Twenty-six

Benny went out front to unlock the gate. None of the businesses around here were open this late. But cars were parked across the street. A black panel truck drove past. He saw its brake lights before it went dark at the end of the block. Then a light blinked inside. No doors opened. No one got out.

Marcy Thornton had led them into an ambush? She had assets like that? Not likely. Those cars across the street, the black truck, it was police. She was working with them and knew what was waiting at the outfitter’s ranch.

He checked the monitors in the room Abel had built, seeing more cars at the back of the lot, a man getting out, walking up to the chain-link fence, rattling it, looking in.

He went out front and locked the gate he’d just opened.

In his office, he got Rigo on the phone. There’s cops everywhere. I don’t want the gate open, give them an invitation. You’ll be okay. They’re looking for the van. Flash your lights to let me know it’s you, then hit the gas. I’ll open and close fast. Drive straight back to the hangar.

The police would be watching all the time now. That had never happened before. Maybe they were outside his house, too. And Rigo’s. And Abel’s. They’d notice he wouldn’t be coming and going. Abel Jr., the school would report him truant.

The future in those two, gone. No one to take over the business, all he and Rigo had built. He sat in the security room, the black and white images of the gate, the fence, the street, and the police cars. Abel’s notebook there, he’d been studying on how to do the job better, learning so much from the television shows that showed real cases.

None of that he’d ever use.

Benny Silva ripped pages from the notebook and fed them into the shredder in his office. Above him was the painting of the conquistadors massacring Indians, his Spanish sword on the wall above his desk.

He wanted Marcy Thornton to see that sword shining, him flipping it back and forth, reflected light in her eyes making her bring a hand up. But she couldn’t. Rigo would be holding her, her shirt undone showing the ribs and tit over her heart.

Rigo bringing in two dead bodies. Then what? They couldn’t do funerals, no way to explain how Abel and Junior got shot. The cops would figure out it had been Rigo blowing past them. After that they’d stop any car leaving the gate with some excuse, maybe have dogs to tell them what was in the trunk.

It would be nice if they could sneak Abel and Junior out so they could be buried somewhere secret. He and Rigo could visit them, maybe once a year on this very day.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

Benny went through the door at the back of his office, staying inside the buildings and fences screening him from the cops on the street. He went to the hangar at the back of the lot. El Puerco needed time to warm up.

Aragon tapped on the window. Rivera reached up and covered the dome light in the panel truck he was using as his command post. She got in next to him. The gate to Silva’s place was down the street and closed.

“Hey,” Rivera said.

She’d expected more. “Anything?”

“Benny or his brother came out,” Rivera said. “Jiggled the lock, cover to look around. He knows we’re here.”

She lifted a water bottle from the console. “I’m really thirsty. Like I ran ten miles in the sun. Drained. I’ve never been so scared.”

He kept his eyes on the windshield. She waited for something from him.

“At least I didn’t shit my pants,” she said.

The water was good, really good. Something in it. Citrus and sugar.

“We’ve got all approaches covered, between us and SFPD,” Rivera said. “There’s a team out back. Still no sign of the van. State Police has choppers over the interstate.”

She took another swig. “Any reports from ERs?” What was that on her tongue?

“Nobody coming in with gunshot wounds. How do you know you hit someone?”

“I saw them go down. They got back up firing. Those goddamn machine guns. I don’t ever want to face that again. But the way they dropped, I hit something critical. Look.”

A brown car, older American model, turned onto the street, moving at about the speed limit, not too fast, not slow enough to look suspicious. Behind the gate inside the business’s yard, a man, it looked like Benny, not his more muscular brother, stepped into the light and moved quickly to the gate. The car accelerated, the engine raced. Benny swung the gate open, then threw it shut behind the car. She saw him fastening the lock, looking their way, then heading around the back of the building, following the car that had not stopped out front where the parking spaces were.

Aragon said, “I bet that was Rigo driving. So who was in the van?”

Rivera checked a text message. “They got a license plate. Hold on, yeah, Rigoberto Silva.”

Aragon cracked the door, letting the dome light go on, no point in worrying about it. “I want to go in there. Why are all the lights on out back? Is that steam?”

“You can’t go in.” Now Rivera was looking at her. His eyes were different, not really connecting deep within her. She wasn’t sensing Miguel in him anymore. “That’s why you’re being sued. Entering and searching Geronimo’s ranch without a warrant.”

