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I SAT AT ROY’S RED Dinner once again, in a corner booth with my back to the wall—an old instinct, which meant I had a cone of only about ninety degrees to watch over.
It was about ten past eight in the evening. I knew this because there was a giant clock on the back wall above the counter. It had little cartoon hens drawn above or beside or beneath each of the quarter-hour bars. There was a large red rooster just underneath the twelve o’clock position. Probably years ago, Roy or his wife or his descendants had seen the clock in a garage sale and thought it would fit the little diner. And since everything was red, it did.
A young, Hispanic girl about twenty-one years old approached my table. She was the evening waitress, I guessed. She looked new. It was something about the way that she walked as if she was confused about what her section was and where things were. She was also a lot more energetic than her counterparts. Maybe she hadn’t yet been corrupted by years of complacency. She wore a fresh smile on her face.
Her nametag said “Maria.” It was silver with bold black lettering. It looked new and gleamed in the light, reflecting my face behind the letters in an obscure way. I felt like I was looking onto the surface of a spoon.
She stopped in front of my table, her notepad at the ready. She was tiny, probably 5’2” tall. Even though I was seated, she had to look up at me.
She said, “Hey there. Are you ready to order?”
She had said hey there in that way that I’ve heard a woman say from time to time in a flirtatious way. I hadn’t expected that, and she had meant it. I could tell. So, I smiled and said, “I’ll have the cheeseburger plate. No fries. Just the burger. And a coffee.”
She looked up from her notepad and said, “Be right back.”
I nodded, smiled. She walked away. She returned with water and coffee, placed both down on my table, pulled a clean spoon out of a plastic covering, and slid it into the coffee.
Pointing a finger toward the inside of my table, she said, “Sugar is there. Do you need cream?”
I said, “I like it black.”
She turned to walk away, stopped, looked back over her shoulder, and winked at me. You don’t have to be an expert in body language to understand a wink. I would’ve been smiling harder if it weren’t for my circumstances.
I shrugged and took out my cell phone again. And once again, I ignored the missed calls, voicemails, and text messages.
I logged into my NCIS email account. I never liked used modern technology that much, but I knew how. It was required for my work—naturally. I understood the ins and outs of mobile devices, the Internet, and social media as much as everyone else. There was just something ingrained in me that preferred the old ways. I liked to speak to a person face-to-face, not by text message, and I never cared to share my every single thought or feeling on social media. Never saw the point. Feelings and thoughts were meant to be private, and they were pretty much meaningless. Thoughts were merely impulses and electronic signals firing in the brain. They didn’t reflect anything about you. Only your actions and words spoke about you. Whenever someone asked me if I had Facebook, Twitter, or one of those networks, my standard answer was, “I don’t tweet!”
I did like getting instant sports news. While I waited for my food, I checked the news in sports. Germany was doing well in soccer. It was rumored that the Cleveland Cavaliers might get back their star player, who had left the team to play for Miami for the last decade. It hadn’t happened, but that was the journalist’s prediction. There wasn’t anything else of interest in the sports arena.
I turned to the news headlines and browsed the articles. There were articles about the president’s low job approval ratings, the bad economy, and something about civil unrest in the Gaza strip, basically nothing new. I saw an article about a raid by the DEA and the Mexican Federales on a major compound on the coast of Mexico and then a story on the rising stock prices of bottled water. Another article talked about the CEO of Starbucks promoting an idea to pay for college tuition for its employees.
The DEA thing looked the most interesting, so I clicked on the link beneath the article, and the web page loaded. The story talked about a man named Oskar Tega. Apparently, seven days ago, the DEA and the Mexican Federales had enough evidence to arrest a criminal mastermind named Oskar Tega finally. They had connected Tega to a string of secret operations all the way from Mexico to the south of Florida. DEA agents had raided his coastal compound on the Gulf of Mexico and found it empty. Then twenty-four hours later, one of Tega’s secret locations was discovered—a bit too late because it had been burned to the ground.
The article said that the men who had already been arrested in connection with Oskar Tega had called the locations granjas. My Spanish wasn’t very good. I knew people who spoke perfect Spanish, and I had taken some classes in high school, but I didn’t recognize the word.
