by Gil Reavill
“You came down here with him?” Ellis was clearly shocked. Remington had carefully kept the details of her affair with Val secret, out of shame, and especially now that Caroline was dead.
“Don’t you see? That’s him in the photo!”
Ellis shrugged. “I say again, so what? He’s got a soft spot for his former nanny. I had a nanny who took care of me, taught me all about Motown. I’ll never forget her.”
“I don’t think Ninny is his nurse. I think she’s his mother. Valentin Duran isn’t a member of the wealthiest clan in Mexico. Far from it. I think he came from right here in smelly, dirty, dirt-poor Playa de los Volcanes.”
Chapter 16
Remington obsessed over the photo that she had requisitioned from Ninny’s house. She kept it on her bedside table. During nighttime bouts of sleeplessness, she would snap on the light and stare at it, as if looking long enough at the faces would eventually cause them to give up their secrets. Truth be told, mostly she looked at the blurred image of a juvenile Val Duran.
She’d also picked up another tidbit of information from her second visit to Playa de los Volcanes. Ninny’s full name was Nina Zaldivar Guerrero.
Naturally, Remington shared the photograph with Julieta. The two of them had a Spanish-English phrase book now. Julieta helped her make sense of the writing on the reverse side of the picture. Scrawled across the cardboard backing of the frame were a few dozen words, written in a tight, tiny script, faded with the years. A series of names, the children of the woman in the center of the shot. Ninny’s family.
Sofia. What looked like two nicknames, Julieta said, Oiny and Tralla. Herm. Laura. Guererros. Some of the others were nicknames, too. Fo-fo. Tino. Seven names in all. Remington and Julieta tried to fit the names to the faces. The written script seemed not to match the left-to-right order in the photograph.
“ ‘Oiny’ es quizá ‘Orinda,’ ” Julieta said. “El mote.” She looked up the word in their Spanish-English dictionary and showed Remington the definition: “nickname.”
“So Oiny is a nickname for Orinda?” Remington asked.
“Sí.”
They counted five females and three male children grouped around the mother. One little fellow gazed out from between two siblings, but they were both pretty sure he was male. Was it Fo-fo? Guerro? Tino?
“ ‘Herm,’ that means, what? Herman?” Remington tried to sort it out.
“Hermana,” Julieta said, since by the numbers the name had to be attached to a female.
Which meant that the face they recognized as Val’s had to belong to Tino. Valentin could very easily be shortened to Tino.
“Is Tino a nickname?” she asked. “Es Tino el mote? Um, um, un nombre?”
Julieta shrugged. “Tino means…” She struggled, finally looking up the word. “Tino, it means ‘knack.’ ” She mispronounced the hard k, but showed Remington the definition in print.
Val Duran equals Tino Zaldivar Guerrero. Or perhaps not. They could be wrong on all of this. It was frustrating to be so unsure.
The photograph was at least a decade old. Remington knew that names in Hispanic cultures were matrilineal. The mother’s family name would be in the middle position, the father’s name last, but the children usually went by the surname of the mother’s family. Zaldivar, from the mother’s family, and Guerrero, from the father.
Which prompted a question. Where was the father? Behind the camera? During her quick rifle through the photographs on Ninny’s chest of drawers, she hadn’t seen any male figure who could obviously serve as father to the clan. Unless perhaps it was the priest. Not unheard of, Remington thought, for priests to have secret families hidden away. But having stolen one photo she couldn’t exactly go back to the bungalow in Playa de los Volcanes to steal another.
Julieta had turned increasingly moody. She didn’t like L.A. and knew not a single soul in the city. Her life had telescoped down to a pinpoint. Remington recognized the signs of depression, or post-traumatic stress, or some other deep psychological wound. She had the idea that the girl was essentially hiding in the apartment and encouraged her to get out, find employment, enlarge her social circle. Counseling, the church, something, anything. The two of them talked less and less. American TV remained Julieta’s painkiller of choice.
