Chapter Four
There had been no serious attempt to make the Buena Rosa Police Department attractive when it had been built sometime in the ‘70s. From the glass brick entry way, to the white painted cinderblock bulk of the building itself, it was an exercise in utility, nothing more. Manuel entered alone, leaving Snowflake to watch the front from down the street.
Night was fully upon the town, and Manuel almost expected to find the glass double doors locked up tight, but they swung open with an easy push when tried. The front counter was deserted even though the lights were on. Behind the counter was a wooden divider that reached to the ceiling, and halfway to the walls on either side. “Buena Rosa” was spelled out in brushed steel letters a foot high, and suspended from the ceiling by wires a few inches from the divider. The indistinct sound of grunting reached Manuel’s ears as he pushed thorough the doors into the lobby, making a bell above the doorway jingle.
Immediately, there was a sound of cursing in Spanish and what could only be the rustle of clothes. Seconds later, a uniformed Sheriff’s deputy rounded the divider with a sour expression beneath his thin mustache. The brass nametag gave his name as Attencio, and Manuel gauged him to be in his early twenties. A few inches taller than Manuel, he also had more muscle mass and broader shoulders, giving the impression that he might have played basketball in high school. Deputy Attencio had heavy eyebrows, and they knit together with annoyance at Manuel’s interruption.
“Can I help you with something?”
Manuel gave the deputy his most conciliatory smile and tone. “Yes. I’m looking for my cousin. She’s gone missing.”
Deputy Attencio licked his lips and looked back towards where he came from for a second, perhaps regretting that he had not locked the station door. Manuel followed his gaze and saw a blue sequined purse hanging on the back of a desk chair. So he was right in assuming that it wasn’t work that his visit had interrupted, Manuel thought. The deputy rolled his head on his shoulders, loosening up his neck, and then pulled out a clipboard from under the counter.
“Name?”
“My cousin’s name is Esther Vega,” Manuel enunciated clearly and slowly.
Attencio paused then looked up at Manuel, his eyes narrowed slightly. “Esther Vega? 29 years old, 5’4” tall with straight black hair and a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back?”
“You know her?”
The deputy put the clipboard back under the counter, a thin, hard smile on his face. Manuel noticed for the first time that the deputy was wearing his gun belt, and that his fingers were dangerously close to it. “I know her. She isn’t missing. She’s under arrest.”
“She’s been arrested? There must be some kind of mistake.”
“No, no mistake, señor. She killed another woman. She’s very dangerous, this cousin of yours.”
“But she couldn’t hurt anyone, especially not killed someone. There must be some kind of misunderstanding.”
“But she already admitted that she killed this girl. She gave us a signed confession.”
“Isn’t there some kind of arrangement we can come to? I know she couldn’t have done something like this.” Manuel piled on as much charm as he could, but it wasn’t looking good. The deputy wasn’t giving any opportunity for Manuel to offer up a bribe. That’s the way the dance was done, but it felt like they were dancing to different songs. Either Deputy Attencio was new to this game or he was one of those rare breed: an honest cop. Unless. Unless there was something more going on in this town, he realized.
“Arrangement? I don’t think you heard me. Your cousin signed a confession saying that she killed someone. What kind of arrangement were you thinking of, eh?”
Clearly open bribery was not going to work, so Manuel changed tactics. “I was hoping that I could at least talk to her and make sure she’s okay.”
Deputy Attencio smiled at mention of Esther’s safety. It was a wolf’s smile, and it chilled Manuel to the bone. It was not done as a show of happiness. It was a challenge. Manuel could see it in the deputy’s eyes. “You suggesting that your cousin is unsafe in our care, Mr. – I’m sorry. I didn’t get your name.”
“Manuel de la Vega. I am not planning on being in town for long. When can I see her?”
The sneer on Deputy Attencio’s face was certain to precede a particularly cutting answer to Manuel’s question, if his reply hadn’t been interrupted by a voice from the other side of the divider. “Ray, before you say something stupid, why don’t you go back to your...desk.”
It was an older voice, calm and weathered, and it came from around the right side of the divider while Attencio had come from around on the left. Heralded by the call to reason that he had given the young deputy, a balding uniformed officer stepped out into the lobby. He appeared to be in his fifties, his hair trimmed almost to his scalp and peppered with gray. The name badge read “Aldovar”, and unlike Attencio, his smile seemed genuine.
“Are you the sheriff?” Manuel asked, trying to keep his cool. He had been certain for a moment that Detective Attencio had been seconds away from doing something stupid, either arresting him or quite possibly shooting him. And even thought Aldovar was essentially a clean slate, he still had the sense that something was off, and made the decision not to pursue a bribery angle just yet.
For his part, Aldovar came to the counter with a friendly, can-do attitude. “I would like to apologize for Ray. The passion of the young is not exactly tempered by experience. Oh, and I am not the sheriff. He left hours ago, but he will be in again tomorrow around ten. You said you were a relative of the prisoner?”
Manuel nodded and hobbled the rest of the way to the counter. He pulled out his wallet and handed his Mexico driver’s license across to Aldovar. “She’s my cousin. Her father knew I was coming through the area and asked me to look in on her. Uncle Chuy hadn’t heard from her in a while and he was getting worried. Now I see he had reason to be concerned.”
Deputy Aldovar finished recording the information from Manuel’s license and handed it back. “We have had some difficulty in reaching Miss Vega’s father.” Which Manuel took as code to mean that the problem they were having is that they hadn’t tried. His uncle rarely if ever left his workshop in Taxco where he did silverwork. If they had tried to reach him, they would have.
“I will try to reach him again and will confirm that you are related to Miss Vega.” Which was code to mean that they might call Uncle Chuy, but probably not, and they would do a background check on Manuel since he was now in town and, as they said in America, “up in their grill.”
“I understand.” Manuel said, which was code for nothing. He had no choice but to let the local police set the ground rules for this encounter. At least no choice yet, he thought, and his thoughts turned painfully to the leathers and bike that Snowflake claimed to have brought to Mexico.
“And I will let Sheriff Bragga know that you are in town and wish to arrange a visit. It shouldn’t be a problem, but in a case like this, it is best to follow procedure. Are you staying at the Soledad?”
“Yes. You can reach me there or leave a message if I’m out.”
Deputy Aldovar nodded, making notes on the same page he had recorded the drivers license number. “Once again, I am sorry for the unpleasantness earlier. If you have any questions or further concerns, please call and ask for Pedro Aldovar.”
Manuel nodded. “That would be you?”
“Si. In the meantime, enjoy your stay in Buena Rosa. If you get a chance, try the Casa del Rancho. Best breakfast in town.”
“Casa del Rancho?”
“On the southern edge of town, it’s easy to miss, but their chorizo and eggs with a little cojita sprinkled on top – I tell you, it is the best food in Buena Rosa.”
“Thanks. And my cousin?”
“She will be right here. I will take it up with Sheriff Bragga when he gets in. You should be able to talk to her tomorrow.”
It was going to have to be good enough, Manuel thought. He nodded, and saw that his apparent satisfaction was well received by the deputy. “I will see you tomorrow then.”
“Muy buien. Have a safe trip back to your hotel and we will speak again tomorrow.”
Manuel rendezvoused with Snowflake further down the block. The panda was sitting in the cab of a battered looking pickup he had brought with him to Buena Rosa. Despite his assurances to Manuel the there was a 5.1-litre HEMI engine under the hood, the trucks usefulness in a pinch had yet to be tested, and Manuel remained skeptical. Still disguised as an American tourist, the panda was contentedly munching on sunflower seeds, watching the front of the police station in the side mirror of the truck. Manuel paused for a rest at the passenger window and leaned against the scarred and pitted red door.
“How did it go in there?”
“Got a good lead on breakfast for tomorrow.”
“The Casa del Rancho? Yeah, good food. Anything else?”
Manuel shrugged, then looked casually over his shoulder in the direction of the station. No sign of any movement, but that could change. “Well, she’s there. It doesn’t look like bribery is an option at the moment, so I’m kind of winging it.”
“I like winging it. Good plan, boss. So, next step?”
“I’m going to play concerned family member for a bit. Stay here another twenty minutes or so to see if they put a tail on me. They know where I’m staying so they might just watch the hotel, in which case its best if we don’t go in together.”
“You don’t think they’ll figure out that I’m here with you?”
Manuel bought some time by making a show of stretching out his arms. “You got here a few days before me, and you’re a gringo.”
“I’m a panda, but point taken.”
“At this point, they think I’m still living in Mexico, but I don’t know how far they’re going to dig. Eventually, they will probably figure out you’re not just some tourist. But I don’t want to make it easy for them either.”
Snowflake cracked another sunflower seed. “And when they figure it out?”
“Well they might arrest you, at which point they are likely to figure out you aren’t human. That could be a problem.”
Neither of them said nothing for a several long moments, and then Manuel de la Vega pushed himself away from the truck door to finish his walk to the hotel. He only made it a few steps before Snowflake stopped him. “Hey boss?” The panda called softly from the cab of the truck.
Manuel half turned to look back at Snowflake.
“It’s great working with you again,” the panda who was not a panda said with a delighted wink and smile.
Manuel said nothing in return, but he found his sidekick - his “Sancho Panda’s” - enthusiasm just a bit contagious. He committed himself to the task at hand of humping the four blocks back to the hotel. The deputy’s final words to him concerned him a bit. He repeated them back to himself under his breath. “Have a safe trip back to the hotel.”
He shook his head. It might have been a simple warning. It might have been a threat. As long as Snowflake was watching the station, he felt relatively safe.
But he had no way to suspect that his entire curbside conversation had been witnessed by someone entirely unknown to the both of them. And as Manuel stumped down the street and out of sight, that unknown figure rolled a motorcycle silently back down the alley. Then, safely out of earshot of the truck, they started the cycle and rode off into the dark night of Buena Rosa.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Buena Rosa Chapter Three
Chapter Three
The air in Buena Rosa carried a faint metallic taste the Manuel suspected couldn’t possibly be good for him. He hoped that the impressive heat would bake any impurities out of it, even though the scientist in him knew that wasn’t the way things worked. If anything, it was probably making things worse. He tried not to think about it too hard. With luck, he would be done with this town in only a few days and back to civilization.
It was his first time back in Mexico since leaving to join the police in Cobalt City, and while he hadn’t forgotten the rampant poverty, he had forgotten how some people were so accepting of it. The longer you lived with the status quo, the more calcified the status quo became, until there comes a time when you can’t imagine anything outside of your own experiences. So many people had bought into this dream that working in a factory gave you an opportunity, that industry would solve all their problems, they were willing to overlook the miseries it brought with it.
Manuel had seen the slums. You couldn’t avoid them in Mexico City, the so called la Ciudad de los Palacios, the “City of Palaces”. With the population in the greater metropolitan area estimated anywhere from 18 to 22 million people, the desperation in some neighborhoods was so thick, you could feel it on your skin. Violent crime, kidnappings more often than not, were so prevalent that they were a way of life for everyone in the city.
