American Blood (8 page)
They all sat quietly, absorbed by fantasy. A quiet crunching noise as Bolt positioned the ice.
Vance said, “Guy give a name?”
Rojas said, “Marshall.”
“Marshall, eh.”
Rojas said, “I got his plate number.”
“You called him since?”
“He’s not picking up.”
Vance grinned around the cigarette and spread his arms along the back of the sofa. He said, “Maybe Leon wants to try.”
Lauren Shore
One of those mornings.
One of those mornings when she woke and it was nearly twelve. Still dressed and laid diagonally on tangled sheets, her feet at the pillow and a thin stripe of sunlight across the darkened room. Somewhere her phone was ringing.
She swept an arm and found where it had nested amidst the covers. It was Martinez.
She said, “Hey.”
“Hey. You sound like you just woke up.”
She laughed croakily, coughed. “If you hadn’t called I’d still be asleep.”
She rolled to the edge of the bed and sat up and found her feet. The room tipped one way and back the other. She crouched and steadied herself on the edge of the bed.
He said, “You doing okay?”
She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, finger-combed her hair. She put an inch of water in the glass that stood at the basin and knocked it back like a shot. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
He said, “You sound like you just ate gravel for lunch or something.”
She perused the medicine cabinet. No aspirin. “Ha. Yeah, I’m fine. Just, you know. I thought stress leave was meant to be relaxing. This is worse than being at work.”
She walked down the hallway to the kitchen. The world steadying. Past the other bedroom door. Windows to the right, and on the left-hand wall these off-shade squares where the photographs had stopped the paint from fading.
He said, “Yeah, well. You gotta give it a bit of time. What’s the doc been saying?”
“She says I’m not a nutcase.”
“Really? You’d better go to someone else then.”
“Hilarious.”
In the kitchen she lifted the kettle, gauged it half full, and set it boiling. She leaned against the edge of the counter. “So what’s happening? You got good stuff cooking, or did you just want to shoot the shit?”
He laughed. “I always want to shoot the shit. But I thought I better give you a ring. Even though I probably shouldn’t.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Probably shouldn’t. I’d better hear what it is then.”
“Yeah. I thought you might say that.”
She could picture him reclining side-on to his desk, kids’ drawings all lined up in their frames.
He said, “Got a call from the staties this morning. Had a guy ring in a nine-one-one from this diner just off the 25, kind of up past Algodones.”
She walked through to the living room to escape the kettle roar. “Okay. And?”
“Guy was a trucker, eating early breakfast or something, said the only other people in there were these three guys having a sit-down and a coffee. In there about fifteen minutes or whatever and then they just up and left. Anyway. He thought they were being kind of quiet, but didn’t really make anything of it, so he pays and goes outside to the lot and two of the guys are laid out in the gravel, and the other one’s gone.”
Her files and news clippings and printouts spread on chairs, the coffee table, everywhere. She sat sidesaddle on the arm of the sofa. “What do you mean, laid out. Like dead?”
“No, not dead, just beat up. He reckoned one of the guys was on his back with a broken nose, blood everywhere, and the other guy was on his side and then sort of got up on all fours when the guy helped him. Wheezing away like he’d been kicked in the balls or kicked in the guts or something.”
“Anybody say what happened?”
“No, but I mean, pretty clear the third guy nailed the other two and then hightailed it.”
“Deal gone bad, maybe.”
“That’s what the truck driver thought. State police didn’t think it was much of a trafficking area, but the descriptions this guy gave sounded like Troy Rojas and Cyrus Bolt. The beat-up guys, I mean. So they ended up calling the marshals because there’s a BOLO on Bolt, and the feds put them through to our missing persons guys, because apparently there’s some angle where they’re connected to a missing girl. Anyway, then they called us just as a courtesy thing, too.”
She said, “Quite the phone tree.”
“Yeah.”
The kettle clicked. She headed back to the kitchen. “So who was the third guy?”
“Umm, hang on. Yeah. Tall, well-built blond guy. Early to mid-thirties. Probably six-three, the guy reckoned, maybe two hundred.”
