“Yeah, but he says he wasn’t a star or anything.”
“You sure he wasn’t letting you win?”
Trevor shook his head. “He’s out of practice. But it was fun.”
“Glad to hear it.” Bruce scooped up the ball from where it lay on the asphalt playground and considered how to handle this.
I guess I’m asking you to support my right to be his father.
So little to ask. So much.
“I’m glad he’s got time just to hang with you.”
“He’s been spending a lot of time with me,” Trevor said with new eagerness, as if given permission to express it. “I heard him on the phone last weekend. Some friend wanted him to go do something. He said, ‘I’ve got my boy living with me now, you know. We have plans.’ Only, we didn’t really have plans. I mean, not like anything important. We just went to the mall to get me shoes and stuff.”
“That’s big plans,” Bruce said gravely. “You’re going to spend that much money you’ve got to consider it important.”
“They cost a bunch.” Trevor looked down at his shoes in awe. “I never had anything that cost so much before.”
Bruce dribbled the ball idly, by instinct. It slapped the asphalt and returned to his hand, the beat rhythmic.
“It sounds like your dad’s being good to you.”
“He’s not anything like I remember.” Trevor hesitated. “Could Mom have been wrong about him?”
Bruce held a lightning internal debate, then chose honesty. “No. You remember them fighting, right? Your dad really drunk. Your mom’s face all swollen and bruised.”
“Both her eyes were black this one time.” Trevor’s face screwed up with the remembering. His voice was slow, reluctant. He didn’t want this amazing father he had now to be the same man who’d hurt his mother. “So how come he’s so nice now?”
Bruce finally palmed the basketball and held it under his arm. “People can change. Mostly, though, I imagine his drinking was the problem. Some people don’t handle alcohol very well. It lowers your inhibitions.” Noting Trevor’s confusion, he said, “When you’re drunk, you act on what you’re feeling. You’re real happy, or real depressed, or real angry. So a drunk person tends to be jovial, or weepy, or violent. From what your mother told me, your dad tended to be angry and violent.”
Trevor nodded.
“And then, it may be that your mother and father were having problems that weren’t all one-sided. You know she used drugs.”
There was a discernible pause before Trevor gave a short, unhappy nod.
“Your dad wasn’t always happy about that. And the stuff she was using changed her personality, so she probably said and did things she wouldn’t have otherwise.” And that was enough on that subject, Bruce decided, watching the boy’s face. “The good part is, your mother took action and asked him to leave. And your dad loved you enough to realize he had to deal with his problems.”
“Is that why he quit drinking? Me?”
“That’s what he says. And I don’t know any reason not to believe him. Do you?”
A sharp breeze was coming off the sound. Trevor shivered. “No.”
“It might be that now you’re seeing the man your father would have been if he had never started drinking,” Bruce said. “Or maybe not. Maybe he’s a better man because he feels bad about those years. We learn from our mistakes.”
Trevor was silent again for a minute. He appeared very young at this moment, skinny and vulnerable, the boy who’d been victimized every day at the bus stop, who’d huddled in an empty apartment scraping for enough to eat while he waited for his mother to come home.
Bruce’s chest hurt suddenly, and he knew he loved this kid. Knew he’d have been a good father if he had had the guts to take him home.
What hurt now was realizing his insight was way too late out of the starting gate. Trevor’s biological father was doing a good job, too, and he loved Trevor. Like he’d said, he had a right.
“I miss Mom sometimes,” Trevor said in a small voice.
“Of course you do.” Bruce stepped forward and wrapped an arm around the boy.
For a moment, he leaned against Bruce. Then, with a sniff, he straightened. “I keep thinking she wouldn’t like me being with Dad.”
So that was what was bothering him. He thought he was betraying his mom by loving his father.
