“The goddamn kid was telling the truth,” Slade said.
None of it made sense. Sure, we had to check out information like this, but most times it was a lie. Like everything else in this life. I remembered then that death is the final truth. The rest of this life is a mirage. Hell, life itself might be a projection of the mind, a reflection of imagination. Who knows? Why not? But death, that I knew––it took being a homicide detective for me to know––was a real fucking thing. Truth at its most brutal and final––no more fun and games. I struggled to my feet, moved next to Slade. He shook his head.
“You know, most times they call us in. We don’t find the damn bodies. We just…”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you’re saying.”
Slade slid his sunglasses up onto his head. His eyes began their cruel inventory of details.
I did the same with my glasses, began my own assessment of the scene. The grave was about fifteen feet from the border fence. Recent rain, it seemed to me, ran heavy there between manzanita and cacti. Slade exposed the child’s hand, but the rain did its job, exposed an odd shape there between the desert foliage. I looked for shoe prints in the immediate vicinity, saw none except for those behind me and Slade. Our own path to ruin. I looked, too, for items forgotten by the gravedigger: cigarette butts, dirty gloves, broken branches, personal items. Nothing, of course. The body (more than one?) would be the source of any evidence. DN-fucking-A, the detective’s French drop.
“No footprints,” I said.
“No, sir.” Slade turned and studied the border fence. He swiveled his gaze east and west. “Have to run a cadaver dog all along the fence, maybe up into the hills, too.”
“Sheriff’s department might want this one.”
Slade looked back at the hand. “God, I fucking hope so.”
“I guess we have a link to our cartel body though, huh?”
“Fucking Turner,” Slade said. “And his pal, Rambo.”
We stood in silence for a good long minute. I thought about Rambo saying he was a dead man. Looking at the little girl’s lifeless hand, I imagined he was correct.
“You thinking again about the tough guy routine?” Slade did not like to play bad cop. Not because he couldn’t do it, but because bad cop meant leaving bruises on suspects. It meant creative interrogation techniques. That was my area. Always had been, once I got my LEO edu-my-cation. I threw a nice punch, and I liked to throw it. I’d done worse, too. But that was something Slade and me didn’t talk about.
Slade said, “I’m thinking Rambo needs to fess up. I don’t give two fat shits how that happens, Frank. We need to find his ass before whoever-the-hell does.” He sighed. “I got to go call this in.” He turned around and walked back toward the fence, taking care to step in his previous footprints. Slade’s shoulders slumped. He looked like an old crow in his leather jacket.
I stood there and stared at a dead child’s dirty hand. At a dainty red thumbnail, the bone below it. For a long time I didn’t think of anything. My brain was blank, dormant. It was like my life had been wiped clean, like I didn’t exist. For those few moments, I was dead. I was nothing. I was a collection of molecules wiped away, dashed to pieces, driven to non-being. I was the reflection of my imagination of (non)life—I was nothing-ness.
But the heat weighed heavy on me. The smells—both imagined and real—of dirt, dried lizard shit, cacti flowerings, and degenerated flesh, burned my nostrils. I came back into myself—my real, live self––for another murder in another forgotten part of the world. I wasn’t nothing. I was a murder detective. And I had shit to do.
Chapter 13
Back at the car, waiting for the sheriff’s department to arrive, I said, “I might just need to call my daughter, see how she’s doing.”
“Make sure everything’s okay,” Slade said.
“That’s right.”
“I got people I can call too.”
Here we were—two clichés talking like made-for-TV cops. I was a bit ashamed by it, aware how it took a traumatic experience for me to communicate—or try to communicate—with my own daughter. But I guessed the shame was something deeper than that, something tied to my own sense of masculinity and fatherhood.
Slade wandered off toward the highway. I leaned against the trunk of the car and dialed my daughter’s cell number. Sometimes, in this job, you’re witness to a deed that can’t be undone––it puts you to being sentimental. Or…scared. That was it—sometimes you get scared. You call your wife, your girlfriend. Hell, you call your ailing mother. You just get the foreboding nature of death, the scent of it, right up your nose and into your head. It’s rot. And it stinks.
