by Urban Waite
Tom opened the folder and pulled out a mug shot of a young Mexican man. “I don’t know him,” Tom said.
“The prints Edna faxed up got me pretty interested to see what was going on down here.”
“You know this man?” Tom said, turning the mug shot over to look at the report that followed.
“I know his family.”
Tom smiled. “Is he in the mob or something?”
“Closest we have to it here in New Mexico.”
“You have to be joking, right?”
“No joking,” Tollville said. The chair he sat in creaked a little with his weight. Sitting, he didn’t look nearly as tall as he was.
Tom put the folder flat on Kelly’s desk, the two sides open and the picture facing up. The man’s name didn’t ring any bells.
Tollville leaned forward and jabbed a finger at the picture. “This guy here is pretty small-time. A few years back he tried to boost one of those big fourteen-wheelers. But when he gets behind the wheel he can’t quite figure out how to drive the thing.” Tollville was smiling again, enjoying himself. “He ends up making it about two blocks, burning the clutch all the way, and then just loses it and dead-ends the truck in some poor guy’s pet shop.”
“That’s like something out of the world’s stupidest criminal tricks,” Tom said.
“Probably would have made the cut, only when the truck went through the wall of the pet shop it killed about six cats, two Labrador retrievers, and a fifty-year-old cockatoo. Animal cruelty and all that,” Tollville said, obviously enjoying the story. “The police found this guy trapped in the cab, pissing himself. The doors all jammed up from going through the front of the place.”
“So what about this file gets you on a helicopter and gets you down here?”
“His uncle, Memo, is the biggest drug supplier we have in the state.”
“Did Kelly say if there were any drugs in the Bronco?”
“There’s always drugs when Memo’s involved.”
“You think he is? What if this Sanchez kid was just up to the same old tricks?”
“What gets me down here is the body count,” Tollville said. He was leaning forward in the chair, speaking quietly across the desk. “Memo’s nephew couldn’t have done any of this even if he’d started training for it the day he got out of prison.”
Again Tom looked out toward the young deputy, Pierce’s back to the two of them where he sat at his desk. “It’s a good story,” Tom said. “But I don’t understand why you’d want to talk to me about it.”
“Twelve years ago things started to go real bad between Memo’s family and the Mexican cartels,” Tollville continued. “Memo had been their guy over here, and then ten years ago, after the trouble you all had down here, U.S. members of the cartel just start turning up dead. They walk into a room, the door closes, and then boom, they’re gone. It happened all up and down the border. It was a real piece of work. Fifty percent of the people we were keeping tabs on either disappeared or ended in very bloody ways.” Tollville paused. “I can’t prove a thing. I mean, we all knew Memo was killing people before all this happened, but this was bad. It was all-out war, no-survivors time. And then it just stops. No killings, no dead bodies, nothing. And that just doesn’t happen. It drags on for years, then peters out, but it doesn’t just stop.”
“You’re thinking it’s starting up again?”
“This is the interesting part,” Tollville said. “Ten years ago I get called down here to check into this thing with you. It’s the first real lead we’d had in a while. Off the record, we all knew Angela Lopez was dirty, which is about the only reason you didn’t end up in jail. But what’s exciting is that it was the first time we got to officially look into the life of one of these cartel figures.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” Tom interrupted. “I lost my job over that.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t end up in jail,” Tollville said. “Going after her the way you did. Without any evidence, and only a tip—which I suspect came directly from your cousin—to rely on.”
“I was just doing my job,” Tom said.
Tollville held up his hands. “Look, I’m not saying Lopez didn’t have it coming. She qualifies as a bad person in the DEA’s handbook, bringing in all that dope. But she didn’t have anything but some money and a baby daughter in that house when you came to her door. What happened to you had to happen to you, Tom. There was no other way around it. And that’s the thing that gets me down here. Two events like that in one small town, it’s too much of a coincidence.”
“That and the bodies.”
“Yes,” Tollville agreed. “That and the bodies.” He waved a hand at the file. “A guy like Sanchez doesn’t do damage like this. He doesn’t do much damage at all, at least on purpose.” Tollville put a hand out and picked up the picture there on the desk. “I didn’t put it together back then. But I dug around a little this time and I did some checking. Your cousin Ray’s files are sealed. You remember me looking into him all those years ago? We got some good information then, didn’t we? Now his files are sealed again. Do you know what that means?”
Tom shook his head. He knew exactly what it meant. He’d forgotten Tollville’s smugness, how his clearance made him think he was smarter than he was.
“Someone powerful had those files closed. Someone with connections.”
“I don’t know anything about this,” Tom said.
“Your cousin worked for your uncle, correct? They were in oil together?”
“Along with my father,” Tom said.
“But before that Ray was in the army, wasn’t he?”
Tom nodded.
