by L T Ryan
Moss gestured to the door with his eyes. Taylor, taking the unspoken command, realized he'd remained frozen in place after opening the door and his hand was still on the knob.
"Please shut the door." The man in the hat spoke clearly and quietly.
Taylor's skin crawled. He clutched the brown bag a little tighter and it crinkled loudly. "I was just leaving."
"Shut the door." The volume and cadence of the man's voice was the same, but this second utterance had a coldness to it that caused Taylor to break into a cold sweat.
With the doorknob still in hand and the door wide open, Taylor decided to make a break for it. He felt the sun on his face as he stepped his left foot through the threshold. His right foot never felt the freedom of the pavement outside the door. The gloved hand of their visitor gripped him by the shoulder.
Taylor spun. Off-kilter, he fell backward. His body slammed into the door, closing it.
Looking into the man's eyes which peeked from under the brim, he could see two faded scars, small circles that looked like burst stars just under the man's right eye. It was the last thing he saw before the bullet passed through his head.
Six
Azul pulled the ambulance to a stop in a strip mall parking lot. It sat idling in front of a Kenmore appliance store. Both businesses on either side were vacant. And from the looks of it, had been for a very long time. Hatch leaned forward and looked past her kind-hearted chauffeur.
Through the driver's side window, Hatch saw across the street to a building that looked more like a sandcastle than a police department. The light brown stone exterior blended into the dirt berm behind it. The sign affixed to the chain link fence topped with razor wire read, “Policia Municipal, Nogales.” Beyond the fence, the steepled front with an arched, clear glass window at the center above the main doors looked more like a church than a law enforcement headquarters.
"Across the street," Azul pointed in the direction of a guard station by a pedestrian access gate, "at that little hut. You see it? That's where you check in. Tell them you're there to speak with one of the officers and they'll tell you where to go."
"Thanks." Hatched grabbed the door handle.
"Look, it's not my business—but if I can help…"
He let the question linger. Hatch noticed it was the third time he'd tried to bring it up without asking, but once again, Hatch offered nothing to satiate his thirst for understanding. Not that she didn't trust him. In their short time together, he'd proved that he was trustworthy. No, Hatch's disregard of his offer came from a different place. Protection. The people she was going after wouldn't hesitate to hurt anybody remotely connected with her and she knew this. The less he knew the better.
"You've been a great help, Azul. I can't thank you enough. I owe you." She took his hand in hers and shook it. "And I always repay my debts.".
"No need. The pleasure was mine."
Hatch exited, stepping on a half-eaten chicken wing overrun with ants. A nearby dumpster added its foul contribution to the weighty heat of mid-morning.
Just before shutting the door, Azul said, "You know where to find me, if you ever need me."
"You're right about that." Hatch chuckled and slapped a hand on the blue ambulance's side panel.
Hatch waited for a gap in traffic and then hustled across the six lanes to the sidewalk in front of the station. Out of the corner of her eye, Hatch watched as Azul pulled out of the lot and headed back in the direction they'd come from.
A short, fat officer crammed himself into the wooden guard shack after arguing with an older woman. Whatever her complaint had been, the officer met her with resistance. The squat officer folded his thick arms across his ample belly and struck a pleased look as he watched the woman turn and stomp off. Hatch took the slight incline in the walkway to the guard house and passed the irate woman who cursed in Spanish until she was out of earshot.
All the effort in thwarting the older woman's claim caused the floodgates to unleash. Sweat poured out of the portly man's forehead. The unfit police officer scrunched his brow at the sight of Hatch approaching. His face screwed up in a question mark when he realized she was American.
"Can I help you?" he asked in broken English.
"I'm looking for somebody."
The officer whose nametag read Torres cocked an eyebrow followed by a toothy grin. "Mexico is a big place."
"I'm looking for a girl. A teenager. Seventeen. I need to speak with one of your detectives."
