Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Then a flash on the glass of the front door.

  It drew the counter girl’s eyes, her fake smile ready for the next customer, the next party. It gave me just enough time to fold the note into my far pocket, pull the plate back where it had been, set my face for Madrone, stopping for a moment at the register to pull a toothpick from the shot glass.

  He offered one to the patrolman with him, shrugged when the patrolman didn’t take it, and made his way through the tables.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, rearranging the rice grain by grain.

  Madrone smiled, shook his head in disappointment.

  “You warned him,” he said.

  “You heard me,” I said. “I was only meeting him.”

  He sat down across from me, fingered a chip.

  “You’ve been saying it’s my fault,” he said, studying the interior of Rosa’s, “that I’m the one killing these girls, figuratively speaking.”

  I was just staring at him.

  He came back to me with his lips pursed, said, “Now the next one’s on you, I guess,” then started laughing, deep in his chest at first but rising, spilling out, filling Rosa’s with his menthol breath.

  Day 6

  Thursday 10 July 2003.

  For the second night in a row, I woke up in a dead girl’s house. Jennifer Rice’s. It was where we wound up after Rosa’s, after walking out into the parking lot, looking up to the helicopter. Watching it bank away. Richard’s plate had still been warm. It meant he was within a mile radius; less. We walked it—Paisano, Ochoa, Delta—the helicopter sometimes blowing my hair down across my face, dogs barking at us, all manner of parole violators and illegals and backdoor men diving through their girlfriends’ bathroom windows, the patrolmen at the front doors unaware, looking instead at the girlfriends’ pupils, to see if they were in danger, a hostage. Tomorrow’s Spanish Angel.

  We let the boyfriends go, after they weren’t Richard.

  And none of the girlfriends were being held hostage in their own homes. Not by anything we could save them from with guns, anyway.

  On the third sweep, the edge of our mile perimeter, one of the houses had our tape framing the door. It was still cut from when I’d cut it.

  “Probably came here to jack off,” Madrone said, pushing the door open, his hand in an evidence baggie because it was too hot for gloves. His shirt was already sweated through, his jacket I don’t know where. On an car antenna somewhere.

  An hour later we turned the house over to the techs, because somebody had obviously been there. In the bed, on the couch. The semen on the mattress would light up blue under the light, when it came, like Richard was an alien. Not human.

  Madrone never let me get more than an arm away from him, either. Like he was preparing his testimony—no, she was never far enough from me to leave her hair in the closet, on the couch. Her prints on the counter.

  I walked through the house as if expecting to wake up at any moment, then slept like Madrone: for five minutes at a time, leaning against a wall CSU was done with, a kitchen chair they said I could have. At six, Madrone toed my foot. I’d been sleeping under my hair, my head on my knees.

  “Find him?” I said, not at all serious.

  “We’ll see,” he said, and we walked together back up Tays, to 6th, the tiendita that still made me think of cinnamon rolls. I ran my finger along the wrought iron bars over the front window and stepped in without asking Madrone if I could.

  The night clerk was watching the early news. Channel 7, my face sliding across the screen. The clerk never noticed me; I could have stole the whole chip rack, the cigarette case.

  “¿Qué?” I said, my bottle of coke growing warm on the counter. When he came back around I said it again, nodded up to the television.

  “Chupacabra,” he said at a respectful whisper, breaking my twenty.

  “That’s not real,” I said, falling into English.

  “Tell her,” he said, nodding at a girl standing in back, staring at the ice cream, her hair butchered off at shoulder level. I could tell it had been long yesterday, though, could tell from the way she turned her head to look at me, see if I was him, el chupacabra, the Rose Killer, the Lote Bravo Rapist. If I’d found her in spite of her haircut.

  “Todoa la noche,” the clerk said, about her: she’d been here all night.

  I closed my eyes, opened them.

  “You’re la migra,” he said, my wallet open, my ID there for a flash.

  I shook my head no, said, “City,” then, before he could get into it, “¿Baño?”

