“You’re telling me you don’t actually have direct information that could lead me to Danny Escobedo.” She rubbed her face: even the skin felt tired. “You only have guesses. And I have to jump through hoops to try and figure out what you mean, when I’m so beat that even if you were talking sense, I’d have problems sorting it out. I have to say, if you’re trying to help, I wish you wouldn’t. You’re wasting time that I don’t have.”
She felt his touch then, firm, dry fingers that came down on the back of her wrist. She looked into his eyes, dark into dark, and saw a reflection of torment.
“To everything there is a season.” The words sounded as if no one had ever thought of them before. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. There is a time for many words, and there is a time as well for sleep. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” The repetition of the word alone was soporific; Olivia wanted to lay her head onto her arms right there on the picnic table. “Take up thy bed. And if we do meet again, why, we shall smile.”
“You’re telling me to go home and have a nap.” His eyes crinkled: yes. “You’re probably right. But you haven’t told me what you wanted me to know, about Danny Escobedo.”
“Those that have eyes to see, let them see.”
“Jesus. Do you have any idea how irritating this is?”
“The discourse of fools is irksome.” He gave her a smile filled with apology and empathy.
“So why do you do it?”
“He wrapped himself in quotations, as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a beggar’s rags.”
But Brother Erasmus merely nodded. “Like him that travels, I return again.” He set the tip of his first finger against the table to indicate: here. Then he spread both hands out against the dented wood. When all his fingers were outstretched, he deliberately folded back the thumb of his left hand, then the first finger.
“You want me to meet you here, at eight o’clock? Tonight?”
Satisfied, he folded the paper around his half-eaten burrito, tucked it and the plastic fork and knife into his knapsack, stood up, and walked away, his staff beating a syncopation to his steps. The carved head, pointing backward, seemed to watch Olivia as it rose and fell.
Ridiculous notion. But in one thing the man was surely right: she did need some rest if she wasn’t to be utterly useless. She phoned the station and told Marcoletti that she was going home, and wasn’t to be disturbed for anything short of catastrophic. Inevitably, he wanted to know what she meant by catastrophic, but she just ended the call.
She drove home, fed the cat, kicked off her shoes, and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over her head. And although she expected perhaps twenty minutes of fitful rest, she set her alarm for seven o’clock. Olivia Mendez slept like a babe in its mother’s arms, her dreams filled with the warm brown eyes of wise old men.
When she woke, it was dark, and the bedside clock told her it was nearly seven. She fried up some eggs, onions, and jalapeños, wrapping them in some of the tortillas her mother had made, topped with her sister’s fiery salsa. Rested, fed, and warm inside, she then took a long, hot shower, washed her hair, dressed in warm clothes with a jacket to cover her gun, and went by the station in the vain hope that something—anything—had come to light in the case. There was nothing. Not even a phone call from Mrs. Escobedo.
Olivia had no intention of meeting the old man. It was ridiculous, a waste of time when she could be out re-interviewing Danny’s friends, or— Oh, that reminded her. She called the Santos number, got Yasmina’s mother again, and was told that no, Mina had been in earlier, but she was staying with friends tonight. Did Sergeant Mendez have Mina’s cell number? Yes, Sergeant Mendez had it, and now tried it, but the phone was either turned off or in one of the county’s many dead zones.
Olivia looked at the clock again: 7:52. Oh hell, why not? If she didn’t go see, her curiosity would drive her nuts.
When she turned down the alleyway near the burrito stand, it appeared empty, until the old man stepped out of the shadows, a swirl of dark robes and a gleaming staff. He pulled open the door, slid the stick inside, and tucked himself into the passenger seat.
“Where are we going?” She reached up to flick on the overhead light.
He held out a scrap of paper, a torn-off section of an old map, showing San Felipe and the outlying countryside. Near the upper right corner, eight miles or so from the center of town, was a penciled circle. She pointed at it.
“You want me to go there?”
