Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “You know you don’t even have clearance to be in this room,” he said, “much less the building.”

  “I got your list for you,” I said, glancing over to the fax.

  Madrone followed, said, “Not yet you haven’t,” then took two steps to the window, parted the blinds. Shook his head, disappointed but at the same time satisfied with what he was seeing out there.

  I knew without having to ask: Liz P, using the chupacabra men as a backdrop.

  “Just because you both wear make-up doesn’t mean you can talk to each other in the mirror,” he said finally, still looking. Only turning around when the printer spool of the fax started winding up.

  We looked at each other about it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said, collecting each page as it came.

  “You’re going to announce those, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Like you announced the garage door shit?” he said, scanning the list. “Good idea, we almost caught him because of that little stunt…”

  I stared at him then, understood for a moment our problem: where he was trying to catch the killer, I was just trying to stop the killings. Different worlds altogether. And mine was more important: I took the next page before he could, tried to photograph it with my eyes. It was a list of handwritten names. No addresses, no social security numbers. One I knew, though: Mena, C. I touched it, nodded: this was where he was getting them.

  Madrone ripped the page away, filed it in with his.

  “There were at least thirty,” I said, watching the last page come. “Times… what? Ten pages? That’s three hundred women.”

  Madrone shook his head no. “More like a thousand, Villarreal. Just names? This is El Paso. For every one Juana Rodriguez, there’s three more.”

  I pursed my lips, looked away: he was right. But still.

  “Can we at least collect them then?”

  Madrone leaned back, the list loose by his leg. “We, Villarreal?”

  “I get it,” I said, then. “It’s just one girl, right? One more little Mexican girl…”

  Madrone laughed, crossed his arms. “Villarreal, we’ve already got every twenty-eight-year-old Mexican girl in Texas and New Mexico calling us every five minutes, and one man for each of them downstairs, saying he’s the one. You really think we have the manpower to—to collect them all for some indefinite amount of time?”

  He was just staring at me when he was done.

  “If it saves even one of their lives, sir.”

  He rubbed his nose hard, like he was trying to push it into his face. “I’m going to get some people contacting them, okay? Don’t get your panties all wadded up.”

  “You said the next one was my responsibility, though.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m not going to let her die,” I said, then turned, left. Called Reyna Cruz from the morgue, Trevana pretending not to know I was there.

  “¿Otra vez?” she said.

  “Again,” I confirmed, my hand to the fax, my finger to the number. “Por favor. This one works, I think.”

  For long minutes then, nothing. Just Trevana, stealing glances into his office at me. I shook my head no to him each time, my eyes heating up so I had to lean back in the chair, tilt my head to the ceiling.

  Ten minutes later—a lifetime—I strolled downstairs, collected the fax from Trevana’s office.

  Ducking out into the parking garage, I had three hundred and nineteen names in my hand.

  It was almost four o’clock. The list would make the six o’clock update, if I did it right. Madrone could go to hell.

  Two and a half hours later, El Paso started spitting up brown women. Not just the three hundred and nineteen on the list, that had been to the shelter in the last five years, but any with any of the names, first or last.

  This was why Madrone hadn’t wanted it on the news.

  It wasn’t a riot—there was no clear figure to rise against except el chupacabra—but there were lights being run, people huddled around patrol cars, like they could ferry this sister or wife or daughter to the station, keep her alive. One girl walking alone on the sidewalk, her hair a pageboy she kept touching, making sure of.

  Out there in it somewhere, the KVIA van, Liz P. driving, her cameraman trying to record it all from the open side door. What he couldn’t get on tape though were the fathers and husbands and brothers who just locked the doors, sat behind them with guns and dogs and a determination that would never show up on video.

  I’d given her a copy of the list when she’d pulled up to my house. She’d made her special report from the school parking lot down the street. When she asked if I still wanted to ride along, I shook my head no, said, “He’s going to know I did it.”

  “Gideon Madrone?” Liz P. said.

  I told myself again that it was worth it, what I was having to trade in. That, to some girl’s family, it was going to be worth it.

  “You get the fax from his office?” Liz P. had asked, impressed.

  “Close enough,” I told her. “Downstairs, Trevana’s morgue.”

  “Mitch Trevana,” Liz P. said, nodding, biting her lower lip. “You know he was on that international task force back in ninety-seven, right? I should hit him up for some Lote Bravo clips.”

  I didn’t say anything else, just kept staring at the same space after she’d left.

  With Richard. Trevana had been on the four-week task force with Richard. I covered my mouth with the side of my hand, breathed into my fist as if I was cold: Trevana had been on my cell phone records too. The one who called for me, maybe, but got Richard. Because they were already talking, probably, it didn’t matter to him what phone Richard was answering.

  I went back inside, locked my door. Watched the news.

  Ten minutes after Liz P. left, KVIA’s running banner at the bottom of the screen had been pulled. The official word was that all the girls were in custody. Unofficially, El Paso PD probably just couldn’t hold anymore.

  They had to have her, though.

  Five minutes after the banner, the celebration started. From my porch I watched the sparks rise, bloom, fade, and knew that even if the police didn’t have her, the next girl, the one dressed in white, she’d seen the news anyway, was taking Liz P.’s advice not to be alone.

