Diablo Nights (Detective Emilia Cruz Book 3)

by Carmen Amato

  “Enough for a turf war?” Emilia wasn’t sure if she was asking a rhetorical question or not.

  “Did we check to make sure that both the guy in the meat locker and Yolanda Lata had all their fingers?” Silvio asked.

  “Yes, they both had all their fingers.”

  “I got a bad feeling about this.” Silvio squeezed the damp paper towel into pulp with one big fist. “I don’t like you running the case alone but Loyola’s got me and Ibarra jumping around like a bag of assholes with all of Ibarra’s cases, plus Macias and Sandor’s leftovers.” He threw the towel away. “Any more cars with dead drivers on your tail?”

  “Haven’t seen the car again.” Emilia said. She stepped to the sink and washed her hands, too. “You never told me what Perez said the last time you talked to him.”

  “Organized Crime is another bag of assholes,” Silvio said. “Perez said they still aren’t doing shit on the Pacific Grandeur.”

  “Typical,” Emilia sniffed.

  Silvio gave the third stall door a random shove and the panel battered itself against the latch. “I don’t like you being out there alone on this case. Like Irma.”

  Emilia shrugged, although her stomach tensed at his implication. “I’ve got Flores.”

  Silvio flashed that rare grin. “How’s he liking the viper queen hair, Cruz?”

  “Shut up, Franco,” Emilia said.

  They walked out of the bathroom. The words Like Irma spun inside Emilia’s head. When Silvio turned to go into the squadroom Emilia kept on going, past the holding cells, and outside. The air was clean and she stood with her back against the wall for a few minutes, until the image of Irma’s smile faded.

  Chapter 19

  Emilia let herself into the penthouse, tossed her jacket onto the sofa, and heard her phone chime. It was a text from Kurt, saying that he would be stuck in the office waiting for a conference call for at least another hour. He’d meet her in the bar later. They could go for a swim, then have a quiet dinner.

  Friday night bliss. Emilia texted back that it sounded like the perfect plan.

  An hour would give her time to shed the week. She got herself a glass of wine from the kitchen, carried it into the bedroom. The en suite bathroom was huge, with a tiled shower stall the size of Acapulco bay and a separate soaking tub. The tub had a whirlpool feature and it was pure heaven to sit in the water, letting the jets pummel her body, and sip cool white wine. She closed her eyes and tried to relax.

  But there were too many incomplete timelines and unanswered questions. How did the Ora Ciego on the Padre Pro finger fit into the story? Were there suddenly several dealers in town with Ora Ciega? Given the way the substance had been found embedded so deeply, had the kidnapping victim been forced to work in a meth lab?

  Emilia knew they couldn’t discount a sudden influx of the rare stuff and a bitter fight to control distribution. Was Acapulco looking at a coming gang war over Ora Ciega? She swallowed the last of the wine. A gang war over Ora Ciega didn’t mesh with the Friends of Padre Pro and their sainthood petition and she didn’t know if the two were connected or not. The timing worked, but nothing else.

  She set her empty glass on the tub rim. Tomorrow was Saturday. She’d go back to the mercado, find this Juan Fabio and shake the truth out of him. If he was a dead end, she didn’t know what to do next. There were so many loose threads, so many things that she should be able to connect, but couldn’t.

  For a long time, she sat in the tub and listened to the drone of the whirlpool. Each thread was examined in turn and discarded, to be picked up again later, until only one thing stayed with her.

  Kurt.

  She wasn’t going to make the same mistake she had last weekend.

  The hotel wasn’t such a foreign place. She knew much of the staff. There were a lot of nice people there. Not Christine, of course. But everybody else. For Kurt’s sake, she had to try harder.

  Wearing the right clothes would help. It would be like speaking the same language. Maybe she would even wear nail polish once in awhile. Right after she bought some.

  She put on her red bathing suit, tied the matching pareo around her hips, and left the penthouse with just her keycard and phone. Tonight she was off duty.

