Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  “I’m not going to mess with this,” Aragon said. “I hit the wrong button, you’d probably sue me.”

  Thirty-two

  “Not even a thank you.” Aragon put her feet on the dash inside Lewis’s car. Through the windshield, she watched the ambulance with Thornton pulling away. “We had a couple minutes alone, she’s hanging by her wrists, me checking Rigo’s pulse. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Tell me again what she said.”

  “Tucker figured out the winch thing. They swung her around, brought her down into my arms.”

  “Now you’ve got burns to go with the black patches from those cactus needles. You know that’s oxalic acid killing the skin. You’re a mess.”

  “Whatever ate her foot, man, it’s nasty.”

  “You should let them work on you.”

  “I’m all right. No worse than splashing hot grease.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “I’ve got her in my arms, all limp. She’s having trouble breathing, must be hurting really bad. I said we’ll do a televised arraignment from the hospital. We know you killed Cassandra Baca. That’s when she said, short legs. I said, I’ve got them too. Strange, huh? She was out of it.”

  “One leg’s going to be shorter. She’ll lose that foot. Don’t scratch.” Lewis pulled her hand from the burns on her cheek. “You’re worse than my girls. I’m taking you to the ER.”

  “Benny, he’s still in there, you know.”

  “Rivera’s trying to run down the manufacturer to learn how to drain that thing. By the time they pull the plug, they won’t know what’s Benny and what isn’t.”

  Aragon got the standard suspension with pay and temporary loss of her official firearm for officer-involved shooting while the incident was investigated. The only eyewitness was Marcy Thornton and she wasn’t talking, not even crazy stuff about short legs. Surgeons took everything below the knee. The DA was ready to hit her with state charges after she was released from the hospital, giving her more of a break than Aragon wanted. The US Attorney was presenting a RICO indictment to the grand jury, with murder, bribery, and obstruction of criminal investigations as predicate acts.

  Judy Diaz was arrested at home, arraigned, and bailed out to be met with news the Supreme Court had permanently suspended her and a full investigation by the Disciplinary Board was underway. All her cases were being reassigned. E. Benny Silva Enterprises v. Jeremiah Kohn Productions was going to a judge from Lea County, over three hundred miles removed from Santa Fe’s politics. The FBI had found Diaz’s work on an opinion denying the motion for new trial on her desk with margin notes check with Marcy, leaving everybody puzzled because Thornton didn’t have a dog in that fight.

  Aragon lay in bed, sleeping late—sleeping!—feeling her burns, listening to traffic sounds outside her apartment, people heading down the stairs, doors closing, music thumping somewhere below.

  Someone pounding on her door.

  She took a Smith & Wesson .38, Chief’s Special, from the nightstand and pulled the curtain aside.

  She relaxed and opened the door.

  “I came to get your ass out of bed and on the range.”

  It was Tommy Arenas, her instructor from the Law Enforcement Academy.

  “You’re supposed to refrain from handling firearms during this time of introspection and inquiry. Bullshit. Best thing you can do is blow up a couple hundred rounds. You don’t want the memory of shooting someone in your head next time you need to use your weapon, seeing someone dying, your brain working on that instead of the threat in front of you. You’re going to shoot so many guns today, you won’t remember pulling the trigger last night.”

  He hadn’t come empty-handed. He walked past her and put a bag from Blake’s on the dinette.

  “The perfect meal, I know you say. Every food group in each Lotaburger.”

  “Tommy, you mind if I dress?”

  “I was going to suggest that. Nobody may recognize your face, but a block of Latina muscle in panties hitting bull’s eyes, they’ll know who’s under the bandages.”

  It turned into a glorious day. The first thing Tommy had her shoot was a Smith & Wesson five times the size and weight of her Chief’s Special. With both hands, he gave her a Model 500 Magnum, .50 caliber revolver, fifteen inches total length, the bullets so big they reminded her of acorns. After just one trigger pull, the feel of the Springfield firing at the Silva brothers seemed like a nervous twitch, not recoil.

