“I should try sleep more often,” Aragon said. “Things happen while I’m out.”
“That case where Montclaire crossed paths with Star Salazar, the two idiots on PCP mad-dogging with vests and mouse guns? Lily got the murder weapon? Bingo.”
“She said she gave it to Thornton.”
“I showed Lily the Beretta you found. She remembered the wooden grips and the funny little barrel. Last she saw it, Thornton was putting it in her desk.”
If Fager thought today was good because it had been miserable for Thornton and Diaz, he was going to love tomorrow.
Thirty
Thornton reached for the cord on the shade of her office window. Fager was at his window across the parking lot, the only car parked there now his Mercedes. The police had loaded her Aston and Durango on flatbeds and hauled them away.
He waved as the shade came down. Bastard. Those news stories, her face above a black rectangle but leaving no doubt she was naked. Judy, too. He had something to do with it. That wasn’t a move the cops would pull. It would blow up on them at trial, demonstrate malice, unprofessionalism. No law enforcement agency had offered any comment. But Fager had been in the stories, talking about the search of her office, how shocked he was seeing it happen. “A prominent attorney,” he’d said, the same line in every report, “subjected to the humiliation of police intruding into the space where she practices her profession. I can’t imagine the humiliation.”
She got back to what she’d been doing before she’d felt Fager’s eyes on her. She had bank statements, a print-out of her mutual funds and brokerage accounts, and a handwritten list of her other assets on her desk by a coffee mug holding red wine. This was something she told her clients to do: decide what you can turn to cash, fast. Be ready if your best option is running.
She’d thought she was worth a lot more than what she was seeing. Knock taxes off the mutual funds and brokerage accounts, it was even less. She could get a second mortgage on her house. The office she owned outright. It would sell fast. But there were realtors’ commissions, closing costs, and taxes on the appreciation. And the depreciation recapture, don’t forget that. She’d probably have to put on a new roof and fix the sidewalks before it went on the market. When they got to inspection, the things she knew about the plumbing and foundation would come out.
She’d open the safe deposit box in the morning and start selling the jewelry and coins. The guns in the storage unit, the best she could do was call Frank Pacheco and agree on a price. Sight unseen, but a lot of guns, all kinds, she told him. I’m not vouching they’re all clean. I got them from clients, you know.
He said, “I get the picture,” and gave her a price that factored in the risk he’d be buying weapons that could be traced to crimes. He’d pay in cash, right after he moved the guns to one of his places.
She wanted him to do it tonight. The police would learn about the storage unit from the bills they’d rifled. They could be there before him. She gave him the code for the key pad at the entrance to the facility and the combination for the lock on her unit.
He called back not much later. He got past the gate, but the combination to the lock wouldn’t work. In fact, the lock needed a key.
She didn’t remember switching locks. She hadn’t been to the unit in a long time.
She told him to use bolt cutters. He had to go home and would hurry back.
Those news broadcasts … Benny Silva certainly had seen them. He’d be wondering how his movies made it to the small screen. The Supreme Court immediately suspending Judy, Silva would know that meant the end of his blackmail scheme.
The bungalow shook a little. That happened when the garbage trucks came. She wasn’t sure if this was pick-up night. The last thing on her mind.
Pacheco called again. He was inside the storage unit. He needed to give her more money. He didn’t want her resentful next time he might need her speaking in court for his family. Where’d she get the Barrett fifty caliber? Three Uzis? And that old Colt with pearl grips, Wild West stuff. Cherry. He knew a crazy Texan who collected and had too much money.
Someone was at the back door. She told Pacheco to hold.
She opened the door to two Benny Silvas in brown coveralls, caps on their heads saying Silva Enterprises, black hair sticking out above their ears. No, the one in front wasn’t Benny. That scar running across his face, no mustache where his lip was patched together. You could see teeth in the gap, though he wasn’t smiling.
