Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  Back in the room Aragon asked Montclaire, “You said mouse guns. Where’d you get that?”

  “It’s what Star called them.”

  “What kind exactly?”

  “Those little pocket Berettas,” Montclaire answered, hugging herself against the cold air blasting from the vents. “The ones where the barrel pops up in the back. The front stays down, the bullet flies out the back. I think .25 caliber. No, I’m sure of it. I’d never heard of that caliber before.”

  “And you gave these guns to Thornton.”

  Montclaire nodded.

  “Okay. You bought yourself another night out of jail. How do you feel about staying here? We’ll bring in a cot. You can order delivery for dinner. Let’s talk about that gun.”

  Montclaire chafed her bare arms. “You can turn down the AC. I can’t talk with my teeth chattering.”

  “In a second. What happened to Griego’s gun?”

  “Marcy has it. Star gave it to me. I gave it to her.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t want us to know about Star. And the Backpage ads had nothing to do with it. Something else I want to know. Did you ever hear the name Benny Silva?”

  Montclaire’s right arm came under her left, her hand reaching up, the pinkie hooking under the thumb of the other hand. This was a new pose.

  “No.”

  “You do that with your hands, I know you’re not giving me the truth.”

  “I’m just cold.”

  “So I’ll get you a sweater and ask again. Benny Silva. I’ll be right back.”

  Twenty-two

  “You should come to my Krav class.” Aragon swallowed the chunk of Lotaburger in her cheeks. “We can’t keep big guys around.”

  “Because you bite them,” Lewis said.

  “Only when we can’t break a chokehold.”

  Aragon tore into her burger, Lewis into something green from Whole Foods. They had the windows down, the AC noisy, the nose of their car at the locked gate leading into the Salazar family compound. On the other side, dogs launched themselves at the chain-link. They’d been doing that since Aragon parked the car to block the gate. If anybody wants out, she said, they have to talk to us.

  “There’s eye gouging.” She chased the burger with iced soda. “If you’re not into biting.”

  Lewis forked salad into his mouth. She didn’t see how he could settle for that, the kind of energy it took to push the weight he moved in the gym.

  “Have some fries.” She nudged the Blake’s bag toward him.

  His hand in the bag, he said, “Maybe you should try meditation. Having to get your face punched to clear your head, it might be the easier way to go. But I’d miss the black eyes. They tell me you’ve worked something out.”

  A Rottweiler crashed into the gate. The posts sunk in cement shivered.

  “I did meditation once.” Aragon tossed a fry into her mouth. “My friend the Roshi. I used to call her Buff.”

  “From the Buddhist temple. The woman in the black robe with no hair, like you.”

  “An introductory session. Nothing woo-woo. No heavy incense, no kowtowing to statues of men with beer bellies.”

  “That’s not meditation. Not what I was talking about.”

  “That was what I expected.” She finished her soda, crumpled the cup, and flipped it out the window with her burger wrapper.

  “Yo, Detective Aragon,” Lewis looked at the window where the litter had gone. “Toss no más. My kids would be on your ass.”

  “Listen. I’m telling you about my great meditation adventure. ‘Just sit and be with whatever it is that arises,’ the Roshi told me. Okay. So the room is dark, not completely black. Quiet, even with Airport Road just over the wall from that temple she has behind razor wire. She goes, ‘You’re in a beautiful garden. The flowers are blooming. Feel the soft wind, you can sense its freshness. All is peaceful.’ I’m going along with it. A nice ride. ‘There’s a door. Open the handle. It pulls outward toward you. A wooden door, heavy, solid. The doorknob is brass.’ They want you to see things. She’s good. ‘Inside there’s a hallway leading down steps. You go down. There’s a light at the bottom. You step into a lit room. There’s a table before you.’”

  The Rottweiler hurled itself again at the fence. It bounced back onto a shepherd cross. The two dogs started fighting, circling, snapping at each other, driving the other dogs crazy.

  “That’s what I was talking about,” Lewis said. “You go someplace in your head. What was on the table?”

