Who knew, who cared? Maybe Snow knew and I cared, but right now all I wanted was to get the hell out of here.
Quicksilver hopped into the passenger seat and I leaned far over to pull the wide door shut. I revved that Caddy engine and we blasted out onto the Strip, heading for the bright lights of Las Vegas Central due north.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ric called me as soon as he got back the next day. "Man, what a mess."
"Where were you?"
"I could use a night at Los Lobos. You ready to rock 'n' roll?"
Hearing the soul-deep weariness in his voice, I decided that mentioning my petty personal problems was minor. I could have pointed out that the exertion of dancing wasn’t the best medicine for a burned-out traveler, but I was too selfish.
"Salsa," I corrected, "but it's not the full moon quite yet."
"We'll make it so."
"Yes, sir, Captain Picard."
"Where are the hot-mama low-rider jeans?" Ric asked when he picked me up outside Hector's estate. I respected his decision not to confront Quicksilver on his own turf yet.
I fluffed my turquoise silk skirt in the car. "I felt festive."
My fluffing gesture had made my silver bracelet jingle jangle like spurs.
"Nice bracelet. Navaho work, isn't it?"
"Um-" I glanced down to find that the bauble had gone Native American and added turquoise stones to match my dancing skirt. "Yeah, I guess."
"You didn't know when you bought it?"
"I found lots of old silver jewelry at estate sales in Kansas."
I told myself that I hadn't-actually lied to Ric; I just hadn't hit him in the face with Snow's nasty little permanent present. Still, I felt queasy about dodging the truth with him, and changed the subject pronto.
"The turquoise doesn’t quite match the rhinestones on my shoes."
He eyed and recognized the vintage plastic heels from our last, and first, date. "Those your lucky dancing shoes, chica? Or mine?"
That was another subject I didn't want to delve into, what could happen between us tonight. Haskell's ugly innuendos had tainted the growing ease of my relationship with Ric.
"So what happened where you were?" I asked. "Or can't I know?"
" Juarez."
I eyed his taut-jawed profile against the passing headlights, wondering if Captain Malloy had ever had this view.
"Oh. The thousands of factory girl murders that have been going on for decades. It must have been awful." I could say that with feeling, having been haunted recently by my own youthful innocent, Jeanie with the light brown hair.
His lips tightened, if that was possible. "I've been on it since I joined the FBI, fresh out of Quantico a few years ago. That's when they started calling me the Cadaver Kid. Sometimes I find the fresh dead. You would swear life had just kissed their cheeks goodbye. There's something…sweet about that. It's good to settle their families' anxieties and get police evidence, but many of them don't make it from the coroner's facility to a funeral home."
"Why not?"
"Hijacked," he said tersely. "Their bodies have hardly deteriorated. If they're raised as zombies, they have most of their faculties and such fresh, young corpses are in high demand as CinSim material."
"Ghastly! Can't anyone stop it?"
"Nobody's stopped Juarez," he said. "It often suits the powerful to use tragedies to enrich themselves."
After a moment he spoke again. "Sometimes I find the long-dead. They are only dry bones, fragile as precious parchment. I feel like an archeologist, privileged to reveal them. Then there are the savagely murdered ones. They still fester in the earth like plague victims. Bruised, bleeding. All those young, helpless girls. It was like being clawed at by…"
Groupies? I almost said. "Why were you there? Isn't it dangerous?"
"Damn right. The drug lords and traffickers in human and unhuman labor run the city with huge gangs. Police chiefs don't last twenty-four hours before being gunned down, and U.S. border forces and drug and immigration agents are often assassinated or caught, tortured, and killed within a day of entering the city."
"Ric!"
"That's why they want me there. I can blend in better than an Anglo agent and there's always my sterling track record at finding corpses. This time I found a DEA agent they'd done a torture voodoo act on. The body had to be brought up in pieces. At least the CinSim runners won't get him."
"Oh, my God! I'm glad I didn't know where you were and what you were doing. It's a wonder you don't have post-traumatic shock syndrome."
Ric shook his head as if dislodging memories of carnage.
"I need to be there. A lot of bodies have needed finding over the years. Some serial killers are working there, and the usual gangs of smugglers, thieves, and rapists. Nobody really cares about the deaths of these young women except their families. The Anglos who run the border factories like the cheap labor and provide buses that are about as secure as a sieve. The workers often have to stay overtime and miss the bus schedule. Their long hours send them home on foot after dark and Mexican culture doesn’t give much respect to women out after dark. They're picked off by the border predators so fast that a girl can be seen leaving the factory one night and sleep in a shallow grave by the next morning."
"All human predators?"
"No." He was silent for a while. "Vampires and werewolves too. And then there's the regional boogeyman, the chupacabra."
"Chupacabra?"
"A blood-sucking goat-killer. It's been described as everything from a small half-alien, half-dinosaur tailless vampire with quills running down its back to a pantherlike creature with a long snaky tongue to a hopping animal that leaves a trail of sulfuric stench. Some claim they're alien 'pets' or cloning experiments gone wrong. The UFO nuts call such creatures Anomalous Biological Entities, aka ABEs."
I had a shuddersome memory of the trio of dead cows near Wichita. That half-dinosaur tail reminded me of the huge reptilian track I'd found there.
"Have you ever seen such a thing out on the desert?" I asked.
He paused for a minute or more. "Maybe. I've seen a lot of bizarre things out in the desert. Chupacabras? Rogue humans and unhumans are scarier, and human predators are worst of all, because they have no need to kill to live."
"You found more victims this trip?" Personally, I meant. These weren't numbers, statistics; these were lost bodies and souls he dowsed for.
"Twelve, some as young as fourteen. The oldest was twenty-two. They'll be identified and catalogued and buried again in the desert, with only a crude headstone. It's beginning to feel sadistic to dig them up, but the authorities keep hoping each new death will nail some single maniac killer who can die for the sins of all the opportunistic rapists who fill the border cities."
We were out of the city now and driving on the dark, almost deserted highway toward the distant faint twinkles of mountain habitations. We were silent for a while, lulled by the empty dark and the roar of the Vette's engine.
"It must…take something out of you to find all these bodies," I said finally.
"It always has." His glance slid toward me and darted back to the empty highway.
He was trying to decide whether to tell me something. Usually I wanted to know everything. Relentless reporter, that's me. Nothing I can't take. No knowledge too devastating. Now I didn't know about taking on whatever Ric was holding back. I sensed still-raw wounds underneath that smooth, defensive exterior. I didn't know if I was one of them. Or could be.
He decided to let me in a little more. "I've always maintained a certain control, a certain distance, when I work. Ric Montoya, human cadaver dog. Ever since… Sunset Park, I don't have that distance. I don't just find them and deal with the dead. I feel them now. They expect something of me I've never had to give, like they're reaching out of the earth to grab me with their living-dead hands, their living-dead minds, their living-dead emotions and needs. It's…exhausting."