Mission Road

Page 18

  “My father’s dying,” she said to the window. “All that talk about optimistic doctors? That’s bullshit. He’s got two months, no more. ”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m sorry wouldn’t have been exactly sincere.

  Before I could decide, my cell phone rang.

  Madeleine scowled. “My father shouldn’t have given that back to you. ”

  “I forgot about it. ”

  “Don’t answer. ”

  I checked the display. The number belonged to my housekeeper, Mrs. Loomis. She was calling from the cell phone I’d bought her for emergencies. She never used it. She hated phones.

  I swore silently, then answered the call.

  A man’s voice said: “Who is this?”

  My heartbeat syncopated until I realized who I was talking to.

  “Sam,” I said. “It’s Tres. ”

  “I know that, damn it. ”

  “Why are you calling me, Sam? Where’s Mrs. Loomis?”

  “They can probably trace this. I told her it was a bad idea. ”

  “Sam, I’m on the run here. Are you okay?”

  “I told her not to worry. Irritating woman. The gunshot isn’t that bad. ”

  I sat up straight. “What gunshot?”

  “Mine, damn it. I’ve had worse. I don’t want you to come—”

  Eight seconds later, over Madeleine’s and Ralph’s stereophonic protests, I was ordering the chauffeur to turn the car around, giving him directions to my office in Southtown.

  FEBRUARY 2, 1968

  DELIA MONTOYA KNEW SHE WASN’T HIS FIRST VICTIM, but she was determined to be the last.

  Delia pulled into the police station parking lot right on time. She struggled to fix her makeup—hard to apply lipstick with three stitches in the corner of her mouth. She told herself she wouldn’t cry. She would face the monster; she would give her statement.

  Outside, the winter clouds were an unnatural mix of gray and sulfur. Even the city skyline looked wrong. To the east, a new tower was rising for the world’s fair. The round top house was being hoisted up the five-hundred-foot column of concrete. It was about halfway today—like a ring awkwardly being lifted off a giant’s finger.

  Delia stopped at the doors of the police station. She took a shaky breath. She’d been here too many times over the last month, trying to get someone to listen.

  Ever since her first visit, White’s men had been shadowing her. They appeared while she was shopping, or baby-sitting her little cousin, or taking flowers to her mother in the nursing home.

  They never threatened her, never spoke. But she knew who they were.

  We are as close as your jugular vein, they seemed to say. Don’t ever forget that.

  Two weeks, three days, eleven hours since the attack. She’d been shattered like a vase, glued back together imperfectly. She could still feel his fingers tightening around her wrists, his whiskers scraping against her throat. She could still taste the blood—first from biting his arm, then from his fist against her mouth.

  She couldn’t let him get away with it.

  She’d spent two years fighting for other people’s rights in California. She’d marched with César Chávez, blistered her feet on the dusty roads of the Central Valley, helped translate the stories of migrant workers for the media.

  At New Year’s, full of optimism and hope for the future, she’d come home to Texas to fight for La Causa. In that rush of confidence, she’d visited a South Side bar and felt comfortable rising to the challenge of a gringo who found her attractive. Why the hell not?

  AN OFFICER ESCORTED HER INTO A green-tiled room with harsh fluorescents. At one end of the table sat a grim-faced detective, smoke curling from the cigarette in his hand. At the other end of the table, he was there, looking the same as the night he’d picked her up—clean, elegant, commanding. To his right sat another well-dressed man, the lawyer who’d visited her a week ago to explain how much she had to lose.

  Mr. White has a wife and little boy, he’d told her. Do you want to embarrass a man with a family?

  Since then, the losses had been piling up. First, her new job. Her boss at La Prensa let her go, mumbling something about budget problems, but she’d seen the fear in his eyes. Then she’d lost her lease. She was given one month to move out, no explanation. Most of all, she’d lost her privacy. White’s men were everywhere she went.

  She shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting. They couldn’t force her to make a statement with her attacker present. But even the police seemed to be playing by Guy White’s rules.

  “Miss Montoya. ” The detective was a grizzled man with a military haircut. The razor stubble on his cheeks was like frost. “We’ve made Mr. White aware of your accusations. We need to know now if you still want to press charges. ”

  His voice sounded weary, like he’d done all this before.

  White’s eyes were a horrible blue.

  If he’d shown any anxiety, she might’ve found her own strength. But there was nothing in his eyes but calm anticipation, as if he were patiently curious about what form of destruction she would choose.

  She’d heard rumors about the previous victims. She knew she was only the latest in a long line of amusements. He had knocked her down the way a boy knocks down sand castles on the beach—just because he could.

  She remembered his fingers around her throat, the taste of blood in her mouth.

  Yesterday Delia had taken her seven-year-old niece to the playground. There’d been a man on the park bench, smiling at them. His eyes were dull with cruelty. Delia was certain the lump in his jacket pocket was a gun.

  She remembered the lines White’s lawyer had suggested. All you have to say . . .

