Double Prey (6 page)

Estelle jogged back to the Expedition, and after thumping and bumping down off the slope, the relative smooth going on the two packed tracks of Bender’s Canyon Trail felt like a paved highway. The trail crossed the canyon bottom twice before settling down on the north side of the arroyo. The tracks were easy to follow where they cut into the softer ground. For another mile, the two-track wound almost due east, then swung wide around the buttress of a ragged mesa. Car-sized boulders had peeled off the mesa rim above them, and at one point the trail squeezed between a jumble of rocks that towered a dozen feet above the SUV’s roof.

“Herb always called this ‘the window,’” Bill Gastner observed as Estelle maneuvered the vehicle through, less than an inch clearance beyond the side mirrors. “He’s lost a lot of paint off his trucks and livestock trailers in this particular spot.”

The trail turned north, the country opening up to prairie that rolled in gentle waves like a tan blanket snapped not quite flat. They could see Bender’s Canyon Trail winding ahead of them, up the rise of open country.

“Freddy probably puts more miles on that ATV of his than any other kid in the world,” Estelle said.

“I admire him,” Gastner said. “You know, most kids are content to rod it up and down the streets, or dust up vacant lots. This kids goes on
adventures
. I love it. If I wasn’t so goddamn fat and old and creaky, I’d buy me one and chase after him.”

“I’m starting to wish that
someone
had gone with him,” Estelle added.

The two-track climbed the rise, and then bordered a stand of dense juniper and scrub as another deep arroyo closed in from the northeast. A small foundation, now nothing but a uniform line of limestone rocks emerging a few inches from the dirt, edged the runty junipers and creosote bush. An old corral, the posts gray and smooth, enclosed an area behind the foundation, and the remains of a fence meandered off into the distance. Various rusted machinery parts, a scattering of cans, and the tiny cab of an ancient truck marked a spot where someone, sometime, had felt that he’d found paradise.

“Morris Trujillo’s grandfather,” Gastner said, and Estelle looked at him with amusement. “Efugio. He came back from the Philippines in 1943, deaf in one ear and with a plate in his skull. He tried to live here for a couple years, couldn’t make it work, and then moved into town.”

Estelle surveyed what was left of the tiny homestead. “And left his truck behind.”

“We could make up all kinds of interesting stories about why that happened,” Gastner laughed. “It’s a 1928 Ford.”

“And you know that how?” The vehicle fragment included little besides the firewall and one fender.

“I found a number plate on the firewall.”

“Are those your tracks?” She nodded at a set of vehicle tracks imprinted in the soft soil near the corral.

“Nope.” The road narrowed even more, squeezing along the arroyo.

“Next century storm, the arroyo is going to chew a chunk out of the two-track,” Gastner said. Just to the east, practically under his elbow, the arroyo yawned deep and wide, a great gouge across the prairie. “Herb was telling me that most of this was cut in one night, back in 1955.” He glanced at Estelle. “Can you imagine a rain that hard? And that’s something else that Reubén might talk about in his journal. He was here then.”

“Only from time to time,” Estelle said. “He built his cabin over off the county road in 1956.”

“Have you considered translating these?”

“I do. I just haven’t
done
it yet.”

“Maybe Teresa would find it interesting.”

“I don’t think so. She can read them effortlessly enough as it is, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time looking back at family history. History of the world, sure, but not family. I think it makes her a little sad.”

“Remarkable woman. That’s about all I do these days, is look back.”

Estelle eased the truck onward, and they nosed up a sharp rise just north of the homestead. Just as they crested the knoll, she spiked the brakes and the SUV jarred to a halt. They faced a swale where the two-track swooped down through a graveled wash that joined the main arroyo. They could see tracks from the ATV, so close-set and characteristic, cross the wash and shoot straight up the other side. Estelle leaned forward, hands locked together on top of the steering wheel.

A second set of four-wheeler tracks were also visible just on the near side of the rise facing them, tracks that swerved erratically toward the crumbling arroyo edge.

Chapter Seven

Both the red ATV and its driver lay at the bottom of Bender’s Canyon.

Estelle sprinted back to the Expedition, yanked open the door, and grabbed the mike off the bracket.

