Texas Sicario (Arlo Baines Book 2) Page 2

  After my family had been killed, I’d spent the better part of a year drifting. At the time, motion seemed to be the only thing that came close to filling the hole in my heart. In the end, I learned that nothing could patch that empty space, so I returned to the place where I’d spent a large part of my life.

  Sam Ross was wearing brown Sansabelt slacks and a yellow short-sleeve dress shirt. He was in his midfifties, so white he probably got a sunburn from the TV.

  Javier stared at the homicide detective with open contempt, his eyes like slits, lips twisted into a frown. A fan of la policía he was not.

  “What are you doing here?” Ross made a great show of looking in either direction. “You live in this neighborhood?”

  Alejandro’s tire store was located in the southwest portion of the county, between Cockrell Hill, a small incorporated area completely surrounded by the city of Dallas, and a neighborhood called Oak Cliff.

  A hundred years ago, the area had been full of middle-class whites. Then the population had transitioned to black. Now, this section of town was dominated by first-generation immigrants, overwhelmingly Mexican with the occasional Central American family thrown in just to mess with the census people.

  I started to answer, but Javier cut me off.

  “Alejandro.” He jabbed a finger at the body. “You need to put a sheet over him or something.”

  Ross fanned himself with his clipboard. “Hot as balls out here, and I got somebody telling me how to do my job.”

  “His wife usually brings him lunch about now,” I said. “I’d hate for her to see him like that.”

  Ross shook his head wearily. He asked one of the crime scene guys if he was finished. The tech shrugged and then nodded, indicating he’d done the absolute minimum and wouldn’t be doing anything else. A couple of minutes later, a white sheet covered Alejandro Sandoval’s body.

  I caught Javier’s eye, pointed to the bar. “Go inside. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  He glared at the police officers and then staggered away. When he was out of earshot, I relayed to Ross the information about the video system and the man with the expensive watch. He wrote everything down and then gave me the preliminary time of death, between ten and eleven, at least an hour before the man in black had wandered into the bar, which was about the same time that one of Alejandro’s employees discovered his body and called 911.

  “Any video from the tire store?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “One camera on the front. Doesn’t show anything useful.”

  “How big of a team do you have canvassing the area?” I didn’t see many uniformed officers, just the ones inside the tape and a couple of others by the store itself. Certainly nobody who appeared to be combing the other businesses on Alejandro’s street, asking if they’d seen anything.

  “You stop reading the papers? Between the pension mess and the budget cuts, manpower at the DPD is fifteen percent below where it should be.”

  “So no door-to-door?” I tried not to sound frustrated. “This is a homicide, you know, not jaywalking.”

  “Did I say that?” He fanned himself again. “The sheriff’s department’s been pitching in until we get fully funded. Some trainees from the academy are gonna be doing a canvass. Hopefully in a few hours.”

  “Trainees?” I said. “In a few hours?”

  “It’s a dead Mexican, Arlo. Give me a blonde girl from a good part of town, and I can put more uniforms on the street.”

  I wondered if it was time to get a better camera system for the mercado and the bar.

  Ross pointed behind me. “Who’s your little buddy?”

  I turned and saw Miguel, a street kid Javier and I looked after.

  He was an orphan, eleven years old, and the last person on earth I wanted to see what was going on in this particular alley.

  - CHAPTER THREE -

  Javier and I had found Miguel in a bus station restroom three months earlier. He’d been huddled in the corner by a condom vending machine, eating the remains of a Big Mac he’d pulled from the trash, while a man in a raincoat told him what a pretty boy he was.

  The man appeared to be fondling himself, which didn’t sit well with either Javier or me.

  So, while Javier hustled the youngster out of the restroom, I throat-punched Mr. Raincoat and threw him into a stall, headfirst.

  The boy was filthy—hair matted, face caked with dirt—and skinny, clothes hanging off his body like they were a size or three too large. Javier spoke to him in Spanish and English, asked his name, about his parents, where he was from.