Maria came by and smiled at me.
She dropped off the obligatory red plate with my cheeseburger, placed a bottle of ketchup in front of me, and then asked, “Can I get you anything else?”
I asked, “Do you speak Spanish?”
She looked at me, and her smile turned to a look of disappointment.
She said, “Oh, baby, you aren’t like these racist idiots that live here, are ya?”
“No. No way,” I said.
She smiled again.
“I’m just wondering if you speak Spanish.”
She said, “Sí. I remember most words. I’m not from Mexico, though. I’m from Texas. But my grandma and I used to speak Español. My mom, she only spoke in English, but she understood it just fine.”
I handed her my cell phone after I enlarged the section with the word I wanted translated. Then I asked, “Can you tell me what this word means?”
She grabbed the phone gently with one of her hands, leaned in toward it, and studied the text. Then she said, “This word means farms. Oh, I heard about this. This guy Tega is some kind of drug kingpin. He escaped capture, and they think he fled to Cuba. But his men are here in the US. They’ve been visiting all of his farms and taking their product out, and they leave no witnesses. There was this town in Texas. Tega’s men went there a few days ago and took back whatever drugs were there. Then they murdered all of his employees and left half of the town on fire.
“It’s like what the Germans did in World War II,” she said.
A puzzled look must have fallen across my face because she immediately responded.
She said, “You know? Like when the Russians would raid German villages and instead of finding prisoners and supplies, the Germans had burned everything to the ground and left their ruined homes behind. They made it impossible for the Russians to use any of their supplies.”
I said, “That’s called scorched earth, and it wasn’t the Germans—it was what the Russians had done to the Germans.”
She said, “Yup. That’s it. Well, enjoy your burger.”
I nodded.
She walked away from the table.
I continued reading about Oskar Tega.
Police thought that he was in Cuba, and they weren’t sure how he’d gotten out of Mexico without them noticing. They guessed by boat, or possibly he’d chartered a plane or already owned one. There was a large docking space at the end of a pier on his property. They figured that he had cast off in a yacht possibly days before. The DEA assumed he had bribed his way past SEMAR, the Mexican Navy, or had gotten past the US Coast Guard on the outer perimeter. Tega was a well-connected man. Now, no one knew where he was.
I took two big bites from my hamburger. One. Two. It was more than halfway gone. I had a big appetite and was hungry. Hitchhiking and tourism were hard work.
I put the burger back down on the plate and clicked on the Internet search bar at the top of the screen. I typed in missing girls from Mississippi.
The circle icon spun around and around, indicating that the browser was searching, and then several results came back—missing children, missing girls, murders, and so on.
I added the word north in front of Mississippi and clicked the search button again. The web browser searched and came up with links to articles like FBI baffled by missing girls in North Mississippi.
I clicked on one link, and it took me to an article that was about five years old. I skimmed through it. It told the same story that Jill, the grad student from yesterday, had told me. Missing young girls. Most of them driving along the freeways and highways. All of them had left one destination and were expected at another but never made it. Sheriffs, local police, and the FBI had all been involved. The investigation had never gone anywhere and remained open.
Some reports claimed that the girls were abducted by hitchhikers, but that was nothing but speculation. Some of their vehicles had been found abandoned, left in ditches or in shopping mall parking lots. In my experience, one thing that a young girl never did was leave her car behind. The reports went on to say that some of the girls’ vehicles had never been found.
I took two more bites of my cheeseburger and finished it. I slid the plate away and drank some water.
I turned off the phone and put it back into my pocket.
Maria returned to check on me.
She grabbed the plate off the table and asked, “Do you want anything else?”
I said, “No, thanks. Just the check.”
She slid the check over to me and winked. As I reached for it, her index finger brushed against the top of mine like she was purposely trying to touch me.
I looked up at her and smiled.
She walked away.
I flipped the check over and saw that below the total, she had written her phone number with a smiley face underneath.
I smiled. I placed a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check, a generous tip, but the service was well worth it. I committed her number to memory and got up from my booth and left the diner.