Mendez had no intention of meeting the old man. It was ridiculous, to waste her time listening to his colorful but meaningless talk, when she could be out reinterviewing the friends of Gloria Rivas she’d suspected hadn’t told her everything they knew, or — . That reminded her. She called the Torres number, got Jasmina’s mother again, and was told that no, Mina wasn’t home that day. She had been in earlier and went out again with friends to a movie. Did Sergeant Mendez have Mina’s new cell phone number? Yes, Sergeant Mendez had it, and now tried it, but the phone was either turned off or in one of the county’s numerous dead zones.
Mendez looked at the clock again: 8:52. Oh, hell, why not?
When she turned down the alleyway near the burrito stand, it appeared empty, until the old man stepped out of the shadows, a swirl of dark robes and a gleaming staff. He pulled open the car door, slid the stick inside with the ease of long habit, tucked himself into the passenger seat, and had the door shut again before the car had settled into stillness.
“Where are we going?” she asked, reaching up to flick on the overhead light.
He held out a scrap of paper, a torn-off section of the local AAA map, showing Rio Linda and the outlying countryside. Near the upper right corner, twelve miles or so from the center of town, was a penciled circle.
“You want me to go here?” she asked, tapping the circle.
In response, he pulled his seat belt around him.
She put the car into gear and drove off.
She didn’t have to check his map again — one thing Bonita Mendez knew, it was this valley. She had been born in the Rio Linda community hospital, had attended schools here, had gone to college just over the range of coastal hills, and had come home, after a brief fling with the bright lights of the Bay Area, to work and live. She’d learned how to drive on the roads near the map’s circle, remote farm lanes where a beginner could learn the intricacies of the stick shift without endangering the driving public; she’d patrolled there when she began at the police department; and she’d helped dismantle a meth lab a little farther along the road, five years later. Before that, she remembered, the INS had raided a farmworkers’ camp, carved into the hills by undocumented workers desperate to save every dollar to send to their families back home.
It was dark out there, miles from any streetlamp. When she let the car slow, the last house had been nearly a mile before; the last car they’d passed, ten minutes before. Even the headlights behind them had turned off at the final junction, when they’d left the main road.
“Okay?” she said, making it a question.
The old man’s hand moved into the glow from the dashboard, one long finger pointing straight ahead. She gave the car some gas, and in a hundred yards, when his finger shifted to the right, she steered down a gravel track between fields.
They went on that way for about a mile in all, gravel giving way to dirt, then ruts. Eventually, his hand came up, and she stopped.
She would’ve had to stop even without the signal, because she had reached the end of the road. The fields on either side came to an end at a creek with a cliff on the other side, thrust up by an underground fault line. Her headlights illuminated a dirt turnaround and a wall of greenery. The camp of illegals had been very near here, as she remembered — the men had used the creek for water, the hills for shelter, and the trees for concealment. In the end, it had been the smell of the cook fire that had given them away.
Just as the smell of smoke as she got out of the car gave this encampment away.
She had her hand on the weapon at her side, easing the car door shut with the hand that held the big Maglite. The old man, however, had no such urge to silence, and before she could stop him, he had slammed his door with a bang that could be heard for a mile.
The very air seemed to wince. Her companion walked toward the turnaround and spoke over his shoulder. “Venga.”
She was already moving before the implications of his command struck her. Unless he’d come up with a very short quotation from some Spanish book, he had just addressed her directly. She trotted after him, switching on her flashlight as they plunged into a shadow of a space between some bushes.
Yes, there was a creek here, with stones laid across it to ensure dry feet. And yes, the smell of wood smoke grew, as did signs of human occupation — a pair of folding chairs that looked as if they’d literally fallen off the back of a truck, with duct tape and a stick holding one leg together; a full black garbage bag with its neck tied shut; a heap of empty plastic gallon-size milk jugs. At least the place doesn’t reek like a toilet, she thought, grateful that she wasn’t picking up disgusting substances on her shoes.
The ground under their feet began to rise, and Mendez thought they were coming near the sandstone cliff in which the illegals had carved their dwellings. The trees grew thin, the path more defined, and suddenly Erasmus came to a halt before her.
“Hola, niños,” he called. “’Stoy aquí con mi amiga. Permiso?”
There followed a long and tense silence, during which Mendez’s fingers worked at the strap on her gun, and then an answer: “Vengan.”
She nearly dropped the flashlight in surprise: the voice was indeed that of a child, although she’d thought Erasmus had used the word as a priest would have: “my children.” She took her hand off her gun and warily followed the shifting outline of his robes.
A barrier had been constructed, jutting out of the sandstone cliff in an L-shaped wall made of splintered pallets, tree branches, and a sheet of warped plywood with tire tracks down its length, the whole held together with duct tape and twine. Just past the end of the patchwork barrier stood the smoking circle of a burned-down campfire; around its back lay the entrance to a cave dwelling, one that either had gone unnoticed when the previous lot had been destroyed or else had been carved anew. Light came from within, and the hiss of burning propane. Erasmus started forward, but she held his shoulder and pushed past him, peering cautiously at the hole hidden by the barrier. Her hand on her weapon again, she peered inside.
