Heartshot
Heartshot
Heartshot
Steven F. Havill
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 1991 by Steven F. Havill.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-068785
ISBN-13 Print: 978-1-89020-829-5
ISBN-10 Print: 1-890208-29-9
ISBN-13 eBook: 978-1-61595-079-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
For Kathleen
Several people were generous in assisting with technical information that I used in this novel. I would like to thank the Yates County Sheriff’s Department of Yates County, New York, and Chief Beverly Aragon of the Ramah, New Mexico, Police Department. Special thanks to pilots Tom Humphries, Charles K. Gunderson, John Mabry, and David Stewart, and particularly to Stewart Brothers Drilling Co. for the time spent in their Cessna T-210.
Contents
The sheriff leaned against the doorjamb of my office without saying a word, lounging there until I finally decided to notice him. I grunted what could have been a greeting, and that broke my chain of concentration. I punched the wrong goddamn key, swore, wound the platen up, and began to smear the mess on the paper some more with that miserable white correction fluid that flakes all over everything when it dries.
“Thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of computers, and you still pound that thing,” Sheriff Martin Holman said. I glanced at him without much interest. He blew across a full cup of coffee as if the stuff was hot. If it came out of the vending machine down the hall, it wasn’t.
“Us antiques got to stick together,” I said. I wound the paper back down to retype over the blotch, groping in my shirt pocket for a cigarette with my other hand.
“Did anyone show you that on a computer you can make corrections on the screen, and when it prints out, it’s a perfect copy?”
“No shit.”
“I mean, you don’t have to go through all that.” He waved a hand at my typewriter, and I took a minute to light the cigarette. I leaned back in my chair until its springs squawled, and looked at Holman. He’d just been elected, and we were stuck with him for at least four years. A goddamned used-car salesman. He spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was on his side.
“Did you need something in particular?” I asked.
“Uh, no. You want some coffee?”
“No, thanks.” He did want something…I could see it wiggling around inside that skull of his every time he shifted his baby-blue eyes.
“You know,” Holman said, and pushed himself away from the jamb, “I’m working up sort of a department profile for the newspaper…nothing formal, but you know, all the publicity we can get helps. And I was looking in your folder, and wanted to check all those years.”
“Those years?”
“Right.” He cleared his throat. “How long were you in the service, anyway? Twenty years?” I nodded and waited. “Twenty years. Damn. You went in right after the war?”
“In 1946.”
He shook his head in wonder. “That’s what I thought…I figured twenty in the service, and twenty for this department.” He grinned at the wonder of his mathematics, and I began to get the uneasy feeling that the son of a bitch was trying for more than historical accuracy in a press release. “And you must have been about twenty when you went into the service…eighteen, twenty, about that.”
He was about to say something else when the radio just behind him came to life. “PCS, three-oh-six.” Holman turned and looked at the radio. The dispatcher wasn’t in his room, which adjoined my office, but Holman made no move. “PCS, three-oh-six,” cracked again, and this time Holman took two steps, reached out and pushed the transmit bar of the microphone stand.
“Go ahead, three-oh-six,” And while he waited, he asked me, “That’s Baker, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I returned my attention to the paperwork in my typewriter, only half-hearing Deputy Baker say that he would be at home for a while. Holman acknowledged and keyed off. He reappeared in my doorway. “When’s his baby due?”
“Anytime.” These days, Baker checked in at home at least twenty times during each shift as his wife podded out with their first kid.
Holman sipped the coffee again. “And so,” he continued, “you served from ’46 to ’66. And you got to see Korea?”
“Twice. Not much to see either time.”
“Just them oriental beauties, eh?” Holman leered with a fake Oakie accent, and I just offered a little sniff of amusement as I penned corrections on my paper. “What rank did you retire with?”
I turned my head and gazed at him for a minute, wondering what the hell he was after, then decided I wasn’t going to play games. “Gunnery sergeant.”
Holman nodded, as if weighing rank against years and concluding something profound. “Damn, that means you joined this department in 1966.”
“That’s right. Eduardo Salcido was sheriff then.” Salcido was probably the most popular sheriff ever elected in Posadas County, and I got a twinge of pleasure out of reminding Holman about Salcido’s good sense in hiring me. And yes, it had been a long twenty years. Now, I was just finishing up twelve years as undersheriff. I didn’t need to be reminded that, since I didn’t have civil service protection, this newly minted politico could tell me to take a walk, anytime.
The dispatcher, just returning from a trip to the can, plopped down in front of the radio, and Holman turned to greet him. I was glad for the interruption, even though I thought less of J. J. Murton than I did of Holman. Murton, a runty, tangle-tongued illiterate whom I had nicknamed “Miracle,” fawned enough over the sheriff to earn himself membership in a goddamned kennel club.
“Well, I need to go,” Holman announced. “Bill, see you this afternoon.”
“Yeah,” I said. I folded the report into a manila envelope, walked into the dispatch room, and chucked the envelope into Detective Estelle Reyes’s mailbox. Miracle Murton watched a little nervously. Sweat beaded on his bald spot.
“Are you workin’ the parade, Mr. Gastner?” he asked.
“Why?”
Murton looked flustered. “I was just tryin’ to get straight in my mind who was workin’ when.”
I pointed at the laminate board that was screwed to the wall just above the radio. The various deputies’ names, printed neatly on magnetic blocks, were arranged in the usual weekly schedule. “You might ask yourself why we bother to put that there,” I said, and Miracle cringed…who knows why, except he was scared to death of me. That was all right. It kept him from being a total screw-up as a part-time, days-only dispatcher. In days gone by, Sheriff Salcido wouldn’t have tolerated Murton’s incompetence for fifteen seconds. I had a suspicion that the son of a bitch was distantly related to one of the county legislators. That would appeal to Holman, too. I reached up and took a set of keys off the board.
