To Bring My Shadow

by Matt Phillips

  “Whatever, man.”

  Slade said, “So, this Rambo guy, he told you—”

  “He knows where a couple bodies are buried.”

  “And when did he say this?” I thought Turner knew how to lie. It’s a craft you learn in group homes and squatter flats from the Mexican border all the way on up to Canada. His eyes kept their color and shape when he spoke, but his forehead scar wrinkled slightly above his nose.

  “Before he dropped us off tonight. Well, last night.”

  “In the car?” I put both elbows on the fold-away table and cupped my hands over my mouth.

  “Yeah, in the car.”

  “You know,” I said, “putting a couple bodies on somebody is no joke—we’re murder police, buddy. You give us some jive about bodies and we got to go figure out what’s what.”

  Turner shrugged.

  “Okay,” Slade said, “what exactly did your buddy Rambo tell you?”

  Turner crossed one booted foot over his knees, rested his hands on the leather boot. “We’re driving down University and he starts talking about some guy he knows.” Turner snapped his fingers. “Guy named Riddick. This guy does contract work for one of those Mexican cartels. Except Rambo said they aren’t Mexican because they’re American. Citizens, you know? I mean, I guess they work for the cartel or something. It’s like a company.”

  “Riddick what?” Slade kept his pen moving this whole time. “Give me the last name.”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Figures,” I said.

  Turner rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I guess Riddick had to do a whole family for these cartel people. Some corporate guy who pissed the fuckers off. A, uh, what is it…guy who owns car dealerships or whatever.”

  I looked at Slade—his brown peepers were already pinned to my face: The Jacoby family.

  Mark Jacoby, his wife, and their fourteen-year-old daughter had been missing for about six months. Disappeared without telling family, friends, or business associates. This scandal ran across the papers for a week or two. It was a federal investigation with SDPD involved as support. Took the case from my pal Donovan and his partner, an ex-college football player named Richie. There was evidence the family had been abducted, trafficked over state lines into Nevada. The Missing Persons Unit was all too happy to get rid of what looked like an unsolvable case. I wrote a note to myself:

  Run by Richie or Donovan’s desk––ask about Feds.

  Slade put his eyes back on Turner. “And what did Rambo tell you about the bodies?”

  “He said they were out near Jacumba, east county.” Turner said the name with a hard J, like us white people always say it. “Some BLM land where nobody thinks to look. The cartel dumps people out there sometimes.”

  Now this, to me, sounded like street talk, a queer manifestation of the American Tall Tale. Throw one punch and say you landed a thousand. Let the legend do its work. I said, “You’re full of shit, Turner.”

  “Whatever, fat man. Suit yourself. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”

  “Why tell us now?” Slade asked.

  “You’re asking me about this other thing, the dead guy in the oil thingy, and I figured this shit might be info you want. Rambo told me this shit, like, six hours ago.”

  Again, me and Slade met gazes. I lifted my chin and tilted my head—let’s go outside for a second. We told Turner to wait and stepped into the hall. Slade stared at his notebook, pinched a leaf of lined paper between thumb and index finger. I leaned back against the wall, closed my eyes. I knew we wouldn’t get much sleep over the next few days. You got a short window of time when it comes to a homicide. Urban legend and statistics say it’s forty-eight hours, but we knew better—it’s a whole lot less than that. Part of why me and Slade were so good had to do with our willingness to work without sleep. For me, mezcal helped. For Slade, it was Red Bull and thick black coffee.

  Slade said, “You want to run by and talk to Richie or Donovan, ask them about the feds?”

  “Yeah, I’ll call as soon as it’s light outside, if they aren’t around.”

  “We need to corroborate this with the girl.”

  “I’ll go in there now. Trust me, she’s about ready to go home. She’ll give it up.”

  Slade nodded.

  “He say much about the guy in the oil drum?” I felt like, somehow, we’d gotten too far away from our own cold body.

  “Yeah, man. He said they were making out and the girl saw something in the water. Said he hoped it was a bale of Mary Jane or something.”

