Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  The Airstream had been trashed, chairs tipped over, drawers pulled out, cabinets emptied. The contents of the refrigerator and freezer had been tossed around the kitchen. I inspected the Bronco. The glove compartment was empty, the contents scattered, and blood dripped from the door handle on the shotgun side.

  “Looks like you got one of them,” I said.

  Cash smiled through picket-fence teeth.

  I didn’t call the cops. With Rolando’s hand in the freezer, I preferred not to have deputies poking around. It didn’t take much to figure out what had happened. The men from Melody’s house followed me. I checked the rearview all the way home. Either they were really good at running a tail, or I was in over my head.

  My money was on the latter.

  They were looking for something they thought I’d taken from the professor. It had to be the contents of his safe, his so-called holy grail.

  I got busy cleaning up the Airstream, starting with my refrigerator and freezer. As I worked, I heard a loud truck coming up the entrance road, the engine clicking and knocking the way big diesels do.

  The sound stopped, and the door slammed shut as someone stepped out. I heard Cash shouting: “Hold still, and identify yourself!”

  I threw open my front door and saw Cash holding a rifle against a man’s back. “This fellow got inside the wire, Mayor. Easy does it, partner.”

  The man looked up at me. Even in the dark from my top step, I could tell who it was.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” said Oscar Molina. “I came to find my boy.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Oscar had a broad, friendly face, though it burned with worry over Rolando’s disappearance. His hair was wild, growing in every direction, and it bore the outline of the frayed slouch hat he held against his stomach. He had a working man’s hands, the fingers filthy and thick as railroad spikes. He stood firm on bowed legs, powerful arms bookending his shoulders.

  His eyebrows matched his hair. They belonged on the kitchen floor, scurrying into a corner when the light comes on.

  We shook hands. He had a mighty grip. After getting my hand back and checking to make sure he hadn’t absconded with a finger, I invited him inside.

  “Looks like you had trouble,” Oscar said.

  “It’s over now,” I said, feeling awkward. I was a man with a secret about to be revealed. “Would you like a cold beer? I haven’t seen you since Las Vegas.”

  “Rolando doubled twice. Threw out three runners.”

  “You remember.”

  “Can’t forget. Won’t ever forget.” His lips shook as the words fell out.

  The kitchen felt barren and cold but not empty. It held the strong presence of the man who introduced me to Oscar and Natty Molina years before when we were young ballplayers with nothing much on our minds and nothing to lose. In the mystery of his death, Rolando was bringing us together again.

  “Sit down, Oscar. Please, please, sit down.”

  “I don’t want to sit down.” Then, regretting his ill temper: “Thank you, Whip. I just need to find Rolando.”

  The time had come to tell the Molina family what I knew. I got Oscar a beer and set it on the table. Men together always turn to beer, for reasons no one understands.

  I stuffed the last of the food into the refrigerator and freezer as Oscar paced, two feet one way and two back the other. Somehow, he didn’t knock holes in the walls with his shoulders.

  He said, “Fausto says Rolando might’ve come up here to see Wilson at the Tucson Thunder.”

  “I talked to Wilson. He never saw him.”

  “Where is he, then? Somebody has to know something.”

  I didn’t answer. Oscar sensed something in my manner, his eyes coming into sharp focus. “You know something, Whip.” When I didn’t respond right away, he pressed. “Where’s my boy, Whip? Tell me now.”

  “He’s gone, Oscar. Rolando’s dead.”

  “Dead,” he repeated. But the word didn’t come from his mouth. It came from some place a million miles away. “What do you mean? Where’s he at?”

  I told him that someone cut off his hand, and I found it in a shoe box on my front steps.

  Oscar stared, his mouth open slightly in disbelief. “Do you still have it? His…hand?”

  We went out to the freezer. I pulled off the tarp and opened the lid, and Oscar stared down at the plastic bag. He picked it up with two hands and pressed his fingers against the plastic to spread it out and see better.

