Falling Down

by David Cole

  “Oh,” he said. Now both of his hands on mine. “He just called me. Said you’ve had a rough morning. A bad crime scene.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” I said finally. “But never a dead child.”

  The completely wrong thing to say in front of Mary.

  “Child?” she said. “Child, what dead child? Who is Bob Gates?”

  “Nobody,” I said. Quick as I could, smiled a bit, got her automatic smile back. “Just something for the Tucson Police Department.”

  “For an old friend of mine,” Ken said. “A good man. But, Laura. You’re not here to talk about TPD. You want to see the website.”

  He sat at one of the computers, opened the web browser.

  “Totally a coincidence,” he said. “It’s not bookmarked, not obvious. I’d Googled something last weekend, so I went to the browser history file. Found something that shouldn’t be there.”

  Clicked the mouse, waited for a site to load.

  Welcome to

  ChupaLuck Casino Online

  A variety of images loaded slowly.

  “Chupa,” Ken said. “A small tribe, another Indian casino, my first thought. So I Googled the name. No tribes, at least in this hemisphere. You must be familiar with these sites,” he said to me. Page fully loaded, yes, very familiar.

  “First off,” I said. “The name means nothing to me. It could be real, mostly likely not. Got most of the traditional images for an online casino. Your account name, for logging in. Your password.”

  “Ken,” Mary said. “Show her the other page.”

  “Just wait,” I said. “I’ve got my routines, I guess. So, by using this casino, you play totally online. You don’t download free games, like the legit online casinos offer. All this place wants is that you list a valid credit card or bank account, from which they say they guarantee they’ll use to pay out winnings.”

  “Is it a scam?” Ken said. “Like stealing credit card numbers?”

  “Possibly legit. See this image?”

  24/7 Customer Service

  Toll Free Phone Lines

  Live! Chat Room

  Email Contact

  “Got a registered eight-hundred number phone line. Email address. All this is traditional. They’re not out to scam you right away, they just want your money. The downside is how long they’ll stay in business. Most of these casino websites are located in Central America or on a Caribbean Island.”

  “Can you find out where?”

  “You have to understand, all you’re looking at is a web page. On a web server, a computer that could be anywhere in the world. Literally, anywhere. The money transfers take place in a completely separate place, again, anywhere in the world. I can find out where the web server is, I can do that easily. Then it gets hard.”

  “Show her the page,” Mary said.

  “Before I do that,” Ken said, “you should know what Chupa probably means. If you Google the word, it can be a lollipop, somebody’s pet dog, somebody’s name, or business or a flower. Mostly likely, though, it’s shorthand for el chupacabra.”

  “Sounds like a Subway special sandwich,” I said.

  “No,” Ken said. “It means ‘the goatsucker.’”

  “A vampire bat?”

  “No. They’re real. I’ve seen them, deep in Mexico. Eight, nine inches long. They love blood, but they don’t suck it out. When they bite into living flesh, usually a cow, a horse, the bat secretes a fluid so the blood won’t congeal. Then they lap up the blood. Chupacabras are mythical. Stories began in mid-seventies, with dead farm animals in Puerto Rico, funny punctures on their necks. Stories spread in the countryside. Hundreds of animals slaughtered, drained of their blood, mutilated.”

  “Like the Navajo skinwalker stories,” I said.

  “Sure. One website report said, ‘It was as if all had been sucked out through the eyes. It had empty eye sockets and all the internal organs had disappeared.’ The stories spread from Puerto Rico to other Caribbean islands, then jumped across the water to Mexico, Central America, and finally into the southern United States. Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Now,” Ken said, “let’s go back to the casino. See this menu of items across the bottom of the page?”

  Home—About Us—Slots—Games—Tournaments—Help

  He clicked on Games. Another web page, listing traditional casino games. Poker. Roulette. Craps. Keno. Anything and everything to take your money. Ken clicked on the item Tournaments. A much longer list, listing different payouts to winners, the list scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the page. Ken put on a pair of drugstore reading glasses, their plastic lenses reflecting the web page colors as he peered close and clicked on one item.

  ChupaLuck DeLux. Another web page filled the screen slowly, a huge black and white photo of a man’s face, the mulatto-skinned face itself partially covered with a large tattoo. Mara 18.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Now find the other page.”

  “Wait,” I said. “That’s…what?”

  “The tattoo. When I found the young girl—you have to read the diary.”

  “I will, Mary. I will read it. But how’s this tattoo connected to the girl?”

  “When I found her,” she said. “There were several men, all dead. With the same kind of tattoo, except the number was different. Twenty-seven. Not eighteen. Ken. Show her the other page.”

  “The Maras gangs,” Ken said. Clicking through menus, trying to find something. “Tattoos are a gang symbol. I found it, was under the links page to other gambling sites.” The top of the page had a small image. Underneath it read simply

  La Bruja Pray for her now

  Our mother of the maras

  Mary gasped, fingering the religious medal at her throat. I thought the image was a tarot card, but looking closer I saw it was a postcard image advertising an old Mexican movie. I’d seen many of them a year ago, when the collector and art historian David Schultz showed Vincent Basaraba some full-size posters from 1950s Mexican B films.

