The boy, trembling, said, “What could I do to—”
Tell quickly held up a hand—not even wanting to contemplate what the kid might be prepared to offer of himself or of the girls to get out from under. The other three Mexican kids were twisted around in their seats, watching. The breath of the two in the backseat had fogged the rear window of the Nova. The girls were clearly terrified; afraid, probably, that at any minute Tell would swing on Richie. Or maybe that Richie would commit them to something.
Tell said, “I’m going to make you and your friends an offer.”
The kid swallowed hard, watching Tell watching the girls. Richie said, “What do you want?”
“Not much, kid. And it’s between you and me, and stays that way. I’m prepared to believe that is your car, Rich. I’m prepared to take your promise that you’re going to drive the speed limit in my town, here on out. Because if you don’t, if your name comes across my desk in some complaint or report, I’m going to personally land on you and send you back to Mexico, and much the worse for wear.”
“What do you want from me, sir?”
“I want you to swear to obey the law in my town, Rich. And your friends in that car—their behavior is on your head now too—from now to forever. I want you to promise me you’re going to get some kind of proof of insurance for that spanking sled of yours. Failing to become legal citizens in the next few weeks, I want you all to find better false identifications, and you’re going to need to do that damned fast, because I’m keeping these phony ones in my pocket. And that brings us to the heart of our deal. I forget tonight, and you all do that too. In return, I just want the name and location of the man who got you these false identifications.”
“I do that, he’ll kill me and rape my sisters,” Richie said. “He swore to me he would do that.”
“He’ll never know who sent me, Rich. You have my word as jefe and as your new best friend on that.”
Richie looked skeptical.
Tell said in Spanish, “I promise you on the soul of my dead baby daughter. I was Border Patrol and a Mexican drug cartel burned her and my wife alive in our home. I swear to you, I won’t let anything like that happen to you or to yours, Rich.”
Richie nodded, wild-eyed.
Tell pulled out his pen and notebook. “Shoot me a name, Rich.”
THEN
Walt had sensed it was the girl’s first time doing it for money as he made his selection. She struck him as a bit shy; half-innocent, really. It was a large part of the reason he’d chosen her from among the remaining whores.
When they reached her room, Walt saw how wrong he was. Playing the tyro, it soon became obvious, was a kind of strategy on her part. A timeworn ploy.
In her dank room, stripping, her demeanor changed. She laughed at his shyness undressing.
The girl was still laughing at Walt. She was speaking in Spanish and pointing between his legs. What was that Mex’ word she kept repeating as she laughed and pointed?
Poco?
Something like that. She kept laughing at his inability to get it up.
Too scared? Not sure what to do? Maybe it was the fact he felt the clock; he’d only paid for half an hour.
Her laughing grew meaner, a grating bray.
She’d pushed him too far, whatever she was gibbering on about.
Walt hit her with the back of his hand and sent her sprawling. When she looked up at him, scared and holding her own hand to her mouth, he saw he’d drawn blood.
He felt this stirring—looked down and sucked in his gut; saw he was finally getting hard.
Walt forced his bulk on the skinny Mexican girl, closing a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming and alerting the big boss whore.
He slid inside her, nearly coming at once. Well, she wasn’t laughing now, was she?
TWENTY TWO
Shawn lay on his cot, deep into his second pack of cigarettes, feeling lightheaded and nauseous from all the smoking; from too much coffee. Too many Krispy Kreme doughnuts the fat cop kept spotting him.
His hands were shaking and he was already stir-crazy.
Stir-crazy.
He understood that term too well now. Shawn felt like banging his head bloody against the walls or bars until he fell unconscious or died.
The New Austin police headquarters was nearly empty. It was just Shawn and the obese cop who sat outside his cell, on guard. “You’re our first all-nighter,” the fat-assed cop, Billy, had confided to Shawn.
Shawn had finally reached some kind of rapport with the bloated son of a bitch, though—at least persuading Billy to step outside so Shawn could take a dump in private.
The weekly newspaper reporter who had never covered a murder or seen a violent crime scene before standing over Thalia’s body, nevertheless had always fancied himself a hard-liner when it came to crime and punishment. But incarcerated now, Shawn was reassessing past positions. This was hell. Shawn chaffed in the too-tight space. He cursed the hard and narrow cot, too stingy blankets and especially that fucking toilet with no privacy.
But Billy wasn’t so bad. He’d even brought the portable TV into the jail area and angled the thing so they could watch a Hunter rerun together.
Shawn said, “You got cable, right?”
Billy said, “Yeah … you got a show this hour?”
“The Shield, on FX,” Shawn said. “Or Nip-Tuck … they show tits and ass on those.”
“And it isn’t a premium channel?” Billy, sucking the filling from a jelly-filled doughnut, seemed incredulous.
“No shit, they do. Lots of righteous nudity. And it’s basic cable,” Shawn said.
Billy wiped his hands down on his socks and picked up the remote. “Which channel?”
THEN
Patricia was fourteen when her parents flew the family to Texas to cross the borderline back.
All the blood relatives the Maldonados had left were still down there in Mexico. It was time, Kathleen and Augustin said, that Patricia met them. Time for her to see what her parents had felt so necessary to flee in order to build this new life in El Norte.
