Two more.
Was he still drunk?
Maybe.
But he thought about the way she was always nagging him, and the weight she’d gained over the past year, and decided that sometime this week, maybe tomorrow morning, the two of them would take a little trip over to the Jorgensens’ garage.
THE SILENCE OF TREES
(2016)
I’d left Phoenix over a decade and a half ago, after the Y2K disaster didn’t happen, burned out on my job, my life, the state of the goddamn world. I hadn’t been back since. I’d been living in Pinetop in a rented cabin with an old-school satellite dish, working for the big casino at nearby Hon-Dah on the Fort Apache reservation. My official title was “casino detective,” but basically all I did was walk around, make my presence known, and try to put the fear of God into employees and customers who were even thinking about doing what they shouldn’t. It wasn’t much of a job, but I didn’t hate it.
I existed.
Change came in the form of a woman. Doesn’t it always? She was tall and dark, thin and gorgeous, and there in the north country she stood out like a polished ruby among rough chunks of broken cement. Hon-Dah’s customers were primarily local yokels and rich residents from down south who had summer homes in the pines, and while there was a consistent flow of women through our doors, they were usually older and accompanied by their husbands. The few lookers who came this far out were invariably with the band performing in the showroom or the arm candy of wealthy businessmen up for a short weekend.
This one was different, though. She was alone and it was mid-morning, mid-week. She was obviously looking for someone, and when her eyes found me, chatting with the pit boss by the central station, she made her way straight past the tables and slots to the spot where we stood. She looked familiar, I thought as she drew closer, and when she smiled at me and said my name, I knew I knew her, though I still couldn’t place the face.
Then it came to me. Frieda Balderama, Carlos’ little girl, only all grown up. She’d been a cute twelve-year-old the last time I’d seen her, but that had been a long time ago, and now she was a stunning young woman. Carlos was one of the good guys, one of the few people I missed, and while I hadn’t seen or talked to him since leaving the Valley, our bond was solid enough that I knew we’d be able to pick it up no matter how much time had passed.
Frieda asked if we could talk. Alone. The pit boss wandered away, and I offered Frieda a drink. “Coffee, tea, soda, water?” She shook her head, said she was fine. There was sadness behind her smile, and all of a sudden, I knew that she’d come here to deliver bad news. I braced myself.
“My dad’s dead.”
I’d been expecting the words, but it was still a shock to hear them. Carlos was dead? He was only a few years older than I was. “What happened?” I asked. Cancer, I was thinking. Heart attack.
She met my gaze and I saw the pain in her eyes. “He was murdered.”
The news hit me hard. Carlos might have known some sketchy people in his younger days, but no one serious. And ever since his daughter was born, he’d been walking the straight and narrow. I found it hard to imagine a scenario where he’d have been in real danger.
Maybe it had been random.
Maybe. But I didn’t think his little girl would be up here looking for me if that were the case.
However it had gone down, I hoped it was quick. I’d been around, I’d seen things, and I knew that a killing was the worst way to go, worse even than disease. Disease might be agonizing, but in its way it was natural. A murder? If it was drawn out, there was nothing more evil, because facing certain death, a death that shouldn’t be, a death that didn’t have to happen, was beyond tortuous.
I cleared my throat. “Did they catch—”
“Would I be here if they did?”
I took a deep breath. “Tell me.”
She opened her mouth, and I could see that she wanted to spill, but she just couldn’t. Not yet. “Maybe I will take that water,” Frieda said.
A few minutes later, seated at a table, her whistle wet, she gave it another shot. “Two months ago, my dad was driving up the Beeline to Payson to see his friend Hilly. You know Hilly?”
I shook my head.
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, he never got there. Hilly called me up several hours later, asking where he was, and I tried his cell phone but there was no answer. There could have been many reasons why he hadn’t made it to Hilly’s yet, and I thought about waiting until he showed up, but I sensed something was wrong. So did Hilly, and we decided to trace the route Papi would have taken, from opposite ends. I started up from Phoenix; he started down from Payson.
“He was the one who found my dad’s truck. And my dad.”
She had to stop for a moment. I didn’t push, just waited. Frieda wiped her eyes, finished her water, and I signaled for another glass.
“He’d driven off the side of the road, and the truck had hit a boulder. They said at first that he’d been drunk, but I told them that he didn’t drink. You knew that, right?”
I nodded.
“So that’s what I told them. They thought he might have had a heart attack or a seizure, but when they did an autopsy, they couldn’t find anything like that. Finally, they put it down to some type of accident. They said maybe he’d swerved to avoid a deer or a coyote or something, and he’d bumped his head in the crash and that had killed him.”
“You don’t believe that, though?”
“No.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
She looked at me. “I think Lieutenant Armstrong killed him.”
