El Gavilan (26 page)

A December honeymoon to the Virgin Islands is planned.

THIRTY NINE

Shawn had been awake for several hours.

The physician had brought him a laptop so he could communicate. Doctors weren’t too sure how long they would be requiring his mouth to remain wired shut. It was maybe just as well, Shawn thought, because his lower face was still a zone of pain, despite the medication he was being given. Talking around all the packing, even if it was only his lips and tongue moving, was a special kind of agony.

He had cried when the doctor told him about his lost teeth—twelve of them in all, and three more that might yet be removed if they didn’t tighten up in the jellied remains of his gums.

Then Shawn learned of the removal and replacement of his kneecap while he’d been under—some aluminum thing he was going to have to learn to use through six or more weeks of intense physical rehabilitation.

But he was numb to the revelation he might be infertile as a result of the attack. He’d never been convinced he wanted children. Patricia’s hints that she was ready for them had appalled and unsettled Shawn. He just wanted to know if he could hope to get it up again.

When he asked for a mirror, the doctor refused. “There’s still a great deal of swelling and bruising. While that is alarming in appearance for the moment, I can assure you it is transient. I don’t want you further traumatized from seeing yourself in your present state, Shawn. But that’s going to fix itself in a couple of days. Believe that. But we also need to reconstruct your nose and reposition your left cheekbone. We have a reconstructive surgeon coming tomorrow to do that. Your mother is in town, and at our request, she brought along a number of photos of you. We’ll use those to try to come as close as we can in reconstructing your nose. Let us do that, then give it a few more days to heal. Then we’ll give you a look at your face.”

That scenario terrified Shawn. How bad could he look? What kind of monster had those fucking Mexicans made of him? How much could he recover of his former face?

He listened, horrified, as the doctor detailed his “extensive dental trauma.” The extent of those injuries precluded dentures or bridges. Shawn was instead to be fitted with permanent implants. “There’s some discomfort associated with that procedure,” the doctor said. “The results more than make up for that. First we have to wait for your gums to heal a bit more before we go at them again. The good news is that an Officer Davis, who helped keep you stable until the squad arrived after your beating, he searched the lot and found several of your teeth. They couldn’t be saved, but they will be used in helping to shape your replacement teeth. But as I say, there will be some discomfort associated with the procedure.”

Shawn wanted to laugh at that. Could there be more pain than he was experiencing now? He typed in:
‘Discomfort’? Worse than this?

The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder. “No, not like this. So you’re in pain now? I’ll see about increasing your pain medication. You will recover from this, Shawn. But it will take some time. Your nose may be a bit different from what you remembered. And you’ll probably always have a slight limp. But you’ll be yourself again. I’m sorry about your prospects for children. It’s the epididymis, your ‘delivery system,’ so to speak, that’s been compromised.”

Shawn shrugged off that last again and asked for any newspapers from the time he was in his medically induced coma that the doctor could scrounge up for him.

When Shawn reached the latest copy of his own paper— assembled by some middling, fill-in reporter named Barbara Ruskin—he stalled at the engagement announcement for Patricia and Tell Lyon. He stared at it for a long time. Then, wondering again how long he had been out, he checked the paper’s publication date. He looked at Patricia’s picture, stunned at how quickly she had dumped him—starting his spiral, anyway you looked at it—and agreed to marry Tell Lyon.

Bitch, he thought. Mexican cunt.

* * *

There was still an exciting newness to sleeping all night in the same bed with Luisa. Now that she was so far along, the doctor had restricted sexual relations. But the novelty of being all night in bed together—naked, of course; Luisa using her hands or mouth to take off Amos’s edge—the novelty of whole nights together, was enough for the young groom. In Thalia’s bed, their couplings had been brief, edgy, urgent encounters—an eye always on the clock. Amos thought this was, in some ways, even better.

And as their room was so close to Able’s, Amos thought it was as well for now they couldn’t fully have sex. The box springs of Amos’s big old bed were insanely squeaky.

“Your grandfather is already up,” Luisa said in her heavily accented English. “For some long time now. I heard him moving around, heard him on the phone. Then I heard him talking to Aunt Sofia. I think they’re out back now, fixing something in Sofia’s and Evelia’s place.”

