Bitch, he thought. Mexican cunt.
* * *
There was still an exciting newness to sleeping all night in the same bed with Luisa. Now that she was so far along, the doctor had restricted sexual relations. But the novelty of being all night in bed together—naked, of course; Luisa using her hands or mouth to take off Amos’s edge—the novelty of whole nights together, was enough for the young groom. In Thalia’s bed, their couplings had been brief, edgy, urgent encounters—an eye always on the clock. Amos thought this was, in some ways, even better.
And as their room was so close to Able’s, Amos thought it was as well for now they couldn’t fully have sex. The box springs of Amos’s big old bed were insanely squeaky.
“Your grandfather is already up,” Luisa said in her heavily accented English. “For some long time now. I heard him moving around, heard him on the phone. Then I heard him talking to Aunt Sofia. I think they’re out back now, fixing something in Sofia’s and Evelia’s place.”
Amos traced the curve of her swollen right breast, its nipple hard as it was almost all the time now. “You’ve been up a long time yourself, huh? Couldn’t sleep?”
“I hardly sleep at all,” Luisa said. “Not for many days. I can’t get comfortable, and it’s hard sleeping on my side all of the time.”
“Shouldn’t be long now,” Amos said hopefully.
Luisa pushed his hand from her breast. “No,” she said. “No, not long now. Then it will be the baby waking up many times in the night, hungry.”
* * *
“They’re in so far over their heads,” Sofia Gómez said. “Too young for this. These now, at twenty-two or twenty-three, they are what we were at fifteen or sixteen, in so many ways.”
Able drove a nail, then hung up a framed photo of Thalia. It made him feel better to see the face he remembered smiling back at him. It helped to erase some of the memory of the bloody mess he’d seen behind the ball fields. He asked Sofia, “How old were you when Thalia was born?”
That segued into another recounting of the Gómez clan’s border crossing. Able listened, all grave attention. When she finished, Able said, “Mine came over by boat. Four brothers, four wives and sixteen children, down in a filthy hold. There was cholera on the boat. Three brothers, two wives and nine children—several of them orphaned—came ashore.”
Evelia walked up next to Able, looking up at him with big, moist black eyes. She pressed her hand to her belly and he heard her stomach growl loudly.
Able struggled down onto one knee and pulled a face at the little girl. Evelia smiled. He asked, “You ever have a Happy Meal, Evelia? Not so much real food, but it can hit the spot.” The little girl looked at him, silent.
Sofia said, “Sheriff Hawk asked you a question, Evelia.”
Evelia said, “I like the Burger King better.”
“Let’s go do that now then,” Able said. “Three of us are past ready for a treat.”
* * *
Patricia pulled into the lot, returning from her day’s only class—an early morning session that ran from eight to nine.
As a new tenant, Tell was locked into a six-month lease. Patricia, after so many years, was granted month-to-month status. Patricia was arguing that she move into Tell’s place while they looked for a house. Tell insisted that he preferred Patricia’s place. He said he loved her shaded deck and the tree full of mourning doves.
Complicating things was Tell’s cousin, Chris.
After their engagement announcement, Tell’s cousin had invited him out to his place in Cedartown for a few days. Patricia pushed Tell to accept the invitation, intrigued to meet Chris and Salome. Insisting he couldn’t leave town with the investigation underway, Chris and Salome instead came their way for an evening together—Salome armed with a DVD of their property outside Cedartown. Over dinner, Chris pulled Tell aside and made him an offer. Chris and his family lived on a wooded expanse of acreage that backed up to a historic, protected creek. Tell had told Patricia that Chris had, from time to time, joked about establishing his own compound. Chris seemed to be well on his way to doing just that. He was building a cabin for his aging parents and his single-mother sister and her children on his property. He offered another plat on his property’s western edge to Tell as an eventual wedding gift—a place for Tell and Patricia to build their own cabin.
Patricia had loved the footage of their log home. She loved the old-growth trees surrounding the cabin and the constant soothing gurgle of the creek running along the back of the property line. She asked Tell, “Does it really look like that?”
