With a full stomach and plenty of ideas, he drove down to Wilmer in the rental sedan they'd picked up in Laredo. He knew Gage would recognize his truck and he didn't trust his luck with the chief a second time. It wasn't yet seven-thirty and Jose figured a woman like Mandy Chase wasn't likely to get up-let alone out-much before ten. He pulled the car off the road a good two hundred yards from the entrance to Lucky Star and dumped two sugars and four half-and-halfs into his coffee. He hadn't finished stirring his drink before the white Range Rover that he knew belonged to the wife came bursting out of gates in a cloud of dust and hit the road with a slight swerve before racing off toward town.
Jose capped his coffee and set off after her, keeping enough distance to avoid suspicion. He followed her onto Route 45, north toward Dallas. When she got off at a South Side exit, Jose squinted and looked around, unable to make sense of a rich senator's wife traveling to the wrong side of town. The white SUV was easy to follow, even from a distance. When it turned into the back lot of a run-down building with boarded-up windows, Jose could only think of another rich wife he'd been hired to follow the previous year. She'd come to this part of town to buy her meth.
He watched from across the street as Mandy Chase got out of the Range Rover wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair bound up in a purple scarf, and wearing a pair of large dark sunglasses. She glanced around, then walked hurriedly past a handful of battered cars parked in the lot and slipped into the back door of the three-story brick building.
Jose studied the area, waiting and watching for some time. When he got out of the car, he felt for the gun under his arm and then the one tucked into the waist of his pants before crossing the street. Clouds hid the sun, but the day was already warm and dank with humidity. Cars whooshed past on the nearby highway and the smell of spent fuel choked the air. In the gutters and scattered across the busted pavement of the lot lay flattened cans, broken glass, used condoms, and the wrappers of a hundred different forms of junk food. Jose circled the building and watched from the corner as a thin stream of ratty-looking people, mostly men, entered the front of the brick building through a battered wooden door.
Next to the building, a decrepit brick church stood in near-ruin, its faded walls tainted by vandals and graffiti. Jose returned to the back of the building and listened at the door Mandy Chase had gone into. The random clank of metal mixed into the occasional bark of orders between people confused him. The door opened easily and the heavy smell of cooking greeted him: frying potatoes, crackling grease, fake eggs, and white toast singed brown and black.
Jose stood at the back of a large kitchen, where several people worked over industrial-size pots with two-foot utensils. Mandy Chase was nowhere in sight. An older black man with tight white curls of hair and plastic-rimmed glasses looked up from his work, wiping the sweat from his face on the white sleeve of his uniform before asking Jose if he could help him.
"Looking for Mandy Chase," Jose said uncertainly.
The man flashed a yellow-toothed smile and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened.
"Miss Mandy?" the cook said, grinning even harder. "She'll be out there."
Jose followed the direction of the man's bony finger, through a set of swinging double doors and into a large hall, thick with the din of nearly a hundred homeless and mentally ill people sitting on benches along three long rows of tables. At the front of the hall, Mandy Chase stood alongside several older black women ladling out food to the line of tattered people. Armed with a giant spoon, she offered up a smile as well as a couple of words to go with her scoops of rubbery yellow eggs whipped to life from a powder.
Jose walked in back of the other helpers until he came to Mandy. Up close, he could see the dark roots of her blonde hair and the mottled skin on her long neck from too much sun. Still, she was strikingly beautiful and as out of place as a daisy blooming from broken asphalt.
"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.
"Oh," she said, glancing at him with a scoop of eggs balanced on her spoon, "good. Can you get more trays from the kitchen?"
"Sure," Jose said.
To the man who'd directed him in the first place, he said, "Mandy sent me for more trays."
"Helping out? Good," the old man said, pointing to a station beside a stainless-steel sink where a younger man worked over a mountain of dishes with a steamy spray nozzle. "Right over there, and you might as well take them plates, too. They're hungry today. Weather coming and I think they sense it."
Jose placed two stacks of mismatched plates, warm and wet from the water, onto a stack of damp gray trays and carried them out to the service line. He set them down alongside the bins of bent and tarnished silverware and returned to Mandy's side.
"Set," he said. "Anything else?"
"Mr. Jenkins," she said, raising her voice so the toothless man in front of her could hear, "it's good to see you. How's your cat?"
"Linda?" the old man asked, opening his coat to reveal a pouch slung across his naked chest, where an emaciated tabby cat stared out with bulging yellow eyes.
"There she is," Mandy said, scooping out another clump of eggs for the cat. "Get her fed, Mr. Jenkins. She's too thin."
Mr. Jenkins worked his gums and gave Mandy a nod before closing his coat and passing on.
Mandy glanced up at Jose and said, "You're new."
"I'm not really a volunteer," Jose said. "But it's nice to see you helping people."
Mandy's face clouded over. She stopped spooning and studied his face.
"Jose O'Brien," he said, extending a hand. "I used to be with Dallas PD."
"He sent you?" she said, her face crimping with disgust, her big brown eyes wincing.
"Who would 'he' be?" Jose asked.
Mandy turned sharply away, set her jaw, and continued with her work.
"Leave me alone, Mr. O'Brien," she said, bitter.
"Your husband?" Jose asked. "I'm not with him. Not even close. He having you followed after your little thing with Elijandro?"
She ignored him, her shoulders drew back, and the cords in her neck showed. Jose waited for her to turn back, but she didn't.
"I thought," Jose said, "when I saw you here, doing this, no cameras, no reporters, just a bunch of broken-down homeless people, that maybe you're not the rich-bitch wife of a megalomaniac senator."
After a pause, through clenched teeth she said, "That's exactly what I am, so leave me the hell alone."
"I'm not with your husband," he said.
"Everyone is with my husband," she said, scooping out eggs. "Go to hell."
"You knew Elijandro had a wife," Jose said. "I'm helping her. Elijandro had a little girl, too. They've got nothing. Now, some lawyer might have told you that what your husband said about Ellie can't come out in court, but that won't hold up. We know about Nelly hearing the two of you fight."
Mandy looked at him sharply.
"Even without Nelly," Jose said quietly, "I've got a witness who knows Nelly was there and what she heard and I'm told that's just as good. So we're gonna subpoena you, and even the senator can't make that go away."
"What about Nelly?" she asked.
Jose shook his head and said, "She's gone, like you probably know. Look, I didn't think it was going to go like this, then I see you dishing out eggs here and I think maybe you give a shit about someone other than yourself. I've seen wives dipping in with the help before and they're usually not working the soup line in their off-hours."
"Dipping in?" Mandy said, shaking her head. "You're pathetic. If you're not with my husband, you should be. Send him your resume, Mr. O'Brien."
"Your husband is not a good man," Jose said.
Mandy turned and looked him in the eye, her own glass-blue irises burning with hatred as she said, "You have no idea."
"Tell me," Jose said. "Help me. Help Elijandro's little girl."
"I tell you, it'll be the end of my problems, that's for sure," she said.