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

beckoned me close and dropped his voice. “Right there.” He played his flashlight under the tire, illuminating what little space remained.
    “What am I looking at?”
    Torrez reached out and touched the smooth concrete of the shop apron with a ballpoint pen. “Rubber marks. From the tire tread. Between these and the marks on the wall, I’m thinking we can backtrack and pretty much tell just what happened.”
    “What happened was that the goddamn tire fell on him and crushed him,” I said. “He was working by himself?”
    “Apparently so.”
    “Jesus,” I muttered, wondering what spat had driven Jim out of the house at that hour to seek the comfort of his machines. “Is Mrs. Sisson inside?”
    “Her and a mob,” Torrez said. “Half the neighborhood, I guess. Tony tried getting a preliminary statement, but it’s rough going. We’re going to have to talk to her after a bit, when things calm down. It’s a zoo in there right now.”
    “I can imagine. Does anyone have a clue about what Jim was trying to do? Was he just trying to change a goddamn tire or work on the brakes or what?”
    Torrez reached out with his boot and touched the front loader’s tire. “This one is flat, so I assume he wanted to work on it. We don’t know for sure. Neither does his wife. She said initially that she was watching television. Jim was out back, working in his shop. According to one of the neighbors, they’d had a rough day. I’ll vouch for that. I was over here three times. Lots of shouting. Tom Mears is working on that angle.”
    “So what else is new,” I grunted. “Where would we all be without nosy neighbors? And Grace said that Jim was alone out here?”
    Torrez hesitated, and I looked up at him. His response wasn’t much more than a whisper. “That’s what she said.”
    “You don’t sound convinced.”
    Torrez reached out and lightly tapped the big tire with the toe of his boot again. “This doesn’t look like a one-man job, sir.”
    I gazed at the two machines. “Stranger things have happened, Robert,” I said. “It’s jury-rigged, that’s for sure. He wanted to lift the tire, so he tried to do it with the backhoe. Something slipped, like where he had the chain hooked, and he got down to work on it. The damn thing nailed him. In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like—one man trying to do something by himself that he shouldn’t have been. And he was in a foul mood to begin with.”
    “You’ll be at the office later?” The way he said it sounded like he’d dismissed my logical scenario.
    I nodded. “I’m just in the way here. Let me know if you need anything.” I indicated the idling tractor. “And you might as well shut that thing down. Make it easier to hear and breathe both.”
    Torrez glanced at his watch. “Dr. Perrone will be here in a minute. Then we’ll clear things up. There’s no hurry.”

Chapter Seven
    Brent Sutherland sat in front of the dispatcher’s console with both elbows on the table and his head supported in his hands. His unruly red hair was about an inch longer than I would have liked, but what the hell. If that was the only concession I had to make as the millennium clicked over, I was lucky.
    Whether Sutherland was reading the
New Mexico Criminal and Traffic Law Manual
that rested open between his elbows or sleeping was hard to tell.
    If the deputy was studying, he certainly had peace and quiet. The persistent exhaling of the building’s circulation system as it moved stale air, summer dust, and range country pollen from one room to the other was all the excitement the Public Safety Building had to offer at 3:15 that morning.
    In four weeks Sutherland would attend the Academy, and until then the weekday graveyard dispatcher’s shift was just the right time and place to whittle away at his inexperience. Once in a while, Bob Torrez assigned Sutherland to double up on patrol with one of the deputies. We didn’t have the manpower to do that often, though, and