Down Among the Dead Men (A Thriller) (22 page)

Vargas nodded.

“Just one last question,” he said. “Something I overheard that I’ve been curious about ever since.”

“Okay.”

“Have you ever heard of someone called El Santo?”

Garcia looked at him blankly, but as the name sank in, his face began to drain of color. He said nothing for a long moment as another dancer took the stage and started stripping off her clothes to the cheers and applause of the regular patrons.

“Where did you hear this?” he asked.

“From the man with the burnt face. He said, ‘El Santo will bless him.…He blesses us all.’ And then there’s this.…” Vargas reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the rawhide string with the ring attached. “Ainsworth’s son told me that the American woman was wearing it when they found her. It’s only a cheap trinket, but it might have some significance.”

Garcia looked at it. His color didn’t return. “La Santisima. What the hell have you gotten yourself involved in?”

“I’m not sure. That’s why I’m asking.”

Garcia was quiet again. Then he said, “You probably already know this, but worship of La Santisima is pretty common down here.”

Vargas nodded. His own parents, who were both Catholic and emigrants from Nuevo Laredo, had spoken of her. Known by many different names—
La Santisima, Santa Muerte, Dona Sabastiana
—she was a grim reaper–like figure that many Latin Americans believed could perform miracles. All throughout Mexico you could find shrines to Saint Death, hooded statuettes surrounded by offerings of beads and flowers and bottles of tequila.

And while the Catholic Church frowned on such worship as counter to its beliefs, this didn’t stop many of its followers from praying to her.

As far as Vargas knew, there was nothing sinister in any of this, but the discovery of this ring, coupled with Mr. Blister’s mention of El Santo—or the Holy One—had raised a red flag.

It might be nothing. But then again, it might be everything.

“Most of the time, this stuff is harmless,” Garcia said. “Simple people praying for their health or their dying loved ones. But El Santo…that’s a different matter altogether.”

“So who is he? Some kind of pagan god?”

“We’re dealing in rumors again. Rumors that are far less reliable than the ones about Rojas. But it’s said that there is a cult of La Santisima’s followers, a cult that has distorted these simple beliefs and offers blood sacrifices in her honor. Led by someone known only as El Santo.”

“Blood sacrifices,” Vargas said. “These don’t sound like friendly people.”

“Just the opposite. El Santo is believed to be a messiah—the direct descendant of their God. And his followers will do anything he asks of them. Including kill.”

“Shades of Charlie Manson.”

“Some say they’ve been trafficking in drugs, but if that’s true, they’ve managed to avoid territorial disputes with the other cartels. Not an easy thing to do.”

“Does this cult have a name?”

“I’ve heard it called by many different names. But the one that seems to stick is
La Santa Muerte
.”

The Holy Dead.

Vargas felt his gut tighten. The words triggered a memory. Something Junior had said.

You’re a dead man.

You’re one of the dead men.

Vargas thought about this a moment, then looked at Garcia.

“Thanks for your hospitality,” he said, “but it’s time for me to go.”

51

I
T TOOK HIM
nearly two hours to find it.

It was little more than a paragraph in the August 14 edition of the
Albuquerque Examiner,
a short blurb about the body of a female being discovered in the parking lot of a Taco Bell.

No identification, no description, but she’d been found by a security guard who was making his rounds.

The victim had “multiple gunshot wounds” but was still alive and had been taken to Burke Memorial Hospital.

Albuquerque was close to a four-hour drive from Juárez but not beyond the bounds of possibility. If Rojas had been concerned enough about his career to commit murder, he surely wouldn’t have hesitated to make the drive. The farther away from his jurisdiction, the better.

There were no follow-up stories. Nothing more about the victim—which, in Vargas’s experience, was not unusual. There was a time when multiple gunshot wounds would have been big news, but nowadays such things were an everyday occurrence. Fresh new stories of violence popped up so frequently that the old ones were quickly forgotten.

Vargas stared at the computer screen and wondered what his next move should be.

He sat in an Internet café located in a strip mall on Triunfo de la Republica. After leaving the Velvet Glove, he had gone back to his motel and slept fitfully through the rest of the night, dreaming about Mexican wrestlers who looked like Rojas and Mr. Blister and Charles Manson.

At one point, Carmelita entered the dream, buck naked, carrying a wad of cash in one hand and a tray of ice cubes in the other. But before she got three feet into the room, she morphed into La Santisima, a grinning skull in a red satin hood and, like something from one of his brother Manny’s ghost stories, said, “I want my ring. Give me my beautiful ring.…”

Vargas had awakened at the crack of dawn, relieved to discover he was still in his motel room. He took a quick shower, checked his head wound and found it healing satisfactorily, then pulled on some fresh clothes and his baseball cap and started driving, looking for an Internet café that opened early.

He’d found this one almost immediately.

After paying his fee, he went to a cubicle near the back, then fired up the computer and began his search. He had accounts with several newspaper archival services—an expensive but professional necessity—and after two hours of searching had finally struck gold.

At least what he hoped was gold.

Pulling out his cell phone, he cycled through his address book and found the number of a guy named William Brett, a reporter he’d met back in the old days who—if he recalled correctly—worked for the
Albuquerque Examiner.
 

He got him on the phone, reminded him who he was, and discovered that Brett didn’t need reminding.

“What do you want?” he asked.