That wasn’t possible. Armstrong had been dead for five years, killed by a motorist he’d stopped on the Beeline. It had been big news, all over the papers and TV. The racist fuck had lost his job after a bad arrest that had cost the department over a million dollars in settlement fees, but he’d somehow landed a position with the highway patrol, and there on Beeline Highway, he’d been ticketing people for speeding and illegal lane changes, targeting, I’m sure, drivers with brown faces. He’d finally pulled over the wrong man and had ended up shot in the face and left for dead by the side of the road. I didn’t know many people who mourned Armstrong’s passing, but the brutality of the crime had been good for ratings, remaining the top story on the news for over a week, and the highway patrol, seeking to capitalize on the free publicity, had renamed a short stretch of the Beeline in his honor, calling it the “Donald R. Armstrong Memorial Highway.”
I knew Frieda was hurting, and I tried to let her down easy. “Armstrong’s dead,” I said. “It couldn’t have been him.”
“It was him,” she insisted. “Remember how he used to do that stupid movie thing where he’d leave a Frito on the forehead of any Latino whose death he had to investigate? So everyone would know it was his case? And that it probably wouldn’t be solved? Well, there was a Frito on my dad’s forehead. Hilly saw it, too.
“Besides…” She paused. “Dad died in exactly the same spot Lieutenant Armstrong did.”
That lent it all a little more credence.
I felt myself being drawn in.
“I need help. And Dad always told me that you were the guy who handled these kinds of things.”
That was true. But not because I wanted to. Things had just worked out that way. I’d been tiptoeing around superstitions for years, but after my experience in Bumblebee, it was like the floodgates opened. Word spread somehow, and I gained kind of a reputation for investigating matters that regular law enforcement would not even acknowledge existed. It was lucrative, I’ll admit that. But it took a toll, and the truth was that it was one of the reasons I’d pulled a Houdini and headed north after the turn of the millennium.
This was Frieda, though, Carlos’ little girl, and I owed it to her, to him, to look into this.
“I can pay you,” she offered.
I looked at her, offended. “No. You can’t.”
She dropped the subject, no
dding her understanding, smiling her gratitude.
“Take me there,” I told her. “Let me see where it happened myself.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll follow you. Meet me in the parking lot. I just have to clear a few things with management first.”
She took my phone from me, programmed her number into it so we could communicate on the way, then went out the way she came in. I told the pit boss that I was taking a day or two: my first vacation since I’d been hired. I got the go-ahead, as long as I was back by Friday night, and I walked out to the employees’ parking lot behind the casino, where there was a crappy Pontiac with a faded bumper sticker touting a long gone local DJ from the 1990s.
Mine.
I pulled out to the front, where Frieda was waiting in a considerably nicer vehicle: a new blue Lexus. She was obviously doing well for herself, and I was glad. Carlos had been a good guy, and Frieda was her daddy’s girl.
We headed west, through Show Low and Heber, turning south at Payson. Two hours later, Frieda pulled over at the spot where Armstrong had been killed, and I parked on the shoulder behind her. There was a plaque by the side of the road, donated by the PBA, as well as several bunches of bleached plastic flowers. Another car, an empty beat-up Chevy, was parked on the other side of the plaque.
The highway here sloped down into a wash, and at the bottom, where Armstrong had been gunned down, was a small grove of cottonwood trees. She showed me the boulder that her father’s truck had hit, explaining in a choked voice where everything had been when they’d found him.
I took it all in, then wandered down to where Armstrong had gotten it. Immediately, I sensed that something was off, something was wrong, though it took me a moment to figure out what it was that I found so disturbing.
It was the silence of the trees.
I’d been living up in the pines for a long time, and one thing I’d noticed was the aliveness of the outdoors. Not that I’m a nature guy. I don’t hunt, fish, hike, bike or do any of that crap. Never have. But even a city boy like me can’t help noticing something when it stares him in the face every day. And these trees were utterly still, completely unmoving. Silent. Even though a slight breeze was ruffling my hair and sending the dead crackling leaves from a nearby sycamore skittering across the dry rocks of the wash. I felt the back of my neck prickle. It was as if the trees existed in a vacuum, a bubble from which no sound could escape.
I looked around, trying to figure out what the cause might be.
And saw a body in the wash.
I slid down the slight incline, causing an avalanche of small rocks. It was an older Mexican man, wearing what appeared to be a janitorial uniform. The Chevy must have been his. Why he was out here in the first place was a mystery, but the cause of his death wasn’t.
There was a Frito on his forehead.
Frieda was right. It was Armstrong. The spirit of that racist fuck was trapped here along this stretch of roadway, and like a spider waiting in its web for flies to land, Armstrong remained in place, saving his strength until one of his enemies traveled through his territory.
“Do you recognize him?” I asked Frieda, nodding down at the body.
She was hanging back, afraid to come closer, and she shook her head emphatically, though I knew she was too far away to see his face.
That didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was Armstrong, and I tried to think of what could be keeping him here and what I could do about it.
“It is Lieutenant Armstrong, isn’t it?” Frieda asked me when I walked back up the incline.
I nodded.
“How do we stop him?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll find out,” I promised.
“What are you going to do?”
That was a good question. “Talk to some people,” I said vaguely.
“I’m going with you.” Her gaze was defiant.
“No, you’re not. We’re dealing with dangerous stuff here, and your dad wouldn’t want me to drag you into this.”
“I dragged you into this!”
