by Rex Burns
The adjective often applied to the project was “controversial.” The controversy was located on the prairie northeast of downtown, connected to the city by a thin neck of gerrymandered land whose population, coerced by various promises and threats, had voted to join the city and county of Denver. From the freshly laid Peña Boulevard, Wager could see the roof of sharp canvas peaks over the main terminal. They looked like an Arab campground and, separated from them by a quarter-mile of horizontal concourses and service buildings, the fifty-five-foot control tower erupted to dominate the level horizon. Boosters called it the biggest airport in the world, others said it was the biggest boondoggle in Denver history. Either way, it was big. The spread of equipment, men, and stacks of materials reminded Wager of one of those major amphibious landings the Marine Corps had always been so happy to do. Hanging ten or twenty feet above miles of the flat prairie around the tower was a dust cloud stirred by earthmovers and tractors, trucks and compactors, graders and scurrying vans carrying survey equipment, work crews, and busy clumps of still-mobile landscaping.
Wager found the office of D&S Contractors, one of a long row of semi truck trailers rigged with electric wires, a few small windows, a set of rough-cut wooden steps leading up to a door in the trailer’s side. A brass plate bearing Mr. Tarbell’s name sat on the edge of a cluttered wooden desk, and on the other side sat Mr. Tarbell. “Help you?”
Wager showed his badge and said what he wanted.
“The Lucero kid? Got shot?” Tarbell, florid and heavy jowled, made a squeaking noise through front teeth that were streaked here and there with gold trim. “Jesus. He was a nice kid, too. Hard worker.”
“I heard he’d been missing a lot of work.”
“Well, yeah, lately he has been sick or something. But I talked to his mother—she was worried about it so she called—and I told her I’d hold his job open. He was one of our student trainees. It’s something we do for the city; give trainee jobs to deserving kids.”
It wasn’t exactly corporate generosity. Elizabeth had told Wager that the job program had been written into the bid requirements, along with a few other social programs such as minority hires and public art. It was the mayor’s way of doing good as well as ensuring that a wide range of constituents got at least a little of the pie. Like a lot of things, the program cost had been buried in a multi-billion-dollar budget that, Elizabeth had told him disgustedly, had already run far over bid. Where it would ultimately run to, nobody seemed quite sure, but a lot of hands were stretched after it. “Can you give me the names of the people he worked with?”
“What you want them for?”
“Hasn’t any other officer been out to interview them yet? A Detective Golding?”
“No. You’re the first I heard about it.”
Wager nodded, as much to himself as to Tarbell. “I’m talking to everybody who knew him. Maybe Julio told them something that can help me.”
Tarbell thought about it for a couple of seconds, then pushed his chair back on its squealing rollers. “OK. Let’s go find his crew. They’re working in the north wing.”
It was one of the few areas of the site that was still only partially completed. Tarbell led Wager through a vacant doorway dwarfed by a massive wall of blank concrete and into a hangar-like space of unpainted cinderblock, exposed steel beams and conduits, the shiny glitter of new ductwork. Under the roof, a raw lattice of wires and struts showed where the finished ceiling would eventually hang to hide the service piping, and from behind a temporary shield came the stuttering electric-blue glare of a welder’s torch. The loud rattle of an air hammer echoed from somewhere at the other end of the long space, punctuated by the shrill beep-beep-beep of a piece of motorized equipment backing up. Here and there were stored piles of dismantled scaffolding, stacks of coiled wire, rows of gleaming elbows and Ts for the ventilation system. Pallets of cardboard boxes marked THIS SIDE UP were placed against one gray wall, and it was there they found Julio’s crew, four young men busy clipping the steel bands from the boxes and piling them for salvage into fiber barrels.
Tarbell whistled sharply between his fingers to catch their attention; gesturing against the deafening clatter and echo, he pointed them outside, and Wager followed, taking a last look around the site where Julio had worked.
Tarbell told them about the boy’s death. There was a murmur of “Aw, that’s really shitty” and “He was a good guy, man.”
“This is Detective Wager. He wants to ask you a few questions, see if you know anything that might help. You people tell him anything you know, right? And then get back to work.” He glanced at Wager. “This ain’t going to take too long, right? We got a pickup scheduled right after lunch.”
It would take as long as it had to, but Wager only nodded. “What’s your name?” he asked the youth standing closest to him.
“Roderick Hastings.” Tall and muscular, somewhere in his twenties. Black. A scarred nose that looked like it had met an immovable object. Didn’t like cops.
“Work with Julio long?”
“Three, four months. Since he come on the job.”
“Did he ever mention any trouble he was having with anybody?”
“Naw, man. We didn’t talk all that much anyway. Just shit about the job. You know.”
“Did he like working here?”
Hastings’s wide shoulders rose and fell. “Didn’t say he did. Didn’t say he didn’t, neither.”
“Do you know why he stopped coming to work?”
The brown eyes shifted away as he shook his head. “Just stopped coming.”
“Anything you can tell me that might help me find his killer?”
