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

by Minerva Koenig

  “Lithium?”

  “It’s in the water here, in the hot springs. That’s why people come down here. You soak in it, makes you feel kinda loopy. In a good way.”

  “You haven’t been in the water yet,” I pointed out.

  “No excuse, then,” he said, getting out a pair of faded blue pajamas and a small travel case. “You coming?”

  “I’m loopy enough, thanks.”

  He dropped his hat on the dresser. “Your loss.”

  I’d almost forgotten about the dog, and was surprised to feel someone watching me when I came back from inspecting the bathroom. He was still sitting in the center of the bed, wearing that attentive and slightly puzzled look that appeared to be his default expression. He lifted his long skinny tail and let it fall once, then his ears stood up. Maines’s phone, on the dresser, was buzzing.

  The caller ID told me that Benny Ramirez was on the other end. I waited for the voice-mail indicator to light up, then fiddled around until I found the access.

  “Hey, John,” Benny’s crusty young voice said. “The dentals came back on that John Doe we found out at Julia Kalas’s place the other day. It’s Orson Greenlaw.”

  Benny paused, as if Maines would know who he was talking about and be surprised, then went on.

  “Nobody reported him missing because he was supposed to have moved to D.C. to work with some political campaign up there. When he didn’t show, they just figured he’d decided he didn’t want the job and was too chicken to tell them directly. Liz is still working on it, but it looks like Greenlaw hasn’t been dead long enough for Connie to have been involved.”

  Benny took a deep breath and continued. “I’m calling because Julia mentioned that you’d asked her to help with your missing-persons case down near the border. Her gun came back neck-deep in a couple of Zetas hits in San Antonio, but I can’t find her to talk to her about it. If she’s with you, just know that she may be fixing to rabbit. She cashed a big-mother check the other day and took half in pesos. Let me know, will you? I’ve got a bulletin out for her.”

  The message ended. I turned the phone off and sat there looking at myself in the dresser mirror. Erasing it might buy me a day or two, but if Maines saw Benny’s name on his call log, it wouldn’t matter. Purging the call log would be worse than just leaving it as is. I thought about hiding the phone somewhere, but with all that cash in my bag, I didn’t want to invite a search.

  After thinking a bit more, I went into the bathroom and filled the sink, then dropped the phone in. I let it soak, then took it out and turned it on. A satisfying crackle and a black screen told me I’d successfully shorted something essential. I took the back off and dried all the parts, then put everything back together and returned the phone to the dresser.

  I folded the bed down and was asleep before I got horizontal.

  CHAPTER 7

  The awareness of a warm body next to mine startled me awake just after sunrise. It was Steve, lying with the blanket drawn up to his chin and his head on the adjoining pillow. Maines was asleep on the floor with his back to us. I was beginning to understand just how impenetrable to my radar the man really was. The comedy of tucking a dog into bed with me wasn’t something I’d have thought him able to enjoy. Maybe the lithium had kicked in during his bath.

  Steve felt me juking around and rolled over, giving a quiet whine. Maines slurred, “I’m coming, boy. Just a minute.”

  “I’ll take him,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed. I wanted to make sure Maines’s phone hadn’t leaked a pool of telltale water overnight.

  Steve jumped up and bounded to the door, and I grabbed his lead off the dresser. The phone looked exactly the same as it had when I’d left it there the night before.

  It was surprisingly cold outside, and the chill blue light showed a flat area about the size of a football field beyond the lower buildings, where several tents were pitched next to soot-marked rock fire rings. This camping area dropped sharply off into a dry riverbed that looked like a mini Grand Canyon, the high banks on both sides banded tan and white. An occasional spiky dark plant stood out along their top edges. Nothing you could call a tree anywhere in sight.

