Steven Havill: Bag Limit

“Sure.” I extended the phone toward the girl. “Mom wants to talk to you,” I said. Jessie pushed away from the car, took the phone, and stepped away a couple of paces, her back to us.

“Thomas,” I said, “make sure she rides in the backseat, and make sure the first thing you do is radio in time and odometer to dispatch. Do the same thing the instant you park in front of Montoya’s.”

“Yes, sir.” The reminder was probably unnecessary. Circumstances were rare when we provided taxi service, and I wasn’t about to summon a matron all the way from Posadas to escort a fourteen-year-old drunk. We didn’t need a couple of distraught parents on the highway either, not when the deputy was headed in. But there was no point in taking chances. She could enjoy the ride behind the wire mesh with doors that had no handles or window cranks. Maybe it would make an impression.

I stayed close to Jessie, but she didn’t have much to say to her mother. When she finally said, “Okay,” and handed the phone back to me, I took her by the elbow to steer her toward Pasquale’s car.

“Here’s Bob,” the deputy said, and I turned to see Torrez strolling toward us, flashlight extinguished and by his side.

“No luck, eh?” I said. He hadn’t been gone long enough to make more than a perfunctory effort, and even that was a waste of time.

Torrez shook his head. “He could be anywhere,” he said. “But I guess he’ll turn up eventually. I’ll run on down to Regal and let his father know.” He rapped the back fender of 310 with his flashlight.

“You want me to come back out and give it a try?” Pasquale asked, but I waved him off.

“Take Jessie home. You might tell her mother when you get there that we’ll be wanting to talk to her again in the morning, after she sobers up.”

The deputy escorted the youngster to the patrol car, with Bob Torrez walking behind them. As Pasquale’s unit pulled out of the narrow road, the undersheriff reached into his truck and turned off the light display, leaving us in comfortable darkness.

“You’ll be all right until the wrecker arrives? I’ll probably be back before they get here,” he said. “We’ll run the tape before they move anything.”

“Sure.” I swung my flashlight and looked at 310 again. The impact in front of the wheel had caved in the rear door. “It’ll probably make it back to town, once the wrecker pulls this other piece of junk out of the way. And if not”-I shrugged-“it’s a nice quiet night to watch the stars.”

During the twenty minutes that Bob Torrez was gone, I leaned against the front fender of my car, listening to the mountain. I could hear the occasional car or truck miles away, and more than one dog’s yap floated on the night breeze. Other than that, the high country was quiet-just a faint whisper of moving air through the scrub oak and juniper.

If Matt Baca was working his drunken way through the brush down the southwest slope of Santa Lucia Peak toward the tiny village of Regal, he was stepping quietly. I tried to picture how a staggering drunk might navigate at night through oak brush, over jagged and loose rock outcroppings, and around vast cactus beds. If he was depending on dumb luck, the pattern of the evening’s events thus far should have made him a bit uneasy-assuming that he had sobered enough to ponder such things.

Just before Torrez arrived, I heard Deputy Thomas Pasquale inform dispatch that he was stopping at the Montoya residence to drop off his passenger. I wondered if, when they drove past the convenience store on the northeast corner of Bustos and Grande, Jessie Montoya had said, “You can just drop me off here. I’ll be all right.” It was going to be a long night for the young lady.

The Expedition’s headlights swung through the trees, and I ambled down the dirt two-track a few steps to meet it. “I was hoping maybe he’d just stroll out of the woods along the roadside,” Torrez said as he climbed out of the truck.

“Stagger, you mean.”

“That, too,” the undersheriff said. “His father isn’t home. This hour of the night, he’s probably shacked up with somebody.”

“Old Sosimo does that, does he?”

Bob grunted in disgust. “That would be why Josie left him two years ago. You haven’t heard anything?”

“Not a peep.”

“Maybe Matt’s found himself a nice spot to sleep it off. And by the way, I talked to Pasquale a minute ago, right after he dropped off the girl. Apparently Matt drove his old man’s pickup into town, and then he and Toby linked up at the pizza place. It was Toby’s idea to talk Jessie into cruising around with them.”

“So Toby’s sweet on Jessie,” I said. “What’d he take his mother’s car for? Dumping the girlfriend in the backseat while the guys ride up front is what passes for a date these days?”

Torrez shrugged. “Sosimo’s pickup is so full of junk that three people can’t fit in the cab. And it stinks. He chews tobacco, and about half the time he doesn’t get it in the cup.”

“Well, one or another of them will show up eventually,” I said. “The next question to ask Toby, as soon as the doctors cut his lips loose from his teeth, is why he let Matt drive.”

“Probably because Toby doesn’t have a license yet,” Torrez said. “I haven’t checked, but I think he just turned fifteen. If I remember right, Matt’s going on nineteen. I don’t remember for sure.”

“For all your relatives, you’d need a directory,” I said. “And I don’t guess that it’s too hard to find someone who’s willing to sell a kid a few six-packs without a background check.” I scanned the interior of the little car with the flashlight again, catching the glint of three open beer cans but no mother lode. “And it doesn’t look like they succeeded in buying anything from Victor Sanchez, either.”

We heard a truck approaching, and as it slowed the undersheriff reached into the Expedition and turned on the red lights for a pulse or two so that the tow-truck driver would know where to pull off into the trees.

In less than five minutes, Stubby Lopez had hooked up to the remains of the Nissan, and with that out of the way, I slid into 310 and started it up. It ran just fine, and since the bodywork hadn’t crushed into the wheel or tire, I saw no point in towing the car back.

“I’d be happy to make a second trip,” Stubby said hopefully.

“Not necessary,” I said. “But let me go on ahead of you, just in case.” I could have just stayed where I was, content to enjoy a second installment of pretending I was a wart on the side of the mountain, but the mood had been spoiled.

I drove back to Posadas without incident and parked the battered 310 over behind the gas pumps. Both Torrez and Pasquale would be off duty just as soon as they cleaned up their paperwork. Jackie Taber was the only deputy scheduled for the midnight-to-eight slot that particular day. On a quiet November Saturday morning, one deputy would be adequate.

September and October had been so slow that all of us had started to look at a routine speeding ticket as excitement. Bob Torrez had even managed to find the time to erect a handful of campaign signs around the county. That was the extent of his efforts.

More than once I had suggested a couple of radio spots, or maybe a newspaper ad or two-or an appearance at the local Rotary Club luncheon. Each time, he shook his head and grimaced. Maybe he was right. Maybe no one was going to vote for Leona Spears, his only opponent. If all of Torrez’s relatives voted for him, the election would be a landslide.

I finally came to the conclusion that it wasn’t that Robert Torrez didn’t want the sheriff’s job. He did-he’d spent the better part of fifteen years with the department, and he had his own ideas about how a tiny, broke county could finance the modern computer age of law enforcement. He just didn’t have any patience with the politics that went with it.