Heartshot (9 page)
The nurse sneezed discreetly, but it was enough to jar me awake.
“You look like you could use about forty-eight hours straight,” Dr. Harlan Sprague, Jr., said quietly. He was sitting nearby, a slender briefcase leaning against the chair leg. He let the journal he was reading fall closed, but kept the place with his thumb.
I rubbed my eyes and pushed myself upright in the chair. “Must have dozed off.” I looked at my watch. Two hours of dozing. “When did you come up?”
“About an hour ago. I flew in.” He fully closed the journal and put it in the briefcase. “Your two compadres left?”
“They had some kind of problem they got called on. Someone else from Gallup was supposed to be here by now.”
Sprague nodded. “I’ve got a two-day conference that promises two days of boredom. Had I known you were going to make the trip, I would have offered you a ride in my plane. More comfortable, I suspect, than the air ambulance.”
“It wasn’t too bad. I appreciate the thought, though. About all we’ve been doing is waiting. Hurry up and wait.”
“I can imagine,” Sprague said gently. “Anyhow, I saw you here and thought you probably wouldn’t be asleep too long.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “I have about an hour, if there’s anything else you need. I’m impressed, by the way, with how thorough your Detective Reyes was, however.”
“We appreciate your cooperation,” I said, trying to marshal my thoughts. What I wanted was a chance to clean up. I was still in uniform and acutely aware of how scruffy I must have looked.
“I wish I could be of more help,” Sprague continued quietly. “Apparently the young officer saw Mr. Fernandez with someone just before the incident. On the sidewalk near the town houses.” He shook his head ruefully. “Had I only looked outside. But, at that hour…” He shrugged.
“I never had much of a chance to talk with Hewitt,” I said. “We’re anxious to do that.”
“How long has he been in surgery now?”
I looked long and hard at my watch, numbed by the passage of time. “God. Would you believe almost six hours?”
Sprague grimaced. “And almost that long down in Posadas?” I nodded. “Well,” the doctor said, “if they finish up right now, it’ll still be a number of hours before there’s any chance of coherent consciousness. I would guess that it’s wishful thinking to expect anything before late this evening. Better tomorrow, even.”
“I’ll wait,” I said. Hell, it was getting to be a habit, waiting. Easier that than anything else. No news was good news, goes the clichÉ. Sprague nodded in sympathy and glanced at the tape recorder that I had with me.
“Why don’t I go find out what’s happening for you?” he asked. “I suspect I’ll have an easier time of it than you.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Harlan Sprague was gone for perhaps twenty minutes, and when he returned he smiled some reassurance. “You can relax a little. The officer has been out of surgery for nearly twenty minutes. I’m sure they would have told you, but there’s been no opportunity. Apparently a messy traffic accident. Anyway, the officer is in ICU recovery. The nurse there says it will be at least six hours before they’ll even think of letting you in the room.”
“Six hours?”
Sprague nodded. “And the chance of him being awake and coherent is just about nil, I can tell you that.”
“But he’s doing all right?”
“The nurse said the surgery went ‘fair’. That was her term. There are always so many complications in this sort of thing that that’s about the best you can hope for.” He stepped up closer to me and frowned. “Now listen. I know a man who’s dead on his feet when I see one. And I also know a mild coronary when I see it…or at least an acute warning of one. And that’s what you had in the park down in Posadas. Sheriff Gastner, you’re a basket case. Go get some rest before you end up in ICU yourself. You’re not doing yourself, or anyone else, any favors.” He looked down at the table. “And for God’s sakes, stop smoking those damn cigarettes.”
I laughed. “Thanks.”
He wasn’t amused. “I need to go. If you’re still alive tomorrow—at four P. M., I’ll be flying back to Posadas. Unless you’ve already made arrangements, I’d appreciate the company.”
“I’ll have to see what happens. But thanks again.”
He tipped his head and looked at me for a long moment, then slowly shook his head and sighed. “Leave a message for me at the desk at the Hilton. I’ll check there just before I leave for the airport.”
