Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I left five, and he smiled.

  “I can just follow you, if you want,” I said.

  He smiled. “I took the bus. Serial killers are big on public transportation. Exact change, anonymity, all that.”

  He stopped us at the payphones by the register. Dialed my number instead of using either of our cells, the coins falling on the first ring. His Brat nosed up to the CBT sign, another lie.

  “Tell him you need a ride,” he said. “Real voice. You’re kind of mad, but more like annoyed. It’s too late for all this, yeah, tell him—” but then Richard was on.

  I told him that the dumbfuck CSU van had my car blocked in. He said he’d be there after the next SportsCenter.

  “How long you think we’ve got?” Davidson said, hanging up for me, pulling me out into the night.

  “Forty minutes,” I said. “An hour.”

  “Beautiful,” he said, teeth chattering in the heat. “Perfect.”

  We took my car to the Rio Grande. A low, dirty embankment in Socorro. Down Winn, a water tower standing over us, the orange towers of the waste water treatment plant just to the east like a castle from a fairy tale. And it wasn’t the Rio Grande, really, but some sort of canal or feeder the waste water people had cut into the land. Same water, though: muddy, brown, hardly moving.

  Davidson turned the key back towards himself and we sat there until I saw it: a black-plastic form in the loose dirt, the edge of the river lapping at it.

  My father. In a trash bag.

  My hand fell to the door but Davidson took my other, and I knew I couldn’t get there.

  “It’s got airholes,” he said. “What do you think I am?”

  “Let him go,” I said.

  “You’ll do whatever I want?”

  “I already am, Hector.”

  “I’ll cut him free—after… you,” he said. After I was dead.

  “I just want to say bye.”

  Davidson shook his head no.

  “How do I even know it’s him?” I said, then. “It could just be—carpet.”

  Davidson nodded, shrugged. “Probably is,” he said, “yeah. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Just show me.”

  “It would be more convincing if you could see him, really?”

  I nodded.

  He shrugged, started the car, the headlights getting brighter as the engine caught, but then clamped the brake down just when he’d put us in Drive.

  I fell forward, caught myself.

  “Sorry,” he said, his hand still to the shifter.

  “What?”

  “How do I know you’ll… cooperate, after you see him?”

  “I guess you don’t,” I said. “Just have to trust me.”

  “But you want to live. I mean, what’s more important, really? Having all your blood drained or keeping your word to a sociopath?”

  I looked to the lights of El Paso. The big white star on the mountain.

  “They should have a manual or something,” Davidson said, draping himself over the wheel again, looking at the water. “Some of this shit’s just so complicated.”

  I smiled, nodded, and was halfway out the door before he caught me.

  “See?” he said. “You’re even lying to me already. Without even talking. What am I supposed to think when you are talking?”

  There was something rising in his voice I didn’t like. As if he were talking himself up to something. Ten seconds later, he showed me: an ampoule of clear liquid.

  “You’re really going to do it,” I said.

  “It doesn’t hurt this way,” he said. “You don’t, like, care or something.”

  I took it in my hand, rotated the tiny bottle around to the label: ketamine.

  “It doesn’t hurt you, you mean,” I said. “Easier to kill a ragdoll than a person, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “Then I can see him?” I said. “You’ll let him go?”

  Davidson nodded, patting the dash over the steering wheel, and without even thinking—it was just a tool—I had my exacto out, for the lid.

  Davidson stopped me.

  “You have that?” he said.

  I looked at it, saw it too.

  “It’s not,” I started, still watching the thin blade, “not like you’re going to kill me. Strip me, do shit with my blood, then make me drink poison, glue my lips shut over it.”

  “We’re not going to have time for the—the shower-part,” he said, offering the syringe again. “That part’s too much like work, anyway.”

  “I have this, though,” I said, flicking the blade across the top of his hand to show. A line of blood welled up, kept welling.

  Davidson brought it to his mouth, watched me over it, his eyes wet with betrayal.

  “And I have this,” he said, popping the brakes, my car jumping forward, towards my father.

