Before She Dies pc-4 Page 17

  “That’s where I was going.”

  “True enough. I talked to Herb Torrance. Among other things, he hasn’t seen Patrick since sometime yesterday.”

  The rumble of Bob Torrez’s patrol car bounced off the side of the mesa as the vehicle emerged from the trees and slowed to a stop in the middle of the road. He switched on the red lights briefly, creating a psychedelic pulse against the surrounding rocks and trees.

  “If Pat Torrance is involved in some way,” Estelle said slowly, “then the odds are good that either he put that truck down there, or…”

  “Or he’s in it,” I finished for her, standing up.

  Estelle thumped her right fist against the flat surface of the rock. “Damn, damn, damn…” she groaned, and I knew what she meant. Being left out of the chase was more painful than any fracture.

  Chapter 25

  “Looks like one occupant.” Bob Torrez’s voice was matter-of-fact over the radio. He’d scrambled down the talus slope like a sure-footed youngster, checked on the two of us briefly, and then continued on.

  For a few minutes we had been able to see his flashlight beam slashing this way and that as he traversed the boulder field, but then the trees hid him from view.

  “Can you ID?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Torrez said, and I knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it. “It’s Tammy Woodruff.” I wasn’t ready for what he said next. “And she’s still alive, sir.”

  “Oh, my God,” I breathed. That option had never occurred to me, and judging from Estelle’s quick intake of breath, not to her either. “Is she conscious, sergeant?”

  “Negative. Hold on a minute.” As Estelle and I sat in the dark cold, we could hear vehicles coming up the county road. “Sir, she’s inside what’s left of the cab. It’s twisted around her pretty good. It’s going to take a lot of cutting to get her out of there.”

  “Rescue is just arriving now. They’ll be down in a few minutes. Stay with her, Bob.”

  “Tell ’em to bring both the jaws and a saw. They’re going to have to cut through a piece of frame to get to her.”

  More winking lights lined the road above us, and I stood up and waved my flashlight.

  “Sheriff, what the hell are you doing down there?” Sam Gates’s voice was a welcome sound as it crackled over Estelle’s radio.

  “Sam, we’re going to need two Stokes. One where I am for a patient with multiple fractures and cuts, and one farther on down the slope. Do you see the deputy’s light?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. And you’ll need both the jaws and a saw. There’s a vehicle down there, and it’s going to be a puzzle.”

  “Jesus,” Gates said, never particularly mindful of the FCC. “Occupant’s still alive?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Bob Torrez interrupted. “Pulse is 130 and ragged. Respiration is shallow and uneven. Hustle it up, guys.”

  Estelle moaned a single syllable and then bit it off. I pulled part of the blanket around her shoulders and tried to pad the rest between her back and the rock against which she was leaning. “Just a bit longer,” I said.

  She shook her head. “They need to go on down to the truck.”

  “No heroics now,” I said. “They know what they’re doing. They’ll have both of you out of here in no time.”

  Which, as it turned out, wasn’t the case at all. Cassie Gates arrived first, breathing like a locomotive and carrying enough luggage to stay a week. “Look at this place,” she said, as she searched for a level spot to spread her paraphernalia. “God, how I love it. Sweetheart, couldn’t you have found a steeper cliff to dive off of? Let me see what you did, now.”

  I backed away, giving the EMTs room. Cassie was joined almost immediately by two members of the Search and Rescue crew, another young EMT I didn’t know, and Nelson Petro. The last time Nels had been with us was when he ran the cherry picker for Estelle down on the state highway. He looked a little unsure about this mess.

  I could see a flow of lights angling down the talus slope toward the wreck below. A gentle nudge from one of the EMTs pushed me farther out of the way. There was nothing I could do but shut up and watch, giving them lots of elbow room. Their efficiency left me feeling all thumbs and stupid.

