Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  Lily Lee’s apartment was the fifth in from the end of the building. At exactly thirty seconds, I pushed open the wrought-iron gate leading to the back of the fifth apartment.

  A short porch led to a sliding glass door, the curtain half-open. A jumble of sounds came from inside the apartment, of the kind made by confusion, chaos, someone stumbling, knocking into furniture in the dark.

  Then the sound took the shape of a vague figure, arms and legs flailing as he ran toward me. Mayflower rolled open the rear door and shot onto the porch. His journey stretched to three feet and ended when I kicked a lounge chair into his path.

  His legs got tangled and he showed the sky his heels before landing with a thud on the cement. He lay on his back moaning, eyes spinning. When he recognized me and realized he was alive and would stay that way, he growled for an ambulance, a doctor, a lawyer, and the police. He left his Pilates instructor out of it.

  “Someone tried to murder me! I’ve committed no crime!”

  I broke up laughing, and when Roxy ran through the gate, she did too. Mayflower wore the same lambskin robe he had on the first time we’d met at his backyard pool. Chestnut colored and the length of a miniskirt, it stopped above his knees with his hairy pipe-stem legs swinging out the bottom.

  “That robe should be ten years minimum,” I said, and shoved him into a porch chair. The effort caused the robe to fall open.

  Roxy said, “It ain’t Christmas, Max.” She shielded her eyes. “Hide the package, please.”

  “He invaded my home! He tried to murder me!”

  I tied his hands behind his back with the robe’s sash.

  “Who are we talking about, Max?”

  “I didn’t see anybody. I saw nothing. I didn’t have to. It was Roscoe Rincon.”

  “That’s some partner you’ve got there.”

  “He’s crazy! He killed Alvarez and Rolando Molina. I had nothing to do with any of that. That was all Rincon. I wanted Rolando’s brother in the big leagues—that’s all.”

  Hearing him say Rolando’s name spun me up. Rioting blood made my face hot. I squeezed his jaw and leaned down. “What you need to do right now, Max, is shut the hell up. I don’t want to hear that name coming out of your mouth again.”

  I pulled out my phone to call Diaz and tell him we’d found Mayflower.

  Roxy stopped me. “I didn’t drive up here for the scenery. Let me.” She was smiling as she punched in his number.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Roxy had to do some talking when Diaz arrived. He was mad, which must’ve explained his shirttail hanging out in back—a rare sartorial imperfection.

  He directed most of his ire at Roxy, saying she’d withheld Lily Lee Summers’s name at Mayflower’s house. Roxy explained that she had to fetch her notebook out of the car first, and even then, it was only a hunch that Mayflower had gone to Lily’s.

  “We lucked out and found him, and now he’s yours,” Roxy said. “So what’s the problem exactly?”

  Eventually, Diaz let it go. Every cop in town knew they had more to lose than gain from a fight with Roxanne Santa Cruz.

  She and I waited in the front parking lot of the apartment complex watching Diaz do his business. There must’ve been fifteen squad cars standing by, all of them angle parked the way they teach it at the academy.

  Diaz put Mayflower into the back of one of the cars and walked over to us.

  “Mayflower says we’ll find Rolando Molina’s body on Paradise Mountain. You two crackerjack amateur sleuths know nothing about that?”

  “Nope,” Roxy said.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Haven’t you searched up there a dozen times already?”

  “At least. He’s probably lying, but we have to look again. We’ll send some deputies up there in the morning.”

  Copper Queen residents had gathered on the sidewalk to watch, some of them in nightclothes. Cop radios let out staggered burps and beeps. The proximity of the big mountains made the sounds bigger and more dramatic.

  Diaz watched the squad car carrying Mayflower roll out of the lot. He said, “It’s all about Roscoe Rincon now, Whip. My advice is to pack up your desert circus out at their Double Wide and drive away.”

  “I’d miss the views. You know how I feel about the views.”

  “Buy a picture book.”

  “What about the people that live out there, Benny? They count on me.”

  “They’re drifters. They’ll find a new place.”