  “Roshi Buff says, ‘Walk around the table first. Just look. Don’t touch anything. There will come a time for that.’ She gets me to see a gold plate painted with white flowers, a beautiful necklace of white pearls, a Chinese kind of fan with pictures of women playing musical instruments, a figurine of a parrot perched on a tree branch, a piece of white cloth, it looks out of place, a little frayed, maybe a little dirty. ‘Now choose one. Take it in your hands.’ I don’t know why, I chose the piece of dirty cloth.”

  “It was out of place, like you said. Your police brain talking to you, saying something’s not right here. We might have to call animal control. Jesus.”

  The Rottweiler had a mangy terrier thing on its back, its hind leg in its maw, flinging it around like a squeeze toy.

  “You’d think someone would come out of a house to stop it. It probably goes on every day.”

  The Rotty released the terrier thing and suddenly the fighting stopped. The dogs laid down in the dust, forgetting the two strangers parked at the edge of their territory. The terrier limped off to the shade under a trailer.

  “So I’ve got this cloth,” Aragon said. “I tell Roshi that. She says, ‘where did it come from?’”

  “How would you know?” Lewis dropped a plastic fork in the empty plastic clamshell and put it on the seat behind them.

  “I’m supposed to find that answer within myself. And I did. It was one of my first cases. A baby buried in a back yard, by the charcoal grill. It was wrapped in a dirty white cloth.”

  “Your police brain, like I said.”

  “But then I flashed to something else. It was my shirt. I’d taken it off and folded it up for a pillow. I didn’t want Miguel’s head on the concrete basketball court.” She felt Lewis looking at her but kept her eyes on the top curve of the steering wheel, below the glare on the windshield. “He was dying. The boys that shot him, they weren’t done with me, I didn’t care. They were laughing. I put my shirt under Miguel’s head. I told him how beautiful he looked running to save me, how much I loved him, I wanted to spend my life with him. Raise a family there at Killer Park, show the world it didn’t have to be this way.”

  The dogs started up again. A woman had appeared on the stoop of a trailer in the back of the compound.

  “I told the Roshi I didn’t like this. She said, ‘Stay where you are. Now what do you see?’ I said, I see myself running back up those stairs, out through that garden and I’m on a hot sidewalk. Cars flying by. Across the street is the police department. I told her I’ve got work to do and felt a lot better.”

  “At peace with things?”

  “Hell, no. Tensed up. Ready to go. Shit, stronger than that. Locked and loaded.”

  “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

  “She said at the beginning, be with whatever arises. Well, that’s what rose up. Who do you think that is?”

  The woman was now at the gate, slapping dogs away. She undid the lock with a key and left it open as she stepped to Aragon’s side of the car. The dogs milled at her legs. The Rottweiler growled. She kicked it in the head and it settled down with its snout between black and brown paws.

  “You’re looking for Star,” the woman said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Her aunt. Her mother thinks she ran to Mexico because you want to put her in jail for the rest of
her life. She thinks Star’s a good girl, the police framed her for that robbery. I see what she doesn’t. And I don’t think she ran to Mexico. I think she’s in real trouble. That Junior, I don’t like him.”

  Aragon looked from the shade of the car into the sun, the skinny woman blocking it, her pinched face backlit.

  She shielded her eyes. “Junior who?”

  “He’s a Silva. Abel, like his father. Her mother thinks he drove with her in that old sports car of hers to Juarez. That car couldn’t make it to Albuquerque.”

  “You get the hell away from them!”

  They looked up to see a woman shouting from the plywood landing of the nearest trailer.

  “That’s Star’s mom,” the aunt said. “I don’t want a fight about helping police so I’m gonna scream at you now.”

  And she did. Five ways to fuck themselves. They rolled the windows and backed away as Lewis’s smartphone gave them an address for Abel and Angelina Silva. It wasn’t far away.

  His mother was home but not Junior. No, he hadn’t gone to Mexico. He was in the mountains with his father learning the business.

