by Blake Banner
She frowned. “You a cop?”
I laughed out loud, and I guess the way I laughed convinced her I wasn’t a cop.
She smiled, then shrugged. “It’s getting a lot harder, but they say a lot of people still get in through Abasse. That’s in San Juan County.” She hesitated. “Red’s uncle is the sheriff down there.”
“No kidding.”
She nodded.
“I guess that’s pretty handy for him.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you know what Red does for a living, Cissy?”
“Well, what kind of a question is that? You been to his club last night!”
“Have you ever been to his club?”
“Uh-uh. Red don’t like me goin’ out. He says it’s unladylike.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
She stuffed a pancake in her mouth and tried to ignore me. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her.
“His club is a bordello, and he sells cocaine.”
Her face went pale. “That ain’t none of my business…”
“The women get hurt. Does that surprise you, knowing what you know about Red? Men go there and pay to beat up the women.”
Her face went from very pale to a bright flush. “That ain’t my problem. I don’t know what you think I can do about it.”
“Just because you ignore a problem, Cissy, doesn’t mean it’s not your problem. That little niggling and gnawing you’re feeling in your conscience right now, that you’re trying so hard to ignore? In time, that becomes hell. Next time he beats you black and blue, ask yourself how many sixteen-year-old girls has he done that to? Girls who came here looking for a better life, to help their brothers and sisters, and their mothers. And instead, they found themselves being beaten and raped, by the man you love, and share your bed with.”
It was quite a speech, and I was wondering where the hell it came from. She was looking at me wide-eyed with her mouth half-open. I stood and took my plate and my cup into the kitchen and washed them up. When I came back, she said, “I want you to leave.”
I smiled at her and shook my head. “I can’t do that. But I’ll tell you what, Cissy, if you have the balls to kick Red out, I’ll leave too. How do I get to Abasse?”
There was real resentment in her eyes. Knights in shining armor were supposed to make your problems disappear. They were definitely not meant to make you face them and take responsibility for them.
“Tucson-Ajo Highway to Three Points, then turn south on the 286. Just follow it all the way to the border.”
I stepped out into the brilliant morning sunshine, climbed into my car, and headed west on Valencia till I came to the Ajo Highway. There I turned south, into the desert.
The Arizona desert is not like the Sahara or the Kalahari. It’s not really a desert in that sense. Those are true deserts, dead places where, as far as the eye can see, there is only rock and dust, ochre, brown, red and black. Arizona is arid, but life is abundant, and southwest of Tucson, in the broad plain that stretches between Keystone Peak and the Baboquivari-Kitt Peak range, the pale dust produces a sparse woodland of sweet acacia, desert willow, palo verde and papago cacti. The heat, even in October, can be intense, and the brilliance of the early sun that morning was turning into a hot glare as it edged toward midday.
The smart thing would have been to close the windows, seal the car and turn on the AC. But how often do you get to drive through the Arizona desert in October? I opened all the windows and let the heat and the air blast me, and spent a couple of hours forgetting about Marni, my dead father, Cissy the eternal victim, and Red.
Red, whom I had decided to kill.
It was less than an hour’s drive, but I took time to get off the blacktop and followed the dirt tracks to see where they led me. Mostly, by and by, they led me back to the main road.
I finally got to Abasse at noon. The first thing that struck me was that there was nobody there. It was like everybody had given up and gone home. Only, for a couple of hundred people, maybe less, this was home. There was a general store with two gas pumps outside, and a wooden bench with a parasol. And there was a handful of houses that all had iron bars on their windows and barbed wire fences around their yards. I parked and climbed out into the dusty heat.
Inside, the store was dark and cool. The guy behind the counter looked Mexican. His eyes told me he didn’t like the fact that he didn’t know me, but he was going to play nice just incase I shot him. It was that kind of place. I bought a pack of Pueblo cigarettes and as he was ringing up the sale, I said, “I need to arrange some border crossing. Who can I talk to?”