  The boy just stared back, his eyes big and round, face blank. He had no reaction until a police officer walked by. Then he hid behind Javier and tried to make himself small, arms pressed to his sides, shoulders hunched, gaze following the uniformed man.

  After the cop had passed, I knelt so we were eye to eye. “Tienes miedo de la policía?” Are you scared of the police?

  He looked at Javier and then at me, lips pressed tightly together as if he were afraid to let the words out. After a moment, he nodded.

  A few yards away, the officer entered the men’s room, where Mr. Raincoat was no doubt pulling his head out of the toilet at that very moment.

  “Tienes familia?” Javier said. “Do you have family? Or anyone?”

  The child’s expression was all the answer I needed.

  I stood, took his hand. “Vámonos.”

  He seemed to understand we weren’t a threat. He grasped Javier’s hand as well and walked outside with us on either side. We headed to Javier’s pickup, threading our way through the homeless people and passengers waiting for their buses.

  “No one is going to hurt you,” I said.

  He nodded again like he understood English and climbed into the cab, sitting in the middle. Javier drove to Target and went inside to buy the boy some clothes, leaving me in the truck. While he was in the store, the boy looked at me and said, “Me llamo Miguel.”

  “Hi, Miguel. My name is Arlo.” I held out my hand.

  He hesitated, then shook, smiling for just an instant. Then he fell asleep on my shoulder, almost in a coma, a slumber so deep that he didn’t awaken even when I carried him from the truck.

  We fed him and cleaned him up. Since I was living in a motel, Javier made a place for him at his house, the bedroom that his girls had shared.

  Over the next few days, I contacted several individuals at the Department of Public Safety and CPS, asking if anyone had reported a missing boy who fit his description. At the same time, Javier reached out to some people on the border, trying to find out what he could about the child, if anything.

  At no point did we consider turning him over to the authorities. The odds were high that he was undocumented, and neither of us wanted him to be deported or get lost in the Kafkaesque machinery of foster care. The child had obviously been through enough already.

  The days turned to weeks, and we all settled into a routine. Javier looked after the boy in the morning and evening, and I, along with several trusted employees of Javier’s, took the afternoon shift.

  Miguel slowly grasped that we represented stability, and though he never spoke willingly about his past, gradually we pieced together his backstory.

  He was from Piedras Negras, just across from Eagle Pass.

  He had no siblings, a sister having died in infancy. His parents had been killed in a car crash several months before he ended up in the Dallas bus station. An uncle had brought him across the border, and the story became murky after that.

  Something about the police and a shoot-out. The uncle was wounded, and he left Miguel on the doorstep of a business associate, a person who sounded like a low-level smuggler running a whorehouse on the side. Or a pornographer. It was hard to tell.

  Miguel wouldn’t or couldn’t say what had happened from that point until we’d found him by chance, after dropping off Javier’s cousin so she could catch a bus back to Laredo.

  No matter. He was a good kid, a
nd I enjoyed his company, a bittersweet reminder of what I had lost.

  Now the boy was staring at the sheet-covered body of a man he knew, and I imagined his past was crashing in on the sliver of normalcy we’d tried to provide the last few months.

  “What is going on?” he asked. His English had improved, but he still spoke haltingly, with a thick accent.

  I moved to block his view. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Dónde está el Señor Sandoval?” He craned his neck to see around me.

  I decided to tell him the truth. “He’s dead. Muerto. Someone killed him.”

  The boy stared at the sheet-covered corpse, face blank.

  A squad car screeched to a stop by the perimeter of the taped enclosure, and two uniformed officers exited. One ducked under the tape. The other stood by the car and spoke into his radio.

  Miguel grabbed my hand. His skin felt cold, and his teeth chattered, like he’d been swimming in ice water.

  “You OK?” I asked. “Estás enfermo?”

  He tugged at my arm, a worried look on his face. “Por favor. We must leave.”