Bruce shook his head. “One thing you’ve got to remember is that way back, when they first met and got married and decided to have you, she loved him. What she got to hating was the guy who drank too much and was mad all the time. Letting go of that hate was hard. She had trouble believing your dad had really changed. But I think she’d be really glad to know he actually has, and that you’re safe and loved. She loved you more than anything herself, and she’d want whatever is best for you.”
Trevor swiped at his face and half turned away, embarrassed to be caught crying. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” he mumbled.
“I suspect so.” Or caught in the purgatory between life and death that was a crack addict’s final months.
“She wouldn’t have stayed away otherwise.”
The twelve-year-old nodded, his face bleak but his expression showing that he was also comforted by his faith that nothing but death would have made his mother abandon him.
“You’ll keep coming to see me, right?” he asked.
Bruce smiled and squeezed his shoulder, hiding his own grief. Trevor wouldn’t need him for much longer.
“Are you kidding? Of course I will.”
“Okay,” the boy said, relaxing at the reassurance, the promise that Bruce wouldn’t let go until he was ready.
“You hungry?”
“Yeah!”
They started walking toward the car, the ball still tucked under Bruce’s arm. “Pizza?”
Trevor cast him a scornful look. “We always have pizza.”
“You might’ve just had it.”
“I never get tired of pizza. It’s my favorite food.
Except, Dad makes really great tacos. He doesn’t say I have to put tomatoes or anything on them. I like to just have the meat and cheese and sour cream. But he doesn’t buy those hard tortillas, like Mom did.”
“The ones that are always stale.”
“Yeah! Dad gets these corn ones that are fresh from some little store, and he heats them up, and then he…”
Bruce listened to him rhapsodize about his father’s culinary genius, followed by his father’s exemplary taste in movies and clothes and pretty much everything else, and felt that ache under his own breastbone.
This was the crummy part of loving someone: the having to let go.
TUESDAY, BRUCE AND KARIN had lunch, as they’d taken to doing regularly at one of the half-dozen cafés near A Woman’s Hand. They were sitting at a sidewalk table under a green, leafy tree, talking about the latest imbroglio involving the police chief and the city council, when his cell phone rang.
He glanced at the screen—253 area code, meaning south of Seattle down through Tacoma. He didn’t recognize the number, but excused himself and answered.
“Detective Walker.”
The spate of apologetic Spanish required him to shift gears.
“Señora Sanchez?” For a moment he didn’t recognize the name. Then it clicked. Vicente Sanchez, the owner of the vehicle when Bruce ran the license plates. This was the woman from the Kent grocery store, the one who’d showed a flicker of recognition when she saw the photo on his flyer.
“I wasn’t sure,” she was telling him. “I asked my sister to go look at the picture, too, because she is better with faces than I am. She says the tall man in your picture is Carlos Jimenez.”
Satisfaction filled him. So, even though Carlos had used a fake last name at the lumberyard, he’d stuck with his given name. People on the run often did.
Karin was watching him, her gaze arrested by his expression.
“And how do you know this Carlos Jimenez?” he asked.
Car
los lived in a trailer a couple of miles from them, Señora Sanchez informed him. Bruce gathered from her disdain that his was a run-down place, not that nice, perhaps trashy. She’d heard he was away, that he’d worked the strawberry fields earlier and might be picking blueberries down in Oregon now. She only knew him a little—which was why she hadn’t been sure that day.
“Can you tell me how to find Señor Jimenez’s place?” He kept his voice easy. “Perhaps he’s there after all.”
“I asked other people,” Señora Sanchez said. “They say someone else is living there right now. A man who isn’t very friendly.”
He sat up, his elbow jostling his coffee cup. Karin snatched it before it could go over. Bruce hardly noticed.
“Have children been seen there, too? Did this person notice?”
“She thought she saw a little girl in the window. When she told me that, I decided I should tell you. For poor Señora Escobar’s sake.”
“You did the right thing,” he reassured her. “If the man isn’t Roberto Escobar, there’s no harm done. Like I told you, I don’t care about papers.”
