Mission Road (6 page)

I sighed. “Let’s go,
Ralphas.
”

“Where to?”

“Back to the phone. I’ve got an idea that’ll probably get us killed.”

•                           •                           •

LARRY DRAPIEWSKI WAS WAITING FOR US
at Mi Tierra—an outside table, just like I’d told him.

The shops on the plaza were just opening up, sunlight melting the frost off the windows. Sleepy mariachis tuned guitars by the fountain. Except for pigeons and one tourist family braving the cold, we had the restaurant patio to ourselves.

Larry pointed to the extra breakfast plates he’d ordered.

He kicked out a chair for me. “Wasn’t enough you shot a doctor this week, huh? You’re riding a shit avalanche, son.”

“Good to see you, too, Larry.”

Since retiring from the Sheriff’s Department, Larry had gone completely gray. He’d gotten a hearing aid, grown a scraggly beard and cultivated a potbelly. He looked like Santa Claus after boot camp.

Ralph sat across from him and spread a napkin in his lap. He started heaping huevos rancheros into a tortilla.

Larry glanced at him with distaste. “Tres, if your father could see you now—”

“Can you help us or not?” I asked. I’d already told him everything over the phone. Some of it he’d already heard from cop friends. None of it seemed to surprise him.

Larry ran his finger around the edge of his Bloody Mary glass. “Your friend here is a killer.”

“You can talk to
me,
Drapiewski.” Ralph took a bite of eggs. “I speak
inglés.
”

Larry’s eyes turned steely. I remembered something my dad had said once about Larry Drapiewski being better than a cattle prod when it came to scaring the shit out of suspects.

“Arguello,” he said, “if it wasn’t Tres asking me this, if I didn’t owe his father my life a dozen times over—”

“My wife. Can you get me in to see her or not?”

Larry stared across the plaza, toward the parking garage where we’d come in. “Not possible.”

“Your guys work hospital security when an officer is shot,” I said.

“We rotate with SAPD. Professional courtesy. The answer is still no.”

“Is Ana stabilized?” I asked.

“She’s still alive. That’s all I know.”

“Then she needs protection,” Ralph said.

Larry glared at him. “Why do you think the cops are on round-the-clock guard duty, Arguello?”

“And if the guy who shot her is a cop?”

Larry blinked. “You’re some piece of work. Why don’t you be a man and turn yourself in? You have a daughter to think about.”

Ralph started to get up.

I grabbed his arm, pushed him back into his seat. “Larry, promise me you’ll keep Ana safe. Promise me the deputies looking after her are good men.”

“I’m retired, Tres.”

“Every man in the department owes you something.”

He sipped his Bloody Mary, checked his watch. His eyes drifted again toward the parking lot. “I’ll do what I can. In exchange, Arguello surrenders.”

“We’re talking about Frankie White’s murder,” I said. “You know what’ll happen to Ralph once word gets out.”

“He made that bed.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “You must’ve heard something about the case back then—some rumor. Something.”

“This is crazy, Tres. Don’t get sucked into it.”

“White’s enemies, maybe?”

“Just talk.” He checked his watch again. “Zapata—you probably already know that. Or the Zacagni family out of Houston. There was something about a hit man, Titus Roe, maybe hired by the family of one of Frankie’s victims.”

“What do you mean—Frankie’s victims?”

Larry glanced uneasily at Ralph, then back at me. “Hell, Tres . . . You don’t know? Forget it. Nobody on the right side of the law is going to help you with this. You’ve got to surrender.”

Something about the way he said it—the way he kept glancing at the parking lot.

I pushed my chair out. “It’s time we left,” I told Ralph.

“Eat first,” Larry said. “I paid for that and you haven’t touched it.”

“Since when have you worn a hearing aid, Larry?”

Ralph put his hands in his lap. “It’s a trap.”

There was a glint of movement on the roof of Mi Tierra, just at the corner of the building.

“I’m sorry, Tres,” Larry said. “I don’t have a choice. Mr. Arguello, put your hands on top of your head, please, very slowly.”

“A cross fire,” I grumbled. “Damn you, Larry.”

“Why don’t you use that little two-way radio in your ear,” Ralph said evenly. “Tell your friends I got a pistol under my napkin, aimed straight at your dick.”

“Shoot,” Larry dared him. “Sniper on the parking garage roof will take off your head. Otherwise, put your hands up and we’ll wait for the SWAT team to join—”

Ralph overturned the table into Larry’s lap.

I rolled to the ground and got up running.

