by Tim Green
With the same determined zeal, he built a ten-person investigation firm that catered to wealthy divorce candidates looking for angles. Three years into it, his own wife played an angle, taking him for nearly a million dollars and half his income until their daughter reached eighteen. Jose sold the business and became a one-man show, working for just enough money to pay the rent and his greedy ex-wife, and, recently, giving the rest of his services away to Casey's legal clinic, which desperately needed an investigator.
Jose was just over six feet with arms that tested the limits of his shirtsleeves and the wide V-shaped torso of a linebacker. The cops Casey knew still talked about his time as a patrolman on the street and the way the sight of Jose in blues would send gangbangers scrambling for cover. One story had him snatching a chrome-plated.45 right out of the hand of a drug dealer and beating him senseless after he'd threatened to kill Jose and his partner.
"And," Jose said, "this place wouldn't be the same without Tina."
On cue, Tina, a small dark girl with waves of kinky black hair, appeared blushing beside Jose and apologized for being late.
"No worry," Casey said. "We're going to skip the meeting and open the floodgates. Is Stacy here yet?"
"Waiting for all of you!" Stacy Berg shouted from the other side of the wall. "And the line's not getting any shorter."
"So, here we go," Casey said.
Jose gave Casey an unusual look and angled his head toward her office, disappearing that way himself. Casey got up from the plastic table and walked past Stacy, who sat behind the filling station counter, ready to direct the human traffic that came in the door.
"Before you send me anyone," Casey said, "I need five minutes with Jose."
"You and every red-blooded woman on the planet," Stacy said, eyeing the investigator as he disappeared into Casey's office.
Casey followed him in and closed the door.
CHAPTER 3
ISODORA HEARD THE CAR. SHE'D OPENED THE WINDOWS after the short storm gave way to glaring sun in hopes of capturing the small breeze. She wondered why Elijandro hadn't returned in the Range Rover. The hands of the clock showed ten before noon and she smacked her dish towel against the metal sink, twisting her frown into a snarl. She hated when he did this, leave her a note that said he'd be back at one time and then arrive four hours later. She took the carton of juice from the refrigerator for the second time and set it down amid the stagnant breakfast things, then went to the door.
Shading her eyes, she studied the car as it materialized from its cloud of dust. When she saw the rack of lights and the police emblem, her stomach turned. Behind her the baby stirred in the crib, giving off a little groan and a small sigh that faded into sleep.
Isodora knew the tall police chief from before the baby was born, when she worked in the big house. Whether it was the ambassador from Brazil or the singer Toby Keith, whenever Elijandro's boss had important guests, Chief Gage would be there with his bolo tie and icy blue eyes, drinking whiskey with just a single cube of ice. Isodora remembered the senator's wife, too, a skinny blonde who laughed like a hyena. The police chief fixed the hat on his head and knit his thick brows so they showed over the rims of his mirrored sunglasses. He scuffed the heels of his cowboy boots in the grit, leaving a small trail that Elijandro would call a man track.
"I got some bad news for you, missy," the police chief said.
Isodora tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She shook her head and turned her face as if bracing for a slap.
"There's been an accident," he said. "I'm sorry, but Ellie's dead."
"No," she heard herself say, "I have breakfast for him. I know he's late."
The porch creaked under her feet and somewhere out back a calf bawled for its mother. A hiccup escaped her and she pressed her fingertips to her lips, her face flushing with embarrassment, and still she shook her head.
"I'm sorry," the police chief said.
"I'll put the eggs on," she said, opening the screen door and slipping away from him.
She moved through the tiny space, removing the box of eggs from the fridge and cracking them into the pan and lighting the stove, still hiccupping.
"Missy," the police chief said, his voice following her through the screen door, "I need you to come with me. There's some papers you need to sign."
Isodora kept right on cooking. She ignored the police chief, and after a time she stopped hearing his words over the crackling eggs. She didn't hear him enter, and when he touched her shoulder, she shrieked and cringed.
