Steven Havill - Convenient Disposal

With five children who had grown too fleet of foot for him to catch, Freddy Acosta regularly took out his frustrations on Juanita, his fiery spouse. Slow but stout, Juanita usually was able to defend herself, and more than once had sent Freddy to the emergency room for stitches. On one occasion when Estelle had happened to be the responding officer, Freddy had shaken his head ruefully, sitting bloody and battered on the emergency room table. “I guess I said the wrong thing,” he had muttered, and refused to tell Estelle just what it was that his esposa had hit him with, opening up a gaping hole in his scalp that required twelve stitches.

School usually provided something of a haven for Carmen from her boisterous, hit-first family. The six-day suspension that was supposed to allow her to cool her heels instead merely placed her at ground zero in the Acosta household. Her mother worked long hours in the parts department of Chavez Chevrolet-Olds, but Freddy Acosta had been on disability for more than a year after slipping on a slick tile at Posadas General Hospital-part of the floor he’d finished mopping not two minutes before. He would be home.

As she turned onto Candelaria Court, Estelle saw Mike Sisneros, the full-time village patrolman, running a yellow tape from the back bumper of his patrol car to the fence that separated the Acostas’ small cinder-block house from their neighbor’s.

The ambulance was parked directly in front of the driveway, back doors agape. Farther on, Eddie Mitchell’s unmarked Chevy was nosed into the curb directly behind Sheriff Torrez’s department Expedition.

Sisneros jogged toward her as she pulled the county car to the far side of the street. Shorter than Estelle’s five seven, Sisneros had inherited his mother’s round Acoma Indian face and his father’s spare build.

“They really did it this time,” he said. “Carmen’s inside. The EMTs are workin’ on her.” He turned and nodded toward Mitchell’s car. “The chief has Freddy locked up over there.”

The Acostas’ driveway was empty. “You need to run a tape on the other side,” Estelle said.

“I was just headed that way.”

“Did anyone talk to Kevin?” she asked. The county manager’s white county truck was parked in his driveway one door east of Acostas’. Nosed in behind his personal car, an older-model Datsun 28oZ.

“Haven’t seen him,” Sisneros said. “I did a quick check, but nobody’s home. Not Zeigler or his roommate.”

Estelle frowned. “What did Freddy have to say?”

“Not a hell of a lot. He says that he walked over to the convenience store, and when he came back home, he found the place tore up and Carmen in her bedroom, beat to a pulp.” He shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

Twisting at the waist, Estelle surveyed the neighborhood. Five doors north, just before the intersection with MacArthur, Doris Marens stood on her front steps, arms tightly folded across her chest, watching. At least three neighborhood dogs carried on in cadence. In the other direction, beyond Zeigler’s house, lay an empty field, the dried kochia four feet high.

“You might talk to Mrs. Marens when you get a chance,” Estelle said.

“I’m on it,” Sisneros replied. He lifted the tape so the under-sheriff could duck under, and she walked slowly along the sidewalk to the gravel driveway. A swatch of dirt a dozen yards wide separated the Acostas’ gravel from Zeigler’s concrete drive. Choosing her path carefully, she stepped across to the county pickup truck and touched the hood. It was warm, warmer than it should have been even with the afternoon sun dappling through the sparse limbs of the single large elm in the front yard.

“Good question,” a voice behind her said. She turned and saw the sheriff standing in the side doorway of the Acostas’ home. “Freddy says the truck wasn’t there when he left to walk to the store.”

Estelle glanced through the truck’s closed driver’s window and saw that the vehicle wasn’t locked. The keys were in the ignition.

Torrez held the Acostas’ kitchen door for her until she crossed to the house. “Miss Carmen might have won the first round, but not this one,” he said. He propped the door open with a capped ballpoint pen, and he motioned for Estelle to slip past him without touching the door frame. “Someone beat the crap out of her and added a few touches for good measure.”

Estelle halted two steps into the Acostas’ kitchen. “She’s alive?”

“Just.” He gently closed the door. “There’s evidence that the fight went from here right through the house. She’s in her bedroom. They’re trying to figure out how to transport her without making matters worse.”

“Freddy found her? Or Freddy beat up on her.”

“I ain’t thinkin’,” the sheriff said, shaking his head. “This isn’t his style, though.” Another siren announced more emergency traffic, and Torrez touched Estelle’s elbow. “I want you to see her before they move her. We need to make it snappy, though. They called another crew so they’d have lots of help.”

Estelle followed in Torrez’s footsteps as the sheriff made his way carefully through the house, keeping his hands in his pockets. They crossed the littered living room, stepping around an entertainment console. The screen of the television was shattered, the entire console skewed toward the wall.

Carmen Acosta’s bedroom was part of a small, shed-roofed addition on the east side of the house that included another bedroom and a small bath. The narrow door was open but blocked by the wide shoulders of Nina Burns, one of the EMTs.

“I think right out the front door,” she was saying. “But you can’t wheel it, Rick.” She turned and glanced at Torrez, then at Estelle. “And we need to wait until we have enough hands.”

“Here’s the hands,” Torrez said.

“Nah, we got a team comin’ right behind you there.” She reached out toward Estelle. “You want to slip in here?”

Carmen lay facedown on her narrow single bed as if she’d flopped there after a hard day picking fights at school. Her clothing-a sweatshirt with an ACTITUD ES TODO logo across the back, jeans, and white socks-were rumpled but roughly in place.

One of the EMTs knelt on the opposite side of the bed near the girl’s head, one large hand cupped over Carmen’s right hand and the other holding an oxygen mask in place. Beside him, another emergency tech worked to arrange an IV line into Carmen’s left arm. Even as Estelle watched, the girl’s right foot lifted off the bed a couple of inches.

“It’s okay,” the EMT holding the mask said, and immediately transferred his free hand in a featherlight touch to the top of the girl’s head. He looked up as Estelle approached and made a face, shaking his head at the same time.

He lifted his hand and pointed.

“Ay,” Estelle whispered. Blood soaked the back of Carmen Acosta’s head, some of it running down into the creases in the back of her neck under her short, spiked hair. Estelle’s attention was drawn to an object in the girl’s left ear. At first glance, it might have been mistaken for a black hearing aid, or a black plastic dangly earring that had been swept upward into the ear canal. But the girl had not been so lucky. Whatever other injuries Carmen Acosta might have suffered, the hat pin driven into her brain through her left ear would have been the finishing touch.

The young EMT’s ruddy face faded to the color of bleached linen, but he didn’t move his hands from Carmen’s head. Out of reflex, he ducked so that he could see the girl’s right ear as if he expected to see the point of the hat pin protruding there.

“It’s six inches long?” he asked, and Estelle nodded. She knelt on the floor, her face close to Carmen’s. The girl’s eyes were half open, her lips parted. If she was breathing, her respiration was too shallow and fleeting to notice. And the EMT, Cliff Gates, was panting so loud that he was apt to need oxygen himself.