Seven Spanish Angels Read online

  “She sure as hell didn’t walk out of here,” he said, cocking his head to the side, threading a menthol I didn’t know he had up to his lip.

  “Give me a chance,” I told him. “I can find her.”

  Madrone laughed, thumbnailed a match into a flame, stared at it.

  “Turn that on,” he said, nodding to the dryer.

  I looked to the controls, back to him.

  He shrugged, lit his Kool and held the smoke in for long, intense, almost private moments, long enough to lower himself to the dryer, open it, find the button inside the door before it stopped tumbling.

  “Permanent Press,” he creaked, smiling, then exhaled a controlled stream into the barrel. It swirled away into the vent, the backyard.

  “I really can find her,” I said.

  Madrone looked all the way up me, his eyes watering, and shrugged, inhaled again. Said, as best he could with his lungs dying, “Go the fuck ahead.”

  Because CSU was lifting prints everywhere, shuttling them to the van for the uplink, I got out of the way, to think. This was my one chance. Nate was getting his, with the roses, the rubbers, and now it was my turn.

  But what could I do that CSU wasn’t already doing? Of course Madrone had been willing to let me help. He knew I was going to fail, that every inroad I thought I was blazing was going to dead-end.

  I shook my head, stepped down onto the top step of the porch. Soon enough a tech eased up, his mask under his chin so he could smoke. He took his glove off to ash in and I watched him do it, waiting the whole time for Tina Ortiz’s location to flash in my head.

  When he saw me watching, he offered me a drag. It was a Kool, from Madrone probably. I shook my head no, tried to quit watching him. Instead, the backyard. It was just a backyard, though: wood fence, the one tree dying, its tire swing broke, the tire on the ground now, the tread hard and weathered.

  The tech stepped down onto the yellow grass with me.

  “You used to be CSU, right?” he said.

  “Something like that,” I told him.

  “Just playing a little hooky, then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like that one,” he said, pointing with his lips over the fence. When it was too tall for me, I put my hand on his shoulder, stepped up onto his foot, and saw what he was talking about. Who.

  A girl in a swing, her back to us. Her hair long, black, combed out.

  I didn’t look away.

  “What, think she saw something?” the tech said, lifting his cigarette to her, his voice the way the techs’ always were: bored, as if the homicide detective on scene could never be thorough enough.

  “Help me over,” I said.

  The tech did—I was light to him, like I had been to Richard—and I went hand over hand down the other side, set down easy, no sound.

  The girl didn’t know I was there.

  “Hey,” I tried, but she didn’t hear. Just kept holding onto the chains on either side of her, but—it wasn’t really holding on, either. Stiff little strings or fibers between her hands and the chains. No, stuck to her hands.

  In a flash I didn’t want then, I knew that a section or two of the tire swing’s rope from Tina Ortiz’s would be hard with superglue. Because it had broke, couldn’t hold even her, whatever she weighed after bleeding out. It had been too late by then, though: Richard had already seen how good she looked in a swing, had to have one just like it. Wanted to push her in a swing on a perfect day because he never got to push his daughter like that. Never got to have any perfect days. Had been out walking the desert for dead girls instead.

  “Hey,” I said again, to the girl.

  Still though, I couldn’t touch her, had to touch the chain above her hand instead. It pushed her forward just barely, and she swung twice, and, on the second swing, her head turned around, her neck loose, I thought it was just that rigor hadn’t set yet, but then her face, her eyes—

  She was alive. Crying.

  I fell back, had Richard’s heavy pistol out without even thinking it.

  I looked at it, tried to scream, couldn’t get my throat to work, so started shooting it instead, straight up, and the tech—I think I could have loved him, married him, stayed with him forever—came over the fence, just touching it with one hand, the cigarette loose in his lips, and then the yard was full of people, of sound.

  “She’s alive,” I said to Trevana. He’d come through the neighbor’s gate, his black bag by his leg.

  Immediately he forgot me, turned to her. The chains.