She paused, midstride. “Huh. Shit.”
“What?”
She kept walking. “Nothing.”
“You know him or something?”
She laughed. “No. I doubt it.”
He didn’t answer. She rolled open a drawer and found a spoon and took a mug from a shelf and rinsed out the dust. “What did the staff think?”
“Couple of cooks out the back, didn’t see a thing. Mexican waitress not too great with English. Cruiser went out but I mean, shit. Nothing to see, other than a bit of blood here and there.”
“Truck driver still around?”
“Yeah. He’s got a place here. Missing persons went out this morning, and I was going to have a word too, but I don’t really have the time.”
She tilted her head to hold the phone against her shoulder, spooned instant coffee into the mug. “So you thought…?”
He laughed. “Yeah. So I thought if you felt up to it there’s nothing says you can’t just call round and see a truck driver for a chat. If you want to.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“You want to?”
She watched water in the mug swirl as she poured. “Yeah. I’ll go see him. What’re his details?”
“Got a pen?”
She did. That marker for the whiteboard by the fridge they’d used to schedule out their week. She bit her lip a second. “Yeah. Go.”
“Guy’s name’s Alvin Lemar.”
He gave her a phone number and address. She scrawled in huge letters, trying to fill the space. Martinez thanked her and they traded some tail-off small talk, and then the good-byes, and then it was just her in the quiet house.
She set the phone on the cradle, resisted the urge to check the front door. It was locked when she went to bed, and she hadn’t touched it since. No need to confirm. The windows were secure.
She sipped coffee, concentrated on staying still. The alarm had been useless during the break-in, so she’d left it unrepaired. To an extent, that felt empowering, as if the system was unneeded, but in practice she’d struggled. For weeks, unexplained sounds meant a check of all entries, and only in the past few days had she started to relax. She no longer carried the gun in the house, and daytime noises could sometimes be ignored. Nighttime was a different story, but she was getting there.
These were the hardest moments, though. Solitude felt most acute with no task at hand, no avoiding the fact that someone was gone. Work helped. Focused on a file, she was less prone to tearful lapses. She could disappear into others’ misery, and it helped to keep her functional. It helped to hide her own tragedy.
She sipped coffee, tears making the kitchen blur.
Don’t lose your grip.
She wiped her eyes hurriedly, trying to keep the Lemar guy front and center. She imagined what she’d say to him, running questions and answers in her head, keep her mind off other things. She tipped the coffee in the sink and dialed the number Martinez had given her.
He took a long time getting to the phone. She was thankful for the noise though, even just the ringtone.
When he answered she said, “Mr. Lemar, my name’s Lauren Shore. I believe you spoke to my colleague Detective Martinez from the Albuquerque Police Department Narcotics Squad.”
“I talked to a few people. I don’t know about a Martinez. You a police lady, are you?”
She said, “I’m a colleague of Detective Martinez.”
Voice shaking a little. Come on. You’ll be all right.
He said, “Well, sure.”
“Sir, I was hoping to come by and ask you a few questions about the incident you witnessed this morning, if that’s okay.”
“Well, sure. I mean, I didn’t really witness anything. I just saw the start and the finish and made a good stab at what happened in the middle.”
“I understand. That’s fine.” She read him back the address Martinez had given her.
Lemar said, “That’s the one. You just come on round any time. We’ll have a drink or something.”
The sooner the better. She didn’t want to face the quiet. She said, “I’ll be there in about forty minutes.”
Marshall
Early afternoon. The car so hot he could barely touch the wheel. At the bottom of Garcia Street his phone rang again. Blocked number. He turned right and put the car against the curb. Above him across the junction the power lines strung like the tatters of some great web, and higher still the birds cloak-black and jagged in their circling. Northward the land so flat the houses across the street obscured all but the distant hills. As if idling phone-in-hand he sat at some frontier.
He answered.
“Good you finally picked up.” The tone digitized, androgynous. Deep and echoic on the line.
