It was midmorning Thursday before I made it to the address Beverly had given me. Carlos Ochoa’s Tucson house, a squat, low-slung box of sand-colored concrete blocks on the east side of town, was a fixer-upper in the middle of its transformation. The building itself was at least thirty years old, and its tarred roof shingles had been torn off and littered the ground like black leaves. Gaps under the front window proved that the blotchy stucco was ornamental, not functional—pancake makeup for a house.
There was a high-pitched whirring from the backyard. I followed the sound past a drainage trail of water and through the muddy side yard.
He was turned away from me, trapezium muscles flexing and bunching on his bare back as he worked at the tile saw. Spraying water glistened in his hair. He turned when I cleared my throat.
“Can I help you?”
Close to my age, with a body both functional and ornamental.
“Carlos Ochoa?”
“That’s my little brother. I’m Guillermo…Bill.” He took off one wet work glove and offered me his hand.
“Hi. I’m trying to find Carlos.”
“You’ve got the right place, but he isn’t here right now.”
I glanced at the war-zone backyard behind him. A cracked and listing baby-blue toilet, hillocks of warped linoleum tiles, and powder-dusted floes of dry wall. It looked like the house had been disemboweled.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” Maybe he’d say six hours and I could offer to wait. Maybe he’d say next year. I’d still offer to stick around.
“Don’t know.” He placed a newly cut square of cinnamon-colored tile gently on the ground. “He had some personal business. I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
“Does he know a woman named Felicia Villalobos? Licia?”
He shut off the machine. “Why do you want to know?”
“She’s gone missing. Her father said that Carlos might know where she was.”
He took two steps toward me and grabbed my arm above the elbow. “Lady, I don’t know what you’re up to, but the news is full of that car bomb that killed her. Now why don’t we start all over again and you tell me who you really are and why you’re here.”
I yanked my arm back and turned to run. His hand slid from my upper arm, but managed to snag the shoulder strap to my purse. I was halfway to the car when he called out.
“Don’t know how far you’re going to get without these, Miss Jessie Dancing.”
The clink of metal on metal.
I turned. He held my open wallet at waist level and dangled my car keys like bait.
He put the keys and purse on the concrete slab porch, and stepped over to an ice chest near the sliding glass door. He pulled out two bottles of beer, opened them with a hinge on the side of the Igloo and held one out to me.
“Come on. I’m not going to bite.” He set one beer down for me, settled himself on the lip of the concrete, and moved my purse and keys to the far side, well out of my reach.
I picked up the beer, but moved back to my own corner of the porch.
“Why do you want to find Carlos?”
“I’m a friend of Felicia’s father. He knew that they were spending time together, and thought…with the bomb and everything…that Carlos might be in trouble. He wanted me to check on him.”
He drained a full third of the beer. “Horseshit. That’s another lie. Felicia’s father hates Carlos.”
“Yeah, he does think Carlos is involved somehow. Aren’t you worried about him?”
His thousand-yard stare carried only as far as the rickety wooden fence that bordered the yard. “Yeah, I’m worried, too. I expected him home by now.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
He shook his head. “Said he had to take care of something. That’s usually bad news when Carlos says it. He never really left the gang life, even if he said it was all behind him.”
“Gang life in Nogales?” I pointed at the spiky shield tattoo over Ochoa’s heart. Braceros was spelled out in medieval lettering below the shield. The Braceros were best known for drug trafficking and shaking down illegal immigrants who were trying to cross the border.
“Yeah, both of us. We thought that moving to Tucson would give us some distance. And for the most part, it did.”
Much like I’d felt, getting as far away as Phoenix.
“But you think Carlos is still involved with them?” I moved behind Ochoa and bent to retrieve my purse and car keys. He didn’t try to stop me.
“Maybe. We lived together when we first came to Tucson. But since he got his own place, I haven’t seen him as much.”
“What about him and Felicia?”
His smile was subdued. “Oh, man, that was love with a capital L. He was getting this house ready for her. Wanted to marry her someday. But the families hated it. Her father thought Carlos was too old for Felicia. My mother wants Carlos to marry Angela—the girl she’d picked out for him.” He paused. “Looks like she might get her way after all.”
I picked up a piece of chalk that he’d used to mark the tiles and scrawled my cell phone number on the concrete slab. “Let me know when your brother gets back.”
Ochoa nodded, but kept his eyes on the back fence. He was more worried than he was willing to admit.
Idling at a red light, I replayed the conversation with Ochoa in my head. Maybe it was Carlos’s voice I’d heard right after the accident with Markson’s car. It had sounded young. For that matter, maybe it was Guillermo’s. Either one of the Ochoas might be the one who got my name from Felicia and dropped that note in Markson’s grave.
If I was going to get off the wanted poster in Sabin’s office, I had to find out more about these guys. Was there some relationship between Felicia Villalobos and the Marksons? Or between the Marksons and the Ochoas? And how did that smarmy lawyer Paul Willard fit into things?
I was glad Bonita’s rent was paid up for a while, but if I was going to stay in Tucson, I’d need supplies.
I stopped at a Safeway to stock up on some of the basics. Milk, eggs, coffee, and beef jerky. It was a light load, and I swung the plastic bag as I returned to the car.
My father was waiting at the VW’s back door. His jaw was more saggy than chiseled now, and he’d moved on to bifocal glasses, but his eyes were still bright blue behind the magnified lenses.
“I was wondering who’d be driving Bonita’s car.”
“Dad.” I wanted so badly to wrap my arms around him, but didn’t know how he’d react. We’d left a lot unsaid at our last meeting, that day he’d chosen to sever his ties with me in order to preserve his marriage.
“Oh, honey.” He opened his arms wide and I moved into them. “God, it’s been so long,” he said into my hair. He pushed me back at arm’s length and sidestepped the last two and a half years. “You look great. What are you doing back in town? Is everything okay?”
I explained about HandsOn, Markson’s call, and Len Sabin’s crusade.
“I’ll call Deke. He’ll know what to do.”
“I’ve already seen him. He’s doing what he can, Dad.” I could hopscotch past a two-year absence as well.
He watched silently while I unlocked the car, put the groceries on the passenger seat, and rolled down the window to cool off the inside.
“I know you didn’t kill anybody, Jessie. You couldn’t.”
My dad’s personal Pledge of Allegiance. I loved him for it, even if some of the faith was misguided. And what he didn’t know definitely would have hurt him.
I wrapped my arms around him, still innocent in his eyes.
I should say it now. Tell him that all his support, all the money he’d put up that that first lawyer frittered away, all the fights he’d started, were a waste. That I was guilty as charged.
I couldn’t do it.
“The jury says I didn’t.”
“That’s good enough for me. Come have dinner with us, Jes. Come see your mom.”
“Can’t. I made a promise.”
“It was a stupid promise.”
I remembered my mother’s snarled accusation outside the courtroom. “I only have six children!”
“It scared her, Jessie, that’s all. Thinking that the county attorney might be right. I’m sure she understands now. Come home. Have dinner with us.”
I shook my head. To my mother, my father’s sin had been to believe in me. What had the last three years been like for him? Did he have to muzzle himself not to defend me in conversation? Or had he, too, settled into a smaller, safer life without me?
“Go home. Tell her I’m in town. Then we’ll see where it goes from there.”
He offered his arms once more. I hugged him tight, feeling the pain that three years as Believer In Chief had cost him.