The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  Local neighborhood patrol search commences after Seth puts in a call to Dispatch saying the driver is probably Ruiz, but overhead heli support comes late to the party because of a hostage situation at a nearby Walmart. When you’ve got only two helicopters in a city as large as Dallas, overhead surveillance can’t be counted on.

  “Goddamn it,” I yell repeatedly, driving fruitlessly back and forth through neighborhood streets. How hard can it be to find a hundred-grand-plus car that looks as though it’s been run through a meat grinder?

  My personal phone in my left pocket rings. I dig it out, but I’m too agitated to talk while driving and so I throw it to Seth to answer.

  “Hey, hi, Jackie,” he says, trying to talk over my swearing. “Yeah, everything’s okay. We’re just a little bit busy right now. No…no lunch yet. Okay. Sure, I’ll tell her. Bye.” He hangs up and hands the phone back to me.

  “Well, what’d she say?”

  “Jackie says if you come home later smelling like Whataburger, you’re in deep shit.”

  Then Taylor calls my work phone in my right pocket and I pull over to answer. He informs me that, if what he’s hearing about Ruiz disappearing again is true, I’m in deep shit and might as well not come back to the station.

  “Go and talk to Ms. Yu,” he says. “Maybe you can redeem yourself by getting her to tell us something we don’t already know.”

  We leave the local patrols to continue their search, and Seth and I drive back to Lana’s. After we pass through the guard station again, I get out of the car and pick up one of the Beemer’s side mirrors that had been sheared off by the gate. When Lana answers her door this time, she’s dressed in expensive jeans and a T-shirt that reads COWGIRLS RIDE HARD. She tells us for the second time that we can’t come in. She smirks in a way that makes me want to hard-slap the back of her head.

  I toss her the mangled mirror. “This is what’s left of your car. We didn’t catch your boyfriend today but, just so you understand, when we do catch him, I’m going to personally let him know that you were the one to give him up because you were trying to beat charges for solicitation and aiding a federal fugitive. So that cracked image you see in the mirror is nothing compared to what your face will look like when his friends get finished with you.”

  She tries to close the door, but my nine-inch reinforced tactical boot is in the way. In another minute, my fingers may be through the door frame as well, ready to tear her diamond-stud earring through one downy little earlobe.

  “You know what Ruiz’s bodyguard’s nickname is?” I ask her. “El Guiso. It means ‘the Stew.’ He likes to burn his victims alive in a metal pot.” I throw my card onto the floor at her feet. “Think about it, Lana. If you change your mind, my number’s on the card.”

  She slams the door, but not before I’ve seen the blood drain from her little scabby face.

  Seth drives to the station and I call Jackie from the passenger seat.

  “Hey, babe, I’m alive, but I may be home late. And, yes, I got your message about the burger place.” My stomach is still churning, but perversely, a dripping-fat burger is exactly what I’m craving.

  I hear her listening to my agitated breathing. “Betty,” she says, “you really need a run tonight—”

  “Yep,” I say sharply, cutting her off. I know what I need, I just don’t want her telling me. After today I should go on a twelve-mile run to lower my blood pressure.

  “I may be working late at the hospital as well,” she tells me with a bit of frost in her voice.

  “Okay, well, see you back at the apartment.” I disconnect, jam the phone into my pocket.

  Seth gives me a censuring look. “She is so going to dump you.”

  “Right, Mr. Expert in Love,” I say defensively. I know I’m an ungrateful wretch, being so impatient with her. If not for Jackie, my idea of emotional self-help would be half a bottle of Jameson. I’d be living out of a suitcase, all my T-shirts would be black, and I’d still be buying underwear in the boys’ section of Target.

  After a moment of concern, I ask Seth, “Flowers, you think?”

  “Yeah.” Seth nods. “Chocolate’s not going to do it for you this time.”

  The balance of the day is spent doing paperwork and making calls to other cops and any informant who will talk to me. Hoskins and Craddock return early evening with no helpful information from Ruiz’s known contacts. By the time Taylor leaves, he is not wishing any of us a good night.