I watched him walk off down the hall, slightly stooped, briefcase swinging rhythmically. I went to the restroom and tried to freshen up. The grizzled face that stared at me from the mirror wouldn’t freshen much. Neither would the rumpled clothes. I tossed the paper towel in the bin. “Who the hell cares what you look like,” I muttered to myself. I turned to leave. The swinging door almost caught me in the head as Chief White walked in.
“Christ, you look awful,” he said.
“I think the next person who tells me that is going to get punched,” I said. I pushed past his bulk and patted him on the arm at the same time. “Hewitt’s out of surgery. The nurse says it will be at least six hours before we can see him.”
“The best we could hope for,” Chief White said slowly. “His parents are on their way from Tucson.”
I nodded. “I’m going to go across the street to the motel and spend some of the county’s money for a bed,” I said. “Give me a call if anything changes. Otherwise I’ll be back around suppertime.”
***
The walk revived me a little…just long enough to attend to chores. Half a block down the main drag I bought a pack of underwear and a pair of socks at an Army-Navy store. At the motel, I talked the taciturn desk clerk into having the maid run my uniform across to the one-hour dry cleaner’s. I called Posadas and filled Holman in.
“Bill, hang on a minute,” Holman said at one point. “Estelle wants to talk to you.”
Her voice was soft on the phone, and I had to concentrate to hear. “If you fly down with Sprague tomorrow, talk with him about his daughter,” Estelle suggested. “She overdosed in January of last year. His wife apparently left him a couple months after that. The interesting thing is that according to a couple of people I talked to, one of Darlene Sprague’s best friends was Jenny Barrie.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody.”
“I just think it’s interesting that Doc Sprague’s daughter OD’d, and then one of her good friends dies, involved with drugs as well.”
“You’re saying Barrie is our connection?”
“No, I’m not. It’s just something, that’s all. It might be interesting to lead the doctor that way, and see what he says.”
“I’ll see,” I said.
“The sheriff wants to talk to you again. Hang on.”
The connections clicked and then Sheriff Holman said, “Bill, I’m making a request of some of the other people that we set up an interagency task force here. We thought we could take the simple, limited approach, but it didn’t work. I think a mass undercover operation might flush something out.”
“It might.”
“You don’t sound overwhelmed with enthusiasm.”
“Not right now, I’m not. I’m too damn tired to think straight.”
“Well, when you get back here, we’ll talk about it.”
“Fine. Tomorrow, probably.” We rang off and I headed for bed. With all its heavy curtains, the motel room was dark as night, and I burrowed in. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes later that the phone rang.
I had been sleeping so hard that I jerked almost upright. Four rings later I managed to find the damn thing.
“Uh?”
“Sheriff Gastner? Chief White.”
I rolled on my back and stared up into the darkness. “Yes.”
“Art Hewitt died a couple minutes ago.”
For several seconds I didn’t say anything. Finally I shifted the phone and mumbled, “Did his parents ever make it up from Tucson?”
“They were with him.”
“Okay. I’ll be over in a minute.” I hung up and rolled my legs off the bed until I was sitting. I dialed the front desk and asked that someone check on my uniform. The puzzled desk attendant replied that it had been placed at my door some time ago. I retrieved the bundle and tossed it on the bed. Then I went to the heavily curtained window, pushed the draperies aside a little and looked outside. I was stunned to find the street lights on and the sky inky.
I let the draperies fall and found the light switch. My watch said nine thirty-seven. I stared at it and then muttered something profane. A few minutes later I was dressed. I buckled on my Sam Browne belt and glanced in the mirror. I saw an aging cop with bags under his eyes. That didn’t concern me. I was thinking about the son of a bitch who had brought that kilo of cocaine into Posadas. The death of five kids I blamed on him. And Benny Fernandez. Now Art Hewitt. “You got seven, you bastard. No more.”
