Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  Amid the distraction, I swung my hands back to the lock, popped it open, shouldered the door wide, and jumped out into a tornado. The powerful wind shoved me back. I thought it would tear the clothes off my body. Debris slapped my face like bee stings.

  I knew the general location of the Bronco. The trick was running as fast as I could in the dark with my hands behind my back. I fell twice, rolled to my knees, and got up again. After the second time, I wiggled my hands free and kept running, faster now, knees high, arms pumping.

  If any of Machete’s men followed, they wouldn’t stay with it long. The chopper had made me much less important. With no place to land, the pilot would radio dispatch to send ground agents to check out why three trucks were on a smuggling trail at night with their headlights off, and then fly off to resume its original mission down at the border.

  Machete’s priority would be getting off that mountain before the agents got there.

  I found the Bronco. Charlie was sitting in the passenger seat with a fistful of popcorn and tossing the pieces one at a time into his wide-open mouth. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “What’s with all the popcorn back there? I’m starved.”

  I jumped into the passenger seat and started the engine. Charlie chuckled at the sight of me. My clothes were disheveled and filthy, and my hair sweaty and clogged with twigs, and sand stuck to my face. He tugged on the loose rope hanging from my wrist.

  “What’s going on, Mayor? Did you meet a girl?” He laughed.

  “I can’t believe you’re still drunk.”

  “I’m in the demilitarized zone. Dreadful state. What say we stop on the way back to get a sixer of tall boys?”

  He showed no curiosity about where he was or how he got there, and I didn’t explain. I drove in the opposite direction from the trucks and the chopper, and after a half mile or so pulled behind a cluster of trees to look back. Nobody rode my back trail and the chopper was speeding south.

  Driving east, away from Paradise and the smuggler road, I inched the Bronco through open desert back to Ajo Way.

  Charlie yapped about his approaching sobriety until I stopped to let him buy his beer. That kept him quiet until we pulled into Double Wide, and he saw his trailer sitting at a sharp angle, a casualty of the storm winds.

  The yapping started again. I promised to help fix it in the morning and he calmed down enough to go to bed.

  For me, sleep was impossible. I couldn’t shake the feeling of that machete against my neck. On top of that, a coyote had curled up on the front seat of the Bronco and was howling at the stars. He’d become a nighttime regular. I named him Jack, and chasing him off did no good because he came right back. When Jack had to sing, he had to sing.

  But my insomnia had a good side. It got me reading my crime novels again, the ones I always carried on road trips. I kept a row of them on the shelf over my bed.

  Given how the night had gone, only a Jim Thompson would do. I pulled out a slim volume, filled with his customary double crosses and casual bloodletting, and read along to Jack’s high, chasing cries.

  NINETEEN

  Next morning, I was in middoze with the book open on my chest when Benny Diaz banged on my door. It was still dark outside, not quite sunrise. He couldn’t make it a polite Jehovah’s Witness knock. No, he was leading a raid on a major terror cell.

  After jerking the door open, I spread my hands as if to say, “What the hell?”

  Even at that ridiculous hour, every strand of his hair was in place and perfectly trimmed, like the lawn of a funeral home. The connection to my father had gotten us off to a good start, but he was giving me reasons not to like him.

  “Did I get you up?” he said.

  There was another one.

  He wore hiking shorts, fresh-out-of-the-box Timberlands, and a short-sleeved tan bush shirt with at least forty pockets to hold the serious gear he’d need to survive a shift on the mountain. He held a safari hat with a brim so wide that, when properly set on the normal-sized human coconut, it would spread into two counties.

  He glanced at the mountain as if it were hell itself. “We’re going to canvass the trail from end to end. See if the killer discarded anything.”

  “Perfect day for a hike. Before long it’ll be a hundred and ten degrees up there.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Out here we call that balmy.”

  Like it or not, I figured I was up for the day and threw the door open to let Chico hobble-hop down the steps. Bundle arrived to give Diaz his semiferocious greeting. Chico and Bundle were brothers, and even before Chico’s shooting, they were completely different.