After further nudging on his part, she told him where Jimenez’s shabby trailer was. He thanked her several times, and was finally able to end the call.
Karin had been waiting, lips parted. “You learned something.”
“The woman saw my flyer and recognized Roberto’s friend. But the friend is away, and someone is staying at his trailer.”
“You think it’s Roberto.”
“Don’t get too excited,” he warned her. “False leads are a hell of a lot more common than good ones.”
“But you’re excited,” she observed.
She knew him too well.
“I’ve got a feeling,” Bruce admitted. “But my gut’s been wrong before. I’ll check out the place this afternoon.”
“Will you call me? Immediately? I want to be with Lenora if you find them.”
“I promise,” he said. He would have anyway. She’d been with him every step of the way on this one. She deserved no less.
They’d both lost interest in lingering. He paid and they walked back to the clinic, where they parted. Using his cell phone, Bruce let Molly know where he was going.
Señora Sanchez’s directions took him to a rural part of the Auburn Valley. He’d never been in this particular area before, and was a little surprised at how run-down most of the houses were. The prosperity that had sent real-estate values skyrocketing in most of King County hadn’t reached this far south of the city yet. To each side of the road, fences sagged, yards were filled with disemboweled cars and trucks set up on cinder blocks, the paint on houses peeled, and mailboxes were dented and listing on semirotted posts.
He passed the Sanchez home, and noted that although it was modest, this yard was tidy and someone had encased the mailbox in a steel barrel to protect it from the baseball bats teenage vandals liked to use when cruising rural roads.
Go one mile farther, she’d instructed him, and turn at the purple house. Which was indeed an eye-popping purple. The owners were also fond of plastic garden decor, from a wishing well to multiple deer, rabbit and gnome statues.
A quarter of a mile farther, he found the dirt road that she’d described to the left. A row of mailboxes at the corner told him that there were eight inhabited properties down this road. He could drive partway.
These houses and trailers were scattered far apart, each set on an acre or more. A couple had pastures containing spavined horses or a few goats. A cloud of dust plumed behind his car, although he drove slowly. He could see the dead end of the road ahead when he made the decision to pull to a wide bit of shoulder and walk.
Feeling conspicuous, he hoped like hell no one—and especially Roberto Escobar—happened to drive by right now. Maybe he should have left his car out at the main road.
Yeah, and then he’d have had to walk farther. No one who spotted him would mistake him for anything but a cop.
Three driveways split at the end of the road. Jimenez’s was the one that led to the left. Bruce took advantage of a stand of scraggly alder trees and vine maples and left the gravel road, trespassing over someone’s land. He moved slowly between the narrow trees, carefully, pausing to listen. The hair on the back of his neck had begun to prickle. He kept having flashbacks to army reconnaissance missions.
On the edge of the small woods, he found a towering mass of blackberries, thorny and impassable. Sucking his hand and swearing, he backtracked until he found an opening that allowed him to look across a grassy field studded with more, leggier blackberry vines to the single-wide mobile home Señora Sanchez had described. Indeed, it appeared barely habitable, set up on blocks, like the rusting hulks of cars and trucks that also made the property unsightly.
From here, he couldn’t see whether any vehicle that still had wheels was parked beside the trailer. He wished he routinely carried binoculars. He set his phone to vibrate rather than ring. Then, using the cover provided by the derelicts in the yard, Bruce bent low and trotted through the grass, crouching finally behind an ancient tractor.
He inched to peer around it, and gave a feral grin when he saw the dented blue Buick. Goddamn. Escobar was here. He hoped like hell the children were, as well.
Bruce settled in for what might be a long wait. He had plenty of practice at stakeouts. He let his mind free-float while he crouched, scarcely blinking as he watched the trailer. He remembered Lenora, frail and wary, in that first self-defense workshop, then the sight of her crumpled body in the parking lot. Her still figure in the hospital bed, chest rising and falling but no other sign of life. Karin sitting beside the bed, talking about gardening and mothers and the happenings outside the walls of the hospital, amused and vibrant and thoughtful. Most of all, he envisioned Lenora Escobar once she’d awakened, her huge, haunted, dark eyes brimming with tears.
