South of Nowhere: A Mystery Read online

  Ignoring the possibility, I said, “So, what do you want my fat ass to do for you?”

  His faint twitch of a smile flashed by. “Get you into the clinic. Yahoos who run it are way off the beam and jumpy as hell. I go in there, the place turns into a dental office soon as I clear the door.”

  I noticed that I was holding my breath, and realized that the tickling sensation behind my belly button wasn’t indigestion. I went ahead and asked my question directly. “Where’s Hector?”

  Maines’s expression went crafty. “It’s a six-hour drive from here to the border. Plenty of time to tell you alla that.”

  I considered for a few minutes. It’d be nice to get the hell out of Azula, if only for a couple of days, but doing it with John Maines wasn’t my idea of a vacation. Neither did I much like the prospect of letting him torment me with whatever information he had about Hector. Plus, if I stopped working, or thinking about work, even for an hour, I might have to face the black thing lurking in my subconscious. I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Good luck with your case,” I said to Maines, and got into my truck.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was an hour and fifteen minutes to the prison at Gatesville, through scenery that might once have been interesting. My tenure in Texas had been completely rainless so far, and everything not bleached white by the ferocious sun was brown. Just looking out the window made me thirsty.

  The women’s unit was a plain white cube, with a frill of tall chain-link fence, that smelled of disinfectant all the way to the parking lot. I filled out the visitor’s form and got patted down, then passed through a series of locked steel gates into a big sun-washed room with bars across the windows and a well-armed guard standing against the far wall.

  Connie was sitting at one of the steel tables, flipping through a textbook. Petite to begin with, she’d grown even smaller in prison, and with her frizzy dark hair caught back in a high ponytail, she resembled a large child. It was almost enough to make me forget that she’d tried to slit my throat six months ago.

  A shiver of wariness slipped up the back of my stomach, and I hesitated. I didn’t feel sorry for Connie—she didn’t feel sorry for herself, and seemed just as content in prison as she’d ever been outside it—so why, exactly, did I keep coming to visit her?

  She looked up from her book and saw me, her sharp little face splitting into a smile. My wariness subsided, making room for something warmer. Don’t ask me to explain why I still liked her, after everything we’d been through. I might have to admit that she reminded me of myself a little. The road not taken.

  As I sat down, she took off her reading glasses and said, “I was afraid you might be in jail.”

  I made a quizzical face, and she directed her eyes at a television bolted high up on the concrete-block wall. It was tuned to a local news station. “They just ran a story about the body you found out at the Ranch. What happened?”

  Her guiltless expression wasn’t reading fake to my radar, so I said, “Nothing very interesting. I opened up a hole in the floor, and there he was.”

  “Did you dissociate when you found him?” she asked as I opened my folder.

  Connie had been finishing up her graduate-school education to become a psychiatrist when everything had gone kaboom last year. The prospect of yet another unsolicited medical opinion coming my way irritated me. I pressed my teeth together so that I wouldn’t snap at her, but then decided, what the hell: If everybody I knew was going to read me like a cheap novel, I might as well face the reviews and get it over with.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “And Liz Harman’s been after me to go see a shrink.”

  “That seems a prudent suggestion, based on my observation of your affect and behavior lately.”

  “Observation?” I snorted. “What observation? You’ve seen me an hour a week for the last six months.”

  “That’s about as often as a licensed psychiatrist would see you,” she pointed out. “And I have the benefit of a social association with you, from—before.”

  I got out the signature sheets for the Ranch closing. “I’m not interested in reliving my childhood, thanks.”

  Connie tilted her head to one side, examining me through her big black-framed glasses, lips pursed.

  “What?” I said.

  “You can relive your childhood experiences a couple of times in the company of a good therapist, or you can keep on reliving them over and over again, for the rest of your life, at inopportune moments.”

  “You’re practicing without a license,” I warned her.

  “It just always amazes me when otherwise logical people resist treatment,” she said with a small laugh, shaking her head.

  “You did it,” I shot back.

  Our eyes met.

  “That’s right, I did,” she said. “And you see where it got me.”

  We sat there measuring each other up like a couple of alley cats, then I passed the signature sheets across to her, changing the subject. “Tova says it will take a couple of days for the money to be transferred to her account. Then she’ll send this in and get the title transfer done.”

  Connie laid down her pen and closed the book over it, sliding her fingers behind her glasses to rub her eyes. “God. Tova. She is such a pain in my ass.”

  “Too bad you can’t fire her,” I agreed. Tova Bradshaw, Connie and Hector’s adoptive sister, was doing the paperwork for free, out of the goodness of her heart. Which was likely very little, considering the heart involved.

  Connie noticed me eyeing her book, and turned the spine in my direction: Clinical Interventions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  Careful, as always when his name came up between us, I asked, “Are you still treating Hector?”

  “I never ‘treated’ him,” she said, sounding defensive. “He’s not a patient, he’s my brother. The fact that we were adopted at different times, from different places, doesn’t change that. I’m not going to let him suffer if I can do something to prevent it.”

  “Have you heard anything from him?” I asked, as I usually did on my visits.

