El Gavilan (16 page)

And a late-night, high-speed pursuit often as not ended with some civilian—some mother and a toddler daughter, for instance—slaughtered, T-boned while innocently attempting to negotiate some crossroads.

Tell was about to break off the chase when the Nova’s brake lights flared and drifted right.

To his surprise, the Nova was slowing, eventually rolling to a stop on the shoulder.

Tell cruised to an angled halt behind the Chevy. The car was clearly some kid’s vanity project: air shocks and a license plate frame composed of entwined, busty, golden nude silhouettes. Lots of flat-black primer patch gave the mostly faded yellow Nova a leopard-spot appearance. The kid was probably still saving money for the cherry paint job he envisioned.

Because Tell had no police radio, he couldn’t run a check on the plate.

He got out warily, hearing his boot falls on crunching berm gravel, his flashlight held out to his side to draw any potential fire, his right hand on the butt of his gun. He saw four heads bobbing inside the Chevy.

The driver wisely turned on the interior lights as Tell approached, so he could see inside. It was four kids—two couples. Guy and girl up front, and girl and guy in back. They couldn’t be more than seventeen, any of them. Hispanic. Too-new clothes on the girls, which meant they’d likely just come across and drifted northeast to Ohio. They all looked terrified.

Tell’s adrenaline kicked down several notches. He said, “License and registration.”

The driver, clean cut, subservient, handed over a driver’s license. He said, his accent still relatively heavy, “Sir, my r-registra-tion, uh, I do have it, but I bought this car a few days ago. I think that it’s in my jacket at home, Officer, sir.”

Tell believed him. The kid was too scared and too green at dealing with American cops to lie. Tell didn’t believe the license he held in his hand, however. The thickness of the plastic was astonishingly slight. The background color in the photo was wrong. The holographic elements were badly blurred. Tell half smiled: the fake driver’s license was exactly like the sorry samples given him by Able Hawk.

Extending his hand palm up, Tell said, “I want all your IDs, now.” The girls, pretty despite their yet-to-wane baby fat, looked confused. The driver spoke to them in Spanish, evidently confident that Tell wasn’t a Spanish speaker. The boy told his riders to pull out their licenses. “He needs to see them,” he told them in Spanish. “Just stay cool, it’ll be all right. Jerry said these licenses always stand up to scrutiny by these town cops. It’s the sheriff’s boys we have to worry about, Jerry said. We’ll be fine.”

Purses opened and were rummaged through. The young dude in the backseat leaned left to pry his wallet out of the ass pocket of his low-rider jeans.

The kids passed three more operator’s licenses out the window to Tell. He shone his flashlight on the plastic cards—three more dismal fakes. The boy in back was allegedly named Magdaleno Ortiz.

Tell slid all four bogus licenses into his breast pocket.

The driver—Richie Huerta, if his own bogus license was to be believed that far—frowned. He said, “Officer? Sir?”

“Police Chief Lyon,” Tell said. “Chief of the
town cops
here in New Austin.” Tell stepped back from the Nova. “Step out of your car, would you Rich?”

The young man got out uncertainly, maybe expecting a beating.

“Walk around the back of your car with me and over to my SUV,” Tell told Richie in Spanish. Now the boy looked truly scared.

“Don’t sweat it yet, kid, I just want a private word with you.” Tell said that in Spanish too. Then, in English, he said, “Rich, I could run you all in and charge you for speeding, false IDs, endangering the public. Probably many other things too. I should impound your sweet car here. I’m frankly figuring you for having no insurance, and that’s a state violation that could send you away for a while. Let alone your lack of a valid license. I should call the county and turn you and your friends over to Able Hawk—
El Gavilan
—which I hope you know, Rich, would be a real dark prospect for you and your friends. Particularly given all the charges that could come your way from that man. You kids could go away for a long, long time.”

The boy, trembling, said, “What could I do to—”

Tell quickly held up a hand—not even wanting to contemplate what the kid might be prepared to offer of himself or of the girls to get out from under. The other three Mexican kids were twisted around in their seats, watching. The breath of the two in the backseat had fogged the rear window of the Nova. The girls were clearly terrified; afraid, probably, that at any minute Tell would swing on Richie. Or maybe that Richie would commit them to something.

