Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (20 page)

The dark mesas of Tijuana were camouflaged by the fog. While Hickey stared at the scattered lights flickering as if they hung in the sky, his eyes scratchy and raw from three nights with maybe nine hours’ sleep between them, the foulest notion pierced his brain. It coursed through his body like poison, settled in his stomach, churned like a puny but lethal storm. What if Castillo was what Thrapp figured? The girl might’ve cried on Paul’s shoulder about Pravinshandra, and he’d set her up, through Charlie Schwartz, with Katoulis. Castillo might be more shrewd than he seemed. Instincts could’ve told him that Hickey would make like the girl’s invisible chaperon, stumble upon Katoulis, get in a beef. Whichever one of them lost, Castillo’d be the winner. Either he and the Jersey mob would lose the threat of Schwartz’s top gun, or Madeline would become a widow.

Hickey leaned out the window, let the mist shock his face until the squall in his stomach quieted. Whoever Castillo was, he thought, whatever role the Cuban played, not much had changed. Katoulis had still been gunning for the master, the girl had still bought a hit. It still looked like Schwartz was delivering her over the border. Donny was still dead. The most that could’ve changed was—in Thrapp’s version, Hickey becomes a world-class chump.

Leo dug into several pockets, finally produced a handkerchief, and buffed the windshield clear. “What’re you thinking, Tom?”

“I’m not. I’m having a nightmare.”

“Spill it. Keep me awake.”

“Never mind. What I can’t figure, Charlie told me he was gonna steal the girl away, book her at a Santa Monica club he bought. How’s that match with them taking her over the border?”

“They might be going to meet somebody. Or, hell, maybe they signed the girl up for a tango lesson.”

As they neared the border, Hickey pulled over and coasted along the shoulder so they wouldn’t approach too closely while the Chrysler was stalled at the gate. The Chrysler got passed through in no time. Hickey sped to the line, where the Mexican officer, tall and stern, with eyebrows like Adolf’s mustache, yawned and circled the car, then poked his head in through Hickey’s window, peered at Leo and into the backseat. He gave Hickey a caustic smile. “You wanna open the trunk, Señor?”

Hickey rushed around and raised the lid. A wrapped and ribboned shoe box fell out. The Mexican displayed his teeth and gums. “I bet you got radios, maybe a rifle in there? You gonna pull over to the office. We take a look.”

“Whoa,” Hickey said. “I gotta catch up with that limousine.”

“
Compadres
of yours, no?”

“Yeah.”

“
El negro
or the
muchacha?
”

“Both. What’s the duty on this stuff? Thirty dollars? Forty?”

After Hickey’d dealt the Mexican two twenties and was pulling away, Leo muttered, “Smooth. You should’ve slipped him a ten before he opened his yap.”

“You got any more advice, let’s hear it now,” Hickey snapped.

“Respect the speed laws, unless you got a pocket full of Jacksons. We’ll catch up. Only way to hide that battleship is cut it in half, scrape off the paint, sink it in the ocean.”

The Mexican road pained Hickey deeply, the way it crashed and battered his Chevy’s undercarriage and springs. He tried swerving around the ruts but only found bigger ones. They banged across the bridge over the riverbed shantytown, rattled through a black cloud of diesel exhaust that gushed from the pipes of two buses at the depot near the main intersection. The smoke mixed with fog made a vaporous mud that clung to their skin and eyes. They swung left onto Tijuana’s one paved road, Calle Revolución. Four narrow lanes that looked endless in the dark, as if they ran straight to oblivion. The sidewalks were busy with hawkers, pimps, Indian beggars, and refugees. Barren of streetlights, headlamps tinted, and most curtains down, the place looked like a sanctuary for ghosts and shadows. As many people out now—at twenty minutes before 1:00
A.M.
, Christmas morning—as there would be on a Saturday noon, they appeared in the flashlight beams of nightclub doormen, vanished, reappeared in a different-colored flashlight beam thirty feet closer.

The whole second block on the left was a cantina called the Long Bar, out of which servicemen careened in a flow as steady as if the building had gotten tipped sideways. Two cops stood on the corner looking puzzled. Probably trying to choose the richest soldier, the best to shake down, Hickey thought. He braked for the stop sign and whistled, motioned a bony, hump-shouldered cop over.

“
Muy grande auto
,” Hickey stammered, and groped for the word that meant silver. “
Plata. Dónde va?
”

“He turn leff on Six Street. Calle Seis,” the cop repeated, in case Hickey’s English and Spanish were equally stupid. He waved a skeletal hand in the direction.

