Bitter Recoil Read online

  “Oh. Okay,” he said, then hesitated. He looked at the light as if it were about to bite him.

  “Just wave ’em down. Another officer will probably be here in a minute or two anyway.”

  I walked back down the highway, past the ambulance. The harsh spotlights from the patrol car converged on a spot near the guardrails where the ambulance attendants and the officer worked over a single figure crumpled on the ground. The victim was lying facedown. I could see one leg extended under the guardrail.

  “Let’s immobilize her just the way she is,” one of the attendants said. “I think we can do that.”

  I kept out of the way. I don’t think the emergency crew even knew I was there. I recognized the deputy sheriff even in the tricky light of the spots and flashlights. But it was no time for a reunion with Estelle Reyes-Guzman.

  I took the opportunity to step to the rail and beam my own flashlight down into the rocks. There was no vehicle in sight. Maybe the victim had been a pedestrian, maybe drunk. They had said “she.” Maybe she’d staggered into the path of a car and been clipped. If so, it had to have been hit-and-run. If the man up the road with the Buick had been involved, they sure as hell wouldn’t have left him up there by himself, directing traffic.

  I turned away from the rail and took a closer look. The victim was female and appeared to be young, perhaps in her twenties. I didn’t have much of a view but she looked vaguely familiar to me.

  The attendants transferred her to the gurney with a minimum of movement, and I could see from the extent of their emergency field dressings that she was hurt in a dozen places. One leg was bent near the hip at an impossible angle.

  With a coordinated effort the two paramedics picked up the gurney and carried the victim to the ambulance. I felt a hand on my arm and turned.

  “You’re just in time,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said. “I saw you drive up.”

  Miss Sharp Eyes hadn’t missed me after all. “Yeah,” I said. “I was camping out and you woke me up. What have you got here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pedestrian?”

  Estelle played her flashlight over the area where the victim’s body had been. “Let me show you.” We walked to the guardrail. “We have a single victim, as far as we can tell right now. Haven’t found anyone else. The gentleman who owns the Buick up where you parked saw her first and used his CB radio. The owner of the all-night convenience store up at the head of the canyon heard him and called me. She was lying right here when I arrived. Les Cook with the Forest Service had stopped before I got here. He’s over there working traffic. He said the same thing. She was lying here, part under the rail.”

  “Sounds like she got hit pretty hard,” I said. “A little more and she’d have been down in the rocks and probably wouldn’t have been found for days.”

  “I think that’s where she was,” Estelle said. “Look here.” She motioned for me to bend over the steel guardrail. “Don’t step over yet, though,” she added as she saw me make a move to do just that. “See right here?” She pointed and held the light close. On the back flange of the rail were bloody fingerprints. “I think she grabbed here to help pull herself up to the rail.”

  “Is there blood on the bottom of the flange?” I asked. “If she grabbed ahold, her thumbprint would be on the bottom.”

  Estelle crouched down low and ducked her head. The bottom of the rail was about eighteen inches off the ground, and she played the beam of the flashlight along the steel surface. “There’s blood opposite,” she said. “Look here.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” If I had scrunched down in that position, I’d never have gotten up. I turned the light to shine on the slope. The rocky incline was just highway fill, and the scuff marks that might be made by someone crawling up the slope would be hard to see…especially by flashlight. Undaunted, Estelle stepped over the rail and examined the ground.

  “Lots of blood,” she said, and she worked her way carefully down the steep slope, keeping her own feet off to one side of the track she was following. “I think she crawled up here. See the dislodged rocks?”

  “You need to look at it in daylight.”

  “I’ll take a set of pictures now. Can I get you to hold the light so I can focus?”

  “Of course.” I knew Estelle’s affinity for photography. When she worked for my county, our film-processing bill had been astronomical. But her results were equally so.

