Satan’s Lambs

by Lynn Hightower

  “Which client?”

  “Which client? Oh, the one got me the free dinners? The owner’s sister. Her daughter was involved in one of those relationships, you know. One of those guys who are pathological liars that young girls can’t seem to resist.”

  The waitress brought them two dog-eared paper menus.

  “Owen here?” Lena asked.

  The waitress narrowed her eyes. “In back.”

  “Tell him Lena’s out front, okay? And bring us two beers and two orders of fried banana peppers.” Lena glanced at Mendez. “You drink Coronas?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” Lena said. “Don’t cut the lime so big it won’t go down in the bottle.”

  The corner of Mendez’s mouth lifted in a half smile. “I’m almost afraid to ask how you handled the boyfriend. Don’t incriminate yourself.”

  “I rustled up a substitute. Boy who’s the son of a woman I know. Nice kid, good-looking, rides a Suzuki. Girls that age are usually impressed with the bike.”

  “It didn’t work?” Mendez said.

  Lena shook her head. “The pathological liar creep was older, and this kid was really hooked on him.”

  “Like an addiction.”

  “Yeah, exactly like that.”

  The waitress came back smiling. She laid out two thick white napkins and two spotted forks, then unloaded the banana peppers and the beers. Thin slices of lime rested on the tops of the beer bottles.

  “Owen says to give you this and say hi.” She pulled a whole lime from her apron pocket and laid it down on the table.

  Lena grinned. They ordered large pork barbecue sandwiches and a double order of onion rings.

  Mendez picked up the lime and squeezed it gently. “So what did you do, Lena? How’d you get rid of the boyfriend?”

  “Did some checking down at the courthouse, and found out he had a wife and two kids in Tennessee. I just wrote the wife and gave her the jerk’s address—plus where he was working. All of a sudden he packs up and disappears.”

  Mendez dipped a banana pepper in the red cocktail sauce that came in a small plastic cup.

  “Hard on the kid.”

  Lena squeezed lime into her beer bottle, then licked the juice off the glass rim. She studied the boar’s head that was nailed over the cash register. Mendez ate another banana pepper. Lena looked out the window.

  They’d had dinner together once before, after Whitney died. Lena tried to remember why they’d wound up eating together, but those memories, so soon after Whitney’s death, ran together in her mind.

  “You ever going to finish grad school?” Mendez asked her.

  “I’m a PI, Mendez.”

  “You should have stuck with economics. Why don’t you go back?”

  “Too late, and I don’t want to. That’s a whole other world.”

  The sandwiches arrived, hot and soggy. Lena picked hers up, letting the sauce drip between her fingers. Mendez ate his with a fork.

  “What did you get your degree in, Mendez?”

  He cut a neat square off his sandwich. “Law enforcement.”

  Lena ate the edge off her pickle. “Figures.”

  “Do you always eat the pickle first?”

  “What?”

  “Do you always eat the pickle first?”

  “You know what, Mendez? I know you said we’d talk after we ate, but we’re down to pickles here. I want to know what you think, and what you know.”

  He chewed thoughtfully.

  “I’m listening here.”

  “When I was a cop down in Florida, I was married. My wife was—”

  “Mendez.”

  “Patience, Lena. My wife was Cuban.”

  Lena leaned back in her seat. “I didn’t know you were divorced.”

  “I’m not.”

  Lena felt a flutter of disappointment. She checked his left hand. No wedding ring. As far as she knew, there’d never been a wedding ring.

  Mendez wiped his fingers on his napkin and took a sip of beer. “My wife spent most of her childhood in Grappa—it’s a small Florida town. Very small. She was … unsophisticated. Religious. A practicing Santera.”

  “Santera?”

  “You know much about Santeria?”

  “I thought it was … I guess not.”

  “You thought what?”

  “Voodoo stuff.”

  He nodded. “A common misconception in this part of the country.”

  “The redneck South.”