He looked ready to gaff her off, just as she'd witnessed him do to the older woman moments ago. But instead, he surprised her. "In through those doors. That's the main lobby. Someone inside will help you."
She turned and started to the door when Hatch heard Torres say, "ID." She turned to see his opened moist palm. Hatch hoped she could avoid using any official identification, but time hadn't been on her side and she had not been able get a quality fake. Besides the hunter killer team sent to silence her in Colorado, nobody was officially looking for her.
Reluctantly, Hatch fished out her license and handed it to him. She was grateful he did nothing more than eye it for less than a second before handing it back to her with a clipboard. A ballpoint pen was attached to the metal clip by a rubber band. "Sign."
Hatch was grateful the officer didn't write it. In the best impression of the worst doctor handwriting ever, she signed it using a name combining a little girl she loved more than anything with the man who'd saved her life. Daphne Nighthawk was scribbled in the first available line. She handed it back to Torres. He returned the clipboard to the rusty nail without even looking at her signature mark.
Quietly grateful, Hatch pocketed the license. "I know it's not my business, but what was the deal with that woman?"
"You're right, it's none of your business." The guard retreated deeper into his shack like a turtle retracting into its shell.
Hatch walked away and into the main lobby.
Seven
She first heard the screams upon entering through the dark tinted glass doors of Nogales' municipal police department. The screams, more of high-pitched wails, reverberated through the open space of the lobby with megaphonic proportions.
Hatch spent time inside a variety of federal, military, and local police department lobbies across the US and overseas while serving as an MP. Combative people in the lobby were nothing out of the ordinary. The mayhem wasn't always caused by a criminal either. She'd seen plaintiffs become convicts when lost in the heat of the moment. The door closed behind her as she surveyed the chaotic events taking place.
A wild-eyed man was wearing nothing but a frayed pair of jeans wrapped around his ankles and exposing his red boxers. Once inside, Hatch waited for her eyes to adjust from the bright light of outside to the incandescent light of the interior of the lobby. In the clarity that followed, she realized he was not wearing red boxers. They were, in fact, white. The blood covering them gave them a red hue. The leakage stemmed from several long gashes on the combatant's head and skull.
He kicked wildly at the two officers restraining him. A handsome officer with an amused look on his face stood nearby, far enough away to not be directly involved in the melee. He gave an authoritative nod of his head to the bigger of the two cops holding the blood covered man. The larger officer drove a wooden straight stick baton across the top of the man's head. In the US, this type of blow would've only been authorized under a deadly force encounter. He delivered an additional blow that caught the shirtless man in the side of his neck before the fighting stopped altogether.
The two officers wearing the unconscious man's blood on their green fatigues dragged him away in cuffs. Something about not wanting to stay a night in a Mexican prison came to Hatch's mind. This experience reminded her of the truth behind its meaning. She hated to think of the conditions Angela Rothman was experiencing at this very moment.
The blood covered man disappeared behind a closed door and the hum of normalcy returned after a brief silence. The handsome offic
er remained behind. His entertainment gone, he turned his attention to Hatch.
Officer Munoz, identified by his polished brass nameplate, was of equal height to Hatch, if not slightly taller by an inch. His boyish charms were packaged into a man's physique. Munoz had chiseled good looks and a neatly gelled crewcut. His uniform was custom fit with tapered sleeves that rolled past his elbow, cinching tight underneath his biceps and engorging the veins on his clean-shaven forearms. The Nogales lieutenant looked to be no more than thirty. He smiled, broadly displaying his ivory teeth as he approached.
He pulled a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses from atop his head and hung them from the outside of his breast pocket. Hatch met his gaze.
"American? Yes?"
"Yes."
"I'm Officer Eduardo Munoz. How can I help you on this beautiful morning in Nogales?"
"You and I have a totally different idea of beautiful." She gestured to the smeared trail of blood marking the unconscious man's path.
"Oh that?" He laughed. "That's nothing to be concerned with. Just a thief."
"What did he steal that would make him fight like that?"