  I held my flashlight against the bag. The letters spelling M-A-R-Y stood out clearly on the backs of the fingers. The silence lingered. It was torture.

  I blurted, “I had some extra freezer bags in the house.”

  Good going, Stark. That was just the thing to say when you’re showing a man part of his son’s body in your freezer. I don’t think my foolish words reached him. Oscar was too far gone. He made a sound in his throat.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” I said. “I didn’t want to hand him over to the cops and I didn’t want to bury him until I found the body.”

  “I have to tell his mother.” Oscar’s breath exited his mouth in short gusts that chopped the words into small, agonized sounds. “His mother will want me to bring him home. All of him.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “But I promise you I’ll find him.”

  Back in the Airstream, I told Oscar about the gold camp on Paradise Mountain, about the heroin smuggling, about Carlos Alvarez leaving the hand on my stoop, and about the violent deaths of Alvarez and Rosa Lopez.

  The names meant nothing to him. I asked if Rolando ever said anything about wanting to mine for gold.

  “I asked him to work at my mine, but all he cared about was baseball.”

  “Something brought him here,” I said. “Not just to Arizona but to Paradise Mountain. There’s no way he was involved in heroin smuggling.”

  Oscar lowered his head as if in shame. “I wish I could say that, Whip, but Rolando was snorting that cocaine again, and it changed him. He was different from the boy you knew. Out of his mind. He was far gone on that cocaine! That poison!”

  For a long time, he stared at nothing, his eyes hollow and desperate. Without word or warning, he swung his hand violently, scooping the glass off the table and shattering it against the wall.

  He leaped to his feet, tipping over his chair. “If my boy is on Paradise Mountain, that’s where I’m going!”

  Oscar got as far as the open door, saw the darkness, and stopped. He turned back, his face a mask of confusion and embarrassment. In his grief, he’d forgotten that night follows day.

  “I’ll go in the morning,” he said. “It’ll be light in the morning.”

  “You were going to call Natty.”

  “Natty! My poor Natty!” Oscar set his chair upright and pulled out his phone. He cupped his forehead with his free hand and spoke in a low voice. I heard Natty wailing on her end, and when I couldn’t listen anymore, I headed for the door.

  The last thing I heard before stepping outside was Oscar saying, “Tell the children…Natty, I know…no, no, Natty, listen to me. It’s true, he’s gone…God will show us all his mercy…Natty, listen to me. I’m telling you, he’s gone.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  By morning, Oscar had changed his mind about looking for Rolando on Paradise Mountain. He’d spoken to Natty again and decided to go home right away. She didn’t believe Rolando was dead, saying her heart would’ve told her if her boy was gone.

  Oscar never mentioned the hand. He couldn’t break that news by phone and didn’t want to bring the grisly evidence back to Obregon without the body. The hand would stay with me until I located the corpse, which I promised again to do.

  There’s no manual for how to do these things, and that’s what Oscar decided.

  After he drove off, I called a woman whose name had turned up in my research on Professor Melody. Annie Patterson, his former assistant. I left her a message to call me and walked down to Cash’s pl
ace to talk to him about going up to Paradise Mountain to look for Rolando’s body.

  I told him about Rolando’s hand and my encounter with Machete. “Could use an extra set of eyes and a long rifle.”

  “You’re in luck, Mayor. I have both.”

  I went back to the Airstream and strapped on my hiking boots. I keep my Glock in a clip-on belt holster. It holds the weapon snug without a top strap to undo if you need to pull it out and shoot. I put an extra fifteen-round clip in my pocket.

  I filled a cooler with ice and water bottles and carried it out to the Bronco. Bundle knew we were going into the desert and began barking and jumping around crazily. His preparation consisted of peeing on my tire. With that done, he was ready to go.

  Before leaving, I called Roxy and left a message inviting her out to Double Wide. I told her I had news and wanted to tell her in person.

  Just before 5:30 a.m., the morning still half-dark, half-light, we started out. Cash rode shotgun, his AR-15 standing buttstock down against his leg. Bundle was in back.

