Read Online Dead Weight by Steven F. Havill - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Steven F. Havill
Ads: Link
him, it had been crushed out during the hour that he’d been pinned before his wife finally stuck her head out the back door to see when he was going to shut off the damn machine and come to bed.
Chapter Eight
For an hour I poked here and there without particular rhyme or reason. The events of the evening jumbled in my mind, and I couldn’t see a well-defined path of action. I didn’t want to end up stumbling all over Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s trail, getting in his way, slowing him down. I idled 310 east on a deserted Bustos Avenue shortly after 4:00 a.m., not breaking fifteen miles an hour.
A mechanic at the Ford garage had replaced some part deep in the car’s guts, and it was almost eager. Still, fifteen miles an hour was just fine, a perfect match for my mood.
By habit, I drove with the windows open and the two-way radio turned low, listening to and smelling the night. In the past, that had always accomplished one of two things: It either cleared my mind or made me drowsy enough that I could go home and grab an hour’s sleep. This time I couldn’t even make myself hungry.
Turning south at the intersection with MacArthur, I cruised past the Sissons’ driveway. Bob Torrez’s old pickup truck squatted in the driveway, well back from the street. He’d been using that oil-burning, huge-engined heap since earlier in the day, his idea of an unmarked car.
Farther south on MacArthur, I passed the neighborhood where the undersheriff lived with his wife, Gayle. It was a scattering of squat, old adobe houses that sat helter-skelter with a spiderweb of dirt streets. The oldest neighborhood in the village, it had once been called
La Placita
and nestled right up to the banks of Posadas Creek. The creek became a dry arroyo, mines opened, Posadas bloomed, and MacArthur sliced through
La Placita’s
vitals and killed it.
A couple dozen families lived in that part of town, and Bob Torrez was related in one way or another to most of them.
As I drove past, I caught a glimpse of 308, his county car, parked under the big elm tree in his front yard.
Reaching Grande, I turned north and a few minutes later completed the short loop by crossing Bustos. Salazar and Sons Funeral Home loomed, the lights in the manicured front yard washing up the white marble facade. The place was garish and prosperous. A black Cadillac hearse was parked under the wrought-iron portico, no doubt waiting to be polished and prepped in anticipation of Jim Sisson’s last ride.
The lights were on at 221 Third Street. The streetlight half a block away cast vague shadows, but even in the poor light I could see that Carla Champlin would disapprove. While she lived in a manicured terrarium, this place was as desolate as the day it was built thirty years before as low-rent housing for copper miners. She may have been right—perhaps at one time the tiny yard had bloomed as a showplace, with a putting-green lawn. I couldn’t remember.
The front yard was dirt, basically a parking lot. A single scraggly, thirsting elm managed a few green leaves in the postage-stamp backyard. If the house was more than eight hundred square feet I would be surprised—not much larger than my kitchen and living room combined.
Linda Real’s Honda station wagon was parked in the narrow driveway, and pulled in beside it was Deputy Pasquale’s old Jeep Wrangler.
“Huh,” I said aloud.
Beyond the casual arm-on-shoulder I’d seen in the darkroom, there had been few other hints that indicated any particular relationship between Linda and Tom—although they had known each other back when he was still flipping cars as a part-timer for the village PD and she was a reporter for the
Posadas Register.
It was as a reporter that she’d been riding with one of our deputies when he’d stopped a suspect vehicle. A shotgun blast had killed the deputy and another had mangled Linda.
Her convalescence from long, complicated corrective surgery after the shooting had taken her out of
Chapter Eight
For an hour I poked here and there without particular rhyme or reason. The events of the evening jumbled in my mind, and I couldn’t see a well-defined path of action. I didn’t want to end up stumbling all over Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s trail, getting in his way, slowing him down. I idled 310 east on a deserted Bustos Avenue shortly after 4:00 a.m., not breaking fifteen miles an hour.
A mechanic at the Ford garage had replaced some part deep in the car’s guts, and it was almost eager. Still, fifteen miles an hour was just fine, a perfect match for my mood.
By habit, I drove with the windows open and the two-way radio turned low, listening to and smelling the night. In the past, that had always accomplished one of two things: It either cleared my mind or made me drowsy enough that I could go home and grab an hour’s sleep. This time I couldn’t even make myself hungry.
Turning south at the intersection with MacArthur, I cruised past the Sissons’ driveway. Bob Torrez’s old pickup truck squatted in the driveway, well back from the street. He’d been using that oil-burning, huge-engined heap since earlier in the day, his idea of an unmarked car.
Farther south on MacArthur, I passed the neighborhood where the undersheriff lived with his wife, Gayle. It was a scattering of squat, old adobe houses that sat helter-skelter with a spiderweb of dirt streets. The oldest neighborhood in the village, it had once been called
La Placita
and nestled right up to the banks of Posadas Creek. The creek became a dry arroyo, mines opened, Posadas bloomed, and MacArthur sliced through
La Placita’s
vitals and killed it.
A couple dozen families lived in that part of town, and Bob Torrez was related in one way or another to most of them.
As I drove past, I caught a glimpse of 308, his county car, parked under the big elm tree in his front yard.
Reaching Grande, I turned north and a few minutes later completed the short loop by crossing Bustos. Salazar and Sons Funeral Home loomed, the lights in the manicured front yard washing up the white marble facade. The place was garish and prosperous. A black Cadillac hearse was parked under the wrought-iron portico, no doubt waiting to be polished and prepped in anticipation of Jim Sisson’s last ride.
The lights were on at 221 Third Street. The streetlight half a block away cast vague shadows, but even in the poor light I could see that Carla Champlin would disapprove. While she lived in a manicured terrarium, this place was as desolate as the day it was built thirty years before as low-rent housing for copper miners. She may have been right—perhaps at one time the tiny yard had bloomed as a showplace, with a putting-green lawn. I couldn’t remember.
The front yard was dirt, basically a parking lot. A single scraggly, thirsting elm managed a few green leaves in the postage-stamp backyard. If the house was more than eight hundred square feet I would be surprised—not much larger than my kitchen and living room combined.
Linda Real’s Honda station wagon was parked in the narrow driveway, and pulled in beside it was Deputy Pasquale’s old Jeep Wrangler.
“Huh,” I said aloud.
Beyond the casual arm-on-shoulder I’d seen in the darkroom, there had been few other hints that indicated any particular relationship between Linda and Tom—although they had known each other back when he was still flipping cars as a part-timer for the village PD and she was a reporter for the
Posadas Register.
It was as a reporter that she’d been riding with one of our deputies when he’d stopped a suspect vehicle. A shotgun blast had killed the deputy and another had mangled Linda.
Her convalescence from long, complicated corrective surgery after the shooting had taken her out of
Similar Books