  “Like how they wash up on the beach every now and then?”

  “That’s right. Fucking kids, man. Said he got out there and almost shit his pants. That’s when they called it in.”

  “It’s weird though,” I said. “This guy Rambo runs his mouth and then they end up seeing another body, and maybe it’s cartel work.”

  “You thinking Rambo wanted the body found? That maybe he dumped it there?” Slade’s eyebrows dipped into a capital V. The man even looked like he could think his way out of a ten-thousand-piece puzzle.

  “But to do that,” I said, “Rambo’s got to know Turner will ask for a ride, and he’s got to know where the lovebirds will want to go.”

  “Maybe they aren’t lovebirds,” Slade said. “Maybe that’s all bullshit?”

  “You’re saying it’s their job to give us the body?”

  Slade said, “Could be.”

  “That just doesn’t make sense.”

  At that moment, Slade’s cell phone rang and he answered. “Yeah, this is Ryerson.” He listened for a few seconds and said, “I appreciate it.” He hung up and nodded at me. “Well, the Johnson in the jar belongs, it seems, to Enrico Frederico.”

  I thought for a while and finally said, “You think they’ll sew that thing back on? Before they put him in the dirt, I mean?”

  Slade pondered that, but didn’t answer.

  I said, “Let me drive the girl home, see if I can get some answers from her.”

  “Do that,” Slade said. “I’ll keep fucking around with numb-nuts Turner.”

  Chapter 6

  No sun yet over the city.

  Gray light outlining the streets and buildings. Above us, one of the first incoming flights of the day roared toward the airport, full with pale-skinned tourists and wacky-headed business people. My buzz long gone, I had no trouble steering the Ford onto the freeway, getting up to speed. Celeste sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed, a smug teenager look on her face. “What exit, Celeste?”

  “It’s faster if you get off on Washington, head east.”

  “Fancy-smancy,” I said. “I thought your momma was a nurse.”

  “My daddy,” she said with sarcasm, “is an asshole lawyer. We haven’t seen him in six months.”

  “Is that what hanging out with Turner is for, to deal with your absent daddy complex?”

  She chuckled. “You think you’re so smart.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m of average intelligence. And that’s all it takes to see you’re fucking things up. One day, you keep going like this, you’re going to wake up in a dingy apartment, common law married to a guy named Spike, has a head tattoo and filed down teeth. You won’t have a career, not unless you call working girl a valid choice. You’ll be thirty years old with saggy tits and an ass that keeps getting bigger. Best you’ll hope for is a John with a little generosity and—”

  “Okay, old man,” Celeste said. “I fucking get it. Turner’s a loser. You think I don’t know that?”

  I took the Washington exit, turned right without braking, and headed up the curved road toward the uptown area. We passed a restaurant called Sapphire’s. I took my wife there for our last anniversary—twenty-five years of marriage. Two decades and some change. More time than a dictator in an African police state. Shit, longer than most folks have a career. Twenty-five years on PD and I could bail out if I wanted, take my decent pension. I was on
e year away from that, and from the big five-oh. Fifty. But now my wife was gone. Not a damn thing to live for.

  Miranda wore a purple dress that night. It hung loose across her shoulders and tapered tight over her hips. I remembered how it cupped the shape of her breasts and ended just above her knees. She never used much jewelry, but that night she had on diamond earrings I bought her years before—Christmas present, I think—and a dainty silver bracelet on her left wrist. Auburn hair to just below her neckline. A beautiful woman escorted by a fat cop with too many open murder cases. What can I say, sometimes a man gets lucky. And that was me. What did we talk about that night? Our kids. Retirement. The next two-week trip to the Yucatán. And all that, to her, must not have meant fuck all. Because Miranda jumped from that bridge.

  Dead the instant she hit water.

  I put my mind back on the Castaneda case, back on this Rambo guy who was supposedly talking about dead bodies. We hit a village area with more restaurants, a grocery store, pubs and coffee shops.

  “Take a left here,” Celeste said.