Her mother had another, unstated motive too, Patricia rightly sensed.
Kathleen had begun to worry about how thoroughly Americanized Patricia seemed. She felt Patricia had begun to acquire a certain kind of gringo’s entitlement mentality.
For his part, Augustin was abraded by his daughter’s increasingly romantic wonderings about the country her parents had deserted years before things truly began to go to pieces back home.
Initially, the trip to the border had done to nothing to further Kathleen’s and Augustin’s agendas.
The dry heat and desert—the strange plants that stubbornly thrived there—captivated Patricia. The terrain further sparked her imagination. She picked up a novel about the life of Pancho Villa, the Mexican peasant-turned-self-styled Revolutionary general, and became lost in its pages.
But then they’d finally left Texas—crossed over to the other side.
Squalor … strange smells. The sounds of distant gunfire, and, too often, of sirens.
Patricia’s cousin, Yolanda, was about her same age. But the boys who interested Yolanda horrified Patricia. They had gang tattoos and hid guns in their pants under their shirttails. They all smoked and they blasted narcocorridos from beater cars and trucks.
Yolanda’s house was a rotting pueblo with no reliable plumbing—but had a giant satellite dish up top that was probably their most expensive possession.
The neighbors incessantly screamed at one another, issued threats and ultimatums.
After the first of three planned nights sleeping over, Patricia awakened to find a cockroach crawling across her bed sheets. She begged her parents to let them return to spend nights in the hotel in El Paso. The hotel wasn’t wonderful—it wasn’t as good as the Holiday Inns they’d visited on trips for cheap family get-aways to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. But it was comparatively clean and something like heaven compared to her cousin’s home.
/> And she didn’t have to plug her ears against the blasting “music” of Valentín Elizalde and Sergio Vega.
When they were seated on the plane back to Ohio, squeezed in between her parents, Patricia said, “It’s good you left there. Thank you for doing that.”
Her parents took Patricia’s hands in theirs and squeezed hard as the jet taxied down the runway. As the plane dipped its wing for a turn before beginning its steep ascent, Patricia never looked down … never looked back.
TWENTY THREE
Tell returned home at eleven thirty P.M. He parked next to Patricia’s Honda—the only available slot in the parking lot. He sat in his car, finishing a song: Springsteen’s “I Wish I Were Blind.”
He locked up his SUV and stared off across the creek at the last, straggling fireflies. Frogs croaked in the high weeds.
Tell had talked to two TV reporters by cell phone on the drive home. He’d toed up to the hint of having his own person of interest for the murder of Thalia Ruiz. He hated to lie about the case, but he’d done it anyway, thinking perhaps the publicity would spark the real killer to some stupid act of reckless and attention-getting rabbiting. Or perhaps Tell’s hints about a suspect would provoke the killer into surrendering himself in time to cut a deal and escape the wrath of Able Hawk. The sheriff was frequently on television and in the newspapers too, making rumblings about a “slam-dunk, death penalty bounce.”
Tell had decided to release Shawn when he got into the HQ in the morning. He had already concluded that his morning run with Patricia was probably off, so he figured for another early morning at the station house.
A note was taped to the door of Tell’s apartment. The handwriting was feminine:
Whatever the hour, please knock.—P.
Tell thought about ignoring it. She’d probably be asleep at this hour. And some time to think more overnight about things regarding Shawn and his sorry actions with Thalia might mellow Patricia’s attitude toward him. Tell hoped so, anyway. Then Tell heard a hinge squeak. Patricia stepped out onto the shaft of light from her opening door. She whispered, “Tell? Can we please talk?”
He doffed his hat, said, “Surely.” He nodded at his door. “Mine or yours?”
Patricia smiled and shrugged. She wore sweats and a T-shirt cut short to expose her midriff. Bare feet. He wanted to pull her close; to undress her tonight and never let go. This time, he wanted to spend the night; to love her and hold her all night long. “My door’s open, Tell.”
“So it is.”
Patricia stepped back to let Tell in. She locked the door behind him. She reached out and took his white hat. “This what you wore on the Border Patrol? It’s kind of high contrast with that black uniform.”
She put his hat on her head, just like Marita used to do. Looking at Patricia standing there—with her black hair and eyes, wearing his hat as his wife had in playful moments, dark eyes looking up teasingly from under the shadow of its brim—it was far too much. Tell lifted the hat from her head and tossed it on the breakfast counter to try to make the memory go away. He kissed her forehead through her hair. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s my hat from back then. Not sure why I wore it tonight.”
Patricia shrugged, her arms around his waist now, pulling him close. “It’s a white hat. You’re a good man. The hero, right? Maybe you’re just reminding yourself of that.”
“I’m no white hat, Patricia. No hero like that.”
“Beg to differ, Tell.” She hesitated, then said, “If you’d let me, I’d like to visit Shawn tomorrow. He must be scared there and he doesn’t have many, if any, friends, you know. Some people just stay back from him because of what he does. And he works crazy hours since he’s about the only staff at that paper. When he’s not writing or designing pages, he’s cruising bars. I really think I’m probably as close to a friend as Shawn’s got in this town, especially now, God help him.”