  “Get lost, move it along. That’s all they ever hear.”

  “But now they’ve got a home, is that it? That makes you what, landlord, parole officer, case manager?”

  Roxy scoffed in agreement. “You got that right.”

  “Don’t forget chef,” I said. “I run a pretty fair greasy spoon.”

  The lines in Diaz’s face tightened. “For a guy like Rincon, revenge is food, and after you fingered him to the whole world tonight, I guarantee you he’s hungry.”

  “I’ve been running since Mazatlán, Benny. No more.”

  “You’re a baseball player. Rincon’s a cold killer. You don’t know what you’re facing.”

  “One way or another, we’re going to meet. Nothing I say or do can change that.”

  “Just leave Double Wide and it’s over.” He stopped to gather himself and then continued in his reasonable tone: “Take a trip for yourself, give us time. Every free hand we’ve got will be looking for Rincon. If we find him, this goes away and you can concentrate on Sam.”

  “Can’t do it, Benny.”

  He nodded with resignation. “I figured.”

  SEVENTY-NINE

  I got up the next morning and peered out the door. The early sun painted the sky in a dramatic blue-gray light.

  Opal was spread out corpse-like on the foldout, one arm and one leg hanging off the mattress, her head nearly off, that long hair obscuring her face and tumbling all the way to the floor. It shook in and out as she breathed.

  I made coffee and let it perk while I went outside. Cash sat on his front porch watching Angel’s trailer. If Cash ever slept, I was unaware of it. Vampire blood.

  He hollered to me down the street, “Cops,” and pointed toward Paradise Mountain.

  Up on the slope, the sun gleamed off a car as it bounced down the road toward Double Wide. Two other cars were farther up on the peak. Diaz had made good on his promise to search for Rolando. They wouldn’t find a thing.

  The breeze felt nice. The birds sang behind the pure light of the morning.

  I called out to Cash, “I feel like cooking this morning. You in?”

  “Be down in a minute. I’ll roust Charlie.”

  I went back into the Airstream and made breakfast. Opal sat up in bed in her Spiderman pajamas. “Mr. Whip, can I just say something. Oh, my God! Like, what time is it even? I couldn’t sleep at all.”

  “Yeah, I could tell.”

  I rolled up a scrambled egg burrito with bacon bits and handed it to her. She made mmm-mmm noises as she ate. She sounded like one of Gladys Knight’s Pips.

  Roxy called. She’d spent the night at the station working on her stories.

  “Have you turned on the TV? It’s all you, Prospero. They’re saying you could write your ticket back into the game, gum or no gum.”

  “I put my soul through that wood chipper once. I’m not doing it again.”

  I motioned for Opal to turn on the TV. She fumbled for the remote, broke off a yawn that ended with a resounding elk bugle, and flipped on CNN. My face filled the screen. The story was a morning show extravaganza.

  “The legendary left hander, reportedly in seclusion at his remote desert outpost…”

  “Murders at the luxurious home of Max Mayflower, one of the game’s hottest young agents, now in custody…”

  “A secret formula derived from the agave and invented by a botany professor…”

  “A pitch called El Bailador, the dancer…”

  Roxy said, “Have you read my stories at the KPIN site?
I posted three of them and beat everybody.” She was running on no sleep and sounded frazzled.

  I wasn’t interested in reading about Mayflower’s arrest, the press conference, none of it. And I had no interest in what CNN said about the game and what it meant for my prospects. My career was over. I knew what I’d done in my final game and couldn’t have been prouder, especially for what it meant to Sam.

  Roxy said, “Has Angel told you anything more about Rolando?”

  “Not a word. He spends all his time hunting rabbits and burying them.”

  “You need to think about what Diaz said. He’s right, you know.”

  I talked with my phone on the counter, set on speaker. I was making blueberry waffles. Cooking gave me something to do while I noodled things out. The egg whites have to be beaten until they’re stiff. Anything but real butter is cheating.

  “There might be a solution to this,” Roxy said.

  I added a few drops of vanilla to the batter for the aroma.

