Without looking away from Lee, he says, “Riz, I want you to take out your gun, and if this fucker removes his hand from the drawer holding a weapon, I want you to shoot him in the head.”
I unholster my gun, rest it in the crook of one elbow. And just to make the point more indelible, I stand up. All five foot eleven of me. Lee has to refocus his gaze on my partner or risk a neck sprain.
Seth puts both elbows on the desk. “Now, where is Mei?”
The door opens and I turn on my heel defensively, but it’s only one of the old ladies shuffling in, cigarette in hand. Seth, who has not taken his eyes off Lee, says, “I want to talk to Mei. I’m not leaving here until I speak to him.”
The old lady has moved behind Lee’s chair and says something to him in Mandarin or Cantonese and he answers her. She calmly stubs out her cigarette in an ashtray on the desk and then, without warning, begins to viciously strike the back of his head. Lee ducks, folding both arms over his ears to protect himself from the flurry of blows. She continues slapping him with surprising vigor, using both hands, until she has driven him from his expensive chair and sent him out of the room accompanied by a stream of insults.
She then sits in Lee’s chair and tells us, “I am Mei.”
“You know who sent us?” Seth asks her, doing his best to mask his surprise.
“Yes, I know,” she answers. “The Vice detective told me.”
She deliberately closes the drawer Lee had opened, and I holster my gun.
“You know we’re in Narcotics, not Vice, right?” I ask.
She flicks her eyes briefly toward me and says, “My other grandson is in prison on a drug charge. If you can help him, then I can perhaps help you.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Seth says.
She nods once, motioning for me to sit. “What can I do for you?” she asks.
“You know about Lana Yu?” Seth asks. “The one who was murdered yesterday?”
Mei takes her time lighting another cigarette as though carefully considering the question. Finally she says, “I watch the news, Detective.”
“Then you know how she was murdered.”
Mei cocks her head to the side and exhales a long stream of yellow smoke. “Someone cut her throat.”
“That’s right. We’re pursuing a Mexican drug dealer she was involved with, but it doesn’t feel like a cartel murder.”
“And you want to know if the killer could be Chinese.”
“We just want to rule out any uninterested parties.”
She studies the long column of ash on the end of her cigarette. “To look here is to look in the wrong place. You say the killer is not Mexican. Your murderer is not Chinese either. He’s…something else.”
She folds her hands on top of the desk—just a demure little grandma in an oversize chair—and turns her attention to me. “This man is a destroyer of women. He cut off her ears, is that right?” She studies my red hair. “And also a piece of her hair.”
“Did Tony Ha tell you that?” I ask. The ears and the hair being taken had been kept from the press.
Mei takes a small piece of hard candy from a glass bowl next to the ashtray, slowly unwraps the paper, and puts it in her mouth.
“Detective, I know everything that happens in my family and in my community,” she tells me. “But I have no idea who killed Lana.”
She extends the candy bowl to me. “But maybe you don’t want to know either.”
As we’re driving back to the station, Sergeant Taylor calls to say that a highway patrolman in Weatherford, a town about sixty miles southwest of Dallas, just found Lana’s battered and abandoned BMW. With a body in the trunk.
11
Seth and I drive the sixty miles to the rural farm road just south of Weatherford where the Beemer has been found. Within fifteen minutes of leaving Dallas, we see the flat terrain begin to roll into gentle hills; the sunburned grass lining the highways is yellow and spiked. We pass tiny houses, double-wide trailers, and a few car lots the size of small cities flying enormous Texas flags in the suffocating heat—at the same level as the American flag, because as any true Texan will tell you, Texas is a republic, not merely a state—on poles the height of cell towers.
But mostly it’s just miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. There is literally one cloud in the whole damn, never-ending sky.
Before leaving the station, I called the Weatherford Sheriff’s Office and was put through to their Detective Peavy, lead criminal investigator with the CID unit. He confirmed that a battered BMW with Lana’s plates attached had been found abandoned on a dirt road just outside the city limits. And that there was indeed a dead body in the trunk of the car. I filled Peavy in on our investigation with Ruiz and on Lana’s murder.
