The Incident (Chase Barnes Series Book 1) (15 page)

              Source spent the night in the storage unit to keep an eye on Esteban and periodically press Esteban for information on Jamal.  On the hour, Source would grab Esteban under the chin from behind and pull his head back until his shoulders were stretched over the back of the chair.  Each hour he would pull harder and further to make it hurt that much more.  By three in the morning Source was given permission to ‘bump it up a notch.’  Source knew what that meant.  He had taken Esteban out of the seat with his hands still tied behind his back.

              “You fucking with the wrong dude,” Source said.

              “I don’t care,” Esteban said.

              “Don’t make me hurt you even more than I already have.”

              “I don’t care.”

              “That punk Jamal is only gonna keep shortchanging you, but if you think what he’s paying you is enough then you keep right on being all loyal and shit to him.  We’ll find him either way,” Source said. 

              “Okay,” Esteban said.

              “You a little bitch,” Source told Esteban on a number of occasions.  The sun had recently angled its way around the sky on the outside and was providing a smidge of natural sunlight through the open door but on the inside the fluorescent glow of the single light bulb remained a constant.  Esteban just stared, trying to keep up the tough façade.  “You know he’s gonna kill you,” Source added, talking about Klein.  “The Chooch don’t fuck around with this shit.”

              Esteban nodded.  “I don’t know shit about Jamal.  That’s what I told you all night and I told him yesterday,” he said.  He spit on the cement floor. 

              “The Chooch thinks you know how he rolls.  The Chooch don’t like nobody messin’ with his shit,” Source said.  He was walking slow circles around Esteban’s chair.  “The Chooch seen you around.  Runnin’ Jamal’s shit.  He gonna wanna know where Jamal works and who he works with.”  Esteban was beginning to grow frustrated at the mention of The Chooch over and over again. 

              Klein showed up at around four in the afternoon, on his way home from work.  “Let’s try this again.  Shall we?”  He removed his suit jacket, handed it to Source, and began rolling up his sleeves just beyond the forearms.  “What can you tell me about Jamal?”

              “He keep sayin’ he don’t know shit,” Source said before Esteban could answer.  Klein shook his head.

              “That’s not what I wanted to hear.  My guys have been watching you for a few weeks.  They see you making runs for him.  I want to know what he’s pushing.  Who he’s pushing it to and what territory he works,” Klein said.  “I got an idea on the territories but the what and the who are most important,” he added. 

              Esteban looked up at Klein, who was standing directly over him.  “I told you yesterday and I told him all night that I don’t know nothing,” he said.  “Alls I do is take his packages, drop them off, get the money, and bring it back to him,” Esteban added, referring to his runs for Jamal. 

              “You never once got a little curious on your runs.  Get a little whiff.  Sneak a little peak.  Swipe a little taste,” Klein said.

              “Jamal said he’d kill me if he ever found out I did any of that shit.  I wasn’t doing it for the drugs; I was doing it for the money.”

              “Well, isn’t that nice.  Quite the Good Samaritan you are helping out the community like that.”  Klein turned his back to Esteban and paced a few steps in front of him.

              Esteban watched Klein reach behind and pull something out of the back of his waistband.  Then he heard the click.

              Klein turned around, raised his Glock to shoulder height, aiming it at Esteban’s forehead, and said, “Now tell me the truth.”

THIRTY SEVEN

It had been almost a full week into my private investigation career and it felt like an hour.  I still didn’t have anything major to work with but it somehow felt progress was being made.  I was still waiting on Fitzgerald to get back to me with the information I requested on Esteban’s older brother and any other useful information he could dig up on Klein.  I guess I was now second rate as far as pertinent information requests went.  If I were still with the department I’d probably get the information within a few hours, if not a few minutes.  My detective instincts weren’t fully sharpened yet but they were getting there.  I just had to keep telling myself that I had to think like a cop and the rest would fall into place. 

             
Remember what happened the last time you thought like a cop?

              Even in the late afternoon hours, Esteban’s paperwork continued to stare at me.  It was strewn about across the kitchen table.  After putting on a long- sleeve t- shirt and a pair of jeans I set out to hit the bricks again.  I thought about paying Esteban’s mother another visit to ask some follow- up questions and have another look around.  As frightened as I might have been after my first visit I knew I had to go back.    Isn’t that what investigators are supposed to do, follow- up?  Something was going to be there, whether it be in Esteban’s room, the basement, or the kitchen.  It was going to be something that led me to find out where Esteban was and what happened to him.  I could feel it.

Before I left, I found Esteban’s father’s cell phone number and gave it another try.  No answer.  No voicemail.

              Esteban’s father was quickly moving up my list of suspected people to have something to do with his son’s disappearance. A requested look into Esteban’s father was a rapidly growing possibility.  The recent turn of events, or lack thereof, with Esteban gone missing, shouldn’t his father be at home with his family?  Trying to protect his wife, or baby mama or whatever the hell she was, from any of the other family members possibly disappearing as well.  That’s certainly what I’d be doing if I were in Mr. Machado’s situation.

             
Nah, that’s too simple for you.  You don’t protect, you just let them die.

I parked in the same spot on the street as my last visit.  I took out my iPhone and snapped a few pictures of the exterior.  For what reason, I have no idea.  It just felt like something I should do.  Something a private investigator should do.  Maybe something for my scrapbook.