In Cobalt City, the major concerns were parking and over priced coffee. In Mexico City, it was the knowledge that the next time you got in a cab, the driver could abduct you and force you to empty your bank account with your ATM card, sometimes even holding you overnight to circumvent daily withdraw limitations.
But he hated the perception that everyone in Mexico was some poor dirt farmer or criminal, just looking for some chance to make the midnight crossing into America for a better life. And he hated the admission that he had gone to America, albeit with a valid work visa, for much the same reason. The general perception that all police departments in Mexico were corrupt in some ways was prevalent and while unkind, not untrue. It was difficult to aspire to being a great cop when so often the bar was set so low.
And the fact that Manuel’s father would probably never understood why he became a cop, well, it was even more justification to move far away. The feeling that you had somehow failed your parents, even if unjustified, was made easier by never having to deal with them. But now his experience in the questionable ethics of Mexican law enforcement might be just what his family needed most. And while he was certain Esther would appreciate the help, he couldn’t help but hope that his father would appreciate it as well.
Manuel had arrived in Buena Rosa anonymously, lest he draw attention to himself. He had flown to Midland, Texas by charter plane then been lucky enough to catch a ride to the border with an elderly couple heading south for their granddaughter’s baptism. Dressing casually in a rarely worn denim jacket and jeans, he crossed the border at Ojinaga and caught a bus there to bring him the final 150 or so miles.
The bus had been virtually deserted, with only four other people making the trip to Buena Rosa from the direction of the border. This close to the “American Dream”, most traffic tended to go in the opposite direction. He felt the eyes of the other passengers on him and suspected that they might be sizing him up, weighing the ease of robbing a cripple against the apparent value of what he might be carrying. Manuel kept his dusty duffle bag within an easy arm’s reach and his attention finely tuned for the entire four hour trip, pleasantly surprised that no one decided he was worth the effort.
He had close to 200 pesos in his wallet, amounting to less than $10 American. $2,000, half in dollars, half in pesos had been tucked into two cleverly designed veladoras. One of the glass saint candles featured Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the other had an image of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos printed brightly upon it.
While it was a fortune for anyone who shared the bus with him, he doubted they would be able to find the release even if they were to suspect there was money hidden within. And the candles were so common among the largely Catholic Mexican community that no one would think anything of finding them in his bag.
Manuel stood on the cracked sidewalk in front of what appeared to be the only hotel in town two blocks from where he had been deposited by the bus. There were vacancies, of course. There were probably always vacancies. Buena Rosa was not the tourist town it might have once pretended itself to be. The Soledad was a two story building with faded flyers taped up in the windows. Low quality photocopies of old photos and hand drawn faces revealed many of them to be missing person posters.
Nothing official, not put up by the police, of course, but instead posted by loved ones – friends, family perhaps. A lot of people, Manuel thought. And these are just the ones who people think are missing. He wondered again about the vision he had received when touching the postcard – a field of carrion birds. Just how big was this thing he had come to confront?
He slung his dusty duffle bag over his shoulder and pushed into the dim interior of the hotel office. Light from between the posted flyers dappled the small space like a secluded grove. A desk fan was working overtime to circulate the air and having little success doing it. A small man with a pinched face looked up from his tattered paperback with a look of surprise. “Buenos dias! Can I help you with a room?”
“Gracias.”
The desk clerk turned a guests register on the counter around to face Manuel. It didn’t surprise him to see the entire operation running without the use of computers. There was only one other name on the registry that was less than a month old, a sloppily printed “Harry Snow”, who appeared to have checked in just a few days ago.
It was too much of a coincidence. “I’m here to meet my friend, Mr. Snow. Could I get a room next to his, perhaps?”
“Si. There is one across the hall. I give you that one. If I can see your drivers license...” the clerk’s eyes flickered down to the forearm crutches and he barely skipped a beat, “or your ID card or passport?”
Manuel considered the false ID card he had prepared but decided against it. It was still entirely possible that this was nothing more than typical graft and corruption, at which point his being registered under his real name would allow the police to research him if they cared to do so. If that happened, the fact that he was a decorated police officer would give him a little clout. He fished out his wallet and handed over his old Mexican driver’s license. He still had over a year left on it until it expired, and a reputation as a Mexican resident, whether it was true or not, might also be to his advantage. He had so few advantages, he realize, no reason not to exploit them all.
“Have you seen my friend recently?”
“Not since this afternoon. He left a few hours ago.”
Manuel nodded as if that was what he had expected, hoping it would mask his disappointment. “Any idea where he might have gone?”
“Si, senior. He is probably at Dos Padres, down the street. He spends much time there.”
Well, if Dos Padres was a bar, then there was little doubt who Harry Snow was. Manuel thanked the clerk and, after collecting the key, hiked up to his room. It was not as entirely dismal as he had expected. The room was small, but wasn’t used frequently, so other than a little dust, it was clean. And with the possible exception of something living in the mattress, it appeared to be more or less bug free. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed with his bag beside him and considered his options.
A long minute later, he stood with the evening’s course of action firmly in mind. The money-laden candles were placed on the small dresser. He lit them both and left them burning while he went into the bathroom and washed the travel grime from his face and neck with a wet rag. Thus refreshed, he extinguished the candles, leaving the paper book of matches from the lobby downstairs in the ashtray. He retrieved a library card from his wallet and pressed his thumb against the line drawing of the library building on the front until the line drawing flashed brightly twice. His tracking device and communicator now switched on, he tucked the card into his jacket’s breast pocket and left, locking the door behind himself.
The sun was low in the sky when he found Dos Padres, making the sky a brilliant rose color. Manuel figured that the smoke from the factory might have something to do with the vibrancy of it, but had to admit that it was spectacular. The painted window of the bar showed two robed Dominican monks, heads bowed, on either side of a wooden table with a bottle of wine between them. A neon Corona sign hummed next to it on one side, while a neon Tecate sign was on the other. He grunted and pushed open the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the relative darkness before going deeper into the room.
He figured picking out “Harry” would be easy, but a long look around the room turned up a lot of gringos, none of which looked familiar to him. The neon beer signs out front tipped him off that this was not exactly a “locals” bar. Locals didn’t drink Tecate and Corona, not if they could help it. This was a bar which owed its existence to American drinkers. Since most transnational corporations used their own management teams, it meant a steady supply of gringos with American money and American tastes. The owner of Dos Padres probably couldn’t print his own money faster than he was bound to make it here.
Manuel worked his way deeper into the room towards an empty booth, and saw a heavy-set man with a buzz cut and pale blue windbreaker waving him over to his table. It was no one he knew, but he trusted his instincts and altered his course. “Harry?”
“Surprised to see me, buddy?” came the all-too familiar voice of Snowflake, the panda former driver/mechanic/pilot associate of the Protectorate. This must be the backup and support Katherine sent for him. She must truly hate him for something or other.
“Yeah, surprised is a good word for it. You’re looking, um, good.” Manuel couldn’t help but stare. Snowflake was a panda, albeit a highly evolved one. A Chinese research project several years ago had tried to save the pandas from extinction by altering their genetics, essentially simulating tens of thousands of years of evolution on their test subject. The end result was Snowflake, a crass, rude, trigger happy, and generally surly individual with undeniable mechanical skills. The experiment was considered a failure and not repeated, making the panda-man one of a kind. It was a fact not lost on Snowflake, who frequently claimed that if they had made a female equivalent for him to hang out with, he would have been considerably less surly.
But before Manuel sat, very clearly, a human male in his late forties. He didn’t know what to say, but in a world of super-humans he had gotten somewhat used to being surprised. He took pulled out a seat and sat, staring at Harry who was looking very pleased with himself.
“Barkeep!” Harry waved at a young, long-haired Hispanic man in a cleanly pressed shirt and red vest behind the bar. “Two more, please.”
Manuel watched his friend closely as he retrieved money to pay for the beers, and realized that if he looked closely, there were some subtle indicators of what was going on. “So, let me guess. Kara Sparx did some custom work for you?”
Harry winked while he touched his nose. It suddenly made sense. Kara Sparx had done state of the art holographic work for the Protectorate on a contract basis. As far as Manuel knew, she had never tried to branch out into holographic disguises, but it was a logical extension of some of her other work. “I have to keep an eye on the battery, but as long as I limit physical contact, its pretty freaking foolproof,” Harry confided in a conspiratorial whisper.
A careful examination of the bar showed no one within easy earshot even if they were paying attention. Manuel took a draw on his beer despite not being a particular fan of Corona, then leaned into the table in what he hoped would appear to be a friendly, conversational manner. “So, you’ve been here a few days now. Have you learned anything?”
“Oh yeah. Don’t drink anything that isn’t fermented or distilled, if you catch my drift. I had a spiritual awakening after a tamale plate and glass of water my first night here, and believe me when I say you don’t want to go through that yourself.”
“That’s a lot of help.”
“You know, sarcasm is an ugly, hurtful trait, Manuel.”
“Okay. Have you learned anything else?”
“Well, factory town, which shouldn’t surprise you. Pegasus Motor Company has this place bought and paid for. These poor bastards here are middle management at the factory, and they live in a little gated community in the hills called Perseus Glen. Way I hear it, there are definite benefits to being management here. The actual employees, and by that I mean the local labor force lives in this shantytown between here and the factory itself. I don’t recommend going there.”
“Depressing?”
“Dangerous. They don’t like whitey too much there. And there have been disappearances which only make them more likely to get all riled up.”
Manuel nodded. It fit with the missing person flyers he had seen. He didn’t like the pattern. “Okay. So what about my cousin?”
“Muriel Cruz, one of the shift supervisors at the factory went missing for about a week. Her sister came up from their hometown, were ever the hell that is, and started raising holy hell. Then there was a rain storm, and Muriel’s body turned up in a ditch the next morning. Animals had been at it, but they were still able to make an ID based on a tattoo, if I heard right.”
“And this implicates my cousin how?”
“Your cousin has a reputation for being a trouble maker. She was trying to unionize the workforce and the plant security had her banned from the factory and tried to keep her out of the shantytown as well. Hard to - no - impossible to enforce, but they tried. The theory is that Muriel went to the floor manager about your cousin, and that’s why she was banned. So she was killed in a fit of anger or revenge.”
“That doesn’t sound like Esther.”
Snowflake shrugged, sipping on his beer. “That’s just what I hear, chief. It’s the official party line, and most of the locals seem to buy it too. She signed a confession and everything.”
“Guess I have to talk to the police.”
“I don’t think you heard me.” Snowflake leaned over the table, his shoulders hunched. “She. Signed. A. Confession.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Manuel sighed. Maybe it was easier for Snowflake to see things in black and white because he was a panda, but nothing was black and white south of the border. “This is Mexico. I grease the right palm, and I might be able to make this entire thing go away.”