It’s been ten minutes of silence in the car with Seth. My stomach is in rebellion, and I’m wondering if one last stubborn bit of scorched meat from Babcock’s is yet clinging to my insides like Ripley’s nesting alien. Seth has been stealing looks at me from the driver’s seat, trying to gauge my mood since my last uttered phrase, which was “Doesn’t it ever fucking rain here?”
“Hey, Riz, I’ve decided to keep Bender’s dog,” he says. “What do you think of my calling her Delilah?” He does a right-hand pass on a car doing at least eighty in the left lane.
I glance at the speedometer. “You know you’re doing ninety, right?” I drive fast, but Seth drives like he’s perpetually on the Autobahn.
“Yeah. So what do you think of the name?” He takes his eyes off the road an unnervingly long time to look at me. When I don’t answer, he glides back into the left lane but eases up on the gas pedal a bit.
“I think, Seth, that if you’re going to keep a poodle, you need to give it a stronger name. Like Spike, or Tornado.”
Grinning, he winks at me. “I’ve already taught her to sit and roll over.”
I mutter something obscene about all females rolling over for Seth and he says, “What was that?”
“I said the dog already knew how to sit. Christ, you’re going all queer on me. Delilah was Samson’s undoing, remember?”
Seth gets quiet for a bit and then says, “How about Rita?”
“It’s better than Delilah,” I say. “Although Riot and Rita sounds like a country band.”
“Riz?” he says.
“Yeah?”
“No matter how this goes, I’ve got your back.”
“I know,” I say. If I’m thankful for anything this day, it’s my poodle-toting partner.
I notice that the one cloud in the sky has elongated into the shape of a celestial pointing finger.
We turn off the highway onto the dirt road and, after a few miles, see Lana’s BMW with several squad cars and a local EMT van parked behind it. Parker County Forensics is still working the scene; a body bag’s on a stretcher. We introduce ourselves to Peavy, a tall, broad-chested cop about forty-five, wearing boots and a straw Stetson. He tells us first thing that it was supposed to be his day off.
“It never fails,” he says. “First time in a month we find a body, and my partner, who is supposed to cover for me, is having emergency back surgery. He fell off the roof this morning moving his dish.”
He continues the running monologue with his own home-maintenance injuries. There’ve been a few.
When we’re ready, Peavy unzips the body bag, and inside is an older, corpulent man, bound wrists and ankles, shot twice in the head. The corpse has been a corpse for maybe a few hours, and Peavy tells us he thinks the guy had been placed in the trunk soon after the shooting. Seeing a body so recently separated from life is always a jolt.
I look at the man’s slightly purpled eyelids, the black and gray lashes like the bristles of an artist’s brush, the lips as relaxed as a Buddha’s smile, and can readily imagine what the man would have been like animated.
The body is wearing a gray uniform with shiny brass buttons.
“That some kind of a band uniform?” Seth asks.
“No,” P
eavy answers. “It’s a Civil War uniform.”
“Civil War,” I repeat, unsure I’ve heard him right.
“See those patches and the sash?” he asks, pointing to the dead man’s shoulders and midsection.
I blink a couple of times. “And…?”
“A Confederate reenactor,” Peavy offers, trying to clarify.
“Reenactor,” I echo, having no idea what he’s talking about. My first thought is that he’s an extra from a movie set.
“It’s a group that gets together and stages Civil War battles. Uniforms, armaments, sometimes small cavalry units. Even cannons. They do it a lot around here.”
I look at Seth and he shrugs.
“They do drug deals too?” I ask Peavy.
“Not that I know of. It’s not that kind of group.”
I detect a note of defensiveness creeping into the investigator’s voice, but I ask, “Then what was he doing in the trunk of a car we suspect was being driven by a large-scale drug dealer?”
