Accustomed to the Dark (7 page)

“Okay,” he said. “There's a guy in the joint. Miller. Ronny Miller. Doing a nickel for B and E. He's got this sister. Sylvia. She's the one who brought it in.”

“How?”

“Visitation. Once a week.”

“Balloons?” A female mule carried the balloon into the prison concealed in her vagina, transferred it to her mouth, passed the balloon over when she kissed the prisoner. The prisoner swallowed it and retrieved it later. Disregarding the possibility of being caught, which was minimal in a busy prison, it was still a dangerous practice. Balloons can break.

“At first,” McBride said. “What I heard, I heard that later she passed it by hand. Lucero paid off the guards.”

“What was she moving?”

“Coke, mostly. Some smack.”

“Why? To help her brother?”

“Nah.” He said this as though no one, anywhere, would want to help a brother. “She's got the hots for Lucero.”

“How does she know Lucero?”

“She doesn't, see, that's the thing. She never even met him, in actual fact.” He became almost professorial as he explained it. “She's one of those straight chicks you read about, they get turned on by hard guys, you know? They get infatuated. She went to his trial every goddam day, I heard. Drove in all the way from Las Vegas.” He shook his head in contempt, and the contempt seemed real. “Women, right? Who can figure?”

“The cops must know about her.”

“No, see, that's where Lucero was smart.” He had forgotten that we weren't friends. He leaned forward again, so he and I could better share the moment. “She gets word to her brother, Ronny, see, that she wants to meet him. Lucero, I mean. So Ronny tells Lucero, but Lucero, he comes up with this better idea. She moves the dope for him, and he gets together with her later. After he gets out.”

“And she went along with that.”

“Like I said. She was infatuated.”

“How did Lucero know he could trust her?”

He shrugged. “He started small, is what I heard. A joint or two. Some hash. Then he moved her up to coke.”

“And Sylvia could've given Ronny the gun Lucero used in the break.”

He sat back and he shrugged again. “Sure,” he said with a conviction that was casual but absolute. “Had to go down that way, I figure.”

“How old is she?”

“Forty-something. Not bad looking. If you like the librarian type.”

“What type is that?”

“You know. Kind of dried up and stiff.”

“What color hair?”

“Brown. That mousey brown. You know.”

“What kind of build?”

“Skinny.”

I nodded. “You said Las Vegas. New Mexico or Nevada?”

He made a face. “Come on, Mr. Croft. Even a crazy chick, she's not gonna drive every day all the way from Nevada.”

I nodded. “Her last name is Miller?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Lucero and Martinez were buddies up there.”

“Right, yeah. They had the same cell.”

“Were they more than buddies?”

“Was one of em punking, you mean? Nah. These are tough guys, both of them.”

“What kind of visitors did they get?”

“No kind. Nobody.”

I spent some time asking him some more questions, but he didn't have anything else.

I stood up. “All right, Jimmy. You can go now.”

He rubbed at the back of his head again, to remind me that we were connected now. “Jeeze, Mr. Croft, you don't think you could maybe come through with a little something? For my troubles, you know?”

He had lived long enough to know that other people sometimes felt guilt, and now he was playing me, manipulating mine. My understanding it didn't prevent it from working.

“Wait here,” I told him.

I went down the hallway into the bedroom, found my pants, dug out my wallet, slipped loose a twenty. He was standing up when I returned. I handed him the bill.

He looked at me. “Only a twenny?”

“You don't want it, Jimmy, you can always give it back.”

“No no, I'll take it.” He slid it into his pocket before I could change my mind. He studied me for a moment, an amateur anthropologist examining an alien species. “You're really gonna go after Lucero and Martinez, huh?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “Well, okay, it's your funeral, I guess. But I'll tell you something. And this is for free, Mr. Croft. You better be real careful. Martinez is one bad motherfucker. You already know that, I guess. And I guess you know he's got a hard-on for you. But that Lucero, he's something else. He's one of those psychopaths for real. He is one very spooky guy. You talk to him and he keeps changing on you. He does impersonations and stuff. Like that Jim Carrey guy, in the movies.”

