Wolf in the Shadows (17 page)

“Definitely not Hispanic, which knocks a hole in the theory that Mourning’s kidnappers were Mexican nationals. Of course it
could be an assumed name, or someone fronting for the kidnappers. On the other hand, we have only what Hy told Gage Renshaw
about the accent of the contact woman to back up that theory, anyway. Hy’s very good with languages, but I wonder if a telephone
voice is really enough to base an assumption like that on. But then there’s this other name—Ann Navarro. Probably Hispanic,
except the first name’s anglicized, so who knows? Ana was definite about it being Ann. I’m pretty sure she’s on the level,
but I’d feel a lot better if I knew something about this Luis Abrego before I—” I broke off because John was staring at me,
mouth agape. “What?”

“You talk things over with yourself like that a lot?”

“A fair amount, but usually just inside my head. With you here, though … well, you’re sort of like the cat.”

“What? I’m what?”

“When one of the cats is around, I think aloud. Doesn’t seem so silly if there’s something to listen.”

“Something.”

“Or someone. Look, do you want to make yourself useful?”

“I’m not sure, since the cat comment.”

“Well, do it anyway. Call Pete and ask him to check with the guy at the Holiday Market. I want to know if it’s okay for me
to tell Abrego he—what’s his name?”

“Vic.”

“If it’s okay to tell Abrego that Vic sent me, just in case saying Ana sent me doesn’t work. And also have Pete ask Vic if
he knows anything about Abrego, Navarro, or Brockowitz. Got that?”

“Yes, boss.” John unfolded his long frame from the Scout. “I saw a convenience store with an intact pay phone right around
the corner. Will you be okay if I leave you alone here?”

“I’ll fend off any muggers by running them over.”

As soon as he was out of sight, though, I began to feel uneasy—that particular brand of unease that makes me suspect somebody’s
watching me. I glanced in the rearview mirror, checked out both side mirrors. No one in any of the parked vehicles, no one
in any of the overgrown little yards. Just the waving branches of the pepper trees. The ragged kids had vanished. The feeling
persisted, however, and I slipped down in the seat. Even on a bright summer afternoon, this shabby little dead-end street
had pockets of shadow—pockets where a watcher could hide.

Don’t get overimaginative, I cautioned myself. RKI hadn’t known where I was at nearly two o’clock when one of their operatives
tailed Rae downhill to the Remedy. It was doubtful they’d been able to trace me through John this fast, given that his identity
was hidden behind that of Mr. Paint. I’d covered my trail perfectly.

Hadn’t I?

When John opened the passenger-side door, I jerked violently. “Scared?” he asked in mocking tones.

“Shut up. What did you find out?”

“Okay to use Vic’s name. Neither he nor Pete knows anything about Brockowitz or Navarro. Abrego—he’s sort of a coyote.”

“You mean one of those people who move illegals across the border?”

“That’s why I said ‘sort of.’ He picks them up at the border, takes them where they want to go. He’s a roofer by day, belongs
to an organization called Libertad and works for them at night. The way Pete tells it, those guys’re like an underground railroad.
He says Abrego is completely honest, charges only what he needs to keep going.”

“Why is it that Pete makes everybody sound like a saint?”

John shrugged, annoyed. “Why is it that you’re so cynical?”

“If you’d seen what I’ve seen—”

“All these years. Yeah, yeah.”

“John!”

“Shit, let’s not fight, okay?”

I didn’t reply. Then I told myself it was silly to get angry over nothing. “Thanks for making the call.”

“De nada.”

“I didn’t mean to put your friend down.”

“I didn’t mean to put you down. I just don’t understand why you can’t see some goodness in these people. After all, you’re
the one who was championing the rights of illegals this morning.”

It was a good point. Maybe I was more fond of championing minority rights in the abstract than in the concrete. And if so,
that bothered me a great deal. I said, “I guess I’ve become conditioned not to accept anything until proven.”

“Conditioned by what?”

I sighed. “Let’s not get into all that now. When this is over, I’ll try to explain. By then I’ll owe you an explanation.”

“You’ll owe me a damn sight more. You’re already in to me for breakfast, a couple of phone calls, the use of the Scout, and
two hundred bucks. Plus when Karen gets back I’m gonna have to explain why her clothes have disappeared. And she’s one scary
lady.”

