Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  The crush of street vendors ended abruptly at the edge of a large cement plaza boasting a central fountain that had never, in Bo's experience, worked. The plaza sported new, one-story buildings subdivided into shops that catered to the basic needs of border-hopping Americans. Liquor. Mexican-made copies of designer clothing complete with fake labels. And prescription drugs for which no prescription was necessary here.

  Indians weren't allowed on the plaza. There were no churro vendors with greasy paper bags of sugary stick-donuts. No roasting meat that, on analysis, would turn out to be goat. Bo sighed. The plaza felt like a cumbersome spaceship set down in the midst of biblical Syria. Too clean. Way too quiet. The way Americans liked it.

  At the plaza's far side she climbed to an overpass that led into Avenida Revolución. The cement steps, recently completed, were already crumbling. That was just Tijuana, she admitted to herself, wondering if merely noticing constituted a form of criticism. Buildings in Tijuana were invariably half completed and then left that way. Paved streets turned to dirt where least expected. The city's slapdash architecture seemed to grope toward some uncherished goal and then give up halfway there in defiance. A sense of flux. Of things falling apart and being rebuilt endlessly and with no point.

  It's just a typical border town, Bradley. For once don't let it get to you.

  But it did. It always did. Bo wasn't sure why. Maybe the open acknowledgment of poverty, always guilt-inspiring. More likely the suffocating crush of noise and people and things, the ceaseless clamor. A sensory overload merely tiring to the average American brain, but frightening to Bo's, which was prone to dramatic overreaction even when protected by medication.

  "Kate Harding, 1892," she pronounced at a canvas-topped stall displaying at least a thousand identical pieces of terracotta pottery painted in nightmarish Day-Glo butterflies. "The British schooner Lily, 1901," she named a covered alleyway from which two men with gold teeth held out armloads of velour blankets featuring panthers attacking antelopes, an Aztec couple in full ceremonial garb doing something erotic, and the Last Supper. "And you," she remarked to an arcade of glass cases from which gleamed brass knuckles in sizes petite to extra large, enough switchblade knives to arm the entire population of Wyoming, and what looked like a collection of pie plates with razor wire edges, "are the Jennie French Potter, 1909."

  The litany of Cape Cod shipwrecks was comforting. Her Irish grandmother, whose hobbies ran to the unusual, had often rocked Bo and her little sister, Laurie, on the porch of the family's Wellfleet summer cottage, singing the names of the doomed ships. Having imprinted the list under optimal circumstances, Bo never forgot it and secretly recited its reassuring syllables sometimes, just to calm herself. The names provided a quiet pathway through Avenida Revolución, where you could buy just about anything.

  "I don't believe it!" she interrupted a mental retelling of the Andrea Doria story as the storefront marquee of a corner drinking establishment came into focus half a block away.

  "Shooters, $1.50," the sign said in English. "Dancing Nitely Hear Record Star Singing Sensacion—Chac!"

  Too easy. The name was too unusual for there to be more than one bar singer using it. Bo shook off a sense of unease. A sense of moving along some track she couldn't see toward a destination, which, at best, did not seek out her involvement. The feeling was not unfamiliar.

  You will have dinner with Dr. Broussard tonight, Bo. You will talk to her about this medication, which seems to be working, but is leaving a few wrinkles. Now, just get the address of this place and then leave.

  Nodding at the sensible advice, Bo jotted down the address and then stood looking at the bar's curtained doorway. The black canvas tarp hanging from a wire across the door revealed nothing. Beneath it Bo could see broken maroon asphalt tile, some cigarette butts, a chair leg. An odor of tequila, shots of which were called "shooters" when forced down your throat by costumed waiters, drifted from the tarp. So this was where Acito's mom worked.

  Bo remembered promising the baby she'd try to find his mother. How could she just walk away? This Chac might be in the bar right now, unaware that her little son had come close to death. Inside Bo heard voices. A few English words.

  "Oh, why not?" She grinned at a burro on the corner, painted in black stripes to approximate a zebra. The burro shook long ears through holes in its flowered sombrero as Bo pulled the black curtain aside and went in.

