Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  He went ahead and pulled the dog out until he saw the mess of its head. Then he dropped the chain, drew his Beretta, and moved around the side of the house to the junipers.

  The Venetian blinds on the front two windows were closed, and the stained shades on the back two were pulled all the way down. In the back it was the same way. There was another dog chained at the back door, its head hidden under the wooden steps. Haydon didn't even bother to look. He went to the side of the house where the boat trailer stood, looked toward the street, then returned to the wooden steps. He mounted the steps over the body of the second dog and opened the back screen. He held it open with his foot as he gently leaned against the door. It was not locked. Slowly he put his ear next to the wood door and listened. Nothing. The muscles on the sides of his neck were tight as he slowly pushed open the door.

  It was the kitchen. A thin naked woman in hair curlers and a stocky man in a port authority uniform with the sleeves rolled tightly over bulky muscles sat on opposite sides of a wooden table in the middle of the room. They were gagged, and tied to their chairs. Their hands were flat out in front of them on the table, palms down, a big nail in the center of each hand keeping them in place. Each had been shot in the right ear, and they were covered with as much blood as their hearts could pump in the convulsive seconds that followed the explosions. The woman had suffered a dozen or more cigarette burns around her breasts. Only four of her ten fingernails were painted with a fresh coat of nail polish, but two fingers on each hand still had needles rammed under their nails. Some of the needle points had exited out the flesh behind the nail roots. The man's fingers had been treated differently. They had been twisted at the joints, skewed at impossible angles, the ends pulverized. Haydon recognized the technique, and remembered the John Doe in the morgue. The man and the woman had both vomited on themselves sometime during their ordeal. The surface of the table was horrifying.

  Haydon fought light-headedness, but couldn't bring himself to take a deep breath because of the stench. He moved around the table, his eyes suddenly jerking to the door that led to the rest of the house. From the kitchen door he could see into the living room, its furniture in tumbled disarray. He jerked left to a bedroom. A tall, thin young man in jeans and a black T-shirt was sprawled face up on the floor, his shoulders and head in a darkening pool. In the bathroom: a mirror broken with such force that glass was scattered all over the room and into the hallway, commode overflowed, shower curtain ripped off it; clips. Another bedroom, empty. A small house.

  He returned his Beretta to its holster and took out the latex gloves again. He didn't know what he was looking for, didn't know what they had been looking for, but soon saw they already had beei through every drawer in the house. They had looked under every cushion, under every mattress, turned every picture, searched ever; pocket in every article of clothing in every closet. And, of course they had talked to these people, and had probably learned something

  Walking back into the kitchen, Haydon stopped inside the door way near the refrigerator. His peripheral vision caught something a eye level, and he reached on top of the refrigerator beside a Sony radio and took down an open wallet. The picture of the man nailed to the table was on the driver's license: Lawrence Tucker Waite. Th wallet had been rifled. There was no money, but the credit cards wer still there.

  Haydon looked up, thinking, and it was then he noticed th woman was not so much in her chair as out of it, her back awkward! arched. His eyes followed the line of her naked body to the floor where he saw the mop head under the table, its handle angling up between her legs. From where he stood, her forward-stretched arm accented the narrowness of her waist and the flared bellows of he rib cage. It didn't matter who she was, they had taken more from her than her life. He moved mechanically around the edge of the kitche and out the back door, fighting the constriction in his chest.

  Standing in a patch of bare ground under a leaning salt cedar at the foot of the wooden steps, he spat and sucked in air, unable to get the odor out of his nostrils, the taste out of his mouth. He wiped at the perspiration pouring off his forehead, recoiled at the touch of the latex, and tore at the gloves, snatching them off in a frantic effort to free his hands. His legs wobbled, and he wondered if he was going to faint. What an absurd picture that would be, him falling away cold in the dirt outside a house full of bodies, a few feet away from a dead dog, all of them lying silently in the day's late heat, only Haydon breathing, and only Haydon eventually to open his eyes to realize how bizarre it all had been.