  I handed the exacto over butt-first. He dropped it out the vent window. Handed me the syringe.

  “It’s clean?” I said, filling it from the ampoule.

  “I don’t think bacteria really… matters,” he said, “right?”

  I shrugged, gave him my arm, tapping a vein up like they do in the movies.

  “None of the other girls had… this,” I said. Needle marks.

  “Well, one,” Davidson said. “But I never took any of them… here, either. You’re the first, the special one.”

  He threaded the needle closer and closer to my skin, concentrating too much.

  “What?” I said.

  “You were really—the knife? You were going to kill me or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at the back of his hand. “Maybe. Probably. Like you said, I don’t want to die.”

  “But it’s me,” he said.

  “I know,” I said back. “You think it’s not easy being the killer, try being the victim.”

  He touched my skin with the needle and I flinched, and he flinched, and the syringe fell under the seat.

  “I don’t want to do this…” he said, rocking back and forth, his hands thrust under his legs.

  “Then don’t, Hector,” I told him, and he started crying, and then that turned into slamming the heels of his hands into the steering wheel, and then his head, until a rivulet of blood opened up, felt down into his eyes, rimming them red.

  I dug the syringe out, set it on the dash.

  “This for him,” I said, nodding out to my father.

  Davidson looked.

  “I thought you hated him,” he said, still rocking.

  “Todos necesitamos familia,” I said.

  Davidson swallowed hard, his breath catching, and nodded.

  I offered him the needle.

  “It’d be too weird,” he said, so I pushed the needle in myself, trying hard not to hit the vein but it didn’t matter: the ketamine found me, hiding inside of myself. Forty seconds. I knew because I was counting the lines of the station on my stereo display: it blinked every two seconds, twenty times. My anchor, what I was trying to tie myself to, t hold onto.

  I was too light, though, too gone. No body at all.

  Davidson eased the car to the water’s edge almost, the headlights on my black plastic father, and buckled me in, walked up to it, looked back to me, then raised his foot, brought it down hard on the head. Even in the dark I could see the red splash up on his leg, flecks of something darker.

  I screamed in what felt like slow motion. Reached, cried, died.

  Davidson fell back onto the hood laughing, holding his stomach.

  It was watermelons. A bags of old watermelons.

  I heard myself laughing with him—that my father was still alive, not a watermelon—watched my hand drape across the console, to the steering wheel, the shifter.

  He’d left the car on.

  I dropped it into Drive, lurched forward, and started holding my breath for the water, the only Mexicans in the history of Mexicans to drive back to Mexico, underwater, then woke seconds later. Breathing the dirty air of El Pa
so City.

  The car had idled up to the watermelon bag, stopped. Davidson on the other side, disappointed.

  He got back in.

  Twelve silent minutes later I opened my eyes, let my neighborhood take shape around me, each house snapping into place. Like we were coming home from church, the wafer still dry on our mouths, and bitter. The kind of dry you can only wash down with blood.

  He led me in by the hand and I followed, not having to act like I was tripping because I could hardly stand, and hardly cared. But then I remembered the other girls and stopped, held onto the couch.

  They were what I was going to keep having to remind myself with: Jennifer Rice sitting in the closet, her arms hugging her legs.

  I stepped back, holding my shirt closed at the hollow of my throat.

  Davidson looked up from the deadbolt he was trying to twist into the broken door frame, held his hand out for me like we were going to dance but I shook my head no, no. He smiled, left me there. Sat the tiendita bag down, placing the contents onto the table one by one, my Frankenstein phone to his ear already somehow, a number punched in.

  “You knew you were dying already,” he said to me over the bulky receiver, “you brought me all this,” and I started laughing then, couldn’t seem to stop.

  Nothing hurt. I wanted to run, couldn’t remember how to start a complicated process like that.

  Davidson, his mouth moving, eyes watching me. I was breathing fast, shallow, sure my diaphragm was failing. He nodded once to me then sat the phone on the table without hanging it up. Sat me down in a chair, held me there by the shoulders.

