Steven Havill: Heartshot

“Benny,” I shouted over his babbling, “we’re not going to let you go down there.”

“Ricky,” he sobbed, and lunged toward the bank. Bishop hugged him still.

“We’ll do all we can, Benny,” I said, and helped Bishop carry the man away from the shoulder of the road, guiding him toward my car.

Someone came up and started talking to Fernandez, and I snapped, “Get out of here.” I held Benny’s arm. “Get in the car, Benny.”

“They called me at the store,” he said. “They said it was his car.”

“It’s his car, Benny.” I silently cursed the idiot who thought he was doing the man a favor. It’s bad enough when a cop and a priest pound on the door at two in the morning. There was no call for this.

“The hospital,” Benny said, pathetically hopeful. “They’ll take him to the hospital, won’t they?”

“Yes. Maybe you should go there and wait. I’ll have Deputy Bishop take you down.”

He made for the door handle, and before he could pull it, I snapped down the electric locks. “Benny, let the deputy take you down. You’re in no shape to drive. I’ll make sure one of the other officers takes your car down for you.” He slumped a little, then nodded, beginning to give up. I flipped on the PA switch of the radio. “Deputy Bishop,” I said, and thirty feet away, Howard turned around. I waved him over. “Would you drive Mr. Fernandez down to Posadas General? I’ll handle things up here.”

Bishop nodded, and Fernandez was gone before they started to bring up the body bags. The thought struck me later that Benny hadn’t even asked if his son was dead. And like a gutless wonder, I had avoided being the one to break the news. No more parents showed up at the site. But by then, Bishop would have found a telephone and called the names to Gayle, and she would have started lining up the appropriate clergy.

At eighteen minutes after two, Les Atawene backed up his big diesel tow truck so that the rear duals were within a foot of the embankment. Bob Torrez and I cleared the crowds back.

“Damn it, aren’t any of you folks sleepy yet?” I shouted at a group of stubborn ones. “Why the hell do you make us work around you!” One of them persisted in standing in the wrecker’s way, and Les tapped the air horn. The guy said something obscene, and I heard it. “Just run over the son of a bitch,” I barked at Les. The man flashed his middle finger at me, but he stepped out of the way, so I ignored him. Les hauled the heavy cable down to the wreck and saw right away that he had problems. If he hitched on to the only part of the car that was completely in the clear, about all he’d pull up the bank was a ruptured rear quarter. He stood and looked for a minute. The big wrecker’s floodlights made it artificial noontime. He and his boy finally circled the cable completely around the wreck, from front to back, top to bottom. When the winch began to tighten, the cable pulled the wreck together into one not-so-neat ball. But it stayed together, and up the hill it came, groaning and twitching and smoking like some living thing.

As the mess crept up the hill, I saw Estelle Reyes crouching low, looking inside the car. She probed with the flashlight, then waved the beam quickly up the hill at Les. “Stop it a minute!”

Les did, patient as ever. “Careful around that, miss,” he called. “Everything’s kinda loose.”

“You better believe that,” I heard Estelle Reyes say. She stood up, face impassive, and waved a hand. “Okay, pull it another foot or so, and stop.” She glanced around and caught my eye, then put her left hand in the crook of her right elbow and closed that arm tight, catching her hand between forearm and biceps. For a minute, I didn’t understand, but then I nodded. It had been a while since I’d given blood, but I’d done the same thing when it was over, holding the small gauze pad in place over the needle hole. The tangle of metal lurched a little bit and stopped again. Estelle Reyes conferred with Torrez, and then she reached for the wrecking bar that Torrez still held. She worked intently, wrenching and prying, and Torrez stood back and watched. The whole ball of metal shook. When a piece of bodywork curled open just right, she took more pictures-she must have been on her fifth roll. She stopped taking pictures and scrambled up the bank. “No, not yet,” she shouted when Les moved a hand toward the winch controls.

“Let me borrow your slicker, sir,” she said to me. In the sixteen months she’d been with the department, she’d never called me anything but that. Not Bill, not Gastner. Just “sir.”

“Is there very much?” I asked.

“A kilo, maybe.” She took the folded rain slicker that I dug out of the trunk of 310.

“Grass?”

“No.” She raised an eyebrow and shook her head. “It must have been under the front seat originally.”

“With that kind of impact, it could have started out anywhere.”

“True.” Estelle Reyes took the slicker back down the hill, and I went with her this time, standing between her and the spectators. She made the transfer slick and fast, then backed away, holding the small bundle under her arm. “We’ll have to take the car apart bolt by bolt. I’ll have Les put it down in one of his bays. That way we can have a little security.” She sounded as confident as a ten-year veteran.

Shortly after three, Estelle Reyes was satisfied that she had gleaned all she could until morning. She had an exhaustive inventory of personal effects. She had photos of skid marks, dirt tracks, grease blotches in grass, bent metal, and torn people. She was a methodical worker, and used a 35-mm with tripod, flash, filters, the works. A goddamned artist. And after each shot, she stopped to make notations in her field book. The rest of us, including me, did as she asked. And now, because the little package had changed the complexion of the crash, Estelle was extra careful.

Finally, the car was gone, the debris collected. When Detective Reyes was sure she needed no more pictures of the scene, she held up her hands. “All right,” she said. “We can secure this area until morning. Daylight might find us something. Torrez or somebody needs to stay with the car. Locking it up isn’t enough. I’ll get down there when I can.”

“He’ll be there until Encinos relieves him. Eddie Mitchel is going to sit out here.” Stealing from other shifts and double-timing was all we could do.

“And Bishop went to the hospital. I’ll call him so he can put a lid on things down there. I should be back out about seven,” Estelle Reyes said. Then she hesitated. “Before I go to the hospital, I’m going up to the lake for a quick look. Won’t do much good in the dark, but you never know. Oh, and you might tell Mitchel to sit out of sight. Maybe just up the hill by the water tank. He might turn up something interesting. You never know. Somebody might be worried about their package.”

“Fine,” I said. “Be careful. And make sure your radio is on.” We watched the rest of the traffic pull away.

“It’s going to be a mess,” Estelle said. “And all those poor kids.”

“You’d better believe it. And we better be damn sure we don’t make any mistakes. When we find out where that shit came from, I have a feeling some folks in this town will advocate a return to lynching.”

“Maybe we should donate the rope.” It was a line from a joke, but there was no humor on Estelle Reyes’s pretty young face.

Sheriff Holman wasn’t a cop. He spent his time playing politics and working innocuous civil cases, something he actually did pretty well. But that night he did something else that clicked my estimation of him up several notches. The dispatcher, Gayle “Wondergirl” Sedillos, had called him as soon as she knew that the crash was a multiple fatal. Holman left a small party he was hosting and drove to the office. He stayed out of our way, but when it came time for someone to notify next of kin, he took that job on himself, chauffeuring clergy here and there until the stunning message had been delivered to the four households that still remained innocent of grief.