“Thanks again for your help.”
As Estelle walked back to her car, she saw that the sheriff and Bernie Pollis had the hood of the Chevy open and were bent over the engine. Linda Real joined them, and Estelle saw the flash of the photographer’s camera light up the engine compartment. Estelle dug out her cell phone, pushed the auto-dial, and waited for two rings before the connection went through.
“Gastner.”
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Estelle said. She glanced in the rearview mirror at the youngster in the backseat, behind the security grill that separated front from back.
Gastner chuckled. “I’ve never fallen asleep as long as a green chile burrito is spread out in front of me. I’m still over here.” He didn’t explain where “here” was, but Estelle knew, to the exact booth, where he was sitting in the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant. “You hungry?”
“No thanks. You’re closing the place down?” They were well past the 2:00 a.m. closing time for the Don Juan.
“Fernando and I were solving all the world’s problems.” Bill Gastner and Fernando Aragon, the longtime owner of the Don Juan, were perfectly capable of sitting and eating the night away-two insomniacs with the best restaurant in town right in the family.
“If you have a minute when you finish dessert, would you swing by my office?”
“Of course I would. But good God, you should be home by now, sweetheart.”
“Sin duda. But we had a nasty little incident.”
“Who?”
“Nobody hurt. I’ll tell you about it when you come over. I’m ten-fifteen, one juvenile.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t know what an old dumb guy like me can tell you, sweetheart. Especially about the younger generation.”
“A second opinion, is all,” Estelle said.
“Well, hell, I’m all opinions, as you well know. Give me ten?”
“That’s fine. No rush, sir.”
“Not in this lifetime,” he said. “But I’m down to the last morsel.”
“Thanks, padrino.” She switched off the phone just in time to swing the car into the Public Safety Building’s parking lot. Pasquale had parked his SUV directly in front of the side door where they moved prisoners back and forth to the small booking room.
Everyone was inside, including Dennis Collins, whose nicked SUV was pulled in behind the fuel pumps, parked beside a damaged county pickup truck that had languished there for three weeks awaiting parts.
The last of the undersheriff’s worries was a damaged truck. She sat quietly for a moment, mentally putting things in order on her list of priorities before escorting the youngster inside.
Perfect timing, she mused. Although she liked to think that she didn’t care what the media said or did not say, she drew a sigh of relief that the writer from the national magazine hadn’t arrived a day early. The whole mess made her insides ache.
Chapter Eight
“May I?” Bill Gastner extended his hand and Estelle passed over the.45 automatic that had been holstered on Deputy Collins’ hip…and that had then taken an excursion through space. Gastner laid the gun in his lap and took off his glasses, inspecting the lenses carefully. He wiped away a small spot on the sleeve of his shirt, then replaced the spectacles with care.
The slide was racked back on the handgun, but the empty magazine was in place. Gastner thumbed the release and let the magazine slide into his hand, then laid it on the desk.
“I lived with one of these for a long time,” he said thoughtfully. “A very interesting, very old design.” He turned the gun this way and that, as if admiring it just before a purchase. “Collins fumbled it somehow? Is that the story?”
“He says that he drew the gun as he slid out of his truck, and then when he saw that there was no particular threat, maybe seeing that it was just a beer bottle that hit his truck and not a bullet, he went to reholster it. That’s when he fumbled it. The gun hit the truck-we have a chip in the Expedition’s paint, and there was a tiny speck of paint residue on the back sight.”
Gastner held the gun in two hands and rotated it, imitating its flight toward the truck’s fender. “And then he managed to grab it.”
“Apparently. After it bounced off the fender.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“Well, I’m not, really. We do that all the time, after all. We drop something, and make a grab for it. Sometimes the catches are spectacular, sometimes we don’t even come close.”
“We just don’t do it too often with a loaded and cocked gun,” Gastner said. “Still,” and he took a deep breath, “the gun didn’t go off when it struck the truck.” He turned the gun so Estelle could see the chamber clearly. “Nothing to feed it, nothing in its mouth,” he said, and waited until she nodded. Then he thumbed the slide release, and the slide shot forward with a metallic clang, closing the gun, leaving the hammer cocked. He bent over with a grunt, and whacked the butt of the cocked automatic on the floor, then did it again. The hammer remained cocked. He straightened up, turned the gun over, and tapped the hammer spur itself sharply on the metal edge of Estelle’s desk.
“Solid as a rock,” he said. “See, there’s just an infinitesimal chance that this gun is going to discharge when dropped.” Gastner turned the gun, holding it by the barrel. “It’s not like the old Colt single actions, where the only thing holding that hammer back was a thin little sliver of trigger steel. Drop that sucker on its hammer, and boom. But not this one. You have to be holding it so that the grip safety is depressed.” He pushed that broad, contoured safety on the back of the handle that a shooter’s grip on the gun would activate. “Unless he’s holding it properly, this prevents a discharge. Supposed to, anyway.”
He thumbed on the hammer safety on the side of the broad, flat slide. “You probably know all this better than I do,” he added, then charged ahead. “And if he’s carrying it with the hammer back, ready to go, he has to depress the thumb safety-if he remembered to click it on in the first place the last time the gun was holstered.”
Gastner snapped the safety up and down, and Estelle sat silently, watching him. “Ehhhh,” he said, and snapped the safety some more. “That’s a little softer than it should be,” he said finally. “Let me see his rig. You got it here?”
“Sure,” Estelle replied. She retrieved the deputy’s belt and holster from the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and handed it to Gastner.
For several minutes, he manipulated the gun and holster, then sat back with a shrug. “It’s conceivable that the thumb safety worked its way out of position against the leather of the holster,” he said. “Especially sitting in a vehicle, with the added nuisance of a shoulder belt.”
He held up the gun. “I think…you might want to have Robert look at it…but I think this thumb safety is a little softer than it should be. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that over time it worked its way down, into the ‘off’ position. When Collins grabbed the gun, he made one mistake.” Gastner held the gun up and his trigger finger lay along the frame, outside of the trigger guard, well away from the trigger. “Instead of having his finger like so, he curled it into the trigger guard…on the trigger. If the thumb safety had rotated down, guess what.”
Estelle didn’t see his finger move, but the hammer fell with a sharp snap. “Just like that.”
“Exactly, just like that.” He reached out and laid the gun on Estelle’s desk. “That doesn’t excuse the a.d.,” he said. “No matter what the gun did or didn’t do, his finger had to be on the trigger. Period. End of story. We could argue physics working against us if the gun had hit nose first, and firing pin inertia was involved. Blah, blah, blah,” and he waved his hand in dismissal. “But that didn’t happen.”
“Mitigating circumstances,” Estelle said, and Gastner laughed.
“Mitigate, schmitigate,” he said. “If his finger hadn’t been on the trigger, the gun wouldn’t have discharged, sweetheart. I’m not saying it’s impossible. Just very, very unlikely.”