by Carmen Amato
“Madre de Dios.” Emilia slumped back against the hard metal chair. She felt sick.
“It isn’t right,” Torrez said. “We know that. But what else can we do to keep our workers alive? I’m trying to grow corn and feed cattle. That’s all.”
The door banged open and two uniformed cops strode into the interview room along with the guard who’d brought Torrez in to see Emilia.
“You’re Cruz?” the taller cop asked.
Emilia recognized him from the meetings in Carlota’s office, although they hadn’t been introduced. His name was Vega. The chief of police’s adjutant. Assistant. Top flunky. Whatever. She stood up. “I’m Cruz.”
“What are you doing here?”
Emilia shrugged and stood up. “Wasting my time.”
The guard quickly shackled Torrez’s hands and feet together again. The prisoner was smart enough not to look at Emilia as they led him out of the room, his feet shuffling slowly.
☼
Emilia drove back to the police station, trying to sort out the threads from the two very different conversations she’d had at the prison. Julieta Rubia had toyed with her, and Torrez Delgadillo had given her information she didn’t know how to use.
She parked, cut the engine, and forced herself to think. Julieta was living high. Someone was helping her. Someone inside the prison. Probably the guards, with a few payoffs to the warden to look the other way. Maybe Julieta was trading sex for favors. A lot of sex. Or maybe a courier brought in cash and nail polish.
Emilia considered who else might be visiting the former madam. Would they have also had to fill out a form for someone to type into a prison visitor database? Emilia wouldn’t have access to the federal prison records through the Acapulco police intranet. But some people knew how to work the system better than she did.
Her cousin Alvaro answered his cell phone on the second ring. “How’s Daysi?” Emilia asked, trying to sound happy.
“Two weeks to go,” Alvaro answered.
Emilia prayed the baby wouldn’t decide to arrive early. “So you’re going to be in the office tomorrow?”
“What do you need, prima?” Alvaro asked.
“I need to know who’s been visiting Julieta Rubia at the Cereso.”
“Julieta Rubia?” Alvaro clicked his tongue. “The hooker who used to run Mami’s?”
Alvaro knew everything. He was a walking encyclopedia of insider information. “Her real name is Julieta Arana Vela.” Emilia paused. “And it would be good if nobody knew I was looking for her records.”
“Mami’s has friends,” Alvaro said.
“I know.” Emilia heard the hesitation in his voice. Alvaro was always careful where he stepped, making few enemies, trading favors as he moved upwards in one of the most successful bartering careers she’d seen yet.
“Julieta might have been the last person to talk to Lila Jimenez Lata, the girl Padre Ricardo asked me to find,” Emilia said.
There was another long pause. Alvaro’s sigh filtered through the connection.
“Come by the office tomorrow around 6:00 p.m.,” he said. “Don’t call me on the office phone, just come by.”
Chapter 25
As promised, Alvaro was in his office late on Friday. His two assistants had gone home for the night and the evidence locker was dark and deserted except for Emilia’s cousin sitting at his desk in front of the wire enclosure. The windowless evidence locker took up a large portion of the basement of the central police administration building. The lamp on Alvaro’s desk threw a circle of light over the surface; otherwise the room was dim.
It had been a long day, Emilia reflected as she took in the scene. The two teams of detectives plus Murillo, who rode with Emilia and Silvio, had talked to the manager or owner of every restaurant advertised in Que Paso Acapulco. Twenty out of 105 admitted to having received the army tax message. Nine had paid. The others said they’d planned to after the El Tigre fire, but the men hadn’t come back.
They got the same basic description in every case. They were looking for two men at least as big as Silvio. Both had regular features and wore camouflage ball caps. Yes, one had the name Guetta on his camouflage jacket. But no one saw them get in or out of any vehicle or provided more concrete information about them.
Lt. Rufino called both Emilia and Silvio several times during the day; Emilia told him she was tracking down missing information from the El Pharaoh case. Silvio said he was searching for Conway and Serverio. She didn’t know what Macias and Sandor had said.
Alvaro looked up as Emilia approached, gym bag in one hand and an aluminum container full of her mother’s homemade empanadas in the other. “Chicken,” she said. “Mama’s best.”