Hastings gazed off toward some equipment working on one of the runways. “Naw, man. Can’t think of nothing right now. Maybe I’ll think of something later.”
Wager handed him a business card. There was a little line for the case under the number and he wrote in “Julio Lucero.” Hastings glanced at it and slipped it into his hip pocket; at least he didn’t throw it away immediately. Wager called the next youth over. Tony Quaratino. Nervously bouncing on the tips of his toes while he talked, Quaratino didn’t add much. “He seemed like an OK dude, you know? But we didn’t talk much.”
“Any idea why he stopped coming to work?”
The youth’s grimy finger picked at a pimple on the side of his hairy neck as he shook his head. His other answers were negative, too, and Wager once again had the feeling that Julio had been little more than a name in these people’s lives, and not a very loud one at that. He gave Quaratino a business card, too, and went to the next name.
Freddy Davenport, a spray of moles across one cheek and down his neck, and a tiny goatee. Frowning with seriousness, he shook his head. “Sorry I can’t help you none. I don’t know nothing about it. We just worked together’s all.” No, Julio had never gone out with any of the crew after work—“We goes our own ways, like”—and he hadn’t seemed worried. “Just stopped coming to work’s all.”
“What kind of work do you do here?”
“All sorts of stuff: cleanup and salvage, like. Move stuff around, whatever.”
Danny Aragon. He looked a year or two younger than the rest, and Wager noticed him letting the others go ahead. Now Aragon stood alone, fidgeting with his tattered canvas work gloves and watching Davenport slouch back into the noisy building. Before Wager had a chance to say anything, Aragon asked how it happened.
“Shot. Coming home from the grocery store.”
Aragon had one of those old-looking faces you sometimes see on kids who have moved too soon into an adult world of not enough sleep and too much work. Absently, his fingers tapped at the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and Wager wondered who bought them for him. “You think it was somebody he knew?”
Wager studied the youth’s worried eyes, the flat planes of his cheeks with the lines already etched into the flesh. “I think somebody had been waiting for him. Somebody who wanted him.” He added, “They picked a place wher
e Julio wouldn’t have a chance, and whoever did it made sure with three bullets.”
Aragon stared hard at the dirt beneath his scarred and dusty work boots.
“His mother’s really broken up. He was her only son. Julio’s father’s dead, too. She’s all alone now.”
“Man …” He rubbed the back of his wrist against his nose, then said quickly, “I don’t know what happened to him—I don’t know nothing about him!”
Wager waited.
“I don’t, man!”
“OK.” Wager doodled something on the page of his notebook. “Where do you live, Danny?”
“Why?”
He tapped his ballpoint pen on the page. “Have to put something down. Regulations.”
“Oh.” Aragon told him. “That all? I can go now?”
“Julio never talked with you about anything that was bothering him?”
“No—never. Can I go now?”
Wager handed out another business card and watched the slender figure almost run toward the doorway and disappear. Then he walked back to his car, slowly.
The end of the week and the end of the month coincided, bringing payday and a weekend, both. Big Ron would be planning on a busy seventy-two hours of very profitable and very illegal activity. Officially off duty, Wager swung his Camaro into the one-way traffic up Marion Street and headed toward the Whittier neighborhood.
He had been right about the effect of the Aurora cop-killing on the size of newspaper headlines, and the television stations had been competing with each other to offer hard-hitting, pull-no-punches, straight-to-the-gut stories on crime scenes around the city. In fact, Julio’s death had been featured on one channel, though the woman announcer who pointed down at the stained sidewalk had been careful to avoid saying he was a gang member. Just that it was one more gang-type slaying. The repeated topic on nighttime radio talk shows was the boys in the ’hood, and plenty of airtime was given anonymous voices to complain about not being understood and about how society forced them to look after themselves and their brothers any way they could. Their message was the same: It was everybody else’s fault, and society was only getting what it deserved for treating them so badly.
Official Colorado, too, shared the widespread interest in gangs; Governor Harmon’s increasingly frequent press releases began to talk about plans for mandatory sentencing, longer terms for repeat offenders, and adult treatment for adult crimes regardless of the perpetrator’s age. And to talk about a three-strikes-and-out bill. The latest police department statistics told Wager that total crime figures were down in the metro area—murders had dropped almost 30 percent over the last twelve months to bring a welcome easing of pressure in the homicide section—but that wasn’t the message politicians were interested in during an election year. Neither the outs, who blamed crime on the incumbents, nor the ins, who pointed to the measures they were proposing, wanted to say that the streets were safer. Nor was Chief Sullivan willing to say that his department didn’t need more money, more personnel, more equipment to fight more crime. Even Elizabeth, busy with the neighborhood meetings that gave her the electorate’s views, said crime, youth murders, and especially gangs were the issues that kept coming up night after night. “The new statistics may say there’s not as much crime, Gabe, but that’s not what people perceive.” She shrugged. “And besides, do you think that the crime rate we have, even if it is lower than it has been, is an acceptable one?”
