One Perfect Shot Read online

  Tony Pino and Buddy Clayton, understanding how we worked a scene, hadn’t just barged in after they had arrived. They patiently stayed a couple dozen yards away, smoking and talking in hushed tones as they watched us work, not eager to move a step closer to the blood and smell. I beckoned, and they approached with trepidation, as if they were trying to walk on eggs.

  Chapter Two

  Before Pino and Clayton reached us, Sheriff Eduardo Salcido’s black Impala nosed to a stop, and he hadn’t pulled his bulk out of the car before a state police cruiser joined us. Highland had become a parking lot. The sheriff cocked a pistol-finger at the state officer before they shook hands, and the two men stood by their cars for a moment, hopefully figuring out how they might approach without planting size twelves all over the crime scene. I waved them toward the far shoulder of the road.

  “Tony, I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to the highway superintendent. “Someone put a shot right through the windshield. It appears that Larry was parked right here.”

  “Jesus,” Tony whispered. “Not Larry. My God.” He stepped closer to the framework below the cab, putting him at eye level with the floor of the grader’s cab.

  “No one witnessed it. Evie Truman happened by and found him. She’s the one who called us.”

  “He’s dead?” That seemed so obvious as to be comical, but what the hell. When we don’t want to believe the ugly way things are going, we’re apt to say silly things.

  “Yes, sir. Probably never knew what hit him.”

  “My God.”

  “I’m going to get together with you later, Tony. We’re going to need Larry’s schedule, things like that. What he was doing this morning, and so forth.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Pino’s voice was distant. He gazed up at the bullet hole through the windshield. “Why…accident, you think?”

  “I have no idea, Tony. None. We’ll be working on that.”

  I turned as Sheriff Salcido approached. He walked with his hands on his rump, fingers in his back pockets, head down to watch where he put his feet. Although he was a couple of months younger than me, I still looked at Eduardo Salcido as an older man—at least until I happened to look in the mirror. Over the past ten years, after I was named undersheriff, Salcido had become less a hard-riding lawman and more of a comfortable bureaucrat, perfectly willing to turn the responsibility of day-to-day operations of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department over to me.

  By no means a lazy man, Salcido simply redirected his energies as the years crept up on him. I suppose I did the same thing without ever noticing. He was good at dealing with the county commission. I wasn’t—and didn’t want to learn. He could give a lively, amusing talk to the Kiwanis Club, while I fumbled and stumbled. He enjoyed talking to a classroom of sixth graders. I’d rather drop rocks on my feet. I preferred long, quiet ambles through my county at any time of day or night, windows down, listening, watching, even smelling that wonderful prairie. And most of the time I did that while the rest of the county was snoozing.

  “Who we got here?” Salcido asked when he was within easy conversational distance. His accent was heavy, musical, even soothing. He could thicken it, or dilute it, depending on the circumstances. He reached out a hand and shook hands with each of us in turn, his grip like squeezing a concrete block.

  “Larry Zipoli. One shot, from the front.” I pointed at the windshield.

  “For heaven’s sakes.” The sheriff’s frown darkened. He stood four-square, a few pounds heavier than me but four inches shorter than my five foot ten. If he had a neck, it grew buried under muscle somewhere on top of massive shoulders. For a while, he’d sported a droopy mustache, but then abandoned it, claiming it made him look like “something from one of those movies.”

  Bob Torrez waited patiently off to one side. Deputy Tom Mears had trudged west on Highland, seeking a panoramic photo of the crime scene. Salcido shook his head wearily and made a point to shake hands with Torrez who, at six four, towered over him. If Sheriff Salcido left the scene for ten minutes and then returned, we’d be treated to the same handshakes, except it wasn’t token. Eduardo Salcido kept his circle connected.

  For a long moment, the sheriff said nothing, taking in the mountain of machinery parked in the sun, the obvious insult of it all. He stretched, rubbing the right side of his upper belly where I knew his cranky gall bladder fussed. Kindred spirits in that regard, the two of us.

  “You got tracks down there?” He pointed with a little nod toward the west, where Mears was making his wide-angle survey. “Freshly graded like that,” he added. “Something will show.”

  “Sure enough,” I said. “He was about half finished. So this lane is hard-packed. Not much is going to show unless they drove in the fresh stuff.”

  Salcido squinted up at the cab. “Por díos, this is no good.” He turned and looked back down the road, trying to make the geometry work. It was a good hundred yards west to the intersection with Hutton, maybe a hundred and fifty. The rifle shot could have come from across the intersection, anywhere out on the prairie. Dips, arroyos, brush—there was plenty of cover. I had only a general working knowledge of how much a high velocity bullet dropped at various distances, but at a hundred yards or so, a couple of inches would cover the mid-range trajectory. I was uneasy about that, since a heavy caliber rifle bullet should have popped through both the windshield and Larry Zipoli’s skull, perhaps even out the back window. To stop short, somewhere in his brain, had to be telling us something.

  “To clear all the gear in the front of this rig, and then go straight into the cab? That’s interesting, don’t you think?” The sheriff reached out and took Bob Torrez by the elbow as if expecting the deputy to say, “Yes, I do think it’s interesting.”

