Texas Sicario (Arlo Baines Book 2) Page 10

  Javier moved toward the passenger door of my truck. “It’s time for us to leave, Arlo.”

  “In a minute,” I said. “The Worm is getting ready to answer.”

  Gusano balled his fists, nostrils flaring as he took several angry breaths. He bounced on the balls of his feet, moving in my direction, obviously wanting to give me a beatdown.

  “Don’t even think about it.” I shook my head. “I promise it won’t end well for you.”

  He stopped. After a moment, he looked at Javier. “You bring a cop here? What have I ever done to you?”

  The driver’s door of the Ford opened, and the guy with the ponytail got out. He was nearly as big as the Honda, tattoos like sleeves on his arms.

  “For the record, I’m an ex-cop,” I said. “And it’s a simple question. Has the Honda left the premises since you towed it here?”

  Ponytail lumbered over. “Everything cool?”

  I stared at Gusano. “The next people who come asking about that car, they’ll have badges and warrants.”

  Ponytail frowned. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “The auto theft unit’ll be first,” I said. “Then the DEA.”

  Ponytail backed away, eyes wide.

  Gusano shot a rage-filled glance at Javier. “The car’s not left here.”

  “Not a single time?” I said. “Not since you’ve had it?”

  He shook his head once. Then he pointed toward the exit. “Get the hell off my property.”

  I strolled back to my truck, got inside, cranked the ignition.

  Javier stared out the window, an angry silence coming off him like a fever.

  I turned the pickup around, headed toward the street.

  He said, “You miss it, don’t you? Being a cop. Fucking with people.”

  I sped up.

  “I’ve never seen you act like that.”

  “Like what?” I pulled onto Davis.

  “Like an asshole.”

  “People are being killed.”

  “Gusano is not someone you want as an enemy,” he said.

  “Neither are the Vaqueros.”

  We rode the rest of the way to the Aztec Bazaar without speaking.

  - CHAPTER NINETEEN -

  Javier told me to drop him off at the bar.

  “You planning to tie one on?” I asked.

  Sullen silence.

  I pulled in to the parking lot, headed toward the front of El Corazón Roto. Before the vehicle came to a complete stop, he jumped out.

  “Take care of Miguel.” He slammed the pickup’s door and disappeared inside.

  I idled for a moment, watching the front of the bar. A car behind me honked, and I reluctantly headed to my parking space on the other side of the building.

  It was a busy day at the Aztec Bazaar. I took up my usual position by the front, a stool with a low back, just past the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a perch that offered a good view of people as they entered and exited.

  By text and walkie-talkie, I checked in with the weekend security crew.

  Nothing was amiss, aside from the usual problems that came with crowds of people. Fender benders and lost keys, children who’d wandered off, misplaced purses. No sign of anyone who resembled Fito.

  I hoped that was a good omen. Maybe he was off investigating one of the other murders, forgetting about us for the moment.

  Maybe he’d stay gone, and we could get back to normal, whatever that was, two grief-stricken men, one prone to excessive drinking, trying to take care of an orphan who had no legal standing in this country. Maybe pigs could operate submarines, too.

  While I sat there, I pulled out the list Throckmorton had given me and scanned the contents, searching for some hidden significance that had eluded me before.

  But there was nothing. Just names. Some dead, some still alive, presumably.

  The name after Juan Gonzalez, Pecky Ruibal, was unusual enough that it might lead to something during an internet search.

  I pulled out my phone as Maria sauntered by. She smiled but didn’t stop, which was OK because I didn’t feel like talking right then.

  I had just tapped out “Pecky” when Miguel burst through the front entrance, zigzagging his way through the shoppers, skidding to a stop by my stool. Kiki was right behind him, a bemused look on her face.

  “Arlo.” The boy tugged on my jeans, his face animated. “The zoo, Arlo. The zoo.”

  I put my phone away and slid off the barstool. “Slow down. What are you talking about?”

  “Kiki.” He was almost hyperventilating. “She—The zoo—Today—”

  After a few moments, I pieced together what he was trying to tell me. Kiki and her kids had free tickets to an event at the zoo that afternoon. Would it be OK if Miguel went?

  He was more excited than I had ever seen him. A deep smile curled across his face, eyes animated with the prospect of seeing all the animals.

  I wondered how a boy with a smile like that could be a killer. Then I remembered his face in Kiki’s backyard when the kid with the toy gun had approached him.

  Kiki asked if Miguel could spend another night with her family. Her husband, Tony, would be off work, and after the zoo they all planned to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s for pizza.

  I told her of course he could go, and while I didn’t want to impose, if she and her family wanted him to spend the night again, that was OK as well.

  Miguel hopped from foot to foot, ecstatic at the news.

  Kiki smiled, happy as well. After a moment, she said, “You think it’s OK with Javier? I don’t want to, well, you know.”

  She glanced in the direction of El Corazón Roto, an almost involuntary movement.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, not telling her that Javier had probably crawled into a bottle of bourbon, and the youngster certainly didn’t need to be around that.