“What, Dad?”
“Kimmie, I––”
“Can I call you tonight, Dad? I’m at work right this second.” Her voice sounded garbled, but it wasn’t the connection.
“Are you smoking those cancer sticks again, Kimmie?”
“Mom did.”
Neither of us spoke. I stared at the desert and tried not to see the lifeless hand jutting from the dry earth.
I heard Kimmie sigh. “Dad,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine. I just wanted to see how you were, how things are going.”
“I’m fine, Dad. You know I’m fine.”
“I don’t know unless you tell me. How can I—”
“Are you lonely, Daddy?”
The way she said it put me in a state you don’t much see from a grown man. I felt tears burn beneath my eyes. I blinked them away and took a deep breath, pushed my sunglasses higher onto my fat nose. Here I am, I thought, talking to my daughter while some kid decomposes in a shallow grave. Fucking inferno that is this life.
“I take that as a yes, Dad.”
“I miss your mom. So, if that’s what you’re asking…” I didn’t finish my thought. I turned to see Slade pacing beside the highway, his cell pressed to his ear. I wondered if he was talking to the reporter. Not the best idea, but if they were in love…
“Have you thought about…dating?”
This snapped me to attention. I felt a familiar rage tug at my throat, claw down into my chest, reach for my heart. “What the hell do you mean? It’s only been––”
“Not for love, Daddy. And not because you didn’t love her. Just because it’s nice to be with somebody now and then. That’s all I mean by it. Mom wouldn’t want you to be alone.”
I said, “Then why’d she kill herself?”
Kimmie started crying. It began with a slight whimper, but became a light weeping. Soon, her voice seemed caught down in her knees, struggling to surface over her emotion. “I’m just trying to help you, you fucking asshole.”
“Kimmie, I––” The line went dead and I finished my sentence, “I wanted to say, I love you.” But nobody heard me. I looked over at Slade. He lifted his chin at me and wiggled his phone in the air. More calls to make. I waved back and dialed the number for ex-Border Patrol agent Hector Candida. His voicemail clicked on after two rings. Motherfucker silenced me. His message said he might call you back if you left your name and number. When the line beeped, I said: “Hector. Hola, amigo. It’s your new best friend, Detective Frank Pinson. SDPD. We talked earlier today. I have some news, my friend. Need you to give me a call. Soon as you can. And Hector, don’t try and fuck with me. I don’t like to get fucked with––I promise you that.”
As I hung up, a sheriff’s deputy pulled into the parking lot, flashed his sirens for no apparent reason, and parked in front of me. I looked back at Slade. He was already walking toward us.
“Every once in a while it happens,” Deputy Markson said. “We get ourselves a dead Mexican. What they do is try to cross the border and they die of thirst, hunger…Shit, pure desperation.”
He was a slope-shouldered white man of some thirty years, widening at the hips, but with no strength or agility. I stared plain-faced at him. I didn’t like him from the moment I shook his soft ri
ght hand. I imagined his diet of TV dinners and cheap light beer, a scoop of ice cream (or four) every single night. Maybe I was too harsh on deputy Markson.
He said, “I tried to tell the congresswoman we got to make this fence electric. She came out here for a town hall and the LT said we should go on and see her, advocate for blue lives. You two see it, don’t you? It’s easy to see how—”
I cleared my throat to cut him off. “You keep your politics to yourself, big boy. How about you check on the techs, see when the hell they’ll be here?”
Slade stared in silence at the deputy. He didn’t like the man either.
“Jesus to pieces,” said Markson. “You two are real city boys, huh. Serious as all hell. I understand it—last thing you want to do is wait around here while all that big important stuff happens in the city. I bet you got a whole bunch of—”
“Make the call, Deputy,” Slade said. “Do it before I shove that baton up your ass.”
