Houston Noir

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  I also knew that no matter how much we learned about all of them, how much actionable intelligence we gained, how many resources or informants we had, we were only scratching the surface. We’d flip on the light, stomp on a cockroach, and fifty more would scramble into the dark corners where we couldn’t get them.

  It had only gotten worse since Harvey. Unlike Katrina, which had drained the delta of its undesirables and sent them to Houston, Harvey clogged the city with more homeless than it could handle. Shady contractors descended on the neighborhoods piled high with Sheetrock, subflooring, and kitchen sinks. Instead of rebuilding homes, they’d spend their cash on women and drugs. The gangs, which we’d gotten better at tracking, had scattered. We’d lost our grip on informants. All of them together floated untethered and just out of our grasp. Some days, just when I thought maybe I was making a dent, I realized it was getting harder to leave a scratch.

  “It changes,” I told Waters. “And it doesn’t hurt to check it out, given we have somebody who knows the area.”

  Waters inhaled. He planted his tongue in his cheek, rolling it around while he seemed to contemplate the idea. “All right,” he said. “You head over there with her. I’m gonna drive by White Chapel. Kill two birds with one stone. We meet back here and hopefully the ME gives us a positive ID. Then we get a warrant and hit the place.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I’ll meet you back here by sunup.”

  * * *

  They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. I’ve got no clue who they is, but they’re right. I’m guessing they’ve lived a life like mine, always fighting the glare of the light, seeking the shadowy quiet between midnight and the alarm clock.

  I’ve never been one for daylight. It offers too much promise. I learned a long time ago that hope is nothing but a sexy woman behind the glass. You stuff your credit card into the slot, the curtains peel back, and she smiles at you. But you’re not looking at her face. And there’s nothing but the promise of a big bill at the end of the month, with an interest rate you can’t afford. It’s a nasty cycle, the sun coming up every morning. I’d just as soon it stayed sunken low.

  It was five fifteen on Friday morning. That’s what the clock on my Chrysler said. I couldn’t be sure it was accurate. Didn’t matter.

  The clouds had the streets darker than normal. Third Ward didn’t get the attention nicer parts of town got. Powers that be would never let the streetlights go out in Memorial or River Oaks. Hell, if a blade of grass was too long on Inwood Drive, the mayor himself would show up with a pair of scissors. But in the Tre, as local rappers called it, a dead body wouldn’t catch much glare, let alone a string of busted streetlights. Gentrification or not, Third Ward was still Third Ward.

  I had my window cranked down, enjoying the musty air and fine mist that had settled over the city. Annie tugged on her seat belt, trying to get it to click. “Your car is old,” she said, “and I think my belt is broken.”

  I turned onto Elgin and headed southeast. “I’ll drive slowly,” I said. “Just focus on where we need to be.”

  A shirtless man on a bicycle peddled past us, riding the wrong way. His wheels were warped and he had to work the handlebars to keep from tipping over.

  “Turn right up here,” she said. “Near the train.”

  I tapped the brake and swung the wheel to turn onto Scott. We were parallel with the light-rail tracks. I started to accelerate, but Annie told me to make a quick right onto Reeves.

  “This is one of the spots,” she said. “They like us to stay close to the train.”

  I slowed to a stop, flipped the car into park, and listened to the windshield wipers squeak back and forth, barely cleaning the glass of the water that had collected on it. There was nobody here. We were alone.

  I undid my seat belt. “You sure? This is the spot?”

  Annie shifted in her seat, inching into the space between the seat and the door. She was facing me. “Yeah. One of them.”

  She was right. This was one of the spots. Reeves and Scott. Delano and Berry streets. Milby and Tuam.

  “When do I get my hit?” she asked.

  “You can have it now,” I said. “Check the glove box. I’ve got a couple packets of potpourri in there. Take whatever you want.”

  Her eyes lit up and she fumbled for the latch at her knee. She plucked it open and leaned toward the opening. She felt around for the drugs, but she pulled her hand back empty.

  I rolled up my window.

  “There’s nothing there,” she said.

