Dark horse, p.13
Dark Horse, page 13
Evan lowered his voice with respect. “Perdóneme.”
She started, jerking back in her chair, then looked up at him with black-rimmed eyes and a hundred-yard war-zone gaze.
He said, “Estoy tratando de identificar el cuerpo de una joven que usted tiene aquí.”
“Identify a body?” she said in crisp English. “Are you Migra? PD?”
Sensing that she was not someone who could be lied to, he shook his head.
“Family member?”
“I’m here on behalf of a family member.”
“I’m sorry. There are legal issues. Confidentiality.” She jotted a few more items on a form. “You like to think we don’t care about such technicalities here, but we do.”
He remained quiet. Thirty seconds passed. Another thirty.
Finally she dropped her pen in frustration and looked back up. “What?”
“You go to extraordinary lengths to try to identify these bodies for the family members,” he said. “Posting photos of tattoos and personal effects on the database. I represent a father who is wrecked with grief and concern over his daughter. Will you please allow me to confirm if he needs to start making arrangements?”
She stared at him. He wondered if she ever smiled. He wondered if it was even possible after doing this job.
“Why do you think she’s here?”
“In the personal effects you documented was a locket necklace,” he said. “Given to her by her father.”
He held up the picture on his phone. She took it in briskly, then typed at her computer for a moment, the monitor’s glow illuminating her reading glasses.
Abruptly, she scooted her chair away from the counter and walked back to the kitchen. It took a moment for him to realize he was to follow her.
The air-conditioning blasted in the kitchen but was no match for the bodies on gurneys shoved against the walls. Two of her co-workers moved among the dead, taking photographs, jotting notes on clipboards. A few corpses were laid out on the stainless-steel counters and rolling worktables that had once been used to chop lettuce and whisk corn meal. A faint hospital hum of machinery, tubes feeding the bodies, preserving the flesh.
“Is it always this crowded?” Evan asked.
“This is the overflow morgue. That’s why we are here on Sunday. Seven days a week.” She gestured at a NEGRO MODELO sign hanging in the sole window, its neon tubes coated with dust. “As you can see, we make do with what we have. Today is worse than usual. They found an ice-cream truck abandoned in Chihuahua. Fifteen bodies locked inside. The smell, it hits you like a paste.”
She snapped on latex gloves and walked around, checking toe tags. Evan followed, breathing through his nose, fighting to hold his gag reflex at bay. Behind them a camera flashed and clicked.
“The pinche guías don’t care about anything,” she said. “They take their money and pump them full of coca or diet pills to power them through the desert. Some have heart attacks. Some are left behind, alone beneath the sun. And even if they do make it? The cartel gets their filthy hands on their children back home, makes them work off an endless ransom. It’s slave labor. The people working all around you, in your hotels and fields, mowing your lawns.”
She halted before a parched form on the prep counter. Lipless and noseless, skin shrunken around the skull, features demolished by triple-digit desert heat. A clipboard rested beside the corpse, showing basic identifying information and the coordinates where her body had been discovered.
“Here. This is your Juana Doe.”
It was difficult to believe that the shriveled form before him was once a vibrant human. More difficult yet to think that it had been Anjelina.
A plastic bag tied to her ankle held the locket and chain, three rusted hair clips, and a tube of melted lipstick oozing maroon. The woman loosened the bag on the ankle, removed the locket, and handed it to Evan. He clicked it open. A posed wedding picture, young Aragón beaming in a tuxedo, Belicia in flowing white, their hands clasped before them in a way couples never held hands in real life.
He thought about Anjelina’s room, posters and fluffy throw pillows. The tears on Aragón’s cheeks as he recalled them at the beach when she was a baby. Evan’s thoughts bled into Joey’s wanting to go on a road trip, out alone in the world where things like this happened to young women, where one minute they were smiling at their birthday party and the next laid out on a stainless-steel prep table in a makeshift morgue.
The Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.
He cleared his throat, cleared his mind. “How am I supposed to confirm her identity?”
“Wait,” the woman said, picking up the stick-dry arm and examining the hand carefully. “She might be ready.”
From a nearby drawer, she removed an ink pad and a blank notecard. She inked the corpse’s prints and tried rolling them onto the pad, to no avail. “The fingers are not plumped up enough yet,” she said. “And even when they are, the prints might be ruined.”
“Sometimes you can slide the skin off the hand,” Evan said. “And wear it like a glove to press the prints more fully.”
She stared at him, her long face growing even longer. “Who are you?”
“I’ve seen terrible things, too.” He gestured at the body.
She nodded.
He reached for the hand and tugged gently at the skin, but there was no give. It had been baked onto the flesh.
He leaned on the table, regarding the body.
Knobby knees turned inward, ribs visible, collarbones pronounced.
And there, an unnatural curve beneath the leathered flesh of the breasts. A kind of roundness not found in nature.
Evan looked at the woman, gestured at the breast. “May I?”
She nodded once more.
He pushed the skin at the side, felt the hard silicon edge beneath.