  LA BRUJA

  THE WITCH

  I stepped sideways, my foot looking for a chair. I sat down too hard, too focused, a hand already in my bag, concentration on what I was thinking. The chair rolled away from me and I fell heavily to the floor. Mary’s stack of papers and folders flooded the room as she instinctively threw up her arms to steady me, Mary on one side and Ken on the other, but I sat on the floor, found the cell phone I wanted, and called Alex.

  “Laura,” she said. “What up?”

  Alex Emerine, my business partner and friend.

  “Who’s there with you?”

  “Sarah B and Sarah C, Stefan, and Kelle Maslyn. The new video woman.”

  “Stop whatever you’re doing. Call up a website named chupaluckcasino.com and work backwards. Find out anything and everything, you know what to do.”

  “Laura. We’re almost done with the phony green card online scam.”

  “Dump it for now. Call me back, report anything new. Wait. Ken. What happens when you click on that tattoo?”

  “Dead end.” An almost totally blank page came up, showing only two boxes. One required a user identity, the other a password.”

  “Who has access to this computer?”

  “Practically anybody,” he said. “Or, I guess, practically everybody. When either Jo or I are here, we can turn over one of these computers to park staff, interns, maybe even volunteers. If nobody’s around during the day, anybody can use this computer, anybody who comes into the building. At night, only the security people.”

  “These computers are networked,” I said. “We don’t know who used this computer. Or why. I need permission to look at some key files on your network’s main computer.”

  “I don’t think the director would allow that,” Mary said.

  “Does she have to know?” Ken asked.

  “I don’t work illegally,” I said. “Can the two of you explain it to her? It would be just a onetime thing. I’d go in there to get the log-in data on everybody who’s used
this computer in the past three days.”

  “The director’s out of town,” she said. “Vacation. Somewhere in Hawaii.”

  “I need somebody’s permission.”

  “It’s a one time thing,” Ken said. Working it out for himself. Nodding as he ran through each point of his decision. “Somebody’s used a park computer for online gambling. It’s totally against the ethics, against all the park stands for. You only want one data list. You’ll not change or delete any network files. Yes. You have my permission.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  He’d set it up to take the fall, to assume responsibility and, on the downslope, to assume blame and repercussions if his decision was wrong. He knew Mary was stressed beyond normal, okay, so he wanted to help a good friend, okay, but he also assumed that I was one hundred percent ethically moral.

  I’m not.

  “Yes,” Ken said. “I’ll give you access permission. I figure, what you’re going to do is hack into our network from outside, right?” I nodded. “And the easier it is to hack in, the easier it would be for anybody to hack in. Right?”

  I nodded again.

  “What’s the reality of that happening?”

  “Of somebody hacking into your system?”

  “Yes.”

  “True odds?” I said. “Within twelve hours, I can upload every one of your files. All your financial and personnel data, all your emails stored on any of the networked computers, all personal stuff on individual computers. Then I’ll plant some software where nobody would ever see it on your main network computer, and that software would let me use everything you’ve got for my own reasons. I could send viruses, spam email, I’d just hijack your computers and you’d never know the difference.”

  “Is it that bad?” Mary said. “You could really do that?”

  “Yes. It’s that bad. Total chaos, millions of sheep never see the wolves.”

  “So we’re doing the park a service,” Ken said. “We’re testing our security, we’ve probably never thought much about it. Yes. Do it.”

  I gave instructions on my cell.

  “Tohono Chul Park,” Alex said. “Is that the client?”

  “Yes.” Only a small lie, a personal lie.

  “And what’s the fee?”

  “Pro bono.” That, I can’t lie about with my partners.

  “Bottom line?” Alex said. “What do you hope I’ll find?”

  “Bottom line…I don’t know. Deep background, a connection, any financial connections with a Central American cartel called maras. Evidence of laundering drug money out of the U.S.”

  “Slim pickings.”

  “First, get the name of whoever used this computer to log in to the website. Then track the website itself, crack the passwords, tell me what’s out there.”

  “Well. It’s not like we’re going where nobody’s gone before.”

  “Last, put somebody on a search for anything you can find about a woman, or an old Mexican movie, called La Bruja.”

  “Funky. I can tell you right now there’s a mountain bike with that name. And I think a pop singer. But we’ll check.”

  “Contact David Schultz. Ask him about that name. Call in whatever extra help you need.”

  “Twenty-four seven,” Alex said. “We never close.”

  “Alex. Wait a minute,” I said. “Can I replace this computer?”

  “What?” Ken said.

  “I want to examine the hard drive.”

  “I’ve looked at the browser caches,” Ken said. “The deleted emails. There’s nothing on there of any use.”

  “If I get you a replacement computer and take this one for my techs, is that okay with the park?”

  “Sure,” Mary said. “I guess so. For how long?”

  “A few days at most.”

  “Take it.”