“PCS, three ten.”

The five heartbeats before dispatch responded seemed an hour.

“Three ten, go ahead.”

“PCS, ten fifty-five, one adult male.” She looked across through the open passenger door at Bill Gastner, who was standing on the shoulder of the two-track, scanning the arroyo bank. “We’re about four miles off County Road 14 on Bender’s Canyon Trail. An ATV off the road.” The ambulance was at least an hour away.

“Ten four.”

“Ten twenty-one in about three minutes.”

Directly in front of them, the arroyo bank was sheer, the edges crumbling. Gastner pointed to the south. A large juniper, the trunk thick and gnarled, leaned precariously from the bank, its roots fighting for a hold against the continuous undermining of erosion. “Maybe there,” he said. “Maybe.”

The last bout of erosion had been deflected by a root mass, gouging down through the bank to a large projection of rock. Estelle surveyed the bank for a moment, then scrambled down, using the roots as handholds. Hand over hand to the rock step was easy enough, leaving only an eight foot slide down the gravel and sand arroyo skirt to the bottom.

She slid in a shower of sand and gravel, keeping her balance on feet and rump. At the bottom, she stood quietly for a moment, surveying the scene ahead of her.

The motionless figure lay on his face, one leg oddly twisted, his right shoulder smashed against a bald slab of bedrock at the bottom of the arroyo. Estelle recognized the slender form immediately. If Freddy Romero had been wearing a helmet, it hadn’t done much good. It now lay in the sand thirty feet away, the force of the crash fracturing the face shield.

Freddy’s eyes were open, staring at the gravel. The undersheriff touched the side of his neck just forward of where the helmet strap would cut and felt nothing but cold, dry skin.

The ATV, fenders, handlebars and even fuel tank twisted and bent, lay inverted just beyond the body.

Estelle squatted on her haunches for a moment, one hand resting lightly on Freddy Romero’s left shoulder. Then she pulled her cell phone out of its belt holster.

“Gayle,” she said when the dispatcher answered, “We have a fatality here. It looks like Freddy Romero somersaulted his four-wheeler into an arroyo. I’ll need Linda out here ASAP, and Dr. Perrone. And if you’ll contact APD, they’ll make contact with George and Tata for us.”

“Oh, my,” Gayle murmured.

“And you might tell the EMTs that they may have to come in from the north, from State 17, through Waddell’s ranch. I’m not sure their unit will make it in here on the south fork of the trail.”

“Matty Finnegan knows that country pretty well. I’ll let her know. What’s your exact twenty?”

“I would guess about four and a half miles in from County Road 14 on Bender’s Canyon Trail. We’re just a quarter mile or so beyond what they call ‘the window,’ and that’s where the ambulance may have trouble.”

“We’ll find you. Freddy was alone?”

“It appears so.”

“Oh, my,” Gayle said again.

“’Oh my’ is right,” the undersheriff sighed, and switched off the phone. She turned to look back up at Gastner, who stood a step back from the arroyo edge, hands on his hips.

“He didn’t move much,” he said.

“No.” She stepped carefully back, seeing the way Freddy’s left hand had clawed briefly at the gravel, what looked like a single spasm. Slipping her fingers under the young man’s wrist, she felt the characteristic resistance of rigor. “I would guess all night, and then some,” she said. “He was out here yesterday afternoon, maybe. Could have been.”
And nobody knew
, she thought.
We all thought mischief, and here you are, all by yourself.

“I want to see if he hit anything,” Gastner said. “I’ll watch where I walk.”

Estelle stepped back, trying to imagine the final cartwheel of the ATV, and the way its driver would have been flung away. The marks of the machine’s first strike were on the arroyo bottom’s bedrock, a black-tinged slash. She pivoted and looked at the arroyo bank. Where the ATV had swerved over the edge, the arroyo was a dozen feet deep, with a sheer, evenly under-cut bank. Airborne, the machine would have nosed over and down. If Freddy had managed to hang on, he would have been flung forward by the initial impact, then perhaps caught by the ATV on the bounce.