He pulled his seat belt around him; she put the car into gear and drove off.
She didn’t have to check his map again—one thing Olivia Mendez knew, it was this valley. Twenty years ago, she’d learned to drive a stick shift on a farm lane just outside the map’s penciled circle. Four years ago, she’d helped dismantle a meth lab half a mile to the north. She’d provided reluctant backup when la Migra raided a camp carved into the sandstone hills by men desperate to send every possible dollar back home.
Ten minutes later, she let the car slow. They were a mile from the nearest house, three from a paved road, and the last headlights behind them had vanished.
“Okay.” She said it like a question.
The old man’s hand appeared in the glow from the dashboard, one long finger pointing straight ahead. She gave the car some gas; in a hundred yards, when his finger shifted to the right, she steered down a graveled track between fields.
They went on that way for about a mile in all, gravel giving way to dirt, then ruts. Eventually, his hand came up—though she’d have stopped even without the signal, because they’d run out of road. Fences lay on either side. Before them lay a dirt turnaround and a wall of greenery, although she knew that behind it was a small creek and a cliff thrust upward by the plates of the earth. The camp of illegals had been very near here, as she remembered—the men had used the creek for water, the hills for shelter, and the trees for concealment. In the end, the smell of the cook-fire had given them away.
As the smell of smoke when she got out of the car gave this encampment away.
She had her hand on the weapon at her side, easing the car door shut with the hand that held the big Maglite. The old man, however, had no such urge to silence. He slammed his door with a bang that could be heard for a mile.
The very air seemed to wince. Her companion merely walked toward the turnaround, speaking over his shoulder. “Venga.”
She was already moving before the implications of his command struck her. Unless he’d come up with a very short quotation from some Spanish book, he had just addressed her directly. She trotted after him, switching on her flashlight as they plunged into a shadow of a space between some bushes.
Stones had been laid across the creek to ensure dry feet. And yes, the smell of wood smoke grew, along with signs of human occupation—two plastic chairs that looked as if they’d literally fallen off the back of a truck; two black trash bags with their necks tied shut; a neat row of empty plastic milk jugs. At least the place didn’t reek like a toilet or meth lab, she thought, grateful not to be getting toxic waste on her shoes.
The ground began to rise. The trees grew thin, the path more defined, and suddenly Erasmus came to a halt before her, raising his voice to call at a patch of vegetation. “Hola, niños. ’Stoy aqui con mi amiga. Permiso?”
There followed a long and tense silence, during which her fingers played with the strap on her gun, and then an answer: “Vengan.”
She nearly dropped the flashlight at hearing a child’s voice—she’d thought Erasmus was using the word children as a priest would. She pressed close against the shifting outline of his robes.
An L-shaped barrier of wired-together shipping pallets and plywood scraps jutted out of the sandstone cliff. Inside this patchwork wall stood two fairly expensive bicycles, helmets looped over the handlebars, and the circle of a burned-
down campfire; in the cliff behind was the low entrance to a cave, one that had either gone unnoticed when the previous encampment had been destroyed, or been carved anew. Light spilled from the mouth. Erasmus started forward, but she caught his arm to hold him back, stooping to peer inside.
Three children stood in an apprehensive half circle behind an upended plastic milk crate draped with an incongruous square of brightly flowered oilcloth, on which stood a rechargeable camp light. On the right was that tiny firebrand Mina Santos. On the left, Carlos Garcia, one of the dozens of kids she’d interviewed several times in the days since Gloria’s murder.
And between them, grubby but standing tall, was eleven-year-old Danny Escobedo.