  Before she went to work, we made the highway a little safer. I walked south and stabbed a flare in the centerline, and then we repositioned the cones, Estelle’s county car, and my Blazer. After taking down what information we needed from the man in the Buick, we let him go. He didn’t waste any time. The timber cop agreed to stay for a while and manage traffic…I think two cars had gone by since I had arrived.

  Estelle set up her 35mm camera and took a series of photos of the slope, each picture downhill from the last, while I held the flashlight so she could focus. The electronic flash was like a lightning bolt in the narrow canyon.

  When she was satisfied, she said, “We can take a close look come dawn, but this way, if it rains or something, we’re covered a little. Look here.”

  I did and could see that the blood trail turned at the base of the steepest part of the embankment and then angled away to the south.

  “The way she was broken up, moving that far took some set of nerves,” I said.

  Estelle took more pictures. Together we followed the trail. The girl had crawled, apparently pulling herself forward with only her hands and sheer will, for fifty yards along the base of the embankment before trying to climb it. The trail led back through a thick stand of grass, and we saw the crushed stems left by the girl’s passing. The grass gave way to a jumble of boulders, and a smear of blood on one of them showed us where the girl had slid off the rock into the grass.

  “Christ,” I said. Estelle muttered something and reloaded her camera. She started up on the rocks, and I said quickly, “Watch for the goddamned snakes.” She ignored the warning.

  “I think this is it,” Estelle said.

  “ ‘It’ what?”

  Estelle played the flashlight on the rocks. From where she stood, the highway embankment up to the guardrails was a seventy-or eighty-degree slope. “The blood ends here,” she said. “At least I can’t see any more.”

  “Nothing coming down from the roadway?”

  “Not that I can see. Shine your light right up here.” She indicated the slope. I did so, and she snapped more pictures. “I don’t see any scuff marks,” she added and then climbed down to where I stood. “I want to climb up the embankment over there, where we won’t be apt to obliterate anything. Maybe there are marks up by the highway.”

  We made the climb, with me huffing and puffing. There were no marks on the highway shoulder, nothing on the steel rail. The only marks on the highway’s road surface itself were two short skid marks, about twenty yards south of where Estelle’s patrol car was parked. The marks were straight and centered in the lane, as if someone had spiked the brakes without swerving. The marks were short—the vehicle hadn’t been traveling fast.

  “They might not even be related,” I said.

  “And probably aren’t,” Estelle said. She took pictures anyway.

  “So what do you think?” I asked as she put the camera gear back in the trunk of her car.

  “I just don’t know, sir. I really don’t. It looks like she was struck and knocked over the rail back there, maybe hit so hard she flew over it, and landed on the rocks. Then she crawled to where we found her. That’s all I can imagine.” She frowned.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But if someone gets nailed by a car hard enough to toss ’em down a goddamned cliff onto rocks, I can’t believe they’d survive, much less be able to crawl so far.”

  “That’s what bothers me,” Estelle said. “Maybe we’ll be able to piece something together when we have the medical report.”

  “She didn’t have any identificat
ion?”

  “None.”

  “Terrific.” I looked at my watch. It was already quarter of five. “What now?”

  “I want to walk down along the road and see if I come up with anything. And then up the other way. By then it’ll be dawn and we can see what we missed.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re on vacation, sir.”

  “Pretend I’m not. I had a couple hours of vacation yesterday. That was probably enough.”

  Estelle smiled and shook her head. “Maybe you’d go down to San Estevan, where they took the girl. She’ll go to the clinic there first and no doubt be transferred to Albuquerque. You might be able to find something out there.”

  I nodded. “Invitation for dinner still on for tonight?”

  “Of course.” She slammed the trunk closed. “By then this’ll be all wrapped up.”

  Estelle Reyes-Guzman wasn’t wrong too often.

  Chapter 3

  By the time I reached the public health clinic in San Estevan, the victim had been airlifted to Albuquerque. The EMTs in the ambulance had been quick-witted and efficient. They knew that the extent of the girl’s injuries was more than the clinic could handle. The helicopter air ambulance, a Bell Jet Ranger, had been dispatched from the city and made the roundtrip flight before I left the mountain.

