The Debt Collector (23 page)

“Come on, get in, Tim. We still need to go get your buddies.”

The hug was swift, sudden, the first she'd had in months. “You really are a great mom.” He retreated to his side of the car. “You know, Mom, we could think of this as quality time.”

“May we always do our felonies together.”

Tim entertained Sonora and his buddies—both starving and happy to be treated to McDonald's Extra Value Meals, supersized of course—with the various plans he had thought of for making his escape from the Boone County Jail. Sonora, well-aware that the jail was run so tightly it squeaked, listened without comment. The boys had been cold, broke, and hungry, and the sight of a parent with a working car and enough cash and goodwill to buy them dinner had been a welcome sight. She supposed that to the average Joe, they looked like tough little fellas, but to her they still seemed like babies.

They were amazingly polite, grateful, helpful. Sonora, who felt that teenage boys were best kept busy, put them all to work at the BP station. Walter pumped gas into the Taurus, Tim checked the tires for air, and Brock cleaned the windshield.

“You should've just escaped that place,” Brock said, as Sonora let him off in front of his house.

“Yeah, why didn't you?” Walter asked.

“Nine dollars seemed a whole lot easier,” Tim said.

It was the most sensible thing Sonora had heard all night.

She and Tim were greeted with ecstasy by Clampett and Heather, who were both glad to see Tim and delighted by the sackful of cheeseburgers.

Sonora checked the kitchen windows, told the kids good-bye. They both looked at her like she was crazy.

“Can't talk about it, kids, and I've got to go. I won't be home till … hell, you'll have to get off to school without me. Tim? I can count on you?”

“Oh,
hell
yes.”

“Plus you owe me nine dollars.”

He opened his wallet. “Money's still there,” he said, putting a five and three ones and three quarters into her palm.

“Thank you.”

“This isn't dangerous, is it, Mom?” Heather was frowning, one hand on her hip.

“Nah. I got Sam as backup, I'll be okay.”

“Load your gun,” Tim said.

“Stay locked up,” Sonora told them. She did not want to leave them.

She paused at the front door, turned and pointed a finger at Tim. “Twenty-four hours. Can you stay out of trouble that long?”

“Sure, Mom. Piece of cake.”

It made her nervous, kids saying stuff like that.

47

Sonora woke suddenly, the van lurching sideways, throwing her up against Sam. Unbelievably, she had dozed off. Sam put an instinctive hand on her knee, steadying her.

The hand did not go unnoticed. Mai, Whitmore's partner and the ERU videographer, studied Sonora openly, unsmiling. She had the personality of a videographer, watchful, uninvolved, stoic—wise little face, a poker face, impossible to guess her thoughts. Her body was compact and petite, but taut and muscular for her size. She was definitely a presence.

A woman, Sonora thought, who had secrets. A woman who would reject much, who would pare the world down to white polished bone, allowing no sharp edges, meat, or gristle. She would be judgmental. Thoughtful. Obscure.

The woman watched Sonora more than she liked, studying, probably habit. She'd make a bad enemy. A rare but elusive friend. Her friendship might be as scary as her enmity.

Sonora took a breath, feeling carsick. It was a tight fit inside the van. Cushioned benches ran along either side, leaving Sonora and Sam, near the driver, beside and facing the twenty-man unit, all of them dressed in black and riding quietly. They looked impressive and impersonal, in black Kevlar helmets, weighted down with forty pounds of equipment. Radio frequencies were coordinated and set.

There was a surprising lack of conversation, to Sonora's mind, the tension as thick as fog. They would be worrying about the children, she decided. Wary of the dog. And what they knew about Aruba would make some of them nervous and some of them aggressive. He was every cop's nightmare, dissociated, disturbed, and unpredictable. Men like Aruba reacted in unexpected ways. They fought like animals, they felt no pain. Logic did not apply to the Arubas of the world, who ran on instinct—warped, ego-saturated instinct—and an inexplicable agenda coupled with an otherworldly strength.

Anybody with brains would be worrying about Aruba.

