The Black Minutes

by Martin Solares

  “Shit,” said his lackey. “We’re fucked.”

  Three dogs barked at them from the top of the incline. They hadn’t counted on that.

  “Now what do we do?” the Blind Man asked.

  “Improvise. There’s no other way.”

  Romero turned on the lights, and, escorted by the three animals, drove the car toward the ranch. There was a tire swing hanging from the only tree they could see. Behind it were two shacks; a guy with a small rifle ran out of the first one. “Hold up, hold up!”

  Romero didn’t see him and was just barely able to brake. The shadow got into firing position behind the tree. At the same time, a brawny older guy stuck his head out of the second shack.

  The guy with the rifle blinded Romero with a flashlight and he lost his cool. “Turn that off!”

  “What do you want?” a voice screamed.

  Romero couldn’t see anything. The dogs’ growling intensified beside him. “Turn that flashlight off, goddamnit!”

  Rangel intervened before Romero messed everything up. “Police!”

  For a few seconds, all they could hear was the deafening buzzing of the cicadas. The light from the flashlight reflected off Romero’s glasses.

  Rangel noticed the man waiting in the door of the hut, lit by the headlights, talking to someone inside the shack. Rangel made out the shape of a girl or a woman squatting down through the Ocote pine branches that formed the wall of the shack. She went up to the man and handed him a gun.

  “What do you want?” the guy with the flashlight repeated.

  Romero moved to pick up his pistol, but Rangel stopped him. He didn’t want to die like a deer on the run.

  “I came to talk to Don Cipriano.”

  The man with the rifle pointed the flashlight on the ground. Rangel was able to make out a young man, about thirty years old, with a mustache and mutton-chop sideburns, pointing a small machine gun at them. Because of the rush, the guard only had on his boots and his pants.

  Rangel recognized the gun and knew that if they started shooting, he and his partner wouldn’t have a chance.

  “Put that away, Chuy,” said Vicente. “Your boss sent us.”

  Judging by the silence, the ranch hand was doubtful. Then the other guy shouted at them without moving. “What are you looking for?”

  And Rangel answered, “We came for the shipment.”

  The guy in the shack gestured to the younger guy, and, to get some time, asked, “Chuy, what’s the man saying?”

  “I don’t understand him. Who the hell knows.”

  The man in the hut came over to them—Rangel saw he was hiding a pistol in the small of his back—walking up to the right side of the car. He stopped as the detective tried to get out.

  “Let’s see. Show me something in writing.”

  As he lifted himself up to take out his wallet, Rangel kept one hand on his Colt. But the guy didn’t try anything, just struggled to read the document.

  “Vicente Rangel González, Secret Service. . . . Why didn’t the boss come?”

  “He sent you this, a bonus.”

  Rangel handed over the envelope from Congressman Wolffer, with the government seal and the rest of the bribe. Don Cipriano counted it and put the package in his pocket, while the second man kept his gun pointed at Romero.

  “Well, now,” Vicente joked, “tell the lady here to put the toy away. She seems real anxious.”

  Rangel thought the one with the machine gun was going to go after him, but he just snorted and spit in the grass.

  “You taking the truck?” the older man asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you gonna go back in that wreck or you gonna take the boss’s truck?” Don Cipriano pointed at a black truck parked behind the house.

  Rangel turned on the high beams and saw the official logo: the same three letters he had seen on the girls’ bodies.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to have Chuy follow us out,” Vicente explained. “We’d appreciate the support. We have to be at the airport in a few hours, because the boss needs to move the shipment. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Cipriano. “Just one thing: why’d you guys come?”

  “To deliver you from evil,” Romero said, and he patted his pistol suggestively.

  The ranch hand didn’t look convinced but he gave in anyway. “Okay, Chuy, give our friend a hand here.”

  Rangel calmly got out of the car. The dogs immediately went for his legs, but Cipriano yelled and they stopped. Fucking coyotes, Rangel thought. The mud had made their fur bristle.

