One Friday, he stopped me by the lockers and said it was time for a “road trip.” There was something else I had to see. Naturally, I was scared. I was a shoo-in for the State Finals in wrestling. I had a B+ average. I looked like a good shot for a scholarship and a chance to get out of our drag race valley town for good. But I was curious then just like I am now. A sucker, if you want to call it that—always a sucker for the dark low ride. Besides, he’d trusted me with a look inside his deepest hiding place.
We drove his street car, a 1968 supercharged Plymouth Duster down to San Diego, where he did most of his “shopping.” He’d done a scout mission two days before and had his target in sight—a BMW in for emission control at a big chrome boneyard by the railroad tracks. I waited by the Cyclone fence, keeping watch. He cut the lock and was into the car and back out the gate before the Doberman or the night guard even knew. He’d learned his trade well. Then we parked his car across town and drove across the border in the Beemer … me scared as a girl.
We went straight to this warehouse garage on the east side. Stifling hot even before sunrise, with soccer posters on the walls and statues of saints beside Tecate beer cans … coverall legs thrusting out from under bumpers in grease pits, engine blocks hanging from chains … paint nozzles jetting and all these somber and sometimes face-masked Mexicans cutting and stripping steel and attaching license plates.
Frank got me involved, haggling with a burly cat with a Zapata moustache in Spanish instead of gringo inglés. Truth was his Spanish was better than mine. We ended up with a tight roll of American cash and a powder blue Maverick with an Arizona tag to go back over the border. But we didn’t go back. We bought a bottle of tequila and headed south with the sun coming up.
“Is that what you wanted me to see?” I said when we finally stopped for a leak.
“Hell no,” he said, looking at me blankly. “That was just business.”
So we drove on. It was starting to get really hot. I was praying the car wouldn’t break down, or we wouldn’t get nailed by the Federales. We just drove. Stopped off at this gecko scurrying cantina for pepper soup and beers. Slept a little in the car with the windows down. Then back on the road. I kept waiting to find out what he wanted me to see.
About two miles south of the turn-off for the beach, we hit an unpaved road leading into the hills toward a hot springs. Frank got me to drive. A mile later, he said suddenly, “It’s right behind you. Stop the car and then look up real slow, man. It’s in your rearview mirror.”
So I looked up. It was the first time I’d ever seen a glimpse of El Miedo in the presence of someone else. This time it took the form of a long red-brown tunnel of dust behind us. I knew on one level that it was just the backfly from our tires, but it had taken on the shape of a living thing … dust drifting in the glare … seeking. A minute later it had vanished completely, as if we’d never driven down the road. As if we weren’t really there at all.
“Did you get it?” he asked.
“Sí,” I said, not knowing if he could even begin to imagine what I’d really seen—what it meant to me. Maybe he did. I was friends with him for a reason. That’s something I’ve learned a hundred times and all the hard way since—everyone you know you know for a reason. So, you better find out what it is.
Frank told me we were going to Mazatlán, and we drove all the way there in that powderpuff Maverick, drinking tequila and listening to mariachi on the radio. It was like some heat shimmer illusion. Rattletrap chicken buses. Adobe alleys choked with burros and goats. I can’t remember if we slept in the car overnight or not—but we arrived at dusk on the beach with the lights of fishing boats bobbing out beyond where the waves were breaking. Frank bought a cigar-sized joint off a boy without a shirt on and perfect white teeth. The dope was dark pungent green with black hairs in it, laced with local opium. We ate tortillas with spicy fish and beans cooked off a stone stove by a full-blooded Indian woman. Then he led me up through a mudbrick arcade where a marimba band was playing, to this old hotel painted seashell pink … a white satellite dish mounted on the tiled roof and little paper lanterns swaying on the balconies.
We were greeted at the door by a silver-haired don dressed in a Monte Carlo suit and a Panama hat, and offered rum and cokes with thick lemon wedges on a verandah upstairs overlooking the sea. Slowly, the girls appeared, like night-blooming flowers. Frank chose this obsidian-eyed Aztec. I was left in a quandary, nervous and blazed. My mother and stepfather didn’t know where I was and would’ve died twice over if they did. I’d put everything I’d worked for at risk. But I was having a great time. And that’s when things got wiggy. One by one the other girls filed out, and I thought for a second I’d done something wrong or offended them. Then she appeared and I knew instantly it was the real lady of the house. Our host.
