The Devil's Bones

by Larry D. Sweazy

  The police department consisted of the main entry, the dispatch desk, and two small offices. There was an odd musty smell that accosted Jordan's nose every time he walked in the door of the police station. The white ceiling tiles were stained, little splotches of brown that looked like Rorschach tests, and mold on the window sills all contributed to the smell, but he wasn't sure that was all there was to the odor. He was almost certain there was a dead mouse or two decaying somewhere, probably in the ductwork. Or the smell was Louella's perfume. Either way, it wasn't pleasant.

  “Holister just called, he wants you to meet him out at Longer's Pond,” Louella said, spinning in her chair to face him.

  Holister Coggins had been the marshal in Dukaine for thirty-one years, and his daily routine was as rote as the change of seasons—always on time, always predictable, always in the same place at the same time every day. He reminded Jordan of a turtle basking in the sun, not moving off his log unless he absolutely had to.

  Jordan was becoming just like Holister. He liked his routine, liked things in their place, where they belonged. But his last shift had been anything but normal, and instead of his world being black and white, like it normally was, his life was suddenly as gray as a funnel cloud just before it touched the ground and became a tornado. He knew, deep in his heart, that things hadn't ended with Ginny when he walked out of her trailer. It had only been a start, and finishing it was not going to be easy, no matter how it turned out.

  “What's he doing out at the pond? He's usually at the café having breakfast about now,” Jordan said. He was really in no mood to see Holister, all things considered, but he was mildly curious why the old man was at Longer's Pond so early in the morning.

  “I don't know. He doesn't tell me anything until he comes in the office. He tried to call you earlier, but you didn't answer,” Louella said. She had the face of a bird, and she changed expressions constantly, always pursing her lips or squinting her eyes through the thick plastic herringbone glasses she'd worn forever. Her hair was tied up in a tight bun with spindly silver hairs poking out haphazardly, and she constantly pulled the miniature knitting needle that held the bun together in and out, never satisfied with its position. Louella Canberry couldn't sit still if her life depended on it. If she wasn't typing a report, she was on the phone talking to her brother, Albert, who owned the local funeral home, or some other family member, keeping up with all the latest gossip around town. She not only annoyed Jordan, she drove Holister nuts too. Johnny Ray treated her like she was Gladys Presley.

  “Nobody called me,” he said, unsnapping his gunbelt.

  “I'm just telling you what he told me.”

  He looked at the clock over the console. “I'm off shift in ten minutes.”

  “Holister said he wanted you out there, now,” Louella said, imposing a reserve of authority she'd once used ruthlessly on disobedient second-grade students. “I'm pretty sure he knows what time it is.”

  “Call back and see what he wants. It's time for me to go home and go to bed. This heat's drained me,” Jordan said. It was not necessarily a lie, but he wasn't about to tell Louella why he was in such a hurry to get out of there.

  The air-conditioning was on full-blast, but it was still warm inside the room. The two offices were directly behind the dispatcher's station, Holister's and the one he shared with Johnny Ray Johnson. There was no jail in Dukaine. Any apprehensions required a trip to the Carlyle County jail in Morland, twenty miles away. The temperature of the police station bounded in extremes. In the summer it was always too hot, and in the winter it was always too cold. Radiant heat and window air-conditioners did little to steady the comfort in the aged building, and the Town Board's budget was so tight that the thought of upgrading any equipment that wasn't vitally necessary was never put on the table for serious discussion. They wouldn't hire another deputy for the same reason. Sweat ran down Jordan's back, but Louella showed no sign of being overheated. She looked like she'd just walked out of an icebox.

  Louella muttered something under her breath, spun back around to the console, and did as she was told.

  Jordan walked into his office, a ten-by-ten room painted light gray with a small nicotine-stained window next to the gun locker, a desk similar to Louella's, a file cabinet, and a corkboard full of wanted notices and memos from INS.

