South of Nowhere: A Mystery

by Minerva Koenig

  “What can I help you with today?”

  Her bogus friendliness unnerved me, and I stammered, “I’m, uh—I wanted to see about getting, having a lap-band done.”

  Her nuclear grin brightened, and she made a note on a pad in front of her. “Wonderful!” Her face then went serious. “You do understand that you must pay cash? Because of our location we are unable to file with American insurance companies.”

  I bet myself that wasn’t the only reason.

  “Oh, no problem. I don’t want my husband to know I’m doing this anyway.”

  “Of course,” the nurse simpered, giving me a conspiratorial look. “Many of our ladies feel the same way. But you won’t be able to hide it for long. The weight comes off very quickly.”

  I nodded, trying to look pleased. She had an accent I didn’t recognize, and I started to wonder how she’d gotten roped into this gig.

  “Now … will you be wanting the hot springs recovery package? Of course we can accommodate you at our inpatient facility if you prefer, but…” She trailed off, her gaze sliding down my face.

  “No, I’m already staying at the springs,” I said. “But is it safe, so far away? I mean, if something goes wrong, will they know what to do?”

  “The procedure has very few complications,” she said, “and we only release patients to off-site recovery after we’re sure that they are stable following their surgeries.”

  “But—I mean—” I hesitated, trying to appear flustered. “Unforeseen things come up, don’t they?”

  “None of our patients has ever had any problem that could not be taken care of.” The bright reassurance in her voice had slipped a little, and the phrasing of her answer felt odd, as if she were on the witness stand.

  I kept my worried face on and said, “But, like—how? Is there a doctor out there?”

  She leaned toward me across the desk, her dark eyes fixing on mine. A little flash of fear shot through me, but she just said, “Don’t worry. You are in the best hands.”

  She gestured at the exam table on the far side of the room. “If you would, please.”

  Steve, who’d dropped into an almost instant sleep beside my chair, lifted his head as I got up. When he saw that we weren’t going far, he put it back down.

  “A handsome fellow,” the nurse remarked as I climbed up onto the exam table. “I have a dog also. Not quite so well-behaved.”

  I nodded, still trying to place her accent. “I’m glad you guys didn’t mind me bringing him. He’s kind of my good-luck charm.”

  She glanced at him again as she pumped up the blood pressure cuff. “The doctor won’t like it, but where’s the harm?”

  The radar found that interesting. You don’t usually find a lot of insubordination, subtle or otherwise, in a crooked enterprise. It’s difficult enough to stay clear of trouble when everyone plays along. Throw a wrench in there, things can get hairy fast.

  “He sounds like a grinch,” I said.

  “Oh, not at all,” the nurse replied, ripping the Velcro cuff off and making a note on her pad. “Dr. Darling is a very accomplished surgeon. A fine man.”

  “They say he’s the best,” I agreed. She stuck an electronic thermometer in my ear. “A friend of mine came down here for her lap-band. She’s the one who told me about the place.”

  “Ah, yes?” the nurse beamed, peering at the thermometer. She didn’t seem interested. I decided to save it.

  After making a few more notes, she picked up her pad and said, “The doctor will see you in a few moments.”

  She went out, leaving the door open. Faint voices echoed in from down the hall, and Steve looked up again, then over at me, and got up.

  “I wouldn’t,” I said.

  I didn’t feel like much of an authority, sitting up on the high table with my feet dangling, but he gave a noisy sigh and lay down again.

  After about ten minutes, Darling came in. He looked exactly like his picture; the third dimension added nothing. Even his hair looked like an imitation of the real thing. Maybe it was.

  He nodded in my direction but his eyes didn’t focus on me. “Now then, Ms.”—he consulted the folder he’d brought with him—“Smith.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I kept quiet. He closed the folder and laid it on the low stool next to the examining table, taking a roll of mints out of his white lab coat pocket. He popped one into his mouth and tilted his head back to look at me. “Open, please.”