“It stopped a killer.” She rolled her tongue in her mouth, thinking about the taste of the water.

“If it had gone to trial, it would have derailed the case. Everything you found would have been suppressed.”

“Calm down. What was it you said we had to talk about, the forensics that came back?”

“Get back in. This might take a while.”

She closed the door. They sat in the glow from streetlights a little distance away.

“They recovered buccal cells from the bite wounds on Andrea,” Rivera said.

“That’s good, right?”

“They ran the DNA against the samples you collected, from Montclaire, the water glasses in the courtroom from Thornton and Diaz. They got a positive match, ninety-nine-plus percent certainty.”

“And? Why are you stringing this out?”

“The buccal cells came from Lily Montclaire.”

Montclaire lying to them every step of the way. And she had bought it. The time wasted. Bullets from machine guns sending wood chips into her face, somebody out there shot, maybe dying with her bullet inside them. Her relationship with Serena destroyed, probably Javier next when he returned home and saw bullet holes in his kids’ room.

“They can do that, get buccal cells from a bite mark that long after?” she asked.

“They got DNA from Thornton and Diaz on the girl’s clothes you secured from the Baca residence. But the DNA in the bite wound, that’s all Montclaire.”

She pulled out her phone and called Lewis, told him the news, and said he should wake up Lily.

When she was done she turned to Rivera. He was drinking from the water bottle.

“We know she was with Cassandra Baca,” she said. “Lily didn’t deny that. Why lie to us about the bite? Hell, she admitted to procuring, to everything else.”

“Dumping more on Thornton? Maybe shame?”

“Lily doesn’t know that word. I think it’s the first one, dumping more on Thornton. You want to be in on questioning her?”

“She’s screwed for witness protection. It’s time we consider her in an entirely different light.”

Rigo had Abel and Junior in the trunk of the Olds, wrapped in the plastic they’d intended for the model. Abel had been shot twice, once through the thigh, another in the ass. It was the bullet in the thigh that had killed him, the big artery in the leg cut in two. Junior’s head was barely hanging on, just the skin on the side of the neck keeping things together.

Rigo added fresh tape so the sheets didn’t open when they lifted them out. He did most of the work. Benny wasn’t much help. They got Abel and Junior onto a cart with wheels.

Rigo brushed his hand over the trunk’s carpet.

“They always find something,” he said. “You can’t beat forensics. I like this car. Only twenty thousand on the second engine. But it goes to the crusher tonight.”

Benny was able by himself to push the cart to the lift that fed El Puerco.

“There’s no other way, Rigo,” Benny said. The look on Rigo’s face reflected the sadness and anger in his own heart. He saw Rigo’s scar as a second frown. “We say they went to Mexico. A trip, father and son. Abel got the idea and just wanted to take off. Fishing season down there, deer hunts on a private ranch, no limit, we’ll think of something.”

“When they don’t come back?” Rigo tugged the plastic and touched Abel’s cheek.

“Things happen down there. There’s a war, bodies in mass graves, people getting stopped on roads. It’s a crazy country.”

“That lawyer. We bring her here.”

They lifted the plastic sheet with Junior first and rolled him into the broth. Abel went next, pushing Junior below the surface, the boy under his father. They could see the acids already working when bodies rolled and fingers broke the surface.

Benny closed El Puerco’s heavy stainless lid, like the top of an enormous pressure cooker. Rigo worked the dials, pressed the red switch. The needle on the temperature gauge rose, steam escaped from a place under the lid where the seal was worn.

The plastic from the trunk went into the incinerator. Rigo drove the car to the crusher. Benny sat at the controls and watched the Oldsmobile turning into a block of metal and rubber.

“Busy for middle of the night,” Aragon said into her phone, Rivera listening from his panel truck. She stood at the fence around Silva Enterprises, the front gate a half block behind her, another half block to the end of the property. “Machines turning. I hear metal, glass popping. Lots of chemical smells. And steam out of that big metal building at the very back. It just went rushing up the stack like a pressure valve was opened. I’m going in, Tomas. No, not now. We need to talk to Montclaire. But I’m going when I figure how to do it.”

The phone brushed her cheek. She winched. Serena had missed some of the cactus spines. She tried pulling them out and cursed her short fingernails. They’d stay in her face until she got home.