  - CHAPTER FOUR -

  Javier’s main business was the Aztec Bazaar, sort of a flea market / low-end shopping mall catering to Hispanics.

  The Aztec Bazaar was housed in an old discount store, a 150,000-square-foot box that had been subdivided into individual stalls, too many for me to keep track of, most no larger than the guest bedroom in a starter home.

  The bazaar was more than just a shopping facility, however. It was a gathering place for Spanish speakers, a social hub for working-class people whose roots lay south of the Rio Grande.

  On weekends, some families would spend most of the day there, buying clothes, browsing for furniture, getting a haircut, seeing the dentist, or just visiting with each other at one of the half dozen food kiosks and restaurants scattered throughout the building.

  There wasn’t much you couldn’t get at the Aztec Bazaar. Used televisions and new tires, cowboy boots, piñatas, toys, jewelry, tools and hardware, religious statues, quinceañera gowns, cell phones, small farm animals . . . the list went on.

  Miguel and I headed for the main entrance, around the corner of the building from El Corazón Roto.

  The entryway contained a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a five-foot-tall plaster statue, her green robes highlighted by lemon-yellow shards of sunlight silhouetting her from behind. Dozens of candles and flower bouquets lay at her feet, offerings from the patrons of the Aztec Bazaar, requests for the blessed virgin’s intercession in various business issues, personal matters, and affairs of the heart.

  Beyond the entryway lay the market itself, row after row after row of stalls, a maze that probably made sense to Javier but was utterly incomprehensible to me. The mix was a jumble, nail salons and auto parts stores next to each other, a chiropractor across from a tattoo parlor.

  Once inside, I looked at my watch. It was well past lunch. Time for a growing boy to eat.

  I turned to Miguel. “Should we have tacos?”

  He smiled. “Tacos. Sí.”

  I waited for him to choose. There were many options for this particular category.

  Miguel headed to the right, down a narrow passageway. Midway down the hall was a taqueria that had recently opened, a place that Miguel particularly liked.

  The Aztec Bazaar was beginning to fill up, the start of the weekend crowd that would culminate on Sunday afternoon when the walkways became clogged with shoppers, throngs of people shoulder to shoulder like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  A few minutes later, we were eating at a small table across from a three-chair beauty parlor owned by a woman named Maria.

  Maria was in her late thirties, single and childless, her husband having died in Afghanistan the year before. More often than not when she saw Miguel and me together, she would sit with us, occasionally asking us to dinner at her house. I could feel the loneliness coming off her in waves, so I kept my distance.

  Beyond a few hookups with random women I’d met in equally random bars, awkward couplings I usually regretted immediately, I hadn’t been close to anybody since my wife had died.

  Maria was a nice person, attractive and pleasant to be around, so I often wondered why I didn’t let her cook me dinner. I was lonely, too. Some days were worse than others, but the emptiness was a constant companion.

  Grief was a funny thing, never far from your mind but hidden, a serpent slithering unseen through the dark places of your heart, making you wary of entanglements.

  As we ate, I looked at Miguel and said, “Have you ever seen a dead body before?”

  No answer. He stared at his plate, munching on a fajita taco.

  “Mr. Sandoval,” I said. “He was a nice man.”

  Silence.

  “It’s OK to be sad that he’s dead.”

  Miguel stopped eating. “Where is Maria?”

  Good question. If she wasn’t busy, she usually sat with us.

  I shifted my chair to one side in order to get a better view inside the salon.

  There were no customers visible. After a moment, I saw her in one of the styling chairs, staring at the people walking by. When our eyes met, she stood and moved out of my view.

  “Es una mujer buena,” he said.

  I nodded in agreement. She was a good woman. One who for some reason didn’t feel like visiting with us today.

  “Señor Sandoval.” Miguel pushed away his plate. “He was malo.”

  I stopped eating. “What do you mean?”

  No answer.

  “Miguel. Do you know something about Señor Sandoval that I don’t?”

  The boy had always been an enigma, even after settling in with Javier.