  “Sorry. Check under the seat, maybe I put them there.”

  Annie reached down between her legs, bending forward as far as she could. I turned on the radio. It was a static-riddled AM station playing jazz. Herb Geller, I think. His saxophone cried through the blown speakers. It was like the sax was drowning.

  Annie started to pull back from her search when I reached across the seat and placed my hand firmly on the back of her neck. She struggled, but my fingers slipped through the greasy tendrils of her mouse-brown hair. I wrapped them tightly and applied pressure, forcing her to stay down, while I used my other hand to manage an orange rope from underneath my seat and around her head. I pulled it tight around her throat and yanked her back toward me, where I could watch her.

  Her eyes bulged, looking at me in a way that told me she either finally recognized me from the last time we’d been together, or she recognized that her sad, pathetic life was ending. The pain was almost over.

  She kicked against the door, reached behind her head to grab at me with her fingers—the fingers she’d spent much of the night chewing. Annie was stronger than I’d figured. Her legs pushed. Her arms flailed. There was a determination, a desire to live I didn’t expect from a drug-addled hooker forced into the sex trade by bad men who kept her under their violent thumbs. For a split-second, I considered letting go, letting her breathe.

  It crossed my mind I could give a couple of hundred from my wallet and put her on a Greyhound toward Oklahoma or Kansas. She could start clean.

  Who was I kidding? There was no such thing as clean. So I pulled harder on the rope. I closed my eyes and tugged. I gritted my teeth and tightened my grip.

  As I watched the life and color drain from her face, I promised her this was for the best. It was the same thing I’d told Mary Ann four nights earlier. And Liz a week before. And Cathy two months before that. And Jane. I couldn’t remember how long ago I’d helped Jane. Six months? Nine?

  Annie’s body shuddered and went limp, her head dropping onto my shoulder as the rattle left her lungs. I sat there for a moment and stroked her forehead. I told her about the things I’d done, the women I’d saved one way or another. I told her she wouldn’t be the last. I couldn’t let her be the last. There were too many to help, too many to set free.

  I told her how, in some ways, it had gotten easier with each of the girls. In some ways, it had gotten harder. I told her about how I’d first understood my calling, as Harvey roiled under the doors and walls of my dank first-floor apartment off the South Loop. I was neck-deep before I escaped, ducking under the water, tasting the gasoline and motor oil, the dog crap, and the grass clippings, as I’d swam through an open window and free of my home.

  I’d blown the air from my lungs and surfaced next to a flooded Ford F-150. As I’d risen from the water, the distant calls for help, the sounds of sirens, and the whoosh of cars driving the wrong way on the Loop above filled the muggy air.

  The lights were out. It had been dark, the sky almost milky from the storm that would not go. And yet, as I’d wiped the water from my eyes and spit it from my mouth, I could see clearly for the first time in a very long time.

  The city needed this flood. It needed a cleansing. And after the waters were gone, it would need me.

  I found the task itself less daunting, more automatic. It ushered in less anxiety but produced less of an artificial high. Mary Ann’s salvation hadn’t sustained me as long as Liz’s. Liz’s ascension wasn’t as s
atisfying as Cathy’s.

  Somehow, I’d built up a tolerance.

  I inched Annie off my shoulder, gently setting her upright in the passenger seat, and reached into my jacket pocket. It was still damp, but the pill bottle inside it was sealed. I uncapped it, shook the last of my Cilatopram into my mouth, and chewed.

  On the radio, Geller’s sax screeched through the broken tweeter, sweetly eulogizing the girl next to me. Outside, the clouds grew too heavy and the rain started again.

  CITY OF GIRLS

  by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

  Aldine

  Sergeant Dan Correal opened the door and heard the delicious hush, the whir of the air-conditioning, and the dog snoring gently on the couch. He locked up his holster in the safe, put in the Glock 22, which he’d secretly named Lady Lisa, after his wife. Just taking off the holster made his shoulders and neck ache as if he’d lifted weights for hours, like he used to, but he had hardly moved much from the seat of his cruiser for his entire shift.

