Kissing Arizona (26 page)

‘Good grief,' Aggie said.

‘You picked a poor day for it,' Will said. ‘Paper says chance of rain.'

‘Won't that be swell?' She got out her weapon and shield. ‘Can't wait to hear what the Mexico City boy thinks of the drug trade after he walks through wet mesquite trees all day, handcuffed to a US Marshall.' She laughed. ‘Remember that, Denny. Contrary to what you have probably heard in grade school in Tucson, crime does not always pay.'

It didn't take all day, it just seemed like it. By two thirty, having flushed the same flock of black-necked stilts out of the river three times, they were taking turns digging in a spot they'd been walking back and forth over, Cruz pointed out, ever since morning. And this was their fourth hole.

Sarah had brought her gardening gloves and was fine except for some lower back pain. Phil Cruz had disdained gloves and had blisters, and a growing contempt for careless hoodlums who couldn't quite remember where they buried body parts.

‘Been quite a while, man,' José Ojeda said. ‘And one part of this river looks a lot like any other.' He was comfortable, sitting on a rock. He had talked his keeper, whose name was Blake, into letting him smoke one more cigarette – ‘my mid-afternoon smoke break, how about it?' – and was enjoying his Marlboro with the gusto reserved for people who know their lungs aren't going to be needed for marathon running anytime soon. Blake was very nervous about second-hand smoke, so the entire day had featured interminable arguments over José's smoke breaks. Sarah had begun to dream about braining José with her shovel if he said one more fucking word about needing a smoke.

In the beautiful silence after Blake lit the cigarette for his prisoner, while José sat contentedly sucking on it, Sarah drove her shovel into the hole and hit something hard.

‘Probably another rock,' she said, not letting herself hope. Phil got excited, though – he came over and helped her dig, not even waiting for his turn. It better not be a rock, he said, because they needed to get out of this stinking ravine before that lightning flickering over Wasson Peak got down here.

Pondering the kind of mind that believed it could work hard enough to stay ahead of lightning, Sarah scooped up one more shovelful of gravelly sand and saw a corner. It looked soggy and gravel-colored but was definitely the unrocklike corner of a man-made object.

She was too happy to say anything but, ‘Corner.'

They both began digging with silent ferocity. When the whole top was exposed Phil asked José, ‘Well, is this the right box? Come over here and look, is this the way you remember it?'

José got up reluctantly from his comfortable seat, strolled over with his perpetual companion keeping step, looked in the hole and shrugged. ‘Yeah, that looks about right.'

‘It seems big for a head,' Sarah said.

‘Got a lot of wrapping,' José said, and went back and sat down. He still had a few puffs of his cigarette left and he didn't want any of them wasted.

The box, they could see, was wrapped in burlap and clear plastic sheeting. It had been a long time in the ground alongside a river, though, and wrapped or not it had absorbed a lot of moisture.

‘Heavy son of a bitch,' Phil said, trying his first lift. They dug and grunted, finally got both shovels under it and tried coordinated heaving. Blake didn't offer to help; he had told them he wouldn't.

‘I guard the prisoner,' he said. ‘I have to stay focused on that.'

Sarah was considering a suggestion about where Blake could put his precious focus when Phil remembered a pair of canvas straps he had in the car. He brought them over to the hole and snaked them underneath the box while Sarah raised it a couple of inches with the shovel. Phil was lying full-length along the edge of the hole by that time, long past caring how filthy he got. When he had four ends more or less even they each grabbed two ends and heaved, groaning, till some mud fell away and the box popped out of the hole with a sucking sound. Phil dropped on one knee and Sarah only just managed to stay out of a prickly pear cactus with nine gazillion spines.

‘Look again,' Phil said, leaning on his shovel, panting. ‘Is this the right box?'

‘No, I don't think so,' José said, and then yelled, ‘Wait, wait, I'm joking!' as Phil came at him swinging the shovel. After José raised his right hand and swore this was the right box (Sarah thinking, why would this man give a damn about what he swore to over a mud hole?), Phil brought the department SUV as close as he could. Using knees, shoulders, gritted teeth and groans, they manhandled the box into the back as thunder rumbled through the black cloud over Panther Peak. By the time they found all their dirt-encrusted tools and flung them in with the box, the first big drops of rain were plopping onto the windshield.

