It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (21 page)

It went on like this for two years, he said. A big cat-and-mouse game on the border. At the end of it, because he couldn’t help it, Refugio even started to respect my real dad. Think of him as more of a brother than an enemy. Just a brother he’d had a big fight with a long time ago. Now he was chasing after him, trying to say he was sorry, maybe even save him from himself. Every day.

But my real dad didn’t know any of this. To him, Refugio was just this one impossible border cop who wouldn’t give up, who was making his smuggling job so, so hard.

What Refugio thought, he told me, was that my dad was probably thinking about getting out. Retiring. Too many times he’d come too close to getting caught, and — Refugio wasn’t sure back then, but it always seemed like the reason Dodd was so good was because he was desperate. Not to do a good job, but to get back to me, in Mexico.

Which of course translated to doing a good job. If he didn’t, then his bosses would make sure he never got back anywhere.

So he left night after night, carrying packages he never opened, and once Refugio had him in his rifle sights, even, but let him go. Because that’s not the way an honest man catches somebody.

The whole time he was telling me this, I wasn’t saying anything. It was like he’d peeled up a corner of the wallpaper in my bedroom, to show me a whole different house behind it. One that shared some of our walls. He told me he didn’t want to tell me the next part, either, but then rubbed his mouth hard with the palm of his hand and did anyway.

When he finally caught my dad, he wasn’t even looking for him. What he was doing was helping some other law enforcement guys break up this drug meeting out in the desert.

It was supposed to be just routine — the law announcing themselves over the bullhorn, then turning the lights on all around. Except this was a meeting some of the bosses were actually at. And my dad, my real dad, he was just suddenly there, handing a backpack through the dust of six trucks’ headlights, and the bosses, before they started strafing the bullhorns with their automatic weapons, they first shot a burst into my dad. Four of them at once, before my dad could even do anything. Before either of my dads could do anything.

By the time it was over and my father — Refugio — could wade through to Dodd, it was too late. It was their first time to meet. It was like they’d known each other forever, too.

“I was the only one he could trust with you,” my father told me. “His most important thing in the word.”

And that’s the fairy tale. In the wake of it, my face was cold.

The week after that’s when, for the first time, I called him ‘Dad,’ Refugio. In thanks for trying to save my real dad, I think. But it’s not something you can say once, then not keep saying. After a while, it doesn’t even feel wrong anymore, and you don’t even remember that it’s supposed to. That it doesn’t matter if your real dad’s dead or not. That he loves you enough to still be out there, trying to save you.

God.

I think Refugio knew this, too, or suspected it.

It’s probably why he made up that story about the turquoise knife my dad had left for him one morning, in a fencepost. The knife Refugio trained me over the years to look for, out in the pastures north of Del Rio.

All it was going to be, he told me, was a dull silvery glint, like an old coffee thermos or something, except smaller. Because it was a family thing, too, he was going to let me keep it when we found it. It would be the only thing I still had of my real dad’s.

I was there every weekend.

After talking to Sanchez, I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the Jomar for ten minutes, I think. In the two o’clock heat. The desk clerk was watching me through his small window.

A device. The FBI. My father.

I started my truck, turned on the air conditioner.

One option no one was considering was that the Ranger’s story and the FBI’s were both right: my father had caught some illegal he already had a history with, yeah. Only, this time, that illegal was being paid to carry plutonium or uranium or whatever. And he somehow used it to get the upper hand, then panicked, locked both of them into the Jomar for a week.

This was the only explanation that allowed my father not to be a terrorist. And — if that’s what they thought he was. Of course they wanted me off the case. Not because my priorities were wrong — I wanted the killer, not the materials for the device — but because maybe I was involved.

I pulled out of the parking lot when the desk clerk picked up a phone, angled his head over for my plates. If that’s even what he was, a desk clerk.

The other choice was FBI.

When I eased into the street, it was right into the path of a hot oil truck. He locked up his eight rear tires, his bug-splattered bumper dipping down maybe twenty-four inches from my face, then sighing back up to level. I pulled out the rest of the way, going extra-slow now, like I could make up for being stupid.

As for the truck driver, I didn’t look up, and he didn’t lay into his air horn, and Del Rio just kept happening all around us. I drifted through two lights, a drive-through for a coke with the rabbit turd ice I liked, and realized about forty-five minutes into it all that I was saying goodbye.

Soon enough I was parked in the visitors’ section of the main office. It was where the Rangers were working out of, where Sanchez might be reporting back, where the advance FBI agents might be sweeping for bugs. I was hoping to avoid all of them, though.

