Light Before Day (37 page)

Eduardo Velasquez.

I had heard the name before, but I had to grope to remember where. Then I remembered that I'd heard it the same place I had first heard another term Caroline had just used: the Michoacan trail. Martin Cale's yacht. Corey's boyhood lover, Reynaldo Reyez, had traveled the Michoacan trail to the small town of Visalia, where he and Corey had fallen in love. His father had worked for a drug lord named Eduardo Velasquez. His grandmother's murder had been ordered by a drug lord named Eduardo Velasquez, and the repercussions had torn apart his family.

Reynaldo Reyez. Missing. Presumed dead.

I had studied the faces of Reynaldo Reyez, Corey McCormick, and Joseph Spinotta,

convinced of a connection among the three men forged during that secret meeting between Corey and Spinotta. Now I was even more convinced. I didn't have to shoot down Caroline's theory. We were both right. The connections were there, but I still didn't have the first clue why a vigilante like Reynaldo Reyez would end up working for a pedophile. The look on my face brought Caroline to her feet. "Adam?"

"Any idea what El Maricon looks like?"

"He's pretty," she said. "Eyes like a cat's. That's probably why he got the nickname."

I asked her to wait and then walked out of the cabin. My bag was in the Jeep's backseat. I reached in and pulled out the drawing of Reynaldo Reyez.

When I turned, Caroline was standing right behind me. I handed her the drawing. Her eyes consumed it. She turned her back to me as she studied the drawing, probably to hide her reaction.

"Is that him?" I asked her. "Is that El Maricon?"

She looked across the clearing to where the front bumper of her Tahoe rested against the doors to the huge barn, its doors secured by a large silver padlock I hadn't noticed when I drove in. "You ever been to a twelve-step meeting?" Caroline asked.

"No."

"Me neither," she said. "But they use this saying I like. You ready?" I nodded.
"What you see
here, what you hear here, let it stay here.
Here here."

She tongued her upper Up. "My mother's scalp came off when they loaded her into the ambulance. She had no skin left on her back. Even then she was trying to tell the cop who was with her that what happened at that trailer was not an accident. I'm going to listen to her, Adam.

I'm going to do whatever it takes to listen to her. If you don't approve, you can hit the road."

I looked to the barn doors. Then I gave her a small nod.

She squeezed herself between the Tahoe and the barn doors, unlocked the padlock, and pushed the doors inward. The second she stepped into the darkness, I saw a man lassoed to a metal bed frame with two lengths of nylon rope that met in a thick knot under his back. His long face was skin on bone, and he was asleep or drugged, his slack jaw revealing chipped and blackened teeth.

His arms were riddled with track marks. Several looked fresh.

I instinctively pulled the doors shut behind me, plunging the three of us into near darkness lit by wavering shafts of light from slats in the rafters. Caroline lit a Coleman lantern and placed it next to the guy's head. He didn't react. The rest of the barn contained a Skilsaw and a stack of old plywood. "Is he drugged?"

"He's been drugged since he was a kid. Now he's under medical supervision."

With that, she crossed to a small leather bag that sat on the Skilsaw table behind the bed. I watched, stupefied, as she loaded a syringe from a small medicine bottle.

"This is bullshit," I whispered.

"Actually, that's what we're going to find out as soon as Eddie starts talking."

"Some of those track marks are fresh," I said, pointing to Eddie's upturned right arm. "How long have you been at this?"

"A little less than a day," she said.

"You wake him up to see if he'll talk, then you knock him out again?"

"Something like that." She took a seat on the edge of the bed.

"That's torture."

She gripped Eddie's left wrist, just below its cinching of nylon rope, and squeezed, searching for a vein. She didn't find one. She squatted down next to the bed frame, found a vein in the man's ankle, swabbed it with an alcohol pad, and made a quick, clean injection. Then she rose and took a step back from the bed.

"Bigfoot had Roger Paterson and Bob Gimlin," she said. "El Mar-icon has Eddie Cairns, petty criminal, lifetime meth addict, and teller of tall tales."

The man named Eddie Cairns sputtered. His jaw quivered with the first threat of tears. He made a pained sound in his throat. Caroline rested her hand on Eddie's forehead and regarded me.

