Accustomed to the Dark Page 5

  “It’s a real shame,” he said, “about what happened to Mrs. Mondragón.” He was sitting forward on the sofa, his thin forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped tightly together. The bony wrist of his left hand was circled by an expandable gold-plated watch band. Coils of black hair were trapped between the tiny golden slats. “It’s terrible,” he said, and he shook his head.

  I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” I told him.

  I padded across the carpet, down the hallway into the bathroom. I stood at the sink and threw some cold water on my face, cupped my hands and sucked some up. I toweled myself dry and stared at the mirror. Gray pouches of flesh sagged against my cheekbones, bright red blood vessels forked through the whites of my eyes. I needed some coffee, but it would have to wait. Fear had herded McBride into my living room, and this wasn’t the time for me to play Mother Hubbard.

  McBride had eased back onto the sofa, but he sat upright when I returned to the room. I sat in the chair opposite him. “Okay,” I said. “What’ve you got?”

  He leaned forward, confidentially. “Well, see, Mr. Croft, what I was told, I was told you’d slip me a little something—you know, a consideration—if I came through for you. Which I plan to do, naturally.”

  “A consideration.”

  He nodded seriously. “Yeah, right, that’s what I was led to believe, yeah.”

  “You were misinformed,” I said.

  He stared at me blankly for a moment, then he raised his head slightly. “Come on now, Mr. Croft,” he said, his voice thin and wheedling. “You gotta understand my position in this thing. I took time off from work to get over here. I’m supposed to punch in at nine. I got a good job now—over at the Texaco, on Cerrillos?—and my paycheck’s gonna get docked.”

  That voice of his was squeaking along the edge of my nerves like a Magic Marker on cardboard. I said, “You were told to come here and cooperate. By someone connected to Norman Montoya. You want me to put out the word that you didn’t co-operate?”

  “Hey,” he said, and raised his hands to show me his palms. They were pale and surprisingly clean. “I’m here, right? I’m co-operating, right? You can’t say I’m not cooperating, Mr. Croft.”

  “I haven’t heard anything so far.”

  “I only just got here, just now. But I’m absolutely ready to go with this, you know?”

  “So go.”

  “Right,” he said. “Sure.” He slapped his breast pocket, took out a crumpled pack of Viceroys. “You mind if I smoke?”

  “I don’t care if you burn to a crisp.”

  “Right,” he said, and smiled weakly. He looked around the room for an ashtray.

  “On the table,” I told him. I hadn’t smoked for years, but I had friends who still did.

  “Right, yeah, thanks.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth, pulled a chrome-plated Zippo from his right pocket. He flashed his left hand over the top of the lighter, slapping it open, and then flashed the hand back again, smacking the striker. He leaned forward and dipped the tip of the cigarette into the flame, puffed smoke from the side of his mouth, sat back, flicked his wrist to snap the lighter shut, slipped it into his pocket again. In Jimmy’s circles, a routine like that was probably a valuable social skill.

  He exhaled a blue plume of smoke. “Okay,” he said. “What is it, exactly, you want to know, Mr. Croft?”

  “How well did you know Martinez and Lucero?”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Well, you know how it is. In the joint, I mean. Everybody knows everybody else, right? It’s one of those closed societies, you know? And Lucero now, well, shit, everybody knew who he was. He was famous, you know? Big-time drug dealer, lots of cash on hand, plenty of pull, and the way he killed that guy down in Albuquerque—you heard about that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shooting him in the eyes.” He shook his head with something that was supposed to look like dismay but may have been envy. “But he’s got a set of balls on him, you got to give him that. A real set of balls.” He heard himself, and backtracked. “But basically, you know, he’s one of those psychopaths. No regard for human life, you know what I mean? Like that Hannibal Lecter guy. In the movie?”

  “Was Lucero dealing drugs up there?”

  He shrugged again. “Sure. I mean, not directly, not his own self. He had guys, you know, did it for him. Associates.”

  “How was he getting the stuff in?”