I smiled, looking at the clock on the dash. “Well, it’s five now. What do you say we try to find the Tradewinds?”

He grinned. “No problem. I looked it up in the phone book. It’s three blocks north on Highland.”

*    *    *

It was fortunate he had looked it up—even though his foresight had made him smug beyond endurance—because the Tradewinds
was the least prepossessing building on an undistinguished strip of fast-food restaurants and small commercial establishments.
Wood frame with no windows and only an unlit neon sign with the name and a wind-tossed palm tree—that was all. I parked down
the block and told John to wait for me. This time he got out of the Scout. “No way!”

I got out too and glared at him across the hood. “I thought we’d established some rules here.”

He crossed his arms and glared back. “No National City bars for you without me.”

“This is ridiculous!”

“Say another word and I’ll cause a scene.”

Already
he was causing a scene. A couple of sailors some ten yards down the sidewalk had paused to watch. I said furiously, “Why
the hell do you have to be so obstreperous?”

“What’s that, your new word for the week?”

“Dammit, you son of—”

“Don’t say that about Ma. Hey, look—those nice sailors are coming to your rescue.”

I looked. The two—who were all of twenty and probably had never gone up against a serious bar brawler like my big brother—had
started toward us. I grabbed John’s arm and said loudly, “Come on, darling.” Then I muttered, “I’ll get you for this.”

“That’s what you’ve been threatening ever since Joey and I rolled you up in the rug.”

“Don’t mention that.” As far as I was concerned, it was a particularly dark event in our personal history. “I will allow you
to go in there with me,” I added grimly, “because I don’t want you to have to punch out those poor sailors. But you are to
sit at the bar and leave me alone. Do not follow me, do not say one word, or so help me—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

As soon as we entered, I realized Tradewinds was a misnomer. Not the slightest current of air moved in there, and when I drew
a breath my lungs filled with cigarette smoke. The darkness blinded me for a moment. Then I saw neon beer signs and an illuminated
backbar stocked with every brand of liquor known to mankind. A babble of Spanish rose to my ears as I waited for my eyes to
adjust enough to distinguish the customers. John tensed, put his hand on my shoulder, and tried to pull me back outside.

“Holy shit,” he muttered.

The people at the bar and tables were mostly men, and all Hispanic. As we stood there, they stopped talking and turned to
look at us. Dark eyes glittered, and faces grew hard and hostile.

I tensed, but said to John, “It’s okay,” and scanned the room. At the far end of the bar sat a lone man with a long, drooping
mustache, hair to his shoulders, and skin so dark he could have passed for black. Luis Abrego. I started down there, felt
John close in behind me. “Go have a beer,” I told him.

“No way.”

“I mean it!”

“I’m looking to protect myself, not you. They probably won’t knife a woman, and besides, you know self-defense.”

“All right, come on. But if you say one word—”

“You’ll feed me to the mean-looking guy by the cigarette machine.”

“Right.”

As we approached, Luis Abrego swiveled on his stool and got up to greet us. Soft, liquid eyes appraised us; then the mouth
under the limp mustache spread into a grin. “You’re the lady Ana called about,” he said to me. “She wanted to make sure I
waited for you.”

John made a sound like air escaping from a tire.

“Mr. Abrego,” I said.

“Luis.” He extended his hand and we shook.

“I’m Sharon, and this is my … associate, John. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Lemme get you a couple of beers. Take that booth over there.” He pointed.

The other customers had looked away and resumed their conversations by now. As we got settled in the booth, I said, “Still
want me to protect you, big brother?”

“Fuck off, little sister.”

Abrego came to the booth, three bottles of Miller’s clutched between his hands. He passed them around, then sat across from
us. “Hey, Ana told me you paid her the money she needed. She shouldn’t’ve asked for it. I told her I was gonna have it tonight,
if this … job that I’m waiting to hear about goes okay, but would she listen? No, she’s too proud to take my money.”

I said, “I didn’t mind paying her. She helped me, and I’m glad I could do something in return.”

“Yeah, she’s a doll, that Ana.” His face grew glum, and he looked down at the table. “Bad break for her. She’s nice and smart
as they come, going to college in the fall, even. Sort of a relative of mine—everybody from Santa Rosalía’s family somewhere
along the line. I’d like to kill the bastard knocked her up, you know?”