  As I drove into the village at six in the morning, San Estevan was beginning the rooster and barking dog stage of awakening. I drove past the Catholic retreat complex north of the village and caught sight of one friar or monk or whatever he was, as he crossed from one white adobe building to another, toiletry kit in hand.

  A hundred yards beyond and on the opposite side of the road was a National Park Service historic site, the restoration of Gualate Ruin, a two-story stone structure that I’d heard was one of the dozens of outliers for the major ruin at Chaco Canyon to the west.

  None of the feds were up yet, nor was there life stirring at the Forest Service District Office, a low, flat building tucked in the cottonwoods where the state highway turned away from the river and into the village.

  No more than two dozen houses, scattered here and there across the narrow valley, made up the ancient village of San Estevan. Originally, the town had sprung up on the edge of the Indian pueblo, a mixture of clergy, traders, and farmers.

  A few of the houses were massive, with adobe walls a yard thick and large courtyards—architecture that said there’d been some rich times in the valley.

  But the inevitable was happening. The village was just outside the pueblo’s reservation, and so the valley was salted now with crackerbox shacks and trailers, bright aluminum mobile homes insulting the stolid, ancient adobes as city folk established their weekend camps and “ranchettes,” as the realtors say.

  If I drove a thousand yards south of the village’s gas station, south of the modern clutter and detritus of seasonal residents, I could imagine that a century had been peeled away.

  The pueblo, one of the state’s smallest, was neat and uniformly reddish-brown. Burnt sienna adobes with mud ovens in every yard, neat stacks of piÑon and juniper firewood behind every dwelling, narrow brown lanes packed hard as cement between the houses, all leading down to the brown-trunked cottonwoods that screened the river from view.

  The demarcation between pueblo land and private land beginning with the village of San Estevan was as obvious as if there were a solid wall between the two.

  I passed the Texaco station and, where the highway jogged another right angle turn, the combination of Dairy Queen and general store. Just beyond, a group of three trailers was parked willy-nilly to form a compound filled with wrecked car and truck carcasses, and beyond those was a fenced pasture where two horses grazed themselves fat.

  Remembering Estelle’s directions, I looked for the sign and found it nearly camouflaged by purple bee-weed. Below the sign for the San Estevan Clinic, United States Public Health Service, an arrow pointed to a graveled lane.

  I pulled into the clinic’s driveway and parked beside a blue Isuzu Trooper with Posadas County plates. No matter where they moved in the state, Estelle and Francis Guzman would carry that tag until it rusted to pieces…a gentle reminder of their home to the south.

  Only one other vehicle was in the lot, an older model GMC pickup—maybe a ’55 or ’56. It was no collector’s item, though, just an aging, battered work truck.

  I crushed out my cigarette and walked inside the building. The clinic was cramped, with a twelve-by-twelve waiting room, a tiny cell for the receptionist, and a narrow hallway that led back to the treatment rooms. I guessed there were two of those at the most. I heard a metal pan clatter and voices, and then an Indian woman stuck her head out of one of the examining room doors. She saw me and held up a hand with one finger raised.

  “I’ll be right out,” she said and disappeared again. I turned, looked around the waiting room, and saw universal doctor’s office decorations…aging magazines, a few children’s books. A large Ojo de Dios woven out of gaudy yarn hung on one wall and a sand painting of an Indian dancer in an awkward pose on another.

  Across the room on the west wall was a framed state map with a large water stain rumpling all of Colfax, Mora, San Miguel, and Guadalupe counties. Beside the map was a framed aerial photograph of a mountain in fall colors, aspens aflame. It was no local mountain, of course…probably one from Colorado or Wyoming—wherever the postcard artist had been able to find a nice, conical, generic mountain with no towns, powerlines, or highways to mar the picture.

