“Beware of BFRC!” is how they put it: Big Fucking Red Cloud.
Many of their investigations consisted of tracking down knowing disposers. Plating companies were among the worst offenders, and their acids were dumped everywhere, much of it in southeast San Diego. Nell knew of one particularly egregious case where fifty 55-gallon drums were transported to Mexico by a waste disposal company that had bribes in to a Mexican customs official. The de-headed drums were dumped into the Tijuana River and the empty ones were sold to squatters who used them to haul drinking water. And there were other horror stories involving Mexico as a dump site; one involved the casting of re-bars used in cheap Mexican concrete housing with metal that had been made radioactive in the United States.
Presidential candidate Bill Clinton had recently sort of approved of the North American Free Trade Agreement, his approval being subject to more environmental safeguards from the Mexican side, but Mexicans said that their citizens had suffered from U.S. toxic waste in ways that no one would ever know about. In that poor Mexicans had a high mortality rate from diseases long since eradicated in the U.S., who could say if hazardous waste contributed to it?
That was the way of things in a Third World country, or so the Mexicans said. And nobody south of the border thought that the Americans would sign the NAFTA agreement unless it greatly favored the U.S. It had always been thus, ever since the gringos stole their land in the Mexican War, or so the Mexicans said.
Of course Nell’s job stopped at the international border, but she often thought about the people down there. She frequently took holidays on the Baja peninsula, and had been to Mexico City twice, as well as to Acapulco. She was interested in the Mexican culture, liked the people, and hoped to be able to afford a decent specimen of pre-Columbian sculpture someday, like those she’d admired in the shops of Mexico City.
If Finbar Finnegan thought it was tough staring down the muzzle at the forty-five-year benchmark, Nell Salter could have told him that it wasn’t a lark turning forty-three, which she had accomplished in July. Unlike Fin, she hadn’t managed to chalk up three divorces during her twenty years in law enforcement; one was enough, when she was twenty-two, then working as a civilian crime-scene photographer for the San Diego P.D.
The job of crime-scene photographer hadn’t been exactly what she’d envisioned. During young Nell’s second day on the job she’d found herself literally cheek by jowl with a dead drug dealer who’d had his throat cut, and was discovered inside the trunk of his own Mercedes two weeks after his murder. Nell’s civilian husband had made her strip naked before she was allowed into the house after that one. Her clothes smelled, her hair smelled, her fingernails smelled. For months she could whiff that dead drug dealer. It might happen when she’d walk into an unfamiliar room, or when she’d open the trunk of her own car. Once it happened when she was cooking dinner. Keeping a small can of aerosol in her purse helped her to get her imagination under control.
“This isn’t what I expected from corpse photography,” she’d explained to her boss.
He said, “Did you expect they’d resemble mannequins that you could dress up like dolls?”
Nell’s fourteen-month marriage to her high school sweetheart deteriorated quickly after that. His boozing, aggravated by a job layoff, made things worse. One night after a drunken row, he’d punched her in the face, breaking her nose and blackening both eyes.
As a civilian employee of the S.D.P.D. Nell had known what to do, but didn’t. She didn’t call the police and didn’t prosecute, but she did try a gag that a cop had told her about. While he was packing his clothes, vowing to leave forever, she put tiny pebbles inside the valve stems on his tires, then screwed the caps back on, while she bled on her $50 silk blouse. Then she watched him drive away, hoping that the tires wouldn’t go flat until he got on the freeway.
It was a pots ’n pans divorce, and she sent him a check for his half of all they owned. As far as Nell knew, her ex was still living in Miami, where he’d gone to work for an uncle at a Cadillac dealership. After she’d taken back her maiden name and joined the San Diego P.D., he’d called her late one night to suggest that they consider reconciliation, asking if she missed him.
Nell said she missed him like a yeast infection, and that she no longer got misty remembering their high school homecoming dance, and that if he ever crossed her path again she was going to show him a few tricks she’d learned at the police academy, like ripping out his fucking eyeballs and feeding them to the cat.
As it turned out, breaking her nose was the only good thing he ever did for her. As she matured physically during her eleven years as a San Diego cop-after she’d got into jogging and regular workouts-her face narrowed and her cheeks hollowed, giving her a more refined look. And with that refinement a slightly bent nose was sexy indeed. In those days other female cops told her that if they could get a nose like that they’d date Norman Mailer. In more recent years they changed it to Mike Tyson.
Nell regularly jogged along the Embarcadero in those days, loving the spangled sunlight that ricocheted off the bay and caressed her bare legs. No headset for Nell; she liked to hear the groans of sailboats straining at their moorings, and the zing of halyards against metal masts. Jogging along the Embarcadero was an utterly sensual experience.
Later in her S.D.P.D. career when she’d worked as a detective, Nell began to dress better. In winter she liked cable turtle-necks, and double-pleated trousers worn with blazers or tweed jackets. A loyal Nordstrom’s customer since the chain opened in the San Diego area, she wore slim-girl things off duty: stirrup trousers and walking shorts.
Nell promised herself that she was always going to dress well and live well, and that no son of a bitch was ever going to punch her in the face again, not without wearing handcuffs and getting some big-time payback before she got him to jail. And for sure he’d be wearing the cuffs with his palms outward, because once Nell had the misfortune to arrest a Plastic Man clone whom she cuffed palms inward for his comfort. While she was outside her patrol car completing her report, he’d managed to jackknife his body and pull his cuffed hands around his legs and feet. Then he drove off, crashing ten minutes later during a high-speed pursuit by the Highway Patrol. Her most humiliating day. After that, Nell Salter wasn’t the kind to worry a whole lot about a male prisoner’s comfort.
Other events began to change her in subtle ways, as inevitably happens to young people in law enforcement. One of these changes resulted from a phone call by a parole board representative who wanted her opinion concerning the impending release of a man she’d arrested for battering his family. The man had not only broken his wife’s nose, but had cracked four of her ribs. During his rampage he’d also managed to fracture the skull of his eight-year-old daughter and puncture the child’s spleen.
He had not served even half of his sentence, but it turned out that his kidney disease was causing the state to have to pay for dialysis treatments, and what with the budget crunch, the parole board thought about springing him. Despite premonitions, Detective Nell Salter had allowed herself to be persuaded not to oppose the release. She was told how, like everyone from Manson murderers to Watergate conspirators, he’d found Jesus perched on his bunk in that little prison cell.