“It’s better in person,” Tell said.
And there was more: Cedartown’s longtime chief of police, a man named Roy Atchity, was to retire soon. Chris could, he said, arrange for Atchity and Tell to speak; Atchity had intimated he was in a position to stipulate his own successor to Cedartown’s city fathers.
Patricia was also drawn to Salome Lyon—the two of them had hit it off immediately. Patricia could see herself and her babies and Tell living there, part of this constructed clan. Salome badly wanted another baby and spoke of the prospect of she and Patricia maybe being pregnant together.
Chris Lyon was a different matter. Chris alternately fascinated and unsettled Patricia. She found him attractive, but, at least initially, harrowingly forbidding. Chris was a couple of inches taller than Tell and darker in every sense—charismatic and intense. And a bit menacing. Then Patricia had spent some time alone with Chris. Just a few minutes really, but when they were over, Patricia felt she and Chris knew all there was worth knowing about one another.
Patricia had asked Chris, the one who knew Tell longest and best of all, how he would sum up Tell. Chris had thought about that for a few long, uncomfortable seconds. Then he’d said, “We used to play cowboys as kids. Tell never really stopped playing. I think maybe that Tell is really the last truly good man on earth, Patricia. And that makes him the most vulnerable man alive. A magnet for grief. But he’s the best man I know. So I worry for him, doing what he does.”
Patricia had said, “But you’re offering Tell another law enforcement post in Cedartown. If you fear so much for him … ?”
“Yes,” Chris told her. “But Roy Atchity, the man whom Tell could replace, has been on the force for thirty-five years. Roy has been chief for twenty-one years. He’ll retire with a wife of thirty-six years and several grown children. It’s a relatively safe post as these things go. And if Tell is in Cedartown, close by in every sense, then I can have his back like I couldn’t when he was out West. Like I can’t if he’s living in New Austin. He’s the closest thing I have to a brother. I can’t risk him.”
Patricia had hugged Chris hard, then. She kissed his cheek and said, “I’ll see what I can do to persuade him.”
Now Patricia keyed herself into her—their—apartment. She checked her answering machine.
A call from her mother: “It’s Mom. Just calling to see how you are doing. Call me, Patricia.”
A call from the hospital: “Ms. Maldonado, this is Dr. James Grier. I’m calling as promised to let you know that Shawn O’Hara is conscious now. I told him you were by and asked to see him and he asked if you could come by the hospital today. He’ll be undergoing surgery again tomorrow, so it could otherwise be a few days.”
FORTY
Tell sat at his desk, reviewing the thin files sent to him by Able Hawk. Each file consisted of seven or eight pages of photocopied crime reports, autopsy reports and news clippings about the three other women—all Vale County women—who had died in the previous two years. All had died in a manner very similar to the way that Thalia Ruiz had been murdered.
All three were Latino. All three, like Thalia, were in their early- to mid-thirties. One had a child. Two of the previous victims, Marisol Hernandez and Sonya Lorca, had been prostitutes—classic targets of opportunity.
The previous victims had been raped and beaten, their bodies dropped nude in fields, or, in one case, a stream in remote Vale County.
And all three cases remained unsolved.
Tell looked longest at the third file. Like Thalia, the victim was another youngish single mother, not a prostitute, who ended up violated and beaten to death six months before Thalia.
Carlita Marquez was a night clerk at a hotel located on an off-ramp of I-70. She punched out at work at six A.M.
The hotel’s exterior security camera caught an image of Carlita alone, entering her green Elantra and pulling out of the lot. No indication there of any trouble ahead.
But her car was found four hours later, less than a mile from the hotel where she worked. On examination, authorities determined someone had cut halfway through her Hyundai’s timing belt. Carlita had driven less than five-tenths of a mile before the timing belt snapped, effectively killing her car and trashing the engine, stalling it just where police later found it.