‘All right!' Phil Cruz crowed, grinning all over his mud-streaked face. ‘Let's get this puppy down to the lab.'

They drove through thunder and sprinkles, then a hard burst of rain that hit like hail, followed by a patch of bright windy sunshine – the ‘occasional showers' weather predicted in the morning paper. Phil and Sarah gave each other a muddy high five that scattered sand liberally over the front seat. Exhaustion faded as they enjoyed their triumph – they had pulled it off, found the box and got the sucker out of the ground.

Ojeda and his keeper sat in back, Blake watching the rain, looking mildly annoyed. This was not his town, he couldn't know, didn't care, that rain in Tucson felt like a party any place else.

José was already thinking about dinner – where would they eat, he asked Blake, could they go some place that had good steaks?

‘I'm not going in a restaurant with you, are you kidding? You're going back to the Pima County jail until time to catch our flight tomorrow.'

‘Aw, come on, I want something good,' José said. ‘I won't get many more chances.'

‘Poor baby,' Blake said.

Phil, who had been paying close attention to traffic during the cloudburst, tuned into their conversation suddenly and said, ‘Nobody's going anywhere until we get this box unwrapped and you ID Maldonado's head for me. And oh, Jesus Christ, it's Saturday, isn't it? Which means we're out of office hours at the lab – we may not even get anybody to open the damn door.' He pounded on the steering wheel in frustration, yelling, ‘Shit! I forgot about this!'

‘Let's give them a call,' Sarah said, pulling out her cell.

‘They won't answer the phone,' Phil said. ‘It's just doctors in there now, carving up bodies.'

‘They won't answer the office phone,' Sarah said, punching in numbers, ‘but a couple of the docs have given me their cell numbers for times like this.' She listened to a couple of rings, got an answer and said, ‘Bernie?' They had a nice humorous chat during which she asked him if he had any rule against heads that had no bodies attached, and Bernie asked which species? She told him rumor said this head had once been on a man and Bernie assured her he was no stickler when it came to portions of homo sapiens. He opened the back door, smiling, when she knocked a few minutes later.

He wouldn't let them come in, though. Pulling his plastic wrappings closer around himself to avoid contact, he gave them a severe look and said, ‘Do you people have any idea how filthy you are? And this box you're talking about –' he peered out through the rain – ‘looks even dirtier.'

‘We just dug it up,' Sarah said, ‘how else would it look?'

‘Well it can't come in here like that. And we can't get to it this weekend anyway. I'll get somebody to open one of the bins for you.' He turned and yelled into a long echoing hall, ‘Juan?'

A janitorial type came with a ring of keys and an umbrella, splashed across the gravel yard to a free-standing row of storage spaces, unlocked one and stood aside while they slid the box in. He had a form Phil signed, leaning in under the umbrella to keep it dry. Phil took the numbered stub he tore off, slid it carefully inside his pants at the waist and hurried back to the car. Sarah blew a kiss to Bernie and called through the rain, ‘You're a hero!' Bernie put his left index finger on his right bicep and flexed. She laughed and he waved her away.

‘I can see why women like police work,' Phil said as they drove away. ‘You all get special favors because of your sex, don't you?'

‘Wash your mouth out with soap,' Sarah said. ‘When did I ever get any special favors from you?' Her back was beginning to hurt a lot and now that she had her gloves off she could see she was getting a blister too. She looked in the glove compartment for band-aids, didn't find any, slammed the door shut and watched it fall open. ‘Did I ask for any special favors down by that bloody river when we heaved that stinking box out of that fucking hole? Did I? Well, then!' She slammed the door again, harder, and it fell open again. ‘Stupid door!'

José Ojeda crowed in delight. ‘Hey, Mr Big Shot Cop, you better watch it now, you said the wrong thing and you gonna get it from her! Hee hee!'