Tell said, “I’m going to make you and your friends an offer.”

The kid swallowed hard, watching Tell watching the girls. Richie said, “What do you want?”

“Not much, kid. And it’s between you and me, and stays that way. I’m prepared to believe that is your car, Rich. I’m prepared to take your promise that you’re going to drive the speed limit in my town, here on out. Because if you don’t, if your name comes across my desk in some complaint or report, I’m going to personally land on you and send you back to Mexico, and much the worse for wear.”

“What do you want from me, sir?”

“I want you to swear to obey the law in my town, Rich. And your friends in that car—their behavior is on your head now too—from now to forever. I want you to promise me you’re going to get some kind of proof of insurance for that spanking sled of yours. Failing to become legal citizens in the next few weeks, I want you all to find better false identifications, and you’re going to need to do that damned fast, because I’m keeping these phony ones in my pocket. And that brings us to the heart of our deal. I forget tonight, and you all do that too. In return, I just want the name and location of the man who got you these false identifications.”

“I do that, he’ll kill me and rape my sisters,” Richie said. “He swore to me he would do that.”

“He’ll never know who sent me, Rich. You have my word as
jefe
and as your new best friend on that.”

Richie looked skeptical.

Tell said in Spanish, “I promise you on the soul of my dead baby daughter. I was Border Patrol and a Mexican drug cartel burned her and my wife alive in our home. I swear to you, I won’t let anything like that happen to you or to yours, Rich.”

Richie nodded, wild-eyed.

Tell pulled out his pen and notebook. “Shoot me a name, Rich.”

THEN

Walt had sensed it was the girl’s first time doing it for money as he made his selection. She struck him as a bit shy; half-innocent, really. It was a large part of the reason he’d chosen her from among the remaining whores.

When they reached her room, Walt saw how wrong he was. Playing the tyro, it soon became obvious, was a kind of strategy on her part. A timeworn ploy.

In her dank room, stripping, her demeanor changed. She laughed at his shyness undressing.

The girl was still laughing at Walt. She was speaking in Spanish and pointing between his legs. What was that Mex’ word she kept repeating as she laughed and pointed?

Poco?

Something like that. She kept laughing at his inability to get it up.

Too scared? Not sure what to do? Maybe it was the fact he felt the clock; he’d only paid for half an hour.

Her laughing grew meaner, a grating bray.

She’d pushed him too far, whatever she was gibbering on about.

Walt hit her with the back of his hand and sent her sprawling. When she looked up at him, scared and holding her own hand to her mouth, he saw he’d drawn blood.

He felt this stirring—looked down and sucked in his gut; saw he was finally getting hard.

Walt forced his bulk on the skinny Mexican girl, closing a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming and alerting the big boss whore.

He slid inside her, nearly coming at once. Well, she wasn’t laughing now, was she?

TWENTY TWO

Shawn lay on his cot, deep into his second pack of cigarettes, feeling lightheaded and nauseous from all the smoking; from too much coffee. Too many Krispy Kreme doughnuts the fat cop kept spotting him.

His hands were shaking and he was already stir-crazy.

Stir-crazy.

He understood that term too well now. Shawn felt like banging his head bloody against the walls or bars until he fell unconscious or died.

The New Austin police headquarters was nearly empty. It was just Shawn and the obese cop who sat outside his cell, on guard. “You’re our first all-nighter,” the fat-assed cop, Billy, had confided to Shawn.

Shawn had finally reached some kind of rapport with the bloated son of a bitch, though—at least persuading Billy to step outside so Shawn could take a dump in private.

The weekly newspaper reporter who had never covered a murder or seen a violent crime scene before standing over Thalia’s body, nevertheless had always fancied himself a hard-liner when it came to crime and punishment. But incarcerated now, Shawn was reassessing past positions. This was hell. Shawn chaffed in the too-tight space. He cursed the hard and narrow cot, too stingy blankets and especially that fucking toilet with no privacy.

But Billy wasn’t so bad. He’d even brought the portable TV into the jail area and angled the thing so they could watch a
Hunter
rerun together.

Shawn said, “You got cable, right?”

Billy said, “Yeah … you got a show this hour?”

“
The Shield
, on FX,” Shawn said. “Or
Nip-Tuck
… they show tits and ass on those.”