“The way I’m looking at this is that Memo has his nephew, the one Edna found out in the Bronco this afternoon, tag along with a fellow like your cousin. Figuring that the kid can’t do any damage, can’t screw up too bad. I mean he’s in the family, Memo has to watch out for him. But then something goes wrong, Gil Suarez gets away, makes a run for it. And all that tension that’s been building between the cartel and Memo starts to boil over.”
On Kelly’s desk the phone began to ring. Jeanie raised her ears but didn’t move from her spot beneath the desk. Out in the office Pierce turned, then rose from his desk and started toward them. After only half a step, every phone in the office was ringing.
Tom looked down at the phone and then he looked up at Tollville.
“Your cousin isn’t in oil anymore, is he?”
Tom watched Pierce where he stood, the phone cord dangling from the receiver he held in his hand.
“I haven’t seen Ray in a long time,” Tom said. Behind Tollville, Tom saw Pierce raise his radio to his lips and depress the button.
Tollville turned and looked to where Tom’s gaze had fallen.
“What now?” Tom asked.
“We wait,” Tollville said. “If this is anything like ten years ago I expect there will be some cartel figures going down in very bloody ways.”
On the radio, Pierce kept repeating the same few words over and over again. “Tate Bulger.” “Smoke.” “Fire.”
Dario sat in his office. The ammonia smell of piss and bleach leaking in from the nearby bathrooms, and the low sound of the men out in the bar. The sheriff gone and Dario feeling a strange loneliness as he listened to the men outside and knew he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He had been honest with Kelly in a way he thought he hadn’t been honest in a long time.
&nbs
p; Still, he was disappointed to hear about the body she’d found out in the Bronco. All that he had hoped would come—his own gamble, his test for the inevitable—now nothing but a disappointment. Kelly had not come to talk to him about the old man they’d left beaten bloody at his house. Dario’s knuckles still tender where he’d crushed them into the man’s face, splitting the swollen skin and watching the blood bloom. Kelly had come because everything in Coronado was now moving toward its end, and perhaps Dario knew that just as she did.
He dug out the small knife from his desk, and listening to the men outside he threw it time and time again toward the floor, watching the blade stick and quiver. No idea if the body out there in the Bronco was Ray Lamar’s. No hope anymore for anything. Dario’s life just the same as it had been days and weeks before.
He heard the voices of the men rise for a moment, and then the dissonant sound of laughter. He didn’t understand anything about this life. Just a day before they’d been in a gun battle, and now they were laughing about it. All he understood was that one day it would be his turn and he doubted anyone would care.
Ray saw the red glow of the oil fire where it lay flat and orange as an eclipse along the horizon, all of it dark in the night and the thin band of light where the well burned. Ray drove his father’s truck, the harsh smell of oil all over his hands and the deep carbon scent of fire floating around in the cab.
He slowed as one of the county cruisers flew by, heading south, the bubble lights going around and the silent pull of the wind as the car went by in a wash of air. Ahead the dim aura of light showed above Coronado.
Any hope for his future now gone with the death of his father and the rejection he’d felt from Billy. Ray didn’t know the boy like he’d thought he would after all these years. What had he expected? What had he thought the boy would do? Had he thought Billy would just run into his arms like in some happy movie? Well, that just wasn’t how it was, or ever would be. Not for Ray.
On the seat next to him was a double-barreled shotgun he’d taken from his father’s house, the metal gleaming from the years Gus had spent caring for the thing, disassembling it and wiping at it with a rag he kept especially for that purpose. Ray had found the shotgun in the hallway closet, where it had always been.
Farther back he found the thin, aged cardboard boxes. Three of them there, each one containing a different shell, number-eight shot for quail, number-six for duck, and number-two for mule deer or antelope. He pulled a selection of shells from each of the boxes, feeding them down into his pockets as he went.
“Are you about to do something stupid?” he said. Speaking to himself as he went on down the road, remembering a night years ago when Marianne had asked him the same question. The oil gone from the land and Memo still new to their lives. Ray just kneeling there at the closet with his hands held down on the Ruger and the clip slid out far enough that he could see how many bullets were inside.
A month later she’d be dead and he’d go on to do a hundred other things he couldn’t take back and that he’d always regret. His father was one of them now and he looked over at the shotgun and thought how his life had gone wrong all those years before and there was no stopping it now.
On his hip he felt the pager giving off a steady vibration. He pulled it up and looked at the number again. He was sure Memo must have heard by now about the Sullivan house, and maybe even about Sanchez, either on the news or listening in over the police scanner. Ray didn’t care. Memo’s business wasn’t Ray’s anymore, not in the way it used to be, and those drugs could just rot under the desert soil for all it mattered to Ray.
In his rearview he saw the glimmer of red and blue as the cruiser disappeared into the night behind him. He put down the window and threw the pager out. He didn’t want anything to do with it now and he could feel a storm brewing inside him he could do little to quiet. No plan at all for his future except for the road ahead and where it led.
