South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery)

by Minerva Koenig

Maines was right. Despite his leftist politics, my handsome boss was well-liked, especially by the local ladies. Attendance had dropped off sharply after he and Maines had left town.

  “So where is he?” I asked.

  Maines shrugged in response.

  Irritated, I said, “Look, you obviously made it in and out of Cuba in one piece, which means mission accomplished. Take off the international-man-of-mystery suit already.”

  Maines chuckled but didn’t crack. I gave up and settled back in the soft leather seat. I’d get it out of him eventually.

  The rolling, rocky landscape of Azula County gave way to flatter, softer, brush country after a while, covered in long brass-colored grass and dotted with puffy chartreuse mesquite trees. It always killed me, what they call “trees” in Texas. Even the largest oaks and pecans seem stunted and misshapen in comparison to the big California pines and redwoods. Maybe that’s what made the sky seem so much bigger here. It was as if you could see clear from horizon to horizon with nothing to block your view. Being under it, even inside the car, felt like a sort of mental vacuum cleaning. My head quieted down, and the vise that had become a permanent part of my digestive system started to loosen up. After a while I fell asleep.

  I came up out of a dream about dancing skeletons to find the top half of a canine stretched out on the console next to me, chin on his paws. The dog lifted his head and looked at me as I opened my eyes, but, unlike my recent feline experience, didn’t say anything. There was a manila folder in my lap.

  “Case notes,” Maines told me. “We’ll stop for something to eat in a few minutes and go over them.”

  It was late afternoon, and my bladder was full. I glanced at the dog. “He’s been holding it all this time?”

  “We stopped a couple of hours ago.”

  I wiped a hand down over my face. “Geez.”

  “You didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out. Been burning the midnight oil?”

  “Hey, you live my life for the last six months and see how much rest you get.”

  The dog went on alert as I reached for my bag behind the seat, lifting his short triangular ears and sitting up.

  “Steve,” Maines said to him.

  I laughed. “Steve?”

  “My kids named him.”

  The dog scooted back off the console, and I groped for my makeup case. “I’m guessing they’re not living at home anymore, or they’d be babysitting him.”

  Maines nodded but didn’t offer any details. I tried to imagine him as a husband and father and drew a blank. I always do with him. He’s one of the few people my radar won’t penetrate. He’s got a lead-lined soul, that guy.

  My compact mirror showed no drool marks or boogers hanging out anywhere, but the sleep hadn’t done my face any good. I’d turned thirty-nine on New Year’s Day and looked every minute of it. Which isn’t to say I was ready to start a plastic-surgery fund. My face had always looked too wholesome for my taste. I liked the edges that age was giving it.

  The landscape whipping by outside was low and rocky now, pockmarked here and there with stubby eruptions of sun-browned, spiky brush. Every now and then an anemic-looking tree appeared, shading some skinny goats or cows, but there was little other vegetation. The air felt dry as a saltine cracker.

  After about ten minutes, Maines started to slow down, and a gas station-slash-store came into view up ahead. We pulled into the gravel parking lot in front and got out of the car.

  Maines handed me Steve’s lead and angled his head at a group of picnic tables shaded by something that looked vaguely tree-like. The dog led me there and watered the stumpy foliage, then flopped down on the dry grass underneath. Maines returned with some sandwiches and drinks, a bowl of water, and a can of dog food. He cranked the latter open with the Leatherman dangling from his key ring while the dog slurped down the water, then put the contents into the empty bowl.

  We sat down and unwrapped our sandwiches. Maines opened the folder, which I’d brought with me.

  “Miles Darling, M.D.,” he said, pointing his chin at a photo clipped to the inside cover. “He runs the clinic.”

  I took the photo off the clip for a closer look. Darling was pale and anemic-looking, with dark, thinning hair and steel-rimmed glasses pinching the bridge of a somewhat long nose. Clean-shaven, with an expensive tie under his white lab coat.

  “He’s got an American medical license?” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, had. Set up shop down there after losing it. Wrote one too many scrips for that banned diet drug. Fen-whatever.”

