The Searcher

by Simon Toyne

“I didn’t trust them. They annoyed the shit out of me too. I can trust you though, right?”

  “Of course you can,” Mulcahy said. “But then what else am I going to say?”

  Tío laughed and slapped his leg. “I like that about you. No bullshit. You should be crawling up my ass, the situation I got you in, but you’re still calling it like it is. I need to get me some more people like you instead of all these kiss asses.”

  The wheels bumped across the verge as they rejoined the road and the shadow of their vehicle stretched out on the road ahead of them as they started heading east.

  “Tell me something,” Tío said, like he was asking for a bit of advice. “How come you’re so loyal to your pop?”

  “He’s family.”

  Tío shook his head slowly. “No, he’s not. He’s no more your father than I am.”

  Mulcahy’s hands tightened on the wheel. He had never told anyone about his childhood—partly from shame, partly from loyalty—though he’d figured someone with Tío’s resources could dig it up if he wanted to. He obviously had.

  “So your mom,” Tío continued, all his attention on Mulcahy, like he was feeding on his discomfort, “what was she—a dancer, a whore?”

  “You probably know better than me,” he said, forcing his voice to stay steady. “I never really knew her.”

  “No. I guess not. How old were you when she took off—seven?”

  “Six.”

  “Six years old and she ups and leaves you with some loser she’s only been banging for a coupla months. What kind of a bitch does that?”

  Anyone else, anyone else in the world, and Mulcahy would have taken his Beretta out right there and shot them straight through the head.

  “You ever find out what happened to her?” Tío continued, probing, enjoying it.

  Mulcahy shook his head. He’d had plenty of opportunity to find out during his time as a cop. He had a name, a physical description, a last-known whereabouts, and access to all the national missing persons databases. But when it came down to it, he didn’t want to know, not the details at least. He knew enough to figure that it wouldn’t be a happy ending, so what was the point in knowing exactly how unhappy or what specific form of sadness it had taken?

  “Why don’t you take a guess,” Tío said, like he was suggesting a game of I Spy to pass the time.

  Mulcahy focused on his breathing like a sniper preparing to take a shot. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest and sweat starting to prickle at his scalp. Tío knew, he could hear it in his voice, he knew what had happened to his mother and he was about to tell him.

  “What you think?” Tío persisted. “Overdose? You think she was beaten to death by some fucked-up john? Or she cut her wrists in some rat-hole motel when she couldn’t face another day of her shitty life? You must have wondered about it.”

  “Can’t say I ever did.”

  “Bullshit. You must have thought about it all the time when you was a kid, wondered what had happened to your mom, why she’d never come back for you.”

  “No,” Mulcahy said, trying to shut the conversation down. “I didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s cold. I thought you was a good kid, the way you stick your neck out for your old man and all, even though he ain’t really your old man. Now I find out you don’t even care what happened to your real mother. That’s stone cold. That’s ice. I’m disappointed in you.”

  Mulcahy shrugged. “Sorry.” He hoped Tío would drop it, but knew he wouldn’t. He was enjoying it too much and information was his thing, knowing something that you didn’t know, telling you things you didn’t want to hear.

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” Tío said, taking his phone from his pocket, “you take a guess at what happened to her and if you’re close, I’ll call my guys and get them to cut your pop loose right now.”

  “What if I don’t want to play?”

  “Then I’ll get them to break something instead—a finger, an arm maybe—and I’ll stick it on speakerphone so we can both hear him screaming. How’s that sound?”

  Mulcahy didn’t say anything. He was trembling and trying hard not to show it.

  “Come on, we got to pass the time somehow. These long desert roads bore the fuck out of me. You see that rock up ahead?” Tío pointed at a large red boulder by the side of the road. “When we pass that, you got to give me your answer. I got to put a time limit on this thing, and don’t you be slowing down to stretch it out neither. If you cheat, I’ll get them to cut an ear off and you’ll still have to give me an answer.”