  The Immigration and Naturalization Service used the office when they were in town checking green cards and work permits. He didn't look forward to those times, which came predictably three times a year: at the start of harvest, followed by a “surprise” visit every August, and then again at the end of the harvest. The INS agents treated the entire department as if they were nothing more than low-life rent-a-cops, po-dunk Barney Fifes who knew nothing about law enforcement. It was easier to let the agents think what they would, because there was nothing that would change their minds. But as far as Jordan was concerned, there were very few small-town police departments that had to deal with the situations the Dukaine Police Department was forced to deal with every migrant season. The crime rate in Dukaine doubled in the summer, and they received very little help beyond what the county sheriff's department provided. And now that meth had burst onto the scene, it was starting to seem like the crazy season was going to last all year long.

  The INS visits were geared more toward finding drug smugglers and coyotes than they were for deporting illegals. Once the agents filled their quotas, they were gone. The only real use Jordan had for the INS was when they weren't around. All he had to do to get the attention of a migrant was utter “INS” under his breath. No matter how drunk or vigilant a Mexican was, when a cop said INS, they understood English perfectly. His Spanish was adequate, and he knew just enough to get what he wanted, at least most of the time, like asking for license and registration when he pulled a migrant over for speeding. “¿Su licencia y registro por favor?” But he used the INS ploy with restraint. Unlike Johnny Ray.

  He sat down at the desk to fill out his shift report and prepare the lone speeding ticket from the night before, when Holister's voice boomed over the radio. “Tell him to get out here, now. I need him.”

  Jordan dropped the pen, raced out of the office, and said, “Radio him back. Tell him I'm out the door and on my way.” Holister's tone finally got his attention. There was no mistaking panic, even over the radio. Louella pursed her lips into a hard smile. He knew her “See, I told you so” expression better than he wanted to, and refused to acknowledge it as he ran by her desk.

  Whether it was from the heat, fatigue, anxiety, or all three, he felt numb. Every step felt like it was in slow motion, every breath consciously taken. He pushed his way out the door of the station, slid into the hot leather seat of the cruiser, and hit the lights and siren.

  He spun out of the parking lot and squealed the tires on Main Street. The cruiser's engine rumbled as he lit a cigarette and focused his eyes on the road.

  The town blurred by quickly. Big Joe's Tavern sat on the opposite corner of Jefferson and Main. The Farmer's Bank & Loan with its gold Queen Anne dome towered over the other buildings across the street. Marlee's Beauty Shop sat in a converted white bungalow next to the Dukaine Café, and a row of Victorian-style houses that sat on each side of the street in various degrees of repair rounded out downtown as he headed east toward Longer's Pond.

  The last house on Main Street belonged to Buddy Mozel, the third-generation owner of the SunRipe plant. It was a huge Victorian with twin turrets that sat back off the road, pretty much hidden by sculpted shrubbery and a six-foot black iron gate that surrounded the five-acre property.

  Jordan flicked ash out of the window and noticed the front gate was standing wide open. Which was unusual, as the mansion was always locked up tighter than a military fortress.

  He had no time to stop and ask questions—and figured if something was wrong he'd know about it anyway. Buddy Mozel had been a recluse since Jordan was a kid, and a person was more likely to see Elvis eating a tenderloin at the local café
than to see Buddy Mozel out and about.

  It only took Jordan five minutes to reach the outskirts of town where the Little Blue River widened into a floodplain. Tomato fields bordered both sides of the road. At least a hundred migrants were at work in the fields, bent over filling bushel baskets with quick deliberate movements to protect the tender tomatoes, and to save as much of the crop as they could from the unrelenting sun and lack of rain. It was too early to use the mechanical pickers, so the cost of losing even one tomato was too high.

  The sight of migrants working in the fields was a timeless event that had occurred each and every summer of Jordan's life. The Mexicans were nameless bronze-skinned ghosts who disappeared after the sun went down, and vanished completely when the first cold wind blew them out of town in October.

  The road was lined with pickup trucks and beat-up cars with license plates from Florida, Texas, and Arizona. A big red GMC pickup that belonged to José Rivero, the field boss and Buddy Mozel's right-hand man, sat separately from the other cars.

