“But he was just an accessory, and it was a long time ago,” Hector reminded me. “If they’re gonna go after every man who’s ever been downwind of a crime where a woman’s involved, they’d have to take out half the population.”
I remembered Mikela’s remarks at the desert house. “I don’t think that would be an ideological problem for them.”
“It’s a waste of manpower,” Hector insisted. “Or womanpower, in their case. I mean, with all the shit that goes down around here, if they didn’t prioritize what they put their people at risk for, their whole organization would go extinct right quick.”
“Maybe it was just luck of the draw,” I suggested. “One of them saw Finn somewhere and recognized him, so they nabbed him because they could.”
“He was a hundred miles away. These broads are local.”
“Maybe he didn’t go straight there,” I suggested. “He stopped somewhere for a snack or something.”
“There ain’t a 7-Eleven on every corner, around here. He’d have had to go all—”
“Jesus,” I cut in, growing impatient. “You’re worse than me.”
That made him grin. “Nobody’s worse than you.”
I gave him a playful slap, which started an ersatz wrestling match that ended the way it usually does. We got it out of our systems and then headed back to the encampment.
Mikela was in one of the folding chairs, cuffed at the wrists and ankles with a hood over her head, but I still didn’t trust her. I got my Glock out and took the safety off, and Ruben picked up his AK. He shook hands with Cigar and Hector, then pulled Mikela up, and we headed out between the shacks. I kept everybody in front of me.
The Suburban was waiting, with Aguilito at the wheel. Ruben got Mikela in, then Finn followed. I got into the seat in back, and we pulled away.
CHAPTER 34
It took about half an hour to get to the road where Finn’s plane was parked, and the takeoff was as rough as our landing had been. Once we were airborne and stabilized, I took Mikela’s hood off. Ruben was sitting several feet away from us, toward the rear of the plane, well out of range if she tried anything.
“So. Let’s hear it,” I said.
She glanced at Ruben. “Hear what?”
“Oh, right, sorry,” I said, miming contrition. “Let me just fill you in on what I know, so we don’t have to do this answering questions with questions shit.” I set my Glock on the bench seat next to me and got comfortable. “You’re Mikela Floyd. You and your sister Jennifer are wanted by the FBI for killing a cop in El Paso last year, and some other stuff. Classified. Federal.”
Ruben stopped playing with his phone and raised his eyes. Finn’s head turned. I hadn’t realized that he could hear us over the plane noise, but it didn’t matter. Having him listen in might induce Mikela to tell more of the truth.
“I’m guessing that’s what sent you to Darling,” I continued. “You wanted a new face. I’m not sure why you waited so long, but it worked out in your favor. If you’d done it earlier, you’d have missed the opportunity to become Rachael Pestozo.”
Mikela’s hard stare dropped and she let herself fall back against the fuselage behind her. She sat with her eyes closed for a while, then raised her head and asked for a cigarette.
Ruben reached into his jacket, and I went back to take his place while he got her lit up. It was tricky, with her wrists cuffed, and she hung one hand from her opposite shoulder so that she wouldn’t have to keep lifting both while she smoked.
Ruben and I returned to our original places. She hadn’t answered my question, so I didn’t bother asking her anything factual this time. I just said, “Why didn’t you pull the trigger?”
She’d returned to gazing into nothingness with her first drag off the cigarette, but now she focused back on me. “What?”
“Out there,” I said.
Her eyes went away again. “I remembered who I was.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting; in fact, I hadn’t been expecting an answer at all, and its correspondence to the things I’d been hearing and thinking about myself lately gave me a little chill.
“What made you forget it in the first place?”
Mikela gave a short, wry laugh. “Well, I was pretending to be someone else.”
The little chill dropped a few degrees. Could all my recent psychic weirdness be due to my change in identity? The WITSEC shrinks had given me some lectures about people who went nuts after leaving their homes and families, but I’d never felt that connected to California, and Joe and I hadn’t had any kids. He was the only person I really missed, and he was dead, so I was going to miss him wherever I lived. I did think about Pete, Joe’s dad, from time to time, but the rest of the family had been involved in their own ventures and never came around enough for me to really get to know them.