  Mulcahy glanced down at his speed. He was doing a steady fifty. The rock was about a mile away, rising up above the desert like a tombstone. They would reach it in a minute. Maybe two. No more.

  He hadn’t thought about his mother much in years, blocking her out like a traumatic experience he wanted to forget. When he’d been little and she was freshly gone, his pop had talked about her a lot, like she was away somewhere, visiting a relative or something, and she’d be coming back any day. Whenever they did something fun he’d always say, “We gotta remember to tell your mom about this.” So for a long while she remained present in his life even though she wasn’t there. And because of this he genuinely thought she would come back one day and that they’d continue as a family, all together, like his pop clearly wanted to—like he wanted to.

  Then, when he was eight or nine, his pop took him to a diner one day and there was a woman there, sitting in a booth, a woman who wasn’t his mother. His pop had sat next to her and held her hand and said, “This is Kathleen, she’d like to live with us and be a family; what do you think about that?”

  Well, he hadn’t thought much, but they bought him a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake and an ice cream after and his pop laughed real hard at her jokes, so he thought that if it made Pop happy, maybe it would be okay.

  Kathleen had been nice enough, but it hadn’t worked out. Pop stopped laughing at her jokes pretty quick and she got mad at him because he was always on the road and because he spent too much time at the track or in back-room poker games. And because Pop was away so much, he had ended up home alone with Kathleen and, though she was never mean to him, he could tell by the way she looked at him that she didn’t like him much. “He sure must have loved her to keep you around like he does,” Kathleen had said to him one day, about a week or so before she moved out for good. “He sure don’t love me nearly so much.”

  There were a few Kathleens over the years, well-meaning women who thought they could turn his father into a home bird instead of a night owl. All of them went the same way as the first. But with the Kathleens around, Pop didn’t talk about his mom anymore, and it was his aunt who finally told him, “You know your mama ain’t never coming back for you.”

  She had said it one evening when his pop was on the road and he was at the kitchen table in his school clothes eating a Kraft dinner. “Woman like that don’t got time for no children. Bad for business is what it is. She stuck around long enough to get her hooks into your daddy, then she took off, leaving you behind like a pair of shoes she got tired of wearing. She picked a good man to dump her child on, I’ll give her that much, but I won’t give her nothing more. You should forget about her. She’s forgotten you by now, if’n she ain’t dead in a ditch somewheres.”

  “Here comes that rock,” Tío said. “You got an answer for me?”

  Woman like that don’t got time for no children.

  He had found a picture of her once in his father’s room, hidden behind a framed school photograph of him that Pop kept on his bedside bureau. It was a flyer for some revue bar featuring a reed-thin, red-haired woman dressed for the tango, all long hair and legs. HOT SALSA STARRING BLAZE it said. Her face was in profile but he recognized enough of himself in it. The picture was creased, like it had been stuffed in a jacket pocket. The next time he looked for it, it wasn’t there. He wondered if one of the Kathleens had found it and made Pop get rid of it. Maybe his old man got rid of it himself.

/>   Mulcahy had hung on to that image of her, young and beautiful, even after he became a cop and saw how fast the street wore down women like she had been, all those crumbling beauties with caricatures of their younger selves painted onto sagging skin, walking the streets and working the bordellos, winding up dead in alleys, or in Dumpsters or abandoned cars, beaten and bloated and tossed aside like sacks of garbage.

  Working Vice, he had also seen the sort of lives the kids of these women led: dead eyed and feral, lousy with fleas and stinking of piss, parked in front of cartoon channels while their mamas went to work in the bedroom or sometimes behind a thin blanket tacked to the ceiling to make a divider. That was the life his father had spared him and that was why he owed him so much.

  The rock grew big and red by the side of the road and they cruised past it, the sound of the car’s engine reflecting back off its side.

  “She’s dead,” Mulcahy said.

  Tío shook his head. “Not good enough. You got to do better than that if you want to win a prize. How’d you reckon she died?”

  “Overdose.”