  She shook her head, and I didn’t press. Nor did I offer that Maines was back in town. Where I was concerned, Hector was her property. She’d almost killed me to prove it, and I didn’t want to get her going again, even in this relatively secure location.

  Changing the subject again as deftly as I knew how, I lifted my chin at her book. “Do you think PTSD could be causing whatever’s going on with me?”

  The federal shrinks had suggested the diagnosis after I’d watched two skinheads blow my husband Joe’s head off back in Bakersfield, which is why I’d gotten into protection. I hadn’t liked that diagnosis much, so I was momentarily gratified when Connie pulled the book back to her side of the table and said, “No.”

  She paused, then added, “There’s nothing wrong with you except that you don’t know anything about yourself.”

  It took a second for what she’d said to register, and when it did, I found myself speechless for a minute. Then I snapped, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  Connie’s eyes stayed on my face. “Just what it sounds like it means.”

  The meat between my shoulder blades had gone cold, but I couldn’t figure out why. I was talking to the woman who’d tried to kill me nine months ago; she was still working on it, that was all. I took a breath and squeezed my anger down into oblivion, pulling the closing signature sheets back to my side of the table and replacing them with the title transfer.

  A few silent seconds ticked by while Connie signed it, then she murmured, without looking up, “Where did you find the body?”

  Tired of playing cat and mouse, I said, “Maybe you’d better tell me what you know about it. You’re the one in prison for murder, and it used to be your house.”

  “You of all people should know that I’m not that kind of killer,” she said mildly, not looking at me.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I was pretty sure she’d tell me if I ke
pt my mouth shut. Sure enough, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to reply, she leaned across the table and said quietly, “You and me, we’re the same. We’re like dogs that have been kicked too much. We’re only dangerous when somebody tries to hurt us.”

  I dragged the title page back over to my side of the table and put it in my folder. “I’m no dog.”

  “If you weren’t at least part dog, you’d be dead now,” she said, smirking. Her manner was shifting, turning sarcastically vicious like it sometimes did near her medication time.

  I got up and shot a look at the guard, who gave me a barely perceptible nod. I moved quickly toward the gate, not saying good-bye to Connie. It was too late for that. I knew too well where the conversation was heading, and how fast it could get there. I preferred to have at least one wall between us when it did.

  CHAPTER 4

  “It’s not personal,” Benny said.

  “You just told me I can’t leave town,” I replied, annoyed. “How’s that not personal?”

  We were in his corner office in the courthouse basement, our voices bouncing off the stone walls. Behind his bristly black head, I could see the sky through the high transom windows that sat level with the ground outside, facing Main Street. He stacked his short brown hands on his hard belly and attempted to look patient. It didn’t suit him.

  I’m not much of a globetrotter by inclination, but having somebody tell me I couldn’t go anywhere made me fractious. “What if I need to travel for business?”

  Benny’s eyebrows climbed his low forehead. “I’d be surprised if you hadda go around the block. The construction market’s in the toilet all over the state.”

  “Maines has a case down near the border he wants me to help him on.” I didn’t add that I’d refused. I was simply making a point.

  “A case? Like, you mean, an investigation?”

  “How is this news to you? Don’t all you Rollers use the same hairdresser?”

  “I knew he was looking into getting his private investigator’s license, but I didn’t think he’d pull it this quick.” Benny leaned forward in the creaky oak banker’s chair, his eyes amused. “You know he thinks he’s gonna make a detective out of you, right?”

  “You say that like it’s funny.”

  “It’s not funny to you?”

  “I’d do a better job than you clowns, in my sleep.”

  Benny’s eyes glittered at me, but I didn’t flinch. He got up, pushing his barrel chest forward. “Your gun over at the apartment?”

  “No, it’s in the truck,” I said. “Why?”

  “The holes in that dead guy were made by bullets.”

  “Benny, I haven’t been in town long enough to know anyone so well I’d want to kill them.”

  “Maybe one of the Aryan Brotherhood guys that’s looking for you found you,” he suggested.

  “So I stuck his body under the rug and then hung around waiting for his buddies to come looking for him? Come on.”

  “If the doc is right, and he’s been dead a maximum of six months, that lets Connie off the hook.”

  “OK, but it doesn’t automatically put me on it,” I told him.

  “You bought the house well before the guy died in it. So, yeah, it does.”

  “All of us were tied up with Connie’s case until May,” I reminded him. “I didn’t even have time to go inside the place until the end of June, which was, like, six weeks ago.”

  Benny didn’t reply, just wiggled his fingers at me impatiently.

  Ignoring them, I said, “What caliber were the bullets?”

  “We didn’t find any bullets. Just holes.”

  I frowned up at him. “What, they all went through?”

  “No. Somebody shot him, then dug the bullets out,” Benny said. “Some CSI wannabe, probably thinking that would prevent an ID.”

  “They couldn’t have done that in the house,” I said. “There would have been blood all over the place.”

  “Yeah. He was killed elsewhere and dumped there.”

  “So what good is my gun going to do you without bullets to test against?”