I pushed through the public doors, smiled to Rosario behind the bulletproof glass so she’d buzz me through, then bee-lined the switchboard, making zero eye contact with anybody in uniform or out. At the door to Dispatch, though, I lost all momentum.

You had to have a five-digit code to get in. And there was no doorbell, and everybody in there had a headset on, so wouldn’t hear a knock, and couldn’t leave their stations even if they did hear.

All I wanted was that post-it note. Or, if it was already tagged as evidence, in some folder, then somebody who remembered the post-it.

I don’t know.

Because I needed an excuse to be there, I rounded the corner, stiff-legged it through the breakroom and reached into my mailslot. If Sanchez asked, I was just cleaning it out before I started staying out of town. It made sense. But then, because the boxes were alphabetical, right under mine was my father’s. And it was full, and nobody was looking.

I palmed his stack of mail under mine, ducked back out to the visitor’s parking lot and read it over my steering wheel. Most of it was the usual nothing — newsletters and updates and memos and jokes — but about halfway down, rolled so it would fit in with the rest, was a fast photocopy of the post-it.

More than that, it was even tagged already, meaning this photocopy was an afterthought, like regulation usually was. What the books probably said was that the Rangers could confiscate the original only so long as they supplied you with a copy for your own records. Never mind that my father was dead, and that they were investigating it.

Whoever’d done this was just following policy. If he hadn’t been, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. On that post-it, in hurried handwriting, up top, in the corner like I used to do it, was my father’s name, then, below, the number the caller must have said was supposed to be good for my father. In the middle, a big question mark.

Not for me, though. I’d called this number a thousand times, growing up. It was Refugio’s old office extension. I pulled away, my world crumbling around me. This
was
someone from my father’s past. That he had some radioactive package was just bad luck. For both of them. I looked to the north again.

What the FBI was probably spending all their computer time trying to figure out was the final destination of that plutonium or uranium or whatever. What they maybe weren’t taking into account, was how many times a package tended to change hands after it came across the river.

My father had tried to break that chain of people — for love or profit, it didn’t matter — and been killed for it. But it had taken a while. And now the courier had to hand the package off to the next person, at some anonymous drop on an empty stretch of highway, probably.

Except he’d spent a week in that room at the Jomar as well. Meaning he was burned, sick with it. Not as bad as my father, but enough to keep him out of convenience stores. And nobody picks you up off the side of the road when you’re bleeding from the eyes.

All this left was north, by foot. Maybe that dog did mean something, then. If it had been the killer’s dog, or just one that had fallen into step behind him, then it was a breadcrumb.

And I had at least ten more days left of my bereavement leave, and they’d already told me they didn’t want me in Del Rio anymore. For the rest of the afternoon I told myself I wasn’t going to do what I knew I was going to do, and when I finally gassed up and started feeling through the pastures north of town, cutting for sign, watching for buzzards, glassing the ridges, the way I pretended I wasn’t doing what I was doing was that I only brought one thermos of water and one change of clothes.

When dark came and I was still out there, though, there was no denying what was happening. I was going after the man who’d killed my father. It sounds like a movie poster, I know. Starring Laurie Dodd, the Austin Marksman.

God.

It didn’t take me long to pick up the trail. It wasn’t from any of the seminars I’d attended on spotting illegals, either. It was on the radio. Crazy Dave was broadcasting from his mother’s garage in Ozona.

For the two hours leading up to the new concrete stock tank a little way into the big Mosely pasture, he’d been my only company. It was completely possible I was his only listener, too. The Misanthrope Morning Show probably wasn’t real big with the crowd who woke before the sun to drink their coffee and glare at the world.

But then, too, they had their coffee to keep them awake.

All I had was Crazy Dave’s lispy, enthusiastic delivery, his complicated theories on everything from the real reason for the spacing between the yellow stripes on state-funded roads to why his mother preferred afghan lap blankets to fleece throws. It’s hard to nod off while you’re smiling, I mean.

And, though I never called in to any of Crazy Dave’s nightly charity drives (he was his own favorite charity), still, for as long as it took me to dip my thermos into the cool water of the stock tank, I did expand his audience out to a record seventy-something, it looked like.

About twenty yards out, to the south and a little bit east, were a wall of dully reflective eyes. Cattle. They’d followed my truck in. But only so far.

It wasn’t me keeping them away, either, I knew — I’ve yet to see a cow that won’t nudge me out of the way, if it wants what I’m blocking — and it wasn’t that they weren’t thirsty. The few I’d seen trotting beside me had been starved down, the skin on their sides drawn in to their ribs.