A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3) (26 page)

     
She started to look up at him, but he kept her pressed so close to his body she couldn't move. So she listened.

     
"I also know marriage scares you to death," he said. "Because of your father and all that. Marriage scares you so much I don't know if we'll ever make it to the altar." Matt gripped her even tighter. "It's supposed to be men who don't want to get married."

     
Now Sylvia did pull away. She lifted her chin, half defiant, half joking. "If we just live together, we'll save on taxes."

     
Matt gave her a gentle push, and she fell backward into the chaise. He brushed the palms of his hands together—
that's that
—and leaned in close. "I'm flying down to Juárez tomorrow. I'll be gone a night or two. Why don't you spend some time, think about what you want for a relationship."

     
She nodded, and she was quiet for a few moments. Finally she asked, "Why Juárez?"

     
"I've got a lead I need to follow up." Dale Pitkin had left a cryptic message on Matt's home number: "Our friend will meet you tomorrow morning, Stanton Street bridge, Mexico side."

     
Sylvia swallowed her words of warning; Matt would take care of himself. "How long will you be gone?"

     
"That depends. I may turn around and fly back tomorrow. I may stay another day. I'll call, let you know what I find." He ran his hands under her T-shirt, along her belly.

     
Sylvia stretched lazily, guiding his fingers beneath the waistband of her boxer shorts, and even lower, to her thighs. The chile on his fingers stung her skin. The sensation was somewhere between pleasure and pain . . . mostly pleasure. "Since you're going to be in Mexico, can I borrow your truck?"

     
He nodded, his voice low, his hands busy. "Swear to me you will not speed. It's scheduled for a tune-up. And don't forget the gas gauge . . . ."

     
"No speedometer, no heater, no radio . . ." She bit his neck, then released him. "No defrost, and no car phone." She pressed the palm of her hand to his groin. Her eyes widened. "Whaddaya think, I'm soft?"

     
He raised his head just long enough to say, "Tough as nails, persistent as a hungry mosquito."

S
YLVIA WATCHED
C
ASH
Wheeler's name swim in front of her eyes. She had inches of documents and transcripts on her study desk. She adjusted her reading glasses and massaged the narrow ridge of her nose. At midnight, she'd left Matt sleeping in bed next to Rocko. She needed the time to begin examining the case files on Wheeler's murder trial. Now sleep was threatening to catch up with her.

     
She jerked awake, only then aware she had nodded off. To refresh herself she made a pot of coffee. With a full mug of steaming French roast she sat down at her desk, tackling the pages once more. Yawning, she thumbed through the pile for something new. Her fingers settled on a worn and discolored manila file labeled:
POSTMORTEM.

     
The autopsy photographs of Elena Cruz and the motel owner were grisly, but they weren't as disconcerting as the actual crime-scene photos. By the time a corpse had been placed on the autopsy table in the coroner's office—or the Office of the Medical Examiner, as it was called these days—there was something anonymous and sterile about the whole procedure. But crime-scene photographs displayed vivid touches of real life—personal articles, recognizable locations, human moments of a life or lives interrupted. Elena Cruz had multiple stab wounds. She'd been tortured before death. Jim Teague had been right when he said the crime had been brutal.

     
Without considering the hour, Sylvia picked up the phone and began to dial. Only then did she remember she needed the lawyer's phone number. She flipped through her files until she found Teague's business card. While the telephone rang, she composed the message she would leave.

     
Jim Teague answered with a sleepy grunt, definitely irritated.

     
Flustered, Sylvia identified herself.

     
Teague yawned. "Do you always call people in the middle of the night?"

     
"I wanted to leave a message. I thought I was dialing your office—"

     
"The call was forwarded. What do you want?"

     
"I need to know about Jesús."

     
"Who?"

     
"The boy you mentioned—the weird one who liked Elena."

     
"Oh." Teague's hand brushed the receiver's mouthpiece. Muffled voices were audible for several seconds, then Noelle Harding came on the line.

     
She didn't bother donning social graces but said, "Big Jim fell asleep on the couch again. He works twenty-three hours a day and forgets to go home."

     
Sylvia made embarrassed noises of agreement.
On the couch? Whose house was this?

     
Noelle continued. "Jesús disappeared, vanished, and two very efficient private investigators couldn't track him down. Neither could the police."

     
"But there must be some information on him." There was silence, then another muffled exchange between Noelle and Jim Teague. Were they lovers? Sylvia found that unbidden thought bouncing around her brain. For some reason, she found the idea unnerving.

     
Noelle's voice softened. "Jesús went to school with Cash, and me, and Elena. Very briefly. The closest the investigators came to him was when they located the mother of a boy named Jesús Portrillo. She was a street whore."

     
"What about her son?"

     
"Dead. Overdosed on drugs, died in a gutter. Good night, Sylvia."

     
Sylvia stared at the phone, finally clicking it off. She switched on the screen of her laptop. For a long while she watched the flashing cursor against the blue screen of her computer. When that grew old, she played a round of solitaire and three games of Minesweeper. All the time, her mind was racing.

     
At a few minutes after one o'clock, Sylvia decided to check her E-mail, shut down the computer, and go back to bed. She logged on-line and pulled up new mail. There was a message from Harry in California.

Sylvia:

      
Did you inherit your mother's brown eyes? We hit it off. She was open about your dad. I'll bring you up to date when I've got a full report. Today's question: Do you ever remember him mentioning a girlfriend? Or a woman named Cora Tate? That would've been when you were twelve or thirteen.

Yours by the hour—Harry

Her response was short and to-the-point:

Dear Harry: Cora Tate? What was she, his lover or something? No, don't remember any Coras. But I do need to end this book, this saga. Find my ever-loving dad!

