Nine Days: A Mystery Read online

  After I got some tea water going, I turned on my laptop, but after it had booted up, I just sat there watching the screen saver, not sure what to do. My head was as thick and quiet as a pool of molasses.

  Going through the ritual motions of making tea helped some of the muck ooze away, and I realized then that it was possible—even probable—that Maines was just fucking with me. Whatever I did next, if anything, knowing for sure whether I was really in or out with WITSEC struck me as critical.

  I went back to the computer and looked up the address of the regional Marshal’s office, which was in Austin. There was an e-mail address and phone number listed, but I knew neither of them were secure enough to handle the information I needed. Fortunately, I could drive the distance in about an hour and a half.

  VI

  Austin reminded me a little bit of San Francisco. It had the same grid of one-way streets dicing up a thick cake of multistory buildings at its center, and the same vaguely insubordinate air, like a conscientious objector forced into uniform.

  The Marshal’s office was on the fifth floor of a concrete box with an armed guard in the glassy lobby who got friendly with a scanner wand and made me sign in. There were a couple of guys in the beige waiting room when I got upstairs, and I tried to keep things nonspecific with the receptionist, who slid her heavy glass window open as I walked up.

  “I need to see someone about a federal witness,” I told her.

  “What time is your appointment?”

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “It’s kind of an emergency.”

  “Did you contact the person’s WITSEC liaison?”

  I glanced over at the two guys, one of whom was almost certainly a plainclothes cop. “She’s not available right now.”

  The receptionist started to ask another question, and I pointed at the heavy steel access door to one side of her reception window. “I could explain this a lot more easily with some privacy. Can I come in there?”

  She gave me as much of a once-over as her window would allow. “No way.”

  The cop’s companion, a blond kid with a street tan and an untrustworthy look that he’d probably never get rid of, had been watching me, and now he grinned.

  “Look,” I said to the receptionist, “just give me the next available appointment with somebody I can talk to privately, all right?”

  She tapped her computer, then drawled, “I’ve got an eight o’clock on December twenty-first.”

  I didn’t even bother to scoff. I just turned and walked out.

  Frustration caught up with me at the truck, which I’d parked in a meter space across from the building entrance. I got in, but didn’t start the motor; I was thinking too seriously about turning the lobby into a drive-through.

  While I sat there waiting to cool off, a carillon sounded somewhere, signaling the start of the lunch hour. People began to stream out of the building I’d just left, among them a crew-cut black guy in a tan polyester Western suit. His odor of cop reached me all the way across the street.

  I got out of the truck and angled over to meet him at the intersection. I wasn’t trying to be sneaky about it, and he clocked me almost as soon as I crossed the street, his eyes moving rapidly down around my hands. I kept them visible and said, “Do you know Teresa Hallstedt?”

  He clearly didn’t like the look of me, but he didn’t get any more interested in the gun under his arm, either. “You got something you want to tell me about her?”

  It was a broad, deep voice, used to command. I replied, “She was my WITSEC contact.”

  His scowl hardened. “You’re a private citizen now, Ms. Kalas.”

  The light changed, and he started across the intersection. I fell into step beside him, careful not to get too close.

  “Look, this guy Maines, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. I didn’t have anything to do with her being killed.”

  The Marshal’s eyes slid my way. “You know how many times a day I hear variations on that theme?”

  I should have known better. He was law all the way through, just like the rest of them.

  We were halfway down the block, people swarming past us on either side. He stopped and turned to face me. “Let me give you some advice, girl. If you’ve really gone straight, act the part and you’ll probably survive. Start following me around, you probably won’t. You read me?”

  I could tell he was done. There wasn’t another inch of tolerance in that impassive face. He turned and left me standing there on the sidewalk. I didn’t try to follow him.

  VII

  Driving back to Azula, I considered my options. If I had any sense, I’d take the Marshal’s advice—keep my head down and let Maines do whatever the hell it was he had in mind. With Tova’s connections, Hector probably wouldn’t spend a lot of time in prison, and if Richard turned up dead—well, it wasn’t my fault.