  “The bullet’s going to tell us a lot,” Torrez said instead. “It ain’t no .22, I can tell you that much.”

  “You keep after it, Bobby.” The sheriff turned and gazed down Highland, lips pursed. Without looking, he reached out a hand and touched my shoulder, as if he had to have physical contract in order to talk to someone. “This is bad, jefito.” I didn’t respond, and Salcido obviously didn’t expect an answer. I didn’t mind his slang nickname for me. He’d called me what translated as ‘little boss’ since the day he’d hired me, although I was neither. He glanced at his watch. “Have you talked to la esposa?”

  “That’s next on my list,” I said.

  Salcido shook his head. “Let me do that. I have to swing back that way anyway. I’ll find his pastor, and we’ll go on over.” His hand reached out to Tony Pino. “You’ll go with me?”

  “Sure, Sheriff. You bet. Jesus, I hate this. What the hell are we going to tell her?”

  “What we know,” Salcido shrugged. “Right now, she needs to go down to the hospital to be with Larry.” He turned to me. “You need any more hands to get this measured up?”

  “We’re set.”

  “Wrong spot at the wrong time,” Salcido mused. He reached out to make contact with State Patrolman Frank Aguilar. “This guy here…he can hold the idiot end of the tape measure, you know.” The sheriff grinned and flashed some gold. “You gotta wonder…” He let the thought drift off. “Somebody had to see or hear something. They got to come forward.”

  “We can hope so.” I didn’t feel particularly optimistic. “Evie Truman found him and called us. That gives us a time window. She saw him alive just after noon. If anyone else drove by, he didn’t stop. It was shortly after three o’clock when she drove by the second time and found him dead. That’s three hours of opportunity.”

  “Well, then, we talk to people,” Salcido said. “Somebody knows something. He didn’t have time to radio in, did he? I mean back to the maintenance barn.” He turned to Tony as he said that, and Pino shook his head.

  “He had trouble with the rig this morning, I know that. He had it back at the yard right a
round lunch time.” Pino said.

  “And still some trouble.” I nodded toward the hydraulic leak up front. I ushered them to the spot, and for a long moment, Tony and Buddy squatted under the rig, examining the new hose.

  “He blew that this afternoon,” Tony said, and stood up with a grunt. “He radioed in. I know that. Who brought him the new one, Bud?”

  Clayton wiped his mouth. He looked as if he’d been considering throwing up ever since he’d watched Larry Zipoli sag down out of the cab, dead face covered in blood.

  “Jeez,” Buddy allowed. “Who was that? I don’t know. One of the boys in the shop. I know that Zip called in on the radio and told ’em what he needed.”

  “No big deal to change that?” I asked.

  “Nah. Easy. That little one is easy.” He turned and patted the big yellow frame beside his head. “Break one up inside, and it’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Does he have to shut down the machine to do that work?” Salcido asked.

  “Don’t have to, but I guess he would.”

  Blow a hose, call for help, wait for the replacement, take the old one off and put the new one on, I thought. Then fire up the machine and back to work. But before he can put the machine into gear, blam. He’s dead.

  Tony kicked a boot in the dirt in frustration. “Shit, I don’t know. I was out most of the morning.”

  “After the shot, he sure as hell didn’t radio anybody. What we know for sure is that when he was found, he was sitting in the seat, stone dead. The engine was idling, the gears in neutral, blade down. Beyond that, we don’t know diddly,” I said.

  The sheriff shook his head sadly and thrust out his lower jaw as if loosening a necktie. “You let me know what you need.” He nodded toward the state policeman. “If we need to ask for more help, we will.” He paused. “I didn’t know this Larry too well. I see him around, you know. But beyond that…” He shrugged and then brightened with another thought. He stepped away from the group and took me by the elbow, walking me toward the rear of the machine.

  “I interviewed a friend of yours this afternoon. A young lady that I think we should hire.”

  “There aren’t a whole lot of young lady friends in my life at the moment,” I laughed.

  “Reuben’s grandniece?” The sheriff’s eyes twinkled.

  My mind went blank. Reuben Fuentes was a basically good-natured old codger who enjoyed a wonderfully casual relationship with the law, often fueled by excessive bouts with the bottle. A stone mason gifted with remarkable skill and artistry, he had relatives a few miles south in Mexico, and pretty much ignored the line in the dust drawn by the Border folks when he needed to haul rocks or cement or bricks from job to job. I found him immensely likeable, had bought him lunch on several occasions, and had made a trip or two with him south of the border—more than once to make sure that he didn’t end up a permanent resident of a Mexican prison.

  “I don’t know the grandniece.”

  “Oh, sure you do. I want you to talk with her, too. I set it up for tomorrow. She’ll come in first thing.”

  “Does this grandniece have a name?”

  “Estelle Reyes? Teresa’s adopted kid down in Tres Santos? Fresh out of school. She’ll be a good one.”

