“Oh, yes, all that. But not the father of José Antonio López. He is a bastard, that boy.”
José Antonio wavers. “Then who is my father?”
The old man tries to shrug but starts coughing again. “Some Indian,” he chokes out, then calms himself with deep breaths. “Why do you think a man kills his wife? He looks at his boy and sees nothing of himself. And his woman, the bitch, she mocks him with it.” He laughs to himself. “Of course he takes a knife to her.”
“Gentlemen, please,” Menéndez interrupts, “I can see you have things to discuss. I should go.” But the ex-convict stands there, waiting. José Antonio looks up from the bedridden old man. “There’s just the matter, senor, of the final reckoning...”
“Oh, yes, forgive me. I still owe you something, don’t I?”
The detective nods as his client comes around the bed.
José Antonio knows how things kill only in the jungle. No slow toxin drips from the fangs of a jungle snake; already the mouse is being digested before it is even swallowed. And the monkey, pricked by a dart, plummets dead from its branch to the damp leaves matted about the trunk of the tree. So when he draws the knife from behind his back and drives it, all in one motion, into the heart of the man who has cheated him of nearly all his lottery winnings, the fat body slumps across the bed without a moan of protest.
José Antonio turns back to his father.
“I can’t move,” López coughs. The heavy corpse has pinned his withered legs to the mattress. Then, grasping the situation, he sneers, “Go ahead. Kill me, you son of a whore.”
But José Antonio takes his father’s skeletal hand and wraps it around the hilt of the knife still buried in Menéndez’s chest. The old man struggles to extricate his bloody hand from beneath the body pressing against his own.
“They’ll come in the morning, won’t they, someone, the old lady downstairs, with your breakfast?” José Antonio explains as he wipes his hand on the blanket. “And what will you tell them, Señor Sánchez, about this former police officer murdered in your room with your own knife? It is yours, you know. It’s the knife I pulled from my mother’s belly.”
The old man is defiant. “I’ll tell them about you, you bastard.”
“You’ll tell them you are Juan López, the murderer of Elena Altiérrez? Killing a young mother — that’s even worse than this. Would you rather be executed for her murder? Either way, it’s justice, isn’t it?” José Antonio leans over and blows out the candle on the nightstand. “You think about it, Papa. You think about it all night until they come for you in the morning.”
“You can’t leave me like this,” the voice wheezes pitifully in the dark.
“Isn’t this how you left me?” the dark answers.
8
Sometimes in the jungle, surrounded by vegetation higher than the eyes, one nonetheless senses the path home. It requires no compass, no landmarks, only an ear to listen to what one already knows.
Monday at two o’clock, Alma climbs the stairs to José Antonio’s room, taps twice, and softly opens the door, expecting to find her lover awaiting her afternoon visit. Though he has missed breakfast before, out early on one of his walks, he has always come home for their siesta.
But on the bed, his city clothes are laid out like a corpse on its bier. Above the linen pants, within the linen coat, the collared shirt is drawn closed with the tie she once taught the man to knot. As she bends to touch the cloth, Alma sees the tie has been threaded through a diamond wedding ring and the shirt pocket is stuffed with hundred-peso notes bound by a letter she will stain with her tears.
Already the steamer on which José Antonio has booked passage inland is leaving behind the smoking plains on the outskirts of Puerto Túrbido. As he sits in the bow on the case of whiskey he has bought for the fiesta with the last of his winnings, it salves his heart to see the brown brush unwither into green jungle.
Michael Connelly
Two-Bagger
From Murderers’ Row
The bus was forty minutes late.
Stilwell and Harwick waited in a six-year-old Volvo at the curb next to the McDonald’s a block from the depot. Stilwell, the driver, chose the spot because he was betting that Vachon would walk down to the McDonald’s after getting off the bus. They would begin the tail from there.
“These guys, they been in stir four, five years, they get out and want to get drunk and laid in that order,” Stilwell had told Harwick. “But something happens when they get off the freedom bus and see the golden arches waiting for them down the block. Quarter Pounder and fries, ketchup. Man, they miss that shit in prison.”
Harwick smiled.
“I always wondered what happened with real rich guys, you know? Guys who grew up poor, eatin’ fast food, but then made so much money that money doesn’t mean anything. Bill Gates, guys like that. You think they still go to McDonald’s for a grease fix every now and then?”
“In disguise maybe,” Stilwell suggested. “I don’t think they drive up in their limos or anything.”
“Yeah, probably.”
It was new partner banter. It was their first day together. For Harwick it was also his first day in GIU. Stilwell was the senior partner. The veterano. They were working one of his jackets.
After forty-five minutes and no bus, Stilwell said, “So what do you want to ask me? You want to ask me about my partner, go ahead.”
“Well, why’d he bug?”
“Couldn’t take the intensity.”
“Since I heard he went into special weapons I assume you’re talking about your intensity, not the gig’s.”
“Have to ask him. I’ve had three partners in five years. You’re number four.”
“Lucky number four. Next question, what are we doing right now?”
“Waiting on the bus from Corcoran.”
“I already got that part.”
“A meth cook named Eugene Vachon is on it. We’re going to follow him, see who he sees.”
“Uh huh.”
Harwick waited for more. He kept his eyes on the bus depot a half a block up Vine. Eventually, Stilwell reached up to the visor and took a stack of photos out from a rubber band. He looked through them until he found the one he wanted and handed it to Harwick.
“That’s him. Four years ago. They call him Milky.”
The photo was of a man in his early thirties with bone-white hair that appeared to be pulled together in back in a ponytail. His skin was as white as a new lampshade and his eyes were the light blue of washed-out denim.
“Edgar Winters,” Harwick said.
“What?”
“Remember that guy? He was like an albino rock star in the seventies. Looked just like this guy. He had a brother, Johnny. Maybe he was the albino.”
“Missed it.”
“So what’s Milky’s deal? If you’re on him, he must be Road Saints, right?”
“He’s on the bubble. He was cooking for them but never got his colors. Then he got popped and went to The Cork for a nickel. He’s got to crack an egg now if he wants in. And from what I hear, he wants in.”
“Meaning whack somebody?”
“Meaning whack somebody.”
Stilwell explained how the Gang Intelligence Unit kept contacts with intelligence officers at prisons all over California. One such contact provided information on Vachon. Milky had been protected by incarcerated members of the Road Saints during his five-year stay at Corcoran State Penitentiary.
As a form of repayment for that protection as well as a tariff for his admittance to formal membership in the motorcycle gang turned prison and drug organization, Vachon would perform a contract hit upon his release.