Saint Death - John Milton #3 (4 page)

Caterina had already counted six body bags being ferried out.

Like they said.

Ciudad Juárez.

Murder City.

The City of Lost Girls.

She pulled her chair back to the desk and stared absently at the computer.

“I am here.”

The cursor blinked at the end of the line.

Caterina sat bolt upright, beginning and deleting responses until she knew what to say.

“I know you’re scared.”

There was a pause, and then the letters tapped out, one by one, slow and uncertain: “How could you know?”

“I’ve spoken to other girls. Not many, but a few. You are not the first.”

“Did they tell you they could describe them, too?”

“They couldn’t.”

“Then the stakes are much higher for me.”

“I accept that.”

“What would I have to do?”

“Just talk.”

“And my name?”

“Everything is anonymous.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re right to be scared. I’m scared, too. These men are dangerous. But you can trust me.”

The cursor blinked on and off again. Caterina found she was holding her breath.

“If I come it would just be to talk?”

“It would be whatever you want it to be. But talking is fine.”

“Who would be there?”

“Me and my partner––he writes, too. You can trust him.”

Another pause, and Caterina wondered whether she should have said that it would just be her alone. Leon was a good man, but how was she to know that? A fear of men whom she did not know would be reasonable enough after what Delores had been through.

The characters flickered across the screen again. “I can choose where?”

“Wherever you want––but somewhere public would be best, yes?”

“La Case del Mole––do you know it?”

Caterina swept the papers from the iMac’s keyboard and typed the name into Google. “The restaurant on Col Chavena?”

“Yes.”

“I know it.”

“I could meet you there.”

“I’ll book a table. My name is Caterina Moreno. I will be there from 8PM. OK?”

There was no immediate reply.

And then, after a pause, three letters: “Yes.”

6.

LIEUTENANT JESUS PLATO stopped at the door of his Dodge Charger police cruiser and turned back to his three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Juárez. His pregnant wife, Emelia was at the door, with their youngest––Jesus Jr––in her arms. She was calling him.

“What is it?”

“Come here,” she said.

He tossed his shoulder holster, the Glock safely clipped within it, onto the passenger seat, and went back to the house. “What did I forget?”

“Nothing,” his wife said, “I did.” She stood on tip-toes and he bent a little so that she could plant a long kiss on his lips. “Be careful, Jesus. I don’t want to hear about you taking any risks, not this week. Lord knows you’ve done enough of that.”

“I know. I won’t––no risks.”

“You got a different life from next Monday. You got me and this one to think about, the girls, and the one on the way. If you get into trouble on your last week it’s going to be much worse as soon as you get back, alright? And look at that lawn––that’s your first job, right there, first thing, you hear me?”

“Yes,
chica
,” he said with an indulgent grin. The baby, just a year old, gurgled happily as Plato reached down and tickled him under the chin. He looked like his mother, lucky kid, those same big dark eyes that you could get lost in, the slender nose and the perfect buttery skin. He leant down again to kiss Emelia on the lips. “I’ll be late back tonight, remember––Alameda and Sanchez are taking me out for dinner.”

“They’re just making sure you’re definitely leaving. Don’t go getting so drunk you wake the baby.”

He grinned again. “No,
chica
.”

He made his way back down the driveway, stopping where the boat he was restoring sat on its trailer. It was a standing joke between them: there he was, fixing up a boat, eight hundred miles from the coast. But it had been his father’s, and he wanted to honour the old man’s memory by doing a good job. One day, when he was retired, maybe he’d get to use it. Jesus had been brought up on the coast and he had always hoped he might be able to return there one day. There would be a persuasion job to do with his wife but when his job was finished there would be little to hold them to Juárez. It was possible. He ran the tips of his fingers along the smooth wooden hull and thought of all the hours that he had spent replacing the panels, smoothing them, varnishing them. It had been his project for the last six months and he was looking forward to being able to spend a little more time on it. Another week or two of good, hard work––time he could dedicate to it without having to worry about his job––that ought to be enough to get it finished.