  There was another photo underneath the doctor’s, a head-and-shoulders shot of a youngish brunette. “Is this our missing person?”

  Maines nodded, chewing and swallowing hastily to say, “Rachael Pestozo. Divorced last year. Quit her job in November to move back home to Arizona. Never showed up.”

  I was looking at Rachael’s eyes, which were the same muddy-bottom hazel as my own, but with an epicanthic fold.

  “Where in Arizona?”

  “Sells,” he said. “It’s on an Indian reservation down there.”

  “Oh, she’s Tohono O’odham,” I murmured, peering more closely at the photo.

  Maines’s face went surprised.

  “My mom is Chiricahua Apache,” I explained. “I grew up in Florence, about a hundred miles north of Sells. Sells is the capital of the O’odham Nation.”

  Maines’s sandy eyebrows rose a few more millimeters.

  “I take after my dad,” I told him.

  “He musta been a really short Viking or something.”

  “He’s Finnish.”

  Maines kept watching me, curiosity flickering in his pale eyes. Since he was so fond of keeping me in the dark, I let him swing. My family history was none of his business.

  “So how’d you end up with the case, if her people are in Arizona?” I said.

  “They called Benny looking for her. He doesn’t have the manpower. Sent ’em to me.”

  “Did they know she was going down to the clinic?”

  “No. Found it in her Internet history. She tracks down there, but not back out. Nobody’s been able to get hold of her since.”

  Granted, I couldn’t see Rachael’s whole body in the picture, but her sharp jawline and only slightly rounded shoulders made me ask, “Why did she think she needed a lap-band?”

  “The ex,” Maines said. “Was always on her about her weight. Guess the divorce drove the point home.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  A cop cruiser with a gold insignia on the door reading TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY crunched into the parking lot. Two burly guys in matching tan uniforms got out and went into the store.

  The hair on the back of my neck got busy. We’d only been gone for half a day, so I doubted that Benny knew I was AWOL yet, but he’d figure it out pretty quickly, and the troopers would remember seeing me with Maines. I just had to hope that I’d be well into Mexico by then.

  While I was thinking all this, Steve paused eating to give me a questioning look. Apparently I wasn’t the only mammal on this mission with good radar. I lifted my eyebrows at the dog, resisting an urge to put my finger to my lips, and he went back to his food.

  “Darling does a little cosmetic surgery on the side,” Maines said around a mouthful of bread and cheese. “Face-lifts, nose jobs. Not actually bad at it. Seen some of his work. Majority of the clinic income is the bariatric stuff, though.”

  “Does he do all the work in-house?” I asked Maines, keeping a furtive eye on the store door.

  “He’s got admitting privileges at the hospital in Ojinaga. Mexican side, just across town from the clinic.” Maines crumpled up his sandwich wrapper. “Can’t get ’em to call me back. Not that it matters. The clinic gave me the ‘medical confidentiality’ runaround. Can’t imagine the hospital is any better.”

  “So what makes you think I can get anything more out of them than you did?”

  “I need a read on this Darling character from someone
who’s got better feelers than me,” he said. “That’ll tell me what my next move is.”

  I couldn’t believe he was willing to haul me eight hundred miles just for that, but the troopers had come out of the store and were headed our way, so I put my interrogation on hold.

  They were the multicultural set—one black, one white—both well over six feet tall, and built like large appliances.

  “Good-lookin’ dog you got there,” the white guy said as they sat down at a nearby table. “What is that, a pointer?”

  “Probably got some pointer in him,” Maines replied, with that negligent drawl that men always seemed to use with each other in these parts. “Mostly mutt, though, I’m guessing.”

  “You seen those DNA kits they got now for dogs?” the trooper chuckled, shaking his head. “My wife is all hot to do one for ours. Get him on the social register.”

  “Don’t matter what DNA he got, he can tree a squirrel,” his partner put in.

  “Got that right,” Maines agreed.

  I’d closed the folder and was trying to look polite but casual while I finished my lunch.

