I damn near lost it on the curve past Valerio’s Mobile Home Park and for a second I had a vision of the sheriff and me sailing through the old drive-in movie screen. The curve blocked my view of the lights ahead but the radio crackled again.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Torrez’s voice said calmly. “Three ten, he’s comin’ at you.” I made a quick decision and pumped the brakes to pull down to a near stop on the loose gravel.
“You going to block the road?” Holman shouted. His legs were stiff against the firewall. If he pushed any harder he’d break the seatback and end up in the trunk.
“No.” I pulled wide of the road and spun 310 around in the gravel, then lurched to a stop. The headlights of the oncoming vehicle stabbed around the bend and then washed over us. I saw Martin Holman tense, both hands grabbing for the door handle.
I was parked well off the road, though, and the driver would have had to make a deliberate effort to hit us. He’d taken out two or three cars already, I guessed. Bashing 310 would leave the department on foot.
Kenny Trujillo saw that he was being offered an opening and he poured the coals to it. The yellow pickup went by in a cloud of dust and flying gravel. It was too dark to see, but I could imagine the smile of triumph wiped all over his grimy face.
And then County Road 19 managed to do what we couldn’t. I hoped that Anna Hocking was able to look down from her patch of heaven and watch the action. She wouldn’t gloat, of course. She’d been too much of a grand old lady to do that. But she surely would have allowed herself a little twinge of grim satisfaction.
Just about the time the back tires of 310 clawed enough traction to put us in pursuit, Kenny Trujillo overcooked it. The thrill of being offered an open door canceled out any cool-headed judgment he may have had left. We heard the bellow of the pickup’s V-8, and even as I accelerated the patrol car back onto 19, I saw the truck’s one taillight up ahead waltz first one way and then another as the bald tires fought for traction. Trujillo tried to force it around the curve by the drive-in but it didn’t work.
The long, slow slide was almost graceful, marked by the red glow of the taillight as it arced far to the left and then snapped back to the right. The pickup charged across the road, plunged down into the ditch and rocketed back out to re-cross the county road. There wasn’t much on the other side, as Abe Hocking had discovered briefly fifty years before.
My own headlights and the side spot caught a flash of yellow metal as Kenny Trujillo’s pickup truck catapulted off the edge of Arroyo del Cerdo at close to eighty miles an hour. The drop wasn’t spectacular, just enough to ensure that the Ford’s nose would be pointed down at a perfect forty-five degree angle when it hit the sandy arroyo bottom.
I slid 310 to a stop at the lip of the arroyo. If the pickup’s one taillight was still burning, it was dug too far into the sand to see. Martin Holman’s door flew open but I stabbed out an arm and grabbed him before he could leap out of the car.
“Don’t go running down there,” I snapped. Holman looked at me with his eyes as big as saucers. A person’s first eyewitnessed crash is always an attention-getter, even if it’s at night and all you saw was a spectacular light show. After about a dozen, they’re all the same-twisted metal with ugly things inside. “If he isn’t unconscious and still has a gun, you’ll be the one lying dead in the bottom of that arroyo.”
“He’s got to be dead,” Holman stammered.
“No loss,” I said and Holman grimaced. “But I’ve seen ’em walk away from ones much worse than that.” I glanced in the rearview mirror as Bob Torrez idled up behind us, the flashing lights on his car’s roof looking like a carnival ride.
I keyed the mike. “Three zero eight…”
Torrez clicked the mike switch to tell me he was listening.
“Go check on Encinos and Mitchell, and if they’re all right, go arrest the second half. Be careful.”
“Ten four.” The patrol car backed up, turned around and kicked gravel as Torrez headed toward the Paradise View Trailer Park.
I pressed the electric lock that released the shotgun. “Let’s go see,” I said. And then I stopped and looked at Holman. “Do you have anything that shoots?”
Damned if he didn’t blush. “Ah, no.”
I sighed and pulled out my own.357. “Take this.”
It would have been a real chore climbing down into the arroyo in any case, but the loose footing in the deepening December darkness was enough to make me want to wait and talk with Kenny Trujillo’s remains in the morning. I twisted the spotlight so the glare picked up the arroyo’s rim. The pickup truck had caved in the top lip of the sand bank when it plunged over.
I stepped to the edge and swung my flashlight back and forth, looking for the best route down. The choices were slim. I slid down the twenty feet, trying to avoid the cacti still clinging bravely to the arroyo banks. Holman followed, his movements irritatingly effortless and graceful as always.
I reached the bottom of the arroyo and stopped, the wreck’s carcass thirty feet ahead. The only sounds from the pickup truck were gentle pinging sounds as the hot metal cooled. I swept the light across the scrap pile, looking for movement.
A load of junk that had been in the bed of the truck for decades had cascaded past the cab when it landed. Chunks of concrete, a rim for a tractor tire, old tools, a handyman jack…all had sprayed forward, much of it crashing through the truck’s back window.
The frame had buckled as the body of the truck folded and the engine drove off its mounts backward into the cab. The deep gouges in the sandy arroyo bottom indicated that the pickup had pitched end over end twice. It had come to rest upside down in a tangle of bent and rusted metal.
I circled the truck and saw an elbow sticking out through where the windshield had been. The elbow wasn’t moving. With the shotgun and flashlight preceding me, I bent down so I could see into the cab.
The crash had taken the fight out of Kenny Trujillo. He was crammed between the crumpled steering wheel and the dashboard. From the blood smeared on the passenger’s side, I could see that he’d been thrown hard against the right side windshield post and then, as the truck rolled, he’d been pitched back to the left, where the truck had clamped him solidly.
With a grunt I knelt down, reached through the side window, and felt for a pulse. There was a faint one, fluttering and erratic.
Kenny Trujillo’s head was twisted in the small space left between the roof and the dash, his left cheek about where the bottom windshield track used to be. And even while I held his wrist, the pulse flickered, stumbled, and then stopped.
I pulled away and stood up. “What do you think?” Holman asked. He didn’t want to step too close.
“I think he’s dead,” I said. I started back toward the arroyo bank.
“What about him?” Holman called after me.
“He’ll keep.” The struggle up the bank cost me dearly, and for a long moment I had to sit in the patrol car until the black spots stopped dancing before my eyes and my pulse returned to normal.
By then Martin Holman, not even breathing hard, was in the car.
“You want me to call for the coroner and the wrecker?” he asked, ever helpful.
I took a deep breath. “Yeah, go ahead.” I listened to him talk to the dispatcher. I don’t know why I was surprised that the sheriff was doing a decent job. It gave me a minute to think. I wanted nothing more than to charge down the road and assist Bob Torrez and the others, but someone needed to stay with the wrecked truck. I had just the man.
When he was finished, I jerked a thumb toward the mess down in the arroyo. “Will you stay here until I can break someone else free?”
“Well, sure,” Holman said. He started to open the door and hesitated, looking uncertain. “Well sure,” he said again as if he had convinced himself. I left him there, standing in the dark with a flashlight and my.357 for company.