  I made the turn and she told me to stop near a nice-looking mid-century-style house. Floor-to-ceiling windows and metalwork for accent. “Nice place. Daddy must be a fancy lawyer, huh?”

  “Criminal defense,” Celeste said. “The best kind. What were you thinking about just now?”

  I looked over at the pink-haired punk teenager and saw, in her eyes, a caring I hadn’t felt in months. Not beyond the ceaseless worry of Skinny Slade, at least—god bless the man. I said, “I’m just thinking about a dead family buried somewhere out near Jacumba.” The name came out right, like the J was a Y. “I hear there’s a fourteen-year-old girl dead. Buried. In an unmarked––”

  “I thought he was fucking with Turner, trying to scare me.” She looked away, squinted in anger at her father’s empty house.

  “Rambo?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s his nickname. I don’t know his real name. You’re saying he wasn’t just talking.”

  “I’m saying it sounds, maybe, like it could be true. You remember the name he mentioned?”

  Celeste said, “Jacoby. It was Jacoby. He said, ‘Those dumb ass Jacobys got killed and we buried them out near Jacumba.’ Like it was, I don’t know, clobbering a mailbox with a baseball bat. He was acting like it was supposed to be funny.” She sighed and looked back to me, this time with hurt in her eyes.

  “It sure as shit isn’t funny. Might be a true fact. He say anything more definite about location?”

  Celeste furrowed her brow. “I think he might have said near the border, near the border fence. But, I mean, the fence is, like, super-long or whatever.”

  Okay, I thought. That’s something. “You going to tell me what you two were doing down there tonight?” I watched her without blinking. Pretty girl. If you took away the pink hair.

  “It was Turner and Rambo—they just said it was private.” She hesitated. Her lips worked for a minute before her voice came out: “I’m a virgin and…I really was going to give him a blow job. Am I that fucking stupid? It didn’t happen, but am I that fucking stupid?”

  I thought about my beautiful wife plummeting headfirst toward the bay’s cold black water, hard as cement when you fall from that height. Or when you jump. Or when you’re pushed. “Listen, sister,” I said. “A blow job ain’t a big mistake. It’s just bad judgment. You can come back from a blow job. Some things, though...”

  “Like being dead?”

  “Right, like murder. You don’t come back from that.”

  Celeste sighed again. Her voice jumped in her throat. She waited half a minute before saying, “I think Turner knows something about the dead guy. I don’t know why. I just...do.”

  I nodded and said, “Thanks for coming clean with me—I appreciate it. Now, get inside before mom notices you’re gone.” I handed her my business card and pointed at the cell number. “Give me a call if you think of anything else. Or, if you hear anything from Turner.”

  “You’re not going to talk to my mom?”

  I laughed. “Sister, you ain’t under arrest. Didn’t your daddy teach you anything?”

  Chapter 7

  Thirty minutes after I dropped Celeste, I met Slade at a dive bar near my place. Open and serving drinks at six in the morning. Big surprise it was us two and the bartender. Slade ordered instant coffee. I got a tumbler full of bourbon without asking. “Thanks, Randy. Appreciate it,” I said.

  The old bartender ambled down the bar, leaned over a real-life city newspaper––he studied the sports page with religious intensity.

  Slade told me he cut Turner loose with a tail––newbie detective we called QB, short for quarterback. I forgot his real name, but he—like Slade—had himself a fancy degree or two. I was suspicious of cops with law degrees because it marked you in a different class, from what I could tell. I still remember the years my son studied for his JD—I swear it was like watching a slow-motion transition to absolute asshole. The kid wore tailored suits now, and he drank expensive red wine. In other words, I felt like he was somebody else’s kid. That’s what a law degree does to you. And to your family.

  “You think QB will lose the kid?”

  Slade shrugged. “God knows I don’t want to follow the punk. I know you don’t either. QB wants the OT—man’s wife is with child.” He rubbed one side of his face. His five o’clock shadow sounded like sandpaper on cement. “You talk to Kimmie or Norton lately?”

  I finished my drink, tapped the glass on the bar. Randy grunted, left his newspaper and poured me another. “What’s that got to do with this fucking case?” It came out more angry than it felt.

