“He was at the theater with some of his army buddies, and we saw each other and couldn’t stop looking. I had never been out with a black man, and my parents thought I was crazy when I finally told them. He came up to me and started talking, and next thing I knew I told my friends to go to the movie without me. We just went to a diner and got Cokes and yakked for hours. I got in trouble for getting home late, but I didn’t care.”
“That’s basically all it took,” Hugh added. “We were married eight months after that, and she”—he ticked his head toward Lulu—“was born ten months later. We went into debt honeymooning in Honolulu, and she was conceived there, so we called her Lulu.”
Oliver had looked at Lulu then, who smiled almost shyly, and saw the love with which her parents showered her reflected back at them.
“Oliver?”
“Yes?” Jeannie had been speaking, but he hadn’t been hearing anything she had said.
“Where were you?”
“Thinking about that time the Lavenders came to dinner here,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“I know what you mean.” Jeannie had been quiet, contemplative, ever since Buck Shelton left. She had gone back to her painting for a while, then come out and started dinner. They were at the table now, eating without enthusiasm, cruising through the evening on autopilot. Warren Zevon’s The Wind played softly in the background.
Back in San Diego, Jeannie had been a volunteer for two different organizations, Habitat for Humanity, which worked building housing for low-income people in Mexico, and the Nature Conservancy. She hadn’t earned any money, but doing good work brought her an enormous amount of personal satisfaction, more than she had taken home in her previous career as a middle manager at an electronics company.
Since moving to Arizona, she hadn’t found much, other than the part-time gallery work, to do with her days. Oliver worried about her, afraid she would get bored, restless. So far she seemed content to work on the house and be domestic in a way she never had before. Whether that could last, he didn’t know.
“It’s just…it’s so awful I can’t really process it,” he said after a while. He put down his fork, done. Eating another bite just seemed like too much effort. “And I can’t help wishing I could come up with something that would save Lulu. Something she told me that I’m not thinking of, maybe, that could be pertinent.”
“You can’t hold yourself responsible for the actions of a madman,” Jeannie said. She folded her napkin and set it beside her plate, a sign that she had given up on dinner as well.
“I’m not,” Oliver replied. “I’m just wondering…you know, if it was someone who knew her. Someone she knew, who maybe she mentioned at one time or another.”
“If it comes to you, then that’s great,” Jeannie said. She rose, lifting her plate, reaching across the table for his. She had cooked, which meant it was his turn to do the dishes. “But you can’t force it, I don’t think.”
He followed her into the kitchen, carrying glasses and silverware. By the time he got there, she had put the plates in the sink and was running water on them, but her shoulders were shaking. He put his hands on them, kissed a tear off her cheek. She pressed back into him, gripping his hands with hers.
“Forget the dishes,” she said, her voice husky. She blinked back tears, turning her body into his arms. “You can do them after you do me.”
“Right now?” he started to ask. But her mouth was on his, hungry, tongue probing, and he didn’t bother to talk any more. Jeannie’s hands roamed down his back, cupping his ass, then moving forward to undo his belt with an urgency that was unusual but exciting.
He managed to turn off the running water before she pulled him onto the floor.
But just barely.
11
He had rented the mountain cabin ahead of time. Knowing what would likely transpire, what to expect, was only one of his gifts, but in this case it had been less an application of talent and more common sense, thinking through the plan, that had been responsible. He had known he’d be taking the girl away from the house. He would need a place to keep her. It would need to be secluded, private.
So he had spent a couple of days driving through Arizona’s high country. He had settled on the Mogollon Rim area, where a natural escarpment two hundred miles long marked the edge of the Colorado Plateau. From the Rim, he could look down two thousand feet onto rolling, pine-covered mountains that slanted toward the deserts of southern Arizona somewhere out of sight. In the other direction, to the north, the plateau gave way to the ruddy arid land of the four corners region, the redrock deserts of Utah.