“Mr. Silva, what— ”
His hand came up. A gun pointed at her chest.
The ugly Benny said, “Now we know what it takes to make a lawyer shut up.”
Fager felt like drinking. One thing he hadn’t done after his wife’s murder was get drunk. He’d held it in, packing it down deep, thinking he was turning grief into strength, coal into diamonds. Maybe if he’d gotten drunk he could have cried. And if he’d cried, maybe he wouldn’t have tried to strangle Marcy Thornton in front of news cameras and he’d still have a law practice.
Tonight’s drunk wouldn’t be about grief. He felt like he’d just kicked ass in court when all he’d done was leak Montclaire’s video. Not one of the reporters had said turn it off before they watched to the end. A couple said, “Run it again.” He reached for the bourbon in the bottom drawer. It made him think of the old days, setting up glasses for staff, sometimes taking everyone out for steaks to celebrate. Marcy, too, when she was a baby lawyer, his only associate attorney back then.
A cigar would be great. He had one left in the box under the picture of Winston Churchill, bulldog face scowling and chomping a stogie. He snipped the end, wet it in his mouth, and fired up, sending smoke circles toward the ceiling. Then he leaned back in his old-style oak lawyer’s chair, feet on the windowsill, facing the parking lot, Marcy’s shiny red Aston no longer out there sneering at him.
The garbage truck cut off his view of her window where her shadow had been. It rolled to the back of her office and parked at the end of the walk where he’d tripped and fallen. He saw her shadow again, rising, then moving toward the rear door. A garbage man was there. Now another, rolling one of those oversized black cans on wheels, laying it on its side.
That wasn’t what garbage men did.
He didn’t see the door open, but he saw them pulling Marcy outside, one stuffing a rag in her mouth. They looked alike, those two. They dragged her toward the garbage can, pushing her feet in first, punching her to stop kicking.
Fager swung his heels off the windowsill and reached for the phone to call 911.
Benny-with-the-scar grabbed her in a head lock. Benny-without-the-scar shoved a sock in her mouth. She tried scratching the one holding her head and he punched her in the nose. They say you see stars. She saw galaxies.
She blinked her eyes clear. Her feet were about to go inside the garbage can. She kicked and the real Benny punched her in the stomach, right under her ribs, knocking the wind out of her.
She felt the black plastic edge of the garbage can scraping her ribs as they pushed her deeper. She threw out her arms, catching an edge in her armpit. They pried the arm loose and the scarred Benny hit her in the back of the head.
The black plastic was up to her chin. One arm inside already, the fingers of her other hand being twisted to make her let go. The garbage can was moving, turning her around, a last glimpse of the parking lot before the lid came down.
There was Walter Fager in his window, standing, a phone to his ear, looking her way.
She tried screaming: Get out here and help me, call the police. But the sock was so far back in her throat she gagged.
For a second, Fager met her eyes.
The hand with the phone dropped to his side.
With the other, he closed the shade.
Thirty-one
Aragon parked three blocks from Silva’s business and avoided street lights as she worked
her way closer. The brown FBI Ford was there, two heads backlit by a portable billboard down the street. Farther back was Rivera’s command post in the black-panel truck.
Only a single light above the gate glowed outside Silva Enterprises. The rest of the street was dark. No one lived here. The other businesses, a car painting shop, a pool supply warehouse, were shut for the night. She smelled chlorine coming from the warehouse and the odor of sewage crossing the street from Silva’s.
Stronger than anything was the smoke. An inversion, they said on the weather report. All that ash from the forest fires riding winds above Santa Fe was now settling on the city. The streetlights were gauzy halos. Her eyes watered. The back of her throat burned.
A car passed. She waited until it disappeared and sprinted to the stacked dumpsters outside Silva’s gate. She knew the FBI people had seen her. She turned under the weak light to let them see her face, then lifted a heavy rubber lid and climbed up and over into the nearest dumpster. She fell onto plastic bags. Her fingers broke through and she touched something damp.