  “There are strong ties to Haiti, and to Africa. What you call voodoo stuff. It’s also strongly influenced by Catholicism. Saints and the Ten Commandments. And it has its dark side—as does any religion.”

  “I could tell you things about Southern Baptists.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile.

  “The thing about being a cop in Florida … Religion is very mixed up in the drug trade. The dark side of Santeria—Palo Mayombe—can accommodate any profession. It’s a good religion for criminals. You take a player who believes—who prays to his god for the latest drug deal to go down smoothly—that’s dangerous. Gives him a sense of safety, invincibility, that makes him lethal to deal with. He won’t put his knife away if he feels divinely protected from your bullets.”

  “You think Hayes feels invincible?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “So where’s your wife?”

  “I was tracking down one of the Marielitos. A hardcore piece of trash from the bottom of Castro’s prisons. He called himself a brujo. A witch. He threatened me. My wife. I made arrangements to see she was safe. Physically. What I didn’t understand, at the time, was how much she believed. You understand? I didn’t realize that believing she would die, could make her die. But this man, this Marielito, he knew this. And he sent her things—little tokens I didn’t understand, but that had great meaning for her. I told her he could not get to her. I was wrong.”

  “What did he do?”

  “She got a doll in the mail, a mutilated doll. There were five little black stones around it representing five gods, and a white candle on its head. From what we pieced together, the doll showed up that afternoon, sometime before lunch. She didn’t tell anybody. She didn’t call me, or anyone. She went straight upstairs and took a bottle of tranquilizers. Then she drank a bottle of brandy we’d gotten as a gift one Christmas.”

  “And she was dead when you found her?”

  “One of my colleagues, one of the ones protecting her, got worried and found her.”

  “Did you catch him? The Marielito?”

  “Yes.”

  “You feel guilty.”

  “Sad. It was why I left Miami. You can’t get away from it down there, it’s always hand in hand with the drug trade. So I came here.”

  “A fat lot of good that did you.”

  9

  “It’s in here somewhere.”

  Lena stood on a wooden chair, rummaging through the top shelf of the kitchen pantry. A small brown moth with black markings on its wings landed on the doorjamb.

  “Don’t worry about it, Lena,” Mendez said.

  “No, it’s in here, unless Beth forgot to get it.”

  “Beth?”

  “She’s doing my grocery shopping for the next six months. I hate going to the grocery.”

  “Why?”

  Two more moths flew from the bottom of the pantry, and soared out into the kitchen. Mendez waved them away.

  “Because,” Lena said. “It’s always crowded. The stupid wheels on the baskets get bent and get stuck or veer sideways when you’re trying to go straight. There’s always a long line at the deli, people are grumpy, and I always spend more than—”

  “I mean why is this woman doing your grocery shopping?”

  “Umm. You told me not to incriminate myself. What did you think of the tape?”

  Mendez shrugged. “I’d like to know what it means to Hayes.”

  “I don’t know how much significance it has. He only heard her sing
it that once, far as I know. An odd thing for him to remember. Well, maybe not. The first time ever he saw her face, and all that, plus … here it is. Clos DuBois, Cabernet Sauvignon. I wish she’d put it in the refrigerator.”

  “You’re not supposed to refrigerate it.”

  “I don’t care what the wine rules are, Mendez, I like it better cold.”

  “We’ll put an ice cube in yours. Where are these moths coming from?”

  “I guess the pantry. I been having all kinds of trouble lately.”

  “Where in the pantry?”

  “I don’t know, I’d have to clean everything out.”

  “Please?” Mendez said.

  Lena stepped out of his way. She went to the cabinet for wineglasses. Mendez started unloading food on the table.

  “Joel, what are you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out where … Lena.” He pulled out a box of Cheerios, peered inside, and wrinkled his nose. “This looks like the problem. There must be a thousand of them right here, cocoons and everything.” He turned the box over. “This cereal expired six years ago. How long did you say you’ve had these moths?”