  “We have to be—efficient,” he said, focusing me onto his mouth, overdoing it with his lips. “Your boyfriend’s going to back here to save the day soon, I think. And I—I just made an anonymous call, y’know? ‘Detective Gideon Madrone, come quick, man. He’s doing it to her, killing her.”’

  “But—but response time…” I started. Davidson shook his head no: “I told them I was at my apartment. Gave them the address and everything.”

  “It won’t—it won’t match my phone number…”

  “Think they’ll notice that?” he said. “Or, will they just blast off, try to beat each other there?”

  I smiled, getting it: once Madrone got here, he was going to take care of Richard, the way Richard had taken care of Nate. And Davidson could say giving his address was a mistake, that it was just the first one he could think of. That he was in a panic, afraid for his life, trying to save mine.

  “You’re… chiva,” I said, my lips thick, head slow: chiva, smart. For not using his cell—leaving the line open to my address, for when Madrone and the cavalry got to his apartment, found it empty, called back to the station.

  Davidson smiled, opening the rust remover. “Chivo,” he said. “I’m a guy, Marta. Or is that part of the insult?”

  I couldn’t keep up, even thought he was Nate for a moment.

  He was breathing hard now too, moving fast; excited.

  “This is what you’ll be interested in,” he said, the ampoule of ketamine in his hand again so smoothly it was like he’d massaged it up from a vein in his wrist.

  I tried to ask a question, couldn’t get the words together.

  He flipped the cap off the small bottle, emptied the contents into his mouth.

  I smiled, laughed again: this is what he’s been on when Madrone had slammed him up against Carrie Mena’s wall. Because he was fresh from having killed Rosario Flores, but needed the ketamine himself, to bluff his way through the killing.

  The pot everyday was to bring him back down, probably.

  I couldn’t say any of it, though. Could just step back, throw my keys at him. It was so useless it was funny. Davidson saw it too, his mouth full, and danced closer and closer to me until he was there suddenly, me on my back, his knee in my chest. He was holding my head sideways with both hands, lowering his mouth to my ear, to let the ketamine drain into my ear canal. It was warm like his mouth—I could feel it—but still: I jerked, rolled, found myself against the couch suddenly, the air under there cool, old.

  Behind me, Davidson was still holding my scarf. Not laughing anymore, a clear string of saliva and ketamine hanging from his lips.

  And then I remembered: my hair. It was bleached now, as blonde as Mexican hair can get in the sink of a tiendita. Not very, but enough. And hair was important to him, I knew, or had known. Part of the visual, the ritual. Important enough to take the time to have unbraided it for one of them—Jennifer Rice.

  I pushed myself into a sitting position, scrunched it up behind my head for him.

  “¿Te gusta?” I said, batting my eyes, my voice just coming back to me through one ear, and Davidson still wasn’t laughing, was just shaking his head no, his eyes shiny wet.

  He disappeared, appeared again. With the scissors my father had left. Stood on either side of my head and stabbed down, taking all my hair off he could, some carpet too.

  I fought back and forth, finally reached up for his crotch, felt that he was hard, liking this. And that he didn’t like to be touched: he hit me hard with the back of his hand. I only knew because I felt my head move, my neck turn. Saw his arm finishing the motion, my mind finishing the thought I couldn’t get into words: Thought you weren’t going to hit me? And then I was under his knee again, my head turned the other way, and he wasn’t laughing, was trying to spit ketamine into my other ear canal. When he rolled off I tried to stand, couldn’t even begin.

  He’d taken my balance. The ketamine in my ear. I was numb in my head, the world tilting. It was the best restraint. I was a doll, now; less. The ketamine he’d meant for my left ear was draining down the side of my neck. I rubbed it in, hid it.

  “Ten minutes,” he said to himself, keeping track, and carried and led me to the kitchen table. “You’ll still be alive when he gets here.”

  His words were slurred from the ketamine on his tongue, but my hearing was slurred too, so we synched up. I nodded to him, my skin cold now, and then he had something in his hand that was deeper than any other fear I’d ever had: a condom, still in its purple package.

