Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “No place you can get to,” Djapper replied. ”No place you could even drop a Delta Force team into. You’d have to be invited. Our best spies aren’t even that smooth anymore. They’re technicians, too straight to bend themselves around corners. But you, Raszer, now . . . ” Djapper widened his eyes. “You’re not straight, are you?”

  “I guess it would take bent to know bent,” Raszer replied. “But let’s be straight about two things: I need to find Katy Endicott, and if you help me, I’ll try to do it without stepping on toes.”

  “I doubt that would be possible.”

  “In any case, I’m going to find her.”

  Djapper wiped his mouth again, and the gesture read as a write-off. “I’ll give you two things. Ruthie Endicott is one. She’s got something, and she knows that sooner or later she’ll have to come out with it, because otherwise she’s facing a bleak future.”

  “Explain. Has she broken federal law?”

  Djapper snorted. He leaned right into Raszer’s face and spoke emphatically, his gravity undercut by the muffin crumb that remained affixed to his upper lip. “She’s dangling at the end of a long chain that involves interstate drug smuggling, human trafficking, industrial espionage, and blackmail—all stuff her boyfriends were into. The fact is, she should be in jail, and would be . . . except that we need her loose as bait.”

  “You have hard evidence that she was involved in criminal activity?”

  “Circumstantial, but solid. Henry Lee had the mouth, but she had the fingers.”

  “What? Pushing dope to Azusa High School? Running teenage prostitutes?”

  “Oh, Mr. Raszer . . . ”

  “And all this can somehow be connected to a mountaintop redoubt somewhere in the Middle East? To Scotty Darrell, and Layla Faj-Ta’wil? And maybe even back to you and whoever’s party you don’t want to bust? And you call me paranoid?” Raszer shook his head. “What is she, then, some kind of ‘asset’? Are you playing her?”

  Djapper laughed. “No. That would require some trust. She’s a Taos tramp. She’s off the circuit, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be plugged back in. Her boys came back from Iraq with a mission. She signed on. They’re dead, and somehow she’s still alive.”

  “These people kill to protect the chain. Maybe she’s not really a link.”

  “Well, you start pulling on that chain, you’re bound to find out.”

  “I have to pull it. It’s my nature.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  “I don’t get you. You asked to meet. Part of you seems to want to help me.”

  “That’s true. Part of me does.”

  “On the other hand, you seem to be telling me that if I pursue this case, I’ll be stepping into some Operation Mongoose sort of minefield. You seem to be suggesting that the people you’re tiptoeing around have some common interest with the people who kidnapped Katy Endicott.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Never said what?”

  “That the Bureau—”

  “What about the NCTC? What about Picot?”

  Djapper turned to look at the purple-haired girl.

  “If I can say so, Agent, you seem a little torn.”

  Djapper kept his eyes on the girl, flicked the crumb from his lip, and spoke almost as if in soliloquy. “That question you asked Picot in the hallway . . . about the role he was playing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing,” said the FBI man, wiping his hands. “I just thought that maybe . . . maybe you’d be someone . . . I’d like to know.”

  Raszer was momentarily quieted.

  “Well, I’m . . . flattered. And I rarely turn down an offer of friendship.”

  “I’ll tell you about these people: They lame you, they let you live, and they put you in debt bondage. It all comes down to what theycan hold over a person’s head.”

  With that, Djapper pushed back from the table and stood up.

  When they hit the bright sidewalk, he offered Raszer a stick from a half-empty pack of Wrigley’s gum. The flavor was wintergreen.

  “Your regular brand?” he asked Djapper.

  “Kills the coffee breath.”

  “Yeah,” said Raszer, taking out a cigarette. “But it’ll rot your teeth.”

  “Ha,” said Djapper, and then again, less jovially, “Ha.”

  Raszer boarded a DC-10 in the bright coastal haze of an April morning. Ahead of him in line was a little rich girl clutching an oversize plush bunny, a reminder that it was nearly Easter, and that he needed to make a contribution to Brigit’s collection of eggs, the wooden ones the old babushkas in the Ukraine hand-paint with gnarled fingers. He’d gotten her started when she was three, and now she scoured flea markets for them.

