Dead Weight by Steven F. Havill Page B

about six feet of space between the tire and the shop wall.” I took a step back so that my boot was about where Sisson’s had ended up. “If that tire comes off the chain, it’ll drop, what, maybe a couple inches at most?”
    “At most,” Bishop said. “And it isn’t going to bounce.”
    “So how’s it going to catch me?” I asked. “Break my legs, maybe, knock me down. But how’s it going to land on
top
of me?”
    “It’s not,” Bob Torrez replied. “This can’t be where the backhoe’s boom was when the wheel dropped. It’s that simple.” He knelt down and pointed at a faint black rubber scuff mark on the concrete. “If you measure from this mark to the top one on the shop wall, you get a distance that’s equal to the height of the tire.”
    “It hit that wall with more impact than just leaning over,” I said.
    “Indeed it did. Enough to scuff rubber and dent the siding. And then it slid down on top of Jim Sisson.”
    “I don’t think so,” I said, and Torrez nodded.
    “I don’t think so, either. For one thing, look at this.” He stepped to the big tire. “We moved this tire up and over to the left just enough to remove Jim’s body. If you look right here, you can see the imprints of the chain where it went around the tire.”
    I peered closely. The imprints were just faint, dark marks, with interruptions that corresponded to the end of each link. “Will this show up in a photo?”
    “It should, sir,” Linda said. She knelt beside me. “I took a whole bunch just a few minutes ago. With this morning light coming in at a strong angle, I think it’ll work.”
    “You took plenty, to be sure?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I heard the clank of chain and looked up as Bob Torrez stretched out a section and laid it beside the marks. The match didn’t take any imagination.
    Linda said, “I took a series like that, for comparison.”
    “Good. So what else?”
    Bob leaned over, moving the chain so that it crumpled into a tight
S,
just above the bright yellow rim, two feet from the first set of marks.
    “The chain struck the rubber here, too,” he said. “If you look closely, you’ll see that it actually scuffed the surface of the tire.”
    “Not with these eyes I can’t,” I said. “What are you telling me?”
    “If I had to make a guess, I’d say that the chain was driven into the tire with a lot of force. And so was the reddish dirt.”
    “Reddish dirt?”
    I bent over, shifting so that I wasn’t blocking the wash of morning sunlight. The tire was clean, but even I could see the loose dirt on that section of the tire, some caught in the crevice between rim and tire, some ground into the rubber.
    “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Did you get this?”
    Linda nodded. “I’ve got a good close-up lens,” she replied.
    “I bagged a good sample,” Torrez said. “And I’ll bet a month’s pay that it matches the dirt on the back side of that backhoe’s bucket.”
    I turned and looked at the machine, its bucket poised seven feet above the concrete slab. The teeth were polished from the constant abrasion of the digging process, but soil clung here and there to the rest of it, the sort of thing I would expect after a session of digging beside someone’s leaking water line.
    “You got all that?” I said to Linda.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And you haven’t moved the machine any?” I asked Robert Torrez.
    “No. Nothing’s been moved.”
    “What are you thinking, then?”
    Torrez took a deep breath. “I think that after the tire was lying down—”
    “On top of Sisson?”
    “Yes, sir. After it was lying down, the operator, whoever it was, curled the bucket like this,” and he curled his hand back toward the underside of his forearm, “and then set it down on the tire. The chain was still attached at the bucket, and a handful of links were caught between the bucket and the tire when he pushed down…” Torrez hesitated. “He pushed down hard enough to lift the backhoe off the