Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  I scooped the eggs onto a plate and did the same with the sausages. Angel watched my every move. I poured orange juice and brought it to the table with the food. He pounced before I drew my hand away. He ate like a Doberman.

  Roxy said, “Why’d Roscoe Rincon want to kill you?”

  Angel had a fork in one hand and a biscuit in the other. He used the biscuit to roll bits of egg onto the fork. “I seen things.”

  Roxy asked what things, and he didn’t respond. She nodded to get my attention and then motioned with her hands for me to hold Angel down by the shoulders. As soon as I had him in my grip, she reached down, unbuckled his belt, and slipped it off.

  The kid had no time to resist. He lunged for the belt. “That’s mine! I found it! Give it back!”

  “It’s not yours,” I said. “It’s ten sizes too big for you.”

  The angry twisting of his mouth showed a gap where several teeth had been. He lunged for it again. Roxy shoved him back into the chair.

  “You saw what happened to Carlos Alvarez, didn’t you?” I said.

  The kid held his hands a few inches apart. “That’s how close I was. Roscoe Rincon killed him real quick.” Angel made a gun of his fingers, put it behind his ear, and dropped his thumb, making a wet gunshot sound.

  I remembered something Opal had said the night we found Alvarez’s body. She saw a dark object in the passenger seat of his truck, possibly a jacket on a hook. She said if it was a person, he was small. Angel.

  I pulled out an apple pie out of the refrigerator, cut a slice, and put it on a plate. I held back, making no move to hand it to him. Angel’s attention fixed on the pie.

  He said, “I know about your friend.”

  The muscles in my shoulders turned to iron. “Do we have a deal?”

  He nodded. When I put the pie in front of him, he grabbed it with his bare hands and devoured it. Never looking up, he said, “I know where your friend’s hand’s at.”

  He had barely gotten the sentence out when I bolted out the door to the freezer.

  FORTY-SIX

  Returning to the Airstream and feeling a grinding anger, I grabbed a magazine off the counter and whipped it across the room. Loose pages flew everywhere.

  Roxy said, “The hand’s gone?”

  “We know one thing for sure. Mayflower’s connected to the heroin smuggling over this mountain.”

  “Dammit. That’s on me, Prospero. I’m sorry.”

  I leaned across the table close to Angel. My pulse punched hard against my neck. “I want it straight, kid. No bullshit now. What happened to Rolando Molina? Where is he?”

  Angel shrugged. I pounded my fist on the table so hard it sounded like a dynamite blast in the tight space. I reached across to grab him, and Roxy’s hands clamped down on my shoulders.

  She edged me aside. “You’re going to talk to me, right, Angel?”

  He stared at her with his good eye. The half-moon eye was off in some other dimension.

  “Let’s start with the hand,” she said. “What happened to it?”

  Angel looked mesmerized. She saw that and leaned closer. “Talk to me, kiddo.”

  Still staring, Angel said, “Roscoe Rincon told me to steal it, and when I brought it to him, he tried to kill me. He smiled like he was happy, and that’s when I knew he was going to kill me. He reached for the gun on his leg, and I pushed him away and ran. He fired at me and kept firing. When I couldn’t run anymore, I hid in the bushes.”

  “What’d you do with the hand?” she said.

  “I dropped it when I was running. I dropped it in a well.”

  I spoke up. “You’re going to take me to that well.”

  With his eyes firmly set on Roxy, he nodded.

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” I said, and poked the kid on the chest to get his attention. “You and me, we’re going up the mountain.”

  “You have to protect me,” he said. “Rincon wants to kill me. He’ll try to kill me again.”

  “I’ll protect you.”

  A few hours later, I whipped up more eggs and sausages and fed Angel again. I threw him in the shower, gave him my Adidas T-shirt, washed his Levis, and gave him a belt to keep them up.

  The kid sat in front of the kitchen TV for several hours. With night coming on, I sent him back to the open trailer and told him to be ready at first light. Roxy spent the remainder of the afternoon working sources to get more information on Rincon and I mulled over what I knew for certain.

