Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  As she hurried down the hall, Connie looked over her shoulder at his clothes: a plain white undershirt, blue jeans and boots. “Do you have another shirt here?” she asked. “Something darker?”

  “I haven’t been home,” he said, following along after her. “There’s a flannel shirt in my truck. I think it’s green and blue plaid. Why?”

  “Put it on,” she said. It sounded like an order. “I’ll tell you why on the way.”

  Barry didn’t feel much better informed than he had been when he was sound asleep. On the way where? Connie charged forward like she was late for the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, and he struggled to keep up. “What about a hat?” she asked.

  “That’s in the truck too,” he said.

  “Good.” She tugged open the front door. A ferocious wind blew rain inside, but Connie seemed not to notice. She bowed her head only slightly as she stepped out into the downpour. Barry braced himself for the cold shock of it. As they ran for his truck, parked across the broad gravel area from the door, stinging drops whipped his face and soaked his shirt to the skin.

  “You have the keys?” She had to shout to be heard over the wailing wind. A lightning bolt illuminated her for a split second, standing beside the truck’s door, hunched against the weather, brown hair plastered to her skull. Raindrops tracked down her face like tears, but Barry could not imagine anything that would make Connie cry.

  He patted his right front jeans pocket. He kept his keys there, hooked to his belt loop by a length of silver chain. Drawing them out, he pushed past Connie and unlocked the truck. She tossed the gym bag in, climbed in behind the wheel, then slid across the bench seat. He followed. He seemed to be doing a lot of that tonight.

  Once he had settled in behind the wheel, he closed his door and took the hat and shirt that Connie offered, putting them on without question or comment. When he finished, she nodded toward the ignition. Barry shoved in the key, unwilling to hide his growing unhappiness with her behavior, her imperious attitude, the fact that she happily issued commands and assumed they would be obeyed without question.

  She sat and waited, arms crossed over her chest, while he turned the key, gunned the engine. “We going somewhere?” he asked.

  “Drive,” she said. “I’ll tell you where to turn.”

  “What’s all this about, Connie?” he asked, driving anyway. He reached forward and cranked up the heater.

  “We have to do something,” she said. “For Carl. It’s important.”

  “Why isn’t he here?” Barry asked. “He didn’t tell me anything about it.”

  “He’s a busy man. He told me; I’m telling you. I speak for Carl, don’t worry about that.”

  “Just seems strange, us rushin’ off like this. It’s dark, it’s raining—”

  “I didn’t take you as the kind of guy who fucking complains all the time.”

  I’m not, Barry wanted to say. He held his tongue, knowing that to object would just prove her point. He drove in silence, turning where Connie directed him. The truck’s headlights cut a ragged cone through the storm-dark night; its windshield wipers banged an uneven percussion in counterpoint to the rain’s steady barrage. They headed toward Douglas, along Highway 80.

  After a few minutes, she put a hand on his thigh and squeezed gently. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, making her voice a purr. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh. It’s just that I didn’t want to talk about this inside, where the others could hear. This is something Carl asked us to do, and he wants it kept quiet.”

  “He didn’t ask me,” Barry said. His words were curt, and he didn’t bother to disguise the grumpiness he felt. Clarice had done the same thing to him sometimes—assuming he would just do as she said without telling him why, or what her intentions were, and his response had generally been the same: anger that simmered under the surface until it finally boiled over in a shouting argument that could last for hours, or days. Connie couldn’t know that, of course, and in almost every other way she was the complete opposite of Clarice.

  “He knew you’d listen to me,” Connie said. “He knows we have a…a special bond.”

  “That what you call it?” Barry wished he could keep the edge out of his voice, but he didn’t know how to bring it under control. Was it something more than just anger? He didn’t know that either, but suspected (from a tickle under his arms, a dryness in his mouth, a liquid churning in his gut) that fear might play some part in it as well.

  “Barry, honey, I’m trying to explain it to you, okay? It wasn’t the kind of thing he could just come out with. And he didn’t want to talk about it at the ranch, like I said. Turn up here.”