  She had fun with the revolver that could take down an elephant. Arenas moved her to a semi-automatic shotgun, this crazy Kel-Tec thing, like something from Star Wars. It was fun, too.

  An M1 Garand next, heavy like a war club, then an antique .44 that kicked like one of Javier’s mules. The Webley Bulldog, an ugly gun with a short, flat-sided barrel, kicked even more. It split the webbing of her gun hand. She didn’t mind that Arenas lacked bullets for a reload. He said it was hard finding .454 slugs.

  He worked her down in size until he handed her a Springfield XDM, same as official carry. She understood what he’d been doing. When she fired, all she noticed was the metal disc at twenty-five yards. All she heard was the lovely pinging of rounds striking its target.

  Her hand was sore, she had to admit. So instead of shaking Tommy’s hand at the end, she gave him a hug.

  She hit the gym after, not giving a damn about her bandages. The women’s world record for a bench press, she’d read and never forgotten, was 264 pounds, set by a nurse in Oregon weighing in at 130 pounds, five-foot-one, an inch shorter than she was. Holding twice her own body weight above her face, that was something to think about.

  Lewis joined her and filled her in while he spotted. She had to rack the bar to take it in.

  “Thornton’s office safe, we got it open. The AUSA wouldn’t let us look at hardly anything, but the one piece of paper he let us see was enough. It was a screen shot from the Cassandra Baca videos. Fingerprints for Marcy Thornton and Abel Silva, Jr. And on her phone, calls to and from E. Benny Silva Enterprises.”

  Aragon swung her legs around and sat up. One of the bandages on her arm had come loose with perspiration. She tore it off and let it fall between her feet. The arm didn’t look too bad. It would heal. She hoped the same for the burns on her face. And the dead black spots on her cheek. Lewis had her worried about oxalic acid.

  “Get this.” Lewis sat on the opposite bench, both of them wearing SFPD tees, white letters on navy blue. “Diaz blurted out she was a victim when we arrested her. Blotto. Vodka in her orange juice for breakfast. She said she was being blackmailed by Benny, they killed a girl to scare her. Why weren’t we doing anything about that?”

  Aragon peeled another bandage off her arm and saw blistering she couldn’t pretend didn’t look serious.

  “Did we have it wrong that Diaz was doing favors for Thornton out of, what the hell would you call it, friendship?” she said. “Was Thornton working with Silva, setting up the blackmail? Maybe she was going to get a cut of the nine-mil verdict.”

  “And they were renegotiating, hanging Thornton above the tissue digester?”

  “That’s what it’s called?”

  “Large animal alkaline tissue digester and sanitizer system. It’s the piece of crap that never worked for the State of New Mexico. Silva picked it up cheap, and somehow it works for him. The manufacturer is out of business. Benny’s still in there while the FBI calls other companies to see if they can help.”

  Aragon pulled a set of dumbbells off a wall rack and got to work on alternating shoulder presses, her mind working better while she moved.

  “Where did the Silvas grab Thornton?”

  “Those cameras on the State Capitol.” Lewis stood next to her, with dumbbells twice what she was pushing toward the ceiling. “We have a Silva truck going behind Thornton’s office, coming out a little later. The lights were on at Fager’s, his
Mercedes in the lot. We asked if he saw anything. He said he was too busy working on his lawsuit against Thornton to be gazing out windows. He gave us a copy, stupid thing about falling on her sidewalk on account of missing flagstones. Exhibits, A, B, and C, photographs of the empty spaces where the flagstones were supposed to be, his bloody knee, a rip in his pants. He’s looking forward to her deposition. Says he’s going to serve her in the hospital.”

  Aragon moved up ten pounds on each hand. Lewis went up twenty but cut back on reps.

  “Did he turn over other copies of the video?”

  “Rivera went with me this time and did the asking. Fager had a couple more. Rivera grilled him about other evidence he was withholding and he said no. He knows the law. He wasn’t going to lie to a federal officer.”

  “How far back can we get film from those Capitol cameras?”

