“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” I said, laughing.
“Nope, it wouldn’t. By the way, do you have someone checking the insurance angle?”
“Sisson’s, you mean?”
He nodded. “Life insurance policies are pretty handy things. It’s happened before.”
“Sure it has,” I agreed. “Anything like that is going to come out sooner or later.”
Rhodes nodded, screwed the cap back on his coffee, and started the patrol car. “Let me know what I can do for you, Bill. And be careful of Her Highness.”
“Leona, you mean?”
“Miss Spears, as my brother-in-law always calls her. He can’t ever get past the fact that the woman never married and refuses to stay home, barefoot and pregnant. But I don’t trust her, either. She lives in some sort of weird parallel universe, that’s for sure. Everything is an issue with that woman.”
“I’ll be careful.”
He reached up and pulled the transmission into drive. “And for what it’s worth,” he said as he let the patrol car inch forward, “I’ve seen Tom Pasquale working down here as often as anyone. I’ve backed him up on routine stops a couple dozen times over the years. He’s a straight arrow, Sheriff.”
I lifted a hand in salute and watched the black Crown Victoria idle out onto the asphalt of State 56 and then accelerate toward Regal. I started 310 and then just sat, listening to the burble of the exhausts.
The copy of Leona Spears’s letter was still lying on my lap, and I started to fold it up but then stopped and picked up my flashlight. The beam was harsh, but bright enough that my bifocals work. “Huh,” I muttered, and then twisted around to look off to the west. The taillights of Mike Rhodes’s car had disappeared around the twisting bends that snaked up to the pass outside Regal.
“Neatly done, Officer Rhodes,” I said. “You aren’t such a bad politician yourself.” I pulled 310 out onto the highway and headed back toward Posadas.
Chapter Twenty-two
By the time I pulled into my driveway, it was 1:15 in the morning. The thermometer that hung by the garage door read sixty-one degrees, the air cooled as it swept down from the rumbling thunderheads over the San Cristobals. That was the only benefit we were going to get, other than an occasional display of pyrotechnics as lightning lit the tops of the clouds.
I went inside, and it was only as I was shouldering the massive carved front door closed that the wave of exhaustion rolled over me. I sat down on the Mexican banco and leaned my back against the cool adobe wall, hat held in both hands in my lap, both feet flat on the Saltillo tile of the foyer. I closed my eyes.
The comfort of a pot of fresh coffee was out in the kitchen, a mere two dozen paces away. Perhaps better yet, my tomb-quiet bedroom was just around a couple of rounded adobe corners. That presented a choice, though, and choices took energy. So I just sat, letting the peace and quiet of the night and my home seep into my tired joints.
That was the worst decision of all, since I promptly dozed off. I started awake and would have sat bolt upright on the bench if I could, but every joint felt as if some sadist were tapping the bone with a sharp-pointed hammer.
I pushed myself away from the wall and squinted at my watch, too tired even to curse my string of bad habits. The watch said 2:55. “The hell with it,” I said to the house, and struggled upright. My feet knew every wrinkle and hump in the tile, and without turning on any lights, I let them shuffle me to the bedroom. As I entered, I could smell the fresh linen. That meant that the day previous had been Wednesday, sure enough, and Jamie, my patient housekeeper, had been hard at work.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, tossed my hat toward the large wingback chair that I knew waited in the corner, swung my feet up and lay back, and prepared to let the cool fragrance play its magic.
That’s all it took to complete the wake-up process. The weights slid off my eyelids and I lay staring at the spot in the darkness where the ceiling should be. As a last effort, I took off my glasses and laid them on the nightstand. All that accomplished was to turn the crisp three-inch numerals of the digital clock into an amorphous red fuzz.
I knew exactly what was going to happen. I’d lie there, wide awake, initially taking some comfort in just stretching out. Eventually, some bone or muscle would twinge, and I’d shift position, beginning the endless flip-flopping that would finish with me rearing out of bed in disgust.
That cycle hadn’t started yet, and I lay still, enjoying the silence. The longer I lay there, the more alert I became. In the narrow confines overhead, between the original dirt roof and the new composition structure added years later, some small animal scuttled back and forth. The beast didn’t have the nimble, delicate toe dance of a mouse but was more determined and draggy. I imagined it to be a skink, and every time the small lizard stopped, I tried to predict his course for the next move. I was wrong half the time.
Over to the left, a cricket announced himself, and I waited for the skink’s course to change in pursuit. The two creatures seemed oblivious of each other.
“Ah, well,” I muttered, and reached out to turn on the light. I found my glasses and swung off the bed, determined that if I couldn’t sleep, at least there were better things to do than listen to a lizard draw trails in the dust.
In her own sweet way, Jamie had left other traces of her weekly visit. The coffeemaker in the kitchen fairly sparkled, and a fresh filter rested in place. I set the machine to doing its job while I showered and shaved.
At 3:45 with a full, steaming mug of coffee in hand, I stepped out of the house into the black velvet of the predawn.
Traffic on the interstate was light, with just a few truckers pounding some night miles into their logbooks. By the time I’d driven north under the exchange and idled into the village proper, even those sounds had faded to a distant hiss of tires and thump of diesel engines. I turned onto MacArthur and let 310 slow to an idle with the headlights off.
I sipped the coffee as I inched along, looking at each house in turn. I knew most of the residents and found it hard to believe that not one of them, on that quiet July night two days before, had heard anything unusual as up at the end of the street the life was crushed out of Jim Sisson.
As I continued around the long, gentle bend that took the street due north toward its intersection with Bustos, I saw the county patrol unit parked two blocks south of Sisson’s place on the opposite side of the street. I let my car roll up behind it, drifting to a stop with just the faintest murmur of tires on curb grit.
I could just make out the silhouette of Deputy Jacqueline Taber’s head, but the streetlight was too far away for more than that. I got out of 310, and even the sound of the door latch was loud.
As I walked along the left rear flank of the Bronco, I saw Taber’s head move ever so slightly, and then an elbow appeared on the doorsill.
“Good morning, sir,” she said.
“Yes, it is.” I looked inside and saw that she had what appeared to be a book or magazine propped up against the steering wheel. The only light inside the vehicle was the single tiny amber power indicator on the police radio, and she wouldn’t have been able to read anything by that even if it were held right up against the page.
“Any activity at all?”
“No, sir. Not for a couple of hours. Not even a stray dog since…” She stopped, then clicked on a small flashlight, with most of the beam blocked by her hand. “About two-oh-five.” Before she snapped the light out, I saw that it had been a sketch pad that she’d been holding. “That was about an hour and forty-five minutes after I parked here, sir. After that, no traffic, no pedestrians, no nothing.”