Steven Havill: Bag Limit

“If you see Francis, would you tell him that we were going to go over to the Twelfth Street house for a bit?” She looked at Buddy. “Do you want to come with us?”

“Tadd might,” my son said. “I’ve got a few things I need to do. If you’d drop me at the house, that would be fine.”

“Let’s play it by ear for dinner, then,” I said.

“I was thinking of green-chile cheeseburgers on the grill,” Tadd said instantly, and Francisco’s eyes bugged with delight.

“Arg,” I said. “More food.”

Janalynn Torrez waited by the front register, and I expected to see her start digging for the ticket. “It’s on the house today,” she said with a smile.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“We hope you enjoyed it.”

“Well, of course we enjoyed it,” I said, flustered. “Thank you very much.” I slipped a twenty out of my wallet and put it in her hand. “That’s for putting up with all the mess, Jana.”

She blushed. “Thank you, sir.”

“Hasta cuando,” I said.

Tadd was holding the door for me. “That’s pretty good, Grandpa.”

“It’s just that natural Gastner ear for language,” I said. Estelle heard me, but made no comment.

***

I exchanged the aromas of the Don Juan for the sterile bouquet of disinfectant at Posadas General Hospital, where instead of black velvet renditions of the conquistadors, the artwork consisted of light green walls and the reflections in the polished floor tile of the Danish-style furniture.

Anne Murchison Shalley looked up from the nurse’s station, saw me, and beckoned. I’d known Anne since she was in grade school. Her mother, Helen Murchison, had been head nurse for years at Posadas General, and knew my insides better than I did. While I had often described Helen as an old battle-ax, Anne was a delight for the eye.

“Sir, Dr. Perrone said that if you came in, I should tell you that Scott Gutierrez would be able to speak with you for just a few minutes.”

“Just a few is all it will take,” I said.

“He’s going to be in a lot of pain,” she added, and her sympathy was genuine.

“Where’s he at?”

“Intensive care recovery,” she said. “You can’t miss it.”

She knew how often I’d been there myself. I turned the corner at Radiology and saw Sergeant Howard Bishop down the hall, leaning against the wall with one hand, deep in concentration. He looked up as I approached.

“All the docs just left a few minutes ago,” he said. “Is Francis Guzman working back here again? I saw him with Perrone.”

I shook my head. “No. Golfing buddies. They’re just visiting. They’re staying over at the house.”

“Estelle, too?”

“Yep. Her too.” I thought Bishop’s expression was a touch wistful. “Is he conscious yet?” The facility had glass partitions, but the sliding curtain had been drawn around Gutierrez’s bed.

“I heard one of the nurses talking to him a bit ago, so I guess he is. I haven’t been in. Bobby said to post a watch in the hall, so here I am.”

“Long day, huh.” I didn’t wait for his reply, but stepped past and pushed the door open. I didn’t recognize the nurse at the ICU desk, but she apparently knew who I was. She nodded and remained seated, caught up in paperwork.

I stepped around the curtain and looked at Scott Gutierrez. His head was bandaged down to the tip of his nose, and he had enough lines and hoses plugged into his system to support a fair-sized village.

He raised his right hand a few inches off the sheet, as if he could sense who had invaded his domain by the change in air pressure.

“Scott, it’s Bill Gastner,” I said.

“Hi,” he replied.

“Can you talk with me for a few minutes?”

After shifting a tiny bit on the bed as if winding up for the effort to speak, he said, “Yes.” He sounded almost normal, like a person with plugged sinuses. He was lucky he still had sinuses. He reached up and touched the bandages lightly. “This is not going to be good, is it?” He spoke slowly, trying his best to make each word come out right with a minimum of movement.

“You’re going to be fine,” I said, unable to think of anything more creative than the standard line. I didn’t know-and Scott probably didn’t, either-if his vision had been saved or not. “Connie is doing all right, too, Scott. She was banged up pretty badly, but she’s going to be all right.”

“I couldn’t catch her,” Gutierrez said. “I remember that. I couldn’t catch her.” He took a deep breath, very slowly. “I remember the look on her face.”

“She’s going to be fine.”

“Walsh?” It wasn’t “Dad,” or “my stepfather,” or anything else that might be tinged with affection.

“He’s dead, Scott.”

He lifted his hand again, then let it drop on his stomach. “How?”

“Heart attack. We found him just a few feet from where the shots were fired.”

“He shot twice,” Gutierrez said. “Really fast. I heard the snap of the first one. Right over my head.”

“Then what happened?”

“Before we could move, he shot a second time. The bullet hit the rock.” He stopped and seemed to be marking time, his index finger tapping the sheets. “I thought that it hit Connie. She kinda jumped. She lost her balance. I couldn’t grab her.”

“She’s going to be all right, Scott.”

“She went right over backward.”

“He shot again, though. Do you remember that?”

“Oh, yeah. I remember that.” He fell silent again and I watched as he lifted his right hand as if in slow-motion. He carefully ran his finger under the edge of the bandage on his right cheekbone. “Uh,” he said and took another deep breath.

“Do you want me to ask the nurse to get you something?”

“No.” He lowered his hand to the automatic morphine dispenser’s plunger that was clipped to the bed rail. He didn’t press the button. “I could see…see that he was trying to line up again, and I dove off to one side.”

“Did you try to shoot back?”

“No.” His left hand lifted an inch off the sheets. “I didn’t even think about that. Can you believe it? I didn’t even remember I had a damn rifle in my hands. And then it felt like somebody hit me in the nose with a baseball bat. I couldn’t see, I didn’t know what the hell…” He pulled his right hand away from the morphine dispenser.

“Do you remember dropping your rifle?”

“No. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember much else, except I couldn’t see where to go.”

I reached out and touched the back of his hand, just a couple of fingers, just enough to make contact. “Why did he do it, Scott?”

“Because Connie was going to quit.”

“Quit what?”

“She was making fake licenses for him.”

“Driver’s licenses, you mean?”

“Yes. Like the one Matt Baca had.”

“He told you this?”

“No. Connie did. She told me last week what she’d done. That she’d run one once in a while for Walsh. He paid her eight hundred bucks. He lines ’em up down south, in Acuna. They come up here when she’s working by herself. She’d help ’em with the test, whatever they needed.”

“Fake addresses?”

“Yes. And especially commercial tickets. You’d be surprised…” He stopped suddenly. His right hand moved halfway to his face and stopped. “Jesus,” he breathed. “You’d be surprised how many truckers down in South Texas live in Posadas, New Mexico.” He made a little snuffling sound as if the laugh had been stopped short, followed by a groan of pain.

“I don’t understand about Matt.”

“She made him a fake license.”

“For eight hundred bucks? You’re kidding.”

“No. No money. She was hot to trot as far as he was concerned. For a little while, anyway. Then she got nervous, and realized that Matt was going to really screw things up if he wasn’t careful.”