  “And why so early?”

  “He has to take a plane to Matamoros. We’ll just have to wake him up.”

  “He never sleeps, right, Chuy?”

  “Is he here in the house?”

  “No, they’ll take you to him. But your partner stays here.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you need him for? Is he your wife?”

  Romero grumbled under his breath but didn’t respond to the insults. Chuy put the machine gun under his arm.

  “Is that an Uzi?” Rangel asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “That gun’s only allowed in the army.”

  “What, you gonna take it from me? Guess who gave it to me?”

  Don Cipriano intervened. “You’ll have to take the horse to get him.” And he motioned to an enclosure where two horses were grazing.

  They went up to two dark-colored mares, who snorted at them as they approached. Chuy jumped up on a horse and Rangel did the same.

  “Come on,” the ranch hand said.

  The mare tried to bolt and knock him off, but the detective tightened his grip as well as he could. As soon as he had the chance, he stuck his gun in the front part of his pants: I can’t trust El Chuy, this guy just rubs me the wrong way.

  When they left the enclosure, he saw a corral where sheep were sleeping. Of course, he said to himself, that asshole used animals from his brother’s ranch to lure the girls to him. He got them from here.

  The two of them rode until the hill descended into a small creek bed. They crossed a forest of tamarind trees. Once in a clearing, fingers of far-off lightning seemingly illuminated the sky, drawing lines across it and surprising the men. The vegetation grew denser, and Rangel heard a bird screech. El Chuy slowed his horse, and they came to an even bigger clearing.

  There was a house made of concrete and three shacks around it. The concrete house was built where the forest began. In case of danger, Rangel said to himself, you only had to run out the back door.

  “Is he in the house?”

  “No,” said Chuy, “over here.”

  They stopped in front of the smallest and most miserable shack. The noises coming from the forest ceased for an instant and then continued.

  The walls were made of Ocote pine branches. The gaps in between them had once been filled with clay; now you could make out the forest on the other side of the shack without much difficulty. A hammock creaked inside.

  Without losing sight of the ranch hand, Rangel moved closer. His heart was beating so hard that he thought he was going to have a heart attack.

  “Mr. Morales!” he shouted.

  “Be careful, amigo,” El Chuy reprimanded him, “don’t talk to him like that. Don’t you know who he is?”

  Rangel thought he was being very considerate of the man who had killed so many girls, so he got off his horse and walked inside the hut. The ranch hand was horrified. Immediately, the creaking stopped. As he got closer, a group of flies buzzing warned him to be careful. What the fuck is this? He immediately recognized the same stench from the abandoned building. It doesn’t matter now, Rangel said, it was already God’s will. He lifted up the swaying fabric covering the doorway and went into the shack.

  He had to blink so his eyes would adjust to the lack of light. Three empty cans of cola led his eyes to the hammock, where a body was wrapped up in a blanket. Rangel told him he’d come to look for him, and the man got
out of the netting.

  He was the spitting image of his brother: a small thin man with blond hair, no more than a hundred and thirty pounds or so, with lank, greasy hair. When he was close enough to him, Rangel asked, “Clemente Morales?”

  The man nodded.

  “You killed the girls?” he asked him quietly.

  The man sighed, as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

  “It was me.”

  “What was the first girl’s name?”

  “Lucía Hernández Campillo.”

  “Where did you kill them?”

  “In a school over by the train tracks.”

  “Shut up and let’s go. Don’t say a word. You don’t have the right to speak.”

  And that was it.

  Once they were back at the ranch, they loaded the suspect into the Chevy Nova and said good-bye to Cipriano.

  “Let’s go, Chuy, hurry up, you have to escort us.”

  The ranch hand got into the black truck and followed the Chevy Nova to the first wooden gate. Once there, the Chevy stopped so Rangel could get out to relieve himself.