The hospital seemed a lot quieter when I walked in for the second time that day.
It was shortly before midnight when I returned to my motel room. The desk clerk looked up, saw me and reached into the cubbyhole for room 207.
“The gentleman who telephoned said to be sure you got this,” the clerk said helpfully, and I took the small message. It was from Sprague.
Sheriff: I’ll be flying back to Posadas first thing in the morning. Leave a message for me if you want a ride. Flight time anytime after 9 A. M. Plane is at Sultan Flying Service at the Inter-national. Sorry about Hewitt.
“He made me read it back to him word for word, so I know it’s right,” the desk clerk said. For the first time I noticed how young he was…probably a high school kid earning a few extra bucks.
“Thanks,” I said. I handed him five dollars. “And thanks for getting it right. It was important. And will you set up a wake-up call for seven-thirty?”
“Sure thing.” He tucked the money away and wrote out a time note to stick in the slotted board behind him.
I called the Hilton and left a message for Sprague that nine o’clock would be fine. After more than an hour of tossing and turning, I fell asleep. I awoke only once, apprehensive as hell about nothing. I lay still, listening. Normal street traffic rumbled up and down Central Avenue. In the distance, a jet thundered off to the west. By turning my head slightly, I could see the faint glow of my watch. Four-sixteen. The air-conditioner kicked on. About time, I thought. The room was stuffy, the air filled with the cloying aroma of that gunk that room maids spray in an effort to make things smell better than Calcutta streets. My mind drifted from one thing to another, and the outside world began to fade a little. The wake-up call interrupted a dream in which Harlan Sprague was vehemently telling Posadas Airport manager Jim Bergin that cracked aircraft engine pistons could be detected with a stethoscope, if only Bergin would take time to listen carefully enough.
***
I watched the mountain just west of Socorro slide by smoothly. “There are towers on top of every mountain in the southwest,” I said, and Sprague laughed shortly.
“Seems like it, sometimes, doesn’t it.”
“As long as we clear them all.” There was little cause for concern. The Cessna obviously had power to spare, and Sprague was evidently not the sort to buzz treetops. I turned from the window and winced a little. I pulled at the knot of my tie and took a deep breath. The discomfort, nothing more than an annoying fullness that seemed to settle behind my sternum, subsided after a few seconds.
“You all right?” Sprague asked.
I nodded. “So the conference was a bust, huh?”
“Total,” Sprague said. “A new low in boredom.” He heard something through his headset and said, “Mike Bravo one seventy-eight.” Immediately he reached forward and changed radio frequencies, then took off the headset and put it on the floor just in front of his seat. “Some peace and quiet,” he said. “If I can’t find Posadas in this kind of weather, something’s wrong. I get tired of all the yammering.”
The sky was magnificently clear, cloudless and the sort of deep blue that always made me think that some of the black of outer space was leaking through. We made a slight turn and then the Cessna settled into a straight course for Posadas. We sat without conversation for another ten minutes, each caught up in our own thoughts, content to watch the rumpled geologic oddities of New Mexico slide by.
“He never regained consciousness, did he,” Sprague said. I just shook my head. Sprague puffed out his cheeks and let out the air in a loud sigh like a leaky tire. “At least he didn’t suffer.” I didn’t respond to that. I could have said that lying in the wet grass of a village park with his insides torn to pieces was pretty close to my definition of suffering. And who the hell knows what the unconscious, or semi-conscious, mind thinks as first one set of synapses and then another shuts down. It sure as hell ain’t party-time, Doc. But I didn’t say any of that, because Sprague didn’t deserve it.
Instead, I shifted a little so that I could talk without twisting my neck. I leaned a shoulder against the gentle vibration of the door and window. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions?” Sprague glanced quickly at me and shrugged. I smiled faintly. “No interruptions up here.”
“Feel free,” Sprague said.
“When your daughter died last year…” I saw the flicker of pain on the doctor’s face, just a brief tightening of the muscles and an extra blink or two. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.” He didn’t look at me, but continued his regular scanning of the sky ahead of us.
