by Neil Clarke
He had the tech guy Photoshop the photos of the Latino’s face, taking away the swelling and water bleaching. With eyes open he looked alive. Then he started showing it around.
He talked to them all—landlords and labor in-between men, Mexicans who worked the fields, labor center types. Nothing. So he went to the small-time boosters, hookers, creeps in alleys, button men, strong-arm types slow and low of word, addicts galore, those who thrived on the dark suffering around them—the underlife of the decaying coast. He saw plenty of thick-bodied, smoldering anger that would be bad news someday for someone, of vascular crew-cut slick boys, stained jeans, arms ridged with muscle that needed to be working. Some had done time in the bucket and would again.
Still, nothing. The Latino face rang no bells.
He was coming out of a gardening shop that used a lot of Latinos when the two suits walked up. One wore a Marine-style bare-skull haircut and the other had on dark glasses and both those told him Federal.
“You’re local law?” the Marine type said.
Without a word McKenna showed them his badge. Dark Glasses and Marine both showed theirs, FBI, and Dark Glasses said, “Aren’t you a long way beyond Mobile city lines?”
“We’re allowed to follow cases out into the county,” McKenna said levelly.
“May we see the fellow you’re looking for?” Mr. Marine asked, voice just as flat.
McKenna showed the photo. “What did he do?” Mr. Marine asked.
“Died. I’m Homicide.”
“We had a report you were looking in this community for someone who worked boats,” Dark Glasses said casually.
“Why would that interest the FBI?”
“We’re looking for a similar man,” Mr. Marine said. “On a Federal issue.”
“So this is the clue that I should let you know if I see him? Got a picture?”
Dark Glasses started a smile and thought better of it. “Since there’s no overlap, I think not.”
“But you have enough sources around here that as soon as I show up, you get word.” McKenna said it flatly and let it lie there in the sun.
“We have our ways,” Dark Glasses said. “How’d this guy die?”
“Drowned.”
“Why think it’s homicide?” Mr. Marine came in.
“Just a hunch.”
“Something tells me you have more than that,” Mr. Marine shot back.
“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
They looked at each other and McKenna wondered if they got the joke. They turned and walked away without a word.
His bravado with them made him feel good but it didn’t advance his case. His mind spun with speculations about the FBI and then he put them away. The perpetual rivalry between local and federal always simmered, since the Feds could step in and capture a case when they thought they could profit from it. Or solve it better. Sometimes they were even right.
He prowled the Latino quarters. Hurricane damage was still common all along the Gulf Coast, years after the unpronounceable hurricane that had made Katrina and Rita look like mere overtures. He worked his way east and saw his fill of wrecked piers, abandoned houses blown out when the windows gave in, groves of pines snapped off halfway up, roofs ripped away, homes turned to flooded swamps. Weathered signs on damaged walls brought back to mind the aftermath: LOOTERS SHOT; on a roof: HELP; a plaintive WE’RE HERE; an amusing FOR SALE: SOME WATER DAMAGE on a condo completely gutted. Historical documents, now.
Hurricanes had hammered the coast so hard that in the aftermath businesses got pillaged by perfectly respectable people trying to hang on, and most of those stores were still closed. Trucks filled with scrap rumbled along the pitted roads. Red-shirted crews wheelbarrowed dark debris out of good brick homes. Blue tarp covered breached roofs, a promise that eventually they would get fixed. Near the beaches, waterline marks of scummy yellow remained, head high.
Arrival of aliens from another star had seemed less important to the coast people. Even though the Centauris had chosen the similar shores in Thailand, Africa, and India to inhabit, the Gulf was their focus, nearest an advanced nation. McKenna wondered what they thought of all the wreckage.
The surge of illegal Mexicans into the Gulf Coast brought a migration of some tough gangs from California. They used the illegal worker infrastructure as shelter, and occupied the drug business niches. Killings along the Mobile coast dropped from an average of three or four a day before to nearly zero, then rose in the next two years. Those were mostly turf wars between the druggies and immigrant heist artists of the type who prey on small stores.
