“And you saw him go in there?” I said.
Stoma nodded. “With that colored fellow. The one with the diamond grill, the one that talks like he’s from England.”
I turned back around and slumped my shoulders.
Tremont never left. He was in the Iris all along.
- CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR -
We didn’t take Stoma Steve to Burger King like we’d promised. Instead we dropped him off at the jail.
Literally.
Piper drove slowly by the intake entrance as I climbed in the back and tossed Stoma out the rear door. The car never stopped.
He was still in his jail whites, still cuffed. He rolled a few times and ended up in the gutter. Hopefully, somebody would find him and get him where he belonged.
I shut the back door, and we drove to the Iris Apartments.
Once there, Piper parked in a handicap spot, and we strode to the building to where Tremont’s unit was, the one he shared with his grandmother.
The courtyard was empty, no thugs standing around drinking beer. Nobody acting tough.
Piper rapped on the door of the grandmother’s place.
No answer.
She hit harder.
I peered through the window.
One of the curtains was open a fraction, giving me a view of where the sofa had been.
“It’s empty,” I said.
“Now what?”
I kicked in the door.
“That’s one option,” she said. “Not necessarily my first choice, but hey, I can go with the flow.”
I stepped inside.
The apartment was empty, furniture and personal items gone. In the kitchen, there was nothing in the refrigerator except a box of baking soda.
“She’s an old lady with no money,” I said. “Where could she be?”
The manager’s office was in the front building, a ten-by-ten cube that smelled like copier toner and cigarette smoke.
The manager, a hard-looking woman in her sixties with a Misty Ultra Slim 120 dangling from her lip, told us that Alice Simpson had left no forwarding address.
“Any guesses where she might have moved to?” I said.
The manager shook her head. “I’m not sure she even knew. Most days she couldn’t tell you where she lived even if she was standing in her living room.”
“When did she leave?” Piper asked.
The woman blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “Three, four days ago.”
“Who moved her?” I said. “She had to have help, right? Especially with the dementia.”
“Some moving company. I don’t remember the name.” The woman shrugged. “Maybe you could ask that Mexican guy.”
“What Mexican guy?” Piper said.
“That one that was always around. He worked for the city or something.”
Piper shook her head, muttered under her breath.
“They were together on the day she moved out?” I asked.
The woman nodded.
“Thanks.” I headed toward the door.
“The old lady, Mrs. Simpson. She said something about the ocean.” The manager lit another Misty. “She and the kid wanted to see the beach.”
“What kid?” Piper said.
“Her grandson. The one that lived with her.”
The office got very still except for the cigarette smoke curling upward. Piper and I looked at each other.
“Her grandson was with her?” I said. “When she moved?”
The woman nodded again.
“He ran away a lot. Used to hide in those vacant units on the ground floor.” She coughed, a deep rattle like marbles in a can. “Had to chase him out a bunch of times.”
“Did his grandmother know he used to hide out there?” Piper said.
“I told you. She didn’t know what year it is most days.”
One of those ground-floor units was where I had encountered Lysol’s girlfriend trying to buy drugs. Sawyer, that was her name. She died in the mysterious explosion a few blocks away, the one that left Lysol Alvarez missing, presumed dead.
Tremont had been hiding in plain sight. Staying at the stash house. He would have made a perfect scout for the crew that ran the Iris, a little off, so no one suspected him of anything.
Or maybe they just let him stay there. Who knows?
Piper and I stepped outside.
“They’ve left, Jon. Out of our jurisdiction, so to speak.”
I didn’t say anything.
She touched my arm. “Let it go.”
“I knew the kid’s father.” I pulled a disposable smartphone from my pocket. “I need to find him.”
The smartphone had an app that was connected to the databases used by law enforcement. Theo Goldberg had allowed me to have access. I was glad to find that the access had yet to expire.
I ran the same search I’d been performing the past few days—Raul Delgado, his social, DOB, last known address, et cetera.
Nothing. Again.
Then I tried Alice Simpson. No results.
“He’s a cop with a lot of money,” Piper said. “He can disappear pretty easily.”
“Do you think the kid’s with him?”
Piper nodded.
“Do you think he’s safe?”
“Safer than here.” She massaged her stomach.
“You okay?”