"Does it matter?"
"I think so."
"He stole some fruit." Munoz's smile disappeared.
"Stolen fruit caught him a beating like that?"
Munoz shrugged. "At least we didn't arrest his mother too."
Hatch thought of the old woman's heated argument and wondered if she was the mother he was referring to when he leaned in close. She choked back a cough. His cologne smelled of vanilla, chestnut, and if she wasn't mistaken, a hint of clove. It gave him a sweet, woody scent as he spoke. "How may I be of service."
Hatch looked over to the main desk sergeant who was fielding a complaint, with a line three deep waiting. Lieutenant Eduardo Munoz was as good as any, and by the frazzled look on the desk sarge's face, might be the best choice. Munoz’s proximity worried Hatch. She was in the lobby of a police department with a loaded pistol pressed against the small of her back. The borrowed clothes fit with just enough excess to hang loose enough to obscure the angular lines of the handgun's butt. She'd seen the beating they delivered the fruit thief and wondered what would be in store for her should they realize she entered a police department armed with a dead man's gun.
"I'm looking for a girl. She went missing a day ago." Hatch took a step back and pulled out her cell phone. She showed him a Facebook image of Angela Rothman. It captured the teen with her head turned. A sunset lit her red hair ablaze. It was a far departure from the last time she’d set eyes on the young girl.
"A missing girl." The lieutenant confirmed.
Hatch heard the sarcasm in his tone but didn't bite. "Her name's Angela Rothman. She's my niece. We got to Nogales two nights ago. We were supposed to head down to a family retreat at Copper Mountain today, but when I woke up, she was gone."
Munoz squinted at the screenshot. "You say this girl is your niece?"
The big officer who'd brutalized the apple thief reappeared from the door he and his partner had dragged the bloodied man through. Officer Rivera stopped beside Munoz and immediately inserted himself into their business. Who's the cutie? That, or something close to that is what Rivera chuckled to his lieutenant.
"This is Miss…" Munoz looked in her direction.
"Nighthawk."
"This is Miss Nighthawk. She's here on a family trip. Her niece Anna was gone when she woke."
"Angela," Hatch interrupted.
"Excuse me?" Munoz snarled.
Hatch saw through Officer Munoz's polished exterior. He was not a man who liked to be challenged, undoubtably worsened by the fact she was a woman. "I said Angela. Her name is Angela Rothman."
"My apologies. Yes, as Miss Nighthawk has just so kindly pointed out, the girl's name is Angela." Munoz put his hand on the bulky Rivera's shoulder. "Luis, I think you're going to need to write this down."
Rivera thumbed open a pocket and slipped out a small notepad. His meaty hands flipped to a clean page. "Go ahead with that name again."
Hatch repeated the name and she watch Rivera write it. He was slick, and if someone else besides Hatch had been there, they likely wouldn't have caught it. But she did. As Rivera looked up from jotting the name in his pad, he made a barely perceptible glance at Munoz. Something was off. If something’s not right, figure out what. If you can't, get the hell out of Dodge until you can. Simply put, if something’s not right, it stays that way until you make it so. Her dad's words always came back to her.
"I don't want to get your hopes up, but this town is home to thousands of lost souls. Do you know how many people go missing in Nogales per year?"
For all Munoz' talking, he never once asked for any details. Not even the basics like height, weight, and clothing. Nothing. Something's not right. One glaring possibility stared her right in the face. Munoz and Rivera never asked because they already knew. The how and why were still up for debate. But following her dad's advice, Hatch decided to get the hell out of that PD lobby.
Hatch pocketed her phone. "I've got to meet back with my family and check in."
"Are you sure?" Munoz gestured to a door, different from the one the bloodied man exited. Hatch had no plans of seeing what was behind door number two.
"I'll be back." Hatch took one step in the direction of the main doors.
"We'd have a better chance of finding her if we had some kind of incentive." Rivera brightened and rubbed his thumb against his fingertips in that greedy money-grubbing sort of way.