  He lifted his chin to the sign.

  I walked down the concrete hall to the restrooms—restroom: the women’s was out of order. On the men’s, then, somebody had used a magic marker to trace a poodle skirt around the stick figure. Meaning unisex, now. Unisex with a condom dispenser instead of tampons. Fucking El Paso City.

  I sat in my genderless stall and tried not to keep seeing the girl by the ice cream, her hair so short. Me, at fifteen. When I walked out, she was watching me. I lowered my face, pushed through the door.

  Madrone was leaning against the wall, one heel hooked up onto the grimy stucco.

  “Cold,” I said, about my coke, then didn’t offer him any, just went back to Rosa’s, like it was the drain at the center of El Paso. The one I was always circling.

  Because it was Madrone’s car he went to the driver’s door but had to wait for me to slide the keys across the roof. He caught them, slid them into the lock. Looked hard at me.

  “Middle of the barrio and you don’t lock it?” he said.

  “Thought I was coming right back out,” I said, then didn’t say anything for the five minute drive to the station. I stepped out before the car was even stopped, knew I couldn’t handle the stairwell alone with him so walked out to the street, for the front entrance, wasn’t ready for the crowd there. It was all the men come to confess, turn themselves in, take blame for the Spanish Angels. Collect all the sin of the city in their mouths and then swallow it. They smiled for the news cameras, let me pass.

  On Richard’s desk in Homicide were my keys, from Davidson. Thank you.

  I sat down and stared at Richard’s file drawer, finally opened it when nobody was looking.

  I was looking for the garage door robberies, or whatever they were.

  Soon enough, Madrone was standing over me.

  “This is in your job description?” I said. “Following me all day?”

  “You’re looking for the Yanez thing,” Madrone said, sitting down on Richard’s desk. I looked up to him. He shrugged. “The guy with the remote. His name was Yanez.”

  I walked through the files, back to Y. It wasn’t there.

  Madrone smiled, had known it wouldn’t be. “You ever wonder why Richard got to be our unit’s guinea pig for your little, um… training program?” he said.

  Disciplinary reasons, I suddenly remembered Nate telling me. I probably wasn’t supposed to know it either, though.

  “You said it yourself,” I said, instead. “He picked me because I’m good.”

  “It was because of the Yanez thing,” Madrone shrugged, tonguing his lip out, “that big car chase he should have let the uni’s handle. It was either get suspended until his paycheck covered the damages to city property, or be our test pilot…”

  “Bullshit,” I said, standing now.

  “I think I should know, Villarrea,” Madrone said, pushing away from the desk. “Kind of already had that money spent, if you know what I mean.”

  The hundred extra a month, tacked onto his paycheck.

  “So you hate him for a hundred dollars?” I said.

  “Shit,” Madrone said. “I’d hate him for free.”

  After he’d walked away I pretended to still be looking down, studying something. Then I found something to study: the phone logs in my pocket. I read through them again, and still, the only one that stood out was the women’s shelter. Then I saw what, if I were better, had some actual rest, would have stood out
yesterday: a shelter.

  From my wallet, I took the card Reyna Cruz had given me.

  The numbers matched.

  She’d called me, got her ex-husband instead, then talked for one minute and thirty-three seconds. About what?

  I backed out of the parking garage, was shifting into drive to angle across El Paso, over to Bishop, to Reyna Cruz’s, when a patrol car flashed me down.

  I stopped in the exit, went back to him before he could get to me.

  “You live up on Marie Tobin, right?” the patrolman said. “Runs with Hondo?”

  “Up by the DPS,” I said, “yeah. What?”

  “Mary J. Stanton Elementary?”

  “It’s down the street. What?”

  “Thought you might know him,” he said, leaning back.

  On the walk up I’d already checked his back seat for surprises, his front for Madrones, but I hadn’t looked low enough. There was a kid there, the seatbelt catching him in the windpipe. He was maybe four. Mexican.

