Wrecker

by Mark Parragh

  The rooms were forgotten guest rooms with dusty furniture, storage rooms full of junk, a utility room with a water heater and electrical junction boxes. The fifth room had a different lock on the door, considerably more substantial than the cheap locks on the others. Should have checked this one first, Crane chided himself.

  He opened the lock, and the door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges. The room held stacked wooden shipping crates and some kind of machine on a table. He checked the topmost crates and found miscellaneous parts for AR-15 rifles. Now he was getting somewhere. The machine was connected to an old PC, and Crane realized it was a computer-controlled milling machine. Specifically, it was set up to mill AR-15 lower receivers out of metal blanks he found nearby.

  In the eyes of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the lower receiver was what made a gun. The barrels, trigger assemblies, stocks, and other components that filled the crates were just parts. Orly could buy those with no more trouble or official interest than he’d draw buying shoes. It was the receiver that was regulated. So Orly was buying AR-15 parts and then milling the receivers himself and building untraceable automatic rifles.

  The legality of all this was dubious in the United States. In Mexico, there was no doubt at all.

  That wasn’t all, though, Crane discovered as he went through the rest of the crates. One was loaded with pistols, blocky, with sand-colored polymer frames. Crane took one out and let out a low whistle. They were 9 mm Sig Sauer P320s, the US Military MHS version. Orly must have a friend in the service somewhere, Crane thought.

  So he wasn’t just making illegal guns; he was running them across the border as well. If he got caught, the Mexican government would bury him. That ought to make it easier to talk to him.

  Crane loaded the Sig Sauer from a stack of full magazines and stuck a few more in his pocket. Then he walked back out to the courtyard and dragged a chair next to the chaise where Orly lay. The noise woke Orly, but he was still languid and yawning with his eyes closed when Crane said, “We need to talk, Orly.”

  Orly opened his eyes to see Crane sitting a couple feet from him, the pistol hanging from one hand so that it filled his field of view.

  “Whoa!” Orly cried. He jumped back and nearly fell off the chaise. “What the hell, man?”

  “Calm down,” said Crane. “You want to be careful around these. They’re dangerous. That’s why the Mexican government takes such a dim view of those AR-15s you’re making in there.”

  “What? I don’t know about any guns. I rent out those rooms!”

  “You might be able to sell that to a judge down here, if you’ve got the right friends. But the Sigs are US government property. Gossip around town is that you already did one stretch in federal prison. You remember it that fondly?”

  Orly gathered the sheet around himself. “What do you want?”

  “What’s your story?” said Crane. “You running guns for the cartels?”

  “Oh, no way, man. You can get killed real fast that way. Besides, they’ve got their own channels. I stay under their radar. I deal to small buyers, local groups, sometimes just farmers looking for home defense. I’m just nickel and diming to keep the lights on. That’s it, I swear.”

  Crane doubted that, given the crate of US Army pistols in his back room. But he wasn’t here to worry about Orly. Then a thought occurred to him.

  “So you’re something of a gunsmith too. Did you reload Boz’s wax slugs for him?”

  Orly swallowed. “Hey, that was just a gag, man. Boz just likes messing with people. You saw. Besides, you turned it around on him. That was some great shooting, bro.”

  “Let’s talk about your friend Boz,” said Crane. “I met Arturo and Juan Manuel yesterday. You might not be cartel material, but they sure are. So how did Boz end up tied up with them?”

  Orly took this in. Then he nodded toward a discarded pair of shorts balled up on the stones a couple feet away.

  “Hey, do you mind if I … ?”

  “By all means,” said Crane. “Boz’s cartel connections?”

  Orly reached for the shorts and pulled them on beneath the sheet. “We don’t talk about that, you know. But he’s here a lot. And I hear things. He’s not part of the drugs side. He’s a special case. I think he’s like HR for them. He lines up people who can do things the cartel can’t do for themselves.”

