Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I smiled, lowered my head.

  “You don’t want my face,” I said. “Then, the only thing left that I can give you is confirmation on something that’s supposed to be confidential, right?”

  She smiled, said, “You already did.”

  I looked up to her and she played my voice back, through hers: “‘My boyfriend-slash-suspect…’”

  I shrugged about this too. Like it was all right too. Like everything was.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, patting the table as she stood. “I could have found out a thousand different ways.”

  She was halfway out the door when I said what I’d been mulling for three hours: “The maternity panties, you think were they new?”

  She stopped, looked back to me.

  “Why?” she said.

  “He had to get them somewhere,” I said. “Like the—the g-string on Carrie Mena. That’s the angle we keep missing. Some awkward guy buying panties.”

  “But,” she said, stepping back in, “the thong…”

  I nodded, already agreed: a clerk wasn’t going to remember one more guy buying lingerie for his girlfriend. But surely one of them would remember a guy running his hands through the bin of maternity panties, right? Buying just one pair?

  “So,” Liz P. started, “in the morning we need to canvas—” but I stood, interrupting her: “What if he didn’t buy them, though? What if he was too embarrassed? Where else could he have got them?”

  “Where he knew there already were some,” Liz P. said.

  Monica Corrido Armendariz Iglesias’s house.

  Liz P. stood, scanning the room. For rival stations, maybe.

  “I need to get back to KVIA,” she said. “Get another truck.” Another cameraman, I added, inside. “You’ll wait?” she said, and I nodded, told her I didn’t even know the address.

  “Just don’t get it before I’m here,” she said, and I turned back around, to my glass.

  The person I called for a ride was Nate. Because Davidson’s shift was going to start soon. Nate picked up on the third ring, just whispered my name instead of saying hello.

  I listened, listened, finally said it: “Where are you?”

  For a long time then, nothing. Then, “Chihuahita. Marta, God, there’s—” but then he cut himself off.

  I set my cell phone on the table just as it started ringing, flipped it over like a beetle, for the caller ID. It wasn’t Nate, calling back, but Liz P., calling to keep me busy, keep me from beating her to Chihuahita, to Monica Corrido Armendariz Iglesias’s house.

  It was too late, though. I turned the phone off and back on, called a cab from the phonebook, then flipped back to the white pages, for an address.

  The house was dark like I knew it would be. The cab driver asked me if I was sure and I pushed the door shut without slamming it, shook my head no. He pulled away. It was long after dark but El Paso glowed at night, enough for me to trace a bullbat, flitting back and forth between sagging power lines then angling off into the city, for the bugs that rose above it every night, their world upside down: the stars on the ground, so close, so bright.

  This was the street I stepped out into.

  Monica Corrido Armendariz Iglesias’s porch was uneven, like the deck of a boat on open water. I kept my hand to the rail, made my way to the door. Told myself that it was stupid to be scared here, because this was the last place the man who would have been her killer would come. That all I was doing was providing support for a fellow officer—Nate had said he was in Chihuahita, after all, and tonight, for us, this had to be the only house in Chihuahita. And all we were going to do was collect some evidence, look for the tag on some maternity underwear, see if it matched the one CSU probably had by now. If they matched, then it would just be police work, the robbery part of Robbery-Homicide: how did he get in? did he leave any trace behind? did anybody see him enter or exit, maybe notice what he was driving, what time of day or night it was?

  I told myself all of that, but knew too that this would be the best place for him. Like Madrone said, walking into Jennifer Rice’s house: returning to the scene of the crime to masturbate. It would be a way of regaining the power I’d stole by having her taken away.

  The door gave under my fingers. Like every door this week. I pushed it back, let my eyes adjust.

  The light in the hall was on. I crossed the living room like a whisper, walked through the kitchen and stepped through the door by the refrigerator, onto the rough carpet, securing the perimeter like Richard would have. Still his little trainee.

  The house was empty except for the middle bedroom, a sound.

  I followed it, my fingertips to the rough paint of the wall.

