Steven Havill - Dead Weight

I stood with my hands in my pockets, looking at what was left of Jim Sisson. “Christ almighty,” I murmured. “Why the hell don’t you get him out of there?” But a closer look made it clear why there was no frantic activity to free Jim from his predicament. The man’s skull had been pulped.

“If he hadn’t swung it so close to the wall, he might have had a chance,” Torrez said.

The wheel and tire, complete with bolt-on weights for added traction and probably loaded inside with calcium chloride for even more weight, had struck the wall of the shop and then slid down, crushing Sisson in between. His skull had slammed against the corrugated steel of the shop siding until it cracked like an eggshell, and then he’d been pushed downward, his neck bent so that his chin was driven down into the hollow behind his collarbone.

Dark rubber streaks marked the steel siding, tracing the tire’s path as it slid downward. Blood puddled on the cement under Sisson’s head.

“Look here, sir,” Torrez said, and he knelt beside the tire. He beckoned me close and dropped his voice. “Right there.” He played his flashlight under the tire, illuminating what little space remained.

“What am I looking at?”

Torrez reached out and touched the smooth concrete of the shop apron with a ballpoint pen. “Rubber marks. From the tire tread. Between these and the marks on the wall, I’m thinking we can backtrack and pretty much tell just what happened.”

“What happened was that the goddamn tire fell on him and crushed him,” I said. “He was working by himself?”

“Apparently so.”

“Jesus,” I muttered, wondering what spat had driven Jim out of the house at that hour to seek the comfort of his machines. “Is Mrs. Sisson inside?”

“Her and a mob,” Torrez said. “Half the neighborhood, I guess. Tony tried getting a preliminary statement, but it’s rough going. We’re going to have to talk to her after a bit, when things calm down. It’s a zoo in there right now.”

“I can imagine. Does anyone have a clue about what Jim was trying to do? Was he just trying to change a goddamn tire or work on the brakes or what?”

Torrez reached out with his boot and touched the front loader’s tire. “This one is flat, so I assume he wanted to work on it. We don’t know for sure. Neither does his wife. She said initially that she was watching television. Jim was out back, working in his shop. According to one of the neighbors, they’d had a rough day. I’ll vouch for that. I was over here three times. Lots of shouting. Tom Mears is working on that angle.”

“So what else is new,” I grunted. “Where would we all be without nosy neighbors? And Grace said that Jim was alone out here?”

Torrez hesitated, and I looked up at him. His response wasn’t much more than a whisper. “That’s what she said.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

Torrez reached out and lightly tapped the big tire with the toe of his boot again. “This doesn’t look like a one-man job, sir.”

I gazed at the two machines. “Stranger things have happened, Robert,” I said. “It’s jury-rigged, that’s for sure. He wanted to lift the tire, so he tried to do it with the backhoe. Something slipped, like where he had the chain hooked, and he got down to work on it. The damn thing nailed him. In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like-one man trying to do something by himself that he shouldn’t have been. And he was in a foul mood to begin with.”

“You’ll be at the office later?” The way he said it sounded like he’d dismissed my logical scenario.

I nodded. “I’m just in the way here. Let me know if you need anything.” I indicated the idling tractor. “And you might as well shut that thing down. Make it easier to hear and breathe both.”

Torrez glanced at his watch. “Dr. Perrone will be here in a minute. Then we’ll clear things up. There’s no hurry.”

Brent Sutherland sat in front of the dispatcher’s console with both elbows on the table and his head supported in his hands. His unruly red hair was about an inch longer than I would have liked, but what the hell. If that was the only concession I had to make as the millennium clicked over, I was lucky.

Whether Sutherland was reading the New Mexico Criminal and Traffic Law Manual that rested open between his elbows or sleeping was hard to tell.

If the deputy was studying, he certainly had peace and quiet. The persistent exhaling of the building’s circulation system as it moved stale air, summer dust, and range country pollen from one room to the other was all the excitement the Public Safety Building had to offer at 3:15 that morning.

In four weeks Sutherland would attend the Academy, and until then the weekday graveyard dispatcher’s shift was just the right time and place to whittle away at his inexperience. Once in a while, Bob Torrez assigned Sutherland to double up on patrol with one of the deputies. We didn’t have the manpower to do that often, though, and Sutherland had to content himself with the bottom rung on the duty ladder.

Tom Mears, a veteran who preferred the midnight-to-eight shift so that he had time to race his beloved stock cars on summer weekends, was the only deputy on the road at the moment. Undersheriff Torrez and one or two others who were supposed to be off-duty were still over at the Sissons’, probing and photographing, oblivious to whatever else might be going on elsewhere in the county.

Mears and Sutherland had the place to themselves, and I trusted that Mears could keep the rookie out of trouble.

Whether the sound of my boots on the polished tile floor woke him up or it was just coincidence, Sutherland’s right hand drifted down from his chin and picked up the pencil on the table. He jotted a note in the margin of the book, replaced the pencil, and glanced at the digital clock in front of him.

“Fascinating stuff, eh?” I said, and Sutherland started, cranking his head around so fast I thought I heard a vertebra crack. “Sorry about that.” I stepped closer and looked at the log. Since the Sisson emergency, things had drifted to tomblike peace and quiet.

Thirty-one minutes before, Deputy Mears had radioed in that the side door of the tiny Catholic church in Regal was open, not an unusual state of affairs, and that he was going to check it. Three minutes later, logged at 02:47, Mears had radioed ten-eight, the numerical mumbo-jumbo that meant he was back in service.

“No sleep-overs this time,” I said, and Sutherland looked puzzled.

“Sir?”

“Sleep-overs. The church in Regal is never locked. I don’t think there’s even a lockable chasp on the door. It’s a favorite place for Mexican nationals to spend the night.”

“That’s why the three minutes, then,” Sutherland said.

“That’s why. And that’s why you need to be on your toes, even when you’re bored to death and you’ve committed that book to memory and you’re counting the ticks on the clock. Where’s the nearest officer who can provide backup to Mears?”

Sutherland frowned and I saw his back straighten and one hand move an inch or two in the direction of the transmit bar on the radio.

“No matter who you find,” I said, “odds are that they aren’t going to be close to Regal. So Mears is on his own. If he walks into that church and there are about eight illegals snoozing on the pews and two of them happen to be armed with something more than an attitude, the night can get exciting. So when someone goes in to check a place like that, you give him three or four minutes, no more. If he isn’t on the air ten-eight by then, you remind him.”

I leaned across and pushed the bar. “Three oh seven, PCS. Ten-thirty-nine.”