  “He showed up there this morning,” the patrolman said. “The school. Ladio Padillo, right?” The kid nodded.

  I looked at him, didn’t know him; wouldn’t.

  The patrolman shrugged, said, “He had to wait in the principal’s office for CPS. When they never came, the vice principal called me. Specifically, somebody who could habla some Español. Sí, I said. Bu-eno.”

  “You don’t need me then,” I told him, trying to get away clean.

  “Just thought you might know him,” he said. “He was watching cartoons on the principal’s television, kind of lit up when you were on the news there.”

  I stood, locking eyes with the driver of the car I had blocked in. Said, where the kid couldn’t hear, “I probably look like his mom. Listen, I have to—” then did, left them sitting there, went to the house on Bishop, apologizing the whole way over to the kid. His mom had probably let him out at school with his big sisters, was already looking for him, too afraid to call CPS because they’d already been onto her for the blue marks on his arm that weren’t bruises, were just part of being Mexican at his age.

  He was alive, though, at least. With a cop.

  I walked the eleven steps up to Reyna Cruz’s house, knocked on the door long enough that it opened under my hand.

  “Hello?” I called in English, no answer. I looked behind me, to both sides, said it again, then stepped into Reyna Cruz’s living room, my heart slamming into my sternum, and realized all at once that I couldn’t remember any of the stop signs or traffic lights or streets that had got me here.

  “Señora Cruz?” I called, my voice too high.

  No answer. There wouldn’t be if her lips were glued shut, though.

  I stood at the door, telling myself to go in, and finally did. She wasn’t there. Then I saw the picture on her nightstand.

  It was her, Richard. Their wedding day.

  I held it, smearing it with my prints, and was still looking into it when a board in the hall floor creaked.

  I turned, falling onto the bed, the picture shattering behind me. Led with Richard’s pistol when I left the room, not searching the house this time, just keeping my back to the wall, leaving all kinds of trace: fiber, hair, adrenaline. I’d shot Richard’s pistol maybe three times for Tina Ortiz. So maybe I had two left, three, I didn’t know.

  The same board in the hall creaked under my foot as I passed, and I nodded down to it in sick thanks, finally made the front door. Daylight. I smiled a thin, what-I-hoped-was-patient smile and looked around, behind me, to see what was wrong, but stopped, found myself watching a young girl in the street instead. She was just standing there by her bike, by my car, and I heard it again, what the smoker tech had said to me in Tina Ortiz’s back yard, about the girl he wanted me to see next door, in her swing: that she was skipping school.

  It was July, though.

  And then I figured out what was wrong with this picture, with the kid: it wasn’t the hooky she wasn’t playing, but what she was doing—staring into my trunk.

  It was open.

  I slid the gun into my pants, touched the screen open with my fingertips.

  “He rode with me,” I said, finally.

  Richard. After riding in Madrone’s trunk from Rosa’s. After hiding there all night. After I’d left the car unlocked. It would have been the best place. He would have just had to ride with us to the parking garage then pop the latch from the inside, squat behind a car until we’d gone in then wait for the patrolmen in the parking lot to look away, then use his copy of my keys to get in my trunk.

  I called Madrone on Reyna Cruz’s phone.

  He was there in twelve minutes, with a tech to dust my trunk. Which I could have done just as well. Reyna Cruz pulled up just as the tech was finishing, stepped up onto her porch. CC was with her, eyes large.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Reyna Cruz, about this—her door being open, the cops being here, all of it. Then I laughed at myself, turned away from her. “Everything I touch turns to shit, okay?”

  “You’ve been conditioned to think that,” she said back. “That it’s your fault.”

  “You talked to Richard,” I said.

  She nodded. CC’s eyes flicked over to her, as if wanting more—the whole conversation. Her father, the one guy she looked like in all the world. I understood.

  “Why?” I said, to Reyna Cruz.

  “I was calling you,” she said. “That girl on the TV. Richard’s supposed to tell you—”

  “Maybe you can.”

