Falling Down (7 page)

“I came here to look for financial records. I mean, that's why I thought I'd been asked. But the CSI techs didn't find any computers, any disks or data CDs, no bank account information, no deposit slips.”

“The GPS units?”

“You'll know when your people seal off those locations.”

Kyle eyed me carefully. “You know more about this than I do,” he said finally. “I'm the lead homicide detective, but you know something more. Right?”

He unsnapped a leather pouch on his belt, his thumbs flying over the cell phone keyboard, sending several text messages, waited for brief replies.

“Listen,” he said. “Word is that you're up for some job at TPD. Tracking
maras
computer accounts, bank records? Is that connected to this?”

“Ask Bob Gates,” I said. “How'd you know that? About the job?”

“Word's around.”

“Bob said that the word was
not
around.”

“This is just between you and me.”

“And who exactly are you?” I said.

“A cop with thirty-seven years on the force. Passed over for sergeant, some say. Didn't
want
to be sergeant, I say. Normally, I'd be off the street, in my little casita, watching TV and drinking tequila and once in a while thinking about eating my gun. Only on the bad days. They keep me around. I've been on so many homicides, I've always got something they need.”

“Sounds to me like you enjoy still being around.”

“A word in your ear,” he said. “Some of the top suits, they don't want you. Jordan Kligerman. He's a good-looking stud, but he's a pogue. Never rode a mile in a unit, never took down a suspect. He's an accountant, he'll use you up.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Christopher. Who are these…these
maras
?”

He hesitated a long time. Not from wanting to hide things or avoid the discussion, just choosing his words.

“They're the worst of everything,” he said finally. “The Colombians, the Russian mafia, these
maras
are the absolute worst of all the ruthless assassins I've ever known. You saw the woman and the kid? Executions. Meant nothing to them. Probably made the man watch before they nailed him down.”

“Are drugs that serious a problem in Tucson?”

“Tucson,” he said. “I've been here since the old days. Before stretch marks.”

“And I should be interested in this…why?”

“In the old days, you used to know who did what. Gambling, women, horses and dogs, racing, I mean. The dog track is still here, but now there's a big greyhound rehabilitation group. They'll place a greyhound in your home. Only problem is, especially with the males…they're trained to race on the flat, to go after the rabbit. You try to adopt one of these males, they can't go up and down stairs, they can't even jump into your car. They only know what they've been trained to do. They don't know anything else.”

“And you? These days, you don't know…what?”

“The border is broken, Laura. These days, it's not just your average Jose coming across so he can feed his family. Now, the people coming up from Mexico. Hell. Coming up from Central America. They're different people, different criminals, different values. But mainly, they're criminals.”

A low-rider cruised slowly by, subwoofer pumping a salsa beat, the five occupants turning their heads in unison to stare at us while driving by. I flinched.

“Not a drive-by,” Kyle said. “They're just curious.”

“This violence, it all seems so…so random.”

“Unpredictable. Seen enough here?”

Again, he sorted through what to say.

“This isn't about the drugs. It's about
control
of those drugs. I can get you a thick file, if you want in on this. I don't know, I'm not high enough in TPD to know why they want to hire you. But if you choose to go with TPD, count on me. I'll watch your back.”

“Why would you promise that to somebody you just met?”

“You look like a woman with trouble in her heart, you talk about smiles and cries.”

He pivoted his upper body, looking up and down the street, deciding what he wanted to say to me.

“Another word in your ear,” he said finally.

“Yes?”

“I don't know anything about this possible job at TPD. But don't do it.”

“Why?”

“You see anybody on this street yet?”

“No.”

“Most of them are illegals. Or undocumented workers, if you're politically leftish. Most of the men, and they are mostly men, they send money back to Mexico. At Christmas, they all go home and celebrate Three Kings day. Then they find another coyote who'll smuggle them back across the border, so up here they can earn more money to send home. They pay two to five thousand dollars to get smuggled across, with a guide. Most of them haven't got the money, they've given all they earned to their families. So they take out loans to pay for the smuggling. It's all just…just, well, it's a system that benefits a few. The border is broken, Laura. People and drugs and all kinds of things flood northward. Whatever hushhush operation TPD wants you for, it's just a waste of time.”

“And your advice?” I said.

“More than a few Tucson cops,” he said. “They may not be on the take, but their eyes are for sale. They work on the edge, they depend on their CIs, but sometimes they use police secrets, something they've overheard, or
an internal document they've seen, they trade off these secrets for CI tips.”