With Divorced Housewives of Malibu blaring in the background, Remington spent the evening getting a jump on course work for the next academy session. She kept being distracted by stray thoughts. She hopped on the internet, plugged the name Laura Zaldivar Guerrero into a search engine and came up with nothing. Same with Guerreros Zaldivar Guerrero. She got lost in Spanish-language websites.
Valentin Duran turned up a few hits, however. The name was indeed connected with the fabulously wealthy Baillères family. A cousin of the patriarch had a daughter who married a man named Duran. It was unclear from the information Remington could get off the Web—none of it in English—but it seemed the couple had a son named Valentine or Valentino. From the sole mention on the internet, and as far as she could tell, the boy had once been featured in some sort of piano recital.
She hit the “Images” link on Google, and came up with a Duran family photo. Whoever the person she knew as Val Duran was, he wasn’t included in the image. She didn’t think so, anyway. Remington’s ancient laptop didn’t have a lot of computing power. The screen kept freezing when she tried to download photographs.
At 10:23 her phone rang. She didn’t check the caller ID before answering, thinking it might be Ellis.
“If you try to see her again, I’ll feed you to my dogs.”
The bad connection couldn’t mask the familiarity of the voice.
“Val,” she said. Not a question but a statement. “Or maybe I should call you Tino.”
“I swear to God, bother her one more time and I’ll kill you. I’ll probably have to kill you anyway, but I will make it much more painful if I ever, ever hear of you going near her again.”
“Where are you? The last we saw each other we were all taking a little hike through the Jucumba Mountains, remember? You had on a clean white linen shirt.”
“Chota puta,” he snarled, calling her a cop whore. “You should have died along with her.”
“You know I—” Remington began, but the line went silent.
—
“How did you like your visit to the American Midwest?” Tino asked Fausto, keeping his tone light. “Will you be relocating there anytime soon?”
“You know, I think there’s conifer people, the ones who like pine trees, and then—what’s the other one? With leaves?”
“Deciduous,” suggested Tino.
“Right, right, deciduous,” Fausto said. “So there’s deciduous people and conifer people. Every time I go up North, I think moist, wet, slick, like a woman when she gets going, you know?”
“Wonderful.”
“Well, yes, I like it, too, in a woman. But in a landscape it’s a little disgusting, don’t you think? Everything rotting at top speed. Not like Sonora, where you bury a body, come back a couple of weeks later, the ants and beetles have got to it, cleaned it up like they was your maids.”
“That’s a good thing?”
“I’ll show you later,” Fausto said.
Tino could tell that his brother’s legs were bothering him. A few years back, Fausto had endured hellish bone-lengthening procedures by a quack in Mexico City named Dr. Artie Bath, a series of operations that were supposed to add a few inches to the dwarf’s height. The steel rigs employed looked like something out of a torture museum. Incredibly painful as the business had been, it didn’t work out for Fausto, and its failure had fatal consequences for the good doctor Bath.
They were on the big porch at the ranch house in Chihuahua, Tino and Fausto and Hermana, the sister serving the brothers their café con leche, happy to do it, happy to have them all together again.
“And how did you like Malibu?” Hermana tried to match her brother’s lightness.
“The sun
shines all the time and everybody tells themselves they are happy,” Tino said. “But as far as I can see only the surfers are truly content. The others are mad for the next thing, and the next.”
“The American disease,” Hermana said, a melancholy tone in her voice. Lately, sadness had infected the woman’s heart. All three of them on the porch that day knew what had to come next. Hermana, for one, felt the enticement of other possibilities, other outcomes. They owned a beach bungalow in Campeche, on the Yucatán. Go down there and drink rum for the rest of their lives, raise families, grow fat and content.
“Or we could leave the country,” she had suggested the night before. “Just fly away, to Spain, or maybe Buenos Aires. We’ve succeeded in our task, haven’t we? Beyond our dreams. We are golden. We have more money than the Pope.”
In Spanish, her words were “Tenemos más dinero que El Papa.” She meant the Pope, but “El Papa” could be interpreted in other ways as well.
Whatever she proposed, her brothers had not been tempted. They both stared at Hermana coldly. They were going to see this thing through to the end.