  “Goddamnit,” said El Chuy, “weren’t you in a big hurry before?” And he got out to shut the gate.

  When he got back to his car, Rangel jammed his Colt .38 into El Chuy’s kidneys.

  “What the fuck? What’s up?”

  “What’s your full name?”

  “Jesús Nicodemo.”

  “Jesús Nicodemo, don’t resist. You’re under arrest for the murder of Luis Carlos Calatrava.”

  He tied his hands together behind his back with a cable and put him into the backseat of the Chevy.

  A few minutes later, Don Cipriano finished counting the money inside the shack and listened intently.

  “What happened?” The woman could have been his daughter.

  “Shut up!”

  The sound of the car on the road faded away. The man listened closely, and when the sound was completely gone, he ran out onto the hill. As soon as he saw the truck parked, he snapped his fingers at the woman.

  “María! Get me my boots.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the gas station, to call the boss.”

  “Why?”

  “They took El Chuy and left the truck!”

  26

  This is the Jackal? Rangel thought. The guy who killed the little girls? On first impression, the man looked like he couldn’t kill a fly. He was thin, with blond hair and blue eyes that were about as expressive as a wall. No one would look twice if they saw him on the street. His name was Clemente Morales and he worked for his twin brother, Edelmiro, supervising the union’s work. As the older brother became the leader of all the teachers in the whole state and built schools, his twin spent his time killing the female students.

  In the last year, Professor Edelmiro Morales had built four schools to consolidate his power. The buildings were impractical, with inadequate light and ventilation, designed irrationally, completely illogically, with no emergency exits. Professor Edelmiro had a strategy: when they were done with the construction, they noticed there was no budget for their maintenance, which wasn’t really serious, because they’d already paid the builder. A few of them closed after a few months. The remains of these schools can be seen throughout the city.

  The mother of the Hernández girl had reported that while they were expanding the public school behind her house, Morales saw her and became obsessed. When her husband wasn’t at home, the man would try to seduce her; because she always rejected him, the man had promised to get his revenge in the most hurtful way possible. Eight days later her daughter disappeared, and out of fear she didn’t report it: she knew Edelmiro Morales was extremely powerful.

  The day of his arrest, the Jackal rode along in silence. Sometimes he closed his eyes, sometimes he looked at the floor of the patrol car. He yawned once: he had a crooked canine tooth. As for El Chuy, he stared at the scenery. “Don’t get distracted, Romero,” Rangel said to his partner. “Even though they’re handcuffed, anything could happen with two guys like this.” That’s why Romero pointed his pistol at them and didn’t take his eyes off them, especially the Jackal. If he could have just one wish granted to him, Romero would’ve asked to know what the guy was thinking. There was a moment when the Jackal seemed to be smiling, so the Blind Man pointed the gun at him and demanded, “What’re you laughing about?” The Jackal, surprised, continued to stare out the front of the car. “Don’t pressure him; you don’t want him to get nervous,” Rangel said.

  “If he tries anything,” said Romero, “I’ll belt him one and throw him in the trunk.”

  He didn’t have to. The guy in the backseat got very, very calm.

  Each one of them made their own plans. We’re gonna get a shitload of money, the Blind Man said, even after dividing the reward up between us. As for Rangel, he was going to leave the state and start somewhere else. Maybe in Mexico City, maybe on the border. . . . Maybe he’d ask for work from Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, that is, if he could get in touch with him. For his part, Romero was going to buy a present for his wife and his girls; that is, after he paid six months of back rent. He’d take his wife to Acapulco on vacation and he could open a business, maybe a lunch place.

  “Hey, Romero,” said Vicente, “what does your wife have to do with you using electric shock on suspects?”

  “Thing is, when my old lady doesn’t go to work, I send her out to take a walk. Then I take her clothes iron, plug in the cord, and, damn, anybody’ll confess. I sit the suspect down in a full tub with just his underwear on, and I graze his wet knees with the tip of the cord. I say, You like 110 volts? ’Cause you can also get 220.”