  Cassie had a BP cuff on Estelle, and in short order she was evaluated and immobilized on the Stokes with her lower leg and foot encased in one inflatable splint and her left arm in another. Radio reception back to Posadas was blocked by the mesa, but one of the S and R folks up on the road served as a relay.

  Even Velcroed in as tight as she was, Estelle still let out a single gasp and clenched her teeth when the six men picked up the Stokes and the guide rope tightened. It was going to be a hell of a long ride to the top.

  Longer still for Tammy Woodruff. By the time Estelle’s litter had progressed to within fifty feet of the road, the first generator fired up. In rapid succession, 500-watt quartz floods snapped on, bathing the hillside in white light. Another generator was on its way down the hill. I watched the four men horsing it down over the rocks and felt a wave of exhaustion. I sat down on a convenient rock to catch my breath.

  I heard the boots on rocks behind and above me, but ignored them, content to sit in the dark cold and watch.

  “Sir, are you all right?” It was one of the EMTs. I turned my head and watched him crab across the jumble of loose, football-sized talus that twitched and turned under his boots like a living thing.

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  With a cough, the second portable generator sprang into life and more light blossomed. I still couldn’t see the wreck, so I gestured across the slope. “I’ll make my way over that way,” I said.

  The EMT glued himself to my elbow, and after about the fourth assist, I felt like an old maid trying to cross a busy street.

  “Shouldn’t you be helping down the hill?” I said at one point as I stopped to catch my breath.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  I turned and pointed my flashlight at his name tag. “Curtis, I don’t need an escort.”

  He grinned. Of course he wasn’t short of breath. “I’d sure hate to be on this cliff by myself in the middle of the night, sir. Think of it as your escorting me.” He was a foot taller than I was, fifty pounds lighter, and a century younger. He could have carried me up the hill and still had that grin on his face when he reached the top. “Cross over to those ropes and they’ll be a help to the top, sir.”

  I had wanted to cross the talus slope for a better view of what was happening down below, not to be dragged up the hill. But I realized that what the kid said made sense. They needed me down at the wreck about as much as they needed another broken leg. I stopped and looked up the hill. Those hundred yards were leagues.

  “Shit,” I said. “You think they’re going to call a chopper?”

  “No, sir.”

  I leaned against a rock with my hands on my knees. “Too windy?”

  “Yes, sir. For a while I thought they might, but not with the wind gusting to twenty knots. It’s just too risky.”

  We’d progressed far enough past the spine of trees that I could see the wreck site down below. The image was surreal, with the artificial white light bathing the gnarled pinon and juniper. A cascade of sparks shot into the sky as the steel-cutting saw chewed into the pickup carcass, and I could hear the scream of it echo off the mesa wall behind us.

  “She’s been crushed in that thing for maybe two days, Curtis.”

  “That’s what I heard. It’s a miracle that she’s alive at all. I guess that’s another reason Sam won’t ask for a chopper. The odds are pretty stacked against her. It doesn’t make it a good gamble to risk a helicopter crew on a night like this.”

  I took a deep breath and pushed myself upright. “Let’s get this miserable job over with, Curtis.”

  “Yes, sir. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  I chuckled in spite of myself. “No, Curtis, I’m not feeling
all right. Just stick close.” It wasn’t the climb I dreaded so much. Or another sleepless night. It was facing two old friends and telling one of them that his daughter was smashed to pieces…and telling the other that every circumstance pointed right down his son’s tracks.

  Chapter 26

  When I stepped off the last treacherous rock and onto the solid, comforting gravel of County Road 14, I would have taken a great breath and sighed with relief if I had had the energy. Instead, I settled on the convenient tailgate of one of the search and rescue trucks. I was dirty, unshaven, and had a rent in my trousers-I looked like an old derelict who didn’t have the gumption to face the trash cans down the alley one more time.

  The activity was a blizzard around me. I was too tired even to pretend that there was something I could do to help.