  I unhinged my jaw and he peered in, then felt behind my ears. His hands smelled of rubbing alcohol.

  “Lie back, please.”

  I did it, and he lifted the hem of my shirt and began mashing my stomach around. He was watching what he was doing but I got the definite impression that he was thinking about something else.

  He grabbed the folder and said, “On the scale, please.”

  I got down and let him weigh and measure, then we went back to the desk. He gave Steve a frown as he went by, as if noticing him for the first time.

  “Have you had your blood work done?” he asked, the mint making clicking sounds against his teeth as he talked.

  I gave him a confused look, and he tore a form off a pad and slid it toward me across the desk.

  “You’ll need to do that today, after you leave here. You appear to be a good candidate. Have you ever had surgery before?”

  “On my shoulder,” I said.

  He looked up, drawing a bead on me for the first time. “Joint problem? That’s very common with obesity.”

  “I was involved in an accident,” I said.

  “Ah.” He tilted his head back and gave me a deprecatory once-over through his glasses. “Yes, excess weight often exacerbates injuries in those situations.”

  It’s not like I hadn’t heard stupid shit like that from doctors before, so I don’t know how my annoyance got on top of me before I could stop myself from snapping back at him, “I was stabbed.”

  His expression went wary. “Stabbed?”

  “Like I said, it was an accident,” I said, quickly corralling my temper. “I’m a little touchy about it.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked, his voice quiet and sharp.

  I was clearly on thin ice, which is usually where I do my best skating, but with horror I realized that a predissociation chill was starting up the back of my neck. I grabbed Steve’s lead and stood up. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I’ll have to come back.”

  The doctor looked up at me, his expression turning dangerous. “Don’t bother.”

  CHAPTER 10

  God only knows what happened between Darling’s office and the street in front of the clinic, where I came back into my body some time later. There wasn’t a battery of guns pointed at my head, and I appeared to have all my parts, so it hadn’t been life threatening, but I almost wished it had. At least then I’d know where I stood.

  Crossing the plaza to head back to the cantina, Steve jerked suddenly on the lead and got away from me, turning down one of the side streets. I gave chase and saw him jumping up on a short man in a chambray shirt and faded jeans at the end of the block. It looked like the coyote I’d seen at the hot springs that morning.

  Amazed at the dog’s memory, I hurried toward them. The coyote was leaning over and scrubbing Steve’s ears like they were old friends, and as I came up, he straightened and turned toward me. We both froze. It was Hector.

  After a minute I found my voice. “What the hell?”

  His hair had been shorn off close to the scalp, exposing patches of gray above his ears, and he’d lost a lot of weight, but he looked at me like I was the one who’d undergone metamorphosis.

  “Julia?”

  “Oh, come on. I haven’t changed that much in nine months.”

  Steve was going nuts, dancing a circle around Hector’s legs. “No, I just—Maines didn’t say he was bringing you.”

  “God damn it,” I said. “He knew you were down here all this time?”

  Hector nodded but said, “I asked him n
ot to say anything to anybody.”

  “Why? It would have been a lot easier to get me down here if he’d told me. I almost didn’t come.”

  “Well, technically he didn’t know my exact location. I’m on the move a lot.”

  “I guess you have to be, to avoid getting picked up by border patrol.” His eyes jumped to my face, and I explained, “I saw you yesterday evening, bringing those people up to the hot springs.”

  “Gotta pay my bills somehow.”

  “You do know that you own a bar in Azula, right?”

  “I can’t go back into the States. The feds’ll pick me up if I do.”

  “So what? You haven’t done anything illegal.”

  The air was heating quickly in the oncoming afternoon, and the faint odors of gasoline and rotting vegetables were growing stronger. Hector stepped into the shade of the building behind him and extracted from his wallet a folded piece of newsprint, which he handed to me. It was a Spanish-language paper, but the photo of him shaking hands with Castro didn’t need translation. The caption read, “El hijo boliviano del Che regressa a Cuba.”