  Roxy had let it slip to Mayflower that there was evidence of Rolando Molina’s murder at Double Wide. That meant the hand. And the next day someone came and stole that evidence. It seemed clear Mayflower told Roscoe Rincon of the problem and sent Angel to steal it.

  Then he shot Angel because he knew too much.

  Angel was the passenger in Carlos Alvarez’s truck when that murder happened, meaning he was probably working with Rincon to set up Alvarez, and Rincon betrayed him.

  Roscoe Rincon killed Carlos Alvarez and probably killed Rolando before that. Now he was trying to eliminate evidence of both crimes, and it just might work.

  In Rolando’s case, no hand meant no evidence. As far as anyone knew, he’d never been anywhere near Paradise Mountain or Double Wide. He simply said good-bye to Fausto in Monterrey, Mexico, and disappeared.

  No trace anywhere. At least until I located the body.

  The remainder of the night was quiet except for Roxy’s voice outside on the phone. She was calling cop sources to dredge up information on Roscoe Rincon, but nobody was calling back. After an hour she came inside and found my tequila bottle and held it up to read the label.

  “Gran Patron Platinum. This is like three hundred dollars a bottle. Did you buy this?”

  “Yeah, I used to be that guy.”

  “No wonder you’re broke.”

  I was sitting at the kitchen table. The weather report was on TV. Hot tonight, hot tomorrow, and hot the next day. The weather tart had to act like she’d just found that out, and it was big news.

  Roxy poured herself a shot and threw it down like water. She leaned against the counter and stared into the empty shot glass like it was telling her a fascinating story. “How do you read this kid, Prospero? You believe him?”

  “What choice do I have? He knows where Rolando’s hand is.”

  “So he says.”

  “I’ll do anything to avoid telling Oscar Molina I lost his son’s hand.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Rincon’s working with Angel to set you up. He steals Rolando’s hand and comes back and tells you, ‘I know where it is, follow me.’ He’ll be waiting for you up there.”

  “It’s a chance I’ve got to take.”

  A moment passed. Silence.

  “It sounds like you’re worried about me, Rox.”

  “This kid’s like nothing I’ve seen before—part animal, part human, and I don’t trust either part. He’s something awful this border created. You can’t feed him because he’ll keep coming around like a nasty cat until he feeds on you. He’s no good.”

  She pointed the shot glass at me. “At least tell me you’re not going up that mountain alone.”

  “Cashmere Miller will come with me.”

  She threw her head at the ceiling in frustration. “The Skipper and Gilligan. This gets better all the time.”

  She washed out the shot glass, dried it and put it back in the cabinet. She made me promise to call her as soon as I returned from the mountain, and then she grabbed her keys and drove off.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The morning sky looked the way the afternoon looks when a storm is coming. The clouds were dark and swirling. The rain, if it came, would make passage difficult on slick roads. But there would be no harsh sun, and that was good.

  I filled Charlie in on the plan and told him to keep an eye on Opal. Make sure she didn’t wander off. Make sure to watch for anybody coming around who didn’t belong.

  Angel sat next to me on the front seat wearing my Adidas T-shirt.
He moved well, showing scant ill effects from the wound. Cash sat in back like he was going to a picnic.

  He wore an Arizona Feeds ball cap and a sleeveless blue muscle shirt that showed off his spare torso. He was as lean as a teenage boy, sinewy, not weak. He smelled like he lived under a tree. He wore cargo shorts with dirty socks that bunched around his hiking boots and leather gloves with the fingertips cut off. He carried his AR-15.

  I trusted Cash completely and don’t know why.

  We reached the top of the mountain about 7:00 a.m. At the outskirts of Paradise, I stopped to look for anything out of the ordinary. I saw nothing, and neither did Cash. Angel urged me forward. I drove quickly between the buildings, shifting my gaze from one side of the street to the other, listening for sounds, looking for movement, alert for anything out of place.

  If gunmen were waiting, this was as good a place as any.

  When we were clear of town, Angel pointed me to the west onto a secondary road leading to a higher set of mountains about a mile away. The road rolled out under black clouds along ground that monsoon storms had dotted with patches of green.