The phone vibrated in her pocket. In the pitch black of the dumpster she read a text from Rivera: Wht u doing?
She texted back: Going in. Legal this way. I think.
Brilliant.
Official FBI OK?
No follow-up came.
She had a pen light and could have learned what she was sitting on. The smell was a mix of sheetrock dust and rotting garbage. She wiped her damp hand on her pants. The smell was no worse than a horse barn, what she called the heroin trailers in the woods, where junkies sprayed blood from syringes, cruised in their own shit, nobody giving a damn about the toilet backed up.
She texted Lewis to forward reports from the scientists and drafts of the warrants he was preparing. She might as well work while she waited. He wrote back roger and asked where she was. She sent him a photo, the flash showing what she really didn’t want to know. She got back a string of question marks.
Something hard hit the side of the dumpster and it shook. Heavy machinery groaned. The dumpster rose, the lumpy bags under her shifted and threw her on her side. Maybe she hadn’t thought this through. Maybe the dumpster was going to be lifted high, tilted, emptied into the belly of a bigger truck. One with a hydraulic compactor.
But the dumpster returned to level, then landed hard. She risked lifting the rubber lid. She was on a low boy, other small dumpsters being parked in rows, a man in a hard hat operating a forklift and wearing a mask against the smoke. She was knocked backwards when another dumpster banged against hers. She found a seat and pulled up Lewis’s draft of arrest warrants.
The sounds of the forklift stopped. A truck engine fired up. The dumpster jerked backwards, then she felt motion. She was going in. She slipped her phone into her back pocket, the side away from her gun. The dumpster lurched harder and she fell onto her face, thankful to hit a clean plastic bag.
She couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the truck engine and metal straining. It got quiet when they stopped.
“That does it. We got this.” An older man’s voice with a Northern New Mexico accent. He sounded like her grandfather, a light voice dancing between high and low notes on alternating syllables. “You boys go home. Your wives miss you and I’m sick of your whining.”
Then other male voices. Feet tromping, car engines starting, the sound of the gate at the front opening and closing.
“What’s wrong with people?” She knew that voice: Benny Silva. “All that overtime, you’d think they’d be happy. All I heard was bitching about working in the smoke. You want to do it now?”
“Let her hang, think about what’s coming.” The first voice. She’d guess a man about Silva’s age, who almost sounded like him.
She waited until she felt safe they’d moved away. A quick look, the heavy rubber weighing down her head, her eyes just above the edge. She was alone, deep inside the business’s yard. She made sure her phone was off and climbed out, letting the lid down gently. She dropped to the ground and made her way to the front of the truck. Some kind of heavy machinery was gearing up behind a corrugated wall, metal screaming, glass exploding.
She jogged to a door, sheet metal on hinges, and inched it open. Benny Silva, wearing orange plastic ear muffs, had his back to her watching a white cargo van getting smaller. Another man was at the crusher’s controls. She saw the old man’s shoes under his coveralls, the crepe soles, the ventilated arches, the same kind of shoes she’d noticed on Benny Silva. Killers wearing SAS comfort shoes. That had to be a first.
She wondered how the van got here, then thought of the flatbed the FBI had seen coming and going. It had carried rows of dumpsters. It could transport a van under a tarp.
She backed out and worked her way deeper into the compound, planning on climbing over the fence at the rear when she was done looking around.
Rows of blue and white porta johns. Two honey-dipper trucks, a pickup, more forklifts, a front-end loader. A mountain of broken glass, bins of cable and aluminum. A metal hangar off by itself, a single bulb over the port burning orange in the smoky air.
She used an aisle between the porta johns, then ran across open ground to the hangar’s door.
Different sounds here. Like a huge hot tub, jets gurgling and churning. That smell, strong chemicals. She thought of salt. How can salt have a smell?