  They had passed through the intersection of 80 and Pan-American, where the highway hooked west and eventually northwest toward Bisbee and continued past the Motor Vehicles Division and an abandoned auto dealership. He didn’t know the name of the street he did turn on, and through the rain and dark he couldn’t make out the sign. The road led north between tall grasses and spiked balls of yucca with stalks that reached toward the sky as if trying to spear the thundering clouds. Lights burned in the windows of trailer homes set back from the road.

  “Are you gonna tell me what this is all about?”

  “I said I would. Slow down and watch for a dirt road on the right.”

  He did as she said, wishing she would get to the point already. They neared the dirt road, its terminus barely an opening in the high grass, with a couple of mailboxes on wooden posts canting drunkenly in the soaked earth. “That one?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Kill the headlights.”

  “What’s goin’ on, Connie? I mean, what the fuck—”

  “Just do it!” she snapped. Barry complied. With the moon hidden by storm clouds, he could barely see to negotiate the turn. He made it slowly, feeling the truck slip as its tires tried to find purchase in the rain-slick mud.

  Beside him, Connie shifted and raised the gym bag from the floor onto her lap. The sound of its zipper seemed loud in the quiet truck, even against the background din of the monsoon. He glanced over, afraid to take his eyes off the narrow dirt trail for long, but the bag’s interior was as dark as a cave, as dark as he was beginning to fear her heart was.

  As she drew something from the bag, a flash of lightning glinted off dark steel. “What the fuck?” he said again.

  “If you want to be precise, it’s a Government Model .38 Colt Super,” she answered. “It’s twenty years old if it’s a day, but they built them like tanks back then. It’s been fired and cleaned recently, and it’s absolutely pristine. And untraceable.”

  Barry stopped the truck. He didn’t intend to drive another inch until she had explained what they were up to.

  “You know we’re in a war here, right?” she asked.

  “I thought the war was in Iraq.”

  “Not that one, although having a border like a sponge makes us vulnerable to terrorists too. I’m talking about the war to defend our border, Barry. The war to save America for Americans. How many illegals do you think cross the border every day?”

  “I don’t know, a few thousand?”

  “That’s on the low side,” Connie said. “Last year the Border Patrol sent back half a million, just from Arizona. That doesn’t include all the ones they missed, of course, or the other states along the border. We’re being invaded. They’re doing it slowly, without an army, but they’re doing it. They’ve almost taken over Arizona and New Mexico. If we don’t start fighting back, they will.”

  “So what, you brought me out here so you can shoot at illegals?”

  “You’re still thinking too small, Barry.” She pressed the gun into his hands. He didn’t want it, tried to refuse it, but she kept up the pressure until it was either open his palms and accept it or have his fingers crushed. He hadn’t held a gun in years, had never been much of a hunter. Vietnam had eliminated any desire to see bullets tearing flesh, smashing bone. “See that house?”

  Barry followed her pointing
finger. A short distance up the dirt road was the place she meant, a manufactured home sitting on a small fenced lot, surrounded by empty fields of grass and sunflowers and thistle. Three windows were illuminated, that he could see, and a floodlight over the door shone down on a forest green wooden staircase attached to the front. Wind drove raindrops through the floodlight’s cone at a slant. “What about it?”

  “That’s where Hilario Machado lives,” Connie said. “You remember who that is?”

  Barry had to search his memory. It seemed like ages ago, but it had only been, what, yesterday? Day before?

  “Guy from Wal-Mart.”

  “The guy who wouldn’t hire you, but hires his own kind. Wal-Mart used to be a symbol of America, Barry, but that store draws people over here from across the border. Sometimes they just come to shop, but then maybe they see it as the Promised Land, and they sneak back in just so they can live in the same country as it. Or so they can get jobs there.”

  “What about him?” Barry asked. He was afraid he already knew, though. The niggling fear that had dried his throat and upset his stomach and made his skin itch blossomed into a full-bodied thing that threatened to leave his limbs shaking and helpless, his gut spewing.

