The Dead Run (3 page)

 

CHAPTER 4

F
or Galvan, the key to surviving prison was ritual. Routine. Break the months down into weeks, the days down into hours. Anticipate any small pleasure. Ignore anything and anyone that wasn't on the schedule.

At six thirty, he woke up. Half an hour before the rest of the population—because he could, because it was a decision he was still allowed to make. He savored the quiet, then dropped to the cement floor for fifty close-grip push-ups, fifty regular, fifty wide. Two hundred sit-ups, a hundred dips. Shave. Wash off in the sink, kiss the picture of his daughter hanging over it, where the mirror would have been if this were the real world. It served the same purpose a mirror would have: it confirmed his existence.

Get dressed. Notice that he was hungry. Relish the thought of the meal to come, unappetizing as the food might be. Pick a song.

The song was crucial. He had to have one by seven, when the door opened and the march down to the cafeteria began. The song was the theme music for the day. He'd play it in his head again and again, really get to know it. Sing it in the shower, run to its beat in the yard, use it to tune out trouble. In eleven months and twelve days, Galvan had never picked the same song twice.

They'd hit him with attempted murder, five counts. Given him ten years on each, to be served concurrently. If he could keep his head down, he might be out in five. He had another four years' worth of songs in him, he was pretty sure.

But not another nine.

There was a radio in his cell, a cheap transistor another American had passed down to him when the guy got out last summer—dude name of Jimmy, closest thing to a friend Galvan had made in here. The only stations it got played narcocorrido, a kind of Mexican country music full of stories about drug runs and robberies, murders and border crossings. Plenty appropriate for this place, but fucking unlistenable. He would've given anything for some music that meant something to him. Some Johnny Cash, some Run-DMC, some War. Something.

A rap song got you the furthest. More lyrics to recite, a good tempo to run to. But Galvan had pretty much exhausted all the tunes he'd grown up driving around L.A. to—and besides, all those so-called gangsta tunes were softer than baby shit compared to the reality of life in here, where vatos slit each other's throats over disrespectful eye contact and the Barrio Azteca and Federación Sinaloa occupied the yard, the cafeteria, even the library at different times of day to minimize the likelihood of their killing each other.

Where the stink of corruption lay heavy over everything and justice was something you bought, if you wanted some. Where cartel bosses sitting in steel cages commanded armies whose firepower the police, the army, couldn't match even if they wanted to.

Which they did not. Instead, one hand washed the other, and everybody else stayed dipped in shit.

Kodiak Brinks, Galvan decided. “Welcome to the Ruckas.” He only knew the first verse, if that. But the rest would come. It had all day.

I'm kickin' the illest shit / Surrounded by wickedness  . . .

The bars opened, and Galvan walked down the tier, toward the stairs, eyes darting left, right, left. Who's in front of me? Who's in back?

I slide through the drama / Use my eyes as my armor . . .

The only reason he was still alive was that the men who mattered had been slow in deciding what to make of him. Galvan kept to himself, worked out like mad. A gringo, but not here for drugs. Showed respect but wasn't weak. Knew how to handle himself. The first thing Galvan had done when he arrived was quick-study the population until he found a guy as much like himself as possible, a hard-ass loner. Then he'd picked a fight and kicked the piss out of the dude, as publicly as possible.

Best thing he could have done, but it was wearing off. And doing it again, Galvan knew, would not help. Prison was boredom. Violence was relief. Alone was vulnerable.

The last month had been buildup: taunts, catcalls. Nothing so direct that the code of the prison dictated he had to fight over it. But closer and closer. It was the weakest members of both gangs who tested him, skinny eighteen-year-olds with bad teeth, little more than court jesters. Or pawns. Expendable flesh, the kind of vatos whose life expectancies had doubled on the day they'd been arrested. Their superiors wanted to see how far Galvan could be pushed before he snapped.

Galvan wondered that himself.

Known as fair and square throughout my youth / Kick the truth, uncouth but I'm livin' proof / Eye to eye, man to man I never blink / The last motherfucker with a pail when the ship sinks . . .

They smelled something on him, Galvan thought. Not fear. Innocence. These men, from the rank-and-file to the bosses, were here because they broke the law for money. That was who they were, and they were proud of it. Galvan was here because he'd failed to mind his business. Because he'd seen something he couldn't stomach and reacted.