  “Hm,” I said, making a face.

  “Yeah,” Hector agreed grimly. “I’m sure you’ve had enough interaction with the feds to know how that might go down.”

  “Fidel’s retired,” I said, handing him back the clipping, “and this new guy—Obama—says he wants to normalize relations and lift the embargo.”

  “Wants to,” Hector emphasized. “Even if he can make it happen, which is questionable, given how much pushback he’s already getting on his agenda, that’s not gonna undo fifty years of political and cultural animosity right out of the box. Not to mention that me and Maines didn’t exactly get our visas in order before we left. Don’t kid yourself. If I was at home and the U.S. found out how and why I went to Cuba, I’d disappear so fast it’d make your head spin.”

  “OK, you might get picked up and questioned,” I agreed. “But you, me, and Maines are the only ones who know what you were doing there, and none of us are going to talk about it. At worst, the cops could pop you for failing to make proper travel arrangements. They don’t put people in prison for stuff like that.”

  “That’s not the point,” Hector said, glancing around the dusty street. “My identity would become public. I’d never walk down an American street in peace again.”

  “Some people admire your father,” I reminded him. I wasn’t sure if I was one of them, politically speaking, but the fact that Hector shared his DNA was enough to make me approve of him as a human being.

  “They’re not the ones I’m worried about.” Hector felt toward the breast pocket of his shirt—a gesture I recognized—but his magic herbal cigarettes weren’t there. They’d been replaced by a white plastic inhaler.

  “You look like hell,” I said, watching him take a couple of hits off it. He didn’t, really—the hawk nose and beautiful dark eyes with their long expressive brows hadn’t changed. His vibe was more guarded, but that was to be expected, given the circumstances.

  He coughed and returned the inhaler to his pocket with a weak grin. “You don’t.”

  A tickle of pleasure fluttered up into my throat, but I swatted it down. The man had disappeared from the face of the earth after a pretty convincing courtship. Who knew what else he had up his sleeve?

  I opened my mouth to begin the shit-giving part of the program, but Hector had spotted something over my left shoulder that was making him antsy.

  “Look, I’m supposed to meet Maines up at the hot springs this evening,” he said, moving away. “We’ll talk more then, all right?”

  I glanced behind me to see what had spooked him: a couple of uniforms getting out of a small green SUV. When I turned back around, Hector was gone.

  CHAPTER 11

  Maines was sitting at an upended wooden cable reel inside the cantina when I got back. He was the only person in the place, aside from the guy behind the bar, who was drinking beer and watching a soccer game on the TV set bolted to the wall.

  “You’ll never guess who I ran into,” I said as I sat down in the metal folding chair across from him.

  “Montezuma?” he cracked, watching Steve ease down onto the floor. “Hope he didn’t take revenge.”

  I gave him the stink eye. “Why the subterfuge?”

  “People see more when they face the unknown. It’s a statistical fact.”

  I leaned toward him and enunciated precisely so that he couldn’t pretend to mistake my meaning. “It’s fucking annoying.”

  Maines adjusted his hat and asked, “How was Darling?”

  “Don’t try and weasel out of this.”

  “It ain’t my fault. Hector wouldn’t come over the border. So I brought the mountain to Mohammad.”

  “Never mind,” I said. I could practically feel his boot heels digging into the dirt floor, and we had business to discuss.

  He received my report on the clinic—edited to omit my last-minute fadeout—with a grim, attentive grimace, and a muttered, “Crap.” He got up. “We’d better make tracks for the hospital.”

  “I imagine the good doctor knows how to dial a phone,” I said, following him to the bar, where he laid down a bill and touched his hat brim at the soccer fan.

  “All the more reason to shake a leg,” Maines said, pushing the screen door open and stepping into the street.

  We wove toward the Crown Vic, single file through the stream of bodies and cars, Steve cutting a path for us. I was beginning to admire the dog’s ability to roll with the changes; he didn’t get jumpy or overexcited by the crush, the way most of his brethren would. Just trotted along with his ears up and his eyes open.

