by David Cole
“And what are you doing for your friend?”
“Mary?”
“Since I know you’re working with Ken Charvoz, I just get the feeling that something happened at that park, where the two of them work.”
“Remember me asking about cockfights?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Well, somehow, cockfighting is connected to drug smuggling.”
“That’s a stretch,” he said. “I told you, those guys go to cockfights for fun. No money in it, no drug cartel would spend time running cockfights, the financial return just isn’t there.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“So I’m asking you again. What are you really doing?”
“Bob Gates told me, Bob said that his worst nightmare is not just having his kids use drugs. It’s imagining them in the business, in the drug business. And his absolute worst horror is just the thought of some kid, the same age as his boy, that kid being a drug mule.”
“Huh,” Kyle said. “Huh, imagine that.”
“You’ve got kids?”
“Nope. You?”
“A daughter. And a granddaughter.”
“Huh,” he said again. “I just don’t see that I can help you.”
“I may need a good friend.”
“You mean, a friend inside the police department.”
“No, Christopher, I just meant…a friend.”
“That’s really sweet,” he said. “But you, computers, I’m useless. I’m just an old homicide dick. I don’t even carry a piece anymore. You do, though.”
“My Beretta and me,” I said. “Sounds like a cheap movie.”
“I haven’t owned a piece in years. Can’t even remember the last time I fired one. So. Okay. Hope I didn’t freak out your friend. Hope I’ve not disappointed you.”
“Not yet.”
“So what’re you doing now? How about an early dinner?”
“Actually,” I said, “tonight, I’m going to a cockfight.”
“Laura,” he said. “Give this up.”
“I can’t.”
“Walk away from this ugly business.”
“Thanks for meeting me, Christopher. And thanks for meeting Mary.”
“These maras, they’re assassins. You go after them, they’ll take you down. It’s all just business to them. Your name comes, you get in the way, your name goes on a contract and make no mistake, you will die.”
“Chris,” I said.
“Christopher.”
“I’m going to trust you with something.”
“Be careful who you trust,” he said. But he was eager to hear me.
“I’m not on the TPD payroll.”
“Okay.”
“But I’m working a special contract for TPD.”
“Okay.”
“Sometime really soon, word will get out that I’m hired to look at financial records of drug trafficking, smuggling…all kinds of things.”
“Waste of time,” Kyle said.
“But that’s not really what my contract is for.”
“Ahhh.”
“TPD suspects they’ve got a dirty cop.”
“Nothing new there.”
“No, Christopher. A very special dirty cop.”
“Involved in what?” Kyle said.
“In drug trafficking. Smuggling. Everything we’ve been talking about. For all I know, even cockfights.”
“That’s a real stretch,” he said finally.
“They know it’s happening.”
“And they know this…how?”
“Leaked special ops,” I said. “But really meant to be a sting.”
“Well. Doesn’t that figure,” he said. Disgust on his face, his eyes behind me, his shoulders rising and falling and whole tectonic plates of muscles shifting on his face. “So you’ve been contracted to…what?”
“Look over personnel records. Hack into bank accounts.”
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”
“Because I need to trust somebody,” I said. “Somebody inside.”
“Who gave you the contract?”
“Jordan Kligerman.”
“No. I mean, who first came to you with this.”
“Bob Gates. Will you help me?”
“Laura. You overestimate my capability. I’m an old homicide dick. They keep me on because of sympathy, well, okay, they keep me on partially because I really know how to work a murder book. But what you’re talking about, if it’s not homicide, I’m useless to you.”
“Unless you hear something,” I said. “Just keep me in mind. If you hear something, give me a call. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You’re asking a lot more than that, lady.”
23
“Mom,” Spider said.
“Yes?”
“Is Nathan gone for good?”
“Spider.” I steadied myself, I’d almost hugged her, I saw her eyes open in surprise when my arms went out toward her, but she couldn’t hug because my granddaughter, Sarah Katherine, had just started her first steps, and she could stand upright only as long as Spider held one tiny hand.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I don’t know if he’s coming back.”
“Mom. He’s hardly been here the last few months. What’s happened?”
“A rough spot.”
“Oh, Mom. He didn’t, God, don’t tell me he beat you?”
“No no no no no. Nathan would never do that.”
“What would he do?”
“He wants to adopt a boy,” I said. “An orphan, nobody else in his born-to or born-from clans wants the boy. Nathan wanted me to go with him, wanted me to meet the boy, welcome him into the family.”
Spider drew Sarah Katherine up in her arms, balanced her on one hip, and put her other arm around my shoulders.
“Hug gammy,” Spider said to the baby. Sarah Katherine put out both hands to swat at my chin and nose until Spider pressed the three of us together.
How many years have I waited for this?
Almost all my life.
“So, Mom,” Spider said, letting me go. “We need to talk about that sweat lodge Nathan built down below. Look at my arm. Up here, near the elbow. That’s a bee sting.”
A reddish circle, half an inch around and swelling vividly at the center.
“Killer bees,” she said.
“Killer bees?” I started to laugh.
