Slade sipped his coffee, made a deep-creased face. “I got a CI, Frank…” He shook his head. “This CI says Castaneda, dick-less himself, was a cartel enforcer. A fucking rager, Frank. I’m saying he’s a bad dude, and he’s done some evil shit. Killings. Beheadings. Whatever else.”
“But he’s got no record in the States?” I coughed hard into my elbow, took a deep breath after I finished. The sea air drifted up this way from the Embarcadero and I smelled salt and water and the long decay of fish. Somehow, I smelled Castaneda’s body, too. Like I did the previous night.
“Nope,” Slade said. “Castaneda’s dressed up for Halloween.”
Slade meant Castaneda was a ghost. I shrugged. “Okay, so he don’t exist. But you got real people saying he’s in the drug game.”
“And he’s up the chain.”
“Castaneda gets some webos,” I said. I placed a finger beneath my chin, acted all Sherlock Holmesian about it. “Castaneda tries to play superstar on his own team. But he ain’t no all-star and the team captain chops him down to size. That sound about right to you? It’s a stone cold who-done-it. But it’s also a stone cold who-gives-two-shits. We get another CI to tell the same story and Captain Jackson lets this case go…Pushes it up to the feds, or DEA. Fuck if we care. Clearance rate stays savvy, baby.”
Slade started moving down the sidewalk. I followed him. The deep-creased look gave way to another face––Slade wanted to know what happened beneath the bridge, and that meant this case was ours until some federal bureaucrat pulled it from Slade’s cold, lifeless hands.
He said, “This has got to be more than all that, Frank. What drug lord is going to make a trophy of a sicario? I mean, on this side of the border? C’mon, partner. You and me both know this ain’t just about a body in the bay.”
A homeless woman in neon pink nylons and a purple windbreaker scratched her dirty head, asked us for a quarter. I reached into my pocket, but I shook my head when I didn’t feel a coin. I like to make like I’m trying––in life there’s lots of shit that goes for show.
Slade said, “You’re a cold ass man, Frank.”
“I didn’t see you writing a blank check.”
“But I don’t pretend to write one.”
I chuckled and said, “Whatever makes me feel better.”
We kept walking and thinking. Soon, we moved out of the courthouse’s shadow into streets drenched with sun and the clever brickwork of gentrification––goddamn condos called lofts and stores called boutiques.
Slade said, “This body is a fucking message. And we need to find out why. And to who.”
“Look, listen to me, Skinny. I know you got all high and mighty when you did law school, but most of us are just getting along. You think I want to go and fuck around with some drug shit? The kind that hangs headless women from bridges and dips people in acid?” Part of me was messing with Slade, and he knew it. I wanted to put this murder down as solved. I believed in my job—I always did believe in my job. But another part of me was serious. It was the part that enjoyed breathing.
Slade said, “No murder makes justice a fool.”
“And no fool gets away with murder,” I said finishing the phrase.
Slade stopped. He looked at me with unblinking eyes. “There’s something big behind this, Frank. I feel it, man. We got a drug man––high up, too––left like a Christmas gift beneath the bay bridge. No record except for what the streets say, and the man is mutilated on top of all that. I been a cop for too long to let that shit happen in my city. Fuck, I live here, Frank. I live in this fucking city and––”
“I live here, too. You know that, Skinny.”
“So, what you going to do about it?” Slade watched me. His eyes were fat and dry. His skin stretched taut over a determined chin.
I said, “I’m going to find me the fool.”
“Good. Any word about Jacumba and those supposed bodies?”
We reached a street corner, turned around and headed back toward the downtown station.
“Nothing I could find out, though I did talk to a prick of a retired BP agent.”
“This prick give us anything?”
“A bad attitude. And…” I paused, thought about Candida’s heavy breathing. “And the little bit of bullshit I need to believe we should check things out ourselves.”
“Walk the fence line, you mean?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“You drive, Slim Fat,” Slade said. “On the way, I’ll call the rest of my CI pricks. Oh, and we got the pics of Castaneda’s body. I’ll bring them with. Make a nice distraction during the drive.”