  “Y’all kinda far from home out here,” the white trooper remarked, indicating the Azula County dealer insignia on Maines’s Crown Vic.

  My stomach tightened up a notch. Steve looked at me again, and Maines muttered to him, “Go do your business.”

  The dog loped out to the grass behind the picnic tables, sniffing the ground.

  “Got a case down near the border,” Maines told the troopers. He flipped open his wallet to show them his PI license. “Missing person.”

  The white trooper shook his head with a silent whistle. “It’s a hornet’s nest down there, brother. Lotta missing people.” He glanced at me. “A lot of ’em women.”

  “She’s my op,” Maines told them, with what passed for a grin with him. “I pity the fool.”

  They all chuckled like they knew something about me that I didn’t. I smiled gamely; the troopers weren’t showing any interest in us aside from the typical roadside camaraderie, and I didn’t want to give them a reason to look closer. It was bad enough they knew where we were going.

  The dog came back from fertilizing the flora and looked at us expectantly. I got up to throw out my trash and didn’t sit back down.

  “You ready?” I asked Maines, taking care to keep a pleasant expression on for the cops.

  Maines made a skeptical face. “Didn’t want to come, now she’s all hot to get on it.”

  More chuckling. I kept my mouth shut. Maines got up and nodded to the troopers, clipping Steve’s lead back on, and we headed for the car.

  “Seems like your opinion of cops would have improved some, considering,” Maines said as we got in and buckled up.

  Relieved that he hadn’t read anything more into my desire for a hasty departure, I shot back, “Considering what? That you guys did such a great job keeping me out of harm’s way last year?”

  “Hey, that was your own fault,” he said.

  Before I could return fire, he went on. “There’s a hot springs about forty miles from the clinic. On the American side. It’s sort of an unofficial outpatient recovery room for U.S. citizens too chicken to spend the night in Mexico. We’ll stay there overnight. Beat the bushes some. Unless we strike gold that way, you’ll hit the clinic the next morning.”

  He paused to check traffic, then pulled back out onto the two-lane blacktop. “It’s a walk-in deal. You show up, get examined, talk to Darling. Then he sets up an appointment for the work.”

  I frowned. “What, you don’t have to make an appointment the first time? That’s pretty relaxed for someone supposedly trying to stay off the radar.”

  “Probably does it so he can sniff people out ahead of time. Make sure they’re not gonna turn him in.”

  “Did Rachael make it over that first hurdle?”

  “Dunno.”

  Steve was listening, turning his head to look at each of us as we spoke, with his eerily intelligent brown eyes.

  “Did you train him to do that?” I asked Maines, feeling a little unnerved by it.

  “Came that way. He was a rescue.” Maines bent his left leg and set his elbow on his knee. “Damn good watchdog, I’ll tell you that. Can’t get a thing by him.” The corners of his dour mouth twitched. “You’re a lot alike.”

  “No, we’re not,” I snapped, Connie’s remark from the previous day slapping me in the face again. “I’m a human being.”

  “I just mean you’ve got an aptitude, that’s all,” he said, lifting the hand between us. “It could be an asset, if you used it right.”

  Why did the whole damned world suddenly have such an investment in my future?

  “I’d say the fact that I’m still sucking air means I’m using it pretty right already.”

  Maines didn’t answer, so I returned to the subject at hand. “What do you think happened to Rachael?”

  “I can tell you what I’m hoping,” Maines said. “I’m hoping she got an infection or something and is laid up in the hospital, with Darling trying to keep it quiet so he don’t get sued.”

  “You’re assuming she’s still alive?”

  Maines glanced my way. “I said ‘hoping.’ Nobody’s heard from her for almost a month.”

  “Nobody’s heard from me for almost thirty-six,” I pointed out.

  “She had no reason to want to disappear.”

  “Do you know that for a fact? Maybe she’s running from that toxic ex of hers, or something else.”

  “She told her people she was coming home,” Maines said. “Don’t make any sense to worry them, if she wasn’t going to show.”