  He held up his right palm, like a traffic cop, and his expression became infinitely sorrowful. “See, Mr. Croft, this is where things could maybe get complicated, you know? Maybe right here is where we come up against a brick wall. I mean, I tell you what I know, and maybe Lucero finds out about it, down the road, you know, and life could get kind of rough for me all of a sudden.”

  I smiled. “It could get kind of rough for you right now.”

  “Right, right. Sure, Mr. Croft, I know you’re not the kind of guy to fool around with. But that’s the point I’m tryna make here, exactly. I appreciate your position, I really do. The thing is, you gotta appreciate mine. I got to balance my priorities. I got to make sure I’m making a decision that’s not detrimental in the long run, you know? For yours truly.”

  I nodded. “Let me see if I can clarify your priorities for you, Jimmy. My partner is lying in a coma in a hospital room. I’m very unhappy about that. I’m going after Martinez and Lucero. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll pound the shit out of you.” I shrugged. “How’s that?”

  He held up both hands now. “Hey now, Mr. Croft. There’s no need for that kind of talk at all. I came here of my own free will. All I’m tryna do is establish—”

  Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been surly and impatient, and sodden with last night’s liquor. Or if Rita hadn’t been in the hospital.

  I stood up. He was out of the chair before I’d taken two steps, but there really wasn’t anywhere for him to go. He flailed his hands at me spastically, like a child, when I grabbed the front of his shirt. I pivoted on my left heel, swung him as hard as I could toward the south wall, where he wouldn’t break anything, and let go. He yelped as he sailed backward, his eyes wide, his arms pinwheeling. His shoulders smacked hard against the wall, and then his head did, and he gasped. I came toward him.

  His body was crouched away from me and his hands were up again, pushing frantically at the air. “Hey hey hey! Okay okay!”

  My heart was thumping against my ribs. My palms were damp. Adrenaline overload. I took a breath, tightened the belt of my robe, jerked my head toward the sofa. “Sit down, Jimmy.”

  I stalked back to the chair, feeling extremely proud of myself.

  He was close to being subhuman. If I were smaller and weaker, if I were a three-year-old girl, he would have had no compunctions about using violence on me. He understood violence. It was a form of currency for him. Probably he was a scrupulous debtor, and he had spent most of his life trying to pay back the violence he had been paid. Probably he hadn’t succeeded, and probably he never would.

  But I outweighed him by as much as he outweighed his daughter. My brutalizing him wasn’t all that different from his brutalizing her, and it had left me feeling sickened and soiled.

  And I knew that I had just enlarged the size of his personal debt.

  He was sitting forward on the sofa, looking aggrieved, wincing as he ran his hand along the back of his scalp.

  I sat down, crossed my legs. “How did Lucero get the drugs into the pen?”

  He was still stroking the back of his head. He winced again. “Jeeze, Mr. Croft, you don’t have—”

  “Jimmy?”

  Once more, quickly, he held up the hand. “Okay, okay.” He looked down, frowned, whisked the hand down the rumpled front of his shirt, flattening it. He sighed with elaborate hopelessness. He had been backed into a corner. He was always being backed into corners, left with no choices. By events. By people like me. People like his daughter.

  “Okay,” he said. “There’s
a guy in the joint. Miller. Ronny Miller. Doing a nickel for B and E. He’s got this sister. Sylvia. She’s the one who brought it in.”

  “How?”

  “Visitation. Once a week.”

  “Balloons?” A female mule carried the balloon into the prison concealed in her vagina, transferred it to her mouth, passed the balloon over when she kissed the prisoner. The prisoner swallowed it and retrieved it later. Disregarding the possibility of being caught, which was minimal in a busy prison, it was still a dangerous practice. Balloons can break.

  “At first,” McBride said. “What I heard, I heard that later she passed it by hand. Lucero paid off the guards.”

  “What was she moving?”

  “Coke, mostly. Some smack.”

  “Why? To help her brother?”

  “Nah.” He said this as though no one, anywhere, would want to help a brother. “She’s got the hots for Lucero.”

