When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (2 page)

“Thanks, RIT,” Gerald said into the mike. “Hopefully, we won’t need you guys, interior team out.”

Lucy could see the four-man Rapid Intervention Team standing off to the side of the scene. They were all geared up like her and Gerald, yet they had nowhere to go unless something went wrong. The only job of RIT was to come get the interior team if they ran into trouble. Lucy hoped the RIT guys would be bored tonight.

*   *   *

The crowd slowly followed along behind the couple portraying the holy parents, who were actually Ted Ortiz and Sylvia Montoya—a brother and sister from the parish of La Iglesia de Santa Cruz de la Cañada. They had been playing the parts of Mary and Joseph for more than twenty years. The couple stopped again, and the crowd stopped with them, this time in front of the Ore House restaurant on the northeast side of the plaza. Another devil came out onto another balcony. This time it was a man dressed in black leather pants with red face paint. Before the crowd stopped booing and hissing, the man started to yell. He seemed unsure of the words at first but then smoothed out. The voice sounded familiar to Gil. He was trying to make out the man’s face in the dark just as Susan leaned over and whispered, “Isn’t that your mother’s cousin?”

His mother’s cousin, Robert, worked for the state museum as a historian, mostly supervising the half dozen or so archeological digs going on in the city at any given time. Robert had helped coordinate Las Posadas for the last few years, but normally he didn’t get involved in the celebration. He didn’t like crowds, but he seemed to be warming to his role, which was made more menacing by his rough voice, the result of a pack-a-day habit since he was seventeen.

Gil looked down, his arms still around Therese, and caught a look at what she was texting: “That is so lame. LOL. Like she really said that.”

“What’s so lame?” Gil asked her.

“Daddy,” Therese said, pulling the cell phone to her so he couldn’t see the screen. “Stop looking.”

“Just show him. He’ll read it later anyway,” Joy said to her sister. “You know he checks our phones, right? And our e-mail. And the names of who we hang out with.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Therese said. “You’re teasing.”

“He’s a cop, silly,” Joy said. “You don’t think he investigates his own daughters?”

Therese looked up at him and asked, “Do you really read our e-mails?”

“No, honey,” he said; then added, “but I’ll start reading your sister’s if she doesn’t leave you alone.” Joy rolled her eyes in mock annoyance.

Gil glanced over to his wife, Susan, who was chatting to a neighbor she had run into, when he felt the phone clipped to his belt begin to vibrate. He assumed it was work, but when he looked down, he saw that it was his mother. He let it go to voice mail.

*   *   *

Gerald hauled the attack hose over his shoulder then made a signal to the engineer at the control panel to flood it with water. The hose sprang to life, going from a limp line to one that tried to twist its way out of Gerald’s grip. Lucy grabbed a section of the hose farther down and, like Gerald, pulled it over her shoulder, trying to steady its bucking movements. With her free hand, she grabbed an axe from the side of the truck. Then they walked slowly forward into the house, pulling the fire hose behind them. Her movements felt stilted in the heavy bunker gear and boots, like trying to swim in pudding.

They reached the front door, which someone had smashed open before rescue crews got there. It had a gray wisp of smoke coming out of it. They immediately dropped to all fours. Gerald crawled through the door to the right, keeping one hand on the wall as he pulled the hose behind him with the other. Lucy did the same behind him, her right hand holding the axe and guiding the hose, her left hand holding Gerald’s right ankle, like in a weird game of Twister. As the nozzle man, Gerald’s job was to find them a low path through the house and take care of any flames they might run into. Lucy’s job was to search for survivors.

Within a few feet, they went from being able to make out hazy furniture to seeing only stark blackness. This was why she and Gerald had to stay in physical contact, so they wouldn’t lose each other in the smoke. She could barely make out his silhouette two feet in front of her. Their game of Twister had become one of hide-and-seek. With the head of the axe in her right hand, she made arched sweeping movements across the foyer floor with the axe shaft, searching. If the handle connected with something, they would stop to investigate, but at the moment, she was reaching out into open space. She could feel hard tile under her knees as she crawled. She moved the axe as far she could reach to the right, but she didn’t make contact with any furniture or walls. She might as well have been reaching into a black abyss.