So he moved among them in jeans, dog-eared hat, and an old shirt, listening. Maybe the Centauris were making people think about the stars and all, but he worked among a galaxy of losers: beat-up faces, hangdog scowls, low-hanging pants, and scuffed brown shoes. They would tell you a tearful life story in return for just looking at them. Every calamity that might befall a man had landed on them: turncoat friends, deadbeat buddies, barren poverty, cold fathers, huge bad luck, random inexplicable diseases, prison, car crashes, and of course the eternal forlorn song: treacherous women. It was a seminar in the great themes of Johnny Cash.
Then a droopy-eyed guy at a taco stand said he had seen the man in the picture over in a trailer park. McKenna approached it warily. If he got figured for a cop the lead would go dead.
Nearby were Spanish-language graffiti splashed on the minimart walls, and he passed Hispanic mothers and toddlers crowding into the county’s health clinic. But the shabby mobile homes were not a wholly Hispanic enclave. There was a lot of genteel poverty making do here. Pensioners ate in decrepit diners that gave seniors a free glass of anonymous domestic wine with the special. Workers packed into nearby damaged walk-ups with no air conditioning. On the corners clumps of men lounged, rough-handed types who never answered questions, maybe because they knew no English.
McKenna worked his way down the rows of shabby trailers. Welfare mothers blinked at him and he reassured them he was not from the county office. It was hard to read whether anybody was lying because they seemed dazed by the afternoon heat. Partway through the trailer park a narrow-chested guy in greasy shorts came up and demanded, “Why you bothering my tenants?”
“Just looking for a friend.”
“What for?”
“I owe him money.”
A sarcastic leer snaked across the narrow face. “Yeah, right.”
“Okay, I got a job for him.” McKenna showed the photo.
A flicker in the man’s eyes came and went. “Huh.”
“Know him?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You don’t lie worth a damn.”
The mouth tightened. “You ax me an I tole you.”
McKenna sighed and showed the badge. After a big storm a lot of fake badges sprouted on the chests of guys on the make, so this guy’s caution was warranted. County sheriffs and state police tried to enforce the law and in byways like this they gave up. Time would sort it out, they figured. Some of the fakes became hated, then dead.
To his surprise, the man just stiffened and jutted his chin out. “Got nothin’ to say.”
McKenna leaned closer and said very fast, “You up to code here? Anybody in this trailer park got an outstanding warrant? How ’bout illegals? Safety code violations? I saw that extension cord three units back, running out of a door and into a side shed. You charge extra for the illegals under that tent with power but no toilet? Bet you do. Or do you just let it happen on the side and pick up some extra for being blind?”
The man didn’t even blink.
McKenna was enjoying this. “So suppose we deport some of these illiterates, say. Maybe call in some others here, who violated their parole, uh? So real quick your receivables drop, right? Maybe a lot. Child support could come in here, too, right? One phone call would do it. There’s usually a few in a trailer park who don’t want to split their check with the bitch that keeps hounding them with lawyers, right? So with th
em gone, you got open units, buddy. Which means no income, so you’re lookin’ worse to the absentee landlord who cuts your check, you get me?”
McKenna could hear the gears grind and the eyes got worried. “Okay, look, he left a week back.”
“Where to?”
“You know that bayou east about two miles, just before Angel Point? He went to an island just off there, some kind of boat work.”
Floating lilies with lotus flowers dotted the willow swamp. Tupelo gums hung over the brown water as he passed, flavoring the twilight. The rented skiff sent its bow wash lapping at half-sunken logs with hides like dead manatees.
His neck felt sunburned from the sour day and his throat was raspy-dry. He cut the purring outboard and did some oar work for the last half mile. The skiff drifted silently up to the stilt house. It leaned a little on slender pilings, beneath a vast canopy of live oaks that seemed centuries old. The bow thumped at the tiny gray-wood dock, wood piling brushing past as he stepped softly off, lashing the stay rope with his left hand while he pulled his 9mm out and forward. No point in being careless.