Snowflake leaned back in his chair and it creaked dangerously under his weight. He pointed at Manuel with his beer bottle. “If you say so. But if you ask me, I think you’re going to need a change of clothes before the nights over.”
“A jacket and tie isn’t going to make a difference here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Snowflake looked genuinely confused.
“I’m talking about waving money about. What are you talking about?”
Snowflake laughed hard enough to elicit curious looks from several bar patrons who quickly turned back to their own conversations. “I figured her royal kitty-ness would have told you. Damn.”
Manuel got an uncomfortable sinking sensation in his stomach. “Told me what?”
“I brought your leathers. Them and the bike, which is, if I do say so myself, a thing of absolute beauty, are here in Mexico.”
The room started spinning for reasons completely unrelated to the weak beer he had been drinking. It was as if the floor had fallen out from beneath him and he was in a sudden, uncontrollable fall with nothing secure left to hold onto. “The bike, the leathers, they were all destroyed.”
“Yeah. Rebuilding the bike was quite the little project. It hasn’t been field tested, but all the diagnostic tests have been outstanding. I got the Tesla twins to help out. Xander reconfigured the leather body suit, so it should be better than new, and the synthetic muscles in it should more than compensate for your gimpy legs.”
“My gimpy...”
“Congratulations, chief. You’re a hero again.”
Manuel only distantly heard the words. He thought he said something akin to “But I don’t want to be a hero.” The details of that were sketchy, as he was too busy falling to be sure.
The air in Buena Rosa carried a faint metallic taste the Manuel suspected couldn’t possibly be good for him. He hoped that the impressive heat would bake any impurities out of it, even though the scientist in him knew that wasn’t the way things worked. If anything, it was probably making things worse. He tried not to think about it too hard. With luck, he would be done with this town in only a few days and back to civilization.
It was his first time back in Mexico since leaving to join the police in Cobalt City, and while he hadn’t forgotten the rampant poverty, he had forgotten how some people were so accepting of it. The longer you lived with the status quo, the more calcified the status quo became, until there comes a time when you can’t imagine anything outside of your own experiences. So many people had bought into this dream that working in a factory gave you an opportunity, that industry would solve all their problems, they were willing to overlook the miseries it brought with it.
Manuel had seen the slums. You couldn’t avoid them in Mexico City, the so called la Ciudad de los Palacios, the “City of Palaces”. With the population in the greater metropolitan area estimated anywhere from 18 to 22 million people, the desperation in some neighborhoods was so thick, you could feel it on your skin. Violent crime, kidnappings more often than not, were so prevalent that they were a way of life for everyone in the city.
In Cobalt City, the major concerns were parking and over priced coffee. In Mexico City, it was the knowledge that the next time you got in a cab, the driver could abduct you and force you to empty your bank account with your ATM card, sometimes even holding you overnight to circumvent daily withdraw limitations.
But he hated the perception that everyone in Mexico was some poor dirt farmer or criminal, just looking for some chance to make the midnight crossing into America for a better life. And he hated the admission that he had gone to America, albeit with a valid work visa, for much the same reason. The general perception that all police departments in Mexico were corrupt in some ways was prevalent and while unkind, not untrue. It was difficult to aspire to being a great cop when so often the bar was set so low.
And the fact that Manuel’s father would probably never understood why he became a cop, well, it was even more justification to move far away. The feeling that you had somehow failed your parents, even if unjustified, was made easier by never having to deal with them. But now his experience in the questionable ethics of Mexican law enforcement might be just what his family needed most. And while he was certain Esther would appreciate the help, he couldn’t help but hope that his father would appreciate it as well.
Manuel had arrived in Buena Rosa anonymously, lest he draw attention to himself. He had flown to Midland, Texas by charter plane then been lucky enough to catch a ride to the border with an elderly couple heading south for their granddaughter’s baptism. Dressing casually in a rarely worn denim jacket and jeans, he crossed the border at Ojinaga and caught a bus there to bring him the final 150 or so miles.
The bus had been virtually deserted, with only four other people making the trip to Buena Rosa from the direction of the border. This close to the “American Dream”, most traffic tended to go in the opposite direction. He felt the eyes of the other passengers on him and suspected that they might be sizing him up, weighing the ease of robbing a cripple against the apparent value of what he might be carrying. Manuel kept his dusty duffle bag within an easy arm’s reach and his attention finely tuned for the entire four hour trip, pleasantly surprised that no one decided he was worth the effort.
He had close to 200 pesos in his wallet, amounting to less than $10 American. $2,000, half in dollars, half in pesos had been tucked into two cleverly designed veladoras. One of the glass saint candles featured Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the other had an image of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos printed brightly upon it.
While it was a fortune for anyone who shared the bus with him, he doubted they would be able to find the release even if they were to suspect there was money hidden within. And the candles were so common among the largely Catholic Mexican community that no one would think anything of finding them in his bag.
Manuel stood on the cracked sidewalk in front of what appeared to be the only hotel in town two blocks from where he had been deposited by the bus. There were vacancies, of course. There were probably always vacancies. Buena Rosa was not the tourist town it might have once pretended itself to be. The Soledad was a two story building with faded flyers taped up in the windows. Low quality photocopies of old photos and hand drawn faces revealed many of them to be missing person posters.
Nothing official, not put up by the police, of course, but instead posted by loved ones – friends, family perhaps. A lot of people, Manuel thought. And these are just the ones who people think are missing. He wondered again about the vision he had received when touching the postcard – a field of carrion birds. Just how big was this thing he had come to confront?
He slung his dusty duffle bag over his shoulder and pushed into the dim interior of the hotel office. Light from between the posted flyers dappled the small space like a secluded grove. A desk fan was working overtime to circulate the air and having little success doing it. A small man with a pinched face looked up from his tattered paperback with a look of surprise. “Buenos dias! Can I help you with a room?”
“Gracias.”
The desk clerk turned a guests register on the counter around to face Manuel. It didn’t surprise him to see the entire operation running without the use of computers. There was only one other name on the registry that was less than a month old, a sloppily printed “Harry Snow”, who appeared to have checked in just a few days ago.
It was too much of a coincidence. “I’m here to meet my friend, Mr. Snow. Could I get a room next to his, perhaps?”
“Si. There is one across the hall. I give you that one. If I can see your drivers license...” the clerk’s eyes flickered down to the forearm crutches and he barely skipped a beat, “or your ID card or passport?”
Manuel considered the false ID card he had prepared but decided against it. It was still entirely possible that this was nothing more than typical graft and corruption, at which point his being registered under his real name would allow the police to research him if they cared to do so. If that happened, the fact that he was a decorated police officer would give him a little clout. He fished out his wallet and handed over his old Mexican driver’s license. He still had over a year left on it until it expired, and a reputation as a Mexican resident, whether it was true or not, might also be to his advantage. He had so few advantages, he realize, no reason not to exploit them all.
“Have you seen my friend recently?”
“Not since this afternoon. He left a few hours ago.”
Manuel nodded as if that was what he had expected, hoping it would mask his disappointment. “Any idea where he might have gone?”
“Si, senior. He is probably at Dos Padres, down the street. He spends much time there.”
Well, if Dos Padres was a bar, then there was little doubt who Harry Snow was. Manuel thanked the clerk and, after collecting the key, hiked up to his room. It was not as entirely dismal as he had expected. The room was small, but wasn’t used frequently, so other than a little dust, it was clean. And with the possible exception of something living in the mattress, it appeared to be more or less bug free. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed with his bag beside him and considered his options.
A long minute later, he stood with the evening’s course of action firmly in mind. The money-laden candles were placed on the small dresser. He lit them both and left them burning while he went into the bathroom and washed the travel grime from his face and neck with a wet rag. Thus refreshed, he extinguished the candles, leaving the paper book of matches from the lobby downstairs in the ashtray. He retrieved a library card from his wallet and pressed his thumb against the line drawing of the library building on the front until the line drawing flashed brightly twice. His tracking device and communicator now switched on, he tucked the card into his jacket’s breast pocket and left, locking the door behind himself.
The sun was low in the sky when he found Dos Padres, making the sky a brilliant rose color. Manuel figured that the smoke from the factory might have something to do with the vibrancy of it, but had to admit that it was spectacular. The painted window of the bar showed two robed Dominican monks, heads bowed, on either side of a wooden table with a bottle of wine between them. A neon Corona sign hummed next to it on one side, while a neon Tecate sign was on the other. He grunted and pushed open the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the relative darkness before going deeper into the room.
He figured picking out “Harry” would be easy, but a long look around the room turned up a lot of gringos, none of which looked familiar to him. The neon beer signs out front tipped him off that this was not exactly a “locals” bar. Locals didn’t drink Tecate and Corona, not if they could help it. This was a bar which owed its existence to American drinkers. Since most transnational corporations used their own management teams, it meant a steady supply of gringos with American money and American tastes. The owner of Dos Padres probably couldn’t print his own money faster than he was bound to make it here.
Manuel worked his way deeper into the room towards an empty booth, and saw a heavy-set man with a buzz cut and pale blue windbreaker waving him over to his table. It was no one he knew, but he trusted his instincts and altered his course. “Harry?”
“Surprised to see me, buddy?” came the all-too familiar voice of Snowflake, the panda former driver/mechanic/pilot associate of the Protectorate. This must be the backup and support Katherine sent for him. She must truly hate him for something or other.
“Yeah, surprised is a good word for it. You’re looking, um, good.” Manuel couldn’t help but stare. Snowflake was a panda, albeit a highly evolved one. A Chinese research project several years ago had tried to save the pandas from extinction by altering their genetics, essentially simulating tens of thousands of years of evolution on their test subject. The end result was Snowflake, a crass, rude, trigger happy, and generally surly individual with undeniable mechanical skills. The experiment was considered a failure and not repeated, making the panda-man one of a kind. It was a fact not lost on Snowflake, who frequently claimed that if they had made a female equivalent for him to hang out with, he would have been considerably less surly.
But before Manuel sat, very clearly, a human male in his late forties. He didn’t know what to say, but in a world of super-humans he had gotten somewhat used to being surprised. He took pulled out a seat and sat, staring at Harry who was looking very pleased with himself.
“Barkeep!” Harry waved at a young, long-haired Hispanic man in a cleanly pressed shirt and red vest behind the bar. “Two more, please.”
Manuel watched his friend closely as he retrieved money to pay for the beers, and realized that if he looked closely, there were some subtle indicators of what was going on. “So, let me guess. Kara Sparx did some custom work for you?”
Harry winked while he touched his nose. It suddenly made sense. Kara Sparx had done state of the art holographic work for the Protectorate on a contract basis. As far as Manuel knew, she had never tried to branch out into holographic disguises, but it was a logical extension of some of her other work. “I have to keep an eye on the battery, but as long as I limit physical contact, its pretty freaking foolproof,” Harry confided in a conspiratorial whisper.