  “Final answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Died of an overdose. Eeeeergh. Wrong.” Tío swiped the screen of his phone and started reading. “Madeleine Mary Kelly, born April third, 1952, also known as Blaze, Scarlet, Red Riding Hood, Mary Kennedy . . .”

  He swiped the phone again and held it out. Mulcahy wanted to knock it from his hand. He wanted to scream and cover his ears so he didn’t have to hear whatever Tío was about to tell him.

  “. . . is now known as Mary Schwartz and living in Southlake, Texas, with her husband, Garry Schwartz, and their two lovely teenage sons.”

  Mulcahy felt like someone had reached into his chest, torn his lungs out, then stomped on them. He couldn’t breathe. His ears were singing. He looked at the phone, his eyes struggling to focus on the photo. It showed two boys, awkward and a touch overweight, standing on either side of a country club couple, a balding man with a paunch that strained against the middle of his pink polo shirt, his cookie-cutter corporate wife beside him. She was slightly taller than he was, her red hair straightened and salon shiny, her face collagened and Botoxed and filled with expensive dental work that gleamed from her full smile.

  “Eyes on the road,” Tío said, and Mulcahy snatched at the wheel, breathing fast, pulling the Jeep back on the blacktop from where it had almost drifted onto the verge.

  “How’s that make you feel?” Tío asked, still holding the phone out, taunting him with the photo. “She upped and left you with a stranger, then traded up. Looks like she made a smart choice though, huh? Dumping her unwanted kid on some traveling salesman so she could hook up with Mr. Country Club here. What you think he drives—Lexus? Lincoln Town Car with the full package? She’s probably got a Mercedes too, little two-seater in a garage bigger than your old man’s apartment.” He let that thought sink in awhile before continuing. “Mr. Mom here works for some big travel company, something in accounts. Sounds boring as shit to me, but I guess it’s nice and safe. How much was it your old man was in to me for by the time you stepped in and settled his debts?”

  Mulcahy swallowed. His mouth had gone dry. “Just north of three hundred.”

  Tío nodded. “Three hundred g’s. I bet this guy earns that in a year—probably more with bonuses and all his health and dental crap. Yep, I reckon your mom made a smart move, dumping you and that loser you call your pop. She saw a chance and she took it. You got to admire someone for doing that.”

  “Yes,” Mulcahy replied. “I guess you do.”

  He could see buildings on the road ahead, a motel or something, and he fixed his eyes on them to keep from sliding off the road again. Everything he knew about himself had been turned on its head in the space of a few minutes. He had always thought his mom was living some tragic life and that was what had stopped her from coming back or looking for the son she had abandoned. Either that or she was dead. It had never occurred to him that it might be shame that had kept her away: not shame of what she had become but shame of what she had left behind.

  The buildings started taking shape and he could see a Texaco sign affixed to a large concrete awning stretching across a six-car forecourt.

  “Okay if we stop for a minute?” he said. “I need a bathroom break.”

  “Why not,” Tío replied, squinting through the windshield at the old-fashioned gas station with its modern pumps. “We can get us some more gas too. And more cans to put it in.”

  59

  MORGAN WAS PACING NOW.

  The coroner was in the barn with Donny McGee and a couple of forensic techs borrowed from the King Community Hospital who were processing the crime scene. They didn’t get many murders, so the medics wore two hats and drew extra pay they rarely had to do anything to earn. They sure were earning it today. Morgan had moved away to the open gate of the corral so no one could overhear his conversation.

  “You heard about the explosion in the Sierra Madre Mountains?”

  He had a phone pressed to one ear and another in his hand. “That tells me he’s coming right now.”

  He held the other phone up, angled his head back, and squinted at the screen. “I also got a report from border patrol . . .” His eyes were getting worse the older he got, but he refused to wear glasses. “They found a barn on fire with a tunnel underneath it and some bodies inside. Right on the border, about an hour and a half away from here.” He listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. “Okay, good. I got one of our SWAT teams heading here right now and some other armed units.”