  That makes sense, Crane thought. Tate had money, social connections, and he wasn’t someone you’d expect to be involved with a narco cartel. He could be useful in laundering money, connecting them to legitimate financial channels in the States, opening all kinds of doors that would be closed to Mexican gangsters. In return, they helped him keep his low profile, protecting him from things like the indictment hanging over his head. He could see it now. That might be a good trade for the cartel, assuming Tate was capable of acting like a professional when he had to.

  “So he flies into town. You know from where?”

  Orly shook his head. “He doesn’t talk about it.”

  “And he’s got his boat in the bay, and he’s got his fancy Cadillac. Where’s he garage that thing, by the way?”

  “He bought a place in town,” said Orly. “Used to be a bar, but it closed down a while ago. For a while he was saying he was going to fix it up and open it again, but I guess he lost interest. But he has some rooms upstairs, and he keeps the Escalade there.”

  “Where is this?”

  “I don’t know the address,” said Orly. “I only went there once. It’s a couple blocks east of the radio towers somewhere. There was a little cantina, I remember. It was blue, light blue, with the name painted in red. And we passed a house with a chicken coop …”

  “Okay, okay,” Crane said, “I’ll find it. Next question. He brings a lot of women here?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “What happens to them? Is he trafficking women for the cartel?”

  Orly seemed genuinely shocked. “No! No, nothing like that. He meets people here for business sometimes, but they’re men. When he’s got a girl here, it’s just social.”

  Crane considered that. If Orly was right about what Tate did for the cartel, then it wouldn’t make sense to have him running women across the border in his yacht. Sooner or later, that kind of thing would get noticed and ruin their asset. And as Orly had said about the guns, they had their own channels for that sort of thing. They wouldn’t need to involve an amateur.

  “What’s Boz to you, anyway, man?” Orly asked suddenly. “You homed in on him the moment you saw him. What’s it about?”

  With his left hand, Crane plucked Amy Carpenter’s passport from his shirt pocket and flipped it open to the photo page. “You ever see her here? Ever see her with Boz?”

  Orly leaned in to study the photo, and Crane caught a whiff of his body odor. He held his breath while Orly peered at the passport.

  “Yeah,” Orly said at last. “I think she was here a couple times. Yeah, I remember her. Girl could drink, man.”

  “Twice? She look like she was having a good time?”

  “Oh yeah. Boz and her were getting along fine. Haven’t seen her in a while. They come and go. You think Boz is kidnapping girls for like white slavery and shit? No, man, he’s not into anything like that.”

  Crane closed Amy’s passport and put it away.

  Orly stretched a kink out of his shoulder. “I mean, sure, he likes pussy, but … you know?”

  Crane sighed. “Thanks, Orly. That’s great to know. On that note, I think I’ll be going.” He stuffed the gun into his waistband. “I’m going to hang on to this, okay? And I think we should never speak of this again. What do you say?”

  Orly seemed to grab on to his good fortune like a drowning man seizing a lifeline. “Yeah, man. Nobody needs to know about any of this.”

  Crane left him there, walking back toward the dock and his boat.

  “Come back any time,” Orly called after him. “Just be cool, right? Right?”

  Crane untied the boat an
d sped back across the bay. He tried to fit Orly’s new information into his picture of Tate. He was increasingly convinced that whatever Tate was involved in, it wasn’t what Chloe thought. Amy Carpenter seemed to have been spending time with Tate by choice. But then, what had happened to her?

  Regardless, Chloe wasn’t going to be happy. He didn’t fully understand the dynamic between Chloe and her father, but once she’d told Malcolm her theory about Tate’s human trafficking ring, and played her dangerous-daughter card to force his involvement, she’d been committed. It would be very hard to talk her out of it.

  Chapter 11

  When he returned to the Emma, Crane found Chloe waiting for him, clutching a bundle of fabric shopping bags in her hands.

  “The hell have you been?” she said as he came up the steps from the swim deck. “I’ve got grocery run today. I need the boat.”