  A passageway running diagonally toward the center of the block between two adjacent storefronts was hung with colored plastic doilies and strands of Christmas tree lights. Eight feet in, a sawhorse over a plastic-draped pile of construction rubble held a sign that said Peligro. Bo had seen the word on Tijuana's streets. It meant "danger."

  "I can't believe you don't know where she is," a male voice spoke in a British accent with overtones Bo couldn't quite identify.

  The voice came from just inside a large room at the end of the passageway. The room was half filled with small tables beyond which a bare expanse of soaped concrete served as a dance floor. Into this a wooden ramp supported by oil drums extended about fifteen feet. The oil drums had been painted gold. Along the left wall a long bar rested on forklift pallets, backed by more plastic doilies and yards of hanging metallic strips that looked like limp slices of mirror. Where the two walls would have met was a gaping hole revealing bent concrete reinforcers and more rubble.

  "A margarita, señorita?" asked the bartender in a white shirt and red satin cummerbund. He seemed genuinely happy to see Bo. Delighted, actually.

  "Um, no, just a Coke, please," she answered. For some reason it seemed wise to say nothing, just sit and wonder why a Mexican bartender was radiating joy at her presence. At the end of the bar a man of about thirty with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail under a leather gaucho hat was working on the wiring of a sound board and bass amplifier.

  "The show tomorrow night's critical," he said thoughtfully. "She knows what's at stake."

  "Señorita Chac, she never miss a performance," the bartender said to Bo, as though she had asked. In his hands a perfectly dry bar glass was being dried ferociously with a red paper napkin.

  Bo stabbed at the lime wedge in her Coke and let it happen. That wide intensity of awareness that, even when dutifully medicated, she possessed as the dubious gift of an illness that could also destroy her. The bartender, she assessed, was defending Chac, and knew perfectly well where she was. He was afraid of the man in the ponytail, glad to have a customer as a buffer between them.

  "I'm a buyer for a little import shop in Idyllwild," she said, noticing an exquisite silver bracelet with a geometric pattern of stone inlay on the wrist of the man with the ponytail. "I'm looking for some quality silver jewelry. Could you recommend a few dealers?"

  The question was directed to the bartender as she pulled a pen from her purse and grabbed a paper napkin.

  "Si, silver," he answered with enthusiasm. "Lots of good places for silver."

  As he named a number of dealers, Bo wrote on the paper napkin. "Acito in peligro. Donde esta Chac?" Acito in danger. Where is Chac? The Spanish was pathetic, but the message clear.

  "Did I get the street names right?" She smiled, pushing the napkin toward the bartender. Then, "Oh, that's what I'm looking for! Something like that." Pretending to notice ponytail for the first time, she strode to his side. "Where did you get that incredible bracelet?" she gushed.

  "Someplace in Venezuela," he replied. "I'm sorry I really don't remember exactly where." His smile was warm, revealing slightly crooked front teeth in a tanned, outdoorsy face shadowed by the brim of the leather hat pulled low on his brow. And his pronunciation was a dead giveaway. "Someplyce," he'd said. "In Venezwyla." Australian.

  "Well, it's certainly fine work," Bo murmured, retreating.

  What did an Australian with expensive taste in jewelry have to do with the poisoned Indian baby who'd drooled his way into her heart only that morning? And why was the bartender afraid of what seemed to be a perfectly nic
e guy?

  "Thanks for your help." Bo smiled over the bar as she gathered her briefcase and the red napkin, and left.

  Outside she petted the zebra-striped burro and read the napkin. An address was on it, and the words "muy peligroso." Very dangerous. In the eyes of the burro's owner, hunched on the painted cart where every day he photographed sombreroed tourists, Bo saw something she could only translate as hate.

  Chapter Five

  "The sun that shows itself is not the real sun."—Popol Vuh

  Dewayne Singleton threw a handful of Tecate cypress cones into the air and listened as they hit the rocky ground. Sometimes you could hear things they said that way. Sometimes almost a real word. This time it was the word "ut-ut," which didn't mean anything. At least not to Dewayne Singleton.