Seven hours later, two senior citizens were seining for crayfish for a planned fishing trip the next morning. They found Carlita face down in the stream, clouds of blood still hanging in the slow-moving water around her head and between her bruised thighs.
No persons of interest were noted in any of the files and no suspicious people or vehicles had apparently surfaced. There was no mention of a red Dodge Ram pickup truck seen in or around any of the body dump sites.
The phone rang. Patricia asked, “You foresee another long day?”
“They all seem that way now,” Tell said.
And they seemed longer still, knowing that Patricia was alone all day at home. He wanted to be home with her. He told her that and she said, “You can always come home for a quickie.” Her smile there in her voice, she said, “I mean, for lunch.”
When he hung up, he saw his phone’s message light was flashing. He punched in his password: it was his technical guru at the university. “We have seven possible license plate combinations, Chief. It’s ten thirty A.M. I’ll be in all day.”
* * *
Tell handed Billy Davis the slip of paper with the license plate possibilities arrived at by the university analysts. He said, “Run these please, Billy. Results and comments to me only, and not by radio.”
Billy nodded, setting chins in motion. “Heading out?”
Tell held up the file folders sent to him by Able Hawk. “Going to go look at the dump sites. Or near as I can come to them, based on what’s in these. Just want to get a feel for the places. And doing that, I may get some notion of the ones who’d drop them there.”
Billy paused, hand poised over the Krispy Kreme box. “That’s all Vale County, skipper.”
“That’s why I’m taking my own SUV.”
“Stay in contact then, Chief,” Billy said, looking worried. “Walt Pierce is a goddamn whack job. I know one of his new deputies, fella name of Tom Winch. Bastard fills my ear with stuff about Pierce. Old Tom, he’s terrified of his boss. And he says Pierce has a real hard-on for Able Hawk and you.”
Tell smiled. “In that order?”
Billy selected a sugar-dusted, jelly-filled doughnut. “I’ll clarify that with Winch, next time I see him.”
FORTY ONE
Patricia was about to head out to the hospital when Luz called. Luz had been scarce since Patricia’s mother and father had posted bail to get her out of county jail on the prostitution charges brought against her by Able Hawk. Luz said, “Could you meet me for coffee, Patricia?”
“Trouble, Luz?”
“I want to say goodbye.”
* * *
“I’m so ashamed,” Luz said, staring into her coffee mug. “After all you and your parents have done for me. Giving me the job at the restaurant. And then I …”
“I just wish you’d called me before you, well … before you started doing that,” Patricia said. “I just wished you’d done that.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” Luz said. “So I did that terrible thing. Made myself a whore.”
“You’re not a whore,” Patricia said firmly. “For God’s sake, you’re not that.”
“I am. I did it eight times. Twice, I actually loved it. They were bachelor parties. Three men there one night, all good looking. The sex was so hot. And I got paid for having that great time. The next night was an old man. Fat. I got paid then too.”
“Oh, Luz …”
“I’ve been hiding. I didn’t realize what it was like. Didn’t realize how the ones who make the connections for you can be … possessive.” Patricia nodded, only half-understanding. She presumed Luz was trying to avoid using the word “pimp.” Patricia guessed that whoever had “turned her out,” to use a phrase she’d learned from Tell, was now threatening Luz in some way.
“My mother’s very sick now,” Luz pressed on. “Worse than before. I can’t get Elizabeth here. And would I if I could? Would I bring her to this place where her mother became a puta? Where this man, this Tomás Calderone, threatens to cut off my nose if I don’t return to work for him? I’m going back to Mexico, Patricia.”
“Do you know what it will take for the two of you to come back here again someday, when you’re ready? Do you know how much harder it could be as things stand now? With the Minute Men? With the National Guard on the border? With that wall maybe coming?”
“I won’t be coming back, Patricia. I can’t make it here. There I was poor. But I was okay. I wasn’t a whore. I don’t want to come back here, ever.”
“You’re sure?”