“Nice, prima,” Alvaro took the container, partially unrolled the foil on top, and inhaled. “Tell Tía Sophia that I love her and her stove.”
“I will.”
Alvaro put the container on his desk and handed her a slip of paper. “Who came and when,” he said simply.
Two names were written on it with dates next to each: Alfredo Soares Peña had visited Julieta Rubia twice, the first time about two weeks after she’d been arrested, and again two weeks after that. Dr. Felipe Ramirez Palmas visited Julieta every Tuesday.
Emilia held up the slip of paper. “Do you know—?” she started but Alvaro cut her off.
“That’s all I got, prima,” he said.
“Right.” Emilia gave him a wry grin and nodded at the container of empanadas. “Are we even?”
Alvaro shook his head. “Find the girl,” he said.
Emilia kissed his forehead. “Tell Daysi I said hi and good luck.”
The slip of paper went into Emilia’s pocket as she left the evidence locker and headed for the big gym down the hall. She worked out there when she could; it was the biggest gym she had access to and it had new equipment and heavy bags to practice kickboxing.
She changed in the woman’s locker room, stretched on the mats, and pulled on her leather workout gloves. There were a half a dozen other night owls there, cops who had just come off a shift or were getting themselves psyched to go on a shift or those who hadn’t anywhere else to go and weren’t ready to start their weekend drinking just yet.
Emilia pounded on the 100-lb. bag, alternately jabbing and punching, imagining she was teaching Castro from Vice a lesson. The bag was suspended from the ceiling by a heavy metal chain, and when she heard the chain jingle she knew she was hitting hard. The bag swung and jumped as Emilia vented herself on it, feeling her muscles get warm and loose and powerful as the chain squealed.
The sweat poured off her face as she hit the bag again, a powerful jab that should have sent the bag kicking backwards, but this time it didn’t absorb the force. Emilia did instead. The jar went all the way up her arm and her teeth rattled.
“Nice work, Cruz,” Obregon said from the other side of the bag.
He leaned to one side and she realized he had held the bag still. “Hello,” she said, panting a little.
Obregon was dressed to work out himself, in black basketball shorts, expensive cross-trainers, and a gray sleeveless tee shirt. He was thick with muscle and his forearms were covered in fine black hair.
“Taking out all your frustrations, Cruz?” he asked, his voice sardonic. “I hear things are in the shitter in the squadroom.”
Emilia aimed a fist at the bag and followed up with a roundhouse kick. Obregon stepped back when the force of her kick shoved the bag against him.
“Or maybe you figure your days are numbered,” his mocking voice went on. “Silvio runs through partners pretty fast, doesn’t he? Fuentes wasn’t even around a year. And the one before that. What was his name?” Obregon snapped his fingers. “I remember now. Garcia. A lot of folks still think it was Silvio did him in.”
“Before my time.” Emilia pummeled the bag, as if she could wipe the smirk off Obregon’s face. Fuentes had been the dirty cop who’d killed Rico. In one nightmarish hour, Fuentes had killed Rico, then been f
atally shot himself by another dirty cop named Villahermosa, who at the time had been Obregon’s deputy at union headquarters. Emilia had killed Villahermosa. Only a handful of people knew the truth about that night, including Silvio and Chief Salazar. Obregon wasn’t one of them, although she knew he suspected.
But as far as Emilia knew, Garcia had been an honest cop killed in a drug bust gone bad nearly three years ago. Silvio had his enemies and they’d tried to pin Garcia’s death on him. They hadn’t been able to make it stick although the senior detective had ended up suspended for six months nonetheless. The rumors still swirled.
“Still, I’d be watching the calendar if I was you,” Obregon said as the bag jumped on its chain.
“Why does Carlota want the fires to be the army’s fault?” Emilia asked, her voice ragged from the workout. “I know her office organized those demonstrations. All those banners and the megaphones.”
To her surprise, Obregon roared with laughter and shook his head as if to clear it. “You’re right. It was a Carlota lovefest until things got out of hand and they started burning cars and Salazar sent in the riot boys. But she learned her lesson.”
