Francis Guzman was organized and waiting. He had already called the ambulance for a transfer to Albuquerque. He and Mary Vallo worked quickly to stabilize the kid. Before I had time to catch my breath, he was stuck with needles in both arms, with chemicals going in from one side and whole blood from the other. Guzman debrided the exit wound enough so that he could see what was what.
At one point he said, “Well, that’s good,” and continued working. I leaned against the wall and watched. Mary Vallo was damned close to a mind reader. Only once or twice did Francis Guzman have to verbalize what he needed.
“Sir?”
I turned and looked down the hall. Estelle had the contents of the kid’s wallet spread on the coffee table in the waiting room. It wasn’t much of a display.
I walked out and sat down beside her. “Who is he?”
She held up the driver’s license. “Kyle Osuna. San Estevan. He’s nineteen.”
“I wonder who the hell he crossed,” I said.
Estelle tossed the license down. It fell on three one-dollar bills. The license and the money were it.
“Estelle?” Francis beckoned his wife, and I followed her back into the examining room. The young doctor spoke with confidence. “The ambulance will be here any minute and we’ll want to transport. But he’s conscious and lucid so you might take your best shot now. He’ll go into surgery, and it’ll be tomorrow morning before you can talk with him again.”
“How is he doing, Francis?” I asked.
Guzman put his hands on his hips and regarded the still form on the table. One of the kid’s hands twitched, and Mary Vallo rested her hand on his forearm. “He’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as it probably looked when he was bleeding all over the kitchen floor.” He flashed a grin at me as if this sort of thing happened all the time. “What’s the story?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what Whiz Kid needs to find out.” Estelle stood beside Osuna’s shoulder with Mary Vallo on the other side. Two faces like those would have been enough to convince any patient that he’d died and gone to heaven. I stood at the foot of the bed and took notes in shorthand.
“Can you tell me your name?” Estelle asked.
“Kyle Osuna.” The kid’s eyes focused on Estelle’s face.
“Kyle, do you know who shot you?”
“No.” He took a shallow breath.
“Did you see the person who shot you?”
“Yes.” He frowned, probably trying to think straight as the intravenous Valium fogged more than the pain.
“Can you describe him for me?”
“He was…he had long white hair.”
“White hair? He was an old man?”
“No.” Kyle closed his eyes, and his right hand lifted and started to drift over toward the dressing covering the wound. Mary intercepted and held his hand in hers, careful that she didn’t dislodge the I.V. “He was young.”
“Do you mean blond hair? Very light?” I heard the crunch of tires pulling into the clinic’s driveway, and Francis went out to meet the ambulance crew.
“Yes,” Kyle Osuna said. “Very light.” He took a deep breath, very slowly. “He’s about my age. Thin, not too tall. About my size. I’ve seen him around some.”
“But you don’t know his name?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he lives? Does he live around here?”
Osuna nodded slightly. “I’ve seen him a few times. I don’t know where he lives.”
“Can you tell me what happened? Why he shot you?”
“I was walking up the highway from my house. I was going to come talk to you. He was walking the other way, just about by the trading post. He knew my name. He asked if I had a cigarette. I said no and kept walking. That’s when…” He paused and looked over at me. “That’s when I heard this noise. Like a metal latch or something. I turned and saw that he was just standing on the shoulder of the road. And right away I saw that he had a gun of some kind. I freaked, man. So I ran.”
“You could see the gun in the dark?”
“There’s that light by the trading post parking lot.”
“And he chased you?”
“No. He shot me. I didn’t hear the gun. But it knocked me down. At first I thought maybe he’d chased me and hit me with his fist. But then I looked back and he was still standing there. He hadn’t moved none. Just standing there. And then he started to walk up the road toward me. Real slow.”
The ambulance attendants brought the gurney down the hall into the examining room. If we wanted to know more, we’d have to ride the ambulance to Albuquerque.
“What happened then?” Estelle persisted.
“I got up and ran into the orchard there and made it over toward the river. That’s when it started to hurt. It hurt so bad and I was scared. I thought that maybe with all the brush he couldn’t follow me. There’s a hundred places to hide. After a few minutes I thought I heard him running up the highway. I’m not sure.”
The attendants moved into position and Estelle held up a hand, gaining a few seconds.
“Do you know why he shot you, Kyle?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I was in the truck when the girl was killed, just like them.” He closed his eyes tightly and bit his already bloody lip. “That’s why I was coming to see you. The other four, they got murdered. I heard about Kenny and Cecil…I got so scared.”
Estelle’s eyes locked on mine, and I could see the triumph on her face. “Arajanian,” she said and headed for the door. I should have shared her excitement, but it was dread that twisted my gut. I knew Estelle, and I already knew exactly what mistake she was going to make.
Chapter 21
Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s first move couldn’t have been more logical. If Kyle Osuna survived, and Dr. Guzman assured us that he would, then he would be charged either with the murder of Cecilia Burgess or as an accessory to murder, depending on how his story developed. Either felony would go a long way toward making Osuna’s convalescence painful.
Estelle used the telephone in the clinic to call her county dispatch and made sure that two deputies would meet the ambulance when it arrived in Albuquerque.
We’d been caught unaware, but Tate wouldn’t be. In Albuquerque, the deputies would have a file photo of Arajanian. If Osuna was lucid before he went to surgery, they’d make sure he saw the photograph. If. I knew the odds of that were small, with his system battered by shock and painkillers.
Estelle wasn’t willing to wait. Her mind was made up, set in concrete.
By the time we pulled into the driveway of the house, I was ready to yell at her as if she were a wayward teenager.
I parked the Blazer and she sat in the passenger seat, making no move toward the door handle.
“In the first place,” she said, “no judge is going to give me an arrest warrant for Robert Arajanian unless Osuna I.D.’s him from a photo. Not on the evidence we have.” She ticked off on her fingers the meager points. “One, we suspect him. Two, Kyle Osuna says his assailant had blond hair and was skinny. That could be Arajanian, or it could just as easily be someone else.”
“Yeah, there are dozens of blondies in this valley,” I said with heavy sarcasm. “Whole tribes of ’em.”
She ignored that and plunged on. “We know Arajanian has a gun but not what kind. And we don’t know what caliber weapon was used to shoot Osuna.”
“It wasn’t a.22.”
“No, it obviously wasn’t.” She opened the door of the Blazer and stepped out. “The only way we’re going to get anywhere is to go up there and confront Arajanian. And Finn. You can bet that he’s behind it…that Arajanian does just what Finn tells him to.”
I slammed the steering wheel with the base of my hand. “Damn it, Estelle. What’s wrong with you? If we left right now, it’d be two in the morning before we could get there.”