Mission Road

Page 14

Etch forced himself not to make a fist. He thought about Ana in that hospital bed, the uneven bleep of the heart monitor. He had stood at her window for an hour, hating himself, his hand in his pocket, fingering a small glass vial.
“Thanks for the atole,” he told Santos. “Maybe we’ll play a few holes some time?”
The old medical examiner nodded, his eyes cautious. “I’d like that, Lieutenant.”
As Etch drove across the dam, he got one last glimpse of Jaime Santos standing on his back porch, two cups of atole steaming on the rail in the afternoon cold.
DECEMBER 1986, THE SAME CHRISTMAS FRANKIE White murdered his third victim, Etch’s abuela, the ninety-two-year-old matron of the family, had died of a bad heart. What was left of the Hernandez clan came unraveled.
Etch’s parents had died three years before—his father staring down the barrel of his old military service revolver, his mother shortly afterward from an overdose of sleeping pills. Etch’s siblings drifted away to other states. His cousins stopped going to mass at San Juan. Even Etch moved out of the old neighborhood, to a nondescript little house on the near West Side where he could do his target practice in the surrounding fields.
His abuela’s funeral hit him harder than he expected. He finally realized he was alone. No family of his own. No wife or kids. Nothing but his job, and not many friends there.
Not that his colleagues disliked him. Everyone complimented Etch on his efficiency. Most of them trusted him to watch their backs. But nobody invited him for a beer. He did not radiate the kind of easygoing manner that made people want to hang out with him.
Except for Lucia. She went to the funeral with him. She held his hand during the lowering of the casket.
Afterward, they sat on her porch swing and drank tequila while inside the Spanish AM radio played old-fashioned rancheras.
“You should take the sergeant’s test,” Lucia told him. “I can see you as a supervisor. A lieutenant, even.”
For a moment, Etch was too surprised to speak. “I’m a career patrolman, like you. You understand that.”
She poured another shot of Cuervo.
She was wearing a charcoal dress, silver earrings, even lipstick. Her hair was freshly washed and curled. She smelled like jasmine.
“People make a wide arc around you,” Lucia said. “They sense you’re not one of the guys. That’s okay. You’re . . . detached. You’re a born commander, Etch. You should stop worrying and play your strengths.”
A Santiago Jiménez song played on the radio, the sounds of accordion and basso guitar pulsing through the screen door.
Lucia’s daughter, Ana, was home from Lackland Air Force Base. It was her first weekend furlough after basic training. Etch could hear Ana inside, talking on the phone to a friend. A lot of twenty-one-year-old catch-up talk—No way. Oh my God, you’re kidding! He did what?
Etch tried not to resent Ana’s presence.
Lucia looked good tonight. It felt right to just sit next to her.
He’d thought, once Ana was grown and out of the house . . . maybe there’d be time to get closer to Lucia. He’d been trying for so long, building up his courage for the eleven years they’d worked together. They spent every day together. In the field, they could read each other’s body language perfectly, finish each other’s sentences. Yet off duty, she still acted distant. Every time he edged toward telling her how he felt, she seemed to sense it and pull away.
“Lucia, I couldn’t work a job where you weren’t my partner,” he said finally.
She smiled, but there was sadness behind it. “You should do more than this, Etch. You could run things better than the brass we got now, for sure. You’re a good man.”
“No, I’m not. Just lonely.”
She said nothing.
“I know everybody in our beat,” Etch said. “I know their kids and grandkids. And I’ve still got no one. I just can’t—”
“Get close,” she supplied, when he faltered. “It’s like somebody stole that part of you—the part that lets you connect.”
There was no need to answer. She described him as perfectly as the day she’d named him “Etch.”
His heart pounded like a damn teenager’s. He reached over and rested his hand on her knee. She didn’t object. She laced her fingers on top of his.
Then Ana flew out the door, breathless. “Mom, can I borrow your car?”
Gently but firmly, Lucia brushed away Etch’s hand.
Ana took a step back. “Oh—”
“It’s all right, honey.” Lucia forced a smile. “Etch, did I tell you Ana is applying for special police?”
“That’s great.” Etch tried to sound enthusiastic, though his heart felt like crushed paper. “You thinking about civilian law enforcement some day?”
Ana studied him warily, then nodded. “Four years in the service, then college. Then apply to SAPD.”
She said it just like any twenty-one-year-old—as if life plans were carved in stone. It was hard for Etch to believe she was the same age as a monster like Frankie White.
“Uh . . . Mom?” Ana looked at the tequila bottle. “I thought you told me you’d stopped drinking.”
Lucia rolled her eyes. She was only drinking to commiserate with an old friend, she said. Everything was fine.
Car keys were provided.
Ana promised not to be out too late.
Etch tried not to resent the look Lucia’s daughter gave him—as if she thought he was making her mother drink. As if that was the only way Lucia would ever hold hands with him.