There was no more discussion. The deputy went around his car, climbed inside, and spoke into his radio. The feelings were mutual—he didn’t like us either.
As it should be, I thought.
Two minutes later, my old buddy Lengo pulled into the parking lot in his cruiser. He gave me a man-hug and pumped Slade’s hand. “Nice to see you again, Skinny. You still run around with the fat man here, huh? Thought you might shoot his ass on purpose.”
Slade said, “I think about it every single day.” He patted the 9 mm holstered on his hip. “It’s why I keep old Bessie loaded.”
I rolled my eyes and asked Lengo about deputy bumblefuck. “Who the fuck is this asshole, Lengo?” The guy was still in his cruiser, mumbling into the radio.
“Markson? He’s…” Lengo stopped talking, peeked over his shoulder to make sure the man couldn’t hear. “His family owns a bunch of land out here. They’re old railroad money, Frank. Rumor is they’re trying to get the old rail line back up running, move goods from Tijuana into the Midwest, vice versa.”
Slade said, “I read about that in the city paper. They had a rail route down into Tecate and westward, went out of business because—”
“Company that owned it couldn’t keep it going,” Lengo said. “Markson’s daddy bought the rights. Been twenty some odd years and they can’t get the permits to update the line, get a new locomotive on there and tugging profit back north. Sonny boy over here is more capitalist pig than cop. He’s about as much cop as—”
I lifted my finger to my lips as Markson pulled himself from the cruiser. Lengo turned to salute him. “You find out what’s what, Markson?”
“Hey, Lengo. Techs will be here any minute. They got some feds headed out here, too. Not sure why. It’s probably just another migrant came over from—”
I said, “You talk anymore shit about that dead kid over there and I’ll put you down my goddamn self.”
Everybody got grim. Nothing but silence.
We stood there in the hot sun until the feds arrived.
Nobody said a fucking thing.
Chapter 14
It was the Jacoby kid. Like we feared.
And once the sheriff’s cadaver dogs got out there, it was the whole family. Mom, dad, and daughter. The techs ID’d the bodies from fragments of clothing and, in the parents’ case, by actual ID. Not official yet—they’d need dental records for that. But enough proof to make the assumption. Didn’t seem like the gravediggers were trying to cover up much. No noticeable trauma. The bodies were too decomposed for us to be sure, but it looked like a nonviolent death for all three. Well, other than the dying part.
Maybe suffocation. Is suffocation nonviolent?
Maybe in this crazy world.
Lengo took off once the feds arrived. Me and Slade spent the day walking from one grave to the next, assisting a G-man named Xander Dames with his documentation. His partner, a lady in tight Levi’s named Tracy Atkins, knocked on doors around town. Within a few hours, it felt like me and Slade were minor players in a surreal stage ensemble—techs in white suits marked evidence with numbered flags, uniformed deputies waved looky-loo traffic past on the highway, cadaver dogs and their handlers searched in a widening grid, local TV news vans arranged a tight huddle, and Xander Dames sauntered from one grave to the next with his black tie flung over his shoulder, a notebook clasped to his hip.
I told Dames and Atkins about Hector Candida, about the teenagers giving us the tip on the bodies, about the dead cartel man named Castaneda (our murder, dammit), and about our runner, Rambo. Dames told us to find Rambo if we could, and to call when Hector Candida got back to me. Otherwise, they’d start a search for Candida if it seemed warranted. For now, it was coincidental.
I got the sense Dames and Atkins knew who killed the Jacobys, that maybe they were running through the motions. But those motions meant a lot of work. Three bodies in the desert means the whole world stops for a detective, a legit detective that is. I didn’t know about these two: Dames seemed to ring a false note of gung-ho with his aviator glasses and goatee, and Atkins I didn’t see much of—she ran off after shaking my hand.