"Going or staying?" she asked.

I stayed. She returned her attention to her broken captive. Keeping one hand on his forehead, she raised the drawing of Reynaldo Reyez so he could see it.

Eddie Cairns let out a scream so loud and piercing it blasted me backward. He bucked and writhed against his constraints as if Caroline had dropped a box of snakes on him.

He bucked and yelled for so long that I pulled the drawing out of Caroline's hand so he could catch his breath. She backed away from the bed without a glance at me.

Eddie had twisted his head away from us as he struggled to breathe through his open mouth.

Caroline sat down cross-legged on the floor. I saw an old tape recorder in front of her.

"Tell us about him, Eddie," she said.

Eddie flinched. There was no place for me to sit, so I backed up to the nearest wall. Eddie finally turned his head to stare up at the ceiling as if an angel had appeared to him between the rafters. From the sudden wide-eyed expression on his face, it looked like the angel had instructed him to obey Caroline.

He started talking.

Eddie Cairns was sixteen years old when he met the old rancher with a face like a horse. The rancher was sitting in his pickup in back of the diner where Eddie's mother and older sister both waited tables. When Eddie emerged from the back door with a trash bag in each fist, the guy bent forward over his steering wheel, his rheumy eyes wide and chapped lips parted, as if Eddie were as remarkable as the sunset setting fire to the hills.

Eddie was pretty sure the guy was some sort of pervert, so he dropped the trash bags off and headed quickly for the back door. Just then, the guy rolled his window down and asked Eddie if he'd like to make some money.

"You some kinda weirdo?" Eddie asked, even as he approached the truck.

The guy cackled. "I pop wood for a nice set of tits, kid, and from the look of things, you ain't got any. Whaddya say? I betcha your mom don't pay shit for all the work you do trying to cover her ass in there."

The guy's face was almost as long as his mane of wiry silver hair, and his eyes were sunken below the bridge of a nose that resembled an upturned shark's fin. His lips were so cracked it seemed he'd been sucking the exhaust from a tail pipe. The truth was, Eddie bussed a few tables and took the trash out without his mother asking him to, and each time he did it, he hoped she would give him something more than a strained smile.

"Good money, kid," the guy said. "All you gotta do is clean up after a few friends of mine.

All cash. None of that IRS bullshit." Eddie heard a tinge of desperation in the guy's voice, knew something wasn't quite right with his manic movements and darting eyes. "Come on, kid. This is a sweet deal I'm offering. Get in and let's discuss the particulars."

Eddie envisioned how the rest of his night would play out if he didn't go with the man. He'd kill time faking his way through his homework in the diner's kitchen. Every now and then his mother would come in, lay her hands on his shoulders, let out a long, pained sigh, and depart, as if her son could offer nothing more than a split-second reprieve from the world outside, including a sister who was always either newly pregnant, recovering from an abortion, or screwing up someone's order. Close to closing time, the pharmacist from down the block would stumble in, a few drinks on his breath, and Eddie would be forced to listen as the guy flirted with his mother, his comments becoming more lewd as the others diners departed. Then on the ride home, his mother and his sister would find something to fight about, something that would leave his sister in hysterical tears and his mother cursing a father Eddie had never met.

"I've got a switchblade in my pocket," Eddie told the wasting rancher. "Try anything fruit and I'll get serious with it."

As Eddie climbed into the truck, the man cackled and clapped his hands together as if he were keeping time to machine gun fire. "That's the spirit, kid. That mouth we'll have to put a muzzle on, but your spirit's A-okay!"

They were speeding west on Highway 198, into the hills on a route that Eddie's mother had forbidden him to take on his bike. The guy's words came out at the same speed his fingers drummed the steering wheel. He'd had a cattle ranch once but lost it, along with his wife, and he'd killed time drinking whiskey and watching his cows die where they stood. Then the rancher had made some new friends. Important friends. Guys who were very good at what they did and needed a nice secluded spot to let off steam.

Eddie knew without asking that the rancher was afraid of these new friends, afraid in the same quiet and supposedly respectful way that his mother was afraid of a God who answered her prayers with a headache or a car accident.