It wasn't a mistake he planned to make again.

After breakfast was the yard. Some people lifted weights. Others played soccer. The old men and the higher-ups smoked cigarettes, ate candy bars, talked business.

Galvan ran wind sprints. He didn't know why, exactly. It was the one risk he took, the one thing he did that drew attention.
Scorn
was a better word. But he had to move, had to exhaust himself. In some vague way, he suspected that running would be important when he got out of here. In chasing down his old life and making things right.

That, and outdistancing whatever memories he took with him.

Galvan was ten minutes into his workout, his breath coming in jagged gasps, when a skinny kid they called Payaso broke off from a cluster of inmates and joined him. He was a low-ranking member of Barrio Azteca, an errand boy. A loudmouth. A catcaller. Top five on the list of people Galvan would have liked to pound into the ground.

“I got a message for you, pendejo,” he said, already panting from the effort of catching up.

Galvan didn't break his stride. “What's that, pendejo?”

“El Cucuy wants to see you.”

Galvan snorted. “Tell him I already got a lunch appointment with Santa Claus. Seeing the Easter Bunny after that, but I might be able to squeeze him in before drinks with the tooth fairy.”

He accelerated, left Payaso in the dust. El Cucuy. Shit. The mythical boogeyman of Ojos Negros Prison. Supposedly, he lived in the bowels of the place, las entranas de la tierra, half inmate and half god. Half monster and half mastermind. Some said they'd built the place around him. Others claimed he was the leader of both gangs, that each was an instrument of his bidding and he played one against the other for reasons known only to himself. His appetite for women was said to be prodigious; the families of inmates left their young daughters at home on visiting days in case the tales were true.

No one ever saw the guy, of course. The guards had made the whole thing up:
Better not
give us any trouble, or we'll take you downstairs and hand you over to El Cucuy.
Decades ago, probably. Now the fable had a life of its own.

Whatever this message meant, it couldn't be good.
El Cucuy wants to see you
—loosely translated, it became
You're going to disappear.
They'd gotten bored with taunts, and now it was time for threats, intimidation. Mind-fuckery.

Galvan threw on a burst of speed. He had to save his aggression for the man who'd put him here, and that meant surviving long enough to rejoin the world and find him.

Sink and more / never get caught on the ropes through / The devil threw low blows / I ducked 'em in slow mo . . .

Galvan never saw the rock, or the arm that threw it. “Órale, gringo!” he heard somewhere behind him, and then pain exploded against the side of his head and Galvan dropped to the ground, clutching his temple. Blood slicked his hands. His vision went spangly.

Easy prey, if he stayed down, and so Galvan forced himself to stand, wiped away the scarlet rivulets cascading down his forehead, turned in a tight circle like a cat chasing its tail. Two men were coming at him from the right, the weightlifting area. He pretended not to see the first one until he was close, then ducked the man's swing, came around his back, and dropped an elbow onto his kidneys. He crumpled. Galvan kneed him in the face as he went down. He wouldn't be getting back up.

The other guy was bigger. One of the biggest. Gutierrez. An enforcer, brutal. Famous as a rapist. He was on top of Galvan before the gringo knew it, shockingly quick for his size. He went right for the neck, with both hands—no nonsense, get it over with fast.

If he'd pushed Galvan down, choked him from above, used the leverage his body supplied, it would have been. Instead, all that practicality went out the window, and he went for the glamour shot: lifted Galvan off his feet, like Homer Simpson when he strangled Bart. Galvan reared back and kicked him in the nuts with everything he had, and the behemoth dropped him, doubled over. Galvan hit him with a right cross, snapped his head sideways, then followed with a left.

All that bought him was time to breathe. Gutierrez was built for this; he wasn't close to done. A circle had formed around the three of them, the noise cacophonous. Galvan had seen this before. The circle was a joke. You thought you were fighting one man, two men, but the truth was that every inmate forming that perimeter was a potential combatant.

The sport was to deliver the knockout blow unseen.