She got up and walked to the helmet. Its wild paint scheme was only moderately scratched, the face shield broken but still in place. Retracing her steps, she then crossed to the ATV and saw the mangled rack behind the driver’s seat and the broken plywood carryall bolted to it. The butt of a .22 rifle, still tangled in its scabbard, projected out from under the vehicle.

One hard bounce, and then the ATV had taken Freddy from behind, smashing his head into the ground. If he’d been able to kick free during his high dive, like some of the wild riders he’d surely watched on television, he might have escaped with a broken leg…or neck.

“Left front?” Gastner called.

Estelle pushed herself to her feet and regarded the ATV more closely. Sure enough, the left front tire was flat, the only damaged tire of the four. A ragged cut tore the sidewall all the way to the inner rim. “Yes.”

“Yeah, well,” the former sheriff said with resignation. “He launched over this little rise and drifted a little bit to the left…just enough to collect a piece of sharp rock. That would have jerked him out of control. He was really whistling Dixie, though. There’s a dozen feet of road here with no tracks, where he got that thing airborne over the crest of the hill.”

“Freddy, Freddy,” Estelle whispered to herself. Of course the boy would have been riding too fast. To an adventuresome kid, that’s what powerful ATVs were for.

She stood quietly, sunshine warm on her shoulders, no breeze reaching the shelter of the arroyo bottom to sweep away the aromas of violent death.

“You want your camera?”

“Please. And the tarp from the back of the truck.”

Estelle stepped close to the bank, caught the little digital camera and then the packaged blue tarp. She took a moment to thread the nylon camera case onto her belt, then trudged far down the arroyo to the far side, where she could look back at the entire scene.

“He swerved very hard,” Estelle said. “The measurements are going to be interesting.”

“How so?” Gastner squatted a yard back from the arroyo edge.

“How fast would he have to be going to go airborne over that rise, do you suppose?”

Gastner turned and regarded the trail. “Fairly fast, I would think. And then he hit that rock outcropping. Powee.”

“And that turned him to the left.”

“You bet. And over the edge he goes.”

Estelle’s cell phone chirped.

“Guzman.”

“Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. “What do you have?” The sheriff had been in court in Las Cruces, but Estelle could hear traffic in the background.

“We have Freddy Romero, Bobby. He put his four-wheeler into an arroyo off Bender’s Canyon Trail sometime yesterday.” The sheriff digested that in silence. “It looks like the machine crushed him on the bounce,” Estelle added.

“He by himself?”

“Yes.”

“Drinking?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like he jumped a little rise in the trail, you know, like a moto-cross rider might. He managed to collect a rock somehow. The left front tire of the ATV is torn open, and
Padrino
found the initial strike mark on the rock.”

She heard a long, slow exhalation of breath. “The folks are still up in Albuquerque with Butch,” Torrez said.

“And that’s not going really well. He’ll lose the eye, and that’s if he’s lucky. And
por Dios
, now this. I asked Gayle to contact APD for an assist. They’ll send over a chaplain.”

“All right. Look, I’m on the interstate right now. I’ll be out there in a bit. I got cut loose early from court.”

“How did it go?”

“A waste of time,” the sheriff replied, without amplification. “I’m just goin’ up the hill out of Cruces now, so it’ll be an hour. How far in are you?”

“We took the trail behind the bar,” Estelle said. “We were following Freddy’s tracks. He parked over on the Borracho Springs road, then drove the ATV over here. We’re just a little bit east of the intersection on Bender’s. Just beyond the window.”

“Be there in a bit.” He rang off without further comment. Estelle pocketed the phone and looked across at Gastner, who now stood with one hip propped against the Expedition’s front fender as he surveyed the country through binoculars.

“There’s a cattle trail on down about a hundred yards,” he called, and lowered the binoculars to point. “You have plenty of cattle tracks in the bottom here, so we can guess there’s another trail up and out somewhere.”

“You don’t have an extension ladder in your hip pocket, sir?”

Gastner laughed. “Wish I did. Look, I’m going to mosey on up here a ways and see what’s to see.”

Estelle continued her photographic survey until she was convinced that no secrets remained in the arroyo itself, then walked back to the ATV. She unpackaged the tarp and snapped it out, then covered Freddy Romero’s body.

