed it out of town. If they wanted a place to hide, then an out-of-town football game is as good as anyplace.”

“The complication is the grille guard, sir.”

I nodded. “If it was on the truck at eight P.M., when Crocker was hit, then it was taken off sometime before midnight thirty-two, when they crashed the truck into the rock.”

And that was as far as my fatigued brain would go. I put the notebook back in my breast pocket and turned over on my knees so I could push myself upright. That accomplished, I brushed the dirt and sand off my trousers and hands.

“I don’t like any of this,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why. No matter which way we go, there’s a fork in the road.”

“For example…”

I shrugged. “If this is the truck that hit Wes Crocker, and if one of the boys was driving it at the time—and by the way, we don’t know
that
for sure yet—then we’ve got a fork in the road.” I pointed off to the right. “One choice says that they meant to hit him.”

Estelle leaned her head the other way and finished the thought. “And the other route says it was an accident.”

“That’s right. If it was intentional, then we’ve got ourselves a wonderful mess, with all kinds of nasty questions. And lots of forks in the road, by the way. And if it was an accident…” I shrugged. “Either way, they took off. Maybe it took as much as half an hour in someone’s garage or backyard to yank that bent grille guard off and clean up the truck.” I waved a hand at the right side. “They missed a little slash of black just above the scrape where the guard bent back and dinged the fender. And then, because it’s a tiny town and they know the cops will be out looking for them, they slip out to the east, figuring to get themselves lost in the sporting crowd. If somebody asks, hell, they were at the game all night.”

“We’re not that stupid, sir.”

“God, I hope not. But kids think we are. And right now, I’m so tired, I think I am.”

“We don’t have to make a move right away,” Estelle said. “If this is the truck, it’ll be around for a while. I’ve got some fingerprints to match, and I was able to pull a paint tracing off that black mark on the fender. We can send it to the lab along with paint from Crocker’s bicycle. That will give us an absolute match. And later today”—she held up the deer whistler—“I’m going to ask Bob Torrez to take a microscope to all this pot metal and see if he can find the spot where the right-side whistler might have been. If we can make some kind of match there, that’s it.”

“It’s part of
it
, anyway,” I said wearily. “If this is the truck, we don’t know why they hit Crocker and ran. And if it’s not the truck, we’re no further ahead than we were.” I glanced at my watch. “I’m going to swing by the hospital and see what time they’re going to release Crocker. I’ll put him in Camille’s old room.”

“The one with all the stuffed toys?”

I grimaced. “Uh-huh. That way, he might not want to get too comfortable and stay too long.”

“It’s really sweet of you to do this,” Estelle said, and I shot a quick glare at her, sure she was kidding. She wasn’t.

“What’s the choice?” I said, and started toward the door of the garage. “You ready for some breakfast?”

She declined, claiming “a couple of things to do.” I didn’t know what, but I didn’t twist her arm. My little notebook told me that I’d been going around in circles since Thursday evening, when I’d eaten too much green chili at the Don Juan de Oñate. I was ready to fall off the carousel.

Estelle locked the door of the steel building and was driving out of the county yard before I’d even untangled my keys. The patrol car started instantly and settled into its usual smooth idle, waiting for me to select a gear.

With my hand on the gear lever, I frowned and looked over my shoulder at the little trail of dust from Estelle’s car.

“What fingerprints?” I said aloud. She had told me that she had some fingerprints to match. I looked ahead toward the garage where the broken truck rested. There had been two occupants. One was headed toward the autopsy slab; the other was riding a wave of sedative at the hospital. We knew who had been driving, and who had gone flying.

I frowned again. There was little comfort in knowing that if Estelle Reyes-Guzman had wanted me to know about fingerprints, she would have told me.

27

I went home and slept for three hours. That was something of a record, and it should have rejuvenated me. It didn’t. I awoke feeling awful, with ears ringing like the carillons in the
1812 Overture
and a vague, general ache that puddled in an arc above and behind my left ear.