  I tried to talk myself into it and couldn’t. Yeah, I still liked the idea of seeing Maines swinging in the wind, but I realized now that it wasn’t what was really driving me.

  Most people have some variety of reality filter, an ability to ignore the ugly truths of life enough that they can sleep at night, hold down a job, raise their kids. Mine is broken; this radar doesn’t have an off switch. The only way I can live with that and not go insane is the trade-off it gives me of being one step ahead. If the stuff I was picking up wasn’t accurate anymore—if something had broken down between here and California, disintegrated under the weight of Joe’s death—I needed to know.

  Now that I didn’t have to play by WITSEC’s rules, finding out would be considerably easier. I decided to start with shaking down Silvia Molina. If she’d just taken a lucky read on me, as the Amazon had insisted, I could probably risk the local notoriety. But if I was right and she had inside knowledge somehow, all bets were off.

  The primary difficulty would be cutting through her shrewd avarice—going in point-blank would just lead to another round of Pin the Tail on the Mark. I’d need a persuader, and getting one legally wasn’t an option for me anymore. My social security numbers, both old and new, were almost certainly flagged in every database in the country. Fortunately, I knew how to get around that better than probably anyone else in the world.

  Back in Azula, I cut through the square and headed out past Teresa’s to the run-down neighborhood along the river. The three baby gangsters were once again staked out at their stop sign. I pulled up and waited. The older boy came over, chin high.

  “I need to buy a pocket piece,” I said, getting my wallet out of the glove compartment. “A nine or better.”

  “Gun shop up the road,” he said.

  “I know it,” I told him. “I can’t pass the background check.” I have the kind of face that makes people believe me when I say things like that. I made sure he got a good look at it.

  His eyes slid down to the stack of bills in my wallet. “You got a phone number?”

  “No, I’m off the grid.”

  “Hold on,” he said, and moved off away from the truck, getting his cell out of a low-riding pocket.

  I cut the motor. The two younger boys were leaning on the truck on either side of the driver’s-side window, observing the proceedings with a languid interest.

  “You guys ever tangle with the Aryan Brotherhood?” I asked them.

  The older one, whose voice hadn’t changed yet, turned his head and spit into the ditch. “Them maricones know better than to come over here. Us country boys kick they ass.”

  I resisted the urge to grin, feeling a prick of sorrow at knowing that this kid, young enough that I could be his mother, had likely traded the unpredictable care of an impaired parent for this more stable life of casual violence, just like I had. Of course, I’d been thirteen to his eight or nine, and I hadn’t actually succeeded. Not completely, anyway.

  “Are you guys People or Folk Nation?” I asked him, making conversation until the point man returned.

  “Independent,” he said, throwing up a sign with his l
eft hand. “Texas Kings don’t bitch for nobody.”

  No independent gang could successfully defend its territory against an organization like the Brotherhood, if the Brotherhood wanted it. There probably wasn’t enough of value in this backwater community to make it worth their while.

  The point man returned, telling me, “Be back here in an hour.” He slipped his phone into his baggy pants. “Don’t bring nobody with you.”

  “I know the drill,” I assured him. “How much?”

  “Nickel,” he said.

  I nodded, and the two younger boys leaned back off the truck as I started the motor.

  VIII

  I found my bank in a small red-brick building two blocks off the square, and withdrew six hundred in cash. This took only about fifteen minutes, so I left the truck where it was and walked over to the café to get something to eat while I killed the rest of the hour.

  The place was unexpectedly packed. Neffa and her father were both on duty, neither of them reading books. Lavon gave me a curious look when he brought my silverware and water over, murmuring, “Sorry to hear about Teresa.”

  “Thanks.” It was starting to feel natural.

  “She was something, that girl,” he said. “I can’t hardly believe it.”