  “Where’s the other one?”

  She sighed in exasperation. “Max and Carolyn took it. They’ve got some … thing down the coast. I don’t know.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you, then. I can help carry stuff. You ready?”

  She pushed past him and down to the swim deck. “I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour.” She threw the bags into the bottom of the boat and climbed in.

  Okay, then. He followed her back down, and they got the tender launched. Chloe sat up front and let Crane steer from the back.

  “Sorry,” she said when they were about halfway back to shore. “I’m just in a really shitty mood today.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Crane.

  “It’s this thing with Scott,” she explained. “I don’t know what’s going on with him. He was supposed to call me, but he’s ducking me. He’s being a jackass.” She paused and then said, “What’s going on over there?”

  Crane looked up and saw a crowd gathered on the beach. People were clustered in a tight pack, held back by men Crane assumed were police officers. Two cruisers were parked up the beach with their lights flashing. Another group of figures stood inside the circle, near the waterline.

  In Crane’s experience, a scene like that never meant anything good.

  He veered away from the pier and headed up the shoreline toward the scene. The boat ground gently onto the beach about fifty yards behind the crowd. As he and Chloe walked up the sand, Crane caught a glimpse of something covered by a tarp near the waterline. He was pretty sure he knew what was under it. Chloe was picking it up as well, he realized. She’d gone very quiet suddenly.

  Then one of the officers pushed his way through the crowd and headed toward them. “Mr. Crane,” he called out as the crowd made way. “Mr. Crane, Chief Moreno wants you.”

  “Oh no,” said Chloe, her voice becoming a half wail. “No, no.”

  Crane turned her toward him and held her by her shoulders. “Wait here,” he said. “You shouldn’t go any closer.”

  He saw the horrified look in her eyes, and then he followed the officer back through the crowd. The officer passed him through the cordon and remained there to keep the crowd back.

  Chief Moreno stood at the waterline with two other officers and a man in civilian clothes. The surf was washing up just far enough to soak his pants cuffs. As Crane approached, he made eye contact and simply nodded.

  Crane joined them, and Moreno knelt down. Crane knelt beside him, and Moreno moved the tarp back long enough to reveal the face of Amy Carpenter.

  She had been beautiful. She still was, but in a different way. From her pictures, Crane could imagine her dancing on the beach, twirling by firelight, her eyes flashing, her arms beckoning. Now she was still. Her eyes were closed, and her skin was pale and matted with tendrils of dark hair. Now she looked like something carved from marble.

  The last confirmed time she’d been seen alive was almost a week ago. He didn’t think she’d been dead that long, but a coroner would know better, if Bahia Tortugas had one. Perhaps the civilian?

  “No apparent injuries,” said Moreno as he covered her face with the tarp once more. “I’d say she drowned.”

  “Can you test for drugs or alcohol?” Crane asked. Glancing up at the civilian, he asked, “Are you the coroner?”

  “Miguel’s a doctor,” said Moreno, “with the local clinic.”

  Crane and the doctor shook hands. “I’m no specialist,” Miguel said. “I can give you a general report, but a drug or blood alcohol screen? No. For a proper autopsy, she’d have to be flown out to Ensenada, or maybe La Paz.”

  “You know her family,” Moreno said to Crane. “Can you tell them, find out what they want done?”

  Crane realized his lie had taken on new dimensions. He had no idea how to contact her family. But someone had to. He had her passport number. Josh would be able to track her down and put him in touch with her family.

  He nodded. “I’ll make sure they know.”

  As Miguel knelt to examine the body more closely, Moreno took Crane’s arm, and they walked a few yards back up the beach.

  “She was with Mr. Zahn on the beach, at Punto Dorado, maybe on his boat,” said Moreno. “They were together three days at least before she dropped out of sight. The last time I know she was alive, she was with him.”

  “I think he’d be the first one I’d question,” said Crane.

