That drew another huff of sound from across the room. That one came from the small black woman in uniform at the dispatch console. It was aimed at Walker and not me. I let it go.
“What’s the deal?” I asked Detective Walker. “You don’t like what I said, or you don’t believe what I said?”
“Hey, you’re the boss,” he said, holding up his hands like they were a kind of denial in themselves. I noticed the expansion band of his cheap watch was stretched to the limit and digging into his wrist. “I didn’t say anything.”
Like I said, chickenshit.
“All I’m saying”—I picked up my thought—“if you have a reason to make an arrest, bring them in. No matter who they are. If someone is in our custody, they remain there until I say so.”
Gutiérrez cleared her throat, and it wasn’t very subtle.
“What?” I asked.
“Or the judge…”
I waved my hand at her like I had it covered. “You all know your jobs. All I’m saying is that if it’s legal, and it’s right, do it. Anything that strikes you as the wrong thing, bring it to me, and we’ll figure it out together.”
The whole room kept looking at me. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d given something away or made a complete fool of myself.
“So…uh…any questions?”
Walker grunted again. I didn’t even look.
“Good,” I said. Then I returned to the safety of my barren office and closed the door.
Before I sat, I pulled the phone and SIM from my pockets and put them together. It wasn’t three minutes before it rang.
“Milo! My man!” I answered, keeping things cheerful.
“What the fuck? What the holy fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Colorful,” I said. “That how you greet old friends?”
“We’re not friends. My friends aren’t braindead rednecks thinking the world is their own private Wild West.”
“What am I doing here?”
He stopped ranting, and the line went silent for a lot longer than was comfortable.
“Milo, what am I doing here?” I asked again.
“What do you mean? You brought it to us. Or have you forgotten?”
“No, but—” I had been afraid of asking because I was sure he had already covered everything with Paris. This was worse. I tried another way of going at it. “Things are muddy here. A lot is happening in this town, and I need to know if we’re doing the same jobs. You and me.”
“What’s going on?”
“You first. Give me some clarity. Help me think things through.”
“You told me your friend, your—contact there, was concerned about the death of the former chief. When the city council hired the replacement, and he was killed, it was hard to ignore.”
Two words stood out there. Milo put a weird emphasis on “friend.” And “concerned” seemed way too small an idea when you talk about two cops being killed.
“Yeah,” I said. “Have you thought about my brother’s death?”
“Okay, yes, I get it. And you’re right: your brother was murdered. There was an impact on the skull above the right eye. It could have been a gun butt. His throat was slit. Someone making sure but doing it quiet. The fire was probably to cover things up. He was dead before the fire. There is no doubt about that. But he had his own issues. There was nothing specific to tie his death to what you were looking at. If someone is killing top cops at Lansdale, you would be the target, not Longview Moody.”
It’s probably a selfish and self-absorbed admission, but until that moment, I had never considered the idea that Paris had been killed because of who he was, not who I was.
“Look,” Milo said. “I know this work is not your kind of thing, but cop murder and cartel activity puts that whole town at risk. Keep your eyes open and your shit tight. You dig what I’m sayin’?”
“See, that’s the thing. I do, and I don’t.”
There was a sigh on the other end of the phone that said a lot about what Milo thought about me. None of it was good.
There were a lot more questions I wanted to ask. I didn’t. I was trapped between my lie and a hard place. I couldn’t get the information I needed from him without telling why I didn’t know the things I should. I changed directions. “Tell me about the DEA.”
“DEA?” He echoed the initials slowly, putting extra meaning into each letter. “Why?” His question was like a warning, a sign in small lettering standing in the middle of a big space that read “Minefield.” By the time you could read it, you’d be in the middle.
I backed out. “Never mind,” I said. “This part of the border is crawling with them.”
“Stay away, and don’t involve them,” Milo told me. “The last thing I need is a pissing match between us and them. You just concentrate on finding out why cops keep getting killed.”
I got off the phone after that. Then I spent a chunk of time hiding in my office trying to figure out how to do a job I had no business doing. I was saved, or at least distracted, by a knock on the door.
“Come on in,” I called, assuming it would be one of the cops. It was Bascom Wood, the fat man from the night before.
“Chief Tindall.” He came in and pushed the door closed with his back. “I told you I would come visit.”
“You told me you would give me a day or two.”
He pursed his lips and seemed to consider what I’d said. “I needed to talk to you.” One of his chubby ringed fingers flicked out toward an empty chair. Without waiting, he claimed it. “We need to talk.” It sounded like a line from a movie.
“What about?”
“You know.” The statement was without subtlety or added meaning. Bascom Wood was certain.
So was I. “What do you want?”
“To know who I’m speaking with first.”
I didn’t trust him. How could I? But he knew. “Chief Paris Tindall,” I said. “You confirmed that last night. To your friend.”
“Maybe a mistake. One I can correct in the light of day.”
“Look, Bascom.” When I said his name, I saw his nose crinkle. “Councilman,” I corrected.