A careful examination of the bar showed no one within easy earshot even if they were paying attention. Manuel took a draw on his beer despite not being a particular fan of Corona, then leaned into the table in what he hoped would appear to be a friendly, conversational manner. “So, you’ve been here a few days now. Have you learned anything?”
“Oh yeah. Don’t drink anything that isn’t fermented or distilled, if you catch my drift. I had a spiritual awakening after a tamale plate and glass of water my first night here, and believe me when I say you don’t want to go through that yourself.”
“That’s a lot of help.”
“You know, sarcasm is an ugly, hurtful trait, Manuel.”
“Okay. Have you learned anything else?”
“Well, factory town, which shouldn’t surprise you. Pegasus Motor Company has this place bought and paid for. These poor bastards here are middle management at the factory, and they live in a little gated community in the hills called Perseus Glen. Way I hear it, there are definite benefits to being management here. The actual employees, and by that I mean the local labor force lives in this shantytown between here and the factory itself. I don’t recommend going there.”
“Depressing?”
“Dangerous. They don’t like whitey too much there. And there have been disappearances which only make them more likely to get all riled up.”
Manuel nodded. It fit with the missing person flyers he had seen. He didn’t like the pattern. “Okay. So what about my cousin?”
“Muriel Cruz, one of the shift supervisors at the factory went missing for about a week. Her sister came up from their hometown, were ever the hell that is, and started raising holy hell. Then there was a rain storm, and Muriel’s body turned up in a ditch the next morning. Animals had been at it, but they were still able to make an ID based on a tattoo, if I heard right.”
“And this implicates my cousin how?”
“Your cousin has a reputation for being a trouble maker. She was trying to unionize the workforce and the plant security had her banned from the factory and tried to keep her out of the shantytown as well. Hard to - no - impossible to enforce, but they tried. The theory is that Muriel went to the floor manager about your cousin, and that’s why she was banned. So she was killed in a fit of anger or revenge.”
“That doesn’t sound like Esther.”
Snowflake shrugged, sipping on his beer. “That’s just what I hear, chief. It’s the official party line, and most of the locals seem to buy it too. She signed a confession and everything.”
“Guess I have to talk to the police.”
“I don’t think you heard me.” Snowflake leaned over the table, his shoulders hunched. “She. Signed. A. Confession.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Manuel sighed. Maybe it was easier for Snowflake to see things in black and white because he was a panda, but nothing was black and white south of the border. “This is Mexico. I grease the right palm, and I might be able to make this entire thing go away.”
Snowflake leaned back in his chair and it creaked dangerously under his weight. He pointed at Manuel with his beer bottle. “If you say so. But if you ask me, I think you’re going to need a change of clothes before the nights over.”
“A jacket and tie isn’t going to make a difference here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Snowflake looked genuinely confused.
“I’m talking about waving money about. What are you talking about?”
Snowflake laughed hard enough to elicit curious looks from several bar patrons who quickly turned back to their own conversations. “I figured her royal kitty-ness would have told you. Damn.”
Manuel got an uncomfortable sinking sensation in his stomach. “Told me what?”
“I brought your leathers. Them and the bike, which is, if I do say so myself, a thing of absolute beauty, are here in Mexico.”
The room started spinning for reasons completely unrelated to the weak beer he had been drinking. It was as if the floor had fallen out from beneath him and he was in a sudden, uncontrollable fall with nothing secure left to hold onto. “The bike, the leathers, they were all destroyed.”
“Yeah. Rebuilding the bike was quite the little project. It hasn’t been field tested, but all the diagnostic tests have been outstanding. I got the Tesla twins to help out. Xander reconfigured the leather body suit, so it should be better than new, and the synthetic muscles in it should more than compensate for your gimpy legs.”
“My gimpy...”
“Congratulations, chief. You’re a hero again.”
Manuel only distantly heard the words. He thought he said something akin to “But I don’t want to be a hero.” The details of that were sketchy, as he was too busy falling to be sure.
Buena Rosa Chapter Two
Chapter Two
She made Manuel wait in the reception area for close to ten minutes. Katherine Wilde was a very busy woman, and he understood the complexities of her schedule, perhaps better than her own staff did. After all, for a while, they were both heroes. And while Gato Loco might have hung up the mask, Wild Kat was still far from retirement.
And when she wasn’t out fighting crime in thigh-high boots and leather bustier, she was still the head of a large arts foundation. Or was it a company? He was never really sure what they did in the three floors of offices beneath her private workspace. It was something to do with promoting or preserving art. Something to do with art, he was sure. They had a snazzy logo and corporate letterhead, and a lot of money was thrown about with their name attached to it.
Manuel never paid a tremendous amount of attention to it. While they had been dating, it had really been Katherine Wilde – Wild Kat – who fascinated him, not her company. And now he sat in a bamboo paneled reception area watching water drip down a slab of granite on the far wall, and he wondered not only what it was that they did here, but if maybe he should have paid attention to it sooner.
He had been through the room plenty of times. But he had never lingered. Katherine’s touch was all over the place, her own style, her attention to detail. This venture of hers was not a front. It was important to her, perhaps as important being Wild Kat, if not more so.
More importantly, it was a part of her life that he suddenly realized he had neglected. It made him a little sad. And he wondered, just a little, if that was part of why they weren’t spending as much time together.
“Mr. de la Vega? Ms. Wilde will see you now.”
Manuel stood and gave the receptionist with the perfect teeth a distracted smile. He checked his jacket reflexively, then swung his legs out and forward, stumping towards the quiet office beyond.
The floor was carpeted in a layer of Indian rugs that stretched from wall to wall, overlapping in places, in others revealing a polished cedar floor. Traditional block print tapestries hung from the walls between ornamental stone pillars. Rattan sofas with brightly colored cushions lay along each wall of the long room, and a pair of matching chairs sat before the desk. Small palm trees held down the far corner of the room, just past the large cedar desk. Her public face. British born, she kept one foot firmly on the throat of her family’s colonial legacy. It was as if she recognized that she may never outgrow the shadows of her ancestor’s deeds, might never repay the fortune they made from the sweat of British colonialism.
Katherine was waiting for him behind the desk, glasses she didn’t actually need held between deceptively strong fingers as she chewed on one earpiece. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” She stood and greeted him halfway across the room. “I was out of the country for a few weeks and I had some business to get tidied up.”
“Understandable.” Manuel nodded. They greeted each other with a hug and a quick, efficient kiss. He paused, a far off look in his eyes.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” Katherine took a seat on one of the sofas and after a long second Manuel hobbled over and joined her.
“My cousin is in trouble in Mexico, a town called Buena Rosa. I don’t know the specifics, but I have reason to suspect that it’s bad. Very bad.”
“What can I do to help?”
“I don’t know, actually. I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Part of me thinks that I can handle this as Manuel de la Vega. That’s all I am anyway, right? But a good detective can be the difference that gets her out. Maybe that’s enough.”
“But what if it isn’t?”
“And I think that’s why I’m here. Maybe I was thinking you would tell me this was crazy and that someone else could do it. That someone else can play the hero.” Manuel stared at his hands as the tightened and relaxed on the grips of his forearm crutches. He couldn’t meet her eye. Now that he was here, he wished he hadn’t come, that he had listened to his instinct and not even tried. But it was too late for that. The words were out.
They hadn’t ever talked about it. Not really. Katherine was convinced that if she put the Tesla twins to work on the hardware, if Snowflake did some mechanical work, that someday Gato Loco would ride again. He had always put it off. It was always a discussion for later. And after months of trying to get him back on the horse, she stopped mentioning it. But his retirement, as such, was never officially open topic for discussion.
But there it was. “Someone else can play the hero.” It was acknowledgement, perhaps that he had given up. And it felt right saying it, like he had been holding onto it for months.
Manuel wasn’t a hero. He never wanted to be. Circumstances had pushed him in that direction, and he had never pushed back. And then circumstances blew him the hell up, and he found a reason to push back.
“I can go down and deal with it, maybe.” Katherine said quietly. There was sadness, resignation in her voice that tore him up inside. “Or I could send Archon down. He could probably clear it all up in a matter of hours.”
Manuel said nothing, loosing himself in the pattern of the rug just past his hands. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it; someone to take the problem, the responsibility off his hands? But it all came down to if he could sleep at night knowing that he gave up.
“No, I’ll take care of it. I just wanted to hear someone offer to take it off my hands, to tell me that I couldn’t handle this on my own. I needed to hear how that sounded.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, you know that don’t you?” Katherine smiled at him. Her eyes were misty, like she might start crying without warning. He wondered if his own eyes had the same threat of rain.
“I know. It doesn’t make sense to me either.” Manuel laughed and it surprised him how easily the laugh came. “But I might need backup or some tactical support if you can spare it.”
“Consider it done. I’ll have it in place in Buena Rosa this time tomorrow.”
Manuel pushed himself to his feet, testing his grip on his crutches. “So, just got back in town from a few weeks out of the country? Sounds exciting.”
Katherine stood and her smile was unexpectedly chilly. “I was called to inland China on family business.”
“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”
She met his gaze and her eyes said it all. No. She didn’t have to tell him anything. He took the hint.
They shared a long hug. With his face buried in her jasmine scented auburn hair, he began to regret his decision to leave. But it was too late for that. It was too late for a lot of things. “Take care, Kat.”
“You take care too, Gato. Call if you need anything.”
Manuel didn’t take another breath until the elevator doors closed. He didn’t want to be rid of the scent of jasmine.
She made Manuel wait in the reception area for close to ten minutes. Katherine Wilde was a very busy woman, and he understood the complexities of her schedule, perhaps better than her own staff did. After all, for a while, they were both heroes. And while Gato Loco might have hung up the mask, Wild Kat was still far from retirement.
And when she wasn’t out fighting crime in thigh-high boots and leather bustier, she was still the head of a large arts foundation. Or was it a company? He was never really sure what they did in the three floors of offices beneath her private workspace. It was something to do with promoting or preserving art. Something to do with art, he was sure. They had a snazzy logo and corporate letterhead, and a lot of money was thrown about with their name attached to it.
Manuel never paid a tremendous amount of attention to it. While they had been dating, it had really been Katherine Wilde – Wild Kat – who fascinated him, not her company. And now he sat in a bamboo paneled reception area watching water drip down a slab of granite on the far wall, and he wondered not only what it was that they did here, but if maybe he should have paid attention to it sooner.
He had been through the room plenty of times. But he had never lingered. Katherine’s touch was all over the place, her own style, her attention to detail. This venture of hers was not a front. It was important to her, perhaps as important being Wild Kat, if not more so.
More importantly, it was a part of her life that he suddenly realized he had neglected. It made him a little sad. And he wondered, just a little, if that was part of why they weren’t spending as much time together.
“Mr. de la Vega? Ms. Wilde will see you now.”