  Serena pried off plywood and looked through the window of the bunkhouse, where Lily had stood naked watching Javier brushing mules. She was glad that woman was gone. A darkness followed her. Standing in full sun, even, there seemed to be shadows all around her. Only during the photo shoot for the catalog did any kind of light come from inside.

  The State Police car had just left after its third visit, turning around in the dirt yard until she’d called out and asked why he was here again. The Black officer, in a black uniform, knee-high black boots, said he was doing a favor for Lewis, keeping an eye on the place for today. She sent him off with a Styrofoam cooler of burritos in aluminum foil for the barracks. He said he’d be back in an hour or so. She said don’t think you’re getting more burritos each time you show up.

  That was three hours ago.

  Sweeping the floor, she found an earring. None of their hunters wore big silver loops.

  She stripped the bed clothes and tossed them into the basket on the back of the ATV parked outside. She would walk miles over mountains and ford rivers tracking a wounded elk. Around her place, she rode the Yamaha everywhere.

  From the main house, she called the police station and left a message with a detective who said he’d pass it on to Denise. Next stop, the laundry room. Standing at the window adding detergent to the washer, she saw sunlight flash on the windshield of a vehicle on the straight length of road out of the woods. It wasn’t moving. She wondered how long it had been there and why.

  The glare off the windshield blinked. It was a van. Coming closer.

  The phone was ringing. She took the cordless outside and watched the van pull to the bottom of the stairs. She could now read the lettering along the side. She hit talk. It was Denise calling back. She’d been away from the office but was back now.

  “Tell Lily I found her earring. I’ll bring it when I come into town. Hey, I’ve got someone here from a garbage company. Later.”

  “Shit. Silva’s van is there with Serena. Right now. What happened to the State Police?”

  Lewis was up and moving, his cell in his hand. “I’ll call the sheriff. They’re closest.”

  “And get State Police down there.”

  Heads turned as they ran the hall to the stairs.

  Sergeant Perez was coming toward them, a cup of coffee in his hand and a question on his face.

  “My sister-in-law is in danger,” Aragon said as she blew past. She raised her voice and didn’t stop running. “Get Pork and Sauerkraut. They know where to go.”

  They flew over the stairs. Lewis hit the crash bar at the bottom and they were in the heat and white sun. The car was an oven. Lewis jumped behind the wheel and put the red and blue light on the roof and was on his horn pushing the car into traffic. He pounded the horn, coming up fast on cars not getting out of the way fast enough.

  He was easing back from a hundred starting up the ramp to I-25, the car’s weight on the two outer wheels, Aragon’s shoulder against the door, when his phone rang. He dug it from his back pocket. Aragon answered, his State Police buddy calling, saying he’d been pulled away to an accident scene, a drunk driving the wrong way on I-25. A family, four kids, wiped out.

  Aragon flattened her hand on the window like she was touching the landscape flashing by: rough brown hills dotted with pinyon and juniper, jagged cliffs with red clay tumbling onto the highway shoulder. Above, lazy white clouds in a pale sky.

  “New Mexico, I love you,” she said, now curling her fingertips against the glass. “Goddamn, why make it so hard?”

  Now it was her phone ringing. Serena.

  Aragon put the phone to her ear. “Are they still there? The garbage people?” She looked at Lewis. “They’re gone. Tell me what they looked like, how many.” To Lewis again, “A man and teenage boy, could have been father and son. Another one who didn’t get out. Wanting to know if she’d like garbage pickup instead of hauling trash to the dump.”

  Lewis slowed to ride the bumper of a Suburban blocking the passing lane, both vehicles doing over ninety, the driver in the Suburban now looking back into the mirror, easing over.

  “Serena,” Aragon said, “those are the men we were worried about. Yes, I’m sorry. They probably think Lily’s still there. I’ll take care of that. We’re coming out. The sheriff will get there before us. Tell them to wait.”