  “How does she know Lucero?”

  “She doesn’t, see, that’s the thing. She never even met him, in actual fact.” He became almost professorial as he explained it. “She’s one of those straight chicks you read about, they get turned on by hard guys, you know? They get infatuated. She went to his trial every goddam day, I heard. Drove in all the way from Las Vegas.” He shook his head in contempt, and the contempt seemed real. “Women, right? Who can figure?”

  “The cops must know about her.”

  “No, see, that’s where Lucero was smart.” He had forgotten that we weren’t friends. He leaned forward again, so he and I could better share the moment. “She gets word to her brother, Ronny, see, that she wants to meet him. Lucero, I mean. So Ronny tells Lucero, but Lucero, he comes up with this better idea. She moves the dope for him, and he gets together with her later. After he gets out.”

  “And she went along with that.”

  “Like I said. She was infatuated.”

  “How did Lucero know he could trust her?”

  He shrugged. “He started small, is what I heard. A joint or two. Some hash. Then he moved her up to coke.”

  “And Sylvia could’ve given Ronny the gun Lucero used in the break.”

  He sat back and he shrugged again. “Sure,” he said with a conviction that was casual but absolute. “Had to go down that way, I figure.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Forty-something. Not bad looking. If you like the librarian type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “You know. Kind of dried up and stiff.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Brown. That mousey brown. You know.”

  “What kind of build?”

  “Skinny.”

  I nodded. “You said Las Vegas. New Mexico or Nevada?”

  He made a face. “Come on, Mr. Croft. Even a crazy chick, she’s not gonna drive every day all the way from Nevada.”

  I nodded. “Her last name is Miller?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. Lucero and Martinez were buddies up there.”

  “Right, yeah. They had the same cell.”

  “Were they more than buddies?”

  “Was one of em punking, you mean? Nah. These are tough guys, both of them.”

  “What kind of visitors did they get?”

  “No kind. Nobody.”

  I spent some time asking him some more questions, but he didn’t have anything else.

  I stood up. “All right, Jimmy. You can go now.”

  He rubbed at the back of his head again, to remind me that we were connected now. “Jeeze, Mr. Croft, you don’t think you could maybe come through with a little something? For my troubles, you know?”

  He had lived long enough to know that other people sometimes felt guilt, and now he was playing me, manipulating mine. My understanding it didn’t prevent it from working.

  “Wait here,” I told him.

  I went down the hallway into the bedroom, found my pants, dug out my wallet, slipped loose a twenty. He was standing up when I returned. I handed him the bill.

  He looked at me. “Only a twenny?”

  “You don’t want it, Jimmy, you can always give it back.”

  “No no, I’ll take it.” He slid it into his pocket before I could change my mind. He studied me for a moment, an amateur anthropologist examining an alien species. “You’re really gonna go after Lucero and Martinez, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “Well, okay, it’s your funeral, I guess. But I’ll tell you something. And this is for free, Mr. Croft. You better be real careful. Martinez is one bad motherfucker. You already know that, I guess. And I guess you know he’s got a hard-on for you. But that Lucero, he’s something else. He’s one of those psychopaths for real. He is one very spooky guy. You talk to him and he keeps changing on you. He does impersonations and stuff. Like that Jim Carrey guy, in the movies.”

  “I don’t think Jim Carrey’s all that spooky.”

  “Yeah, well, Jim Carrey, he won’t pull out a gun and shoot you in the eyes. Lucero will, and he won’t even think twice about it. He’ll be having a good time. So the two of em together, Martinez and Lucero, they could cause you some real hurt.” Running through the melodrama in his voice I thought I could hear a faint thread of vengeful hope.

  8

  AFTER MCBRIDE LEFT I called the hospital. Rita was still unconscious.

  I dialed New Mexico information and got a phone number and an address for Sylvia Miller in Las Vegas. There were no other Millers listed at that address, so presumably Sylvia lived alone.

  I tried the number. No answer.