  Nate was the sound. He was sitting on a large cooler pushed back against the wall. The lid was creaking as he rocked back and forth.

  Across from him, in a folding metal chair, a man in a bunny suit, astronaut-white like the doctors who’d worked on Tina Ortiz. Him and Nate were just staring at each other.

  “Come in,” Nate said, too happy it seemed. Not at all surprised to see me there.

  Gingerly, a hand to each side of the doorframe, I stepped in, breathed in sharp when the bunny man craned his plastic faceplate up to me like a blind person will, following sound.

  It was Davidson.

  I leaned back against the wall, covered my mouth with my hands.

  “I picked it up on the scanner,” Nate said, pointing to Davidson with what I saw now was a large, automatic pistol. The model FBI agents were carrying in the field this year, I knew.

  “Picked what up?” I said weakly.

  The reason Davidson had craned his head up as if he were blind was because he was: he had sunglasses on, the lenses wound in black electric tape. And his lips: they weren’t opening with his mouth, were glued shut.

  I turned back to Nate. He was smiling.

  “You remember on the news early on, that one woman who said she saw el chupacabra walking away from the crime scene in an astronaut suit?”

  I nodded.

  Nate shrugged, said, “Well, we should have listened to her. Hector here showed up on the neighborhood radio about thirty minutes ago. People were calling in an alien invasion.”

  “And you were the only one who responded?” I said.

  “I respond to all reports of extraterrestrial activity,” Nate said, shrugging, laughing almost, then got serious, said, “I already knew it was him.”

  “Why is he—he…?” I said, and Nate finished: “In the suit? According to him”—Nate opened his hand to the odd pages of paper between the two of them—“he was ‘abducted’ from the parking lot of that place down where Paisano—”

  “Rosa’s,” I said.

  Davidson nodded, urgently.

  Nate went on: “According to him, he was taken from there, injected with something he says is ‘K,’ then taped and etcetera into what you see here. One of the department’s hazmat getups.”

  I nodded, could see it then: what I thought were reflective stripes on the legs and side of the suit was really duct tape, over the zippers.

  “But why is he still in it?” I said, almost reaching for Davidson.

  Nate breathed out through his nose, said, “Aren’t you supposed to be the criminalist here, Marta? Because he wants us to remove the tape, contaminate the glue and whatever is in the glue that’ll prove he did it to himself.”

  “Or that he didn’t,” I said.

  Nate shrugged, nodded.

  “That your gun?” I said.

  He held it up sideways, looked at it. “I think I was supposed to shoot him with it,” he said, pulling his head over to aim down the spine, “just wing him, though. It’d be the ultimate proof of innocence, for him. And of course the medics would destroy the suit for him, trying to save his life.”

  “Or somebody else wanted you to shoot him,” I said, pushing my mind hard, for all the angles. “Somebody else wanted—knew you would think it was Hector. Then, if he died, it would be him. Especially
in that suit.”

  Nate scratched his forehead with the sight of the automatic, wasn’t going to let me one-up him. Not tonight.

  “Except it is him,” he said.

  I closed my eyes, had to say it: “…and why is it not you, Nate?”

  He stopped scratching, looked to me, his face awash with amazement. But then he was impressed too, liked it. Said, shrugging into it, “Yeah, guess so. It’d make sense, I mean. I dress him up then—yeah, damn. Shit, Marta. Go the front of the class.” He stood, turned around fast to the wall, thinking. Came back all at once. “You’re right,” he said, talking fast. “From your point of view, it could just as easily be me—assuming I would, y’know, do all that killing.”

  “For me.”

  His eyes flashed up for that, then narrowed. But he nodded himself on, gesturing wide with the automatic: “The proof of course will be if anybody else heard that on the scanner, about the aliens. Or—”

  And then I wasn’t listening, was backing away.

  Another option, besides it being Davidson, or Nate, or some third party, was that it was Davidson and Nate together.