“Okay, Bob,” I said. “You've warned me, okay. So?”

“Forget it.”

“Forget…what?”

“Whatever they've offered you.”

“Chris.”

“Christopher.”

“Christopher. Nobody's offered me anything. I'm doing one small thing for them tomorrow. I get a payback, then I'm gone.”

“Payback,” he said. “Here's my view on payback. My ex drove a Honda Accord. It got stolen and recovered the next day, except the passenger seat was missing. Like they only had time to remove that one thing, and the heat showed around the corner. So a month later, my ex is bitch bitch bitch, get a new seat, so I'm at a junkyard looking for a replacement and I see this seat that looks so familiar, it's so familiar it's…it's the stolen seat, it's still got the smiley face decals on the side. That's when payback is just plain sour.”

His cynicism enveloped me, overwhelmed me, I turned to my car.

“What small thing?” Kyle said.

“Say what?”

“You said, you're doing one small thing for TPD, then you're done.”

“Take
my
advice, Christopher. You don't want to know.”

“Fair enough.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Christopher, tell me. How'd you lose so much weight?”

“Seven hundred calories a day. Three hours on a treadmill. My wife said I'd got to take it off or she'd leave me.”

“She must be happy.”

“Well. She left me anyway. See you around.”

I trudged to my Jeep Cherokee, set the Nikon on the
passenger seat, and drove away, I didn't even put the lens cap on or turn the battery off.

I called Mary Emich, apologized for being delayed, said I'd be there soon.

Headed up I-10 and turned east on Ina, but not really to meet Mary Emich. Just to go to the park and be by myself. In a world where a child's life meant so little, I wanted to spend time in my favorite spot in Tohono Chul.

The grotto, the Riparian area, the soothing watery ripples of the artificial creek bed and the puppyfish. A spot where I'd found serenity five years ago, but where I also set in irrevocable motion the events from which Tigger died.

But that's another story for another time.

“O
h, dear,” the old woman said. “These aren't the desert pupfish.”

Reading the placard beside the stream, listing several different kinds of endangered fish. She'd banged her walker into my serenity, couldn't stay in one position, moving around and around until I gave up.

“Over there,” I said. Pointing to the grotto some twenty yards away. “This is the riparian habitat.”

“This isn't the grotto? This plaza, this isn't the grotto?” Confused, trying to read her park map while navigating her walker.

“Let me show you,” I said. “Just a minute.” I dialed Mary Emich's number and she answered immediately. “I'm here. Near the grotto.”

“Five minutes,” Mary said.

“I appreciate your help,” the old woman said. “But look, there are some fish in this little stream, I don't care if they're pupfish. I'm going to sit on the bench, I'm just going to listen to the water, I'm just going to watch these fish.”

The bench where I'd been sitting, remembering.

 

Tohono Chul is a nonprofit Tucson park, dedicated to showing and preserving Sonoran Desert vegetation. Spread out over forty-nine acres, with a completely re
modeled parking lot, many looped trails, and a lot of new fencing.

Some years before, the night security guard had been inexplicably shot five times in the head, and the park was now marginally less accessible. Most of the fencing would be easy to get over for anybody determined. Mostly, I realized, the fencing just kept out random night visitors like sexually active teenagers or the stray large dog, but not bobcats or coyotes.

I'd used the park five years before because I could always guarantee privacy when talking to clients. Back then, I rarely met clients face-to-face because I didn't like them seeing me.

 

I remember being nervous, back then. I remember I couldn't find the water fountain where, bending over to drink from the spray, I'd fingered my belt pouch, wanting to take another Ritalin or two, just to keep me focused.

Sliding the zipper open and closed, open and closed, trying to resist the pills. I did that a lot, back when I was addicted to meth.

But I'd always remember that day when I first met Ana Maria Juarez, which led to Tigger's murder.

I could hit
replay
and run the vivid memory.

 

Tigger was out of sight as I walked up to the pincushion cactus ramada. The circular roof was interlaced with twigs and branches, woven into a grid of plastic-coated green wire. A semicircular concrete bench provided shelter for those who wanted to escape the hot summer sun. I could hear traffic noises from Oracle and Ina roads, but nobody sat on the bench.

 

Tigger's real name was Tigist. She was Ethiopian, scarcely five feet tall, with luminous kohl-blackened eyelids and intense ocean-green irises, the eyes set deep over a long, slightly hooked nose in the exact middle of
a thin face. Since few people remembered how to pronounce her name, she'd started calling herself Tigger after reading a Pooh book to her son. And the name fit, since both the fictional and the real Tigger were always nervous, excited, bouncing up and down with relentless energy.