She was dressed in a matador’s traje des luces, the suit of lights, with a flamenco dancer’s hat. She approached me like a cat, her shadow sweeping across the prickled arms of the cacti in their ceramic planters. She tossed her hat down at my feet. I stooped to pick it up, and when I rose to look into her face, I saw it was a mask of fiesta make-up—heavy, lurid. Her long dark hair was streaked with white—she was older than the old man who’d let us in.
In her mouth was a rose with thorns as sharp as the spurs on a fighting rooster. She wore polished leather shoes and had a length of braided cowhide hitched to her waist with a scarlet ribbon. She clapped her hands and a dwarfish little hombre in a white suit brought in a tray with a bottle of mescal and two glasses. She motioned for me to sit down at a wrought-iron table. She took the rose from her mouth and plopped it down. Then she poured two shots. We drank in silence, me trying to listen to the waves and not look her in the face. Meanwhile she kept her eyes on me. I could feel it—both of them burning through that mask of make-up. I wondered if Frank knew this was happening. Something else he’d wanted me to see. A set-up?
After we’d had two shots … the last faint plinks of the marimba band fading out in the street … the old gentleman brought in an antique wind-up Victrola with an elephant-ear speaker trumpet, and cranked it up. Tango music. Scratchy and melodramatic. The woman stood and flipped the rose into her mouth and snapped her fingers. I’d never even slow danced at high school parties. The old man came back to wind up the machine again. The music played on. Our shadows stalked across the tiles.
She didn’t care that I had bad acne. She had lines and troughs. How the rose got in my mouth I don’t know. Then she kissed me, and I felt the sharp barb of one of the thorns puncture my skin, the bittersweet iron taste of blood coming after the mescal. Alone in a glazed pot on the tiles was one particularly bulbous cactus. She pointed to it, and then made a rude gesture and laughed. The old man was standing in the doorway. He saw it all. I knew then she intended for a lot more to happen than a dance. I hadn’t chosen one of the girls, I’d been chosen by her.
She led me down a paneled hallway into a plastered chamber lit by a wall of candles like you’d find in a Catholic church. Across from it was a mahogany bed with lions carved in the posts and an enormous wicker bird-cage on a three-legged stand. Inside the cage was a lime green parrot. It seemed to be staring right at me, accusingly.
It was like being with some ghost come back to prey upon a young man. The candles became blades of fire, and through the window I could hear the tango music. We seemed to swim through animal heads … pinwheels spinning in a parade of burning matadors—and then I exploded like a piñata—gored and released at the exhausted same moment.
It was only the third time I’d had sex. If that’s what it was. Then we lay there, watching the wax drip on the parquet floor, and she ran her old hands through my hair and whispered dark, crazy things to me in Spanish, although it sounded like the pages of some leather-bound book turning in the breeze out on the verandah. Then I about jumped out of my skin when I felt this creature leap up onto the bed and claw me. It was a Chihuahua with a beaded Indian collar that said PICO. I tried to toss it off t
he bed, but the old woman slapped my face and cradled the dog to her saggy breast. Suddenly, the entire scene that had passed between us came back to me, clear and horrifying. She laughed and chucked me a lace comforter that had fallen on the floor. Then she said in knife-sharp English, “Go sleep out on the balcony. I’ve finished with you.”
I felt my fists clench, I’ll tell you. She just laughed as if there was a joke I didn’t see. Confused and ashamed, I grabbed my clothes to storm out, when my eye caught the parrot cage. I went over to slam it against the wall—but all that happened was the green bird tipped off its perch and fell on the bottom of the cage. It was stuffed. The old woman roared with laughter.
The next morning I woke up groggy and cold on the beach below, fish nets drying on a rope beside me. Frank came and found me about an hour later and we went for café con leche in a little place around the corner. Then we started on the long road home. We never said a word about that night the whole way back to San Diego. And nothing was the same after that.
