The Black Minutes (42 page)

The man sighed, as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“It was me.”

“What was the first girl’s name?”

“Lucía Hernández Campillo.”

“Where did you kill them?”

“In a school over by the train tracks.”

“Shut up and let’s go. Don’t say a word. You don’t have the right to speak.”

And that was it.

Once they were back at the ranch, they loaded the suspect into the Chevy Nova and said good-bye to Cipriano.

“Let’s go, Chuy, hurry up, you have to escort us.”

The ranch hand got into the black truck and followed the Chevy Nova to the first wooden gate. Once there, the Chevy stopped so Rangel could get out to relieve himself.

“Goddamnit,” said El Chuy, “weren’t you in a big hurry before?” And he got out to shut the gate.

When he got back to his car, Rangel jammed his Colt .38 into El Chuy’s kidneys.

“What the fuck? What’s up?”

“What’s your full name?”

“Jesús Nicodemo.”

“Jesús Nicodemo, don’t resist. You’re under arrest for the murder of Luis Carlos Calatrava.”

He tied his hands together behind his back with a cable and put him into the backseat of the Chevy.

A few minutes later, Don Cipriano finished counting the money inside the shack and listened intently.

“What happened?” The woman could have been his daughter.

“Shut up!”

The sound of the car on the road faded away. The man listened closely, and when the sound was completely gone, he ran out onto the hill. As soon as he saw the truck parked, he snapped his fingers at the woman.

“María! Get me my boots.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the gas station, to call the boss.”

“Why?”

“They took El Chuy and left the truck!”

This is the Jackal? Rangel thought. The guy who killed the little girls? On first impression, the man looked like he couldn’t kill a fly. He was thin, with blond hair and blue eyes that were about as expressive as a wall. No one would look twice if they saw him on the street. His name was Clemente Morales and he worked for his twin brother, Edelmiro, supervising the union’s work. As the older brother became the leader of all the teachers in the whole state and built schools, his twin spent his time killing the female students.

In the last year, Professor Edelmiro Morales had built four schools to consolidate his power. The buildings were impractical, with inadequate light and ventilation, designed irrationally, completely illogically, with no emergency exits. Professor Edelmiro had a strategy: when they were done with the construction, they noticed there was no budget for their maintenance, which wasn’t really serious, because they’d already paid the builder. A few of them closed after a few months. The remains of these schools can be seen throughout the city.

The mother of the Hernández girl had reported that while they were expanding the public school behind her house, Morales saw her and became obsessed. When her husband wasn’t at home, the man would try to seduce her; because she always rejected him, the man had promised to get his revenge in the most hurtful way
possible. Eight days later her daughter disappeared, and out of fear she didn’t report it: she knew Edelmiro Morales was extremely powerful.

The day of his arrest, the Jackal rode along in silence. Sometimes he closed his eyes, sometimes he looked at the floor of the patrol car. He yawned once: he had a crooked canine tooth. As for El Chuy, he stared at the scenery. “Don’t get distracted, Romero,” Rangel said to his partner. “Even though they’re handcuffed, anything could happen with two guys like this.” That’s why Romero pointed his pistol at them and didn’t take his eyes off them, especially the Jackal. If he could have just one wish granted to him, Romero would’ve asked to know what the guy was thinking. There was a moment when the Jackal seemed to be smiling, so the Blind Man pointed the gun at him and demanded, “What’re you laughing about?” The Jackal, surprised, continued to stare out the front of the car. “Don’t pressure him; you don’t want him to get nervous,” Rangel said.

“If he tries anything,” said Romero, “I’ll belt him one and throw him in the trunk.”

He didn’t have to. The guy in the backseat got very, very calm.

Each one of them made their own plans. We’re gonna get a shitload of money, the Blind Man said, even after dividing the reward up between us. As for Rangel, he was going to leave the state and start somewhere else. Maybe in Mexico City, maybe on the border. . . . Maybe he’d ask for work from Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, that is, if he could get in touch with him. For his part, Romero was going to buy a present for his wife and his girls; that is, after he paid six months of back rent. He’d take his wife to Acapulco on vacation and he could open a business, maybe a lunch place.