  “Jesus, Slim Fat. I’m just asking. Because the...Well, because I mentioned the kid.” Slade slumped on his bar stool, shook his head.

  Nothing like a cop being pissed at his partner to hold up a murder case. “It’s fine. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.” We sat in silence for some time, thinking about dead bodies and lopped off weeners. “I been meaning to call Kimmie. Seeing this girl tonight reminded me that, shit, I don’t even know my own fucking daughter. You believe that? It’s damn odd, the way people change.”

  Slade slurped coffee. The thing about Slade—and this helped him as a cop—was that he knew when to shut up, when to let things be.

  I said, “That bridge, standing under it, looking up, that got to me a little. I keep wondering why she did it, you know? And it wouldn’t matter if it was a small reason, something simple. Just any meaning behind it would help.” I sighed and drank more bourbon. “Ain’t death a bitch?”

  Slade nodded.

  The bar’s front door opened and a wino stumbled in. He wore dirty Levi’s and flip-flops, a flannel shirt over bark-colored skin.

  Randy stood and crossed his arms. “I told you you’re eighty-sixed, Freddo.”

  “The hell with that. I been drinking here since before you––”

  “Get the fuck out.” Randy stood taller behind the bar. It was like the man grew when he got angry. I wondered if the same thing happened with me. I’d seen it in Skinny Slade, and some other cops I knew. Not all of them were straight either. I’d learned that rage, given the right direction, could be a force for good. It could be the opposite of that, too.

  Slade swiveled toward the wino and cleared his throat. He pulled open his coat at the collar, revealed the badge hanging from a chain around his neck, like it was some goddamn ancient talisman. Fucking movie star cops.

  The wino hacked a loogie onto the carpet, backed away, exited the bar. Randy nodded at us, went back to reading the box scores.

  Slade said, “You get anything from Celeste?”

  “She said that Rambo kid mentioned the border fence. But, like she said, that doesn’t nail things down necessarily. Both of them mentioned Jacumba though. That sounds like it’s worth a look. Maybe we head out there today, ask around a bit.”

  “After we talk to Rambo.”

  “Shi
t,” I said. “You know where to look?”

  “Apartment complex in Mid-City. Rent-controlled. You know the kind of place.”

  “What are we waiting for then? Let’s hit him while he’s passed out.”

  Slade nodded and scratched his chin. “After I get some more coffee. You know what, I went out to Jacumba a couple months ago with...” He paused. “A lady friend, let’s say. Horseback riding. Sweat my damn ass off out there.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You’re telling me you, Skinny Slade Ryerson, went horseback riding?”

  “Cowboy up, motherfucker.”

  “I’d have paid to see that.” It was my turn to shake my head. I couldn’t see this pretty boy chasing after some news anchor on horseback. It was an image too far from reality.

  “Twenty bucks and I’ll show you a picture.”

  “You let her snap a pic of you?”

  Slade said, “It’s for my scrapbook.”

  “Shit.”

  “Twenty bucks and I’ll let you see it. Point to this, though, is something I noticed. There’s a fence out there on the border, like most other places. But I noticed there’s a big part on each side where there’s no fence. It’s just rocky hills and—”

  “You’re saying the fence—the border fence—doesn’t have fence on each side. Like, it’s not a fence? Because, if you ask me, a fence unfinished ain’t really a fence.”

  “What I’m saying is the fence runs up against rough terrain. There’s no way to put a fence along—”

  “The hell there isn’t. A fence is a fucking fence.”

  Slade finished his coffee, smacked his lips and sighed. “Again, point is, there’s a distinct stretch of border fence.”

  “And maybe that’s what Rambo was talking about,” I said. “Could be.”

  “Yes, it could.”

  Slade said, “I say we go find out.”

  We stood and dropped a crumpled ten on the bar. Randy nodded. As we walked out, he said, “A fence is a fence, boys. Where it stops, that’s where it ain’t a fence no more. Doesn’t take a detective to see that, does it?”