The Feds came in, lots of them, and they took Martinez. For the next couple of days, from hospital beds in different rooms, Carpenter and I answered their questions.
On the third day, Billy Fetterman/William Cornwell showed up.
The knitted slacks were tan today and the pressed white cotton shirt had short sleeves, but he was still as dark and weathered as a strip of jerky. He wasn’t wearing a hat. Maybe he’d left it in the car.
“Hey, Billy,” I said from the bed. “How are brother Delbert and the pigs?”
He smiled. “You’re recovering, it seems. Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Why would I mind? Everybody else has.”
He lowered himself into the plastic chair and looked over at me. “I thought I’d bring you up to speed on Martinez. I felt we owed you that.”
“He’s been talking?”
“In torrents.”
“Why?”
“He seems to believe that we’ll go easy on him if he tells us what happened.”
“And will you?”
“Not likely.” He smiled. “I can’t imagine where he got the idea.”
“What’s he say about New Orleans? Who were the two men in the convertible?”
“A pair of nobodies. Small-timers from Miami. They drove up to New Orleans and met Lucero and Martinez at the site.”
“How did Lucero and Martinez fake the deaths?”
He crossed one leg over the other. He was wearing the same shiny lizard-skin boots he’d worn in Texas. “Harper was paid to drive the truck to the site, and paid for his testimony. We’ve got him, and he’s talking. The four of them, Lucero and Martinez and the small-timers, stood in the convertible and held Sylvia Miller by her arms and legs and tossed her out onto the street. Martinez says that Lucero was laughing while he did it.”
“Harper confirms that?”
“He showed up later. So he says. Martinez says otherwise.”
“Was Sylvia alive at the time?”
He shook his head. “Lucero had already broken her neck. She was out cold when he did. They’d gotten her drunk.”
And she had slipped, unknowing, from one Dark to Another.
“Then what happened?” I asked him.
“Then, according to Martinez, Lucero took out the two from Miami.”
“By himself.”
“According to Martinez. A couple of karate chops.”
“You believe Martinez?”
His square shoulders moved in a comfortable shrug. “It hardly matters, does it? He’s an accessory. He certainly didn’t try to stop Lucero. Not then, and not when Lucero worked on their faces with a baseball bat.”
“Who cut off the guy’s pinkie?”
“According to Martinez, Lucero did. With a cleaver. Then he cut off his own. He bandaged the hand up and used a few grams of cocaine as an anesthetic. Afterward, they drove to a doctor who cleaned the wound.”
“You find the doctor?”
He nodded.
“When did Harper and the truck show up?” I asked him.
“Just as Lucero was wrapping up his hand. Once again, that’s according to Harper. Martinez puts him there for the entire time.”
“So then,” I said, “after they get the bodies arranged in the car, Lucero and Martinez set the car running toward the tanker truck. It explodes, and they drive merrily away. In the car the Miami men brought.”
He nodded again.
“Pretty complicated plan,” I said.
Another nod.
I said, “And they had to pull it off quickly. They needed the confirming testimony from the guy at the gas station.”
“That’s right.”
“Kind of hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“That they did pull it off. That Lucero’s pinkie finger exactly matched the missing finger of the guy in the car. That an autopsy couldn’t determine that Sylvia’s neck was broken before she hit the ground. Or that the faces of the guys in the convertible had been smashed before the car hit the truck. And what about DNA testing?”
Smiling, he tipped his head forward slightly in agreement. “It does stretch credulity a bit, now that you mention it.”
“Uh huh. So when did you people realize that the bodies weren’t Lucero and Martinez?”
He was still smiling. “Maybe an hour after you left Texas.”
“You kept quiet about it. You never told the newspapers. You were thinking that if Lucero figured he’d gotten away with it, fooled you, he might make a mistake.”
“And he did. But you were the one who caught it. You did a good job, Croft.”
“Jeeze, Billy, thanks.”
He smiled again, but now the smile was tight.
“Tell me something,” I said.
“What?” He glanced at his watch. I’d hurt his feelings. He didn’t like sarcasm.