Chapter 11
During the hour ride to Jacumba, Slade called his informants and got nothing about Castaneda. Nobody knew the man. Or, if they did, Castaneda scared them enough to keep quiet. Even after Slade promised the sicario was dead. The lack of information (and honesty) didn’t surprise either of us. When it came down to it, the streets were a lot of shitty things: vengeful, dishonest, hate-filled, violent, forsaken, and hopeless. But the streets were also loyal to a code. And it was a code I could never fully shatter: The streets did not, under any circumstances, open up and talk to cops. The way you got people to talk, in my long years of experience, was to threaten them. You needed to use whatever threat you found might work, and you needed to use it well. After Slade hung up on his last call, I said, “Next boy we talk to about this is going to get smacked in the mouth.”
I sensed Slade rolling his eyes. “I’ll hide the tough guy routine until I really need it.”
“Like right now, Skinny.”
“You played tough on the girl last night?” He said it with a sarcastic question mark attached.
When I didn’t answer, Slade slid some images from a manila envelope. These were the photos of Castaneda’s body, taken by the coroner at the morgue.
Slade said, “That’s a cartel tat, for damn sure.”
He lifted the image so I could see it: The black inked rosary stretched down Castaneda’s chest, ended––like I first thought––in a cartoonish image of Saint Death. Slade showed me other pictures, too: Castaneda’s bullet wound, a gruesome close-up of his severed penis, a wide shot showing his severed hands laid out on a steel table.
“Nothing new,” I said. “There’s the tattoo, I guess. That’s something.”
“A thousand of those tattoos walking around, Frank. Especially if a guy spent time behind bars. Here, or in Mexico.”
“You ever look into that––the Saint Death thing?”
Slade shook his head. “Not much. I just see it on the bad guys. I figure it’s, like, a superstition. Like fucking fortune telling, you know?”
I nodded. Growing up Catholic, I still held a weird and unfounded reverence for religion, especially when I heard about saints. “You need to know who a man prays to,” I said. “That’ll tell you what he is.”
Slade grunted. Too smart to believe in God, I supposed.
I checked my mirrors and shifted into the slow lane. Our exit for Jacumba was fast approaching. We sped through patches of manzanita, crossed a bridge high over a dry ravine. The highway headed downward, lost elevation at a rapid pace. Slade gripped the door handle, his knuckles white with anxiety. Slade was a bit of a control freak––he liked to drive.
“Surprised you wanted me to drive,” I said.
“I’m trying to get over that thing.” He stared out the window, let his head fall back against the seat. “I can’t always have control, Frank. Nobody can.”
In my head, I saw Miranda plunging headfirst toward the black waters of the bay. No, I thought, nobody has control of a damn thing. Whole damn shebang is up for grabs. It always has been and it always will be. “You going to fly soon?” Slade hadn’t been on a plane in three years. When a case forced us to travel, Slade either drove or, if it was too far, let me handle the long-distance stuff.
Slade chuckled. “Soon as I get my pilot’s license, partner.”
>
“Shit. Looks like you’ll never see Cabo San Lucas.”
“I can see it on the computer.”
I shrugged, eased the car into a long curving exit ramp. We headed southeast on a two-lane road, passed scattered mobile homes and modest houses. Enough dirt bikes and old pickup trucks to make Texas proud. It surprised me to see that much horsepower here in California. I’m a city kid. I grew up three blocks from where me and Miranda bought our house. For this old cop, police choppers and traffic noise make familiar atmosphere.
Jacumba didn’t have much of either.
We pulled into the small main street area, slid past a breakfast diner, three churches (two Catholic, somehow), a post office, and an elementary school comprised of beige, portable trailer classrooms. We came to a small park and pulled into the dirt parking lot. I got out first and Slade followed me. He came around the car and we both stared southward: In the distance, about two hundred yards away, the tall border fence stood glaring in the sunlight. Beyond it, clear as day, the territories of Mexico unspooled into blue sky and mystery. Slade sighed and I sneezed.
