Kids. They’d found a bunch of dead kids. And they were also chasing kids. Two deadly children, not much older than her own daughter.
A waitress arrived and gave them a tired glance as she pulled out her notepad.
“Coffee,” Ana said. “Cream, too.”
“Beer and pork chops. And a basket of bread.”
The waitress looked rather skeptical about their choices.
“I don’t think our collaboration is working as planned,” Ana said. “That thing with Atl? It was a mistake. She got away and all we had was a bunch of dead people in the street. I’m lucky I’m here.”
“Life is unexpected,” Kika declared, as though she were a walking, talking greeting card.
“Well, what’s unexpected is that after the massacre at that factory my boss has sidelined me. I gave him Atl and Nick’s pictures. Luna is doing some shit with checkpoints and distribution of the images. I’m not leading the investigation anymore. I’m probably of no use to you now.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You got us very close to her. I have faith in you. You want the other half of the money, right?”
“I want a decent night’s sleep, is what I want,” Ana said.
The waitress returned with the coffee and the beer. She forgot to bring any cream and Ana stared at her drink, irritated.
“You’re the closest thing to a vampire hunter in this town, Ana. We don’t have anyone else to go to.”
“Why don’t you just let them kill each other?” Ana asked, utterly exhausted by the conversation. “They’ll manage it, eventually.”
Ana grabbed a napkin and folded it in half, then in another half, while Kika drank her beer, looking cool and chill. If the young woman ever had a bad day, she didn’t let it show.
“I told you why already. It’s disrespectful. Vampires start getting the idea they can just waltz into Mexico City, how soon before they’re snacking on us and messing it up like they do in the rest of the country? It’s a question of pride.”
“Yeah, I don’t give a fuck. I’m worried someone thinks I’m working with you, or at least suspects something’s up.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“I’m not imagining shit. I got a phone call the other day, very unsettling, asking why I was researching Nick and Atl.”
Ana had not breathed a word to Marisol about what she was doing in her spare time, but she had checked the locks on the door and made sure the electronic peephole was in good working order. Marisol was under strict instructions to never open the door when Ana was away anyway, but it didn’t hurt. As an extra precaution Ana had arranged for Marisol to ride the daily school shuttle back and forth from school, which she normally didn’t do because it cost an extra fee. Since it was a private school the shuttle carried an armed guard.
“Come on, you do give a fuck,” Kika said, brushing away Ana’s concerns like they were useless garbage.
“My boss is going to fire me if he figures out I’m working with you,” Ana countered.
“Who cares?” Kika took another swig of beer and smiled at Ana. “Don’t start with the lame excuses. You won’t need your stupid job soon enough. Are you scared?”
“It’s scary when you’re going against vampires. Maybe you don’t care, because you think this is a staff barbecue, but I know what they can do.”
“If the pictures in the papers are correct, I also know what they can do. Disgusting.”
“The reporters are enjoying it,” Ana said. “Naked girls on page three and a guy that was gutted on the cover.”
“When I was a kid, I remember reading those old romantic books. The Gothic paperbacks. Remember those?”
Ana stared at the calendar and what, she supposed, was the Chinese character for Year of the Snake printed below the Western letters. She remembered the Chinese vampires she had bumped into, their atrophied muscles giving the sensation that they were always shuffling around. The Revenants had similar problems: kyphosis, arthritis. Not like in the books, no. Not romantic, either.
“No,” Ana said. “But then again, I have never been a big reader of romance books.”
“Well, they had castles in those books and they vampirized young virgins, offering them eternal love. The truth, though, well, the truth is more interesting. Corpses on parade. It’ll be a blast putting a bullet through their skulls. Stake. Something.”
“I’m not interested in discussing vampires in popular culture,” Ana said. “I’m heading out.”
“You can’t let me eat by myself.”
Ana considered staying for a bit longer. She decided against it. The coffee looked terrible, anyway. “I got work,” she said. “I’ll phone you if anything comes up.”
“You’re not scared, Detective Aguirre,” Kika said, raising her bottle in a salute. “You’re eager.”
Ana took out a bill and left it on the table. The walk back to the office had her thinking more about types of vampires. She bounced between reciting their characteristics in her head and remembering the faces of the two young ones who were responsible for the bloodbath she had been staring at on her screen.
Deny it as she wanted to, Ana knew Kika had a point. Ana was good at one thing and that thing was dealing with vampires. They fascinated, repulsed, and obsessed her. She was disgusted by this whole business but she also needed to see this case to the end. Try as she might, she couldn’t turn her head away.
And yet by the time she reached her desk, she was ready to go home. The office zapped her life, it was the real vampire. Tops five minutes after she sat down, another officer came walking by.
“Hey, Aguirre, I’ve got a guy who says he saw something in connection to your case.”
“Tell Luna about it. He’s the lead on it,” Ana muttered.
“Like I wouldn’t have tried that. Luna’s not here.”
He was probably banging his mistress in a cheap motel that charged by the hour.
“Will you talk to the damn guy?”
“Yeah, sure. Send him over,” Ana said.
She pulled out the voice recorder and her notepad. A man in a striped shirt sat down across the desk from her, looking nervous.