"You got to at least sign this," he said, looking at his watch. "Sign it, and I'll leave you be for now, but when I come back later, you and the baby will have to come."
She put the spatula in her left hand and signed the paper with her trembling right hand, anything to have him go. He looked at the paper and nodded and she turned back to her work.
When the sound of his car disappeared over the hill, she put out her breakfast the way she knew Elijandro liked it and sat down to wait, staring blankly out the window, hiccupping all the while and listening for the sound of his voice, which she knew she'd hear at any moment.
Isodora had no idea how much time passed before the next knock came at the door. The room had grown hot, not summertime hot, but warm enough for the sweat to bead on her upper lip. The baby had been up crying in her crib, then playing quietly before crying again and falling back to sleep. Isodora knew this because the knock at the door woke up the baby and set her to crying again.
From where she sat at the table, Isodora could see that it wasn't Elijandro and it wasn't Gage, either. The man and woman wearing green jackets in the heat didn't knock twice. They came in, the woman bending over the baby's crib and the man approaching her and talking gently.
Like the boogeyman from an adult fairy tale, he wore a jacket bearing the letters ICE. The Icemen, that's who they were, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who came in the middle of the night and stole husbands from their wives, tore babies from the arms of their mothers. A scream bubbled up out of her throat, breaking her trance. She jumped up and pounced at the woman who had her baby. The man grabbed her arms, restraining her and deftly snapping metal cuffs on her wrists.
The woman laid Isodora's baby on the changing table, wincing at the smell as she undid the dirty diaper. The man kept his voice low, but it didn't keep him from escorting her out through the front door against her violent thrashing. The baby's screams pierced even her own and Isodora boiled with rage and indignation, her vision blurred with steamy tears.
A white county van waited outside next to the agents' car. The Range Rover belonging to the senator's wife was there, too, and she got out and approached Isodora.
"It's better this way," the senator's wife said, with a face twisted in pain. "Please, believe me."
Isodora thrashed and struggled and spit at the wife's face.
Through her rage, Isodora was aware that two women with short hair climbed out of the van and spoke to the Iceman about the baby. The two took Paquita from the woman agent and put her into the van, snapping her into a car seat in the back and driving off while Isodora howled from the cage in the back of the ICE agents' car. As the van disappeared over the hilltop, Isodora felt her throat constrict and she choked and gagged and banged her head against the glass until everything went black.
CHAPTER 4
CASEY SAT DOWN BEHIND HER DESK AND REMOVED A FILE from her briefcase. Jose dug into a beaten leather valise, pulling out several files of his own, then holding up one like a card for her to see and placing it on the desk before he sat down.
"Statements," he said.
"Statements?"
"Telling what kind of guy our dead coyote really was. And pictures."
"Of?"
"Rosalita wasn't the first woman this asshole tried to leave in the middle of nowhere," he said.
Casey opened the file, looked at the pictures, and quickly closed it.
"Can we connect him to this?" she asked.
"Had an old friend run some DNA," Jose said. "He was a randy little son of a bitch."
"That's not even funny," she said.
"I didn't mean it to be," he said, nodding toward the file. "There's six. Just the ones they found. I got persuasive with one of his mules. Word is that he'd peel off one lucky girl for every trip he made."
"Which is?"
Jose shrugged. "Twenty, thirty a year. He's been in business five. He picked them up at the bus stop in Nuevo Laredo and took them downriver where he kept a shitty boat, shuttled them over, and took them on a fifty-mile hike through the hills."
Casey flipped open the file again and stared for a moment, the blackened skin clinging to the bones like mold. She gritted her teeth. "Too bad he died so quick."
"A.357 hollow point tends to end things pretty abruptly," he said. "But even if it was quick, you gotta admit getting your balls shot off is no way to go. Can you get the DA to drop the charges against Rosalita with this?"