“I feel like crap.” Her face was pale. “Let’s stop by the drugstore on the way—”
She put a hand to her mouth, then ran around the corner of the building. A moment later, a retching sound.
I dashed after her.
She was leaning over, hands to her stomach, a pool of bile at her feet.
“What’s wrong, Piper? Talk to me.”
“Nothing.” She waved me off. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You think it’s food poisoning? Something you ate?”
She didn’t reply.
I put an arm around her shoulder. “Let’s find a pharmacy.”
She nodded.
I said, “Maybe an antacid will help.”
“I doubt it.” She looked in my eyes for a few seconds.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I don’t think an antacid is gonna help what I’ve got.”
I didn’t reply, my mind racing with the implications.
“When I broke up with Raul. Couple months ago.” She said, “I shouldn’t a quit taking the pill.”
“The pill? What pill are you talking about?”
“The pill-pill, you idiot.”
My mouth was hanging open. We’d been together since then, several times, the last being in her rented house right before she’d gone to ground.
“Let’s go to the drugstore, Jon.” She took my hand, pulled me toward the car.
Port Isabel, Texas
Cesar Diaz considers himself the mayor of Jefferson Street. He watches over the homes on his block like a shepherd does his flock. Quietly, without seeming to. Missing nothing.
Jefferson is a tranquil residential street that dead-ends in the marina. The houses are old and small, occupied by working-class people or retirees.
You can’t see the ocean from his house on Jefferson, but you can smell the salt and hear the gulls trill overhead.
The marina is a few blocks away from Cesar’s place, South Padre Island maybe a three-minute drive over intercoastal waterway via the Queen Isabella Causeway.
Cesar is sixty-three years old, an ex-Navy mechanic and former letter carrier for the postal service. He’s worked hard all his life and is now content to pass his time as an observer of the activity on Jefferson Street.
He sits on the front porch of his wood-frame house, drinking coffee in the morning, beer as the afternoon wears on, watching
people come and go.
The stucco house across the street from Cesar’s is set back from the curb, under a pair of palm trees, a “For Rent” sign at the end of the sidewalk. A porch runs the length of the front, a swing at either end. Cracked shells and weeds make up most of the yard, encased in a waist-high fence that matches the material of the house.
Port Isabel is near the Rio Grande Valley, a peculiar slice of North America that is a strained mixture of two vastly different cultures, a place where people keep to themselves and don’t ask many questions.
This is why Cesar doesn’t immediately walk across the street and welcome the mixed-race family that moved into the stucco house one hot summer night.
So many strange occurrences on the border, things that don’t seem to fit together.
Men are enemies one day, friends the next.
People drop out of view regularly, only to surface in another town with a different name. Usually. More often than not, they disappear and are never heard from again.
Hard to tell what is normal in these trying times.
Maybe the strangeness is due to the heat. Perhaps it’s the brujas, the Mexican witches who sell potions and spells from their shacks by the Rio Grande.
Or maybe it’s the narco-traffickers, the shadowy people no one likes to talk about.
Who’s to say?
In any event, Cesar doesn’t bother the new arrivals. He just watches.
Two African Americans—a boy in his early teens, and a woman in her late seventies. And a handsome Latino man with hard eyes and a trim physique.
The man is the one who walks with the boy to the marina every day to look at the boats.
They stop at a little shack by the Catholic church for tacos and coffee, and then they continue on to a bench by the water, where they watch fishing trawlers leave for the Gulf.
A few days after they move in, another, even odder pair joins them.
Cesar sees them arrive one morning as he is reading the Brownsville Herald, a story from Dallas about a group of babies found in an abandoned house not far from where Bonnie and Clyde grew up.
The new arrivals come in a late-model sedan, a Japanese import, gray and nondescript.
A pretty woman in her late thirties, a Caucasian, with hair the color of mahogany. Her companion is a light-skinned black man in his forties, who walks with a slight limp. The man is dangerous-looking, the type of person you cross the street to avoid.
Cesar watches them get out and then continues reading. It’s a sidebar story about the skeletal remains of a young man found on the ranch of the Dallas vigilante killer, a former police officer named Robert McKee.
The authorities had been alerted to the existence of the makeshift orphanage by an anonymous call from a cell tied to McKee’s account. At the moment, they were trying to piece together the connection, but were not having much success.