His heart quickened, a surge of hope. From what little he knew of Anjelina, he thought it unlikely that she had gotten breast implants.
“Can I … Do you have a scalpel?”
The woman must have read the emotion in his face, because she got a scalpel and returned to his side.
“I will do it,” she said.
She carved a six-inch incision down from the armpit and applied gentle pressure until the translucent yellow implant popped out. She ran it under the faucet to clear the body fluids and then placed it beneath a desk lamp clamped to the sink.
The serial number, rendered in soft relief.
Before touching his phone, Evan washed his hands and then washed them again, keeping the water hot enough to turn his flesh red.
A quick Google search brought up a legal website for breast-implants showing which models were eligible for recalls and which were considered safe.
He typed in the number. Realized he was biting his lip. Stopped biting it.
The surgery had taken place at Centro Médico Internacional on Sexta Sur y Avenida Longoria.
Eleven years ago.
Anjelina would have been seven.
He exhaled, lowered his head.
“What?” the woman asked.
“It’s not her.”
She rested a hand on his shoulder blade. He appreciated the gesture but didn’t like being touched with hands that had just touched the dead. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thank you.”
“This will help us, too. We can find her family. And perhaps get her a proper burial.”
He looked her in the face, taking in those black-rimmed eyes. “You do important work,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
He left her there among the bodies.
The air outside provided little relief. Pausing by his car, he thumbed off a text to Joey:
NOT HER.
He drove with the windows down and the air conditioner high. The smell was in his hair, his clothes, his pores. He passed a motel and pulled over, paid cash for a room. The clerk wrinkled his nose as he handed over the key.
Evan grabbed his duffel bag from the trunk, went inside, and stripped naked, piling his clothes in the corner. He took a shower, scrubbing himself from head to toe, and then dressed in an identical set of clothes. By the time he emerged from the bathroom, the stench of death had emanated from his clothes and hung heavy in the room.
He found a metal trash can in the alley behind the motel, dumped in his clothes, and burned them. But he couldn’t get the smell off his hands.
Back inside, stripped down again, another shower. He dried off with a fresh towel, flossed his teeth, clipped his fingernails. Stole a bedsheet to sit on for the ride back until he could air out the seats.
He wanted to have Guaridón in the rearview before the afternoon came. That’s when cartel violence intensified, peaking by design just before the six-o’clock evening news—menace and marketing hand in hand.
He rode the whole way with the windows down.
It was dusk by the time he arrived back at Aragón’s complex.
Special Ed and Kiki were waiting at the front gate, bullshitting with a few PMCs. Eduardo was cradling the arm Evan had nearly hyperextended but released it quickly when he recognized the car.
Evan slowed, stuck an elbow out the window.
“You don’t just leave whenever you want,” Eduardo said.
“That’s exactly what I do.”
“Keep talking back,” Eduardo said. “And you’ll see what happens.”
“How’s your arm?” Evan said.
Kiki smirked a little, and Eduardo glared over at him.
Evan held up Anjelina’s locket, let it dangle beneath his fist. “Open the gate,” he said.
They opened the gate and hopped into a Jeep to follow.
As Evan coasted up to the house, the front door opened and Aragón came out onto the porch.
Twisting one hand in the other, he walked toward Evan, meeting him at the driveway.
“I came from the morgue,” Evan said. “It wasn’t her. But I found this.”
Aragón took the locket, and his knees buckled. Evan steeled him with an arm across the small of his back.
“I’m fine,” Aragón said irritably, pulling away. “I’m fine.” He stared at the locket, then clenched it tight and pressed his fist to his forehead, shutting his eyes, his lips moving in a silent prayer.
The Jeep remained at the curb, Kiki and Special Ed keeping a respectful distance.
After a time Aragón lifted his head and looked at Evan.
Violent men and trauma victims often recede behind their faces, shrinking back and in, leaving flat eyes to face the world. Aragón’s eyes weren’t like that. They held a staggering depth of knowledge and pain and life lived unflinchingly and close to the marrow. Soulful eyes, the eyes of survivors who do more than survive, of war veterans and the terminally ill and the grateful living, the eyes of those who refuse to give up or look away or retreat into numbness.
His voice came hoarse and cracked. “And now?”
“The Leones,” Evan said. “What do you have on them?”
Aragón’s jaw shifted left and then right, as if resetting itself. “I know them better than they know themselves.”
Evan said, “Tell me everything.”
20
Filthy and Subhuman
Anjelina was tired of lying in bed. Her head throbbed, and she felt nauseated and hot beneath the slow-turning paddle fan on the high ceiling. She cast off the covers, and then a freeze hit her so she pulled them on again.
She sobbed quietly for a time, curled inward, one hand pressed to her stomach, the other held over her face as if she could close her eyes to the desperation of her situation. Her pillow was wet with tears, her sheets damp with sweat, and she was exhausted from trying not to make noise.
She was hungry and sticky and completely unmoored.
Her father had always said to take the world on in your own terms, to hold true to what you felt was right and force reality to organize itself around you, good or bad. That’s what she’d have to do now. Even now.