  “He’s alone in there,” Connie said. “He’s not married, has no family in this country. He sends some money to his father in Mexico, but his mother’s dead, and he’s insured. It’s not like anyone will suffer. Not even him—that Colt would stop a bull in its tracks.”

  “You want me to…You want me to shoot him?”

  “Carl wants you to kill him,” Connie said, finally putting words to it.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a fucking war, Barry. He’s the enemy. More than that, he’s a symbol, just like that Wal-Mart is. You know you wanted to do it when he turned you down. Now you can. No witnesses, no danger of being caught, no harm to any other living soul. But the statement it’ll make—that’s what makes it important, Barry. That’s what makes it necessary. We have to let them know that they can’t take our country away from us.”

  It was crazy. She was crazy, and so was Carl, so were the whole lot of them. Killing the poor sap wouldn’t send any kind of statement.

  Except Barry didn’t know anything about politics. He had heard some of the people at the ranch arguing about immigration issues and other things, the war, the economy, terrorism. Every one of them seemed smarter than him, better informed. They watched Fox News while he fell asleep. No, he wasn’t to be trusted on such things; he was too dumb and ignorant.

  Anyway, Connie sat close to him in the truck, and it was like they were in a cocoon together, with all the rain and the lightning and the politics outside. Her legs pressed against his and her hand touched his thigh again, fingernails stroking, stroking, and her breath felt hot on his neck, and his blood pounded like the rain on the roof, rushing to his groin, thundering in his ears. She was a woman of the world, one who had been around and done all sorts of things, and Carl was some kind of genius, and he was just a dumb hick who didn’t know a good thing when it slapped him in the face or woke him up with her mouth.

  “It’s loaded?”

  “Ready to go.”

  He started to grab for the door handle, but she moved faster, taking his face in both hands, pressing her lips against his, her tongue moving through them and into his mouth, probing. Then she released him, and at the same time his hand found the handle and pulled it. The door fell open and he dropped to the muddy road, shutting it.

  Barry slogged through mud that sucked at his feet toward the little house, about forty yards away. The wind-whipped rain stung, and his clothes, just beginning to dry, were soaked again, chafing where they rubbed against his skin. A fence about three feet tall surrounded the house, with a gate halfway down the gravel drive. He worked the gate, let it close on its springs with a bang. He thought something moved inside, a shadow against one of the walls he could see through a window. He kept going, up the wooden steps, stomping hard to loosen some of the mud that had adhered to his boots. Before he could even knock on the door, it opened, spilling yellow light out onto the little landing made by the top stair.

  “Yes?” Hilario Machado said. “You—”

  Barry raised the weapon, its barrel less than a foot from the shining head with its precise comb lines, and squeezed the trigger like they had taught him back in basic, so many lifetimes ago. A clap of thunder almost drowned out the boom of the gun, and he wondered if it had gone off at all or had maybe misfired, but lightning and the yellow light from inside showed him that Hilario Machado tumbled backward, blood spraying like black paint, up and back. From where he stood outside, Barry waited until Machado had hit the floor, jerking and quaking, and fired two more times, each bullet slamming into Machado’s yellow short-sleeved shirt and causing another reflex jerk. Then Machado stopped moving, and Barry, still gripping the weapon in his right hand, jumped off the top step and ran back toward the truck that hunkered in the darkness on the muddy road, toward Connie and Carl and a new life unlike any he had ever known, the life of someone who has murdered another human being.

  14

  Police work could be the most frustrating job in the world, Buck thought, but then once in a great while it turned out to have a certain elegance, when everything came together like the steps in a ballet.

  He drove through the punishing monsoon, north up Highway 191, with Raul Bermudez at his side. Scoot Brown and Carmela Lindo followed in another vehicle. Ed hadn’t been willing to reassign any of the officers working the suddenly more complicated Lippincott case, but six officers from the Willcox office would join them at the scene.

  “Busy night,” Raul observed. “I can’t believe you hooked this all up so fast.”