“What’s her problem with the army?” Emilia pressed. She kicked the bag and the chain rattled. “Besides the usual.”
“General Hernandez is from the past,” Obregon said lightly. “Thinks women like you and Carlota should be at home pumping out babies. Hernandez was stupid enough to tell her.”
Emilia would have laughed if she’d had the breath. “That was stupid.”
Obregon steadied the bag again. “So I hear your arrest isn’t talking. Torrez Delgadillo.”
Emilia delivered two punches to the bag, shoulder height. Jab, jab. Her punches didn’t have as much force as her kicks, and the bag stayed steady in Obregon’s hands. “He’s innocent.”
“He’s got no alibi, according to Salazar’s office.”
“He doesn’t need one,” Emilia said.
“He looks good for it.”
“We’ve traced both fires to an extortion ring. Might be army or pretending to be. We’re following up.”
“He could still be involved. Torrez needs an alibi that holds up.” Emilia ran a forearm across her forehead, pushing the sweat out of her eyes. Obregon looked at her with definite interest, but she didn’t know if it was from the things she was saying or if he liked sweaty women.
As the head of the police union for the entire state of Guerrero, Obregon had assets and resources she could only guess at. Plus he obviously had a direct line to Carlota. Could he help? Or was the risk too great?
“Well,” he prompted.
“Torrez has an alibi.” Emilia drove her fist into the tough, unyielding leather of the bag. “You need to tell Carlota, get her to take the heat off Chief Salazar. We can’t blame Torrez.”
“No good enough, Cruz.” Obregon made a come-on motion.
It was a gamble, but the only idea she had. Emilia dropped her fists. “He was paying off the Sinaloa cartel the night of the El Tigre fire,” she said. “So they’d stop press-ganging the workers off Macario Urbina’s place.”
Obregon looked interested. “How do you know this?”
“He told me,” Emilia said. “Yesterday. At the prison. He’s loyal to Macario Urbina. Doesn’t want it to get out.”
“Why did he tell you? Why hasn’t he told Salazar’s people?”
“If you were Torrez, who would you trust?”
“The pretty girl detective.” Obregon gave a low chuckle and gave her the look she remembered from their interactions several months ago. The look of a predator assessing his prey. It left her with a cold, gnawing feeling of unease.
Obregon walked over to the weight bench and pulled on a pair of bag gloves, the kind like Emilia’s that looked like thick leather mittens. His looked new, however, and she guessed that he mostly lifted weights. As he stood with his back to her, she found herself frankly assessing his physique. He was heavier than Kurt, with a thicker middle and less definition to his arms and legs. Once upon a time, she’d thought he was handsome, sexy even. Now he looked like just another macho in basketball shorts, dark and dumpy in comparison to Kurt, but with a tension in his body that made her wary.
“Señor Torrez would appear to be facing the end of his days,” Obregon observed as he came back to the heavy bag. “Probably Macario Urbina, too. As soon as Torrez gets out of jail, Sinaloa sicarios are going to come after him for squealing. If they don’t get him in jail first. Doesn’t matter if he keeps his mouth shut or not. They’ll assume he told everything.”
Emilia backed away as he hunched low and punched hard, sending the bag rocking on its chain. “He’s got a family. A life,” she said.
Obregon danced a little from side to side, then pounded the bag again with a quick left and two rights. “Life is hard these days, Cruz.”
“You can do something about it.”
“Why me?” Obregon looked at her around the side of the bag. He was already breathing hard. “Tell Rufino, let him figure out a way to protect Torrez.”
“Torrez met them up north in the Sierra San Rita hills. It’s out of Acapulco’s jurisdiction.”
“Okay.” Obregon hit the bag again. “Why would Carlota want to do something for Macario Urbina? The man bloodied her nose in the election.”
“He’ll owe her a favor.”
“Are you calling in your marker? Or rather, Rucker’s marker for getting me and Carlota out of the El Tigre?”
“If that’s what it takes,” Emilia said.
“Very nice, Cruz. I like the way you think.” Obregon put his gloved fists down and grinned, the pleased predator. “But aren’t you really trying to tell me that Rufino can’t help?”