"If she were a sorority girl from Tech?" Casey said, closing the file for a second time and shoving it away from her. "No problem."
"I didn't see her wearing no pin when I spoke to her."
"Exactly," Casey said, shaking her head. "He'll offer us a manslaughter plea."
Jose whistled low. "Five to seven."
"Instead of the steak dinner we owe her for cleaning up that garbage. If I have to, I'll go to trial."
"Like in the movie?" he asked.
Casey blushed. In her past life she'd represented a law professor who turned out to be a homicidal maniac. The whole thing made national news. She got him off at trial, then helped to nail him when she learned the truth of his guilt. Hollywood got ahold of it, and the story ended up as a Lifetime Movie of the Week with Susan Lucci playing Casey.
"About the only thing real in that thing was me being a damn good trial lawyer," she said, unable to meet his big brown eyes.
"Hey, I like how you take all this stuff personally."
Casey studied his face, looking for the joke.
"I mean it," he said. "You live this stuff."
"I wish you could've seen our old offices," Casey said, looking around, her eyes resting briefly on the plywood slab and the diesel-smudged window above.
"In that glass tower on Commerce?" he said, shaking his head. "I met you there, remember?"
"You never saw the office, though," Casey said.
She'd met Jose getting off the elevator. Instead of getting in, he followed her into the lobby, asking if he could buy her coffee. When she asked him his business there, he told her he was an investigator for one of the attorneys on the tenth floor. She replied that she'd have coffee if he'd track down a witness for her in a case where a young woman was being prosecuted for possession of drugs, just for being in the backseat of a car driven by her older brother. When Jose called with the witness's new number and address by the end of the day, he asked to take her to dinner instead. She agreed, but only if he'd make it a working dinner.
"That place was for divorce lawyers and ambulance chasers," Jose said.
"I'm just thinking about the dignity of these people," Casey said, angling her head toward the door.
"These people-my people, I guess-don't need leather and brass for dignity," Jose said. "Give them a job and a paycheck and they'll hold their heads high."
"I didn't mean it that way," she said. "The place was nice, that's all."
"And hard to get to," Jose said. "Bet they never stacked up outside the door on Commerce Street. I'm sorry about the grease and gasoline smell, but this is the right place for your work. I'd have to charge if you were still in that glass tower."
"And we'd get about half as much done without you," she said. "So, it's all good."
"One thing is not so good," he said, reaching into his briefcase, leaning forward, and laying a second file down on the desk. "That guy you got the restraining order against?"
"For Soledad Mondo?"
"Yeah, her husband, that guy, Domingo Mondo," Jose said. "Just keep your eye out."
"For what?"
"I'm sure it's fine," Jose said, "but I leaned on him a little and there was something about him. I don't know. He didn't make a threat or anything like that, but he had a look. I'm sure it's just me being overcautious."
"Like he's going to come after me?"
"No. Just keep your eyes open. If you see him, or notice something funny, you call me. Don't worry about it. Just be smart. You still got that little.38 I gave you?"
Casey patted the desk drawer beside her knee.
Jose grinned and slapped his knees, rising as he said, "Speaking of smart, I got a little redheaded wife who's taking personal training to a whole new level, but they keep changing where they go so I can't ever get set up on them."
"Redhead?"
"Not red like yours," Jose said, scooping up his files and stuffing them into the valise. "The orange kind."
Casey touched her own hair and felt her cheeks warm.
"Thank you for the photos," she said.
"You'll make it up to me one day," he said, winking and drawing the bolt and letting himself out the back.
Casey went to the door to watch him go. As he climbed up into his F-350, she felt a reply bubbling up from the knot in her stomach. She even opened her mouth to speak and he paused with his hand on the truck door, but the words tangled themselves into a snag and hung up in her throat.
So she waved goodbye.