  Bundle was up for anything. He’d chase anything and fight anything, and he gave the narcos all they could handle. I named him after his habit of finding their marijuana loads in the desert and tearing off the burlap covers. After exposing them, he’d lift his leg and give it a good hosing. Bundle’s indignation was a beautiful thing.

  I invited Diaz inside and pushed the button on a pot of Maxwell House. He sat at my kitchen table, folded his hands on top of it, boxed his thumbs, and looked around uncomfortably. “This is where you, ah, live? I mean, all the time?”

  “You’re inside a classic Airstream, a 1977 Ambassador model. People kill to find one of these. The seller basically let me tow it away, if you can believe that.”

  “I think I can.”

  “I’ve spent a fortune fixing it up.”

  As I fiddled with the coffee mugs on the counter, I gave Diaz a verbal tour.

  Past the kitchen was a couch that folded out into my bed. Opposite the couch was a section of counter space that served as an office. I kept my laptop there. At the back of this room was an accordion door that closed off the bathroom and shower.

  The interior measured twenty-eight feet from hitch to rear end, and when people asked if there was enough storage space, I told them I made out just fine. The only thing it couldn’t handle was all my books. I stored most of them in boxes in one of the bedrooms in Opal’s trailer. The ones I kept on the shelf over my bed were the classics I read over and over.

  I said, “There’s a whole cult of people who swear by Airstreams and write about them in articles and online. They call it ‘rounded living.’ No angles.”

  “It’s like being in an airplane fuselage,” Diaz said.

  “I stand six foot two, and the biggest thing for me was learning when to duck.”

  “That’s a problem I don’t have.”

  I gave Diaz his coffee in a Campbell’s Soup mug and sat opposite him. The steaming coffee made it feel more like morning, but it was still dark outside. He said he’d already talked with Charlie and Cash and crossed them off his suspect list.

  “I saw your televised plea for information about Rolando Molina. Why didn’t you mention that when we talked?”

  “Because there’s no connection to the body on the mountain,” I said, even though I knew there was.

  “I’m a cop. We don’t close cases believing in coincidences.”

  I talked for a minute about Rolando helping Fausto in Monterrey. I told him of the Tucson Thunder connection and suggested he call Danny Wilson to confirm. I was in a funny position. I wanted Rolando found but couldn’t mention the evidence stashed in my freezer.

  Part of me wanted to warn Diaz about Machete. But that would raise questions I didn’t want to answer, and he was going up there with plenty of backup.

  Diaz sipped from his mug and made a face. “This is truly awful coffee.”

  “How about a refill?”

  Two hours of sack time had made me cranky. Diaz’s cologne didn’t help. When he left, the Airstream smelled like a Holiday Inn bathroom after the maid finishes.

  TWENTY

  I stood at my open door and watched him drive off. Morning was breaking. A slash of gray light traced the ragged line of the Tucson Mountains to the east. Their west-facing slopes were still black, but that would change as the sun topped the peaks and slanted down, turning th
e saguaros to candles as it chased the darkness across the desert.

  I whistled for Chico and got no response. I left the front door open to hear the squawk of the cactus wrens and went to the kitchen to cook breakfast. I tossed a few eggs around and made some noise with a frying pan.

  The red sun curved into view over the mountains, and when the chorizo started to sizzle in the pan, it became a land rush at my door.

  Chorizo does that. Nobody can resist the smell of chorizo.

  Charlie came in, then Cash, and I welcomed them both.

  Sure, come on in and sit at my public table. What did I care? I never ate breakfast alone, and sometimes space in my trailer got tight, especially when Opal was around. Is that anybody’s definition of trouble?

  I prefer English muffins to toast, and in either case you can’t push down on the toaster until the last minute. Too early and the muffin stiffens up and tastes like a shingle.