  Steve squatted and made a dark puddle in the rust-colored dirt, then started to sniff around, pulling on the lead. Movement off to the left drew my eye: the monk who’d checked us in the previous night, walking down into the camping area. A group of people appeared over the edge of the small canyon, coming to meet him. They were too far away for me to make out anything more than general specs—a couple of men and a woman carrying a small child. The monk talked with them for a short while, then one of the men peeled off and disappeared back into the canyon. The others turned and started toward the cabins with the Buddhist.

  “Coyote,” said Maines’s voice behind me. He was still in his pajamas, minus his hat and glasses. He looked about eighteen, all skinny wrists and tufts of sleep-mussed strawberry hair.

  I peered back out into the barren landscape. “Where?”

  “That fella who just went back down,” he said, nodding toward the canyon. “They bring illegals across the border. Under the radar.”

  The group with the monk was heading for the office, coming closer now, and Maines motioned me back into our cabin.

  “Well, that certainly doesn’t smell too good,” I said as he went to the dresser and put on his glasses.

  “Illegals come with the territory down here,” Maines replied. “It ain’t unusual.”

  Maybe not, but it tweaked my radar. “This place is a way station for illegals in addition to being an informal recovery room for the clinic where Rachael disappeared? Maybe the two things are related.”

  Maines looked at me. My suspicion wasn’t well-formed enough yet to put into more words than that, so I just looked back.

  He held still, thinking, then said, “Might be worth looking into. Let’s keep an eye on it.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that I’d jumped out of bed without having to crawl out from under that heavy, wet thing that camped on my chest most mornings. Getting away from Azula was turning out to be good therapy.

  “I wonder if the clinic owns this place,” Maines muttered to himself, then said to me, “You know how to look up property records, don’t you?”

  “If the county has their tax-appraisal records online, there’s nothing to it. All you need is an Internet connection.”

  Maines grabbed his phone and mashed the “on” button. I went over to get my duffel bag off the floor, so as not to seem like I was watching him.

  “What’s wrong with the damned thing now?” he muttered, smacking it against his hand.

  “Is there a library where we’re going?” I said, putting my duffel on the bed. “I can do it on a public-access computer, if they have them.”

  Distracted by his phone, Maines didn’t answer. I watched him fiddle with it for a while longer, then asked, “How’d the snooping go last night?”

  “She stayed here the night before she disappeared. Left her suitcase with some clothes and personal items.”

  “She was planning on coming back here, then.”

  “Right. Never did.”

  The vague suspicion aroused by seeing the coyote came into sharper focus. “Maybe she somehow got sideways with whoever is killing these women along the border, the stuff those troopers were talking about.”

  “Those gals are all Mexican nationals,” Maines said. “Whoever’s doing them in knows better than to mess with Americans. Most people figure the cartels are to blame.”

  “Rachael probably wasn’t wearing her passport on her forehead,” I said, “and she could easily be mistaken for Mexican. Who’s to say she didn’t run afoul of some cartel business by accident?”

  He pressed his lips together, then shook his head. “I ain’t saying you’re wrong, but that’s a ways down the road. Might be worth chasing, if we don’t turn up some other connections right quick.” He got out his shaving kit. “You want the bathroom first?”

/>   I grabbed my duffel. “I’m fast.”

  CHAPTER 8

  We took a short, skull-rattling drive south to a sun-bleached general store with a rusted sign nailed to it that read RUIDOSA, TEXAS, POP. 43. There was a half-demolished adobe church next to the store, its cedar latillas—the horizontal roof members typical in the Southwest—caved in. Maines went into the store and bought some breakfast tacos and caffeine for the two of us, and another can of dog food and a bowl of water for Steve.

  Sitting down under the front porch, which was just a piece of tin roofing balanced on top of some stripped tree trunks stuck in the dirt, I noticed a broad, sandy wash about a hundred yards from the road.

  “I can’t believe it ever rains here,” I said, pointing my chin at it.

  “That’s the Rio Grande,” Maines told me.

  I swallowed my mouthful of iced tea. It was weak and tasted kind of like old paper, but I still preferred it to coffee. “Get out of here.”