Ralph was way ahead of me. He dove behind the only other occupied table—the family of startled tourists—and burst into the restaurant where the crowd was thicker.

There was no snap of gunfire. No clear shot.

We wove through the dining room, knocking down waiters and kicking over breakfast platters. Larry Drapiewski was yelling and cursing behind us.

I glanced back long enough to see two SWAT guys in full combat gear jump the patio railing. Both were carrying assault rifles.

Nice to feel wanted.

“Not the front,” Ralph warned.

He was right. Two uniformed deputies were pushing through the hostess’s line, knocking over baskets of pralines.

Fortunately, Ralph and I knew Mi Tierra better than most places on earth. I’d been coming here since age fifteen. I’d retched my first pitcher of margaritas into their men’s room toilet.

We burst into the kitchen, ran for the delivery ramp. Cops behind us yelled at the dishwashers: “Get
down
!”

Finally one of the smarter cops yelled it in Spanish, but by the time he got off a shot we were through the service exit.

I didn’t notice the uniformed officer outside the door until it was too late.

“Vato!”
Ralph yelled.

The deputy was waiting to the side of the kitchen entrance, his gun drawn, ready to fire at whoever came through first. That happened to be me.

In a heartbeat, I registered his cocky smile, the gleam in his eyes that told me he intended to shoot first and make up a good story later. I watched him level the gun, then
wham.
I went flying sideways, the air slammed out of me. The pistol cracked.

When I looked up, the deputy was crumpled on the curb. Ralph’s knuckles were bleeding. I could hear the other cops still pushing and cursing their way through the kitchen, trying to shove through the mob of upset dishwashers.

“Come on!” Ralph ordered. He yanked me to my feet and ran.

I shook off my daze and followed. When I caught up, Ralph had already stopped a cab and pulled out the driver. I had just enough time to jump in the back before Ralph peeled out, the cabbie screaming and running after us, providing beautiful cover from the cops who were trying to take aim at us.

We heard a lot of sirens, saw a lot of lights, but they were too slow bringing around the helicopter. A critical mistake. We shot under Interstate 10 and into the labyrinth of the West Side, which opened up to embrace us like a mother.

•                           •                           •

EIGHT MINUTES LATER WE WERE SHIVERING
in a storm drain off Palo Alto, listening to the police helicopter circle overhead and the sirens wail.

We’d left our cab half submerged in the lake of Our Lady of the Lake University, the car’s back end sticking up like the Iwo Jima Monument. The way Ralph and I figured it, SAPD would have to dispatch at least five cops to deal with that new neighborhood conversation piece, which left only two thousand and fifty on the force to search the West Side for us.

Ralph kicked the corrugated metal of the storm drain as if it were Larry Drapiewski’s face.

“You saved me back there,” I said. “You pushed me out of the way.”

The look Ralph gave me was the same he’d given Frankie White, years ago, when Frankie made a comment about Ralph beating up his stepfather. A blank stare—as if I were questioning something that was completely obvious. “What was I supposed to do?”

“You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

Ralph shrugged.

Despite my gratitude, that made me angry. Here I was trying to save his butt . . . He was the one with the family. He was supposed to know better than to risk himself.

“What did Larry mean,” I asked, “about Frankie’s victims?”

Ralph wrapped his bleeding knuckles in his shirt. “That was after high school, ’round ’86, ’87. You seriously never heard?”

I shook my head. Those years had been a daze for me. My father had been murdered in ’85. Shortly afterward, I’d fled San Antonio for the Bay Area and tried to sever my Texas roots as much as possible.

“Frankie was getting into trouble,” Ralph said. “I mean . . . bad trouble.”

Some of my memories about Frankie White started weaving together—the image of him staring at Ralph’s fourteen-year-old cousin through the window, other things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I remembered my dad’s old stories about Frankie’s father, Guy White, and some of the things Guy had done in his youth to prove his power. A few of those exploits had supposedly driven his wife to an early grave.

“Frankie’s trouble,” I said. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with women, would it?”

Ralph nodded. “When it started getting bad . . . I mean, so bad it was affecting his family, Mr. White talked to me about him. You know, helping him settle down. Finding a business he liked.”

“Mr. White came to you?”

“Maybe it was a little bit my idea. But Mr. White and I were square,
vato.
After Frankie died, I got nothing out of that. Took me five years to pay back Mr. White for the money Frankie had fronted me, but I did it. I paid off the pawnshops free and clear. I’m not crazy.”

I tried to imagine how much trouble Frankie could’ve been in for Guy White to see Ralph as a moderating influence on his son. It wasn’t easy.