“You know what I mean.” I put my hands gently on her shoulders, and she wasn’t a beautiful young woman to me but Carlos’ little girl, frightened and full of questions and worried about her father. “This is what I do. It’s my job. I’ll keep you informed, tell you what’s happening every step of the way, but I work alone.”
“I’m—”
“I work alone, or I don’t work at all.”
I hated to pull that on her, but I could see the stubbornness in her eyes and knew that she wouldn’t back off unless she was forced to.
“You call 911,” I told her. “Report this. Let the cops investigate it in their way. I’ll see what I can do about Armstrong.” I pulled out my phone, moved away toward the pile of plastic flowers. “I’m going to make a few calls myself.”
Bark Herrington’s was one of the only phone numbers I still knew by heart. Bark knew more about what he called “the uncanny” than any man I could think of. I’d met him on a case in the mid-nineties, a guy who’d claimed his house had been built on top of an Apache burial ground and spirits or demons were stealing his wife’s jewelry. Turned out the wife had a coke habit and was hocking her own jewelry to pay for the snow, but I wouldn’t’ve figured that out as quickly as I did if Bark hadn’t helped me rule out all of the supernatural possibilities. The man knew his stuff. Which was why I’d used him as a resource on probably a dozen other cases.
Bark lived out past Superior, though, and it wasn’t worth the three-hour round trip just to ask him a couple of questions. He was skittish about the phone, and it was hit or miss whether he’d even answer, but I gave it a shot, and he picked up on the nineteenth ring, obviously figuring that if someone was that persistent, the call must be important.
As usual, there was no preamble.
“Herrington here.”
“It’s me,” I said.
If he noticed that I hadn’t been in touch for over a decade, it didn’t register. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
I gave him the rundown.
“How was the cop killed?” he asked.
“Shot.”
“Who killed him, then?”
“Why?”
“If it’s not the how, it’s the who. One of those two things is the reason he’s dead and kicking.”
“Regular con, so far as I know.”
“I’d talk to him if I were you, check up on that. Something’s out of whack in this equation, and my money’s on the shooter.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t be such a stranger,” Bark told me. He immediately hung up.
I smiled. That was about as emotional as Bark ever got, and for him that was a big admission. He’d missed me. I missed him, too, I realized, and for the first time, I admitted to myself that I missed this. I missed The Job.
They’d pinned Armstrong’s murder on a Papago gun runner who I was pretty sure was serving time in Florence. I couldn’t remember his name, so I called Phoenix to see if any of my old contacts were still working. Santucci was long gone, but his flunky Nakamura was still on the state payroll, and while the two of us had never been bosom buddies, there was no bad blood between us, either. A little sweet talking, and he was at his computer, typing away.
The Papago’s name was Cameron Wood, and he wasn’t at Florence but was being housed at the prison in Winslow, that dying town’s only real source of employment. If I headed back up the Beeline, I could probably make it there in two.
“Got a lead,” I told Frieda. She was still on the phone with a 911 operator. “I’m going. I’ll call you if I find anything out.”
She was stuck in her conversation and thankfully couldn’t talk back, and I waved to her as I got in my car.
I headed out.
****
Winslow.
Drunk or wasted men sat ass-flat on the dirty sidewalk, their backs against the shuttered storefronts. By the McDonald’s, a thuggish group of teens eyed my car
suspiciously. Two bratty little kids were throwing rocks at the Standing-on-the-Corner statue, a misguided piece of public art that was supposed to lure tourists because The Eagles had once referenced this shithole in a song.
I had no authority to see anyone in the prison, but I hauled out my Hon-Dah ID and told the halfwit acting as gatekeeper that an accomplice of Wood’s was suspected of ripping off the casino, and I was here to interview him about it.
The two of us met over phones, across glass.
Wood frowned at me. “Who the hell are you?”
“A guy. I have some questions about the Armstrong murder.”
“Didn’t do it.” He hung up the phone and got up to leave.
I tapped on the glass, which earned me a warning from the guard at the other end of the room. Wood thought for a moment, then picked up the phone again, probably remembering that he didn’t have anything better to do.
“What?” he said.
“I’m not the law,” I told him. “I’m private. On a case. I don’t know if you did it or not, but I want to talk to you about it.”
That seemed to soothe his ego. He nodded. “Okay, shoot.”
“You say you didn’t kill Armstrong—”
“I didn’t.” The convict shrugged. “Not that I wouldn’t’ve. I just didn’t get the chance because someone else got there first. Something,” he corrected himself. “Something took out that asshole. I was just in the wrong place at the right time.”
“What do you mean something?”
He shook his head. “I gotta go.”
“You don’t gotta do shit and we both know it.”
“The pig was dead when I got there.”
“What do you mean something?”
He leaned forward. “That’s bad land,” he said. “It’s always been bad land.”
I thought of the silence there, that heavy oppressiveness I’d encountered.
He must have read the expression on my face. “You know it, don’t you? You’ve been there.”
I nodded.
“It’s not just a Papago thing. Any tribe could’ve told you about that spot. But does anyone ask us about it? No. They just build their highway right through it and then wonder why things go wrong.”
Walking Alone Page 17