Done for a Dime (47 page)

Things swam and he felt himself closing down, growing cold, his vision hazing darker. So hard to breathe—he convulsed, trying to inhale, gargling blood. As the adrenaline drained away, he felt the pain more clearly and couldn’t help himself. His eyes filled with tears, he soiled himself, descending into a formless place of terror and want. I know this place, he thought. Known it all my life.

You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.

He caught the sound of a vehicle roaring forward, slamming to a stop and then the door opened. Steps churned across the damp gravel. The security guard from the gate, Murchison thought, unable to see. He heard the man wailing, “Good God, no, fucking hell, no, no …” A voice like a strangled trumpet. Then shouts into the cell phone, calls for an ambulance, but the nearest hospital was so far away.

Murchison eased himself onto his side, laid his head down. Time to let go. Embracing the terror and want, in time he felt them give way, till a vast cold stillness encircled him.
Too hard to breathe,
a voice said,
and what for?
His own voice, and yet—

Above him, a presence, the security guard: “Go ahead and bleed. Lying bastard. Go ahead.” Well said, Murchison thought, as the guard kicked the gun away from his hand. You tell the tale now. Look at the bodies, figure it out, save yourself.

26

T
he funerals began. Every church in Rio Mirada, it seemed, served double duty, a shelter for the homeless, a chapel for the bereft. Services ran nonstop, packed with mourners who offered ritual prayers and tried to steady their voices as they joined together in hymns.

Murchison and Stluka were honored together—matching flag-draped caskets carried in identical white hearses, proceeding at dirge speed behind row after row of motorcycles and squad cars, cruiser strobes flickering blue and red. Over one thousand officers came, as though to say,
You can’t kill us all.
They traveled from across the state and as far away as Denver, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, each cop wearing a funereal armband or a black-banded badge.

News crews stationed themselves at the base of the charred hillside, pointing their cameras toward the devastation, framing it as backdrop, while the mile-long motorcade edged solemnly past, heading toward the high school stadium for the memorial service as the public, held back behind barriers, looked on.

The stands were full—men and women in uniform, a mosaic of blues, plus mayors from across the state, the families of the fallen men and selected local officials. The public, again, was excluded, in keeping with custom. This ceremony was for the brotherhood. Twenty motorcycles in slow procession led the two white hearses around the cinder track, then a bagpipe played “Amazing Grace” as Holmes and the others in the honor guard, wearing their white gloves and dress blues, carried the flag-draped caskets to the stage and placed them on stands marked by wreaths bearing each man’s badge number.

The speeches came next, some sweetly personal and teary, others droning, pompous things that made Holmes cringe. If I hear one more politician say, “We’re all family here,” or “They paid the ultimate sacrifice,” he thought, I’ll draw my piece and fire. Officers from the outside departments, growing bored, chatted or cracked jokes among themselves in the stands. Later they’d hit the bars or show off the latest bells and whistles in their cruisers.

No one mentioned how Murchison died, nor the deaths of the men found with him. It seemed eerie and odd and almost poisonous, that silence. The circumstances remained a riddle, made no more clear by the brief, implausible, self-serving tale proposed by the security guard on the premises at the time, who promptly hired a lawyer and said no more.

The chief had refused even to honor Murchison without first consulting the mayor’s office and legal counsel regarding its propriety. They’d been able to keep his being on administrative leave under wraps for now, but it would come out eventually. Sarina Thigpen had hired Grantree Hamilton to pursue a misconduct claim, which was more nuisance than threat but still cast a shadow. As for the families and business associates of Clint Bratcher and his lawyer, Gramm, they stayed quiet, retained counsel with an expertise in wrongful death, and waited.