  “Cut them,” he said, and a fireman ran away, came back with some bolt-cutters just in time to see two patrolmen unhook the top links of the chains from their hooks. The two firemen held the seat below Tina Ortiz, so she wouldn’t fall. A CSU tech and another patrolman held the chains below her hands, so her arms wouldn’t sling down.

  “Lay her back,” Trevana said.

  The fireman did, and I saw: her hair, it was the kind I’d wanted all through high school. And her skin—she was porcelain, so pale, no blood left for color.

  But she wasn’t dead, was trying to move her mouth, tell us something.

  “It’s in her,” Trevana said, more to himself—to me, maybe—than the paramedics.

  They tried to push him away, elbow him out, but this was his case.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” I said weakly, and then looked over to the gate. It was Davidson; he’d swung back by with burritos, but was dropping them into the grass now. Looking to Trevana.

  Trevana saw me seeing Davidson, turned, waved him over.

  “We’ve got to get it out of her,” he said, nodding down to his antique leather bag.

  Davidson unzipped it, watching his hands too close. I understood: he was used to assisting with the dead, not the living.

  “You can’t operate here,” one of the medics said.

  Trevana looked back to him.

  “We have to get it out of her,” Trevana said to him, not letting any emotion infect his voice. “Now you can either assist, monitor her vitals, or I can have you escorted out.” Davidson lowered himself to Trevana, handed the scalpel over, and some kind of ancient spreader. When he passed them across Tina Ortiz’s face, though, she recognized them maybe, and started bucking, trying to get away, her mouth moving mutely, eyes wheeling like a horse’s. And then it happened: vomit filled her mouth, splashed against the back side of her glued-together lips, leaked from her nose.

  “She’s suffocating,” the medic said.

  “Clear it,” Trevana said. “It burst. We shook her too much.” When the medic reached in with a tube, to thread it up her nose, Trevana clamped onto the medic’s wrist.

  “Hydrofluoric acid,” he said.

  The medic nodded, and then Tina Ortiz’s vomit changed, became blood. Thick blood, not frothy. She stood on her heels and the back of her head, her back not touching the ground at all, and screamed inside again, and Trevana reached down calmly with his scalpel, cut a line in her lips.

  Her scream erupted into the backyard and I saw that one of the patrolmen was crying, his hand a fist pressed against his mouth.

  After that Tina Ortiz went slack, and Trevana shook his head no at this, operating here, in these conditions, on a live person, but did it anyway, cut a neat, Cesarean line over her upper stomach. More blood than she should have had left welled up. It was sizzling, bubbling, moving on its own almost. It was enough that even Trevana had to sit back, wait for it to wash past.

  I held my hand over my mouth, knew suddenly that the killer was making them drink it, the blood, making them take back in what he’d taken out, lying to them that this was the only way they could live. It was how he was getting them to swallow when they shouldn’t be swallowing. I didn’t want to know it, though.

  Beside me now, I felt Davidson start to dry-heave then stumble away, to throw up. It was just sound, just background. What mattered was Trevana, putting on a long black rubber glove, an electrician’s glove almost, from before electrici
ty.

  He reached into Tina Ortiz, gave birth to the smooth-headed grub, the Durex Avanti. It was distended, leaking fast from the knot at its base.

  Trevana sat back, giving up, and the medics moved in, gloved too, and started trying to save Tina Ortiz’s life.

  She never opened her eyes again.

  Because they had to—because Trevana couldn’t pronounce her, as he’d been peripherally involved in her death, might be the subject of an inquisition instead of just a witness—the medics loaded Tina Ortiz onto a stretcher, eased their ambulance out of the yard. To keep the cameras away, the fireman had laid the fence down, let the medics back over it, right up to Tina Ortiz.

  “How long can this go on?” Davidson said, beside me.

  “If it’s him,” I said—Lote Bravo, “then…” and didn’t have to finish: Las Hijas de Juarez had been dying for ten years already.