  Special Agent Djapper was a hidden variable. It seemed clear he was caught in the crosscurrents he’d hinted about. What else was new? The feds had been playing footsy with organized crime for nearly a century, and at any given time, half the investigatory agencies of the U.S. government were plumbing rackets from inside the sewer pipes. It was a matter of pride for them to think they could work both sides. Maybe the only way for Djapper to get free of the current was to pull someone else in.

  Djapper had made good on his promise to put an FBI surveillance team on Raszer’s house, and as this gesture had unsettled Raszer as much as it reassured him, Monica had won her battle and remained in place, with her $2,000-a-week Danish bodyguard.

  The Jeep Monica had reserved for Raszer was a ragtop red Wrangler, and he promptly unhooded it for the drive from Albuquerque to Taos. Like a coyote, he wanted to sniff his way into town, making the perfume of creosote, piñon, and mineral dust part of his own scent, exchanging its atoms with his own. He wanted to feel as if he’d ridden the wind into Taos like a hawk, so that once he got down into the maze, he might retain that perspective. There were three questions he wanted to ask Ruthie Endicott, and seeing the answers for what they were might require an aerial view.

  The first one was a formality, but it had to be asked. Had she received any form of communication from either Katy or her abductors, whether by proxy, ransom note, threat, or direct contact, since the night of the abduction?

  The second question was operational and, once again, had to be asked. Had

  Ruthie’s mother at any time engaged the services of another private investigator?

  The third question was the one that mattered. It broke down into three parts: Did Ruthie have any knowledge of how Johnny Horn and Henry Lee had entered their killers’ employ? Had she ever seen or met any of these men? Did she still have the emails she’d received from Henry over the year preceding his death?

  If Ruthie had kept the emails, they were presumably not accessible to the FBI, or Djapper would have gotten his hands on them already. If she could be persuaded to give Raszer that access, he’d need to rely less on Djapper’s dubious patronage.

  As he ascended the grade from Santa Fe toward his destination, he watched the cloud shadows creep up the slopes of the Sangre de Cristos like blood spreading on rough linen, defying gravity, staining the pink rock and pine in shades of royal purple and midnight blue. In the shaman art of the Chimayo Valley, the mountains were always defined by the shadows that fell on them. The color of the shadows changed throughout the day, but was always some variant of blue. The mesas surrounding Albuquerque were muted, striated pastels—baked colors—and Santa Fe’s red clay glowed at sundown. But Taos was blue, and blue is the color of the mystic, the color of blood seen through the bridal veil of skin. It never surprised Raszer that places of spiritual pilgrimage had become what they were. It wasn’t the churches or temples or New Age dude ranches built on their soil; it was the genius of the places themselves.

  No one had to tell this to the Pueblo Indians, of course. They were the longest-standing residents of Taos, still harvesting the sky in a settlement north of town with no indoor plumbing, content to live and dance and perform all bodily functions in the sight of their god. People came to Ta
os for visions. Even agnostic painters came for vision and called it the “quality of light.”

  Whatever anyone chose to call it, the place had it, and Raszer conceded that as much as he was here to grill Ruthie Endicott, he was here for an epiphany.

  He’d taken the main highway north from Santa Fe and then detoured into the Chimayo Hills just past the turnoff for Los Alamos, where six decades earlier J. Robert Oppenheimer had midwifed the atom bomb and declared, “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.” The old coach road that was now Highway 76 cut through high country occupied by ten generations of weavers, and was still the route of choice for art hounds.

  But Raszer wasn’t buying art today. He was making a pilgrimage of his own, to a place pilgrims had come at Eastertime for nearly two centuries, an adobe chapel known as the Santuario de Chimayo, where, it was said, the soil healed and visitors were encouraged to sift it through their fingers and cake it on their wounds. It was ritual, yes, superstition, probably, but Raszer, who undertook each rescue mission with the awareness that he might not come home, was not beyond either of these. If the soil of Chimayo healed, so much the better. He’d need all the psychic armor he could carry.

