Dead Weight by Steven F. Havill Read Free Book Online Page A

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