“And you never remarried?” Carolyn asked, sounding kind of sad.
“No reason to. Frank did. After we split, he moved to L.A. Came back about ten years later to take a job as VP of a bank here and married some nice little Maid-of-Cotton type. I hear they have some kids, so maybe he’s happy. I hope so.”
She sat silent for a while. Then she said, “His name isn’t Escobar, is it?”
I was surprised. “Yeah, Francisco Escobar. You know him?”
“He’s on the opera board.”
I had to laugh. “Poor Frank. The new wife must have dragged him into that.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Carolyn answered. “She strikes me as sort of snobbish. They have two girls and a baby boy. He’s evidently crazy about them and goes to all the school productions the girls are in.”
“Better them than me,” I said, glancing at my watch. Thank the Holy Virgin, Carolyn hadn’t asked to pee. Smack was snoring happily in the back seat, minding her own business, when Carolyn changed the subject and asked why I’d given my dog such a strange name. Maybe she thought I smacked the dog around. Anyway I told her it was slang for heroin, Smack heard her name and woke up, sticking her nose in my ear, and Barrientos pulled into his driveway in a red sports car that he’d screwed up with a lot of fancy detailing.
Guy was as dumb as ever. You’d think with a record like his and a reward on his head in the States, he’d want to make a stab at anonymity. No way. Asshole had that skunk streak and a loud, expensive car. Piss for brains. No question. “Quit it, Smack,” I told the dog. I like her, I trust her, but I’m not crazy about dog drool in my ear.
“Let’s go.” I wanted the three of us to get to him before he pulled into the garage or went into the house. Hadn’t seemed to be anyone there. I’d got out once and walked the perimeter. No lights. No TV. No noise. If there’d been bodyguards, even after all the garage-door racket, we’d have been up shit creek. And nobody followed him home, thank the Lord. My luck was holding. “Call out to him,” I told her. “Tell him we’re accepting his invitation.”
28
The Capture
Carolyn
The stakeout had been fascinating, but I really didn’t want to talk to Mr. Barrientos again. I personally thought he hadn’t killed Vladik, so why take the risk? However, Luz insisted, so I got out of the car and called, “Hello there, Salvador. I hope it isn’t too late to accept your invitation.”
He whirled, hand stabbing toward the back of his trousers, scaring me half to death because I thought he might have a gun tucked into his heavy belt. When he recognized us under his own safety lights, he squinted suspiciously, not at me, but at Luz and the dog, which had clambered out of the back seat at her mistress’s command. “What’s with the dog?” he demanded, hand still behind his back.
“I’m blind half the time,” said Luz. “My sight comes and goes. The dog’s doesn’t.”
I’d never heard of anyone whose sight came and went. Surely he didn’t believe that. But I guess he did because he said, “Man, that’s tough. No wonder you had to retire. Does the dog bite?”
“She’s a Seeing Eye dog, leads me around when I need it. Seeing Eye dogs don’t bite,” Luz responded, as if anyone with half a brain would know that. “Her name’s Smack. How about that?”
Barrientos laughed and opened his front door, without taking his eyes off us, which made me very anxious. Then he insisted that we go in first, acting as if he was being polite. Luz and the dog went right in. I followed less willingly. Didn’t she see the danger in this? I wondered. Maybe the drugs she took for arthritis affected her judgment. For a moment the room was dark, but I hadn’t heard the door close. I wanted to scream and run for my life, but I knew that Luz would be even angrier about that than my taking over the conversation at the mariachi bar. Before I could act on my fears, he snapped the lights on.
“Cool place, Barrientos,” said Luz, walking from the entry hall into the living room and dragging me along with her. The dog led, its nose in the air.
Heaven help us, I thought. This is a drug dealer’s house. Obviously he has drugs in it, and Smack has smelled them. Any minute now the dog would howl and head for the drugs, and—well, I didn’t want to think of what would happen next. And why had she said this was a cool place? It was the ultimate tasteless room—all fake zebra and leopard skin and naked women painted on velvet. I was gaping at one picture that had a naked man as well, the depiction positively pornographic. I hadn’t seen anything that shocking since a Japanese lady showed me a prized antique scroll when Jason and I were invited to visit a professor’s home in Tokyo.