  Maybe it was like the sound of feet, somebody with a limp, walking up and down outside his cell at Wade. One of the guards had limped like that. Said he busted his knee playing baseball and the damned state of Louisiana didn't pay him enough to get it fixed. The guard stopped and talked sometimes because he knew nobody ever came on visiting days to the medium-security prison in the Kisatchie National Forest Preserve near the Louisiana/Arkansas border. At least nobody ever came to visit Dewayne Singleton.

  "Ut-ut" also sounded a little like the breath catching in the back of the dogs' throats after they ran awhile. Bloodhounds mostly, barking and running right on past Dewayne in a big old pine tree, his socks full of Iodoform. The stuff the prison infirmary dumped into wounds made by knives and axes. He'd put the disinfectant powder in his armpits, too, and in his hair and his crotch, and tied down his shirt and pants cuffs with rubber bands. The dogs couldn't get a scent. An old Choctaw convict taught him that. Said the dogs couldn't smell you unless they were sitting in your lap.

  So Dewayne packed himself in Iodoform, went with his crew to clean ditchbanks along the two-lane asphalt road leading to the prison, and waited for his chance. When another convict spotted a water moccasin in the ditch and the freeman guard got off his horse to shoot it, Dewayne sprinted into the dense pine forest and kept going. It was twenty minutes before he heard the dogs behind him, and he climbed the tree.

  The Choctaw'd been right, Dewayne nodded as a warm breeze blew up the unpopulated mountain from the Mexican border below. Because the dogs had run on. And Dewayne was far away now, in California.

  "Ut-ut," he whispered into the wind, toward Mexico. The syllables blew back, one in each ear. "Al-lah," they said now, and he turned to his left and threw himself facedown on the ground. Left would be east, since Mexico was south. It was easier to figure out which way Mecca was on the outside than it was in Wade, for sure. The prison's narrow, louvered windows set six feet up under the roof overhang kept out the sun, but not Allah's message. The message that he had to tell his wife, down there in Mexico.

  As her husband it was his duty to protect her. To tell her what Allah had told him in a prison called Wade Correctional Center sixty miles from Shreveport, Louisiana. To tell her the Angel Jabril, called Gabriel by the infidels, was coming. Coming right here. Because Allah was angry. The Angel Jabril was going to kill a lot of people here because their ways displeased Allah.

  With his face pressed to the ground Dewayne prayed and tried to remember this wife he'd married a long time ago. He'd been drunk for weeks in Tijuana then, trying to stop the headaches. She was some foxy lady, he remembered. But she was a whore. The shame of it brought tears to his eyes and he pushed his forehead against a sharp pebble until he smelled blood.

  Rising, he crawled to the circle of stones where he'd cooked a squirrel last night, and rubbed ashes into the cut with both hands. The mark, he imagined, would show his devotion to Allah. It would show his wife and everyone else that Allah was the one, the true God. He hoped she'd hear. Because if she didn't, she might have to die.

  Chapter Six

  The Yellow Road, South

  Bo looked at the scribbled address on the red paper napkin in her hand. She couldn't really read it. "Calle something-or-other," it said, with a number. It might have been the address of the Dalai Lama, for all she knew about the city before her. Standing on the corner beside the painted burro, Bo realized that her understanding of Mexico centered entirely on food and fear, nothing more. A cultivated appreciation of fresh salsas, tempered by an uneasy awareness of inexplicable difference.

  The address was more than sufficient for Estrella's report. In fact, it would probably earn Es some needed brownie points with Madge, who knew perfectly well what effort an investigator would have to expend to get a parent's Mexican address. Madge might even take Estrella out to lunch, Bo thought. Except that at the moment Estrella's tolerance for lunch wasn't impressive.

  It was only 12:30.

  "The English vessel Sparrowhawk," Bo began the sequence of shipwrecks again. "Aground at Nauset, mid-December 1626." Over Avenida Revolución's thousand purveyors of goods, the sun burned off the last of the haze. Bo thought about the passengers on the Sparrowhawk, a tiny ship with room for only about twenty people. They had come all the way from England on an icy dark sea, her grandmother said, courting death from storms, disease, possible starvation once they arrived. And these were mere English. Could an Irishwoman display less courage in obviously safer circumstances?

  "Taxi!" she yelled at a rusty 1973 Plymouth cruising Revolución, and handed the red napkin to the driver.

