CHAPTER TWELVE

“You mean, you were lovers?” Daly Marcus said.

“You have such a simple way of putting things.”

“But I thought you hated her.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I hate her still.”

She opened her lips to say something, but hesitated.

“Yes?”

With her finger, she drew a pattern on the couch next to her. “Mr. Bracknall said that you tried to have sex with her, and she wouldn’t, and that made you mad and that’s why you hate her.”

“Mr. Bracknall,” I said. “The fount of all wisdom.”

She stood up, irked. “Well, it happens that way sometimes.”

I looked her over. In the yellow light, she looked like Rhea. The blue eyes, the graceful neck, the firm chin. The right height and the right face and the right clean sweep of the shoulders. Just like Rhea. Except for the green hair and the innocence. Jesus.

“How would you know how it happens sometimes?” I said. “You’re out here stumbling around in this sewer, planting your angels on the foreheads of corpses, telling me God’s got his face set against pistols and taking advice from the lowest kind of bastards on earth. You think Rhea turned me down for sex and that’s why I’ve got it in for her? If she had only done that one favor for me, I’d be a happy man today. I wouldn’t be waking up in the middle of the night seeing the faces of all the immigrants she banged up in some shithole in the West Valley, then butchered when their families couldn’t come up with ransom. Or left to die in some airless cargo trailer in the middle of the desert because the cops were sniffing around.”

She was crying. That made me furious.

“You’re a bastard yourself,” she said.

“You’d better hope I’m a bastard,” I replied, “because there’s some damn bloody work to be done now, just because you thought you’d take a run among the slop buckets of Arizona. They’ve planted Arnie Sweeney, and for all I know, they did it because he was a link to you. And they’ve tried to do you and me. They thought you were in the car with me, don’t you see?”

She stared. This wasn’t working for her. Yet. “You think you can wave a crucifix at these people and they’ll shrink back in horror? Something is going on, and I’ve got to sort it out myself, because I’ve got no-one to turn to. If I lay this buffet in front of Halvorson, I’ll get the sack. If I go to the police, they’ll laugh in my face. If I tell how much I got involved with Rhea, I’ll be indicted.”

This hooked her. “What did you do?”

I tried for a sneer. “Oh, I just played the insider, the undercover reporter turning the tables on the bad people, to write the real story, the prize-winner.” I got up and paced to the fireplace. “I’d begun to see hints of Rhea’s violence. Bracknall told bloody stories that were supposed to be funny. Morrison would jump about like a cat when the subject of kidnapping migrants came up. I played along. I tried to give Rhea the benefit of the doubt. But I had to find out for sure. I don’t know if I fooled her—few did—or whether she was looking to trap me. In any case, she did. She asked me to run in a load of illegals for her, and I agreed. She was looking to involve me, I was looking to expose her. What a first-person account that would have been. Well, one of them died on the way.”

I didn’t bother to look at Daly. She’d be revolted. Why not? So was I.

“He’d caught pneumonia sleeping out after they’d got through the fence, but the others covered for him. I picked them up in Nogales, in a bar on Morley Street near the placita. He got worse on the run to Phoenix. Outside Casa Grande, he was coughing and choking. I told them we had to get him to a hospital. Most of them agreed.” I drew a hand over my face. “But Rhea had planted one of her own among them, a brass-balled coyote with a pistol in his pocket. He wasn’t going to have the shipment jeopardized. So the man died. We put him out in the desert.” I paused. “Rhea had me then, and that was the end for us. I told her about the migrant. I looked into her eyes and saw her check that man off like you’d cancel an entry in a ledger. ‘This will bring us closer,’ she told me. Then it was, ‘You’re in deep, Michael.’ That was the last I heard from her. She thought I would go away. But I didn’t, I didn’t. I kept after the story until she died.”

I looked at Daly then, and she had a queer expression on her face.

“You’re lying, aren’t you?”

“Not about that.”

“You must be lying. You make it sound as if Rhea was always in control. But she couldn’t have been.” She held up a finger. “Look what’s happened. The others had her killed. They arranged that car crash. That means they were running things. Maybe she was trying to stop them, and they killed her for that.”

Some of that was possible, except for the part about Rhea trying to throw a spanner in the money machine.

“I don’t know what she was doing, not exactly. If I had been able to prove it, I would have splashed up some headlines and given evidence,” I said. “But, for all that, she’s dead now, and we could get dead, too. If you want to prevent that, you’d better tell me about her. You know something important, so Morrison and Bracknall think.”

I took a chance, then.

“Tell me why they’re chopping up those illegals.”

“Chopping up?”

She looked shocked, but that could be a ploy.

“They kill some they can’t ransom,” I said. “Dump them in the desert, out in the southwest Valley, in the Salt River bed. Hands bound, bullet in the head. Corpses whole, until recently. But as of a month ago, they’ve been badly chopped. And missing organs. Kidneys, livers, hearts. There’s something happening there, something profitable.”

