Steven Havill: Before She Dies

“Estelle is down at the office processing Tammy Woodruff.”

“For what?”

“DWI and assault.”

I settled back against the fender of 310 and folded my arms across the top of my ample belly. “You issued the DWI?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the young lady became upset?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

I leaned forward slightly and squinted. “I don’t see any damage, Robert.”

“A little scratch here,” he said, fingering his left earlobe. “That’s about it.” Tammy would have had trouble reaching Torrez’s earlobe, much less damaging it.

“And for that, you tacked on an assault charge?”

“Uh, no, sir. She broke one of Linda Real’s cameras.”

“Linda was with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought she was at the game.”

“That must have been someone else, sir. Maybe Frank Dayan.”

I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. Linda Real had been with the Posadas Register for four years. I’d grown to like and trust her. And I’d assumed it was her behind the camera that evening. I hadn’t made a point to look closely.

“Frank, huh,” I said. Dayan was an unknown quantity, fresh out of the home office in Omaha, Nebraska, taking the reins after the O amp;N Newspapers chain had purchased the Register . It was hard to imagine anyone moving from a metro area like Omaha to dusty, brown, deserted Posadas.

“So let me get this straight. You stopped Miss Tammy for drunken driving and Linda was with you.” Torrez nodded. “And Linda reared up with her camera and started snapping pictures. So Tammy flipped, not quite so drunk she couldn’t imagine her little freckled face on the front page of the Register .”

“Well, no, sir. Linda remembers what you told her about riding along on patrol just for the opportunity to take embarrassing pictures of the public, sir. While I was talking with Miss Woodruff, Linda decided to go into the Broken Spur and get a bag of chips or something. Miss Woodruff saw her, knew who she was, and off she went. She wasn’t thinking too straight, sir.”

I rubbed my face. It was going to take an hour to shower off the gymnasium fume residue. “You were at the Broken Spur when this happened?”

“I stopped Miss Woodruff just as she was pulling her truck out onto the highway from the saloon’s parking lot.”

I groaned. “You were coming in toward town, or what?”

“No, sir. I was parked. Just down the highway. I was backed into that little dirt road that leads down to Howard Packard’s windmill and stock tank.”

“Watching the bar.”

Torrez nodded. “I can see the doorway pretty good through binoculars.”

“Of course,” I said wryly. Every deputy I’d ever known had his own “specialty,” and worked it hard. Bob Torrez was from a family of twelve, and he’d lost both a younger brother and sister one night seven years before when a car in which they were passengers missed the interstate ramp and slammed into an abutment. The driver, a sixteen-year-old neighbor, had been so soused he hadn’t been able to start the car without assistance.

That had been the deputy’s rookie year, and from then on, his random checks of local liquor establishments and their patrons had been unrelenting. Sheriff Holman fielded more than a few complaints, and it was to his credit that he shrugged most of them off.

“Tammy Woodruff is no juvenile, Robert,” I said.

“No, but she staggered so bad she almost didn’t make it to her truck. And then when she started up she backed into Gus Prescott’s horse trailer.”

“Any damage?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’ll sort itself out, I’m sure,” I said. “Did Victor see this?”

“If he did, he didn’t come out.”

“That’s a plus,” I said and got into 310. Victor Sanchez owned the Broken Spur Saloon and Trading Post. He’d made it a point more than once to tell me that if my deputies didn’t stop harassing his patrons he’d file suit. He was hot air, of course. Judging by the way most scuffles ended in the Broken Spur, he was more apt to pop somebody with a wrecking bar.

And this arrest was going to test even Martin Holman’s sense of fair play. Karl Woodruff, Tammy’s old man, was a nice enough guy, running his RxRite Pharmacy cleanly and professionally through good times and bad. He supported the Posadas County Sheriff’s Office to the hilt, and that included keeping Sheriff Martin Holman in office.

I could imagine the headline Monday afternoon: Republican Committee Chairman’s Daughter Busted-Sheriff Fires Undersheriff and Deputy .

Hell, I wasn’t paranoid, but it was shaping into a great week.

I arrived back in the office shortly before midnight. A small thermonuclear cloud over the building wouldn’t have surprised me, but instead, the old place was quiet. Every car we owned was in the lot beside the brick building. With everyone inside and busy, it was a hell of a good time to bust a bank or rob Wayne Feed and Ranch Supply.

I considered parking the county car, climbing into my Blazer, and going home to bed. That would have been a waste. I’d lie there and stare at the dark ceiling, mumbling to myself, and wishing I were somewhere else. I’d found over the years that the best cure for insomnia was just to keep plodding along. Eventually I’d collapse into a ten-minute nap.

The office door opened just as I reached the top step. Linda Real-her last name pronounced like the Spanish Camino Real -looked out, saw me, and smiled. She was pretty, with black hair cut short in a pageboy. The odd hours mixed with junk food snacks were beginning to show around her waistline. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up in ten years being as wide as she was tall. She was holding a camera in one hand and her notebook in the other.

“I thought your camera was broken,” I said.

“Backup,” Linda replied. Her smile was immediate and radiant-too damn radiant for the middle of the night.

“And I thought you had the flu,” I said to Deputy Howard Bishop. He towered behind Linda, face like a big basset hound, somber and now just a little pale.

He held the door open as I shouldered past. “I was feelin’ a little better, so I decided to come on in,” he said.

I started to say that I wished he’d felt better about four hours before, but thought better of it. He still looked like he’d have helped more by staying home in bed. “Isn’t Tony Abeyta on tonight anyway?”

“Yes sir, but he can’t come in until about two,” Bishop said. “And Bob’s all tied up, so…”

“Take it slow, then,” I said. “And Linda?” The young reporter had started across the parking lot toward the patrol car. She stopped and turned around. “If you get tired,” I called, “don’t hesitate to go home.” She cheerfully waved a hand.

“Something’s wrong with that girl,” I muttered, and Bishop nodded solemnly.

“Yes, sir.”

Linda Real spent at least fifty hours each month riding with either us, the village police, or the Fish and Game Department, and we’d long since grown accustomed to her pleasant, smiling, ever-present face. Why she did it was a mystery to me. Little ever appeared in the paper about what we did that couldn’t be gleaned in five minutes each morning from the dispatcher’s log. Maybe she was husband hunting.

Or maybe she and her boss were lying in wait for that perfect, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of cops at work. I remembered punching Sonny Trujillo in full glare of somebody’s flash. That wasn’t the kind of publicity I wanted, no matter what the prize.

Detective Lieutenant Estelle Reyes-Guzman was waiting in my office with half a dozen file folders spread out on my desk. She looked up from one of them as I walked in. A ghost of a smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.