Tell narrowed his eyes. “How so?”
“I questioned our friend Shawn pretty close back at your jail and jogged his memory,” Able said. “Young man stopped for some smokes on his way back to his apartment after banging and then sneaking out on my poor Thalia. My boys screened the surveillance tape at the fillin’ station where Shawn stopped. Time imprint on the film says he was there at seven fifteen A.M. Coroner Parks puts time of death at ten A.M. or eleven A.M. at the latest.”
Tell gestured Able inside. Able took a seat on a stool by the breakfast bar. Tell said, “Something to drink?”
“I’m never truly at rest,” Able said. “But official hours are over, so yeah, a beer would be good.”
Tell opened the refrigerator. He pulled out a Sam Adams and twisted the lid. “You want a glass, Able?”
“Fuck that.”
Tell slid the bottle across the bar. He said, “Some might argue back—Sheriff Walt Pierce, for instance—that Shawn had time to return to rape and kill Thalia and still make our respective interviews … assuming someone else dumped the body for him in that field.”
Able savored the peaty Scotch ale. “But it gets better, Tell. Shawn’s apartment’s outside staircase backs up to the bank’s drive-through windows. Turns out that the ATM security camera is aimed right at the back of Shawn’s building. The camera caught Shawn arriving at his apartment—time imprint again—at eight ten A.M. He doesn’t leave the building again until twelve fifty P.M., leaving him just enough time to get to Big G’s to hook up with us.”
“Impressive,” Tell said. “And enough to do the trick for any honest and sane lawman.” Tell smiled. “But do you think Walt Pierce will go for it?”
Able looked at his beer bottle. “Already broke the news to Walt. He’s upset, but, I think, stymied.”
“So we should go kick Shawn loose?”
Able lowered the bottle from his lips, shaking his head. “Oh, hell no. Not quite yet. My inclination is to paint the bastard—Walt—into a tighter corner. Let Shawn spend a bit longer in your jail. Hell, way he did Thalia, I’d make him do six months if we could, for doing her like he did. On that note, we may yet get back to him on that date rape drug. And if we kick Shawn loose tonight, Old Walt might pick him up and put him through a hard and wet interrogation just to soothe his own shitty ego. He might do that all right. He’s the type.”
“So what do you propose?”
“I’ve already done my media interviews and pointed the news crews your way, Tell. You give ’em some interviews. Reinforce what I’ve told you. Maybe indicate you’ve got a better suspect for Thalia’s murder. Convince them you’ve got a real and viable suspect, even if you don’t. Do that, and our combined quotes will shut Walt’s business down for keeps, so far as Shawn is concerned.”
“I’ll do it.” Tell nodded at Able. “You and your folks did great work, and fast. You delivered your end and cleared Shawn.”
“Sure. Cocksucker’s life is trashed though,” Able said. “Shawn’s media confreres in the daily papers and local TV stations will likely roast his nuts, and I mean good.”
“Expect so,” Tell agreed. He checked his watch. “I’ve gotta get out there and deliver my end now, Able.”
Hawk nodded. “On that note, no hard feelings, but as Shawn’s out of Walt’s clutches, come morning, I’m going to focus on getting my gal Thalia some true justice.”
“Exactly,” Tell said. “Whoever did that to her, he’ll do it again. I’ve combed all my department’s files looking at wife-beaters and male-on-female assault victims going back ten years in this town. But there’s nothing in the New Austin records that approaches what happened to Thalia. My guys and I have spoken with every coach, parent and kid who was out at those ball fields. Nobody saw anything. It’s frustrating as hell.”
“Yeah,” Able said. “That’s not how we’re going to get there; that’s pretty clear at this point. Thanks for the beer.” He drained the dregs and slammed the bottle down, smacking his lips. “Tasty stuff. Now I gotta go visit your neighbor.”
Tell hesitated, his hand clutching Able’s empty bottle, poised over the trash basket. “Yeah? Why would you do that, Able? You’ve cleared Shawn. Why question Patricia?”
“Just dottin’ the damned i’s, Tell. Crossin’ them fuckin’ t’s.”
“It’s irrelevant now, their relationship. Why don’t you give her a pass, Able?”
“Because that’s not my way, Tell. You be sure to be available to the goddamn reporters tonight now, you hear?”