  He watched me watch it, nodded, and tore a corner of the package off, shook the condom out and blew into it, opening it. Next, as if he were just cooking here, he poured the rust remover into the condom, his eye blinking more than usual, from how hard he was having to focus.

  “If you put too much,” he said, watching it rise, “then it heats the air in there up or something—pop. Premature ejacusplosion, yeah?”

  I nodded, watching the condom lengthen, the head pendulous.

  “You—all this… science,” I said, when I’d wanted chemistry.

  He started twisting the condom to tie it.

  “Science,” he said. “It doesn’t take a textbook to figure out that pouring industrial solvents into a girl will kill her, Marta.”

  When he was done with the condom he nodded, liking his work.

  “No,” I said, trying to shake my head, reaching for his crotch again, the only thing he seemed not to like. He dropped the condom balloon, hit me away again with the palm of his hand, like a girl, then stood over me, part of him giving up it seemed. Not wanting to do this.

  I smiled, couldn’t focus for a second. Trying to move so slow.

  Davidson nodded, still just watching me, then stepped forward with a new resolve, tried to pick the condom up by the tie, so he wouldn’t get any on him.

  His hands, busy.

  Now.

  I breathed deep once, twice, and on the third, tried to stand, fell into the hall, fell immediately over Richard’s box of papers, spilling them again after he’d gotten them all in order.

  Davidson was standing behind me.

  “He’s going to kill me,” I said, laughing, crying, trying to straighten the papers.

  “He’ll have to get here quick,” Davidson said.

  I let myself go slack then. Told myself that this was good, this is where it should end. Me, where I should en
d: in the papers that recorded my birth. With all the dead girls of Juarez.

  But then Davidson saw them, cocked his head to the side. Lowered himself to them. Photograph after photograph of girls’ bodies, in all states of decomposition. He couldn’t look away, was dropping them as he went. And then he got to the ones colored slightly different. The ones from the mission. The ones about me.

  He stood, holding the condom far away, the papers up to the hall’s naked bulb. Not the form-parts the nuns had filled out in their parochial script, the information, but the footer stamped onto the bottom of each page.

  “These are from the Socorro…” he said, finally, squinting disbelief. “You mean you… you knew this whole time, and still…?”

  Davidson closed his eyes, slid down the wall, the paper pressed to his head.

  “You knew?” he said, again.

  I stared at the carpet, breathed, had no idea what was going on anymore.

  “What is it that I know?” I said, forming each word in stages.

  Davidson looked at me, real confusion in his eyes for the first time.

  “Why I got that job at the morgue,” he said. “Working with gross-ass dead people.”

  I shook my head no.

  “Because you wanted to learn Spanish?” I tried, my words suddenly clear. Because I hadn’t thought about them first. That was the secret.

  He was just looking at me now, his lips loose, forgotten.

  “I got that job to be close to you,” he said, then leaned back to keep from crying. “God, Marta. All that—at Rosa’s. Us running away together. It was bullshit. You were always number seven. Thinking the other way, that I had an… un enamoramiento on you, all that shit—it was supposed to make it easy for you. Easier, anyway. If you didn’t know, I mean.”

  “If I—I didn’t know what?” I said again.

  “Christina Ramos,” Davidson said, looking up to me, his hand in his hair, holding his head up. “In nineteen-eighty she came to the mission to have you.”

  It wasn’t enough to sober me up, but the new adrenaline was from a deeper place than any gland, anyway.

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why you—why you left that…”

  “She’d been there before though,” Davidson said when I couldn’t finish. I looked up to him. He was holding one finger up—once, she’d been there once—then pointing to himself with that finger. “Two years before,” he went on. “Me, Marta. Berry and Marcia helped me… find her. It was supposed to make me feel better, I think. Be good for me or some shit. ‘There’s your biological mom, son. She’s deader than shit.’ I don’t know. I was fourteen.” He shrugged, looked into my living room. “You were twelve then, I guess. I hadn’t found you yet, then. Didn’t even know you were real.”