  I gave Miguel a ten-dollar bill. “Go get something for Kiki’s kids, a present for being so nice.”

  He scampered toward a store that sold Mexican candies. When he was out of earshot, Kiki said, “He’s a good boy. A pleasure to be around.”

  I stared down the hall where he’d gone, remembering my own son.

  “Javier.” She paused. “He worries me sometimes.”

  I came back to the present.

  “The drinking,” she said. “You know what I mean, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Miguel is very attached to him. And you, too, of course.”

  I waited, sensing there was a point to the conversation.

  “If it comes down to it,” she said. “You need to be the one who takes charge of things for Miguel.”

  I looked back down the hall. We were both silent for a moment.

  “Does he ever talk about his life before Dallas?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I wonder what that was like,” I said. “Just how bad it was.”

  A moment passed.

  “What’s going to happen, Arlo? Are you going to adopt Miguel or what?”

  I was living in a pay-by-the-week motel. What kind of environment would that be for a kid? Even if I had a house with a white picket fence and a loving wife, would I be able to provide proper care for someone who’d been through what Miguel had endured?

  Would anybody?

  “He doesn’t have papers. There’s nothing to adopt,” I said. “And we don’t want to get the courts involved, obviously.”

  Kiki nodded. She’d been born in this country, but her parents had been illegal. While she loved America, she had a healthy distrust of the authorities.

  “What about when he gets older?” she said. “What then?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried not to sound as frustrated as I felt. “We just take it one day at a time.”

  She stared at the throngs of shoppers filling the halls. “It’s so sad. I wonder if anyone will ever come looking for him.”

  I’d been pondering that same question, asking myself if maybe they already had.


  Kiki and Miguel left for the zoo, and I returned to Google.

  There were two Pecky Ruibals in the Dallas area. One was a retired plumber in his eighties, the other an accordion player in a conjunto band, Los Tres Reyes, The Three Kings, a group that frequently toured throughout Texas, especially the southern half.

  Pecky the musician was in his thirties and had an active social media presence, specifically Twitter and Instagram accounts, both of which were filled with pictures of Pecky and his fans, mostly raven-haired beauties and guys who dressed like Juarez street thugs.

  He also had a web page, which was where I found his email address.

  I looked through the band’s schedule of past gigs and then dropped Pecky a note, saying that I was a screenwriter who had recently caught his show in Austin, and I’d be interested in talking to him about a script I was working on. I left my cell number.

  Two hours later, I was drinking a cup of coffee from my perch by the front door, watching people come and go, when my phone rang, a number I didn’t recognize.

  I answered.

  Quinn Vega’s voice on the other end, frantic. “Arlo. Please help.”

  I jumped off the barstool. “What’s wrong?”

  No answer.

  “Quinn, are you OK?”

  No noise from the other end except what sounded like the ding-ding of a car door left open.

  “Quinn?”

  “Frank,” she said. “Someone’s trying to kill him.”

  - CHAPTER TWENTY -

  Dallas wasn’t known for its intrinsic beauty, unless you were into prairie land and dry creek beds. Still, there were parts of the city that possessed a certain natural charm. One of those was the area around White Rock Lake, a large man-made body of water in the eastern half of town.

  The Vegas’ house was on Fisher Road, on a small rise that offered a nice view of the water. The lot was small for the area, about a half acre or a little larger, partially wooded.

  The front gate was open, so I drove up a gravel driveway and stopped behind the Maserati, which was parked at an angle like whoever had driven the car last had been in a hurry to get out.

  The vehicle sat in front of a large one-story home made from cream-colored stone, topped with a tin roof. A detached three-car garage was behind the house at the edge of the property, underneath a live oak that looked like it had been planted during the Coolidge administration.

  Quinn Vega opened the front door of the house before I could get out of my pickup. She was wearing Nike trainers, a pair of yoga pants that came to just below her knees, and a sleeveless workout shirt. Saturday attire for people who paid to have their houses cleaned and their dogs walked.

  She strode toward me, obviously worried.

  Frank Vega appeared in the entryway. He wore a dark slim-fit suit with a white dress shirt, no tie. Saturday attire for hipster undertakers or criminal defense attorneys who might need to appear before a judge at any moment.

  He just stood there, shaking his head, not really inside the house or out. Like he couldn’t decide which way to go.

  “Thank you for coming,” Quinn said.

  “What happened?”

  She glanced at her husband, about twenty feet away.

  “Why’d you get him involved?” Frank called out.

  Quinn touched my arm, her fingers cool and dry. “I’m scared, Arlo.”

  “Somebody try to break in?”

  Frank Vega stepped outside, slammed the door. “This is ridiculous.”

  “How can you say that?” Quinn faced her husband, voice choked with emotion.

  I waited.

  After a moment, Frank sighed loudly, clearly exasperated. “Fine. I’ll show you.”

  He marched toward the garage.

  I followed, Quinn a step behind me.

  All three doors were open.

  In the far right slot was a Mercedes sedan. Boxes and discarded exercise equipment filled the far left. The middle space was empty.