Amos traced the curve of her swollen right breast, its nipple hard as it was almost all the time now. “You’ve been up a long time yourself, huh? Couldn’t sleep?”

“I hardly sleep at all,” Luisa said. “Not for many days. I can’t get comfortable, and it’s hard sleeping on my side all of the time.”

“Shouldn’t be long now,” Amos said hopefully.

Luisa pushed his hand from her breast. “No,” she said. “No, not long now. Then it will be the baby waking up many times in the night, hungry.”

* * *

“They’re in so far over their heads,” Sofia Gómez said. “Too young for this. These now, at twenty-two or twenty-three, they are what we were at fifteen or sixteen, in so many ways.”

Able drove a nail, then hung up a framed photo of Thalia. It made him feel better to see the face he remembered smiling back at him. It helped to erase some of the memory of the bloody mess he’d seen behind the ball fields. He asked Sofia, “How old were you when Thalia was born?”

That segued into another recounting of the Gómez clan’s border crossing. Able listened, all grave attention. When she finished, Able said, “Mine came over by boat. Four brothers, four wives and sixteen children, down in a filthy hold. There was cholera on the boat. Three brothers, two wives and nine children—several of them orphaned—came ashore.”

Evelia walked up next to Able, looking up at him with big, moist black eyes. She pressed her hand to her belly and he heard her stomach growl loudly.

Able struggled down onto one knee and pulled a face at the little girl. Evelia smiled. He asked, “You ever have a Happy Meal, Evelia? Not so much real food, but it can hit the spot.” The little girl looked at him, silent.

Sofia said, “Sheriff Hawk asked you a question, Evelia.”

Evelia said, “I like the Burger King better.”

“Let’s go do that now then,” Able said. “Three of us are past ready for a treat.”

* * *

Patricia pulled into the lot, returning from her day’s only class—an early morning session that ran from eight to nine.

As a new tenant, Tell was locked into a six-month lease. Patricia, after so many years, was granted month-to-month status. Patricia was arguing that she move into Tell’s place while they looked for a house. Tell insisted that he preferred Patricia’s place. He said he loved her shaded deck and the tree full of mourning doves.

Complicating things was Tell’s cousin, Chris.

After their engagement announcement, Tell’s cousin had invited him out to his place in Cedartown for a few days. Patricia pushed Tell to accept the invitation, intrigued to meet Chris and Salome. Insisting he couldn’t leave town with the investigation underway, Chris and Salome instead came their way for an evening together—Salome armed with a DVD of their property outside Cedartown. Over dinner, Chris pulled Tell aside and made him an offer. Chris and his family lived on a wooded expanse of acreage that backed up to a historic, protected creek. Tell had told Patricia that Chris had, from time to time, joked about establishing his own compound. Chris seemed to be well on his way to doing just that. He was building a cabin for his aging parents and his single-mother sister and her children on his property. He offered another plat on his property’s western edge to Tell as an eventual wedding gift—a place for Tell and Patricia to build their own cabin.

Patricia had loved the footage of their log home. She loved the old-growth trees surrounding the cabin and the constant soothing gurgle of the creek running along the back of the property line. She asked Tell, “Does it really look like that?”

“It’s better in person,” Tell said.

And there was more: Cedartown’s longtime chief of police, a man named Roy Atchity, was to retire soon. Chris could, he said, arrange for Atchity and Tell to speak; Atchity had intimated he was in a position to stipulate his own successor to Cedartown’s city fathers.

Patricia was also drawn to Salome Lyon—the two of them had hit it off immediately. Patricia could see herself and her babies and Tell living there, part of this constructed clan. Salome badly wanted another baby and spoke of the prospect of she and Patricia maybe being pregnant together.

Chris Lyon was a different matter. Chris alternately fascinated and unsettled Patricia. She found him attractive, but, at least initially, harrowingly forbidding. Chris was a couple of inches taller than Tell and darker in every sense—charismatic and intense. And a bit menacing. Then Patricia had spent some time alone with Chris. Just a few minutes really, but when they were over, Patricia felt she and Chris knew all there was worth knowing about one another.