  José was standing in front of the truck with one black cowboy boot propped up on the shiny chrome bumper, talking on a cell phone. He waved casually as Jordan zipped by.

  He barely had time to wave back. Jordan had known José since he was a kid. One of the few Mexicans he'd ever spent any time around. And then, it wasn't openly.

  Whites and Mexicans didn't mix under any circumstances beyond the fields. Most of the townspeople held the migrants in low regard; they were wetbacks, spics, dirty people who didn't know how or didn't even care to learn to speak English. The line of prejudice was a sad fact of life in Dukaine, and was clearly drawn on both sides. The Mexicans avoided whites as much as possible, coming into town only when they had to, always traveling in crews of fours and fives.

  A sign on the front door of Miller's Grocery said it all: NO MORE THAN 2 MEXICANS INSIDE AT 1 TIME. There was no sign on the front door of Big Joe's Tavern though, it was just common knowledge that the migrants weren't allowed there—if a Mexican wanted a good ass kickin', that was the place to go. For alcohol, the migrants had to go to Peg's Keg & Spirits just on the other side of the railroad tracks. On Friday nights the liquor store parking lot was filled with cars blaring Mariachi music. Jordan was normally parked across the street, watching for the first sign of violence. The cruiser's presence was usually enough to keep the peace. But there were times when the tequila and Tecate took hold and things got ugly, especially lately, with the yields down from the drought. Money was tight and tensions were high.

  José had worked for the Mozel family for over thirty years, and was a friend of Jordan's grandmother, Kitty. It was not uncommon for José to knock on her back door, in need of some herbal cure for one of the migrants who had fallen ill. They were not welcome by any of the white doctors, and Kitty had made it her life's work to treat the Mexicans the best she could once she'd retired as a nurse—standing outside the lines drawn by religion, the town, and even Holister, who was her next-door neighbor. But since Jordan had become a cop, seven years ago, José rarely spoke to him, and avoided him just as the rest of the migrants did. José never asked for favors, but Jordan had turned his head more than once when an illegal made a misstep.

  Ginny was wrong about his hunger for power. Her rules for right and wrong changed on a daily basis. But consistency was key to Jordan, even if it meant not following every letter of the law, even if it meant allowing an illegal to continue to make a living. He was more apathetic than righteous, but the rationale for his thinking was simple: Arrest and deport one illegal only to have them replaced by another. In his mind, it was better to keep a known face under a watchful eye than continually have to deal with new faces, a new unknown.

  The migrants faded in the rearview mirror as he slowed the cruiser and turned onto the gravel road that led to Longer's Pond. He immediately noticed that it was lined with devil's plague, three-foot-tall white flowered weeds that were brittle and dry.

  It had been months since he had been to the pond. Oak and hickory trees showed little sign of bearing nuts, and their leaves were tainted with fragile brown edges. The woods surrounding the pond looked more like mid-October than mid-August. For the first time in weeks Jordan was chilled to the bone, and he didn't know why.

  He scanned the parking area and saw Holister's police cruiser, a three-year-old unmarked white Impala, sitting under a seventy-foot cottonwood tree. The windows were down, the doors unlocked. Holister was nowhere to be seen, and there were no other cars in the lot. He took a deep breath, ground out his cigarette in the ashtray, and radioed his location to Louella.

  As he got out of the cruiser, a mockingbird sat in an elm tree singing a song that was a three-part chorus of chickadee, killdeer, and police siren. The song ultimately sounded like a jumbled Hank Williams song turned up on high speed. Otherwise, the pond was silent. He whistled at the mockingbird. When the bird didn't whistle back he unsnapped the strap on his Glock, slid his nightstick into his belt, and reached for the handheld radio.

  A well-worn path led down to the pond from the parking lot, which wasn't anything more than a small field covered with dead grass and sparse gravel. Holister appeared on the path just as Jordan called him on the radio. In a hurry, limping badly, the marshal looked like he was a Saturday night drunk, except it was Tuesday morning.

  “You all right?” Jordan asked.