              Ms. Cruz answered the door on my first knock.  She was holding one of the babies in her arm with a dishrag over her shoulder.  I was invited in and wasn’t sure where she wanted me to sit.  Not thinking it was possible, the place appeared messier than my last visit.  Bigger piles of clothes on the floor.  Noisier toys to trip over in the hallway.  Higher stacks of newspapers covering the couch cushions.  Louder television in the background somewhere.  I followed Ms. Cruz down the center corridor to the back of the house.  If the main floor looked like this I could only imagine what the basement was like.

              “What can I do for you now, Mr. Barnes?”  I couldn’t tell if she sounded annoyed by my visit or stressed by the routines of being a mom to too many kids.  “Any new updates on Esteban?”  I immediately picked up on the lack of concern for her missing child.  It was as if his disappearance was not a major worry.  Like choosing Corn Flakes over Cheerios was more important than locating her son.  As if his disappearing act was a regular thing in the Machado/Cruz household. 

              Other missing kids cases that came through in my time as a cop usually resulted in a frantic parent or guardian wanting to conquer the world during the duration of the child’s disappearance.  Emotions frantically consuming their conscience and acting hysterically and irrationally, trying to overpower the authority of the police.  Trying to conquer the world with an army of one.  This situation struck me as odd and I was determined to find out why.

              “I’ve been talking to a few people and working on a few things that I’m waiting to pan out,” I said.  In other words: ‘I don’t have shit.’  I casually wandered from the kitchen into a back room designed like a den.  Another dilapidated couch.  Run down coffee and end tables.  Thrift shop lounge chairs.  But the television was a brand new fifty- plus inch flat screen Panasonic.  It always amazes me what people consider to be priorities.  Not enough money to put clothes on their children and ample amounts of food on the table but just enough to make sure the television screen is big enough to watch the latest trashy reality shows from across the street. 

              “Then why are you here?” Ms. Cruz asked.  Now I could sense the sincere strain in her voice. 

              “I wanted to ask you a few more questions then have a look around his bedroom again.  With your permission, of course,” I said.

              “Whatever you want.”  I watched her drop one of the kids into a kitchen chair.  I noticed there was a different potted plant on the table this time.  I couldn’t remember which kid Ms. Cruz back- handed last time for breaking the other pot. 

              “How was Esteban in school?” I asked, knowing the response I’d get.  Ms. Cruz gave me an ‘are- you- for- real?’ side glance, rolling her eyes in my direction and squeezing her lips together so tightly I thought she’d just eaten an entire lemon.  She lit a cigarette.

              “Oh, lord.  He is a pain in the ass.  Always getting in trouble.  Mouthing off to the teachers.  Fighting and thinking he’s a bad- ass bully,” she said, while releasing the smoke of her freshly lit cigarette. 

              I noticed she wasn’t conscious or cautious of keeping her cigarette smoke out of her children’s clean air.  “You know, I sometimes think he should get a good ass- whoopin’ from one of them bigger kids at school or on the street to teach him a lesson.  He sure as shit don’t listen to no one around here.”

              “Was he liked by his teachers or the principal?”  I asked, trying to work what Lindsey told me about Esteban always getting to be the special helper versus what I had gotten out of Garvey, which was the polar opposite.

              “I don’t know.  He never told me shit about his school day.  He was supposed to bring home these papers for me to sign every day telling me how he did that day but he’d lose them somehow on the bus ride home,” Ms. Cruz said.  She was talking about the daily communication sheets that the teachers at Right Step were required to send home, which the parents were to sign and return to ensure they were informed on how well, or not so well, their child did that day.  I picked up on the fact that she was referring to her missing child in the past tense-
‘he never told me…,’ ‘he
was
supposed to…’ 
Was that to be taken as a sign that Esteban’s own mother knew something about her own son’s disappearance?  Was this all some kind of ploy or scam? 

The kids got up from the table and ran to watch television with their grandmother. 

              “Who did he hang out with outside of school?” I asked.

              I watched her think. 

              She finally said, “His best friend is Joey.  Joey Alvarez.  He lives by the school.  I think he’s just as bad as Esteban be when they on the street.  I know that’s who he sneaks out to see.  There’s an older boy named Felix.  Felix Cabrera.  He’s in high school.  I don’t like Esteban hanging out with no high school kids but he don’t listen to me.  He listens to his father even less.”  I wrote the names down on a pad and made notes next to each one.  Ms. Cruz knew the street names of where Joey and Felix lived but not the house numbers.  I’d have Fitzgerald look into it for me.  Anything I needed, right?  Isn’t that what Fitzgerald told me when he kicked me to the curb?

              “You said Esteban was on Facebook a lot, right?” 

              Facebook.  The root of all adolescent evil.  There have been more bullying cases among adolescents since the inception of the social media’s ultimate giant.  More and more teenage suicides are somehow rooted around the comments shared on Facebook amongst other social media.  Facebook is somehow always intertwined into the cause.  Videos, photos, and comments have led hundreds of students to feel like they are inferior and their life really is not worth living.  Just as some booze hounds become stronger and develop ‘beer muscles’ the more they drink, teenagers are developing their ‘tech muscles’ with the unlimited amount of freedom and built up barriers between them and their devices.  We are ready to jump on the parents and blame them for their lack of supervision and rules against social media, which is true to an extent.  At what point are the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world made responsible for what their invention has done to a child’s chance to enjoy being just that?  Innocent adolescent freedoms stripped away just so some tech nerd can have his face plastered on the cover of another magazine.

              “Esteban’s always on Facebook.  I have to go into his room every night to get him off that damn computer.  He be talking to friends, tagging photos, and playing games,” Ms. Cruz said.  Didn’t seem too out of the ordinary.  Seemed to be the same thing that I did whenever I went on Facebook.  I know, I’m a hypocrite.