Oh, yeah. He could sit here for the next two days if he had to.
But it wasn’t more than an hour later that he heard a child crying, then a man’s angry voice, too muffled for words to be distinguishable. Another voice—a girl’s? It, too, rose to a wail. A door slammed. Something crashed inside, and the first sobs abruptly cut off. The second, shriller, ones hung in the air an instant longer, like an echo, then fell silent, as well.
Bruce saw a shadow move inside, a figure passing back and forth in front of one of the windows. The pace seemed quick and agitated.
Not enjoying single parenthood, Roberto?
Time passed. Bruce waited. At last, the front door—or was it the only exit? he’d have to check—opened. A man stood on the top step, scanning the yard, his gaze narrowed and suspicious. Had a neighbor called, mentioning the strange vehicle parked beside the road?
But after a moment Roberto pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit up. Relaxing infinitesimally, Bruce realized suspicion was Roberto Escobar’s constant companion these days.
“Papa?” a small voice called from the open door behind him.
He turned and snarled something, then swung back to face the yard. The child didn’t ask again.
Movement at one of the windows caught Bruce’s attention. A child’s face appeared. As Señora Sanchez’s friend had said, a little girl’s. She must be standing on something to peek out. In that glimpse, Bruce read desolation.
Anna Escobar, at least, still lived. Bruce guessed the first cry must have been the little boy’s. From the sequence of cries, he thought Anna must be doing a nearly-five-year-old’s best to protect her younger brother, or at least to deflect their father’s rage. She had learned, perhaps, from watching her mother.
At last Roberto went back inside. Eyes on the single-wide, Bruce pulled out his cell phone and made the calls that would bring out a SWAT team. He faded back to the stand of trees and made his way in a large circle around the trailer, which had no other door. Then he walked rapidly to his car. Not until he was out on the main road and had chosen a driveway that looked rarely used, where he could park and
watch unseen for the Buick in case Roberto decided to make a run to the grocery store, did he dial his phone again.
“I found them,” he told Karin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BRUCE HAD MADE the decision to move a team into place around the perimeter of the single-wide mobile home, but otherwise to wait until Roberto emerged to go to the store or do another errand. Hell, if he’d just take a few steps from the front door while having his smoke they might be able to bring him down. Bruce wanted him to be separated from the children when they attempted to make the arrest. A man as cold-blooded and egocentric as he was wouldn’t hesitate to use the children to evade capture.
One by one, black-suited SWAT-team members slipped across the field and took up their stances behind the hulks of cars, trucks and tractors that studded the yard. A couple eased up to the single-wide itself, where they flattened themselves against the exterior walls so they couldn’t be seen through the windows.
They’d considered trying to get in through one of the windows to the children, perhaps passing them through, but given the children’s ages, the consensus was that they couldn’t be trusted not to cry out. And the windows were small. Even an adult Molly’s size, say, would have a hell of a time squeezing in. It wasn’t going to happen without alerting Escobar, whose frequent, restless appearances at the front door suggested that he was hypervigilant.
A couple of snipers were in place, as well, and Bruce knew they were itching to take that shot, but until Escobar threatened one of the kids, killing him wasn’t justified.
The girl’s face appeared a couple more times. Bruce, sitting behind a pickup truck that had no axles or wheels, wondered what she was looking for.
The afternoon and early evening passed with no indication Roberto had any intention of going anywhere. Every cop in hiding tensed when he walked out once. Were they going to have a go? But, whatever he’d planned, he wheeled and went inside.
Back in the trees, they started holding a discussion. Did they camp out here all night? Hope for a chance tomorrow? Bruce didn’t like the odds in a confrontation.
The Man Behind the Cop Page 17