This American woman, whoever she was, had mischievous eyes and a million-dollar smile. The kind of woman men get in bar fights over. The kind who makes you regret you ever got involved with her in the first place, no matter how good she is in bed.
Maybe that’s why she was in that house with a bullet in her chest.
Maybe she’d pushed someone too far.
Tomorrow morning-Monday-Vargas would get up well before dawn and take Highway 2 back into Ciudad Juarez. By the time he got there, the state police station would be open and Rojas was bound to be in his office.
But no whitewash this time. No missing crime scene photos or doctored police reports.
Vargas wasn’t about to take any bullshit from Rojas.
This time he wanted the fucking truth.
46
Rojas wasn’t in his office.
Even though Vargas had gotten a 3:00 A.M. start, the drive to Juarez had been interminably long and almost unbearably hot, and by the time he reached the state police station he felt as if he’d taken a bath in his own sweat.
The bandage on his head had become so drenched that he’d pulled it off and left it off, simply covering the damage with his new baseball cap. The bleeding seemed to have stopped anyway.
Parking his car, he went inside to blessed air-conditioning and found the homicide unit. The office looked the same as before: A reception counter adjacent to a waist-high entry gate. Dingy beige walls decorated with newspaper clippings and photos of wanted suspects. A half-dozen cluttered desks butted up against one another.
Today, they were all empty except one, where a young detective was leaning back in his chair, talking on a cell phone. Vargas remembered seeing him the last time he was here, but they’d never been introduced.
He waited, trying not to listen in on the conversation. The detective was speaking Spanish, but Vargas had no trouble understanding him. Growing up, Vargas had been trapped in a kind of limbo between two cultures, raised in a country that spoke English by parents who rarely ever did. A lot of the time he found himself thinking in Spanish, but in these last few days he’d been bouncing back and forth between the United States and Mexico so frequently that he’d begun to blend the two languages, sometimes forgetting where he was.
“Come on, Carmelita,” the detective said. “You know she means nothing to me. She asked for a ride, so I gave her one.”
He nodded to Vargas and held up a finger, indicating he’d be with him in a moment.
“No, baby, that’s not true. If I wanted to be with her, I would have stayed married to her. Look, I gotta go. You still want me to come by tonight?” He listened a moment, then smiled. “That’s my girl. See you around eleven.”
He clicked off, looked up at Vargas. He was a handsome kid with a wisp of hair above his lip that was supposed to be a mustache. He kept his piece in a shoulder holster, trying hard to look like Steve McQueen in Bullitt but not quite pulling it off.
“You have a girlfriend?” he asked.
Vargas shook his head. “Not lately.”
“Do yourself a favor and keep it that way. I give my ex a ride home, and now I’ll be spending the night apologizing for it. Women are nothing but trouble.”
It was Vargas’s experience-with few exceptions-that women were only trouble if you treated them that way, but he wasn’t about to argue with the guy. Someone his age wouldn’t get it anyway.
Instead, Vargas said, “I’m looking for Rojas.”
The detective got to his feet, came over to the counter. “You’re the reporter, right? You were here last week.”
“That’s right,” Vargas said. “Is he around?”
“Not at the moment, no. You here about the casa murders again?”
“Yes.”
“That case is as good as dead. Not one lead. I did some of the footwork on it, and we got nothing.”
“Maybe I can help you with that.”
The detective’s eyebrows went up. “You have information?”
“Yes,” Vargas said, “but I’ll only talk to Rojas.”
“I told you, he’s not here. Why don’t you tell me what you know and I’ll-”
“Not gonna happen,” Vargas said, making it clear by the tone of his voice that he was leaving no wiggle room. It was Rojas or nothing.
The detective nodded, then held up a finger again. Moving back to his desk, he picked up his cell phone, dialed, then waited a few moments before speaking quietly into it.
Vargas couldn’t hear him this time but knew what was being said.
After a few moments, the detective clicked off, then stuffed the phone into his back pocket.
“You hungry?”
Vargas shrugged. Truth was, he was famished, but he saw no reason to point that out. “I could eat.”
“Good,” the detective said. “Rojas has invited us to breakfast.”
47
The restaurant was in the heart of Juarez, a tiny hole-in-the-wall with a walk-up ordering counter and a backyard patio sheltered by trees.
Rojas sat at a table in the shade of a laurel, a large man with a short, military haircut, looking very much like the Mexican army general he once was. He was halfway through a plate of chorizo and eggs when Vargas and the young detective-whose name was Garcia-approached.
“Have you ordered something?” Rojas asked.
“Not yet,” Garcia told him.
Rojas frowned and gestured to a young woman nearby who was pouring water for another customer. “Anna, bring my two associates some breakfast. And I’ll have another plate as well.”
The woman nodded and, like an obedient servant, quickly disappeared inside.
Rojas gestured for them to sit.
“Best homemade chorizo you’ll ever eat,” he said to Vargas. “My promise to you.”
Vargas sank into a chair. “I don’t know. My mother’s was hard to beat.”
“Was? She’s no longer with us?”
Vargas shook his head. “Cancer.”
Rojas crossed himself and raised a glass of water in a toast. “May Jesus smile upon her.” He took a sip and set the glass down. “Let me revise my promise. What you’re about to experience is the second — best chorizo you’ll ever eat.”
Vargas wasn’t quite sure why it mattered-but then it dawned on him. “This is your restaurant?”
“It is,” Rojas said. “Been in the family for over sixty years. People come from miles away to eat here.”
“An institution,” Garcia said.
Rojas shot him a look, as if he were an annoying fly, then smiled at Vargas. “We’ll eat first. Then talk.”
So they ate, Rojas telling them stories of his childhood, working like a dog in the kitchen and wanting nothing more than to escape its hell. Then, once he joined the military, he found that he missed the place, and years later, when his older brother decided against taking the reins from their father, Rojas had agreed to run the business.
His version of running it, however, seemed to be to bark the occasional order to one of the staff as he chowed down on his second plate of sausage.
Vargas paid little attention to it all, merely nodding politely as he ate the chorizo, which, it turned out, was not the second best he had ever tasted.
It was better than his mother’s, God rest her soul, and as he shoveled it down he realized he’d been more than famished. Despite stopping for food along the way, he felt as if he hadn’t had a bite to eat in days.
When they were finally done, Rojas said, “What happened to your hand?”
Vargas glanced at the bandage covering the puncture wound, which was starting to look a little haggard.
“Long story.”
“But that’s why you’re here, yes? To tell it? Garcia says you have information about the Casa de la Muerte murders.”
Vargas nodded. He had been wondering all through breakfast how to broach the subject, and had decided that the direct approach was best.
“I’m offering an exchange.”
Rojas hesitated. This obviously wasn’t what he had expected to hear. “What sort of exchange?”