  I drove on the same bouncing trail that Opal and I had followed the night we found Alvarez. It took work to wrestle the steering wheel around rocks and rain gouges, the Bronco heaving this way and that on its shocks. I couldn’t push it past fifteen miles per hour without breaking a rib.

  My only plan was to see what there was to see and follow whatever clues came of it. Something might lead to Rolando.

  Paradise sat atop the mountain as it had for 130 years. Cash and I walked through the middle of town the way gunfighters do in movies, watching for any sign of Machete. Cash wore a red bandana on his head and held the rifle high across his chest. His eyes stayed on the move, sweeping across the long morning shadows, seeing everything.

  If Rolando’s body had been left there, my nose would tell me. My nose said nothing.

  We walked behind the saloon to the main drift, the one Machete’s men had been clearing out.

  Two turkey vultures watched from their perch atop the roof, their black forms clear against the blue sky. As we neared, they squalled in annoyance, lifted off the roof, and seemed to suspend for a moment, wings spread in an indignant pose, conquering the air, and then together they dipped their wings and flew away.

  Sturdy oak beams framed the drift opening. Bundle ran ahead into the cool dark. I had a flashlight and followed the beam. Bundle sparked on something and ran out with his tail whirling to show me what he’d found.

  He had the leaf of an agave plant clamped in his jaws. It was four feet long and green, with sharp teeth running along its edges and a razor tip.

  The drift might’ve been eighty feet long. A tangle of beams and rocks blocked passage beyond that. The remainder of the way, we found nothing, no additional items unusual to a mine drift. The smugglers had cleared out everything except that one leaf.

  We departed the drift into painful sunlight and hiked to two tailings piles west of town. They were perfectly symmetrical as they should be. Nothing disturbed.

  Far to the west, against the white horizon, stood a low hill that offered the best chance to see any distance. Long before noon and already the sun was a sword in the sky. We hiked through scrub oak and cholla cactus to the hill and climbed it, acquiring thorns and burrs in or socks as we went.

  Using eight-power binoculars, I scanned the landscape with no idea what I was looking for. Maybe scavengers, maybe a dark something lying out in the sun. There was nothing out there but shimmering ground that looked wrung out and exhausted and, higher on the slopes, juniper trees climbing to razorback ridges and rock bluffs.

  I mopped my neck with a hanky and tried to catch my breath. Bundle sat panting at my feet, his tongue hanging sideways out of his mouth.

  “Hot enough for you, boy?” I said. Bundle looked at me like he might attack. Asking that question in Arizona in July should be a felony. I poured cold canteen water into my palm and let him lap it up.

  Roxy called. George Jones singing to me in the mountains. Cash sang along to the first few bars, never taking his eyes off the landscape.

  Roxy said she was willing to come out to Double Wide tonight, but only if I told her everything. I agreed. Cash and I followed Bundle’s lead and hiked back to the silent town of Paradise. Whatever secrets it held, it held them close.

  THIRTY-THREE

  By late that afternoon, a storm was brewing, and Charlie wanted to right his trailer before it hit. Cash had worked to fix the release lever on the jack and thought it was ready for another go. But the lock gave way entirely and smashed the second cinderblock, leaving Charlie’s trailer at an even more severe tilt, only one block holding the whole thing up.

  “We have to do something, Mayor,” Charlie said. “I can’t live at an angle!” When he got worked up, his voice rose higher and higher until it came out of a squeeze toy.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and take the open trailer.”

  “It doesn’t have a door, and there’s a big ol’ hole in the kitchen floor. Ain’t that where Bundle sleeps, for gosh sake?”

  He kept grousing, and I knew he wouldn’t stop. I told him he could sleep on my kitchen foldout until we got his trailer set up, and in return, he had to keep an eye on the place for me.

  “Okay, you got yourself a deal,” he said.

  “Just a couple of nights until we fix this,” I said.