Emilia hesitated and his grin widened.
“Tell me,” Obregon said. He punched the bag again, easy this time. Playing, not fighting. “How is he managing the pressure? Thinking clearly? Giving cool, crisp directions?”
Emilia didn’t answer.
Obregon pulled off one glove, pushed his hair back from his forehead, and replaced the glove. “Rufino was a good cop once upon a time,” he said, attacking the bag again. “Undercover counternarcotics. But he made the mistake of getting married, having a kid. They stayed in Mexico City while he worked the Cuernavaca plaza. Fake name, fake identity, everything.” He kept crouching, weaving and jabbing the bag as if it was an opponent. “Even so, he got fingered. They killed the wife and daughter and dumped the bodies in front of his door. Don’t know how he got out of Cuernavaca alive, but he’s been blind drunk ever since. Salazar took a chance, thinks he can save him. But he can’t.”
Emilia’s throat was tight. “I’m putting down the marker. Will you talk to Carlota? Help Torrez?”
“I think you just declared your allegiance, Cruz,” Obregon said. He steadied the heavy bag as it swung gently from the force of his last punch, winded from his workout.
“I don’t want to see an innocent man go down for something he didn’t do,” Emilia said stubbornly.
“No one ever does.”
Emilia gave him an abrupt nod, stripped off her sweaty gloves, and went into the locker room. As she changed back into her street clothes, she wondered what exactly Obregon was to Carlota. Lover? Confessor? Confidante?
Spy?
Chapter 26
By noon on Saturday, Emilia was ready for whatever the next 12 hours would bring. She had a complete list of all the restaurants that had been listed in Que Paso Acapulco and a camera with a long-range lens from the detectives’ inventory. Her phone was fully charged, her gun was fully loaded, and the police radio was tuned to the emergency frequency. Silvio’s car smelled like fried grease from a take-out bag of burgers. A shrink-wrapped six-pack of water and two tall coffees in thermal cups rounded out their supplies.
If the grenade throwers kept to their pattern and attacked another restaurant around 11:00 p.m., the detectives had plenty of time to figure out the entrances and exits for each restaurant an
d to map out the most useful route between them. It was a long shot, but maybe they’d catch these pendejos.
Emilia and Silvio would patrol 48 places on their half of the Que Paso Acapulco list. Their half kept them on the east side of the city, while Macias and Sandor’s half was on the west side. Both teams would just keep prowling around the restaurants, paying special attention to the ones they knew had received the notice but hadn’t yet made a payment.
The Saturday party and beach crowds meant a lot of stop-and-go driving. Silvio didn’t seem to mind, however, and the afternoon slid into night as he drove. Emilia navigated, kept in touch with Macias and Sandor, and photographed the most vulnerable locations.
They stopped twice for bathroom breaks and to grab more fast food. As it grew darker and nothing seemed amiss, Emilia found herself increasingly nervous. The Que Paso Acapulco lead felt right. The pieces fit. It had been her idea. But nothing was certain.
“It would have been too easy,” Silvio said, breaking the silence of the last half hour or so.
“What?”
“Finding a truck registered to somebody named Guetta.”
“Or finding one in a repair shop.” They’d called at least 30 garages asking about club cab trucks coming in for repairs. Nothing.
Silvio shrugged. He wasn’t wearing his jacket in the car; just his usual grim expression, white tee, and scuffed leather shoulder holster. “That makes it easier for us tonight. We see some shot-up truck, oye, there’s our friend.”
“Rico used to say that,” Emilia said.
“What?”
“Oye,” Emilia said. The time would have passed so much more quickly if it had been Rico in the car instead of Silvio. Rico would have talked about the last woman he’d dated, what his mother had cooked the other night, if he had enough money to buy some new electronic gadget. Told her jokes, played some music. In contrast, Silvio was just a heavy, brooding presence, emanating waves of disapproval. She’d never be entirely comfortable around him.
“Yeah.” Silvio shot her a sideways glance as the car slogged through the traffic in front of the iconic white Torre Pacific condominiums. “So what’s the deal with you going over to Mami’s?”