When the sun hit the western hills, me and Slade hopped in the department-issue Ford Focus and drove out of town. Nobody said a damn thing to us. As we got on the highway, Captain Jackson buzzed my cell phone. “This is Frank, Captain. What’s up?”
“You two headed back to the city yet?”
“Just got on the road.”
Me and Slade shared a look—it was rare for the captain to call after regular business hours. As good as he was—and he was good—Jackson was a time clock jockey, counting the days until retirement. And a great pension. Like a lot of cops, sometimes Jackson just didn’t give two shits. But when he did, you were in for decent overtime pay.
And a whole bunch of missed sleep.
Jackson said, “Don’t go home. Stop and get some strong coffee. We got a gangbanger in here who has some info for you two. You’re going to want to pick his brain. Sweet little guy with some face tattoos and a bullet scar on his neck.”
“He there about Castaneda?”
Jackson grunted. “That’s right. Walked in here about twenty minutes ago. Said he wanted to speak with Detective Frank Pinson.”
“This OG have a name?”
“Said they call him Chato on the streets. Doesn’t want to give his Christian name. We’re working on it right now. I guess he forgot we have to do paperwork.”
“Chato, huh?” I looked over at Slade and saw he was only half-watching the road. Get Slade a lead and he’ll rip it to shreds. He accelerated and moved into the fast lane. I double checked my seat belt. “Kind of a wimpy name for a gangbanger, Captain.”
“He said there’s a reason for it, but it’d probably get him in some shit. With us.”
“He’s serious,” I said.
“As a tax man’s wardrobe. Got some weird joo-joo beads around his neck or something. Grim Reaper-looking pendant on what looks like a rosary necklace. I don’t know what the fuck. Just get back here as soon as you can.”
We hung up and I stared out the window at a string of endless taillights, all overtaken by the Ford’s hardworking four-banger.
Slade said, “He got something for us?”
“Some G who wants to talk about Castaneda, a sweetheart named Chato.”
“No shit,” Slade said. “Chato, huh? I know that motherfucker.”
I said, “He one to talk to the cops?”
“Not unless he’s got a good reason—a selfish reason.”
“Jackson said he’s wearing joo-joo beads. Said it was religious. A pendant.”
Slade nodded and said, “Saint Death. The narco saint. There she is again.”
“She keeps on coming up, now doesn’t she?” I scratched my chin, tried to keep my eyes open against the wave of fatigue.
“Fucking cult,” Slade said. “Easy to sell snake oil to the poor, Frank.”
“A cult, just like the Mormons,” I said
, laughing at my own joke.
“Right, Frank. just like the Mormons. And Catholics.”
I glanced at him with cold eyes. But after a few seconds, I thought: Yep, like Catholics. Just like the Catholics.
When me and Slade entered the interrogation room, Chato had his boots on the table. Thick-soled cowboy boots made from some kind of exotic greenish skin. Gator boots, I thought. He wore a light gray guayabera and tight-fitting black Levi’s. Not quite the gangbanger image I had in mind, but the captain was right about the tattoos. Chato was inked across his neck with Gothic lettering, on his head with Aztec warrior imagery, and he had three tear drops inked on his face. The “joo-joo” beads did, in effect, comprise a black rosary—slightly oversized—with Santa Muerte in place of the Virgin Mary. Imagine this pretty picture, would you?
Chato didn’t make a move as we sat down, but instead shot us full of holes with dark, hate-filled eyes. He crossed his arms, lifted his chin in the manner of gangsters from in or around California and the Southwest, and said, “You finally my man, Frank Pinson?”
“I’m Detective Pinson,” I said while taking a seat across from the gangbanger. “And this is my partner, Detective Slade Ryerson.”
Chato said, “I know you.” He was looking at Slade. “You’re that street narco from the southeast.”
Slade nodded. “How you doing, Chato?”
Chato ignored Slade and looked at me. “I’m supposed to talk to you.”
I said, “That’s fine, mister…”
To Bring My Shadow Page 6
