Seven Spanish Angels Read online

  I nodded, touched the spine, and for the rest of the ride he kept his hand on the shifter, his eyes everywhere but me. For some reason I was thinking about the women’s nipples some of the narcotraficos were supposed to wear as necklaces in Juarez. Probably because of the superglue on Rosario Flores’s. Because it didn’t make any sense. Hours too soon, then, we were there, Rosa’s.

  “This place is going to get you in trouble,” I said. “It’s too close to that first one.”

  “Returning to the scene of the crime…” Davidson said, play-acting an eek, then angled himself across the parking lot. I could almost see the concrete bed of the Rio Grande from my side of the Brat. The fence anyway. I looked from it to Davidson, at the front door. Our first date, I said to myself. He held the door until I got there, then followed me in.

  “Moving slow,” he said.

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “The good Detective Madrone really fucked me today.”

  Davidson smiled. “Thought you looked kind of like shit,” he said, but his tone was false, and, right before he said it, he’d flashed his eyes up, to be sure I was joking.

  “Gracias,” I said, about the door.

  “De nada,” he smiled.

  In Rosa’s, he tried to only speak Spanish. It was what I’d told him early on: that the reason most Mexican kids learn to talk it is because there’s one place where it’s the only thing talked—home. That he needed a place like that.

  He stumbled through the order, going too fast because I was there but the waitress seemed to know him, probably knew what he wanted anyway. I just got a chicken enchilada, a Diana to them, but then only moved it around on my plate. The one bite I took swelled in my mouth until I had to force it down my throat. It made my eyes water. I touched them with my napkin, remembered what I was here for: the tox report.

  I opened it beside my plate. Couldn’t seem to read.

  “My father,” I said instead, then told Davidson about last night. Just the skeleton of it: Ignacio, wavering on the backseat of a patrol car, probably afraid to open his mouth, because he was going to throw up. “Can you pick him up?” I said, after.

  Davidson looked up to the waitress, suddenly there with a glass pitcher of tea, then said, “This is a trick, yeah? Just to get me back there so they can cuff my ass all over again, give me a bar of soap I can never hold onto?”

  “They know me too, now,” I said.

  “You coming?”

  I shook my head no. He was watching my eyes now.

  “Why do you do this for him?” he said, finally. “If you hate him and all, I mean.”

  I smiled, tried to.

  Another scene with my father: me, him, and Richard, sitting around an unbalanced table, under a restaurant umbrella. I’d been dating Richard for maybe two months then. He was sleeping over three times a week, on average. I think my father thought we were getting married, that that was why I’d called to invite him to dinner. That I was just relaying what Richard wanted—to ask for his daughter’s hand. My father wore a white shirt buttoned all the way to the neck. It wasn’t like he thought, though. I’d invited him, yes, but only told Richard about it at the last minute, after work. It was just a meal to him. Both of them were too stupid to know anything, to notice that I’d worn my sleeveless black blouse, so that the marks Richard had left on my arm two days ago in the break room would show. I even sat with that arm to my father for the first part of the meal, and kept my elbows on the table. And he saw it, too, no doubt whatsoever, but flicked his eyes away. It was the night I was supposed to have left Richard, the night my father was supposed to tell him nobody touched his mija like that, his mijita, and I was going to guide him back down to his chair—an old man, forgetting he’s old—then let Richard leave alone.

  Instead, my father left me there with him, with Richard, and I said to him in my head Okay then, if that’s what he wanted. If that’s what he was willing to allow.

  “I don’t know why I do it,” I said to Davidson.

  “You call him Dad, I mean,” he said.

  I shrugged, said, “What’d you call yours?”

  “Berry,” he said, like it was obvious. “Dingleberry, sometimes.”

  “But you’ll do it, pick him up?”

  “He won’t know me.”

  “Speak Spanish to him. It’ll be like a mid-term, a practical.”

  Davidson smiled, asked if it was going to cost anything.