The light-skinned black man and the Latino do not greet each other. They keep their distance from one another like two tomcats aching for a fight.
They all go inside and after a while the lights in the stucco house click off, one by one.
The next morning, as Cesar is having his second cup of coffee, the black man leaves the house, gets into the gray import, and drives away.
Cesar never sees him again.
The woman stands on the porch and watches him go. After a few moments, the Latino man joins her.
By the way they stand, Cesar surmises they are lovers or used to be. The status of their relationship now is hard to determine, though Cesar spins all kinds of wild tales in his head, most based on the soaps his wife watches on Univision.
Perhaps they are bank robbers on the lam. Or spies hiding from the government. Cesar wishes he could ask, but that is not the way on the border.
For the next few weeks life is serene on Jefferson Street.
Cesar and the man nod hello to each other and occasionally visit about the weather and how the redfish are running.
The man tells Cesar his name but it is so obviously a fake that Cesar only thinks of him as the guy across the street.
He has family nearby, that much is obvious. Cousins in Brownsville and Matamoros. From time to time, the cousins come over and there’s a big cookout in the backyard of the stucco house.
Smoked brisket. Ears of corn on the grill. Coolers of beer. Bottles of white zinfandel.
The old black lady stays inside for these events, her health precarious.
The man and the boy seem to enjoy themselves, but the pretty white woman sits by herself off in a corner of the yard, drinking her wine. She smiles when people approach, but by the way she holds her shoulders, Cesar can sense her sadness.
One evening, as a get-together is in full swing, the woman storms out of the backyard and sits on the low wall in front of the stucco house.
The shadows are long, so she doesn’t see Cesar on his porch.
A few moments later, the Latino man joins her.
He is angry; she is drunk. The predictable happens. They argue, voices raised, fingers pointed.
Cesar hears certain words that are louder than others.
Wayne and Junie.
And, from her: Hannah! Why can’t you fucking say Hannah?
He doesn’t know if those are the real names of the couple or not. He really doesn’t know anything. After a few moments, the man and woman look up and down the block as if suddenly realizing they are arguing in public. They go inside and the party breaks up soon after.
As the months go by it becomes increasingly evident that the woman doesn’t fit in.
The neighborhood is not to her liking. More and more she comes back from the mall in Brownsville with shopping bags from expensive stores, places that the other residents of Jefferson Street would never consider patronizing.
She drinks more.
A glass of wine on the porch in the afternoon becomes a bottle or sometimes two.
The man is concerned; this much is evident. He takes her to church but she doesn’t like the ritual, Cesar hears via another argument—the priest in his vestments, the confession booths, the candles.
Her downward spiral continues.
There is a car crash and a fight, each delivering and receiving blows. Both the crash and the fight are smoothed over with the local police by generous amounts of hundred-dollar bills that the man has in abundance, according to a friend of Cesar’s who works at the city.
Finally, in the fall, nearly six months after they moved in, the woman goes away. One day she is there, the next not.
The man and the boy and the old lady remain.
Cesar wonders if perhaps she joined the black man, but he knows better than to ask.
This is the border country, and people disappear all the time.
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -
Creating a book for public consumption is an oddly communal effort. The raw material may have been mine but the finished product is the result of a group effort, a dedicated team of professionals who are as much responsible for what you hold in your hand as the author is. To that end I would like to thank the incredible team at Thomas & Mercer: Alison Dasho, Jacque Ben-Zekry, Gracie Doyle, Alan Turkus, Tiffany Pokorny, and David Downing.
I would also like to offer my gratitude to Jan Blankenship, Amy Bourrett, Victoria Calder, Paul Coggins, Peggy Fleming, Fanchon Knott, Brooke Malouf, Clif Nixon, David Norman, Glenna Whitley, and Max Wright.
Special thanks to Richard Abate for helping me navigate the waters leading to this book being published.
And finally, last but never least, thanks to my wife, Alison, for all her love, patience, and support.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Photo © 2013 Nick McWhirter
Harry Hunsicker, a fourth-generation native of Dallas, Texas, is the former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America. H
is debut novel, Still River, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America, and his short story Iced was nominated for a Thriller Award by the International Thriller Writers. Hunsicker lives in Dallas, where he works as a commercial real estate appraiser and occasionally speaks on creative writing. Shadow Boys is his fifth novel.
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