In fact, in a lot of ways, leaving California had been kind of a relief. I wasn’t reminded of Joe every time I went to the grocery store or paid the phone bill. Being married to the mob also meant I’d learned not to talk about things to other people, so I didn’t have chats with my girlfriends to miss, because I’d never had them to begin with. The girlfriends or the chats.
“No, I forgot way before that,” Mikela said. She paused to think, then added, “It was after Jenny found out about this fence thing.”
I didn’t want to push her so I didn’t say anything, just looked at her with mild curiosity. Oddly enough, she seemed to want to talk about it.
“My sister was something,” she said, in a slow, thoughtful voice. “Not like me. Really something. Genius IQ, special classes in high school, but she never wanted to do the whole child prodigy thing.” Mikela chuckled. “Too boring, she said. So she ran off and joined the circus—the actual circus—at sixteen, then the pipe-fitter’s union up north to learn how to weld.” Mikela paused to take a drag off the cigarette. “That’s what got her into the service, that certification.”
“The service?” I said.
“The army,” Mikela replied. “She went in as a warrant officer, repairing Humvees that didn’t get blown completely to pieces in Kandahar.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah,” Mikela said, twisting her mouth. “Talk about a waste of talent. She liked it, though. It was exciting. When she came back, the NSA offered her a job translating radio transmissions. She spoke, like, five languages. That’s where she found out that there are people who say they want the border fence who don’t really want it, and vice versa.”
“Surely that’s not a state secret.”
“I don’t mean people like you and me,” she said. “I mean in the government.”
“Dishonest politicans,” I marveled. “Who’d have believed that such a thing existed?”
She cut her eyes at me, exasperated. “No, moron. I’m talking about the people who are buying those politicians. The real power behind the throne. The lobbyists, the people with the money.”
Now the radar was kicking in. “Are you saying that your sister got crossways with some of these people?”
“You had to know her,” Mikela said. “It wasn’t just crossways. She was organizing, and it was working.”
“I’m guessing that’s where the demonstration that resulted in this dead cop comes in.”
Mikela nodded, looking pensive. I thought she might try to justify frying the bacon, but she just took another drag off her cigarette and went on with her story.
“Jenny and I split up after that, figuring it would make us more difficult to track down. Then I saw an article in the paper about a white girl being killed near Juarez.” Mikela cleared her throat, tapping ash onto the steel-plate floor. “Mexican papers aren’t as ticklish about publishing gory pictures as papers in the States.”
“So it’s not just a rumor that she’s dead?”
Mikela started to shake her head, then said, “Well, to the rest of the world it probably is. I couldn’t go and identify her without risking my own neck, but they didn’t even try to find out
who she was or what had happened to her. She was just, like, roadkill or something.”
I felt the unholiness of it, imagining what it would have been like for Joe to have been treated that way. There’s something horrible about anonymous death, even to me.
Mikela looked like she was ruminating over something. I didn’t want to interrupt that process, so I kept quiet, and after a minute she started to talk again.
“Not knowing what had happened to Jenny, I started worrying I was next. I’d already been talking to Darling about a job, but he wanted to pay me shit—not enough to take the risk of working for him. After I saw Jenny in the paper, I went back to him with a deal: if he’d give me a new face, I’d work for him for free for as long as I could evade the cops. I’d volunteered at the low-income clinic back home, so I had experience and stuff. I guess that—plus the fact I was wanted, and unlikely to turn him in for anything—made me worth it to him.”
“But Rachael didn’t show up until six months later,” I said. “Why’d you wait, to get your new face?”
“Hang on,” she said, lifting the hand she’d hung from her opposite shoulder. “If you’re going to make me tell it, at least let me tell it my way.”