He said, “I’ll take west, if you take east.”
“You’ll be walking into the sun.”
“It’s better for my tan.”
As we walked through the desert––dirt, creosote and cacti––the fence’s tapered ends revealed themselves. The fence ended on both ends after about a mile, maybe less. The metal posts stopped where the landscape became rocky hillside and carved ravine.
We reached the fence and I put my head between two of the posts, stuck it through. “My head’s in Mexico, Skinny. How about that?”
“Funny, Frank. Be careful, or it’ll get chopped off.”
That brought me back over the border.
“Look for irregularities on the ground, bushes dragged or––”
“Exposed clothing,” I said. “I know the deal.” I looked down the fence line and squinted. “You know what, Slade? I’m wondering if our buddy Rambo overheard this business about the Jacoby family. Maybe he’s dealing drugs, sure, but the kid’s not passing his SAT, right? He’s a low-level dealer. And I’m thinking he’s trying to impress––or maybe scare––our angsty teen there.”
Slade nodded and said, “Maybe wanted to impress the girl. Get himself a hand job.”
I cringed, but added, “That seems––the whole idea––like it could make sense. What I’m saying is, maybe the shit about the Jacobys isn’t bull honkey. Could be legit, and we’re about to catch three more bodies.”
“We’d hand it back to the feds.”
I imagined working four murders at once, pushed back a wave of nausea. “True that, Skinny.”
“Only way to find out is check it out. We find anything––I mean anything––we’ll call it in, get a cadaver dog and organize a grid search.”
“Man, I hope we don’t find anything. If I got to see a dead kid, I’m going to lose my shit.”
“Me too,” Slade said.
The sun kept arching skyward. Dust entered my nostrils and I sneezed twice more. The desert sounds didn’t seem like sounds—creosote branches whispered against each other, a bird sang in discreet staccato, beads of sand toppled over each other in the half-existent wind. I sighed and ran a finger beneath my shirt collar. “It’s getting hot,” I said, but I didn’t get an answer. I looked to my left and saw that Slade was already walking along his section of fence line, eyes to the ground, his head swiveling back and forth like a heavy machine gun.
I hoped like hell neither of us found a goddamn thing.
Chapter 12
You know what the wise men say: Hope in one hand and shit in the other––see which comes first. Or maybe it was George Burns who said that. Either way, it’s more true than a bible story. I took my time walking along the fence. Sunlight burned high on my neck and I wiped sweat from my face. There were lots of boot prints out there––most of them military issue. Border Patrol agents stomping around outside their SUVs, waiting to punch the time clock. What a hell of a shitty job, I thought, sitting around for ten hours and not seeing a damn thing but dry-ass Mexico. Sure, agents sometimes chased migrants or stymied a drug shipment. But that kind of shit was few and far between—even they admitted that much.
I found a few cigarette butts, kicked them over with my toe. Marlboros, maybe. Me, I never smoked. Miranda did though. She liked a cigarette after a meal, after a workout, and after sex. Like cleansing your palate, I supposed. I tried to get her to give them up, but as I get older, I’ve found quitting a habit takes more time and effort than the habit itself draws. It’s like drinking too much beer on the weekends: Fuck it, what else are you supposed to do?
The first time I met Miranda she was smoking a cigarette, in fact. Outside the old record store where El Cajon Boulevard hit the 805 freeway. Little place where they sold folk, blues and jazz albums from way back when––the best stuff to hit wax. She leaned one shoulder against a brick wall, her hair blowing in the breeze that came under the store’s awning. In her left hand she held a record by James Brown and it was funny to see that, a teenage girl, in a short blue skirt and heels, holding an icon from a time before her time. Funny how we love music a generation or two behind. At least, those of us who have good taste love it that way.
She puffed on the cigarette, blew smoke at me from the corner of her mouth. I said, “Nasty habit for a lady.”
“Who died and made you lord of the ladies?”
“I’m just saying.”
She leaned both shoulders back against the wall, squared up to face me. “You think you’re righteous enough to make it a law that a lady can’t smoke?”