  Nate saw it written on my face, pointed from him to Davidson to be sure he was reading me right. He smiled, like it, then sat down across from Davidson again, shrugged, and said, “Guess we flipped for the suit, right? Sorry, man.”

  It was funny to him. He was laughing. His first real case. He was drunk with it.

  “Except it is him and him alone,” he said again, looking to me as if sorry to be having to say this. “That’s what—this morning. Trevana didn’t tell you? I shot by the lab again, was still following that garage door remote. And there it was, Marta, like the fucking cherry on top of the Sunday. The weight. That Joe Yanez speedfreak who died in that crash? I honestly thought your asshole boyfriend had walked away from the wreck with the remote that day. But then I figured, wait, wait—get it? ‘Weight?’ Anyway, I mean, if the good Detective Godder really was good and not bad, then where could the remote possibly be? The car, still? Maybe. But nobody knows where that car is anymore. So, the only other place would be inside of Joe Yanez. He was holding it when he ran out of the house, never put it down when the big car chase started…”

  “And…weight?” I said.

  Nate nodded. “Anyway, Yanez was weighed, standard procedure, when his body was first checked into the morgue. But then, so they could set the oven to the right temp or something, I don’t know, he was weighed again.” Nate was looking at Davidson for this part. Still nodding. “And guess what?” he said, holding up four of his fingers. “Cuatro ounces, mi amigo. One garage door remote.”

  “Nate,” I said, “c’mon. Four ounces? That’s nothing.”

  “Not to six dead women.”

  Frantically, Davidson was trying to pick up a pen from the carpet, to explain the four ounces to us maybe, but his bunny man fingers were too big.

  I lowered myself to help but then Nate’s automatic cocked overhead.

  I looked up. He was pointing at Davidson, not me—protecting me—but still.

  I stood into the gun, between it and Davidson.

  Nate looked at me then, for the first time it seemed, his eyes registering something—that the radio record wouldn’t clear him, maybe, because he could have made the call himself, from a payphone—but then he shook his head no, leaned to me with the gun, to push me aside, and then, slowly, even softly, the sound and pressure of a gunshot tore my world in two, left me floating between them.

  I was dead, I knew, dying. The blood sprayed on the wall beside me my own, maybe Davidson’s too, but then I’d done too many spatter tests, knew how blood went. That, if it was mine, it should be behind me, not beside me.

  Nate smiled just as a finger of blood welled up from the hollow of his shoulder. He smiled and started bringing the gun around, stepping so that he was as in front of me as he could get. Still protecting me.

  Standing in the hall just past the doorway, Richard, his long-barreled revolver exhaling a delicate ribbon of smoke.

  “Don’t,” he said to Nate, but Nate did, already was: his gun, coming around, his mouth, smiling, saying so it wasn’t that complicated.

  Richard shot him again, this time in the center of the chest, so that all I could think about was coring an apple.

  Nate fell to his knees. I fell with him, guided his gun down but he was still talking, saying now “blaze of… blaze of…”

  “Glory,” Richard finished, then stepped forward, shot him again, in the throat, opening the back of his neck up into a mouth, the vertebrae splintering into broken teeth.

  This time it sprayed warm across my face.

  I lowered Nate’s head down into my lap, hooked his hair behind his ear, then looked up to Richard, rose shaking my head no and attacked him with everything I had, beating him, hitting him with the sides of my fists, kicking, crying, and he took it, pulled me closer and closer. Turned like an animal when the first flash strobed the window of the bedroom. Pulled me deeper into the house, to hide.

  We couldn’t, though.

  Madrone was just stepping through the back door, into the kitchen.

  “So you’re the aliens?” he said.

  “This one’s got papers,” Richard said, smiling with his eyes.

  Madrone shook his head, herded us out onto the lawn. Minutes later a fire engine rolled up for some reason, the firemen’s thick yellow jackets impenetrable and, here, in the heat, useless. Beyond them, Liz P. tilted her head to me and I turned away, and then a fireman I didn’t even know had gone in the house walked out the front door, his steps ponderous, whatever he was carrying nearly as heavy as he was.