  Now all that was left for me to do was Chorizo’s, like Richard had said on the kid menu.

  Because I didn’t want to leave my car there, I called Nate for a ride. He pulled up just as the sun went down, pushed the door on my side open and hooked his head out to El Paso, almost in wonder, it seemed. “It’s a desert out there, yeah?” he said.

  It was a line from a commercial a few years back: I was supposed to answer that I might just need a tall glass of water like him then, right?

  Instead I leaned over, gave him a kiss on the cheek. It was a surprise to both of us, and kept him quiet for most of the ride, until we got into Ascarate, the skeleton of the drive-in screen leaning over us.

  I touched his arm for him to stop, said, “This’ll do.”

  “I can take you wherever,” Nate said, looking around at all the run-down houses, but I shook my head no, explained: “My old neighborhood.”

  He just looked at me, his brakes washing the yard behind him red.

  “You’re going to see him, aren’t you?” he said, finally.

  I didn’t say no.

  My father was on his usual bench at Chorizo’s. I watched him through the glass for too long then kept walking, watching for the Channel 7 van, listening for helicopters, waiting for an unmarked car to turn its headlights on in stages: yellow, white, bright. There was nothing, though. I was alone. Just Richard, watching from his rooftop, his borrowed car, his manhole, his face grease-painted black, every nerve alive.

  I tried to walk natural for him, not give him away.

  “So I’m supposed to go in…” I said aloud, when he never coalesced out of the grimy shadows, then shrugged, put my hand on the weathered piece of copy paper taped to
the outside of Chorizo’s door, pushed. Under my fingertips, Get Tu Vitamin T Aqui: tacos, tostadas, tortillas.

  Because the cylinder on the door was broke, I guided it closed, looked to the side instead of at my father, into the fifty-five gallon trashcan pushed up against the wall. For a moment I couldn’t control, it unlocked me in time, made me feel not like I was walking in, but like I was walking out, away from one of the crime scenes of the last few days, depositing my gloves in the bag somebody’d always been holding. And then I looked up.

  My father touched the fingertips of his left hand to the bench beside him, had seen me minutes ago through the window, my face transparent in some reflection.

  There was a lemonade on the way for me already, I knew. It was what he used to get me every Sunday morning, before my mother came to collect me for church. They always had to mix it special for me, because mornings at Chorizo’s were all about coffee. I’d got to put my own sugar in it too, to keep me awake in Mass, my father would say, leaning down; it was our secret. His breath had been so harsh, and perfect.

  I wasn’t here for him, though. He was just the one who was here.

  I crossed to his table, said it as I was sitting down: “Hola.”

  He nodded, swallowed the last bite of whatever had been on his plate.

  “He was here all day for you,” he said—spat—in English.

  Richard.

  I nodded, touched a fleck of lettuce off the white stubble around his mouth. It was the first time I’d extended a hand towards him since I was fifteen, probably. Like with Nate a few minutes ago, I hadn’t even realized I was going to do it until I was doing it either, and then, then it was like I had sandbags tied all over me, pressing down on me, every movement heavy. And him. He was so old, so light, like he could float away at any moment.

  When he’d had a wife, he’d eaten at least.

  I looked to the plate glass window, for Richard.

  “He say anything?” I asked.

  My father shrugged, his old man tongue touching his lower lip in thought.

  “It’s a police matter,” I said. “Por favor. Dígame.”

  My father brought his glass up again.

  “¿Qué?” I said, my hand on his forearm, the touch, the thin fabric of his shirt, uncovering an image, a scene I’d tried to bury long ago, when it first rose: me and Davidson, sitting outside my father’s eventual nursing home with a foil-wrapped plate of sopapillas already dripping with honey, sopapillas he wasn’t supposed to have.

  We would walk through walls to get them to him, was the thing. Crawl up the drainpipes, float over the roof, unscrew light bulbs from the backside then slither down through the holes, say to him ‘Here,” and he would nod, say that he’d adopted me because he’d had an affair with my real mother, and this was the only way he could be with me, still.

  It would be perfect. For a twelve-year-old girl.

  A white one, who put her parents in homes.

  The muscles in my father’s cheek took up slack, and then he nodded to himself, satisfied with the English words he’d picked, and said, “He says it’s not him.”

  I let my hand fall away from my father’s shirt. He took another drink, held the glass to his lips longer than he needed to.

  “Did you believe him?” I said.

  I stared down at the carved wooden table with him. Finally he shrugged, raised his glass again. This time I could see it tremble. He was drunk, had been drinking all day.

  “We used to come here,” I said, not looking at him anymore.

  “Asi es,” my father said, his lips thin and formal.

  “When did he leave?” I asked.

  My father swirled his water almost over the edge of his glass.

  “I remember when we used to come here,” he said, as if hearing it again. He laughed then, not a comfortable laugh. “What am I now, though, qué no?” He set his glass back down. “Just a—a viejo menso. An old man sitting en a cubierto he used to come to with his—his hija. His mija, mijita. Cuando tú eras mi niña—Martita.”