Word leaked concerning the chief’s misgivings, prompting a cry of outrage not just from some on the force but the community, too. Rumors flew, each more insidious than the last and only intensified by the details of the Ferry confession, now well known. Tina Navigato had passed along Murchison’s tape to the press, and not all reports bothered with restraint. A typical headline, this one in the normally modest
Rio Mirada Index
, read:

T
RAUMATIZED
C
OP
K
ILLS
T
AINTED
P
OWER
B
ROKER
L
INKED TO
B
AYMONT
F
IRES

The community rose up. Ralston Polhemus, one of their own, had been in league with arsonists—worse, killers—knowingly or not, that was for him and God to work out. People vowed that they would burn the rest of the city down before they saw Bob Craugh or Wally Glenn or any of their henchmen so much as turn a shovelful of dirt on Baymont or St. Martin’s Hill or let the council approve such a thing. And Murchison, he’d shown true courage, “our homegrown hero,” sacrificing himself as he had.

So easy to praise the dead, Holmes thought, when he heard such things. So hard to forgive the living. Stluka, it was true, he did not much miss, except for the sake of pity. Murchison, that was different. Despite the ugly side he’d shown that last day of his life, he’d been fair overall, more or less honest, smart, decent. Hard to know what had gone so wrong inside him. Holmes wondered, though, remembering the sight of Murchison twisted up inside, the lost look in his eyes, the scattershot rage, whether the heroic self-sacrifice everyone felt so compelled to honor wasn’t actually a sort of death wish. Whether noble sacrifice wasn’t just suicide dressed up for company.

As irony would have it, the chief spoke last. Holmes prepared himself for a final insult of numbing pomposities, but the man surprised him.

“Cops think they’re invulnerable,” he began, sounding for once not quite as young as he looked. “We’re convinced we’ll die from a heart attack two weeks after retirement, not in the line of duty. And so when one of us goes down, that illusion gets exposed for what it is.”

A restlessness rippled through the crowd as he spoke of how the awareness of our own waiting death only intensified when two men, partners, were killed. And how it was easy, but wrong, to blame the dead for reminding us so starkly of that one inescapable part of the future.

“It happens,” he said, “that blaming. It already has.”

Holmes felt oddly moved, first from the surprise of hearing this man so roundly despised by the rank and file speak so honestly on a touchy point, then finally by the words themselves, the man’s recognition that they were all gathered there not just in grief but also in fear. He’d be ridiculed by some for saying as much. Holmes found courage in it, and in that courage, solace.

As the chief stepped away from the microphone, six helicopters flew low above the stadium, performing a twofold missing man formation as first one then a second chopper peeled away, returning back the way they had come instead of continuing on with the others.

At the cemetery, while “Taps” played and Murchison and Stluka received their twenty-one-gun salutes, the honor guard rolled up the flags from each casket and presented them to the widows. Sheila Stluka—defiant and tearless one moment, then shaking with sobs the next—received her flag like she intended to hurl it down into the grave with the casket.

Holmes presented the second flag to Murchison’s wife, Joan. She accepted it with a nod, her face stoic in its sorrow inside her veil. A bit too stoic, Holmes couldn’t help thinking as he snapped to his salute.

Coast Guard planes patrolled the ocean as
La Chica de Buenas
kept to the ten-mile mark. Ferry and the boat crew, watching the sky, spotted a C-130 or Falcon Lear jet pass overhead at least once a day, usually twice, but no patrol boats or buoy tenders appeared to send out a boarding crew, scour around, looking for drugs or weapons under the guise of checking to be sure they had enough life vests and fire extinguishers aboard.

Ovidio’s friend Rafael had made a point in San Quintín to demand Ferry relinquish any weapons. “They’ll seize the boat on that alone, even if it’s your own gun.” Ferry had tossed a perfectly fine Walther P5 overboard under those pretenses, and then, as it turned out, not a boarding to bother over the whole trip down.

Now, anchored off La Libertad, they lowered the dinghy from its boom and Rafael and Ferry disembarked, heading in for the huge long pier stemming out from the old town of ruins. Late in the day, the fishing boats headed in, too, aiming for the crane that would pull them up from the surf to the pier itself with a blast from its smokestack whistle.

Rafael brought the dinghy in close to the pier. As the boat jostled in the late day surf, Ferry stowed his laptop inside his duffel, tossed the bag over his shoulder, and grabbed hold of the wood ladder and climbed to the top.