The cabin he found was a quarter mile from the rim’s edge, screened by Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and aspen. Bare dirt, partially carpeted by pine needles, surrounded it. A long driveway led in from the Rim Road, passing only two other cabins on the way. The one nearest the road belonged to the owner of the property, a woman named Peggy Olsson.
Driving the Rim Road, he had opened his senses, listened to his pulse—another of his talents—and it had told him when to turn. He had pulled his truck to a stop outside Peggy Olsson’s cabin and braved a fierce wind to knock on her door. A minute passed, then a woman pulled it open with a tentative, awkward motion. She was in her forties or early fifties, with red hair showing strands of silver, glacial blue eyes, a hard mouth and a voluptuous figure that a bulky sweatshirt tried hard to disguise. “Can I help you?” she asked, her voice smooth as strained honey. She did a better job than many at masking her distaste for his appearance.
“I’d like to rent a cabin,” he told her. “I understand you might have something available.”
She gave a surprised, nervous laugh and forced a smile. The fingers of her right hand pinched a few strands of her coppery hair and fed them into the corner of her mouth. “Where’d you hear that?’ she asked. “I usually rent them in the summer but close up after Labor Day.”
“So you do have an empty cabin?” He already knew she did, of course, and that she would agree to rent it to him. But he had to go through the motions. Knowing the outcome didn’t allow one to skip the steps necessary to reach it.
“Well, yes…”
“I’d be happy to pay whatever your summer rate is. A little more, maybe, for the inconvenience. You won’t even know I’m there. I’m working on a project, see, and I’m looking for a private place where I won’t be disturbed for a few weeks.”
“Not much chance of that,” Peggy said. “It gets quiet up here after the season. Sometimes the road isn’t even open. You okay with that?”
He ticked his head over his shoulder toward the four-wheel-drive truck parked there, an old green Ford full-sized pickup with a tan Gem camper shell, bleached almost white by the sun. Faded gold curtains covered every window. “Sure. That thing’ll go just about anywhere.”
“I can’t handle laundry or meals or anything like that. You’ll be on your own. There’s a Laundromat and a grocery store over in Show Low, and more choices down in Payson, of course.”
“On my own’s the way I like it,” he said.
She gazed out toward a big pine, its branches swaying in the wind. “Okay, then,” she said. “I guess I could use the money, so if you’re okay with the terms then I guess we have a deal.”
“That’s great,” he said, favoring her with his best approximation of a smile. Sometimes that soured an agreement, but Peggy Olsson wasn’t really looking at his face.
A week later, he returned and unloaded his cargo into the cabin, replacing the rope that bound the girl with shackles that he chained to a radiator in the second bedroom. He had moved all the furniture out of the room, leaving only a mattress on the floor, a metal bowl and a roll of toilet paper. He would bring her meals to her on a plastic tray and take them away when she was done. The whole ordeal wouldn’t have to last long, he hoped. Just until she told him what he needed to know. Or until he had the girl—the one he really wanted, the precious one—in his hands.
He should already have known which it would be. But he couldn’t see the outcome of all this, didn’t know which way it would go.
That failure troubled him more than anything else.
12
When Gabriel Rodriguez Loreto had heard the Call, he was sitting between two stunning women sporting four of the biggest breasts he’d ever seen outside of a porn film. The one at his left hand was blond (not naturally, darkness at the hairline proved that, but her hair was frosted to near-platinum in spots, so he thought the roots just added to the overall look), wearing a shiny gold dress cut almost to her navel in front, with a hemline that barely cleared the tops of her thighs. Her spike-heeled shoes were made of a transparent plastic embedded with flecks of gold, and her jewelry—hoop earrings, a thin choker, a couple of rings and an ankle bracelet on her right leg—was also gold. Her right hand was on Gabriel’s thigh, and not just sitting there but kneading, long fingernails sometimes digging painfully into the flesh through his silk pants. The pressure of her hand promised all manner of pleasures, once they left the club and went back to her place.