  “Farms and ranches upstream are siphoning off so much it hardly runs anymore.”

  I gestured at the corrugated panel fence just beyond the wash. “How do these ranchers water their cattle?”

  “That ain’t a ranch fence,” Maines said. “That’s the newest thing in border security, courtesy of your U.S. government.”

  I’d heard about the border fence, of course, but the thing I was looking at made me wonder what the backers were smoking.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Your dog could climb that thing.”

  “He’d be dead in a couple of days,” Maines said, tilting his tan-hatted head toward the vast expanse of bleached dirt and dry brush beyond the fence. “That’s the Chihuahuan Desert. Better barrier than any damn fence.”

  I finished my breakfast taco, realizing that my plan to fade would have to be better planned than just wandering off when Maines wasn’t looking. Even though I was dressed in boots and jeans—a sartorial tradition I’d adopted shortly after realizing that everything in Texas below about mid-thigh level was out to bite, sting, or stick something sharp into me—I wasn’t ready to join the mad dogs and Englishmen.

  “You think I should mention Rachael, when I get to the clinic?” I asked Maines, watching Steve scarf down his dog food. “I could say she referred me. Maybe it’ll shake something loose.”

  Maines mashed his taco wrapper into a tight ball. “Finding her stuff out at the springs means whoever was involved in her disappearance wasn’t bothering to cover his tracks.”

  “It could also mean that there wasn’t a whoever,” I pointed out, glancing back at the desert. “If you don’t buy a run-in with some nefarious border types, maybe she wandered out there and got lost or something.”

  “She’s born and raised,” Maines said. “She knows better.”

  “I’m just trying to bring you around to seeing some logic about this thing.”

  Maines looked at me. “Why?”

  “You’re already sold on the clinic being involved when there are at least a dozen other possibilities.”

  “No, I mean, why do you care?” He’d taken off his clip-ons, and his ineludible eyes remained aimed at my face.

  “Because I don’t want to spend a week down here if we can get this thing cleared up in a day.” I didn’t tell him that was actually because I was anxious to get over the border and disappear before the news trickled down that Benny was looking for me.

  “No possibility that solving the case holds some fascination, huh?” Maines said, mouth corner twitching.

  I gave him a pitying glance. “Give it up, man. The day I turn cop is the day we all find out whether or not there really is a God.”

  Steve flopped down at our feet, having finished his postprandial gambol. Avoiding Maines’s laser gaze, I pointed at his cup and said, “You want another one?”

  “Black,” he replied, still watching me.

  When I came back out with our refills, he was scowling at his dead phone, which he’d hooked up to the charger on our drive here.

  “You been screwing with this?” he asked me.

  I gave him my surprised look as I handed him his coffee. “Why would I?”

  He studied me briefly, then got up and tossed the phone into a rusted steel trash barrel next to one of the porch poles. He stood there looking out across the parched view for a few minutes, sipping his coffee, then asked over his shoulder, “Got that P40 with you?”

  “No,” I said, the back of my stomach going cold. “Why?”

  He pointed to his left temple. “Just running the possibilities.”

  “You’re not filling me with confidence here, man.”

  “Well, that’s our deal, idn’t it?” he said, adjusting his hat with studied carelessness. “You don’t trust me, I don’t trust you. Keeps us both on our toes.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I just sat there and drank my tea until he started for the car.

  We buckled in and pulled out onto the two-lane blacktop, Steve panting quietly in the backseat. I sipped silently and tried to decide if it was better to keep my mouth shut or rewind the conversation. Sometimes, if you pretend something hasn’t been said, the other person starts to believe it.

  A green-and-white sign flashed by, advising that we were entering Presidio, Texas. We came around a flat, wide curve with some sick-looking palm trees on either side. In the hazy distance ahead of us the blue-gray mountains were coming closer, and another sign loomed: OJINAGA MEX. PORT OF ENTRY.