  At the end of his shift, he’d had to make a domestic disturbance call on Bissonnet, and he already felt old and grizzled as he climbed the apartment steps to the third floor. His radio and its perpetual buzz, the sun’s hot-white glare still strong in the fall, gave him a headache that pulsed into his ears.

  He’d knocked on the apartment door, which pushed it open. A young woman, Charlie, stood in a transparent black shift dress. She was a regular, both sad and disturbingly attractive to Dan with her shifty, bottomless gaze, full lips, dark eyes. “He’s already gone,” she said, pushing back her hair into a sleepy pile, a mound of soft cleavage peeking through the V in her dress. Dan shifted his eyes quickly to the window, the spoons, the collection of flip-flops and heels that had been kicked off by the door. A pair of brown work boots, the laces undone in long snakes.

  She’d met his gaze, made a small, teasing smile. “Oh, he left those, I guess.” She’d sighed and walked to the kitchen. He did his check, his to-do, and left.

  Now, without the weight of the pistol and its responsibility, he let himself think about the black lace trimming Charlie’s breasts. She looked just like his daughter’s friend Chickie, and this thought both plagued and haunted Dan every time he saw her on his calls. Chickie’s little doppelgänger, he’d thought as he saw her striding toward him in a spaghetti-strap dress, the weight of her breasts, the curve of her ass.

  Dan closed the bathroom door behind him. He hadn’t changed out of his uniform, wanted to feel the cold dangle of his handcuffs a little. Chickie, in Charlie’s black dress, pulling up the thin hem, pulling down her panties. He remembered the massage parlor, as he did during these moments—that hole-in-the-wall where his father took him for his first time. Those red lips, the mix of humiliation and the sheer pleasure of an orgasm with a live girl, the warm flesh beneath his hands, its softness and its salty taste. Chickie and her wet lips.

  “Dad, what the fuck?” The door pushed against him abruptly, the knob jamming into his back as he climaxed.

  He looked in the mirror and saw his daughter and Chickie, covering her face. “Oh my god.”

  He turned quickly, realizing they’d seen enough in the mirror. He shut the door, locked it, pushed his back against it, holding up his pants. Maybe they’d seen only a bit, he reasoned, zipping up and clearing his throat. He heard them rush down the hall to his daughter’s room.

  She was old enough to understand her father was a man, he figured. He looked in the mirror and washed his hands. They felt dirty and he washed them a second time, scrubbing under his nails the way his mom had taught him. He stayed in the bathroom until he heard the girls leave. He wasn’t sure what he did during that time, waiting, except stare at his hands. What broke through his shock was the hard sound his wife made coming home, the thud of her purse on the kitchen counter, all the hurried noise she made after entering the front door. Only then did he dry his hands and go to change his clothes.

  * * *

  The sky was about to crack open and release everything held in its dark clouds, but Chickie Rodriguez didn’t care. She kept swimming, ignoring the shade creeping from the clouds, cooling off the water. She’d paid her two dollars—money she’d saved by skipping lunch—and wasn’t going to waste it.

  She sank again into the water, held her breath, let it blow a big balloon in her chest, beneath her breasts. A hot-air pump, made of anger.

  At home, her mother waited to be fed, bathed, comforted like a child. But Chickie would no longer be the one to do it now. Thinking of her mother’s stench, Chickie held her breath as she spun upside down, feeling her hair cast wet fingers from her head, floating her legs into a perfect V. She held it as long as she could, picturing her mother’s crooked smile that was no longer a smile.

  It’s not so bad, she thought as she left the pool in her worn bikini bottom and the anti-drug campaign T-shirt she’d had since second grade. For instance, she could be that lady in the studded bathing suit with her little brats, clearly trapped in a life of watching them grow and shit and scream. Diamond ring glinting as she moved to grab one child or another, to keep them from scratching or biting each other. Golden handcuffs, lady.

  * * *

  Chickie never cried. She didn’t cry at her father’s funeral, and she didn’t cry when the two police officers showed up at their filthy apartment, full of empty vodka bottles and pills, to take her mother away.