  Aragon gave the driver in the Suburban a hard look as she passed, then dropped her eyes to her phone and searched the directory. She tapped a name. She waited until she heard a sparkling female voice, “Law offices, Marcy Thornton and Associates.”

  Thornton was in conference. Aragon told the receptionist to give her this message, word for word: “We moved Lily. Call off your dogs.”

  She explained it to Lewis. “I want to make sure Thornton gets the news. We’ll see Serena’s safe, then I’ll head back to deliver the message personally. She forced me to reveal Montclaire’s location. It was supposed to be a closed hearing. Last night, a van probably belonging to Silva tried the road. Today, a van we know for sure is Silva’s rolls up. Maybe it’s not a coincidence Cassandra Baca ended up in one of E. Benny’s bins.”

  The circles she’d been drawing on paper taped to walls were starting to close.

  Rigo and Abel ordered the tamales at the café in Pecos, twenty miles from the outfitter’s ranch. Rigo remembered the tamales here. They’d stop in when he took the family to the campground way up the road, dead-ending at the wilderness boundary. Three days of fishing and getting away from the smells and noise of Silva Enterprises.

  The place was empty, too early for lunch, the breakfast crowd gone. When the waitress had left with their order—Junior going with beef tacos despite his grandpa saying tamales all around—Rigo talked about bringing Abel through here when he was Junior’s age. Outside of town they’d turned from the pavement onto a dirt road winding for miles through a subdivision of undeveloped forest parcels spilling down slopes facing the wide-open country to the east. Rigo had someone to see and it was time Abel learned more of the family’s business, just like this trip with Junior.

  He’d let Abel pull the trigger, a guy who’d crossed a client of Silva Enterprises. They’d wrestled him into to a chair and tied him down with bungees from his garage. Someone was shooting somewhere, hunters maybe, no, too many shots too fast. Target practice. Rigo said it was good cover.

  They buried the problem in the woods, under the heaviest boulders they could push on top. Animals couldn’t dig him up, but there was always the risk of a bulldozer if someone ever built there.

  Now with El Puerco in the metal building they didn’t have those little worries.

  “More chips and salsa.” Rigo held the empty plastic basket for the waitress coming to check on their iced teas.

  “I
think the bunkhouse,” Abel said. “You see that woman on the three-wheeler? She had sheets. Someone’s sleeping out there. Too early to be putting up hunters.”

  “Those two guys by the tree in the road last night.” Rigo took a fresh basket of chips from the waitress, scooped salsa, and filled his mouth. “I didn’t buy their lost traveler story.”

  “Do you think they were cops?” Junior asked.

  “They weren’t there today and the tree across the road was gone. Maybe they only think they need to be there at night.”

  “Because the State Police are watching during the day. That Black statie we saw with his lights going when we were coming in.”

  Their orders arrived, oblong plates crammed with tamales, rice, and refried beans under melted jack cheese for Rigo and Abel. Three hard tacos leaning against each other for Junior.

  “That enough for you?” Rigo frowned at the boy’s plate. “Bring him a bowl of menudo,” he told the waitress.

  They took their first bites, then Rigo laid it out. “We go in heavy. Straight to that bunkhouse, get her, then out the way we came.”

  “Is she disappearing or dying?” Abel asked.

  Rigo waited until he had Junior’s attention, looking up with the taco at his mouth. “All this science, you see it on Forensic Files, there’s a body, you’re giving the police a gift.”

  Junior added hot sauce to the ground beef stuffed into a taco. “Do I come with you?” he asked.

  “Why do you think you’re hearing this?” Rigo dug into his plate. “Good stuff, huh? These tamales, they make them here. None of that freezer-burned Safeway shit. If the cops are back with their tree across the road, you’ll be in on killing your first police. Ready for that? It’s a lot different than pushing skinny Star Salazar into El Puerco.”

  Junior was staring at Rigo, the shell getting soggy, grease sliding down the inside of his wrist.

  “Any cops we kill,” Rigo talking with food in his mouth, Junior still staring, “we bring them, too.”