Dragonfly Bones (19 page)

“This one, I've forgotten his name. A maintenance worker at Casa Grande Monument. I met him two days ago. Met both of them. At the housing development where they found the bones.”

I felt dizzy and didn't realize I'd started to faint until Brittles grabbed me under the arms, holding me up against the door, propping me there.

“Go outside,” he said.

“Can't move.”

“Then lean against the door. Close your eyes. I'm going to get the computer and that other electronic stuff.”

But he called out two minutes later.

“You're going to have to come in here and tell me what's worth taking.”

“Shouldn't we call the police…somebody? Shouldn't we call?”

“I'm the police,” he said.

“But we should leave things here, we should
leave everything here and just go away
!”

“We leave this computer, we may never find out what's on it once the Tucson Police Department, or the FBI, or whoever comes in here and takes all the evidence into custody. We've got to take this computer now.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping around the blood, going into the other room.

A black Dell computer stood on a cheap deal table next to a refrigerator, the monitor stacked beside a printer, keyboard, and mouse blackened with grime, as though an auto mechanic
had used it for months. A two-burner portable kerosene stove sat on the floor, the grill covered with grease.

“What have we got here?” Talking to myself, trying to be logical and technical, just shut off the rest of my head. “That's the computer box. Unplug it.”

He took a clasp knife from his pocket, opened it, and slashed all the cables.

“Okay. Cutting them is okay. We don't need the cables.”

“What else? This?”

“No. That's just a monitor. And that's just a printer. Look for CDs?”

“Music?”

“Same size. But not music. Data.”

He raked stacks of paper off the deal table, opened the single drawer, crammed with junk. He turned it upside down to empty everything on the floor. There was a small, unfinished pine bookcase, just three shelves stacked with pornographic videotapes. He swept the top shelf on the floor, left me to pick through the tapes while he cleaned out the second shelf, then the bottom one. Just tapes. He picked up the bookcase, turned it around, and seven CD jewel cases were taped to the back.

“These?” he said.

I nodded and he crammed them into his pockets. Shouldering the Dell computer, he backed out of the kitchen, motioning me with his palm to step where he stepped. When he opened the back door a swarm of flies rushed into the room, filling my hair and the inside of my blouse, driving me truly mad for a moment, and I ran, I ran to the car, stripping off my blouse, brushing off flies, not wanting to swat them, not wanting their bodies stuck to my skin. When Brittles got to the car, I sat shivering in the heat, leaning against the front bumper.

Down the dirt road, an old black man stood on his porch, holding his screen door open with one hand, a twelve-string guitar in the other. Staring at me.

“Get in the car, Laura. Put on your blouse.”

“Yes,” I said.

Yes, anything.

The black man stood absolutely still as we went past him, except his head swiveled to follow us until he couldn't turn his neck around any farther. He didn't have the will or the energy to bother turning his body until we disappeared.

26

W
e drove, we drove, we drove. Brittles pulled over at the Tom Mix Memorial, trying to comfort me. Done with crying, I sat motionless, slumped against the door, staring at the half-inch thick steel outline of a cowboy on a bucking bronc, the steel pocked with bullet marks, one of them a hole through and through and probably from somebody who got tired just dinging the metal and went home to load his assault rifle with a full metal jacket slug, hand-loaded with extra powder.

We drove past Catalina into Oro Valley, the outlines of Pusch Ridge dark against the sun. Brittles started working his cell phone, but I couldn't hear anything with my window down, the air whistling by and the steadily increased roar from traffic. Or maybe I just didn't want to hear anything. Brittles turned off Salina at the Tucson Mall, went across to Stone, and pulled into the parking lot of the Five and Diner.

“I'm not hungry,” I said.

“Well, I am.”

Ahead of us, a family of five pushed open the front door. The mother held a crying baby girl nestled in her right arm, her left hand gently urging the other three children toward the order counter. They all clumped together at the cash register, waiting to be seated. Our waitress motioned them into
the left side of the diner, patting each of the children on the head as they passed her, the mother ordering all the meals in Spanish without looking at a menu, finally quieting the shrieking baby by opening her yellow cotton blouse so the baby could suckle.

Brittles steered to the right, way in the back to a red leather booth underneath all kinds of pictures of Marilyn Monroe. A young waitress plopped two menus on our table, got two large plastic glasses full of ice water.

“What you want, hon?” she said to Brittles.

“What's good here?” he said.

“Well, you asking what I like myself?”

“Sure.”

“Well,
okay.
All soup is homemade and fresh, absolutely delicious. Especially the clam chowder and the potato-leek. We got a turkey club sandwich with fries, spices or no spices please, a kickass chicken sandwich, onion rings. To drink, dynamite malteds, chocolate or vanilla, or either vanilla diet Coke or cherry Coke. All drinks are fountain-mixed and hand-stirred with lots of syrup.”

I opened the thick menu, all burger-and-fries kinds of things, one of which Brittles ordered. I couldn't stand the thought of eating meat and ordered macaroni and cheese.

“You'll like that, hon. We make it ourselves. What to drink?”

“Two large diet Cokes,” Brittles said. “No straws.”

“Comin' back atcha.”

He stared out the window, his mind completely elsewhere, not even noticing the waitress leave the diet Cokes. His cell phone rang. He listened without talking, folded the cell shut.

“You okay?” he said.

“No!”
I shouted, and people looked around. I leaned forward, arms on the table, facing him, whispering. “No. I am so
not
fucking okay.”

“Yeah.”

“That's a stupid thing to say to a person.”

“What? What's stupid?”

“‘Are you okay?'”

“It's just a thing,” he said.

“A thing.”

“You know. In bad times, that's what people say to each other. You okay?”

“It's stupid.”