TWENTY
Walt Pierce sat in Big G’s diner with three of his deputies. Harry Moffatt and Luke Strider were veterans, each about four years younger than Sheriff Pierce. Tom Winch was a new recruit, still baby-faced, despite his recently cultivated mustache.
Pierce said, “So the reporter’s cleared, nearly as I can tell. Hawk found an ass-load of camera evidence at filling stations and banks. Airtight stuff. Meddling fat-ass cocksucker.”
Harry had a big gut. Harry had gin blossoms at his cheeks and a veined, red, swollen and several-times-broken nose. He said, “So what’s the next move, W.P.?”
“Search warrant,” Sheriff Pierce said. “Dead girl’s mother wouldn’t cooperate with me, so I got me a judge for that warrant. Should have it soon. We’ll go tonight and search this Ruiz cunt’s home. Hawk was through there, but didn’t do anything forensically. Just looked for letters, diaries … anything that might refer to some man. We’ll comb her bedroom. We’ll get this cocksucker, sure enough. Or we’ll get someone. And we’ll do it first. If Hawk’s right about this reporter being innocent, then we need fresh clues.” He scratched his head and said, “On the other hand, maybe Hawk is wrong about this reporter, and we’ll yet find something on that journalist Hawk missed. Maybe we’ll do that.”
Pierce kneaded his swollen hands; his knuckles were split. He wrenched loose one of his less ostentatious rings—his wedding band—and massaged his left ring finger. Harry smiled at his chief’s hands. They were always like that—barked and swollen and bloodied … the legacy of hard interrogations and bar fights that the chief favored wading into rather than diffusing. Walt was short and fat, but deadly in close combat, even at the age of fifty-seven.
Young Tom Winch sipped his coffee, uncomfortable, taking it all in. He wanted to be home with his wife of three months, Cheryl-Ann. But Sheriff Pierce was an avid proponent of after-hours fraternization amongst his deputies. Tom had begged off once … and he had learned his lesson.
He looked again at Pierce; pressed his legs harder against the legs of his chair to stop their trembling. Walt fucking Pierce—what was his story?
THEN
“La frontera, amigos! We’re headed way down south, out past where you’ve dared to go before!”
The blast-furnace wind almost stirred Buddy Troy’s butch-waxed flattop. They were six in all, piled into Buddy’s ragtop Bonneville. Navy boys straying across the line from San Diego to old Meh-hi-co to TJ for a three-day-pass blowout.
Buddy drained his longneck, bellowed back over the wind shear, “We all know that you can leave Brownsville, but you can never get Matamoros outta your soul!”
Walt Pierce, a shade thick around the middle and just-this-side of asocial, crowded into the rear corner of the passenger side’s backseat, yelled back, “We’re in San Diego, not Texas, Buddy.”
Buddy belched, yelled back, “What the fuck ever. It’s the goddamn spirit of the thing that matters, dipshit. I aim to misbehave!”
Walt had heard the stories from pretty much the day he’d arrived at base: Cherry boys with butterflies in their bellies stealing across the border to get laid. To drink rum at TJ’s infamous “longest bar in the world” and to try to find out exactly what the hell a “Donkey Show” is.
Pretty clearly, Walt figured, his road mates had made more than one trip across that borderline. It was obvious the boys had been with women.
And they were always riding Walt for something.
Walt? He was cherry, and how.
His tendency to run to fat, what his mother excused as a genetic lean toward being “big-boned,”—coupled with Walt’s dental and acne issues—had contributed to his goddamn “cherry” state. So he’d lied. He made claims about myriad conquests. He figured they believed him. He had to believe they would.
Walt had bought a jug of rum and a six-pack of Coca-Cola to provision himself for the border run. He’d been mixing half-assed Cuba libras in a Styrofoam cup to steel himself for what was to come.
Thank God, Walt thought, the other boys don’t suspect I’m a fucking virgin. Those last two words made him smile. Feeling the rum, he laughed at his own accidental word joke.
Then the one sitting next to him, Lyle Porter—tall, thin and bookish … yet worldly, in his way—disabused Walt of that comforting illusion. Lyle drawled, “Go easy on that rum there, Walt. You’ll want to be a bit sharper than you’re looking to go into tonight, hombre. Rum and first sex can be a treacherous mix.”