Tigger was a Fugitive Recovery agent. She tracked down bail-skippers, arresting them without any help except assorted stun guns. I'd never met a client without having Tigger look them over first, then staying out of sight during the meeting so she could track the client back to a vehicle and make sure it left before I did. It's part paranoia, I tell you, but when I did mostly illegal things with computers, I had fixed rules about security.

And the first rule was to make sure that clients were exactly who they claimed to be. I still follow that rule.

Another rule was to avoid letting clients know things about me, which was why I disliked personal meetings. I'm a lot more social now, but back then few people knew what I did. I remember when Tigger told me from her microphone that the women had moved.

I remember what they looked like, the colors, the fingernails, what they wore, and how they spoke.

 

I'd walked along curving dirt paths toward guidepost twenty-six, where a trapezoidal concrete table sat underneath another circular ramada.

Two women sat on a concrete bench along one side of the table. One of them toyed with a folded sheet of paper and a yellow legal pad. Seeing me approach, she stood up quickly, her eyes darting in all directions to see if we were alone. She was near my height, but slim and small-boned, with shoulder-length brown hair pulled back by twin brown barrettes. She wore yellow spandex runners' pants and a pale strawberry North Face tank top, with spaghetti straps over bare arms and shoulders.
Veins popped along her well developed arms, and her body looked muscled and taut in that way which only comes from working out with free weights.

 

“Laura?” I heard somebody say. “Excuse me?”

This had to be Mary Emich, seeing the old woman, the walker, confused, mistaking her for me.

“Over here,” I said.

A tall blond woman hurried toward me, not running, but stepping quickly and with purpose. Wearing a sleeveless cotton pullover, with a small hula girl on the front, bits of yarn hanging loose for the hula skirt. A short above-the-knees Madras skirt, the kind you wash and ring out by hand to dry in the sun. Lightly streaked and dyed-blond hair bunched loosely and carelessly in the back with a huge butterfly clip and

“I'm Mary.” Held out a hand, a huge smile over white teeth. “And your name is…what
is
your name?” She fumbled through a stack of folders and pads held under her left arm, trying to be casual, taking off the sunglasses and sticking them up into her hair without realizing she now had two pair up there already. A real or a feigned casualness, asking me my name. She
knew
who I was, but I measured her fear in her offhand, seemingly forgetful question.

“Laura,” I said. “Laura Winslow.”

A clanking sound, the old woman moving around.

“Let's go to the grotto,” Mary said.

A half-moon-shaped pond, set against an unfinished wall, probably from the original property. Water bub
bled from uncapped pipes and something intensely blue glittered and disappeared when I looked into the pond.

“Puppyfish,” I said to myself. Knelt to look. “I call them puppyfish.”

Close up, the pond alive with small, silvery fish, barely two inches long, each banded with half a dozen or more stripes of brilliant blue.

“They don't live very long,” Mary said. “But they're so beautiful.”

I read the placard aloud. “‘Desert Pupfish develop quickly, sometimes reaching full maturity within two or three months. Although their average life span is short, some survive more than a year.'”

She giggled.

Actually, while reading, I looked sideways as best I could, trying to read Mary Emich and contrasting what I saw with what I'd memorized from her résumé. The giggle stopped, she turned in profile, a strong face, strong profile, somehow reminding me of Crazy Horse, or not really the man, but that big statue being carved in the hills near the four presidents.

“That green spot,” I said. “Right above your forehead. Does that glow in the dark, or what?”

“Oh.” She touched it, I realized she'd forgotten it was even there.

“A dye stick, supposed to be gold. It'll wash out tonight.”

I stood suddenly, faced her directly.

Several inches taller than me, which put her about five-foot-ten. As tall and slim as a Kansas cornstalk with curves. Her smile returned quickly. A brilliant smile, nodding her head as though to some song, both pairs of sunglasses falling from her hair. She picked them up, not at all embarrassed.

“Behind your back,” she said. I turned around, confused. “No. Under your shirt. Is that a pistol?” she said.

“Yes.”

My shirt must have ridden up in the back when I knelt to look at the puppyfish. So she'd seen my Beretta, so she'd been reading me also.

“Most people don't notice it,” I said.

“Nine millimeter,” she said. “Glock?”

“Beretta,” I said shortly.

“I've fired the 92FS, but that looks totally different. What model Beretta?”

She cocked her head, a combination of seriousness and curiosity.