  “I don’t know, Mendez, it’s not the kind of thing you mark on your calendar.”

  “Where’s your trash can?”

  “Under the sink. You aren’t going to throw them away?”

  He stopped and looked at her. “Were you planning to keep them?”

  “Mendez, I didn’t invite you here to clean out my pantry.”

  He nodded and continued unloading boxes, stopping to look in a package of rice. “They’re in here, too.”

  “You going to go through everything in there?” Lena took a corkscrew and eased the bottle of wine open.

  “I want you to talk to me about Hayes.”

  Lena felt her stomach muscles tense. Images rose in her mind—bloody footprints, her sister—nothing she wanted to think about, not now, not tonight.

  “You know everything I know,” Lena said.

  “Your sister told me Hayes was an abused child.”

  “Bullshit. That was all stuff he made up.” Lena glanced at Mendez. He was scrutinizing a box of crackers.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If you knew the kind of nasty stuff he told her, you’d know too.”

  “Why would he make things like that up?”

  “As a turn-on. He has a disgusting and perverted libido.” Lena handed Mendez a glass of wine, then reached over and loosened his tie. He smiled at her.

  Lena stepped back and blinked. God, she thought. Must be feeling the beer. She tried to remember how many Coronas she’d had. What the hell. For one night, she could relax.

  “Let’s curl up on the couch and talk about something else.” She frowned. “We’ve known each other a long time. Haven’t we, Joel?”

  Mendez smiled at her, the sweet smile she didn’t see very often. He pressed a hand against the small of her back, then his smile faded. He turned back to the pantry.

  “Potato chips,” he said. “I have never seen so many half-eaten packages of …”

  Lena drained her glass of wine. Mendez carried an armful of potato chip bags to the trash can. He picked the wine up and refilled Lena’s glass.

  “What’s Jeff after now?” he said. “Why is he focusing on you?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Jeff gets out of prison, and comes straight after you. Valetta’s on his way out, and you think he’ll go after your client. This interests me.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “You think it’s revenge?”

  Lena shifted sideways in her chair. Valetta, at least, was after money. And Mendez was too damn smart.

  “I don’t know what’s in Jeff’s head. He’s a nut case, Joel. I don’t even try.”

  “I do.” Mendez stacked canned goods on the table next to the wine. “So anything you can tell me about him helps me.”

  Lena put her chin in her hands. She felt dizzy. She closed her eyes and thought about Jeff Hayes. She didn’t want to think about Jeff Hayes.

  She was aware, suddenly, that Mendez was leaning over her, his face so close she could feel his breath.

  “Talk to me, Lena.” His eyes were very brown, very steady. She couldn’t seem to look away.

  “Okay.” She swallowed. “Okay, one thing is.” She took a breath. “Like Whitney always kept saying how he was two people. I mean that he felt like two people, like he had two sides. The good boy, and the bad boy. And that no matter how much he wanted to be the good boy, he couldn’t. Because of what he’d already seen and done. He was marked by Satan, one of Satan’s lambs. That’s how he put it.” Lena put her chin in one hand and blinked at Mendez. She was starting to feel a little sick.

  Mendez patted her shoulder, then turned back to the pantry. “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “She said he wouldn’t go into a church because he’d been told, when he was little, that if he did, it would kill him. Eat him up inside with fire, is what he said. And how he joked about it, and said of course it wasn’t really true, but still she never saw him go into a church.”

  Mendez unloaded six cans of Green Giant Blunt Cut Unsalted Green Beans on the table. “There are eight more cans of green beans in here.”

  “That’s Beth,” Lena said. “She’s into coupons.”

  Mendez refilled her wineglass. “What else did your sister tell you?”

  Lena took another sip of wine. She smiled, though she wasn’t sure what she was smiling at.

  “Go on,” Mendez said.