I sighed and sat back, pressing my lips together.
“So Darling hires me,” Mikela said, “but then he keeps stalling. First he says he can’t afford for me to be laid up for a couple of weeks, and then he says what if he does the surgery and I run off before he’s gotten his money’s worth out of me. Then it’s something else…” Mikela blew an annoyed breath out through her nose.
“What changed his mind?”
“Rachael did.”
I raised my eyebrows, and she shifted on the bench, leaning forward. “During her intake interview, she talked about going back to Arizona and joining up with this Native women’s militia group. They hunt down people who’ve committed crimes against women but escaped prosecution.”
“And they don’t take white women,” I said.
“Right,” Mikela replied, looking surprised for a minute. “You have to be Native, which Rachael told me isn’t just a matter of showing up with a DNA certificate. You have to be known by someone who knows someone.”
Just like I’d told Hector. You had to have been raised in it. It didn’t matter how much blood you could prove. It mattered who you knew and who you grew up with, which ceremonies and prayers you could recite from memory, the traditions you observed and believed in.
“I was totally down to join up with these women, considering what happened to Jenny,” Mikela continued. “So I tell Darling, just turn me into Rachael. I’ll take her ID and stuff and go to Arizona, and neither you nor the El Paso cops need ever see me again.”
“He went for that?” I said, surprised.
Mikela pressed her lips together, looking away. “She’d brought a bunch of cash with her.”
“Ah,” I said. “Which he adopted off the books after she died I’m guessing.”
“I took what was left over.” Mikela said. “It wasn’t like she was going to use it.”
“Well, that’ll sure work for motive,” I said, half to myself.
Mikela’s eyes jumped to my face. “I didn’t kill her! Jesus, what kind of sense would that make, killing one woman to avenge another?”
“I guess the chick you shot out in the desert doesn’t count.”
She flinched, closing her eyes, and took a couple of breaths before replying, “Rachael died after surgery, on her own. Darling said it was a blood clot.”
“There are drugs you can give people that will cause blood clots,” I said, remembering the discussions with Maines’s doctor. “I’m sure Darling is aware of that, and crooked as he is, I doubt he’d hesitate to use them, for a price.”
“Well, if he did, it wasn’t at my direction,” Mikela said. She dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and mashed it out with the toe of her boot.
“He wouldn’t let us take DNA from the body.” I let her figure out what that implied.
“Look,” Mikela said, “I didn’t come up with the idea to pose as Rachael until after she died, so there was no motive to kill her.”
“I’m sure the jury will take the word of two criminals for that,” I agreed amicably.
Another item shot across my brain. “That’s why you dug the bullets out of Orson, isn’t it? So they couldn’t be compared to the ones from that cop you shot.”
“Orson?” Mikela balked. “Rachael’s ex?”
She didn’t need a yes so I didn’t waste one. She read my face and leaned her head back, closing her eyes. “This can’t be happening,” she murmured.
“What about him?” I said, tilting my head toward Finn. He gave us another look over his shoulder.
Mikela shrugged. “Nalin and a couple of the other girls got him. I don’t know where or why. Then after I told her about you, she decided to do the trade.”
“Why? I’m not worth anything to the Kokoi.”
“I couldn’t have you running around loose not knowing what you knew about me,” she said, “so I told Nalin that you were a collaborator. A couple of her women had gotten picked up by the cops a few weeks ago. I said that you’d turned them in.”
I took a couple of breaths, thanking my lucky stars that I’d busted out when I did.
“Y’all buckle in,” Finn advised over his shoulder. “We’re fixing to hit some weather.”
It was a rough ride the rest of the way back to Azula, so I didn’t have a chance to do any more work on Mikela, but I was satisfied. I’d gotten her. Benny could do the rest.
CHAPTER 35
Finn had the air controllers call Benny before we landed, so that he could meet us and take custody of Mikela. The airport was a single-runway setup just south of Azula, and I could see Benny’s cruiser parked in the nearly empty lot next to the hangar as we came in. He watched us land and then trotted out to meet the plane as it taxied over. I felt like I’d been gone for a million years.
