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enough by then to imagine himself hanging half in and half out of the window—feetfirst or headfirst didn’t matter much. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
    For a couple of miles, the only sound I could hear was his rhythmic breathing. I turned up the volume on the police radio and keyed the mike.
    “Posadas County, three ten.”
    Enough seconds elapsed that I was raising the mike to repeat myself when Brent Sutherland finally found the transmission bar on the dispatcher’s end. “Three ten, Posadas County.”
    “Posadas, three ten is ten-fifteen, one adult male. Request that three oh one ten-nineteen. And give the undersheriff a call. Advise him that his rabbit is in custody.”
    There was a moment while Sutherland digested that I was inbound with a prisoner and wanted Deputy Taber’s assistance when we arrived and had to transfer the young hothead in the backseat to a jail cell.
    “Ten-four, three ten.”
    Jackie Taber’s husky voice added, “Three ten, three oh one copies.”
    I clicked the mike a couple of times and hung it back on the radio. What my backseat passenger thought of the cryptic conversation was hard to tell, but whatever he thought, it served as a trigger. He realigned and let fly again. Just as we passed the abandoned mercantile at Moore, the passenger-side back window let loose with an expensive
whump
and a shower of glass.
    My first impulse was just to let the little shit lie in his own glass until we reached Posadas. I snapped on the dome light and saw that Matt was continuing his craftsmanlike job of removing the entire window in a hail of stomps and kicks.
    A pair of headlights popped into view in the rearview mirror, and I slowed and pulled off on the shoulder, swinging into a dirt lane that was blocked a car-length ahead by a locked gate.
    Brilliant red lights blossomed, and at first I thought that Deputy Taber had pulled in behind me. As I got out of the car I caught a glimpse of the horizontal green stripe on a field of white. Two figures got out of the Border Patrol unit, and I recognized the short, blocky driver instantly. His gait reminded me of someone walking across a pitching ship’s deck.
    “We saw the feet,” Scott Gutierrez said with a laugh. “Who you got in there?”
    “A frisky teenager,” I said, and extended a hand. “You timed it just right.”
    Gutierrez crunched my knuckles in a quick handshake and flicked his flashlight toward his partner. “By the way, this is Taylor Bergmann, Sheriff. He joined the crew a week or so ago. We were taking a little tour, showing him the sights.”
    “Lots of those,” I said, and shook Bergmann’s hand. “Especially in the middle of the night. I’m Bill Gastner.”
    “I’ve heard plenty about you, sir,” Bergmann said, and the tone of his voice left it unclear just what he meant. He turned to watch a truck as it approached from the east, the driver riding the Jake when he saw the red lights flashing on the opposite shoulder. From his confident posture, I guessed Bergmann to be retired military. The truck thundered by in a bow wave of air and a lingering cloud of diesel.
    “Have you met Bob Torrez yet?” I asked, and Bergmann shook his head. “With any kind of luck at all, after next Tuesday, he’ll be the new sheriff.” The three of us chatted for a few minutes as if Matt Baca didn’t exist.
    And while we talked, not a peep issued from the backseat of my car. Young Matt had the brains to appreciate how the rules of the game had changed.
    Gutierrez stepped to the busted window and shined his flashlight in Baca’s face. “Hey, my man,” he said pleasantly.
    “Why’d you break the sheriff’s window?”
    Baca didn’t answer. He blinked into the light and lay perfectly still—the first thing he’d done right all night. Gutierrez turned to me, still keeping the light in the boy’s face. “What’ve you got him on?”
    “Oh, a number of things,” I said. “No big deal. He rammed my car, for one thing.”
    Gutierrez