  The other phone started ringing, a bell that made it sound like an old phone.

  “I’ll be ready,” Morgan said. “Don’t you worry about me. We’re all set here.”

  He hung up and switched phones. “Morgan.” The frown melted from his forehead. “Hey, sweetheart,” he checked his watch, “you finishing up for the day?”

  He glanced over at the barn again to make sure no one could hear. Flashes lit up the inside as somebody took pictures. It was nigh on impossible to keep anything of a romantic nature private in a town like Redemption, but he and Janice Wickens had managed it for almost three months now.

  “Just locked up,” she said.

  It had started off as a necessity, getting her on his side so she would keep an eye on what James Coronado was pulling out of the archives. Then it became something else. She was so different from him but it seemed to work. He couldn’t imagine life now without the home-cooked meals and the warm body to hold at night. Life was good, was about to get a whole lot better. All he had to do was get through tonight.

  “Listen, honey,” he said, “I’m not going to be able to get away. I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on, but you should head on home. Have yourself an early one. And lock your door.”

  “Lock my door! You’ve never said that before.”

  “Well, there’s some stuff going down. I got it, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “Is it anything to do with James Coronado?”

  Morgan turned away from the barn. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I just had Holly in the office. She had a requisition chit for something Jim had asked for but never collected. She was . . . I don’t know, a bit distracted. She got a call while she was here and that made her worse.”

  “Did you catch the name of who she was speaking to?”

  “No.”

  Morgan glanced over at the barn. The medics were wheeling the body out now and heading to the ambulance. Over at the house Ellie was sitting in a rocker with someone next to her, holding her hand and talking to her, though she didn’t seem to notice. She just rocked back and forth, the shotgun resting across her knees while her blind eyes stared out at the reddening sky.

  “I think she was going to meet someone,” Janice said, drawing his attention back. “I can’t imagine who. She seemed agitated though.”

  Morgan stepped a
side to let one of the ranch hands ride past. He was pulling a couple of loose horses behind him, dragging them back into the corral. Morgan had a good idea who she was going to meet. “I was worried about her,” Janice said. “Considering what she’s been through.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Morgan, and he headed back to his cruiser, parked over by the ambulance. “I’ll take care of it. You go home now. And don’t forget to lock that door.”

  60

  HOLLY WALKED THE LONG WAY BACK TO HER HOUSE, AVOIDING THE MAIN road and as many residential streets as she could. She didn’t want to be seen, not after what Solomon had told her.

  The news of Pete Tucker’s death had shaken her deeply. She had thought of him as her enemy, partly blamed him for her husband’s death, but when she heard he had been killed, her reaction had surprised her. It hadn’t made her feel happy or avenged. She just felt sad and empty, like death was becoming commonplace and meaningless here. A few hours previously she wouldn’t have cared. She had buried her husband and walked home through the rain with no thought in her mind but to switch it all off and turn her back on everything. Now she was keeping to the shadows, fearful of losing the life she had so casually wanted to end.

  It was Solomon who had changed that. Solomon, with all his contradictions: a man who seemed to know so much yet nothing about himself, and who maintained he was here to save her husband, as if the usual parameters of life and death were no barrier to him. He had shamed her with his determination and commitment to finding the truth. He had reignited some spark of life in her that she thought had sputtered out.

  She reached the junction to her road and carefully peered around the corner into it, expecting to see some big black vehicle parked outside her house. There was nothing. The back road she had arrived by joined hers about halfway up. She had come this way figuring that anyone watching for her would expect her to come up the hill from the direction of the main road, not down it.

  She began walking toward her house, keeping to the shady side, alert for any sign that there might be someone there. Solomon had told her not to go back but she needed a car and figured that stealing one would attract far more attention than simply getting her own. She had no idea how to steal a car anyway and didn’t know who she might trust enough to call up and ask to borrow theirs. This had seemed the best option, or it had at the time. Now that she was here she wasn’t so sure.