Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss (5 page)

The Nogales Station of the CBP was probably one of the most unfriendly looking buildings Dean had ever seen. He’d seen prisons that looked more welcoming.

The officer at the archive check-in desk was female. According to her laminated photo ID, her name was Ariana Cruz. She looked way too young for the job. Wide, heart-shaped face and big brown eyes. Pretty, even with minimal make-up and her dark hair pulled back into a no-nonsense bun. The sweet, kid sister type. No wedding ring.

“You must be Ariana,” he said, flashing the most charming smile in his arsenal. “Ray Sandoval told me that you were the one to talk to about pulling some old records.”

“I’m sorry, you are...?” She blushed, dropping her gaze.

“I’m Special Agent Allman,” Dean told her. “I’m sure Sandoval must have mentioned that I was coming.”

He badged her with the FBI ID, holding it low, just to the left of his belt buckle. Trying to make her feel embarrassed about looking too closely at that area of his body and keep her focus upstairs, on his face.

“Well... I...” She picked up a clipboard, scanning over a list of some sort.

He took a step closer, one hand on her desk. He didn’t want to overplay it and act all pervy. Just give her the impression that he liked what he saw but was trying to be professional about it.

“It took me three weeks to get all the paperwork together to cover the transfer of document custody,” he told her. “I’d hate to have to go through that all over again.”

“I’ll need your badge number,” she said.

Dean pulled out a very official-looking business card with the FBI logo and Bobby Singer’s phone number. Held it out to her.

“If there’s a problem you can contact my superior back in DC,” he told her.

“I need to enter your badge number into the system for security cross-check,” she said. “It’s standard procedure.”

“Listen, Ariana,” he said, leaning in and lowering his voice, making it softer, more intimate. “I know you hate all that paperwork just as much as I do...”

She cut him off before he could continue.

“You’ve always had it easy with women, haven’t you?” she said. A funny little smile curled in the corner of her mouth. “I can see why. And, you know what, I’d love to lie to you and tell you that I can get you past security if you take me back into the supply closet and show me a good time. Just for my own selfish reasons.”

Dean couldn’t help but laugh. Some innocent kid sister.

“But let’s face facts,” she continued. “Even if you rocked my world, which I have no doubt that you would, I still don’t have the power to let you in without performing a security cross-check and issuing a bar-coded visitor ID. If you want to bypass security, you’ll have to show my superior officer a good time.”

A new voice, masculine, deep and slightly accented, spoke up behind Dean.

“That would be me.”

Dean turned to face the owner of the voice. Latino, late fifties with thick, perfectly groomed white hair and incongruous pale-blue eyes set in a deeply lined face the color and texture of old saddle leather. He wore the same uniform as Cruz but with higher-ranking insignia. His photo ID read “Raphael De La Paz.”

“Sorry, sir,” Cruz replied, blushing even deeper and awkwardly shuffling papers on her desk. “This is Special Agent Allman, here about some old case files. I just need to get his badge number...”

De La Paz looked at Dean.

Dean couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so profoundly scrutinized. By a normal human being, anyway. It was like that unflinching gaze was riffling through the drawers of his mind. Dean was sure the game was up.

There was a fingerprint scanner beside the clipboard on Cruz’s desk. If they printed him, it would only take a few clicks on a computer to call up Dean’s less-than-sterling history with law enforcement. Sam had been right. This was a spectacularly bad idea.

“Come into my office, Agent...” De La Paz gave Dean another searching look. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Allman,” Dean said, sweating in earnest now. He knew perfectly well that the older man hadn’t forgotton the fake name he’d given Cruz.

“Right,” De La Paz said. “Cruz, take a break. Smoke. Coffee. Facebook. Whatever.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

De La Paz turned and headed down the drab, fluorescent-lit corridor. Dean saw no choice but to follow. As they walked, Dean noticed the older man limping slightly on his right leg. De La Paz opened a metal door labeled with his name and gestured for Dean to enter.

Dean stepped inside the cramped, windowless office. It was pin-neat and minimalist. Standard, government-issue metal desk, nearly bare except for a phone, a small, outdated computer monitor, and a single framed photo facing away from Dean. Two identical chairs, one behind the desk and one in front. One wall was lined with large, alphabetized filing cabinets, making the small room feel even smaller.

De La Paz stepped in behind Dean and closed the door. There was barely enough room for the two of them to stand side by side in front of the desk. Dean wondered for a moment if maybe Cruz had been serious about him showing her boss a good time, but De La Paz just squeezed past him and sat down behind the desk. He motioned for Dean to take the other chair.

“I’ve worked Border Patrol for twenty years,” De La Paz said. “Seventeen of those years in the field, before a Zeta bullet put me behind this desk. People tell you all kinds of stories. Some are true. Most aren’t. You learn to know the difference just by looking at ’em. At their eyes. I never even listen to what people say anymore. I just look at their eyes.”

Dean shifted in the uncomfortable chair, feeling like he was twelve years old again and back in the principal’s office.

“I know you’re not an FBI agent.”

The uncomfortable chair squeaked under Dean’s weight as he shifted again, a subtle torture device that amped his discomfort up to eleven. He ran every angle, every possible response over and over in his head and still came up empty. He looked down at his sweating hands. Some Chuck Norris.

“But I also know you’re not a criminal or a terrorist,” De La Paz continued. “You probably like to think of yourself as some kind of rebel, but you have the soul of a lawman. I see that in your eyes.”