Marshall said, “I only missed two calls. There’s not much finally about it.”
“There’s a finally for everything. You included.”
Marshall didn’t answer.
“I hear you’re not an easy guy to deal with.”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“So I’m told. I think I got the message: give me some answers or I’ll come and fuck you up. Am I in the ballpark?”
Marshall said, “More or less.”
“Not a very safe thing to be telling people.”
“Not a very safe thing to be refusing.”
“Safe for me I think, my friend. I can give you some advice though: looking for disappeared people is a good way to end up disappeared yourself.”
“So you know what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter. What I can say is that sometimes people go missing, and then they meet their end.”
Marshall didn’t answer. He shut off the motor.
“I think you’ve delivered a kind of ultimatum, so I hope you can accept one back. Well. Not an ultimatum, but a statement of the reality you’ve introduced.”
Marshall said, “Which is?”
“Soon you’ll be dead. Maybe you’ve been around long enough to live your dreams, I don’t know. Any case, you’ll get to live your nightmares. If not yours, then someone’s. If briefly.”
Marshall didn’t answer.
“Are you a man of principle?”
Marshall said, “Everyone is. Some people just can’t name it.”
“Would you say you have something to lose?”
“Not really.”
“Not really. Okay. But bear this in mind, because it’s important: as soon as you hold someone dear, then you stand to lose something. Do you understand? Even if you don’t value yourself, once everyone else is dead you realize how much has been taken. Wives, children, friends. Like that. Picture it, having no one. Earth with no sun, that kind of thing. Wheeling blind in the void.”
Marshall didn’t answer.
“Not to say that we won’t come for you. But just to show there are alternatives. If you’re elusive.”
“I’m not elusive. I’d quite like to be found.”
“I think you might renege on that at some point. We’ll see. I think you’re one of these people who think that because we inhabit the same territory, we also inhabit the same world. Not the case. I can live in yours, but you can’t live in mine. You don’t issue a threat from your realm into mine and expect to keep breathing.”
Marshall didn’t answer.
“Believe in God?”
Marshall said, “No.”
“What about the devil?”
“Ditto.”
“Maybe reassess that. You’ve got him on the phone right now.”
The call ended.
The world and its features slowly forming: birds above and the traffic beside him and the phone warm on his cheek. A brief quiet in the hot confines of the vehicle as he replayed it all and wondered into what madness he’d entered for the sake of someone he’d never known. His phone buzzed again. He checked the screen. An image file: two arms and two legs coarsely severed, laid out side by side. Blackened concrete beneath.
He felt the blood draining from his head, edges of his vision softening as he leaned against his door. He stretched and opened the glove compartment, heft of the Colt instantly comforting. He leaned back in his seat. Gun in his lap, smooth curve of the trigger beneath his finger.
If it was her, there was no telling. But he’d got the message:
You’re next.
Rojas
They listened to Leon make the call, sitting shirtless at his desk, a cigarette in two fingers held aloft.
Leon was IT proficient. The Marine Corps made him conversant. The phone was rigged to his computer, and there was a voice distortion applied. Everything he did was routed through some Internet substructure he called the dark web. It had been set up in the nineties by military intelligence for the purpose of safe communication, but somewhere along the line it had been hijacked for nonofficial activities:
Buying and selling porn.
Buying and selling kids.
Arranging fake IDs.
Contacting hit men.
The beauty of it was that by virtue of some complicated science, it was anonymous. Shit got bounced around through servers all over the place, and if you did things properly not even the geek kids at Fort Meade knew who you were. Leon hated the NSA. He believed eavesdropping was unconstitutional. He said the kicker about the dark web was that while one branch of the federal government was attempting to crack it, another was simultaneously bolstering its security. He called it a perfect dichotomy.
His office was full of books. Floor to ceiling on his shelves, great tomes lying open on the desk. Anatomy was his present interest. Vance said he liked to know exactly what he was cutting.
When he put down the phone Leon sat a moment with his back to them and then he swiveled smoothly in the chair.
He said, “Boy has to die.”