Two weeks later Frank died in a stolen car outside National City. He’d been spotted by police. He got chased and rolled over an embankment into a concrete retaining wall. He’d always lived a toda madre. Me, I went on to fail two courses and lose my Semi-Final match. State University, medals, ribbons—everything I’d hoped for dematerialized—just like that cloud of dust. El Miedo haunting me, looking for another form to take.
Sitting there blindfolded, in Cliffhaven, more than 30 years later, I saw it distinctly. My old life had ended with that trip. What grew instead was a garden of failure and luminous broken things. A fixation on crime and a fear of it. Anger and lust that couldn’t tell each other apart—and a doomed sense that it didn’t matter anyway. The candles would burn, the waves would break and the cloud of dust would disappear behind you no matter what. And then find another way to get to you.
I took off the blindfold and Genevieve was standing there, fully dressed. I suspected she’d been close, watching me for quite a while, just like that parrot. Only she was so very real. I rose, as stiff as I’d felt that morning on the beach. At least the sun had set. The lights of the harbor shone through the window.
“I knew you would be a good pupil, Sunny,” she said. “Despite appearances, you have a real imagination.”
“I won’t be back,” I said brusquely.
“You can’t return Sunny,” she replied. “If you never really leave. And you won’t really be leaving now … because your need is too strong. Somewhere back in your little boy hard-as-nails cop head, where you’re really frightened and alone, you know that what you’re chasing can’t be found unless you face yourself. I’m going to help you do that. No matter how much it hurts or frightens you.”
“Why me?”
“I like the look of your dark,” she said. “It calls to me.”
I noticed that there was music playing in some other part of the house. Tango music. It was just a coincidence I figured, but it still upset me. Just like the silk pajamas she was wearing, that reminded me of a matador’s suit. She turned on her heel and swept down the hall to wherever it was she’d gone before. The tango music wafted after me across the patch of lawn.
The street was vacant and my footsteps echoed on the steep pavement. I seemed to see the night like infrared heat images—but by the time I got to my apartment I thought I’d wake up, go to work and everything would be back to normal, even the emptiness.
The trouble was I reached into my coat pocket. I had my keys in hand already, but my right hand dove into the pocket without me even thinking … and pulled out … a little dog collar that had the word PICO spelled in white beads.
Ten minutes later I was shaking out in front of the Liquor Mart. Antabuse or not, I drank with both hands. I tried as hard as hell to chuck the collar in a trashcan, but I couldn’t damn well do it. I dumped the pack of Camels I bought instead. I knew if I didn’t have the collar when I woke up, I’d have something worse than El Miedo to be afraid of.
LL NIGHT I WAS SICK AND SWEATING. BUT THERE’S something strangely therapeutic about staring into a toilet bowl, and I should know—I’ve done a lot of it. I felt like I’d been ground through the hamburger and broken glass of a lot of years. Things I hadn’t thought of in a long time came back to me with unusual clarity. Simple, foolish things. Like back in first grade … when we’d lie outside on hot days during our Quiet Time. Frank, me—five or six of us, boys and girls. We never did anything blatantly childish like pointing out the animal shapes in the clouds, unless there was a really flagrant ostrich or fish—a dragon or a whale. We just lay very close, the warm pale grass worn to soft dirt beneath us. Sometimes Sims O’Driscoll would lie about how his father had beaten him up the night before. We’d listen and nod, and go back to studying the sky. Nobody knew where to find us. For a little while, no one even thought to look, all of us lying out in the open in what might’ve been a small field.
What I wouldn’t have given to be back in that field, even for a moment. I was sure as shit glad I’d hung on to the collar. It was still there when I went to examine it over black coffee. The tango music and the matador looking pj’s could’ve been just a coincidence. The dog collar was something else. Something to hang onto. Sort of anyway.
I had a twenty minute hot shower and then went for eggs and smoke-link sausages at Cheezy’s. I needed to refuel and my stomach seemed inclined to let me get away with it. Over the feedbag, I checked my voicemail from the night before. Four messages. Cub Padgett, being a good Scout, wondering if I was OK, and a guy named Brewster, an informant whose cover had been blown back when he was helping out me and Jack. I’d sent him off to Salt Lake City. He was just reporting in. Said he’d gone straight. They always say that. I texted him BOL and deleted the number.