Dean squinted at the older man, wondering where he was going with this.

“You’re carrying a hell of a lot of scar tissue for someone as young as you are.” De La Paz sat stone still, never taking his eyes off Dean as he spoke. “But we all get calloused on account of the things we’ve seen on the job. Things we’ve done. Things the people we protect could never understand. Those things have made you cynical, but deep in your heart you still believe in justice, don’t you?”

Did he? Dean had no idea how to answer a question like that.

“You know I oughta turn you in,” De La Paz said.

“What’s stopping you?” Dean asked. If De La Paz really was going to blow the whistle, Dean wished he’d just get it over with already.

“Maybe the fact that you remind me of someone.” De La Paz pulled a bottle of top-shelf tequila from a desk drawer, along with two shot glasses. “A complicated, driven man with eyes like just yours. Met him back when I was your age. Still young enough to think I knew everything about everything.” He looked down at the bottle, shaking his head with a slight smile. “That man sure proved me wrong.” He opened the bottle, poured two modest shots. “His name was Winchester. John Winchester.”

De La Paz held one of the shot glasses out to Dean.

“Pleased to meet you, Dean,” De La Paz said, raising his shot glass and clinking it against Dean’s.

Dean tried to no-sell his surprise, but he was pretty sure his jaw was in his lap.

“You knew who I was this whole time?” Dean asked.

“I had a pretty good idea.” He smiled. “I suppose you might have been Sam, but you’ve got firstborn written all over you.” He tossed back the tequila and set the glass down on his desk. “Now why don’t you tell me what this is really about.”

Dean looked at the older man for a moment, then at the tequila. He wondered what supernatural horror had brought his dad and this guy together, but figured this wasn’t the time to ask. He just had to hope that they had both been on the same side. He sucked in a deep breath, downed the shot, and took a risk. A risk he was probably out of his mind for taking. He told De La Paz what this was really about.

Dean laid out everything they knew. Everything they’d found out up to that point. Including their suspicion that the thing responsible for the attacks wasn’t human.

De La Paz listened without interrupting, poker-faced and giving Dean no idea if he was buying it or if he was planning to call the men in white coats to come take Dean away.

When Dean was finished, De La Paz nodded. He didn’t immediately arrest him or call the men in white coats, he just sat there for a minute in thoughtful silence.

“So you’re saying that you think someone, or some
thing
, had it out for Keene because of an event that occurred on the job fifteen years ago?”

“Pretty much.”

More silence. Had Dean made a mistake, trusting De La Paz? Just because the older man knew their father didn’t necessarily mean he knew everything. Maybe they just had a couple of beers and talked about baseball. But there was something about De La Paz that Dean couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that made Dean instinctively trust him.

The phone on De La Paz’s desk rang, startling Dean a little.

“Excuse me,” the older man said, lifting the receiver. “De La Paz.”

He spoke for a minute in Spanish, his tone intimate and soothing, like he was telling someone not to worry. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Dean.

“My wife. Every time she sees something on the news, she thinks I’m in danger, even though I’ve been working archives for three years now.”

De La Paz listened to whatever was being said to him, and suddenly, his eyes went wide. He made a quick excuse to his wife and hung up.

“What...?” Dean began, but De La Paz held up his hand for quiet and then started tapping away on the computer.

Dean waited, feeling that hot excitement building inside him again. He had the feeling that he was moving in on their prey.

“There’s been another ‘animal attack’ against our field officers,” De La Paz said. “Three, possibly four victims this time. One of them may have been Charlie Himes, currently MIA.”

Dean waited for the older man to elaborate.

“Himes was partners with Davis Keene, back when they were rookies, but he put in for transfer to San Diego...”

De La Paz stood and pulled open a file drawer, riffling through files till he found the one he wanted. He laid it on the desk, flipped through it until he found a particular piece of paper, then turned it around so it was facing Dean.

It was an application for transfer. De La Paz tapped the date with a thick, nicotine-stained finger. It said “April 18th, 1995.”

“...fifteen years ago,” De La Paz said.

De La Paz led Dean down another hallway to a door labeled “DOCUMENTS.” De La Paz swiped his ID through a bar-code reader next to the doorknob and pushed the thick metal door open.

“Welcome to the graveyard,” he said.

The room they entered was a cavernous, dusty warehouse space packed with row upon row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving. The shelves were lined with thousands of identical cardboard file boxes.

“We’re working on getting all this old paperwork uploaded into the system,” De La Paz said. “But it’s a monumental task for which we are desperately understaffed. All the personnel files are in my office but any incident reports involving Himes and Keene from April of ’95 would be stored here.”

Dean walked with De La Paz down the dimly lit rows, past 1997 and 1996, until they found a section marked 1995. The file boxes were in rough chronological order, but not exact, so it took them a few minutes to locate the later half of April.

“Okay, fifteen, sixteen,” De La Paz was saying under his breath. “Right, here’s the nightshift report that covers April 17th and 18th.” He pulled a file, opened it. “Officers Keene and Himes were teamed up with José Porcayo and Gilberto Brewer that night. At 8:37 p.m. on the 17th, there was a pretty substantial narcotics intercept. Three arrests, 500 pounds of cocaine seized. Then nothing all night until 2:58 a.m. on the 18th, when a small group of migrants was apprehended trying to cross the border, including an abandoned female infant, aged nine months, whose mother was never found.” De La Paz shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary.”