Dead Weight Read Online Free PDF Page A

night, listening and watching. If I was really lucky, I wouldn’t find a damn thing.
    I backed out carefully, made sure the garage door lowered solidly into place, and turned out on Escondido, past the trailer park by the interstate and then northbound on Grande. I hadn’t driven more than four blocks before I saw the white-and-blue Posadas County patrol car coming in the opposite direction.
    It flashed by, already well over the posted speed limit. Undersheriff Robert Torrez was behind the wheel, and he glanced my way at the same time the radio in the Blazer barked twice. I lifted a hand in salute, wondering why I had been expecting that it would be Deputy Thomas Pasquale, heading south toward State 56.
    The Don Juan was quiet, and I slid into my favorite booth, the one whose window looked out across the parking lot toward the San Cristobals to the southwest. The blinds were turned to ward off the evening sun, and I could feel the heat through the glass. Bustos Avenue stretched flat and hot east-west, bordering the restaurant’s parking lot. Traffic was light.
    I picked at my food, my irritation growing by the minute. I had time to dig my way through about a third of the Burrito Grande when my privacy vanished as Sam Carter appeared around the service island.
    “Damn, he was right,” he said, and advanced until he was staring down at my burrito plate.
    “Hello, Sam. Who was right?”
    “Your dispatcher. Ernie Wheeler. He said odds were good that you’d be here.”
    “And sure enough,” I said. “Pull up a chair.”
    He slid into the booth, hands clasped in front of him, just like Dr. Arnold Gray a few hours earlier. It wasn’t yet six, and Carter’s Family SuperMarket hadn’t closed for the day. I was surprised to see Sam out and about, mingling with the public. He ducked his head, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing, and glanced back the way he’d come.
    “You being followed?” I said, but he didn’t take it as the joke I’d intended. His eyes widened for just a second, and he leaned forward. The waitress appeared by the service cart, hand reaching for the coffeepot. I caught her eye and shook my head. She nodded and vanished.
    “What’s the problem, Sam?” I said. “Two county commissioners in one day in this same booth…that’s something of a record for me.”
    Sam Carter’s narrow face crumpled up in a grimace, as if he was genuinely sorry to have to talk to me in public…or in private, either, for that matter.
    “Somebody sent me an anonymous letter,” he blurted out, and his hand darted for the inside pocket of his limp blue seersucker jacket.
    With anyone else, I could have made a wisecrack about the man cheating on his wife or not paying mounting gambling debts or something of the sort. But Sam Carter’s life was a mess, and both he and I knew it. His senior cashier had filed a complaint against him a couple of months before, charging him with making obscene phone calls to her home after she’d refused his amorous advances at the store.
    I knew the woman and somehow found it hard to imagine the weasel-thin Sam Carter, semibalding, with a mouthful of perfect false teeth, bending the stout, frizzy-haired matron backward over the sour cream display while he attempted a quick, passionate smooch.
    Taffy Hines had complained and even been brassy enough to sign her name. Estelle Reyes-Guzman, my chief of detectives at the time, and I had talked to old Sam and pointed out to him the error of his ways…and made it clear to him what a field day the
Posadas Register
would have if the story ever went public—which it would do if he didn’t button his mental trousers.
    As far as I knew, he’d behaved himself since then, but our relationship had turned a touch chilly. When the previous sheriff had died in a plane crash, Carter had talked me into taking the post until after elections—but that was not because of any love for me on his part. Next in line was Estelle Reyes-Guzman, and the county