  We were sitting on Tina Ortiz’s back porch by then. The smoker tech standing above us. When he lowered his cigarette to me I took it, coughed until my eyes watered, until Davidson took it from me, ground it beneath his foot. My shoulder was already sore from shooting Richard’s heavy gun.

  “Mitch wants me to follow her,” Davidson said, nodding to the ambulance, crawling away. “Chain of evidence or some shit.”

  “We almost had her,” I said.

  “She was dead already,” Davidson said. “She just didn’t know it.”

  I nodded, suddenly focused.

  “Wait here,” I said, then stepped up onto the porch, walked through the kitchen before my eyes were adjusted, so that all the patrolmen and firemen and leftover medics were just shadows, watching me.

  I was going to the bathroom. The sink with all the pill bottles. Because Davidson was right: she should have been dead. Hours ago, probably.

  I slid in like I belonged, scooped the bottles into my shirt and backed back out, keeping my head down again as I crossed the living room, stepped out onto the porch, into a sea of flashbulbs I hadn’t been expecting. My hand came up to shield my eyes, the pill bottles I’d had in my shirt scattering on the concrete.

  I picked up the two I could without making an issue of it then kept a hand up, got stalled for too long at the barrier. Davidson followed seconds later. Ghosting behind him, Liz P. She held the microphone up to my mouth, so that when I stood from ducking under the barrier, I was rising to the foam head. I took it under the palm of my hand, guided it down.

  “No comment,” I said.

  We were moving towards my car. The sun so close.

  “It’s not—” she started, then did it again: “Off the record.”

  I lifted my eyes to her hulking cameraman. Said, “He’s making one.”

  “He’s not.” Liz P. looked too, pointed. “There’s a red light—”

  “A bulb,” I said, “yeah,” not having to say anything obvious.

  Liz P. nodded, thinking. We were outside the main ring of spectators now, to the outer rim, the other reporters trailing away because I’d been claimed already.

  “Okay then,” she said, producing a tube of lipstick from some pocket or sleeve. It was maroon, demure but confident. A hint of brown. “You think he’s recording,” she said, unscrewing the lid.

  “I have to.”

  She nodded, kept nodding, and lowered her mouth to the lipstick, came up agonizing moments later with clown lips. The way you paint yourself when you’re ten, and only have a few minutes in your friend’s mother’s bathroom.

  “How’s this?” she said. “Am I ready for prime time, you think?”

  I shrugged, and, on cue, she held one of my pill bottles up between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

  “Prevacid,” she said. “Ortiz, Tina H.”

  “I have to process that,” I said. “You’re interfering—”

  “With the theft of evidence?”

  I pursed my lips, stared straight ahead. Kept walking.

  “Prevacid,” she said again, leaning down. “Doesn’t that… what? You get it for severe indigestion, heartburn. I saw the commercial. It neutralizes your stomach acids or stops them or something, right? Like that six-week deodorant?”

  “What do you want?” I said.

  Liz P. was touching a tissue to her lips, looking at it the way you do a nosebleed.

  “What do all ace reporters want?” she said, smiling.

  We were to my car now, Davidson and me climbing in front, Liz P. in back like she had been invited. I ground the starter, dropped the car into gear, held it in place with the brake. Looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  “That footage of the second girl’s house,” I said. “Your cameraman shouldn’t have had it.”

  “There are… you’re saying we can’t shoot certain places, now?”

  “You know what I mean. You were there before he was.”

  “He.”

  “Whoever.”

  “Maybe we’re just good.”

  “Maybe you want what every ace reporter wants,” I said. “Right?”

  This time Liz P. didn’t shrug.

  “Just tell me how you got it,” I said.

  She stared at me, thinking. Finally said, “Tell me why the Prevacid was so important.”

  “Not the Prevacid,” I said, leaning over the bench seat, holding one of the other bottles out to her. “Wellbutrin. It’s like, I don’t know. Organic Prozac. But you don’t start out on it, you work up to it. Or, down, really. Meaning she was probably in some group hug therapy, or a listserv—”

  “And you thought the original prescription would lead you to people like her, same age group, same vulnerabilities…”

  I nodded, wouldn’t look her in the eye.

