American Blood (29 page)

Shore didn’t answer.

Cullen said, “I want to be sure you’re not just pushing aside what happened last night. Or anything else, for that matter.”

Shore stood up. “I’ll see you next week.”

*   *   *

Back in the car she checked her cell and found a missed call from the main office line. She dialed Martinez.

“Did you just call me?”

He said, “Yeah. Are you still in the building?”

“No, I’m outside. I just had my shrink session.”

He said, “We had Bernalillo sheriff’s on the phone. They’ve caught a big shooting at some motel up there, four people dead.”

“God. When, just now?”

“About ten
A.M.
That guy Lucas Cohen from the marshals was there, apparently he’s saying Troy Rojas was involved.”

“But he’s not dead?”

“Rojas? No. They didn’t get him.”

She turned the key so she could run the air-con. The radio started, and she killed the volume. She always drove with it on. She couldn’t sit alone in the quiet.

She said, “So what happened?”

“Well, from what I can gather, Rojas was at the motel and Cohen was lined up to get him, but there was some third-party interference, ended up with a major shots-fired.”

She said, “Third-party interference.”

“Yeah. I don’t have the whole story yet.”

“Was it cartel?”

“Sounds like it could be. I’m not sure.”

“So what the hell was Cohen doing up there?”

“I don’t know.”

She said, “Have you spoken to him?”

“No, not yet. Look, you should come back in. I’d feel much better about having someone drive you home.”

“There’s a unit watching my house.”

“Yeah. Well two, actually.”

“So I’ll be fine.”

She clicked off.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Marshall

He’d given the cabdriver vague directions, said he thought the house was on the 8000-block of Loma Del Norte Road. As they approached Shore’s address he saw there were two APD patrol cars out front, one at each curb, both directions covered.

“We getting close, boss?”

Marshall was in the middle seat in back, leaning forward to see through the windshield.

“Just keep going. I’ll know it when I see it. Maybe speed up a little.”

He sat back as they cruised past the first car, speedometer showing twenty-five, the two guys up front ignoring them.

Nothing happening at Shore’s place. No sign of her Chevy.

Marshall, counting houses, said, “I think it’s actually the next street over. Just take a left when you can. Funny how you think you know a place, but then when you haven’t visited for a while it all looks a bit the same.”

“I know, boss, I know what you mean, exactly. We just take our time. No rush with anything, eh?”

More than happy to keep the meter running.

“I take a left here, you think?”

“Yeah. Here’s good.”

As the car made the turn he could see through the side window the two cars just sitting there and no one on the mike.

“Where now? I go left again?”

“Yeah, take another left. We’ll do the other side of this block.”

Counting down now as they doubled back. No police in sight. A few cars out on the street, but no red Jeep. Marshall’s count hit single digits.

“This will do.”

“This is the place, boss?”

“This is the place.”

The guy coasted slowly to a halt, really eking it out. Marshall took a hundred dollars from his pocket and set it on his knee to fold, make sure the crease was perfect. He handed the bill across the seat.

The guy reached across himself to take it. “Eh. Boss, that’s too much, even plus the tip.”

Marshall said, “Have a good day.”

He stood at the roadside and watched the cab pull away. Its putter the only sound, fading weakly into nothing.

He walked along the street. Beyond the nearside row of houses he could see Shore’s roof, just above the fence line. He paused and removed the sunglasses and hooked them in the neck of his shirt and stood smiling in the harsh light. All still. No one watching. The vast cloudscape borne as one on a slow current, like the sky was some fixed socket in which the world turned blindly.

He listened briefly and then he moved off the sidewalk and cut down a right-of-way along a line of town houses to the rear property. Laidback, nonchalant. A small dog yipping, a woman cursing it. Without breaking stride he threaded through the low planting along the boundary and vaulted the fence into Shore’s property and stepped out of the shrubs and ran lightly across the yard and stood at the corner of the house with his back to the wall. The gun drawn and raised. His footprints already fading: blade by blade the short grass recovering. He waited. No sound from inside. He eased his head out and risked a look. No one.