  The memory flooded back, but it was of an eleven year-old urchin playing under the cottonwoods in Tres Santos, Mexico. Reuben had introduced me first to his aging niece, Teresa Filipina Reyes, a woman who eked out a living teaching school in the tiny village, and then to the skinny little twerp whom Teresa had adopted from the church orphanage a decade before. Reuben and I had had other issues to attend to that day, but I knew that a few years later, when the child turned sixteen, she had come across the border to live with Reuben and attend Posadas High School. Maybe she’d come across legally, but knowing Reuben, ceremony perhaps had not been stood upon.

  I knew about her during her two years at the high school, but not much else. She’d been in classes once in a while when Salcido or I had given guest talks during career day, but managed to get through her two years of public school without showing up on law enforcement radar. As far as I knew, no raucous parties, no lead foot, no experiments with alcohol or weed, despite her guardian’s propensity for sauce. And then she’d gone off to college. Since Reuben Fuentes wasn’t the sort to blab about his relatives, the girl had dropped off my planet.

  “I didn’t even know she’d sent in an application to work for us,” I said. Most of the time, such things would have crossed my desk, but Eduardo Salcido was Eduardo, after all, operating under the patron system more often than not. “There hasn’t been a background check, has there?” I’d had my share of challenges trying to convince Eduardo Salcido to join the twentieth century in a lot of ways. Now, in the late summer of 1987 with technology in full bloom, using formal background investigations remained an issue between us.

  Eduardo tended to hire either people he knew, or people about whom he felt comfortable. He asked enough questions on the first face-to-face meeting to satisfy himself, bedamned what some “fancy computer” might reveal. To my knowledge, he’d never ordered up a background check when he’d hired me. We’d interviewed, and while I answered his questions, I recall that those dark eyes of his had never wavered from mine, as if he were x-raying my brain. He’d read through the paperwork I’d offered him, and nothing beyond.

  “Is she even a citizen?” What an interesting can of worms that could turn out to be. I knew that plenty of people served in the armed forces on a visa, but as a cop?

  “Last year,” Eduardo said. “She told me that she started the process when she turned eighteen, and took the oath the week that she graduated from university. You’ll like talking to her. A most articulate young lady.” He said the four syllable word with relish.

  “Well, all right, then. And by the way, Evie Truman will be working on her deposition. I’ll be caught up with that, too, unless you want to work with her on it.”

  He frowned and rubbed his belly. “When you have a chance, see what you think. Have the young lady sit in with you, then. See how she responds. I told her she’d have to catch you on the run.”

  Having a civilian in the room during an official activity like a deposition wasn’t the usual policy—probably not even a good policy—but I didn’t argue. Eduardo Salcido had his way of doing things, and I respected his judgment. Right then, a new hire was the last thing on my mind, even though our small sheriff’s department stretched desperately thin. But hell, that was normal.

  Chapter Three

  The holes in the county road grader’s windshield and Larry Zipoli’s skull didn’t offer much of a datum line. Deputy Mears conjured up a duct-tape and pencil solution to secure the contractor’s foundation twine to the inside of the windshield. From there, the line was strung forward over the seventeen feet of the grader’s big yellow prow, off into the hard, sinking sun. I stood on the blade, one hand on the cab, with Tom Mears gingerly sitting in the driver’s seat. Tom was slight of build, perhaps five-eight, with a short torso.

  Larry Zipoli had been at least six feet tall, long of torso. To hit him in the eyebrow would have meant that the bullet was angled slightly upward—exactly what made sense to me. The bottom of the cab door was about sixty inches from the ground, another three or four feet up to a spot even with the victim’s eyebrow. Fired from in front, the bullet would naturally angle upward, unless the shooter had either scrambled aboard the grader’s nose, or had set up a stepladder in the middle of the road.

  “How curious,” I muttered. Torrez was obviously excited by the whole thing, though, like figuring out the perfect five hundred yard shot on a trophy antelope. If there was something about firearms, shooting, and hunting that he didn’t know, I hadn’t stumbled across it yet.

  I trudged out a couple of yards in front of the grader, where Torrez stood, string in hand. “What’s all this tell you?�
� Down the road a bit, Trooper Aguilar waited.

  “The main thing is that it wasn’t real high velocity, sir. Pretty stout bullet that wasn’t goin’ fast enough to break up. Pretty good sized.” He raised his voice, calling back to Mears. “I’m going to be pullin’ hard on the line, so make sure that thing is secured.”

  We then walked down Highland, away from the grader, the twine spinning out behind us. We reached a point about a hundred feet in front of the grader. By then, when Torrez held the twine at shoulder height and pulled on it until it twanged, he could sight along the slight sag, all the way back to the grader, clearing its massive snout, to Deputy Mears’ forehead.

  “Somewhere right around here,” Torrez said. “If the shooter was shorter’n me, then on down the road a bit.” If we continued westward on Highland, we’d cover a couple hundred feet before reaching the intersection. Had the shooter parked on Hutton and then walked toward his target? That was coldly calculating. Had Larry Zipoli seen him advancing down the lane weapon in hand, and wondered what the hell was going on? Had the gunman fired, then walked forward to gaze up into the grader’s cab, admiring his handiwork? Had he first driven past the grader, made sure of his target, and then returned? Tracks weren’t going to offer a convenient answer, since the dirt of the ungraded portion of Highland was hard as concrete.