  I stepped to the window and looked out at chamiso, cactus, and rocks.

  “May I help you?”

  I turned quickly. The nurse had a pencil and metal clipboard poised at the ready. She was older than I had first thought. Steel gray was beginning to temper her ebony hair, tied back tightly in a bun. Her black eyes regarded me calmly from a broad, flat face whose flawless skin was like burnished walnut. I read the name tag on her white blouse and wondered how long Mary Vallo had been an R.N. She might have been forty years old or sixty-five.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Vallo,” I said. “I’m Bill Gastner, undersheriff of Posadas County, down in the southern part of the state. I’ve been assisting Deputy Guzman with an accident investigation this morning.” I started the standard smoker’s fumble for a cigarette and thought better of it. “I wondered if I could talk with Dr. Guzman for a minute, if he’s not tied up.”

  “Surely,” Mary Vallo said. “Come on back.” She led the way down the hall, and in one small cubbyhole I saw a coffee maker just beginning to drip. Sharp-eyed Mary saw my glance and said, “I just started it. I’ll get you a cup as soon as it’s ready.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, feeling about three hours overdue for my first morning caffeine buzz.

  The examining room we entered was small and the scene of considerable recent action. Mary Vallo resumed her labors, at that moment cleaning the spatters from the front of the portable X ray unit. Francis Guzman was sitting at a table by the window awash with paperwork. His white smock was white in small spots only. He glanced up, not eager to move.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” the young physician exclaimed, and he pushed himself away from the table, extending a hand to me at the same time. “You’re about the last person I expected to see at this hour. How have you been, Sheriff?”

  “Just fine, except that wife of yours has been putting me to work.” At his puzzled expression, I added, “The accident this morning with the girl pedestrian happened just above where I was camping. And you know the way old cops are. I couldn’t help snooping.”

  “Up at Steamboat, you mean?”

  “Yes. And how is the girl?”

  Guzman shook his head and sat down again. He was six inches taller than my five-eight and built like an athlete, but now he looked like he’d just finished the pentathlon.

  “I don’t think she’s going to make it, Sheriff. She has about eight broken bones, including her skull. She’s hemorrhaging internally as well
as suffering a dozen gashes and lacerations. She was out there a while, you know, before anybody found her. I was surprised she hadn’t bled to death.”

  “And with all that, she still managed to crawl almost a hundred yards,” I said and accepted a Styrofoam cup of coffee from Mary Vallo.

  “You’re kidding.”

  I shook my head. “The last few yards were up a steep embankment, back up to the highway shoulder. It looked like after she was hit, she ended up on a pile of boulders down by the river. At that point the highway embankment is almost vertical. Since she couldn’t crawl up there, she apparently moved in the only direction she could, along the stream in the grass until she reached a spot where she could try for the road again.”

  “I don’t see how that would have been possible,” Guzman said. “I really don’t.” He stood up. “Look at this.” He had a set of small X rays and he handed the top one to me.

  “We don’t have very good equipment, but even so, look at that hip.” He traced the fracture with his index finger.

  Even I could see the damage. The head of the femur looked like it had been pried off the shaft, taking a chip of the hip socket with it.

  “And her right arm was broken in three places. Her left ankle was snapped. There are what look like compressed fractures of two lower vertebrae. And a comminuted fracture of the right parietal.”

  “What’s that?”

  He tapped the side of his skull above his ear. “With all that and the bleeding, I can’t believe she crawled.”

  “No one was there to help her that we know of,” I said. “Not as far as we’ve been able to determine. Of course, it’s hard to tell. But Estelle’s still there and might turn up something.”

  Francis Guzman leaned forward, hands clasped and forearms resting on his knees. He remained silent, deep in thought. Finally he said, “The other thing that bothers me about her injuries—and I’m no great expert, you understand—what bothers me is that they’re not really consistent with being smacked by a car or truck. I know that’s what the ambulance attendants told me, but still…”