by David Cole
“You can’t put my daughter there now,” I said.
“Got to do it.”
“No way.”
“The only way.”
“Nathan, you’re not putting my daughter in jeopardy.”
But he’d already made plans for the transfer and explained the details.
“A female U.S. Marshal is flying in from Denver. She’ll take your daughter to the camp and sign her in.”
“No! I’ll do it.”
“Laura, you’re not thinking. Two different assaults by young bikers. Two different targets, who’d never met. I don’t know the connection, but you’ve been identified. You go to the camp, they’ll automatically tie you to your daughter. That puts her in even more danger.”
“You take her, then.”
“Think, think. The only place you’ve been, outside of the Perryville prison, is that housing development. Where the bones were found. The bodies. Women’s bodies. I don’t know the connection, but it has to involve somebody who knows I’m working the case and saw you there with me.”
“When will Spider be taken over there?”
“It’s already being arranged.”
“Damn you!” I shouted. “You didn’t even ask me first?”
“No time. You and I have to go to Florence.”
“The call center? That’s not even on my radar anymore.”
“It’s a contract,” he said. “With Aquitek. We can deal with it in one day, if you’re half as good as Don says you are. By the time we’ve finished, your daughter will have been enrolled in the camp, and you’ll get a full report.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
“One more thing,” he said. “I want you to move into this house. For now. I’m somehow responsible for getting you involved with these bikers. I want to make sure you’re protected.”
“I’ll find a place of my own.”
“No, Laura. This is going to be your place. You can just call it home until I’m satisfied you’re no longer in danger.”
Home. What a concept. And it wasn’t even my choice.
“There’s something else,” he said hesitantly.
Hesitation always drives me really nuts. Somebody’s usually got bad news, doesn’t really want to give you this news, but knows he has to be the messenger. But he hesitated, fiddled, walked in circles like Rich.
“What?” I said. “What else?”
“Don ran a trace on Abbe Consuelo Dominguez.”
“My daughter.”
“On the woman who calls herself your daughter.”
I fumbled out the only picture I had of her, the one Jonathan had given me two years before.
“It is her!”
“Don couldn’t find any database records out there that link Abbe Dominguez with anybody named Spider Begay.”
“I’ve used a dozen different names over the last ten years.”
“Anything’s possible,” he said slowly. “But…”
“But what?”
“Abbe Dominguez was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth for federal mail fraud. Dominguez was also suspected of involvement in a huge identity theft ring working out of New York City.”
“I want to see her. She called me Mom. I want her to tell me, to my face, that she’s really my daughter. When I was fifteen, I ran away from the Hopi rez with this guy, Jonathan Begay. We had a baby. We drank a lot. We smoked a lot of pot, we did a lot of radical Indian stuff. AIM stuff. I was at Pine Ridge when the FBI men and Joe Stuntz were killed. When my daughter was two, Jonathan just…disappeared with her one day. We were in some motel, I don’t remember where just now. I woke up, they were both gone. Now, twenty years later, I’m not letting her out of my sight again.”
“You can’t go near her,” Brittles said. “Somebody knows who you are. Knows who I am.”
I turned on my cell phone, but he put his hand around it, folding it shut.
“If you’re going to call Don, he’s with me on this. For now, Laura, we’ve got to consider the possibility that the Dominguez woman is not your daughter. That she’s a convicted felon and is working a scam on us, on you, to get out of jail free.”
“Whatever makes you even say a thing like that?”
He hesitated. “Don checked her records, found nothing in her background before she wound up in the courtroom for sentencing. Don thinks…and I agree…Don thinks you have to look at the initials of her name. Abbe Consuelo Dominguez. A. B. C. D.”
“Ridiculous!”
But I trusted Don’s intuition on things like this. And I’d always trusted his ability for data mining. If Don couldn’t turn up any traces of that name before the prison sentence, it probably didn’t exist. She didn’t exist. It was phony ID.
“Okay,” I said finally. “But how about a close friend of mine taking her to the camp?”
“Who?”
“Veronique Difiallos.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“At least a week ago,” I said.
“Still…how about, for a few extra inches of protection for your daughter, or whoever she is, how about we disguise her somehow?”
“I’ve already thought of how to do that. Listen. Nathan. Let’s be clear about something. What happened here, it’s a one time thing.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I hardly know what I want these days. Except to get my daughter out of prison. Find a home for the two of us.”
16
“This will take most of the day,” Michael Craven said. “Right, Shelly?”
Michalle Sasha looked closely at Spider’s hair, at the roots and ends. Michalle had cut my hair for years, although she lost interest in trying to persuade me to do something creative beyond L’Oréal coloring. A loud techno track came from the giant sound system and Michalle wiggled her hips slightly to the beat.
Spider slouched in the green leather chrome-armed chair in front of Michael’s station. She fiddled with his tool case, slipping different kinds of scissors and combs out of it until he finally took the entire kit away from her.
“I’d give it four hours, tops,” Michalle told me.
“Bring it on,” Spider said. “Just do me. Get me outa here.”