She turned her attention to the jumble of bent and twisted plastic and metal. The damage suggested that the four wheeler had burst over the rim of the arroyo and crashed nose-first to the bedrock of the arroyo bottom a dozen feet below. The left front suspension had taken most of the impact, crushed backward and upward so hard that the handlebars had been balled into junk, torn back on top of the rumpled gas tank.

The initial impact had somersaulted the rig, the rack behind the seat pounding into the arroyo bottom and the back of Freddy Romero’s skull. The machine’s final resting place was nine feet from the body, the ATV resting flat on its back, bent suspension turned to the sky like a dead beetle. A large patch of gasoline had leaked out to stain the rock and sand.

Estelle knelt and touched the left front wheel. It was jammed back against the frame and would not spin freely. The damage to the tire began an inch or so toward the rim from the tread. Had the tire struck the rock with its knobby tread, Freddy might have had a survivable wild ride with the bounce.

The undersheriff set the little camera on
macro
and took photographs of the tear, showing the rock particles imbedded in the rubber. The rock had opened the tire’s sidewall like an enormous, rough can opener right to the rim, where the aluminum was dented and torn.

The force of the impact would have jolted the ATV savagely to one side, and there had been no time for Freddy to correct.

“A hundred yards that-a-way,” Bill Gastner called from the rim. He pointed up the arroyo. “Cow trail makes it easy for you.”

“What else did you find?”

“Well, trajectory, I guess. I’ll show you when you come up.”

“I’m on my way.” Estelle trudged back up the arroyo, wanting to stop and turn around at each step. The last thing she wanted to do was leave Freddy Romero face down in the gravel, ruined and alone.

The cattle always found the easiest route, and over the decades, their hooves cut and packed long, diagonal trails that criss-crossed the arroyo banks, bringing them to shade, to protection from the elements, to the rare standing puddles that remained for a few hours after a cloudburst. Dodging the cow patties, Estelle climbed out of the arroyo. Bill Gastner met her by the two-track.

“You all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine.” She
wasn’t
fine, and that there was nothing she could do to make things right just added to it. She paused and took a deep breath, surveying the open country. “Freddy was ten when they moved into their house on Twelfth,” she said. “Butch was six.” She let it go at that, knowing that
Padrino
understood her anguish perfectly.

“Well, this is what he did,” Gastner said. He turned and pointed back up the road, toward the rise that had catapulted the ATV to disaster. Just ahead of where they stood, a wide and deep quagmire, more than just a routine pothole, took up most of what had been the two-track. Fresh tracks had been cut on the side farthest from the arroyo edge. The sink collected runoff and became a rutted and slimy trap in the wet, and when dry, as it was now, presented a deep, jarring axle breaker.

Gastner turned and swept his arm in an arc. “He had a good run through here—flat and straight. He takes the route around it on the left going in, and retraces his route coming out. If he’d been going slower, he might have bounced right through the middle of it just for the hell of it, but not rippin’ the way he was.” Gastner walked across to the arroyo lip. “If he tries to skirt this sink on
this
side, he’s running too damn close to the edge. Now…” and he interrupted himself and walked across the sink, standing perpendicular to the road and facing Estelle and the arroyo. He held up both arms, pointing in each direction. “Look how narrow that two-track is when it crests that rise, sweetheart. All the rocks and brush, there isn’t much room. And there sure as hell isn’t any room for error. Freddy comes through here, and he’s intending to jump the hill. I mean, he came in that way, didn’t he?” He swept his arms again in an arc. “He comes through here, but he doesn’t want to end up in those rocks and trees there, on the uphill side of the trail, so after this pothole, he’s got to swing back pretty hard.”

“Show me the rock,” Estelle said.

“Sure enough.” She followed Gastner as he plodded up the slight grade. The ATV’s tracks were clear. Both coming and going, Freddy Romero had chosen the same route over this particular rise. At the crest of the hill, there were no ATV tracks. He’d felt comfortable enough that he’d used the little hill as a ramp, both coming and going.

“I think that he just overcooked it,” Gastner said. “He comes up here and ramps off, maybe a little crosswise after skidding around that sinkhole. If he does that, if he’s not absolutely goddamn straight, then he’s heading toward the left side of the trail. And pow. Right there.”