  “Alex,” I said. “Courier over a standard PC, hire a geek to set it up however these people want.”

  “I’d already thought of that. Anything else?”

  “No.” She disconnected.

  “How, what are you, what?” Mary said. “Look. I don’t understand this.”

  “It’s a labyrinth,” Ken said. “And this woman is going to the center of it.”

  “I make no promise,” I said. “Some of this is untraceable.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re going to do,” Mary said. “Just do it. I’ve got to go to a meeting. Laura? You’ll help me?”

  “Yeah, sure. Yes.” For the moment, she didn’t want to hear anything else. When she left, I sunk into one of the office chairs, head lowered, shaking my head slowly, overwhelmed with my day.

  “What’s wrong?” Ken said after a while.

  “What exactly do you do here?” I said.

  “Coordinate all the volunteers.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Three hundred, give or take, depending on the season.”

  “Do they trust you?”

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “Not that I’m Big Daddy or Mr. Wonderful. But yeah, they trust I’ll do my best to match up whatever they’re seeking with what needs doing at the park. Why?”

  “I want to volunteer.”

  “Whoa, baby,” he said. “What are you asking here?”

  “I need to trust somebody. I’ve got a daughter, I’ve got my own psychic who’s also an astrologer and Tarot card reader, I’ve got myself.”

  “And you don’t trust any of them right now?”

  “Not to make decisions. No.”

  “What decisions are we talking about?” he said.

  And so I told him everything from the past day.

  Nathan leaving

  Photographing a horrible crime scene

  Working for TPD to get my PI license back

  Helping Mary

  “Wow,” he said.

  After I’d pretty much laid my soul on the table in front of him. He didn’t poke away with questions, he just listened. He barely moved, I noticed he’d lay his index finger into that small vertical depression just below the nose, what some people called the touch of God to show humans we’re imperfect. We sat in silence for a few minutes, reading each other, nothing like a Vulcan mind meld, but I felt as close to him in those minutes as I’d felt with anybody in a long time. At one point his cell rang, but he fiddled with the menus and turned off the sound.

  “Wow,” he said again. “That’s a real shitload of deciding you’ve got. You’re wrapped way too tight, girl. Here. Have a candy.”

  “A candy?”

  He handed me a peppermint candy. “My ex wife,” he said. “Man, she’d roll the candy around in her mouth, show it between her teeth, taunting her girlfriends who didn’t have any candy. Me, I crack the thing into bits, I have no patience with candy, I just want to taste the peppermint. You, I’d bet you’ll suck on that candy without crunching or showing off, you just enjoy it to the last itty bitty flake while your head crunches away trying to decide something.”

  “What am I trying to decide?”

  “Leaving out the guy?” I nodded. “You’re conflicted about working for TPD, that’s pretty obvious. You’re conflicted about helping Mary, that’s pretty obvious. Actually, you’re pretty much stuck in a conflicted state of mind, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you expect me to explain…what?”

  “What to do.”

  “And you somehow expect me to know that?” he said. “Somebody you just met? C’mon, get real, Laura.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “This was stupid, even asking, stupid telling you this stuff.”

  “Hey. I can’t explain what to do. But if you need help of any kind, just ask.”

  “That’s really sweet, Ken.”

  “Turned out okay, didn’t it.”

  “What?”

  “Our first date.” I stood up abruptly, he stood up, he offered his hand. “But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t sleep with anybody on the first date.”

  10

  �
�Kyle.”

  “I have a question,” I said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Laura Winslow.”

  “Laura, I’m sorry, Laura who?”

  “We just met. At that crime scene.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Just woke up.”

  “No problem.”

  “What did you want, Miss Winslow?”

  “Laura.”

  “Laura, okay.”

  “I’m confused about something,” I said.

  “I’m confused about a lot of things.”

  “The maras,” I said. “I’ve read stories. On the Internet.”

  “Okay?”

  “These are brutal people.”

  “They’re assassins.”

  “No regard for life?”

  “Regard for their own lives,” Kyle said. “And even then, if the contract goes out, they’ll kill their own children.”

  “I’m looking for a connection.”

  “Between?”

  “What do they do for fun?”

  “You mean, besides killing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Enjoyment. Music, drinks, drugs, sex, what else?”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a suggestion?”

  “Cockfights.”

  “Ahhhh,” Kyle said. “Oh, yeah. Cockfights, dogfights, anything that kills. I’ve also heard about rodeos, unsanctioned rodeos, where horses and bulls are spurred and ridden until they die.”

  “Cockfights,” I said. “Right now, just cockfights.”

  “Why that?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  The faint sound of liquid being poured into a glass, a sip, a gulp.

  “Cockfights. It’s a Latin thing.”

  “And betting?” I said.

  “Legal betting?”

  “Illegal.”

  “Sure,” Kyle said. “Miss Winslow.”

  “Laura.”

  “Where are going with this, Laura?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Need some help?”

  “Not right now, no.”

  “Okay. I got a call, earlier. Gates called me. Said he might have a proposition for me. You have any idea what that proposition would be?”