“It was after a party with some of her friends, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know her friends very well?”
Sprague turned and looked at me steadily. “Obviously not. Had that been the case, she wouldn’t have been…” He hesitated, then said, “The incident wouldn’t have happened.”
“Was Jenny Barrie one of her close friends?”
Sprague was once more scanning the sky, this time looking out to the east, and for a moment it appeared that he hadn’t heard the question. I was sure he had, though, and let the silence hang.
“She and the Barrie girl became friends during their freshman year.” He said it to the window, then reached forward and wiped a speck of dust from the rim of one of the gauges. He seemed to settle a little. “That was a hard year.”
“In what way?”
“I didn’t like the direction I saw Darlene going.”
“And how was that?”
He waved a hand at the familiarity of it. “The usual. Minimal effort at things I thought important. The sort of daily dress that…I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole process. You watched four of your own grow up. First thing you know, there seems to be a gulf growing, and be damned if there’s anything to do about it. Pretty soon the gulf’s too big to cross.” He glanced at his watch. “Too damn big.”
“And the Barrie girl?”
“I tried to ignore her. That was a mistake, in retrospect.”
“There was never any decision about where the cocaine came from that killed Darlene.”
“No, there wasn’t. But you would know that better than I.”
“What do you think?”
Sprague eyed me skeptically. “You’re serious?”
“Of course.”
“For months, I agonized over that question, Sheriff. Agonized. Over that question, over my daughter’s death. You’re a parent. I’m sure you can empathize. In fact, if I read you right, you’re finding it hard to write off Art Hewitt as just another cop killed in line of duty. He’s not so far removed in age from your youngest, right? And he was even living under your roof.”
“Go on.”
Sprague shrugged. “My first thought was to blame Barrie and her circle of creepy friends. Hell, not my first thought. My only thought.” His lips compressed grimly. “It would seem that your department has found evidence supporting that notion.”
“The accident that killed Barrie and her friends, you mean.”
“Certainly.”
“So you think the cocaine found in that vehicle was hers?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how it turns out. The common denominator is Barrie. Or her friends.”
“Do you have any notions about which one? Or ones?”
“Detective Reyes asked me the same thing a day or two ago. Whenever it was. No, I don’t. In fact, of the five youngsters who died in that car crash, I knew only two fairly well. Jenny Barrie, obviously. Tommy Hardy was a patient of mine when he was very young.” Sprague blinked rapidly a couple times. “He was in leg braces for almost a year. A two-year-old in leg braces. He walked like a goddamned duck. It worked out all right, though. And now this. What a goddamned waste.” He looked over at me and shrugged. “I knew the Fernandez boy only tangentially. I knew Hank Montaño only as a name and a kid in a long line of fall sport physicals. I did that for a few years, as you no doubt remember.”
“I remember. My youngest son came home one day after his and told me that you dipped your hands in buckets of ice water between each kid.”
Sprague laughed loudly. “They always think that, don’t they. God, that was years ago when he went through it.”
“Something like nine.”
“You know”—and he squirmed down a little in his seat, a touch more at ease—“I know I’m from a generation light-years removed, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how a run-of-the-mill high school kid gets ahold of a kilo of hard drugs. That puzzles me. No kid has that much money. Do they?”
“Evidently one of them did. Either that or they were set up.”
Sprague grimaced. “Set up? A teenager?”
“Or being used. It’s possible none of the five knew the coke was there. It’s conceivable that someone else was just using the car as a stash. That’s possible.”
“There aren’t many other choices. Either they were dealing, or someone was using their car innocent of their knowledge, or someone was framing them. I don’t see any other choice.”
“I don’t either.”
“And so what do you plan to do?”
I shrugged. “Detective Reyes has been digging during my absence. I’ll see what she’s come up with. We’ve got a couple leads, and we’ll thrash those out.” Sprague didn’t ask what those leads were, and that was a good thing. I didn’t know, myself.
