A burly Latino in a cotton plaid shirt and jeans had gotten out of the Nissan and was hurrying toward the gurney, and Virgil had time to think, Husband, when the man stepped past the gurney without looking at it, up to Sparkle, and with no warning, hit Sparkle in the face. She went down in a heap and Virgil went that way fast, with Mattsson a step behind, but Bill was behind the man and wrapped him up and lifted him off his feet and walked him away from Sparkle.
As he did that, Bill turned his head to Virgil and said, “I got him, help Sparkle.”
The Latino was a big guy, and he struggled, but Bill had clamped two heavy arms around him and carried him away. When they’d been skinny-dipping, Virgil noticed that Bill had some serious muscles. Now that was working for him, and nothing that the big man did got him loose.
Sparkle tried to get to her hands and knees, but Mattsson knelt next to her and said, “Stay down, just turn over, let me look…”
A nurse had come over and Virgil squatted and they all looked, and Sparkle’s eye was already starting to close and she sputtered, “It hurts…”
The nurse pressed a cold compress against her forehead and cheekbone and said, “If you can stand up, we can get you inside…”
The three of them helped Sparkle get to her feet and the nurse helped her get inside and Sparkle looked back at Virgil and Mattsson and said, “Don’t do anything to Leandro. Don’t do anything to him.”
Bill had pushed the man into an inside corner of a wall, blocking his way out: he was talking to him quickly but quietly, and as Virgil and Mattsson walked up, the man reached out and touched Bill’s crucifix and Bill patted him on the shoulder and said something in Spanish.
“We okay?” Virgil asked.
“We are,” Bill said. “This is Leandro Cortez, Ramona’s husband. He told her not to take Sparkle into the plant, but she did anyway. He doesn’t know how the Castro people found out about Ramona, but they did, obviously. He thinks he’ll probably be fired tomorrow.”
“No, he won’t,” Mattsson said. To Cortez: “What time do you go to work?”
“Seven o’clock,” the man said, in heavily accented English.
“I will see you there,” she said. And, “We should charge you with assault, which would get you thrown out of the country and probably banned for good, but Sparkle doesn’t want to do that. If she’s hurt bad, we’ll do it anyway. If she’s only got a black eye, we’ll probably let it go.”
The man looked at Bill, who translated, and he nodded.
“That woman, she says to Ramona nothing would happen…” Cortez looked close to crying, and Bill patted him on the shoulder again.
“I’m sure this will work out,” Bill said. He said something more in Spanish, and the man nodded, and Bill said in English, “Let’s go see about Ramona.”
–
Inside, a nurse told them that Ramona’s vitals were being reviewed by the doctor, and then she’d be off to get a full-body scan. Bill explained that to Cortez in Spanish, and Mattsson asked Cortez exactly what had happened.
With Bill translating, Cortez told them that they lived in an informal trailer park hidden away on a farm that supplied the Castro plant. Cortez had been watching a Cubs baseball game with a couple of friends in one trailer, while Alvarez was visiting with two other women at the other end of the park at a picnic table. The women were sitting outside, because the night was hot and most of the trailers didn’t have air-conditioning. The one where the men were watching the ball game did have air-conditioning, and the windows were closed.
Which was why they didn’t immediately hear the women screaming, that and the ball game.
According to Alvarez’s friends, a red pickup truck stopped a short distance away, maybe a hundred feet, and two men got out and walked into the park. That Alvarez should be sitting outside was an accident, but the men knew who they were looking for, recognized her, came directly to the table. Without a word, one of the men began hitting her, and then, when she was on the ground, kicking her. The other man faced off against Alvarez’s two female friends, blocking them from the assault.
One of the women went running to get the men, and the two attackers jogged away, jumped into the truck, and tore off. By the time the men had run to the other end of the trailer park, the truck was gone. The attack had lasted maybe fifteen seconds.
The two attackers, one of Alvarez’s friends told Cortez, wore Halloween masks, a man’s face. Nobody knew whose face.
That was all he knew.
–
Mattsson said to Virgil, “Same guys. Wish I’d moved sooner.”
“You needed the backup,” Virgil said. “You think we ought to check the trailer park first, see if we can get more details?”
She shook her head: “We ought to move on this guy. Nail him down now.”
“You’re leading on this,” Virgil said. “We’ll do it your way.”
Mattsson nodded and said, “Let’s check on Sparkle. Make sure she’s okay.”
Sparkle had taken a good shot to the eye, but no bones were broken. She’d have a shiner for a while, a nurse told them, but there wasn’t much to be done except to keep the cold compress on. “Me ’n’ Frankie sort of match now,” Sparkle said, looking into a mirror.
Virgil nodded and said to Mattsson, “You ready?”
“Yeah. Get your gun on,” Mattsson said.
“Such a fascist impulse,” Virgil said. “But okay.”
–
Their first target for the night was Frederick Reeves, aka Slow Freddie.
“I’m pretty sure he’s the blocker, not the hitter,” Mattsson told Virgil, as they left the hospital parking lot in Virgil’s truck. “Everybody says he’s a really big guy. Fat. The other guy, Blankenship, is built more like you. Tall and wiry, strong and mean.”
The idea, they agreed, would be to get Reeves to roll over on his partner. “We know he’s scared of the lockup, like claustrophobia. We’re gonna have to lock him up for a while, but if he thinks we might lock him up for years, maybe he’ll talk about Blankenship. And maybe Castro.”
“It’s Blankenship that we could get on DNA from the bite on the arm,” Virgil said.
“Right. But we need a reason to serve a warrant on him. If we can even get Reeves to mention his name, we got him. That’s why we need to whisper in Reeves’s ear.”
–
Reeves lived in the town of St. Peter, a few miles north of Mankato, in a neighborhood of manufactured homes, which were exactly like single-wide trailers but with foundation skirts instead of wheels. The houses were all set end-on to the streets.
The neighborhood was neatly kept, with lawn sheds outside many of the homes and a boat parked here and there. At one of the homes, a half-dozen people were sitting at a picnic table with a woman playing a guitar. Virgil’s window was open, and when they passed, they could hear the group singing what Virgil recognized as “Ablaze,” a Lutheran religious song. The darkness is deepest where there is no light…
“They sing that in my old man’s church, the youth group,” Virgil said.
“Neat to hear it passing by,” Mattsson said. “You don’t hear much outside music anymore, except in malls. Elevator music.”
–
Reeves lived with his grandmother, Mattsson said. When they arrived at the address she had, they found a trailer that looked black in the night, but turned out to be navy blue when their headlights panned across it. There were lights on inside. A white pickup sat on the parking pad beside it, and Mattsson grunted, “Good. That’s his truck.”
Virgil pulled in behind the truck, blocking it. With the end of the house just in front of it, there’d be no way for the truck to get out.
“I’ll knock, if you want to stay back a bit,” Mattsson said. “Be more likely to open up for a woman.”
“Okay.”
The house had a two-step concrete stoop. Mattsson climbed the stoop and banged on the aluminum screen door; Virgil could hear TV voices inside. A moment later an elderly woman looked out through a hand-sized, diamond-shaped window, and the door rattled as she pulled it open, then cocked her head at Mattsson. “What?”