It was Cracker Jack who’d wised me to the text message lingo. All his snitches and contacts, from bookies to love dolls, had code names. DV8. G9. TIAD. FYEO. And they all communicated in this dyslexic kindergarten finger-speak. Jack’s favorite text response when one of the under citizens would reach out for some advice was IANAL, I am not a lawyer.
It was a good thing he clued me in because my card had been passed through those circles too.
BM&Y, I think it’s pretty moronic, but it had come in handy with Polly, BC she had no head for the stuff and that made things a little safer if she ever had a peek at my phone and I hadn’t scrubbed a message. I think she always figured every signal that ever came through had the smell of crotchless panties to it, or was about some line of toot for a pigeon. She couldn’t understand that a lot of the calls and texts I got off-duty were from people who needed my help. Not the kind of uniformed help you can ask for openly. Real help. Like Terry, one of our old dispatch supervisors, who’d get walloped every time her ex-hubbie went off his meds. A lot of victims can’t go through legit channels for a lot of reasons, and in my line you end up owing and being owed a lot of favors. That’s just how it is. “Why can’t you be friendly with normal people?” Pol always asked me. I never had an answer for her. I couldn’t say if it was the cop work or something inside me. When the feverbeast was loose inside me and the ravenous need for anonymous sex came on, I always forgave her the distrust. I deserved it.
The third message was some telemarketing survey. The fourth message was just someone listening. Private number. Could’ve been anyone, but you know who I thought it was.
I bought a Sentinel and did a quick scan of the crime reports. The news had leaked about the new wife’s windfall as a result of the “Mercedes Inferno” and there was a file photo of a pre-scorched Whitney. He looked like The Racketeer in that old game Lie Detector, only decked out in a Pal Zileri suit. It made me think of Padgett.
Chris was young and extremely good looking. A whiskey brown welterweight Most Likely to Succeed from the strip mall side of town. He’d been raised an only child by a large-and-in-charge mother when his skirt-chasing pop ran off to Reno with some gold lamé mutton dressed up as lamb. Now he looked like a lifeguar
d with his eyes on the prize. He never walked into a room when women didn’t turn their heads. And yet men couldn’t hate him because he was so damn likable. I’d heard locker room rumors that he’d picked up the name “Coke Can,” but being more of a grower than a shower myself, I couldn’t vouch—I try to keep a low profile around naked men. But it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was big in the pants. He had all the luck.
It would’ve been nice to be to do some buddy things with him outside the job. Go to Big Dog and have a rootbeer float—I knew he was as sober as a nun—I respected that. Maybe the go-karts. I’d always had this dream of having a son and taking him to the go-karts. But I was embarrassed about hanging with him off the clock. His future was too bright to chaw the rag with the likes of me on his own time. Funny thing is, I think he thought I was too good for him.
His new wife Tabbie was a Gucci do-gooder. She was currently working as a Public Defender, but she was a Yale graduate who’d done her law degree at Boalt. She looked like a vegan version of Jennifer Aniston and she wore too much White Linen perfume. Her father just happened to be Humphrey P. Moran, the District Attorney, who had well-known schemes for a much bigger political career. (His handle on the Force was “Humphrey Dumpty,” on account of him being short, bald and far too well-tailored for an elected official.) I think the Botox mother’s people manufactured thumb tacks or something back in Illinois. The box score? Chris the Cub had married well and his future looked rosy to golden, but from what I’d seen, he was stand-up in every way.
Still, while I was flattered with being given the charge of taking him under my wing, I wasn’t so doddery that I didn’t see there might’ve been a hidden agenda. There almost always is. I had a few question marks against me, the odd reprimand—and one very formal review. My record was clear officially, but you can’t do this job as long as I had without making enemies behind both kinds of bars—and on the bench. He could’ve been assigned as my partner to keep an eye on me. I tried to put the private mystery of the day before out of my mind and headed to the boiler room.
Private Midnight Page 3