I showered in the hottest water my aging hot water heater could brew, and then managed to shave without cutting my throat—although that might have been an improvement.

Breakfast didn’t hold much of an attraction, so I settled for coffee, taking a steaming mug with me to Posadas General Hospital.

Sometime during my three-hour nap, a couple of ideas had begun cooking inside my thick skull. One in particular had leaked to the surface and refused to go away. If an answer was to be had, Wesley Crocker had it…and then several forks in our tangled road would close like magic.

I walked down the hall to Crocker’s room and was surprised to see Ernie Wheeler sitting outside the door. Even dispatching was more exciting than counting floor, wall, and ceiling tiles. Posadas General was as quiet as the village it was named for…no one shouting “stat,” no crash carts charging down the hall, no buxom nurses threatening to heave their bosoms out of their white uniforms.

Ernie looked up at me and his eyes focused on the coffee cup.

“You want some?” I held up the cup.

He shook his head. “No, sir. I’ve had enough to float my kidneys as it is.”

I glanced at my watch. “Why are you here?”

Wheeler shrugged and yawned. “The sheriff thought it was a good idea to have someone around after he pulled Pasquale off.”

I nodded and pushed open the door. Crocker was up and dressed, sitting easily in a wheelchair. That didn’t surprise me. That Estelle Reyes-Guzman hadn’t beaten me to the punch did.

Crocker grinned at me as I stepped in the room.

“Well, good morning, sir,” he said, and nodded vigorously. He thumped the arm of the chair. “They won’t let me walk on out, so I got to sit in this thing.”

“Beats crawling,” I said. “When are they going to spring you?”

“The good doctor said the minute you walked in the door.” I grunted something not particularly gracious, and Crocker’s good humor faded. “They got me those fancy iron crutches, over there, and I can manage just fine. Maybe there’s a little room somewhere’s that I could rent for a week or two.”

I rubbed my eyes wearily and shook my head. “No. In the first place, a wrecked knee isn’t for a week or two. And if you try and bounce around on it too much right away, it’ll be for life.”

Crocker looked stricken. “Well, I sure don’t want to cause no trouble.”

“Things are what they are,” I said. “I think the best thing to do is call your sister to come and fetch you.”

If I had stuck an electric cattle prod up Crocker’s ass, the reaction wouldn’t have been more immediate. His face collapsed into a grimace and he held up both hands as if to ward off another attack, leaning back in the wheelchair so far I thought he might flip the thing.

“Kind sir,” he said, and I swear there was a tremble in his voice, “don’t ask her to do that.”

“Real close family, are we?”

Crocker took a deep breath, keeping his hands up to fend off any more punches. “Sir, if you talked to my sister, well, then you know what kind of woman she is.”

“I have an inkling.”

“Sir, she just cannot”—he stopped and fumbled for words—“she just…” He looked up at me. “In all these years, anytime I’d call, all she could think to say was some comment about when I was going to stop ‘this silliness.’ That’s what she called it. ‘This silliness.’ She couldn’t bring herself to ask me how I was, or ask what I’d seen, or ask where I was goin’ next.” He lowered his hands to his lap and stared at them. “And that’s why I just stopped callin’ her ever, don’t you know.”

“Well,” I said, and then let it trail off.

“She’d fix it somehow so’s I could never leave again. I know she would,” he said. “I’d rather make my way along the road on crutches than face her.”

“We can’t let you do that,” I said. “You got in the way of traffic once already. But I guess there’s no hurry. We need you around for a few days until we work out a few details. Maybe that will give you time to think of an alternative.”

“I could always steal a car or something, and get myself thrown in jail,” Crocker said with a lame smile.

“Theft is not your style,” I said.

“No, sir, it’s not.”

“Then we’ll think of something.” I picked up his fancy aluminum crutches and laid them on the bed. “Don’t forget those. I’ll go get the nurse. And then we can get out of here.”