‘Hey, Sarah, come on, I'm sorry,' Phil said. He leaned across and closed the compartment door quietly. ‘I know that was a helluva job you did down there, I didn't mean to squeeze your shoes.'

‘Aw, don't kiss and make up yet, what fun is that?' José said. ‘C'mon, lady, let him have it some more.'

‘OK, José, just settle down now,' Blake said, obviously mortified by this breakdown in procedure.

José, though, was enjoying himself for the first time in a long time and he didn't want it to end. ‘Look at that asshole driver trying to drown his passengers,' he said, watching a Sun-Tran bus stop at a flooded curb and disgorge passengers into two feet of fast-flowing muddy water. José squealed with pleasure as men cursed the driver and one lady lost a shoe. When the bus closed its doors and pulled away he sighed and said, ‘You know, I been thinking.'

‘Now, there's a first,' Phil said, taking his blisters out on José.

‘Yeah, seems to me we had so much fun today, we oughta get together again tomorrow.'

‘Oh, for sure,' Phil said, ‘that sounds as amusing as a rubber crutch.' He rolled his eyes sideways at Sarah, trying to get her back on his side.

‘I mean, long as we gotta hang around this stupid town tomorrow anyway,' José said, blissfully oblivious to the angry discomfort of the other three people in the car, ‘why don't I show you the house where they capped ol' Chuy?'

Sarah swiveled inside her seat belt and fixed José with a red-eyed stare. ‘You saying you know the house where the Solteros . . . Phil, you want to pull over someplace?'

‘In a minute,' Phil said, ‘we're in a flood here if you haven't noticed.'

‘A good place to pull over,' José said, ‘would be right up ahead there at that Wendy's drive-in, so you could buy me a double bacon cheeseburger and a large frosty. I eat that, I bet I could remember exactly where that house is. And the Home Depot store,' he added quickly, to counteract the angry noises Blake was making as Phil turned in at the Wendy's sign, ‘where Huicho made me drive him so he could buy the saw and cement and all that shit. What you bet they got that on videotape? And you could find it easy if I can just remember which day – get me some fries with that, will you?'

While Eduardo drove them home from cleaning the duplex in mid-town, Ynez asked Vicky if she had noticed the men watching the house from a green car.

‘What?' Vicky looked all around. ‘Where?'

‘They are gone now. But I'm sure they were watching that house.' Vicky tried to ask her what kind of car but of course she didn't know, and then she got all agitated about the little Anglo girl in the house back there. What did she want, hanging around them like that? Ynez had no English yet and was afraid of everything all the time – rightly so, Vicky thought, because she never had a clue what was going on.

‘
No sé
,' Vicky said. ‘I don't know. Why would anyone want to watch while we clean? I cannot imagine.'

‘I thought you asked her,' Ynez said.

‘I? No.'

Luisa had warned them, ‘Be very careful in that house. Do not speak to anyone.' So Vicky was not going to admit she had. Ynez seemed like a brain-dead robot half the time, but you never knew, she might be Luisa's spy. Vicky was sure that Luisa, like all despots, had spies everywhere.

‘I heard your voice,' Ynez said.

‘She asked me for something, and I said I do not speak English.'

‘Ah. Good idea.' Ynez hugged herself, a characteristic gesture. She got goose-bumps from fear. ‘
Son policías
,' she said.
They are police.
More than rapists or mad dogs, Ynez feared the police. Rapists only took more of what had always been taken from her anyway, but the police would send her home. Before they did they would find out where her family was, and if she ever let that happen, her husband had promised, he would beat her. ‘I wish,' Ynez told Vicky, ‘that I did not have to work in their houses.'

‘Ask Tía Luisa to send you someplace else.'

‘No, no. I never ask for anything. She gets angry.'

‘So? She is angry most of the time anyway, I think.' An idea came to her, a way to get this loser out of her life and still make her an ally. ‘I will tell Tía Luisa you would be better working with Elena, who is from your home town and looks after you. Elena always does the public buildings and you would be better off there.'

‘Would you do that?' It was startling to see how almost-pretty she was when she smiled. ‘Tía Luisa likes you. Be careful not to make her angry, though.' Her husband would also beat her if she lost her job.