  He moved to the Vanden Plas and leaned on it, his hands on th roof, his arms straight out, his head slumped between his arms until he felt the tendons stretching to the bursting point at the back of his neck.

  It was Cordero's list. A teco list. Not an intended hit list. Then why had Ireno Lopez—if John Doe was Lopez—and Tucker Waite turned up dead? Had they been teco contacts or resources who, once they had served their purposes, were then dispensed with for security reasons? If so, why was Lopez found lying at the gates of their own safe house? It didn't seem to fit together. Nor did it seem like a reasonable scenario in light of the torture evident in all the killings. Why would the tecos do that to their own resources?

  The people who had done what Haydon had found in the house were looking for answers, and they had been looking for answers from John Doe/Ireno Lopez, too. What Haydon needed to know was: What were the questions, and who was asking them?

  He straightened up from the car and turned to face the house. The shadows were long now, spreading, blurring into one another like a growing stain. He had left the back door open, a sinister rectangle in the white cube of the house, a doorway to a despicable scene. There was very little to be learned about the investigation from seeing the two bodies in the kitchen, but if you had the strength, if you had the courage to look at them long enough, you would learn something about the darker corners of human nature.

  Haydon walked back to the wooden steps and pulled the kitchen door closed, using the rubber gloves on the doorknob. He walked over to the salt cedar and broke off a leafy branch, which he used to obscure his footprints at the back of the steps. He got into the Vanden Plas and backed away from the garage and onto the pavement. Leaving the motor idling, he got out and made sure none of his tire tracks were left in a dusty pocket of the coarsely crushed shell.

  He drove back to Clinton Drive, and decided against using the cubicle telephones at the Athens Bar and Grill. He would look for a booth as he returned on Wayside. The city was beginning to glisten as late afternoon slipped into evening and the light in the barrio faded into blue. Not far from Harrisburg, he saw a booth at a small convenience store near a gas station. He pulled off the street, parked to one side of the store in front of the booth, and got out. A yellow neon sign that ran the length of the front of the store threw a jaundiced glow over the parking area, turning Haydon's linen suit a bright gamboge. He called Nina.

  "I was beginning to wonder," she said. "Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine. Were there any calls?"

  "Celia Moreno, about half an hour ago. She wants to talk to you."

  "She didn't say why?"

  "No. I told her you were out, but I was expecting you to check in anytime. She said she would call back in an hour. That would be around eight-thirty, I guess."

  He looked at his watch. "She didn't leave a number?"

  "She wouldn't."

  "If she calls again before I get back, try to get a number from her. Ask her if she's at home."

  "Are you on your way home?" Nina asked.

  "Just about. I've got to make another call. Maybe two."

  "Is everything all right? You sound . . . you sound a little tense."

  "I'm fine. I'll get back to you."

  He hung up and put in another quarter. When information answered, he asked for Celia Moreno. No listing. He asked for C. Moreno. No listing. He hung up. He couldn't think of her mother's name, but he remembered the address. He reached down for the tele
phone book, knowing it wouldn't be there, and found only the dangling chain.

  Cursing, he put another quarter into the telephone. When the dispatcher answered, Haydon identified himself and asked for Lieutenant Dystal. He said he knew Dystal was out on a scene, but it was important that he talk to him. He gave the number at the booth and said he would wait ten minutes. He opened the folding door to ventilate the suffocating air inside and stood looking through the wash of yellow light at the cars on Wayside. A couple of kids on bicycles coasted up to the store from the street and went in. Yellow Chicanos, smiling yellow smiles. A yellow woman in a sagging print dress plodded across the stretch of yellow caliche carrying a paper sack loaded with empty soft drink bottles and holding the hand of a yellow child. The little girl stared at Haydon standing silently in the booth until she disappeared into the white fluorescence of the store. The woman never saw him.