  When I was that, his little girl.

  It was a speech for him. After it he had to rest. I stared at his water with him, brought my own lemonade to my mouth. It tasted the same as it used to somehow, but still, I coughed enough that he unfolded his left arm, touched me on the back. Through my hair. I didn’t stop him, just leaned forward, close to the table, and, when the door opened behind us, everything in me fell down, because the primal part of me—the Marta with parents, still—knew it was my mother from then, in her church hat, her purse hooked across her wrist. That she was here to inspect my dress, see if I’d let my father dirty it. If he’d bought me anything that would drip cinnamon.

  I looked down at the front of my shirt without meaning to, then, trying not to, back to the door. It was nobody. Not her. Just some pachuco, reaching down for a Thrifty Nickel then backing out, holding it up to the girl behind the register, to show her.

  “I don’t know what you are to me anymore,” I said to my father.

  He laughed, and then my back straightened: the door had never closed after the pachuco.

  I breathed in, seeing the SWAT team I knew had to be in formation outside, on the street, at the back exit. My father sensed it, angled his face around just enough to see then pretended he hadn’t, followed the concrete floor back to our bench, the water between his hands. I turned to the door.

  Richard was holding it open with one of his hands, a sarape draped over him gunfighter style.

  “I didn’t mean meet me here when it was convenient,” he said, his voice rolling across the concrete floor at me.

  “Hello, Detective Godder,” I said to him, turning back around to my lemonade.

  Richard breathed out through his nose, amused.

  “Little Mexican girl comes home,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” I said too fast, though I knew what he was doing: taking away my ability to think, replacing it with anger. “¿Que quieres?”

  “You,” he said back, the door still open.

  I took another drink of my lemonade, understood in a flash why I drank coke, now: not for the sugar, but for this sugar.

  “We’re here to talk about Lote Bravo,” I said, loud enough that my voice could wrap around to him. That everybody else could hear. That they had to.

  “Lote Bravo,” Richard said. “It’s bullshit.”

  “Not to them.”

  “Them?”

  “The girls, Richard.”

  Everyone was listening now.

  “You didn’t have to come,” he said.

  We were talking English now because he never could keep up in Spanish. Not when there was emotion involved. That was when I talked it the cleanest, too.

  Another drink, so sweet my eyes watered, a thing I wasn’t going to let him see.

  “You stood me up at Rosa’s last night,” I said.

  “You want them to catch me?”

  “I want it to stop,” I said, standing.

  Richard nodded, his eyes not leaving me.

  “You still don’t believe it’s not me,” he said.

  “I don’t know what I believe,” I said, then looked down to my father. He was hunched over his glass, watching the light shatter in the water, come back together.

  “This—” I started, getting his attention, my father’s attention, directing it to Richard, “he’s wanted for killing all those girls.”

  “Solo para interrogar me,” Richard said, quietly, hitting each syllable of the Spanish. It was for my father, so he couldn’t miss it, that Richard was only wanted for questioning.

  I turned to him.

  “Justo,” I said, splitting hairs all the way to the quick. “Not solo, you fucking gringo.”

  “No más,” my father said, loud, eyes still unfocused on the table. Another man would have slammed his hand down, maybe. Or stood. But my father was just shaking his head no, no more, no mas. Please.

  “I’m leaving with him now,” I told him then, se
tting my glass down at my place.

  My father stared at nothing, then stared some more, so I dug a dollar out of my pocket, flattened it onto the table for my lemonade, and told him in Spanish to say goodbye to me.

  He looked up to me, across the room to Richard.

  “You may not get another chance, I mean,” I said.

  My father looked back down into his glass.

  Richard’s car was four blocks south, one block over. He opened my door first, then his, and before he even had his door shut I had my tongue in his mouth, was guiding his hands to me, priming them until they knew what to do. Just as they started, though, he stopped, pushed me away. Just looked at me across the bench seat.

  “What?” I said.

  “Not here,” he said, the back of his sleeve to his mouth. To check for blood.

  “¿No te gusta?”

  “No,” he said. “Get my pants around my ankles, watch me try to run, right?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Little-girl-mad-at-daddy act, throwing herself at the first guy she sees?” he said.

  “So you only want it when it’s clean?” I said, pulling my back away from the seat to straighten my shirt.

  “Fugitives don’t need officers shining lights in the windows of their car,” he said.

  “Like it would take that long,” I said.

  The car turned over easy for him.

  “You taste like pitillo anyway,” I said, touching my mouth now. It was the way I’d said cigaro in high school. It was supposed to have made me cool.

  Richard pulled out into traffic, hooked his seatbelt.

  “Your little tough-man-on-the-run act,” I started narrating. “Wrongly-accused-man-on-the-run act. Set-up man-on-the—”

  “Okay, already,” he said, pulling his lights on late.

  “They know we were at her house,” I said. “Jennifer Rice’s.”

  “Already?”

  “Trevana not tell you?”

  He smiled, switched driving hands from left to right, so that he was half-turned away from me.

  “Five girls dead,” he said, “and all you’re worried about is who I’m talking to.”