Munoz laughed. "For us to do our job effectively in our city, we find that if additional risks are warranted, then those risks come at a price. As municipal police officers, we are not paid nearly enough for what we are asked to do."
"You mean like beating somebody half to death because he stole a piece of fruit?"
"Every choice has a consequence." He closed the gap she'd started to create. The woody notes accompanied him. His hot breath kissed her neck as he whispered in her ear, "If you have a problem with how we do business, please feel free to take it elsewhere."
Hatch reeled against the overwhelming desire to slam the side of her head into the bridge of the lieutenant's nose before spinning on her heels and walking away.
Just before stepping back into the bright light of day, she caught sight of an odd-looking man sitting on a bench. A peacock trapped in a net; he wore an olive drab fishing vest over a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt. A straw-woven fedora topped off the ensemble. The peacock chewed the end of a cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth and was taking note of Hatch as she made her way outside.
She walked back past the guard, through the pedestrian gate, and onto the sidewalk. Hatch had an idea of where she would go next and started walking back toward the heart of Nogales.
A couple blocks from the police department, Hatch caught sight of the peacock man again in the reflection of a store window. He was following her. And Hatch needed to figure out why.
Eight
Hatch stood in front of a strip club. The hand painted sign depicted a stripper's bare legs standing above a T-bone steak wearing sunglasses and throwing cash. The caption, targeted at Americans, was written in English and read, Steak and legs! Get it by the mouthful!
"Their steaks aren't bad, but you might want to skip the legs—especially the morning crew." It was the peacock man. She'd stopped and waited for him to catch up. She watched as he hung back, aside from his outlandish outfit, he moved in and out of the crowded streets deftly.
She turned to the brightly colored stalker. He tipped his fedora and smiled. "If you're looking for a nice place to eat, I could take you to a café not far from here."
"I think I'll take my chances out here."
He gnawed at the cigar in the corner of his mouth, exposing his yellow stained teeth. A messy salt-and-pepper goatee framed his smile. "I saw you at the station."
"I know. You're a hard man to miss."
"Miguel Ayala, I'm a reporter with the Not
icias Independientes Para La Gente, the Independent News for the People. I know, it's a mouthful." He moved his hand to a fanny pack strapped to his midriff. Hatch's left hand instinctually moved toward the small of her back. It hovered an inch from the butt of the Glock hidden beneath the white shirt.
He unzipped the pouch and pulled out an official looking press badge with the man's picture. What lent credence to the pass was that it depicted a much younger version of the peacock man. Somebody using this type of subterfuge would typically use a recent photo. And the photo on the badge was at least ten years old and showed a clean shaven and less gray version of the man standing before her.
Sometimes the reward outweighed the risk. Hatch was in a foreign territory trying to recover a girl from traffickers and, right now, she was running low on leads. And a reporter might be just the right person to remedy that. If nothing else, Miguel Ayala, the Peacock Man, seemed good company in the interim, until she figured her next step.
He leaned a little closer. Unlike Munoz and his nutty vanilla aura, Ayala's was of coffee and stale cigar. He spoke in a whisper, "To be honest, I hate this place."
"Not a steak man, eh?"
He laughed. "I hate this place and all the others like it. But that conversation is one I'd rather have away from the little birdies that fly their messages back to their master." He stepped back and spat. "Take it or leave it. I'll be at Café de Rosa. Two blocks at the corner. Great coffee. And if I may say so myself, some pretty great company."
"I'll think about it."
And with a tip of his hat, Ayala pivoted and continued in the direction of the café. Hatch bent to check her laces. As she did, her eyes swept her perimeter. She watched for movement patterns outside of the flow. She looked for people pretending to be occupied. Surveillance is a cornerstone of any investigator worth their salt, but counter-surveillance was the real test. Harder than it sounds, Hatch was confident in her ability. She was also confident Ayala didn't have a partner and, more importantly, nobody else was following.