Steven Havill - One Perfect Shot

Tony Pino and Buddy Clayton, understanding how we worked a scene, hadn’t just barged in after they had arrived. They patiently stayed a couple dozen yards away, smoking and talking in hushed tones as they watched us work, not eager to move a step closer to the blood and smell. I beckoned, and they approached with trepidation, as if they were trying to walk on eggs.

Before Pino and Clayton reached us, Sheriff Eduardo Salcido’s black Impala nosed to a stop, and he hadn’t pulled his bulk out of the car before a state police cruiser joined us. Highland had become a parking lot. The sheriff cocked a pistol-finger at the state officer before they shook hands, and the two men stood by their cars for a moment, hopefully figuring out how they might approach without planting size twelves all over the crime scene. I waved them toward the far shoulder of the road.

“Tony, I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to the highway superintendent. “Someone put a shot right through the windshield. It appears that Larry was parked right here.”

“Jesus,” Tony whispered. “Not Larry. My God.” He stepped closer to the framework below the cab, putting him at eye level with the floor of the grader’s cab.

“No one witnessed it. Evie Truman happened by and found him. She’s the one who called us.”

“He’s dead?” That seemed so obvious as to be comical, but what the hell. When we don’t want to believe the ugly way things are going, we’re apt to say silly things.

“Yes, sir. Probably never knew what hit him.”

“My God.”

“I’m going to get together with you later, Tony. We’re going to need Larry’s schedule, things like that. What he was doing this morning, and so forth.”

“Yeah, sure.” Pino’s voice was distant. He gazed up at the bullet hole through the windshield. “Why…accident, you think?”

“I have no idea, Tony. None. We’ll be working on that.”

I turned as Sheriff Salcido approached. He walked with his hands on his rump, fingers in his back pockets, head down to watch where he put his feet. Although he was a couple of months younger than me, I still looked at Eduardo Salcido as an older man-at least until I happened to look in the mirror. Over the past ten years, after I was named undersheriff, Salcido had become less a hard-riding lawman and more of a comfortable bureaucrat, perfectly willing to turn the responsibility of day-to-day operations of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department over to me.

By no means a lazy man, Salcido simply redirected his energies as the years crept up on him. I suppose I did the same thing without ever noticing. He was good at dealing with the county commission. I wasn’t-and didn’t want to learn. He could give a lively, amusing talk to the Kiwanis Club, while I fumbled and stumbled. He enjoyed talking to a classroom of sixth graders. I’d rather drop rocks on my feet. I preferred long, quiet ambles through my county at any time of day or night, windows down, listening, watching, even smelling that wonderful prairie. And most of the time I did that while the rest of the county was snoozing.

“Who we got here?” Salcido asked when he was within easy conversational distance. His accent was heavy, musical, even soothing. He could thicken it, or dilute it, depending on the circumstances. He reached out a hand and shook hands with each of us in turn, his grip like squeezing a concrete block.

“Larry Zipoli. One shot, from the front.” I pointed at the windshield.

“For heaven’s sakes.” The sheriff’s frown darkened. He stood four-square, a few pounds heavier than me but four inches shorter than my five foot ten. If he had a neck, it grew buried under muscle somewhere on top of massive shoulders. For a while, he’d sported a droopy mustache, but then abandoned it, claiming it made him look like “something from one of those movies.”

Bob Torrez waited patiently off to one side. Deputy Tom Mears had trudged west on Highland, seeking a panoramic photo of the crime scene. Salcido shook his head wearily and made a point to shake hands with Torrez who, at six four, towered over him. If Sheriff Salcido left the scene for ten minutes and then returned, we’d be treated to the same handshakes, except it wasn’t token. Eduardo Salcido kept his circle connected.

For a long moment, the sheriff said nothing, taking in the mountain of machinery parked in the sun, the obvious insult of it all. He stretched, rubbing the right side of his upper belly where I knew his cranky gall bladder fussed. Kindred spirits in that regard, the two of us.

“You got tracks down there?” He pointed with a little nod toward the west, where Mears was making his wide-angle survey. “Freshly graded like that,” he added. “Something will show.”

“Sure enough,” I said. “He was about half finished. So this lane is hard-packed. Not much is going to show unless they drove in the fresh stuff.”

Salcido squinted up at the cab. “ Por díos, this is no good.” He turned and looked back down the road, trying to make the geometry work. It was a good hundred yards west to the intersection with Hutton, maybe a hundred and fifty. The rifle shot could have come from across the intersection, anywhere out on the prairie. Dips, arroyos, brush-there was plenty of cover. I had only a general working knowledge of how much a high velocity bullet dropped at various distances, but at a hundred yards or so, a couple of inches would cover the mid-range trajectory. I was uneasy about that, since a heavy caliber rifle bullet should have popped through both the windshield and Larry Zipoli’s skull, perhaps even out the back window. To stop short, somewhere in his brain, had to be telling us something.

“To clear all the gear in the front of this rig, and then go straight into the cab? That’s interesting, don’t you think?” The sheriff reached out and took Bob Torrez by the elbow as if expecting the deputy to say, “Yes, I do think it’s interesting.”

“The bullet’s going to tell us a lot,” Torrez said instead. “It ain’t no.22, I can tell you that much.”

“You keep after it, Bobby.” The sheriff turned and gazed down Highland, lips pursed. Without looking, he reached out a hand and touched my shoulder, as if he had to have physical contract in order to talk to someone. “This is bad, jefito .” I didn’t respond, and Salcido obviously didn’t expect an answer. I didn’t mind his slang nickname for me. He’d called me what translated as ‘little boss’ since the day he’d hired me, although I was neither. He glanced at his watch. “Have you talked to la esposa?”

“That’s next on my list,” I said.

Salcido shook his head. “Let me do that. I have to swing back that way anyway. I’ll find his pastor, and we’ll go on over.” His hand reached out to Tony Pino. “You’ll go with me?”

“Sure, Sheriff. You bet. Jesus, I hate this. What the hell are we going to tell her?”

“What we know,” Salcido shrugged. “Right now, she needs to go down to the hospital to be with Larry.” He turned to me. “You need any more hands to get this measured up?”

“We’re set.”

“Wrong spot at the wrong time,” Salcido mused. He reached out to make contact with State Patrolman Frank Aguilar. “This guy here…he can hold the idiot end of the tape measure, you know.” The sheriff grinned and flashed some gold. “You gotta wonder…” He let the thought drift off. “Somebody had to see or hear something. They got to come forward.”

“We can hope so.” I didn’t feel particularly optimistic. “Evie Truman found him and called us. That gives us a time window. She saw him alive just after noon. If anyone else drove by, he didn’t stop. It was shortly after three o’clock when she drove by the second time and found him dead. That’s three hours of opportunity.”