Steven Havill - Double Prey

“I want to see if he hit anything,” Gastner said. “I’ll watch where I walk.”

Estelle stepped back, trying to imagine the final cartwheel of the ATV, and the way its driver would have been flung away. The marks of the machine’s first strike were on the arroyo bottom’s bedrock, a black-tinged slash. She pivoted and looked at the arroyo bank. Where the ATV had swerved over the edge, the arroyo was a dozen feet deep, with a sheer, evenly under-cut bank. Airborne, the machine would have nosed over and down. If Freddy had managed to hang on, he would have been flung forward by the initial impact, then perhaps caught by the ATV on the bounce.

She got up and walked to the helmet. Its wild paint scheme was only moderately scratched, the face shield broken but still in place. Retracing her steps, she then crossed to the ATV and saw the mangled rack behind the driver’s seat and the broken plywood carryall bolted to it. The butt of a.22 rifle, still tangled in its scabbard, projected out from under the vehicle.

One hard bounce, and then the ATV had taken Freddy from behind, smashing his head into the ground. If he’d been able to kick free during his high dive, like some of the wild riders he’d surely watched on television, he might have escaped with a broken leg…or neck.

“Left front?” Gastner called.

Estelle pushed herself to her feet and regarded the ATV more closely. Sure enough, the left front tire was flat, the only damaged tire of the four. A ragged cut tore the sidewall all the way to the inner rim. “Yes.”

“Yeah, well,” the former sheriff said with resignation. “He launched over this little rise and drifted a little bit to the left…just enough to collect a piece of sharp rock. That would have jerked him out of control. He was really whistling Dixie, though. There’s a dozen feet of road here with no tracks, where he got that thing airborne over the crest of the hill.”

“Freddy, Freddy,” Estelle whispered to herself. Of course the boy would have been riding too fast. To an adventuresome kid, that’s what powerful ATVs were for.

She stood quietly, sunshine warm on her shoulders, no breeze reaching the shelter of the arroyo bottom to sweep away the aromas of violent death.

“You want your camera?”

“Please. And the tarp from the back of the truck.”

Estelle stepped close to the bank, caught the little digital camera and then the packaged blue tarp. She took a moment to thread the nylon camera case onto her belt, then trudged far down the arroyo to the far side, where she could look back at the entire scene.

“He swerved very hard,” Estelle said. “The measurements are going to be interesting.”

“How so?” Gastner squatted a yard back from the arroyo edge.

“How fast would he have to be going to go airborne over that rise, do you suppose?”

Gastner turned and regarded the trail. “Fairly fast, I would think. And then he hit that rock outcropping. Powee.”

“And that turned him to the left.”

“You bet. And over the edge he goes.”

Estelle’s cell phone chirped.

“Guzman.”

“Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. “What do you have?” The sheriff had been in court in Las Cruces, but Estelle could hear traffic in the background.

“We have Freddy Romero, Bobby. He put his four-wheeler into an arroyo off Bender’s Canyon Trail sometime yesterday.” The sheriff digested that in silence. “It looks like the machine crushed him on the bounce,” Estelle added.

“He by himself?”

“Yes.”

“Drinking?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like he jumped a little rise in the trail, you know, like a moto-cross rider might. He managed to collect a rock somehow. The left front tire of the ATV is torn open, and Padrino found the initial strike mark on the rock.”

She heard a long, slow exhalation of breath. “The folks are still up in Albuquerque with Butch,” Torrez said.

“And that’s not going really well. He’ll lose the eye, and that’s if he’s lucky. And por Dios , now this. I asked Gayle to contact APD for an assist. They’ll send over a chaplain.”

“All right. Look, I’m on the interstate right now. I’ll be out there in a bit. I got cut loose early from court.”

“How did it go?”

“A waste of time,” the sheriff replied, without amplification. “I’m just goin’ up the hill out of Cruces now, so it’ll be an hour. How far in are you?”

“We took the trail behind the bar,” Estelle said. “We were following Freddy’s tracks. He parked over on the Borracho Springs road, then drove the ATV over here. We’re just a little bit east of the intersection on Bender’s. Just beyond the window.”

“Be there in a bit.” He rang off without further comment. Estelle pocketed the phone and looked across at Gastner, who now stood with one hip propped against the Expedition’s front fender as he surveyed the country through binoculars.

“There’s a cattle trail on down about a hundred yards,” he called, and lowered the binoculars to point. “You have plenty of cattle tracks in the bottom here, so we can guess there’s another trail up and out somewhere.”

“You don’t have an extension ladder in your hip pocket, sir?”

Gastner laughed. “Wish I did. Look, I’m going to mosey on up here a ways and see what’s to see.”

Estelle continued her photographic survey until she was convinced that no secrets remained in the arroyo itself, then walked back to the ATV. She unpackaged the tarp and snapped it out, then covered Freddy Romero’s body.

She turned her attention to the jumble of bent and twisted plastic and metal. The damage suggested that the four wheeler had burst over the rim of the arroyo and crashed nose-first to the bedrock of the arroyo bottom a dozen feet below. The left front suspension had taken most of the impact, crushed backward and upward so hard that the handlebars had been balled into junk, torn back on top of the rumpled gas tank.

The initial impact had somersaulted the rig, the rack behind the seat pounding into the arroyo bottom and the back of Freddy Romero’s skull. The machine’s final resting place was nine feet from the body, the ATV resting flat on its back, bent suspension turned to the sky like a dead beetle. A large patch of gasoline had leaked out to stain the rock and sand.

Estelle knelt and touched the left front wheel. It was jammed back against the frame and would not spin freely. The damage to the tire began an inch or so toward the rim from the tread. Had the tire struck the rock with its knobby tread, Freddy might have had a survivable wild ride with the bounce.

The undersheriff set the little camera on macro and took photographs of the tear, showing the rock particles imbedded in the rubber. The rock had opened the tire’s sidewall like an enormous, rough can opener right to the rim, where the aluminum was dented and torn.

The force of the impact would have jolted the ATV savagely to one side, and there had been no time for Freddy to correct.

“A hundred yards that-a-way,” Bill Gastner called from the rim. He pointed up the arroyo. “Cow trail makes it easy for you.”

“What else did you find?”

“Well, trajectory, I guess. I’ll show you when you come up.”

“I’m on my way.” Estelle trudged back up the arroyo, wanting to stop and turn around at each step. The last thing she wanted to do was leave Freddy Romero face down in the gravel, ruined and alone.

The cattle always found the easiest route, and over the decades, their hooves cut and packed long, diagonal trails that criss-crossed the arroyo banks, bringing them to shade, to protection from the elements, to the rare standing puddles that remained for a few hours after a cloudburst. Dodging the cow patties, Estelle climbed out of the arroyo. Bill Gastner met her by the two-track.