The house was making noises that she could hear through her hood—loud banging and long groaning: the sounds of walls and floors warping from the heat. She heard her radio squawk and tried to listen as the outside teams confirmed that electricity to the house had been cut off. Gerald turned, and her grip on his ankle slipped. He stopped until she found it again.

They moved into a hallway. Hallways were good. If she wanted to, she could feel across to the other side of the space as they crawled, but she wouldn’t. Her left hand stayed on Gerald’s ankle and his left hand stayed on the wall. Period. They were doing a left-hand search, and that was protocol. Firefighters who didn’t follow protocol died. If something happened, the RIT guys would know exactly where she and Gerald were—they just had to follow the left wall.

She stopped every few feet to pull the hose along. Then put her hand back on Gerald’s ankle before crawling forward and reaching out with the axe handle, bumping and scraping its way along the other wall. It was awkward and slow. Her knees were getting sore and her back ached, but she knew that if she stood up to stretch, the upper gas and smoke layers would quickly kill her. She was safe only down here, on her knees, but being safe didn’t mean being comfortable. She was so hot. She forgot what she was wearing and tried to wipe the sweat off her forehead, only to have her gloved hand meet with the plastic of her face mask. For a second she panicked, and then took a few deep breaths to calm herself.

She crawled forward again, her hand on Gerald’s ankle—until she hit something with the axe handle. She pulled back on Gerald’s ankle to make him stop. She reached across to the other side of the hallway and felt along the baseboard. There was a finger-wide vertical gap in the wall—then something metallic. It took her a second to realize it was a hinge sticking less than an inch out into the hallway. That was what her axe had hit. A hinge meant a door. She pulled back on Gerald’s ankle again. His face appeared in front of her, their masks almost touching.

“A door,” she yelled and pointed. Probably a closet. Maybe a door to the outside. Maybe a door to where the fire was. He nodded and put his gloved hand on the door to feel if it was hot. She could barely see him, yet they were shoulder to shoulder. She felt him shake his head “no” instead of seeing it or hearing him saying the word. She crouched down and flattened herself up against the wall as Gerald did the same against the wall on the other side of the door. If the fire was in the closet and they opened it, they could have flashover, which would instantly ignite everything in the room, including them. But they still had to check. Children often hid in closets to escape fires. Gerald cracked the door slowly. Nothing happened.

She pulled the door open enough so she could squeeze her upper body through it, then grabbed Gerald’s ankle again and, with her other arm, reached into the closet as far as she could. She pushed through long hanging pieces of clothing—maybe dresses or coats—until she touched the back wall, then swept her hand along the sides. There was no one in there. She edged back out and tugged on Gerald’s ankle to let him know they could keep searching.

They crawled out of the hallway and into a bigger room, where Lucy’s axe once again reached out into blackness. But here, instead of a smooth and uninterrupted wall, there were things in their way, pushed up against the wall: furniture. They had to stop and feel everything as they tried to keep the wall to their left. A chair. A couch. A table. It was like a Halloween game Lucy had played when she was six. Her friend had told her to stick her hand into a box and figure out what was inside by touching it. Cooked spaghetti noodles were supposed to feel like intestines, and peeled grapes like eyeballs. Here it was much the same, but she had to figure out what the secret something was through heavy work gloves. She groped over a chair. A bookshelf. She crawled along, feeling a table. A desk. A lamp. A sofa. She was getting better at this. Another lamp. A chair leg. And something else. A shoe.

Her hand crawled around the shoe. It was next to something—no, attached to something—a leg. The skin felt soft under her glove, like a half-deflated water balloon. Her hand tightened on Gerald’s ankle. She tried yelling to him, but she sounded like she was talking through a tin can on a string. His face appeared in front of hers. He put a hand on her arm to quiet her.

She breathed and said slowly, “There’s someone in the chair.”

