Dead Weight Read Online Free

enough Spanish to make yourself understood beyond
‘I’ll have a burrito.’”
    “That’s cruel,” I said.
    “I can just see you, standing out in the dark, negotiating with a vanload of Mexican nationals,” Gray said.
    “I don’t see Tom Pasquale doing that, either,” I retorted. “But they claim documentation. Either they have it, or they don’t. If they have it, why the hell not come forward with it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You trust me with this?” I picked up the note. What I really felt like doing was crumpling it up and sticking it in the Don Juan’s trash with all the uneaten refried beans and rice.
    “Of course.”
    “Did you make yourself a copy?”
    Arnold Gray gave me a look as if I’d stuck a fork in the back of his hand. He didn’t dignify the question with an answer, and I moved his name even farther up the list to
“favorite people”
status.

Chapter Three
    Dr. Arnold Gray dropped me back at the modest flat-roofed two-story structure that Posadas grandly called its Public Safety Building. As I walked inside, a trash can by the pay phone reminded me that my first inclination, to tear the anonymous note into shreds before it could do any damage, was probably a good one. The whole idea of someone sanctimoniously tapping out a little message that could ruin either a career or a life made my stomach churn.
    But I wasn’t naive, either. In a department with a dozen employees, there was always an off-chance that one of them wasn’t as pure as the driven snow.
    When I walked in, Gayle Torrez glanced up from her desk. Hell, I’d known her since she was a skinny twelve-year-old. She’d started working for the Sheriff’s Department when she was eighteen, had been with us for a decade, and was now married to Undersheriff Robert Torrez. If the note rang true, was she in on the scam? Was he?
    I dropped the white envelope in my center desk drawer and slammed it shut until I could figure out what to do about the damn thing. After taking a minute to straighten my face so the anger wouldn’t show, I strolled out to Dispatch. Gayle was on the phone, the pencil in her right hand doodling little spirals on the scratch pad. Every once in a while, she’d stop spiraling and the pencil point would tap a few times on the pad as she listened.
    “Sure,” she said. I leaned against one of the black filing cabinets and waited. The pencil tapped another series. “Sure.” She nodded. “I know it does.” I took a deep breath and looked off into the distance. “Let me pass it on to the village for you. Maybe they’ll listen to me.” Gayle sat patiently through another long string and nodded as if the nod were carried over the wires. After a few more noncommittal pleasantries, she hung up.
    “Another dog,” she said, jotting in the big logbook by her elbow. “You’d think it would be too hot to bark.” She looked up at me. “What’s wrong, sir?”
    “Wrong?” I asked.
    “You looked peeved,” Gayle said.
    “The damn car, I suppose,” I replied, and she accepted that with an understanding nod. I pushed myself away from the filing cabinet. “I need the dispatch logs for last month.”
    “Just June’s?” She reached across to the steel bookcase under the window and pulled a slender black volume off the shelf. I took it and started back to my office.
    “No calls for a while, all right? And when Bob comes in, I’d like to chat with him.”
    “He’s home right now if you need him,” Gayle said.
    “No,” I answered quickly and shook my head. “Just whenever he comes in this afternoon is fine.” Gayle didn’t ask what I wanted with the dispatch logs, my privacy, or her husband, and I felt better. Gayle Torrez worked hard at being the best dispatcher I’d ever met, making her a perfect match for her husband. Undersheriff Torrez worked the four-to-midnight shift, as well as twenty or thirty other odd hours during an average week. He avoided the boredom of working the day shift whenever