Then suddenly everything happened at once. Everything horrible. Mr. Barrientos grabbed me from behind, dragged me backward toward the entry hall, and said to Luz, “Okay, Vallejo, what’s up here, and you keep your hands away from whatever you’re carryin’ or I’ll blow this pretty gringa’s head off.” He could have done it too. I felt what I took to be the barrel of a gun pressing against my ear. But worse than that, his hand was clamped onto my right breast. Not only was it shocking and embarrassing, but it hurt.
Luz remained perfectly calm and said, “If this is what you call hospitality, Palomino, it sucks. You invited us over. We came. And here you—”
Given my position, I wasn’t about to wait for negotiations. I placed my hand over his, the one on my breast, not the one that held the gun to my ear and said, “You’re hurting me, Mr. Barrientos.”
“Tough shit,” he snarled.
So I got hold of one of his fingers, a strategy I’d read about in an article on protecting oneself against rape and other assaults. He laughed and said, “Knock it off!” I yanked the finger back as hard as I could, so angry that I completely forgot about the gun at my ear. The finger cracked loudly, he screamed, and the pressure on my ear eased. Luz murmured, “Get the gun, Smack,” and the dog lunged, mouth wide and snarling, and clamped its teeth onto Mr. Barrientos. I was still clinging to his hand and—I don’t know what got into me—I bit his broken finger. The gun fell to the floor and discharged, sending a bullet into a pornographic pillow on his zebra couch, I—feeling dizzy—removed my teeth from Mr. Barrientos’ hand, and he fell down with the dog on top of him.
While I was staving off a nervous breakdown, Luz walked over to him and placed her cane carefully against the left side of his groin. “If you move, my piss-for-brains friend,” she said, “I press the button on the cane, and the blade goes right into your crotch. Then if you don’t die from arterial bleeding, I might consider cutting off your balls in the course of the little talk we’re about to have.”
I leaned against the wall, breathing deeply.
“Now, don’t pass out on me, Carolyn,” Luz said.
Mr. Barrientos stirred. Maybe he was considering a counterattack, but there were tears on his face—it probably hurts to have your finger broken and your wrist bitten by a huge dog that still has its teeth in your flesh, although Smack was now stretched out comfortably beside her prisoner.
“And you, Palomino, don’t move a muscle. Caro, go get his gun. It’s under the magazine rack with all the girlie magazines.” Then, when Mr. Barrientos stirred again, she snapped, “Watch it, Palomino. You make me mad, and looking at magazines is all the sex you’ll ever get.”
I wobbled over to the wrought-iron magazine rack, studiously avoiding the sight of the naked women on the covers while I fished the gun out. Then, without taking my eyes off Luz and Mr. Barrientos, I returned and handed the gun to Luz, who went to the other side of the prisoner and squatted, gritting her teeth, to stick the muzzle against his ear. “How’s that feel, you frigging bastard?” she asked.
I must say, in that instance, I could forgive her language because she was paying him back for what he’d done to me.
“Now Carolyn,” she ordered, “I want you to look in my bag. There’s a big roll of duct tape and some scissors. Tape his feet together. Don’t spare the tape, and make it real tight.”
It wasn’t
easy to do. I dragged over a footstool with a tapestry picture of two lions having sexual intercourse. Maybe his mother made it for him. I giggled at the thought, and Luz said, “Don’t fall apart on me, Caro.” I didn’t. I sat down and wound the tape around and around his ankles. Some experimentation led me to the discovery that it was easier to shove the footstool under his calves and sit on the floor to finish the taping. While I was at work, Luz stood up. I heard her sharp indrawn breath and assumed that she’d been in pain, although she looked less stressed when I looked up.