  “Now tell me how you got that footage,” I said.

  “The truth, or—like you just told me?”

  Now I did raise my face to her.

  “I’m a reporter,” she explained.

  “Then—how about we just don’t know?” I said.

  “Better.”

  “How about that stomach medicine, it almost saved her life?” Davidson said, suddenly.

  Liz P. smiled, nodded thanks.

  “Your turn,” I said, then. “How’d you beat everyone there?”

  “Doing your job,” she said back, still dabbing at her lip. “Her address book. Jennifer Rice’s address book. Say an enterprising reporter obtained a photostat of it, then she could take all the female names from it, cull out the ones unlike the victim herself—not late twenties, not Hispanic, not in El Paso, etc—then it would just be a matter of this enterprising reporter sending her faithful, devoted cameraman to a few addresses, getting some establishing shots…”

  “They knew each other,” I said. “Jennifer Rice, Carrie Mena?”

  Liz P. nodded. “I thought you knew?”

  I shook my head no, couldn’t look at her.

  “This one,” I said—where we were. “Do you have any footage of it already?”

  “The second victim was a lucky hit,” she said. “No. I’m sorry. Believe me, if they did know each other, I would have put it on at ten.”

  She nodded, held my eyes in the mirror a moment, then her cameraman was stepping out from the crowd, his eyes heavy, intent.

  I turned to Liz P. for a translation, and she directed me to the house. Madrone was working his way off the porch, wading towards us.

  “How about a shot in there?” Liz P. said, stepping out, indicating the house.

  “Ask him,” I said, not looking up, and backed out.

  Four hours later, Tina Ortiz was alive again. Clinically. The way the short paramedic told it, he’d just barely stopped the CPR he could do with the Ambu bag, was turning her monitors off when her eyeballs rolled under her lids and she grabbed his pants leg. Like she could still feel the shit burning her from the inside, he said. Like the pain had brought her back, wasn’t done with her.

  The taller paramedic behind the wheel swerved, looking back, then turned the lightbar on, leaned forward over the whe
el, and shot that ambulance forward. Behind him, the shorter paramedic charged the paddles, tied an oxygen mask over Tina Ortiz’s face, then pushed enough epinephrine into her heart that she was able to maintain a chemically-induced rhythm until they got to the hospital. There they lost her again, but the ER doctors brought her back, started feeding her blood she’d probably helped process.

  It had been going on all through lunch.

  Davidson’s coroner’s office ID badge let us stand around in the hall if we wanted, circle like buzzards, but that was all. She’d been in a curtain room like every other emergency case until the paramedic who’d forced the needle through the sac around her heart came back with a clipboard, something to sign. He nodded thanks to the nurse who’d signed it, looked at his hand, and collapsed.

  Hydrofluoric acid.

  He was getting calcium and magnesium now, a flood of it, and was supposed to live. Just from getting it on the skin of the back of his hand, above his glove.

  Tina Ortiz, though. Until Trevana had lifted the condom from her, she’d had a cup of it in her stomach, maybe more.

  I could believe that, about the pain bringing her back.

  “Like shocking a frog leg,” Davidson said, nodding to the pair of windows we could watch through.

  “What are you talking about,” I said. “You never went to class.”

  He smiled, traced a wide arc with the toe of his right shoe, and then, behind him, the specialists appeared, from all over the city, and I dropped the can of coke I’d been holding. Davidson turned, ready to—I don’t know—run, take my hand and pull me out of there, but then he just looked back to me.

  They were all in bunny suits. White, environmental shells like astronauts. One of them looked at me through his faceplate, down to my spilling coke, and stepped over it, his knee rising too high, as if this were less gravity than he was used to.

  Davidson sat on the couch, spent. I followed.

  “You on tonight?” I asked. He was leaned back into the couch, his eyes closed under the heels of his hands.

  “On what?” he said back, smiling. Like junior high then, he pinched a joint out of the air, lowered his head to it, his eyebrows staying in the same place.