  About halfway there we heard the first boom of thunder. No rain yet, but it was coming. The air pulsed with the smell of it.

  Cash chuckled in the backseat. “Weren’t you going to put a roof on this rig, Mayor?”

  The road split the mountains and turned south. I followed it up the rocky slope. The wind picked up. I went a short distance and stopped. I didn’t like what I was seeing. The way ahead narrowed, with tall ridges looming on both sides of the road approaching the mouth of the canyon.

  “Keep going,” Angel said. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Getting in is the easy part,” I said. “I’m worried about getting out.”

  “It’s right up here. Not far.”

  I pulled a map from the glove and unfolded it against the steering wheel. Another cannon blast of thunder. I traced our course from Paradise to our present location, and saw we were entering a place called Crooked Canyon.

  The name seemed just right. I put the map away and kept going.

  After another half mile, Angel shouted, “There it is!” and jumped out of the Bronco and ran ahead. I braked and watched him go.

  He came to a set of stone ruins on a gentle rise at the mouth of Crooked Canyon. They were the remains of an old house with the well beside it. The cement housing stood intact, as did the wood frame that held the crank for the rope and bucket.

  When Angel got to the housing, he spread his hands on the lip and leaned over to look inside. He held that position for a few seconds and ran around to the other side and dropped his head inside to look from there.

  I said to Cash, “What do you think?”

  “Remember your training.”

  “We never did anything like this in spring training.”

  “That’s the only thing our CO said worth a shit.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Until he got himself blowed up.”

  I left the engine running and stepped out. Cash did the same. The wind blew stronger, and the air was much cooler, the temperature falling with the coming storm. Angel was fifty yards ahead of us, still peering into the well. I studied the ridge tops, and so did Cash.

  The kid probably couldn’t see more than fifteen feet into that well, and the bottom had to be far deeper than that. I grabbed my flashlight. Angel swung his arm to wave us forward, and we started walking. I couldn’t have gone much farther in the Bronco anyway. The road had been made impassable by huge boulders carried by rainwater through the narrow canyon.

  Cash held the AR-15 in front of him with two hands, the barrel angled down. The first raindrops hit, followed almost immediately by another crash of thunder that obscured the gunshots, three in quick succession.

  Angel ducked for cover. Three more shots. A chunk of cement flew off the well housing. The gunshots jumped atop the wind and rode it through the canyon.

  Cash stood in a crouch, eyes raised to the ridge tops. “He’s up high, Mayor,” he said coolly. “When he fires again, I’ll have him.”

  I ran behind the nearest boulder. I had the Glock in my left hand and don’t remember drawing it. “Cash! Over here! Get over here!”

  That was it for talk. The morning exploded in gunfire. It came first from the ridge, and then from Cash returning fire. The echoes made it sound like a hundred guns going at once. The sound reverberated in my chest.

  I saw where Cash was aiming and fired four times in the same direction. With a nine millimeter, I couldn’t hit anything at that distance. But I wanted the gunman to know that I was armed too.

  Cash ran for my position behind the boulder. A man was running along the ridge, bent at the waist and moving quickly, a rifle in hand. He had dark hair and dark clothing and lumbered along, running in a heavy-footed side-to-side gait. It was Rincon.

  He dropped out of sight. Ten seconds passed. He popped up in a spot farther down the ridge and sent multiple rounds at our position, the bullets slapping against the boulder. Cash returned fire, but Rincon dropped out of sight again.

  When I looked again, Angel was out in the open now, running away from the well. I yelled for him to stay put, but he couldn’t hear me over the driving rain and the shooting.

  “He’s going to get himself killed!” I said. “Cover him!”

  Cash put the AR-15 atop the boulder and fired round after round. I emptied the first clip, shoved in a fresh one, and kept firing. Angel ran in a zigzag, Rincon’s bullets digging at the ground around him. He was trying to make it into the mouth of the canyon and cover.

  “Come on, kid!” I said. “Run! You can make it! Run!”