“Why did Lucero kill Lyle Monroe, in Denver? It was Lucero who killed him, right, and not Martinez?”
“According to Martinez it was. He claims that Monroe had promised money to Lucero, and then reneged.”
“Martinez was pretty much an innocent lamb in all this.”
“According to him.” He stood up. “Well,” he said, “it’s time for me to go, I’m afraid.”
“What does Martinez say about shooting Rita?”
“Ah,” he said, and nodded. “He does admit to firing the rifle. But he says he was aiming for you.” He smiled another tight smile. “Ironic, don’t you think?”
He seemed to feel that this was a good exit line, because he tapped his finger at his forehead, adios, and turned to leave.
Just as he reached the door, I said, “It was pretty much a win-win situation for you, wasn’t it?”
He turned. “What was?”
“The faked deaths. If you people managed to find Lucero, you could claim afterward that you hadn’t been fooled. And if Lucero managed to get away, it didn’t make any difference—he was already dead.”
He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “You’re a cynical man, Mr. Croft.”
“Yeah,” I said.
While I was still in the hospital, I received phone calls from Hector Ramirez, Norman Montoya, Ted Chartoff in Dallas, Ed Norman in L.A., and from some other people, including Mr. Niederman, the computer expert in Denver. Mr. Niederman thanked me for putting the FBI in touch with him.
Dick Jepson, from Miami, stopped by to introduce himself. At my request, he brought along something I wanted to give Carpenter. It set me back a fair amount—I had no idea that a Barbie doll, even a rare one, could cost so much.
On the day I left the hospital, I spoke with Leroy. Rita had begun to come out of the coma.
She was still on the respirator, and she would slip in and out of consciousness, but she had been lucid enough to write down questions for the nurses. The first question was “What happened?” The second question was “Joshua?”
I said good-bye to Carpenter that day, and Eugene Samson drove me back to the house in Clearwater. I picked up the Cherokee and I started the trip back.
On my second day of traveling, I spoke to Rita. She had been taken off the respirator. Her voice was threaded, sandy, and she couldn’t talk much above a whisper.
“You’re in all the newspapers,” she said. “My hero.”
“How are you?”
“Like a little baby. It’s very … frustrating. I try to say something, and sometimes I can’t come up with the right word. Things come and go.”
“I’m one of them. I’ll be there in a day or two.”
“I’ll be there. Here. I mean here.”
“Wherever. I’ll see you soon.”
I spoke with her again the next day, and the day following.
That night was the night I came home.
I sailed over the hill at La Bajada at a little after ten o’clock—too late to go to the hospital—and I saw, stretched ahead of me, the far-off twinkling lights of the city. No matter how often I complain about t
he place, the sight of those familiar lights in the darkness has always given me a lift. It was a signal that the journey was nearly over. And this time it signaled a great deal more than that.
If someone had been standing at the Cross of the Martyrs that night, looking off to the south, he would have seen my headlights as only one more droplet in the stream of lights that poured into Santa Fe.
I saw her the next morning, at eight. They had moved her from Intensive Care into a private room.
Her head was still bandaged and her skin was still whiter than it should have been. But she was sitting up, her back propped against the pillows, her arms outside the covers. She smiled at me when I came in.
I bent down and I kissed her. “Hello,” I said. Once again, I was having some difficulties with breathing.
“You look pale,” she said. “The newspapers said you’d been wounded.”
“Not badly.” I sat down on the bed, took her hand.
She smiled wryly. “Just a flesh wound?”
“The bullet bounced right off.”
She reached up and touched me, just below the stitches on my lower lip. “What’s this?”
“It’s nothing, Rita. I’m fine. How are you?”
She frowned. “I’m still disoriented sometimes. The doctor tells me that I’ll be that way for a while.”
“How will we know?”
She smiled, squeezed my hand. “Listen,” she said. Her face went very serious for a moment, as though she were concentrating with all her effort. Then she looked at me directly and said, “You did the right thing.”
“Which right thing?”
“Leroy told me what happened. And I’ve read the papers. If you hadn’t gone after them, Lucero and Martinez would’ve gotten away.”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
“Leroy told me that he gave you a hard time.”