“Done,” I said, pleased with myself. I started to put the tape and scissors back into her handbag, but she said we needed to save them for his hands, so I settled for returning the footstool to its place. No need to make a mess. His finger and wrist were already bleeding on the tiles. It occurred to me that blood might be very hard to get out of the grout.
“Smack, bite.” Luz pointed to Mr. Barrientos’s thigh and leaned over to press the gun against his ear in case he had any idea of resisting. The dog scrambled up, shook Barrientos’ wrist while looking for the next bite site—bite site—that rhymes, I thought giddily. Smack dropped the wrist and sank her teeth in the selected thigh. Barrientos groaned again.
“Shut up,” said Luz. “She’s not biting hard, but she will if you make a fuss. Carolyn, go look out the windows and see if any lights are coming on in the neighborhood.”
Obediently, I went to look. In fact, I circled the house looking out windows and satisfying my curiosity about drug-dealer accommodations and taste in decorating. Except for security lights, the neighborhood was dark, and the other rooms were just as tastelessly furnished as the living room. He had a bed, in what I took to be the master bedroom, with a mirror on the ceiling, not to mention a mirrored bath. I took the opportunity to use the toilet. When Luz shouted, “You okay?” I hurried my rounds and returned to report.
“There are no lights in the neighborhood, but I found several bathrooms if you need to go.”
She shook her head.
“You really should,” I urged. “You’ll never see another like his. I can hold the gun on him.”
“Have you ever shot a gun?” she asked.
“No, but it’s just a matter of pulling on the trigger, isn’t it? Not only does he have mirrors in his bathroom and over his bed, but he also has overhead lights in his shower and tub and pornographic tiles. It’s amazing.” Not that I approve of pornography, but I got the giggles when I told her about the décor.
Luz grinned at me. “Well, I’m glad you’re having fun, but you’ve got to settle down now and tape up his hands.”
Mr. Barrientos had been glaring at us, particularly during my description of his bathroom “Hey, that bitch broke my finger, and then she bit it. You can’t—”
Luz hit him in the temple with the barrel of the gun and said, “Watch who you’re calling bitch, you ass wipe.” His forehead developed a blood trickle that headed for the tiles. This house was going to be very hard to sell when he went to jail or died. His poor mother, who’d gone to the trouble of embroidering the amorous lions for him—how would she explain the red stains to prospective buyers? And was she able to buy kits for those footstool covers? I started to giggle again, thinking of what a stir such a kit would cause among respectable customers in a craft shop.
“Are you drunk, Caro?” Luz asked me.
“No,” I replied. “It’s just the nasty embroidery his mother did. No wonder he’s a drug dealer.”
There was an angry reaction from Mr. Barrientos about what he took to be a slur on his mother. Luz put her knee on his broken finger, and Smack shook her head, teeth still attached to his thigh. That put an end to Mr. Barrientos’s latest protest, but I worried about how much pain kneeling might cause my partner. What if she fainted?
“Up you go.” Luz yanked him into a sitting position. “Hands behind your back. Caro, get the tape.”
In no time at all I had Mr. Barrientos’s hands crossed and taped up. I was getting good at this, not that it was a skill likely to prove useful in later life. Once our prisoner was immobilized—and groaning, although I’d been as gentle as I could with respect to his broken finger and gnawed wrist—Luz shoved a heavy, upholstered chair behind his back. There goes the upholstery, I thought. He’ll bleed on that too. Then she stood in front of him and demonstrated her cane. When she pressed a button, a thin, wicked-looking blade about nine inches in length shot out with a soft snick.
“So,” said Barrientos, trying to look unafraid, “you got a fancy switch blade. Big deal.”
Luz nodded, retracted the blade, and placed the tip of the cane against his crotch again, the gun still aimed at his head. “Conversation time, amigo. The name Caro mentioned at Mariachi Caliente, Vladik Gubenko, also known as Vladislav Gubenko. A source told us you know him. Said he owed you gambling money.” She put pressure on the cane. Barrientos tried to squirm away, but the chair at his back held him.
