by C. J. Box
“Description.”
“Tall, lean guy like you, in his late sixties, with silver hair and a thick salt-and-pepper mustache. Voice like a cement mixer. Wearing a cream Stetson just like the one in your lap there. Sure. Several folks came forward and said you were poking around town last week asking about Ralph Oakley. Serving papers, you say?”
I showed him my PI license and a copy of my process service log. “He ditched out on jury duty. Judge wanted to have a word with him.”
“Guess that ship has sailed. I do recall some legal papers we retrieved from the trashcan in his room. You scared the piss out of that cleaning woman at the motel. I mean, like, literally. She peed her pants when you came knocking on Oakley’s door. She thought you were there to kill him. Don’t suppose you were. That would make my day.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I was sitting in my car at the motel where he was shacked, and a woman came to visit him. It looked like she didn’t want to be seen entering his room. Has anyone said anything about him having a girlfriend?”
“Not as I recall. Can you describe this woman?”
“Five-five, nice figure. Good legs. I only saw her clearly from behind. I got her license number, though. Caught it on my dashcam.”
I handed him the slip of paper with the number and a thumb drive with the video segment from the cam.
“We’ll run this right away. I’d like to thank you for coming in.” He extended his hand. “This could be a big help.”
I started to shake hands, but my telephone beeped. It was Wade Stanfield. I held up a finger to Sheeran and answered.
“Sorry it took so long to run that number, buddy,” he said. “Computers just came back up this morning, and I had a backlog.”
“Did you get a hit?”
“Sure did.”
He told me the car owner’s name. I glanced at Sheeran.
“You need to do a safety check,” I said.
* * *
He tried to make me wait at the station, but we both knew that was unlikely. I followed him across town in my car. We parked in front of a wood frame house with a deep covered gallery. I followed him up the steps to the front door.
A woman answered when he knocked. I had never seen her face before, but the figure was familiar.
“Mrs. Borum?” Sheeran asked, flashing his shield. “Mrs. Margery Borum?”
“Oh, my God!” she said, her hand rising to her mouth. “What’s happened?”
“I think you know,” I said. Sheeran shot me a warning look.
“You,” she said to me. “I recognize you. You were the man sitting outside—” She stopped, cutting off the very end of the last word.
“Mrs. Borum,” Sheeran said. “We need to talk.”
She led us inside. She was flustered and sweaty, and she nearly forgot her manners. Finally she asked us to sit and even offered iced tea. We declined.
“Tell us about Ralph Oakley,” Sheeran said.
“He worked for my husband,” she said.
“He wasn’t working last Wednesday,” I said. “I know, because I served him a subpoena at his motel room. I saw you there minutes later. Were you in the habit of visiting him when your husband was at work?”
She started to cry. I sat back and let her. I did hand her a box of tissues from the table next to the couch. Her entire world was crumbling. I’d seen it a thousand times. It never got easy, but sometimes you just had to wait it out.
After a few minutes she calmed a little.
“We . . . Ralph and I . . . started seeing each other a few months back. It got out of hand, but I couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. We were talking about running off together. It seems silly, now that he’s dead. It never would have worked.”
“Why?” Sheeran asked.
“No money. Cash just burns holes in Ralph’s pockets. He can’t hold on to it. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Where were you on Friday?” I asked.
“In Houston, visiting a friend. We went shopping and had some drinks at a restaurant there. I know what you’re thinking. I was nowhere near Ralph on Friday. By the time I returned, around eight on Friday evening, the news was spreading around town. I’ve been a nervous wreck ever since.”
“Where’s your husband?” I asked.
“He’s at work, of course. He’ll be there until six.”
* * *
Sheeran told her not to call her husband. I followed him several streets over to the Borum Butcher Shop. When we walked through the door, the sales floor was empty. I pointed toward the door to the back.
“I’m calling for backup,” Sheeran said as he pulled a walkie from his pocket. I moved toward the door to check the parking lot. Sheeran started to follow me. I heard the blow that dropped him. It sounded like beating a watermelon with a wiffle bat. I turned. Sheeran was sprawled out on the floor, a pool of blood spreading from the back of his head, his eyes oddly unfocused. He twitched and jerked on the linoleum. Bob Borum stood over him, holding a honing steel, which dripped blood. In his other hand was a cleaver.
“You!” he shouted when he saw my face. “This is all your fault!”
“What did you do?” I knelt next to Sheeran and checked his wounds.
“Why in hell did you have to say anything about Ralph’s girlfriend?” Borum pleaded. There were tears in his eyes. “Twenty-three years. We been married twenty-three great years. Then you come in and tell me Ralph’s knocking off a little, so I decide I’ll swing by and see who he’s shagging. Thought it’d give me something to rib him about. I get to the motel, and there’s my own car sitting out front of his room. I followed her the next night, when she told me she was going out to a Grange meeting with her friend Sally. Sure enough, she went straight to that bastard Ralph.”
I backed toward the door. The confines of the butcher shop were too close for comfort. I pined for the open air, where I could dodge any swipes he might want to make with the cleaver. I had palmed Sheeran’s walkie. As I backed up, I quickly raised it and made an “officer down” call, adding the butcher shop address. I suddenly wished I’d also palmed his gun. I don’t carry one.