“I don't think Jim Carrey's all that spooky.”

“Yeah, well, Jim Carrey, he won't pull out a gun and shoot you in the eyes. Lucero will, and he won't even think twice about it. He'll be having a good time. So the two of em together, Martinez and Lucero, they could cause you some real hurt.” Running through the melodrama in his voice I thought I could hear a faint thread of vengeful hope.

8

A
FTER
M
C
B
RIDE LEFT
I called the hospital. Rita was still unconscious.

I dialed New Mexico information and got a phone number and an address for Sylvia Miller in Las Vegas. There were no other Millers listed at that address, so presumably Sylvia lived alone.

I tried the number. No answer.

I made some coffee, took a shower, realized I hadn't eaten anything for twenty-four hours, and put together a sandwich. It went down like raw cotton and turned to lead in my stomach. I washed it down with a glass of milk, thick and chalky.

I kept an emergency stash under a loose floorboard in the bedroom, hundred-dollar bills, ten of them, that I hadn't touched for almost a year. I scooped them up, slipped them into my wallet. I lugged the carryall and the computer out to the Jeep, stowed them behind the front seat, went back to the house and shut down the gas and the hot-water heater. I called the phone company and arranged for all the office phone calls to be forwarded to the cellular in Leroy's briefcase.

Chuck's Garage sat back from the roadway on West Alameda, not far from Siler, a low building walled with metal siding painted a sickly yellow. Beyond a chain-link fence, a small herd of aging automobiles slept in the forecourt, most of them blotched with primer, a few sagging to the side as though mortally wounded. The door to the garage was open and Chuck was in there, standing beneath an ancient Chevy truck perched high on the pneumatic lift. There was a smell of motor oil and old metal, but the cement floor was spotless.

He turned when he heard my footsteps. “Joshua. Haven't seen you for a while. How's it going?”

“Fine. You?”

“Can't complain. What brings you by?”

“I could use some help.”

He glanced past me, at the Jeep. “Not running right?”

“Not that kind of help.”

He nodded. He wore dark blue cotton coveralls and he was an inch or so taller than I was. He had deep-set dark brown eyes beneath a wide craggy forehead. His long hair was black, pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a black beard that left his long upper lip bare, like a Mennonite. It made him resemble a young, handsome version of Abraham Lincoln.

“What do you need?” he asked me.

“Something clean and reliable.”

He nodded again. “I heard Mrs. Mondragón got shot.”

“That's right.”

“'Kay,” he said. “Let's see what I got.”

He pulled a pale blue rag from his back pocket, used it to wipe his hands, tossed it to a metal workbench. I followed him to a door set in the east wall of the garage, waited while he found the right key on his key chain. He opened the door, leaned into the room to pull the string for the overhead light, then stood back and gestured me forward. He trailed behind me, pulling the door shut as he entered.

It was an office, cramped and windowless. To the left, at one narrow end of the room, sat a gray metal desk. To the right was a narrow wall that held only a Michelin calendar. Chuck went toward this, pushed gently against its side. The wall swung open, and behind it was another wall, this one made of Peg-Board, and hooked on each of the pegs was the trigger guard of a handgun. There were twenty or thirty of them, and most of them were semiautomatics. Lying along the base of the wall were a Ruger .223 carbine and a black Mossberg shotgun with a plastic stock and an extended cartridge tube.

“I got a forty-caliber Smith,” he said. “Brand new, very nice. More stopping power than a nine mil. Lot of your cops these days, that's what they're carrying.”

“Ten-round clip?”

“That's the law now. Courtesy of those assholes in Washington. Your tax dollars at work.” I didn't know Chuck well, but I'd always suspected that politically he stood somewhere between Pat Buchanan and Jesse James.

“You want more firepower,” he said, “I got this Beretta.” He lifted it from its peg. “Model Ninety-two-eff. Almost cherry. Got a pre-Carter clip—fifteen rounds. Sixteen pellets in the piece if you keep one up the spout.” He handed me the pistol.

