Steven Havill - Privileged to Kill

“We’re not that stupid, sir.”

“God, I hope not. But kids think we are. And right now, I’m so tired, I think I am.”

“We don’t have to make a move right away,” Estelle said. “If this is the truck, it’ll be around for a while. I’ve got some fingerprints to match, and I was able to pull a paint tracing off that black mark on the fender. We can send it to the lab along with paint from Crocker’s bicycle. That will give us an absolute match. And later today”-she held up the deer whistler-“I’m going to ask Bob Torrez to take a microscope to all this pot metal and see if he can find the spot where the right-side whistler might have been. If we can make some kind of match there, that’s it.”

“It’s part of it , anyway,” I said wearily. “If this is the truck, we don’t know why they hit Crocker and ran. And if it’s not the truck, we’re no further ahead than we were.” I glanced at my watch. “I’m going to swing by the hospital and see what time they’re going to release Crocker. I’ll put him in Camille’s old room.”

“The one with all the stuffed toys?”

I grimaced. “Uh-huh. That way, he might not want to get too comfortable and stay too long.”

“It’s really sweet of you to do this,” Estelle said, and I shot a quick glare at her, sure she was kidding. She wasn’t.

“What’s the choice?” I said, and started toward the door of the garage. “You ready for some breakfast?”

She declined, claiming “a couple of things to do.” I didn’t know what, but I didn’t twist her arm. My little notebook told me that I’d been going around in circles since Thursday evening, when I’d eaten too much green chili at the Don Juan de Oñate. I was ready to fall off the carousel.

Estelle locked the door of the steel building and was driving out of the county yard before I’d even untangled my keys. The patrol car started instantly and settled into its usual smooth idle, waiting for me to select a gear.

With my hand on the gear lever, I frowned and looked over my shoulder at the little trail of dust from Estelle’s car.

“What fingerprints?” I said aloud. She had told me that she had some fingerprints to match. I looked ahead toward the garage where the broken truck rested. There had been two occupants. One was headed toward the autopsy slab; the other was riding a wave of sedative at the hospital. We knew who had been driving, and who had gone flying.

I frowned again. There was little comfort in knowing that if Estelle Reyes-Guzman had wanted me to know about fingerprints, she would have told me.

I went home and slept for three hours. That was something of a record, and it should have rejuvenated me. It didn’t. I awoke feeling awful, with ears ringing like the carillons in the 1812 Overture and a vague, general ache that puddled in an arc above and behind my left ear.

I showered in the hottest water my aging hot water heater could brew, and then managed to shave without cutting my throat-although that might have been an improvement.

Breakfast didn’t hold much of an attraction, so I settled for coffee, taking a steaming mug with me to Posadas General Hospital.

Sometime during my three-hour nap, a couple of ideas had begun cooking inside my thick skull. One in particular had leaked to the surface and refused to go away. If an answer was to be had, Wesley Crocker had it…and then several forks in our tangled road would close like magic.

I walked down the hall to Crocker’s room and was surprised to see Ernie Wheeler sitting outside the door. Even dispatching was more exciting than counting floor, wall, and ceiling tiles. Posadas General was as quiet as the village it was named for…no one shouting “stat,” no crash carts charging down the hall, no buxom nurses threatening to heave their bosoms out of their white uniforms.

Ernie looked up at me and his eyes focused on the coffee cup.

“You want some?” I held up the cup.

He shook his head. “No, sir. I’ve had enough to float my kidneys as it is.”

I glanced at my watch. “Why are you here?”

Wheeler shrugged and yawned. “The sheriff thought it was a good idea to have someone around after he pulled Pasquale off.”

I nodded and pushed open the door. Crocker was up and dressed, sitting easily in a wheelchair. That didn’t surprise me. That Estelle Reyes-Guzman hadn’t beaten me to the punch did.

Crocker grinned at me as I stepped in the room.

“Well, good morning, sir,” he said, and nodded vigorously. He thumped the arm of the chair. “They won’t let me walk on out, so I got to sit in this thing.”

“Beats crawling,” I said. “When are they going to spring you?”

“The good doctor said the minute you walked in the door.” I grunted something not particularly gracious, and Crocker’s good humor faded. “They got me those fancy iron crutches, over there, and I can manage just fine. Maybe there’s a little room somewhere’s that I could rent for a week or two.”

I rubbed my eyes wearily and shook my head. “No. In the first place, a wrecked knee isn’t for a week or two. And if you try and bounce around on it too much right away, it’ll be for life.”

Crocker looked stricken. “Well, I sure don’t want to cause no trouble.”

“Things are what they are,” I said. “I think the best thing to do is call your sister to come and fetch you.”

If I had stuck an electric cattle prod up Crocker’s ass, the reaction wouldn’t have been more immediate. His face collapsed into a grimace and he held up both hands as if to ward off another attack, leaning back in the wheelchair so far I thought he might flip the thing.

“Kind sir,” he said, and I swear there was a tremble in his voice, “don’t ask her to do that.”

“Real close family, are we?”

Crocker took a deep breath, keeping his hands up to fend off any more punches. “Sir, if you talked to my sister, well, then you know what kind of woman she is.”

“I have an inkling.”

“Sir, she just cannot”-he stopped and fumbled for words-“she just…” He looked up at me. “In all these years, anytime I’d call, all she could think to say was some comment about when I was going to stop ‘this silliness.’ That’s what she called it. ‘This silliness.’ She couldn’t bring herself to ask me how I was, or ask what I’d seen, or ask where I was goin’ next.” He lowered his hands to his lap and stared at them. “And that’s why I just stopped callin’ her ever, don’t you know.”

“Well,” I said, and then let it trail off.

“She’d fix it somehow so’s I could never leave again. I know she would,” he said. “I’d rather make my way along the road on crutches than face her.”

“We can’t let you do that,” I said. “You got in the way of traffic once already. But I guess there’s no hurry. We need you around for a few days until we work out a few details. Maybe that will give you time to think of an alternative.”

“I could always steal a car or something, and get myself thrown in jail,” Crocker said with a lame smile.

“Theft is not your style,” I said.

“No, sir, it’s not.”

“Then we’ll think of something.” I picked up his fancy aluminum crutches and laid them on the bed. “Don’t forget those. I’ll go get the nurse. And then we can get out of here.”

And fifteen minutes later, we were out in the fresh October sunshine, Crocker sucking air from the exertion of swinging from the wheelchair to the front seat of the patrol car. The cast around his injured knee was a small, light, high-tech thing made out of aluminum and fiberglass that accomplished with a few ounces what the old thigh-to-ankle plaster had done a decade before.