  I shook my head no, didn’t know how to do the next thing so just did it: set one of my latex gloves on the edge of the table. “One more thing,” I told him.

  “Just because I’m already bent over…” Davidson said, cutting a wedge off whatever he’d ordered. I already couldn’t remember, and he had enough sour cream on it that I couldn’t tell anymore.

  “Just touch it,” I said. “For me.”

  Davidson quit cutting, looked at me, then the glove.

  “You molesting me again?” he said, looking only at the glove. It was the closest he’d come to talking about that night, our kiss. He didn’t know I had a tape of it in my living room.

  “Yes,” I said. I was molesting him again.

  Finally he shrugged, reached across the table with his fork, touched the glove.

  “I’m a prince yet?” he said.

  “With your hand,” I said. “Your skin.”

  “Like, put it on?”

  “Whatever.”

  He did, turning it over to see both sides.

  “Now your face,” I said. Because I didn’t know how it worked—maybe the blisters or welts or hives or rash only showed up after a few minutes.

  Davidson shrugged, ran a powdery white index finger under his eye then down along his jaw, out to the tip of his nose.

  “I’m supposed to be allergic to this, right?” he said, his finger still to his nose.

  I rocked forward, hugging myself more than I meant to.

  “I just need to know who I can trust,” I said.

  Davidson nodded, narrowed his eyes at me, then opened his mouth, ran the latex finger all over his gums. His tongue.

  “It’d show up here first,” he said, around the glove. “Mucous membranes are like skin without the skin on.”

  I shrugged, not remotely hungry, and Davidson peeled the glove off, tried to blow one of the fingers up into what he told me was going to be a clown dick but he just ended up filling it with refried beans instead. I coughed like I was going to throw up and smiled, and he smiled back, his gums just normal, his face just Mexican brown, acne scarred. Not allergic red.

  When he was done with his chalupa—that’s what it was, I could tell towards the end—the waitress brought a single sopapilla, one wax-papered pat of butter, and a honey bear.

  “Want?” he said, about the sopapilla, and I knew his tone well enough, said no, thanks. He prepared it for what felt like ten minutes then, gave me one last chance at a bite. I shook my head no again and he took it himself, closed his eyes to enjoy it.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, punctuating it with his fork as if cutting space to say it, pointing at the tox report, “Something cool there.”

  I looked down to it, the meaningless numbers I should probably know from chemistry class, then up to Davidson, his mouth full again. I watched him swallow, let it get all the way down, then reached across with the fork I’d been holding when the waitress took our plates away.

  “Think I will try un pedacito…” I said, and took the half that was left.

  Davidson watched it go, looked up to me, his chin a prune of disappointment.

  “Tell me,” I said, touching the report with the side of my fork hand.

  “He sedated her, I guess,” he said, still watching his sopapilla.

  “With what?” I said around a bite so thick and sweet I almost gagged.

  “Special K,” Davidson said, giving it some street flourish—giving up on his sopapilla. “Ketamine. It’s rave candy, an anesthetic. Supposed to produce out-of-body experiences…”

  “Tha
t all?”

  “Just the usual,” he said. “Only thing that didn’t make sense was…” he closed his eyes to remember it. “Some kind of chained molecule, like teflon.”

  I set my fork down.

  “Polyurethane?”

  “How’d you know?”

  I didn’t answer, just balled my napkin into my plate, over the unfinished sopapilla.

  “They still haven’t found her today,” I said.

  “Who?” Davidson said back.

  “Girl four.”

  “Maybe it’s over then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Davidson didn’t want to, but when I wouldn’t get into his Brat again, he left me at Rosa’s. The lie I told was that I was meeting someone. The truth was that it was within walking distance of Jennifer Rice’s house.

  First, though, I settled into the old-fashioned phone booth built into the wall—a wooden seat like a pew, generations of phone numbers written all over it—tried calling the morgue but finally had to dig my cell out like always, for the caller ID. I knew the number pretty much, but it shared so many digits with the front desk that I got them messed up still.

  Trevana picked up on the second ring.