The woman in Sergeant Mendez wanted to vault the plastic crate and throw her arms around the boy—then grab his shoulders and deliver a tongue-lashing these three would not recover from soon. She wanted to dance and sing and kiss the old monk’s bearded cheek and yank out her cellphone to tell all the world the missing boy was safe—safe!—but the cop in her nailed her boots to the ground and sent her eyes traveling across the contents of the cave. It was, she had to admit, dry, neat, and surprisingly well equipped. Half a dozen gallon water jugs were lined up against the wall beside a cheap Styrofoam cooler, a second smaller lantern, a large box of candles, and a one-burner propane cooker with two extra canisters. A stack of neatly folded bedding—wool blanket, mover’s pad, and a sleeping bag losing its stuffing—sat atop the cooler. Thought had gone into the hideout, and care—most kids would have dumped a pile of charcoal in the middle of the cave and suffocated to death by morning.
Olivia studied the cheerful flowered tablecloth, and wondered if it had been put there to impress her.
Not going to work.
“You guys having fun here?” She made her voice harsh. “The city’s spent a fortune looking for you, Danny. Half of us haven’t slept in a week because we’ve been searching for your body. Your family is going nuts.” At the last accusation, the boy’s gaze flicked over to Mina. There was a blatant lack of guilt on his face.
“God damn it. Your mother knows, doesn’t she? That you weren’t kidnapped? That’s why she stopped phoning me ’round the clock.”
“Mina told Mom I was at her house. I…I didn’t want her to worry.”
At that, Olivia lost it. “What are you doing here? Why the hell didn’t you come to the police?” The kids’ eyes grew wider with every word. “Why are you hiding out—”
Click: she stopped. Realization dawned. “You saw it, Danny, didn’t you? You saw Gloria die. And you’re afraid he’s coming after you.” In a community dominated by gangs, a minor crime—a passing remark—could escalate into a circle of violence and retribution.
Olivia sighed, rubbed at her face, and started over. “Okay, let’s sit down and talk about this.”
The boy’s last trace of defiance melted, leaving him small and scared. With Danny’s friends on either side of him, the kids settled onto the dusty pads. Olivia moved the camping light to the ground and sat cautiously down on the “table.” She glanced behind her to see if there was some perch for the old man, but he was not there. Faded into the night like a brown-robed Zorro.
“Dígame.” And the boy told her, so eager, his words tumbled in a rush of Spanish and English, with his friends contributing the occasional comment or clarification.
The first thing Danny wanted her to know was that Gloria wasn’t really his babysitter, just that his mother paid to have her stay with him whenever she had to work nights. He didn’t need a babysitter. But Gloria’s family was large and she was serious about getting into college, and she could work more easily in the silence of the Escobedo house, so they all pretended she was a babysitter.
Olivia blinked at the boy’s sense of priorities, but did not interrupt.
“So anyway, on Friday night—a week ago—Gloria got this call on her cell. She looked all funny when she saw the ID, and took it outside so I wouldn’t hear. I didn’t know who it was, but later, after I’d gone up to bed, there was this knock on the front door. I looked around my curtains and there was this guy. I figured he was the one that called.”
“What made you think that?”
“ ’Cause Gloria was mad when she was on the phone, and mad when she saw him. She wouldn’t let him in so they stood in the yard. She made him keep his voice down, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell she was real mad.”
“Did you know him?”
“I know who he is. Somebody told me he’s big in one of the gangs. They call him Taco.”
“Go ahead.”
“Like I said, I couldn’t hear them, but it looked like he was trying to talk her into something, all friendly and joking, like, you know? But she just kept shaking her head, and after a while he hauled off and hit her—hard enough to knock her over. I was going to run down and make him stop, but this Taco guy started to go back to his car. And Gloria went after him! She grabbed his arm just before he got to the car, and he turned around really fast and I heard this bang! and Gloria fell. I just…I kept waiting for her to get up, you know?”
The boy’s stricken expression, the tears in his eyes: the first time Olivia had seen a dead person, she’d felt the same way. She nodded.
“Then he looked up and saw me. He started running toward the front door, and he had this gun, and I heard the front door crash, so I got out of there, fast.”
“How?”