The police helicopter made another pass overhead, the rotors’ noise making the loose rivets of the storm drain rattle.

Ralph said, “I
am
thinking about her, you know.”

“Ana?”

“The baby.” Ralph closed his eyes. “Drapiewski said I have a daughter to think about. I been afraid since the day she was born that something in my past would come back to hurt her. Last two years,
vato
. . . I felt like I’ve been loaned somebody else’s life, you know? Never deserved this kind of luck. Best two years I ever had.”

I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure how. He was talking about the two years when I’d been part of his life the least.

“We’ll figure out something,” I managed. “What about the hit man Drapiewski mentioned? You ever heard of Titus Roe?”

Ralph kicked at a puddle of icy water. “Just stories. None of them good.”

“Could we find him?”

“If he’s still around. Zapata could point us the right way. They knew each other.”

“You already tried Zapata. He baited you.”

“I still think he knows something,
vato.
He got the blame for Frankie’s death. Suffered bad from that gang war with White. I’m sure he made it his business to find out what really happened to Frankie. If I could just get Zapata alone, corner him for five minutes without him trying to kill my ass—”

“He makes himself hard to find,” I reminded Ralph. “We’ve got no resources. No money. No wheels. And only forty-eight hours.”

Ralph checked his watch. “Forty-
three
hours.”

The chopper thundered overhead.

I thought about what Larry Drapiewski had said:
Nobody on the right side of the law is going to help you.

And I got my worst idea yet, which was saying something, considering the banner week I was having.

I locked eyes with Ralph. “We need to find Frankie White’s killer. And we can’t do it without help.”

“There is no help. Not a single person cares enough about who killed Frankie to risk their neck.”

“I can think of one person.”

Ralph stared at me, slowly getting it. “You’re crazy.”

“Lots of resources. Plenty of clout. No love for the police.”

“And he won’t know I need killing for a whole two days.”

I spread my hands. The suicidal logic was perfect. “Let’s go knock on Guy White’s door.”

“LIEUTENANT?” MAIA ASKED.

Etch Hernandez stood at the ICU window, fingering something in the pocket of his tailored wool slacks. When he turned, Maia was sorry she’d interrupted him. His face was raw with emotion.

“They said she was a little better.” He struggled to get his voice under control. “I was hoping . . .”

He didn’t need to finish.

On the other side of the glass, Ana DeLeon lay webbed in tubes and wires. A nurse was changing her IV. Another was frowning at the heart monitor.

To believe there was a human being in the hospital bed, Maia had to concentrate on small details—a glossy black wisp of hair curled against the pillow, a smooth stretch of forearm exposed against the white sheet.

If
this
was better, Ana DeLeon was in bad shape indeed.

“Has she ever regained consciousness?” Maia asked.

The lieutenant shook his head. “The surgery—they said it went well . . .”

The nurses worked grimly, aware of their audience. Their expressions reminded Maia of jurors about to return a verdict.

In a weak show of optimism, someone had placed a picture of Ana’s baby on the bed stand. In case Ana woke up, it would be there to comfort her. There were no pictures of Ralph.

Hernandez took his hand out of his pocket. He scooped his cashmere coat off a nearby chair. “I have to go before your friend makes another headline.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave her a hard stare. “Assuming that’s an honest question? An hour ago, Navarre and Arguello set up a meeting downtown with a retired deputy, Larry Drapiewski. Drapiewski alerted the Sheriff’s Department. The hotshots in county SWAT were stupid enough to try setting a trap on their own. Without notifying SAPD.”

Maia processed this, trying not to show her anxiety. “Tres and Ralph got away?”

“After threatening Mr. Drapiewski, endangering a restaurant full of tourists, assaulting a deputy and stealing a cab at gunpoint, yes. I’ve told the sheriff I never want to see his deputies again. That’s why I’m here. I’m placing my own men in charge of guarding Sergeant DeLeon.”

Which explained, Maia thought, the dour-faced SAPD uniform who had frisked her at the door.

Hernandez put on his coat. “Our goodwill toward your boyfriend has pretty much evaporated, Miss Lee. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“Why did you try to warn Ana off the Franklin White case?”

He scowled. “Who says I did?”

“Your good cop. Kelsey.”

Hernandez’s face darkened. “I’m not sure why he’d . . . I didn’t discourage Ana. I only told her it would stir up bad memories. As I said, Miss Lee, on this case, I’ve tried very hard to distance myself.”

“Because you and Lucia were the first people at the scene?”

“Yes. Partly.”