Walt ground his teeth. He decided if he could get Lyle alone in some TJ alley, he’d make the cocksucker regret that remark. Walt twisted rings on his fat fingers, imagining Lyle on his back, bleeding and spitting out teeth.
From up front, Buddy yelled back, “Matamoros? Tijuana? What the fuck difference does it make? Either way, the señoritas are there and waiting all wet and ready. Gut-shoot me or break my heart, because, tonight, I just want to feel somethin’!”
* * *
Maybe it was the lowest-rung whorehouse in Tijuana. Certainly it struck Walt that way, though admittedly, he had nothing to measure it against.
They stumbled out of the Pontiac into the dusty parking lot at the back of the bordello. They were already sweating from the booze and the desert swelter. The night was heavy with heat lightning and the scent of rain; all that only made the heat seem somehow fiercer.
Walt steadied himself against the rear fender. He closed his eyes and the world began to spin. He thought he might vomit. Walt opened his eyes and the world steadied a shade.
Buddy cast another empty bottle into the dust and said, “Ya’ll got cash right, ’cause these spic cunts inside, they don’t give it away, you know.”
Dragging an arm across his damp forehead, Walt concentrated, feeling his roll in his tube sock. He’d left only a few token dollars tucked in his wallet in case he fell prey to a pickpocket or treacherous whore who might try to rob him after. He’d heard plenty bad about Mexico; and worse about those low ones who chose to live in it.
“Let’s just get to it,” Walt said. “I’m fuckin’ tired to death of waiting.”
He could have added: Tired of imagining.
* * *
The girls were lined up for their choosing.
The whorehouse smelled of something Walt couldn’t put a name to.
He looked around, afraid to focus on the women. Joint was a dive all right: faltering overhead light bulbs; peeling paint and wallpaper. Sagging sofas and Naugehyde chairs were held together with duct tape.
Eventually, Walt had to look at the girls; had to make his choice.
He was getting leftovers; the other boys had already made their selections.
The ones who remained were either too fat or too skinny. Most were topless; their bare breasts fascinated Walt. They were slick with sweat and he had a strong temptation to taste them. Well, that’s the way it was supposed to be, right?
Right?
How could he know how this was supposed to be? How it was supposed to go?
Walt walked the line, end to end; once, twice.
He finally settled on some dark-haired, dark-eyed skinny girl who looked sadder than the rest. Walt figured maybe that sadness would make her nice. Nicer than the fatter ones who dared Walt with their eyes, or the one with the gold front tooth who’d said something in Spanish to him and then laughed. Said something Walt just knew must have been a dig of some kind. Bitch.
He looked at the skinny one again. Said, “I think this one. She speak English?”
The boss whore—three hundred pounds if she went two-fifty—a one-eyed hag, said, “She knows all the gringo words you’ll need, niño.”
Walt grunted, listened to the terms, then skidded off two tens.
He didn’t think he needed to pay for anything … exotic.
Not for his first time.
The girl looked him over … pulled her open blouse closer around her breasts. The boss whore snarled and tore the blouse off the girl. She said, “Go with him, rápidamente.”
TWENTY ONE
Tell drove aimlessly around New Austin in his SUV, trying to think of other investigative avenues to pursue Thalia Ruiz’s killer now that he had exhausted all the paper trails and obvious investigative paths. He shook his head, thinking of the sorry parade of men who’d beaten Latinas in the past few years whom he’d spoken with over the past several hours. Tell walked out of every interview with trembling fists and the taste of his own blood in his mouth from biting his lip.
In the early going, his job with the Border Patrol had found Tell driving, day and night, alone and looking for men and women whose greatest crimes consisted mostly of crossing an invisible line in the dust.
Later, after he had risen to a supervisory post, he spent his hours coordinating the efforts of others who drove through the desert looking for bodies. In the end, during that last terrible year in California, Tell had drifted into a whole new level of policing and promptly gotten crosswise with the Rios cartel. He lost his family for his trouble playing detective.
Tell had taken the New Austin chief’s post thinking it would be relatively light duty.
New Austin hadn’t suffered a murder or violent crime in three years. But now Tell was confronted with a rape-murder less than one week in. More of his good luck …
Returning to old habits, Tell drove on through the night, roaming the blackened back roads again just like the old days, trying to think of fresh moves. Hell, he’d even plunked on his old white Border Patrol hat for some reason.