“I’m Detective Aguirre. They tell me you want to speak with me?” she said, and did not even bother sounding like she was interested. She should have had the damn coffee and a bit of food.
“It was a terrible stench, just awful. Like rotting meat,” he blurted. “It was that psychopath vampire from the papers.”
She could smell the booze even from across the desk. Ana looked into the old guy’s face and hoped this wasn’t an alcoholic who’d had a vivid hallucination. The crazies came out in force anytime a big crime took place.
“Sir. Let’s slow down. You say you saw a vampire?”
“They were riding in my car.”
“Okay. How did they get into your car?”
“How do you think they got in?” the man spluttered. “I drive a taxi. They just got in. I had no idea until she grabbed me by the neck and threatened me and she smelled bad, terrible, like meat that’s gone bad. There was a boy, too. And a damn dog.”
Ana held her pen up, pausing. “A dog?”
“Yes, a big dog. They made me drive them around.”
She leaned forward. “Do you remember where you took them?”
“To the Roma.”
“Where in the Roma?”
“I don’t know. A house.” He shook his head. “I was too spooked to pay attention to it. But my friend, he told me today that you guys give rewards for this kind of stuff. How much are you giving?”
“Sir, does your taxi have a geolocator? Taxi companies use it nowadays to track where the vehicles are.”
“No. What do you think I’m rich to be having this fancy geolocator shit?”
Could be he was driving an illegal taxi or didn’t care for it. “I don’t think anything. You think hard. Can you remember anything about the street you dropped them off at?” Ana asked.
“It was in the Roma. I
t’s what I know.”
The Roma. It had been a big vampire quarter, once upon a time. They’d all left. Except she remembered hearing a rumor from Archibaldo Ramos, who’d been in hot water—well, more than usual—a couple of years before when they busted him trying to run a prostitution ring near Coyoacán. Cops weren’t very nice when people weren’t paying their bribes, and Ramos thought he could just pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and not have to pay anyone off. Ramos, whom she’d met several times before, was aware she had an interest in vampires and tried to gain brownie points by regaling her with vampire stories. He’d mentioned the vampires of the Roma and hinted one remained there. At the time she thought he was just bullshitting her. She wasn’t so sure anymore.
“All right, that’s good. I’ll file your statement,” Ana said.
“What about my money?”
“There’s no reward money.”
“That’s bullshit, lady! Plain bullshit!”
Several officers turned their heads to look at them. Ana could have the guy arrested, but it would mess up her plan. She reached into her wallet and found a bill. “Here’s a hundred and get out,” she said.
The guy took the bill and crumpled it, but he didn’t say anything else and walked out. Ana logged in to one of the databases and scanned it for info. She then grabbed a few papers and went over to the officer who had sent the taxi driver over to her.
“I’m heading out again. If Castillo asks I was sick, all right?”
The officer, who was busy browsing ties on the Internet—she could see the site on the monitor behind him—sneered at Ana. “Suddenly got your period, Aguirre?”
“I think you’re the one who’s PMSing, asshole,” she said.
She was sure that was going to go in her file, under “lack of team spirit and cooperative skill building,” but she didn’t give one fine fuck.
CHAPTER
31
At night, Plaza Garibaldi was overrun with mariachi bands and drunkards. Adventurous tourists walked around, trying to ignore the indigents gathering at the fringes of the plaza. It was a seedy place and no amount of rehabilitation could possibly bring the area under the blanket of respectability, though the city planners had given it a halfhearted attempt, stringing numerous green and red LED lights on buildings in a futile attempt at festivity.
There were a lot of bars near the plaza. The Tenampa stood out due to its yellow façade and its history: it harked back to the ’20s and the story went that the painter Frida Kahlo used to hang out there. It was, like anything else in the area, a little tacky. The Tenampa was also crowded, though Domingo imagined it had been crowded for decades. Three mariachi groups and a jarocho band played in the joint, while roaming mariachis walked around the tables, looking for customers willing to pay for a song.
There were men walking around selling electric shocks, holding up their boxes with jumper cables. It was an attraction imported from up north, from Tijuana and Juárez, but it had caught on with the drunk patrons. A variant was called the Mexican roulette, which had four people passing the contraption around until one of them was zapped.
A mariachi asked them if they wanted a song for what must have been the third time and Bernardino waved him away. The vampire looked miserable, hunched over a glass of mezcal, a hat shadowing his face, but not bothering to take a sip. Domingo was nursing his second beer, too nervous to do much drinking. Atl, on the other hand, had downed three glasses of tequila.
Domingo thought they painted quite the picture: a surly old hunchback in black; a young, bright-eyed woman with her arm in a sling; a teenager in a fancy vest. Though, to be fair, everyone was too drunk to pay them much attention.
“I don’t quite believe it,” Elisa said as she approached their table, a backpack slung over her shoulder and a dainty purse dangling from her right arm. “Bernardino. Here. Aren’t you averse to people and noise … and, well, everything?”
“I would have preferred that we met at a different place, but yes, here,” he replied.
Elisa took off her coat. “I didn’t think you’d get involved in this.”
“Well, I am.”
