Steven Havill: Final Payment

Estelle glanced in her rearview at the winking lights that had appeared behind her on Grande just as she guided the Expedition around the curve under the interstate overpass and onto State 56-the long, empty stretch of twenty-six miles between Posadas and the tiny village of Regál at the Mexican border.

“Three-oh-five ETA about eighteen minutes,” Sergeant Tom Mears’ voice said. No matter how hard Estelle pushed the bulky Expedition, the sergeant’s sedan would overtake her before she’d gone a dozen miles. The county coroner-either Dr. Alan Perrone or her husband, Dr. Francis Guzman-would respond to the 10–63 code more sedately. As Leona had already observed, no one was as patient as a corpse.

Holding a steady hundred, Estelle didn’t slow until the turnoff to County Road 14, a half mile beyond the Broken Spur Saloon. Tom Mears’ patrol car remained a dozen car lengths behind. As they crossed the cattle guard, Leona Spears appeared to relax for the first time, her left hand releasing its grip on the computer.

The wide dirt road swept down to cross a shallow arroyo on a bridge none too wide, then angled up a rise. In a quarter mile, Estelle saw Bob Torrez’s again Chevy pickup truck parked on the shoulder of the road. The sheriff leaned against the truck’s front fender, arms folded across his chest, one boot crossed over the other-a lounging rancher waiting for a good gab fest.

With no need of lights and siren, Estelle approached slowly. The desert showed no signs of catastrophe. No airplane lay in a smoking heap on the gas company’s runway just to the west, no truck pulling an overloaded livestock trailer lay crunched in the bar ditch, no lost tour bus rested on its top…and no mangled cyclists littered the right-of-way.

Torrez pushed himself away from the fender and motioned her away from his side of the road. She stopped, window down.

“You need to park on the other side,” he said. He leaned on the Expedition’s windowsill and looked across at Leona. The expression on his handsome, dark face asked “Why?” with a raised eyebrow, but he didn’t voice it. Estelle had taken the county vehicle that the sheriff normally used because her Crown Victoria would never tackle the rough paths on top of the mesa. Leona’s powerful perfume would linger in the Expedition for days, giving the sheriff plenty of reason to complain.

He straightened up and waved for Mears to follow her.

She parked and switched off the truck. “Stay here for a few minutes, all right?” she asked, and Leona nodded.

“How’s the kid up on the mesa?” Tom Mears asked as he joined her.

“Badly busted,” Estelle replied. Torrez met them in the middle of the county road, his hands thrust in his hip pockets.

“Hey,” he greeted. “All the way down at the end. We gotta walk down. There’s some stuff you’ll want to see.”

“What are we looking at?” Estelle asked.

“Three,” the sheriff said. “Middle-aged man, middle-aged woman, and a younger guy.”

“Migrants?” Mears asked. The jagged mountains to the south formed an effective barrier at this point of the border, and a somewhat less effective border fence had been built just south of Regál, where the official port of entry was manned twelve hours a day.

“No, I don’t think so. They aren’t dressed like it, and they sure as hell aren’t day laborers.” He turned and looked back at the Expedition and its occupant. “Tell her that when the coroner shows up, he needs to walk down the right edge of the runway. I don’t want any tire tracks in there yet.”

Estelle passed the message on to Leona, who brightened instantly. Her interest in law enforcement was keen. Among her various election campaigns-all unsuccessful-was a run for sheriff against Robert Torrez. She had lost in spectacular but good-natured fashion. And now, as an appointed county manager, she had become a powerful voice on behalf of the Sheriff’s Department. She frequently indulged herself in ride-alongs with deputies, and had learned when to stay out of the way.

The gas company’s access gate was new, solid, and securely locked. The four padlocks, one each for the owners, the Sheriff’s Department, the State Police, and the Rural Electric Cooperative, were all intact. Torrez dug out his keys and popped the county lock, swinging the gate just enough for the three of them to enter before dropping the latch. The gravel access road curved fifty yards to the verge of the runway, and they walked it in silence.

Reaching the pavement, Torrez pointed down the runway, a 2,560-foot strip of macadam 26 feet wide with a neat dotted white line down the middle. “All the way down at the other end,” he said.

“Well, all right,” Tom Mears mused. “Do we get to know how you discovered the bodies without driving in here?” A slender, sandy-haired man an inch shorter than Estelle’s five-seven and a full head shorter than Torrez, Mears always seemed completely at ease with his moody boss.

“Damn coyotes,” Torrez said, and let that suffice. “Come on.” They walked down the right side of the runway for only fifty yards before he held out a hand. The macadam was scrubbed clear in most places, with patches of sand here and there. The prairie vegetation grew right to the edge of the pavement, poised to take over if ignored for more than a season. “Right there,” Torrez said. “You can see where the plane landed.” Sure enough, two scuff marks about ten feet apart straddled the centerline. “It’s the only set I saw,” he added. “Most of the time, you can’t see ’em. But once in a while, they cross a patch of blow-sand, and it’s pretty clear.”

They walked on in silence, the half-mile-long runway sloping slightly downhill as it ran from east to west. The afternoon light slanted across the pavement at a perfect angle, picking up the airplane’s narrow tire prints every time they ran across a patch of sand. As the end of the runway drew closer, the aircraft had drifted smoothly toward the right, until its right tire ran along the edge of the asphalt. A hundred feet from the end of the runway, the tracks showed that the plane had swung tightly to the left, turning around to face east.

“He went off over there,” Torrez said. He pointed without crossing the runway. “Ran the right tire and the nose wheel off the pavement. We’ll look at that later. Lemme show you this. And watch where you step.”

The first corpse lay partially in a bed of cacti, his right cheek pegged to the fleshy pads by the tough thorns. Estelle bent down and saw the small wound centered just above the collar of the man’s dark green work shirt, in the crease between skull and neck-the single shot would have snuffed out the man’s life as effectively as an on-off switch kills a light. The wound hadn’t bled much, and what blood there was had crusted hard and brown. Without disturbing the body, it was impossible to tell if the bullet had exited the skull. In the past few days, the sun had been harsh, the days hot. The man’s shirt stretched taut over his bloating torso.

“No personal possessions? No weapons?” Estelle asked.

“Nothing yet,” Torrez said. He stood like a signpost, waiting for her to move, adding no more tracks that later would have to be sorted out.

Moving with great care, Estelle picked her way through the sparse vegetation, aware of Bob Torrez’s breathing behind her. The second corpse lay twenty feet from the first, dropped by what appeared to be a single shot just above and behind the right ear. A younger man, perhaps in his early twenties, he lay on his face, hand outstretched as if reaching for the heel of the woman who lay in front of him. She lay curled up in a fetal position as if asleep, exhausted from the grueling trip. The wound through the bridge of her nose had bled a single track to puddle in the sand under her head.