  One of the officers was a woman who acted overly compassionate and warm, and to Chickie, it seemed feigned and slightly arrogant. This disgusted her. For some reason, it mixed in her mind with the disgust of finding Renee’s dad in the bathroom pleasuring himself the day before.

  “It’s going to be okay,” the officer said, patting her shoulder. The condescension made bile gather in Chickie’s throat. The fuck it is.

  Chickie walked to the room she shared with her mother and packed up her clothes: a cotton shirt with the logo of a Mexican restaurant they’d loved, a pair of faded, too-loose jeans, a busted bra, an extra pair of underwear that used to be gray. She looked at her mother’s things, especially the ceramic elephant sitting on the windowsill. Chickie had always admired the figurine, which was probably a gift from one of her mother’s boyfriends. It symbolized the precious, hateful, and painfully loving relationship she had with her mother. She would run her fingers over its lines and indentations after putting her mother to sleep beside her. We’ll be okay, she would say to herself during those times. But she didn’t mean it the way the police said it.

  They were waiting. She left the elephant on the sill and left the room for the last time.

  * * *

  Farah Peña is always that other woman. She imagines that, on some other planet, she walks around in a nightgown, fresh from a bath, living the life she should’ve lived. That other Farah leans against the brick of her house, exhaling sweet breath, holding a wineglass to her mouth, tasting something foreign and glistening. Her mouth is not a horrid thing—just a mouth. Her breasts and torso held lightly in a gown for sleeping, and just that—a body. She listens to the crickets’ and frogs’ music. She goes back into her own house, disappears behind a thick layer of curtains fat with dreams, with hours and hours stitched inside them. Oh, how that other Farah sleeps.

  She hasn’t heard the sound of frogs and crickets in years. It’s annoying and sad—the wrong background noise for a concrete lot with pitiful fists of grass and weeds growing from split cracks. Farah stubs out her cigarette on the bottom of one of the black stilettos—the ones that don’t slide against the spa floor, that give off a solid crunch when she walks in them, like she might be safe in them. She likes the gritty sound they make when she walks, the way they’re too big for her feet and not two or three sizes too small. She took them from Mary’s feet while she slept off the fresh bruises one of the johns had left. It was a repeat guy, a soccer-dad type who spooned his wife at night—the worst kind. Farah’s prepared for the same john now, her little stash lined up neatly at least an hour before he’s expecte
d to show up: the plastic card with the Pizza Hut logo propped against her can of spray lubricant.

  Back inside, Justin tells her to put on the bright pink lingerie—the cotton candy one, he calls it—the one most coveted by all the other girls. Farah used to care about such things, and about Justin’s preferences more than anything.

  When she first met Justin—her friend Chickie’s cousin—he paid attention to Farah like no one else ever had. Called her twice a day, bringing her flowers, food, jewelry, little notepads, and drawings. Soon he was fingering her in her bedroom with the door half open while her parents walked around the house, oblivious. She didn’t want to do it, but was willing to endure, to keep his attention on her. Wasn’t that what it meant to matter?

  Then, he asked her to endure more things—things she didn’t mind at first, until she realized she minded very much and had all along. Things like him touching her beneath her clothes when he dropped her off at school, a favor her parents appreciated, once they warmed up to the idea of their fifteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old. She endured him pushing her head into his crotch on the freeway, on the road to her house, in parking lots behind factories and chain stores, before and after dinner. She endured this with him and soon with others, and he promised her dinners, clothes, makeup. Suddenly, no seemed unavailable. No had disappeared. No had been swallowed with semen and the salt from sweat and tears. She was sneaking out at night to meet grown men behind her house, by the bayou. Not because she wanted to—because it was something she had to do to see Justin, to win his favor. She didn’t know how to stop it.

  Months later, Farah packed a backpack with all her money—two hundred dollars accrued from a summer job and six months of skipping lunch—and a notebook in which she’d already written one sentence: And now I’m pregnant, and he has met his goal of destroying me. She left her parents’ home—her family, Chickie and her other friends, and the rest of her life—with no plan, only the thought that she couldn’t live this way anymore.