Just as night fell over the inner Coast Ranges, the rancher turned onto a road lined with a rotted cattle fence. Eddie saw a single trailer uphill a little ways from a large barn with a cathedral window over the front door. They jerked to a stop right next to a battered trailer surrounded by the stalks of dead trees. Several yards away lay the burned-out crater where a small house had once stood. Just then the guy's hand brushed Eddies shoulder, and he jumped a foot off his seat. The guy cackled and reached past Eddie for the glove compartment.

Eddie watched as the guy removed a small glass pipe and a plastic bag full of white rocks stained slightly yellow. Loading the pipe gave the man a sudden focus, and when he spoke, it was with the patient and even voice of a schoolteacher: "You come up here on the weekends and you stay here. Tell your mom you're at a friend's house or something. Come Sunday you get a hundred bucks cash."

"What do I have to do for it?" Eddie asked, his voice shaky and his heart turbocharged.

"The minute you see an empty beer bottle hit a table, you pick it up. One of these guys spits in your direction, you get a rag and start wiping." The guy pressed several white rocks into the glass pipe with one thumb; then he shook it with one wrist. "Every now and then they'll bring in some bitch and get rough with her. If it gets bloody, make sure she's cleaned up after they're done with her. Maybe talk sweet to her or something."

His pipe loaded, the rancher met Eddie's eyes, and Eddie saw there was a strange fire in them fueled by anticipation and fear. "Call 'em all sir. They're all fucking wetbacks, so they'll love that shit. Especially coming from a little gringo like you. Not senor, 'cause then they'll think you're fucking with 'em."

Before he could stop himself, Eddie said, "These guys aren't really your friends, are they?"

The rancher pressed his feet against the floor and straightened himself, holding his pipe up in one hand as he dug in his pants pocket with the other. He pulled out a lighter and smiled at it.

Suddenly the rancher seemed to remember Eddie was sitting next to him.

"And you
don't
sleep," the rancher said. He lit the pipe and gave it a long deep kiss.

When he extended the pipe toward Eddie, Eddie frowned at it. He had some vague notion of what was inside of it, but some cruel instinct in him, as natural as his thirst for water, told him that he couldn't possibly know or judge what was inside the pipe until it was inside his lungs.

During the long nights that would follow, when his fingernails bled because he spent hours on end cleaning the windows, or with his bones trembling as he cowered on the floor of a drunk tank, Eddie Cairns would come up with lots of different reasons for why he took the pipe without asking what was inside it.

He took it because he had buckteeth and chicken legs. Because when his sister came home pregnant by another man, he felt what could only be described as jealousy. Because no matter how tough he tried to be, the sound of a backfiring car made him clutch his heart looking for a bullet hole. Because when his mother moved a piece of furniture several inches to the left, he was overcome by a paralyzing sense of dread and a desperate urge to tell his mother how he felt without having her laugh at him.

Eddie Cairns took the pipe because no matter how hard he tried not to, he still saw things other people did not: fissures, phantoms, and blood. Lately he had started to suspect that all the people around him had trained themselves not to see these things, but for some reason, they had deemed Eddie unworthy of learning their tricks.

When Eddie brought the pipe to his mouth, the rancher took his lighter and applied its guttering flame to the bowl. Eddie saw the white rocks light up around the edges. He inhaled. He watched the orange glow fringe the red rocks inside the glass pipe and then spread to the fields outside and the ridges of the mountains. The strands of low clouds passing high above the truck revealed the strange energy inside themselves by dragging some of it across Eddie's skin.

Then the rancher said, "Suck it in, son. The spiders will be here soon."

At least ten men came to the barn that night: the ringleader, a bald and portly man with cue ball eyes named Eduardo Velasquez, a man who controlled a large chunk of the Central Valley meth trade, and his small posse of meth cooks, runners, and street dealers, the starry-eyed young boys who had come up from Mexico to brew a drug that reduced houses to craters, men to jackals, and mothers to murderers.

The rancher had provided them with enough Corona to keep them singing badly for days on end, and a stereo system with surround speakers mounted on the ceiling. The barn still had some of its cattle stalls, and the men were using one to take turns with an emaciated, groaning prostitute.