As with many of Vargas’s colleagues these days, there was unmistakable resentment in the guy’s voice. Vargas had, after all, betrayed their profession and had tainted everyone in the process—much like Rojas had tainted the Chihuahua state police.

“I need a favor,” Vargas said.

“Please don’t tell me you’re looking for a job.”

Vargas paused. “No, I need information on a story your paper carried back in August. No byline.”

“You’re actually working again?”

There was just enough incredulity in Brett’s voice to irritate Vargas, but he kept his cool.

“Strictly freelance,” he said. “The story is dated August fourteenth of this year, a woman with multiple gunshot wounds found in a Taco Bell parking lot. She was taken to Burke Memorial.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

Vargas hadn’t expected it to but pressed on.

“I’m hoping you can find out who worked it and see if they have any follow-up notes. She may be connected to a story I’m working on.”

“That’s a tall fuckin’ order,” Brett said. “What’s in it for me?”

“If it pans out, I’ll give you first shot. An exclusive. Drug smuggling, murder, and the possible involvement of a Mexican religious cult. I’m working on a book, so anything you print is bound to help me down the road.”

“Yeah? And how do I know you aren’t making all this shit up? I mention your name to my editor and he’ll laugh me out of his office.”

“Fuck you,” Vargas said. “You don’t have to source me. You want in or not?”

There was a pause on the line as Brett thought it over.

“I’ll call you back,” he said, then hung up.

The call came forty minutes later.

Vargas was on the road again, traveling back along Highway 2, this time headed toward Columbus, New Mexico, where he hoped to cross the border without incident.

Grabbing his phone from the passenger seat, he clicked it on. “Hey, Bill. Any luck?”

“Your victim was a Jane Doe. Spent seven hours in surgery for gunshot wounds to the head and chest, almost died twice on the table. She was comatose for three days, but finally managed to pull through.”

“Jesus Christ. She’s alive?”

“Isn’t that what I just told you?”

“Right, right,” Vargas said. “So what happened to her?”

“Don’t know, didn’t ask. And that’s all the charity work you’re getting out of me.”

“What are you talking about? I told you you could have an exclu—”

“Dream on, Nicky boy. You’ve got about as much chance of anyone taking you seriously as I do of getting a blow job from an Argentinian whore. So I’m giving you this one because I’m a nice guy, but that’s it. Don’t call me again.”

Then he hung up.

Vargas dropped his phone onto the seat, feeling heat rise in his cheeks, wanting to put a fist into the dashboard.

Fucking prick.

But the sad sorry fact was that Brett was right. Getting anyone to take him seriously would be an uphill battle.

But then he’d known that for a couple of years now and that hadn’t stopped him. Might even have fueled him.

Whatever the case, he had new fuel now.

The American woman was alive.

 52

Beth

“
YOU’RE MAKING REMARKABLE
progress, Elizabeth.”

Beth sat before a computer in a small exam room, the last of her cognitive regeneration exercises on-screen. She had just finished alphabetizing twenty words in less than sixty seconds. A new record for her.

Or so she’d been told.

“Four weeks ago, you could barely walk and talk, and look at you now.”

She had also aced a six-color pattern sequence and had correctly identified seven Central American countries randomly highlighted on a map. The stumbling block had always been Honduras, but this time she’d recognized it immediately.

Yet despite these small victories and the ever-expanding moments of lucidity, she often felt confused and disoriented.

Without looking up at Dr. Stanley—who stood at her shoulder—she said, “It’s not the walking and talking I’m worried about. It’s the remembering.”

Stanley was her neuropsychologist, a bear of a man who never pulled punches.

“I’ve told you before, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get it all back. You’ve had significant tissue damage and there are still bullet fragments in your brain.”

“And the hallucinations?”

Stanley moved around to the other side of the table and sank into a chair, looking directly at her.

“I’m not convinced that what you’re experiencing can really be classified as hallucinations. You’re more than likely a victim of what we call confabulation.”

“Have you told me this before, too?”

Stanley nodded. “Hallucinations exist in the present. For example, you might look down at this table and imagine there are a hundred spiders crawling across it.

“Confabulation, on the other hand, although rare, is simply the mind filling in the details of a memory where none exist. Some of those details might be false, while others might come from some other past event. If I were to ask you what you had for dinner last night, you might tell me you dined with the President of the United States and be entirely convinced that it’s true.”

“But I know I was on that cruise. And I also know that Jen’s missing.”

“Unfortunately, that’s about all we can verify. You were missing, too, Beth, for nearly ten months. And no one knows what happened during that time. But a lot of what you remember about Playa Azul could well be a product of the dysfunction.”

“No,” Beth said. “It happened. Rafael and Marta, Meat Without Feet, the mugging, every bit of it.”

“According to your ex-husband, the cruise company insists that they have no record of the Santiagos.”

“Then they must have been using false identities.”

“The Playa Azul police have discounted your story as well.”

“They’re wrong,” Beth insisted. “I…I just wish I could get my head past that police station and remember it all. Then I might be able to find her.”

Dr. Stanley smiled. A gentle smile. Beth sensed he must be a man of infinite patience.

“I once worked a case similar to yours. A young man who was convinced that his brain injury was the result of being mauled by a grizzly bear. He remembered it clearly. But the truth was, he was the victim of a bus accident and had never seen a bear in his life, grizzly or otherwise.”