After four more stop signs—at each of which Hickey paused a few seconds and nodded to the officer on the corner, to avoid the bite for a rolling stop—Hickey spied the Chrysler a block down the hill, parked with two wheels on the gravel sidewalk. He made the turn, coasted down past a nightclub, a gated outdoor
mercado
, a tiny café where four marines squeezed around each of two miniature tables beside a pit grill mesquite-broiling pork.

The Chrysler was parked before a storefront from which a sign jutted out like a flagpole. Leo had the better eyes. He noticed first that the sign displayed a caduceus. Hickey pulled over just downhill from the café, about twenty yards above the limousine. Both men climbed out. They met on the sidewalk and started down carefully, Hickey slightly in the lead, wishing he carried a weapon. He’d left his automatic at home, and the Denver police had his .38. Leo’s pistol was back in San Diego, in the glove box of his Packard in the lot behind Rudy’s.

They crept to the high side of the storefront and squinted at the block lettering on the blackened window.
DOCTORES HINAJOSA Y VILLAREAL, EMERGENCIAS
, 24
HORAS
.

“Some kinda clinic,” Hickey whispered. “What you figure?”

“Getting her nose fixed prettier? Or say there’s a dentist in the outfit and she’s got this throbbing toothache. Maybe that’s why she was bawling at the club. Or maybe Schwartz belted her, sent her down here to get her face sewed up. Could be she’s got outta hand,
muy loco
. I bet they’re loading her up with dope, sedatives. They’re gonna put her in a Mexican nut farm, keep her from pulling any more stunts that’ll tarnish her reputation. Teach her how to act before they whisk her off to Santa Monica.”

“I think we oughta take her.”

“Then what?”

“Hard to know that till we find out what’s up. At least we get her away from Schwartz.”

“Tom, far as we can prove, she’s down here on her own and Charlie’s not pulling anything illegal. Think we should risk it?”

“She’s seventeen.”

“Oh yeah.” Leo stuck his hand into a coat pocket, then yanked it out, as though reaching for a cigarette before remembering he didn’t have the leisure to smoke it now. “Schwartz’s boy—did I tell you he’s the same gentleman that chucked my car keys in the dog pen? Big, long baboon arms. You’ll have to crowd him. I caught a glimpse of steel underneath his coat, first time we met.”

“We just gotta do it fast. Carrying your old badge, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We run in, you wave it around, I’ll go right for the big guy. Anytime you’re ready.”

Leo straightened his hat, caught a deep breath, and socked his fists together. “Let’s go.”

Hickey stepped to the door, paused a couple seconds. Slammed it open. Behind the desk on the left side sat a sleepy dark female in white. In the middle of the back wall, a doorway led into a hall. On the right, on a flowered couch, Cynthia Tucker lay sprawled, both arms under her head, her body pinched into the corner, as far as she could get from the big Negro whose eyes were just blinking open. His arms, across his chest, started unfolding while Leo waved his souvenir L.A. badge and shouted, “
Policía del Norte
.”

Hickey rushed the chauffeur, who’d just pushed off the couch and begun straightening his legs when Hickey’s fist with two hundred pounds of old fullback behind it drove into his jaw. His skull dented the plaster wall, cracked it all the way to the concrete block. The man slumped and collapsed sideways. His head flopped over the couch arm.

Cynthia was on her feet, howling and battering Hickey with her fists and arms, while Leo stood by the desk warning back the nurse and the pudgy doctor who’d appeared at the hall doorway. One arm shielding his head from the girl’s attack, Hickey lifted the lapel of the Negro’s leather coat and found a holstered automatic. He snatched it, tried to dodge the girl. Before he got to Leo and passed him the gun, she landed a right jab on his ear. She flew at him, her claws out in front, groping for his eyes. He stooped and jammed his head into her belly, drove her across the room, where she slammed the wall and toppled forward, groaning and panting rapidly. He got her heaved over his shoulder but as he started for the door, she commenced to thrash and kick, pounding him on both sides.

“Don’t let anybody outta here,” Hickey yelled. “Give me a couple minutes, then run for the car. You’re driving.”

Outside, the first ten yards, the girl kicked and flailed, cussing him so loudly that he knew he couldn’t get her into the car before a squad of marines heard the battle cry and ran out of the café to massacre him and save the damsel. Suddenly she fell limply against him. The next moment she gave a roaring laugh.