  I watched until the rain enveloped him. Cash stopped firing, and so did I. There was no point anymore. The ridge had disappeared behind the downpour.

  “Let’s get outta here!” I was two feet from Cash, but I had to yell to be heard as the rain pounded down.

  “You know what, I think I’m shot, Mayor,” he said, and laughed. “Look at this here!” There was blood on his fingertips. “I’m over there in I-raq and nothing and here I get myself shot up. Baby, that’s rare.”

  He sat with his back against the boulder holding his hand to his forehead.

  “We have to move,” I said. “There’s a flash flood coming.”

  In a storm like that, in a narrow canyon like that, the rushing water comes with incredible force and little warning. Cash held his hand out and looked at it. It dripped with a thin mixture of rainwater and blood. The bullet had left a gash on the side of his forehead.

  “Funny, I don’t feel nothing,” he said. “I seen plenty of guys shot. Screaming, man.”

  “Can you run?”

  “Man, all day long. This ain’t no thing.”

  “Let’s get outta here.”

  We ran to the Bronco and sped out of Crooked Canyon in reverse. I spun the wheel in a wild U-turn and glanced over at Cash. He had pulled off his muscle shirt, and rolled it up and was pressing it against the wound.

  “We might not be done yet,” I said. “Keep that peashooter handy.”

  It took fifteen minutes of hard driving through mud and running water to get to the other side of the mountain and find the trail up to the gunman’s ridge. Even in four-wheel drive, I couldn’t make it all the way to the top. I had to walk the last few hundred feet.

  The storm had already done its work and moved on, leaving behind billows of cool, ground-hugging mist. When a desert storm almost kills you, it leaves a parting gift. I walked through the mist with the Glock in my hand.

  No sign of Rincon and no way to track him on rain-washed trails.

  I heard the rushing water before I saw it. At the peak, I looked down at the brown, wall-to-wall mass roaring through the canyon.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Opal bandaged Cash and spent the remainder of the day resting. His mind seemed fine, although that gets into definitions. He wanted to go back to find his Arizona Feeds hat. I told him we w
ouldn’t be returning to the mountain until the roads dried out.

  Besides, I knew one of the company executives and could get him a brand new hat. Any color he wanted, snap-back or fitted. I have connections where it counts.

  I called Roxy and told her what had happened. She crowed, telling me I needed to listen to her next time. I said I didn’t think Angel could’ve survived the flood, and as close as the gunman’s bullets came to killing him, it didn’t look like a setup.

  Then I made the call I dreaded making. Oscar Molina.

  When I told him Rolando’s hand was missing, there was a long silence on his end, and then, in a bitter, accusing voice: “You promised to take care of him.”

  It was his turn to listen to a long silence. I had no idea what to say except that I’d get it back. I repeated my promise to find Rolando’s body. It was a difficult conversation.

  I punched off on the call and felt lousy. I’d let him down, let happen the one thing I vowed wouldn’t happen. If I were a serious drinker, that would’ve been the time to hit it. But I lacked the constitution for boozing. Always had.

  I poured myself a glass of milk and waited for it to calm my stomach. It didn’t work. Misery had found a home in my gut, and seemed to like it there. I took a shower. I cleaned the kitchen until the smell of bleach made me sick and went outside and paced around.

  It was sunset time, and the sky was dressed up in all the colors you can imagine, putting on another of its shows. This one was a full Broadway extravaganza, with a long-legged chorus line and a pale-faced orchestra in pearls and tuxedos squeezing out that knife-in-the-neck sound of too much cello.

  A lot of people go crazy over Arizona’s sunsets. They travel from around the world to see them, fumble around with a camera, and gurgle on about this or that aspect of the beautiful natural world.

  Like the next fellow, I can see a splashy sunset and be reminded of eternity or someone who died too soon. But it’s different when you live with it every day. It gets exhausting. After a while, you want to be left alone, without all that Jackson Pollock business.

  That was one of those nights. I looked up and said, “Okay, I see you. But right now I could use a little honest darkness, so go ahead and set already.”