The board fence around Sisson’s enclave was six feet high, but I could see the emergency lights winking from two blocks away. A fair-sized crowd of rubberneckers had assembled, all of them standing in the middle of the street gawking toward the Sissons’ property, spectators to an event that everyone in town had known would come one day or another.
Deputy Tony Abeyta, who wasn’t on the duty roster for the evening but had jumped in response to the call anyway, had parked his patrol unit across the Sissons’ driveway, beside a yellow ribbon that stretched from the corner downspout of the house across to the high wooden fence.
One of the village’s part-time patrolmen, Chad Beuler, detached himself from a group of half a dozen gawkers and waved a flashlight at me. Chief Eduardo Martinez hadn’t arrived, but at 9:30 we were well past his bedtime. Beuler, a beanpole with a receding chin who kept twitching his shoulders as if his undershirt was binding his armpits, shook his head in deep frustration as he stepped to the curb and intercepted me.
“We got us a hell of a mess,” he said, and waved the flashlight again. The beam caught me in the eyes, and I lifted a hand to ward it off. “Now you-all just step on back,” he barked toward the gathering of folks on the sidewalk. None of them appeared to be moving in any direction, forward or back, but Beuler liked to make sure. He walked ahead of me toward the ribbon.
He turned to face me, still walking-not a bad feat. If I’d tried it, I’d have been flat on my back. “The undersheriff is in there,” he said, indicating the narrow driveway that ran between a slab of fence and the side of the house. “It’s a hell of a mess.”
“Thank you,” I said, and slipped past, ignoring the four people who tried to talk to me at once.
“And I think a couple of the bigwigs are inside the house,” Beuler called after me.
I walked along the dark side of the house toward the artificial daylight of the well lighted backyard and shop area. As I passed under a frosted window, I could hear voices inside, one of them tight and distraught and trying to piece a sentence together around sobbing gulps of air.
At the back corner of the house, Tom Pasquale’s Bronco was parked bumper-to-bumper with one of Bob Torrez’s personal pickup trucks, a faded red-and-black hulk with two spare tires chained in the back to the ornate iron racks.
I could hear the heavy, clattering idle of a diesel engine, and as I made my way past the vehicles I caught a glimpse of Torrez’s towering bulk as he walked around the back of a large yellow backhoe. In the instant that my attention was diverted, my toe caught something hard, sharp, and immovable, and I stumbled hard, landing on one knee, driving the palm of my left hand into the sharp gravel that covered the driveway.
With a string of colorful curses, I pushed myself to my feet, the shock of the fall hammering my joints and making the lights dance. I stopped, brushed myself off, and took several deep breaths, realizing that I wasn’t looking at just one machine. There were two, the backhoe parked butt-to-butt with a huge front loader, like a beetle backed up against a scorpion. With no breeze, the cloying sweet odor of diesel exhaust hung thick as it chuffed out of the rear tractor’s stack.
“Sir?” Deputy Pasquale appeared from out of nowhere at my elbow.
“What have you got?” I asked. Once out of the tangle of shadows cast by the house and the vehicles I could see just fine, and I snapped my flashlight off and thrust it in my back pocket.
“Over here,” he said, and almost made contact as he reached out toward my elbow. It was a simple-enough gesture of assistance, the sort of thing I’d do if I saw a little old lady startled to a standstill by the sudden rush of the automatic doors at the supermarket.
I stepped around the large yellow bucket of the front loader and stopped short. “Jesus,” I said.
Jim Sisson appeared to have managed one of those incomprehensible accidents that would be difficult for Hollywood stuntmen to reproduce. And like most accidents, it had probably started simple.
The left back tire and wheel had been taken off the disabled front loader, and the machine’s axle was supported by a terrifying collection of wooden blocks and old boards, along with the single hydraulic jack. The tire and wheel were lying several feet away, the cleated tread just inches from the wall of the shop. The backhoe bucket of the second machine was poised overhead, a length of heavy chain hanging from its teeth. Underneath the tire, head scrunched up against the building at an unnatural angle, one leg grotesquely kicked out, was Jim Sisson.
Robert Torrez had been kneeling beside the building, near Sisson’s head, in company with two EMTs. He pushed himself to his feet. “Don’t touch that,” he snapped as Tom Pasquale bent down as if to poke at the huge rubber tire.
The undersheriff stepped gingerly around the machinery and approached me. “It looks like he was lifting the rear wheel off one machine with the backhoe of the other, sir. Somehow the chain slipped. He’s dead, for sure. Skull’s crushed, and his neck must have snapped like a twig.”
“Did you call Linda?”
Torrez nodded. “She’ll be here in a minute.” He beckoned. “So will Perrone,” he added, referring to Posadas County Coroner Alan Perrone. “Step around this way.”
I did, catching a glimpse of a figure in the partially open back door of the house. It was Deputy Abeyta, and he no doubt had his hands full keeping the stream of people from flooding out into the yard. At the same time, I heard a serious of deep, heavy barks. The family dog, eager to leap out into the backyard with the rest of us, tried to shove his broad head between Abeyta’s legs. The deputy reached out and swung the solid back door shut.
I stood with my hands in my pockets, looking at what was left of Jim Sisson. “Christ almighty,” I murmured. “Why the hell don’t you get him out of there?” But a closer look made it clear why there was no frantic activity to free Jim from his predicament. The man’s skull had been pulped.
“If he hadn’t swung it so close to the wall, he might have had a chance,” Torrez said.
The wheel and tire, complete with bolt-on weights for added traction and probably loaded inside with calcium chloride for even more weight, had struck the wall of the shop and then slid down, crushing Sisson in between. His skull had slammed against the corrugated steel of the shop siding until it cracked like an eggshell, and then he’d been pushed downward, his neck bent so that his chin was driven down into the hollow behind his collarbone.
Dark rubber streaks marked the steel siding, tracing the tire’s path as it slid downward. Blood puddled on the cement under Sisson’s head.
“Look here, sir,” Torrez said, and he knelt beside the tire. He beckoned me close and dropped his voice. “Right there.” He played his flashlight under the tire, illuminating what little space remained.
“What am I looking at?”
Torrez reached out and touched the smooth concrete of the shop apron with a ballpoint pen. “Rubber marks. From the tire tread. Between these and the marks on the wall, I’m thinking we can backtrack and pretty much tell just what happened.”
“What happened was that the goddamn tire fell on him and crushed him,” I said. “He was working by himself?”
“Apparently so.”
“Jesus,” I muttered, wondering what spat had driven Jim out of the house at that hour to seek the comfort of his machines. “Is Mrs. Sisson inside?”
“Her and a mob,” Torrez said. “Half the neighborhood, I guess. Tony tried getting a preliminary statement, but it’s rough going. We’re going to have to talk to her after a bit, when things calm down. It’s a zoo in there right now.”
“I can imagine. Does anyone have a clue about what Jim was trying to do? Was he just trying to change a goddamn tire or work on the brakes or what?”
Torrez reached out with his boot and touched the front loader’s tire. “This one is flat, so I assume he wanted to work on it. We don’t know for sure. Neither does his wife. She said initially that she was watching television. Jim was out back, working in his shop. According to one of the neighbors, they’d had a rough day. I’ll vouch for that. I was over here three times. Lots of shouting. Tom Mears is working on that angle.”