“Great mood you got, missy,” Michael said.
“Yeah. Tickle me so I can die laughing.”
Brittles grabbed the back of her chair and swung her around to face him.
“Look, girl,” he said in a low, stern voice. “We’ve got a deal, right?”
Spider didn’t answer.
“Right?” he said louder. She nodded. “Okay. Part of this deal is that you go into that camp, you try to find out anything that might help us. Right?”
“Yeah, okay, okay. Right, okay?”
“If anybody connects you with your mother, I mean very bad anybodies, you could be in serious trouble. So get this hair thing over with, then we’ll buy you some different kinds of clothes. Right?”
He released the chair.
“I’ll be back in three hours,” he said to me, and left the salon.
Spider jerked her body, like a child trying to get a swing started, and got the chair swiveled around so she looked at herself in the mirror. Michael arranged some Goldwell products on a side table.
“‘Oxycure Platin,’” she read. “Is this, like, bleach?”
“We call it stripping out color.”
“Bleaching my goddam hair,” she said. “B.F.D., dudes. Like I really always wanted to be a platinum blond.”
“Do mine, too,” I said to Michalle.
“Oh puleeze!” Spider said.
But I settled into the chair at Michalle’s station. Both Michael and Michalle mixed a scoop of the Oxycure with a careful measure of Topchic solution, twelve percent alcohol, it said on the container. They brushed the solution onto just the ends of our hair.
“I thought you’d cut it first,” I said.
“No way,” Michael answered, grabbing Spider’s head at the t
op so she’d stop squirming. “We’ve got to let this stuff stay on until we’ve stripped all the color out, till there’s no color on the ends.”
“Great,” Spider said. “How many times are you going to put this crap on?”
Michael yanked a plastic cap over her head.
“Just sit there for a while,” he said. “What kind of music you like?”
“Who cares?”
“Got any hiphop?” I said, as Michalle put a similar cap on my head.
Michael sorted through a few hundred CDs.
“Got some Scarface. Mystikal. Snoop Dogg. Boo Yaa Tribe.”
“Anything,” I said, and he sorted the CDs like a deck of cards, fanning them in front of me until I picked one at random. He slotted it into the player.
I gotta a tattoo on my lower back
Sayin no dirty dicks allowed and if it’s fishy I’ma throw it back
And it’s startin to smell like the coastline
When you startin to tell me
Which of these young hoes you think is most fine
And I don’t play that
I don’t stay that way at home
Don’t play with your bone
So doncha never say that
Just get your hat, I’m leaving you flat
You really fucked up when you thought that it was okay to say that
“Jesus Christ,” Spider complained. “Lemme hear some thug gangsta tracks if I gotta sit here all day.”
Michael picked out another CD.
Fifteenth of the month just got my county check
Rollin down the block watchin hoes break their necks
I’m the pimp nigga that they wanna be on topa
Ridin my dick as I serve that ass propa
When up come these fools wearing blue
This is a blood town so I told em that they better duck down
Shot a couple rounds in their direction
Maybe I could hit em or at least I would scare em
One mothafucka rollin strapped shot back
Punks shoulda known that my block got my back
Once again it’s on, Tucson Vietnam
Like rat-tat-tat-tat and the bitch niggas gone
Like that.
A timer dinged. Michalle hit the Stop button on the CD player. She and Michael mixed a fresh batch of their goo, but this time applied it to the roots, snapped fresh plastic caps on. We repeated the process one more time until both of them were satisfied.
“This is it?” Spider groaned. “This is shit, man.”
“Over here, kid,” Michael said, motioning for both of us to sit at the shampoo basins and lean our heads backward.
“Who you calling kid?” Spider said to Michael with some humor. “You can’t be more than five years older than me. Six, tops.”
“All potty mouth brats are kids to me,” he said, spraying cold water on her head and rubbing in shampoo.
“Whoa,” she said, “that tickles.”
“You complain any more and I’ll tickle you to death.”
Back in the chairs again. Delighted that Spider’s mood had improved, I tried to get her to talk to me, but she focused entirely on Michael, with an occasional comment to Michalle that whatever happened to my hair it wouldn’t improve my personality.
“So now, like, you gonna cut it finally?” Spider said.
“Nope. We’re gonna give you some Ellumen.”
Michael showed her a platinum bottle with a red cap, spraying it on her head as Michalle did the same to me.
“Take out all your color, Laura?” Michalle said. “You going full platinum, like the girl?” I nodded. “Short cut?”
“Not too short,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to look like Annie Lennox.”
Once our hair was a brilliant platinum blond, the haircuts took very little time. Michael used both thinning and texturing shears and a clipper on top. Michalle used only a clipper. As Michael spun Spider’s chair around, Spider caught my eyes in the mirror and she nodded to the techno beat as she checked out my hair. She grinned, gave me a thumbs up, then shut down the grin and cut her eyes away.
I savored that grin, that thumbs-up gesture. A small thing, I thought, but even more than I’d hoped for. If it takes a simple haircut, I thought, to get me closer to my daughter, great. I’d do more, I’d do anything.
