Suddenly aware that he was being paced by a county car, the priest touched his brakes. One of the brake lights managed a faint flare, and Estelle pulled out and passed him. In the wink of time when their eyes met, Anselmo’s expression was guarded. Estelle wondered where the priest had gone after leaving the church, and then felt a pang of regret that his movements might become her business.
In another few miles, as she approached the little ghost town of Moore just beyond the Rio Salinas bridge, she saw flashing lights. Sure enough, the magazine writer’s red Buick LaCrosse was pulled off the road, snared by one of the state troopers who liked to park behind the remains of Moore Mercantile, a tumbled-down reminder of half a century ago that now afforded an open radar shot in either direction.
“Oops,” Estelle said. The trooper was standing on the passenger side of the Buick, bent down so he could see inside. He heard her county car approaching, itself rocketing along well over the speed limit, and looked up. He was smiling broadly, and Estelle wondered what Madelyn Bolles had used as an excuse.
Chapter Twenty
“The magazine writer is in town,” Estelle said, and when Sheriff Bob Torrez looked at her blandly as if to say, So what? added, “She may want to talk to you at some point.”
“People in hell want ice water, too,” the sheriff said affably.
“She followed me in from Regál. We’re going to meet here after a bit.”
Torrez shifted so that he could stretch out both legs past his desk, and Estelle nudged the door closed and then pulled one of the metal folding chairs out of the corner. The sheriff’s office was long on function and short on amenities or color. He never spoke of the two years he’d spent in the army decades before, but apparently he’d been impressed with the use of drab as a foundation style.
He opened his desk drawer and took out the same pistol that she had showed Bill Gastner, reached across the desk, and laid it directly in front of Estelle. “I did some studying,” Torrez said cryptically, as if that explained everything. She reached out and hefted Deputy Dennis Collins’ department sidearm. The slide was locked back, with an empty magazine in place.
“These have inertia firing pins,” Torrez said after a moment. “Could be, if that gun is loaded, cocked, and locked, it could fire if it falls and hits the muzzle just right.”
“Except it fell against the truck, back sight first,” Estelle said. “And not very hard, at that.”
“I know it did. I’m just sayin’. If that don’t happen, it means that either something else was wrong with the gun or it was cocked, locked, and his finger pulled the trigger when he grabbed onto it.”
“That’s most likely,” she agreed.
Torrez leaned forward and folded his hands on his desk. “Not that it matters a whole hell of a lot,” and then he sat back abruptly as if he’d caught himself talking too much.
Estelle laid Dennis Collins’ gun back on the sheriff’s desk. “I suspect that you could pick any gun, made by anybody anywhere in the world, and if you worked hard enough, you could invent a circumstance where it might go off unintentionally.”
Torrez nodded once. “And if you take any gun and pull the trigger, it’s going to go off…unless there’s something wrong with it or the ammo. Collins was too quick gettin’ it out of the holster, then he fumbled it, and then he flat ran out of luck.”
“I think that’s exactly what happened,” Estelle said.
“We got to make sure that the fumble don’t happen again.”
“Any word yet from the boy’s father? He impressed me as the sort who won’t let go. My impression was that he thinks he can lay the blame for this whole mess right on the deputy’s head.”
“Don’t care about him,” Torrez snapped. “He’s all mouth. He can do what he wants. If he wants to sue us, let ’im. I could give a shit. I’ve been thinkin’ about what we need to do.” What he said next surprised Estelle. “I think Collins is a good, solid kid. I don’t plan to just throw him away.”
“Do you want suggestions and input, or have you already decided?” Estelle said, and she saw the sheriff’s left eyebrow edge up a little.
“You can input all you want,” he said, and held up both hands, waiting.
“Well, first of all, we need to take a long, hard look at our own training and qualification program,” Estelle said. “Dennis went through the academy last summer, and then he had to qualify here. I don’t think he’s a shooter in his leisure time, and I’m willing to bet that before the other night, he hadn’t actually fired a box of ammo through this pistol since he had to go through the department’s qualification…and when was that, October?”
“Well, he’s going to start,” Torrez said. He pointed at the filing cabinet across the room. Resting on top of it was a stack of heavy paper nearly six inches high. “That’s a thousand targets,” he said. “It’s all we had in the vault, and that’s what he shoots before he goes back on duty. Each target is a full magazine, starting with the gun holstered. Draw against the clock. He’s going to shoot at three, seven, and fifteen yards, and three hundred rounds or whatever it works out to be for each distance.” He rose carefully, as if his bones were fragile, and edged around the desk. He slid one of the targets out of the plastic pack. “He puts the date here, the time, the score, and one of us initials it.”
“That’s an ambitious program,” Estelle said, both impressed and relieved that Torrez hadn’t taken the simple route and told Dennis Collins to go sell real estate.
“Yep. And by the time he’s done, maybe he won’t drop the damn gun again. He’ll be able to draw and fire in his sleep. He’ll be a damn Sundance Kid.”
“He needs someone with him for the first few go-arounds to make sure he doesn’t have any dangerous habits. You’ll do that?”
“Could. Me or Eddie or you. But I was thinkin’ of asking Bill to do it. What the hell, that old gunny ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”
“He might just like that.”
“Anybody else wants to go along and do the same thing, they can,” the sheriff said. “We’re requalifyin’,” and he paused while he leaned forward to examine the calendar on the wall beside the filing cabinet, “on August second. Everybody. That gives us two and a half months to do what we gotta do to be ready.”
“And this is everyone?”
“Every single everyone,” Torrez said emphatically. “Includin’ me.” He turned and frowned at Estelle. “And that’s includin’ you. And Eddie. And everyone.”
“That’s ambitious,” she said. “Changes in the scoring?” The actual scores needed for police qualifying had always impressed Estelle as abysmal, and cheating the system wasn’t unusual, either. She was aware of the standard, budget-saving arguments. Cops were required to make correct decisions that sometimes-although rarely in these far-flung rural areas-required that their weapon be drawn.
But cops weren’t required to shoot out a gnat’s eye at fifty paces with a handgun. They didn’t need to. That’s what shotguns or sniper rifles were for. Hitting center mass on a man-sized target at seven yards didn’t require the skills of an exhibition shooter. And, she reflected ruefully, an entirely different set of skills was required if the “man-sized target” was shooting back or flailing with a butcher knife. It was almost entirely mind-set, not gun-set.
Torrez smiled, an expression that Estelle thought the sheriff should do more often. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “There’s changes in the scoring. I’ll post ’em as soon as I talk to some folks. A whole lot higher scores this time around.” He rested back in the chair and changed subjects as effortlessly as a breeze shifted. “What the hell was Marsh up to?”
Estelle took a moment to organize her thoughts. “I talked with Betty, and then visited with Joe Baca and Serafina Roybal. It appears that Chris Marsh was delivering checks from a Canadian sweepstakes.”