Nine Days: A Mystery Read online

  “You don’t think I know that?” he snapped.

  We glared at each other; then he reached over and laid his forearms on my shoulders, cupping the back of my head in his hands. He didn’t say anything, just pulled me forward until our foreheads touched, and closed his eyes. I felt the heat go out of him.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

  I stepped away, twitching my head toward the cottage. “I’m not going anywhere until you explain that.”

  Hector pressed his lips together, pushing his chin forward. It was a gesture I was starting to recognize.

  I said, “If Maines has gone so far as to fake a forensics report, do you really think he’s going to hesitate to do worse? You’re going to need people on your side, and I’m not joining up unless I know exactly what I’m getting into.”

  “Fine,” Hector said, bending down to tighten a buckle on one boot. When he stood back up without saying anything else, I realized he didn’t mean it the way I’d hoped.

  “Listen,” I pressed, “I’m not being altruistic here. Maines told the feds that I’m somehow involved in Teresa’s death, so they’ve cut me loose. If I don’t get to the bottom of this thing, I could end up in the clink right along with you. Or worse.”

  He stood there in the moonlight, mulling it over. It wasn’t easy to read his expression in the half darkness, but it seemed to me that he didn’t like the idea of being responsible for someone else’s troubles. I was counting on that.

  He sighed again, pushed his hair behind his ears, and started back toward the cottage. I followed.

  The candles on the altar had burned down, and he got some fresh ones from under the velvet drape, setting their wicks on fire with his chrome lighter. He murmured something I couldn’t hear, then turned and beckoned me forward.

  “Come on in and meet my father.”

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5

  I

  I stumbled into the room, trying to get my head around what Hector had just said. After a minute, I realized that I was staring at the hand, looking for a family resemblance. The absurdity of it forced a short laugh out of me.

  Hector put a finger to his lips and whispered. “You got a dollar? It’s not polite to talk until you’ve given him something.”

  Mechanically, I opened my wallet and took out a bill, laying it on top of the stack at the edge of the table. The smell of hot wax, decaying flesh, and flowers floated through the room. I couldn’t figure out what question to ask first.

  Hector saved me the trouble. “It’s traditional in my culture to keep your relatives with you even after they’re dead.”

  “Your culture?” I managed.

  “I’m Aymara, from Bolivia. We’re native to the Altiplano, the high plains of the Andes. Up there, it’s so dry that bodies don’t decay, so we have this whole tradition around mummified ancestors.” Hector smiled. “We even build little houses for them. Chulpas.”

  I was only half listening. A vague sense of misalignment kept flashing at me from the altar, like one of those puzzles where you have to figure out what’s different between two seemingly identical pictures.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, seeing what it was. “This isn’t the same hand we found behind the bar. The thumb’s on the wrong side.”

  “Yeah, it’s the other one.”

  Hector paused until I looked at him again, then said, “It was with Teresa’s body when I found her. I took it down to Lavon’s and threw it over onto the hotel roof before you came up. I went over there and got it yesterday.”

  Speech failed me again, and Hector turned toward the altar, pinching out the candles. As he did so, he murmured something unintelligible and held a few of the small green leaves up in a gesture of benediction.

  Then he turned back to me. “Let’s go outside,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t like to talk about this in front of him.”

  We stepped out onto the porch and he locked the door. Then he dropped onto the top step. I sat down next to him and waited.

  “They were stolen from my apartment during that break-in last week,” he said when we’d both settled. “Thursday night, after I threw that drunk out, Richard called and told me I could have them back if I’d sell Jesse the bar. I didn’t have time to answer him before Connie—”

  I’d jumped up, unable to suppress a jubilant “Yes!” Hector’s expression went alarmed, and I said, “I knew they were colluding on this Milestone Properties deal, but I haven’t been able to find anything to prove it.”

  He gave me a look that was half tenderness, half pity, and reached into his shirt pocket. “You can’t tell anybody any of this.”

  It felt like the beginning of a long story. I sat back down.

  Hector fired up a cigarette and took his time putting the lighter away. Then he pointed a frank look at me and said, “The only reason you’re hearing this is because I’ve got something just as big on you. Got it?”

  I made the sign of the cross over my heart and zipped my lips, throwing away the key.

  Hector said, “You ever heard of a guy named Jorge Escobar?”

  I thought for a second, then shook my head.

  “He was one of the head guys in the Medellín drug cartel, back in the ’70s and ’80s. You know about them, right?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “OK, well”—he took a deep breath—“Escobar and his guys killed my mother and my two younger sisters—my entire family at the time—for refusing to sell him our coca crop.”

  My eyebrows headed north. “Your family were cocaine farmers?”

  “Coca isn’t cocaine,” Hector said, a tired patience coming into his voice. “It’s a medicinal plant that’s been used by indigenous people in the Andes for centuries. Yeah, you can turn it into cocaine with enough processing and chemicals, but in its natural state, it’s just a mild stimulant, like nicotine or caffeine. That’s how we use it.”