  When we stopped at the car, he spotted another dog across the street and stiffened, emitting a short, sharp bark. Maines started to shush him, then pulled up short, his eyes fixing on a group of people standing at one of the open shops.

  Without saying anything to me, he came around the car and handed me the leash, then threaded across the street and approached the group, touching the elbow of one of the women. As she turned toward him, I got a look at her face, which was a fairly reasonable facsimile of Rachael Pestozo’s photo.

  Crossing the street to join them, I observed that she’d had a lot more work done than a lap-band. To the average person, she might have passed for organic, but I’d lived in California long enough to recognize even the best plastic surgery when I see it. She didn’t look “done” the way the people on those celebrity-disaster websites do, but her skin was too smooth, her expression too serene. Nobody comes out of their mother like that.

  “Yes, I am,” she was saying when I got to where they were standing. She gave me a wary look with eyes that seemed lighter than in her photo. This mixed-blood eye color is a weird thing, though. Some days I could swear my eyes are hazel and the next day I’ll get up and they’re blue or green or even yellow.

  “Who are you?” she asked me.

  I pointed at Maines. “I’m with him.”

  He handed her one of his cards. While she read it, I wondered why she’d bothered with plastic surgery. Not because the work was bad—Maines was right about Darling’s skill—but because she didn’t look much different from her photo. Usually, when women go under the knife, they don’t want to come out of it just a slightly altered version of how they went in; they want to be eye-catching—younger looking, sexier. Rachael, while not unattractive, was none of those things, even though it was obvious to me that she’d had extensive work done on her face and body.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said, giving Maines back his card and glancing at me. “Who hired you? If it was Orson, you’re in trouble, because I have a protection order against him.”

  “Orson?” I said, surprised. Maines shot me a quick look, and I added quickly, “Who’s Orson?”

  “My ex-husband,” she replied. “If he didn’t send you, who did?”

  My ears went offline for a few seconds while the brain assimilated. If I believed in coincidence
, the fact that the dead guy in my house was the ex-husband of the woman Maines and I were looking for would have been an amazing one. Since I don’t, I kept my mental teeth in the subject until the logic lined up: Rachael must have gone AWOL because she’d killed her ex, using the story of returning home to Arizona as a cover to run for the border.

  “Why’d you leave your stuff out at the hot springs?” Maines was asking her when I could hear again.

  His voice had that mild, friendly tone cops get when they smell bullshit, which was a relief. I didn’t want to have to tell him about Benny’s phone call, but neither did I want anybody getting away with murder on my ticket. I couldn’t care less about Truth, Justice, and the American way, I’ve just never liked being on the losing team.

  I could see that Rachael felt Maines’s distrust, and that it was making her prickly. “I stayed out there after my surgery. I must have missed some things when I packed.”

  “You missed checking out, too,” Maines said, those wet-pebble eyes of his shimmering behind his glasses.

  “So what? The bill was paid.”

  “You look pretty well healed up,” he observed. “How come you haven’t headed to Arizona like you planned? Nobody’s been able to get hold of you.”

  Rachael made a tsking noise and got a phone out of her fringed suede purse. “Because the cell reception down here is terrible. I texted my aunt to let her know I couldn’t get there until next week. It must not have gone through.”

  She started poking at the phone like we weren’t there. Maines let her get away with it for a few minutes, then said, “I think it’d be a good idea if you came back to Azula with us.”

  My stomach did a little celebration dance. I was off the hook. Hello, Mexico.

  “For what?” Rachael asked, her voice cool.

  Maines didn’t answer. The cool blinked.

  “You’re not cops,” she said. “You can’t make me go anywhere.”

  Maines gave the ground a sorrowful look. “No, you’re right. I can’t.” His mild voice went even milder. “I can be a real pain in the ass, though.”

  “That’s true,” I told her. Anticipation was pinpricking the bottoms of my feet, turning me persuasive.