Come Dark (5 page)

“You could have taken this whole trip with a temp tag. And the dealer would have given you one of those.”

“Well, yeah, we could have. But they're an attractive nuisance, if you know what I mean. They attract attention.” He looked hopeful. “It's just a hang-up of mine, Sheriff. I never liked those paper permits taped in the back window.” He tried to snuff his nose, the bleeding now all but stopped, on the shoulder of his shirt. “I mean, you know, it's a sign. Like ‘Hey, look at me. I just got a new car!'”

“Hey, look at you,” Torrez repeated. “And so…” He eyed the man for a long moment. “What did you think you were going to do with the pellet gun?”

“I…” He gave up and shrugged hopelessly.

“Yep. Not much thinkin' going on there. You're lucky I didn't just shoot your silly ass.” He spun Swartzman-Bond around, opened the Fusion's back door, and guided the man inside. “Don't bleed all over the inside of the new car. Owner wouldn't like that much.”

“But my wife…”

“She's fine.” With both of the strange couple secure but separated, Torrez slammed the Fusion's door and glowered in mock-irritation at Pasquale.

“You find some of the strangest people, Thomas,” he said. “And just as soon as we get another unit over here, we'll get him out of the car so he don't pass out.” He paused. “You been keepin' your eyes open for Stewart?”

“Yes, sir.” The Volvo sat untended, roasting in the sun.

Chapter Six

“It
is
a pellet gun,” Tom Pasquale said. He had secured the weapon from the Fusion's center console and held it up, a large black revolver made to look like a Smith & Wesson. He deftly pulled open the piston lever that projected from the bottom of the grips. “No gas cylinder. It wasn't going to do him much good this way.” From a distance, the gun looked remarkably realistic, and Pasquale looked at the sheriff with surprise. “Good call, sir. I wonder what he was planning to do with it? Use it as a hammer?”

Torrez shrugged. “Maybe he's gettin' tired of livin'.”

“He thought about it, you know. I mean,
doing
something stupid with it. I was watching his face.”

“Yep.” Torrez snagged the keys off the roof of the car, walked around and unlocked the trunk, easing the lid up. He held onto it as he surveyed the contents, then tugged aside the corner of a homey-looking quilt, revealing three neat cardboard boxes, the lidded sort that originally had held ten reams of printer paper.

“Okay, then. Placin' bets?”

“Not with his mental equipment.” The box lids were taped, and Torrez flicked open his razor knife and deftly slit the seal. With a finger on each end, he lifted the lid straight up.

“Huh.”

For a moment, both men were silent. Some amorphous instrumental rendition of a decades-old Jefferson Airplane hit wafted out from the store.

“Who you got comin'?” Torrez asked.

“Taber is on the way, and dispatch was going to try and find Captain Adams. Estelle will be tied up at the hospital until Stacie shows up. Or CYF takes over.”

“Good enough. I think Adams went fishing up in Chama, though.”

As careful as if the cardboard box top were thin crystal, Torrez leaned it to one side, out of the way. The packets, sealed tightly in some sort of white, waxy paper, filled the box in neat rows, sixteen packets to a layer. Torrez tilted his head.

“Sixteen up, maybe four layers, so sixty-four bricks to a box, times three. That ain't bad.”

He slipped his knife out, snapped the blade open, and used it to gently pry one of the packets loose. “Ain't no kilo.”

“This is the economy, pocket-sized sample,” Pasquale said.

“Of what?” Bob Torrez held out the little brick to his deputy, who accepted it and turned it this way and that. He held it close to his nose and inhaled deeply, looking puzzled. Nothing he had sampled or sniffed or chewed in his recent State Police seminar on illegal drugs shared this aroma.

“Don't look much like any joint
you
ever toked,” the sheriff said.

Pasquale grinned. “Been too long, sir.”

Sergeant Jackie Taber drove into the parking lot, taking the long way around the outside perimeter until she parked her black SUV behind Bob Torrez' old Chevy. She saw Pasquale lift a small white packet and hold it to his nose for a long, careful inhale, eyes closed like a wine-taster.

She took her time making sure dispatch understood where virtually the whole day shift was, got out and locked her unit, and then strolled along the side of Pasquale's SUV, looking inside at LeeAnn Swartzman-Bond. The young woman cowered.

In high school back in Detroit, Jackie Taber had been known as “Stump,” a not-particularly-kind but dead-on accurate nickname prompted by her five-seven frame that carried one hundred eighty pounds—actually very little of it fat.

If anyone in the Sheriff's Department called her by her old nickname, it wasn't to her face. Retired from the Marines, Taber kept the brim of her Stetson the proper rake back from the bridge of her nose, and she folded her dark glasses and slid them into her pocket as she regarded first LeeAnn and then her husband in the Fusion. After a moment, she rounded the front of the old Expedition and reached out a hand to Tom Pasquale's right shoulder.