“How long did you work with Ana’s mother?”

“Twenty years. All of it on patrol. She was the most exceptional officer I’ve ever known.”

“After she died, you sponsored her daughter’s career. Tres told me you recommended Ana for the sergeant’s position in homicide.”

“She was the best person for the job.”

“Does Detective Kelsey see it that way?”

The lieutenant stared through the glass at Ana’s hospital bed. He radiated worry and frustration, but whatever he wanted to say, he kept it to himself.

Maia wondered what it would be like working for this man.

He reminded Maia of her old law firm mentor, John Terrence, back in the days when she still trusted his sincerity. There was something about him—an air of long-ago heartbreak that sparked a woman’s instinct to nurture, to heal. With Hernandez, you’d have to exert a conscious effort
not
to want to please him, not to start treating him like a father figure.

“Ana was . . .
is
a good detective,” he said.

“She wasn’t going after her husband,” Maia said. “She had another lead. Do you know who it was?”

Hernandez pinched the knot of his tie. “Ana was desperate to clear her husband, Miss Lee. Grasping at straws.”

“But did she tell you anything?”

“No.”

“Case notes?”

“There was nothing in her office. She usually kept everything on her laptop, which she would’ve carried home with her, but the laptop was not there when we got to the scene. Disappeared, just like Ralph Arguello.”

Maia thought about Kelsey riffling through Ana’s desk drawers, poring through stacks of case files.

Just being thorough.

“Lieutenant, what happened the night Frankie White died?”

Hernandez watched the nurses. One filled a hypodermic needle. The other was checking something on Ana’s chart.

“We found John Doe bodies along Mission Road all the time,” he said. “Popular dumping ground for the gangs. Nice rural stretch, heavy ground cover, hardly any streetlights. That night, I knew who the victim was the minute we pulled up. Frankie White used to cruise our beat. I knew his car. Good thing, too, because his face was unrecognizable. When we found him . . . Lucia was the professional. She did everything by the book. She said even Franklin White deserved justice. Me? Honestly, Miss Lee, I wanted to push the body into the bushes, back out and pretend we never saw anything. I knew what kind of hell would break loose when word got out. I knew Lucia and I would be on the hot seat for all kinds of questions because we’d found the body. I didn’t care who killed the son-of-a-bitch, as long as he was dead.”

“You make it sound personal.”

“Miss Lee, I was hoping to make retirement without
some
things coming back to haunt me.” Hernandez’s gaze was so intensely sad it sent a shiver down Maia’s back. “Apparently, God has other plans.”

He swept out of the room, the guard in the corridor straightening to attention as he passed.

Alone at the observation window, Maia tried to keep vigil.

That was why she’d come—as if by being close to Ana, Maia could understand what she’d been after, why she’d gotten herself shot.

All Maia felt was growing unease. She felt like she was still back at police headquarters, the rapist elf’s arm around her neck, his sour breath on her cheek. She hated feeling helpless.

She took the note from her coat pocket.

She’d already located the medical examiner, Jaime Santos. Two quick calls had done that, but Maia was loath to go. She never liked talking to MEs. Since childhood, she’d had an aversion to people who handled dead bodies.

Bad luck,
her father always said.
The worst luck of all.

Of course, her father had had his own reasons to fear death.

Maia looked at Ana DeLeon. She tried to imagine the sergeant’s limp hand writing the words:
Timing is wrong.

The picture of Ana’s baby grinned at her on the bedside table. The heart monitor bleeped, ticking off seconds Maia didn’t have to waste.

•                           •                           •

ETCH HERNANDEZ SAT IN HIS CAR
considering what Miss Lee had said.

The lawyer reminded him strongly of Ana, which made him uneasy. He didn’t like the doubts she’d raised about Kelsey. He wished she hadn’t asked about Lucia. No matter how many years went by, that subject was always painful.

Most of all, he was ashamed she’d caught him at a weak moment. Looking at Ana in that hospital bed had been harder than he’d anticipated.

He had a reputation for being professional—calm and collected. Yet for all the years he’d been climbing the ranks, he still felt like a pretender. At heart, he was still a simple patrol cop. He wanted nothing more than to be back in his unit again, with Lucia DeLeon, drinking bad coffee at three in the morning and watching the moon rise over the South Side barrios.

He closed his eyes and remembered the day he’d come closest to dying. August 10, 1975.

He and Lucia had been patrolling together for almost a year at that point. Etch had been doing his best to hate her.