He returned to the cruiser and got inside. He pulled down the visor and looked at his reflection in the vanity mirror. He was the wrong side of fifty now, and it showed. His skin was old and weathered, a collection of wrinkles gathered around the corners of his eyes, his hair was salt-and-pepper where it had once been jet black and his moustache was almost entirely grey. Age, he thought, and doing the job he had been doing for thirty years. He could have made it easier on himself, taken the shortcuts that had been offered, made the struggle of paying the mortgage a little easier with the backhanders and bribes he could easily have taken. He could have avoided getting shot, avoided the dull throbbing ache that he felt in his shoulder whenever the temperature dipped. But Jesus Plato wasn’t made that way, never had been and never would. Honour and dignity were watchwords that had been driven into him by his father, a good man who had also worked for the police, shot dead by a
sicario
around the time that it all started to go to hell, the time that dentist was shot to death. The rise of El Patrón and La Frontera. Plato had been a young cadet then, and, while he had been green he had not been blind. He could see that plenty of his colleagues had already been bought and sold by the narcos, but he vowed that he would never be the same as them and, thirty years later, he still wasn’t.

He looked down and saw that Emelia was laughing at him, watching him stare at his own reflection. He waved her away with an amused flick of his hand and gunned the Dodge’s big engine. One more week, he thought, flipping the visor back against the roof. He reversed off the drive and onto the street, his eye drawn to the overgrown lawn and wondering if he could justify buying that new sit-down mower he had seen in the Home Depot the last time he had crossed over the bridge into El Paso. A retirement present for himself; he deserved it. Just five more days, and then he could start to enjoy his life.

7.

THE CALL had come through as Plato was cruising down the Avenida, Juárez’s main drag. The street had two-storey buildings on each side, the once garish colours bleached out by the sun, the brickwork crumbling and broken windows sheltering behind boards that had themselves been daubed with graffiti. The shops that were still open catered to the baser instincts: gambling, liquor, whores. East of the main street was the red light district, a confusing warren of unlit streets where, if the unwary escaped after being relieved just of their wallets, then they were lucky. Plato had seen plenty of dead bodies in those dirty, narrow streets and the rooms with single bare light bulbs where the hookers turned their tricks. But then he had seen plenty of dead bodies, period.

The call had been a 415, just a disturbance, but Plato was only a couple of blocks away and he had called back to say that he would handle it. He knew that if he took it there would be less chance he would be assigned one of the day’s 187s and 207s. Those were the calls you didn’t want to get, the murders and the kidnappings that always turned into murders. Apart from the risk that the killers were still around––first responders had been shot many times––they were depressing, soul-sickening cases that were never really resolved, and the idea of having one or two of them on his docket when he finally hung it up wasn’t the way he wanted to go out.

No, he reminded himself as he pulled the Dodge over to the kerb. Taking this call wasn’t cowardice. It was common sense and, besides, hadn’t he had more than his fair share of those over the years? He had lost count, especially recently.

The disturbance was on the street outside one of the strip clubs. Eduardo’s: Plato knew it very well. Two college boys were being restrained by the bouncers from the club. One of the boys had a bloody nose.

Plato looked at the dash. Inside was sixty degrees. Outside was one hundred and ten. He sighed and stepped out of the air-conditioned cool and onto the street. The heat on his body hit him like a hammer.

“What’s going on?” Plato asked, pointedly addressing the nearest bouncer first. It was a man he knew, ‘Tiny’ Garcia, a colleague from years ago who had been chased out of the force for taking a cartel’s money. Plato abhorred graft and despised the weakness in the man, but he knew that treating him respectfully was more likely to get him back to the station with the information that he wanted with the minimum of fuss.

“
Teniente
,” the big man said. “How you doing?”

“Not bad, Tiny.”

“You still in?”

“Only just. Coming to the end of the line. This time next week and I’ll have my pension and I’m done.”

“Good for you, brother. Best thing I ever did, getting out.”

Plato looked at him, his shabby dress and the depressing bleakness of the Avenida, and knew that that was his pride talking.

“So––these two boys. What have we got?”

“A little drunk, a little free with their hands with one of the girls, you know what I mean, not like it’s the first time. We ain’t got many rules back in there, but that’s one of them, no touching none of the girls at no time. She calls me over and I say to them, nice and polite like you know I can be, I says to them that it’s time to leave.”

The boys snorted with derision. “That’s not what happened,” one of them said.