He heard somebody running at him, whirled, and cracked Payaso in the jaw, sent him spinning into the dust. The crack was bullwhip sharp, and for an instant, it hushed the yard. Then Galvan was on the ground next to him, with no idea how he'd gotten there except that it seemed to involve getting hit in the face. He scrabbled to his knees. The noise crested. This was when the shivs came out.

Then the sound everybody was waiting for ripped through the air: three warning shots from the riflemen stationed in the watchtowers overlooking the yard.

The buckshot kicked up flares of dust, and the circle loosened, dispersed. Galvan staggered to his feet, only to be laid flat on his back by a guard's baton. They were everywhere, sticks flashing, taking people down.

Galvan caught a blow to the head and felt himself go limp. The cries of the other inmates reached him as if from far away, the sounds swimming through the fog that filled his head.

Payaso's voice cut through it all.

“Please, please, I'm begging you,” the kid wailed through his busted face, the words distorted by pain and panic, as the guards rained down blow after blow.

“Kill me if you want. Just don't take me to El Cucuy.”

Welcome to the Ruckus.

 

CHAPTER 5

N
ichols hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, shifted his weight, sighed.

“What makes you think your daughter's been abducted, ma'am?”

Melinda Richards threw her arms wide. Hard to do, standing in a doorway, but she managed. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes.

“I'm her mother!”

“I understand that, ma'am. But—”

“When something's wrong, a mother knows!”

She was loud, panic edging her voice, and the neighbors were starting to pay furtive attention. The guy across the street had been pretending to curb his trash ever since Nichols pulled up in the squad car, and now the old biddy next door was futzing with her front-porch flowerpots, ears pricked up for scandal.

What a fucking day. Dead girls buried in the desert, live girls missing from the town pool. And it wasn't even two yet. Thoughts of a late lunch in an air-conditioned diner filled Nichols's mind. The good one, he didn't go to anymore; it had been his and Kat's spot ever since junior year. But the mediocre one had a few standout plates. Hard to fuck up a cheeseburger.

“Maybe we could talk inside, ma'am?” he said, throwing a couple of meaningful sideways glances at the neighbors.

The Richards woman didn't seem to catch his drift, but she acquiesced, turning away without another word, a ropy ponytail swinging behind her as she stalked off like an angry rag doll. Nichols followed her through a hallway covered in threadbare gray carpet, into a mustard-colored kitchen straight out of the seventies. The only decoration was a wood-framed needlepoint, hung over the table.

As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord.
Joshua something-or-other.

Nichols wasn't much for scripture. He'd done his best to be vague about that the first time he'd run for sheriff, steered away from any talk of religion whenever possible and mouthed a few platitudes about the strength of his faith when he was cornered. It wasn't hard; he'd had plenty of practice pretending he didn't think religion was horseshit. And besides, this was Texas; nobody had it in them to believe their cherished football star and war hero
wasn't
a foot soldier in Christ's army or a cashier in Christ's Laundromat or whatever the fuck.

Nichols pulled out a chair, beckoned the woman toward it. Melinda Richards shoved her hands into her back pockets and shook her head. Nichols shrugged and parked himself in the other one.
Must have been just the two of them,
he thought.
Mother and daughter. No dinner guests.

“She should have been home hours ago. She's never late. She knows I don't abide lateness.”

Nichols readied his most soothing voice and said, “All due respect, Ms. Richards, your daughter is how old? Fifteen?”

“Sixteen last week.”

“At sixteen, they tend to get a whole lot less punctual. What with the . . . hormones and what-all.”

Bad move. She went ramrod straight, stared switchblades at him. “Officer Nichols, this is a Christian home.”

All the more reason for your daughter to be out getting loaded, lady
.

So much for calming her down with stats. Somehow, he couldn't see Melinda Richards finding much comfort in the fact that 85 percent of “missing” teenagers turned up the next day, hanging their heads and nursing their hangovers.

Of the other 15, most were runaways. That was beginning to look more and more plausible. Nichols had only been here five minutes, and this place was already giving him the heebie-jeebies.

“Of course,” he said. “I'm sorry. Let's start from the beginning. You've tried your daughter's cell?”

“She doesn't have one.”

Nichols swallowed his incredulity. What sixteen-year-old girl wasn't glued to her phone? Maybe God disapproved of wireless technology.

Easier to keep track of your kid if you give her a way to communicate, lady
.