“Nathan hasn’t lit a fire in that sweat lodge for weeks. Pack rats are in there, but worse, I think there’s a nest of killer bees.”
“What a concept,” I said.
Couldn’t stop laughing. A swarm of killer bees, near my house? What a concept, that I’m not dealing with real people, it’s just killer bees.
“Mom. It’s no joke. There’s a swarm in the sweat lodge.”
Leave it to nature, it always kicks you in the butt when you’re feeling low. I couldn’t stop laughing, after all I’d been through in the past forty-eight hours.
“Mom. These are Africanized bees. They’re very aggressive. If they swarmed on my baby, she’d die from shock. This is serious, Mom.”
“Yes. You’re right.” Tried and failed to suppress a giggle. “We’ll call the exterminator. We’ll kill those killer bees. We’ll rip down the sweat lodge.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do,” I said to myself.
And like that, things seemed lighter, less serious. I staggered slightly, grasped a mesquite bush to steady myself.
“Rip it down?” Spider said. “So he’s really gone?”
“It is what it is,” I said.
“So he’s really gone.”
It wasn’t a question, despite my facile answer.
Killer bees. Not much of a unique metaphor, but I’d already seen four bodies, the results of aggressive assaults and torture by the maras. If that’s who did the killing, so be it. Killer bees, killers of any kind.
“Let’s call an exterminator right now,” I said. “And a trash rem
over, to tear down the sweat lodge.”
“Mom.” Concern veins rippling blue in her temples, a long wiggly vertical vein down the center of her forehead. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve got to do this quick or I’ll talk myself out of it. And when he comes back, if he comes back, he can build another one.”
Over the next four hours, Spider dealt with the exterminator and the man who came with his son to rip apart the sweat lodge and truck it away. I called Nathan’s cell number fifteen times, it rang and rang and rang, and nobody answered.
Around eleven at night, Spider gave me some of her Mexican clothes to wear to the cockfights. Latinas dressed with panache. A lot of skin, a lot of fake long fingernails and eyelashes, too much black or purple or pink eye shadow, we settled for pink. Spider’s leather pants fit me like a glove, not so bad at all, looking at myself sideways in a full-length mirror. No tummy, no tree-trunk thighs despite my long miles of swimming every day. And no panty lines, Spider emphasized this, made me take off my cotton panties and pull the leather pants tight, being careful of the zipper. A leather halter top without a bra, I couldn’t fill it out to Spider’s breast size, but it worked. And four-inch platform heels, amazing myself I could walk in them.
“So who’s the guy that’s taking you out?” Spider said.
Clothes approved, guy not yet checked out.
“Ken. Ken Charvoz. Used to be an undercover cop. Now he’s coordinator of all the volunteers at Tohono Chul Park. And he’s not taking me out.”
“And you know him…how?”
“Spider,” I said. “It’s not a date. It’s for a client. I don’t want to tell you about it, I don’t want you to know.”
“Hey, cool. And here he comes.”
The blahtblaht of a Harley, downshifting to crawl up our driveway. We went down the back stairway to the parking area, Ken revving the Harley a few times before he switched off the engine.
“It’s a Fat Boy,” Spider said.
“Come on,” I said. “He’s in good shape.”
“Mom,” Spider said. “That’s the bike. A Harley-Davidson Fat Boy.”
Ken removed his helmet, neck-length black hair spilling out over his face and he shook his head like a dog to free the hair. “Ken,” he said.
“Spider. Cool ride.”
“Well,” he said, “Laura. Look at you.” Spider shot me a smile, climbed onto the saddle, trying the clutch pedal, leaning forward slightly to grasp the handlebars. “Mom,” she said. “This is one nasty bike, this is so cool. Just like the battle cruiser Arnold rode in Terminator 2.”
“One more thing to do,” I said. “Come up. See the view. I’ll be out in five.”
Back in my office, I carefully fitted a miniature video camera into the leather halter, wincing at the small hole I cut with fingernail scissors in the left cup. After securing the camera with surgical tape, I fitted a five-hundred-and-twelve-megabyte memory stick into the right halter cup, linked it to the camera. In front of the mirror, I adjusted the halter, turned to three-quarters profile, decided everything would stay put as long as nobody groped me.
“This is incredible,” Ken said. An amazingly clear night sky, all of Tucson laid out below us as far as we could see. “This is your house?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I mean, you own this place?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in the wrong business,” he said. “Nonprofits don’t pay this well.”
“Just a client. Nine months’ work, a team of five people. He paid off his debts by deeding the house over to me.”
“You mean”—he couldn’t quite grasp what I’d said—“it’s all paid for?”
“Yes.”
“I could work nine years, I still wouldn’t be able to afford this.”
His cell burped twice, not the insistently obnoxious ring tones you hear in malls and airports and even restaurants, just two short burps, then two again. He answered and just listened, then snapped the cell shut.
“We’ve got some time,” he said. “Can I just enjoy the view?”
“Come up to the roof.”
“Oh, man,” Ken said.