Manuel stood and gave the receptionist with the perfect teeth a distracted smile. He checked his jacket reflexively, then swung his legs out and forward, stumping towards the quiet office beyond.
The floor was carpeted in a layer of Indian rugs that stretched from wall to wall, overlapping in places, in others revealing a polished cedar floor. Traditional block print tapestries hung from the walls between ornamental stone pillars. Rattan sofas with brightly colored cushions lay along each wall of the long room, and a pair of matching chairs sat before the desk. Small palm trees held down the far corner of the room, just past the large cedar desk. Her public face. British born, she kept one foot firmly on the throat of her family’s colonial legacy. It was as if she recognized that she may never outgrow the shadows of her ancestor’s deeds, might never repay the fortune they made from the sweat of British colonialism.
Katherine was waiting for him behind the desk, glasses she didn’t actually need held between deceptively strong fingers as she chewed on one earpiece. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” She stood and greeted him halfway across the room. “I was out of the country for a few weeks and I had some business to get tidied up.”
“Understandable.” Manuel nodded. They greeted each other with a hug and a quick, efficient kiss. He paused, a far off look in his eyes.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” Katherine took a seat on one of the sofas and after a long second Manuel hobbled over and joined her.
“My cousin is in trouble in Mexico, a town called Buena Rosa. I don’t know the specifics, but I have reason to suspect that it’s bad. Very bad.”
“What can I do to help?”
“I don’t know, actually. I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Part of me thinks that I can handle this as Manuel de la Vega. That’s all I am anyway, right? But a good detective can be the difference that gets her out. Maybe that’s enough.”
“But what if it isn’t?”
“And I think that’s why I’m here. Maybe I was thinking you would tell me this was crazy and that someone else could do it. That someone else can play the hero.” Manuel stared at his hands as the tightened and relaxed on the grips of his forearm crutches. He couldn’t meet her eye. Now that he was here, he wished he hadn’t come, that he had listened to his instinct and not even tried. But it was too late for that. The words were out.
They hadn’t ever talked about it. Not really. Katherine was convinced that if she put the Tesla twins to work on the hardware, if Snowflake did some mechanical work, that someday Gato Loco would ride again. He had always put it off. It was always a discussion for later. And after months of trying to get him back on the horse, she stopped mentioning it. But his retirement, as such, was never officially open topic for discussion.
But there it was. “Someone else can play the hero.” It was acknowledgement, perhaps that he had given up. And it felt right saying it, like he had been holding onto it for months.
Manuel wasn’t a hero. He never wanted to be. Circumstances had pushed him in that direction, and he had never pushed back. And then circumstances blew him the hell up, and he found a reason to push back.
“I can go down and deal with it, maybe.” Katherine said quietly. There was sadness, resignation in her voice that tore him up inside. “Or I could send Archon down. He could probably clear it all up in a matter of hours.”
Manuel said nothing, loosing himself in the pattern of the rug just past his hands. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it; someone to take the problem, the responsibility off his hands? But it all came down to if he could sleep at night knowing that he gave up.
“No, I’ll take care of it. I just wanted to hear someone offer to take it off my hands, to tell me that I couldn’t handle this on my own. I needed to hear how that sounded.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, you know that don’t you?” Katherine smiled at him. Her eyes were misty, like she might start crying without warning. He wondered if his own eyes had the same threat of rain.
“I know. It doesn’t make sense to me either.” Manuel laughed and it surprised him how easily the laugh came. “But I might need backup or some tactical support if you can spare it.”
“Consider it done. I’ll have it in place in Buena Rosa this time tomorrow.”
Manuel pushed himself to his feet, testing his grip on his crutches. “So, just got back in town from a few weeks out of the country? Sounds exciting.”
Katherine stood and her smile was unexpectedly chilly. “I was called to inland China on family business.”
“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”
She met his gaze and her eyes said it all. No. She didn’t have to tell him anything. He took the hint.
They shared a long hug. With his face buried in her jasmine scented auburn hair, he began to regret his decision to leave. But it was too late for that. It was too late for a lot of things. “Take care, Kat.”
“You take care too, Gato. Call if you need anything.”
Manuel didn’t take another breath until the elevator doors closed. He didn’t want to be rid of the scent of jasmine.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Greetings From Buena Rosa - Chapter One
Chapter One
The old black woman clutched her purse tightly against her chest and eyed Manuel suspiciously. He offered her a warm smile and tilted his head down, drawing her eyes to his sleek, black forearm crutches. Her attitude shifted quickly through shades of relief to pity then back to relief. From criminal to cripple in seven seconds, he thought, a new personal record. He almost preferred she think she was a mugger.
Wind sliced up from the river, carrying with it the smell of diesel and urban decay. A pair of cargo ships had docked in the night, and a steady stream of rigs had been making their way into the freight yards all morning, choking the air with fumes and noise. Even in the Hollows, blocks from Quayside, it had disrupted traffic enough to make Manuel’s morning commute difficult. And with a low pressure system camped out over the city for the past few days, temperatures had climbed to a very un-New England high nineties, reminding Manuel of the weather back home. It was hot and muggy in Cobalt City, but it was no Mexico City.
The weather was starting to make people crazy, and violent crime rates had been spiking. No wonder the woman was suspicious. She had every reason to be. In fact, a little suspicion in her direction wouldn’t be unhealthy. A mugger had been dropped with pepper spray by an old lady in Lafayette Park two days ago, and when the mugger was down she tasered him in the head, killing him.
Manuel gave the old woman a quick look over, reassuring himself that she still thought he was harmless.
Harmless.
And to think. He used to be a super hero.
How the mighty have fallen.
A well-maintained brown hybrid sedan pulled up to the bus stop, the passenger side window already on its way down. Manuel caught sight of the curly ginger hair and porn star mustache of his partner Donegal in the driver seat and stumped closer to the curb, leaning over to put his head into the air conditioned interior.
“You riding the bus again like the common people, de la Vega?”
“Closer than the monorail stop.” Manuel shrugged.
“No friend of mine rides the damn bus,” Donegal growled. “Get in.”
It had been two months since Manuel had started back to work at the station. Donegal had picked him up at the same spot for a all but a week of that time. It wasn’t a formal arrangement, and Manuel suspected that eventually Donegal would tire of the charity and stop driving twenty minutes out of his way every morning.
“You plan on stopping for coffee?” Manuel asked as he tucked his forearm crutches into the back seat.
“Is it your turn to buy?”
“Si.”
“Then I’m stopping for coffee. Buckle up, I’m going to try to make the light.” Donegal zipped dangerously out into traffic and through the yellow light, eliciting angry horns from other drivers.
Ten minutes later, Donegal flipped a U-turn in the middle of a relatively quiet street, securing a parking space across from Schrodinger’s Cup. It was Manuel’s favorite coffee in town, but Donegal didn’t play favorites, generally going wherever was closest. “What’s the occasion?” Manuel asked, secretly glad that his friend hadn’t stopped at the Cup O’Chino Drive-thru Coffee Experience again.
“I need an occasion? I’ll hop in grab the java. You want the usual?”
Manuel was too good of a detective to believe for a second that there was nothing unusual in the air, but decided to ride with it and see where it was going. He fished into the breast pocket of his leather blazer, finding $10 which he handed to Donegal. “Yeah, thanks.”
Donegal looked at the $10 with a forlorn, almost insulted look.
“What? It’s my turn to buy, right?” Manuel said.
With a shrug, his partner looked up then back at the bill. “So, no muffin?”
“I ate before I left home.”
“No muffin for me?”
Manuel smiled and dug out another dollar to cover the additional costs of one of the caramel apple muffins his friend had developed an addiction to. He leaned the seat back a bit, and contemplated closing his eyes while he waited. Sleep had been coming easier these days, and he no longer had to take pain pills to drift off. That alone was a blessing, as they always made him feel a bit blurry for a few hours after waking up. But lately his sleep hadn’t been restful. He found it strange that less than a year ago, he was lucky to get six hours of sleep in a night. Ever since the accident, he had done little but sleep, and now it seemed that even his waking hours were some kind of dream he couldn’t break out of.
A glint of light caught the corner of his eye, and he craned his head up to see Stardust fly past high above Lafayette Park. The shining blue and gold body armor glinted in the sunlight, and even from this distance, it stirred emotions that Manuel had been trying to fight down. Adrenaline pumped into his veins and he reached for the door briefly before reality set in.
“You aren’t a hero anymore.” His voice sounded hollow in his chest. The adrenaline died down, turning sour in his stomach, sending his hand to shake. He was so focused on calming his shakes that he didn’t even see Donegal return to the car until the door was opened suddenly, sending the shakes into a jumpy repeat performance.
Donegal handed a large cinnamon latte across the driver seat before sliding into the car himself. He took notice of the quiver in Manuel’s hand and grunted. “I spook you or something?”
Manuel shrugged, taking a sip on his perfect and piping hot coffee. “Something.”
They sat in silence for a moment while Donegal buckled himself in and arranged his breakfast on the armrest and drink holder. He started the car and let it run for a second, his eyes looking out the front windshield but unfocused. Finally, he shook his head and turned off the car, turning to face Manuel. “This has been bothering me too long, de la Vega. It’s the frickin’ elephant in the room and since you’re never going to say anything about it, well, I guess I have to.”
“Is this about…” Manuel couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t find the words, and instead looked down at his ruined legs.
“Yeah, and no, not entirely.” Donegal shook his head, making faces while he struggled with what was apparently a difficult topic for him. “I need to know. Is that why you quit?”
“Quit? I didn’t quit…”
Donegal looked at Manuel out of the corner of his eye and sighed. “Then why hasn’t anyone seen him since your accident.”
Manuel felt his mouth go dry. “I don’t understand.”
“Damnit, buddy. I’m not an idiot, okay? I admit it took me a while, but come on, what kind of detective would I be if I didn’t figure out that my partner on the force was the vigilante Gato Loco?”
Denial was the first thought that sprang to mind, and Manuel hated himself for it. But what would he really be denying? That he was Gato Loco, which he was, or that he had quit, which he was afraid that he had? “How long have you known?”
“Ah hell, I don’t know.” Donegal sighed and rubbed his eyes. He took a sip of his coffee and gave the matter a moment of sincere thought. “I think maybe I always suspected. I mean, your helmet masked your voice pretty well, electronically, I bet. But how many 6’2” skinny detectives with a penchant for motorcycles live in this town? Three, four at most, right? And he always seemed to overlap the cases we were on, like the thing with Jubal Kane, or the ventriloquist dummy murder. And I never saw the two of you in the same place at the same time…”
“By that logic, he could be Michael Jackson.”
“Too short, wise guy.” Donegal smiled. He started tearing off bits of muffin and tucking them into his mouth. “Anyway, the accident cinched it. You get damn near killed in an accident for which there is some suspicious accident report filed on the same night Condor and Wild Kat get nailed to a wall down near the river, well, a smart detective gets curious. Then Gato Loco just disappears, never to be seen again. Meanwhile they’re replacing shredded muscle tissue in your thighs, trying to patch major arteries, and did I mention that accident should have killed you?”