  I nodded, not saying anything.

  “Did I hear she was on Hector’s roof?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lord. I knew that mess was gonna turn out bad.” He looked over at Neffa. “Her mama used to run around on me. I like to kill the woman myself once or twice, before she run off for good.”

  I tried to ignore my reaction, but couldn’t. “Can I ask you something? This guy Maines, what’s his story?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re the third person today who’s suggested that Richard killed his wife, but he likes Hector for it.”

  “Well, him and Richard family. You know he’s gonna look at everybody else first.”

  “But, I mean—if it came down to it, would he break the rules to get Richard off?”

  Lavon held up both hands. “I ain’t the person to ask about white cops.” His eyes flickered at me. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I murmured, distracted. Something about what he’d said was tweaking the radar.

  “We got catfish po’boys today,” he offered after a short pause.

  “Sounds good,” I nodded, and he headed back to the kitchen.

  I looked out the window at the side of the hotel, waiting for the itch at the base of my solar plexus to either subside or morph into a conscious thought. It did the latter after a few minutes, telling me that all the surviving businesses on the square were owned or operated by minorities—Latino, Jewish, black, Korean, gay, disabled, elderly, female. Not a single straight, able-bodied white man in the bunch. Was that just a coincidence, or did it point to something?

  Lavon’s voice cut through my thoughts. “I hear we’re gonna be neighbors,” he said, setting down a heavy white plate with my sandwich on it.

  Before I could get a response out, he continued, “You ever want to sell off any of that place, you talk to me first, hear? My forty acres and a mule ain’t enough to run a restaurant on. One of these days everything I serve gonna be home-grown. Vegetables, meat, everything.” He nodded down at my plate. “Caught them catfish my own self, right out of the river here.”

  The brain was sliding around between my ears like a semi on an icy road, and I found myself gaping at him, unable to speak.

  He waited, then said, “I told the girl she oughta split it up, but she didn’t want to fool with that.”

  I continued to look at him, mute. I knew what I wanted to say, but the words just wouldn’t penetrate the high, quiet buzz inside my head.

  After a minute, Lavon did a small shrug and returned to the kitchen.

  I looked down at my sandwich, forcing myself to breathe slowly. What had the shrinks called this, again? I couldn’t remember, but it was clear to me now that my failure to banter with Hector on my first night at work might not have been just a one-off. Of course, it had happened right after my scare with Silvia, and the heads had warned me that stress could bring this on. I wasn’t feeling particularly edgy at the moment, but maybe it was a delayed reaction to getting yanked from protection, or even Teresa’s death. Most people would be curled up in the fetal position if they’d lived through what had happened to me over the last couple of days.

  Joe had always warned me that I leaned too hard on my tough-broad persona, that someday it would crumble and drop me right on my ass. I’d patiently explained that it wasn’t an act, that the hypersensitive, solemn kid my mother had sent daily to her sister’s house so that she could drink the demons away in peace had actually evolved into the indestructible woman he’d married. He never bought it, spending our eleven years together constantly trying to squeeze something soft out of me. It got to be a joke between us after a while. Now it was crawling under my skin.

  I squelched the wave of memories I felt coming and scarfed my sandwich, then made a point of having a completely coherent conversation with Neffa while I paid my bill. By the time I hit the sidewalk, I was feeling bulletproof again.

  IX

  Cutting through the alley on my way back to the truck, I saw that Richard’s Lexus was still parked where I’d left it in the vacant lot behind Guerra’s. Fucking Maines. Where I come from, you don’t take people’s money to do a job and then not do it, not without experiencing repercussions. A Bakersfield cop who tried it would find his snitches closing down shop, or anonymous evidence of his ounce-a-week coke habit showing up on his supervisor’s desk.

