Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “¿Quién sabe?” I said, about Liz P’s Navarro. Playing along for Richard. “¿Qué piensas?”

  Richard smiled, to see me taking her side. That I wasn’t going to back down.

  “If you would have just told me first,” he mumbled, the index finger of his right hand tapping on the base of the remote. The news signing off, opening up into late night syndication.

  “I don’t want to do this again,” I told him as softly as I could, and the wooden frame of the couch shuddered with his fake laugh. In a moment of blackness between the commercial and sitcom we saw each other reflected in the TV screen, looked away.

  “I’m just saying—” he started, trying to play the victim, but I dropped my head back as far as I could into the dead space behind the couch, exasperated. It stopped him.

  “Do you want me to say that I fucked him, is that it? Can we move on, then, or do you want to know what it was like? If when he pulled out I—”

  Richard gestured with his scotch as if making room to say something, then didn’t.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I said, and hated myself immediately for saying it.

  “He was… what’s the word for it?” Richard play-acted. “There?”

  “And that was all,” I said, my voice already rising in my throat.

  He started to say something cheap back but I cut him off, explained in great and painful detail how the relationship we had at work didn’t carry over to my house, Detective Godder.

  “Vámonos púes,” he said, a flat edge to his voice. “Go back to school if you don’t want to work with me on real jobs.”

  “It’s not that.”

  I turned to him before he could call me on the lie. Before he could smile in his way that meant this was all just foreplay. That he was just stirring me.

  “What’s this really about?” I said. “Because we’ve been through what I didn’t do already, thank you.”

  He pursed his lips out, shrugged.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “It’s something.”

  He just shrugged again.

  I hit him in the face with a pillow, then. With the side of the pillow, where the piping was. It wasn’t in play.

  He closed his eyes, counting under his breath. He’d learned it in a workshop once, probably. One a judge had ordered him to attend. It wasn’t going to work, though. I wasn’t going to let it, was already standing up hard, pushing away from the couch, away from him, banging into the coffee table.

  One thing you learn with a Richard is that if you can’t finish it, at least start it, get one good one in. Give him a reason. Otherwise, he’s just hitting you because you’re you. Which is worse.

  His scotch, already half off the wicker coaster, tipped over the rest of the way, rolling over onto its side, onto the glass top of the coffee table, and we watched it in silence. The only thing we’d done together the whole night. And then Richard stood after me, bringing the table up with him, completing the motion I’d started.

  It crashed into the wall under the window on the other side of the room, fell onto its side.

  I stepped back, opening my arms to the rest of the house, the rest of my furniture, then saw his boxes, lined up in the hall.

  He shook his head no but was too late: I pulled the first one out with my foot, stepped back, and kicked it hard, followed through.

  It spread out over the living room. Camping supplies, Army stuff. Mr. Survivalist.

  “Done?” he said.

  “Not even.”

  He shook his head, rubbed his mouth, and I kicked another box.

  “I was going to tell you, too,” he said, after the papers he’d had filed settled, far from alphabetical order.

  “Bullshit.”

  “You don’t even know what.”

  “I know you want me to ask.”

  He chewed his cheek, looked to the third box.

  “That’s my bowling ball,” he said. “Go on.”

  I stared at him. This was the way he was, the way he could be.

  I stepped forward, into the living room again.

  “I don’t even want to know,” I said.

  “Then why are we doing this?”

  “Because you didn’t have any perps to push around today. To interrogate.”

  He shook his head, disappointed.

  “A perp,” he said, “is somebody out there”—the world, El Paso. “A collar, now that’s somebody you can push around.”

  “Thank you, Richard,” I said. “For confirming you’re a dick. For a second there it had slipped my mind. Don’t ask me how.”

  He smiled, shrugged.

  “You had your… your little friend, there,” he said—Davidson. He looked right at me for the next part: “Now I have mine.”

  I stared back at him.

  “You better not bring her back here,” I said, finally. “I’ll cut the bitch, and you know I will.”

  He laughed. Shook his head no, no, like I couldn’t be more off-base here.

  And then I got it, understood, could see it in his face, the way he’d caught on my her: “You found something.”

  He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no.

  My mother. He’d found my birth mother. It was what his Homicide connections were supposed to be good for, why I’d let him pick me special from my last semester, instead of going through like everybody else.

  He had my mother’s name, and wanted me to ask him for it.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Or what?” he asked. “You’ll cut me if I don’t?”

  “Because you have to.”

  “‘Have to,’” he repeated, tasting it.

  “Richard, please, okay?” I said one last time, even kneeling to pick up his camping shit I’d spread all over the living room. Canteen, olive-green belt with metal grommets, glow sticks, something in a waterproof case, like water from the sky was an issue in El Paso.

  He watched me, let me.

  I came to him with it all in my arms and he took it, and I picked up what fell between our fingers, said it one more time than I’d told myself I was going to: “You know what this means to me.”

  He exhaled, defeated.

  “That’s why,” he said. “I never should have—”

  I placed two fingers to his lips, stopping him. Shaking my head no, that he should have. That he still could.

  And then he smiled.