“Out the window. You can climb out onto the porch roof and down the what-ya-call-it, the trellis, but I sort of just shot off the roof and hit the ground and ran. I hid in a neighbor’s garden until he came out. He looked around for a minute, but then I heard sirens coming, and I could tell he did, too. He got in his car and drove off, but I was scared to go home again. I mean, I saw him, saw his face. He’s in a gang!”
“So what did you do?”
“I could tell Gloria was…Anyway, the cops were on their way. But I knew they’d ask what I saw, and I just couldn’t. Mina lives on the next street over, and I knew her a little, mostly ’cause she’s best friends with Gloria’s sister. And nobody would think of looking for me there. And anyway, I couldn’t think where else to go in the middle of the night. So I snuck through the yards and knocked on her window. When I told her about Gloria, she said I was right, and let me hide out in her tool-shed until morning, when I had her call Carlos—I’d left my phone at home—to see if he’d heard anything. He didn’t know anything new, but he said he had an uncle who lived down in these caves for a while, before la Migra deported him. So we figured I could hide out here a couple days until you guys arrested Taco. Mina had a bunch of stuff she could bring.”
“And that was your plan?”
“If I told, about Taco, he’d come after me. And my family. I figured if everyone knew you couldn’t find me, they wouldn’t blame me when Taco got arrested.”
In the backward logic of the gang world, it made sense. “So why did you have Brother Erasmus bring me here?”
Danny’s look of defiance wavered. “Erasmo saw Mina riding her bike on the levee a couple days in a row, bringing me water and stuff. He followed her, and found me. I was getting—well, these caves are really creepy at night. And he’s easy to talk to, you know? I told him about Gloria, and somehow, I don’t know, I got to thinking about her. Not just how horrible it was that she died, but how really great she was and how smart, and how much she was looking forward to college. And how my hiding out…well, she deserved better.”
The trio across from Sergeant Mendez seemed to sit a little straighter, either shouldering their portion of responsibility, or squaring off for the firing squad. Two eleven-year-old boys and their guardian of thirteen, prepared for whatever fate she would march them to.
Must’ve been some conversation with that old man, she thought, and cleared her throat.
“You know, it would’ve saved us all a lot of grief if you’d stepped forward the night it happened. But you’ve done so now, a
nd that lets me get on with my responsibility. Which includes protecting you.” For an instant, just a flash, she felt an urge to stand up and walk away, to leave these kids to their Neverland, far from vengeful gangbangers and the relentless machinery of the legal system. Ridiculous, of course. They were lucky they hadn’t run into some human predator already. Or had the cave fall in on them. Time to take them home.
She told them to gather their things, a process that consisted of picking up two already-full backpacks. She stuck the flashlight in her belt and exchanged it for the lantern, running her eyes across the sanctuary. The two boys hadn’t organized this. Young Mina Santos showed signs of becoming a formidable woman. Olivia was almost smiling as she bent to pass through the entrance of the cave, but the moment she straightened, a sound echoing off the sandstone cliff froze all the blood in her veins. Her hands shot out to block the children behind her, and she snapped out a command.
“Back! Get back!”
It was the sound of a shotgun racking a shell into place.
The lamp in her left hand blinded her, but she knew that sound, oh yes, and although it set her guts to crawling and every cell in her body wanted to fling itself to the ground, she was not about to let these three children walk into it.
The kids scrambled backward into the dark and inadequate depths of the cave. Olivia kept her arms outstretched. The gun couldn’t be more than twenty feet away: impossible to miss at that range. But maybe if she turned her left side toward it, she could survive long enough to pull her weapon and take him down…She raised the lantern a bit, shifting her body to the right as she moved.
A Latino voice came from the darkness. Taco? “I want the kid.”
“You don’t want these kids. They’re just vagrants camping out here. I’d suggest you leave before my partner arrives.”
“You don’t got a partner, you came on your own.”
So he’d seen her leave the station, though not her stop to pick up Brother Erasmus. “You’ve been following me?”