  “Holy shit.” Vicente shook his head. “Just tell me one thing: is this gonna be in the papers?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “’Cause you’re the snitch, Romero. You went to Klein’s last Monday. You had a date with some reporters you thought you could get some money from, and you ran out when you saw me walk in.”

  The lackey looked straight ahead. “Swear you won’t tell the other guys; they’d come after me. I’ve gotta make a living somehow. I don’t make anything at the station, even though they fuck with me all the time.”

  Rangel turned on the radio. They were playing that Pink Floyd album, the one with the clock ticktock sounds and a woman yelling like she’s scared: Dark Side of the Moon. By free association, he remembered the German who gave him the coin as a present. Soon he’d be able to go looking for the B-side of his life, he told himself. He who started out a musician and ended up a cop.

  Romero noticed a billboard on the side of the highway that advertised a luxury auto dealer: THERE’S A FORD IN YOUR FUTURE. He took out a pen from the glove compartment and scribbled down the phone number on a paper: 31539.

  “What do you want that for?”

  “You never know.”

  The one time they stopped was near González to fill up on gas. As he was paying at the cash register, Rangel saw the front page of the paper and his smile faded fast.

  ARRESTED FOR DRUG TRAFFICKING. The picture was of Agustín Barbosa, Ciudad Madera’s mayor.

  Fucking A, he thought, fucking A. And he showed the paper to Romero.

  “Hmm,” Romero sighed. “What’re we gonna do with these guys? There’s no way we can take ’em back. What do we do?”

  “The only choice,” he said, “is to try to turn him in to Chief García. We’ve gotta take that risk.”

  They called García from a pay phone, even though it was three in the morning. Doña Dolores answered. “My husband hasn’t come back from the capital; he should be here any minute.” Vicente explained that they had the Jackal under arrest and he’d confessed. The woman asked who it was and Rangel told her, summing up his investigation: the cigar and the wool, the report, the stains on the girls’ shirts, the circumstances of the man’s arrest, and the spontaneous confession. Doña Dolores understood.

  “Go turn him in at headquarters.
I’ll tell my husband to meet you there.”

  27

  They locked him up at 3:00 and let him go at 3:05. Romero was still talking but Rangel wasn’t listening anymore. He had seen something in his rearview mirror and an alarm went off.

  Romero noticed Vicente’s restlessness. “What’s going on, Rangel? What did you see?”

  “Look at that black car, the Grand Marquis. Do you want me to point at it? In violation of all safety recommendations, even in violation of all common sense suggestions, the madrina turned around toward the back part of the car. You’re such an idiot! What do you think you’re doing, Romero? Don’t be so obvious, jackass! But his madrina didn’t move, he just kept staring. Are they official plates? I can’t tell. Then sit down, man. Speed up, his lackey said to him; let’s see if they follow us. This is too much, Rangel thought, now Romero is giving me orders. He sped through a red light, making a pickup screech to a halt, and took the street that went to headquarters. He was about to chew his lackey out but, looking behind him, said instead, “He ran the light, too; there’s no doubt he’s following us. Do you know them?” Rangel asked. I’ve never seen him before. Rangel took out his Colt and put it between his legs. “There’s no problem,” Romero said, “we’re almost at headquarters. They wouldn’t dare attack with all those cops around.”

  They parked in front of the main entrance to headquarters. The Grand Marquis stopped six feet away. “Watch out,” remarked Rangel, “be on guard, Romero, anything can happen.”

  A bum was headed toward them but they motioned decisively for him to get lost. The beggar got the picture that something was about to happen and stopped with his leg in the air, turned around, and went back where he came from, as fast as he could. When he was gone, Rangel flicked on his hazard lights and put the car in first, just in case they had to gun it out of there. But the black car didn’t move: the engine was still on.