The woman on his right appeared, at a glance, to be more covered up. On closer inspection—and Gabriel had inspected very closely indeed—the top that pretended to disguise her abundant charms proved to be made of a thin black mesh, the holes in which showed everything in satisfying detail. The top met satiny black pants at her narrow waist, tight enough to show that she wore no underwear at all underneath them. She had on black strapped high heels, a sinuous silver threaded chain at the waist, drop earrings and, beneath the mesh but still visible, a small gold crucifix dangling deep in the canyon of cleavage.
This woman’s name was Natalya, she had said. Her hair was black, her makeup heavily applied, with deep red lips surrounded by a thin black line, black around her eyes and rose on her cheeks, dusting over what looked like skin badly scarred by acne. She had told him her name immediately before describing a few of the things she planned to do with him. As she shouted these words into his ear, in order for him to hear over the thundering techno blaring from the club’s speaker system, she had rubbed her breasts back and forth across his arm. She punctuated her pledge by shoving her tongue into his ear and swirling it around a couple of times, then leading him over to the low leather couch where the blonde, whose name Gabriel still didn’t know, joined them.
Carolina, his wife, wouldn’t approve of him doing any of the things Natalya had suggested—at least, not with Natalya. But there was much about Gabriel that Carolina didn’t know, couldn’t know. She knew he had taken a new job, working with his brother Enrique, and she knew it was a lucrative position, but she didn’t know the details of the job. Being told would only put her in danger, and make her worry. She might guess, but Gabriel would never confirm or deny.
The club was a riot of loud music and sweaty bodies writhing in dance and other activities, flashing lights and the smells of perfume, tobacco, alcohol, sweat and sex. A low ceiling made the bass boom even louder than it might have, made the lights more blinding, the whole scene more intense. On the second floor of a downtown block in Sonoita, with a shoe store and a bakery below, the club held a hundred people comfortably, but half again that number had crammed inside. Two months before, Gabriel would never have been allowed through the door. That was before Enrique had arranged for him to become a soldier in the Sonora Cartel. With that position had come cash, nice clothes, respect and the opportunity to meet the kind of women he had only dreamed of. He was strapped, with a nine-mil tucked into a leather shoulder holster—just like James Bond’s, according to the guy who had sold it to him. He had a buzz on, and a film of perspiration coated him, and he would end the night in the arms of one or both of the fine babes who were coming on to him.
Except then he had heard the Call. Or lived it, to be more accurate. The club, the music, the smoke and noise and crush of the crowd, even the women, had all dropped away, vanished. He was transported (and for a few seconds he worried that some of the blow he had done that night was tainted, somehow, giving him hallucinations) deep into the jungles of central Mexico. He was behind the wheel of a small truck, and he was filled with a sense of well-being that nothing, not even his new, exalted position with the cartel, had ever given him.
A blink, two, and then he was back in the club. Natalya and the blonde stared at him, aware that he had, if only mentally, abandoned them for a moment. Gabriel gave them the easy grin he’d been practicing in the mirror for just such an occasion, but he knew the grin was shallow, barely scraping the surface. He couldn’t genuinely smile, because with his return to the club and his real life had come an overwhelming sensation of aching emptiness.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“What?” the blonde asked. He looked deep into her brown eyes, blinking, vacuous. She had a body, no doubt some skills, but ultimately nothing to offer him that mattered. The same went for his fancy clothes, his expensive pistol, his shiny holster. It was all meaningless. He belonged out there in the jungle. The vision or whatever it had been had lasted only seconds, and he didn’t know what it all meant, but he knew with absolute certainty where he had to be, and when.
He stood up with difficulty, brushing aside the hands of the two women trying to hold him back. He pushed through the bodies on the dance floor, looking for Enrique. A couple of minutes of searching turned him up, body pressed against yet another incredible-looking woman, their mouths locked on each other. Gabriel grabbed Enrique’s shoulder, shaking it. “Enrique,” he said, “I have to go. I need your truck.”