The van was a world unto itself, housing a range of weaponry that included MKs, AZs, and the weapon of choice, MPS submachine guns. There was a Remington 11-87 semiautomatic shotgun, tools for the sniper on the team, silencers.

Sonora shuffled her feet, toes sticking on the metal floor. It was claustrophobic inside, too many people crowded too close together, Whitmore up near the front with Captain Taleese and the driver, who had the only roomy seat in the van. Blackout curtains muzzled the windows. A phone system—the command center—was installed behind the driver, just under the television and the microwave oven. The team could survive long stakeouts and watch the action on television if the raid was complicated by the predatory press.

The guys across from Sam and Sonora had the worst seats—bench bolted in front of slots for the shields.

Outside, Sonora could hear the frizzy noise of tires on wet pavement. Still raining. Sam had accused her of bringing the rain back from Cincinnati, but as far as Sonora could tell, Kentucky had plenty of its own.

The weather was a mixed blessing. It would give more cover, less visibility, and muffle some of their noise. But it would also make the ground slippery and spread wet misery over the team, who were technically not supposed to care. And Sonora had always been of the opinion that weapons did not function as well in heavy humidity, though Sam was prone to arguing the point.

She had missed the run-through, being tied up in Boone County on Mom-duty, but Sam had been impressed.

The van slowed. Sonora hoped they were close. She was getting very carsick, riding sideways, with no window to see out of. Captain Taleese was on his feet; they must be close. At his command, the team stood up and grabbed plastic straps that hung from the roof. They were like a parachute team, readying for a jump.

The van shifted sideways and stopped, resting at a tilt that said they had pulled off the road. The neighborhood dogs sounded the watch, background music to every raid Sonora had ever been through. No doubt the rottweiler was a member of the chorus.

Sonora thought of the children in the tiny white house, uneasy in their sleep. She thought of Aruba, edgy now that Kinkle had not returned, alerted by the barking dog.

Someone once said that massacres were all the same.

The back of the van opened with the creak of a metallic hinge, and things happened quickly. Sonora felt oddly detached, with a panicky sense of being out of control. Each man jumped out, shouting,
Off the truck
. She followed Sam, Whitmore, and Taleese out of the front of the truck, around the side to the teams filing out the back doors, moving toward the house in a stylized shuffle step. When the last team was out of the truck and in the lineup, Taleese gave the signal and the teams broke into a slow jog, heading in a direct line toward house number four, like a line of black army ants after a picnic, ground giving wetly beneath their heavily booted feet.

Sonora looked up to the wet mist of rain, feeling it settle on her face, knowing that it would make her hair curl. She was damp all over. They'd smell like wet dogs by the end of the night.

She imagined looking out one's living-room window, spotting the white van and the line of darkly dressed men and women, intimidating in helmets, equipment, with that confident and inexorable threat that emanated from well-trained men on a mission.

Call the police would be the first thought. The second, sinking, helpless—this is the police.

There was a surreal quality here, the men and women jogging in the rain, the first team, the ones with the sledgehammer and ram, turning now, veering across the dormant grass to the tiny house, which showed not a light to the face of the world. She felt uneasy. A sense of dread. She felt as if she and she alone had set this in motion, as if she would be responsible for what would happen next.

She thought of the three children and the sister. Were they all that different from the Stinnets? Lower on the socioeconomic scale, with the unsettling vulnerability of a family in the orbit of predators. In the back of her mind, she could hear Joy Stinnet,
Hail Mary, full of grace
, as the ram thundered into the flimsy front door of the small row house and knocked it splintering backward off the hinge.

The house erupted in an explosion of noise, men in heavy boots, clustering for a critical and vulnerable three seconds as they all tried to fit through the gaping door.

The dog howled, a bay that set the hair rising on the back of Sonora's neck. A little girl screamed
Mommy
, and Sonora heard a shout go up:
He's got a gun!

She stood outside the house, feeling the straitjacket of her disinvolvement, no choice but to stand and wait, while rain ran over her hair and down her face, mixing with tears as she listened to the dog yelp and squeal in macabre harmony with an infant's wail.