“Sometimes, Donegal, I almost wish it did.”
Donegal opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. They sat in the car sipping coffee and Donegal continued dismantling his muffin. “So, you want to tell me what happened?”
“There was a shipment down at the docks…major drug delivery fresh out of the Caribbean was the rumor. A few of the Protectorate went down to deal with it, and I had my own interest in the case, looking for a friend who was missing and had ties to those circles. There wasn’t supposed to be any heavy hitters there, just a drug gang, violent maybe, but human.”
“But it was a trap.” Donegal grunted around a mouthful of muffin.
Manuel nodded. “When I got there, Wild Kat and Condor were nailed to the wall of a warehouse as a warning. Wild Kat was alive, but only barely. Condor…he had only been with them for a few weeks. He was still on probation. But they killed him anyway. I was on my cycle trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I didn’t even see who did it.”
“Who did what?”
“Someone blew up my bike. I had my reflexes wired up fast it would make your head spin. I had a multi-stage force field on my suit. And none of it mattered. The bike went sky high, and I went with it.”
“That suit of yours probably saved your life.”
“After five months of painful surgery and physical therapy, I still need sticks to walk. I have one questionably functioning testicle remaining. I might never be able to ride a cycle again. That suit saved my life. But if it wasn’t for the suit, my life wouldn’t have been in danger.”
“So it’s all gone now? The costume, the bike, the super powers; they’re all gone?” Donegal said quietly.
“I never had any super powers.” He hoped that his personal conviction that the questionable psychic gift he possessed didn’t count as a super power would be convincing enough to prevent Donegal from seeing through the lie.
Donegal seemed satisfied with the answer. “Well, you’re still a damn fine detective, and a hell of a partner.”
“Thanks. Now, would you like to get us to the station before someone notices that we’re fifteen minutes late?”
“Shit.” Donegal dropped the picked-clean muffin wrapper on the floorboard and started up the engine. Manuel finished his coffee on the way to work, thankful that his friend hadn’t pried too closely. Super powers, no, he had nothing so grand as super powers. But when he touched things from time to time, he – saw things. A fork at a restaurant could give him a vision of the last person who used it, or the busboy picking it up off the floor and wiping it on his apron. A doll at a murder scene could show him a happy childhood memory or a scene by scene re-enactment of a murder. They were strong, sometimes requiring all of his concentration to not let on that he was seeing things. But they were random, and that was a source of constant frustration.
And ever since the accident, they had been – different. He had five months on world class pain killers, laid up in bed for most of it, and that was a lot of time to focus on more cerebral pursuits. It wasn’t like there was anything on daytime TV. And it wasn’t like he received many visitors. Manuel had learned to interpret the visions a lot better, and he was proud of that. And sometimes he could tell, as his fingers approached an object that a vision was in the offering. But it was never at his bidding.
Considering how tough traffic had been earlier, they made great time. Once upstairs at his desk, Manuel noticed a short stack of paperwork, with a colorful postcard on top of the stack, as if it were pinning the folders to his desk. He reached to pick it up and felt a now familiar electric tingle. His fingers stopped inches from the bright and sunny painted cardstock and he paused to contemplate it a bit longer.
A small tourist town, brightly adorned with wild, red roses stared up at him from the 4x6 card. “Greetings from Buena Rosa” was printed across the top in sweeping white letters. He had never heard of Buena Rosa. The buildings were classic haciendas, but that meant nothing except that the town was probably in or near a desert. He imagined it was somewhere in America, because the writing was in English, but he had known tourist traps in Mexico that catered to Americans and printed their postcards in English.
Manuel glanced casually around to make sure no one was watching. Thankfully, Donegal was pulling files for an ongoing case and was nowhere to be seen. Manuel picked up the folder beneath the postcard, and deftly flipped the card over so he could read the back without touching it.
Mexican stamps and postmark were the first thing he noticed. The second was the chilling message printed carefully on the back.
“Esther Vega is being held by the police in Buena Rosa, Mexico. She is innocent, but the charge is very serious and they say they have a confession. She needs your help.”
It was signed simply, “A friend.”
He looked closely at the postmark. The card was mailed from Mexico, but not from Buena Rosa itself. He fired up the computer at his desk, and after entering in his password, pulled up Buena Rosa on a map. It was near the U.S. border with Mexico, just west of the southern tip of Texas. He knew without looking further why the postcard was printed in English.
Buena Rosa was a maquiladora. Time was, they were only near the borders, but now they were all over Mexico. Towns built up around factories that did final assembly on products while the parts were generally made somewhere else. Building factories, training a staff who would work for far less than American workers, it was all very cost effective, and the factory towns spread like a virus. Manuel had seen one himself, but only the once.
He didn’t doubt for a second that his cousin Esther was there. She was a fiery hearted activist, always had been. She had been traveling around trying to unionize worker last he heard, and it made perfect sense that she would have tried to do so at one of the many maquiladoras. And if she stirred up too much trouble, putting her in jail on some trumped up charge was par for the course.
“Someone on vacation and they didn’t think to take me?” Donegal pointed at the postcard with the thin folder in his hand.
“My cousin, Esther. She’s in some kind of trouble back home.”
Donegal’s tone became somber instantly. “Is it serious trouble?”
“Legal trouble.”
“Then it’s serious. She need you to bail her out or something?”
“Or something.” Manuel set his jaw and touched the postcard.
A vision washed over Manuel, and he could smell factory smoke, tinged ever so slightly by the scent of wild, desert roses. A woman’s body was lying in an arroyo and the birds and coyotes had been at her. Nearby, he could hear a woman crying, but couldn’t see who it was. His gaze drifted out over the arid hills and saw a storm of carrion birds circling overhead like a tornado of feathers.
There was death there – a lot of death. But it wasn’t just death, which had its own scent. No, this was murder. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it on his skin like chemical dust and oil, clinging to him.
Manuel blinked and saw Donegal looking down at the postcard from across the desk. “Jesus. I wonder what they’re holding her for.”
“I don’t know,” Manuel said, his jaw set with grim determination he hadn’t felt in months. “But I intend to find out.”
The old black woman clutched her purse tightly against her chest and eyed Manuel suspiciously. He offered her a warm smile and tilted his head down, drawing her eyes to his sleek, black forearm crutches. Her attitude shifted quickly through shades of relief to pity then back to relief. From criminal to cripple in seven seconds, he thought, a new personal record. He almost preferred she think she was a mugger.
Wind sliced up from the river, carrying with it the smell of diesel and urban decay. A pair of cargo ships had docked in the night, and a steady stream of rigs had been making their way into the freight yards all morning, choking the air with fumes and noise. Even in the Hollows, blocks from Quayside, it had disrupted traffic enough to make Manuel’s morning commute difficult. And with a low pressure system camped out over the city for the past few days, temperatures had climbed to a very un-New England high nineties, reminding Manuel of the weather back home. It was hot and muggy in Cobalt City, but it was no Mexico City.
The weather was starting to make people crazy, and violent crime rates had been spiking. No wonder the woman was suspicious. She had every reason to be. In fact, a little suspicion in her direction wouldn’t be unhealthy. A mugger had been dropped with pepper spray by an old lady in Lafayette Park two days ago, and when the mugger was down she tasered him in the head, killing him.
Manuel gave the old woman a quick look over, reassuring himself that she still thought he was harmless.
Harmless.
And to think. He used to be a super hero.
How the mighty have fallen.
A well-maintained brown hybrid sedan pulled up to the bus stop, the passenger side window already on its way down. Manuel caught sight of the curly ginger hair and porn star mustache of his partner Donegal in the driver seat and stumped closer to the curb, leaning over to put his head into the air conditioned interior.
“You riding the bus again like the common people, de la Vega?”
“Closer than the monorail stop.” Manuel shrugged.
“No friend of mine rides the damn bus,” Donegal growled. “Get in.”
It had been two months since Manuel had started back to work at the station. Donegal had picked him up at the same spot for a all but a week of that time. It wasn’t a formal arrangement, and Manuel suspected that eventually Donegal would tire of the charity and stop driving twenty minutes out of his way every morning.
“You plan on stopping for coffee?” Manuel asked as he tucked his forearm crutches into the back seat.
“Is it your turn to buy?”
“Si.”
“Then I’m stopping for coffee. Buckle up, I’m going to try to make the light.” Donegal zipped dangerously out into traffic and through the yellow light, eliciting angry horns from other drivers.
Ten minutes later, Donegal flipped a U-turn in the middle of a relatively quiet street, securing a parking space across from Schrodinger’s Cup. It was Manuel’s favorite coffee in town, but Donegal didn’t play favorites, generally going wherever was closest. “What’s the occasion?” Manuel asked, secretly glad that his friend hadn’t stopped at the Cup O’Chino Drive-thru Coffee Experience again.
“I need an occasion? I’ll hop in grab the java. You want the usual?”
Manuel was too good of a detective to believe for a second that there was nothing unusual in the air, but decided to ride with it and see where it was going. He fished into the breast pocket of his leather blazer, finding $10 which he handed to Donegal. “Yeah, thanks.”
Donegal looked at the $10 with a forlorn, almost insulted look.
“What? It’s my turn to buy, right?” Manuel said.
With a shrug, his partner looked up then back at the bill. “So, no muffin?”
“I ate before I left home.”
“No muffin for me?”
Manuel smiled and dug out another dollar to cover the additional costs of one of the caramel apple muffins his friend had developed an addiction to. He leaned the seat back a bit, and contemplated closing his eyes while he waited. Sleep had been coming easier these days, and he no longer had to take pain pills to drift off. That alone was a blessing, as they always made him feel a bit blurry for a few hours after waking up. But lately his sleep hadn’t been restful. He found it strange that less than a year ago, he was lucky to get six hours of sleep in a night. Ever since the accident, he had done little but sleep, and now it seemed that even his waking hours were some kind of dream he couldn’t break out of.
A glint of light caught the corner of his eye, and he craned his head up to see Stardust fly past high above Lafayette Park. The shining blue and gold body armor glinted in the sunlight, and even from this distance, it stirred emotions that Manuel had been trying to fight down. Adrenaline pumped into his veins and he reached for the door briefly before reality set in.
“You aren’t a hero anymore.” His voice sounded hollow in his chest. The adrenaline died down, turning sour in his stomach, sending his hand to shake. He was so focused on calming his shakes that he didn’t even see Donegal return to the car until the door was opened suddenly, sending the shakes into a jumpy repeat performance.
Donegal handed a large cinnamon latte across the driver seat before sliding into the car himself. He took notice of the quiver in Manuel’s hand and grunted. “I spook you or something?”