“You killed it, Tom.” She laughed again as he lurched the last few feet, slung open the door, knocked the front seat’s backrest forward, and crammed her into the rear. “You’re gonna kill everything, aren’t you?” She howled a grand laugh, the kind comedians must dream about, and slapped both hands over her eyes.

Hickey fished the car keys out of his pocket, tossed them onto the driver’s seat, slipped in beside Cynthia. “What’re you talking about?”

Her head cocked, a sneer on her lips, the girl peered into Hickey’s eyes as though gauging whether he could truly be so ignorant. Finally her gaze drifted, down over her wrinkled clothes. She rubbed at a stain on her knee, then tugged the dress snugly around her legs. “I’m cold. Let me wear your coat.”

He was slipping the coat off when Leo dashed out of the clinic and hustled up the hill, rounded the front of the car, and pounced into the driver’s seat. “Give me the keys.”

“You sat on them.”

His partner dug for the keys, crammed them into the ignition, and tromped on the starter. “I was hoping the big fella would wake up, give me an excuse to thump him. But no. You sure fixed his insomnia.”

“Probably killed him,” the girl muttered.

“Naw,” Leo said. “Which way, Tom? It’s faster if I cut down here to the river road, except it’ll bang your car all to hell.”

“Take the fastest way.”

The girl was raking her hair with her fingers. “Where’re you taking me?”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” Hickey said. “Depends on what you’ve got in mind, who you’re gonna hire to knock off who, things like that.”

Fast as a champion welterweight, the girl backhanded him squarely in the nose. He grabbed her arm, pinned it to the seat, and used his free hand to feel for the handkerchief in his pocket and wipe the first gush of blood off his lip. “Next time I bind and gag you, sweetheart.”

“Sure,” the girl snarled. “You might as well, as long as I’m your prisoner. Maybe you think you can lock me up, let me out every night to sing. Is that how you figure?”

“What’s with you and Schwartz?”

“He thinks I’m great. Four hundred a week he’s gonna pay me, and that’s not including the record deal. Next year this time, I’ll be in movies.”

“Goody.”

Cynthia wriggled to the corner, stretched her legs against the floorboard, pushing herself into the wedge of the seat. After a minute she relaxed and gazed smugly at him. “Aren’t you gonna try to keep me around?”

Hickey wagged his head slowly. The Chevy skidded to a stop. They’d reached the border, with four cars lined up ahead. Because the girl flashed him a wicked grin, Hickey said, “Make a fuss, we all spend Christmas morning at the police station, till they get the whole story, starting in Dunsmuir.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Don’t bet four hundred a week and the movies on it.”

“You’d go to prison. Longer than I will. It was you killed a guy, Tom, not me.”

“Nope. I’d be in the same fix I am now. Everybody knows I killed him, babe. Either it’s self-defense or no. What happens to you’s got nothing to do with the fix I’m in.”

“If you got me busted, Charlie’d have you killed.”

“He’s probably gonna try anyway. As long as I’m around, somebody’s got the goods on his favorite songbird. He’ll figure when you’re not singing for me, I got no reason to cover for you anymore.”

“Besides, you shot down his pal.”

“Yeah. There’s that.”

“Hush.” Leo pulled alongside the civilian gate guard, whose cheeks pooched as though he had mumps, and a young MP who leaned against the post, staring at something in Mexico. The guard asked for their citizenship. While quizzing Cynthia, he craned his head in and stared at the ruby brooch between her breasts as though it were the object in a hypnotism. Finally he retreated and asked what they were bringing from Mexico. Hickey swallowed a groan, remembering his load of gifts in the trunk. No doubt the guard would order them to pull over by the office shack where some fool would make him unwrap every package. Before they got loose, the phone would ring. A query from the Tijuana cops, about a kidnapping.

“Not a damn thing,” Leo grumbled. “How we gonna buy anything after we lost every dime, even hocked the girl’s mink, at that crooked casino in Rosarita?”

“Learned your lesson, huh?” the guard gloated, and waved them through.

The second their front tires spun off the gravel, onto the highway, Cynthia wheeled on Hickey. “So that’s how it is,” she hissed. “I get it. You think you can blackmail me into singing at your dump forever.”

“Naw. Matter of fact, you’re fired.”

The girl stared at him in bewilderment, her eyelids quivering, as though never before had she been rejected or even imagined such a thing. Finally she chuckled. “Yeah, sure.” She straightened her dress and sat primly, now and then scratching her lower lip with her teeth or fidgeting with her earrings.