Kelly felt the wind shift. The heat moving over onto them till the air boiled against their skin, and Hastings raised a hand and started to back slow toward the cruiser. The black smoke overhead disappeared into the night, and the rush of the fire coming off the wells spilled up into the sky as if out of a jet engine.
“Christ,” Hastings said, his hand held up toward the flames, shielding his face from the heat.
Kelly backed away, watching how the fire billowed up. Flames rising thirty feet into the air and snapping at the black clouds of oil being burned, the skeleton of the well now only a thin cage of metal around it all, pulsing red with heat where it came exposed and naked from the fire.
None of it felt right to her and she backed away toward the cruiser with the rush of the flames heard in her ears like a high wind cutting across a mountain ridge. Where were the protesters, the oil workers with their signs and picket lines? The whole landscape completely empty and only her and Hastings backing away as the heat rolled over on top of them. The volunteer firefighters not there as she’d hoped they would be. Probably still pulling their boots on.
Pierce had gotten her on the radio as soon as she’d come out of the bar, his voice breathless as he told her about the calls coming in from all over the valley. The tower of black smoke climbing dark into the last pale strands of sun over the Tate Bulger well to the southeast.
The heat on them and Kelly making it back to the cruiser first, her fist jamming the transmission into reverse as Hastings took his seat. They spun back along the access road, the well spitting flame before them and the sand beneath their tires kicked up through their headlights as Kelly tried to keep them out of the heat.
Nothing was right about any of it and when she got Pierce on the radio, she asked for his position.
“Just where you told me to be,” came the response.
“You’re not too close?”
“I’m a block up from the bar, I can see the front door and I can see if anyone leaves.”
“Good,” Kelly said. “Stay there, we’ll be back as soon as we can.”
Tollville and Tom Herrera waiting for her in her office, listening in the whole while. A fear inside her, and a feeling of helplessness about the things she wanted to protect but could not. Several miles to the north she saw the blaze of the fire engine’s lights traveling down the highway to meet them.
“There’s no way they’ll be able to stop this thing, is there?” Hastings said.
“No,” Kelly said. “This isn’t the type of thing you can stop. It’ll burn itself out soon enough. Until then it’s just a matter of letting it go.”
Through the department windows, Tom heard a distant sound he couldn’t quite figure. Something like a wrecking ball tearing through cement and rebar, metal on stone. Stepping close to the window, he stared out into the night, his reflection looking back at him out of the pane. The echo hanging in the air for a moment before all went silent again. He turned from the window, watching as his ghost turned away as well.
Upstairs he knew Claire was probably working. She’d be putting in a full day, trying to make up for what she’d missed. He thought about her now and what she’d offered, to simply drive back with him to his place, to leave all this behind. He’d had his chance to say something to Tollville, to reveal everything, the bodies adding up and the origins of it all. Only he hadn’t wanted to in that moment, knew now that perhaps there would never be a perfect time. His own cousin, Ray, at the heart of it all.
In the office Tom saw Tollville watching h
im where he stood next to the windows. Tollville waited, his head half turned, listening for anything more. Neither of them with any idea what had happened until Deputy Pierce’s voice sprang up on the radio, fluttering between excitement and fear, followed closely by the echo of gunfire reverberating up the street.
All sense of control had left Ray. With a penny he’d taken the plates from the truck and then scraped off the VIN, throwing the plates into a nearby Dumpster with all of the paperwork from the glove. He’d tied the wheel of his father’s truck straight with his belt, securing it all down, then depressed the accelerator with a spare piece of timber he’d found in the bed. And then he’d just let the truck go.
The big truck, weighing a half ton or more, sped out of the side street, across the intersection, and rammed Dario’s bar headfirst, pitching forward on its front axle as if it were a boat punching through the first big swell of surf, breaking through the spray. Glass and brick and metal, all of it suspended for a moment in the air. The back axle of the truck hanging for a moment before it rocked to the ground in a crush of metal. The deadening sound lingering, tactile and solid as he brought the shotgun around, his pace quickening as he crossed Main.
He came on toward the bar, two number-six shells in the belly of the gun and the Ruger loose in his waistband. The front of the bar now just a pile of rubble. The hood of the truck sitting about five feet inside the barroom with the front tires pushed over what remained of the outer wall. Brick dust everywhere and the sound of men coughing.
Ray climbed up over the rubble and entered the bar. The spark of an overhead electrical fixture cast a muted light everywhere about the place. Like lightning through a sandstorm. Dario’s men now regaining their feet with nothing but the fine claylike brick dust all around them in the air.
Ray opened up with the barrel of the shotgun and took three men down in one blast, the birdshot playing heavy into all of them. Each number-six shell carrying with it a little over two hundred lead BBs. The men falling back against the wall, or landing full on the floor, guns still in hands. Blood beginning to show on their faces and clothes from every little ball that had found skin.