  Roxy said, “If you threaten to run Angel off, he might talk. Think about it. His chances of surviving Rincon on his own are zero. How many murders has Angel seen him commit?”

  I poured the batter into the waffle maker, sprinkled the blueberries on top, and closed the lid. “If Angel’s gone or dead, I’ll never find out what he knows about Rolando.”

  “The kid knows that too. And he knows you won’t play hardball.”

  When I didn’t dispute that, Roxy breathed a sigh. “Okay, have it your way. But I’m going to call every morning and again at dinner to make sure you’re all right.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “If you don’t pick up, I’m calling 911 and coming out there myself. That’s a promise.”

  Cash and Charlie came. I fixed plates for them and one for Opal, her second breakfast. She had a healthy appetite. Roxy was right about a lot of things, the most obvious being that by the time she got to Double Wide, everything would be over. But I kept that to myself.

  We broke off the call, and I spent the remainder of the day indoors. Late the next afternoon, Oscar and Fausto Molina drove down my entrance road.

  EIGHTY

  I’d had no contact with Oscar since our last phone call, when he told me he was going to Mexico City to search for Fausto. He’d failed to return multiple calls. I brought them inside, closed and locked my door, and poured them lemonade, and we sat at my kitchen table.

  “You’ve made a ghost of yourself, Oscar,” I said. “I thought something bad happened.”

  “I didn’t call you because they listen in. You know they do that, Whip. These cartel men, they have ways of finding out what they need to know.”

  He was right about that, and I said so.

  He gave me a fierce look. “I wasn’t going to lose another boy.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  He invented the story of going to Mexico City, and made sure to say so in his last phone call to me—an effort to throw off the men hunting Fausto. Instead, the Molinas had holed up at Oscar’s gold camp in the mountains until Diaz called asking Fausto to testify against Mayflower.

  When it was Fausto’s turn to talk, he could barely raise his eyes to look at me. I remembered Wilson describing Mayflower’s plan to market the boy as much as El Bailador and turn him into a teenage celebrity.

  Seeing Fausto for the first time, I thought it might’ve worked.

  He was lean and muscular with soft, almost feminine features. His hair was light, more like gringo hair. His eyes were a rich brown with long lashes and thick, swooping eyebrows much darker than his hair. He had a goatee that tried valiantly to make something of itself, but it needed more years.

  Oscar told Fausto to go ahead and talk. He said he knew nothing about how the gum was made, the connection to drug smuggling and heroin, none of it. All he knew was that Rolando had given it to him and taught him how to use it, and it worked.

  Rolando’s instructions were to keep quiet about it no matter what.

  “Even after he went missing?” I said. “You didn’t think he might be in trouble?”

  Fausto’s eyes begged forgiveness. I thought he might cry.

  “He was out of his mind on cocaine, Whip,” he said. “I thought that’s what he was off doing and didn’t want to get him in trouble.” He was almost pleading. “Mayflower told me not to talk to anybody. He threatened to kill me.”

  No doubt he did. But I also knew that Fausto was winning games with that gum, and I remembered what it felt like to be young and on top and willing to do anything to stay there. If he’d spoken up, it might not have saved Rolando’s life, but he’d never know for sure, and the question would likely haunt him forever.

  Based on Diaz’s offer of protection, the rest of the Molina family planned to come to Tucson as soon possible. Oscar had an appointment with Diaz later that evening.

  “He wants me to make an identification,” Oscar said, and his voice fell. “Of the hand.”

  Fausto heard that and whimpered. Oscar put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Go get something to eat, mijo. I’m sure Whip has food.”

  There was cold pizza in the fridge and Fausto went.

  “I won’t say anything to Diaz about you having the hand, Whip,” Oscar said. “We know how much you loved our boy.” He lost his voice to grief, and when he could speak again, the sound was small and hushed. “All we want now is a proper burial.”

  “I’ll find Rolando. I made a promise and plan to keep it.”

  Oscar nodded in acknowledgment. “I have something that might help. It’s not much.”

  “Please, anything.”