“No one named that owes me no money,” he cried, looking as earnest as he could.
“Unzip his fly, Caro.” Luz ordered.
“What?” I didn’t want to unzip his fly.
“That way we’ll see what happens when I push the button. Bet you’ve never seen an artery let go. Lotta force there. Sends up a real fountain of blood.”
“Jesus i Maria,” cried Barrientos. “The El Paso police don’t do this kinda stuff.”
“I’m not in the police department any more. And I’m not in El Paso,” she said with a really scary smile. It frightened me, so I can imagine how he felt. “Caro.”
Before I had to refuse, Barrientos said, “So I know him. Okay? But he don’t owe me no money.”
“Go on,” she ordered, pressing harder on the cane. He was sweating.
“Quit it, will you? We have a little deal going, okay? I ship people across the river for a price. Vladik puts them in this trailer park in West El Paso. Then my cousin, who runs the park and ain’t got any warrants on her, puts them on tractor trailers, a few at a time, an’ sends them up to Chicago. I don’ know why the hell you’d care. Smuggling illegals was never your—”
“So why did you kill him?” Luz snarled.
“What d’ya mean? Who killed him? If he’s dead, I never heard it. I got more people comin’ across this weekend. I never heard nothin’ about—”
“What’s the name of the park?” she asked.
“Pinon Park. It’s on the Westside.”
“That’s where Polya and Irina live,” I said, astonished.
“So you believe him?” Luz asked.
“I don’t know.” Did I? “They did say they never got to know their neighbors, who spoke Spanish and were always changing.”
“See! It’s the truth. They was comin’ an’ goin’ all the time because they’re my illegals. But they din’ all speak Spanish. We took anyone wanted to cross an’ had the dinero.”
“Well, I got it on tape,” said Luz, tapping his gun against one of the two patch pockets of her blue silk blouse, but keeping the cane in place. “We’ll see how your story goes over with the feds.”
“Ah, come on, Vallejo. What feds? What’d I ever do to you? Anyways, the federales, they’re gonna nod their heads, let me go, and lock you up. What d’ya think? We ain’t got them bought? ’Course we do.”
“I believe it, amigo,” said Luz. “but we’re taking you home with us. Caro, dial this thing to eleven and push the button. That opens the garage door on the left so you can drive in. We’ll put him in the trunk.”
“In my trunk? He’s bleeding. And he—well, you may not have noticed but he had an—an accident.”
“Right. He pissed his pants. So what?”
“I don’t want him bleeding all over my trunk. And it will smell like urine in there. Why don’t we take one of his cars? You drive him over, and I’ll follow. People in the neighborhood are much less likely to notice if—”
“Damn it, Caro, will you just go get your car. You are the most—what word do I want?—fastidio
us woman I’ve ever seen. Picking up after yourself when we’ve got a dangerous prisoner to watch, checking out the bathrooms, worrying about the upholstery in your trunk. You can take the damn car to El Paso Car Wash and get it cleaned. Have lunch and write about it in your column.”
An interesting idea—column-wise—but how was I supposed to explain what had happened in my trunk to the attendants?
29
Bounty Hunters
Luz
It took some doing to talk Carolyn into bringing her car into the garage, especially since Barrientos kept taking her side of the argument. “You try kidnappin’ me, my people are gonna kill you,” he said to me. “Her too. You want to end up in a shallow grave outside town in the desert, lady?” he asked Carolyn. She didn’t of course.
“When your people find out you were running a smuggling business on the side, they won’t care what we did to you, Palomino. And they’ll find out. There’ll be big headlines tomorrow: ‘Wanted Drug Dealer/Smuggler Brought in by Female Bounty Hunters.’ Gonna look bad. You know? Two women kidnapping a tough guy like you and turning him over to the feds.”
“Are we bounty hunters?” Carolyn asked, wide eyed.
Holy Guacamole! Page 17