The air that gusted in as I slid the side door open smelled of something burning off in the distance, and the temperature made the actual distance questionable. Ruben stood up and held his AK on Mikela while I grabbed her arm and guided her out onto the tarmac.
“Wow,” Benny said as she stepped down. “She’d have got by me.” He stepped around to her side, examining her like some kind of museum piece. “That’s good work.”
“Fuck off,” Mikela told him.
“And an attitude, too,” Benny tsked.
Finn had finished his flight check-in and turned in the pilot’s seat to watch us. Ruben eyed Benny impassively from the side door. He didn’t try to hide his AK.
“Gracias,” Benny said to him, shaking hands. “Don’t take this personal, but don’t hang around, OK?”
“We’re going to head straight back,” Finn said.
Benny gave him a salute, and Ruben slid the side door shut. Benny, Mikela, and I walked to the edge of the runway and watched them take off. Finn waved from the pilot’s window.
“Maines is asking to see you,” Benny told me as we headed for the parking lot.
“Right now? I haven’t bathed, slept, or eaten anything remotely nutritious for the last three days.”
“I’m sure tomorrow will be fine.” He got Mikela into the back of the cruiser and then said, “Come on, I’ll drop you home.”
It was Wednesday, our closed night at the bar, and the square was deserted except for my truck, parked in front, and the ever-present assortment of cop cars on the other side of the courthouse. Benny pulled over to let me out at the curb. Mikela had been still and silent for the drive, and I glanced into the backseat as I opened the car door, to make sure she was still with us.
“I’ll come over in the morning to fill you in before I go see Maines,” I told Benny.
We hadn’t said anything about the case on the drive, and he nodded. “I’m not going to try and get anything out of her tonight. I’m expecting the doc’s full report on Orson Greenlaw t
omorrow. That’ll tell me where I need to start.”
“You haven’t done anything on him yet?” I said.
He shook his head. “Been waiting on Liz, and this one.” He pointed his thumb at the backseat.
I got the feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me, but I’d had it ever since I’d met him. He’s a cop. It comes with the territory. I found my keys and got out.
As I walked through the dark bar, I got a ghostly whiff of Cuban cigar smoke again, and my blood went cold. Now what? I paused at the foot of the stairs, and the odor quickly dissipated.
There was food in Luigi’s bowl when I got upstairs, probably courtesy of Mike, and the cat was lounging in his favorite spot in the exact center of the dining table. He opened his eyes a slit to watch me drop my duffel bag on the floor and come over to the table. When I sat down, he lifted his head and looked at me.
“Speak,” I said. He’d done it before. If he did it again, I’d just go back downstairs and drive myself straight to the loony bin.
The cat gave me the feline version of a puzzled frown for a few seconds, then put his head back down on his paws. So I hadn’t completely lost it. Not yet.
I took a shower and made some tea, then booted up the computer to look up Liz Harman’s contact information. I knew she wouldn’t be in the office at this hour, but I called to leave a message with her service, asking her to give me a referral to her head-shrinking colleague. It wouldn’t be fun, but neither was not knowing if or when I could trust reality.
That night I dreamed about the devil smoking a Cuban cigar in the Mexican desert. I went out after him and discovered that he was me. I woke up tangled in sheets humid with sweat, and realized—because it was back—that the morning sensation of struggling up from under something heavy had been absent while I’d been out in the desert. I tried to remember if it had gone away before or after I’d seen my mother, but couldn’t. All of it seemed so long ago.
Another shower was required to rinse off the night’s exertions, then I got dressed and walked across the square to the police station. The concrete on the sidewalk looked funny, the light poles foreign, the way those things do when you go someplace you’ve never been. I wasn’t sure if it was because my brain was disintegrating, or because so much had happened while I’d been away.
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