  "Si," he nodded as Bo crawled into the back seat, after which he gunned the car left on Avenida Benito Juarez and headed toward the Ensenada toll road. Bo watched pavement slide by through a hole in the floorboards. Perhaps this had been unwise. Perhaps the address was in Ensenada, some seventy-five miles down the Baja Peninsula. Perhaps it was south of Ensenada, where she couldn't go anyway, without papers. Where legendary bandidos were still known to prey on unsuspecting gringos.

  Stupid gringos who, had they any sense, would be at the outlet mall in San Ysidro right now, looking for bargains. The driver swerved left again over a rocky parkway, and headed south, up into the hills of Tijuana. The road visible through the hole was now dirt. Bo looked out the window and wondered whether to blame this ill-advised adventure on manic impulsivity or a perverse pride that insisted on beating back fear. Either way, it had landed her on what looked like a set for The Grapes of Wrath.

  "Thanks," she said when the cab stopped, paying the driver and skating through a collection of thin chickens circling her feet. The driver had pointed toward an alleyway between two crumbling walled courtyards. Inside one Bo could see a large, immaculately clean Duroc sow fastened with a long rope to a Model T that seemed to have sunk into the ground. Red geraniums grew in the wheelwells. The alleyway was dim, covered in places by strips of corrugated plastic or boards. The feeling was oddly medieval.

  "I'm looking for a woman named Chac," Bo told an old man sitting in a large basket beside a curtained door. He seemed not to hear her, but a middle-aged woman in flip-flops came out and pointed up the alleyway, then showed four fingers. Four doors up that way. Bo headed to the designated door, and stopped. How did you knock on a curtain?

  "Is there someone named Chac here?" she yelled into the flowered fabric.

  "Who wants to know?" came the answer in a voice that was male, adolescent, and English-speaking. Bo was sure she heard fear in that voice. Why was everybody connected to this case so afraid?

  "My name is Bo Bradley," Bo told the shirtless blond boy who now stood in the doorway. "I work for Child Protective Services in San Diego, and I have no official capacity here at all, but I need to see Chac about her baby, Acito. Is she here?"

  Bo had given the last three words a deep-voiced emphasis she hoped sounded threatening. Beside the slender boy the curtain moved and a young woman stepped into the alley. A slender young woman with rosy-brown skin, braided hair so black it reflected light in tones of blue, and a classic nose Bo recognized immediately.

  "I am Chac," the young woman said. "What did you say about my baby, Acito?"

  "This
could be a trick," the boy muttered.

  "You're Maya," Bo noted with enthusiasm. "The baby's nose ... I don't know why I didn't think—"

  "What about my baby!" Chac's black eyes were filling with tears as she wadded handfuls of the baggy white T-shirt she was wearing into the waistband of tight black jeans.

  "He's in the hospital, but he's doing fine," Bo explained. "St. Mary's Hospital for Children in San Diego. He's been poisoned. They haven't figured out the substance yet. Babies get into things sometimes. But he's getting the best care. He's going to be just fine."

  "Acito is poisoned?" Chac gasped and grabbed the door frame. "Poisoned by what? I was with him in San Ysidro this morning. He was not poisoned then. I do not believe you."

  The singer's English sounded formal. Old-fashioned.

  "Your English is beautiful," Bo said, puzzled. "Where did you learn it?"

  "I learned in Antigua, at a convent school called Instituto Indigena Nuestra Señora del Socorro," Chac replied as if the school's name were an impressive calling card. "I was trained as a teacher there and I have U.S. residency papers." Her voice was fierce. "My son is a U.S. citizen. You have no right to take away my son! I will go to the U.S. consulate—"

  "Wait a minute," Bo interjected. This changed everything, if it were true. And a call from the U.S. consul's office in Tijuana to Madge Aldenhoven might just lose Bo and Estrella both their jobs. "Natalio and Ynez Cruz brought Acito all the way into San Diego, to St. Mary's, because he was very sick. Since then they've vanished, but the baby's okay. The hospital placed a hold on him and notified my agency because there was no way to reach a parent, but if your child really is a U.S. citizen ..."