  “Wound comparison,” he said, rippling his fingers again. “Come on.”

  I sighed and passed him my keys. He took them and clomped out. I got up and followed him through the squad room, around the courthouse and across Main to where my truck was parked in front of the bar. He unlocked the passenger side and opened the glove compartment.

  “It’s under the seat,” I told him. “Driver’s side.”

  He straightened up and went around. “Loaded?”

  “Yeah, but the safety’s on.”

  He cut his eyes at me over the hood. “You know it ain’t legal to carry a concealed firearm unless you got a permit, right?”

  I showed him my surprised face and he made a disgusted noise. My little Kahr P40 appeared, and he handed me back my keys. “You and me, we’ll be talking more tomorrow.”

  I watched him stride back across Main and disappear around the courthouse, then I went into the bar, locked the door behind me, and grabbed the phone.

  “Tell me that piece you sold me is clean,” I instructed Mauricio Torres when he answered. I’d bought the Kahr from his bunch of local bangers during the previous winter’s festivities, when I wasn’t sure I was going to get out of the mess I was in alive, and wasn’t feeling picky about the firearm I laid my hands on.

  “You didn’t specify that you wanted a weapon with no history,” the Inca replied in his soft, courteous voice.

  “God damn it,” I muttered, then said, “Can you at least tell me what that history might be?”

  There was a pause, and then Torres replied, “I believe we obtained that weapon from a rival gang, whose executioner used it.”

  “So it’s got bodies on it?”

  Torres’s silence was as good as a yes. I did a little swearing. He waited for me to finish, then said, “I know that you will, nevertheless, honor our agreement.”

  What he meant was, “I know you won’t say anything to bust me, because if you do, I’ll make sure the Brotherhood finds you.” I was starting to wish I’d decided to just leave the damned linoleum where it was.

  I stood there with my hand on the phone for a while after Torres hung up, picturing the paces Benny would put me through when the Kahr’s record came back. Yes, eventually, somehow, someone would figure out who the guy in my floor was, and that I had no reason to kill him, but the stretch of time between now and then was going to be unpleasant. I was getting really tired of unpleasant.

  I spent an hour or so thinking about it, at the end of which I decided there was only one solution I liked: getting the hell out of Dodge. Permanently. I wasn’t on WITSEC’s books anymore, and the only things keeping me in Azula were my construction-business plans and my relationship with Hector, neither of which were developing the way I’d hoped. As far as the feds were concerned, I could go anywhere I wanted, and their $51,240.00 would last a lot longer in Mexico, which, conveniently, would also put me out of reach of whatever Benny pulled out of his ass. Yes, I’d have to sell the Ranch, but I could do that remotely. Everything with Mike and the bar was sewn up. All I had to do was pack.

  I picked the phone up again and called Maines. “When were you thinking of heading south?”

  “As soon as I could talk you into it.”

  “You can pick me up first thing in the morning,” I said. “One condition: I want all my money up front.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Maines waited outside in his tan Crown Vic while I went into the bank to deposit the certified check he gave me. I was a little worried that carrying my duffel in with me might put him on my scent, but I guess he was used to women hauling big bags around.

  I had the cashier convert half my money into pesos and give me the rest in American dollars. She banded up the cash into bundles, and I stowed them under my hasty packing job before heading back out to the car.

  I expected Maines to loop around the block back to Main Street, w
hich turned to highway a couple of miles outside of town, but he didn’t.

  “Gotta pick up our third,” he said, in answer to my quizzical look.

  Irritated, I replied, “When were you going to tell me this was a trio?”

  We pulled up at a low stucco building with a pair of scissors painted on the glass door, a couple of blocks farther down Third. I let Maines get out and go inside, using the time to decide if an additional person would interfere with my plans. I made up my mind that it wouldn’t, and Maines returned, leading a medium-sized brown-and-white short-haired mutt. He let the dog into the backseat and got behind the wheel. When we turned onto Main and started to accelerate, I realized who the third was.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said, glancing at the dog. It was sitting up on the leather seat, looking quietly out the window.

  “He’s freshly bathed and groomed,” Maines said, sounding offended, “and I can’t just leave him at home alone for however long we’re gone.”

  “However long we’re gone? You said a couple of days, max.”

  Maines gave me a disgusted look. “You’re gonna hafta learn to be more flexible if you want to make it as a PI.”

  “Look, Pygmalion, I’m a builder, not a cop, OK? And even if I were looking for career advice, I wouldn’t be taking it from the likes of you.”

  “Bad time to start a construction business,” he replied, shifting the Crown Vic into overdrive, “and you and Mike can’t keep that bar going by yourselves forever.”

  Knowing he wouldn’t support my secret relocation plans, especially if he knew what had instigated them, I didn’t tell him that the bar staff had just been halved.

  “Lots of places operate with out-of-town owners.”

  “Maybe in a big city, where nobody knows each other. People want to just drink, they do it at home. Hector was the draw for that place.”

  Maines was right. Despite his leftist politics, my handsome boss was well-liked, especially by the local ladies. Attendance had dropped off sharply after he and Maines had left town.