  The hotel’s huge tiled lobby, with its check-in counter and concierge desk cooled by softly turning ceiling fans, had once seemed so grand and forbidding. Now it felt normal. She crossed the floor and avoided looking to see if Christine was on duty. The lobby segued into an immense tiled terrace open to the ocean on the far side, with a picture postcard view of the beach and waves licking up to the shore. The piano was centered on the tiles again, after having been moved for last weekend’s regatta event, and she exchanged smiles with Raul, the pianist, as his fingers danced over the keys.

  The Pasodoble Bar was busy. Tables and chairs were dotted about but somehow none obscured the view of the bay for the people soaking up the salty breeze and laughing over mojitos and margaritas. The barstools were all occupied. Half a dozen gringo businessmen in golf slacks and polo shirts, with conference badges around their necks, were enjoying themselves at a table on the far side of the bar while other tables were occupied by couples who looked like second honeymooners. All the women wore cotton caftans and chunky necklaces of semi-precious stones.

  Emilia slid into a chair facing the ocean, glad for the stylish bathing suit and pareo. She didn’t have the jewelry that so many women wore at the hotel with swimsuits, as if they expected a fashion photographer to take their picture at any moment, but she was also in better shape than any other woman there and the suit showed it off.

  A waiter materialized and lit the lantern on the table. “Nice to see you again, Señorita Cruz,” he said. “The usual mojito?”

  Emilia smiled and pretended to consider the idea. “We’re supposed to go swimming later.”

  The waiter winked. “A very light one.”

  He brought the drink quickly, without asking her to sign for it. As Emilia sipped, she let her mind clear, thinking of nothing more taxing than the hypnotic way the waves rolled again and again onto the sand. It was gravity and nature and a pull at her heart. Acapulco would always be the biggest part of who she was.

  “My darling Emilia,” a heavily accented voice said.

  Emilia looked up. “Hello, Jacques.”

  Kurt’s best friend was Jacques Anatole, the French chef who ran the hotel’s famous restaurant which jutted into the bay like a Spanish galleon breasting the waves. The roof was made of soaring canvas sails, the floor was teak decking, and artfully strung antique signal flags crossed overhead. A piece of fish at the restaurant cost about as much as a treasure chest of gold doubloons. Emilia consciously avoided looking at the prices on the menu when she and Kurt ate there, despite the fact that they always ate for free.

  Balancing two trays, Jacques bent to exchange kisses. “Wait here,” he said. “I shall bring you a portion of heaven. A new appetizer.”

  She watched him go to the bar and set down the trays. Jacques didn’t look like Emilia imagined the typical French chef; plump, red-cheeked, given to flowery expressions about food and wine. Instead, Jacques was a runner and swimmer like Kurt. He had jet-black hair, a large nose, and a sharp, almost pointed chin that gave his face mobility and character. The white chef’s jacket and loose checkered pants disguised his lean frame.

  He came back to her table with a small blue-edged plate and two forks. Grilled shrimp were arranged into a pinwheel on the plate.

  “Try it, try it,” Jacques urged as he sat next to her. “You will be first with a verdict.”

  “They’re too pretty,” Emilia protested.

  Jacques happily stabbed a shrimp. “Beautiful food feeds the soul as well as the body. You torture me in that red suit, non? So you will eat my shrimp, the spell will be cast, and you will leave Kurt for me.”

  “You’ve always been my one true love, Jacques,” Emilia said dramatically and ate a shrimp.

  She’d had shrimp all he
r life. Fried, pickled in lime, drenched in salsa, stuffed into tortillas. This was totally different. It was exquisite.

  “Shrimp bathed in Calvados, then grilled with garlic and brown sugar,” Jacques said, helping himself to another. “Good, non?”

  “Madre de Dios, it’s wonderful.” Emilia closed her eyes in rapture. “What’s Calvados?”

  “Mon dieu,” Jacques said in feigned exasperation. “In this place I am teaching all the time.”

  “Yes, you are,” Emilia agreed, loading up her fork again. “What is it?”

  “A traditional and very famous French liquor made from apples.”

  Emilia shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Of course you have not,” Jacques agreed amiably. “I am to be famous for introducing it to Mexico.”

  They talked for another minute, until Jacques announced he had to get back to his kitchen, kissed her on both cheeks, and loped up the steps to the lobby level.