“No. And I’m not saying I’ll be out of a job anytime soon. I guess I’m wondering where everybody was a couple of years ago when things were a hell of a lot worse and no one seemed to care. Now there’s a lot of noise, but I’m not sure it’s for the right reasons.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means it’s an election year, Elizabeth. It’s ratings time for the television stations. It’s a circulation war for the newspapers.”
“Aren’t children still being shot? Your cousin, for example?”
He had no answer for that because it was true. But there still seemed something phony in all the attention. It was the feeling that the people who were making the most noise were somehow using the shootings, the deaths, the fears for their own profit; and when the profit had been gained, their attention would shift to some other crusade that offered a better cash flow, and not much would have changed on the street. He had tried to explain that to Elizabeth, but she kept coming up with statements like there shouldn’t be any kids with guns anyway, and people should be able to walk the streets in safety, and schools should be places for academics rather than violence. Of course they should, and Wager’s job was to help make that happen. But he couldn’t make Elizabeth see exactly what he meant, maybe because he wasn’t so certain himself. And arguing with her when he wasn’t sure of his own grounds meant setting himself up. She enjoyed argument, she was good at it, and Wager—even at those times when he knew exactly what he meant—could always count on her to find some on-the-other-hand or well-what-about-this reply that left him feeling outmaneuvered. In something like this, when he couldn’t yet find the words to say what he was thinking, he just felt dumb. It wasn’t a feeling he liked, but he didn’t blame Elizabeth for that; what he did was start going over points in his mind that he would bring up when they found time to argue about it again.
He turned off Marion onto 29th Avenue. Three or four blocks down, Fuller Park—across from Manual High School—was one of the places he might find Big Ron. Morrison Park, three blocks to the north and near Cole Middle School, was another. According to Wager’s contacts in Vice and Narcotics, Big Ron wasn’t supposed to be selling to the schoolkids, but the parks—put near the schools by the city planners of a less defensive time—were the favorite gathering places for various neighborhood groups. During the day it was mothers and their kids; when night came, the moms and toddlers fled, leaving the grounds to those who didn’t want to be seen in daylight. By now, the sun had dropped below the mountains west of town and night was slipping into the streets in a purple-red haze of dust and exhaust fumes. Cars were starting to turn on their headlights, too, and traffic was picking up, moving not with that earlier weariness that came at the end of the workday but with the building energy of a Friday night. Payday. Money to spend, things to spend it on, and tomorrow morning for sleeping late. From one passing car came the visceral thud of stereo speakers turned full volume to drum, Wager thought, like some kind of jungle message.
Pulling to the curb near the park, he sat and studied the grassy level with its concrete benches, some still resisting vandalism, and the sodium lights just beginning to glow orange. The area was mostly open: a few trees scattered here and there, a cluster of slides and swings for small kids, few clumps of shrubbery or hedges left that could conceal rapists and muggers. On the asphalt basketball court, two youths wearing their baseball caps backwards took lazy shots at a backboard. Several figures sat on benches or strolled along the walks. A handful of boys played tag football on the worn grass at one open end. They had the high-pitched voices and excited movement that kids get when the world turns magic at dusk. But none of the shapes that Wager could see had the hulk of Big Ron. He gave it another ten and then turned up Franklin toward the narrower strip of Morrison Park. Where Humboldt formed a small cul-de-sac nipped into one side of the park, sat a pair of cars. Their headlights were off, and even from this distance, Wager could tell they were real cockroaches—dented, rusty, no loss to the dealer if they were seized by a narc. Even Big Ron was smart enough not to use his Coupe DeVille for drug dealing. Wager flipped on his high beams and cruised slowly and steadily toward the cars. As he approached, puffs of exhaust showed their engines starting and they quickly pulled away, turning onto 31st. Wager took their place in the cul-de-sac and waited; five minutes later one of the cockroaches slowed at the end of the block to peer through the dusk and then speed off.
He waited some more as the darkness slowly gathered like rising water, leaving the sodium lights to show brighter and brighter cones of or
ange light. The kids playing football had disappeared, and now figures approached from the dark, paused and stared, moved hesitantly away; a kid on a bicycle rode slowly past and studied Wager and his car. Then he pedaled harder into the dark, his thin voice calling “Five-O, Five-O” into the waiting silence. It reminded Wager of one of the calls that haunted long summer evenings during his own childhood—“Olly olly all’s in free.” But this message had a less innocent purpose: “Five-O,” part of the title of an old television series, was street code for a plainclothes cop. The kid was a lookout warning his dealer. Maybe even one of those who had been shouting for a pass a few minutes ago. Wager could feel the anxiety in the restless shadows at the edges of light. But no Big Ron. That was OK—Wager didn’t expect to bust the man, just hassle his business a little. Let him know that his silence was going to irritate his customers and even cost him some money.
After a while, it was too dark to make out anything but the vague shapes, probably cursing Wager and sweating with eagerness, who moved back and forth hungrily on the fringe of light.