  The night wind had changed direction, beginning its dawn cycle. This mesa top should have been a beautiful, quiet place. There should have been a potpourri of aromas to enjoy other than diesel and small-engine exhaust. There should have been quiet night sounds other than radios, engines, shouts, shrieks of metal-cutting blades, and the groaning of bending metal forced apart by steel jaws.

  Lots of things should have been. Tammy Woodruff should have been home in bed, curled around a good boyfriend, not crunched up and squashed inside the grotesque wreckage of her pickup truck.

  Behind me, Deputies Tom Mears and Tony Abeyta tried to make sense of the tracks left by Tammy’s truck. Apparently, she had managed to drive up the winding county road without incident until she reached a point just before the road opened up on top. After rounding a tight, decreasing radius curve, the road passed between a limestone outcropping and a thick grove of scrub oak.

  Sprayed gravel and a deep gouge in the trunk of one of the five-inch oaks showed that someone-probably Tammy-had lost it on that corner and strayed into the brush. She’d had time to correct and cuss a couple of times before she broke out on top.

  And then, like a straight and true missile, her truck had drifted to the right, with no signs of swerving or correction, until the right front wheel dropped over the rocky edge. Even if she’d been sober, at that point there was nothing she could have done to save herself.

  The gouges in the road’s shoulder showed that her truck had executed a slow roll to the right, with the first flip sheering off the passenger-side mirror. Mears found the mirror lying wedged between two boulders within fifty feet of the road. After that, it was impossible to tell exactly what gyrations the vehicle had executed as it tumbled down the talus slope, shedding bits and pieces as it went.

  The total distance from last contact with the county road to the truck’s resting spot in the scrub trees at the bottom measured 346 yards. Three and a half football fields. And Tammy Woodruff, twenty-three years old and 105 pounds, had survived it all.

  She had to know the circumstances that prompted her lonely drive up County Road 14, but maybe she wouldn’t be able to remember how she’d come to drift that shiny, year-old truck too far to the right. And if she was lucky, she wouldn’t remember a damn thing about that never-ending flight down the talus slope.

  A dark, uniformed figure appeared at the side of the truck on which I was sitting. I turned and recognized Deke Merriam, one of the enforcement officers for the Forest Service. This mesa top was their turf, even though the tallest tree on it couldn’t skin twenty feet.

  “Why aren’t you down there, Deke?”

  He snorted. “Why aren’t you?”

  “I was. Well, part way. I saw enough.”

  He groped in his shirt pocket and pulled out cigarettes. I watched him light one, and smelled the first waft of smoke that the night air thoughtfully brought to me.

  Down slope, a new shower of sparks shot a dozen feet into the air. “It looks like they’re going to have to cut that truck into a million pieces to get her out,” Merriam said.

  “Looks like,” I agreed. “It’s wadded up pretty good.”

  “What was the deal, anyway? She was speeding, or what? One of the guys said it was the Woodruff girl from town.”

  “It was, and we don’t know. She’s got a boyfriend out in these parts.”

  “What, on up…” Merriam made gestures toward the north.

  I nodded. “Right. One of the Torrance boys.”

  “They know about this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “When did this happen? You figure that out?”

  I shook my head and leaned an arm on the side of the truck bed. “We just don’t know for sure.”

  “How did you happen on it?”

  “One of our detectives was out this way.”

  Deke Merriam grinned. He knew the size of our department, and knew every soul onboard. We only had one detective. “Estelle found it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of the night?”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that it hadn’t been the middle of the night when Estelle had seen the vehicle. “She was detecting, Deke. That’s what we pay her to do. Detect.”

  “All this is tied in with the shooting, somehow, eh?”

  Deke wasn’t as stupid as he liked to sound most of the time. “We think so,” I said.

  He carefully ground out the cigarette on the tailgate, then walked around, opened the driver’s side door, and put the butt in the ashtray. Perhaps the owner wouldn’t mind.