  “Tina Ortiz,” Reyna Cruz said, collecting herself. “She came to see us four months ago.”

  The way she said us, it meant the shelter. Madrone looked around.

  “What did Richard say about that?” I asked, being careful with my words.

  “That she’s probably been a lot of places in the last four months.”

  He was right: five hundred other people had probably been in contact with Tina Ortiz. None of them were the main suspect’s ex-wife, though.

  “Did you believe him?” I said.

  “About Tina?”

  “About it not being important?”

  Slightly, barely, Reyna Cruz shook her head no.

  I nodded thanks, gave her the standard cop line—“Thanks, we can handle it from here”—then stepped off the porch, trying to take Madrone with me, but he was just staring at Reyna Cruz.

  “What about the others?” he said. “Rice, Mena. The Flores one.”

  Reyna Cruz shrugged, didn’t know, but flashed her eyes to me about it. Not for help, just to see where I stood on this. When she saw, she didn’t look back to Madrone, just out to the street.

  “Did the Salinas girl see him get out of the trunk?” she said.

  I followed her eyes to the girl on the bicycle, felt as much as saw Madrone shaking his head no.

  Reyna Cruz nodded, said to him, “The women come to my center to be safe, Detective. We tell them it’s a safe place. Part of that safety, you understand, is privacy.”

  Madrone pulled one side of his face up, opened his hand to her, and was about to hit her with the other standard cop line, I knew: ‘Don’t make me get a warrant.’ It wasn’t going to work with Reyna Cruz, though. She wasn’t going to be intimidated. Living with Richard had taught her how to push back.

  “It’s just,” I said, cutting Madrone off just as he was breathing in, “it’s just that somebody else seems to have the list already, see?”

  “So they’re… not safe,” Reyna Cruz put together, looking to me again.

  I nodded, prayed.

  Beside her, CC nudged her, said what I couldn’t: “Mom.”

  Reyna Cruz breathed out, as if amused by it all having come to this—her marriage to Richard, the shelter she probably started in order to recover from him, me showing up fifteen years later. She breathed out and gave in.

  In the parking lot of the taco shack I stopped at on the way back to the station, I slammed my open hand into the dashboard above the radio again and again.
Reyna Cruz was probably at the shelter already, getting the list together to fax over. Or, she was sitting in the parking lot outside it, wondering what she’d agreed to. What she was doing.

  I stepped out of the crime scene my car was now, just to distance myself. Sat down on the curb. Knew getting her to betray the women at her shelter was only going to be worth it if the killings stopped today. If we really saved a life.

  And I wasn’t hungry, had been staring at my drive-through burrito instead of eating it. Now it was too late: this far from the heat lamp, it was reverting to its natural state, remembering the indentations left in it from the rack of an industrial freezer.

  Slowly, fascinated, I poured it from its paper into a cheesy pile on the curb, let the paper go. Beside it, a black beetle raised its head, its antennae slashing the air. I promised myself not to step on it, then rose for my door, the burrito paper blowing behind me.

  “You can’t do that,” a drive-through attendant said from his window, but I could. My boyfriend was a killer. I could do anything.

  Liz P. was standing on the sidewalk when I got back to the station. Not waiting for me, but she walked over when I stopped.

  “You’re not answering your phone,” she said.

  I didn’t explain, just shrugged.

  For a few moments she studied me, then got her compact out, started powdering from all the angles. “We’ll be collecting some footage this afternoon,” she said, casually. “If you want to ride along, I mean.”

  “Police protection?”

  “Something like that.”

  “When?”

  “Hour, hour and a half.”

  I tried to see that far, couldn’t. “Maybe, yeah.”

  “We’ll be in the van, though,” she said, snapping her compact shut.

  “My house then.”

  She didn’t pretend not to know where it was.

  I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.

  On the sidewalk beside us, wrapped around from the front entrance, all the chupacabra men come to take credit for sucking the blood of the women of El Paso. I was walking in a dream, still. At the end of it, Madrone, waiting for me in Homicide.