Steven Havill - One Perfect Shot

“Oh, he’ll know.” She looked numb from fatigue and the emotional drain of this impossible day. I watched her go into the house, and then walked back to my county car. The old yellow dog stood so still he might have been a statue.

“What do you know?” I asked. He didn’t answer.

Apropos of nothing, I realized that in all the years I’d lived and worked in Posadas, in all the years I’d known who the Zipolis were, in all the years I’d had the opportunity to perhaps greet one or the other on the street or in the bank, in all those years, I had never seen them together.

I didn’t give much thought to what Marilyn Zipoli had told me about Mr. Raught. Gossip about neighbors was not generally reliable…certainly not the stuff of court testimony, which is where all this would end up eventually. You see the old lady digging in her iris bed, and it’s obvious as hell that she’s burying body parts that used to belong to her husband because, when you saw her, that’s the creative daydream that shot through your head. Surprise, surprise. She was burying iris bulbs. Marilyn Zipoli wasn’t thinking straight, and I wasn’t about to go charging into a man’s life based on her wandering statements.

Maybe Jim Raught did have a marijuana plant in his back yard. Maybe his idea of happy hour included a big fat reefer. I didn’t care. Some cops would, and I probably should have, the law being something that I was sworn to uphold. What he did with his weeds in the privacy of his own home was up to him, until he sold some of it to a neighbor kid, or baled it to take to Albuquerque.

I didn’t care what arguments Jim Raught had had with Larry Zipoli, either-unless the argument turned violent. I did care that someone had put a high-powered rifle bullet through a seated, defenseless victim. That was the work of a warped and twisted sniper, and the idea that we might have one of them living in our little village was enough to massage my natural insomnia.

At midnight, the county building was like a tomb. Two trustees were currently in residence, and both would be asleep upstairs in the lockup, so there was no gentle swishing of the mop on the entryway tiles, no monotonic whistling as Benny Vasquez dusted everything with a treated cloth-he’d even dust me if I held still long enough. The sheriff’s wife drew a pittance salary as the department’s chief matron, and she made sure the trustees-never would she use the word ‘prisoner’-were well fed and comfortably housed. My own theory was that Benny enjoyed his lodging just a little too much. Locked up with Benny was Todd Duncan, a long-haired dope-sniffing loser who was basically good-natured enough, and enjoyed washing county vehicles. Todd enjoyed our hospitality for short stretches every couple of months.

Even the dispatch center was quiet, and Ernie Wheeler, just now coming on for his shift, would be hard pressed to stay alert through the night. A rookie dispatcher himself, Ernie would have help from Eddie Mitchell, a young deputy who had joined us the spring before from the metro department in Baltimore, Maryland. Why Eddie had given up on the east coast, why he had embraced our hot, bleak little county in southwestern New Mexico, was his business. I couldn’t argue his decision, since I had been bread and buttered in North Carolina, and now couldn’t stomach the thought of a hundred and ten percent humidity and mosquitoes playing the role of state bird.

And sure enough, the radio came to life as Mitchell fired a license number for an NCIC check. When times were dismally slow, several of the deputies took a moment to swing through the parking lot of the big motel down by the interstate. They’d run numbers until both they and the dispatcher grew weary of the exercise. Once in a rare while, there’d be a hit, and the traveling felon would be just as surprised as the deputy.

In another hour, the bars would close, and there’d be a little flurry of activity as the last patrons tried to figure out how to drive home without being nabbed for DWI.

I leaned on the counter until he’d finished with the NCIC check and radioed the news back to the Deputy that the blue older model Olds 98 didn’t belong to a fleeing Bonnie and Clyde.

“Quiet night, sir,” Ernie said as he swiveled his chair to glance my way. Just twenty-one, Ernie was one of those twenty-one going on fifty fellows, already steady and unexcited by life. I could imagine that in twenty years, Ernie would still be sitting in that chair, working the day shift so he could go home to his comfortable wife and four kids. Neither the wife nor the kids had materialized yet.

“That’s a good thing.” Now that I had a comfortable perch, elbows resting on the old, polished oak of the divider, I felt no huge inclination to do anything constructive.

“The new hire is going to be workin’ graveyard?”

“When we have a new hire, sure enough.” That’s what new hires did, after all. Sheriff Salcido and I were in agreement that we wanted no part of those torturous rotating shifts, where employees worked a few weeks on days, then went to swing, and then to graveyard. The brain never quite caught up and adjusted, and everyone ended up cranky and tired. It had been our experience that there were plenty of people who wanted to work midnight to eight, or who wanted the adrenalin rush of the rowdy four to midnight shift, or who enjoyed toasting in the sunshine of broad daylight. That worked for us. The sheriff worked mostly days, and I worked mostly whenever I wanted to. I didn’t count the hours.

“So,” I said to Ernie, “Tell me everything you know about a guy named James Raught. He lives over on north Fourth, just a half block off Blaine.”

“I don’t know him, sir.”

“You know the Zipolis? Larry and Marilyn?”

“I know that Marilyn is one of the cashiers at the bank. I don’t know her husband. A nasty deal, sir.”

“Nasty indeed. Keep your eyes and ears open, Ernie. The truth of the matter is that someone is out there with a high-powered rifle. Don’t go sending the deputy into deep water without everybody being heads up.”

“Eddie was reading the case folder before he went out. He was going to swing by Highland and talk with Scott Baker from time to time. And with Murton.” The deputies and part-time village officer were talking, and nervous. That was as it should be.

I regarded the battalion of heavy filing cabinets across the dispatch island. I knew that Jim Raught had no record with us. I didn’t have to paw through miles of file folders to tell me that. Until today, no folder had carried the name of Lawrence E. Zipoli, either.

With a couple raps of my Marine Corps ring on the divider, I straightened up and nodded at Ernie. “I’ll be out and about,” I said. “The pumps, please.” He reached over and flipped the switch that powered the fuel island outside, and I trudged back out to 310. Fueled, fat, and happy, I idled the car out onto Bustos, in no hurry to go anywhere in particular. With all four windows rolled down and the radio turned to a whisper, I could mosey along and listen to a quiet county, letting the sweet air flow through the car.

Bustos Avenue cut through the village east-west, and I headed east, driving past the two car dealers and turning on Camino del Sol, a short spur street whose pavement soon gave way to gravel and County Road 19. The Drive-in theater had seen the economic slump coming, and when Consolidated Mining announced that it was shutting down its Posadas operations, the owners of the drive-in jumped ship. Now the parking lot sat empty, the speakers removed, the ocean-wave humps studded with row after row of naked steel posts, a wonderful attractive nuisance for ATV and motorbike riders.