She slipped out of bed, anticipating the cool floor, but even the tile had been warmed by the satanic heat.
Cracking the door, she peered out into the hall. It looked clear.
She started to step out when a low ticking noise came from the hinge side of the door. She yelped and spun around.
Darling Boy sat on a chair, back to the wall, eyes glimmering at her. A guard post. He was scolding her, making a clucking noise with his tongue against his meth-rotted teeth. The inked band around his neck rippled with the movement of his Adam’s apple.
She drew another sharp intake of breath. “Why are you here?”
“El Moreno wants you watched. All the time.” He made a horrible grin by stretching his loose lips outward, seemingly pleased by the opportunities that watching her might afford.
“Where’s Reymundo?”
“You don’t get to choose who watches.”
She realized she’d drawn back behind the door, hiding her body, peering around the edge at him. “I’m hungry. I need to eat.”
“Food will be brought.” Even at this distance, his breath smelled like death.
“I need … I need a towel.”
He rose, his bald pate shiny from the light. “I will fetch it for you.”
As she withdrew into the room, he shoved the door from the outside, scooting her in quicker. A metallic click announced itself. The dead bolt was reversed, the latch on the outside. She ran her palm across the smooth wood.
The first time they had locked her in the room.
She moved backward on wobbly legs and sat on the bed.
After a time she heard Darling Boy’s footsteps ticktocking across the tile, drawing closer. Revulsion churned in her stomach, climbed the back of her throat.
The door unlocked. He entered, holding a towel in his hand. A chemical smell wafted off him, meds and body chemistry gone bad.
She took the towel. It was soft and fluffy and felt brand-new.
She stared at him.
He stared back.
In a foreign country. On a guarded cartel estate. Behind a door. Alone.
With Darling Boy.
It took a moment for her to find her voice. “Will you excuse me?”
“As I said.” Another gruesome smile. “You are to be watched.”
She entered the bathroom. Shut the door behind her. No lock.
It was vulnerable-making to undress, but she felt filthy and subhuman, layers of panic sweat dried on her skin, her hair greasy and tangled. She started the water, stared at herself in the mirror. A thin line of broken capillaries where the necklace had been torn from her neck; it had caught on the seat belt when she’d been hustled out of the SUV for the sole bathroom stop they’d allowed.
She no longer had the photograph of her mother and father the locket had held.
She no longer had anything of who she had been.
The steam began to mist the mirror, and she stepped into the shower, easing the sliding glass door shut. She lathered herself up, using soap for her hair, feeling the blunt edge where Montesco had taken a lock of it. Scrubbing beneath the stream. And then she sensed it, the faintest squeak of the hinges.
Panicked, she swiped suds and water from her eyes.
Through the fogged shower glass, she could see Darling Boy filling the doorway, a dark cutout from the light beyond.
She didn’t breathe, didn’t move.
He didn’t either.
Fixing her stare on him, she rinsed off as quickly as she could. Her breath kept hitching in her throat, and she made an effort to draw full inhalations so she wouldn’t pass out.
She turned off the water.
Still he didn’t move.
The fog was lifting from the glass. In another minute he’d be fully visible to her. And her to him.
She eased the door open. The towel rack just beyond reach. No way to get there without exposing a breast.
She leaned out, snatched the towel, jerked back into the false safety of the shower stall.
The mist carried the scent of him; it seemed to fill the room.
She wrapped herself up.
He stayed in the doorway. Staring. Unblinking.
The last bits of fog evanesced from the glass.
She was trembling from the cold. She hadn’t dried her hair.
He wasn’t smiling that awful smile. He just stared at her, his eyes focused with longing and something beneath it, something hard-edged and aggressive. He looked underfed.
He took a step forward.
She reached out and grabbed the handle to hold the shower door shut.
“Hey!”
A voice from behind, from the bedroom.
Reymundo stepped into view. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Darling Boy hesitated. “Your father told me to watch her.”
“Not like that. Do you understand me? Not like that.”
Reymundo was breathing hard, and Anjelina sensed fear in him. He was heir to the throne, yes, but Darling Boy was a sicario. He had done things that a young man like Reymundo and an eighteen-year-old girl like her could scarcely imagine.
She used the distraction to slip past them both into her room. She grabbed her clothes and stood in the corner, facing the wall, holding her towel in place as she slid on her panties and jeans, her bra and T-shirt.
Behind her the men murmured, their voices low and angry.
Finally she turned around, toweling her hair.
“I have to go,” Reymundo told her. “He understands now.”
“He doesn’t understand anything,” she said.
Darling Boy watched them mutely. She knew she was risking his wrath by taking a stand, but if she didn’t, she would be here alone with him.
“I want to go with you.”
Reymundo said, “Where I am going isn’t safe for you—”
“I don’t care. It’s safer than me staying here.”
“My father will be there. You don’t want to see what he is going to do.”
She looked at Darling Boy. Those eyes. That skin. That hungry look.