He counted to thirty, patient, a little more than half a minute. Then with the gun at his leg he walked down the side of the house toward the road. There was a frosted-glass door just before the garage. He crouched and listened. The little dog still carrying on.

From his pocket he took the canvas lock pick bag and unfolded it on the ground. This bright ladder of utensils, snug in their loops. He put down the gun and noticed the little telephone junction box, twenty feet away at the corner of the garage. The short wire at the base had been clipped. A break-in precaution: cut the phone line so the alarm system can’t dial out.

He waited there a moment. The crouch starting to burn.

Do it. You’re not going back now.

He looked at the junction box. Close enough to the corner the patrol car up the street could probably see it. He considered that. Then he took a torsion wrench and a small rake pick and on a single held breath opened the lock and returned the tools to the bag and pocketed it. Then he quietly picked up the gun and stood with his back to the wall on the handle side and opened the door cautiously: a gentle underhand motion, thumb and index only, barely a sound.

Gun up as he went in. Left through an empty hallway. The empty garage. The oil-stained slab with cracks wending through. Into the house proper. The curtained living room. Churchlike in its dusty gloom. Police files abounded. Her makeshift home office.

Nothing in the kitchen. She’d removed pictures from the hallway wall. He could tell from where the paint hadn’t faded. Her bed made, the quilt rumpled. He pictured her lying across it.

Back down the hallway. He stood a moment at a closed bedroom door. The files in the living room and the photos gone from the wall and he just knew without looking what lay within. Nobody hiding. One of those things you just know and know for sure. It had that long-unopened look.

He went back to the kitchen and sat at the table with his legs crossed and the gun resting on his knee and waited to see who would show first.

2010

Still at the Hilton, still in bed, watching her get tidy. She sat on a corner of the mattress, legs crossed one way and then the other as she slipped on her boots.

“Can you zip my dress up?”

She leaned back so he could reach.

He ran a knuckle up the valley of her spine, her skin soft and sleep-warm. She laughed and arched catlike. He said, “I only know how to take them off.”

“Give it a try. It’s easy.”

He did the zipper up smoothly, kept his hand there when it reached the top. He said, “I want to get out of here.”

She moved away and tugged the sheet with her. He made a grab and trapped it waist-high and laughed. She said, “So get dressed.”

“Yeah. I mean, away from here. Out of New York. Do something different.”

She walked to the window and drew the curtains. On the carpet the narrow band of morning growing wider and her stretched shadow through the middle of it. She said, “How come?”

“Various things.”

She sat down again on the edge of the bed. “Work?”

He pulled the sheet back up and ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah. Mainly.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Basically.”

Looking at him quietly, features hidden by the bright window behind. He draped an arm over his eyes against the glare. She said, “Why?”

He said, “I have to do things I don’t want to.”

“That’s a bit vague.”

“It’ll give you nightmares.” He smiled. “I’ve made you lose enough sleep as it is.”

She said, “I’ll risk it.”

He thought a while, arm still covering his face. He said, “I hurt people.”

“Hurt people how?”

He didn’t answer. After a moment she said, “So quit.”

“It’s not quite that easy.” He rubbed sleep from an eye. “I think I might have to run away.”

“And join the circus.”

“It’s the circus I’d be running from.”

She didn’t answer.

He rolled on his side to face her. “Are we always going to do it like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like … Meet at a hotel and then go our separate ways.”

She found his hand under the sheet and held it. “I don’t know. We’ve only done it twice. And it’s still fun.”

He smiled. “Feels like an affair or something.”

She said, “Probably help if you weren’t trying to hide from my father.”

He nodded but didn’t answer. He waited a few seconds, building up to it, and then he said, “Would you want to come with me? If I went somewhere?”

His heart thumping with the wait. She squeezed his hand and said, “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far. But I will.”

She leaned over and kissed him and stayed there beside him. Her shampoo and her perfume. She could probably feel his heart racing.

She said, “I’ll think about it.”