  When the telephone rang, Haydon quickly closed the door.

  "Well, we found the place," Dystal said. Haydon could hear the static from the radio cars in the background.

  "There's something else."

  Dystal waited. The strain of his predicament filled the silence between them. Haydon wasn't the only one having to pay for what he was doing, but Dystal was handling it stoically.

  "There are three bodies at 1119 Stang Street, over in Port Houston. One white male in the back bedroom. A white woman and a white man named Lawrence Tucker Waite in the kitchen. Waite's driver's license is in a wallet on top of the refrigerator. I don't know who the other two are. It's a bad scene, Bob. They've all been shot, but the two in the kitchen have been tortured."

  "God a'mighty."

  "Bob, when I was in Cordero's office, I copied an address book I found in his desk. I thought Lapierre's people would find it, but I guess Cordero came back and got it before he disappeared. At the back of the book were four coded names. When I finally deciphered them, they turned out to be the telephone numbers of four people: Valverde, Ireno Lopez, Lawrence Waite, and someone named Daniel Ferretis. I don't know anything about him, but his address is 2855 Dumfries in Meyerland."

  "I'll get people over there right now," Dystal said. "You got any more surprises?"

  "No. But I think Celia Moreno knows something. She's been trying to call me, but won't leave her number with Nina. I'll be trying to get in touch with her."

  "Stu, you gonna be home later? I gotta talk to you." Dystal's voice was conciliatory, but Haydon knew that he had better make himself available.

  "I'll be there," he said.

  "It could be late."

  "That's fine," Haydon said. "I'll see you later."

  Chapter 32

  BLAS and Rubio sat at a window table in a Sandwich Chef on the corner of Kirby and Norfolk and studied a city map as the streetlights flickered, then came alive along Kirby and on the overpass of the Southwest Freeway two blocks away. It had been two days since they met with Professor Ferretis, received the money, and were told to either hurry it up or call it off. They had had no contact with him since, though Bias continued to drive by the dead drop in the mornings and at night to see if a signal had been posted.

  Because there were only the two of them now, it had taken considerably more planning and an excessive amount of vigilance to tail Gamboa. They had stayed with him all day Wednesday, Wednesday night—except for the few hours when they had bought the RDX from Waite on the ship channel—Thursday, and now Thursday evening. They had taken elaborate precautions, renting no fewer than four cars, each a different color and make, keeping them scattered in parking areas throughout the western part of the city where Gamboa moved in a relatively confined geographic area. They switched cars frequently so that Negrete's men, more vigilant now than before, would be less likely to tag them. Both Bias and Rubio had had a lot of experience at tailing, and they were smooth at it. They used powerful hand-held radios and made clipped, coded transmissions.Bias knew Negrete, and he was amused at what had been happening during the past two days. He could easily imagine the mercenary's frustration at being employed to protect a man whose ego got in the way of strict, sensible security. Despite Negrete's conscientious attention to detail, he had not been able to overcome the ingrained confidence of a powerful and wealthy man who could not conceive, not really believe, that he would be killed by assassins. Gamboa was probably agreeing to adhere to all Negrete's preventive precautions, up to a point. This was only apparent because Bias had the benefit of Ireno's scouting reports, which he had accumulated over a three-week period before Bias and the others had even arrived in Houston. Gamboa did vary his routes of travel, but over a period of weeks it was clear that only a small number of routes were used. He did vary his dining establishments, but he used only a small number of restaurants. He did vary his timetables, but only by an hour at most.

  Bias guessed that deep down Gamboa had allowed his belief in his own importance to supersede reality, just as a young man placed his concern about his own fate in the hands of the statistical odds and rarely gave death a thought. Gamboa probably regarded the possibility with a lack of serious credulity. Besides, Negrete, a man with an extraordinary capacity for venality, was being paid extremely well to keep him alive. If nothing else, Gamboa probably felt safe because he knew the mercenary he had hired to protect him would go to great lengths to preserve such a lucrative resource. It was obvious that Gamboa had more arrogance than wisdom, or he would never have remained in the city.