  I made some coffee, took a shower, realized I hadn’t eaten anything for twenty-four hours, and put together a sandwich. It went down like raw cotton and turned to lead in my stomach. I washed it down with a glass of milk, thick and chalky.

  I kept an emergency stash under a loose floorboard in the bedroom, hundred-dollar bills, ten of them, that I hadn’t touched for almost a year. I scooped them up, slipped them into my wallet. I lugged the carryall and the computer out to the Jeep, stowed them behind the front seat, went back to the house and shut down the gas and the hot-water heater. I called the phone company and arranged for all the office phone calls to be forwarded to the cellular in Leroy’s briefcase.

  Chuck’s Garage sat back from the roadway on West Alameda, not far from Siler, a low building walled with metal siding painted a sickly yellow. Beyond a chain-link fence, a small herd of aging automobiles slept in the forecourt, most of them blotched with primer, a few sagging to the side as though mortally wounded. The door to the garage was open and Chuck was in there, standing beneath an ancient Chevy truck perched high on the pneumatic lift. There was a smell of motor oil and old metal, but the cement floor was spotless.

  He turned when he heard my footsteps. “Joshua. Haven’t seen you for a while. How’s it going?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “Can’t complain. What brings you by?”

  “I could use some help.”

  He glanced past me, at the Jeep. “Not running right?”

  “Not that kind of help.”

  He nodded. He wore dark blue cotton coveralls and he was an inch or so taller than I was. He had deep-set dark brown eyes beneath a wide craggy forehead. His long hair was black, pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a black beard that left his long upper lip bare, like a Mennonite. It made him resemble a young, handsome version of Abraham Lincoln.

  “What do you need?” he asked me.

  “Something clean and reliable.”

  He nodded again. “I heard Mrs. Mondragón got shot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “’Kay,” he said. “Let’s see what I got.”

  He pulled a pale blue rag from his back pocket, used it to wipe his hands, tossed it to a metal workbench. I followed him to a door set in the east wall of the garage, waited while he found the right key on his key chain. He opened the door, leaned into the room to pull the string for the overhead light, then stood back an
d gestured me forward. He trailed behind me, pulling the door shut as he entered.

  It was an office, cramped and windowless. To the left, at one narrow end of the room, sat a gray metal desk. To the right was a narrow wall that held only a Michelin calendar. Chuck went toward this, pushed gently against its side. The wall swung open, and behind it was another wall, this one made of Peg-Board, and hooked on each of the pegs was the trigger guard of a handgun. There were twenty or thirty of them, and most of them were semiautomatics. Lying along the base of the wall were a Ruger .223 carbine and a black Mossberg shotgun with a plastic stock and an extended cartridge tube.

  “I got a forty-caliber Smith,” he said. “Brand new, very nice. More stopping power than a nine mil. Lot of your cops these days, that’s what they’re carrying.”

  “Ten-round clip?”

  “That’s the law now. Courtesy of those assholes in Washington. Your tax dollars at work.” I didn’t know Chuck well, but I’d always suspected that politically he stood somewhere between Pat Buchanan and Jesse James.

  “You want more firepower,” he said, “I got this Beretta.” He lifted it from its peg. “Model Ninety-two-eff. Almost cherry. Got a pre-Carter clip—fifteen rounds. Sixteen pellets in the piece if you keep one up the spout.” He handed me the pistol.

  It was heavy, and it would be heavier when it held fifteen or sixteen cartridges. But it wasn’t so heavy that I couldn’t carry it.

  “Cock it,” he suggested.

  I worked the slide. The action was flawless.

  “It’s okay to dry fire it,” he said.

  Holding the gun so its barrel pointed toward the wall, I pulled the trigger. Snap.

  “Smooth as silk,” he said. “Double-action. Spring-loaded safety. Reversible mag release. A very tasty piece of equipment.”

  “Spare clip? Ammunition?”

  “Sure. You want Glasers?” Glasers were cartridges with slugs that blew apart on impact.

  “No,” I said.

  He smiled. “Oh yeah. I forgot. You’re a liberal.”