Falling Down (9 page)

“I
love this part of the park,” Mary said.

She'd come back to get me, not really paying attention to me, intent on her own purpose and leading, toward that purpose, me along one of the park's paths. I hardly looked at the signposts, scarcely could focus on where I was, on what I was doing.

“God
damn
those sheep,” I said.

“What?”

Still within myself, everything outside my emotional shield.

“Fuck those goddam sheep,” I said.

“Laura,” Mary said. “What sheep?”

“What?”

“You're cursing some sheep.”

Looking around, lost just for that instant. Like when you're in your car at a stoplight, foot on the brake, but the car next to you moves ahead and you react in panic that somehow
you
are moving.

The entire heavens shift while you remain static, you're aware that events and people and machines function totally outside your control or awareness.

“I can't stay here,” I said.

“What's wrong?”

“Talk to me while I go to my car. That's all the time I've got.”

“But…Laura. You promised. You said at least you'd look. At the computer. You said you'd help me. Laura?”

“Let's do it really quick,” I said.

“Are you sick?”

“Let's get it over with.”

“Thank you,” she said.

 

Walking ahead of me, always turning to slow for me trailing behind, lost in my own world, Mary herself very much a person used to walking these paths while dealing with the public, while accommodating other people.

I can't exactly say what I'd seen to like in Mary Emich.

I can't tell you why I felt close to her, but most of all, why I didn't just leave her and drive away, drive up to the rez.

I'm really confused,
I thought.
What do I do?

My offer to help Mary. Something morbid or coincidental, a contrast between the murdered child, Mary's not-quite-a-daughter, and my own girls, Spider and her baby?

Two years, that's how long I've loved Nathan.

Two years.

However does somebody say goodbye, after just two years?

Is it my fault?

These thoughts left me paralyzed, so I had to tamp them way down inside and resolve to come back to them later.

 

“I love this grotto,” Mary said. “I really love the riparian area. Don't you?”

“I've got bad memories of this place.”

But lost in her own thoughts and emotions, she ignored me.

“This place, the grotto, it makes me write poetry, it makes me put things into words. In the shade of the
sycamores, in the ramada, the plaza, with its deep blue Mexican tile work, oh, I try to write haikus about this. Except I have a hard time keeping myself to the three lines.”

She stopped.

“‘As a gentle breeze wafts the scent of chocolate flowers up into my brain and the
splisssshsplassssh
of the waterfall snarepats my eardrums, there, there, it's okay, everything's okay, sweetheart.' I wrote that poem, it's really a dreadful poem, but I wrote it for my daughter, for Ana Luisa. I got a few lines like a haiku. Around the rock wall, five syllables for the first line, but I kept wanting to write more first lines of five syllables. ‘The wild-flowers in spring. The pingponging penstamens,' no, that's seven. ‘The bowing bluebells, the shimmering salvia,' well, seven again.”

No idea where she was leading me. Not with her poetry. Not with our destination along the caliche pathway.

“The night-blooming cereus of Ron's garden, intertwined and climbing up the mesquite trees. You know, it's hokey. I think of poetry when I look out Mary I's window, that's one of the women I work with. They call us Mary E and Mary I. I love watching the baby coyote pups cool off and splash in the fountain of the vacated children's garden. And there's this chunky, purple lizard, he's called Vin. He hangs out near the stone-covered water fountain, he dares to cross my path every day. Maybe he's telling me to slow down? Someone or something snatched off his tail the other day. He's not bothered at all. Life goes on. Here we are. This is what used to be the Haunted Bookshop. Now it's our education center, our discovery center.”

She swung open a door, held the metal bar with her left hand. A gold wedding band, a diamond ring, and on her small finger, a Cladagh ring, the heart turned inward.

I'm taken.

“I didn't know you were married,” I said.

“Well, I am, well…I'm not, I'm…he's dead.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“A year ago. Fourteen months. Iraq. Are you? Married?”

She'd already scanned my left hand, looking for a ring. Not much got by her.

“No. I have a daughter. And a granddaughter.”

“You're old enough to have a granddaughter?” she said. “I'm thirty-six, you don't look much older than me.”

“I was really young when I had the baby. Fifteen, I think.”

“You were married before…?”

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “And I don't talk about my life.”

The edge of my sorrow popped out, she smiled, I wondered again, does she cry? Her smile widened even further, she tilted her head slightly, and I felt her sweetness wash over me, so it wasn't just a coincidence that I liked her.

Sometimes, two people just hit it off. Bam. An emotional connection during the first ten minutes.

“Uh…let me show you the computer.”

“What kind of facial muscles make these dimples?” I said. Held up a finger, reached out to touch the vertical lines above her smiling mouth.

“Actually, it's the lack of muscles. You smile, but your whole face can't smile with you. We've got to go upstairs.”

Inside the building, she led me past photographs and exhibits, up a narrow flight of stairs, and past a closed office door.

“Jo's office,” she said. “Jo Falls. Director of public programs.”

“Mary?”

A man's voice from an alcove overlooking the downstairs exhibits. Mary steered me around a corner into a work area, several computers placed at different stations along three sides of the alcove.

“This is Ken,” she said. “Ken Charvoz, Laura Winslow.”

Tall, slim, long curly black hair, somewhere along toward handsome but definitely eroded somehow by life, and certainly on the other side of forty. He gave Mary a slight hug as we shook hands.

“Bob mentioned you,” I said. “Bob Gates.”

“Oh,” he said. Now both of his hands on mine. “He just called me. Said you've had a rough morning. A bad crime scene.”

“I've seen worse,” I said finally. “But never a dead child.”

The completely
wrong
thing to say in front of Mary.

“Child?” she said. “Child, what dead child? Who is Bob Gates?”