  Emilia finished the shrimp, the waiter brought her a second mojito without being asked, and her phone chimed with another text from Kurt saying he’d be there in 15 minutes. Not to worry, she texted back. She was watching the ocean and relaxing.

  The colors of the sunset spread slowly toward the horizon. The sky darkened like fabric soaking up liquid.

  Emilia swirled the straw around in her new mojito, took a sip, and watched the sunset. The sky turning pink and orange and scarlet over the ocean was always a miracle. Lights switched by the bar, changing all the silhouettes. More people came through the lobby, past the piano. Most were first-time hotel guests. She could always tell because they stopped on the step and gazed wide-eyed at Punta Diamante’s incredible view of sky and ocean. By the time the first-timers got to the massive bar with its blue mosaic spelling out Pasodoble, they’d collected themselves.

  A man slipped into the chair Jacques had vacated. “Good evening, señorita,” he said. “You look lonely.”

  “I’m waiting for someone,” Emilia said. She gave him a pointed smile.

  “I’m someone.” He leered at her, a middle aged Mexican in gray pants and a white guayabera shirt who’d had a few too many.

  Besides a very famous norteamericano rock star a few weeks ago, the man at the table was the first drunk she’d encountered at the Palacio Réal. It was too posh a place for drunks and people who made scenes. “Sorry.” Emilia dropped the smile. “He’ll be here any moment and I’d like to be alone until he comes.”

  “One, maybe two, high end clients a weekend, eh?” His voice was this side of slurred and his eyes slid from her striped hair to the red bathing suit top.

  Made de Dios, she was Avenga the Hooker. “Señor, I am truly waiting for someone to join me,” Emilia said coldly.

  He leaned closer. “Do a couple of the hotel staff, like that cook, too, so it all stays quiet. Looking like that in a place like this, you probably pull in 50,000 pesos a weekend. A lot more than you make during the week.”

  Before Emilia could react, he reached across the table to cup her breast. Suddenly Kurt was there, dragging the man backwards with an arm around his neck. The man’s chair skidded over the terrace flagstones, and his legs bicycled, seeking a purchase that wasn’t there as Kurt twisted him into a painful head lock. The man’s choking gasps were drowned out by the slap of the surf and the sounds of the bar—soft music, subdued chatter, the clink of glasses.

  It wasn’t a fight, not even a scuffle. An outsider would have said the blonde gringo in polo shirt and board shorts had unfair advantages of surprise, height, weight, and fury. The smaller Mexican never really had a chance, he’d been too busy licking his chops over the girl with the ponytail and red bathing suit.

  Emilia watched as two burly hotel employees, dressed in the hotel’s signature blue floral shirts and khaki pants, raced across the lobby and wrested the man from Kurt. As the man repeatedly apologized, they marched him rapidly across the broad space and disappeared down the corridor behind the concierge desk that Emilia knew led to the security chief’s office. A waiter cleaned up the remains of her mojito. In seconds, the whole episode had never happened.

  Kurt came back to the table where Emilia stood. She was still dumbfounded. “Are you all right?” he asked. From across the bar the bartender caught his eye and raised a glass in a silent query. Kurt shook his head but gave the bartender a thumb’s up. The bartender put down the glass and returned his attention to the customers at the bar.

  “Remind me to pick you to be on my side in a bar fight,” Emilia said.

  “I’m always on your side, Em.” Kurt ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath as if trying to tame his anger. “I thought he’d hurt you. That your head was bleeding.”

  “He was drunk,” Emilia said. “Thought I was a hooker. You might have overreacted a little.”

  Kurt wrapped his arm around her shoulders. They left the bar and slowly headed for the elevators. “You sure?” he asked. “That’s all it was?”

  Emilia nodded. “Yes, some drunk.”

  “You don’t want to arrest him?”

  “If I tried to arrest everybody who was drunk in Acapulco on a Friday night . . .” Emilia let her voice trail off with a little laugh.

  Kurt kissed her forehead. “You want to tell me about your hair?”

  “No.” Emilia leaned into him. “But I will. Over dinner.”