  But the assassination attempt had caused a few blips in the record that Ireno Lopez had kept of the limited variability of Gamboa's routine. In the past two days there had been additional bodyguards in the limousine, and now a car of them traveled in front of, as well as behind, Gamboa. Security around the house itself was beefed up. And there had been a deliberately visible increase in patrolling police cars.

  The most troublesome change, however, was something else. Twice, both Bias and Rubio had observed cars of bodyguards with binoculars and radios sitting alongside Inverness a block in either direction from Gamboa's home. They were taking license numbers, and there was no doubt the numbers were being spot-checked. Even though Bias and Rubio had rented four different cars from four different agencies to decrease the risk of being spotted, this new effort by Negrete could tap them. If the spot checking identified an increase in the number of rental cars traveling on Inverness, it could trigger an inquiry. So now Bias and Rubio had begun passing by on cross streets, and would loop back and make a run down Inverness only if there was no sign of stakeout cars.

  But the waiting was almost over. As Bias hunched over the map and sipped at the dregs of his fourth cup of coffee, he was formulating his final plans after having spent a dozen long hours poring over the notes Lopez had accumulated about Gamboa's travel routes, as well as their own surveillance in the two days after the assassination attempt. It was true that you could not predict where he would be or when, but there were only so many ways for him to get where he was going. Even in a city this size. On the average, the shortest routes were used most often.

  Gamboa conducted a lot of business—and pleasure—in the Greenway Plaza area and among the office buildings along Post Oak. Between the River Oaks and the Southwest Freeway, there were only four east-west streets that went straight through to Post Oak: San Felipe, Westheimer, Alabama, and Richmond. There were no back ways, no quiet residential streets to travel unobserved. From Inverness, San Felipe was the nearest route. Sooner or later, in the course of any twenty-four-hour period, Benigo Gamboa's limousine could be seen taking advantage of it.

  The exact point along San Felipe at which to make the hit required considerable planning. The RDX would take up roughly the same amount of space as a couple of shoe boxes, though it would have to be kneaded into a shape that would guide and enhance the force of the explosion. And that was a large part of the trouble. To do its best work, the RDX should be directly under the limousine when it was detonated, and there was little way of doing that on a public street as busy as San Feli
pe. Alternatively, it could be placed in a mailbox, or a trash can beside the street, but more than half the amount of the explosive force would be wasted in a direction away from the car, greatly reducing its effectiveness.

  It could be placed in the gutter, disguised as some form of trash—a ragged cardboard box, a torn paper sack—which would get it closer to the passing car and would guide the initial explosion in a ninety-degree radius in the car's direction. An improvement. However, the explosive might have to be left in place for as much as twenty-four hours, and in that length of time it was likely to be picked up by city cleaning crews, or accidentally detonated by a passing vehicle.

  Rubio looked at his watch. "I have to go," he lisped. "I want to see if he has any visitors tonight. The old bastard doesn't move much after the sun goes down. He huddles up like a crow after dark."

  Bias nodded, and looked at the map they had been studying. "We've got to settle on something," he said.

  "That is your problem, huh? I will do my part." Rubio grinned crookedly; his bottom lip did not behave the same on both sides of the deep notch. The nerves had been damaged on the left.

  "I'll make a decision tonight," Bias said. "We can't afford to put it off any longer."

  "Bueno." Rubio pushed back his chair as he wiped at his mouth one final time with a paper napkin. He stood and walked out of the shop without another word, or even a glance back.

  Bias watched him leave. He had never heard Rubio say goodbye to anyone, not even a casually polite "See you later." Bias had decided long ago it was a superstition. When Rubio walked away from you, you could never tell by his attitude whether he would be gone five minutes or a year. And you learned nothing from the Indian's broad, thick back.