  “There's somebody out there,” Holister answered. A wild, unfamiliar look danced across the marshal's eyes. His solid white hair was a mess. His uniform shirt was splotched with sweat and untucked, hanging from his protruding belly like a flag. “I heard 'em running,” he continued, gaining his breath. “Laughin' like it's funny. Like it's all a big goddamned joke. My legs gave out, or I'da showed them how fucking funny it is.” He had his .38, a service revolver from the Korean War, drawn with his finger heavy on the trigger.

  Jordan couldn't do anything but stare at Holister warily. He'd never seen his boss in a state like this before.

  “I heard a mockingbird when I got out of the car. You sure it wasn't just a bird you heard?”

  “It wasn't a goddamned bird, Jordan.”

  “Back up. Tell me what the hell's going on. You sure we don't need to get you to the doctor?”

  “Damn it, I don't need another mother hen, Ginny and Celeste do a good enough job at that.” Holister paused, looked up at the sky, and then back to Jordan, holding his gaze with steel blue eyes. “You won't believe me.”

  “I'd believe just about anything right now.”

  “I found Tito Cordova, Jordan. I finally found him.”

  CHAPTER 4

  August 21, 2004, 6:32 A.M.

  Holister might as well have said he'd come face to face with The Bogeyman and invited him to speak at the Founder's Day breakfast.

  “I sure wasn't expecting that,” Jordan said.

  “You think I was?” Holister answered.

  Tito Cordova's name bounced around in Jordan's head like a wraith released from its chains. Of all of the secrets Jordan knew about the people in Dukaine, Tito's story was the one that hit closest to home. He'd done his best—just like most everyone else in town, to forget about the little light-skinned Mexican boy—to act like Tito never existed, that nothing out of the ordinary happened on that November day so long ago.

  It took a few days, but the search for Tito Cordova became an event. Holister had told Jordan more than once, when he recounted the story of Tito's disappearance, that he could not bear to see Esperanza Cordova camped outside the police station waiting for news about her son, but he had hesitated to do anything because she was a Mexican. After receiving a stern request from Buddy Mozel that was more like an order, Holister organized a formal search that eventually consumed everyone in town.

  It was Holister's failure to act swiftly, and his suspicion that there was more to the disappearance than it being just a random act, that drove him to look for the little boy long after the search ended. Long after the trail had gone cold, until the
memory of Tito Cordova slowly became a whisper.

  They searched everywhere in Dukaine, yelling, “Tito, Tito,” over and over again. Jordan remembered the hopelessness and frustration in Holister's eyes, who seemed old even then, as he looked inside every garage, every empty house, for a sign that Tito had been there. It was like the boy had just vanished, gone for the winter like the rest of the Mexicans.

  And Jordan could never forget Tito's mother, hysterical, standing alone on her porch day after day as Holister told her there was no news. Esperanza Cordova screamed at Holister in broken English, and then in Spanish, “I will never forgive you! I will never forgive you if you do not find my son!” Afterward, she would collapse in a bundle of sobs and moans that made his own heart quiver and shake.

  Jordan knew better than anyone that Holister was still obsessed with the Tito Cordova case. Holister brought up the search, and his guilt, every year after the harvest ended and cold weather became a promise fulfilled, recounting each and every step he'd taken looking for Tito.

  The file was hidden and locked away, but pulled out and dusted off annually, like a memory book of a long-lost relative who'd died tragically and did not deserve to be forgotten. For Jordan, the recounting of the past, of the time after Tito had disappeared, was just as painful to him as it was to Holister. But regret and professional failure had nothing to do with Jordan's pain.

  He was twelve when Tito Cordova had disappeared, and his own sense of loss had more to do with the knowledge of what his own life was like in 1985. That was the summer when he learned the word divorce, followed by the reality and certainty of death and the scars it left behind.

  Now, as an adult, when Holister pulled out the file to celebrate their own Day of the Dead, their own Día de Los Muertos, he would pretend to listen. Holister never showed him all of the file—he guarded the contents fiercely, even from Jordan, and then put it away for another year.