  He had a point. I settled back to think, but with no obvious answers to keep it entertained, the brain eventually wandered to other subjects.

  “OK, so tell me about Cuba,” I instructed after we’d covered another twenty miles. The road had turned completely flat and straight now, stretching out ahead of us into a bare gray-and-brown eternity.

  Maines cut his eyes at me. “After you’ve held up your end of the deal.”

  “You said you’d tell me on the drive.”

  “I didn’t specify coming or going.” He was watching the road with his head against the headrest, hat tipped forward. The visible corner of his mouth was twitching at me.

  “Enjoying yourself?” I said.

  “A little,” he admitted.

  “Laugh while you can,” I advised him. “You’re going to pay up eventually, if I have to beat it out of you.”

  He didn’t reply or even look my way, just kept his eyes on the road and that smirk pasted on his face. I sat back and thought about the dead guy in my house. If things worked out the way I hoped, I’d never have to think about him again.

  CHAPTER 6

  We got to the hot springs around 10 P.M., after a bone-jarring crawl down a winding dirt track with more holes than flat places. The final hairpin ended at a small adobe cabin with several others marching up a low hill behind it. The light coming through its windows fell onto a row of metal roofs below and parallel to the cabins. Everything beyond that was darkness.

  My joints cracked as I got out. It felt good to stand up. The expansive relief of driving through the flats of West Texas had shrunk the knot in my stomach to almost nothing, and I was feeling optimistic about my plans to slip into Mexico when the time was right.

  A young man with a shaved head, dressed in red and yellow robes, came out of the first cabin to meet us. He was maybe twenty, with large dark eyes and a high-bridged nose that looked local.

  “Welcome,” he said to Maines, pressing his palms together at his chest. “Is it Mr. and Mrs. Smith?”

  I shot Maines a look as he drawled, “Sorry we’re so late.” He’d told me to wear something that would pass as a wedding ring, but I’d assumed that was for my cover at the clinic.

  “It’s not necessary to apologize,” the man said, gesturing toward the lighted cabin. “Please come in. Everything’s ready for you.”
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br />   The tiny building had a clay-tile roof and some kind of spiky gray-green plant growing in its painted window boxes. Inside, our host stepped behind a plywood counter and dragged a large ledger over, showing Maines where to sign.

  “The bathhouses are always open,” he said while Maines drove the pen across the indicated space. “The water is hottest at the end of the day.”

  Maines looked up. “That sounds good.”

  “I’m exhausted,” I said quickly. “I think I’ll just hit the sack.”

  The monk inclined his head with a smile, his eyes taking their time to follow. Something about my face seemed to interest him.

  “Please come and go as you wish. There is always someone here in the office, but we prefer not to intrude upon our guests’ time unless something is needed.”

  “Perfect,” Maines said. He touched the brim of his tan felt hat with a finger. “Number four, is it?”

  “Yes, just three doors along. You may park next to your cabin.”

  “Buddhist?” I asked on our way back to the car.

  “I guess. They run the place.”

  “I thought it was part of the clinic.”

  “They have some kind of arrangement,” Maines said, making an annoyed face. “Don’t like the smell of it, but couldn’t get to the bottom of it from home.”

  “This thing better have two beds,” I growled as we pulled up next to our cabin.

  Nothing in Maines’s face moved, but I could feel the joke coming. “Gets pretty cold at night out here.”

  “The Arctic couldn’t get cold enough.”

  Number four was just like the office, without the counter in it: one big room, with a small bathroom at the far end. The solitary double bed was covered with a colorful horse blanket, and there was a rustic chair and dresser. Steve jumped immediately onto the bed.

  “Guess we’re both sleeping on the floor,” Maines remarked.

  “You couldn’t say we were relatives or something?”

  “Didn’t want to take a chance on our story here not matching the one we’ll use at the clinic,” he said, emptying his jeans pockets onto the dresser. He was maybe ten years my senior, too young to pose as my father.

  “Man, I can feel that lithium doing its thing already,” he said.