  He was prone to periods of silence, not talking at all for hours on end.

  Sometimes he repeated phrases that were gibberish, others that were obscene.

  He was deathly afraid of a homeless person I occasionally gave food to, a slightly deranged woman in her sixties who always dressed in a ragged skirt and blazer, business attire for a job that no longer existed, and liked to shout at pigeons and people who got too close. (To be fair, the homeless woman had yelled at Miguel on several occasions, though I was pretty sure he’d had worse done to him before he came to be with us.)

  I had often wondered how much of his condition was due to the trauma of losing his parents and the subsequent time spent in the company of some very bad people and how much was inherent in his makeup. Did he fall somewhere on the autism spectrum?

  He didn’t reply.

  Before I could press him, my phone rang. I answered.

  Javier was on the other end. “The narco is back.”

  - CHAPTER FIVE -

  The man with the silver-toed boots was at Restaurante Consuelo, sitting at a four-top. The restaurant, located at the rear of the bazaar, was really just a glorified food stand that served enchiladas and burritos. The place had only a few tables, all of them set out in a wide spot in the walkway. He was the lone customer.

  The man was drinking another Bud Light, an empty plate with a wadded-up paper napkin in front of him.

  Javier stood across the hall in the doorway of a tax preparer’s office, maybe twenty yards away. He didn’t look wobbly anymore. He looked alert and sober. I took up position next to him.

  The man in the silver-toed boots glanced across the walkway and raised his beer in my direction, toasting my arrival.

  “Pendejo,” Javier said. “Would you look at him?”

  “What am I looking at? He’s just sitting there.”

  Javier jerked his head in my direction and glared at me. “I want him gone. Now.”

  “He’s not doing anything.”

  “After what happened, you say that?”

  “He didn’t kill Sandoval.”

  “How do you know?”

  OK, that was a valid point. I didn’t know for sure. All I had to go on was my instinct, honed after twenty-plus years as a cop.

  Som
ething was off about the man; that much was clear. He didn’t belong at the Aztec Bazaar, eating lunch, shopping for nail guns and chrome wheels. He was working some angle, which nine times out of ten proved to be illegal. But I didn’t believe that he killed Sandoval. That smelled like a professional hit, and a professional would not stick around to sample Consuelo’s enchiladas.

  Nonetheless, I decided it was time to learn what I could about the man and then urge him to move along. I ambled across the hall and sat down at his table, uninvited.

  He took a sip of beer. “You want some coffee? Or is it time for you to start drinking?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Your amigo Javier, he doesn’t like me very much, does he?”

  I pondered the fact that he had taken the time to learn names. The squeeze had to be coming soon.

  “Javier Morales, owner of the Aztec Bazaar.” He smoothed back his hair. “He’s come a long way from Nuevo Laredo.”

  “Let’s stay on topic. Tell me your name and what you’re doing here, and then maybe we can talk about Javier’s improbable rags-to-almost-riches story.”

  “You can call me Fito.”

  I pulled a notepad from my pocket, jotted the word on a fresh page.

  “Why are you writing that down?” He cocked his head. “You’re not a cop anymore, are you, Arlo Baines?”

  I closed the notepad. “Am I supposed to be impressed that you know my full name and what I used to do for a living?”

  The man who called himself Fito didn’t reply, a smug look on his face.

  “It’s almost like you have some magical way of finding out stuff.” I smacked my forehead in mock surprise. “Oh, wait. That’s Google.”

  “You have a sense of humor.” He smiled. “I like that.”

  “What are you doing here, Fito?”

  “I’m a, whatdoyoucallit, student of commerce. Businesses, how they run, that sort of thing. Javier, he has himself a good operation here.”

  So this was a shakedown. Next would come the offer of his services to prevent break-ins, theft, vandalism, or whatever, all for a reasonable weekly fee, payable in cash. If we didn’t agree to his terms, well, this was a rough neighborhood, and who knew what might happen.