  “Hector told me about the keta-whatever,” I said, studying the cell phone in my lap. The one Madrone had a line on.

  “Ketamine,” Trevana said. “Good. Did he mention the hydrofluoric acid?”

  “No,” I said, scanning the tox report for an uppercase h. “He was eating, I guess.”

  “It’s rust remover, essentially,” Trevana said, talking fast like he needed to get all this out before somebody came back, “though it’s also used to etch glass, I think. In small amounts, it’ll just cause a heart attack. You don’t even want to touch it without gloves, though. Because it doesn’t have a charge it goes right through the fatty layers of your skin like it’s not even there, starts bonding with all your calcium and magnesium, and also—it is rust remover, and rust is primarily oxidization—it releases all your oxygen. It doesn’t want it so much, but it wants what the oxygen wants. And, in the right—wrong—amounts, it gets it.”

  In the booth, I had my eyes closed, tight.

  “So that’s what he’s putting in the rubbers,” I said.

  “Rubbers?” Trevana said. I gave him the short version.

  Fifty cents later, he was quiet, thinking.

  Finally he came back. “A condom doesn’t abrade the throat on the way down,” he said. “That’s how mules carry stuff up… because you can’t just shine a flashlight into their mouth, check for irritation… and, I don’t know, but, because it’s not latex, yes, I think either the stomach’s own acids or the hydrofluoric acid itself would dissolve the condom, releasing the acid all at once. So I guess it’s possible, yes.”

  “More than just possible, I think,” I told him.

  Trevana breathed into the phone, as if he’d just turned towards a wall or something. For privacy.

  “Marta,” he said, in a way that I could hear his eyes narrowing, almost. “Where are you?”

  I smiled, said “Church” and hung up.

  It was dark walking up to Jennifer Rice’s house. At the end of her street, the tall angel was still there, hustling the two children out of the mural, his mouth chipped away by a rock or a bullet. El Paso City, on the Rio Grandé.

  I nodded once to the angel, for permission, then turned to Jennifer Rice’s.

  It was black, holy. Where it all started.

  “Okay,” I said out loud, and stepped up onto the porch, cut the yellow tape with my exacto. The door swung back as if the house had been waiting for me.

  The first thing I didn’t have was a flashlight. There was one in the trunk of my car, but my car was at the station. Jennifer Rice had had lights, of course, and her power wouldn’t be shut off yet, but I couldn’t use it either: whatever patrol cars were in the area were probably supposed to be working Tays into their rounds, because it was still an active crime scene, couldn’t be vandalized yet.

  The second thing I didn’t have was a complete set of gloves; one was still at Rosa’s, greasy with refried beans. I only realized it was gone when I felt the brass knob under my fingers, under the pads of my fingers, my whirls and vortices rising from the metal already.

  They could be expected to be there, though, maybe. Unless they were on top of somebody’s ninhydrin.

  I wiped the knob with the tail of my shirt, gave my eyes a forty-count to adjust to the shadows then crossed the living room, leading with my right foot.

  The third thing I didn’t have was field-training.

  The fourth thing was my cell phone, shaking once in my pocket—the end of the lo-batt shutdown.

  I told myself it was better that way, though. That if I called anybody, they could just track me down like we’d tracked Richard down. His cell, anyway. Which was in the passenger seat of my car, still, instead of logged into Evidence. But there was nobody to call, either; I wasn’t here to work the crime scene like I’d been trained to. Like I’d been told not to.

  I stepped into the kitchen, let my eyes slip across the counters.

  Four days ago, Jennifer Rice had died here.

  As a girl, my then-mother had taught me to hold my breath when riding by cemeteries, because the ghosts could get in through your mouth, inhabit you. At fifteen, my hair shorn, terrible, ugly, I’d sat by the closest cemetery to our house, my mouth open, breathing in everything. Now, in Jennifer Rice’s house, without even meaning to, I was holding my breath.

  I shook my head no, let my hair down like hers, like Jennifer Rice’s. Because I needed to understand her.