After Ana was gone, Lucia and he sat on the porch a while longer, but the moment for holding hands had passed.
A news break came on the radio, the Spanish DJ giving an update on Julia Garcia’s murder. The witness who’d provided the description of a possible suspect had now turned up missing herself. Police would not say if they had other leads.
Music came back on, a ballad about love in the desert.
“Who was it?” Etch asked.
Lucia frowned. “Who was who?”
“The guy who broke your heart. What’d you say: ‘stole a piece of your soul’?”
Lucia crossed her ankles. “That was a long time ago, Etch.”
She drank her tequila.
The song played through.
He was so close to Lucia he could feel her warmth, but she wasn’t with him anymore. Her thoughts were a million miles away.
For the first time, Etch felt the anger burning inside him. He resented Lucia’s past. He felt powerless, the way he’d felt watching the forensics team bring up the draped gurney with Julia Garcia’s body.
“I could do something about Frankie White,” Etch said.
Lucia set down her shot glass, leaned toward him. “Promise me you’ll never say that again. Not even a hint.”
“Lucia—”
“You become like them if you do that, Etch. It would eat you up. The only way to keep your soul from rotting when you deal with people like Frankie White is not to be like them. Don’t hate them. Just do your job.”
“Is that possible?”
Her eyes were intense, almost desperate. “It has to be.”
They sat on the porch swing in their funeral clothes, listening to love music from the Mexican desert while the phone rang cheerfully inside—Ana’s friends trying to reach her, optimistic young women all dying to chat about their wide-open futures.
ETCH WAS ON COMMERCE, THREE BLOCKS from the office, when he pulled over to take a call.
“Bad news,” Kelsey said. “Ballistics can’t match the bullets from Ana’s leg with the gun we found at Navarre’s house. Slugs are too badly mangled.”
“Caliber?” Etch asked.
“Yeah. Right caliber: .357. But the blood on the shirt isn’t Ana’s. Could be Arguello’s. They’re still testing . . .”
His voice trailed off, wiry and nervous.
“What else?” Etch asked.
“A body turned up in a South Side dumpster this morning. One of Zapata’s cutters, shot point-blank in the gut. Our guys have been asking around. Seems there was a meeting that went bad at Jarrasco’s last night. This guy and a friend met a heavyset Latino with a ponytail, about the same time that Ana was shot. The description kinda matches Ralph Arguello.”
“You’re saying Arguello has an alibi.”
“A bad goddamn alibi. He was busy shooting a guy?”
“But that would mean he didn’t shoot Ana.”
“It’s weak, sir. It’s still gotta be him.”
Etch heard the indecision in his voice.
Kelsey was the equivalent of an Abrams tank. As long as he had a clear target in the distance and wide straight road, he would roll over everything in his path. But as soon as he started doubting his aim or hit muddy terrain, he ground to a halt. He needed a good push to keep going.
“Kelsey,” Etch said, “if you think you may have been too focused on Arguello, for whatever reason, if you think you’ve made a mistake, it’s not too late . . .”
He could almost feel the steam on the other end of the line. Etch had dared to use the M-word.
“I didn’t make a mistake, sir,” Kelsey said tightly.
“All right.”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
Kelsey hung up, hard.
Etch sat back and closed his eyes. He tried to convince himself everything could still work out.
With luck, Kelsey would now hound Arguello till Doomsday, and he would think it was his own idea. He would think Etch had tried to convince him not to.
Etch didn’t hate many people, but Ralph Arguello deserved to go down. He’d gotten away with murder before. He was no better than the Whites. Worse. He’d married Ana, jeopardized the career Etch had helped her build.
Two years ago, watching them at the altar had been more than Etch could bear—Ana in her white dress, her face so much like her mother’s, and a common criminal next to her, grinning like the devil.
Navarre and Maia Lee had been at the wedding. Then, as now, standing by Ralph Arguello, supporting somebody who didn’t deserve it, watching him take Ana’s hand.
Etch imagined Lucia sitting next to him, the way she had so many years on patrol.
Why did you do it, Etch? she asked.
It was an accident, he promised her. It wasn’t supposed to happen.
She turned her face to the window. It was no accident. You know better.
The sound of his cell phone startled him out of his trance.
His surveillance man had a short report: Maia Lee had spent the last couple of hours inside the Express-News offices, probably going through the archives. Now she was at the Pig Stand, talking to the old guy behind the counter.
Etch hung up, hit the steering wheel with his palm.
“Miss Lee,” he chided. “Miss Lee, Miss Lee.”
He felt his anger building.
Jaime Santos had done more than a little talking. The old man was dangerous. And Maia Lee . . . she was too much like Ana. She was following Ana’s trail too well.
If Kelsey didn’t do his work right, if Arguello started looking bad as a suspect . . .
Etch searched for a fallback plan. Only one came to him—an idea that had been brewing since he debriefed the old deputy Drapiewski. It had a certain sense of justice to it.