“What happened to your arm?” Elisa asked, looking at Atl.
“An accident,” she replied.
Elisa pulled up a chair and sat down. She placed the backpack on the table. Atl unzipped it and found a large envelope.
“ID cards. Health cards. Passports,” Atl said, taking each item out. Atl grabbed one of the ID cards and looked at it, then opened the passport. “They look legit.”
“They’ll work,” Elisa said.
“What about the ride? When can you drive us out?” Atl asked, holding up one of the cards, examining it more closely.
Elisa hesitated, sliding her hand across her wrist. “There’s a problem with that.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not driving you anywhere.”
“That’s not possible,” Atl said, placing the documents on the table.
“I’m not sure if you know this, but the city is going wild,” Elisa told them. “Cops found an abandoned factory filled with corpses and they’re talking vampires. They’ve got checkpoints set up; they’re checking buses and cargo trucks. I won’t do it.”
“So you can’t take us to Guatemala,” Atl said.
“It is too dangerous. You can have your money back.” Elisa tossed Atl’s envelope in front of her.
“I don’t want the damn money,” Atl exclaimed, slamming her hand on the table. “I need your help to make the border crossing. You said you’d get me out.”
“I said it was complicated,” Elisa replied.
“Can’t we just take a bus?” Domingo asked.
“Sure. When we get to the terminal, we’ll ask security to let us on nicely. I’m sure they won’t question us when they notice I’m missing a hand or anything. Good God.” Atl grabbed her glass and downed it in one quick gulp, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
“Sorry,” Domingo muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.
“She could stay with you,” Elisa said, speaking to Bernardino. “Things will cool down in a while and it’ll be easier to leave the city. The roads should be better.”
“They can’t be with me,” Bernardino said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“What other option is there?” Elisa said.
“If you think—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Atl said, stuffing the papers back in the envelope. She was trying to keep herself in check but it wasn’t working, her hands were shaky, barely able to grip her documents. “I got into Mexico City and I can get out by myself and—”
“Cross at Ciudad Hidalgo. It will be controlled by Necros,” Bernardino said nonchalantly, his turn to interrupt her.
“The South is still in dispute,” Atl said. “It’s not controlled by them.”
“I’m sure Godoy has shared your picture with as many associates as he can. I’m sure it’s even been shared with people who are not his associates at all. One way or the other there are going to be too many people interested in you. You can’t manage on your own. Not if Elisa is right and this has exploded the way it has.”
“What do you suggest?” Atl asked.
“There’s old trails in the jungle. Stuff only villagers use.” Bernardino said, “You can get far if you know the right person. I do. I can help you get into Guatemala, but I can’t get you out of Mexico City.”
“I hopped on a truck to get in,” Atl said. “I could hop on another.”
A group of mariachis had begun to play at a nearby table. They were singing the corrido of “El Caballo Blanco.” People started to sing with them. Atl had poured herself another glass of tequila.
“I’ve seen what the checkpoints are like,” Elisa said. “They’re not going to let the truck through without a search.”
“So? We keep quiet,” Atl said in a clipped voice.
“And if they have thermal scanners? Every bus, every car, anything with wheels is going to be sear
ched. This stuff’s too hot right now.”
Atl did not reply. She leaned back on her chair and raised a hand, covering her face for a minute before she downed her drink. A thought popped into Domingo’s head.
“You don’t need no wheels to get out of Mexico City,” Domingo said. “You can walk out.”
The three of them stared at him.
“Walk out?” Atl said, sounding incredulous.
“They’re not going to have people at the landfills.”
Atl straightened up in her chair, raising her chin.
“Go on,” Bernardino said.
Domingo licked his lips. “Bordo Blanco overflows into the State of Mexico, okay? It’s not supposed to, but that’s the way it is. In theory there’s the containment wall and the canal running by to divide it neatly, but that doesn’t happen. Once you get across the drainage canal you’re outside Mexico City pretty fast. You can keep going from there. All we have to do is walk through the landfill and cross the canal. And there’s a way to do that. There’s a path.”
“And there’ll be no security?” Atl asked.
“No. Look, the landfills are not ruled by cops, they’re ruled by the people there. Zamora is the boss at Bordo Blanco and I’ve bought garbage there for the rag-and-bone man. I’ve hauled stuff and I’ve been across the entire landfill. I can take you.”
Bernardino raised his eyebrows and glanced at Domingo, giving him a smirk. “You’ve managed to surprise me, boy,” he said.
Domingo smiled. He drank his beer.
“Well, it seems you are in good hands,” Elisa said, pushing her chair back abruptly, like she’d left a ham in the oven and her house was about to burn down. “I trust I won’t be meeting with you again.”
“No,” Atl said. “Thank you.”
Elisa grabbed her purse and her coat. “Lovely seeing you,” she told Bernardino.
“Likewise,” Bernardino said, showing his yellowing teeth, a note of derision punctuating his words.
Elisa paused to incline her head toward Atl, in what Domingo thought was a microscopic salute. Then she walked out of the joint without another word.
A waitress came around to ask if they wanted more drinks. Three mariachis were headed to their table, eager for business. Bernardino tossed several bills on the table and grabbed his cane.
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