  Frank grasped the cord at the bottom of the middle door, his fingers barely able to reach. He pulled down.

  The door was wooden, painted a flat white. Unremarkable except for two crude figures spray-painted in black, a skull next to a sickle.

  Beneath the figures was a phrase: “Plomo para mis enemigos.”

  “Lead for my enemies.” Quinn pointed to the words. “That sounds like a threat to me.”

  I looked at Frank. “I take it you’re the enemy?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Any idea what this is about?” I could still smell the paint. Whoever had defaced the door had done so within the past hour or so.

  “My line of work,” he said, “you occasionally come into contact with some unpleasant people.”

  Almost exactly the same thing that his wife had said yesterday.

  “You mean your clients?”

  “Everyone deserves zealous representation.” He crossed his arms, his words sounding like a brochure for the bar association.

  “Any client in particular come to mind?”

  Frank didn’t answer. Instead he glanced at his wife and then turned away from both of us, staring at the door.

  “When did you first notice this?” I asked.

  “I had a brunch meeting,” he said. “It wasn’t there when I left.”

  “What time was that?”

  He continued to stare at the garage door, appearing lost in thought.

  “Ten o’clock,” Quinn said. “That’s when he left this morning.”

  For a brunch meeting. On Saturday. I didn’t say anything.

  Frank looked away from the door and scowled at me, chin jutting out, angry for no apparent reason.

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “He came back about twenty minutes ago, and we both saw it,” Quinn said. “That’s when I called you.”

  “So were you here when it happened?”

  “Yes.” She paused. “Alone.”

  They glared at each other, waves of anger rippling between them.

  “Did you hear or see anything?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “What about video? Any cameras on the property?”

  “Some people have a different way of communicating than you and I do,” Frank said. “Let’s not blow this out of proportion.”

  “This isn’t communicating, Frank. This is a threat.” Quinn turned to me. “We have cameras on the doors to the house and part of the backyard. Nothing on the garage.”

  The garage appeared to be accessible only from the front of the property, the gravel drive I had used.

  An ivy-covered masonry wall, about eight feet tall, surrounded the entire lot. After a moment, I noticed a small wrought iron gate near the left side of the garage, closest to the space filled with boxes.

  I walked to the gate, knelt so that I was eye level with the latching mechanism.

  A push-button keypad lock secured the entry. Punch in a four-digit code from either side and you could come and go as you pleased.

  Up close, I could see that the lock was shattered. Pieces lay on the gravel drive, sprayed out like something had impacted the mechanism from the street side.

  Something like a bullet.

  I looked across the driveway, trying to guess where a round would have hit.

  The house was about fifty feet away, shaded by a pair of magnolias more or less in a direct line of sight from the damaged lock.

  Maybe we’d get lucky and find the bullet. Maybe not. That was a job for the police. I imagined that getting them involved was going to be an issue with Frank Vega.

  I used my shirttail to grab a rung and opened the gate.

  “That’s supposed to be locked,” Frank said.

  “Yeah. I can see that. Somebody shot it, though.”

  Quinn gasped as I stepped outside and peered in either direction.

  Live oaks and elms lined both sides of Fisher Road, shading the surface of the street. There were no cars or people visible.
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  I walked a few yards toward the lake, trying to get a feel for what the perp had seen, how he might have acted, where he would have parked.

  Through a break in the trees, I could see a sailboat slice across the surface of the lake, the water like glass. This was a pleasant neighborhood, the residents not ready for the violence they read about in the Sunday papers encroaching on their bucolic section of Dallas.

  Quinn appeared beside me.

  “You need to call the police,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “Frank won’t like that.” She looked back toward the gate, clearly nervous.

  “This isn’t about what he likes or doesn’t like. This is about not getting killed.”

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered.

  I continued to stare at the water, wondering who had cameras in the area, which direction the person responsible would have come from.

  A moment passed.

  “What are you two talking about?” Vega stood in the entryway to his property.

  I turned away from the lake. “Who’s the client?”

  “Does it really matter?” He crossed his arms.

  I waited for him to continue.

  “You have any idea who these people are?” he asked. “The resources they possess?”

  Two people had been murdered, the ones of which I had direct knowledge. According to Throckmorton, there’d been others, and there were more to come.

  I wondered if there was another list, one with Frank Vega’s name on it. I couldn’t see a direct connection between the two killings and the defaced garage door. But I’d been a law enforcement officer for too many years not to grasp that there had to be a link.

  Whatever the connection was, the killer needed to be caught. That was my baseline, the cop in me, even before I considered the veiled threats to Miguel.

  “You can’t stop them,” he said. “No one can.”

  “Stop who?” I asked.

  Silence.

  Quinn said, “Tell him, Frank.”

  No response.

  “Either of you know a man named Fito Alvarez?” I asked.

  Quinn closed her eyes. She reached a hand out to steady herself on the brick wall that surrounded her home.

  Frank Vega said, “We’d better go inside so I can explain.”