Peavy shakes his head. “I have no idea. But it looks like whoever was driving ran out of gas. The keys are in the ignition. Maybe the driver took off on foot? Got picked up?” He shrugs. Ruiz is not his problem, but the body is.
He looks around as though to point out the obvious. It’s dusk, we’re ten miles away from Weatherford, and it’s going to be dark soon. One of the local cops who’s been murmuring into his car radio comes running with the news that the wife of one of the reenactors called in because she’s not heard from her husband in over twenty-four hours.
Peavy tells us that the reenactors do military exercises on several hundred acres of private undeveloped land nearby that’s used for deer hunting in season. It’s somewhat hilly and full of dense brush, boggy after it rains, crisscrossed with small streams. Cell phone reception is poor to nonexistent.
“They leave their cell phones in their cars and are allowed only one call a day, at noon,” he tells us. “The parking area is on higher ground, where the reception is better. The wife says that some of the other women have called her and they’ve not heard from their husbands either.”
“How many men in the group?” I ask.
The patrolman shrugs. “About fourteen. Give or take.”
I point to the corpse. “Was he part of that group?”
He nods. “Probably so.”
“Could they be lost?” Seth asks.
Peavy shakes his head. “Not likely. They’ve all grown up hunting around here.”
The ball of light to the west is well below the horizon, flaming the lone cloud to a deep magenta.
Peavy asks us, “Do you want to trail us to the encampment? See if the men know the victim or have seen Ruiz?”
It’s unlikely that El Gitano has headed back toward the costume party, but it’s worth a look.
Peavy traces on a map the farm-to-market road that leads to a gate entrance to the deer lease, beyond which, somewhere, is the reenactors’ encampment. We drive caravan-style: a Weatherford patrol car, Peavy, then us. We trail behind for several miles through a curtain of dust kicked up from the dirt road. After fifteen minutes or so, I see through the headlights a high deer fence stretching into the darkness on either side of the road and a tall gate straddling it. The cop stops at the gate, opens it, and signals for Seth to close it after we’ve passed through.
The road just beyond the gate forks, and the two cars in front of us veer to the left in the direction of the base camp. While Seth gets out of the car to wrestle the gate closed, I glance to the right and see in the distance a faint, solitary light bobbing its way toward us. It’s not a flashlight beam. It’s yellowish and winking, more like a candle flame. It starts swinging crazily as though someone’s trying to signal us.
When Seth gets back into the car, I point to the right. “Do you see that?”
Squinting through the windshield, he puts the car into gear, turns to the right, and drives slowly toward whoever is signaling us. He puts the headlights on high and within a few minutes a boy of about twelve jogs into the blue, columned beams carrying a lantern and panting like he’s been running for miles. He’s dressed like an extra in a Western movie, with high-water pants, linen collarless shirt, and a thumb-buster revolver shoved under a broad leather belt.
When he sees us get out of the car, he drops the lantern in the road, puts his hands on his knees. He points back up the road and gasps. “Help…please…they’re trying to kill us.”
“What’s your name, son?” Seth asks him, hand on his own gun.
“Kyle Parsons,” he says.
“We’re Dallas Police, Kyle. Get in the car,” I tell him, and he scrambles into the backseat. I get in next to him, but not until I make him give me his pappy’s pistol. It weighs a ton. He must have to grasp it with both hands to hold it aloft.
“Who’s trying to kill you?” I ask.
“The Mexicans.”
I catch Seth’s eye as he gets in the car. The kid looks terrified. “What Mexicans, Kyle?”
“I don’t know. Just Mexicans. They’ve been shooting at us.” His eyes tear up. “It’s all my fault.”
From the front seat Seth hands him a bottle of water and Kyle drinks half of it without pausing. “What are you doing out here alone?” Seth asks.
Kyle gestures in a westward direction and says, through choking breaths, “There’s a group of us camping over by the stream. I’m with my dad and uncle.”
“Better call Peavy,” I tell Seth. We’re not on the local police’s radio band so he tries calling him on his cell phone. No signal.