  “It just happened,” Buck said. “I started making calls, trying to follow up on what happened to Henry Schaffer after he got out back in Oklahoma. I got lucky and found a cop in Lawton who not only remembered Schaffer, but had a CI who was friends with him, so he was able to keep tabs on the guy even after his probation was up. Schaffer didn’t stick around Oklahoma, but he wanted someone to know where he’d gone, so he told his buddy, the CI, that he was moving to Arizona.”

  Buck swerved around a coyote carcass, its blood running toward the edge of the road along with the rainwater. A gully alongside the highway roared with water that would overrun its banks at some low point and send a flash flood across the highway, unless it hit a wash first that directed it off into the desert. “When he landed here, he changed his name, got a driver’s license under the new identity, Dana Fortier. Turns out that a Dana Fortier got a fix-it ticket a few weeks back, outside Willcox, for a busted taillight. He gave an address in Dos Cabezas. I got hold of the officer who wrote him up, and he confirmed the pictures we have of Henry Schaffer. Same guy. The place in Dos Cabezas is pretty isolated, up a dirt road off 186, toward the hills. Perfect place to stash Lulu.”

  “Lucky break,” Raul said.

  “Sometimes that’s what the job’s all about. If we didn’t have luck we’d be totally screwed.”

  Raul laughed. “Got that right,” he said.

  During the day, or even on a clear night with a good moon, Buck knew, a person driving on 186 could look up and see the two vaguely head-shaped lumps on the mountain that gave Dos Cabezas its name. The town was largely a ghost town now, a few inhabited dwellings mixed in with the remains of adobe buildings from a mining boom that had gone bust most of a century before. In the dark you could drive right through it and never know it had been there.

  It was just about an hour from Elfrida, past the turnoff for the Chiricahua National Monument. While things seemed to have fallen together quickly, it had been after nine before Buck had confirmation on the Dana Fortier/Henry Schaffer connection and the address, and another hour had passed while he worked out the logistics with Willcox, keeping Bisbee in the loop as he did. Fortunately they’d been able to rouse a judge and get a warrant during that same period. He had called Tammy, who had
sounded neither surprised nor disappointed to hear that he would probably be out all night. He was himself both surprised and disappointed by that fact.

  She had also told him that Aurelio had said the pregnant cow was in labor, and he’d be staying with her in the barn tonight. Buck knew that cows didn’t necessarily calve in the middle of the night, but he had spent enough long hours in late-night barns, or out in the fields, observing and assisting, that it seemed to him that it was their preference. He liked to be present for births and regretted that he would miss this one. In his mind’s eye he could see her sides (white with brown markings) contracting. She would lie down on the hay as the contractions worsened. A membrane, like a water balloon full of blood, would issue from her, then she’d get up and it would tear, and the next contraction would expel a thick stream of amniotic fluid, releasing a stink that could knock a grown man back on his heels. Finally, another bubble, this one the birth sac, would present. Buck would be able to see the calf ’s hind hooves inside. Cows took no Lamaze classes, but she would know without being told that she had to push. If the calf got stuck, or presented improperly, Buck would know it soon, and he’d break out the calf puller, but that hadn’t been necessary as often as it had when Buck was a kid himself. He chuckled at the memory.

  “What?” Raul asked.

  “Bad joke I thought of,” Buck said. “Rancher humor.”

  “Like ‘You might be a redneck if…’?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Lay it on me, bossman.”

  “You asked for it. Okay, kid visiting his rancher grandpa, from the city. Grandpa’s got a cow ready to calf, and the kid, who’s a real pest with all his questions, wants to watch. Grandpa worries, because he’ll have to concentrate on the cow, but finally agrees. The process takes a long time, calf is turned wrong, rancher has to latch on to one of its legs with a calf puller and tug. When it’s all over, he turns to the kid, who has been wide-eyed and silent the whole time. ‘Okay, Johnny,’ he says, ‘you got any questions?’ ‘Just one,’ Johnny says. ‘How fast was it running when it hit her?’”