  “Selena,” he said, and started in on one of her songs from when I was twelve, but was laughing too much to finish.

  He was saying Selena had been my mother.

  I almost didn’t know how to respond, even. Which was my fault, because he’d done this before.

  “Every fight doesn’t turn into fucking,” I said, quietly. “You know that, right?”

  He shrugged, said it, that the night was young, and I kept my face slack, put the two fingers I’d had to his lips to the top button of his jeans.

  “Te gusta?” I said, up into the base of his ear.

  He swallowed loud, and I pulled the waist of his pants out, dropped something in: the glowstick that had fallen between us.

  I could tell it was cold by the sharp way he breathed in.

  “Say gracias,” I said, and when he opened his mouth to form the word, brought my knee up into his crotch with everything I had.

  He fell back, his balls glowing green with pain, but caught himself against the wall. Kept one hand to his crotch—he still wasn’t standing straight up—and snaked the other out to a breath off my face, held it there. Showing what he could be doing here. What he was barely not doing.

  I pushed his arm away, stepped in close. Knew I couldn’t take him physically—Mr. Army Ranger—but still, I hadn’t given him that about my birth mother just so he could use it against me. Somewhere in there was where he started hitting me back. Just twice, his open hand a blur, then his fist, more deliberate, but each time it was less like being pushed down, more like a string to the other
side of my face, pulling me immediately to the carpet. But I stood, and I stood, and the last thing I broke, after he’d smoked his tires in reverse down my driveway, was the living room phone, over and over, so he couldn’t call me, talk his way back in.

  A shirt I saw once at a gas station said Such is Love. I stood in the door and watched the tail lights of his LTD, tried to imagine a t-shirt that could say something about this.

  When he was all the way gone I slammed the door, crossed the floor to my kitchen, for my soldering gun in the junk drawer, to Frankenstein the phone back together, and then crossed the rest of the impossible night somehow, and then the day, to Jennifer Rice and Nate and Davidson and Madrone, and finally, like it had all been designed, the reporter I recognized all at once: Liz P. The one who’d been there last night, when the fight started.

  Anybody but her, I would have toed the blue line, followed protocol, kept my lips shut.

  Instead, when she asked about means of entry, if there was anything she needed to warn her viewers about—the camera right there over her shoulder, in my face—I’d said not to trust them, then said it again louder when she needed me to.

  “Who?” she’d asked.

  “Men,” I told her. “One of them shows up at your door with an armful of red roses, then what you want to do is—” which is the exact point Madrone stepped in, forced the camera down, his eyes steady on me.

  How to Wreck Your Career Before It’s Even Started, by Marta Villarreal. Playing at six, then again and eleven, and probably for the rest of her life.

  Because Madrone didn’t have a departmental towsack to stuff me in, he sent me to take statements from Jennifer Rice’s co-workers, maybe go through her locker a bit if her supervisor was cool with it. The idea was that there wouldn’t be anything at her hospital I could screw up. No reporters to talk to, anyway. Not yet. And who knows, maybe she’d have a shoebox of letters from disgruntled patients, threatening to murder her in her own home.

  The problem with all of it, though, was which hospital was hers?

  I was standing in the east parking lot of Columbia Medical now. It was the third hospital I’d been to so far.

  It would have been easier if Madrone would have let me back in the house, to pull a check stub, go to that hospital, but what he said, barely containing his voice, was that a little legwork wouldn’t kill me. That the city paid twenty-eight cents a mile for this kind of stuff, if I cared to document it properly.

  I didn’t.

  It was my way of getting back at him: paying for my own gas, not getting any compensation for the wear on my tires. Getting to hoard all the resentment that went with it. Let it burn the back of my throat, water my eyes.

  Just as I turned my headlights off, Columbia’s staggered floodlights glowed on across the parking lot, all at once. It felt strange, like some kind of shift had occurred, the light just switching places around me. Like being at the theater, almost. There was even an actor for me: a late night flower delivery boy. He was standing under the concrete porch of the emergency room of Columbia. The automatic doors before him were opening and closing, as if unsure if he was there or not. The roses he’d been carrying were at his feet, the petals skittering across the slick concrete one at a time, to the polished toes of the two security guards, their guns out, on the delivery boy.

  So they’d seen me on the news, I guess. Knew about the means of entry.

  The roses were just how the killer was getting the door open, though. The real story was what happened after he closed it.

  The report Davidson had penciled in suggested that all the blood had been drained from Jennifer Rice’s body. That that was the proximate cause of death. Corollary to this was that the closet wasn’t where she’d bled out: the carpet there was clean, perfect, vacuumed once, long ago, then forgotten for years.

  Like Nate had said, the killer had bled her out in the bathroom, then splashed bleach over every surface, rubbed it in.

  The point in her body the blood had been drained out was twin quarter-inch holes in her lower calves, just below the muscle. It was the logical place: the ligature marks on her wrists said she’d been tied, and the way they cut up into the ball joint of her thumb suggested there had been significant pull—her own weight. If she’d been outside, the depth of the marks could be explained by her killer leading her, dragging her, either himself or by mechanical means. A truck, a four-wheeler, a horse. But, indoors, when coupled with the holes in her calves, the missing cord from one of her lamps, and the damage done to the shower head, it meant she’d been hung up. Alive. Most of the blood in her body would have had to pass that point in her calves.