It was heavy, and it would be heavier when it held fifteen or sixteen cartridges. But it wasn't so heavy that I couldn't carry it.

“Cock it,” he suggested.

I worked the slide. The action was flawless.

“It's okay to dry fire it,” he said.

Holding the gun so its barrel pointed toward the wall, I pulled the trigger. Snap.

“Smooth as silk,” he said. “Double-action. Spring-loaded safety. Reversible mag release. A very tasty piece of equipment.”

“Spare clip? Ammunition?”

“Sure. You want Glasers?” Glasers were cartridges with slugs that blew apart on impact.

“No,” I said.

He smiled. “Oh yeah. I forgot. You're a liberal.”

“How much?” I asked him.

“For anyone else, six. But I owe you, so I'll make it five. Including the ammo. Bring it back in good shape and I'll buy it off you for three-fifty.”

I smiled. “Only three-fifty?”

“Gotta replace the barrel.” In case I had left any slugs lying around—in someone's stomach, for example—that a ballistic test might match with the barrel the gun now held.

I asked him, “Is it sighted in?”

“Sure. For standard nine-mil ammo. But I'd play with it before I used it.”

“How much for the shotgun?”

“Three.”

“You have any shells?”

“Double ought and deer slugs.”

“I'll take the shotgun, too. And a box of each.”

At both entrances to the Interstate, one opening onto the north and one to the south, there was a line of cars nearly fifty yards long. Here at the northern entrance, two State Police cruisers had been angled across the roadway to permit only one vehicle through at a time. Two troopers leaned against the side of one of the cruisers, arms crossed over their chests, while two others waved the cars up, stopped them, spoke with the drivers, and checked inside the trunks.

When it was my turn, the trooper tipped the brim of his Smokey the Bear hat at me. “License and registration, please, sir.” I knew a few state cops, but I didn't recognize this one. I didn't recognize the other trooper, either, the one who strolled around to the back of the Cherokee, hand on the butt of his Glock, and peered in the tailgate window.

The shotgun and the boxes of shells were under the rear passenger seat, the Beretta was under the front passenger's, Rita's .38 was in the glove compartment. But these two weren't looking for guns.

I handed over the papers. The first trooper glanced through them, glanced at me to make sure I matched the photo on the license, then handed them back. “Thank you, sir. Sorry for the delay.”

“No problem.” I drove off.

It didn't seem possible that Lucero and Martinez had gotten through roadblocks like these. But it didn't seem possible that they had run around Santa Fe, from the penitentiary to Airport Road to Rita's house. And they had.

PART TWO

9

A
FTER LEAVING
S
ANTA
Fe, I-25 heads southeast for a while, looping through the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos before it gradually swings toward the north and Las Vegas. Up there the mountains are on the left—the easternmost slopes of the Rockies, only rolling ridges nearby, speckled with piñon and juniper, but growing larger and darker and more massive off in the blue distance. To the right is prairie, the Great American Plains, looking as flat as a plate but slowly descending off to the east as far as the eye can see, and a lot farther, down through the Texas panhandle, through Oklahoma and Arkansas, all the way to the Mississippi River.

The weather was clear again, the sky was the color of turquoise. The road was nearly empty. I passed the turnoff for Lamy and Eldorado, passed the turnoffs for Glorieta and Pecos, but I really wasn't paying attention. Out of habit, partly, and partly out of hope, I kept playing in my head the conversation I might have had with Rita.

“
It seems to me,” I told her, “that the way to find Martinez and Lucero is to find whoever brought in the drugs. And that's Sylvia Miller. If she brought in drugs, she could've brought in a gun. And she could've been the accomplice who cut the perimeter wires at the pen
.”

“
If she brought in the drugs,” said Rita. “You have only Jimmy McBride's word for that
.”

I pictured us sitting out on the patio at her house, the sun shining, the air warm. She was wearing a long white cotton skirt and a silk blouse that matched the sky. At her throat was a small golden cross that sometimes caught the light and flashed at me like a tiny beacon. No one had fired a rifle at this Rita, and no one ever would
.