“Will you be returning for the funeral? Officer Hewitt’s?”
“Yes.”
“His parents are from Tucson, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Is that where the funeral is? Tucson?”
“The family affair is. I won’t make that one. Just the one in Gallup.”
“And when is that?”
“Thursday at two.”
“Another flight upstate, eh?”
“No. Holman and I will drive. The car will be in the procession. For some reason, cops seem to believe that it’s a comfort for the grieving family to see the brotherhood assembled.”
“Is it?”
I held up my hands. “Who knows. I can’t imagine that anything is a comfort, except passage of time. Maybe the fanfare makes for a less painful memory, I suppose. Beats standing in the rain by yourself. We all need things like that sometimes.”
Dr. Sprague toyed with a couple of things on the dash. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it.”
“About?”
“At what point folks will stop accepting that it’s a part of life to see their young buried.”
“I’m not sure any of us accept that as a necessity, Doctor. We’d all pay a fancy price to avoid it.”
Sprague looked at me for a long minute. Even without his attention, the Cessna drove a straight rail through the sky. “I don’t think so, Sheriff. I don’t see much evidence of willingness to do that.”
“Wouldn’t you do about anything if it were possible to have your daughter back?”
“That’s what I mean,” Sprague said so softly I almost couldn’t hear him over the engine beat. “In retrospect, it’s so simple. But before it happens? Did I do enough? Did any of us? We all know fast cars can kill, and we know they especially kill the young. And yet we allowed five youngsters to pack themselves in that vehicle…with alcohol included. We don’t require much training for a driver’s license. We allow parties. And all the time, what do we do? We gamble, Sheriff. We gamble that the ones who are killed—and we know they will be, every year—we gamble that they aren’t our own.” When I didn’t respond immediately, Sprague added, “You see? It costs, doesn’t it? Let me give you one simple example. You’re a law officer, and should appreciate the simplicity of this. Suppose that if you were caught driving while intoxicated, no matter what your age, you lost your driving privileges for life.” I raised a skeptical eyebrow. Sprague smiled. “You see? We are not willing to pay the price yet, are we? The convenience of driving is more important to us…more important…than a stiff penalty to clear the roads of drunks.”
“People would drive anyway.”
“Even if they knew that if they were caught without a license they would have to perform five years of full-time public-service work?”
“And let their families starve?”
“So whose fault is that? Did they have to drink and drive? I don’t mean to be argumentative, Sheriff. I’m just making the point that we aren’t willing to pay the price. Yet. It just isn’t important enough to enough people. We all think we can dodge fate. I stand down from my soapbox now.” He grinned. “You asked for it.” He gestured at the airplane. “There’s nothing like having a captive audience.”
“If you ever figure out the answers,” I said, “be sure to let me in on the secret.”
“Be assured,” Sprague replied, nodding vigorously. Then he added, “But don’t hold your breath. Humans are strange creatures. It takes a catastrophe of royal proportions to drill through the average person’s complacency. I lost a daughter and a wife, and saw little stirring in the community. A car crash kills five teenagers.” He shrugged offhandedly. “Still, not much. A few feeble efforts to form a parents’ awareness group. A prominent merchant is killed after he mortally wounds an undercover police officer.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow in question. “What’s it take, Sheriff?”
“I don’t know.”
Sprague looked off ahead, then pointed. “That hump on the horizon there is the mesa north of Posadas. We’ll be home in about fifteen minutes.”
Home. I thought about Posadas, and felt uneasy. For a hundred years or more, a sleepy, tiny border hamlet. For thirty years after that, a booming mining town, jerked so fast into the twentieth century that it lost almost all of its former color, culture, and dignity. A two-bit, booming mining town. Now the mine was gone, the mill closed. And what was left was struggling under something ugly and threatening. I looked up at the bright blue of the sky. Harlan Sprague was absorbed in his own thoughts, and we flew the final miles in silence.