  He watched my face to make sure I got it, then looked back toward the river. A long time went by without him saying anything. When he went on, his voice had sunk to a low monotone. “I’d gone to town to get some medicine for my mother. Coming up the road to our house, I saw her and the girls being marched out of the house by Escobar and his men. I knew right away what was happening. I dived into the bushes before they could spot me.” A quiet pain lifted his monotone a notch. “I can still smell those flowers.”

  He choked off and stopped. I waited awhile, then snaked my hand across his thigh. He took it, squeezing hard. His voice was looser when he started to talk again.

  “After they were gone, I went around to our chulpa. In the old days, whole malquis—family mummies—were kept in them, but we just had my father’s hands. When I came back around the house with them, Escobar was there. He saw me and hollered for his men. I ran like a son of a bitch. I still don’t know how in hell I got away.”

  I’d drawn closer and set my cheek against his shoulder, lulled by the vibration of his body as he spoke. “They must have been lousy shots,” I said.

  Hector looked at me. “They didn’t have guns.”

  I frowned up into his face.

  “Machetes,” he said.

  Nausea rattled at the back of my throat. “That’s what they used to kill your mother and sisters?”

  He nodded. I closed my eyes and took a slow, deep breath, willing myself not to visualize the carnage Hector must have witnessed.

  “I think I made it to La Paz on pure adrenaline,” I heard him say. “I got on a train heading north and rode it until I ran out of money. Red found me a couple of months later.”

  I opened my eyes. “Why didn’t you just go to the cops, after you got away from Escobar?”

  Hector scoffed gently. “Escobar and his men were the cops. That’s how it was those days. The drug cartels ran everything.”

  “OK, but the Medellín Cartel was dismantled in the ’90s,” I remembered aloud. “Those guys are all in jail now.”

  “Escobar worked some kind of de
al,” Hector said. “I think he served five years or something, then he went in with the Mexicans. Now he’s second in command of the Gulf Cartel.”

  The bottoms of my feet went cold. Two hundred miles south of where we were sitting, men, women, and children were being slaughtered on the order of hundreds daily by an organization grown so brazen that even the military wasn’t safe. Joe and I had sold guns to drug mules coming up from Baja, and I knew that the cartels were a vast international network worse than any Mafia. They never forgot an enemy, never let a transgression go unpunished. If they were looking for him, Hector was indeed in mortal danger.

  “Escobar’s distribution route runs right up through here,” Hector was saying, watching me. “If he tracks me down, I’m a dead man.”

  I started to protest that finding someone of Hector’s description in Central Texas was probably about as easy as picking out an individual pebble at a gravel mine, but then I realized that publicly associating him with a pair of mummified hands significantly improved Escobar’s odds. That’s why Hector had tried to hide the one he’d found with Teresa’s body.

  “Ever thought about moving to Canada?” I said.

  Hector’s hand strayed up toward the pocket where his cigarettes were, but he didn’t get another one out. “Yep.”

  Before WITSEC, I wouldn’t have thought twice about giving him shit for not going, but now I knew better. There’s a reason the U.S. government devotes an entire program to helping people disappear effectively: it’s not something that’s easy to pull off by yourself. Most people who get away with it on their own do so only because nobody is very interested in finding them. Once you escape the immediate threat, the safest thing to do is stay put and blend into the woodwork as quietly as possible.

  “So how does Richard know about all of this?” I asked after a minute.

  “I wish I knew. Teresa’s the only person I ever told, and she would never have said anything, especially to Richard. She understood how dangerous the situation was for me.”

  “Maybe Tova or Connie said something without thinking, and it got into the local gossip pipeline.”

  “There’s nothing for them to say. They don’t know anything about it.”

  “That you know of,” I corrected with a smile. “Take it from me, little girls are nature’s crack detectives.”

  Hector shifted on the worn board steps, making them creak. “No, look. When Red found me in Managua, he just assumed I was Nicaraguan, and everybody in the family followed him.” He fixed his dark eyes on my face. “There hasn’t been a moment of my life, since that day, that I didn’t understand what the stakes were. I’ve always kept the malquis out of sight and under lock and key, and nobody—in the family or outside it—has ever said or done anything to make me think they knew anything about them. If they had, I’d have split and taken them with me.”

  I digested this for a few minutes, trying to decide if the Amazon could have let something slip unintentionally, but I’d known within thirty seconds of meeting her that she didn’t have an unintentional bone in her body. Even if I were wrong, she’d surely have warned Hector that his secret was out, had she been the one to spring it.

  “Maybe Richard doesn’t know all the details,” I said. “I mean, obviously he knew about the malquis and where they were before the break-in—you don’t open a wall safe with a pocketknife.” Hector’s eyes lasered over to me, and I went on quickly. “It’s possible all he knows for sure is that you don’t want people knowing you kept a pair of mummified hands in your apartment.”

  “No,” Hector insisted, shaking his head. “He’d never have taken the risk of leaving that second one with Teresa if he thought there was any chance I’d report it.”

  “Why not? I assume that if you could make a connection between him and the break-in, you’d have done it by now.”

  “It would have been enough for me to make the accusation—everybody in town knows how their divorce was going. He had to know, for a fact, that whatever the malquis meant was problematic enough that I’d let him get away with murder. He’s not the kind of person to take a risk that big on a wild guess.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but Hector’s chin was starting to get that stubborn look to it. “So, what did you report about the burglary, if anything?”

