“We’re not going to the campground,” Estelle said as if that made everything hunky-dory. “The scouts are a couple of miles this side of it, where the mesa edge is right next to the old logging clearing.”
She was already assuming that I knew the country as well as she did. I let it ride and concentrated on keeping my head from being driven through the roof of the Ford. In a couple places, the road would have been narrow for a three-wheeler, and the low-hanging ponderosa pine branches wiped scratches the full length of the patrol car. A limb as thick as my thumb whacked the mirror on my side askew and screeched across my window.
“Guzman, this is Garcia.” The radio message cracked loud despite the bouncing car, and I reached for the mike. I wasn’t about to give Estelle an excuse to take her hands off the steering wheel.
“Go ahead, Garcia.”
We hit another rut and I almost dropped the mike. Garcia’s voice was loud and clear. “I can hear you coming up the two-track. Estelle, stop where the scouts are. There’s a washout or two farther on. You’ll break an axle if you’re not careful.”
“Ten-four. Appreciate the thought,” I said, and to Estelle, I added, “I wonder if he broke his.”
For another five minutes we crashed along the path. Then Estelle swung the Ford around a corner and slewed the car to a stop. Four Girl Scouts stood in the middle of the lane, terrified. The lights from the roof rack pulsed across their faces.
The oldest kid couldn’t have been fourteen, and I wondered where their counselor was. “We can park right here,” Estelle said. She switched off the car and the lights. “…if you don’t mind hoofing it for a few yards.”
“No, no. I don’t mind,” I said and popped my seat belt before she changed her mind.
“The other officer told us to meet you out here,” the oldest scout said as Estelle got out of the car.
“Good girls,” Estelle said. She snapped on her flashlight. I was still rummaging, and Estelle called, “In the glove compartment.” I found the other flashlight and grunted my way out of the car. It felt good to plant both feet on unmoving ground.
“Where’s the other deputy?” Estelle asked, and the scout pointed off to the west.
“It’s shortest this way,” the girl said. “Part of the road farther on is washed out pretty bad. We can cut straight across.” There were six of us and six flashlights, and still the timber was dark as tar. I brought up the rear, hoping that the five young ones in front of me would kick all the obstructions out of the trail. They left enough to keep me paying attention.
This particular portion of Quebrada Mesa was a narrow spit of land where the two sides of the mesa tucked in tight before fanning out to blend with the swell of the mountain behind it. The Forest Service two-track was an access road to an old timber sale area. Campers used it and maybe serious lovers who didn’t want to be disturbed. I couldn’t imagine casual drinkers jolting their innards just to quaff a brew under the moon.
We reached the edge and as we paused for a minute, I could hear the faint shush of wind through the pines below us. “Where’s Garcia?” I asked.
“Down this way,” the brave scout said, and we walked along the edge single file. A hundred yards ahead I saw several lights gathered at the edge and then, when the timber thinned some more, I saw a single flashlight down below, fifty, maybe sixty yards away. It had to be a hell of a drop-off.
Four more scouts and two counselors waited for us. The counselors-two gals of maybe eighteen or twenty-looked as scared as the little ones. Estelle looked down and then asked, “Is there an easy way down there?”
“It’s all pretty steep,” one of the counselors said. “The other deputy just slid down from here.”
Estelle sighed, and I knew what was going through her mind. She didn’t like someone skidding willy-nilly through the middle of her evidence. She pulled the hand-held radio from her belt and keyed the button.
“Paul? You copy?”
“Ten-four.”
“We’re up on the edge above you.”
“I see the lights.” His flashlight swept an arc for us.
“What have you got down there?”
“One nineteen-seventy-six Ford half-ton, blue over white. As far as I can tell, there were just the two occupants.”
“All right. I called Dr. Bailey from Jemez. He’s covering for Dr. Guzman tonight. He’s our closest. It’ll be a half hour at best.”
“Ten-four.”
Estelle turned to me. “I called for ambulance and coroner before I picked you up. But it’s going to be a while. Do you want to go down or stay here?”
“Should you be doing stuff like this?” I asked and knew right away my concern was a waste of breath.
“Come on, Padrino,” Estelle said. She grinned. “The kid may want to be a mountain climber someday.”
I grunted disapproval, at the same time swelling a little with pride that when Estelle had finally called me something other than “sir” it had been the Mexican equivalent of “godfather.”
“Let’s do it,” I said. Skinnying down into that black void wasn’t my idea of a good time, but what the hell. When her child was born, I didn’t want him looking up at me from his cradle and saying wimp as his first word.
Estelle swept the ground with the flashlight. “Paul,” she said into the hand-held radio, “did you locate exactly where the truck went over?”
“About fifty feet south of you. To your left.”
“Ten-four. We’re going to look around up here a little; then we’ll be down.”
“We ain’t going anywhere.”
Estelle included all the scouts in her flashlight arc. “Maybe you girls would go on back out to where I parked the car. An ambulance and other personnel will be following us in, and we don’t want them going any further than we did.” That would be a real trick, since the fat rump of her patrol car was blocking the two-track. The girls started to move off, and Estelle added, “And we’ll want to talk with you all, so don’t go anywhere else.”
I heard a “Yes, ma’am,” from one of them, and then we could see their flashlights bobbing as they made their way back through the big pines.
“Hell of a way to spend a campout,” I said. “Imagine the ghost stories you could tell ’em now.”
“And you’d have wet sleeping bags for sure,” Estelle muttered. “Let’s see where it went over.”
I took a deep breath, suddenly and deeply feeling fatigue as it snuck up and clubbed me. Being an insomniac is one thing, but I’d been on my feet, one way or another, since the accident sirens had awakened me at the campground. And this was the second time I’d been stumbling around in the dark, peering at evidence with the feeble light of flashlights.
“I wish to hell you’d learn to work during the daylight hours,” I said as Estelle made her way along the rim to the south, her light sweeping the ground.
“No time like the present,” she said cheerfully. “And here we go.” The tracks she had found were faint impressions in the soft duff. Estelle followed them with the light. The tracks came from off to the left, from the old two-track.
Her flashlight beam reflected off the white of Garcia’s four-wheel-drive Suburban. The road he had driven wound down through the trees from where we had parked, then looped over toward the mesa rim forming a turnaround that the logging trucks had used years before.
The driver of the pickup had driven straight across the turnaround and held course for the vertical drop-off…and as tired as I was, even I could see that not once had he spiked the brakes before going over.
Chapter 11
The pickup truck lay on its side at what we later measured as sixty-three yards below the mesa rim. I pictured the Ford crunching almost lazily off the precipice. The undercarriage had scraped the rocks as the truck tipped over, so it certainly hadn’t vaulted off like something driven by a Hollywood stuntman.
Fifteen feet into the plunge, the truck had hit a small juniper and twisted sideways, beginning the first of several rolls. On the second roll, the windshield had smashed against a large limestone boulder.