  “They’re digging it up. Might take a while. Not exactly the Smithsonian archives over there.”

  Aragon dropped back five pounds. Lewis moved to cables.

  “Cassandra Baca weighed about a hundred pounds,” Aragon said. “I don’t see how Thornton could have done it. All these connections to the Silvas, maybe they helped her.”

  “And not use the digester? Why? We’re back to sending a message.”

  “To Diaz, dragging her feet. Thornton couldn’t persuade her to move faster. So scare the crap out of her with a dead girl in a dumpster.”

  “Abel Junior’s prints on that screen shot.” Lewis was talking with arms stretched wide, curling the cable grips to the sides of his head. “Him and Abel Senior haven’t been seen. Mom’s not worried. She’s sticking with they ran down to Mexico. They’ll be back when they have enough fun.” Lewis finished, walked one cable, then the other, to their seated position. “You want to come for dinner tonight? No excuses now. We’ll get some green stuff inside you. I’ll bake fish. Unless you’ve got plans with Rivera. You guys still a number?”

  “The Silvas aren’t the only thing that died this week. What time?”

  She was up early next morning, watery coffee in a travel cup, leaning into the curves on the winding road to the trailhead for the seven-mile climb up Santa Fe Baldy. She parked in the lot where she’d met Rivera on the Cynthia Fremont case and impressed him by nailing where Fremont had been killed, a lake off this trail she knew from fishing trips with Javier. She’d seen Miguel in him then, the same widow’s peak, thick black hair, the way he held his head, making her think of a boy she’d loved grown into a man.

  She reached the trailhead while the sun was the other side of the mountains, still cold enough up here for a jacket and wool cap at the start. She was going to move fast and didn’t want her gun bouncing on her hip. The .38 went into a mesh pocket outside her daypack. She headed out, picking up speed and peeling off clothes as the trail grew steeper, taking no breaks, pushing her heart and lungs hard.

  Jogging on level stretches, concentrating on her feet so she didn’t trip, she forgot the job. She loved it here, the trees changing as she climbed higher, the air clean, none of the smoke and exhaust clogging Santa Fe’s air. But it was scary dry. Her feet kicked up dust. The ground was cracked. The trees looking weary and stressed.

  God, she hoped this never burned.

  She finally took a breather where the tree line ended at a ridge, giving the first views inside the Pecos Wilderness. Below her the rising sun bounced off the smooth surface of a tiny lake, someone camped down there, smoke curling through the trees. Idiots. The last section of the climb up Baldy was to her left, only a half a mile to the summit. She went straight, running now, heading for the campfire.

  A mile later she was there. No one around. They’d burned their garbage and left embers smoldering after breaking camp. She carried water from the lake in a charred tin can. Six, seven trips and she had it out. She stirred the ashes, then kicked dirt over the fire pit.

  The climb back to the ridge was the steepest of the day. She’d trashed her quads running downhill and took her time. Her second wind came when she reached the ridge. She covered the remaining open ground in a steady jog.

  She had the summit to herself. Santa Fe spread below. The Rio Grande, a strip of green against parched brown, wound its way south from Colorado. When she turned she saw the sharp point of Truchas Peak, and behind that Wheeler Peak, almost 14,000 feet, just outside Taos. The Pecos Wilderness was a green oasis between the dry Rio Grande Valley and the brittle, arid plains disappearing on the eastern horizon.

  Turning back west, she watched a thunderstorm building over the Jemez Mountains, lightning flashing in black, boiling clouds above the wall of flames eating mountain slopes. Rain, she prayed. Drown us. Flood the arroyos. Kill the fires.

  The storm was moving straight at her. She couldn’t wait for it to hit.

  She pulled a PB&J sandwich from her pack, not her favorite kind of food. It made her feel juvenile. She compensated with a fistful of elk jerky. She watched the storm opening up, dumping sheets of water on the Jemez fires, and fell in love with New Mexico all over again.