  Below the holes, like socks, her skin was mottled blue. This was the blood the killer hadn’t been able to get at, that had pooled, congealed, gone livid. Which was where it stopped making sense: the blood was mostly gone from there now too, the skin just stained. You could tell by the weight—67.4 pounds. On the radio they were saying she was as light as an angel. As fragile. Her other forty pounds just… gone. Unexplained. Until tomorrow morning anyway, at six, when Trevana touched down in a DPS helicopter, drew a black line down her, traced it with his scalpel. That was still eight hours away, though. Eight hours for Davidson to sneak me into the morgue.

  Just because Madrone had told me I couldn’t see her didn’t mean I wasn’t going to.

  I nodded to myself, stood from my car, one of the security guards in the emergency lane flicking his eyes over, to me.

  By the time I got to them, their guns were holstered, the delivery boy just standing there.

  Because I didn’t want to be part of their little show, I just kept my eyes down, stepped into the sensor of the door, waited for it to register me. Then it was the cool, sterile whiteness of the emergency room, the arrows on the wall telling me where to go. From the two hospitals I’d already been to, I knew that trying to track down the nurse in charge of assigning and replacing shifts was a joke—why Madrone had sent me to do it. Instead of even trying again, this time I just went to the most main information desk I could find. The girl behind the counter was wearing a blue cardigan, a matching blue tie, her hair pulled back into a ball.

  I stood there until she looked up.

  “I need to know if someone works here,” I said.

  She was Mexican, her eyes lined so heavy that it looked like stage make-up. Me, in high school.

  “Lots of people work here,” she said, her voice lilting. “Me, for instance.”

  I shook my head to show I appreciated this, her ability to find humor in the second shift of a thankless job, but then laid my ID down on her marble desk. It expired in four months, when my training period was supposed to be over; I kept my finger over that part.

  The girl nodded, acting impressed, and said it again: “Lots of people work here.”

  “Rice,” I said. “Jennifer.”

  “Do you have a unit? NICU, Burn, ER…?”

  “She had… little boxes on her top,” I said, touching my own shirt to show. “Like, the print of it I mean. I don’t know. Maybe it was presents.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, pulling her keyboard out, “police work, right? I guess you’ve really done your homework on this one…”

  “She wouldn’t have been in today,” I said, my voice flat.

  The girl heard it, nodded, said, “No Rice, J. in the directory… but—here. Let’s try all the medical personnel who called in today. That’s what I would do, if I were an investigator with the police department.”

  I nodded, looked past her, to the bank of elevators, then shook my head no.

  “She wouldn’t have called in,” I said.

  “We would have called her, then,” she said.

  The girl nodded, agreeing with herself it seemed.

  “So…” she said, “just the no shows, then. Rice, you say?”

  She shrugged, shook her head no about the results, hit F12 with the ring finger of her right hand anyway. Under her desk, an ancient dot-matrix printer wound up
into the higher decibels of human patience.

  “You sure?” I said.

  “And she is a nurse at this hospital?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  The girl laughed, pushed her headset back onto her neck. “You do know there’s, um, home care, assisted living facilities, costume parties…?”

  She was giving me the print-out now.

  I took it, didn’t understand.

  “All the no-shows,” she said, nodding to the paper.

  I shook my head no, said, “Rice, Jennifer.”

  “What?” the girl said back. “Is this like slow cop, slow cop?”

  I looked away again. Was glad I wasn’t armed, could, instead, just back away from her desk, pretend-read the seven names on the print-out. Not have to go to jail for very voluntary manslaughter.

  In the parking lot at last, I folded the list into my pocket, found my car and started it, but didn’t drop it into gear yet.

  The radio was on. I’d been flipping through on the way over, for news. Now it was a disc jockey talking sports, weather, music, then national, then local. Jennifer Rice was local. He didn’t say her name—waiting to notify the family—but described her as a twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic bookkeeper from Ysleta.

  “Ysleta,” I said, shaking my head no—Segundo—then pulled the shifter down into Drive, didn’t go anywhere. The car behind me washed red in my brakes.

  Up on the third floor, a woman in a gown was standing between a curtain and a window, her fingertips to the glass, her hair silky black beside her.

  Jennifer Rice, her ghost. For now, anyway.

  I said her name, waited for the sound to get to her, then told her that she wasn’t an angel, not like they were saying. That she wasn’t an angel and she wasn’t a bookkeeper. That I wasn’t sure what she was, really. Just dead.

  Day 2

  Sunday 6 July 2003.

  Mitch Trevana didn’t make it at six, or at seven, then called in at eight to say it would probably be lunch. Davidson took the call, nodded, then guided the phone down, bleary-eyed. His four weeks off had got him back on a daytime, human schedule; now he was having to go nocturnal again. Graveyard shift at the graveyard, he called it.