  No, I had no problems. I owned a little Shangri-La in the middle of nowhere. After I bought Double Wide and before my tenants wandered in, I had the world to myself. It took thirty minutes of driving to see another living thing that didn’t crawl, slither, bark, howl, or hoot. At least not sober.

  Double Wide was close to exactly nothing, which was a long way from where I used to be. At the top of the world, famous, tossing money around like it was lint from my pocket.

  I’ve been hugged, feted, and toasted by strangers. I’ve walked into bars and restaurants where I couldn’t buy a drink if I begged on my knees. Walked into hospitals to smile in front of sick kids and been treated like I came in on water.

  The important part of chorizo, after heating the oil in the skillet, is watching for it to brown. The color has to be just right. You know you’ve got it when the shade matches a new catcher’s mitt. I spooned the cut-up chorizo onto a plate and covered it with a paper towel.

  Then, snap of the fingers, my career was over, and I hit the road. Driving nowhere and in a hurry to get there, alone, not hearing jeers I didn’t want to hear, not worrying about the next exit, the next, or the one after that.

  Just drive, baby.

  The farther I went, the better I felt. With every state line crossed, the failure fell off my back, and in the rearview I watched the wind blow it on down the highway. If you could run forever, well, there’s your answer.

  But at some point, you have to stop and it catches up to you again—the idea that you could’ve done more, should’ve done more, and there’s no way to go back and get it right. The only thing you’ve ever done in your life, the thing that defined you and got you up in the morning, is over forever.

  Now I lived in a place where having a well-functioning vehicle made me a prince among men.

  I scooped the scrambled eggs out of the pan, separating the portions onto three plates. The muffins popped up in the toaster. Perfect timing.

  Forget it, Stark. You’ve got no problems. Dust yourself off and deal with right now, the collection of human strays gathered in your fashionably remodeled trailer.

  They’re trying to stay out of the line of fire, too. Not bad people, just lost, forgotten, beaten down, unloved, unwashed, and, okay, maybe a little crooked. If copper wiring goes missing from the construction site, hey, everybody has to stay alive, right?

  Perspective is everything. My tenants looked at me and thought I had it all, every ounce of hope and grace in the world. Helping them made me think they were right, and maybe that explained everything. Maybe it was just that simple.

  The pressing crisis that morning was jacking up Charlie’s trailer so he wouldn’t have to live uneven.

  After breakfast, I went outside to smoke a cigar and called Roxanne Santa Cruz. She’d left two messages while I was on Paradise Mountain. I left her a message of my own, after which Cash, Charlie, and I walked to the trailer next to mine.

  The tenants, Gil and Helen Pappas, had left the week before to visit Helen’s people in Apache Junction. Gil worked as a handyman and kept every tool and spare part you could think of in his storage shed. I got out his hydraulic jack while Cash and Charlie found two sturdy wood beams, and we carried everything to Charlie’s trailer.

  The job was to jack it up enough to slip in a replacement block. The jack had a three-ton capacity, the same kind mechanics used to lift cars. I set it up underneath the fallen corner. Charlie and Cash stuck the wood beams under the trailer on both sides of the jack in case it slipped.

  I pumped the lever until the lift grabbed the bottom of the frame, the trailer rising slightly with each downward thrust. Charlie and Cash strained with the beams held over their shoulders.

  When the trailer got high enough, I locked the jack and grabbed a fresh cinder block.

  Before I could slip it into the space, I heard a fast clicking that went faster and faster until the lock gave out, and the trailer crashed down.

  The two remaining cinderblocks held. If one or both had shattered, the whole thing might’ve tumbled over. I told Charlie we couldn’t do anything more until I got the jack fixed.

  For the remainder of the morning and into early afternoon, I waited to hear from Oscar Molina. Nothing. I called Alice Menendez and left another urgent request for Oscar to call me.

  Opal was still missing, and in daylight the problem seemed less sinister. Disappearing wasn’t that much out of character for a seventeen-year-old vagabond, someone susceptible to the strongest wind.