The door slid on rollers. Her eyes traveled across a concrete floor to a circular mound of stainless steel, rings upon rings. Gauges, valves, mist rising from a bubbling surface of green liquid.
Marcy Thornton hanging by her wrists, naked, one foot in the green broth, her other leg bent, tied back, heel against her ass, stretching the thigh like some yoga pose. That birthmark by her black pubes, damn if it didn’t look like the New Mexico state symbol.
Thornton’s eyes came around, her face bruised, a little blood under her nose. She spat a rag from her mouth and screamed.
“The lawyer’s calling,” Rigo said, coming down from the controls of the crusher. “They don’t stay quiet for long.”
Benny said, “We could take her hands while the foot’s melting. Oñate cut off hands. People forget that. People forget a lot.”
“He wanted them to live. How’d he do it?’”
“Put a sword in fire till it’s white hot. Then press where the hand or foot used to be. Burns everything closed. Smells like a matanza. Pig skin on hot iron.”
“Lawyer cicharones. We’re not gonna do that. She doesn’t tell us who shot Abel and Junior, we drop her to her chin while El Puerco does his thing. I suppose she’d keep living until he ate her lungs and heart. No, her throat would go first. Six hours later, we can flush her down the toilet.” Rigo hung his ear protection on a hook and unzipped his coveralls. “And away go troubles down the drain.”
“I’ll get my sword,” Benny said. “Something to wake her up if she passes out again.”
Aragon was trying to understand the winch controls, not wanting to hit the release switch instead of the one that would raise Thornton, when she heard voices at the hangar’s door. She searched for a place to hide. Barrels marked Bioliquidation solution / Caution: caustic contents formed a wall. She got behind in time to look back and see two Benny Silvas walking into the hangar, one carrying a sword.
The other one must be Rigo. One hell of a scar, the mangled lips. Lewis had called him zipper face and said she would understand if she saw him. He went to the winch controls and hit a button. An electric motor churned. He leaned into a lever and Thornton rose, what was left of her foot rising from the broth.
Thornton dropped her eyes, her chin on her chest. Then she looked at the twins.
More panting than talking. “It was Aragon.” She focused beyond them at the barrels where Aragon was listening. “She said if you came there again you’d find her. That’s who killed your people.”
Benny touched her nipple with th
e tip of the sword.
“What you haven’t explained is why you didn’t let us know she was waiting.”
“I tried to warn you. I called. No one answered.”
“There’s an answering service, I don’t get to the phone fast enough. Lower this time, Rigo. Dip her to the knee.”
Aragon came out from the barrels, her gun on Rigo.
“What you want to do is swing that boom around and bring her down, here on the floor. Gently.”
Benny pushed the sword through the nipple into Thornton’s breast. She screamed again.
“You shoot Rigo, this goes through her heart.”
“Okay, I shoot you first.”
And she did, hitting Benny dead center, sending him backwards, the broth splashing all over Thornton, she was sorry about that.
Rigo spun toward her, a gun coming under the arm that had been on the winch controls. His first shot hit one of the barrels. A spout of liquid leaped into the air and splashed her face. Aragon hit him with a double-tap, bam, bam, one above the other along the buttons on his shirt. He stood there, already dead, before his legs folded and he went down on his face.
She turned back to where Benny should have gone under. But there he was, bobbing at the surface, trying to swim, face down, arms thrashing above his head, legs kicking. Not getting anywhere. That damn sword had fallen hilt first, all that metal heavier than the tapered tip. He landed on the point and it held him up. The more he struggled the deeper the blade went.
“Stop moving.” She searched for something to pull him over so she could drag him out.
He turned once to her, his mouth open, struggling for air. Instead he got a mouthful of broth. She wondered what that was doing to his tongue, her own face and arms burning. The tip of the sword came out his back, through his kidney. Then he was gone.
Aragon pulled out her phone and called Rivera, the closest backup, as she studied the winch controls. She saw Thornton watching her.
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