“That’s up to the people and the courts.”
She smiled and said, “What are you, the president?”
My heart burped a bit and I said, “I’m just an attentive social studies student.”
“Got an A, huh?”
“B minus.”
She laughed at that––my heart belched.
“I didn’t mean to be a…”
“A man?” She lifted her chin and smoked some more, like she was doing it to piss me off.
I didn’t respond to that, but instead moved toward the doorway, a glass swinging deal with posters of Miles, Sinatra, Billie, and Elvis pasted to face the ceaseless traffic. Miranda’s voice, like it did for so many years after that, stopped me from leaving her.
“You talk like a bureaucrat,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“All certain or whatever, like you read the rules in a manual.”
“I’m just saying it’s a bad habit. My fault for trying to help you out.”
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” She tossed the cigarette to the sidewalk, stomped on it. Her eyes flashed on the busy street and swung slowly back toward me, touched my face with anger and delight.
I said, “I’m planning to be an LEO.”
“A Leo? Like the astrology sign?”
“A cop,” I said. “Law enforcement officer.”
She laughed and I loved it—it was a melodic sound, edged with her sing-songy voice and a slight smoker’s garble. Beautiful, somehow. Perfect. Miranda was all seduction and malice.
She said, “A Leo then. Mr. Righteous is going to be a Leo. You know what kind of people become cops?”
I shrugged. “The kind who want a steady paycheck and overtime.”
Miranda spun away from the wall, twirled on one heel. She tossed her hair back over a shoulder, glared at me. “The kind who like to play bully, but can’t do it without a pistol and some mace.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You are jaded to the bone.”
“I’m just honest,” Miranda said. “And forever will I be.”
“You telling me, if I mugged you, you wouldn’t want a cop to kick my ass?”
“No,” Miranda said, “I’d do that myself.”
I shrugged at the memory, walked a few more paces alo
ng the fence line. The sun was getting to me. I could feel the skin on my neck reddening, smell the heat boring into the ground and plants. It tasted like smoke and granite. I moved farther down, found more cigarette butts, a large empty water bottle. Nothing else. I moved a few yards from the fence, walked through the brush and dodged snake holes. After another thirty yards or so of walking, my cell buzzed in my pocket. I picked it up and said, “What’s up, Skinny?”
Slade said, “I found something, Frank.”
Hope and shit––those are mostly what we have as detectives. I turned and stared back toward Slade, saw him silhouetted in the far distance, an arm raised to draw my attention. “It ain’t good,” he said. “It ain’t good at all.”
“I can see you. Be there in a few minutes.”
Slade said, “Take your time. This trouble ain’t going nowhere.”
Shallow graves don’t give a man faith in humanity.
When I walked up on Slade, he was standing with his hands on his hips, staring down at a small section of upturned earth. I noticed dirt on his hands, dark crescents beneath his fingernails. His sunglasses covered his eyes, but I sensed the sadness there––wet trails streaked down his cheeks. A few feet away, at the base of a manzanita, a warm pile of vomit sat uncovered. Egg burrito re-cooking in the high noon heat. Slade didn’t say anything to me. He cleared his throat, coughed without covering his mouth.
I stood behind him, looked down at the small section of upturned earth.
It took a second for me to see what Slade was staring at. The dark undersoil served as a bit of camouflage. And the hand was small––a child’s hand. My eyes adjusted and I saw a red-painted thumbnail. The thumbnail led me to see the hand’s shape. All bone. I saw four other tiny fingers, covered in soil, and a palm the size of an apricot. This led to a bone-exposed forearm, jutting from the ground like a buried wishbone. I felt nausea swirl in my belly. The burn stretched into my throat, like lava flowing over stone, and I turned to vomit. I went to my knees, retched, held the liquid in somehow. I pushed the vomit back down my throat, swallowed fire. “Jesus H. Christ, Skinny. What the hell are we into here?” I sat there on my knees, breathing hard and trying not to lose my breakfast.
To Bring My Shadow Page 5