The seven-hundred-acre Rancho de los Espejismos occupied a dusty stretch of scrubland north of El Medio, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. In the disgusted sentiments of the ranch hands, the place was Nowheresville, “Donde el diablo perdió la mierda”—“Where the devil lost his shit”—with not a decent bar for kilometers around.
But as a smuggler’s haven the ranch was well situated. It was surrounded by borders, situated on the line between Chihuahua and the state of Sonora, for one, just a mile to the west. A few miles north was El Alambre and the United States. Another border sliced through up there, too, the one between Arizona and New Mexico. To the west, Tucson, to the east, El Paso, Texas. A world of possibilities.
Rancho de los Espejismos. Ranch of the Mirages. Or Jismos, for short. A frontier outpost of the Blood Alliance, the fearsome Sinaloa crime cartel. Trace a line straight north from the narco-state of Sinaloa to the U.S., and that line would pass right through Jismos. The ranch was the launching pad, the marshaling point, the entrepôt for the cartel’s push across the U.S. border. Vast amounts of rooster, parrot and goat flowed through as if in a pipeline.
In recent months the menagerie of drugs welcomed a new animal, methamphetamine, with additional Sinaloa labs churning out high-quality product. The Mexican meth was designed to knock out the homemade stuff of American amateurs who manufactured in places like Arkansas, Iowa and Indiana. The appropriate totem creature for meth, everyone agreed, had to be the monkey.
Rooster, parrot, goat and monkey.
Envíen sus animales, que traen de vuelta el oro. Send out your animals, they bring back gold.
The latest rage at the ranch involved playing around with a Stinger missile launcher and AT4 rockets that the Blood Alliance had purchased on the international black market. The Sinaloa cowboys were mad for the Stinger, calling it a bazuca cielo, a sky bazooka. In the parlance of the armament industry, Stingers were “personal” surface-to-air missiles. The cowboys conducted target practice on the slow-moving stock, laughing manically as they blew up one steer after another.
Naturally, so much activity around Jismos attracted the interest of law enforcement, greedheads in beige uniforms eager to muscle in on the action. Everyone had their hands out for la mordida, the bite. The skim off a single shipment of contraband could purchase a large pleasure boat, or send a child to college, all four years.
So many cops. On this side of the wire were antinarcoticos, local police, federales of all stripes. On the other side, FBI, DEA, Border Patrol and agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs. Jismos was like an island of crime in a sea of law enforcement. It had to live up to its name, Ranch of the Mirages. It had to be invisible.
Which is one way that Fausto served his Blood Alliance masters. The rites of Palo Mayombe, he assured them, rendered smugglers undetectable to the police. The traffickers possessed endless amounts of cash. Truth be told, money handling was much more of a hassle than smuggling the product. The traficantes were happy to gift their pet santero with mad stacks of it. Fausto’s disfigured dwarf’s body somehow made his magic more potent, not less.
To the Rina brothers, the narcos who ran the ranch, the little brujo offered a full menu of services. He protected them from evil spirits, blessed their shipments of contraband and cursed their competitors. He swore that he could magically conceal smugglers from the eyes of the authorities. Little by little, he wormed his way into the organization, until it was difficult to tell who was the boss and who was the servant. Cash rained down on the dwarf santero like pennies from heaven. Only in his case it was in hundred-count packets of Franklins.
The problem was that the Sinaloa caballeros around the ranch believed in Fausto’s powers only too well. He promised them they were fully immune from being busted by the cops. So the hotshot cowboys all acted as though they possessed a free pass. They became arrogant and reckless. Lately, they had taken to blasting their pickups straight through police roadblocks without stopping, which tended to piss the uniforms off.
Hermana, at least, could feel the noose tightening around Jismos. Sooner rather than later, she knew, a raid would scream down on the ranch. She itched to be elsewhere. Her brothers, too, had plans to decamp. But Tino and Fausto wanted to go where they would only get into deeper trouble. De Guatemala a Guatepeor, as the saying went. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
“Come along,” Fausto said to his siblings now. They had finished their front-porch coffees. The late-morning heat was beginning to soften the nighttime winter chill. Fausto led Tino and Hermana along the arroyo, past the bunkhouse trailers and the pole barns, up toward the coffin shed, where he conducted his Santería hocus-pocus. The stench of rotted blood rose up to greet them.