  In the back room, her bedroom, the TV was on. I went to it, the news. Saw again Channel 7’s footage of Carrie Mena’s house. Understood finally why it kept sticking in my mind: there were no emergency vehicle tire ruts in the yard. No tape fluttering from the porch.

  “No,” I said, out-louder than I mean, and turned to what I was seeing, from the corner of my eye. It was me. Jennifer Rice had a full-length mirror on the back of her door. I looked back to Liz P., and she was finally doing her report in front of a garage door.

  Nate had called it in. I loved him.

  I left the TV on, backed away from it, no clear line between when I was facing it and facing the hall. That was where I had to go—the closet. I swallowed, made my way down to the door, stepping out of my shoes on the way, leaning hard against a strand of tape I saw too late. The static electricity from my bare feet on the carpet wrapped the tape around me and I walked out of it. Standing in front of the closet door at last, I put my one glove on, was ready, telling myself I was ready, that I could do this, then went back to the kitchen instead. For the drawers, for a match. It lit on the second strike, threw the shadow of my fingers onto the wall. I drew the flame to me, cupped my hand around it like I was from the nineteenth century, and had no more excuses.

  This is a door you’ve already opened, I told myself. Just a door.

  I held the match to it until it burned into my fingernail, then shook it out, started another, my other hand to the button of my shirt. To all of them—because Jennifer Rice had been wearing scrubs, which was like wearing nothing. And I needed to understand. I switched the match to my other hand to let the shirt fall, but then shrugged it back on: it was loose, like Jennifer Rice’s top had been. Not my slacks, though. I unsnapped them, stepped out of them. And my bra: she hadn’t had one. Or panties. I dropped them to the carpet, toed them behind me and placed my hand on the knob, stepped in all at once, before I could even look, and pulled the door shut, shrouding myself in a whole new kind of blackness, a womb, one in which I could commune with Jennifer Rice. Know her last moments.

  I nodded, pulled my legs closer to my chest, my chin resting on the ledge of my knees, hair draped nearly to the floor.

  What next, I said to Jennifer Rice.

  Together, we listened for footsteps in the hall, footsteps in the kitchen. Maybe we were hiding here—that’s why he was going to put
us back here, after the bathroom.

  But the slick thing I’d just swallowed, or was about to. The thing he’d probably held out like a dick, made me approach on my knees.

  Why would I do it? Why would I swallow a rubber full of something when I already knew I was going to die? When he’d just bled me out from my own shower head, or was about to, talking about it already?

  How I could almost understand—the ketamine relaxing my muscles, suppressing the gag reflex, making the whole experience only half-real, like something I was watching—but why, why made no sense.

  I shook my head no, that this was stupid, that this wasn’t how real crime scene techs figured things out, that this was why I wasn’t CSU, and put my hand down to push up, stand, leave, but then stopped again, listening all over. The hall, the bedroom. Maybe he’d been wearing his combat boots, the ones with the spongy rubber soles. His face painted black, eyes a sharp contrast. Leading with his fingers, walking slow, a step a minute. Not from the kitchen, but the bedroom, the hall, his breath controlled, his bad knee popped in the backyard already, where I couldn’t hear. Where Jennifer Rice couldn’t hear. And then pushing the garage button through the cargo pocket of his combat pants, the door rising, Jennifer Rice moving towards it, towards him.

  I smiled, pushed the closet door open, saw what I was doing: instead of placing me with Jennifer Rice, I was placing her with me, in my house, the lock slipping on my sliding glass door, my garage door rising, twenty seconds of cover in which I could rise like she had, float to the utility, part the muslin over the glass, look out.

  Richard moving up the hall from the bedroom.

  From the back, she would have looked like me, could have been me.

  I swayed forward against my knees in anticipation of whatever was coming, and it was like the dolls you have when you’re a little girl: sit them up, the eyelids roll back.

  Mine did.

  The closet door was still open. Framed in it now, black against the shadowed wall, a form, a man.

  Richard.