  Heads appeared on the far ridge. They grew into bodies. Over a dozen people swinging walking sticks and trekking poles. The first one—you’ve got to be kidding—was wearing lederhosen. They were singing. The hell was this, The Sound of Music?

  She’d been seated on a mound of rocks with her daypack at her feet. When they drew close they stopped singing, stared, then mumbled among themselves and moved away, glancing back over their shoulders as they retraced their steps off the summit.

  Her hand went to her cheek. She’d forgotten the bandages on her face and the black dead flesh from the cactus toxin. She didn’t think she looked bad enough to scare anyone. She crumpled the wax paper from her sandwich and bent to put it in her bag. Her pistol showed through the mesh in the pack’s outer pocket. That’s what drove them away.

  She couldn’t see them when the singing started again. It drifted on the wind, voices rising and falling like eagles riding thermals. They must be from the Santa Fe Opera, it was that good. Now a woman’s voice, slicing the sky, men’s deeper voices giving her a platform to reach for the darkening clouds.

  Aragon soared with the music, a small bird drafting behind eagle wings. Now a man and woman singing a duet, voices intertwined. Silk cables.

  And she thought she hated opera.

  On her way down, the singers shifted closer to each other when she passed by. She said, “Thank you,” and floated down the mountain, their music deep inside her.

  Seven miles later, her clothing heavy with sweat, her lungs working overtime, legs screaming from running downhill, she reached her car. In the last mile, flying through the switchbacks, hikers coming up getting out of her way, her mind had swung back to work.

  She saw what she’d been missing: she should have stayed on the roses.

  Thirty-three

  “I’m a zombie cop,” Aragon told Lewis. “Just one look at me sends people running.”

  She’d asked to meet at the Blake’s on St. Michael’s. She’d had a good day at the office on top of the mountain and wanted to tell him. And she was starving, three thousand calories burned so far.

  “You could get a role on The Walking Dead,” Lewis said. “Play a cop who won’t die until she solves every murder. She’s been gored by cactus, burned by acid. Nothing stops her. There’s always murders, so she can never rest. She eats the killers. Hell, you already bite. You’d be a natural.”

  “I need you to talk to some people.” Aragon scratched a red splotch on her arm, the burned skin already peeling away. “We can’t wait till I’m off suspension.”

  “You’ll be command central, the wounded zombie general, sending zombie troops into battle. Me, your first wave of shock troops.”

  “I’ll be in the car, waiting for you to come back and tell me.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll be at home taking care of yourself. Yo
u need to change those bandages. Half are falling off. People are staring.” He pointed at the bag on the table, the lights bouncing off the surface, the sun pouring through windows that needed to be cleaned. “For your fries, I’ll march where you order as long as you stay home and don’t move for a couple days.”

  “I’ll go nuts in my puny apartment.”

  “You’ll have time to relax. Remember what that was?”

  She asked him to find the cleaning woman she’d met outside Thornton’s office, the one taking flowers out the back.

  “She said, ‘I take the flowers now.’ Does that mean she’s taking flowers because Thornton’s done with them now, or now she’s the one taking the flowers? Did she take the flowers before? Did someone else take the flowers?”

  “You want to tell me what you saw up there in the clouds got you thinking about flowers?”

  “Not ready. I want it to make sense when it comes out.”

  She was a good girl and went home to shower and remove her soiled bandages. The dead skin and redness on her face scared her but the cactus devastation looked better. She applied more of the salve prescribed in the ER and left her skin exposed to the air while she called Elaine Salas to talk about roses.

  Salas said, “I should be earning credits toward a degree in horticulture.”

  “Tell me.”

  Most of what Salas had to say, the genus of the roses, their likely source of production, how they’re transported and kept fresh en route, the wholesalers for New Mexico, did not interest her. But two things did.

  “The stems were shorter than what I thought you’d see in a store. I compared them to fresh roses at Whole Foods.”

  “Why Whole Foods?”

  “Just did. Maybe the bag on Cassandra Baca’s head. Anyway, the stems were about six to eight inches shorter than what was on sale.”

  “Any idea what that might mean?”