The cave’s three occupants, adolescents all, were standing in an apprehensive half-circle, separated from the adult intruders by an upended plastic milk crate draped with a square of cloth that had once been a pajama shirt. The girl on the right, tallest of the three, was Jasmina Torres. The boy on the left, small and dark, was Ernesto Garcia, a friend of Enrique Escobedo’s whom she’d interviewed along with two or three dozen other middle school students.
The boy in the middle, clothes dirty but chin up, was Enrique Escobedo himself.
The woman in Mendez wanted to vault the plastic crate and seize the boy in ecstatic relief, then turn on the other two and deliver a tongue-lashing they would not recover from fast. She wanted to dance and sing and yank out her cell phone to tell all the world he was safe, but the cop in her nailed her boots to the ground and sent her eyes traveling across the contents of the cave, to keep the kids dangling. It was, she had to admit, dry, neat, and surprisingly well equipped. Half a dozen of the plastic milk jugs, filled with water, were stacked against the wall, along with a plastic storage bin showing the gaudy wrappers of packaged food within. A stack of neatly folded bedding — a wool blanket, a mover’s pad, and a sleeping bag patched with duct tape — leaned against the storage bin, with a second propane camp light. Thought had gone into the hideout, and care — most kids would have dumped a pile of charcoal in the middle of the cave and lit it, suffocating to death by morning.
Mendez studied the impromptu tablecloth and wondered if it had been put there, and the cave tidied, just to impress her. A demonstration of their responsible behavior, perhaps.
Not going to work.
“You guys having fun here?” she said in a hard voice. “You playing at Peter Pan or something? The city’s spent a fortune looking for you, half of us haven’t slept in two weeks because we’ve been searching for your body, and your family is going nuts.” At the last accusation, the boy’s defiance hardened, and he glanced past her shoul
der at the old man. His lack of guilt confirmed a suspicion.
“Your mother knew, didn’t she? That you hadn’t been kidnapped. That’s why she stopped phoning me every couple of hours, two days after you disappeared.”
“Mina told her,” the boy confirmed, gesturing at the girl. “I didn’t want her to worry.”
At that, Mendez lost it. “Why the hell didn’t you come to the police?” she shouted. “Why are you hiding out — ”
Click, as the penny dropped.
“You saw it, didn’t you? You saw Gloria die, and you’re afraid her killer will come after you.” It really wasn’t much of a leap of inspiration — this sort of thing happened all the time, in a community dominated by gangs, where one crime, or even an accident, could lead to an escalation of violence and retribution until eventually the police managed to wrap official hands around it all and smother it.
The boy nodded. His defiance suddenly melted away, and he looked small and scared. Mendez sighed, rubbed at her face, and decided to start over again.
“Okay, let’s sit down and talk about this.”
The three kids looked hugely relieved and settled onto their dusty pads. Mendez took the camp light off the table and put it on the ground, pulling the table back toward the entrance as a chair. She glanced around to see what the old man would sit on, but he was not there — leaving the police to their work, or maybe just a recognition that the cave would be stifling with one more body in it. Or perhaps he had some kind of Zorro complex, so that when his job was done, he would fade into the night.
“Digame,” she said. The boy was so eager to do so, his words tumbled in a rush of Spanish and English, with his friends contributing the occasional comment or clarification.
The first thing he wanted Mendez to know was that Gloria hadn’t really been his babysitter, although his mother paid her for staying with him when she was working nights. He was twelve and didn’t need a babysitter. But Gloria’s family was large and she was serious about getting into college, and she could work more easily in the silence of the Escobedo house, so they all pretended she was a babysitter.
Mendez blinked at the boy’s sense of priorities but decided to let him tell it as he wanted. She nodded solemnly, and he went on.
“So anyway, a little after eight, Gloria got this phone call on her cell. She got all funny when she heard who was on the line and took the phone outside so I wouldn’t hear, but she didn’t talk for long and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Then a little while later I was upstairs, getting ready for bed, and I heard this knock on the door, and I looked down from the window and there was this guy there, and I figured it was the same guy who’d called.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Well, she was angry when she saw him, and she wouldn’t let him in, and they went out in the yard and talked for a while, angry but in low voices.”
“Did you know him?”
“I’d seen him around once or twice. He’s big in one of the gangs, or at least that’s what someone told me. They call him Taco.”
“Go ahead.”
“Like I said, I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, not without opening the window and hanging out of it, but it looked like he wanted her to do something, and she wouldn’t. After a while, he got really angry and he hit her — not with his fist, with his hand, like a slap, but he knocked her back, and I was going to go down and make him stop, but he turned and walked away. But Gloria went after him and grabbed his arm just before he got to the car, and then he turned around really fast and I heard this bang, and Gloria fell. It took me a minute to realize what had happened, and I just stared at Gloria lying there and this Taco guy looking down at her. It was . . . I kept waiting for her to stand up, you know?”
The boy’s stricken expression, the tears in his eyes, were strong reminders of the first time Mendez had seen a dead person, the unreality of it. She nodded again, with no humor this time.