  Charlie’s face got serious. “I won’t be a pest. You know me. Soon as Cashy fixes the jack, why, I’ll be outta your hair.”

  We were still talking about it when Roxy drove over the mountain. I introduced her to Charlie and Cash, and she nodded at them with an expression cold enough to keep meat. They gave her shark eyes in return and said nothing, which was the safest move.

  She wore black jeans with zipper pockets, a pink T-shirt, and white sneakers with pink laces. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore oversized sunglasses. She glanced around Double Wide and said, “Well, well, Fallujah in the Sonoran Desert.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Oh, Phenom, it’s worse.”

  The storm winds had begun to blow. She studied the dust devils whirling across the saguaro flats. “Let’s go inside. I don’t like the wind fooling with my hair.”

  Without invitation, she walked into the Airstream. She stopped inside the door to adjust to the small space, and walked past the kitchen into the bedroom and office area, pausing to inspect everything before her. She paid special attention to the books on the shelf above my bed.

  “All crime titles,” she said. “I’m sure that makes your father happy.” It surprised me how astute that comment was.

  In the kitchen, she ran a palm along the countertop and checked it for dust, turned on the water in the sink and quickly shut it off, and opened and closed cabinet doors. She was like a realtor doing an inspection.

  After all that, she sat at the table, exhaled, and said, “All right, take me through what we’ve got.”

  I told her about solving the Melody riddle, the trouble at the professor’s house, and the shootout with the two bruisers who’d tailed me from Melody’s to retrieve what they believed I’d taken from the house.

  When I told her my theory that Dr. Melody had been hired by the smugglers to produce a drug made from the agave plant, she showed no disbelief or surprise. “With these cartels, if you can think of it, it won’t happen.”

  She pulled off her sunglasses and dropped them on the table. “Okay, apart from working with Mayflower to get Fausto a contract, where does Rolando fit in? And don’t hold anything back.”

  I shifted around in my chair. Talking about Rolando’s hand wasn’t easy. I grabbed Roxy’s sunglasses and saw the name etched along the temple. Tom Ford. I shoved them back across the table to her.

  “That’s our world now, isn’t it?”

  “Something wrong?” she said.

  “Some private-jet clown puts out cheesy sunglasses and scribbles his name on the temple like it means something, and people rush out to buy them.
”

  “They go for three hundred dollars a pair.”

  “How many batters did Tom Ford strike out?”

  “He owns the team, genius.”

  “Another reason not to like him.”

  The storm had arrived. The rain drummed on the roof.

  Roxy said, “I get a kick out of it when millionaires fuss at one another.”

  “Everybody thinks I’m rich.”

  “I read about your contracts.”

  “They don’t write about how fast you spend it,” I said. “Right now I’m looking for a deal on a new roof for my Bronco, if you know anybody good.”

  “You’re a working-class guy fighting to stay afloat, is that it? Like your tenants?”

  I pointed outside. “This country’s filling up with people like them and nobody notices.”

  “Everybody’s busy. I see what’s out there.”

  “No, you don’t and neither did I, until I hit bottom. And there they were, all over the place.”

  “Maybe they should try working. A wild idea, right?”

  “The jobs that pay are all gone,” I said. “If you walk around with a bunch of keys on your belt, this country’s got no use for you anymore.”

  “I feel like I’m at a boring meeting in somebody’s basement,” Roxy said and sighed to the bottom of her feet. “Do you have news for me or not?”

  I came right out with it, told her about Rolando’s severed hand and my encounter with Machete on Paradise Mountain.

  She was shocked. “You met Rolando’s killer?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “The stakes are definitely rising. You’re lucky to be alive, Prospero.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who is this cat? What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. He’s fat, wears a sidearm, and carries a machete.”

  Her eyes were bright. She gave me a level look. “It’s time for a story. A maniac in the mountains is good, but it’s only half a story. I need a visual for the other half and a hand in a freezer is a visual times ten. I could take this national.”