“I’m taking three-ten,” I said. “The trustees did wash it, didn’t they?”
“They sure did. Waxed it, too.”
“Wonderful. I love parades, don’t you?” I didn’t wait for Murton to figure out an answer.
And the parade was all right as parades go. The weather on that July Fourth was hot and clear, with a hint of the afternoon thunderheads that would bloom along the horizon above the jagged San Cristobal mountains separating us from Mexico. I had no intention of being in the parade that plodded up the wide, dusty street of Posadas, but I enjoyed watching the color. Posadas needed all the color it could get, since it wasn’t much more than a scruffy wide spot, a watering hole for tourists hurrying to get somewhere else. July Fourth was a big shindig, with the parade officially opening the holiday arts and crafts fair in the small town square. For two days, the law turned its back on alcoholic beverages in public places, and the aroma of Indian fry bread became so thick it blanked out even the red dust. I parked at a cross street, blocking traffic with 310 while I stood out in the sun with the crowd. By the time the thirtieth unit of the parade passed, I had cleared the office politics out of my head and started to enjoy the scenery.
The high school pom-pom team rode by, sitting pretty on hay bales piled on a flatbed. I waved at one of them whom I’d known since she was born, and then my good mood was ruined. The cheerleaders were throwing penny candy out to the crowds along the street, and just to my right was a fat little kid, maybe four years old, busy scrambling for the goodies. He came up with a piece of pink bubble gum and saw me. His eyes took in all the bright, shining hardware on my belt, the colorful patches on the uniform shirt, and the tan Stetson. He kept looking at me as he backed uncertainly toward his mother’s legs. When he was firmly nestled there, he looked up at her and said, “How come he’s so fat, Mommy?”
I guess I was standing far enough away that the mother, blond and fat herself, thought I hadn’t heard. She bent down and patted the little brute’s stomach and murmured, “Watch the parade, Jerry. He’s just old, that’s all.”
I turned so I could ignore them both, and after five minutes gave up on sucking in my gut. Hell, 210 pounds for five feet eight inches wasn’t that bad. It’s just that the extra pounds tended to collect immediately behind the Sam Browne belt. I crossed my arms and stood comfortably, leaning against the gleaming white fender of the county patrol car. In a minute, I felt a hand on my elbow.
I turned and saw Benny Fernandez, a blocky man shorter than me by a foot. “You ought to get some business out of all this,” I said. Benny owned a fast-food joint down the street that would be mobbed after the parade broke up.
“Hey, maybe,” he said. “How you doin’, Bill?”
“All right.”
He joined me in leaning against the car. “How’s that boy of yours?”
“Which one?”
Benny looked puzzled. “Don’t you have a boy who’s out on the Coast or something?”
I laughed. “I got one on the West Coast, and one down in Corpus. And a daughter in Flint, Michigan, and another one in New Britain, Connecticut.”
“Hey, that’s something,” Benny said, having already forgotten what I’d said. “I got relatives all over this state, man, and when we all get together…” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Hey, and talkin’ about parties…”
“Were we?” I lifted a hand in casual salute as two New Mexico State Police units rolled by, their grille lights pulsing.
“You know what I heard?”
“What did you hear?” I smiled and waved at the Eastern Star ladies, one of whom was particularly attractive, even if silver-haired. She was perched on a hay bale in the back of a new pickup truck, lending moral support to someone pretending to be the Statue of Liberty. I caught her eye, and she threw a handful of penny candy my way. I reached up a finger and tipped my Stetson…and ignored the candy.
“I keep hearin’ about a party tonight.”
“So what?” I remembered then that Benny’s boy had been nailed a month or so ago by the state cops for driving while intoxicated, and that had just about turned Benny’s nice little conservative, parochial world inside out. Somehow it was all right to sneak the twenty miles south, cross the border to raise all kinds of hell in a little cantina somewhere, and return home without disturbing the old folks in Posadas. “It’s summer. A kegger or two goes with the territory.”
“Well, maybe,” he continued lamely, “I just thought I’d mention it to you, you know? I mean, the kids at the restaurant, they were talkin’, you know. I thought I’d just mention it.”
“We’ll keep an eye out, Benny. We’ll check up at the lake.” Our “lake” was just a seepage-filled mining pit up on the mesa, adjoining the National Forest. The water there was clear, cold, attractive, and dangerous as hell.
“I’m still worried about the boy, you know? Ricky, he’s pretty headstrong.”
And DWI-prone, I thought. Keep the little bastard home, then. I said, “Tell you what, Benny. I’m going to be out and around tonight. I’ll pass the word to the other deputies, too. If I see Ricky, I’ll throw him in jail for you until morning.”
“Hey, now, you don’t have to do that, Bill,” Benny protested, grinning. “He’s not a bad kid, I mean. But I thought maybe I should talk to you. Then I saw you here, and I just thought…” He fluttered his hands. Nothing like convenience when a man has a problem.
I straightened my shoulders and hitched up my gun belt as I painted on my best public servant’s face. “Tell the kid to keep ’er slow.” Benny sidled away with a halfhearted wave of his hand, eager to be back in his restaurant slinging burgers.
I could see the last unit of the parade, the antique fire engine owned by the Posadas Volunteers, and figured it was time to beat the crowds out. I started 310, and as I waited for the fire engine, saw the fat little kid who’d tweaked my mood with the comment about my gut. When I pulled 310 out onto Bustos Avenue, I glowered at him, waved an index finger, and said, “Eight points.” The patrol car’s window was up, but I think he understood me. He jumped back up onto the curb, seeking Mama.