  He leaned across the table. “There’s a fellow works for me that got run out of the Sierra Madre by one of the narcos up there, by one man in particular. Roscoe Rincon. Everyone knows him in that region. He owns mines there, and the ones he couldn’t buy, he murdered to get.”

  “Gold mines.”

  “He loves gold. Talks about gold all the time.” Oscar spread his hands. “Does that help?”

  Maybe it did. I had a hunch—a long shot but worth a try.

  When Rincon told his men to dispose of Rolando’s body, what if they drove to a place they knew, another remote gold mine Rincon had found on the Arizona border? With Paradise Mountain in the police spotlight, Rincon was relocating his heroin operation. He needed a new trail, and to indulge his obsession, he might’ve chosen one with a gold mine nearby.

  After Oscar and Fausto left, I called Tork Mortenson, the historical society curator who first alerted me to gunmen threatening visitors on Paradise Mountain. At the time, he’d said members of the Rich Hill Gang had been concentrating on border-area mines.

  In Mortenson’s book I found five possibilities, gold mines that had thrived and died in the mountains along the Mexican line. If the Rich Hill Gang visited those mines, they might’ve seen something suspicious, some sign of renewed activity.

  Mortenson said they’d visited two of the five mines but encountered nothing interesting. “Next weekend we’re traveling to Oro Grande in the Patagonia Mountains, and I’m leading the group,” he said. “It seems you’ve inspired me to get back into it.”

  I cautioned him to be careful.

  “I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “The marshal in Patagonia’s a dear friend, and he’s agreed to escort us. He came on board when I informed him of our exhaustive food preparations.” He chuckled. “Lots of iced tea and exotic cheeses.”

  EIGHTY-ONE

  The next few days were hot and slow moving. Opal and Charlie spent most of the time in the Airstream, the door closed and locked. Cash came in at odd intervals to eat standing up and then hurry back outside on patrol.

  I strapped the Glock to my hip in the morning, and it stayed there all day. The gun weighs a little less than two pounds. I felt it at first, the burden of it. After a few days, I couldn’t feel anything. But when I took it off to go to bed, I didn’t feel right. Something was missing.

  The sh
ootists of the Old West must’ve felt the same way.

  There had been a change in everyone’s attitude. The tension was there from the beginning, but as the days passed, it intensified, and the conversations got shorter.

  Charlie played solitaire and chattered on about anything that came to mind. It was all nervous talk. He told jokes only he understood and laughed alone. Opal passed the time cooking.

  Exactly a week after Tequila Sunday, we were sitting at my kitchen table when a late-night thunderstorm blew in, the first in days. The sounds of it knocking around outside rattled Opal, and got her talking about Gila monsters.

  “They come out of their burrows at night to look for food.” She chewed on a strand of her hair and stared across the table as she spoke. “The closer they get to you, the more the ground shakes. He’s probably out there right now.”

  Charlie wasn’t much better off. His eyes were puffy and restless. I poured him a Coke. He splashed it with gin from his pocket flask and got up to return to his trailer for the night.

  Before walking out, he said, “Doesn’t it wear you down, Mayor? Thinking he’s coming all the time and nothing?”

  “Hang in there,” I said. “Rincon wants us to drop our guard.”

  “Wish he’d get it over with.” Charlie stood at the door watching the rain. Chico came out from under the table and hobbled down the steps. Charlie watched him go. “Where’s Jack the coyote at, anyhow? He’s usually out there giving us the business.”

  “Go home, Charlie. Cash has us covered.”

  “You’re right, Mayor. Cashy’s good. Old Cashy’ll watch over us.”

  Opal got her foldout ready for the night. Before going back to my own bed, I opened the door one last time and whistled for Chico. Sometimes he explored for a while and barked when it was time to come inside.

  The rain poured down. Chico never lingered in bad weather.

  As I walked back to my bedroom, the wind rocked the Airstream the way turbulence rocks an airplane. I got a book from my shelf and tried to read. Couldn’t concentrate with the noise of the hoist chains banging against the flagpoles.