He pointed south. “The border is two minutes away, jus’ follow the road.”
I didn’t move. I just kept staring at him with just enough of a smile to make him feel uncomfortable. He shook his head and spread his hands, appealing to me for understanding. “Please, señor, I don’t know nothin’…”
I kept staring, but let the smile die. He sighed. “Maybe you can talk to señor Arana, but he don’t like visitors, and if you tell him I sent you…”
I shook my head. “I am not going to tell him anything. I am just going to leave and you will never see me or hear from me again. Where can I find Arana?”
“Señor Arana and his friends, they are usually in the bar, go back, four hundred meters, you see a sign by the road, Casa Coca. Is maybe fifty meters down the track.” He kind of winced. “But is kind of private. They don’t like visitors.”
I grinned. I hoped it was a friendly grin. “That’s OK. They’ll like me.”
“Please, señor, don’t tell them I told you…”
“Don’t worry about it. Forget you ever saw me.”
I stepped out into the heat and the glare and climbed into my car. I crawled back the way I’d come. Before long I came to a dirt track on my left with an old wooden sign that said, ‘Casa Coca’. They weren’t shy, you had to say that for them. The sign looked old and dilapidated, and I figured it belonged to a time when they wanted to attract customers. I turned into the track and rolled along for forty yards till I came to a big adobe house on three floors. It had a broad, wooden porch with a vine growing over it, a door with a Mexican curtain and small windows that were designed not to let the light in, but to keep people out. There was a Jeep parked in the shade of a palo verde and I pulled in next to it.
What I saw when I stepped inside was not what I had expected. Maybe I’d expected to see Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood smoking cheroots in the corner. What I saw was a comfortable bar that seemed better suited to Vegas than this remote border crossing. There were just two people there, and they were both staring at me, frowning.
One of them was the sheriff. He was in his fifties, lean, strong and tall. He had a gray crew cut and mean blue eyes. You could see the family resemblance with Red. He wearing jeans and a khaki shirt, where he’d pinned his badge, sitting on a barstool with both hands loosely around a bottle of beer. Across the bar, there was a guy in a white shirt polishing a glass.
I did my best imitation of an amiable smile and ambled up to the bar.
“G’day. Any chance of a cold beer? I’m parched.”
The barmen gave me the dead eye for a count of four and said, “I think you must have taken a wrong turning somewhere, friend. This is a private club.”
The sheriff took things in hand and creased his concrete face with something he probably thought was a smile.
“Just keep going north. In less than an hour you’ll come to Three Points. There’s a restaurant right there on the crossroads.”
“That’s very civil of you, Sheriff. Problem is, I have a mighty thirst upon me right now.” I looked at the guy behind the bar and said. “Gimme a cold beer there, will you, Sancho?” He went very still and I turned back to the sheriff. “While we’re here having this friendly chat, maybe you can help me out.”
His eyes went hard and cold. “Why don’t you tell me who the hell you are and what you
want, friend?”
“Well, that’s exactly what I want. I want to be friends. I want to be friends with Mr. Arana. So I thought I’d drop in and say hello. And to break the ice, I thought I’d sell him some information.”
“You got exactly five seconds to turn around and get the hell out of here, mister…”
“I don’t think that would be smart, Sheriff. And to be honest, I don’t know if I should be talking to you, or Sancho over here.” I turned to look at the guy in the white shirt. “What do you say, Sancho?”
“I say the next time you call me Sancho I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ throat.”
“Can he threaten me like that, Sheriff? Is that allowed? Are my five seconds up?” I turned back to the guy behind the bar. “Where is my beer, Sancho?”
I didn’t wait for a reaction. I put the Sig to the sheriff’s eye and said, “It’s cocked and the safety’s off, Sheriff. I would advise you not to move.” I grinned at Sancho. “Now are you going to give me a fucking beer or do I have to come around there and beat one out of you?”