He drank half the diet Coke, rattled the ice, finished off the Coke, and waved the glass at the waitress, who brought him another.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm sorry. I should have asked how you were doing.”

“Not good. I just want out of this, Nathan. I want to get my daughter pardoned, I want to take her away from all of this.”

“We're not done yet.”

“
I'm
done,” I hissed. “I found out how the credit card stuff got out of the prison, I found where it all went. That's our deal.”

“Half the deal.”

“The other half is your half. Not mine. I've done my half.”

“It's all a piece.” He tried to hold my hands and I jerked them away from him and put them on my lap, under the tabletop. “You found out how.”

“And where.”

“You found out how and where.”

“So you do whatever's left.”

“Why?” he said. “That's the missing part. Why?”

“I'm not helping you with that part.”

“No,” he said carefully. “But your daughter will.”

“Uh uh. She's outa that place. She's outa there. We're both done.”

“Laura, let's get this clear. For now, she's
in
that place. She
stays
in that place until we figure out why that place, that camp, why is it involved.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“Laura. You're just not getting the picture at all. I'm thinking of your daughter's safety.”

“Don't shit me, Nathan.”

I couldn't understand his logic, you see, I couldn't see how staying in that camp made Spider safer than her being released in my custody. But I could also tell that whatever
I
wanted to do, Nathan would reject. He had a plan. I could see it working from one side of his head to another, knew he was figuring how to work it, how to put it into words and so into action.

“I've got no choice in this, do I?”

“Don't do that.”

“I'm not doing anything. You won't let me do anything, you won't listen to what I want. What I need.”

“I meant, don't trade on our relationship.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don't let whatever we have come between me and my job.”

“‘Whatever we have,'” I mimicked. “There's another stupid phrase. Something from a Sunday night movie of the week, from people who think they can use clichés and play a lot of fake feel-good piano music in the background.”

“Let me tell you what we need to do.”

“California Dreaming” came on the sound system. I listened to the entire song without even looking at Nathan. The next song prattled on about having fun in the seasons of the sun, and during the next song, Nathan's cheeseburger and fries arrived, he poured ketchup on the fries, and started eating. At some point I stopped paying attention to him, to the music, the colors and chrome of the fifties interior, the pictures of Marilyn and Elvis and James Dean.

I didn't want to think. I got up to look at the jukebox.

All the songs were fifties and sixties rock and roll. Mostly sixties. The music I grew up with and still love, CDs, the three-inch mini-size, no vinyl 45's like a genuine jukebox. But the style was amazingly accurate. An old-style Wurlitzer, all woody-looking with the colored light tubes going up from the base over the curved top and the air bubbles bubbling up
inside them. No doubt available from Wurlitzer by mail order, or from the Neiman Marcus catalog.

I saw the waitress headed to our table with my macaroni and cheese. Delicious. I ate the whole bowl, spreading fresh layers of ground pepper after eating through the previous layer. On the wall, I fiddled with the sixties-style control heads for the main juke, the kind that were typical at every diner during my youth. All chrome and plastic, a rounded top and bulbous front with a large window displaying pages you flipped using the metal dingus things protruding out the slot in the bottom. Songs were listed on small labels that slip into the pages, about twelve labels per page, each label listing one song, the artist, and the button combination to punch to hear it.

At the bottom of the control head, two horizontal rows of square plastic buttons having white faces with one red letter or number on each. One song for a quarter, five songs for a dollar. Feeding it quarters, I punched the two button codes each for five choices.

Elvis. Beach Boys. Connie Francis.

I barely paid attention, and the five songs ended quickly. I found some more quarters in my purse, stuck them all into the coin slot, and punched combinations of buttons until all my money was used up. The sound system started up with the little old lady from Pasadena.

Brittles had finished his food, sat quietly waiting for me to say something. At one point he half stretched a hand across the table to touch me, but pulled it back. I worked on deciding how I could play all of this and finally realized there was no other choice except to follow whatever he wanted me to do.
That's the only way I can get Spider out,
I kept repeating to myself.
The only way to get her released.

“It's the only way,” I said out loud. “Let's hear it.”

“All of it?”

He pushed his plate aside. Wiped his mouth with several paper napkins. Wiped his fingers. I nodded.

“Those two men,” he said. “The house belongs to Jesus Totexto. Don looked up his police record. A dozen arrests, most of them misdemeanors, a few felonies. At one time he seems to have been a bad-debt collector, another time a repo man. Got in trouble just last year. Chased a guy who owed money into a McDonald's, pushed the guy behind the counter, and stuck his hand into the deep fat fryer.

“He was also a maintenance worker at Casa Grande. I figure he was at the housing development when you and I were there. He saw you, he told somebody. Who, I don't have a clue. I also figure that he buried all those bones there. He knew exactly which spots had been excavated and wouldn't be touched for years. Better than just dumping things out in the desert, where some new housing developer would run a backhoe through, laying sewer lines, dig things up.”

“The desert's a big place,” I said. “Kinda dumb not to just drive over toward Yuma and pick a spot no developer is ever going to touch.”

“I never said Totexto was smart. But smart enough to know the exact plans of which areas on the grounds weren't scheduled to be looked at for years.”

“Which one was Totexto?”

He hesitated, not wanting to describe the mutilations.

“The bigger guy,” he said finally, hurrying to talk so I wouldn't dwell on the blood. “The other guy was called Early Thumb. A Pinal County deputy sheriff, although he'd been dismissed from the force some months back. He worked as a security officer at the boot camp, and for some reason he just kept wearing his deputy uniform. He was the next level up the food chain.”

“You think he set up the computers?”

“No. Somebody else did that. Probably Thumb collected the data, transferred it to a CD, delivered it to somebody. Except Totexto might have been smart enough to make copies for himself.”