“Visit him if you like,” Tell said, stepping from her embrace. He walked over to her sliding glass door and looked out at the wind-stirred willow—its draped branches pushed around by the warm night wind. “You can visit him at his place, if that’s what you want. Come morning, I’m kicking the sorry son of a bitch loose.”
“Really?”
Tell shrugged. “Able Hawk—El Gavilan—amassed scads of exculpatory evidence. So, Shawn will walk. At least on the murder rap. Though I think he’s pretty well through in this town. I also sincerely doubt Shawn’s denials about having slipped that dead woman the Rohypnol. Hawk doubts it too, and he’s driven to pursue it. If Shawn did drug Thalia—even if it had nothing to do with her getting herself murdered later—it’s still a terrible crime.”
Patricia stepped up behind Tell and wrapped her arms around his waist again, her cheek pressed to his back. “You’re right. In that light, I’ll keep some distance from Shawn for now. You’re right, of course too, that he’s ruined in this town. I just hope Shawn has the good sense to cut his losses and move on fast. Find himself a good position elsewhere and grow the hell up. Maybe even clean up his act.”
“That may be asking a lot of that one,” Tell said. “He has a tendency to follow his dick around. Or so Able says.” Tell hated the taint of jealousy in his voice.
“I really didn’t ask you in to talk about Shawn,” Patricia said, pulling Tell closer.
“You brought him up, Patricia.”
She released her grip and walked into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and rummaged. She said, “Maybe I did it because he was on my mind. A few hours ago, Hawk—El Gavilan—came and tried to ask me a lot of very personal, very invasive questions about Shawn and what he liked to do in bed.”
“I didn’t send Able to talk to you, Patricia. And I don’t want to talk about any of this.”
“Did you know he was coming, Tell?”
“I tried to talk him out of it.”
“Then you did know.”
“I tried to stop Able, Patricia.”
“You might have warned me.”
“Yeah. I might have with more time. But Hawk walked out of my place, straight down the hall, and knocked on your door. There was simply no time to give you that heads-up. I’m sorry you had to go through it.”
“I really didn’t … didn’t give him his answers. I showed Hawk the door. I think he hates me now.”
“Good for you,” Tell said. “And good on you.” He picked up his hat. “I should let you sleep. Hell, I’m exhausted myself.”
“I’m wide awake,” Patricia said.
She pulled a small bowl of sliced limes from the refrigerator and tugged off the bowl’s plastic lid. She opened the cupboard and pulled out a saltshaker. “Drink with me, Tell.”
She poured two waiting shot glasses full of tequila.
Tell tossed his hat back on the counter.
Patricia squeezed lime juice on both of their hands—on the space between their thumbs and index fingers—and then sprinkled salt on the wet spots. They hoisted their shot glasses, entwining arms, licking one another’s hands, then downing their shots.
She said, “That’s one.” Patricia poured a second round.
“Go easy there, we both have work tomorrow,” Tell said.
“Yes, we do.” She picked up a remote control and pressed a button. Gordon Lightfoot on the stereo: “If You Could Read My Mind.” Melancholy stuff and very much his kind of music.
They downed their second tequila shots and Patricia pushed her shot glass aside. She began fumbling with the buckle of his gun belt. “Let’s finally get you out of this uniform tonight,” she said.
Tell took her hand from his gun belt. “Patricia …”
She looked up at him from beneath careless black bangs with dark bedroom eyes. For a moment, she reminded Tell of his cousin’s wife. It didn’t unsettle him. And he found that … unsettling. She said, “Tell, I want this. Don’t you want it too?”
He started to answer, but then her mouth was pressed to his mouth, her salty tongue tangling with his own. Her hands
began fumbling with his gun belt again. He moved her hands and unbuckled his gun belt and placed it on the counter by the discarded shot glasses. Patricia was already working on his tunic’s buttons.
She pushed his shirt over his shoulders and it fell with a thunk to the floor—drawn down by the weight of his badge. Patricia slipped off her own T-shirt, naked underneath. Her hands went to Tell’s neck, urging his mouth to her breast. He sucked on her nipple and felt her knees tremble. She moaned softly. Long as it had been since he had been with a woman, Tell felt weak in the knees too. He said, “I should go to a store, get something.” God, he felt like a kid. It had been so long since the last time, and thinking about buying rubbers? God’s sake.
“We don’t need anything,” Patricia said, her mouth hungry against his. “I have all we need.”
Then it was a feverish tangle, backing to her bedroom, shedding shoes and pants along the way; a wild, desperate coupling. Her kisses drew blood, her teeth nicked his bottom lip. Her short nails dug into the small of his back and his ass. She wrapped her legs tightly around him, refusing to let him pull out when it was on him. She screamed, coming with him, coaxing his body with hidden muscles.
After, tangled up and damp in one another’s arms and legs and in the half-kicked-off comforter and twisted sheets, Patricia said, “Oh God, Tell … oh God.”
She must have set the song on a loop, because “If You Could Read My Mind” was still playing, just as it had been through their fumbling, hungry lovemaking. Heroes often fail.
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