THIRTY-NINE

Rojas

Shakes made it hard to drive. He held the bottom of the wheel and clamped the wrist with his other hand, trying to keep steady in the lane. He was running on survival instinct, a white-knuckle fear of dying. Not a new experience. He’d been shot at in the Gulf, Khafji in ’91, but that was wartime danger. He’d never been a sole target. This morning had been different. A peril for him alone. Sitting with a pistol in his hand in his quiet room, a departure lounge of sorts, he knew that doorway had been given all-new meaning. Those years and years behind him, and in the weighing of good and bad you could reach a judgment about which way he leaned, but the only ruling would be whether he was in the cross hairs and that would be final.

And somehow he’d made it out.

Not a word to his mother but he wasn’t a spiritual man, no time for guardian angels or anything like that, but if someone said the devil himself had taken him beneath his wing he wouldn’t have argued. If his escape had been a miracle then it was hell’s doing, because no moral god would see this as justice. Not with what was planned.

He was southbound on I-25, still very conscious of the tracking unit somewhere on the car, Leon probably watching on his screen, pissed off but not worried.

Getting south toward the airport now. He took the 223 exit and coasted down the ramp. The shoulders just brown-yellow and as he turned west into the suburbs he could see a thin shelf of desert wavering beyond the city, arid out there, like a vision from his new watchman.

He made a right onto Broadway Boulevard and pulled to the curb and sat idling with the turn signal still counting tick-tock. Quiet residential, stunned lifeless in the heat. The bag on the seat beside him with the zip open and the .44 Anaconda waiting beneath the flap.

He patted his pockets for the phone, feeling light when he came up empty. A frenzied dig through the money and he found it at the bottom of the bag. He called Troy Junior, but the kid didn’t pick up. Probably spaced out on something, too fried to reach the phone. He tried his mother. It went to voice mail. He almost hung up, but he stayed with it.

“Um, Ma, thought I’d just leave you a message, let you know where things are at.”

He tapped the back of his hand on the wheel as he spoke, make it an absolute promise: “I got some things to fix up and then I’ll be on the way. I’ll be coming. It’ll just take some time.” He leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose with his other hand. “I know I keep saying it, but it’ll just be a couple of days. No more than that. Anyway, I dunno, I just wanted to say, all the things I’ve done or been involved with or whatever, it was always because of other people. Like, I kinda get swept along by it. All my life, I dunno, I’ve been in other guys’ slipstreams and it’s all just bad luck. But I’m fixing it. I’ve just gotta do these couple of little things and then I’ll come see you, bring you that money.”

He paused, thinking of something nice to finish on. He wasn’t sure if promises were any good if you made them in a stolen truck with a dead man in pieces in back and three million bucks on the next seat, but he said, “I’m on the good path, Ma. I’ll see you soon.”

He hung up and tossed the phone aside. Then he bit his lip and sat with his elbow on the sill and the web of his thumb like a visor across his brow. Instinct told him to vanish, never surface again, but he couldn’t. Leon would kill his mother, kill his boy.

You have to get rid of him.

He sucked a breath and checked the mirrors, tasting blood. How long had he been sitting here, three or four minutes? He pictured the transmitting unit on the truck, the little dot on the map just hovering there.

Scalding hot in the car. The fan was fucked. He wound the window half-down and reached in the bag and put his hand on the gun. It had a nice clearing effect, made plans come together.

They’re tracking the car, so you need new wheels.

Cyrus was still in back, but Rojas had never touched the plastic. Plus Vance and Leon’s prints would be all through the car. There was nothing that definitively said:

Troy, you cut the guy up.

Even if they hung it on him, he’d held a police detective at gunpoint last night. Killing an ex–federal convict would just be like a bonus round.

He checked the mirrors again. A car maybe every fifteen seconds. He shut off the turn signal but left the motor running. One knee jiggling anxiously. He could just picture that shot-up Audi creeping nearer in the mirror, swimming out of the haze. Leon with some god-awful weapon on the seat beside him: No rush, just looking for my money.