  I send Ryan home for the evening, although he doesn’t go without a protest, and the remaining four of us sit there kicking around possibilities for leads, trying to pull on the connecting strings without unraveling the whole sweater. All our informants, all the snitches we’ve cultivated for drug information in the past, are sorted through and reviewed. Ruiz is a major player, never doing a deal under a million dollars. He was a close lieutenant to his boss, but Fuentes is in a Mexican jail, and whatever chance Ruiz would have had to grab a piece of the cartel territory as a capo evaporates dramatically by the hour. Ruiz is in El Norte with one bodyguard, away from the action to the south.

  He will have to be very careful whom he approaches for help in Dallas because any practiced snitch, meaning just about every heavy drug user or drug dealer who’s got a record, will know that information about him will bring them repayment in drugs from the eager Sinaloa cartel and a reduced sentence from us.

  On the whiteboard with a black marker I draw a large circle representing the city of Dallas and print Bender’s name in the circle. Below the circle, about twelve inches down, I draw a wavy line, representing the border between Texas and Mexico. Beneath the line, on the Mexican side, I print Juárez cartel and Alberto Carrillo Fuentes, aka Ugly Betty. I draw an arrow from Mexico to Dallas and write Tomás “El Gitano” Ruiz and El Guiso, his bodyguard, on top of that. I print Lana Yu next to Ruiz’s name. I take a red marker and cross out Bender’s name, then take a green marker and cross out Fuentes’s name, to show that he’s alive but out of action.

  With a blue marker I start putting sequential numbers where Ruiz has been seen the last few days, the number 1 in El Paso, 2 in Dallas proper, 3 in Oak Cliff, 4 back in Dallas.

  I point to Lana’s name with the blue marker. “We need to keep an eye on Lana’s movements. Even though that particular haven’s been blown, Ruiz may try to contact her again. So I’m putting Ryan on that tomorrow. Easy duty to follow her and she doesn’t know his face. Hoskins and Craddock—”

  Hoskins sighs loudly as though he’s disappointed. “Detective, you never actually got eyes on Ruiz driving that car. You’re assuming it was our guy. What if it was just a spooked john?”

  “If it was a john, he would have stayed hidden in Lana’s house,” Seth says. “He wouldn’t have taken her car and destroyed it driving through a thick metal security gate trying to get away from us.”

  Craddock, who’s been noisily fishing around in a bag of fries left over from lunch, gathers up a few cold crumbs, pops them into his mouth, and says, “Let’s assume it was Ruiz. We’ve lost the car. As far as we know he’s headed back west on I-20 toward Juárez in another stolen vehicle.” Typical of Texas-speak, Craddock pronounces it “vee-hicle.”

  “Not necessarily,” I tell him. “We don’t know that he can go back to Juárez right now because we don’t know who’s filled the vacuum of power left by Fuentes. The Mexican officials may be waiting for him as well. Or La Línea, or even factions from Barrio Azteca along the Texas corridor.”

  On the Mexican side is La Línea, the Line, a well-equipped and well-trained group of urban street fighters for the Juárez cartel. Brutal and efficient, these former policemen had sent an unmistakable message to competitors a few years ago by killing sixteen teenagers at a high-school party and then another nineteen in a rehab hospital nearby.

  Across the border to the north were the Texas enforcers, the Barrio Azteca, formed in the jails of El Paso in the 1980s. Some DEA figures had put the current number of gang membership at over eig
ht thousand in states from New Mexico to Massachusetts. These are the guys who would not only kill you but also dismember you and package you up for your mother’s birthday celebration.

  “I think Ruiz is long gone,” Hoskins says. “All this jumping through hoops in Dallas proper is just a waste of time.”

  I turn away from him like I’m studying the board, but it’s to hide my irritation. I could make a stinging comeback about his knowing all about wasting time, but ignoring him will piss him off more.

  “Highway patrol will be looking for Ruiz along the southwest corridor,” I say. “But I have a feeling he’s still in Dallas.”

  Seth sits in his chair, one leg jiggling up and down with restlessness. “The cocaine has got to be somewhere close by. The kilos were not in either of the abandoned cars, and he can’t carry that much around in a suitcase.”

