Steven Havill - Bag Limit

He got to his feet, a hand reaching out to the arm of the chair for support. He reminded me of a doughnut-pasty complexion and round through the middle. If anything was worse for the waistline than long hours in a patrol car fleeing boredom, it had to be working in the very source, the mother lode, of fresh junk food.

“Who can sleep?” he said.

I knew what was on his mind. “Come on in. Let’s collapse together,” I said. He tried a little chuckle, but it didn’t work.

Behind the dispatcher’s console were the neat rows of mail slots, and I could see the bouquet of “WHILE YOU WERE OUT” notes taped to the lip of mine. They could wait. Before I had a chance to disappear into my office, Brent Sutherland surfaced from the conference room.

“Are Gutierrez and Bergmann in there?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. And…” He stopped when he saw Tommy Portillo in trail. “Mr. Portillo wanted to see you.”

“We’ll be in my office. Did Bob Torrez go home?”

“Yes, sir.”

I nodded and reached out a hand to usher Portillo through the door of my office. “Get comfortable,” I said. I sat down and swung my feet up on the corner of my desk, relaxing my head back against the old leather of the chair. After five slow, deep breaths, I turned my head and looked at Portillo.

He was sitting on the edge of the chair in front of my desk, hands folded between his knees, shoulders hunched, head down as if he were trying to think away an inflamed prostate.

“You’ve been listening to the scanner, eh?” I asked.

He looked up and met my gaze without flinching. He was wearing an Oakland A’s baseball cap, and I realized that I couldn’t remember ever seeing him without it. I’d have to go to a service club meeting just to find out what was under it.

“The undersheriff stopped by to see me,” he said.

“So I understand. I’d like to hear about it.”

“I told him that Baca came in around ten o’clock. That’s as close as I can estimate it.”

“And you told him that Matt Baca showed you a legal ID of some sort?” I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the New Mexico driver’s license that I’d retrieved from Matt Baca’s wallet. The photo showed a good-looking kid, dark and lean-featured, embarrassed to be sitting in front of a camera without quite knowing how to look tough.

Portillo watched me, and could figure out for himself what I was holding. He waited until I was finished and then reached over for the license when I extended it to him.

Frowning, he turned the plastic card this way and that, and then shook his head.

“This is not the license that Baca showed me.”

“I can’t remember which side of the bed I’m supposed to get up on most of the time,” I said gently. “After a quick glance, there isn’t a chance you could be mistaken?”

“No, I mean this isn’t the one. And I look, you know? I mean, I really do. Not just a glance.”

“All right.” I kept my tone noncommittal.

“This is the old style. Here.” He handed it back to me. “The license that Matt Baca showed me earlier tonight was the new kind.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his own wallet, then extracted his license. “Like this. I got this on my birthday last month.” He held it up so I could see it.

“The new style,” I said, as if we didn’t deal on a routine basis with the licenses issued by the Motor Vehicle Division.

“The new ones-with all those state seals on them. They kinda shimmer, like.”

“Uh-huh.” I tapped Matt Baca’s license against my thumb. “He showed you a brand-new license. That’s what you’re saying?”

Portillo nodded. “That’s why I came in. First, the undersheriff stopped to talk to me…I guess it was about midnight. And then later I heard about…” He let it trail off with a helpless wave of his hand. “When I talked to Torrez, you didn’t have the kid in custody yet, is that right?”

I nodded.

“When I heard about what happened, I knew that you guys would be wanting to talk to me again. But believe me-if I’d thought that Matt Baca was underage, I wouldn’t have sold him the liquor.” He shrugged helplessly. “I just wouldn’t. I wanted to come in and tell you that.”

“That’s thoughtful of you,” I said. “Did you happen to notice his date of birth?”

“I remember that it was before this date in 1980. You know, that’s how we do it. Just has to be before…” He let it drift off, realizing that he was lugging coals to Newcastle.

“But you don’t remember the year that was on the license?”

“No. Seems to me that it was ’79. I don’t remember for sure. I mean it was close to that, but as long as it’s before 1980 what’s the point of paying attention, if you know what I mean.”

“Did you happen to notice the date of issue?”

“Date of issue?”

“It’s on the license, in small print.”

“I didn’t notice that, no.”

“It had his picture, though?”

“Yes.”

“Same one as this?” I held up Baca’s license.

Tommy Portillo leaned close and squinted. “No.” He settled back in the chair. “It wasn’t the same picture.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“Huh,” I said, and leaned my head back against the chair again. “That’s something to go on, anyway.”

“I just wanted you to know. It was nagging at me, you know? You know how that goes?”

“Oh, yeah. I know how that goes.”

“I think maybe I can go home now and get some sleep.”

“I appreciate this, Tommy. I really do. We may want to talk to you again.”

“Anytime, Bill. Just anytime.”

After he left, I put Matt Baca’s license back in the small, tagged evidence bag. My intuition told me that Tommy Portillo was telling the truth. He had good reason to make any attempt to cover his ass, especially now, with a fatality involved-however tangentially.

A second license explained the boy’s reaching for ID in the Broken Spur. If Tommy Portillo was correct, Matt Baca had been about to show the bartender his freshly minted license. Victor Sanchez stopped the game before it had even begun.

Victor was no threat to Baca-he might not honor the bogus license, but he wouldn’t report the kid, either. The kid was free to go elsewhere. It made sense that he’d head for home, where Sosimo was known to keep a bottle or two. But when the red lights blossomed as the trio left the Broken Spur, Matt Baca had reason to run. His cousin, the undersheriff of Posadas County, knew exactly how old he was.

Having the fake license was one thing. Explaining where he got it was another story entirely.

I spent a couple of hours drafting my own written explanation of the night’s events. It was a simple enough incident, and ordinary circumstances would have required just a few minutes to whack out the necessary paragraphs of the deposition, beginning with the collision of Matt Baca’s car and my own.

“Ordinary circumstances” would have been if the incident had happened to someone else. As it was, I lingered over every sentence, letting my mind search and sift, looking for something that might strike a spark. I knew exactly why the kid had been mangled by the delivery truck. He was fast, I was slow. It was that painfully simple. Discovering why he’d decided to run in the first place wasn’t so simple.

Later in the morning, one of the deputies would have the chance to talk at length with Jessie Montoya, the young lady in the backseat. And maybe Toby Gordan would be able to mumble a few words past his stitches. The rules of the game had changed since I’d last seen those two kids-there was no need now for them to worry about protecting Matt Baca, or even saving face in front of their friend.