“So tell me.” The lips moved, but if there was a voice, it hadn't yet amped up to a whisper.

“Bogus plate, no registration, Elvis costume, traveling under the alias of Swartzman but the driver's license says Bond. I got curious, but then we got caught up in the thing with Stacie Stewart leaving her kid and dog in the car. We nabbed these two as they came out of the store and got to the Fusion there.”

“Nabbed.” A smile hinted at the corners of Taber's mouth. “Well, you don't have much of a case, Thomas. Out of the whole list, only a bad Elvis impersonation is illegal.” When his face went blank, she quickly added, “So what's that?”

Pasquale held out the opened packet to the sergeant. Even as she unwrapped it a little further, they heard a holler and then several thumps from inside the Fusion. Taber stepped around the car and ducked a little so she could glare at Swartzman, who, handcuffed securely, had been using his skull to drum on the window.

“Just relax, Elvis,” Taber snapped, suddenly with plenty of threatening volume. She turned back to the sheriff. “What do you think, sir?”

Torrez had been head-down in the Fusion's trunk, probing corners, shuffling things around and lifting the corner of the mat. He straightened up.

“Alfalfa.” The one-word pronouncement brought another smile to the sergeant's face. She rearranged the end of the plant “plug” with the tip of a pencil, examined it closely, sniffed it.

“Best not to taste it,” Pasquale observed.

“Might be poison ivy?” She handed it back to the sheriff. “I think you're right, sir. But it's a pretty labor-intensive, expensive way to ship horse feed.”

“So…” Pasquale said.

“So it's illegal to possess drugs, or possess with intent to distribute drugs, whether they're real or not. All kinds of trash gets passed off as the real thing.”

“Maybe they're just usin' 'em for taste treats when they go to the horse track or something like that,” Pasquale offered.

“Something like that,” the sheriff said dryly. “Gives us an excuse to hold 'em for a little bit, anyway.” Torrez placed the top back on the box. “Read 'em, then book 'em on possession and intent to distribute and auto theft,” he said. “When you're talkin' to 'em, keep 'em separate and make sure the recorder works.” He slammed the trunk lid down. “Call Stubby and have the car taken to impound. We might want to look at it again.” He started to turn away. “Oh, and process the pellet gun into evidence, along with the horse feed. Are there personal possessions we need to lock up? What'd she have on her? Anything?”

“I…well, two small bags of groceries. They're in the backseat. And the two small suitcases in the trunk.”

“You searched her?” Taber asked.

“No, ma'am. I thought that should best wait for you or the undersheriff. She's cuffed, but I didn't search her.” That earned a sideways glance of disapproval from Sheriff Torrez, who certainly saw no point in being so politically correct, or at the very least, gender-careful.

“Then let's do that.”

Sergeant Taber walked around to the passenger side of Pasquale's Expedition and opened the rear door, holding on to it with her right hand as she faced LeeAnn Swartzman-Bond. Pasquale looped around and positioned himself on Taber's left. “Step out of the vehicle, ma'am.” Jackie stepped back half a pace to give the woman a small amount of room to maneuver, an awkward task with hands cuffed behind her back. Pasquale stood poised to assist, mindful that the tall step down to the ground gave many passengers trouble—whether inebriated or just plain clumsy.

LeeAnn leaned forward until her head was practically touching the security screen, and contorted her arms, leaning hard to the left. Before the deputies knew it was even there, the little chrome-plated automatic fired one round, incredibly loud within the confines of the SUV. The .25 caliber bullet struck Taber's heavy leather boot with a glancing blow, then dug into the hot, soft asphalt. The tiny gun promptly jammed, but Pasquale was already in motion. Actually closer to LeeAnn than his sergeant, Pasquale clamped his left hand around the woman's thin neck and forced her hard forward. With a viselike grip that locked the automatic's jammed slide open, he twisted the pistol out of her hand, hearing the little “pop” as her right index finger, still locked in the trigger guard, gave up a joint. LeeAnn screamed.

Pasquale handed the little gun to Torrez, who had leaped around the vehicle toward them at the sound of the gunshot. Then, with one hand on the woman's neck and the other clamped on the cuffs, the deputy eased her out of the Expedition.

“You broke my hand!” she wailed. “Howard, you can't let them…”

“Howard ain't goin' nowhere,” Torrez said. “You okay, Sarge?”

Taber glanced down at her boot. The tiny bullet had raked an inch-long scuff along the leather just above the heavy black sole, hardly breaking the polish. “Nothing,” she said.