Patricia had asked Chris, the one who knew Tell longest and best of all, how he would sum up Tell. Chris had thought about that for a few long, uncomfortable seconds. Then he’d said, “We used to play cowboys as kids. Tell never really stopped playing. I think maybe that Tell is really the last truly good man on earth, Patricia. And that makes him the most vulnerable man alive. A magnet for grief. But he’s the best man I know. So I worry for him, doing what he does.”

Patricia had said, “But you’re offering Tell another law enforcement post in Cedartown. If you fear so much for him … ?”

“Yes,” Chris told her. “But Roy Atchity, the man whom Tell could replace, has been on the force for thirty-five years. Roy has been chief for twenty-one years. He’ll retire with a wife of thirty-six years and several grown children. It’s a relatively safe post as these things go. And if Tell is in Cedartown, close by in every sense, then I can have his back like I couldn’t when he was out West. Like I can’t if he’s living in New Austin. He’s the closest thing I have to a brother. I can’t risk him.”

Patricia had hugged Chris hard, then. She kissed his cheek and said, “I’ll see what I can do to persuade him.”

Now Patricia keyed herself into her—
their
—apartment. She checked her answering machine.

A call from her mother: “It’s Mom. Just calling to see how you are doing. Call me, Patricia.”

A call from the hospital: “Ms. Maldonado, this is Dr. James Grier. I’m calling as promised to let you know that Shawn O’Hara is conscious now. I told him you were by and asked to see him and he asked if you could come by the hospital today. He’ll be undergoing surgery again tomorrow, so it could otherwise be a few days.”

FORTY

Tell sat at his desk, reviewing the thin files sent to him by Able Hawk. Each file consisted of seven or eight pages of photocopied crime reports, autopsy reports and news clippings about the three other women—all Vale County women—who had died in the previous two years. All had died in a manner very similar to the way that Thalia Ruiz had been murdered.

All three were Latino. All three, like Thalia, were in their early- to mid-thirties. One had a child. Two of the previous victims, Marisol Hernandez and Sonya Lorca, had been prostitutes—classic targets of opportunity.

The previous victims had been raped and beaten, their bodies dropped nude in fields, or, in one case, a stream in remote Vale County.

And all three cases remained unsolved.

Tell looked longest at the third file. Like Thalia, the victim was another youngish single mother, not a prostitute, who ended up violated and beaten to death six months before Thalia.

Carlita Marquez was a night clerk at a hotel located on an off-ramp of I-70. She punched out at work at six
A.M.

The hotel’s exterior security camera caught an image of Carlita alone, entering her green Elantra and pulling out of the lot. No indication there of any trouble ahead.

But her car was found four hours later, less than a mile from the hotel where she worked. On examination, authorities determined someone had cut halfway through her Hyundai’s timing belt. Carlita had driven less than five-tenths of a mile before the timing belt snapped, effectively killing her car and trashing the engine, stalling it just where police later found it.

Seven hours later, two senior citizens were seining for crayfish for a planned fishing trip the next morning. They found Carlita face down in the stream, clouds of blood still hanging in the slow-moving water around her head and between her bruised thighs.

No persons of interest were noted in any of the files and no suspicious people or vehicles had apparently surfaced. There was no mention of a red Dodge Ram pickup truck seen in or around any of the body dump sites.

The phone rang. Patricia asked, “You foresee another long day?”

“They all seem that way now,” Tell said.

And they seemed longer still, knowing that Patricia was alone all day at home. He wanted to be home with her. He told her that and she said, “You can always come home for a quickie.” Her smile there in her voice, she said, “I mean, for
lunch
.”

When he hung up, he saw his phone’s message light was flashing. He punched in his password: it was his technical guru at the university. “We have seven possible license plate combinations, Chief. It’s ten thirty
A.M.
I’ll be in all day.”

* * *

Tell handed Billy Davis the slip of paper with the license plate possibilities arrived at by the university analysts. He said, “Run these please, Billy. Results and comments to me only, and not by radio.”