  “Seth’s right,” I agree. “I’m not satisfied with the initial search we did of Bender’s house, so I’ll want another one conducted. I’ll be getting a search warrant tomorrow for Lana’s house as well.”

  I set the marker down and face Hoskins. What I want to tell him is that it’s hard for me to take seriously a man who’s three inches shorter than I am, who wears his shirt collars a size too big for his neck, and who thinks that because he’s inside his car, people can’t see him picking his nose.

  “Detective Hoskins,” I say, “tomorrow you and Craddock will be searching through Bender’s house again, attic to floorboards.”

  “I hope the son of a bitch has crept back across the border,” Craddock says. “Then it’s not our problem.”

  “If he is here,” Hoskins says, “which I doubt, then I hope we do catch him. Five minutes in a cell with us, and the good taxpayers of Dallas will only have to foot the bill for a ventilator for a few months.”

  “I understand why you’d feel that way,” I tell him, trying to imagine what Ruiz would do to Hoskins left alone in a room with him for five minutes. “But we have to find him first. Seth and I will be in contact tomorrow with the Feds through Hayes, border patrol, and local police in El Paso. Ruiz has got to emerge somewhere soon, hopefully without inflicting more carnage. Any more thoughts before we wrap up for the night?”

  “Yeah,” Hoskins says, standing up and stretching. “I need a drink. I’d ask you to come with us, Detective Rhyzyk, but you wouldn’t like my choice of bars.”

  I know I should be going to the gym or running a few miles, but I decide the only exercises I want to be doing for the next few hours are eight-ounce curls with my partner.

  “Coming with us?” Craddock asks Seth.

  “You serious?” Seth says. “Riz here knows all the best places to find women.”

  “Yeah,” Craddock says, cackling. “Just not women who’d want our asses…” His voice trails off and Hoskins gives him an evil look.

  I wait until the two amigos gather up their things and walk out of the room. “What was that about?” I ask Seth.

  “Come on, you don’t know?” he asks.

  “I have no idea.”

  Seth begins to laugh. “I can’t believe you still don’t know. Oh, this is so good.” Seth throws his head back and howls, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Hoskins’s wife left him months ago. For a woman.”

  6

  Once a week, Seth and I visit a bar within the greater Dallas metro area. The rules are simple: Two hours minimum stay, two drinks each, maximum, and no bar can be revisited. So every Monday, we each write down the name of a bar on a piece of notepaper, fold it up, and drop it into an empty wide-mouthed jelly jar. We alternate who pulls out that week’s selection. We’ve made some interesting choices.

  We’ve been to biker bars, gay bars, and stripper bars; visited Asian karaoke palaces, Mexican wedding halls, Russian vodka dens, and Lebanese hookah stalls. And, of course, a country-dancing bar where Seth threatened to tell everyone in the place I was a Democrat if I didn’t let the bouncer—a three-hundred-pound lineman from some red-dirt college—teach me the Texas two-step.

  Tonight, I pull out of the jar the name I’d written down, and I begin my own victory howling. It’s a bar called Slugger Anne’s, and Seth will get in only because I know the owner and will insist. He will most assuredly be the only man on the premises.

  We drive there in separate cars. It’s a small place downtown, quiet and discreet, no real sign at the door, with worn, comfortable booths and a long bar that’s always full in the latter part of the evening. It looks like a million other neighborhood Texas bars, except there are no handbag hooks above the foot rail and no men’s room with urinals in the back. The walls are lined with vintage black-and-white photos of cowgirls, and behind the bar are two large paintings: one of Annie Oakley, and one of Calamity Jane.

  I know the owner and chief bartender, Dottie, well. She had some drug problems in the past, went clean, and opened the place. She will, at times, pass on to me useful information about drug-dealing around her bar. Wearing her usual uniform of a sleeveless Western-style shirt and low-slung jeans, she waves at us exuberantly when we walk in, one bare, muscular arm raised in greeting, displaying a lush patch of underarm hair, like a nesting hedgehog, in one pit.

  “Hey, girl,” Dottie crows. “That your new bitch?”