He liked that better. “You cut your hair. It makes a difference. You look even more like him.” Councilman Wood was less agitated than he had been the night before.
“Whatever mistake you think you made—there’s no reason to correct it until you know you have to. Is there?”
“Chief Tindall.” He said the title and name in that same movie-drama kind of way. Either he was accusing me or accommodating me. “Would you be a member of the Drug Enforcement Agency?”
I snorted a little in surprise and distaste. “No.”
“You sound like you mean it.”
“DEA Agent Stackhouse left here not long ago.”
“And?”
“And he wasn’t happy. Neither was I. They let go a man who tried to kill me.”
“I heard he had a brother.”
I didn’t say anything. I kept my gaze set to his and didn’t blink.
Councilman Wood did. “But you’re a cop.” He said it as a statement. It was a question.
“You think they would have dumped me in here if I wasn’t?”
“FBI?”
I didn’t answer.
“ATF?” He wiped beads of sweat from under his nose with a ringless finger. “CIA?”
“The CIA is not a law enforcement agency, Councilman Wood.”
Bascom Wood nodded knowingly. He looked like a poker player who had caught someone in a bluff. “No. But things are past that here, aren’t they? Laws. Enforcement. Maybe even sides.”
“Tell me about the man you were with last night.”
“You will be hearing from Simon without me getting in the middle.”
“I have questions.”
“I’m sure you do, Chief. I’m sure you do.” Mr. Wood stood and rubbed under his nose again. “I don’t know if we can work together.”
“What’s that mean?”
<
br /> “Lansdale isn’t a town. It’s a small boat. And everyone has their own paddle in the water.”
“That doesn’t help me understand anything.”
“Until I know we’re paddling the same direction…”
“What direction?”
His eyes brightened with decision. He opened the door and spoke loudly. “Chief Tindall.”
Faces in the front office turned to look.
“I’m glad we got to talk again,” the councilman went on. “I’m looking forward to working with you.” He extended a hand but didn’t come forward.
I came around the desk to stand with him in the open door. We shook. His grip was clammy but firm.
“Since we can’t judge each other by who we are,” he whispered, “we’ll have to judge by what the other does.” He let go of my hand and grinned as he turned to go through the door. “Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.” Bascom Wood waved at officers and citizens as he sauntered to the exit.
Two of the cops he waved at were on the way out the door themselves. Gutiérrez and her partner, Hector, nodded at the big man as he left. She turned to look at me. He, deliberately, looked at the floor when I caught his eye. Hector didn’t want to look at me, and I figured the reason had to be the new shiner around his eye. Two and two got together with some other things kicking around my head, and it added up.
“Chief,” Gutiérrez said, stepping back from the exit. “Getting a lot of work done this morning?” The sarcasm was friendly but I ignored it.
“What are you two up to?” I asked, looking straight at Hector.
After an uncomfortable moment of silence while she waited for her partner to answer, Gutiérrez finally said, “We’re going out to a domestic. A frequent flyer.”
“You stay and cover for me. I’ll go with Officer…”
Hector squared his shoulders and the line of his mouth. He looked straight into my eyes and held his gaze. It was not a friendly look. “Alazraqui,” he said. The tone of his voice perfectly matched his eyes. He offered his hand.
I kept my stare on his eyes and my hands at my side.
“Hector Alazraqui,” he finished, letting his hand drop.
Gutiérrez watched what passed between us, and again, when things seemed too silent for her, she interjected. “Most of us just call him Heck.”
I nodded. “I thought they might.” His continued look at me was a dare, an argument he’d started without me that he was dying to continue to my face. It would be continued, I decided, but later. “You drive.”
The cruiser and its air conditioner locked out the dry heat and gritty wind of the day. It did the same for the sound of the road, leaving us too close for anyone’s comfort, two antagonistic peas in a cold and quiet pod. I looked out the window and let the atmosphere do the work. It wasn’t that I wanted him to talk. I wanted him ready to talk. I think it would have worked too if the town was larger. As it was, we went out, curving around the Desert Drop and up a hill. Behind the yucca and mesquite was an area that had recently been bulldozed flat and planted with cheap trailers. It was the largest expanse of mobile homes I had ever seen in my life. The other developments I’d seen around town had been planted with at least a small bit of care. This one looked like a war cemetery laid out in a rush to cover over the leaving behind. Between the prefab bits of heaven, there were no plants of any kind. The mobile homes, none of them skirted and many still resting on tires, looked just as lifeless as the community they occupied.
“What’s this?” I asked. Hector jumped. Even to me, my voice sounded loud after the silence of the drive. “‘Possum walk over your grave?” I asked.
His answer to that was a renewal of the earlier hard looks. When he turned back to the road, he said, “Tin City.”
“Tin? Like sheet metal?”
“Yep. Developers putting in all the big stuff out closer to the National Park bought this land for nothing. They put in trailers and rent them to their own workers. It sucks their earnings back into their boss’s pockets and keeps them close enough to work but far enough away not to spoil the view.”