  The Santuario’s builder had cut a well in the chapel floor, through which visitors could touch the soil below. It was dark inside, even in midafternoon, and as Raszer stepped in, he was only vaguely aware of another presence: a girl—more precisely, a young woman—lying prone before the hole in the floor, face to the ground, arms spread in apparent supplication. Her hair was black—or seemed so—and fell around her head. She wore a simple sundress, pale blue, and its skirts had ridden to the top of her brown thighs in the effort to position herself. Suddenly, she thrust her hands down into the soil, then rose to her knees, scrubbing her face with the red soil.

  Only then did she see Raszer, who was instantly pierced by the whiteness of the eyes behind the mask of dirt. She fled like a fox.

  There it was. Taos. Penitential and erotic. The Spanish legacy, the El Greco languor, and the shaman-sense that things weren’t as they seemed. No wonder D. H. Lawrence had asked that his ashes be brought here.

  Raszer went to the well and dropped to a squat, inhaling the girl’s afterscent along with the mineral cologne from below. The trace lingered, but her image became less distinct with each second. It was hard to know for certain if he’d seen what he’d seen: hard in the reborn stillness and darkness of the place; hard after ten years in the liminal zones; hard when hers was the same face and form he saw in oblique reflections from shop windows, and in his dreams. Seeing her now was, in any event, a good sign.

  Nothing was retrieved by the eyes without first having been cast by the mind on the tabula rasa of mean existence. Scent was a more accurate gauge of reality than sight, which was probably why animals survived by it.

  Highway 68 into Taos was like all access roads to all places of pilgrimage. The camp followers of sprawl—fast-food outlets, insurance offices, beauty salons, liquor stores—had found their way there and planted flimsy foundations. Not even timeless Taos could keep Burger King off the Paseo del Pueblo Sur. Even so, the steep boulevard leading to the old village promised haven from commerce, if only because there was nothing beyond but the mountains and the Rio Grande.

  Raszer dropped his bags at the Adobe Pines Inn, the most indigenous of the more modestly priced places on the strip. It was a low-slung, tile-roofed hacienda of 1832 vintage, surrounded by orchards and fronted by an eighty-foot grand portal. The beds were as sturdy as galleons, the decor tastefully rustic, the breakfast advertised as home-cooked. Raszer took an approving look around, then headed into town.

  Special Agent Djapper had given Raszer the last known address for Constance and Ruthie Endicott, estranged wife and elder daughter of the late Silas. It was a tiny, wind-blasted cracker box of a house on farm property along the Camino del Medio, probably built to shelter a ranch hand’s family and now rented by the month. The screen door was half off its hinges, the porch sagged with dry rot, and the place was clearly unoccupied, but through a pane glazed over with red dust, Raszer spotted an empty half pint of Cuervo and a cat curled on a stained pillow. He figured that the cat probably came with the house, the Cuervo with Ruthie.

  He stepped off the porch, feeling temporarily adrift. He’d purposely not warned Ruthie of his coming, for fear she’d bolt, and because both Djapper and the elders of the church had assured him that mother and daughter were still in Taos. But people did blow in and out of this town like tumbleweed, didn’t they? And where would Ruthie have blown? The wind rippled across a swath of columbine and carried the delicate fragrance to his nostrils. Spring in the high country. He thought of the girl in the church, of the dress she wore, and he determined to start from scratch, beginning with the local phone book, then the local Witnesses, and then the local taverns.

  After two hours of leaving calling cards, Raszer circled back to Taos Plaza, dead center, as in all old Spanish towns. He parked himself on the steps of the bandstand and surveyed the tiled plaza and the little shops that bordered it. The locals were inside the shops, the tourists squinting through the glass at turquoise and silver and glazed pottery—squinting because the storefronts all mirrored the low sun. There were barely two hours of daylight left, and Raszer was no closer to finding Ruthie. In the window of a New Age trinket store, he spotted the reflection of a crew of townie kids headed off in a huddle. They had just about vanished when he saw a fringed pant leg rounding a bend into a narrow lane off the northwest corner of the plaza.