“She’ll be okay now.”

“Maybe.” He looked up, eyes uncertain. “I don’t know, though. I think there’s something wrong with her. You see how sick she
looks?”

I nodded.

John said, “I know somebody at the Woman’s Place Clinic in Hillcrest. I think they charge less than two ninety-five for the
… procedure, and they’ll check her over for other problems. I’ll write down my friend’s name and number; you tell Ana to call
her. Gina’ll make sure she gets good care.”

Abrego brightened and fished a finger-smudged piece of paper from his shirt pocket. John took it and wrote. As he passed it
back, I squeezed his arm, but he just shrugged and looked away, embarrassed.

“So,” Abrego said to me, “you want to know about the guy who came up to Ana in the Holiday Market parking lot.”

“She told me you saw him again that night.”

He nodded. “It was down near the border on Monument Road. I was … you know what I do?”

“You help people get where they need to go.”

“Right. I had a pickup scheduled for Sunday night. Maybe around eleven, maybe later. What I do, I sit in my car across from
the old dairy—sometimes most of the night—waiting for them and hoping they’ll make it through the canyons okay. Anyway,
I noticed this guy because he was an Anglo, and you don’t see too many down there at night unless they’re
la migra
.”

“What was he doing?”

“Just sitting on a pile of broken-up concrete by the road that goes up to the mesa.”

“You’re sure it was this man?” I showed him Hy’s picture.

“Yeah, that’s the one, same one who bothered Ana. I watched him pretty careful. He was just sitting there on the concrete
with a lit cigarette, but he wasn’t smoking it. He’d knock the ash off, and as soon as it burned down, he’d light another.
Some kind of signal, I guess.”

That explained the pack of cigarettes Hy had bought at the Bali Kai bar. “And then?”

“A Jeep came by, maybe about fifteen minutes later. The guy got in, and it drove up on the mesa.”

“This mesa—what’s on it?”

“Not much. Rocks and dirt. A burned-out adobe. You need a four-wheel drive to get up there. Sometimes tourists go look at
the view, but
la migra
warns ’em off. It’s dangerous even during the day—too close to the canyons.”

I considered that. “It’s a strange place for a meeting, if the border patrol watches it.”

Abrego smiled. “Hell, they can’t watch it at night; they’re too busy chasing my people in and out of those canyons. You gotta
remember, they only got around thirty guys working a shift, and they cover the whole county, including the border checkpoints
and the airports. I’ll tell you, though, your friend and whoever else was in that Jeep were taking their lives in their hands
going up there. Bad stuff goes down all over the place at night. Real bad stuff.”

The words chilled me. I asked, “Luis, did you see the Jeep come down again?”

“No. My people made it through maybe five minutes later.” He shook his head, pulled heavily at his beer, emotion clouding
his eyes. “People made it through,” he repeated, “and then I lost ’em.”

“What happened?”

“Damned San Onofre checkpoint—you know, the border control station near Oceanside?”

I nodded. It was where many illegals attempting to travel north on Interstate 5 were stopped.

“The way we work it,” Abrego said, “we drop our passengers off before we get to the checkpoint. Tell ’em to run across the
freeway when it’s clear and go around the station in the brush. No way
la migra
can patrol that whole area. These people we’re moving, they’re tired, scared, their judgment isn’t so good. My organization,
we know they’re gonna head north anyway, so we try to help ’em have a safe trip. But some of ’em just don’t make it across
the freeway.”

Beside me, John grunted.

Abrego gripped his beer bottle, looking down, shaking his head. “About two hundred and fifty people been killed up there,
run down because they couldn’t tell how fast the cars were going. A couple of years ago they posted signs—down here by the
port of entry, too. ‘Caution,’ and a picture of a family running.” He looked up, eyes bleak. “You know what’s so funny about
that? A lot of our people can’t read. They don’t know ‘caution’—in English or in Spanish. They look at those signs and they
think they mean it’s a safe place to cross.” He bit his Up, raised his beer bottle, drank again. “I explain it real careful
to my people, so that wasn’t the problem last night. These people were from a little village. They never seen cars going that
fast before. They … just … couldn’t judge the speed.”