  “Trust me, Joel, you don’t want to hear this.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Okay, then, I don’t want to talk about it.” Lena’s lower lip quivered. “Please, Joel—”

  He was close again, bending over her, and she could smell his cologne. He pushed hair out of her eyes, his hands gentle.

  “Did Hayes talk about being taken to ceremonies?” His voice was low and insistent. “About men and women and children, standing around a naked woman? Did he say he saw animals butchered, and drained of blood—that he had to taste the blood?”

  Lena put her hands over her ears. She was breathing fast—too much wine, too many beers. Mendez pulled a chair up in front of her. He sat down and pulled her hands away from her ears, his fingers pressing against hers.

  “Look at me, Lena.”

  “No.”

  “Look at me.”

  She tried pulling away but he kept hold of her, his hands warm, his grip tight.

  “Let me tell you what else he said,” Mendez told her. “He said he was forced to drink urine. Eat excrement. Hold a knife and use it. He saw a woman murdered, heard a baby scream.”

  “How do you know?” Lena took a harsh breath. “How do you know what he said?”

  “Who took him? Who made him go to the ceremonies?”

  Lena shook her head.

  “Who?”

  He was close to her, too close. Lena pulled back and glared at him.

  “His mother. And his grandparents. There was an uncle and some cousins.” Lena snatched her hands away. “You see what I mean? No mother would do something like that. You’re telling me his family—”

  “There are hardcore groups, Lena. Family groups. They brutalize their children from generation to generation.”

  “Here? In the kind of little town where Hayes grew up?”

  Mendez nodded. “Hayes comes from a classic hardcore situation.”

  Lena stood up and walked across the room. She backed up against the kitchen counter. “So why didn’t he tell anybody? Why didn’t he get away?”

  “Who would he tell? You didn’t believe him; you didn’t want to. What happened when Whitney tried to tell? What happened when you told the parole board that Hayes was a Satan worshiper who committed crimes in the name of his religion? Didn’t buy it, did they?”

  Lena shook her head.

  “These people are not stupid. They are good at sleight of hand. They can impress a child, make them believe incredible
things. Make them think they see a man killed, then come back to life. Remember, they’re drugged. What happens when you drug a child, and tell him he’s bad, he belongs to Satan, that Satan will always watch and know? There’s a Santa Claus and an Easter bunny. Why not the devil? And when the child reports the things he thinks he sees, as well as the things he really saw—”

  Lena sighed deeply. “No one believes. If one thing can’t be true, the other probably isn’t either.” She sagged against the sink and folded her arms. “So how do you know what really happened?”

  “You don’t. But some groups are … extremists.”

  “Extremists. Why? What’s the point of this?”

  Mendez shrugged. “Power, acceptance, and always, always, drugs. The people in the group may be looking to fit in, to get high, easy sex. But the leaders usually have a good, old-fashioned reason. Money and power. Pornography, sex—young women, boys, children to exploit.”

  Lena picked her wineglass up, then put it down. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. This was supposed to be a nice evening.”

  “Was it?”

  “I’m going upstairs and go to bed. You do whatever you want down here, Joel. When you’re done with the pantry, the basement could use some work.” Lena kicked her chair sideways. “And don’t throw away my Cheerios.”

  10

  Lena wondered what Mendez had done with the coffee.

  The kitchen was spotless, the pantry neat and organized, the old box of Cheerios gone. When she opened the pantry door, nothing happened in the way of moths flying out.

  The phone rang.

  “Lena? Rick. Maynard is peeing on the rug in my bathroom.”

  “I wonder if he’s sick or something.”

  “I think he just likes the rug.”

  “Keep the door closed.”

  “Keep the door closed, keep the lid down, we might as well still be married.”

  “Rick, if you just called to complain, I wish you would—”

  “I called to tell you I found your man. Or didn’t find him, more like. He quit right after the Valetta robbery. Advised paying the claim to the savings and loan, and turned in his resignation.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Now, how would I know?”

  “Did he?”