Steven Havill: Bag Limit

“Just take it easy, Matthew,” I said. Earlier, by the time he found his way home and passed out on the sofa, he’d hiked a good deal of the liquor out of his blood…enough that he’d remembered to kick off his Nikes. I toed them toward him. “Put on your shoes.”

He muttered an expletive and pushed himself up until he could sit on the sofa, eyes locked on me.

“You’ve had quite a night,” I said. He didn’t make a move, so I indicated the shoes. “Put ’em on.”

“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?” he said, and the venom was pretty good for the hour and the circumstances.

“Don’t care.” I shrugged. “If you can’t manage, then Robert can carry you out.”

Matt’s eyebrows darted together and he glanced at the open door. He could see the headlights of my car, and little else. But his expression made it clear that Matthew Baca didn’t want to deal with his cousin, Undersheriff Robert Torrez. He scrabbled the nearest shoe upright and stabbed his toes into it, stamping it on with practiced ease.

“Do you have your driver’s license on you?” Matt hesitated. “I need to see it.”

He leaned sideways and managed to pull his wallet from his back pocket. I reached over and took it. “Where’d you buy the booze last night?” I asked.

“I didn’t buy nothing,” Matt Baca said.

“Oh, sure,” I agreed pleasantly. The wallet included seven dollars and a valid New Mexico driver’s license that showed a sullen Matt Baca and a birth date of December 13, 1982. I slipped the license into my shirt pocket and handed the wallet back to Matt.

“Sosimo,” I said, “your son is charged with leaving the scene of an accident, providing alcohol to minors, driving under the influence, and half a dozen other things. The best thing for you to do is to come down in the morning and have a chat with Judge Hobart.”

“The judge,” Sosimo said.

“That’s right. The judge. We’ll have a preliminary hearing about nine o’clock. Unless you want me to wake Judge Hobart right now. He’s apt to be a little sore if you did that.”

“No,” Sosimo said.

“And you’re not in any shape to talk with him now anyway.” I stepped toward Matt and took him by the left elbow. “The boy will be safe in the county lockup until morning.”

“So you’re going to drive up there now,” Sosimo said.

“Yes,” I said. Sosimo looked like he wanted to say something else, but waved a hand. The whole thing was too much for his cider-laced brain. “You have a good night,” I said, and turned Matt toward the door. He shuffled along, letting me steer him into the glare of the lights.

I opened the back door of the Ford and he ducked inside before I had a chance to say, “Watch your head.”

It was only as I was turning the car around on the narrow lane that he said, “Where’s Bobby? I thought you said he was out here.”

“Apparently not,” I said, and Matt Baca settled back and ran through his entire four-letter vocabulary in both Spanish and English.

I lost a bet with myself. I figured that the first thing Matthew Baca would do after he settled down in the backseat was to squirm his cuffed wrists down around his legs so that his hands were in front of him. That wouldn’t accomplish much, but at least he’d be able to pick his nose. About half the kids that we put into cuffs managed to accomplish that maneuver, and I suppose that every one of them hoped that we’d be surprised as hell, thereby showing us a thing or two, by God.

Matt didn’t bother with that stunt. Instead he lay on his back and let fly at the right side window with both feet.

The safety glass was pretty strong, and for the first few kicks he was off balance and experimenting. I slowed the car and twisted around to look through the heavy steel grille that separated front from back. Matt Baca was a dark, featureless shadow, but he could see my profile clearly enough.

“The last time one of those windows got busted,” I said, “the court made the young man who kicked it out pay a hundred and eighty bucks to replace it. And that’s in addition to all the other charges. You might want to think about that.”

Matt did think about it, for about ten seconds. Reasoning wasn’t on his agenda. He set to kicking again, this time with a vengeance. The thud, thud, thud rocked the car. Either he was tuckered from his trek on the mountain, or the soles of his nifty sneakers were too well padded. The window refused to break. His muttered display of colorful language came in short bursts as he sucked in air between assaults on the window.

“Son,” I said, “I’ve never actually seen anybody climb out through a bunch of broken glass while the car was moving,” I said. “Especially with handcuffs on. That’s going to be quite a stunt to watch.”

Maybe young Baca was sober enough by then to imagine himself hanging half in and half out of the window-feetfirst or headfirst didn’t matter much. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

For a couple of miles, the only sound I could hear was his rhythmic breathing. I turned up the volume on the police radio and keyed the mike.

“Posadas County, three ten.”

Enough seconds elapsed that I was raising the mike to repeat myself when Brent Sutherland finally found the transmission bar on the dispatcher’s end. “Three ten, Posadas County.”

“Posadas, three ten is ten-fifteen, one adult male. Request that three oh one ten-nineteen. And give the undersheriff a call. Advise him that his rabbit is in custody.”

There was a moment while Sutherland digested that I was inbound with a prisoner and wanted Deputy Taber’s assistance when we arrived and had to transfer the young hothead in the backseat to a jail cell.

“Ten-four, three ten.”

Jackie Taber’s husky voice added, “Three ten, three oh one copies.”

I clicked the mike a couple of times and hung it back on the radio. What my backseat passenger thought of the cryptic conversation was hard to tell, but whatever he thought, it served as a trigger. He realigned and let fly again. Just as we passed the abandoned mercantile at Moore, the passenger-side back window let loose with an expensive whump and a shower of glass.

My first impulse was just to let the little shit lie in his own glass until we reached Posadas. I snapped on the dome light and saw that Matt was continuing his craftsmanlike job of removing the entire window in a hail of stomps and kicks.

A pair of headlights popped into view in the rearview mirror, and I slowed and pulled off on the shoulder, swinging into a dirt lane that was blocked a car-length ahead by a locked gate.

Brilliant red lights blossomed, and at first I thought that Deputy Taber had pulled in behind me. As I got out of the car I caught a glimpse of the horizontal green stripe on a field of white. Two figures got out of the Border Patrol unit, and I recognized the short, blocky driver instantly. His gait reminded me of someone walking across a pitching ship’s deck.

“We saw the feet,” Scott Gutierrez said with a laugh. “Who you got in there?”

“A frisky teenager,” I said, and extended a hand. “You timed it just right.”

Gutierrez crunched my knuckles in a quick handshake and flicked his flashlight toward his partner. “By the way, this is Taylor Bergmann, Sheriff. He joined the crew a week or so ago. We were taking a little tour, showing him the sights.”

“Lots of those,” I said, and shook Bergmann’s hand. “Especially in the middle of the night. I’m Bill Gastner.”

“I’ve heard plenty about you, sir,” Bergmann said, and the tone of his voice left it unclear just what he meant. He turned to watch a truck as it approached from the east, the driver riding the Jake when he saw the red lights flashing on the opposite shoulder. From his confident posture, I guessed Bergmann to be retired military. The truck thundered by in a bow wave of air and a lingering cloud of diesel.