Pasquale moved LeeAnn Swartzman-Bond until he could flatten her against the side of the truck. With the motion, she screamed again. Torrez, his phone already against his ear, lowered it for a moment and glowered at the small crowd of friendly shoppers who had gathered to watch the show.

“You all can leave now,” he snapped. “It's all over.” He turned his back and said to dispatch, “I need that ambulance back here at The Spree
.
Got a shopper with a broken finger.” He didn't bother to await dispatcher Esperanza's response, but snapped the phone closed.

“Let me look.” Taber lifted both of LeeAnn's hands a bit, prompting another scream.

“You broke it!”

“Looks like it.” Sure enough, the second joint of LeeAnn's index finger had been modified so that the finger skewed off to the left. “We'll have you fixed up here in a minute, ma'am. Just stand still.”

That was hard for the woman to do, wanting nothing more than to dance in painful circles, clutching her injured digit. Replacing Tom Pasquale's grip with her own, Taber pegged LeeAnn against the Expedition and did a quick search.

The pistol had nestled in a thin chamois holster at the small of the back under the tail of the woman's blouse, in the soft recess around her left kidney.

“I should have seen that when I put on the cuffs,” Pasquale remarked.

“Yup,” Torrez agreed. He watched as Taber continued her search from head to toe. “Well, well, well,” the sergeant said, and once more the sound of hook and loop announced modifications. Keeping the tail of the blouse discreetly low, she peeled off the waist belt, and LeeAnn immediately shed twenty pounds of belly fat.

She managed a weak cry, tears now abundant.

“Is this yours?” Jackie ran a hand up the woman's neck and fingered a handful of long, black locks.

“No,” LeeAnn moaned.

“How about it, then?” Jackie eased off the wig, leaving behind a natural head of cinnamon-colored hair cut short. “That looks better, anyway,” the sergeant said, ruffling the top of LeeAnn's head as if she were a child. “Makes you look twenty years younger.”

She glanced at Pasquale. “Don't do it until she's in the ambulance, but as soon as she's off this hot pavement, make sure the shoes come off. Clunky as they are, she could hide just about anything inside 'em.” She pulled LeeAnn away from the vehicle. “Let's put her in my unit until the ambulance gets here. You behave yourself,” she said to LeeAnn, “and we'll put the cuffs around front. Be easier for you. Maybe hurt less.” She waited, watching the woman snuffle. When she didn't answer, Jackie added, “Are we going to wrestle again?”

“No.” The voice was tiny, the lower lip dancing with pain.

“And when I loosen the cuffs,
don't
touch your finger. I know, you're going to want to grab it with your other hand. You'll wish you hadn't. Okay?” The sergeant's tone was soft, even sympathetic, and LeeAnn glanced at her gratefully.

“Yes.”

Deftly, Jackie unlocked one side of the cuffs, and keeping hold of the injured right hand, swung the left around to be re-shackled in front of LeeAnn's now flat waist.

“Oh, it's sooooo broken,” LeeAnn wailed.

“Yes, ma'am, it is. Things could be worse. The deputy could have shot you.”

That set off another cascade of tears. Her wail almost matched that of the incoming ambulance.

“Take a picture of the bullet scar in the asphalt, and the scuff on your boot,” Sheriff Torrez reminded her. Pasquale had anticipated that, and chalked a circle around the imperfection in the hot asphalt.

“Bullet's still stuck in tar,” he said. “I can see the heel of it.”

“Then, there you go.” Torrez nodded, then sighed. “That's a lock.” He turned in place, gazing around the parking lot as Pasquale transferred Swartzman-Bond from the Fusion to the Expedition. Torrez nodded across the parking lot toward the now-empty blue Volvo. “So where's Skippy?”

“In Mexico by now,” Pasquale offered.

The EMT unit idled in, the same two attendants who had responded to the roasting child and pooch.

“You folks having just a real good time?” Mattie Finnegan helped her assistant Burt Cosgrove roll the gurney out of the back and snap its folding legs down. She beckoned at LeeAnn Swartzman, the sheet-white face, tears, and grotesquely bent finger sure signs of distress. The woman wavered on her feet, ready to collapse, Sergeant Taber providing support.

“Sit, you.” Matty patted the gurney. “Before you fall down.” As LeeAnn did so, Matty caught her right wrist, holding it firmly. LeeAnn whimpered.

“My goodness. Okay, let's stabilize this with an air splint,” she said to Cosgrove. “Gentle air splint. Sheriff, I need the cuffs off.”

“Nope.”

“Nope,” Matty grunted a fair imitation of the taciturn sheriff, not the least bit intimidated by his size or glower. “Look, turn the right one loose, and latch the left to the gurney, if you have to. That way, if she escapes, she'll be easy to find.” She raised her voice an octave to imitate a mind-blown shopper. “
Look at the girl dragging that bed through the parking lot!
”