The throng pressed in on her. A tide of human misery and injustice seeking asylum. Casey wished she were God and could make all their problems disappear. Women bound to men like slaves so they could get green cards. Women working for poverty wages with infants who needed lifesaving operations. Women hiding from abusive husbands, desperate for the protection of a law whose effectiveness worked on a sliding scale dependent on wealth. Women robbed of their virginity, their dignity, and their savings by a race of criminal opportunists without conscience or fear of judicial retribution.
At eleven-fifty she ushered a pregnant teenage girl-hoping for child support from the married executive of a large software company-out the door with promises of help. She thanked Tina and told her to take lunch. As Tina passed through, Casey saw Stacy marching toward her with a file. Before she could get her office door closed, Stacy jammed her foot between the door and the frame and barged in, closing it behind her.
"Wait," Stacy said. "One more."
"Give it to Sharon."
"She says she'll only see you."
"I've got a lunch and I've got the DA," Casey said, looking at her watch.
"Just one more."
"There's always one more," Casey said, rounding her desk and stuffing some files into her briefcase.
"Maria Delgado," Stacy said, slapping a hand on the desk. "You helped her older sister get away from some creep. She has another sister, younger. Her husband's dead. She's got a two-year-old baby, and they've got her in custody and the baby in some foster home."
"Drug dealer?" Casey asked, glancing up.
Stacy shook her head. "A hunting accident."
"It's really important?" Casey asked, snapping the case shut.
"Absolutely."
"Then tell her to wait," Casey said, slinging the briefcase over her shoulder and making for the back door. "Paige Ludden and her friends provide about half our operating budget and I'm already going to be late for lunch, and then I've got a meeting with the DA about Rosalita Suarez, who's looking at manslaughter one.
"If it's really that important, then she'll be here when I get back. You can tell her that."
"Go if you have to," Stacy said, hands on her hips, wagging her head toward the waiting room. "But if you could see this woman's face? You wouldn't be worrying about lunch."
CHAPTER 5
WE GOT AN OPEN CONTAINER LAW IN THESE PARTS. "
Teuch squinted through the tail of cigarette smoke leaching from his nostrils. Frowning, he told the old white man behind the counter to kiss h
is ass, then opened the forty-ounce bottle of King Cobra, popping the twist top with his teeth and taking a long hard pull. He wiped the foam from his mouth on a bare, tattooed arm and belched. The old whitey had already given him the address he needed so there was no longer any reason to pretend to be polite.
He scooped up his groceries and stepped outside, the cuffs of his baggy jeans dragging in the grit, the noon sun smacking him in the face, and the heat waffling up from the parking lot. He hawked up something from the long drive and spat, expecting it to sizzle like hot grease on the blacktop, disappointed when it didn't. The midnight-blue Chevy pickup rode low with twenty-inch Neeper Titans buried in the wheel wells. He dumped his bag on the passenger floor, then slid in and eased back into the reclined seat, pulling out onto Highway 45 and into the little four-corner town of Wilmer. On the seat next to him, a MAC-10 rested under an army blanket. He reached in to fondle it, then took a bottle from the bag on the floor and drank as he drove.
He turned left and after half a block the dusty trees opened up onto a small stone church built on a gravel lot. A wooden cross marked the high point on the arch above the doors and two small stone belfries stood out front like midgets hawking tickets at the big top entrance. The priest looked up from his broom on the flagstone stoop and squinted at Teuch.
Teuch stopped and leaned across the seat.
"Father Diego," he said.
The priest nodded, leaned the broom against the stone wall, and crossed the gravel yard in his heavy brown robe until he stood at eye level with Teuch.
"Teuch?" the priest said, his eyes small but languid beneath the blunt border of his dark bangs.
"You're good with names, Father," Teuch said, speaking English for the priest.
"Paquita's godfather," the priest said, speaking in Spanish, his eyes going sad. "How could I forget? We were able to repair the nave window with your donation. I'm sorry about your brother."