“You’re crazy.”

She thought it over. It took her a while, but at last a light came into her eyes.

“You know what you’re seeing?” she said. “It’s the alien mutilations. Everyone knows about those. They’ve been seen all over the world since the 1960s. It’s cattle, usually. They cut off the jaw, slice out the tongue, remove an eyeball, slit out the sex organs. It happens at night, and there are no tracks. That’s because UFOs do it.”

I searched her face for mockery—the lip corner tightened and slightly raised—or the lopsided, fleeting expression of deceit. I detected neither.

“Or perhaps chupacabras,” I said.

“What?”

I had meant to be jocular.

“The chupacabra is a nocturnal alien creature,” I said. “Much feared in Mexico and Miami and the American Southwest, though it was originally discovered in Puerto Rico. Called the Goatsucker, because it prefers to feast on the blood of goats, though it also sucks the blood of other livestock and small animals.”

Daly clearly believed I was making sense.

“Does it kill humans?”

“No cases have been documented, but it has fangs and long, sharp teeth.”

She seemed so ignorant, but how could she be? After all, she had run with Rhea and knew her methods. And Rhea had trusted her enough to bring her here.

“Chupacabras or other aliens may be the malefactors here,” I said, straining to not sound patronizing. “But we must consider all possibilities. You must tell me anything that might help. Now.”

No change in her expression.

“People may kill you to keep you from talking,” I said, gently emphasizing the word people. “But there’s an out. If you’ve already talked, if the world knows what you know, the reason for killing you goes away. That’s what I can offer. A large, splashy news story. Jesus-Is-Coming headlines. It’s a grand approach, for it throws all the light on others, and it lets the reporter shape things. Marvelous. The coppers and the prosecutors fall in line and do what the newspaper wants.”

This was far too honest for her.

“That’s disgusting,” she said. “That’s corrupting the justice system.”

“It’s reality. And I want to experience reality until I’m 75 years of age, which the actuarial tables say should be my life span.”

“You just feed your readers what you want to feed them.”

“I keep them well fed. And me.”

“You weren’t in love with Rhea.”

My head was singing with that strange music that lies above music. It blended with the snuffling of traffic, the yelping of night birds, the voice from the stereo, crying an Irish cry: “For the stranger’s land may be bright and fair, and rich in its treasures golden. But you’ll pine, I know, for the long ago, and the love that is never olden.”

“I’m a sick bastard,” I said. “And I don’t know about love, but I do know I shouldn’t have been in love with her. If I was, and if there’s a God in Heaven, that’s the sin he will put against me forever.”

She looked helpless now.

“You don’t know what love is,” she said, and that was a prayer. If she was wrong, what chance did she have, what chance did anyone have?

“Oh, I do,” I said. “Love is pity. Love is sympathy with the human being inside the cold operator. Rhea once told me a story. I believed it. And that frightens me, for I think she might have won me over.”

“Tell me,” said Daly. “Unless you’re afraid to tell me.”

“To tell you a story?” I said. “Of course not.”

And so I began.

“Once when she was eight and living in a foster home in north Chicago, a man came looking for her. She supposed it was her father, though she didn’t know her father. She saw him through the window—a man with a false smile and a bad suit, too much rayon matched with too much cheap cotton. A man who asked, ‘Is there a little girl here, a brown-haired girl about this size?’ If so, he had a message for her. No, said her foster mother, no little girl here like that. Silence, for many moments. The man looked as if he might say something more. Rhea could see an alcoholic tremor fluttering his lips. But he closed his mouth and went away. She saw him making his way to the corner, pumping his knees as if to show he had some pride, not looking back, the wind catching his dry forelock and wrenching it about. It was an autumn day, bright and chill, the tree branches dead, the leaves kicking across the cold ground. And she watched him until he turned the corner and was lost.”

Daly’s hand was at her throat.

“What was the message?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Rhea didn’t know. ‘I want my daughter back? I shouldn’t have let her go? I want her to be with me? I am all alone in the world?’ I don’t know. Rhea said he did not look like the kind of man who was easy to love. He looked like the kind who wanted to get something from you. But she lived her whole life wanting to hear that message, whatever it had been. And seeing him turn the corner and vanish.”

The room was quiet, and I spoke into the silence.

“Did she ever tell you that story?”

“No,” said Daly. “Not that one.”

“Even so, you made me think of it,” I said. “Because you believe in her.”

She looked into her empty glass. “I can’t tell you anything about her,” Daly said. “And I’m going away in the morning.”

“Away from Phoenix?”

“Away from you. You tell me things I can’t believe.”

“My stories are always true,” I replied. “They are my stock-in-trade, as a journalist and as a man.” I thought about Rhea, and I thought about the ghosts of the illegals, and I thought about all the stories I had told, and would tell. “Truth is the best lie,” I said. “No-one can catch you out.”