  “But we won’t question him,” Moreno answered.

  “Because he’s protected.”

  Moreno laughed. It was a short, bitter laugh without humor. “Because we’re out of our depth, Mr. Crane. We’re country rubes here. We give out tickets and sweep up the drunks on Saturday night. That’s what we’re here for. Something like this, we wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  He took a breath and met Crane’s eyes. Crane could see the anger boiling inside him.

  “I bet someone could put a bullet in Mr. Zahn’s skull in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight, and we’d be lost, chasing our tails. We’d never figure out who did it.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know it,” Moreno said. “We’re a terrible police department. No good for anything.”

  Crane nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He passed back through the police cordon and through the crowd who now kept a respectful distance and watched him closely. He was no longer just an onlooker like themselves, but part of the incident. Crane heard murmurs debating his role, apparently from people who didn’t realize he spoke Spanish. Was he the dead girl’s brother? Did he work for the American who killed her?

  Crane made his way back down the beach, looking for Chloe, but he didn’t see her. He looked for the boat and saw that it was gone.

  He swore and ran down the beach toward the pier. A panga was beached another hundred yards down the shore, its owner leaning back against his boat and watching. Crane ran to the boat and had it run him back out to the Emma.

  When they arrived, the tender wasn’t there. Crane told the boatman to wait while he went aboard. He found Captain Burch in the main salon.

  “Has Chloe been here?”

  “Yeah,” said Burch. “You just missed her. She came back without any food, she went below, and then she took off again. What’s going on?”

  Crane thought for a moment. “I need the keys to the garage where you keep the truck.”

  Burch looked confused.

  “Now!”

  “All right, all right,” said Burch. “I’ll go get them.”

  “Meet me back here,” said Crane. Then he headed below to Chloe’s cabin, though he had a good idea what he would find there.

  He was right, he discovered as he entered the tiny cabin. The storage compartment was open, and the metal box holding Amy Carpenter’s things lay open on Chloe’s bunk, her items strewn across the thin brown blanket.

  Amy’s .32 pistol was missing.

  Chapter 12

  The air was still and oppressive as Crane climbed the ladder to the public pier. The breeze had died down, and it seemed the whole town had gone insid
e for a nap. Amy Carpenter’s body had been removed from the beach, and the crowd had dispersed. The Emma’s tender was tied up nearby.

  Crane hurried to the foundation’s garage and unlocked number four. The pickup and the Yamaha dirt bike were as he remembered them. He pushed the bike out into the light and checked it over. There was gas in the tank, and the engine roared to life as Crane rolled over the kickstarter and stomped it. He put the bike in gear and took off.

  Almost immediately, he reached an intersection and stopped. Where was he going? He’d ridden through town with Chloe and he’d walked around parts of it, but he didn’t really know his way around. Bahia Tortugas was a maze of mostly unpaved streets that followed no apparent pattern and had few street signs.

  Chloe must know where she was going. Orly had mentioned an old bar that Tate had bought and renovated into a local apartment. But Crane still didn’t know where that was. Finally, he spun the bike to the left and headed toward the center of town. The radio towers provided a handy reference point. He could halfway navigate by them, unless a street took a sudden turn and didn’t go where he wanted it to.

  He spent nearly twenty minutes riding around, kicking up great clouds of dust and sending the engine’s poorly muffled roar through the streets. The heat and the heavy air had driven most of the locals inside. Sweat caked dust to Crane’s forehead.

  Then he caught a flash of gleaming black in his peripheral vision. He braked hard, spun the bike beneath him, and rode back a few yards. To his right, the land fell away in a steep bank. The street crossed what looked like an old storm gully here, and they’d packed in dirt to make it level. Crane looked over a backyard fence shared by two brightly colored houses. Between them, he could see that they fronted onto the end of a street that headed straight away from him. A couple hundred yards down that street, Tate’s armored Escalade was parked in front of what looked like it could have been the old bar Orly had mentioned.