  We rolled by a row of battered yellow gates and guard houses under a flat tan canopy where uniformed border patrol were checking papers and searching cars coming from the opposite direction. Maines saw my puzzled expression and explained, “They don’t care about people going in. Just people coming out.”

  We crossed a low bridge over the river and did the same song, second verse on the Mexican side: an older-looking series of gates, none of which were facing our way. The uniforms didn’t even look over as we passed.

  Ojinaga—a jumble of tin-roofed adobes, industrial-looking public buildings, and decaying palacios, all faded to pale imitations of their original colors—crowded right up to the edge of the riverbed. There were several perfectly respectable-looking hotels along the divided boulevard leading away from the crossing.

  As we turned off onto a narrower street coming in at a crazy angle, I asked Maines, “People will seriously drive forty miles after having surgery when they could just stay here?”

  “You underestimate the average American’s fear of brown people.”

  I wondered, not for the first time, how he’d come to harbor thoughts like that. His good-ol’-boy Texan demeanor always made me expect something else.

  We cut through another assortment of buildings that looked like they’d been dropped there from outer space by someone with no sense of direction. The air smelled of gasoline and cigarettes. After a while we turned onto another street, this one so narrow we couldn’t have gotten out of the car if we’d stopped, which didn’t seem to bother the other vehicles bombing along in both directions at breakneck speed. We spent some time driving on what would have been the sidewalk, if there’d been one, then Maines spotted a parking space and made use of it.

  There was a corrugated-tin shack on the corner in front of us, conjunto wafting from its open windows, which were just flaps of lumber hinged at one side, thrown open and hooked to the wall. The other side of the street was all open shops with boxes of produce, clothing, and cigarettes stacked chin high. Pedestrians boiled all around us, threading between cars, bicycles, and noisy scooters; browsing along the shops; standing in clusters to talk.

  Maines got out of the car and clipped Steve’s lead on. “The clinic’s on the square. Couple blocks. I’m coming with you.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I said, stepping quickly out of the street to avoid being flattened by an oncoming vegetable truck. “The wedding ring might have fooled those monks, but you and I clock about as married as Margaret Thatcher and Cesar Chavez
. If Darling has his ears up at all, he’ll smell you coming from a mile away.”

  “I’m not sending you in there alone. Not after finding Rachael’s stuff.”

  “What was the goddamned point of dragging me all the way down here, then?”

  The dog took a seat. Maines watched him, pushing his jaw to one side.

  “Look, I assume you wanted me on this because you know I can handle myself,” I said. “So enough with the white-knight shit.”

  Maines started to reply, but I headed him off. “I’ll take Steve. You said yourself that he’s a good watchdog, and he’ll be a distraction, keep their focus off me. I’ll tell them he’s a service animal or something.”

  We stood there for maybe ten minutes, Maines not looking at me and not saying anything. Then he passed me the dog’s leash and pointed his eyes at the tin shack. “I’ll wait for you in the cantina. If you’re not back within an hour, I’m coming after you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The plaza was a dusty stone rectangle with a dry fountain in the center, concrete benches along the street side, and a lone palm tree guarding a whitewashed adobe church at the far end. A small sign reading DARLING CLINIC was posted on one of the pillars of a long arcade on the left.

  I walked over. A smaller sign posted above the bell at the plank door inside the arcade read, PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE. I found some humor in the fact that neither it nor the main clinic sign were in Spanish. Obviously, Darling’s target demographic wasn’t local.

  A short, hefty black woman in a nurse’s uniform opened up a few seconds after I touched the bell. She didn’t say anything, just stood aside and held the door. I let Steve lead the way in, expecting to get some resistance, but the nurse offered none. She merely turned and started down a narrow, high-ceilinged hall with lumpy white walls. At a corner, she led me into a large, windowless room with a desk just inside the door. There was an exam table and some painted wooden cabinets at the end of the room facing the desk, which had a single chair standing in front of it. The nurse gestured me to take this, putting on a sudden, somewhat alarming smile.