“And it isn’t a premium channel?” Billy, sucking the filling from a jelly-filled doughnut, seemed incredulous.

“No shit, they do. Lots of righteous nudity. And it’s basic cable,” Shawn said.

Billy wiped his hands down on his socks and picked up the remote. “Which channel?”

THEN

Patricia was fourteen when her parents flew the family to Texas to cross the borderline
back
.

All the blood relatives the Maldonados had left were still down there in Mexico. It was time, Kathleen and Augustin said, that Patricia met them. Time for her to see what her parents had felt so necessary to flee in order to build this new life in
El Norte
.

Her mother had another, unstated motive too, Patricia rightly sensed.

Kathleen had begun to worry about how thoroughly Americanized Patricia seemed. She felt Patricia had begun to acquire a certain kind of gringo’s entitlement mentality.

For his part, Augustin was abraded by his daughter’s increasingly romantic wonderings about the country her parents had deserted years before things truly began to go to pieces back home.

Initially, the trip to the border had done to nothing to further Kathleen’s and Augustin’s agendas.

The dry heat and desert—the strange plants that stubbornly thrived there—captivated Patricia. The terrain further sparked her imagination. She picked up a novel about the life of Pancho Villa, the Mexican peasant-turned-self-styled Revolutionary general, and became lost in its pages.

But then they’d finally left Texas—crossed over to the other side.

Squalor … strange smells. The sounds of distant gunfire, and, too often, of sirens.

Patricia’s cousin, Yolanda, was about her same age. But the boys who interested Yolanda horrified Patricia. They had gang tattoos and hid guns in their pants under their shirttails. They all smoked and they blasted
narcocorridos
from beater cars and trucks.

Yolanda’s house was a rotting pueblo with no reliable plumbing—but had a giant satellite dish up top that was probably their most expensive possession.

The neighbors incessantly screamed at one another, issued threats and ultimatums.

After the first of three planned nights sleeping over, Patricia awakened to find a cockroach crawling across her bed sheets. She begged her parents to let them return to spend nights in the hotel in El Paso. The hotel wasn’t wonderful—it wasn’t as good as the Holiday Inns they’d visited on trips for cheap family get-aways to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. But it was comparatively clean and something like heaven compared to her cousin’s home.

And she didn’t have to plug her ears against the blasting “music” of Valentín Elizalde and Sergio Vega.

When they were seated on the plane back to Ohio, squeezed in between her parents, Patricia said, “It’s good you left there. Thank you for doing that.”

Her parents took Patricia’s hands in theirs and squeezed hard as the jet taxied down the runway. As the plane dipped its wing for a turn before beginning its steep ascent, Patricia never looked down … never looked back.

TWENTY THREE

Tell returned home at eleven thirty
P.M
. He parked next to Patricia’s Honda—the only available slot in the parking lot. He sat in his car, finishing a song: Springsteen’s “I Wish I Were Blind.”

He locked up his SUV and stared off across the creek at the last, straggling fireflies. Frogs croaked in the high weeds.

Tell had talked to two TV reporters by cell phone on the drive home. He’d toed up to the hint of having his own person of interest for the murder of Thalia Ruiz. He hated to lie about the case, but he’d done it anyway, thinking perhaps the publicity would spark the real killer to some stupid act of reckless and attention-getting rabbiting. Or perhaps Tell’s hints about a suspect would provoke the killer into surrendering himself in time to cut a deal and escape the wrath of Able Hawk. The sheriff was frequently on television and in the newspapers too, making rumblings about a “slam-dunk, death penalty bounce.”

Tell had decided to release Shawn when he got into the HQ in the morning. He had already concluded that his morning run with Patricia was probably off, so he figured for another early morning at the station house.

A note was taped to the door of Tell’s apartment. The handwriting was feminine:

Whatever the hour, please knock.
—
P.

Tell thought about ignoring it. She’d probably be asleep at this hour. And some time to think more overnight about things regarding Shawn and his sorry actions with Thalia might mellow Patricia’s attitude toward him. Tell hoped so, anyway. Then Tell heard a hinge squeak. Patricia stepped out onto the shaft of light from her opening door. She whispered, “Tell? Can we please talk?”