And fifteen minutes later, we were out in the fresh October sunshine, Crocker sucking air from the exertion of swinging from the wheelchair to the front seat of the patrol car. The cast around his injured knee was a small, light, high-tech thing made out of aluminum and fiberglass that accomplished with a few ounces what the old thigh-to-ankle plaster had done a decade before.

I waited patiently until he had settled into the seat.

“I haven’t had any breakfast yet,” I said. “How about you?”

He waved a hand. “Oh, now, they gave me a little something.”

“I bet they did,” I chuckled. “Let’s go get something decent. You think you can hobble into the restaurant?”

“I should think so,” he said, “but really, don’t go out of your way on my account.”

“Don’t worry. You’re going to pay for it this time,” I said, and pulled 310 out of its parking slot. Wes Crocker apparently didn’t know what to say in reply, and I noticed that he rubbed his jaw with that nervous tic so many of us use when our brains are racing pell-mell trying to puzzle out an answer.

***

There was something about a good breakfast that always brought out the best in me. I could cheerfully skip any other meal of the day or night—and frequently did. The time to make up for those omissions was over a breakfast burrito as only the Don Juan de Oñate could serve it. I ordered two, and the platter must have weighed four pounds when it came.

The aroma of the fresh green chili cleared my head. Even the ringing in my ears settled down a decibel.

Crocker and I ate in silence for a few minutes until the worst of the wolves were at bay.

“How do you make out on your travels?” I asked, resting my fork for a while.

“Well, now,” Crocker said, and wiped his lips, “the good Lord has seen fit to bless me with my health, so…” He shrugged.

“That’s not what I meant.” I reached over with a fork and indicated a sausage link that he had pushed to one side. “You going to eat that?”

“You just go ahead,” he said and started to lift his plate.

I speared the tidbit and wrapped it in the tail end of the burrito’s blanket where the stuffing had ended. “A man’s got to eat. And food costs quite a bit of money these days. What do you do, work a few days here and there to pay for things?”

Crocker ducked his head and frowned as if he were expecting a broadside from his sister.

“I’m just curious about the logistics of life on the road, is all,” I added. Shari arrived with the coffeepot and we both waited until she left. “I mean, you’re obviously fit. You’re not starving.”

“Well,” Crocker said slowly, “I take work now and then, but say, I don’t do it for the money. No.” He shook his head. “That just don’t appeal.”

“What about when you worked for Tom Lawton? What made you decide to stay on there and work?”

“The wagon place? Well, now, that’s an easy one, sir. You see, I stopped at this little café in Button—that’s Button, Utah—just down the road from where his place is. And there on the bulletin board on the wall behind the cash register they had one of his flyers tacked up. I read it, and I got to thinking about a man who’d make a living today working on something that hasn’t seen regular use for a half a century.”

“And so you rode out to his place.”

“I did that. Yes, sir. And the good Lord provides. He was working on his tractor when I rode up, and I could see his new fence, just about half finished. So I figured”—Crocker paused and sipped his coffee—“so I figured that this man, this Thomas Lawton, could tell me just about everything a man would ever want to know about wagons and such.”

“And that took three days?”

“Well, I didn’t see no reason to head on out until that fence was just the way he wanted it. We talked about wagon trains, and freight wagons, and buckboards, and buggies—” He waved his hand at the wonder of it all. “It’s interesting to know just what kind of hardware moved things along, don’t you know.”

“You haven’t worked since leaving Lawton’s place?”

Crocker pursed his lips and thought a minute. I knew it wasn’t a hesitation to refresh his memory. “No, sir. See,” and he leaned forward against the table, his coffee cup between his rough hands. “I get a little something every month from the government. It ain’t much. Tied in with my days in the military. But it’s all I need.” He grinned. “I don’t go in much for buying souvenirs. You’d be surprised how far two hundred bucks will take you when you don’t spend much of it.”

“I can imagine,” I said, and almost added, Especially when you panhandle a few meals along the way. “How does the government get the money to you, if you don’t have a permanent address?”

“Well, now, that’s one thing my sister will do, bless her heart. Every now and again, I send her an address where I’ll be for a few days. Then she up and sends along whatever money’s come in. Every two, three months, maybe.”