  OK, I wasn’t the most trustworthy citizen on earth, but Maines couldn’t seriously believe that I was fabricating what I’d tried to tell him about Richard and Jesse. I mean, if I was going to devise something to get Hector off the hook, it damn sure wouldn’t be something that convoluted. I could have just said that we spent Thursday night together. The only person who could say it wasn’t true was dead.

  Of course, if Maines really was in Richard’s pocket, he was going to shoot down anything involving his cousin. Which meant that I’d have to find something definitive to prove this Milestone thing, something Maines couldn’t sweep under the rug.

  Maybe Jesse or Richard would be willing to roll over on the other guy in exchange for immunity, if I could make them believe that discovery of their scheme was imminent. Richard’s attempt to kidnap me suggested that he at least was getting desperate.

  As I got into the truck, I wondered if he was even still alive. It was theoretically possible that he’d made peace with his disgruntled associate and gone home without picking up his car, since I still had his keys. Maybe I’d go by his place after I finished with Silvia, assuming that whatever she revealed didn’t send me down a hole. If he’d made it back in one piece, we could have a nice little chat about what he’d had in mind for me the last time we met.

  X

  It was just the point man waiting for me when I got back to the river-bottom neighborhood. I pulled onto the dirt shoulder and shut off the motor, but before we could speak, his cell phone rang, and he showed me the palm of his hand, stepping away as before.

  It was a longer conversation this time, and he came back to the truck with an aggrieved expression. “You gotta come in the house.”

  I looked at the destroyed box leaning into the sunset behind him. “What am I, stupid?”

  “My man say he knows you.”

  I put it together pretty quickly and got out, locking up the cab.

  Alex Méndez, the roofer I’d met during my job interview with Hector, was sitting on the edge of a decaying sofa in what had once been a cozy living room. There were three pistols lying on the scarred wood floor in front of him: a Tomcat, a Kel-Tec, and a Kahr. An odd, dizzy nausea passed over me, and it took a second to realize that it wasn’t a reaction to seeing Alex. It was the guns. Clearly, it was going to take some time for me to get used to being around them ag
ain.

  “What’s your story?” Alex asked, his voice hard.

  “No story,” I said. “I’ve got a record. If I’d known you were dealing, I wouldn’t have bothered your middlemen.”

  “You were friends with the police chief,” he said, his flavorless eyes searching me up and down.

  “I worked for her aunt for a while,” I said. “It’s not like we were joined at the hip.”

  My naturally iffy vibe was doing its thing; the suspicion in his eyes was slipping away.

  “Lemme see your money,” he said.

  I opened my wallet and handed over ten of the fifties I’d withdrawn from the bank. He put them to his nose, and I couldn’t help smiling.

  “I can smell that marking stuff they use,” he told me, not smiling back.

  I went ahead and laughed then. “Come on, man.”

  He stretched one leg out in front of him and slid the bills into his pocket, then got up, collecting the pistols. “I’ma have to check you out with my Inca. Tomorrow night you come see him, around nine. Everything’s good, your piece’ll be waiting for you there.”

  I sighed, looking off to one side. “What’s the address?”

  Alex recited it; then he and his associates sloped out of the house with my five hundred bucks.

  XI

  When I got back to the apartment, there was a cardboard box with Luigi’s name on it leaning against the door, inside the screen. Hector had accepted my mailing arrangement without comment, and must have come by to drop it off while I was out. Considering that he hadn’t returned any of the numerous calls I’d made to the bar and his cell, it was beginning to look like he was avoiding me. I was disappointed, but when you’re barely five feet tall and wear a size 16, you get used to these things. A lot of men don’t seem to know what the hell to do when they find themselves attracted to me; it’s like they woke up on Mars.

  I carried the box inside and slit the clear tape with a kitchen knife. A framed lithograph snuggled into a nest of crisply wrinkled currency. It was the print of Cochise’s son Naiche that had hung in the front foyer of our house on Avenue B, the one possession I’d regretted leaving behind. The paper was mostly twenties, with some tens and fifties mixed in. Good old Pete.