  At the end of the lane, wedged into a cul-de-sac, was the Alley Cantina. The door was open, and a Ryan Adams song slapped off the surrounding adobe. The kids had gone inside, as the air was turning cool, and Raszer followed them into the dim, moderately crowded barroom. It smelled of hops and tortillas, and he realized he had a taste for both after the drive. He found a stool, ordered a Carta Blanca, and finished a basket of nachos before taking Ruthie’s picture out and calling the bartender over. It wasn’t difficult to command his attention; Raszer was easily fifteen years older than the next-oldest person in the room. Beyond that, he had a $20 bill on the bar.

  “Ever seen this girl?” he asked. “The hair might be different. Look at the eyes and the mouth. And the attitude.”

  “Uh-huh,” the bartender grunted, drying his hands with a towel.

  Raszer held a beat, hoping for some elaboration on the grunt.

  “Does that mean you’ve seen her?” he asked. “Her name’s Ruthie.”

  “Is she in trouble?” the bartender asked with a grin. “Wouldn’t surprise me, with that mouth. You a cop?”

  “Nope,” said Raszer. “Private investigator. It’s actually her little sister I’m looking for. She was abducted over a year ago in L.A. I just want to talk to Ruthie.”

  “Right, well . . . I’m not positive, but she looks familiar. Cat’s eyes. See those even in the dark. Lemme call Sage over. She’s half Tiwa. Knows everybody.” The bartender summoned a heavy, brown-skinned young woman who smelled of her namesake and had been drinking in the corner. She came slowly, gravity weighing on her limbs. The Tiwa were the Indians of the Taos Pueblo, but this girl—Raszer guessed—was an outcast.

  Raszer introduced himself and refreshed her 7 and 7.

  “Know this pistol, Sage?” the bartender asked her. “Isn’t she the one—”

  “The one who rode off on Bobby T’s Indian last Saturday,” Sage affirmed. “Hell, you oughta know her. Your drink orders double when she comes in. All the boys scrambling to get ’er lubricated.” The Tiwa girl turned to Raszer. “Are you a bounty hunter, mister, or a Hollywood casting agent?”

  “He’s a private eye,” answered the bartender. “But he is from Hollyweird.”

  “She done somethin’ wrong?” asked Sage. “I sure hope you haul her ass off somewhere. Us local girls got enough competition.”

  “Not that I know of,” said Raszer. “But I will try to sideline her for a few days.”

  Sage s
miled and tipped her glass to Raszer’s. “She ’n her mom live out by the tin works on outbound Highway 64. There’s a trailer park called Reynaldo’s. Not too trashy. The mother’s got a man. It’s his trailer. He’s a holy roller.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know his name?” Raszer asked. “There could be a lot of trailers out there.”

  “Sure I do,” said Sage. “For a refill.”

  Raszer nodded to the bartender.

  “It’s Angel,” she said. “Ong-hell. Angel Davidos.”

  “Thanks,” said Raszer, handing the girl her drink. “You’ve been a help.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The wind comes up with sunset in the mountain Southwest, and for at least a few minutes, modern man walks in the same spirit world as his ancestors. Raszer felt it rising on his back, finding the dampness in his shirt, in the furrows that ran along his spine. It was as if the massive red ball of the sun was displacing an ocean of air as it sank between the peaks. It was also a harbinger of night’s coming, and of the wolves. The turnoff to Reynaldo’s RV Park was as advertised, just north of the Taos Tin Works, through a broken gate that led to a graded dirt road over an empty pasture and past a stand of cottonwoods. On the far side of the grove, across a little stream, a wooden fence bounded a few acres of flat, rocky land that was home to a transitory community of about three hundred souls. There were campers up on cinder blocks that looked to be there for keeps, forty-year-old trailers with hulls as encrusted as ships in dry dock, and a few late models of the Winnebago type. The turf occupied by long-term residents had a sunken-in look and an accretion of mostly out-used junk that was probably kept in place to mark the imaginary property lines.