“I'm going to need a picture of your daughter, ma'am. The more recent the better.”

Unless, of course, God frowns upon cameras
,
from his holy cave in the sky.

She turned and rummaged through a drawer crammed with junk. Nichols glimpsed the top of a tattoo at the small of her back.

The Rolling Stones logo.

Like most of the zealots Nichols had met, it appeared that Melinda Richards was not without some past sympathy for the devil.

“This is last year's school photo.”

He studied it. Brown hair, pretty brown eyes. A grubby white sweatshirt, like she hadn't known it was picture day. She looked jumpy, tight-wound. Living with this woman would do that to a kid.

“Do you know what she was wearing when she left the house today?”

“I went out before she did. She was planning to go swimming. At the town pool. Her swimsuit is missing.”

“I'd like to take a look at her room. See what else she might have taken with her.”

Melinda's eyes blazed. “My daughter did not—”

“To the pool, I mean,” Nichols added hastily.

“This way.” Melinda stalked past him, down the wood-paneled hall. She banked right and opened a flimsy particleboard door onto the girl's room.

Nichols lingered in the kitchen. In her haste, Melinda had left the junk drawer open. The sheriff peered into it, junk drawers the windows of the soul.

Coins, Allen wrenches, unlabeled cassettes, crumpled takeout menus. He was about to slide it shut when he noticed a business card, protruding from a jumble of coupons.

Ruth Cantwell
,
Clinical Psychologist
,
New Life Clinic.
Nichols gave it his interrogator's frown, as if the card might speak. New Life Clinic rang a distant bell. Was it that upscale rehab place out in the suburbs, high fences hiding plush bungalows full of corporate cokeheads and rich sex addicts?

Melinda Richards was several tax brackets shy of that.

Nichols slipped the card into his pocket and followed her down the hall.

The kid's room was more like a monk's cell than a teenage girl's sanctum. Bed, made. Desk, orderly. Cross on a silver chain hanging from the mirror on the dresser. Nothing on the walls but the Scotch-taped corners of posters.

Whatever Sherry had put up, her mother had torn down.

Nichols pocketed his hand, flicked his thumbnail against the business card. Come to think of it, didn't New Life Clinic do cult recovery, too?

He turned to Melinda. “It doesn't appear to me that your daughter was taken from home, Ms. Richards—
if
she was taken at all, which, again, I want to reassure you, is highly unlikely. But there's no sign here of a forced entry, no evidence of a struggle. Nothing appears to be missing.” He took a stab at a comforting smile. “And you're right, no one runs away in a bathing suit. I'm sure it's all going to turn out fine. Probably just a misunderstanding.”

He tried out an apologetic smile.

“Can you think of any reason Sherry might be upset, Ms. Richards? A fight with a friend, maybe? Any tension between the two of you?”

“No.” She barely parted her lips to say it.

“Any other relatives she might be with? Uncles, aunts, cousins, her father . . . ?”

“It's just us.”

“Does Sherry have a boyfriend?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You're sure? Kids today, you know, they don't always tell their parents what—”

“Sherry tells me everything, Sheriff.” Rage and hysteria jockeyed for control of her eyes. “What's the point of all this? Somebody out there's got my daughter, and you're standing here asking me these, these . . .” Melinda broke off, raised her palms to her face, and smothered a sob.

“I'm sorry, Ms. Richards. There are standard questions we're required to ask everyone.” He paused, took a breath, plunged back in.

“Again . . . what makes you so sure somebody's ‘got' your daughter?”

“Because they—” She broke off, cupped her hands over her nose and mouth.

“
They
who? Ms. Richards, is there something you want to tell me?”

She back-and-forthed her head, like a little kid standing by some dumb lie, her hands still covering her face.

“I've got to go pray,” she whispered. “Officer Nichols, please. Find her. Before it's too late.”

Melinda Richards shuffled from the room.

Nichols showed himself out, clambered back into his squad car. Blasted the air, pulled out the card, and dialed.

Two rings. “Ruth Cantwell.”

A honeysuckle voice. Clad in a business suit.

“Dr. Cantwell, this is Sheriff Bob Nichols. I'm calling about a patient of yours, Melinda Richards?”