He nodded. She felt for Gerald’s foot and hooked her own ankle over his. She put her hands back on the shoe and felt her way up the leg. Just below the knee, something caught on her glove. It was sticky. She felt a smooth strap that wrapped its way around the leg. She thought at first it was a belt, but it wasn’t thick enough. And it was sticky: tape. It was tape. The person was taped to the chair. She felt her way to the thigh, then to the torso. She felt Gerald reach forward to feel for himself and then edge his way slightly to the right. A moment later she heard Gerald yell, “There’s something else over here.” She stopped and listened, trying to hear Gerald through her hood. Then his face was in front of her: “Another body—in a chair.”

She could hear him, but not see him, talking on the radio to Command.

She reached out to touch the person in front of her again, and felt her way up their chest, kneeling up as much as she dared, trying to keep her head low so as to not disturb the upper gas layers in the room. The smoke here was even thicker. She couldn’t make out a damn thing. She should pull off her mask so she could see better. Maybe pull off her gloves to feel for the person’s pulse. She eased her panic back down and breathed slowly. No one could have lived through this smoke. No one. Whoever it was, they were dead.

*   *   *

Gil, Susan, and the girls stood in the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors museum, which had served as the governor’s mansion for more than three hundred years. The play had ended when Mary and Joseph knocked on the museum door and, after no devil appeared to bar their way, they were allowed inside. The crowd was now gathered drinking hot cocoa and eating
bizcochito
cookies. Therese and Joy weren’t on their cell phones for the moment, and were warming their hands against the sides of the paper cups full of hot chocolate they held. It was only 7:15
P.M
. but already almost freezing. A group of carolers stood near an old stagecoach that was on permanent display in the museum’s open inner courtyard and sang “Silent Night.” A few small bonfires and even more
farolitos
circled the space. Gil looked up at the huge cottonwoods laced with snow.

“Daddy, how old do you think these trees are?” Joy asked.

“At least a hundred years,” Gil said. “Maybe they were even here when Lew Wallace was governor.” Wallace had lived in the palace in the 1870s, while he was writing
Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ,
with all the windows shuttered because he thought Billy the Kid was coming to gun him down.

Next to Gil, Susan scrunched up her face as she took another bite of a
bizcochito,
making him laugh. “They aren’t that bad,” Gil said, taking a bite of his own cookie.

“It tastes like they used maple flavoring and butter,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t anyone ever make it right? It’s just a sugar cookie with a little anise.” She took another bite before saying, “Did you remember to invite Joe over to your mom’s for Christmas Day dinner?”

“He’s actually going out of town,” Gil said.

“Is he going back east to visit his family?” she said, making a face before taking another bite.

“No. To Las Vegas,” Gil said.

“Who goes to Las Vegas for Christmas?” Therese asked.

“Someone who likes to get drunk and gamble,” Joy said.

“Mom, can we go to Las Vegas for Christmas?” Therese asked.

“A la,”
Joy said, in response to her sister. “No way.”

“Watch your language, young lady,” Susan said.

“
A la
is not a bad word,” Joy said.

“But it’s part of
a la verga,
and that’s bad…” Therese said.

“Girls…” Susan said in warning.

“That just means a male body part,” Joy said. “It’s not worse than
hell
or
damn
…”

“And we do not use any of those words,” Susan said.

“It’s not like I said
chingadera,
” Joy said, teasing her mother.

“Okay, enough,” Gil said as Joy and Therese started laughing at their mom’s frustration. “Let’s talk about something else. What did you get Grandma Montoya for Christmas?”

The girls started talking about what they’d bought for his mother as he saw his mother’s cousin coming through the crowd. Robert was still wearing red face paint with black around the eyes but had changed into his street clothes. As the two men shook hands, Gil said, “I didn’t know you could act.”

“I don’t think what I did could be called acting,” Robert said. “They handed me a piece of paper with some words on it and said, ‘Yell this really loud in Spanish.’ So I did.”

“I thought you did great,” Susan said, giving him a hug.

“I guess it wasn’t too bad for a last-second thing,” he said. “I had to fill in. Remember that guy who does it every year and always puts on the red body paint and the real ram horns? He didn’t show up.”

Gil felt the phone buzz again on his hip. He pulled it off his belt and looked at the caller ID. This time it was work.