“And then he looked up and he saw me in the window. He started running toward the house, and I could see the gun in his hand then, and I got the hell out of there.”
“How?”
“Out the window. You can climb out onto the porch roof and down the whatchacallit, the trellis, but I sort of shot off the roof and hit the ground and ran. I was down the street before I heard his car take off, but I was afraid to go home again. I mean, I saw him, and he’s got a lot of friends.”
“So what did you do?”
“I sneaked down to Mina’s house, and she gave me her phone, and she and ’Nesto and I hid out at her house until morning. ’Nesto had a cousin who’d lived down in these caves for a while, before La Migra deported him, but he said there wasn’t anyone using them right now, so we figured I could hide out here until you guys had arrested Taco.”
“That was your plan?”
“If I led you to Taco, his homeys would come after me, maybe even my mom. But I thought that if everyone knew you couldn’t find me, they wouldn’t go blaming me when Taco got arrested.”
In the backward logic of the gang world, it made sense. “So why did you have Brother Erasmus bring me here?”
Enrique’s defiant look wavered, and his gaze dropped. “I realized I was just thinking about me. Me and my mom. But then Erasmo asked about Gloria, and so I told him about her and how she was really nice and she really wanted to go to college and all, and when I was telling him about her, I began to think that I wasn’t being much of a friend to her. I have a responsibility to her too.”
The trio across from Sergeant Mendez seemed to sit a little straighter, either shouldering their responsibility or squaring off for the firing squad. Two twelve-year-old boys and a girl who’d just turned thirteen, facing her as if prepared for the fate she would march them to.
Must’ve been some conversation with that old man, she thought.
“Thank you for being willing to come forward,” she said. “It would have saved us all a lot of grief if you’d called me ten days ago, but you’ve done so now, and that lets me get on with my responsibility, which at the moment includes protecting you.” For a second, just a flash, she felt a powerful urge to stand up and walk away, to leave these kids to the safety of their hideout, far from vengeful gangbangers and the inadequacy of the legal system. But she couldn’t do that — they were lucky they hadn’t run into some adult animal out here before now. Or been inside when an earthquake collapsed the cave. Time to bring them home.
She told them to gather their things, a process that consisted of picking up two already full backpacks and standing expectantly. She stuck the flashlight in her belt and exchanged it for one of the propane lamps, running her eyes across the sanctuary. How much of the organization had the girl been responsible for? she wondered. Young Jasmina showed signs of becoming a formidable woman. Mendez was smiling to herself when she ducked her head through the entrance of the cave, but the moment she was out, standing between the sandstone cliff and the wood-and-duct-tape wall, she heard a noise that wiped away any thought of a smile, a sound that froze the blood in her veins and made her hands shoot out to block the children behind her.
“Back!” she ordered. “Get back!”
A shotgun, racking its shell into place.
She was blind, with the lamp in her left hand dazzling her sight of the darkness beyond, but she knew that sound, oh yes, and although it set her guts to crawling and the impulse to fling herself to the ground was almost more than she could resist, she was not about to let these three children walk into it.
The kids hesitated in confusion, then to her relief she felt them retreat, back into the dark and inadequate depths of the cave. She kept her hands outstretched, her face and chest crawling with the anticipation of the deadly blast. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away, no one could miss at that range, but if she turned her left side toward the gun, she might live long enough to get out her weapon and take him down as he climbed past her into the cave. She straightened slowly, leaving her hands out but s
hifting a fraction to the right as she moved.
“I want the kid,” said the voice from the night.
“You don’t want those kids. They’re just vagrants camping out here. I’d suggest you leave before my partner arrives.”
“You don’t have a partner. You left the station by yourself.”
Which was true, although he’d missed her brief stop to take on Brother Erasmus. It was also worrying. “You’ve been following me?”
“Just the last couple of nights. One of my boys heard you were on to the kid. He was right.”
“Those were your headlights I saw behind me, on the road.”
“Didn’t need to follow you closer. I could see where you were coming. Now, get out of the way.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “And whoever you are and whatever you’ve done, you really don’t want to shoot a police officer.” If he thought she had no idea who he was, he might possibly be more inclined to back off, leaving Enrique for another day.
She heard a step, then another, and braced herself for action — throwing the lamp, dropping to the ground, or just dying, she didn’t know.
Then came a sound that didn’t fit: a patter of rainfall on a dry night, off to the side. She knew it had to be Erasmus and drew breath to shout a warning, but before the words could leave her mouth, there was a scuffle and a thump beneath a sudden exclamation. Then came the huge noise that she had been dreading and the brilliant flash that lit up the hillside.
What seemed a long time later, Mendez lifted her head off the ground. She was blind. And half-deaf, but over the ringing in her ears she could make out a high-pitched noise, a chorus of noises — screams — the kids, in the cave! She scrambled to her feet, vaguely grateful that she could move, that she hadn’t been cut in half by the shotgun blast. She staggered, crashing into something that gave way and bit at her hand: the pallet wall. She reached out more cautiously, then remembered the flashlight on her belt. She yanked it out and thumbed it on, and over the noise in her ears, the screaming voices seemed to diminish slightly.