  But with all that was going on, I thought I’d better look for her just the same, and the best place to start was the last place she’d been.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Downtown Tucson was busy late in the afternoon. I parked at a meter outside the convention center and walked to Opal’s sidewalk spot to canvass passersby. Somebody had to have seen her. Whether she walked away, hopped into someone’s car, or boarded a bus, a heavyset Indian girl carrying an easel would be a memorable sight.

  Two hours yielded nothing. But I learned that stopping people on a boiling sidewalk in July is seen as a hostile act by an obvious psychopath.

  A cop arrived to check me out. He wasn’t interested until I told him my name, and then he wanted to help. We were standing in the shadow of TPD headquarters, and he called over there to set me up with a missing-persons detective.

  “Whip Stark is coming to see you,” the cop said. “Yeah, that Whip Stark.”

  That landed me in a cramped office with a balding officer named Jensen. He pounded the keyboard with two bent fingers. He’d hit a few keys, let five seconds pass as he looked over his glasses at the screen, hit a few more, and look again. After several minutes of that, he sat back to catch his breath.

  In a tired drawl, Jensen said, “I’m seeing an Opal Sanchez in the system. We’ve got two warrants out for shoplifting on the reservation, out at Sells. Is this your friend?”

  I dressed up my shocked face. “There must be some mistake. Golly.” Now I knew why Opal didn’t want me to call the police.

  Jensen said, “Looks like multiple DOBs and aliases. Ginger Padilla. Gail Suarez.”

  To wiggle out of it, I told Jensen I might know where Opal was after all, and as I was talking too much, Roxanne Santa Cruz called. I held the phone up to Jensen, and he nodded okay.

  “Been trying to reach you,” she said. “I’ve got news.”

  “I turned my phone off last night.”

  “You didn’t tell me they found a corpse out your way.”

  “Somehow you found out anyway.”

  “When it comes to mayhem, I know all. You have time for a cocktail?”

  “A glass of milk maybe.”

  “We must have a bad connection. Did you say milk?”

  We met at the Blue Note. The bar is immediately north of downtown in a part of town built for late-night monkey business. Fourth Avenue is lined with bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors, and other establishments where college kids do things their parents would hate.

  The Note has a horseshoe-shaped bar, a few pool tables and a shaded patio out b
ack. A couple of miserable downtown lawyers huddled at tables with their medicated secretaries.

  Even though I don’t drink much, I like bars and don’t ask for a whole lot. The darker the better and there can never be somebody on the next stool singing along with Patsy Cline. If I’ve got those two things, I’m good.

  Roxy wore tight jeans ripped above the knees and a loose-fitting white pullover blouse with three of the five buttons undone, creating a wide and interesting V. She had on ankle boots that were high-heeled and black with silver ankle buckles.

  She flattened a twenty on the bar. “The usual for me, Tommy, and whatever for my famous friend here.”

  Tommy stared at me, the wheels turning as he tried to figure out who I was. He had tortoiseshell glasses and a pug nose over a salt-and-pepper mustache. After a few moments, he gave up and went to work on the drinks.

  Roxy whispered, “He has no idea who you are. Must be a foreigner.”

  Tommy brought vodka neat for Roxy and soda water for me. They didn’t have milk.

  “Tommy, this is Whip Stark, the baseball player.”

  He stared again, wide eyed. He thrust his hand over the bar for me to shake. “Sure, sure. I knew I recognized you from somewhere.”

  Tommy made small talk until he could comfortably leave.

  Roxy said, “You realize he’s working the tip, right? He’s never heard of Whip Stark.”

  “Once upon a time, everybody knew.” I raised my glass. “To once upon a time.”

  “Look at you, still digging the fame.”

  “Like a dog digs the dogcatcher.”

  “I hate to be cruel, but soon it’ll only be your mom and your dog who remember anything about you, and dogs can’t clap. But it’s something, right? Cheers to fame.” She raised her shot glass, clicked it against my glass, and said, “Tell me, what’s with that cocaine business in Mexico?”

  “I take it you Googled me.”