Steven Havill - Final Payment

The Cessna’s engine pitch didn’t change, and the airplane continued its slow amble diagonally across the runway. The stabilizer passed over her head. She grabbed at Hector’s right wrist as he threw an ineffectual punch at her. It should have been easy to throw him facedown, twisting his left arm hard behind him. But she couldn’t move, and instead her body sank to the asphalt despite her best efforts. She heard running footsteps and vehicles approaching. Hector stopped his struggle, and lying together in a heap, they both watched the Cessna cross the runway, lurching as its nose wheel dug into the soft gravel on the other side. As soon as the mains ran off the pavement, the airplane slowed. Its prop burst through a thick, stout bush, sending an eruption of plant matter, dirt, and rocks in all directions. Finally the plane stopped, engine burbling in idle, prop windmilling. Estelle could see only a small portion of Manolo Tapia’s slumped body in the cockpit.

The boy cursed in Spanish, crying at the same time. But he was trapped, and knew it.

Estelle felt the cuffs released from her wrist. It was Jackie Taber’s quiet voice that she heard next. “Be smart now,” the deputy said to Hector. “It’s over.”

It felt good to relax and let her face touch the warm asphalt. She could see a line of police vehicles swerving onto the runway, pulling past the Mustang. Moving as little as possible, she looked west and saw the tall, powerful figure of Sheriff Robert Torrez. He walked quickly through the runty vegetation that grew south of the runway, the scoped rifle cradled in his left arm, right hand relaxed on the stock near the trigger. He circled the airplane warily, then disappeared behind it.

“Tapia has a handgun,” Estelle tried to say, but the words came out as little more than a whispered burble.

“You just hold still,” someone said. The aircraft engine ran rough and then died, the propeller ticking to a stop.

Estelle pushed herself up, astounded at the weight of her own body. “I’m okay. Really,” she said. Other hands took custody of Hector Ocate, and Jackie knelt close to Estelle. “I’m okay,” Estelle said again.

“Sure you are,” Taber said gently. She barked instructions into her handheld radio, and in a moment Torrez loomed over Estelle, face grim. “He’s dead,” he said.

“Ay,” Estelle murmured. She tried to take a breath. “That’s too bad.” She tasted copper, an odd, pervasive sensation that was as much a smell as a taste. She knew the first round from the Beretta had caught her flush on the vest, and she tried to turn her head so that she could look down at the single small tear just below the third button of her tan blouse. “Bruised me pretty good,” she managed to say.

More faces and hands appeared and she found she had difficulty keeping them in focus. Jackie Taber leaned close, a hand on either side of Estelle’s face. “I want you to lie back a little,” she said. “We have help on the way.”

“Shit,” Estelle heard Sheriff Torrez say. “Where’s that comin’ from?”

In her fog, Estelle found the question absurdly funny. Help came from Posadas, Robert. Where else? The asphalt was warm on her back, and it felt good to lie quietly. “I’m okay,” she said again, but the faces and voices ignored her.

“Like that,” she heard Jackie say, and when shade fell across her face, she opened her eyes and saw Leona Spears. The county manager’s large hands took over from the deputy’s.

“We’ll get you fixed up,” Leona said.

“I don’t need fixing,” Estelle said. What might have been a weak chuckle erupted in a single violent cough. She struggled against the lack of air.

“Get them down here now,” Torrez shouted, and off in the distance, toward the end of the runway, Estelle heard more sirens. “Use this,” he said, apparently to Jackie. She felt hands fussing with her blouse, her vest, her belt.

“Disrobed with an audience,” she whispered, and then the world shifted out of focus and light.

Three times Estelle drifted up toward the surface, and her mind linked the moments together and remembered them as an incomprehensible mix of light and sound. When she finally distinguished her husband’s voice, she couldn’t remember if she had already had conversations with him.

“Can you hear me now?” he asked.

She might have said something, or only thought a reply. He continued to talk to her, quiet and insistent, and the flow of sound gave her a point of focus and comfort. She allowed time to march on, drifting in and out. Oddly, it was a single sound somewhere outside her room-a dropped clipboard, perhaps a clanged mop bucket-that started her into consciousness. It felt as if someone had lowered a concrete slab onto her body.

For a time, she lay absolutely immobile, except for her eyes. She could move those without effort or pain, and she took advantage of that, counting the ceiling tiles, examining the way they were cut and trimmed around the electrical conduits that fed the machines that tended her. She concentrated on the simple task of bringing all the sharp edges into focus. The earlier events that had brought her to this place remained indistinct and confused.

Francis Guzman moved back into view at the right side of the bed. At the same time, she became aware of a thin, bony hand that firmly clamped her left hand. She tried to turn her head and was greeted by a sharp stab of pain whose epicenter erupted in her right armpit, coursing down her arms and up through her shoulder, finding its way to her neck and then down the other side.

“Don’t do that,” Francis said, and he leaned closer so she could see him without being tempted to shift position. She looked into his dark brown eyes and saw nothing hidden there. “Your mom is here. She’s going to make sure you do what you’re told.” He straightened up, adjusted something, and bent back down, watching her closely. “Is that better?”

“Drugs are wonderful things,” she whispered as she felt the odd buzz of the morphine drip.

“Oh, sí, they are. Lie quiet and let them do the work.”

“Where’s Mamá ?” The tiny hand that held hers didn’t feel attached to anything, but it squeezed again.

“She’s sitting right beside your bed, querida . Don’t be moving around, now.”

She heard a chair and cautiously shifted her eyes. Her mother’s tiny form moved into view, so short and bent that her shoulders were even with the bed.

“You can rest now,” Teresa Reyes said, the command absolute.

Tricks of time blended things together again, and when she was able to focus on her husband’s face once more, her vision had cleared another click, like sitting behind an optometrist’s gadget as he spun the little pinhole wheels and asked, “Which is better, this…or this?”

“I need to talk to Bobby,” Estelle said, or thought she said. Her husband leaned close again.

“There’s a whole crowd of people who want to see you, querida. They’re all going to have to wait.”

“Padrino?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll tell them for me that they all need to go home?”

“Sure. Maybe you can have some company tomorrow. Maybe Thursday.”

That made no sense. She searched his face. “What time is it?”

“A little after three.”

She closed one eye in an expression of skepticism, careful not to move anything else. “Come on, oso. ”

He grinned and looked at his watch. “Three-oh-five a.m. This is Tuesday. You’re in Presbyterian in Albuquerque.”

“Ay.” None of that computed. There had been no passage of time in her world. Just an instant ago, her face had rested on the asphalt of the gas company’s airstrip…sometime early Sunday afternoon. She could still feel the warmth of the pavement, the sharp bite of the little pebbles against her cheek.