“Hey, Romero,” said Vicente, “what does your wife have to do with you using electric shock on suspects?”

“Thing is, when my old lady doesn’t go to work, I send her out to take a walk. Then I take her clothes iron, plug in the cord, and, damn, anybody’ll confess. I sit the suspect down in a full tub with just his underwear on, and I graze his wet knees with the tip of the cord. I say,
You like 110 volts? ’Cause you can also get 220
.”

“Holy shit.” Vicente shook his head. “Just tell me one thing: is this gonna be in the papers?”

“Why do you ask?”

“’Cause you’re the snitch, Romero. You went to Klein’s last Monday. You had a date with some reporters you thought you could get some money from, and you ran out when you saw me walk in.”

The lackey looked straight ahead. “Swear you won’t tell the other guys; they’d come after me. I’ve gotta make a living somehow. I don’t make anything at the station, even though they fuck with me all the time.”

Rangel turned on the radio. They were playing that Pink Floyd album, the one with the clock ticktock sounds and a woman yelling like she’s scared:
Dark Side of the Moon
. By free association, he remembered the German who gave him the coin as a present. Soon he’d be able to go looking for the B-side of his life, he told himself. He who started out a musician and ended up a cop.

Romero noticed a billboard on the side of the highway that advertised a luxury auto dealer:
THERE’S A FORD IN YOUR FUTURE
. He took out a pen from the glove compartment and scribbled down the phone number on a paper: 31539.

“What do you want that for?”

“You never know.”

The one time they stopped was near González to fill up on
gas. As he was paying at the cash register, Rangel saw the front page of the paper and his smile faded fast.

ARRESTED FOR DRUG TRAFFICKING
. The picture was of Agustín Barbosa, Ciudad Madera’s mayor.

Fucking A, he thought, fucking A. And he showed the paper to Romero.

“Hmm,” Romero sighed. “What’re we gonna do with these guys? There’s no way we can take ’em back. What do we do?”

“The only choice,” he said, “is to try to turn him in to Chief García. We’ve gotta take that risk.”

They called García from a pay phone, even though it was three in the morning. Doña Dolores answered. “My husband hasn’t come back from the capital; he should be here any minute.” Vicente explained that they had the Jackal under arrest and he’d confessed. The woman asked who it was and Rangel told her, summing up his investigation: the cigar and the wool, the report, the stains on the girls’ shirts, the circumstances of the man’s arrest, and the spontaneous confession. Doña Dolores understood.

“Go turn him in at headquarters. I’ll tell my husband to meet you there.”

They locked him up at 3:00 and let him go at 3:05. Romero was still talking but Rangel wasn’t listening anymore. He had seen something in his rearview mirror and an alarm went off.

Romero noticed Vicente’s restlessness. “What’s going on, Rangel? What did you see?”

“Look at that black car, the Grand Marquis. Do you want me to point at it? In violation of all safety recommendations, even in violation of all common sense suggestions, the
madrina
turned around toward the back part of the car. You’re such an idiot! What do you think you’re doing, Romero? Don’t be so obvious, jackass! But his
madrina
didn’t move, he just kept staring. Are they official plates? I can’t tell. Then sit down, man. Speed up, his lackey said to him; let’s see if they follow us. This is too much, Rangel thought, now Romero is giving me orders. He sped through a red light, making a pickup screech to a halt, and took the street that went to headquarters. He was about to chew his lackey out but, looking behind him, said instead, “He ran the light, too; there’s no doubt he’s following us. Do you know them?” Rangel asked. I’ve never seen him before. Rangel took out his Colt and put it between his legs. “There’s no problem,” Romero said, “we’re almost at headquarters. They wouldn’t dare attack with all those cops around.”

They parked in front of the main entrance to headquarters. The Grand Marquis stopped six feet away. “Watch out,” remarked Rangel, “be on guard, Romero, anything can happen.”