Dusk settled in. A purple storm hung on the southern horizon and sheet lighting worked yellow magic at its edges. A string of lights hung along the wharf, glowing dimly in the murk, and insects batted at them. Two low pirogues drifted on the tide and clanked rusty chains.
The lock was antique and took him ten seconds.
The room smelled of damp dogs. He searched it systematically but there was nothing personal beyond worn clothes and some letters in Spanish. The postmarks were blurred by the moisture that never left the old wooden drawers. But in another drawer one came through sharp, three weeks old from Veracruz. That was a port town down the long curve of the eastern Mexican coast. From his knowledge of the Civil War era, which was virtually a requirement of a Southern man when he grew up, Veracruz was where Grant and Lee nearly got killed. Together they went out in a small boat to survey the shore in the Mexican war and artillery fire splashed within ten yards of them.
Lots of fishing in Veracruz. A guy from there would know how to work nets.
He kept the letters and looked in the more crafty places. No plastic bag in the commode water closet. Nothing under the filthy pine floor. No hollow legs on the flimsy wooden chairs. In his experience, basically no perp hid anything in smart-ass places or even planned their murders. No months of pondering, of painstaking detail work, alibi prep, escape route, weapon disposal. Brilliant murders were the stuff of television, where the cop played dumb and tripped up the canny murderer, ha ha.
The storm came in off the Gulf and rattled the shack’s tin roof. In the musty two-roomer he thought as mist curled up from great steaming sheets of rain. Drops tapped on leaves outside the window and the air mixed with sharp, moist smells of bird droppings. He stood in the scrappy kitchen and wondered if this was a phony lead. The Spanish letters probably wouldn’t help but they were consistent at least with the Latino body. Still, he was getting nowhere.
His intuition was fuzzy with associations, a fog that would not condense. The battering shower made him think of the oceans rising and warming from the greenhouse gases and how the world might come to be more like the Centauris’ moon, more tropical sea and the land hammered with storms. Out the streaked front window he wondered if aliens swam among the quilted waves, living part of their lives among the schools of fishes.
This thinking went nowhere and his ankle had acquired red dots of flea bites. He looked out the back window. The rain tapered off and he saw now the gray of a FEMA trailer back in the woods. A breeze came from it. Frying peppers and onions flavored the air with pungent promise.
He knocked on the front door and a scrawny white man wearing jeans and nothing else answered. “Hello, sir,” plus the badge got him inside.
In a FEMA trailer even words take up room. You have to stand at a conversational distance in light-metal boxes that even a tropical storm could flip like playing cards. His initial urge was to hunch, then to make a joke about it. Mr. Fredson, a gangly six foot two, stretched out his arms to show how he could at the same time touch the ceiling with one hand and the floor with the other. Hangers in the small closet were tilted sideways to fit and beside them stood a short bronze-skinned woman who was trying not to look at him.
“I was wondering if you knew who lived up front there.”
“He been gone more’n a week.”
“Did he look like this?” McKenna showed the picture.
“Yeah, that’s Jorge.”
“Jorge what?”
“Castan,” the woman said in a small, thin voice. Her hands twisted at the pale pink fabric of the shift she wore. “You la migra?”
“No ma’am. Afraid I got some bad news about Jorge though.”
“He dead?” Mr. Fredson said, eyes downcast.
“’Fraid so. He washed up on a beach east of here.”
“He worked boats,” Fredson said, shaking his head. “Lot of night work, fillin’ in.
“Mexican, right? Wife in Veracruz?”
“Yeah, he said. Sent money home. Had two other guys livin’ up there for a while, nice fellas, all worked the boats. They gone now.”