Manuel shrugged, taking a sip on his perfect and piping hot coffee. “Something.”
They sat in silence for a moment while Donegal buckled himself in and arranged his breakfast on the armrest and drink holder. He started the car and let it run for a second, his eyes looking out the front windshield but unfocused. Finally, he shook his head and turned off the car, turning to face Manuel. “This has been bothering me too long, de la Vega. It’s the frickin’ elephant in the room and since you’re never going to say anything about it, well, I guess I have to.”
“Is this about…” Manuel couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t find the words, and instead looked down at his ruined legs.
“Yeah, and no, not entirely.” Donegal shook his head, making faces while he struggled with what was apparently a difficult topic for him. “I need to know. Is that why you quit?”
“Quit? I didn’t quit…”
Donegal looked at Manuel out of the corner of his eye and sighed. “Then why hasn’t anyone seen him since your accident.”
Manuel felt his mouth go dry. “I don’t understand.”
“Damnit, buddy. I’m not an idiot, okay? I admit it took me a while, but come on, what kind of detective would I be if I didn’t figure out that my partner on the force was the vigilante Gato Loco?”
Denial was the first thought that sprang to mind, and Manuel hated himself for it. But what would he really be denying? That he was Gato Loco, which he was, or that he had quit, which he was afraid that he had? “How long have you known?”
“Ah hell, I don’t know.” Donegal sighed and rubbed his eyes. He took a sip of his coffee and gave the matter a moment of sincere thought. “I think maybe I always suspected. I mean, your helmet masked your voice pretty well, electronically, I bet. But how many 6’2” skinny detectives with a penchant for motorcycles live in this town? Three, four at most, right? And he always seemed to overlap the cases we were on, like the thing with Jubal Kane, or the ventriloquist dummy murder. And I never saw the two of you in the same place at the same time…”
“By that logic, he could be Michael Jackson.”
“Too short, wise guy.” Donegal smiled. He started tearing off bits of muffin and tucking them into his mouth. “Anyway, the accident cinched it. You get damn near killed in an accident for which there is some suspicious accident report filed on the same night Condor and Wild Kat get nailed to a wall down near the river, well, a smart detective gets curious. Then Gato Loco just disappears, never to be seen again. Meanwhile they’re replacing shredded muscle tissue in your thighs, trying to patch major arteries, and did I mention that accident should have killed you?”
“Sometimes, Donegal, I almost wish it did.”
Donegal opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. They sat in the car sipping coffee and Donegal continued dismantling his muffin. “So, you want to tell me what happened?”
“There was a shipment down at the docks…major drug delivery fresh out of the Caribbean was the rumor. A few of the Protectorate went down to deal with it, and I had my own interest in the case, looking for a friend who was missing and had ties to those circles. There wasn’t supposed to be any heavy hitters there, just a drug gang, violent maybe, but human.”
“But it was a trap.” Donegal grunted around a mouthful of muffin.
Manuel nodded. “When I got there, Wild Kat and Condor were nailed to the wall of a warehouse as a warning. Wild Kat was alive, but only barely. Condor…he had only been with them for a few weeks. He was still on probation. But they killed him anyway. I was on my cycle trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I didn’t even see who did it.”
“Who did what?”
“Someone blew up my bike. I had my reflexes wired up fast it would make your head spin. I had a multi-stage force field on my suit. And none of it mattered. The bike went sky high, and I went with it.”
“That suit of yours probably saved your life.”
“After five months of painful surgery and physical therapy, I still need sticks to walk. I have one questionably functioning testicle remaining. I might never be able to ride a cycle again. That suit saved my life. But if it wasn’t for the suit, my life wouldn’t have been in danger.”
“So it’s all gone now? The costume, the bike, the super powers; they’re all gone?” Donegal said quietly.
“I never had any super powers.” He hoped that his personal conviction that the questionable psychic gift he possessed didn’t count as a super power would be convincing enough to prevent Donegal from seeing through the lie.
Donegal seemed satisfied with the answer. “Well, you’re still a damn fine detective, and a hell of a partner.”
“Thanks. Now, would you like to get us to the station before someone notices that we’re fifteen minutes late?”
“Shit.” Donegal dropped the picked-clean muffin wrapper on the floorboard and started up the engine. Manuel finished his coffee on the way to work, thankful that his friend hadn’t pried too closely. Super powers, no, he had nothing so grand as super powers. But when he touched things from time to time, he – saw things. A fork at a restaurant could give him a vision of the last person who used it, or the busboy picking it up off the floor and wiping it on his apron. A doll at a murder scene could show him a happy childhood memory or a scene by scene re-enactment of a murder. They were strong, sometimes requiring all of his concentration to not let on that he was seeing things. But they were random, and that was a source of constant frustration.
And ever since the accident, they had been – different. He had five months on world class pain killers, laid up in bed for most of it, and that was a lot of time to focus on more cerebral pursuits. It wasn’t like there was anything on daytime TV. And it wasn’t like he received many visitors. Manuel had learned to interpret the visions a lot better, and he was proud of that. And sometimes he could tell, as his fingers approached an object that a vision was in the offering. But it was never at his bidding.
Considering how tough traffic had been earlier, they made great time. Once upstairs at his desk, Manuel noticed a short stack of paperwork, with a colorful postcard on top of the stack, as if it were pinning the folders to his desk. He reached to pick it up and felt a now familiar electric tingle. His fingers stopped inches from the bright and sunny painted cardstock and he paused to contemplate it a bit longer.
A small tourist town, brightly adorned with wild, red roses stared up at him from the 4x6 card. “Greetings from Buena Rosa” was printed across the top in sweeping white letters. He had never heard of Buena Rosa. The buildings were classic haciendas, but that meant nothing except that the town was probably in or near a desert. He imagined it was somewhere in America, because the writing was in English, but he had known tourist traps in Mexico that catered to Americans and printed their postcards in English.
Manuel glanced casually around to make sure no one was watching. Thankfully, Donegal was pulling files for an ongoing case and was nowhere to be seen. Manuel picked up the folder beneath the postcard, and deftly flipped the card over so he could read the back without touching it.
Mexican stamps and postmark were the first thing he noticed. The second was the chilling message printed carefully on the back.
“Esther Vega is being held by the police in Buena Rosa, Mexico. She is innocent, but the charge is very serious and they say they have a confession. She needs your help.”
It was signed simply, “A friend.”
He looked closely at the postmark. The card was mailed from Mexico, but not from Buena Rosa itself. He fired up the computer at his desk, and after entering in his password, pulled up Buena Rosa on a map. It was near the U.S. border with Mexico, just west of the southern tip of Texas. He knew without looking further why the postcard was printed in English.
Buena Rosa was a maquiladora. Time was, they were only near the borders, but now they were all over Mexico. Towns built up around factories that did final assembly on products while the parts were generally made somewhere else. Building factories, training a staff who would work for far less than American workers, it was all very cost effective, and the factory towns spread like a virus. Manuel had seen one himself, but only the once.
He didn’t doubt for a second that his cousin Esther was there. She was a fiery hearted activist, always had been. She had been traveling around trying to unionize worker last he heard, and it made perfect sense that she would have tried to do so at one of the many maquiladoras. And if she stirred up too much trouble, putting her in jail on some trumped up charge was par for the course.
“Someone on vacation and they didn’t think to take me?” Donegal pointed at the postcard with the thin folder in his hand.
“My cousin, Esther. She’s in some kind of trouble back home.”
Donegal’s tone became somber instantly. “Is it serious trouble?”
“Legal trouble.”
“Then it’s serious. She need you to bail her out or something?”
“Or something.” Manuel set his jaw and touched the postcard.
A vision washed over Manuel, and he could smell factory smoke, tinged ever so slightly by the scent of wild, desert roses. A woman’s body was lying in an arroyo and the birds and coyotes had been at her. Nearby, he could hear a woman crying, but couldn’t see who it was. His gaze drifted out over the arid hills and saw a storm of carrion birds circling overhead like a tornado of feathers.
There was death there – a lot of death. But it wasn’t just death, which had its own scent. No, this was murder. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it on his skin like chemical dust and oil, clinging to him.
Manuel blinked and saw Donegal looking down at the postcard from across the desk. “Jesus. I wonder what they’re holding her for.”
“I don’t know,” Manuel said, his jaw set with grim determination he hadn’t felt in months. “But I intend to find out.”
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Greetings From Buena Rosa - Prologue
Prologue
The cell was dark, and in that darkness, Esther heard things moving. She gauged they were cockroaches by the sound; the dry, scraping of tiny legs on the cinderblock walls. She had grown up in a middle class neighborhood of Mexico City, but even there the relentless insects could find a home somehow, making them familiar. No, the roaches didn’t bother her too much. She knew they hated the smell of people, and would most likely leave her alone. But here, near the U.S. border, there were worse things in the dark. The idea of a scorpion living in the poorly maintained jail, nesting under the floor, or in the wall, no, that was not entirely unlikely.
And as much as that thought knotted her stomach every time she contemplated rolling over on the hard cot, wondering what she might “disturb” by her movement, she knew that there was even worse than scorpions roaming this building. That something worse wore a badge.
They had come for her in the dead of night. Arresting someone half asleep was always much easier than risking a confrontation. She woke with a start, woolen-headed with sleep and a belly-full of Dio Diablo beer, and heard shouts and wood splintering. The lights were bright in her face, and it took a full twenty seconds to realize that someone had cuffed her arms tightly behind her back. Two minutes later, and Esther was in the back of the dust covered Pegasus Motors SUV which the local law used for their paddy wagon.
They didn’t tell her what she had been arrested for until they had beaten a confession from her with hoses. She had gotten off lucky, she thought. There was still blood on some of the surgical and less-than-surgical tools displayed in the “interview” room. And a room she had been led past on the way there had the reek of ozone and singed flesh.
Before then, she had never really seen any proof that the local law used torture. She suspected, of course. They all did. And the residents of Buena Rosa generally knew that their police had the toys to carry out torture if it was their desire to do so. The police in Buena Rosa had a chilling record for closed cases, something of which they took significant pride.
It wasn’t until after Esther had signed the confession that she realized that she was being held for the murder of Muriel Cruz, a local woman she knew only superficially through her attempts to unionize the workers of Pegasus Motor Corporation in Buena Rosa. There was no way it would hold up, she told herself. A confession under torture…no court in the world would accept it. But still she tossed and turned on the hard cot, careful not to disturb any unknown cellmates. And her bruises began to heal. And she began to lose track of days in the dark.
And gradually, she began to lose hope.
Skritch, skritch, skritch-
That wasn’t a cockroach. She knew that. No scorpion either. She pulled her long, matted dark hair free from around her ear and listened intently.
Skritch, skritch, skritch-
No…too large…too...regular. A thought occurred to her and she desperately tried to put it out of her mind. But in the darkness, all it took was the slightest suggestion to let the imagination run wild. The jail shared an alley with a greasy taco stand, and she had seen the rats running in herds there on occasion. A rat, given the inclination, could chew through concrete. And if they were hungry enough, there was little that a rat wouldn’t eat.