He pulled up in front of a trailer. It was one of a hundred clones parked in rows.
“You sound like you don’t approve,” I said.
“Do you?” He asked, looking at me again. The look answered his own question. He assumed I would approve of the modern-day model of the company store. “Whatever.” He pushed the shifter into park and opened the door. When he stepped out, heat rushed into the car.
“Hang on,” I said to Hector’s back as he walked to the trailer’s steps. He didn’t turn or respond at all. He was already knocking by the time I had closed the car door. When I reached the bottom of the steps, he was passing through the screen door. He let it slam closed behind him, the aluminum smacking and then rattling loudly.
I didn’t knock. I pulled the still-vibrating screen door open and stepped in. The only one in the room who looked at me was the slight, dark woman with bruises old and new on her face. She wasn’t pretty, but it was a hard thing to look good after a beating and harder still after a lifetime of them. Her face was a map of choices in men that showed only one ending. The man, her partner, was sitting in a reclining chair that was more rip than vinyl. His face was in his hands, and he was staring at Hector’s boots.
“You know how it is,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothin’. It was just an accident.”
“The neighbors heard the accident going on for twenty minutes,” Hector told him.
“It’s between us. Ain’t nobody’s business but ours—me and Becky—and you don’t hear us complaining or making a fuss, do you?” He lifted his face from his hands to look at Becky.
Hector turned to her and said, “This will keep happening until you choose to make a change. You can get counseling.” He held out a small card.
Becky shook her head.
“Will you press charges this time?”
Again, Becky shook her head; then she looked at me. Having a stranger witness this ritual seemed to be the worst part of it for her.
“You a new cop?” the guy in the chair asked.
“This is the new chief,” Hector said without turning to either him or me. Becky looked around at the mess surrounding us. She was more embarrassed to have someone she considered important see her house than to see the state she was in.
“Wouldn’t it be usual to get them apart and talk to them separately?” I asked Hector. “Maybe putting her on the spot in front of the bastard who treats her like a punching bag is not the best way to offer help.”
“The fuck?” Becky’s husband glared at me and started to rise on shaky legs. “You can’t—”
“I can.” I pushed him back, and he collapsed back into the chair. When he did, I caught the strong odor of booze. If it came from his huffing breath or from the stained batting of his seat, I couldn’t tell.
“All we can do is talk,” Hector said. “And offer help. She doesn’t want help. I’ve offered till I was blue. And I’ve been here eight times in less than two months.”
“Is that true?” I asked Becky. “You don’t want help? Or are you just afraid that this is what you get in life? He’s the best you deserve?”
Hector looked at me with a kind of horrified rage. I was doing the wrong things the wrong way. He was wondering just how bad I would make things. Becky looked at me too. There was something different in her eyes. It might not have been actual hope, but it was something that said she didn’t deserve her life.
“Hang on…” Hector groped for what to call me. He knew I wasn’t Paris. “Chief,” he finally said. It looked like the word had a sour-milk taste in his mouth. “I don’t know how you think…” He stopped and thought about what he was saying. He looked at the man and the woman listening in and pulled himself back from what he wanted to say. Instead, more calmly, he said, “This isn’t how we do it. I hope you know it. I hope you know how wrong what you’re thinking about can be.”
I smiled at him.
At his understanding. I grinned, in fact, and then I turned to the man on the recliner. “Take her outside and talk about options, Officer Alza…” It was my turn to stumble over his name. “Alza…”
“Alazraqui,” he finished for me.
“Easy for you to say.” I was only half joking. The man in the chair looked like he was going to laugh, but the warning in my look stopped that.
“But—” Hector started.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “Things are going to work out here.” I had never stopped looking at the man, who was now cringing back into his chair a little.
“Come outside with me, Mrs. Padilla.” Hector took her arm and urged her toward the door.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he answered, but there was a lot of doubt in his voice. “They’re just going to talk.” They went out the door, and Hector had the sense to pull the main door shut. I heard the screen slap and rattle again in its frame.
“Gonna do the tough-guy bit, huh?” the guy in the chair asked. There was a false sound to his bravado. The smug tone, however, seemed genuine and completely natural to him. “I know you can’t touch me.”
“You sound sure of yourself.”
“’Course I am. You want to scare someone, you don’t send the chief of police.”
“Why’s that?”
“Chiefs always have something to lose. They like the rules. You want someone scared, you send one of the Indians.”
“What’s your name?”
“Padilla, Rand Padilla.”
“Has that happened to you, Mr. Padilla?”
“What?”
“Has anyone come around trying to scare you? Anyone from the Lansdale Police Department?”
He grinned like he understood something and scooched forward in the chair. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that boy out there and his big grain-fed bitch got a little pushy. That what’s going on? The new guy comin’ in like Santa Claus making his list?”
“Okay, they got tough with you. What happened?”
“You know what happened. I work for the Machados, and the Machados own this town.”
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