“What are you going to do for a new bike?”

Crocker grimaced. “I ain’t thought that one through yet,” he said. “Got to find a used one somewheres.” He shook his head. “I sure hated to see the last one go. My, that was a brute of a machine. Would have lasted another century.”

I leaned back to give the burritos room to settle. “Do you make plans for where you’re going to travel, or do you just make up your mind each morning?”

“Oh, I get notions.”

“Notions?”

Crocker smiled and looked down at his coffee cup. “They don’t always work out just the way I’d plan ’em, but say, it’s all been interesting.”

“For instance.”

“Well…it isn’t the sort of thing to bore another man with, but there’ve been times.” He grinned again. “Like last summer. I got a bee in the bonnet to see Death Valley. You know, in California? I’d been reading this magazine that I got in a little town outside of Yosemite. It had a story in it about a wagon train getting stuck out in Death Valley in the middle of summer time. And I got to wondering just what that might have been like.”

“And so you rode your bike down into Death Valley?”

He nodded. “I rode into Stovepipe Wells on June 30. It was so bright out I was near to blind, and so hot that my bike tires sounded like they were rolling through molasses. Folks thought I was crazy, needless to say.”

“Needless to say they were right. Your sister also mentioned something about you getting stuck in a blizzard in the Dakotas.”

Crocker’s grin turned electric. “That’s about the only time I ever thought that maybe I’d made me a big mistake. See,” and he leaned forward again, “I just got done reading this book about the pioneers and how they managed to survive through some of those north country winters. Now me, I’m from down this way, and the only time I ever saw the North was in the finer times of the year. So…” He leaned back and shrugged. “I rode into Bismarck, North Dakota, on December 23. I’d had me a fair enough trip, comin’ up from the south. Hit a little storm in Kansas, and another one right at the Nebraska–South Dakota line, but neither one didn’t amount to much. I kind of got to thinking that all the stories were just that…stories. Well, I figured to take one of the back roads north out of Bismarck and visit old Fort Mandan. You ever been there?”

I shook my head.

“Well, it’s kind of along the Missouri River, there, just east of Washburn a hair. I got me about fifteen miles out of Bismarck, and I tell you what. That old wind commenced to rage down from Canada, and those big old storm clouds lowered right down on the prairie”—he smacked the table with one hand—“and snow pellets about the size of golf balls start shooting right down the road, right into my face. Let me tell you, I got to know real quick why some of them settlers never made it where they was going.”

“But you obviously did.”

“Well, it’s ranching country. I found me a barn and snugged down on the lee side, between a big old combine and an old semitrailer. Long as a man’s got something to break the wind, it’s not so bad. So I sat there, listening to that storm and watching that snow snake and curl around the buildings. It got dark, and the only thing I could see was the vapor light right by the barn. Watching that blizzard dance around that light was about all the entertainment I had for the better part of twelve hours.”

“Makes me cold just to think about it,” I said. Shari Chino appeared at my elbow with more coffee, but I waved her off. Wesley Crocker tried his best not to look relieved when I picked up the ticket.

“Well, it was worth the wait. The storm broke, and I guess I had dozed off for a while, because when I woke up it took some work to shovel myself out of the snow that had drifted around all that machinery. That’s when the man of the house saw me. They were fit to be tied. They was mad that I hadn’t just come to the house, instead of waitin’ it out wrapped in a blanket under the snow.”

Crocker stretched his bad leg out, trying to find a comfortable position. “They fed me more’n two men could eat, but the best part was they hauled out two big old scrapbooks that they’d kept over the years. Showed me some pictures of blizzards that were
storms
. That’s what the wife told me. She said, ‘This wasn’t no storm. It’s when it don’t stop for a week that things get bad.’ I believed her.”

I thumped the table. “Let’s get you somewhere more comfortable. I’ve got a couple other things I’d like to ask you about.”

Crocker nodded eagerly, thinking that it was his traveling that piqued my curiosity.