“Buy your own, ese,” Enrique said. He was wasted, his words slurred, his handsome face seeming close to collapsing in on itself.
“I don’t want the new one, the Tahoe,” Gabriel clarified. They shouted at each other. “Just the old Toyota. That’s still in your garage, right?”
Enrique let go of the woman and turned to Gabriel. He nearly fell forward, catching himself on Gabriel’s shoulders. His fingers squeezed hard, digging in uncomfortably around Gabriel’s shoulder blades. “You’re talking crazy, man,” he said. “Sit down, let one of those fine putas blow you, you’ll feel better.”
“I’m not kidding, Enrique. I have to go tonight, right now.”
“Arturo has a job for us later on,” Enrique said. “You’re going nowhere, mi hermano.”
Arturo was their jefe, the boss, the highest-level cartel officer Gabriel had met. He lived in a mansion outside of town, surrounded by twelve-foot walls and guarded by men with machine guns. His pool, Enrique had said, always had women like Natalya and her friend in it, swimming naked. Behind the house was a caged enclosure in which two Bengal tigers paced, cared for by a man who had once been in charge of big cats for the San Diego Zoo. He had brought his own recipe for tiger food from the zoo, but Arturo occasionally supplemented their diet with the corpses of those who crossed him.
“Fuck Arturo,” Gabriel said. “There’s something important I have to do.”
Enrique slapped a hand across Gabriel’s mouth. In his inebriated condition, he smacked his brother harder than he intended. His eyes widened and he moved the hand away, kissed Gabriel once. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But if you say things like that in public, I’m not going to be able to help you, either.”
“It doesn’t matter, Enrique, because I’m leaving.”
Enrique still gripped him by his left shoulder. His breath in Gabriel’s face was hot and reeked of mescal. “Dude, if you walk out that door, there’s nothing I can do for you. Arturo wants us later on. You can’t just decide that you have other plans.”
“What if I wanted to leave with Natalya?”
“Anything you want to do with Natalya you can do right here,” Enrique told him. “What, you think someone’s going to arrest you because you have your dick out in public? We own the police, Gabriel. And Arturo owns the club. You leave, he’ll know about it. You’re gone longer than it takes to piss in the alley, he’ll send people after you. One of
them might be me.”
Gabriel shrugged and pushed his big brother’s hand off his silk shirt. “I’m sorry, Enrique, but I have to do this thing. I have no choice in the matter. I wish I could make you understand, but I can’t, so I’m just going to ask you to trust me.”
“I trust that you’re committing suicide, and you won’t let me stop you, that’s what I trust.”
“Think what you want, Enrique. When I’m done, I’ll bring your truck back.”
Enrique clapped his hands over his own ears. “Don’t let me hear where you’re going, Gabi.”
Gabriel looked into his brother’s eyes for a few seconds, wishing there was a way to explain, or something else he could say. But they could barely hear each other as it was, shouting at top volume, and he knew Enrique was right. If Arturo wanted him to do a job and he wasn’t available, Arturo would take that as a treasonous act. The tigers would be well fed if they found him.
He turned away and headed for the door. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Only that he got the truck and drove south, through the Mexican night, as fast as he could.
She waited for him, out there in the jungle.
Three weeks had passed since then. Gabriel had kept his appointment. Now he drove his brother’s truck north, always north. The cab was crowded with two other men in it, the back weighted down so much that the front wheels didn’t always find the purchase they should, especially on dirt and gravel roads.
He missed Enrique, and there were moments, when he woke up in the middle of the night by the side of the road, that he feared what would happen to him when his task was done.
But he had not regretted his decision for a moment.
13
After his visit to the Bowles place, Buck returned to the Lavender house and spent the rest of the day there, walking it inside and out when the rain allowed, taking photographs and measurements. A forensics team finally showed up, and he vacated long enough to let them do their work. Not hungry, he skipped lunch.
Missing White Girl Page 5