“Good sweet Jesus,” Brittles said from the door.
Spider and I whipped off the protective sheets, turned to face him, standing side by side. Impulsively, I stuck my arm around Spider’s shoulders, and she let it stay for at least a minute.
“Get a good look at this,” she finally said to me. “Once I go into that camp, once the deal is complete, you’ll never see me again. You thought it was funky, getting your hair done like mine. It was funky. You made me laugh, for a little while.”
She gestured at all the hair clippings on the floor that Michael was sweeping into a dustpan.
“But nothing more than a moment. Like that hair.”
“Spider. Please.”
“You’re pathetic, mom,” she said sarcastically. “You’re fixated on a two-year-old baby. I’m no diaper brat anymore. And you’re…you’re history. Like the hair.”
“It’ll be all right,” Brittles said halfheartedly.
That I didn’t want to hear. If he was wary, I was downright scared.
“It’s a risk,” Brittles said to Spider as she snorted. “One of those times when you’ve got to trust somebody. You’re headed into risky business and not knowing what to expect. Don’t be so young. Long ago, in another part of the world, I had absolutely no fear. I’d push into the jungle without knowing what was on the other side of the next clump of bamboo. I welcomed what might be waiting there for me.”
“How old were you then?” she asked.
“Eighteen.”
“I’m five years beyond that. Don’t go lecturing me with your past.”
“She’s a pistol,” Brittles said after Spider went out the door. He stared at my haircut. “I’m revising my outlook on you every day.”
“So you going to play your flute again for me?”
“I moved it into my bedroom. With all my other good stuff.”
“So I guess I’m not going to see it again?”
“Sometime. When we’ve got time.”
“Maybe,” I said, “you’re just the kind of man who’s not really available.”
“Think I’ll just wait until you take me out to dinner. Been ages since a woman bought me a great meal.”
“Hey,” I said. “Let’s give this thing some time to breathe. Maybe a few dinners, a picnic would be nice, some sightseeing or hiking in the canyons. Something not quite so…so, spur-of-the-moment-hop-into-the-sack kind of things.”
“It’s that hair bleach,” he said, opening the door for me. “Can’t know yet if it leached all your good sense out or refreshed your mind with curiosity.”
revelations
“Abbe Dominguez,” Father Micah said, looking over the completed application form. “Age twenty-three. We don’t usually accept people that old. And you are the mother or the guardian?”
“I’m her stepmother,” Veronique Difiallos said. “Divorced from her actual father. But I’m the one who decided to take responsibility for young Abbe.”
“And why did you come to our place? There are many different facilities that offer programs for young people who struggle in their homes, their schools, or their social environment in the community. Why did you choose Rapture Warriors Camp?”
“I heard about your successes.”
“From whom, if I may ask?”
“I called around,” Veronique said. “Called friends in similar situations. Friends who had financial resources to get only the very best. Three places were recommended. One in California, one in Utah. And Rapture Warriors. I lived in Phoenix for some years. I liked the idea of Abbe being in a remote area, like the desert, where there are no large cities too close.”
“Minimize distractio
ns,” Father Micah said. “Maximize healing.”
“Exactly right.”
“And you, Miss Dominguez. What do you think about this?”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever.” Father Micah sighed. “Maybe you’re younger than your years. You certainly exhibit teenage indifference.”
“How do you handle security?” Veronique asked.
“Rapture Warriors Camp is run by very strict disciplines. We have no bars, no real locks, no resident restraints. However, we do classify each resident according to certain risk factors. New residents are considered flight risks. We assign them to special dormitories under constant supervision. In extreme cases, we may classify a resident as a ‘bad dog.’ Part of the discipline at this level involves wearing handcuffs and leg chains for a twenty-four-hour period. This is all voluntary. If the resident refuses that discipline, the resident is dismissed on the spot.”
“Do you have many runaways?” Veronique asked.
“Not as often as you’d suspect. Instead, we put residents into groups. Most of the residents here need schooling. We offer an accelerated program toward a high school GED. Plus therapy groups, crafts, arts. If a resident needs medical assistance that our staff nurse practitioners cannot provide, the resident is escorted to Tucson. Stop that, Miss Dominguez.”
Abbe was walking around the room, humming to herself.
“Sit down.”
They all waited until she sat, shrugging.
“We have zero tolerance for negative behavior. We specialize in really troubled young people. From those dealing with the bad effects of peer pressure on up the scale. Depression, using drugs or alcohol, people with behavioral disorders, like ADD, and young people who are sexually promiscuous.”
“Cut to the chase,” Abbe said to Veronique. “You going to dump me here or what?”
“We have an agreement,” Veronique said to Father Micah. “If Abbe stays here for a full month, I will pay her ten thousand dollars. Another month, another ten thousand. Until you think she’s ready to go outside.”
“She’s gonna dump me,” Abbe said to the ceiling. “So get on with it.”
“The fee,” Veronique said, taking out a checkbook.