Plato nodded to the boy’s bloodied face. “And his nose?”

“He didn’t want to go, I guess. He threw a punch at me, I threw one back, I hit, he didn’t.”

“Bullshit!” the boy with the bloody nose spat out.

Plato looked at the two of them more carefully. They were well dressed, if a little the worse for wear. They had that preppy look about them: clothes from Gap, creases down the trousers, shirts that had been ironed, deck shoes that said they would be more at home crewing up a regatta schooner. Plato recognised it from the university at El Paso. A little too much money evident in their clothes and grooming, the supercilious way they looked at the locals. He’d seen it before, plenty of times. A couple of young boys, some money in their pocket and a plan to take a walk on the wild side of the border. They usually got into one sort of scrape or another. They’d end up in a rough, nasty dive like this and then they didn’t like it when they realised that they couldn’t always get their own way. On this occasion, Plato knew that the boys had just been unlucky or tight. There was plenty of touching in Eduardo’s, and a lot more besides that, if you were prepared to pay for it.

He shepherded them towards the Dodge. As they reached the kerb, one of them––blond, plenty of hair, good looks and a quarterback’s physique––reached out and pressed his hand into Plato’s. He felt something sharp pricking his palm. It was the edge of a banknote. He turned back to the boy and grasped it between thumb and forefinger.

“What is this?” Plato asked, holding up the note.

“It’s whatever you want it to be, man.”

“A bribe?”

“If you want.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re trying to buy me off?”

“It’s a Benjamin, look! Come on, man!––there’s no need for all of this, right? A hundred bucks makes it all go away. I know how things work round here, I been here before, lots of times, I know the way the land lies.”

“No,” Plato said grimly. “You don’t. You just made things worse. Turn around, both of you.”

Garcia gave out a deep rumble of laughter. “They don’t know who they’re talking to, right, Jesus? You dumb fucks––I know this man, I worked with him, I doubt he’s ever taken so much as a peso his whole life.”

“Come on, man, I know we fucked up, what do we have to do to make it right? Two notes? Come on, two hundred bucks.”

“Turn around,” Plato said, laying his hand on the butt of the Glock.

“Come on, man––let’s say three hundred and forget all about this.”

“Turn around now.”

The boy saw Plato wasn’t going to budge and his vapid stoner’s grin curdled into something more malevolent. He craned his neck around as Plato firmly pressed him against the bonnet of the car. “What’s the point of that? If you won’t take my money I know damn straight one of your buddies will. You Federales are so bent you can’t even piss straight, everyone knows it. You’re turning down three hundred bucks bonus for what, your fucking
principles
? We all know it won’t make a fucking bit of difference, not when it comes down to it, we’ll be out of here and on our way back to civilisation before you’ve finished your shift and gone back to whatever shithole you crawled out of.”

“Keep talking, son.” Plato fastened the jaws of his cuffs around the boy’s right wrist and then, yanking the arm harder than he had to, snapped the other cuff around the left wrist, too. The boy yelped in sudden pain; Plato didn’t care about that. He opened the rear door, bounced the boy’s head against the edge of the roof and pushed him inside. He cuffed the second boy and did the same.

“Later, Garcia,” he said to the big man as shut the door.

“Keep your head down, Jesus.”

“You too.”

8.

THE LEACH HOTEL in Douglas, Arizona, was a handsome relic from a different era. It had served an important purpose in the frontier years, the best place to stay in the last town before the lawlessness and violence of the borderlands. The hotel, built at the turn of the century, bore the name of the local dignitary for whom it was a labour of love. Mr. Robert E Leach was a southern nationalist, a supporter of slavery and, in later years, the US Ambassador to Mexico. It was Leach, who, in 1853, had overseen the purchase of all land, including southern Arizona, south of the Gila River, for the United States from the Mexicans. His hotel, a last beacon of respectability among the gun stores and bike repair shops of hard scrabble Cochise County, was the only monument to him now. It was still a fine building; it had seen better times, perhaps, but the Italian marble columns in the lobby and the marble staircase that curled up to the first floor were still impressing newcomers as they made their way to the reception desk to check in. The place was a relic of the Wild West, of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo, and the sounds of that time still echoed around the wood panelled walls.