McKenna looked around, thinking. The Latino woman went stiffly into the kitchen and rearranged paper plates and plastic cups from Wal-Mart, cleaned a Reed & Barton silver coffeepot. Fredson sighed and sat on a small, hard couch. The woman didn’t look like a good candidate to translate the Veracruz letter, judging from her rigid back. To unlock her he had to ask the right question
“Jorge seem okay? Anything bother him?”
Fredson thought, shrugged. “I’d look in over there sometimes when he was out on the Gulf for a few days. He axed me to. Lately his baidclose all tangled up come mornin’.”
“Maybe afraid of la migra?” McKenna glanced at the woman. She had stopped pretending to polish the coffeepot and was staring at them.
“Lotsa people are.” Fredson jutted his chin out. “They come for the work, we make out they be criminals.”
“We do have a justice system.” McKenna didn’t know how to work this so he stalled.
“Jorge, he get no justice in the nex’ world either.” Fredson looked defiantly at him. “I’m not religious, like some.”
“I’m not sayin’ Jorge was doin’ anything dishonest.” McKenna was dropping into the coast accent, an old strategy to elicit trust. “Just want to see if he died accidentally of drowning.”
Fredson said flatly, knotting his hands, “Dishonest ain’t same as dishonorable.”
He was getting nowhere here. “I’ll need to report his death to his wife. Do you have any papers on him, so I can send them?”
The woman said abruptly, “Documento.”
Fredson stared at her and nodded slowly. “Guess we ought to.”
He got up and reached back into the packed closet. How they had gotten a FEMA trailer would be an interesting story, but McKenna knew not to press his luck. Fredson withdrew a soiled manila envelope and handed it to McKenna. “I kept this for him. He weren’t too sure about those other two guys he was renting floor space to, I guess.”
McKenna opened it and saw inside a jumble of odd-sized papers. “I sure thank you. I’ll see this gets to her.”
“How you know where she is?” Fredson asked.
“Got the address.”
“Searched his place, did ya?”
“Of course. I’ll be leaving—”
“Have a warrant?”
McKenna smiled slowly. “Have a law degree, do you?” His eyes slid toward the woman and he winked. Fredson’s mouth stiffened and McKenna left without another word.
He crunched down his oyster-shell road in the dark. Coming around the bend he barely saw against the yard light two people sitting in the glider swing on his porch. He swung his car off into the trees. He wanted to get inside and study the papers he had from Fredson, but he had learned caution and so put his hand on his 9mm as he walked toward them. The gulf salt tang hung under the
mimosa tree. A breeze stirred the smell of salt and fish and things dead, others spawning. Sugarcane near the house rattled in the breeze as he worked around to the back.
He let himself silently into his back door. When he snapped on the porch light the two figures jumped. It was Denise and his distant relative, Herb. Unlikely they knew each other.
McKenna opened the front door and let them in, a bit embarrassed at his creeping around. Denise made great fun of it and Herb’s confused scowl said he had been rather puzzled by why this woman was here. McKenna wondered, too. He thought he had been pretty clear last time Denise showed up. He didn’t like pushy women, many with one eye on his badge and the other on his pension. Even coming to his front door, like they were selling something. Well, maybe they were. He grew up when women didn’t ask for dates. Whatever happened to courtship?
Not that he was all that great with women. In his twenties he had been turned down more times than an old blanket. He got them drinks and let the question of why Denise was here lie.
They traded pleasantries and McKenna saw maybe a way to work this. Herb said he’d been in the neighborhood and just stopped by to say hello. Fine. He asked Herb if he knew anything new about the Centauris, since the Pizotti fish fry, and that was enough. Herb shifted into lecture mode and McKenna sat back and watched Denise’s reaction.
“There’s all kinda talk on the internet ’bout this,” Herb said with relish. “Seems the Centauris deliberately suppressed their radio stations, once they picked up Marconi’s broadcasts. They’d already spotted Earth as a biological planet centuries ago, see?—from studying the atmosphere. They’d already spent more centuries building those electric starships.”
“My, my,” Denise said softly.
Herb beamed at her, liking the audience. “Some think they’re the origin of UFOs!”