  They had her favorite kind of night; a swim in the large pool with the waterfall and dinner in the apartment in front of a funny movie. But as Emilia drifted off to sleep in the warmth of Kurt’s arms, she wondered if the drunk drove a gray sedan.

  Chapter 20

  “You’re going to attract a lot of attention, you know,” Emilia warned. “Hardly any gringos go to the Mercado Municipal.”

  “I’m invested in this thing, Em.” Kurt poured her a second cup of coffee. “I’m coming with you.”

  In the daylight, with the bay gleaming under the Saturday noon sun outside the penthouse window, Emilia felt as if the ridiculous conversation with the drunk last night had never happened. The morning had passed in a glow of lovemaking, laughter, and eventually a discussion of the Padre Pro case. Before Emilia could say that she needed to take time out of their weekend to go to the market and find the elusive Juan Fabio, Kurt had suggested it himself.

  Emilia navigated them to the mercado and through the winding aisles to the junkman’s stall. As predicted, Kurt attracted attention, with vendors vying for his attention with shouted offers of everything from a Rolex watch to a washing machine. Emilia cringed at the commotion it would cause if the stall owners knew how much money Kurt usually carried.

  A compact man in his late thirties was on the stool behind the makeshift desk in the stall. His shirt sleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing sinewy forearms. His hands were the big-knuckled, veined hands of someone who did manual labor. One thumbnail was black.

  The hands were hardly the first giveaway, however. A thick piece of cloth, sewn into pockets to hold woodworking tools, was spread on the desk. He was busy sanding a small wooden pedestal.

  “Are you Juan Fabio?” Emilia asked.

  He smiled at her, revealing straight white teeth as the corners of his eyes crinkled. For some reason he reminded Emilia of a younger Padre Ricardo. The two men had the same earnest air about them, the same genuine smile. “Yes,” he replied. “Just like the sign says. Juan Fabio. Best for you. Everything for the house.”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about a Padre Pro relic.”

  The genuine smile widened as Kurt studied the stall merchandise. “Would you like to sign the petition?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Emilia said. “First I have some questions for you about a relic we found in Villa de Refugio, the Catholic store.”

  Juan Fabio put down the sandpaper and pedestal. “A very different store, as you can see, señorita.”

  Emilia stepped closer and touched the rough wood of the pedestal. “I think you can,” she said. “You see, w
e bought a relic there. A relic of the martyr Padre Pro.”

  “You are very lucky to have found such a wonderful item,” Juan Fabio said. “Padre Pro is my patrón and soon he will be a saint. You will have a blessed house.”

  “A laboratory tested the finger,” Emilia went on. “It isn’t Padre Pro’s. It’s the finger of a woman.”

  Juan Fabio blinked in astonishment, but the reaction was a bit too theatrical. “Truly?”

  “You made the relic.” Emilia didn’t raise her voice. She gestured to the woodworking tools. “Asked some friends to create four fake letters that said the relic was the finger of the martyr Padre Pro.”

  “You are mistaken, señorita,” Juan Fabio said.

  Kurt stopped browsing and positioned himself to catch Juan Fabio if the man tried to run out of the stall.

  “You even said what should be in the letters,” Emilia continued. “Used the same words as in the brochure from the Friends of Padre Pro. When the relic and letters were finished, you sold it to an art dealer, Señor Blandón Hernandez. He’s bought several of your creations, all with letters from a couple of forgers named El Gordo and El Flaco.”

  Juan Fabio slid off the stool and retreated into the recesses of the junk stall. Emilia kept on him while Kurt maintained position near the front of the stall by the stool and makeshift desk.

  “If you tell me where you got the finger, I swear nothing bad will happen to you,” Emilia said. With her back to the aisle, she showed the junkman her badge. “If you don’t, I can arrest you for trafficking in body parts. You’ll go to prison and certain inmates will know why you are there. Selling a woman’s body parts, especially if this turns out to be a kidnapping victim, is a crime other prisoners don’t like. You know what I mean?”

  “Señorita.” This time the man’s voice was strained. “I swear on the head of the Holy Mother, that what you say is not true.”

  Emilia glanced at Kurt. Without a word, he began taking the woodworking tools out of their flannel pockets.