He entered a circus of activity. Makeshift stalls lined the pier, the deck slimy and fetid with salt water and fish entrails. Old women sat shelling
camarones
or cleaning
boca colorada
, selling their wares from ice-filled tubs and haggling with buyers. Boat crews wheeled their vessels down the pier on homemade dollies—some built from toy wagons or bicycles—shouting,
“¡Con permiso!”
as they pushed through the crowd, down the gauntlet of fishmongers’ stalls, guiding their boats into their proper berths for the night.

Just beyond the pier, Ferry bought a cup of ceviche made with lime juice and bitter orange, chasing it with two pilsners as he sat with a group of P
escadores
at a stone table in the shadows of the old train station. Once majestic, the old station now sat empty, a ruin—and in its decrepitude, it served as a kind of cautionary backdrop for the weekenders from the capital who flocked here, as well as the expatriate surfers you still found lolling around the beach.

For dessert, he bought a fresh coconut, drinking the clear sweet milk first, then shaving pieces of the meat from the shell, eating the slivers one by one as he paced, waiting. In the shadows of the palm trees, black crabs emerged from the dark volcanic sand and skittered away from his footfalls. Down the beach toward Punta Roca, a pack of shirtless boys stoned a rat.

“¡
Hola!
¡Guillermo!”

He turned at the sound of his given name, rendered in Spanish. Marisela waved from her car, unwilling to pay the old men who would watch it for her if she wanted to park. Ferry hoisted his duffel and hurried toward the street.

She beamed at him, waiting for a kiss behind the wheel. Ferry apologized for his cabin stench. She was wearing a flowered sundress and sandals. Seeing his eyes run up and down her body, she blushed.

“How I see me?”

She meant, “How do I look?”

“It’s nice, the dress. Does you justice.”

He realized the expression lay a little outside her grasp, but his tone seemed to register. She blushed again.

“I don’t have nothing for put me on.” She shook her head prettily, putting the car in gear.

The road to the interior wove through low green hills. Traffic was light, psychedelic buses and smoke-spewing trucks mostly. Remembering his in-country manners, he extended his arm out the window and waved to the driver ahead when he sensed Marisela wanted to pass.

She attempted further conversation as she drove, bungling her English as usual—”She look me see when I be here,” or, “She more young as me,” or, “I feel me bad, it shame me”—then launching helplessly into streams of Spanish when the translating impulse failed. Ferry nodded, understanding little of what she meant by her English and next to none of the Spanish, knowing he’d need to try harder at that, and soon. He had half the money he’d expected, and the boat had cost him an extra ten thousand, the cost of short notice. To make things worse, expenses here were through the roof now that they’d switched to the dollar. He’d be hiring himself out again sooner than he wanted.

They merged with the Pan-American Highway just outside Santa Tecla, passing the Col Don Bosco as they headed east. Since the 2001 earthquakes, whole sections of the city lay in ruins. The cinder block homes had collapsed like sand in the tremors, leaving skeletal remains. These areas looked like war zones, facing the sheared mountain face that had given way.

Nobody knew how many bodies remained beneath the debris, though from time to time government workers returned to spread lye around. Packs of
vagabundos
sniffed the rubble each day, side by side with trash pickers scavenging for pots and spoons and table knives. Marisela’s family’s lumber business should have prospered, but who had money to rebuild?

It wasn’t just buildings that had fallen apart. The economy had tanked. Men with guns roamed everywhere. Six had appeared on a flatbed truck a week after Ferry had left for this most recent trip. They’d pushed Marisela, her mother, everyone else into the office, stripped the jewelry off the women, watches and belt buckles off the men, grabbed the money from the register, the vault, everyone’s pockets. Not even a brother-in-law in the PCN with ties to
La Mara Dieciocho
could protect them. As for the lumber, it stayed put—what good was that?

Remembering the story, and seeing again the ruins throughout the town, Ferry wondered what variety of weepy, woe-is-me hand-wringing would still be going on about the Rio Mirada fires. People in the States, he thought, they’re like children. They have no idea how the rest of the world lives, what suffering really looks like.

Marisela lived in a second house on her parents’ property, which lay inside a gated middle-class community of no particular ostentation. Even so, uniformed men armed with machine pistols manned the entrance, and they jotted down Marisela’s license number on a clipboard as they waved her through.