“He was worried about you. Everyone was.”
“But you did the right thing. I want you to know that I know that.”
“I had to believe you’d come out of it. That you’d get better.”
“I know that.”
I said, “Look, I’m not supposed to stay very long. But suppose I start making some plans. For the two of us. As soon as you get out of here, as soon as you’re able, we can go away for a while. Maybe back to Cancun. Or back to Catalina. Someplace new, if you want. It’s up to you.”
She frowned again, and looked away. “This is going to be difficult.”
“What?”
Once again, she looked at me directly. “Joshua, I want you to understand that this has nothing to do with you. With us. And certainly nothing to do with your going after Lucero and Martinez.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looked away, looked back at me. “When I get better, I need to go away for a while, on my own. Without you.”
“Without me.”
“I need to be on my own for a while.”
“On your own?” I was beginning to feel like an idiot, repeating everything she said.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” she said. “Since before … this.” She moved her hand limply, to indicate the hospital room, the shooting, the two of us.
“For a long time now,” she said, “I’ve been thinking that I needed to go off and do something for myself. Being here, lying here hour after hour in this ridiculous bed, in a way that’s helped me think about it more clearly. Become more focused about it. Joshua, for most of my adult life I’ve been a part of something else. The marriage to William. The office.” She smiled. “You.”
“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a part of—”
She squeezed my hand again. “I know that. I know that. But I’ve never really had any alternative. And I need it, Joshua. It’s time for it. I need to put myself in a place where I can do something on my own. Entirely on my own. I’m not even sure yet what that place will be. But I know I have to put myself there. I know I have to find it.”
“Rita, we can talk about this when you get out of here.”
She smiled another wry smile. “I’m sure we will. But I want you to understand that I’m going to do this.”
“Leave me,” I said. “Leave Santa Fe.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. However long it takes.”
“Rita—”
“You have to understand that my feeling for you hasn’t changed.”
“Sure, that makes sense. That’d be why you want to take off.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t about you. This is about me.”
“This is not making me very happy, Rita.”
“It’s not making me happy, either. It’s going to be very difficult for me. But it’s something I have to do. Will you at least try to understand?”
I looked away. “Shit,” I said.
Once again, she squeezed my hand. “Will you at least try?”
I looked at her. “I’ll try,” I said.
But later, when I went to the office, I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would never understand.
There was a bottle of Scotch in Rita’s desk. Single malt, expensive. It had been there for months. The time was only nine-thirty, early in the day for a drink. But it was early in the day for desolation, and I was having plenty of that already.
I opened the bottle, poured myself a drink, sat down behind Rita’s desk. A film of dust lay along everything, the desktop, the computer, the keyboard.
And it lay, too, along the corridors of my heart. A film of dust and soot and bleak gray ash.
I took a sip from the drink.
I thought about the way she looked that day, years ago, when she stood in my room at the De Vargas Hotel. I thought about the way she looked that night when she walked toward me, white and sleek, through the pale light of the moon. Thought about her face, the dark eyes, the small ironic curl at the corner of her mouth. Thought about her hair, tumbling sleek and black to her shoulders, sheened like a raven’s wing.
I wouldn’t let it happen, I told myself. Somehow I would talk her out of it. I would convince her, somehow, to stay.
I took another sip.
I would convince her.
I had to convince her. I knew that being without her, being alone, was a Dark to which I could never grow accustomed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing is one of the few forms of self-abuse in which a helping hand is sometimes necessary. This book probably wouldn’t have been completed without the kind assistance of a number of people. So, thanks to Dana Bramwell in Colorado Springs; Sara Bullington, Senor Pelota, Dr. Roger Smithpeter in Santa Fe; Bill Crider in Alvin, Texas; Mike Stone in Denver; and to Susan Rose at Snoop Sisters, in Bellaire, Florida.
Thanks, also, to Janet McConnoughey, for showing me New Orleans, and to Thomas L. Touhy for the feral women.
And particular thanks to my wife, Caroline, who put up with me while I put this out.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1996 by Walter Satterthwait
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Accustomed to the Dark Page 22