We emerged from the narrow stairway onto the dark roof, the only lighting from the full moon. Stars glittered over half the sky, dimmed only over the street-lit portions of Tucson, a city built to be dark for the many observatories on peaks rimming the southern basins. Once our eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I led Ken to the wooden chairs, pulling aside the broken chair used by Bob Gates two mornings ago. Ken turned his chair around, sat backward, leaning on the carved wooden backrest, a broad grin on his face as he looked everywhere.
“Oh, my,” he said. “Oh, my, my, my.”
“I come up here to watch monsoon lightning. Tried to photograph it a hundred times, but lightning is tricky to capture. I’d just rather watch.”
We sat in silence until his cell burped again. Opening it, he read a text message.
“Ten minutes, we’ll leave,” he said. “So I hear you met with Gates and Kligerman today. You going to work for them?”
“A contract, yes.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t.”
“Be realistic here,” Ken said. “Be honest with your limited knowledge of the power politics within the Tucson Police Department. They want you at a midlevel position. You’ve not met the chief of police, not met the movers and shakers out of headquarters. The guys who move in political circles inside and outside TPD.”
“I like Gates,” I said. “I probably trust him a lot.”
“He’s a fair man. But Kligerman is the next wave of TPD politics. You’ll never, ever really know why decisions are made, why people are hired or motivated or fired. When I retired, I was a Detective Level One. I ran a whole squad, I made calls, I controlled crime scenes. But once something became political, I’m just the guy who follows parading elephants with a broom and a shovel. Well. That’s not fair.
“Kligerman never wore a uniform. Went right from the academy into administration. They knew, back then, they knew he’d move up really fast and nobody wanted to get in his way. So he never strapped on the gear, he never rode a sector car. There’s good men in admin. Gates, he’s a good man. Eight years in a unit, never wanted undercover but they made him detective. He knows.”
“Knows what?” I said.
“Most of us out there in the units, uniforms and undercover…you ever see a neighborhood sweep?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s night, it’s after midnight. Say you’re driving down Grant, you’ve had this great meal at Kingfisher and you’re headed east to your home, up here, your palace away from the streets. But along Grant you see the bubblegum lights a few blocks ahead of you. Cherry and sapphire, ’round and ’round. You get closer, you see a unit blocking off side streets. And uniforms are humping over fences, Maglites bobbing around backyards, every uniform’s got his duty piece out, they’re all yelling, clearing out one backyard after another. Sometimes it’s all just…somebody heard a noise, saw a shadow, punched nine-one-one. Guy’s got a gun, somebody says to the nine-one-one operator. Out we go. Do the sweep. Jump up to clear a six-foot fence, you got no idea what’s on the other side until you put your Maglite on the yard. Adrenaline pumps big-time, this sounds like a movie, like a TV reality show. But it’s really what it is. Some guys…after clearing a dozen fences, sweeping a dozen yards, maybe they find a perp, maybe he’s got a gun, maybe it’s a coyote eating somebody’s garbage, or somebody’s little dog, it’s all melodrama, you’ve seen in a hundred movies, a thousand TV shows. But those movies, that TV, you never smell what it’s like those times when shit really goes down. Listen to me, I’m talking like Al Pacino. But that’s what movies don’t give you. Blood, how it smells, coppery, metallic. Some guy’s puking his guts out, if the scene’s really bad. What an old cliché, that you can smell fear. But you can.”
“And K
ligerman?” I said.
“Never.”
“But that doesn’t make him any less good at what he does.”
Ken looked at me a long time. A sad look. Shrugged. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, it does make a difference. He’s done a lot for the department, but he’s still an equal opportunity asshole. You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Where you guys going?” Spider said. Ken climbed onto the bike, helped me get seated behind him.
“Can’t say.”
“Okay, Mom. I guess you’re old enough.”
“She’s nowhere too old for me,” Ken said.
“Where’s my helmet?” I said.
“Honey Bunny,” Ken said. Just a term he used, like baby or dear, I didn’t take it personally. “Where we’re going, a helmet would be like the only dog in the mall. Tie your hair in this bandanna.” He kick-started the bike. “And away we go.”
24
Beyond Tucson, heading north, I-10 stretches past Marana and what used to be mostly desert and old ranches, now heavily populated with subdevelopments, industrial parks, and fast-food strip malls. With a full moon, in the distance you see Picacho Peak looming dark against the skyline.
Ken wove the Harley in and out of thinning traffic, exiting at Tangerine and then north on a state farm road. We passed through a few small towns, not even towns so much as gatherings of trailers and houses surrounded by abandoned vehicles and all manner of junk dropped randomly on the desert floor. Some of these little places had a gas station and a store or two, occasionally a bar which might be a double-wide trailer or some ancient cinder-block building with the adobe facing pretty much worn off by the wind and the dust.
Ten miles and three cattle guards later, the paved road disintegrated into loosely graveled dirt ruts and, not far past that, a clump of a few dozen trailers. Oddly enough, the rutted road came back to a paved surface, an old two-lane road with a yellow center line so old it barely registered in the bright sunlight. Power poles jagged into the place from the southeast and ran off across the road into the desert. Power cables sagged down to most of the trailers, a few cables so old they hung just a few feet off the ground, you could see the bare aluminum wires and you knew they were hot.