T
HROUGH ONE BARELY
open eye, Matt watched Sylvia tiptoe back to bed. Her face was visible, though only for an instant, in the moonlight. Dark hair tousled around her face, pajamas rumpled. He thought she looked about ten years old—and sad. He wondered if her sadness was caused by the issue of marriage—or child? When she was settled under the cotton blanket, he sleepily flung one arm over her belly and snuggled close.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

N
ARCO COP
B
OBBY
Dowd crawled back to semiconsciousness from a deep ragged tear in the center of the earth. Manic monkeys and a woman with half a face had been chasing him around for hours. Then, for some short-lived eternity, he was caught in a video-game grid; he eventually figured out the grid was nothing remotely high-tech, just the filthy, smelly orange-and-brown plaid carpet directly under his nose.

     
Without moving a muscle, Bobby tried to reconstruct the last few hours of his life. A shadow hovered on his brain, something about fairy tales.

     
Snow White
.

     
Oh, yeah . . .

     
The moment Bobby Dowd got a little bit pleased with himself for his recall abilities, one of Fortuna's gangsters gave him a swift kick in the butt. In the kidneys, was more like it. The Kicker had big feet, and he was hurling insults.

     
He kept repeating, "
¿Qué te ha dicho, Paco?
" Kick. "
¿Dónde están los libros?
" Kick. "
¡Dime el nombre!
" Kick. "
¿Quién compró los libros?
"

     
Bobby groaned. Damn, that hurt. He curled up into a tighter ball, bracing himself for the pain that came with even the slightest movement. After a few moments, he rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. Well, that was some kind of progress. One step at a time.

     
The fog drifted from his mind out his ears, just enough so he remembered:
Snow White—the feds' project
.

     
But these guys kept nagging him about the name.
Which
name? The name of one of the feds' snitches . . . the name of some undercover cop . . . the name of an arbitrageur?

     
Bobby had helped the feds on their arbitrage project two years back.

     
And what about Paco? Had they found him already? Did they have him in the room next door? Were they torturing both men at the same time? Or was he dead?

     
If so, only Bobby had heard Paco's last words in Mexico
.

     
With his ear and cheek to the filthy carpet, Bobby took a shuddering breath. Amado Fortuna's creeps were huddled in a corner whispering again. He listened, straining to hear—and to comprehend. He translated the fragments:
move the cop . . . dump him at the warehouse . . . Amado says do him today
.

     
Bobby rubbed his eyes and saw the kid standing over him. Fortuna's gangster boy with a dirty hypo—the blood and the cloudy drug swirling together in the cylinder, a perfect bead of milky liquid pendulous on its point.

     
The boy murmured, "
Muera, chingado
."

     
Bobby Dowd felt terror, a sting much sharper than the filthy needle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
HE BORDER BETWEEN
the United States and Mexico shifted every day. The river known as the Rio Grande and the Río Bravo simply did what rivers do—cut back and forth between its banks. The headwaters of the Rio Grande were in south-central Colorado; the river traversed the state of New Mexico, continuing on to divide Texas and Mexico. By the time it flowed between the border towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, it was little more than a polluted, international trickle encased in concrete in a desperate attempt to contain it so neither side lost ground.

     
Across this concrete casing, four bridges spanned the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. The bridges on El Paso and Stanton streets connected the bellies of the sister cities, providing access to older, somewhat shabby downtown neighborhoods.

     
Matt England checked his wristwatch; he'd been standing on the corner of Avenida Calle Lerdo and Avenida Riberena for fifty-nine minutes. His Southwest Airlines flight had landed promptly at eight-fifteen
A.M.
at the El Paso airport. From the terminal, he'd taken a taxi downtown to Stanton Street, then walked across the Santa Fe Bridge. Pedestrian traffic was heavy from Mexico; the stream of weekday workers trekking to day jobs seemed to stretch farther than the Rio Grande. In contrast, foot traffic from the U.S. into Mexico was moderate, customs minimal (especially for a man without luggage), and the toll was all of fifteen cents.

     
Such a deal
.

     
But the decision to travel on foot had been made for reasons that had to do with anonymity and security. For vehicles crossing from the U.S. to Mexico, the border-checking system was as random as a traffic light. Green light, go ahead. Red light, pull over. Cars traveling from Mexico into the States—the usual direction for heroin, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines—faced the possibility of stringent searches. Occasionally, those contraband searches also occurred in the north-to-south lanes—U.S. to Mexico. The main contraband moving in the southerly direction was laundered drug money, portions of the cash backlog that continued to pile up in Texas safe houses as the Department of Justice tightened its operations. Some drug lords had resorted to mobile couriers to transport loads of money across the border into Mexico. Although his chances of being stopped were slim, Matt needed to minimize the possibility of his crossing being documented.

     
He checked his wristwatch again: sixty-two minutes. The flight from Albuquerque to El Paso had taken less than fifty minutes. All around him, the streets were thick with people—shoppers, vendors, hustlers, and those with nothing better to do than hang out.

     
A cabdriver trolled past on Riberena. "
Hola, señor. Youwannarideconmigo?
"

     
Matt waved him off just like he'd waved away the last five taxis.

     
"
Muy barato
." The taxi driver winked. "Very cheap for my taxi."

     
"No, gracias." Matt glanced at the driver, started to walk away, then stopped. Slowly, he stepped over to the battered red-and-white Taxi
Heroe
—noticed a string of bullet holes along the door—and leaned in the window.

     
The taxi driver was smiling, but his eyes were sharp as glass. He mumbled, "I give you the Pitkin tour,
señor
."

     
Matt adjusted his sunglasses against the mean Mexican sun, tasted baked smog, and slid into the backseat. Dale Pitkin had finally managed to contact Vargas through the Mexican's street network. Vargas had agreed to meet with Matt—as long as it was done
his
way.