“What's happened?” The voice coiling like a spring.

“Well, she believes her daughter's been abducted. The girl's only been unaccounted for a few hours, but Melinda's terrified, and I get the sense she knows more than she's saying. Of course, I respect your doctor-patient confidentiality, Dr. Cantwell, but if there's anything you might—”

“You're at her house?”

“Yes.”

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

S
HE MADE IT
there in ten, red Audi two-door screeching to a stop across the street from Nichols's squad car. He'd given up on the air-conditioning by then, decided he might as well kill the wait time doing something that resembled police work. When Cantwell arrived, he was just coming around the side of the house, a search of the Richardses' postage-stamp yard having turned up plenty of jackshit.

The doctor unfolded herself from the driver's seat, smoothing down a skirt that ended just above her shapely calves. Wine-colored lips, her blouse and jacket the same shade, the whole ensemble conservative enough for business but sexy enough to distract from it.

Hell, thought Nichols, if losing control of your life meant sitting across from
that
every day, he ought to start bringing his flask to the office. Maybe pick up a gambling habit, too.

She crossed the street in three paces and extended her hand. “Hello, Sheriff. Ruth Cantwell.”

Nichols shook, and waited for more.

“Can we walk?” she asked, glancing behind him at the house, the drawn curtains.

“Sure. I want to trace the route between here and the town pool, anyway. Just in case.”

The moment they'd passed out of the house's sight line, Cantwell turned to him and dropped her hands onto her hips.

“Melinda Richards is a recovering cult member.”

“Recovering, huh? Seemed pretty devout to me.”

“She's a believer, sure. But you should have seen her eighteen months ago. Sherry was barely allowed out of the house. Melinda was about to move them into a compound when we intervened.”

“No offense, doc, but the New Life Clinic seems a tad rich for Melinda Richards's blood.”

“I waived my fee.”

“How altruistic.” Nichols crossed his arms over his chest. “You tear ass all the way across town to tell me that?”

Cantwell crossed her arms right back—the gesture less defiant than she probably thought, given the way it Wonderbra-ed her cleavage.

“What makes you think she's hiding something?”

Nichols shrugged. “Well, didn't mention anything about a cult, for starters. But even without that—most people don't call in the law when their teenager's late coming home. At two
P.M
.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the house. “Maybe you oughta talk to her, doctor.”

“Please, call me Ruth.”

“Maybe you oughta talk to her, Dr. Ruth.”

Nichols tried to hide his smirk. Cantwell ignored it.

“I'm sorry to say she's no longer under my care.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I insisted she go public with what she saw at that compound, and she refused. Said they'd kill her. And that the cops were in Seth's pocket. She moved here to start over. But maybe it wasn't far enough.”

“Who the hell is Seth? What did she see?”

“Are you familiar with the legend of the Virgin Army, Sheriff?”

Nichols stifled a laugh. “Yeah, sure. Undead virgins buried in the desert, right? They rise and feed on human flesh when there's—what is it again? A full moon? An eclipse? Nothing good on TV?”

Cantwell's eyes flashed. “You know what Melinda saw? Sixteen-year-old girls nobody ever heard from again, that's what. Good Christians who sang in the church choir and didn't have boyfriends. Sound familiar?”

Nichols pulled the notepad from his back pocket, flipped a page, and felt the blood drain from his face. “Sherry Richards turned sixteen one week ago.”

“Then we don't have a minute to spare. Come on. It's ninety minutes north of here.”

She walked straight to Nichols's car, jacked open the passenger door, and eye-daggered him impatiently.

“Ninety minutes north is forty-five past my jurisdiction,” he told her. “Give me an address. I'll call it in.”

“Did you not hear me, Nichols? The cops up there cannot be trusted. That's not paranoia. That's a fact.”

She bent, sized up the sorry state of his roller, and fished her own keys from her purse. “We'd better take my car.” She pressed a button, and the Audi's headlights double-blinked.

Nichols gaped for a moment, unpleasantly aware that he was two steps behind and dealing with a dynamo. Then he jogged to the Audi.

Ruth was already inside. He crossed in front of the hood, reached for the door handle. She buzzed the window down.

“You keep a shotgun in the trunk?”

“Yeah.”

“Grab it.”