Dead Weight by Steven F. Havill

I was them, I’d give me the damn thing, too. And speaking of all that, you didn’t lose any time, either, Frank.”
    “True enough. I hope that my motives are different, though.”
    I turned 310 onto the broad shoulder in front of the Moore Mercantile hulk and snapped on the spotlight.
    “What are you looking for?”
    “We just check,” I said. “See that old stone building back there? It used to be a party spot. Sometimes folks from south of the border stop there, too. You never know.” I looked over at him as I snapped off the spotlight. “We just check. That’s what we do. We look a lot.”
    We pulled back out on the road and headed south.
    “Tell me about Jim Sisson,” Frank said.
    “What’s there to tell? You’ve heard the basics already. He was working on a big old front loader and had one of the back tires held up by a chain from another tractor. The chain slipped and the wheel and tire crushed him against the wall of his shop. That’s it.” I glanced over at Dayan. “As the papers are fond of saying, ‘he is survived by his widow, Grace, and six children.’”
    “It was an accident?”
    I hesitated only a fraction of a second, but that was long enough to tell Frank Dayan what he wanted to know. There was no point in being coy.
    “Don’t know,” I muttered, thinking back to the photos Linda Real had taken.
    “I saw the yellow ribbon across the Sissons’ driveway, with the undersheriff’s truck parked there.”
    “Yes.”
    “If it were a simple accident, I don’t see much point in protecting the scene by having the undersheriff sit there all night.”
    I fell silent for a moment, not bothering to tell Dayan that I didn’t have a clue about why my undersheriff was spending the night keeping two silent machines company when his young wife would have been a hell of a lot more cuddly. I said, “If I had any choice about what you print, I’d request that you said something vague like ‘investigation is continuing.’”
    “Fair enough. If something breaks, will you give either me or Pam a call?”
    “Of course.”
    “How’s Linda doing, by the way?”
    “Linda is a treasure, Frank. Stealing her away from you folks was the best thing we ever did.”
    “And you’re not forgiven yet, either, let me tell you.”
    We swept past the Broken Spur Saloon and in another couple of seconds passed the spot where the shooting of Linda Real and Deputy Paul Encinos had taken place two years before. As we started up the long, winding route through Regal Pass, I said, “After what she’s been through, she deserves some happiness. She seems content now, and she’s very good at what she does. And why she’s so happy, only she knows.”
    Frank Dayan nodded, but I didn’t add that the source of much of Linda Real’s contentment was the human target of some creep with too much free time. That made me angry enough, but what was worse was the other side of the coin. If Tom Pasquale was a crooked cop, was Linda Real in on the scam, too?
    “Shit,” I said aloud, forgetting in the recoil from the thought that I had a passenger.
    “What?” Frank Dayan asked.
    “Nothing. I was just telling myself stories. It’s an occupational hazard.” I looked at the clock. “Let’s circle through Regal, then head back and get some breakfast.”

Chapter Ten
    “Let me give you a tour,” Undersheriff Robert Torrez said. The five of us stood near the back of Sisson’s tractor—Torrez, Sgt. Howard Bishop, Tom Pasquale, Linda Real, and myself. The hubbub of the night before was long gone.
    Two cameras hung around Linda’s neck, and a heavy camera bag with a plethora of gadgets rested on the gravel at her feet. Her right hand was poised on one of the cameras, index finger on the button as if she were covering an action sport.
    “Jim is working right here, at the left rear hub. He wraps the chain from the backhoe’s bucket around the wheel, so that when he takes off the lug nuts the wheel is supported. The front