A jacked-up Nova whipped by Tell’s SUV doing sixty-five, seventy, easy, in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone.
Tell had loaded a portable, magnetic cherry light in his SUV. He rolled down his window, slapped the light on the roof and flipped it on, giving chase.
Some circumspect part of Tell knew that it was a reckless, stupid thing to do. He had not equipped his personal vehicle with a radio, or even a walkie-talkie, so he had no prospect of securing backup if needed.
And a late-night, high-speed pursuit often as not ended with some civilian—some mother and a toddler daughter, for instance—slaughtered, T-boned while innocently attempting to negotiate some crossroads.
Tell was about to break off the chase when the Nova’s brake lights flared and drifted right.
To his surprise, the Nova was slowing, eventually rolling to a stop on the shoulder.
Tell cruised to an angled halt behind the Chevy. The car was clearly some kid’s vanity project: air shocks and a license plate frame composed of entwined, busty, golden nude silhouettes. Lots of flat-black primer patch gave the mostly faded yellow Nova a leopard-spot appearance. The kid was probably still saving money for the cherry paint job he envisioned.
Because Tell had no police radio, he couldn’t run a check on the plate.
He got out warily, hearing his boot falls on crunching berm gravel, his flashlight held out to his side to draw any potential fire, his right hand on the butt of his gun. He saw four heads bobbing inside the Chevy.
The driver wisely turned on the interior lights as Tell approached, so he could see inside. It was four kids—two couples. Guy and girl up front, and girl and guy in back. They couldn’t be more than seventeen, any of them. Hispanic. Too-new clothes on the girls, which meant they’d likely just come across and drifted northeast to Ohio. They all looked terrified.
Tell’s adrenaline kicked down several notches. He said, “License and registration.”
The driver, clean
cut, subservient, handed over a driver’s license. He said, his accent still relatively heavy, “Sir, my r-registra-tion, uh, I do have it, but I bought this car a few days ago. I think that it’s in my jacket at home, Officer, sir.”
Tell believed him. The kid was too scared and too green at dealing with American cops to lie. Tell didn’t believe the license he held in his hand, however. The thickness of the plastic was astonishingly slight. The background color in the photo was wrong. The holographic elements were badly blurred. Tell half smiled: the fake driver’s license was exactly like the sorry samples given him by Able Hawk.
Extending his hand palm up, Tell said, “I want all your IDs, now.” The girls, pretty despite their yet-to-wane baby fat, looked confused. The driver spoke to them in Spanish, evidently confident that Tell wasn’t a Spanish speaker. The boy told his riders to pull out their licenses. “He needs to see them,” he told them in Spanish. “Just stay cool, it’ll be all right. Jerry said these licenses always stand up to scrutiny by these town cops. It’s the sheriff’s boys we have to worry about, Jerry said. We’ll be fine.”
Purses opened and were rummaged through. The young dude in the backseat leaned left to pry his wallet out of the ass pocket of his low-rider jeans.
The kids passed three more operator’s licenses out the window to Tell. He shone his flashlight on the plastic cards—three more dismal fakes. The boy in back was allegedly named Magdaleno Ortiz.
Tell slid all four bogus licenses into his breast pocket.
The driver—Richie Huerta, if his own bogus license was to be believed that far—frowned. He said, “Officer? Sir?”
“Police Chief Lyon,” Tell said. “Chief of the town cops here in New Austin.” Tell stepped back from the Nova. “Step out of your car, would you Rich?”
The young man got out uncertainly, maybe expecting a beating.
“Walk around the back of your car with me and over to my SUV,” Tell told Richie in Spanish. Now the boy looked truly scared.
“Don’t sweat it yet, kid, I just want a private word with you.” Tell said that in Spanish too. Then, in English, he said, “Rich, I could run you all in and charge you for speeding, false IDs, endangering the public. Probably many other things too. I should impound your sweet car here. I’m frankly figuring you for having no insurance, and that’s a state violation that could send you away for a while. Let alone your lack of a valid license. I should call the county and turn you and your friends over to Able Hawk—El Gavilan—which I hope you know, Rich, would be a real dark prospect for you and your friends. Particularly given all the charges that could come your way from that man. You kids could go away for a long, long time.”
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