  “How’s it hangin’, Dottie? And, no, that’s my work partner, so be nice.” I pat the air in front of Seth, letting him know that Dottie’s full of rude bluster and not to get hot under the collar about it.

  We find a booth and order two shots of Jameson on the rocks from a young woman dressed in shorts, cowboy boots, and a tight Slugger Anne’s T-shirt. She greets us with the ubiquitous Texas salute: “Hi, y’all.”

  She’s not wearing a bra and I catch Seth staring.

  “What?” I say to him after she walks away, the two globes of her rear end swaying suggestively. “You were expecting plaid flannel shirts?”

  When the drinks are delivered, Seth gets to make the toast because I picked the place. The last two rules are that the toast can never be the same as a previous one, and we can never refer to a current case. Well, almost never. Have to have some free space sometime, somewhere.

  Seth raises his glass and says, “Here’s to not having to hide your true self.”

  I tilt my head back, surprised, but I drink to the toast.

  “That’s an interesting one,” I say. “What’s it supposed to mean exactly?”

  “Well, for you, it means you’re always having to hide the fact that you’re a damn Yankee.”

  “Okay, I’ll go along with that. What’re you hiding?”

  “That I’m secretly in love with lesbians.” He smiles and looks for the cute waitress in the shorts.

  “Don’t even go there.”

  He crunches some ice between his teeth and says, “I envy you.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because your place in the world seems so secure.”

  “Oh, right. A woman working as an undercover cop with a bunch of testosterone-driven males. Right now, I’m not feeling so secure with the way this case is going.”

  “You have a live-in girlfriend, a kick-ass partner, a community.”

  “Well, I do have the first two, that’s for sure. I’d be barely human without Jackie. And my partner…well, I guess he’s not a total ass-wipe. But a community? You say it as though being a lesbian is like being in a garden club. Like we all have a secret handshake and a special clubhouse.”

  “You always knew what you wanted to do?” he asks.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Nope. Being a cop was something I fell into. Not good enough for a football scholarship, so I worked driving a forklift to pay my way through junior college. At twenty I signed up with the force. It was either that or the Marines.” He pauses to sip at his Jameson.

  Seth makes slightly slurpy sounds when he’s drinking something, like a kid savoring his chocolate milk. His head hangs thoughtfully over his glass and I can easily imagine him in high school, a star on the f
ield and in the school halls, his physical prowess and his Olympian good looks holding him aloft. Until, that is, the time that his classmates—the ones wealthy enough to get into good colleges or athletically talented enough to get sports scholarships—went on with their lives, smugly satisfied that Seth Dutton would have to work in a warehouse even to finish a two-year college.

  He raises his head and gives me the grin that, if I lusted after men, would have had me grappling with him in one of the bathroom stalls.

  “Let’s see how well you know your partner,” he says. “If I had stayed in college, guess what I would have majored in?”

  I start to say something dismissive like “Girls” or “Animal husbandry,” but he’s so earnest about the question that I bite off the remark. “I don’t know.”

  “Environmental studies.” He glances around with a guilty look, as though he’s just told me that he wanted to major in dressmaking.

  “No shit? Okay, well, that deserves another toast.” We toast to the environment.

  He rests both arms on the table, then puts his hands down in his lap, twisting slightly away from the bar where Dottie is eyeing him in a critical way. I try to suppress a laugh at his discomfort.

  “Not so easy being in a sexually hostile environment, is it, Riot?” I say.

  He wags a finger at me. “You love being a cop, don’t you?” He says it like it’s a declaration and not a question.

  “Man, there is not a word for how much I love being a cop. Don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “My grandfathers on both sides were cops. My father was a cop. My father’s brother was a cop…”

  I come within a hairbreadth of adding my own sibling to that litany. My older brother, Andrew, who was my father’s pride and joy. But I catch myself before my lips can form the words. Andrew had been a cop as well, but his career had ended badly. A drug bust, a lab explosion in a tenement, lots of charred bodies from both sides—cops and dealers—my brother’s suicide soon after with a drunken, solitary swim in the Atlantic Ocean in February. Following that, my father’s alcohol-sodden decline into bitterness and regret that he was left with only a daughter to carry on the Polish pride.