“More than anything. But I’m pregnant, Patricia. Maybe from the party. I can’t afford another child. And I can’t afford to be pregnant, not now, not having to care for Mother and for Elizabeth. I’m going to the clinic now. To take care of it. I—I wondered if you’d sit with me, help to see me through it.”
Patricia’s hand was pressed to her own belly. “I … can,” she said without enthusiasm, not wanting to do it. “Sure Luz. Sure. Okay.”
* * *
Patricia drove Luz in silence. She stopped at the bank and withdrew a thousand dollars. She forced the money on Luz, who looked nauseous. “To get you home more quickly after,” Patricia said. “Use some of it tonight for a hotel. I’ll drop you there. You can’t go home with this Calderone dude after you.”
“But my stuff … ?”
“I’ll pack it all for you and bring it by your hotel. If you’re going to do this, you need to do it now. Right away. Get out before this bastard can hurt you.”
“But you wouldn’t be safe in my place, cleaning it out.”
“I’ll go in with Tell, or one of his people, then,” Patricia said. “Maybe one of Able Hawk’s deputies. Did you tell Hawk, El Gavilan, about Calderone?”
“No. Tomás said he would kill any of us who told. So we didn’t.”
“Well, plan on leaving tomorrow. I’ll drive you to the airport. Do you have money for the fare?”
“I have the ticket.”
“When you’re back with your mother and daughter, let me know, and I’ll send you another thousand.”
“It’s too much,” Luz said.
Patricia said, “It’s nothing. Really—it’s not enough.”
* * *
It was several hours later that Patricia drove to the hospital, depressed and shaken.
The abortion clinic had been a nightmare. Patricia had to run a gauntlet with Luz through a thicket of demonstrators. One, a preacher, had spat on Patricia. Luz wasn’t yet showing, so it was any fanatic’s call which of the young women was going inside to kill her baby. The demonstrators evidently decided it was Patricia. The preacher called her “puta,” his lip curled.
They waited in a room with a mix of pregnant girls and women. Some were alone. Some were there with mothers, somber boyfriends or tight-jawed brothers. Some with other women who were there, like Patricia, for support.
Patricia sat with Luz through a brief counseling session. When they described the procedure, Patricia became nauseous and excused herself, vomiting in the sink. It was late morning, and she’d missed breakfast between her early class and her time with
Luz. She returned just in time to hug Luz as she went back for “treatment.” That was the term the counselor used for what Luz was to do. As though it was an illness that Luz suffered from—a condition to be corrected.
Then, after, the two of them had to again run that gauntlet of protestors to reach the car.
Alone, glad to be away from Luz, who angered Patricia now—who disgusted her even—Patricia had to drive through four levels of the hospital’s parking garage before finding an empty parking space. She followed a color-coded stripe through twisting corridors that stank of medicine and turned her stomach again. She followed the red stripe to the intensive care unit. She inquired at the nurses’ desk for Shawn’s room number.
“Mr. O’Hara is not accepting visitors,” a heavyset black nurse said, not looking up from a chart she was examining.
Patricia said, “But I came here because Shawn—because Mr. O’Hara—asked that I come.”
The nurse held up a finger, remembering something. “You’re Patricia, aren’t you? Shawn asked I give you this.” She handed Patricia an envelope. Patricia took it and slit it open with her index finger. She winced as the envelope’s edge cut the side of her finger, blood staining the letter inside. Distractedly, Patricia said, “But Shawn did ask that I come by personally.”
The nurse held out a hand, offering Patricia a Band-Aid for her paper cut. “He said you were to be given the letter,” the nurse said, “but not to be allowed back. He’s a mess, honey. Ask me, he wants you to see him after we make him pretty again.” Patricia half heard her, concentrating on Shawn’s message. The nurse paused, looking at Patricia’s face. She said, “You okay, sweetie?”
Patricia’s chin trembled. Her mouth was dry and her heart was pounding. She backed away, staring at the letter. She twisted her ankle as she turned and ran down the corridor to the elevator.
El Gavilan Page 21