As I said it, I smashed the butt of the Sig into the sheriff’s ear and knocked him off his perch on the barstool. He crashed to the floor in a mess and lay groaning holding his head. My guess was he felt real sick and had a bad headache. Sancho reached in the fridge for a beer. I climbed on the stool and kept talking.
“Now, my guess is that this guy wears the badge, but you are the man to talk to. Am I right?”
“Señor Arana is at the casino. He ain’t gonna waste time talkin’ to a punk like you. What the fuck do you want?”
“I already told you. I have information that he needs and I am willing to sell. And that is going to be the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship.”
He made a face of contempt. “What information? You full of shit.”
I took a long pull on the beer, smacked my lips and sighed. “Friend, in thirty seconds I am going to walk out of here. After that, what you do is your business. But I can tell you this: I, personally, would not want to be the one who has to explain to Arana why I chose not to pass on the information that could have avoided what’s going to happen next.”
He frowned hard and looked real worried.
“Huh? What’s gonna happen next?”
I leaned forward and leered at him. “That is for sale, Sancho.” I pointed the automatic between his eyes. “I’ll be back here tomorrow night. If Arana isn’t here, I’m going to want to know why.”
On the floor the sheriff was dragging himself into a sitting position. I climbed off the stool and walked back out into the glaring sun and the heat. As I pulled out of the dirt track onto the 286, I wondered vaguely to myself what the hell I was doing, and why I was getting involved in Cissy’s problems. I settled back and started cruising north, toward Three Points. I told myself I was killing time until I got some action from Marni. But I knew I was kidding myself. I knew it went deeper than that.
Six
I drove back into Tucson, stopped for a hamburger at Chilli’s Grill, and sat over a coffee and a whiskey staring blindly at the receiver for the tracking device I’d put under Marni’s car. I was wondering what the hell I was going to do next. I was restless, angry and unfocused. It was bad, and I knew it was bad.
I sat like that until the sun started making long shadows across the concrete parking lot outside. Then I had another coffee and another whiskey. I still hadn’t reached any kind of decision when the tracker bleeped and started to move.
I paid up and climbed back in the car. I put the tracker on the dash and followed the bleep to the Park Place Shopping Mall, on East Broadway Boulevard. I didn’t go in. Instead I accelerated past and threw a right onto South Prudence Road, which took me all the way to Carson Corner. I pulled in to Tamara Drive and parked fifty yards from her house, as the sun went down.
I walked up like I owned the place, picked the lock in fifteen seconds, stepped inside and closed the door behind me. I was in a spacious, open-plan living room-diner with broad glass doors onto a back garden with a pool. Houses without pools are the exception in Tucson. The room was sparsely furnished in neutral colors. There were no photographs or pictures, or any kind of ornament. There was nothing that said that Marni lived here. In spite of the heat outside, it felt cold.
I wanted to look around and explore, but I knew my time was limited and she would soon be on her way back. I had to act fast. I put the first bug under her coffee table. It was essentially a voice-activated, miniaturized cell-phone in the form of a chip that was pre-dialed into my laptop. If anybody started talking, it would activate and leave whatever it heard in a file on my hard drive. It was clever stuff.
I climbed the stairs to the top floor. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom. One bedroom was unused and the bed was just a bare mattress, still wrapped in plastic. The other was clearly hers. I left a second bug under her beside table, hoping with a sour twist that it never got activated.
I opened her wardrobe. There were very few clothes, but I found a rucksack and a pair of leather boots. I placed one tracker in the rucksack and another in her right boot. They worked on a GPS system. When she left, wherever she went, I’d be able to find her.
I stood a moment in the doorway, looking at the room and the tousled quilt on the bed. I had a strange sense of loss. I should not be spying on her, I should be a part of this room, of her life. Which was absurd, because I had told her in London, five years back, that there could never be anything between us. She could never be a part of the sick life I had created for myself. So why now? Why this sense of loss now?