Lucia had started in ’67. She’d spent five years relegated to typical women’s jobs—doing body searches on female prisoners, caring for children after domestic disputes. Finally in ’72 she’d made enough noise and rattled enough cages to get a regular patrol assignment. The male officers despised her. Many refused to work with her. She spent three years getting bounced from partner to partner, given the worst shifts in the most boring parts of town, but she wouldn’t quit. Finally, in ’75, she got her wish—a patrol on the near South Side, the Mission area where she’d grown up. Etch was the lucky guy who got her as partner.

He tried his best to ignore her, to say nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary. She never let him get away with it.

“Herberto Hernandez,” she mused one night as they were riding the dog watch. “H.H.
Hache, hache.
Too much of a mouthful. I’m gonna call you Etch.”

“The hell you will.”

Lucia smiled. She loved goading him to talk.

“Etch,” she repeated. “Like
hache,
see? It’s a good name.”

His protests didn’t matter. Even his male colleagues picked up the nickname. It fit, they said. He’d been Etch ever since.

Seven months into their partnership, they got a call for backup from the Pig Stand restaurant on South Alamo—two officers on a disturbance call, a fight between a woman and her jilted boyfriend. The officers on the scene were having trouble subduing the male assailant.

The Pig Stand was an old diner even in ’75. A slim box of glass and neon and brick, it sat on a triangle of asphalt where South Flores scissored into South Alamo. Its most remarkable feature was the giant concrete pig outside.

The two patrolmen who needed help were Ingram and Halff, old-timers in the department. Hernandez knew damn well they would never have picked a Latino and a Latina to be their backup, but they sure as hell needed help.

Judging from the broken furniture and shattered windows, the fight had started inside and moved out into the parking lot.

Ingram was lying on his back in the diner doorway. Etch didn’t know whether he was dead or just unconscious. Halff was on the pavement, being straddled and beaten by the assailant, a long-haired Anglo biker who must’ve weighed three-fifty. A woman knelt next to him, crying, trying to pull him off the cop. She had a bloody mouth and a black eye and her paisley dress was torn.

The biker was yelling at half-conscious Officer Halff: “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want to her! You understand? Whatever the fuck I want!”

Lucia started forward, but Etch said, “Let me handle this.”

“Etch—”

“
No.
Stay back. Call for an ambulance.”

He didn’t wait for her to argue. There was no way he was going to send a woman into a brawl like this.

Etch drew his weapon and approached the biker. He yelled the right commands in just the right tone of voice. He was cool. He’d done this before. He didn’t know that the biker was pumped up on Angel Dust, something nobody in San Antonio had seen yet. It wouldn’t be common on the streets for another ten years.

The biker reared and charged with such intensity Etch never had time to shoot. He saw a flash of black and he was on the pavement, the barrel of his own gun swimming in front of his face.

“I’ll start with you!” the biker yelled, pressing the muzzle against Etch’s forehead. “Cops in my business! I’ll do you first!”

Etch realized there wasn’t going to be any help. There wasn’t time. The biker would murder three cops and his girlfriend just because it felt good. Then he would probably shoot himself. Etch knew cops who had died this way. He just never thought he would be one of them.

“Hey, asshole!” Lucia yelled, somewhere off to the left. “Maybe it’s because you got no dick.”

The biker lurched toward her voice. The pressure of the gun muzzle eased up a little between Etch’s eyes.
“What?”

“You heard me,” Lucia called.

Etch could only see her feet behind the patrol car, but he understood what she was doing—crouching for cover, both hands on her weapon, elbows steadied against the hood of the car. Etch wanted to scream
no.
He couldn’t allow her to die, too. And yet he was totally powerless.

“I’ll kill this motherfucker!” the biker warned.

“Yeah,” Lucia said. “Because you got no dick. No wonder your girlfriend left you.”

“You bitch!”

“That’s right,” Lucia coaxed. “I’m the one you should be mad at. I’m laughing at you—a dickless coward who beats up his defenseless girlfriend. How’d you do against
me,
asshole? Come on, show me your gun.”

“I’ll kill you, you goddamn—”

He took the gun off Etch and pointed it at Lucia, which is what she’d been waiting for.

She shot him through the heart.

A month later, an official hearing cleared Lucia to return to patrol. The brass presented her a medal of bravery for saving three officers’ lives. She got an avalanche of press attention. She turned down offers of better assignments and went right back to patrol.

Etch and Lucia started meeting at the Pig Stand for dinner every night before their shift. Surprisingly, the manager was glad to see them. He comped every meal.

The changes between Lucia and Etch were subtle but seismic. She had saved his life.