A bum was headed toward them but they motioned decisively for him to get lost. The beggar got the picture that something was about to happen and stopped with his leg in the air, turned around, and went back where he came from, as fast as he could. When he was gone, Rangel flicked on his hazard lights and put the car in first, just in case they had to gun it out of there. But the black car didn’t move: the engine was still on.

“I don’t like this at all,” Romero said. “What is it? What do they want? You know them?” El Chuy shook his head. When he looked at the Jackal in the rearview mirror, Rangel noticed he was trembling.

The officers didn’t move. They watched the car and they didn’t budge. The black Grand Marquis still had its engine on, the radiator was roaring. Rangel checked out the main entrance. There wasn’t a single cop to be seen, not even El Chicote dozing off at his post. Where were they? He noticed a red glow light up behind the black car’s tinted windshield and thought,
He’s smoking, whoever it is, he’s smoking
.

An orange Caribe two-door, loaded up with suitcases, parked behind the Grand Marquis and the patrol car and started to honk at them. It was a family: a man, his wife, and their kids. They must be going to the bus station. Since the cars were blocking the street, the man honked his horn. Then the Grand Marquis pulled over to the curb a few centimeters and turned on its hazard lights, two small, elegant, yellow lights that emerged from the headlights. Then, demonstrating the ostentatious features of the fancy car, the lights moved from one side of the
bumper to the other. The driver of the Caribe ran out of patience and passed the two cars. As he passed by the patrol car, he shouted, “Idiots!” And kept driving.

Rangel finally saw movement on the first floor. He parked about ten feet from the door and told Romero, “OK, partner, turn those guys in.”

“And what are you gonna do?”

“I’ll cover you.”

“And if you don’t come back, can I keep your half?”

Rangel smiled—there was something suicidal in that smile—and answered, “It’s my gift to you.”

Romero took his automatic pistol and pointed it into the backseat. “Look,” he said to them, “the first one to do something stupid gets blown away.” But he didn’t have to say it, because both of them were scared to death and got out peacefully.

“Move it, move it,” he spurred them on.

Once at the door, he had to kick it for someone to open up.

A tall, incredibly brawny guy he’d never seen before opened it. He was wearing a black suit and tie.

“Oh, fuck, where’s El Chicote?”

“On vacation. What do you need him for?”

This rubbed Romero the wrong way. “I’m a special agent,” he informed him. “I arrested this guy.”

“What did he do?”

“He’s the Jackal.”

“Oh, the one who killed the girls?”

“Yeah, the Jackal.”

“You don’t say?” The man gestured with his hand and two huge, gorilla-looking guys came up from behind him. “Gutiérrez, the Jackal just got here. What do you think?”

“That’s great. We have to congratulate this man. Come in, come in. Leave him with us.”

“And who are you?”

“Mr. Fernández, Mr. Gutiérrez, Mr. Barrios.”

“The Jackal, awesome! Was it hard for you to find him?” another one asked.

“Listen, who the hell do you think you are?” asked Romero.

“You have to start the process. Why don’t you advise the chief?”

They burst out laughing. “The chief doesn’t work here anymore. We’re in charge now.”

Gutiérrez took the prisoners by their arms and escorted them toward the door.

“Listen,
cabrón
! What are you doing?” Romero asked indignantly.

Calm down, they insisted. Romero looked around but couldn’t find one familiar face. He went to the desk and tried to make a phone call, but they had cut the line. “OK,
pendejos
, what the hell’s going on? This is the Jackal! Arrest him, he’ll get away!” The Blind Man thought he was going crazy. You’re not going to do anything? I’m not going anywhere. Fernández, what about you? No, me either. By then, the third man was leading El Chuy and the Jackal to the door. He motioned to the black Grand Marquis and the prisoners left the headquarters. These motherfuckers are gonna let him go just so they can grab them and get the reward for themselves, Romero thought. The guys in Paracuán had done this to him once before, when he was just starting out. So he walked toward the Jackal, but Officer Gutiérrez pulled him by the arm. “Look, buddy, these are my instructions, if you don’t like it, talk to the boss.”