“A new model,” I said. “A Px4 Storm.”

“Can I see it?”

“No. No, you can't. I came here about computers, not handguns.”

“I shoot a lot,” she said. “There's a target range down off Flowing Wells. Inside a gun store. I go there two or three times a week. But I never heard of that model Beretta.” I must have looked skeptical. “Even from a few feet away, I can see there's a very different back-strap. What else?”

“Slide stop can be either standard or low profile. Magazine release button comes in different sizes, depending on small or large grip. And I've got this rigged out for constant action, with a spurless hammer.”

“Magazine capacity?”

“Seventeen,” I said. “But I could extend it to twenty. This is just a little weird, two women talking about pistol tech specs. How come you know guns?”

“I grew up on a farm. Well. My family owned a farm, for a while, but the bank foreclosed, so we all trooped off as seasonal pickers. You name it, we picked it. Everybody had guns of some kind.”

“I thought seasonal pickers were, well, from Central America.”

“We were poor. Apples, pears, grapes, tomatoes, cherries, walnuts, we traveled all around the circuit. But this is Tucson. Why do you carry a pistol?”

“If you think I'm that kind of PI,” I said, “if you think
that I'm available for personal security, or a bodyguard…I'm not really the person you need.”

She fingered a medal at her throat, dangling from a silver chain. A religious medal of some kind, probably Catholic. I don't know much about religion.

“No,” she said finally. “I don't need a bodyguard right now. I just need your help.”

“For what, Mary?”

“Will you? Help?”

Not begging or pleading, not defensive, just an outright question, almost matter-of-fact, her mouth starting a smile, then just open.

I tell you, she had this…honesty? Directness? Openness? For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why I liked her so immediately.

“You
are
Laura?” she said.

“Yes. I am.”

Confirming it to herself, the smile gone, replaced by lips closed and curved down gracefully, like a sad clown's smile.

Liked her, yes, I liked her for whatever reason, but I wasn't in the park to find friends, and that was the problem.

“Listen. Mary. I have to be clear about something. I'm seeing you as a favor. For my friend Bob Gates. You talked to him, he gave you my name. That's pretty much all you have to know, I mean, know about why I'm here. But I don't have much time. I should really be driving up to Window Rock right now.”

“Are you Navajo?” she said.

“Hopi,” I said. “Half. Please. Don't ask about my going up to the rez.”

“I'm Lakota Sioux. Half. But…why won't you help me?”

“Mary,” I said. “I don't really know what you want. Something about
maras
? That's all Bob told me. Something on a computer?”

“Mr. Gates told me that you were a computer expert. I Googled your company.” Reaching for one of the hundred stray ends of paper sticking out of the packet of folders and pads. “So you know about…hacking?”

“Yes.”

“You know, uh, I don't understand computer security that well, you know how people hack into your system? You do that kind of work?”

“Yes.”

“Illegal hacking?”

The smile, back again. This time, too bright. She giggled, something I knew a lot about. Giggling around a stranger. When I first started spending a lot more time around strangers, I hung by walls, sat on couches, and giggled because I didn't yet know how to interact. Mary Emich's giggles sounded like she'd laughed all her way through life.
This woman,
I thought,
is wrapped way too tight.

“Yes,” I said shortly. “But I don't do anything illegal.”

“But you know people that, what do you call it, um…create identities?”

“Fake ID?”

“More than that.”

“You mean…” I said, understanding where she was going and already backing away from her—in fact I took two steps back and nearly stumbled into the grotto pond—“you mean,” I said, “change somebody's identity.”

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

“There's a girl,” Mary said. Shook away the thought of a tear, I wondered if she was wrapped too tight to cry, I sure knew what that was like.

“Your daughter.”

“She's not really my daughter. Here.” She pulled a teenager's pink diary from inside a folder. “I wrote in this, I couldn't find anything else to write in. This is the
girl's story. Somebody almost killed her once. I'm afraid…she's Mexican, she's illegal. I'm afraid, with what showed up on one of our computers, Laura, I'm afraid somebody knows about her and wants to hurt me. Hurt her.”

She held out the diary.

“Read this,” she said.

But I sidestepped away, slung my bag over my shoulder. Ready to leave.

“I can't help you,” I said. “I
won't
help you. Not with a fake ID.”

“Please,” Mary said. Iron in that word, pure steel.

I remembered what Sandy told me about Mary's astrological chart.

Awash in nervous energy always on the move both physically and mentally. No way are either of you ever, ever,
ever
going to make a snap decision. It just isn't in your makeup.