Skritch, skritch, skritch – tap, tap-
Esther froze. The sound, wasn’t coming from near the ground, she realized, but higher up, near chest level. And had she really heard that? Had she really heard the tap, or was she finally going out of her mind in isolation and darkness?
Tap, tap-
Reaching towards the untreated cinderblock wall, she ran her fingers
across the rough surface, trying to ignore how much they shook. She curled her hand into a fist and it felt good. It felt strong. She pounded against the wall twice, feeling the rough concrete abrade her hand. Esther didn’t care. She had been hurt far worse recently.
Her pound was met with two more taps. No, she thought. Definitely not a rat. That was metal she heard. “Hello?” she heard her own voice, dry and cracked. She summoned up reserves of strength, willing herself to raise her voice past the painful whisper. “Hello?” Louder this time, she thought. Good.
A dusting of mortar fell across her knuckles, startling her. And a pinprick of light filtered through a crack between cinderblocks. “Who is this? Who did I find?” The voice was terse, and Esther couldn’t tell if it were male or female.
But she didn’t care anymore. She had been forgotten there, left to die in the dark, without being given the chance to let anyone know where she was, to let them know she was innocent. “Esther Vega. My name is Esther Vega. Please you have to help me.”
“Why should I help you, Esther? You killed Muriel, left her body in a wash outside of town for the coyotes.”
“I didn’t do it,” Esther pleaded, surprised that she still had tears left as they cut rivulets through the grime on her face. “Please. They made me sign a confession. I didn’t even know what I was signing until it was too late. I didn’t hurt anyone…didn’t kill anyone. You have to believe me.”
There was silence on the other side of the wall. It seemed to Esther that it stretched on forever. She wept, trying to do so silently to not drown out any possible answer.
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry. I believe you, but I can’t help you,” the voice on the other side of the wall finally answered. “I wanted to know. I didn’t think it could have been you who killed her. Muriel’s friends thought you were a trouble maker, but not trouble, comprende? So I believe you, but what I believe won’t help you. I don’t think there is anyone in Buena Rosa who can help you. I’m sorry.”
Esther felt her heart sink. Of course this stranger couldn’t help her. And who was she to be contemplating a jail break, anyway? She was just a labor organizer, in her thirties with a lifetime of drifting and high ideals. She wouldn’t last a day on the run from the law. “Can you at least let my family know I’m here? Can you tell someone where to find me?”
The silence which greeted Esther’s request was absolute. She stilled her breath until she could hear nothing but her own heart beat pounding in her ears. No response from the other side came for a long moment, and she began to think the voice was gone never to return. The stomach-churning possibility that she had imagined everything clawed at the edge of her thoughts, and she fought that idea down.
“The police almost saw me,” the voice whispered harshly through the space between cinderblocks. “I can let someone know you are here, but you had better hurry. I don’t want to risk getting singled out by the police. Not in this town.”
“Manuel de la Vega,” Esther said immediately, her voice stronger now. “He’s with the police in Cobalt City, in America. A detective, I think. I don’t know his address or phone number…”
“I can find that part out. It was Manuel de la Vega in Cobalt City, right?”
Esther leaned against the wall and sobbed. Her cousin Manny would be able to fix this. If anyone could help her now, it was him. “Yes. Cobalt City.”
“Keep your chin up, Esther. Help is on the way.”
In the dark of the Buena Rosa jail, Esther repeated her visitor’s words again and again, holding them as a feeble flame against the blackness. “Help is on the way. Help is on the way.”
And in the alley between the jail and the back of a busy taqueria, a mysterious figure slipped from shadow to shadow with another mantra repeated over and over again in a terse whisper. “Manuel de la Vega, Cobalt City Police.”
Shortly the night swallowed both the words and the person who spoke them as if they had never been there at all.
The cell was dark, and in that darkness, Esther heard things moving. She gauged they were cockroaches by the sound; the dry, scraping of tiny legs on the cinderblock walls. She had grown up in a middle class neighborhood of Mexico City, but even there the relentless insects could find a home somehow, making them familiar. No, the roaches didn’t bother her too much. She knew they hated the smell of people, and would most likely leave her alone. But here, near the U.S. border, there were worse things in the dark. The idea of a scorpion living in the poorly maintained jail, nesting under the floor, or in the wall, no, that was not entirely unlikely.
And as much as that thought knotted her stomach every time she contemplated rolling over on the hard cot, wondering what she might “disturb” by her movement, she knew that there was even worse than scorpions roaming this building. That something worse wore a badge.
They had come for her in the dead of night. Arresting someone half asleep was always much easier than risking a confrontation. She woke with a start, woolen-headed with sleep and a belly-full of Dio Diablo beer, and heard shouts and wood splintering. The lights were bright in her face, and it took a full twenty seconds to realize that someone had cuffed her arms tightly behind her back. Two minutes later, and Esther was in the back of the dust covered Pegasus Motors SUV which the local law used for their paddy wagon.
They didn’t tell her what she had been arrested for until they had beaten a confession from her with hoses. She had gotten off lucky, she thought. There was still blood on some of the surgical and less-than-surgical tools displayed in the “interview” room. And a room she had been led past on the way there had the reek of ozone and singed flesh.
Before then, she had never really seen any proof that the local law used torture. She suspected, of course. They all did. And the residents of Buena Rosa generally knew that their police had the toys to carry out torture if it was their desire to do so. The police in Buena Rosa had a chilling record for closed cases, something of which they took significant pride.
It wasn’t until after Esther had signed the confession that she realized that she was being held for the murder of Muriel Cruz, a local woman she knew only superficially through her attempts to unionize the workers of Pegasus Motor Corporation in Buena Rosa. There was no way it would hold up, she told herself. A confession under torture…no court in the world would accept it. But still she tossed and turned on the hard cot, careful not to disturb any unknown cellmates. And her bruises began to heal. And she began to lose track of days in the dark.
And gradually, she began to lose hope.
Skritch, skritch, skritch-
That wasn’t a cockroach. She knew that. No scorpion either. She pulled her long, matted dark hair free from around her ear and listened intently.
Skritch, skritch, skritch-
No…too large…too...regular. A thought occurred to her and she desperately tried to put it out of her mind. But in the darkness, all it took was the slightest suggestion to let the imagination run wild. The jail shared an alley with a greasy taco stand, and she had seen the rats running in herds there on occasion. A rat, given the inclination, could chew through concrete. And if they were hungry enough, there was little that a rat wouldn’t eat.
Skritch, skritch, skritch – tap, tap-
Esther froze. The sound, wasn’t coming from near the ground, she realized, but higher up, near chest level. And had she really heard that? Had she really heard the tap, or was she finally going out of her mind in isolation and darkness?
Tap, tap-
Reaching towards the untreated cinderblock wall, she ran her fingers
across the rough surface, trying to ignore how much they shook. She curled her hand into a fist and it felt good. It felt strong. She pounded against the wall twice, feeling the rough concrete abrade her hand. Esther didn’t care. She had been hurt far worse recently.
Her pound was met with two more taps. No, she thought. Definitely not a rat. That was metal she heard. “Hello?” she heard her own voice, dry and cracked. She summoned up reserves of strength, willing herself to raise her voice past the painful whisper. “Hello?” Louder this time, she thought. Good.
A dusting of mortar fell across her knuckles, startling her. And a pinprick of light filtered through a crack between cinderblocks. “Who is this? Who did I find?” The voice was terse, and Esther couldn’t tell if it were male or female.
But she didn’t care anymore. She had been forgotten there, left to die in the dark, without being given the chance to let anyone know where she was, to let them know she was innocent. “Esther Vega. My name is Esther Vega. Please you have to help me.”
“Why should I help you, Esther? You killed Muriel, left her body in a wash outside of town for the coyotes.”
“I didn’t do it,” Esther pleaded, surprised that she still had tears left as they cut rivulets through the grime on her face. “Please. They made me sign a confession. I didn’t even know what I was signing until it was too late. I didn’t hurt anyone…didn’t kill anyone. You have to believe me.”
There was silence on the other side of the wall. It seemed to Esther that it stretched on forever. She wept, trying to do so silently to not drown out any possible answer.
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry. I believe you, but I can’t help you,” the voice on the other side of the wall finally answered. “I wanted to know. I didn’t think it could have been you who killed her. Muriel’s friends thought you were a trouble maker, but not trouble, comprende? So I believe you, but what I believe won’t help you. I don’t think there is anyone in Buena Rosa who can help you. I’m sorry.”
Esther felt her heart sink. Of course this stranger couldn’t help her. And who was she to be contemplating a jail break, anyway? She was just a labor organizer, in her thirties with a lifetime of drifting and high ideals. She wouldn’t last a day on the run from the law. “Can you at least let my family know I’m here? Can you tell someone where to find me?”
The silence which greeted Esther’s request was absolute. She stilled her breath until she could hear nothing but her own heart beat pounding in her ears. No response from the other side came for a long moment, and she began to think the voice was gone never to return. The stomach-churning possibility that she had imagined everything clawed at the edge of her thoughts, and she fought that idea down.
“The police almost saw me,” the voice whispered harshly through the space between cinderblocks. “I can let someone know you are here, but you had better hurry. I don’t want to risk getting singled out by the police. Not in this town.”
“Manuel de la Vega,” Esther said immediately, her voice stronger now. “He’s with the police in Cobalt City, in America. A detective, I think. I don’t know his address or phone number…”
“I can find that part out. It was Manuel de la Vega in Cobalt City, right?”
Esther leaned against the wall and sobbed. Her cousin Manny would be able to fix this. If anyone could help her now, it was him. “Yes. Cobalt City.”
“Keep your chin up, Esther. Help is on the way.”
In the dark of the Buena Rosa jail, Esther repeated her visitor’s words again and again, holding them as a feeble flame against the blackness. “Help is on the way. Help is on the way.”
And in the alley between the jail and the back of a busy taqueria, a mysterious figure slipped from shadow to shadow with another mantra repeated over and over again in a terse whisper. “Manuel de la Vega, Cobalt City Police.”
Shortly the night swallowed both the words and the person who spoke them as if they had never been there at all.
NaNoWriMo Progress
So this is the official meter. Not much time to write anything that isn't associated with Greetings From Buena Rosa now, but I'm sure there will be ample posts in December when I return to sanity. My novel? It is a noir south of the border mystery with a little masked vigilante influence. Think of it as a contemporary Touch of Evil, the Orson Wells movie released in 1958 which is widely considered the last true example of film noir. Only mine has a wise-cracking panda in it.
If you want to see a sample, seek me out on NaNoWriMo and do an author search for me. I can only post 10,000 words at a time there, so earlier chapters will be deleted as newer ones are finished.
-T
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)