  “I told Teresa everything—confidentially—but that was before Richard’s phone threat on Thursday night. I was getting ready to call her when Connie screamed and all hell broke loose.”

  That explained the hateful look he’d given the Amazon. Maybe it hadn’t been so much hateful as terrified. “So you went over to her place after we closed, to fill her in?”

  “No, I told you,” he said, impatient. “Whoever you heard talking to her that night, it wasn’t me. The last time I saw her was when she left the bar with you that night.” His face went suddenly haggard, skull-like in the darkness. “I never thought Richard would kill her. I figured I’d catch her up in the morning.”

  The buzz in my stomach turned sour. I got up, extending a hand, and he looked up at me, those beautiful eyes pits that went all the way down. “Do you think character is hereditary?” he asked.

  It was an odd segue, and I wondered if talking about all this was ramping him up to a PTSD episode.

  “I wouldn’t know. I was raised by wolves,” I said, hoping to put an end to the story for now. I wiggled my fingers at him. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Hector was gazing muddily off into the darkness. “When Mami got mad, she’d always say that I was just like my father. Self-centered and arrogant. She’s right. All I’ve cared about in this thing is keeping my own ass out of the fire.”

  I dropped my hand to his shoulder. “Look, you don’t need to work at making yourself feel worse. Things are bad enough on their own. Put it away for a couple of hours. Sometimes things clarify themselves if you stop thinking about them for a while.”

  He didn’t say anything. I felt him struggling against something tidal, and then his shoulder solidified under my hand and he got up. “I’ll call Nathan in the morning to come tow the truck to his shop,” he said. “It’ll be OK up there tonight.”

  II

  Back at Teresa’s, Hector parked under the oak tree and held the bike steady as I got off. I didn’t stop to say good-bye, hoping he’d follow me up the back steps and into my apartment. He did.

  “Whoa!” he exclaimed as I went over and turned on the lamp. “Not too big to keep clean, is it?”

  My cardboard box full of money was still sitting there. I got myself between it and Hector and took it over to the kitchen cabinet, my heart pounding. I’d been so distracted when I came back upstairs after prowling the basement that I’d just grabbed Richard’s keys and run out. I was lucky the box was still there.

  Hector passed behind me to look into the bedroom as I shut the cabinet door. The place seemed even smaller with him in it, as if the family Rottweiler had just trotted into the kids’ playhouse. The thought made me smile. He saw my grin and came over to slide his arms around me.

  The light from the shaded bulb in the bathroom fell on his face, illuminating the sparse black beard coming through his skin. There was something enthralling about looking at him up close, like having a private audience with a famous work of art. Behind his back, my fingers ran through the ends of his hair. It was coarse and supple, like a horse’s tail.

  “Are you staying over?” I asked, watching him watching me.

  His face went surprised. “You want me to?”

  “I thought you might like a chance to improve on your previous performance.” If he was going to sex me up to try and keep me quiet, I might as well get his A game.

  His dark eyes moved down to my mouth, with a smile in them. “Yes, please.”

  This time the fire was a slow burn, and Hector worked it like a man with something to prove. He was deliberate and thorough, hard and soft in all the right places, and deliciously filthy without being vulgar. I wasn’t quite sure how he managed it, until
I realized that he’d almost certainly had a lot of practice. He’d probably been beating women off with a stick since puberty.

  The moon had gone down when we finally exhausted ourselves. Hector, lying next to me with one leg heavy across my hips, ran a hand over my bruised side.

  “Where’d you get this?” he asked.

  I squirmed, eyes closed, reluctant to dilute my afterglow. “I fell down some stairs.”

  “Were you on fire at the time?” he chuckled, holding up my burned finger.

  I covered a yawn. “It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell you later.”

  I felt him sit up. “OK if I take a bath?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he nudged me. “You coming?”

  “In a minute,” I murmured, smiling.

  I heard the water turn on; then I don’t remember another thing until the sun crossing my pillow woke me, some time after noon.

  III

  I was in bed alone. I lay there savoring my memories from the previous night for a few minutes, then got up.

  Hector wasn’t in the apartment, and a look out the kitchen window told me his BMW was gone. He must have gotten up early to go take care of the truck. I appreciated the fact that he’d let me sleep, but a note would have been nice.

  I put some water on for tea, then went back into the bedroom and dialed Hector’s cell. He didn’t answer, so I left a short message asking him to call me back. As I hung up, I wondered if the PTSD attack I’d felt coming the night before had gotten hold of him. I liked that better than the depressing thought that he’d gone off somewhere to formulate his “let’s be friends” speech, but I knew less about how to handle it.

  While the tea was brewing, I sat down at the laptop to do a little research. Not that the Internet is all that useful for that purpose anymore. I remember a time when you could type in something like PTSD and get actual information. Nowadays you’re just as likely to land on a site selling time-shares in the Australian outback or a conspiracy theory page advising you that the government has planted a chip in your head. I sifted through these online gems for a couple of hours, spending most of that trying to discern whether or not what I was reading was reliable.