Steven Havill - Bag Limit

“Have you met Bob Torrez yet?” I asked, and Bergmann shook his head. “With any kind of luck at all, after next Tuesday, he’ll be the new sheriff.” The three of us chatted for a few minutes as if Matt Baca didn’t exist.

And while we talked, not a peep issued from the backseat of my car. Young Matt had the brains to appreciate how the rules of the game had changed.

Gutierrez stepped to the busted window and shined his flashlight in Baca’s face. “Hey, my man,” he said pleasantly.

“Why’d you break the sheriff’s window?”

Baca didn’t answer. He blinked into the light and lay perfectly still-the first thing he’d done right all night. Gutierrez turned to me, still keeping the light in the boy’s face. “What’ve you got him on?”

“Oh, a number of things,” I said. “No big deal. He rammed my car, for one thing.”

Gutierrez stepped back and swung the light along the unmarked Ford’s flanks. “Not this one,” I added. “This is his second wreck for the night.”

“A leg tie or two would fix that,” Gutierrez observed, and I shrugged agreement. The flashlight swung back into Baca’s face. “We were going to hit Tommy’s in Posadas for a sandwich anyway. Let’s throw him in the back of our unit and we’ll drop him off for you. That way he won’t sue you for making him sit in a pile of busted glass.”

“I’d appreciate that.” I stepped to the back door and opened it. “Matthew, time to change wagons. Slide on out of there. And you might want to be careful of the glass.”

The kid took his time, and as he swung his legs out, Gutierrez said, “And that unit is brand-new, kid. You so much as breathe on it, we’ll take you out into a field somewhere and leave you there.”

Gutierrez was about my height and outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds, no mean stunt in itself. But his was youthful brawn. Bergmann was the better part of six feet three with a wonderfully ugly face that would have looked right at home in a barroom brawl. It was reasonable to assume that the three of us could handle a half-stoned kid who weighed maybe one-forty dripping wet.

None of us knew what was going through Matt Baca’s head. Because another vehicle was coming, this time from the west, and because the driver was slow to change lanes to give us a wide berth, both Bergmann and Gutierrez hesitated. Matt Baca hadn’t stood up yet, and Scott Gutierrez was in the process of pulling a couple white nylon ties from his back pocket.

Baca lunged out of the backseat of the car, driving hard against my right hip with his shoulder. That didn’t move me much, but it spun him around so that he lost his balance, back-pedaling away from me. If he hadn’t been cuffed, he could have just extended one hand as he went down, using it as a pivot.

Instead, his flailing body danced backward away from the door and my frantic grasp. The oncoming vehicle wasn’t a tractor-trailer, and it wasn’t burning up the pavement. Maybe the driver’s gaze was attracted by the blinking red lights, and not the shadows beside the vehicles. His front bumper and Matt Baca merged with an awful thump. Because the kid had already started a downward sprawl when the truck hit him, he had no chance.

So quickly did the collision happen that the driver didn’t hit his brakes until the front tires, undercarriage, and rear duals had finished the job of pulverizing the young man. Then, amid billowing clouds of blue tire smoke, the truck skewed across the oncoming lane and plunged into the soft sand of the shoulder, finally jarring to a halt with its left front fender thrust through the highway right-of-way fence.

I didn’t want to take the handful of steps that would carry me to Matt Baca’s side. Bergmann and Gutierrez were quicker. The thought came to me unbidden that Sosimo Baca’s last contact with his son had been when they were both drunk. Odds were good that Sosimo would wake up with a pounding head Saturday morning and not even remember that I’d been in his house the night before, that I’d taken his son away. I wondered what Sosimo’s last sober memory of his son would be.

Travis Hayes had been on his way to Posadas, about a third of his nighttime food-service delivery route completed, when Matt Baca staggered backward into the path of Travis’ International. The truck’s violent slide into the sand had scattered Jorgensen’s Blue Label Dairy Products around the inside of the rig’s reefer unit like small, frozen missiles.

If there had been heavy traffic, Hayes might have been the second fatality, because he launched himself out of the cab and dashed onto the highway without a glance left or right, only to be grabbed in a bear hug by Bergmann.

“My God,” Hayes cried, “I didn’t see him. He just…”

“We need you to stay back, sir,” Bergmann said.

“He just…” Hayes repeated, and tried to take a step toward the shapeless lump on the pavement. As I approached from the other side, the steel of the handcuffs winked in the headlights of the Border Patrol unit. One of the cuffs was empty and flung wide.

There was no point in feeling for a pulse, but Gutierrez did anyway. Reeling as if someone had punched me, I made my way back to my patrol car and rummaged for the mike.

“Posadas, three ten.”

“Three ten, go ahead.”

On automatic pilot, the words that would summon the troops spilled out. Deputy Taber estimated her ETA at six minutes, with Undersheriff Torrez right behind her. The ambulance would take twice that long. As far as Matt Baca was concerned, there was no hurry.

I slumped back in the seat and waited. Mercifully, the highway was deserted, as if the world were recoiling in hushed silence. One of the federal officers found a black tarp and highway flares, and the other moved the Border Patrol unit so that it completely blocked the eastbound lane, lights flashing.

I watched the amber numerals on the digital clock on the dashboard, but after a while even they drifted out of focus. My gaze was fixed somewhere out ahead, through the windshield and off across the dark prairie toward the south.

“Are you all right, sir?”

Startled out of whatever world I’d been in by the soft voice and a gentle hand on my left shoulder, I turned and looked up into Bob Torrez’s face.

“No…I mean, I’m fine,” I said, and shook off the mental cobwebs. The first word out of my mouth had been the accurate answer. I hadn’t seen Torrez drive up, but now the area was practically daylight in a brilliant symphony of flashing lights that captured half a dozen moving shadows.

“Deputy Taber is taking a statement from the truck driver,” Torrez said. “What he says jibes pretty much with what Gutierrez and his sidekick say happened.”

“I’m glad everybody goddamn agrees,” I said, and pushed myself out of the car. “How the hell long have you been here?” An ambulance was backing up carefully toward the black plastic-covered lump, the vehicle’s tires straddling the center line. A hundred yards to the east, another set of red lights blinked where Taber’s patrol unit blocked the highway.

“Just a couple of minutes.”

I don’t know why that irritated me, but it did. I had the mental picture of them all tiptoeing around me, careful not to disturb the old man sitting off by himself. What the hell did they think I had been doing, writing memoirs with a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the door handle?

I leaned against the rear fender of my car and watched the paramedics try to decide which part of Matt Baca’s remains to lift first onto the gurney.

“Baca had his feet out of the car when Officer Gutierrez walked back to his unit,” I said. “For a few seconds, I was the only one immediately beside the kid. He bowled into me, and twisted, and I wasn’t fast enough to grab him. He took a handful of steps, lost his balance, and went backward out into the high-way, right past the back of the car, here.” I patted the back fender of the unmarked Ford, and then lowered my voice. “The driver of the truck hadn’t pulled over to the left very much. And he didn’t spike the brakes until after he hit the kid.” I took a deep breath, and my fingers groped at my shirt pocket where I used to keep the cigarettes. “Just like that. I don’t think that the driver ever saw him. He certainly didn’t have a chance to swerve or brake.”