  She couldn’t let him get away with it.

  “It didn’t happen,” she muttered.

  Silence. Cigarette smoke curled into the ugly lights.

  “Excuse me?” the detective asked.

  “I made it up to get attention,” Delia said. “He never touched me. ”

  She was conscious of the detective studying her—her stitched-up lip, the blue bruises under her eyes.

  Please, she thought. See that I’m lying.

  The detective looked down. He gently closed the file in front of him, rested his hand on it like a Bible.

  “Well,” Guy White said breezily. “That is that. ”

  LATE THAT NIGHT, DELIA SAT IN her bathtub, warm water lapping against the porcelain, a candle burning on the sink. She watched the watery reflections of flame dance off her shower curtain and felt herself floating away.

  She had betrayed herself.

  No amount of washing could cleanse her. There was no way to stop the poison White had planted in her. Nothing to do but cut it out.

  She used a razor—a momentary sting, then no pain in the warm water. She closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry, the water spiraling red around her naked body like firecracker smoke.

  Chapter 9

  MAIA WAITED BY THE CONCRETE PIG.

  It was one of the more ridiculous places she’d ever been asked to rendezvous—a fifteen-foot-high grimy pink goliath of pork at the edge of the diner parking lot.

  She glanced at the brown Acura parked across the street and prayed her police tail wouldn’t decide to take her picture. Her only consolation was that the cop inside the car was probably as cold and bored as she was.

  After eleven minutes, the old fry cook Mike Flume emerged from the diner. He wiped his hands on his apron and trudged toward her.

  “Sorry, I got busy,” he said. “Here. ”

  He tossed her a house key rubber-banded to a slip of paper and started walking away.

  Maia caught his arm. “Whoa, wait a minute. ”

  “I got less than a minute, miss. There’s nobody watching the oil. ”

  “How’d you get the key?”

  The old man glanced toward his diner.

  He reminded Maia of a geriatric leprechaun—s
mall, wrinkled and nervous, thinning orange hair, ears and eyebrows and nose all a bit too pointy.

  “I rent the property from Ana. I put the stuff in the back. Figured she would come get it eventually, you know? She never did. ”

  “What stuff?”

  “Look, miss—Detective Kelsey’s already gonna kill me for talking to you. He came by, you know, after Ana . . . ” He shook his head. “Damn. I can’t believe she got herself shot. ”

  “If you want to help her,” Maia said, “tell me what was wrong with the timing on the Franklin White murder. ”

  The old man winced. “Hell, I only told Ana because it was her mom, for Christ’s sake. It’s probably nothing. ”

  “You don’t believe that. ”

  “My waitress can’t cook. I got meat on the grill. ”

  “Mr. Flume—”

  “All right, damn it. Etch and Lucia used to stop here before their shift. Every night, like clockwork. Etch parked his own car in the lot. Few minutes later, Lucia would bring the patrol unit around. Nine-thirty, every night, I’d give ’em both dinner on the house. Two cheeseburgers with rings. Lucia liked Big Red. Etch took a vanilla malt. They went on duty at ten. ”

  Maia fingered the paper-wrapped key.

  She stared at the signs painted on the diner windows—FISH PLATTER, CLASSIC CAR FRIDAY. She imagined two uniformed officers sitting inside at the counter.

  She had spent the last few hours at the San Antonio Express-News, buried in the news morgue, reading about the White family, Mission Road and any case involving Hernandez and DeLeon. What she’d learned had depressed the hell out of her, but it hadn’t made things any clearer.

  “The 911 call about Franklin White’s body came in at just after ten,” she recalled. “The ME’s report placed the time of death at not very long before that. ”

  “That’s why Etch and Lucia asked me to talk to homicide for them. You look at their regular routine, they couldn’t have killed Frankie White. They would’ve been here eating dinner. ”

  “They were suspects? News reports said nothing about that. ”

  Flume shuffled from foot to foot. “Look . . . Etch and Lucia were frustrated about Frankie White, okay? This was their beat. Kid kept coming down here, picking up women at the bars. Later, those women turned up dead. How would you feel? Longer the detectives went without arresting him, the more Etch talked about intimidating Frankie. He knew Frankie’s car. He knew the bars Frankie liked. Sometimes Etch would follow Frankie around, to discourage him. Etch even told me . . . well, he said what he’d do if he ever caught Frankie on a dark street somewhere. ”

  “And when Frankie turned up dead,” Maia said, “Etch and Lucia were first at the scene. ”

  “They couldn’t have killed him,” Flume insisted. “Etch might’ve talked about it, but Lucia never would’ve let him. She was the most even-keeled person I ever met. ”

  “She killed a man once,” Maia recalled. “Right in your diner, wasn’t it?”

  “That was different. Lives were at stake. She did what she had to—one clean shot. Calm and cool. But hitting Frankie White the way he was hit? I mean, no. No way. I told the homicide detectives Etch and Lucia were totally in the clear. I explained their routine. ”