Down These Strange Streets

Didn’t work. Three weeks later, she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”

“Ai!”

“Yeah, sweet, eh? What’s the next stop?”

“I’ll try and see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”

Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”

“So we could just work one case at a time? Sí, the thought has crossed my mind.”

III

“OKAY,” CESAR SAID TWO WEEKS LATER. “GUESS WHAT? SOMETHING FUNNY on the Brézé case.”

“Tell me something funny. I could use it.”

Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling piñon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, which happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.

The prospect was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now. Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sues cops. Tell me again why I’m not selling insurance?

“The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,” Cesar said.

“Ain’t a policeman’s life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?”

“Sí, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on U.S. soil. Anyway, there’s blood in the puke.”

“I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Brézé’s puke, right?”

“Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I’m pretty sure that Brézé paid him something to forget about it—he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it too.”

“So he’s got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?”

Cesar scratched his mustache, and Salvador consciously stopped himself from doing likewise.

“I’m not sure it does,” he said. “But it’s funny. Because the DNA from the puke is not the same as the DNA from the blood. In fact, the DNA from the blood is on the Red Cross list. One of their donors, a Shirley Whitworth, donated it at that place just off Rodeo and Camino Carlos Rey. It seems to have gone missing from their system. They clammed up about it pretty tight. We’ll have to work on that.”

Salvador grunted. “Let’s get this straight. The puke is Brézé—”

“Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there’s no Brézé in the DNA database.”

“That’s not so surprising; they only started it a couple of years ago, and it just means he’s not a donor and hasn’t been arrested or gone to a hospital or whatever. But the blood is definitely some Red Cross donor’s?”

“Sí. So, funny, eh?”

“Funny as in fucking weird, not funny as in ha-ha. Because it had to be in his stomach, right?”

They both laughed. “Good thing we know he comes out in daylight, eh?” Cesar said.

“Yeah, and he doesn’t sparkle. I’d feel fucking silly chasing a perp who looked like a walking disco ball . . . but he did drink it . . . maybe some sort of kink cult thing?”

“So I’m not surprised he puked,” Cesar said, still chuckling. “It’d be like drinking salt water, you know? Blood is salt water, seawater. My mother used salt water and mustard to make you heave if you’d eaten more than you should.”

Salvador could feel his brain starting to move, things connecting under the fatigue of a half-dozen cases that were never going to go anywhere. Then his phone rang. When he closed it, he was frowning.

“What’s the news, jefe?”

“The boss wants to see us, now.”

The chief’s office wasn’t much bigger than his; Santa Fe was a small town, still well under a hundred thousand people. It was on a corner, second story, and had bigger windows. The chief also had three stars on the collar of his uniform; he still didn’t make nearly as much as, say, Giselle Demarcio. On the other hand, his money didn’t come from San Francisco and L.A. and New York, either.

Cesar’s breath hissed a little, and Salvador felt his eyes narrow. There were two suits waiting for them as well as the chief. Literally suits, natty, one woman and one man, one black and one some variety of Anglo. Both definitely from out of state; he’d have put the black woman down as FBI if he had to guess, and the younger man as some sort of spook, but not a desk man. Ex-military of some type, but not in the least retired.

Possibly from the Army of Northern Virginia, a.k.a. the Waffen-CIA.

“Sit down,” the chief said.

He was as local as Salvador and more so than Cesar, and might have been Salvador’s older cousin—in fact, they were distantly related. Right now, he was giving a good impression of someone who’d never met either of the detectives, his face like something carved out of wood on Canyon Road.

The male suit spoke. “You’re working on a case involving the Brézé family?”

“Yes,” Salvador said. “Chief, who are these people?”

“You don’t need to know,” the woman said neutrally; somehow she gave the impression of wearing sunglasses without actually doing it. More softly: “You don’t want to know.”

“They’re Homeland Security,” the chief said.

“Homeland Security is interested in weird love triangles?” Salvador said skeptically. “Besides, Homeland Security is like person, it’s sort of generic. You people FBI, Company, NSA, what?”

“You don’t need to know. You do need to know we’re handling this,” the man said.

Wait a minute, Salvador thought. He’s scared. Controlling it well, he’s a complete hardcase if I ever saw one, and hell, I’ve been one. But he’s scared.

Which made him start thinking a little uncomfortably that maybe he should be scared. The man was someone he might have been himself, if things had gone a little differently with that IED.

“Handling it how?” Salvador said, meeting his pale stare.

“We’ve got some of our best people on it.”

“Oh, Christ—” he began.

“Eric, drop it. Right now,” the chief said.

He’s scared too.

“Hey, Chief, no problem,” Cesar cut in. “It’s not like we haven’t got enough work. Right, drop it, national security business, need to know, eh?”

The two suits looked at each other and then Salvador. He nodded himself.

“Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Curiosity killed the cat, that right? And unless I want to go