  Richard’s hand fell to his gun but I followed it with my own hand, held it there, and, as El Paso watched, the fireman set his bundle down onto the lawn, started unwrapping it.

  Davidson.

  I fell to him, pulled the helmet off and laughed when I remembered that his lips were superglued.

  On videotape—I’ve seen it, night after night—I start to lower my face to him, to kiss him, but then check myself, come back up to Richard instead, and watch as Davidson is birthed into the news, blinking, coughing.

  Twenty minutes later the fireworks started down the street. All the ones people had saved back for next year, they were lighting now: independence. They filled the sky with their brief light.

  After.

  Richard was standing at my door with a television set. It was Monday July 14th. Two days and three hundred briefings after what the news was calling the ‘Shoot-Out in Chihuahita.’ I didn’t know where he’d been sleeping the last two nights.

  “Called,” he said, through the screen, not looking me head-on.

  “My dad’s still got my cell,” I said.

  “Mine, you mean,” Richard said.

  I pushed the door open for him. We were both on leave. Richard’s shooting inquiry was starting Wednesday. There would be no news crews there, but they’d already done their damage, after finding out that it was Richard who shot Nate, Nate who was investigating the Yanez case. The inquiry board would never clear him. If they did, Liz P. would crucify them.

  Not that I cared.

  I was still wearing my black slacks from Nate’s memorial service. Richard hadn’t been there. After the three other mourners had left, I’d done the only thing I could—taken a flower to carry across El Paso, to Socorro, to put on a grave there. The only person who saw me take it, I think—who saw that I was trying to knit these deaths together, make them matter—was Davidson. The hospital had released him that morning. He had a tube of medicated lip balm he kept having to apply.

  “Trevana told me,” I said, instead of hello.

  Davidson nodded, shrugged.

  The standard blood work for his stay at the hospital had tested positive for more drugs than just the ketamine he’d been injected with.

  “Least I don’t have to clean out my locker,” he said, toeing a loose clod of earth over. “Never had time to put anything back
in it, really.”

  I nodded, watched the wind push a red balloon from headstone to headstone.

  “Sucks,” he said, nodding down to what was going to be Nate’s plot.

  It did. Wouldn’t quit.

  “So you talked to him,” I said, “Mitch?”

  Davidson made his hand into a phone, focused on a car making its slow way past the cemetery. “Not sure I want to be—” he started, trying to shrug it off. “Confined spaces, all that.”

  I understood: the bunny suit.

  Davidson was tracking the balloon too, it looked like, and then it hung in the fence. He breathed out through his nose as if not surprised and pulled out what the hospital must have thought were his personal effects: the sunglasses with the electric-taped lenses.

  “Chingow,” I said, laughing a bit.

  Davidson threaded them over the bridge of his nose, onto his ears, then touched his right eyebrow to me, in farewell. “Adios, amígdala,” he said, grinning his little boy grin, and turned, felt his way forward, and, maybe three graves away, I called out, “I can teach you to talk como un mejicano de verdad…”

  He waved his hand over his head, behind him—no thanks—kept walking.

  Looking at Richard through my screen door now, I wanted to tell him this—about Davidson. How two people like us could be friends. How we were going to be, even if we never saw each other again.

  But I didn’t.

  Instead, I said the obvious—what Richard was holding: “New television.”

  Richard nodded, shrugged, and I let him in, and that night he slept on the couch and I laid in my bed, my door closed, and thought that this was normal, maybe. That this was how arguments ended—one on the couch, one in bed, listening. No furniture dying, no hands caressing faces hard enough to make them bleed. I fell asleep staring at the LED numbers of my clock, counting the lines that made up each until I knew that a 3 took four, a 5 five, a 6 six, a 7 three.

  It wasn’t sheep, but it worked.

  I said Christy Ramos’s name like a prayer and didn’t think I was awake anymore.

  The next morning Richard organized the files I’d left on the floor. The Juarez girls, the photos, the birth records.