“Nobody,” I said. Quick as I could, smiled a bit, got her automatic smile back. “Just something for the Tucson Police Department.”

“For an old friend of mine,” Ken said. “A good man. But, Laura. You're not here to talk about TPD. You want to see the website.”

He sat at one of the computers, opened the web browser.

“Totally a coincidence,” he said. “It's not bookmarked, not obvious. I'd Googled something last weekend, so I went to the browser history file. Found something that shouldn't be there.”

Clicked the mouse, waited for a site to load.

 

Welcome to

ChupaLuck Casino Online

 

A variety of images loaded slowly.

“Chupa,” Ken said. “A small tribe, another Indian casino, my first thought. So I Googled the name. No tribes, at least in this hemisphere. You must be familiar with these sites,” he said to me. Page fully loaded, yes, very familiar.

“First off,” I said. “The name means nothing to me. It could be real, mostly likely not. Got most of the tradi
tional images for an online casino. Your account name, for logging in. Your password.”

“Ken,” Mary said. “Show her the other page.”

“Just wait,” I said. “I've got my routines, I guess. So, by using this casino, you play totally online. You don't download free games, like the legit online casinos offer. All this place wants is that you list a valid credit card or bank account, from which they say they guarantee they'll use to pay out winnings.”

“Is it a scam?” Ken said. “Like stealing credit card numbers?”

“Possibly legit. See this image?”

 

24/7 Customer Service

Toll Free Phone Lines

Live! Chat Room

Email Contact

 

“Got a registered eight-hundred number phone line. Email address. All this is traditional. They're not out to scam you right away, they just want your money. The downside is how long they'll stay in business. Most of these casino websites are located in Central America or on a Caribbean Island.”

“Can
you
find out where?”

“You have to understand, all you're looking at is a web page. On a web server, a computer that could be anywhere in the world. Literally, anywhere. The money transfers take place in a completely separate place, again, anywhere in the world. I can find out where the web server is, I can do that easily. Then it gets hard.”

“Show her the page,” Mary said.

“Before I do that,” Ken said, “you should know what
Chupa
probably means. If you Google the word, it can be a lollipop, somebody's pet dog, somebody's name, or business or a flower. Mostly likely, though, it's shorthand for
el chupacabra
.”

“Sounds like a Subway special sandwich,” I said.

“No,” Ken said. “It means ‘the goatsucker.'”

“A vampire bat?”

“No. They're real. I've seen them, deep in Mexico. Eight, nine inches long. They love blood, but they don't suck it out. When they bite into living flesh, usually a cow, a horse, the bat secretes a fluid so the blood won't congeal. Then they lap up the blood.
Chupacabras
are mythical. Stories began in mid-seventies, with dead farm animals in Puerto Rico, funny punctures on their necks. Stories spread in the countryside. Hundreds of animals slaughtered, drained of their blood, mutilated.”

“Like the Navajo skinwalker stories,” I said.

“Sure. One website report said, ‘It was as if all had been sucked out through the eyes. It had empty eye sockets and all the internal organs had disappeared.' The stories spread from Puerto Rico to other Caribbean islands, then jumped across the water to Mexico, Central America, and finally into the southern United States. Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Now,” Ken said, “let's go back to the casino. See this menu of items across the bottom of the page?”

 

Home—About Us—Slots—Games—Tournaments—Help

 

He clicked on Games. Another web page, listing traditional casino games. Poker. Roulette. Craps. Keno. Anything and everything to take your money. Ken clicked on the item
Tournaments
. A much longer list, listing different payouts to winners, the list scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the page. Ken put on a pair of drugstore reading glasses, their plastic lenses reflecting the web page colors as he peered close and clicked on one item.

ChupaLuck DeLux
. Another web page filled the screen slowly, a huge black and white photo of a man's face, the mulatto-skinned face itself partially covered with a large tattoo.
Mara 18
.

“That's it,” she said. “Now find the other page.”

“Wait,” I said. “That's…
what
?”

“The tattoo. When I found the young girl—you have to read the diary.”

“I will, Mary. I will read it. But how's this tattoo connected to the girl?”

“When I found her,” she said. “There were several men, all dead. With the same kind of tattoo, except the number was different. Twenty-seven. Not eighteen. Ken. Show her the other page.”

“The
Maras
gangs,” Ken said. Clicking through menus, trying to find something. “Tattoos are a gang symbol. I found it, was under the links page to other gambling sites.” The top of the page had a small image. Underneath it read simply

 

La Bruja Pray for her now

Our mother of the maras

 

Mary gasped, fingering the religious medal at her throat. I thought the image was a tarot card, but looking closer I saw it was a postcard image advertising an old Mexican movie. I'd seen many of them a year ago, when the collector and art historian David Schultz showed Vincent Basaraba some full-size posters from 1950s Mexican B films.

 

LA BRUJA

THE WITCH

 

I stepped sideways, my foot looking for a chair. I sat down too hard, too focused, a hand already in my bag, concentration on what I was thinking. The chair rolled away from me and I fell heavily to the floor. Mary's stack of papers and folders flooded the room as she instinctively threw up her arms to steady me, Mary on one side and Ken on the other, but I sat on the floor, found the cell phone I wanted, and called Alex.

“Laura,” she said. “What up?”

Alex Emerine, my business partner and friend.

“Who's there with you?”

“Sarah B and Sarah C, Stefan, and Kelle Maslyn. The new video woman.”

“Stop whatever you're doing. Call up a website named chupaluckcasino.com and work backwards. Find out anything and everything, you know what to do.”

“Laura. We're almost done with the phony green card online scam.”

“Dump it for now. Call me back, report anything new. Wait. Ken. What happens when you click on that tattoo?”