Was this what it had sounded like the night Aruba and Kinkle invaded the home of the Stinnets?

48

Sonora heard the fight all the way out in the front yard. She looked at Sam, who nodded, headed in through the busted front door. She followed without hesitation, and they made two unnecessary people in an overcrowded house.

A woman in a white nylon nightgown, heavy breasts loose and in motion, was wrestling the dog into a tiny bathroom. Sonora got a quick glimpse of curling linoleum and the white flecks of liquid nitro on the dog's muzzle, where he had been sprayed with CO
₂
. The woman's hair, pale reddish gold, like Aruba's, swung in a plait down her back. Her eyes were large and dark, the right one swollen shut and purple and black with a brand-new bruise. The rottweiler showed the face of a dog with a dilemma, but thankfully it listened to the woman's whispers of reassurance and entreaty, as she ignored the man with the submachine gun and locked the dog away.

The front of the house was partitioned into two rooms, a living space on the left, dominated by a big-screen TV, kitchenette on the right; a tiny room in the back, a closetlike bedroom. The couch was upended—one officer going through the cushions. Sonora counted the children. All three were safe in the arms of men who were fathers in their off-time.

The action was in that back, dark bedroom, and Sonora could hear the shouts of the officers—
down, now; you are under arrest; cooperate and we will not hurt you
. Words tossed like pebbles into the abyss of Aruba's rage. If he saw the officer training the submachine gun on his midsection, he gave no sign, and it took a fiveman pileup to get the arms locked behind the body, working pressure points and using brute force to get the leg hobbles tight around the ankles, and still one man got caught by Aruba's powerful kick.

But at last Aruba stopped moving, his breath coming like a tornado through a sieve. The couch had been searched, set upright, and the woman sat in handcuffs, head turning, as she tried to keep an eye on all three of her children.

A blessed sort of quiet began to descend, the baby soothed by the rocking of a muscular man, six foot if an inch, mustached. The keloid tissue of the scar that ran down his left cheek wrinkled as he smiled down at the baby.

The toddler, a golden-haired girl with blue eyes and a white-lipped look of shock, reached for her mother, and the police officer sat her on the couch. She lay sideways, thumb in her mouth, head on her mother's lap. The woman stroked her head carefully, keeping the slender cuffed wrists a safe distance from the child's flushed, delicate skin. The five-year-old boy buried his head in one of the men's shoulders, legs wrapped around the officer's waist, and the man made no move to peel the boy away but carried him wherever he went.

Captain Taleese called an ambulance and Whitmore read the search warrant word for word to an uninterested, shell-shocked audience, with background chants from Aruba, complaining, “You fuckers broke my fucking arm.”

49

Someone had given Lanky Aruba's sister a raincoat, which had almost gone double around her thin angular body. She held it tightly across her chest, arms folded. She had nodded once, when Mai Yagamochi asked her to confirm that her name was Belinda Kinkle. She had asked twice about her children and, when no answer was forthcoming, had set her lips and found a place, inside herself, to go into full retreat.

Sonora handed her a chemical ice pack for the black eye. “Who gave you that?”

Belinda Kinkle spoke through clenched teeth. “Ran into the door.”

“What is Aruba to you?” Mai asked.

“He's my stockbroker,” Belinda said. Her thin face seemed ready-made for pain, so quickly did it settle into lines of stress.

Mai, sitting upright in her chair, ran a pencil through her slim fingers, tapping the eraser on the edge of the desk. Sonora wanted more than anything to smack her hand. “Let me explain what will happen to you, Miss
Belinda
, if you do not care to answer my questions.

“You will be charged as an accessory to murder. Your children will be put into protective custody. Your dog will be taken to the pound. If you cannot raise bail, your children will be put into foster care and eventually put up for adoption. If you are found
guilty
, your children will be put into foster care and put up for adoption. It may take some time to place your oldest boy, but the baby girls will find a home very quickly. Certainly the infant.”

Almost none of the above was true, and Sonora was not sure what surprised her more—Belinda's seeming to believe every word or Mai's clumsy handling of a woman who might have been able to give them a great deal of insight, as well as solid information.