“Okay, Kyle,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Take a deep breath and tell us what’s going on.”
“I took a bucket down to the stream to get water for our horses—”
“What time?”
“This morning. On the other side of the stream, at the base of a tree, I saw a big red bag. I crossed the stream and looked in the bag and…there was a lot of money in it.”
“How much money?” I ask.
“I don’t know. A lot.”
“Okay, then what happened?”
“I took the bag, but I forgot the bucket at the stream. I hid the money in the old barn. I figured finders keepers. Right?” He looks to me for validation, but I just motion him to go on.
“When I got back to the camp, my sergeant, Mr. Billings, yelled at me for leaving the bucket behind. Mr. Billings went to get it. But he never came back. We heard shots by the stream and we all ran to see what was going on.
“That’s when we saw the Mexicans. Five of them. There were some cars parked up on the far side of the stream and these guys started firing at us. One of them had an automatic rifle, but we returned fire with our muskets.”
Muskets. They returned assault-weapon fire with Civil War muskets. My mouth must be hanging open in disbelief because Kyle says, “It’s all we had. We couldn’t call anyone…” He begins to cry.
I have to ask him the next question. “Was your sergeant, Mr. Billings, a heavyset man in a gray uniform? Blue sash around his middle?”
He nods and wipes his nose with his sleeve. “Is he okay?”
Kyle sees the look on my face and covers his eyes with both arms.
“We shot one of them,” he says with surprising anger. “But two of ours went down at the river trying to make it to the fort. I think they’re dead too.”
“The fort?” Seth asks. He’s still trying to reach Peavy on the cell.
“It’s just an old house in front of the barn. We use it for our maneuvers. There were eleven of us barricaded at the house all day.” He looks at me, eyes filled with tears, snot mixed with dirt running down his upper lip. “They kept yelling at us, telling us what they were going to do to us when we ran out of ammunition. They said we had their money and a big package of drugs. But I swear there were no drugs in the bag. Just money. I would have given it back if I could’ve. When it turned dark, the others told me to go and try to get help. I snuck out and made my way to the road.”
While he’s talking, I’m doing the math. If there were five dealers to begin with and one got shot and one drove Lana’s car away, that leaves three armed, pissed-off dealers working to get their money and drugs back.
And maybe we’ve just stumbled onto the place where Ruiz has hidden his stash of cocaine. The main highway through Weatherford, I-20, runs southwest directly to El Paso.
I peer through the rear window at the road stretching back into the darkness and wonder when the hell Peavy’s going to realize we’re not behind him and come investigate.
It dawns on me that Kyle’s lantern was a beacon not only for us but also for the drug dealers.
“Kyle, when did you light the lantern?” I ask the boy, and then I see headlights approaching in the distance; it’s Peavy coming back to check on us.
At the same moment, the front of our car is sprayed with gunfire, explosively shattering the windshield inward, pellets of safety glass hitting like BB pellets.
I throw myself down over Kyle, unholstering my gun, and I hear Seth swearing from the front seat. It sounds like two shooters with semi pistols and they’re moving clockwise around the car. The front passenger-seat window shatters as well, the bullets punching holes in the metal frame. I reach over Kyle, open the back door away from the shooters, and shove him out onto the road. Seth opens his door and falls out, gun drawn.
“Goddamn it, they shot me!” he yells angrily.
I return fire over the hood but only briefly, as the shooters are spraying the length of the car with a closer-range assault.
Behind me, the headlights of Peavy’s car have come to a stop, and I hear the distinctive ping of bullets hitting the vehicle’s frame. Then the headlights begin to rapidly retreat, “advancing to the rear,” as Uncle Benny used to say. Peavy can’t see who he’s shooting at and takes the sensible course. I would have done the same thing.
The assailants are firing at us again and I feel Kyle’s hand tugging mine.
“We’re about to lose our heads, partner!” I yell at Seth. “We gotta do something—”
Kyle yanks hard enough to pull my arm out of its socket. “Come on, come on.” He points to the woods opposite the road.