  “I’m surprised she wasn’t thrown out,” he mused, returning to lean against the truck with one boot heel hooked on the edge of the tire tread. “All that twisting and crushing is bound to spring the doors and shatter all the glass. Even the seat brackets can snap off when the cab twists. Maybe she was wearing her seat belt. But hell, even them sometimes fail.”

  I looked at Deke for a long moment, musing. “Let me bum one of your smokes, Deke.”

  “Why sure,” he said, with generous alacrity. “I thought you quit.”

  “I did. Two years ago.”

  I took the book of matches he offered and thoughtfully peeled one off. The cigarette filter tasted chemical and sterile between my lips, bringing to mind the odd image of the ball of cotton a nurse uses to patch a hypodermic needle hole in a patient’s arm. I lit the match, held it for an instant, then snapped it out. “Ah, maybe later,” I said, and put the cigarette in my pocket.

  “Tough hombre,” Deke said.

  “Yeah, I’m tough, all right. Thanks just the same.”

  Sergeant Torrez had already passed some initial information to me via the handheld. The wreckage, he said, despite the lapse of time between the crash and its discovery, still smelled like a liquor store to which someone had taken a baseball bat.

  We knew something of Miss Woodruff’s drinking habits. She drank until she was lit-that seemed to be the girl’s standard operating procedure. If there was nothing else pressing to do, she’d drink herself unconscious.

  With a grunt I reached around and slid Estelle’s handheld radio out of my belt holster and keyed the switch.

  “Torrez, Gastner.”

  I waited for ten seconds and then heard two quick bursts of squelch that told me Bob had heard me, had found a quick moment to reach around and tap his mike key a couple of times, and then had gone back to work.

  “He’ll respond when he can,” I said, and set the radio on the tailgate beside my leg. In silence we watched, our vantage point fifty feet down the road from where the lines snaked out of the rescue truck’s winch.

  At 3:50, with dawn still hours away, we saw the tiny figures down the hill working around the Stokes litter. The radio beside me barked and I startled.

  “This is Torrez.”

  “Bob, are they about to come on up?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Not too good, sir. They stabilized her as best they could, but it doesn’t look good.”

  “Not conscious?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No sign of any other occupant
of the vehicle?”

  “No, sir. And if someone else was in the truck and was thrown out, they would’ve been found, with all the people up and down this thing.”

  “Ask him about the seat belt,” Deke prompted me, and I frowned with irritation at being prompted.

  “Bob, was she wearing her seat belt?” In the dark, on that mesa top, with the yawning talus slope in front of me, the question sounded ludicrous. If our local walkie-talkie conversation could be picked up by an avid scanner-ghoul with a humongous booster, he’d wonder about us for sure. Were we going to write the poor girl a ticket for not buckling up?

  “Affirmative. One of the brackets broke sometime during the crash, but she had the belt on when she started out.”

  Deke Merriam nodded sagely. “Pays to buckle up,” he said, with that curious graveyard humor that we all adopted at times when someone else was hurting the most-or was dead.

  I keyed the radio again. “Bob, you’re going to make arrangements to sift through everything down there come morning?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “I’m going to follow the ambulance on into the hospital, then.”

  “Affirmative. Is Estelle all right?”

  “Busted up some. She’ll be okay.”

  The Stokes litter, with its six-man crew carrying it up behind the pull of the lead line, was already a quarter of the way up the slope.

  I pushed off the tailgate and stood up. “Deke, thanks for the smoke. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. We’ll get all the paperwork to you just as fast as we can crank it out.”

  He grimaced and waved a hand.

  With Tammy Woodruff on her way, I heaved a sigh of relief. Gayle Sedillos was working dispatch, and that meant the girl’s parents had been notified. They’d be at the hospital, waiting. So would half of the world, probably. I wasn’t in the mood to talk with any of them.

  I walked-maybe shuffled would have been a better description-to 310 and edged the car out through the sea of vehicles. The ambulance carrying Estelle would be in Posadas already, but the second unit with Tammy Woodruff would be half an hour behind me. I had some time to think. I idled the patrol car down the county road, windows open.