Chupé Torres, Fausto’s faithful servant and all-around butt boy, waited in the yard beside the shed. Fausto told him that it was time to pull the wire.
“I don’t think he is ready yet, boss,” Chupé said. But Fausto insisted. He wanted to show off for his sister and brother.
A rusted metal wire stuck upward out of the ground in the yard, like a buried phone cable that had come loose. It had a loop at the end, which Chupé gripped and pulled. The loose dirt gave way easily. A putrid smell rose from below, mingling and competing with the ugly odors that already emanated from the nearby shed. With a muffled ripping noise, blood-black bones emerged from below the ground, strung along the wire like beads on a necklace.
Human vertebrae. The rusty wire had been fed through the sacrificial victim’s sacrum and up through the bones of the back. And, yes, Chupé had been right. They were not yet ready to rise from the grave. Fausto’s underground army of maggots, ants and beetles had not cleaned the dead sufficiently. Instead of being pristine and bleached white by time, the vertebrae were still clumped with bits of life.
“Ugh,” exclaimed Tino. “Jesucristo, Fausto.”
“I told you, boss,” Chupé said.
Fausto gave him a crack alongside his head for his insolence. Had to reach up to do it, but connected just the same. Chupé retreated a step, a welt rising on his cheek.
“This is from my sicario,” Fausto told Tino and Hermana. He put his face close to the bones, examining them one by one. “Raúl dos Santos. The one who did the Loushane girl.”
The subject was a sore one with Tino. He now challenged Fausto about leaving Raúl to die at the scene. Too risky, he said. Raúl could lead the Americans straight back to them. The brothers bickered about it, standing over the desiccated spine of the former lobotomized hitman. Fausto said the bones had gained a great deal of power, not only from the murder but from the way the killer died, at the hands of a whole platoon of police. Besides, Fausto said, Chupé had retrieved the body, hadn’t he?
The theft of Raúl’s half-dissected corpse from the Milwaukee crime lab seemed to be one more indication of Fausto’s power. Swiping the dead body had no repercussions at all. Nothing showed
up in the media about it, which was strange, since the Loushane affair was such a hot topic. Once again, Fausto had effectively channeled Harry Potter. He had been able to throw a cloak of invisibility over the actions of his subordinates. The body snatchers—Chupé, Marco and David—were all amazed.
The truth had a more mundane twist to it. The Wisconsin Department of Justice had long been breathing down the neck of the manager of the Milwaukee crime lab. Barrett Cameron was in trouble for a series of administrative blunders. Several times the lab had misplaced key evidence samples on important cases. During legislative hearings, Cameron had been caught in outright lies. He could not seem to come up with a viable plan to clear a severe DNA-analysis backlog. Plus there was the embarrassing incident with a late-night stripper party on the premises.
In such a position, what was a beleaguered crime-lab manager to do when a whole corpse under his charge went missing? Entering into a conspiracy with two of his assistants, Cameron contrived to have an empty, weighted casket interred in an indigent burial at Milwaukee’s Graceland Cemetery. No one attended the supposed last rites of the still-anonymous mass murderer. Out of sight, as far as Barrett Cameron was concerned, was out of mind.
Meanwhile, here was the real thing, or what was left of him, being pulled from the ground behind the palo shed at Jismos. A cartel caballero at the ranch had ordered up a necklace of human vertebrae from Fausto. He had seen others worn by his comrades, and wanted one of the powerful talismans for his own. The santero planned to sell him a string of bones from the spine of the legendary zombi sicario Raúl do Santos. A five-figure deal, easy.
The remainder of the vertebrae would go into la nganga, there to join the brain of Raúl’s victim, Cindy Loushane, handed off to Chupé after the murders, as well as a bloody medallion of flesh that Tino had taken from the chin of Cindy’s older sister, Caroline. Mementos from victims had almost as much fetish force as the bones of evil men. Fausto’s black cauldron would soon be glowing like a nuclear reactor, it would possess so much power.