I hit the door, but it didn’t budge. I recalled that it opened inward from the street.
“You ruined my life, you son of a bitch!” Borum cried as he strode toward me, real tears streaming from his eyes. “Ain’t nothin’ left for me here. I either go on the road or on the gurney. Cain’t kill me twice, can they? I done took out Ralph, and now I done a cop. Ain’t nothin’ to keep me from doing you too.”
“When did you kill him?” I asked, trying to buy time.
“The next morning, on the way to work. I called his phone. Told him I’d drop by, give him a lift. I gave him a lift, all right. Lifted his cheatin’ ass all the way to fucking heaven!”
He dropped the bloody honing steel and raised his hand to wipe at the tears running down his face. I took the opportunity and charged him, the way a tackle sacks a quarterback. My shoulder rammed into his midsection, just below the ribs, crushing against his solar plexus. The air rushed out of him in an explosive gasp. In the back of my mind, I heard the sirens in the distance. I felt a sharp, searing pain along my left shoulder blade. He had swung at me with the cleaver and had connected. The cleaver hit the floor and skittered across it into the corner under a baseboard heater. My stomach lurched, and I tasted metal in the back of my throat. My heart raced as I grappled with the burly butcher, him trying to suck air into his lungs and me trying to hold him down. We rolled and scrabbled about in Sheeran’s blood. I got in two good punches just as the cruisers pulled into the parking lot, and I saw his eyes roll up in their sockets as he went slack beneath me.
* * *
It was touch-and-go for Ken Sheeran. They had to remove part of his skull because his brain was swelling. He was unconscious for almost a week, but slowly came around. He took a disability retirement. I had a call from him a few weeks back. He was thinking about the PI game. Wanted to know how to get a foothol
d. My long silence spoke volumes.
Bob Borum’s lawyer managed to make a deal for aggravated manslaughter mitigated by passion, but he’ll still spend the better part of the rest of his life in prison.
His wife divorced him while he was in jail waiting for trial. She moved away, I think to San Antonio. She showed up to testify, but otherwise nobody in Humble saw her again.
It took seventeen stitches to close the gash in my shoulder. Borum also fractured my scapula, so I was in a sling for a couple of months. You heal slower as you get old. It put a crimp in my PI activities, but that was okay. I needed a while to process things.
Bob Borum wasn’t a bad guy. Neither was Ralph Oakley. They weren’t criminals. They weren’t evil. They were two men in love with the same woman, and I walked into their lives, a stranger come to town, who innocently catalyzed their self-destruction. There were no bad guys in this, just people set on the path of disparate fates.
Borum blamed me for his life turning to shit. In a way, he was right. If I’d kept my mouth shut about seeing the woman go into Ralph Oakley’s motel room, probably none of this would have happened. At least it wouldn’t have happened because of me. Humble’s a small town. Sooner or later, one way or the other, the word would have gotten back to him. Killing Oakley was on him. I triggered it, though. That’s a lot of responsibility to carry around.
I would have to learn to live with that.
RYAN DAVID JAHN
All This Distant Beauty
FROM Mystery Tribune
Noah Beckett was standing in front of a small airplane hangar, watching the bruise-purple sky turn dark. He lit a cigarette while he waited for George Beverly, his pilot, to pull a small Cessna out onto the faded tarmac. Beverly was a skinny old man with the sad, wet eyes of a basset hound, and he dressed like you might see him stamping paper on bingo night. Noah had never worked with him before, but he used to run drugs for the Medellín cartel before retiring to a stucco bungalow in Valle de Bravo, and a man who’d lived through the life of a drug runner was a man who could handle himself.
Once the plane was out on the tarmac, Beverly pushed the tug back into the hangar and closed the roll-up door. Then he hesitated, looking at Noah with his sad, wet eyes.
“What is it?”
“You seem like a nice guy,” Beverly said. “This job you took, there’s a reason the cops are leaving it alone. You follow through, you’ll probably get yourself killed.”
“Don’t worry,” Noah said. “I’m not a nice guy.”
“It’s your skin, kid.”
“I’m forty-three.”
Beverly shrugged. “My man should be here in about twenty minutes. I have a parachute ready to go, but if you wanna repack it yourself I wouldn’t be offended.”
“I’ll trust you.”
“How much experience you have jumping?”
“Had airborne training in the army.”
“Static lines rather than ripcords?”
Noah nodded, took a drag, flicked his butt away.
“My advice? Pull as late as possible. A parachute’s a big fucking target and they probably have armed guards all around that island. We’re doing our flyover at night, but that don’t make you invisible. Wait till you’re at four hundred feet—two hundred if you’re feeling a little suicidal, and I’m guessing you are.”
“This has nothing to do with my mental state. It’s just a job.”
“Bagging groceries is a job.”
Noah first read about the kidnapping four days earlier in El Reformador, the Mexico City newspaper at which the victim, journalist Sofia Trujillo, worked. According to the paper, she’d been investigating an international human trafficking ring when she vanished from her apartment, the only evidence of trouble a broken door frame. A day after the piece ran, the newspaper’s owner came knocking.
