Steven Havill: One Perfect Shot

“How curious,” I muttered. Torrez was obviously excited by the whole thing, though, like figuring out the perfect five hundred yard shot on a trophy antelope. If there was something about firearms, shooting, and hunting that he didn’t know, I hadn’t stumbled across it yet.

I trudged out a couple of yards in front of the grader, where Torrez stood, string in hand. “What’s all this tell you?“ Down the road a bit, Trooper Aguilar waited.

“The main thing is that it wasn’t real high velocity, sir. Pretty stout bullet that wasn’t goin’ fast enough to break up. Pretty good sized.” He raised his voice, calling back to Mears. “I’m going to be pullin’ hard on the line, so make sure that thing is secured.”

We then walked down Highland, away from the grader, the twine spinning out behind us. We reached a point about a hundred feet in front of the grader. By then, when Torrez held the twine at shoulder height and pulled on it until it twanged, he could sight along the slight sag, all the way back to the grader, clearing its massive snout, to Deputy Mears’ forehead.

“Somewhere right around here,” Torrez said. “If the shooter was shorter’n me, then on down the road a bit.” If we continued westward on Highland, we’d cover a couple hundred feet before reaching the intersection. Had the shooter parked on Hutton and then walked toward his target? That was coldly calculating. Had Larry Zipoli seen him advancing down the lane weapon in hand, and wondered what the hell was going on? Had the gunman fired, then walked forward to gaze up into the grader’s cab, admiring his handiwork? Had he first driven past the grader, made sure of his target, and then returned? Tracks weren’t going to offer a convenient answer, since the dirt of the ungraded portion of Highland was hard as concrete.

“That’s a good shot, though,” I mused. “To place it like that.”

“A hundred feet? Nah. You could do that with a rock.”

“ I couldn’t.” But I knew what Torrez meant. A skilled rifleman could place an easy shot like that, and that told me something else. This didn’t look like a snap, panicky shot taken by a shaking amateur-no “buck fever” involved here, and that would be what Bob Torrez was thinking. I imagined that the shots he took during his hunts were coldly calculated, too. He didn’t need a trophy. He wanted to fill his freezer, and would place a careful, confident shot to do the trick.

He traced a line through the air. “It’s going to matter what kind of gun it was, sir.” I noted the trace of satisfaction in his tone. He held the string motionless while Mears took a roll of film from every angle possible. “I don’t think the shooter was standing any farther out.” Without releasing his hold on the string, Torrez turned and nodded westward. “The angle says that ain’t likely. Then there’s that arroyo on out there where a lot of folks go and shoot, but it’s deep enough that a bullet isn’t going to stray this far unless the shot is deliberate.”

“Ricochet?” I prompted, even though I could see for myself that the bullet that had killed Larry Zipoli was no errant fragment.

“A ricochet ain’t going to drill a straight hole like what we got here. And it’s far enough away that a deliberate shot from the arroyo would have to cover five or six hundred yards. That’s a whole different thing for the shooter. There ain’t many people who can shoot at those kinds of ranges.”

I looked down Hutton. A couple of cars had parked across the field, driven by curious onlookers who had the sense not to approach any closer.

“Somebody drives up, stops about here, and takes one shot.” The freshly graded surface on the south half of Highland included a fair collection of tracks that were going to take a careful inventory to sort out. It would have been nice to see a clear trail of shoeprints, but in all likelihood the shooter had skirted the freshly graded side. We hadn’t had time to complete a formal, complete survey, but nothing obvious had jumped out at us. No tracks, no stash of fresh butts, no shiny shell casing-no nothing.

“All right,” I sighed. “I want Highland closed from one end to the other, Roberto. Nothing missed.”

“I’d like to have that shell casing,” Torrez said.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky. That’s more than Zipoli got.”

By the time darkness made more work at the scene impossible, we had a disappointingly short list of evidence. I didn’t want the grader moved until we’d had time for a fresh survey in the morning, and there was a single good shoe print and tire mark that I wanted to cast off the north shoulder.

A yellow crime scene ribbon wouldn’t be adequate to keep the curious at bay, and believe it-when word spread, half the town would take a drive out to the site, hoping to catch a glimpse of some blood and the gruesome bullet hole. Maybe we could boost the county budget by charging admission…maybe for an extra contribution we could even include a stop by the morgue.

I left Deputy Scott Baker at one end of Highland Street with village part-timer J. J. Murton at the other. I promised Baker that he’d have relief, but Murton could sit there all night as far as I was concerned, a job just about perfectly matched to his skill levels.

While Mears processed film, Bob Torrez hung over Dr. Clark’s shoulder waiting for the rifle slug to be removed, and Deputy Howard Bishop led Evie Truman through her formal deposition, Sheriff Salcido and I cruised the neighborhoods off Hutton that evening, doing what both of us did best.

Only four houses graced Hutton on the outer fringes of the village, and of the four, only one resident had been home. Julie Sanchez worked the night shift at the Posadas Inn down by the interstate, and she rented the little bungalow on Hutton because it was cheap and far from the roar of interstate truck traffic. She hadn’t even noticed the road grader, hadn’t heard its gutteral diesel, hadn’t heard a gunshot. Loud as either might have been, a radio or television on inside the house would blanket the sound. Our luck didn’t improve, even when we scouted through the modest little homes east of Hutton, or south toward Twelfth Street. That left all the neighborhoods to the south, to Blaine and beyond.

“You know how much noise a high powered rifle makes?” Salcido asked rhetorically. “And por díos, not a soul hears it.” He shook his head in wonder and popped his seat belt off so he could stretch his burly torso. He preferred to ride, and I didn’t mind being chauffeur. As we drove south on Twelfth, he nodded at the parking lot of the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant.

“I’ll buy dinner,” he said. “You got to take advantage of that.” The offer wasn’t unusual. One of Eduardo’s favorite management techniques was taking his people out to dinner or lunch. One on one with a deputy was good strategy. “ You’re the one I really want to talk to,” was the obvious message. “ I want to hear what you have to say.”

“You’re standing Maria up again?”

“She’s in Cruces with our oldest daughter. Another baby, you know. I’m a grandfather again. ” He shook his head in wonder. “That’s number six for those two.” He looked across at me. “Like rabbits. You think they’d figure out what causes that condition.” He accented each syllable of the word in the most Mexican way and then laughed gently. “Six, now. Bautizos, birthdays, Christmas… Jefito, they’re going to break me.”

Not many folks shared our enthusiasm for such a late dinner, and the restaurant was nearly deserted. The booth’s bench suspension was comfortably broken down, and we settled in with the mammoth basket of chips and salsa that Arlene Aragon presented.