Something on her bedside table caught my eye. It was a passport, an ID card and a driver’s license. I picked them up and examined them. The photographs were of her, but the name was Mandy Gillan. The quality was good, almost perfect. I wondered how she’d got hold of them. The Marni I knew would not have had access to the kind of people who make near perfect fake IDs. Did I know her? Did I know her at all?
The tracker in my pocket told me she was on the move again. I checked and saw she was headed back toward home. No time for questions now. No time for soul searching.
I ran down the stairs, stepped out into the darkening evening and walked to my car. I didn’t wait for her to arrive. I didn’t want to see if she was alone. If Engels was with her, right then I didn’t want to know that.
On the way back to Cissy’s I stopped at a supermarket and bought two bottles of wine, one red and one white. They were both good and both were damned expensive. I was a rich man now, and I could afford it; and besides, there was a growing, wild anger inside me that I couldn’t explain—or at least I didn’t want to explain—and all I kept telling myself was that I didn’t give a good goddamn about anything. I didn’t give a damn that Red and Chetan were selling women like Lucia to perverts so that they could beat them up; I didn’t give a damn that Red was beating up and raping Cissy, and I didn’t give a damn that she believed she loved him. And I sure as hell didn’t give a damn that Marni was teaming up with Engels, taking him into her confidence, while she was telling me to ‘go home’ and ‘do my reading’.
When I got back to the bed and breakfast, it was dark and the stars were brilliant and cold overhead. I rang on the bell and Cissy opened almost immediately, like she’d been waiting. She’d put makeup on, maybe to conceal her bruises. The swelling on her eye had gone down. I smiled at her and she smiled back, a little nervous. I held up the bottles.
“A peace offering. I hope you like wine.”
“You shouldn’t have. There was no need. I shouldn’a said the things I said.”
I handed her the white. “That one could go in the freezer for half an hour.” She took it and as she put it in the fridge, I started rummaging in the cutlery drawer for a corkscrew. “It’s your house, Cissy. You have a right to kick me out if you want to.”
I found what I was searching for and straightened to look at her. “I’ll be gone in a couple of days anyway, so if you can wait I’d appreciate it. But I
was wrong, and I apologize.” I shrugged. “I was kind of mad.”
She listened to me in silence. As I started to uncork the bottle, she said, “I wasn’t sure when you’d be back. I ain’t cooked anything.”
“That’s OK. We can have a drink before supper.”
“I don’t usually drink much.”
I held her eye a moment and saw her cheeks color. “Will you make an exception tonight?”
“I suppose a glass of wine won’t do any harm.”
“Harm? It’ll do you good.”
She giggled. “I hope Red don’t turn up!”
“If he does, we’ll offer him a glass too.”
Her eyes opened in fake alarm. “Oh, Lord!”
“You got some music?”
“Well sure!”
She put on some country music and I started peeling potatoes. I put on a kind of generic southern accent and said, “When y’all done there, y’all could git me a beer.”
She squealed with laughter, like I’d said something hilarious. It was easy to make her laugh, and that made her easy to have around. It also made it easy to forget all the things I didn’t want to remember. She poured me a beer and I poured her a glass of cold white wine, and we ended up dancing while the French fries cooked in the deep fryer. We laughed a lot at stupid things—because she laughed at anything I said, and I laughed at the way she laughed. It was good.
After dinner, we sat on the sofa and watched a movie on TV. I put my arm around her and after ten minutes, she rested her head on my shoulder. It was comfortable. It was a nice feeling, and for an hour or two I pretended to myself that it was normal; that I could have this, like other men had.
Before the end of the movie, she was snoring quietly, and I stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head. When the film was over, I picked her up and carried her upstairs. I laid her on her bed and stood for a long moment wondering what to do. In the end, I undressed her and put her under the covers. Then I went down, washed up and went to my room, where I lay and stared at the ceiling, fighting the unexpressed rage I had inside me.