Noah was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee in his underwear, when he heard three staccato raps. He cursed to no one, got to his feet, and padded across the cool tile floor. When he pulled open his front door, he found himself looking at a brick of a man. He wore a well-tailored suit, his hair and nails immaculate, but his nose had been broken at least once, the bridge doglegging left midway down, and his eyes were moist. A thick manila folder was gripped in his fist.
“How can I help you?”
“Mr. Beckett?”
“He’s not in. Can I tell him who stopped by?”
“My name is Santino Garcia.” The voice was thinner than you’d expect from a man of his build, as if the sound of a flute came squeaking out of a tuba. “I own a newspaper and something has happened to one of my journalists. I believe Mr. Beckett might be able to help.”
“Is this about the kidnapping?”
“You heard about it.”
“I read about it. Why don’t you come in? We can talk in my office.”
“You’re Mr. Beckett.” It wasn’t a question.
Noah nodded, then stepped left to let Santino inside. He led the man to his kitchen, gestured toward his table.
“This is your office?”
“Wait here. You can have a seat if you’d like.”
When Noah returned—now wearing a pair of threadbare cut-off shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt—Santino was pouring coffee into a chipped mug, the manila envelope left resting on the counter. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Help yourself.”
Santino sipped his coffee.
“Who told you I might be able to help?”
“Dante Lopez.”
Noah nodded. He didn’t advertise his services, as they tended to be illegal, and only accepted clients if they could name someone he’d worked with before. “What do you think I can do for you?”
“I want you to find Sofia.”
“Do you think they kidnapped her for ransom?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
“Then there’s nothing to be done. She got too close to something and they wanted her dead.”
“That is my fear, of course.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I might be wrong,” Santino said. “She’s my stepdaughter, Mr. Beckett. If she’s still alive, I want her home safely.”
“Any idea where they might be holding her?”
“I have the notes from her investigation.” He picked up the envelope and held it out to Noah, who took it from him. “My hope is you’ll read something in there that will help you find her.”
Noah flipped through the paperwork. “It’s almost all in Spanish.”
“You don’t speak Spanish?”
“I speak it okay—I’ve been in Mexico a long time—but I read at a third-grade level.”
“I can provide a translator.”
“I guess I’ll make do. I don’t like coworkers. But first we need to talk about terms.”
“I can pay you fifty thousand dollars up front and another fifty if you make her mother stop crying. That is every penny of liquid cash I have. I cannot negotiate. Your expenses will have to come from the money you’re paid.”
“Okay,” Noah said.
Noah didn’t know that he believed the man, but fifty thousand dollars in cash would allow him to engage in nothing but fuckery for the next year if he wanted to, even after expenses. The second payment didn’t enter into his calculations at all. Sofia Trujillo was almost certainly dead, which meant the money would never come, but he’d still do what he could to find her.
* * *
He spent the rest of the day going through the dead woman’s investigative notes and found himself impressed by her work. He was no investigator himself—at best, he was a mercenary given to sloth—but he wasn’t so stupid he couldn’t tell when someone had managed to find worms under a rock. She’d uncovered dozens of money transfers to and from prominent men; the names of half a dozen orphanages from which girls aged five to sixteen frequently went missing, and the orphanages’ financial ties to several of those prominent men; she had uncovered wh
at looked to be a reasonable approximation of the trafficking ring’s hierarchy, with a few names missing; and, finally, she’d uncovered a base of operations, which appeared to be Isla de Zapatos, a private island off the coast of southern Mexico whose rubber trees were once harvested for a shoe company, now defunct.
If she’d already been murdered, she was probably buried out in the desert somewhere or stuffed into a wall. But if her abductors had for some reason kept her alive—maybe they wanted her to tell them who’d betrayed them by talking to her and giving her documents—he might find her on Isla de Zapatos.
Based on Sofia Trujillo’s research, the trafficking ring held girls on the island until buyers came to get them, which meant it had already been set up as some sort of prison camp, the perfect place to hold a kidnapped journalist from whom you wanted information.
It was a long shot, of course, but everything was.
* * *
Noah was lighting another cigarette when Beverly’s guy showed up in an old powder-blue Ford pickup that was dotted with rust holes behind the wheel wells. The guy parked in front of the hangar door, killed the engine, and stepped out into the night. He looked at Noah, stepped over to Noah, and held out his hand.
“How you doing? Name’s Gael.”
Noah shook his hand and told him his name.
“Cool, man, cool. Are we ready to go?” He was young and had more enthusiasm for life than Noah liked, but that came with youth. All the things he dreamed of doing hadn’t yet become the things he’d never done. Give him another fifteen years, let regret calcify his soul, and Noah predicted he’d turn into the type of man you could sit next to in a bar and not hate.
“I’m ready.”
“Where’s Bev at?”
“On board.”
Gael stepped up onto the plane and Noah went back to smoking. He looked up at the sky. The bone-colored moon was a thin hooked blade, which was good; the lack of moonlight would increase his odds of getting onto the island unseen.
