Twenty miles down the highway, they took the turnoff past a battered, bullet-riddled road sign that read: DUNAS DEL HOMBRE MUERTO. Dead Man’s Dunes. Vargas thought this was both ironic and appropriate, considering what the Ainsworths had found here.
A narrow dirt road took them to an abandoned PEMEX gas station that looked as if it hadn’t seen business since the early sixties. The windows had been boarded up decades ago, the plywood now gray and dilapidated, covered with layers of crude spray-painted graffiti written in both Spanish and English. puta and joto and fuck were featured prominently.
Ainsworth pulled onto the asphalt next to the pumps and killed the truck’s engine.
“This is it.”
He gestured beyond the station to a wide expanse of beige, dusty earth, dotted with dunes and yellowing desert scrub. Nothing unusual. You could find miles of the stuff from here to Texas.
What set this particular piece of land apart was the house that sat in the distance. The one that had been featured on the local news and in the Chihuahua newspapers just two months ago, a crumbling adobe box with broken and missing windows and only half a roof.
Despite the heat, Vargas felt a faint chill. And a small tug of excitement.
“Take me through it,” he said to Ainsworth. “Step by step.”
“That should be easy enough. Right, Junior?”
But Junior wasn’t listening. He was staring at the house, his dopey smile gone. He looked as if someone had just ripped out his soul.
“I wanna go home,” he said.
“Come on, now, Son, we talked about this.”
“I don’t care,” Junior said. “I wanna go. Now. I don’t like this place. I don’t like it at all.”
Ainsworth showed Vargas a tight smile.
“Boy hasn’t been right in the head since the crash. Caved in half his skull. Almost joined his mama in the morgue.” He returned his gaze to Junior. “I told you, Son, I’m not gonna let you pussy out on me. We made this man a promise and by God-”
“It’s not that big of a deal,” Vargas said. “He can wait for us here if he wants.”
Ainsworth turned sharply. “Did I ask you to butt in?”
“I’m just saying, if he doesn’t feel comfortable…”
“If God had put us on this planet to feel comfortable, Pancho, we woulda all been born with La-Z-Boys stuck to our hindquarters.”
Vargas stiffened.
“The name is Ignacio,” he said. “I told you that. Most people call me Nick.”
“Fine, Nick. But we’re doing you a favor here, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to get between me and my own goddamn son. He may be a half-wit, but he’s twenty-two years old and it’s about time he grew some motherfuckin’ balls.” He eyed his rearview mirror. “You hear me, Junior?”
Junior didn’t answer, lost somewhere inside his own head.
“You hear me?”
“I wanna go home,” Junior said. “What if they’re still in there?”
“Who?”
“Them people. The dead ones.”
“Now why would you think that?”
“I seen ’em. Laying there all shot up. They kept looking at me with them dead fish eyes.”
Vargas expected another flash of anger, and was surprised when Ainsworth softened, a genuine warmth in his voice.
“Listen to me, Son. You’re mixed up, is all. I promise you, they’re not around anymore.”
“How do you know?”
“The Mex police came and tidied the place up, remember? We were here when they came.”
Junior thought about this a long moment, looking thoroughly confused; then the sun slowly rose somewhere inside his brain, shining light across the memory.
He nodded. “They asked us questions.”
“That’s right,” Ainsworth said.
“And I didn’t say nothin’ wrong.”
“Right again. You made your papa proud.”
“And they put all them people in big black bags, threw ’em in the back of a truck.”
“Every single one of ’em. And we’re here to show Mr. Vargas what we found and where we found it. He’s gonna write you up in a book, make you famous. What do you think about that?”
Junior’s smile returned.
“Like Elvis the Pelvis?”
“Just like Elvis,” Ainsworth said.
3
The house was farther away than it looked.
They drove along what had once been an access road but was now little more than chunks of broken earth, making passage by truck difficult and uncomfortable. Vargas had to hold on to the support bar to keep from getting knocked around inside the cab.
Ainsworth had offered to pull the bikes down, give Vargas a ride, but Vargas had declined. The one time in his life he’d taken a ride on the back of a dirt bike had scared the ever-loving crap out of him. Not an experience he was interested in reliving, especially with this guy at the wheel.
About halfway there, Ainsworth brought the truck to a stop and gestured with a nod toward a nearby dune, fronted by a patch of scrub.
“I came up over that rise and nearly put my rear tire in her face. Almost took a header in the process.”
“She the only one you found out here?”
Ainsworth nodded.
“Sonsabitches must’ve used a razor-sharp garrote. Practically took her head off. Then they shot her a couple times for good measure. Local police figured she’d managed to run for it and got caught.”
“Oh? They tell you this?”
Ainsworth huffed a dry chuckle.
“Hell no. They wouldn’t give us the time of day. For a while there, I thought they were gonna cuff us both and send us off to no-man’s-land. But that didn’t seem to keep them from jabbering on in front of us. And I may have forgotten to mention to ’em that we both speak Spanish.” He grinned. “Figured the more we looked like turistas, the better off we’d be.”
“Mi padre es un bastardo elegante,” Junior said.
Ainsworth smiled. “You’re right about that, boy. I’m what you might call a wolf in hick’s clothing.”
They both got a good laugh out of that one as Vargas stared at the patch of earth where the body had lain. After several weeks, whatever blood there’d been had been absorbed by the dirt and brush and blown away by the wind and was no longer visible. But Vargas had worked a few crime scenes in his time, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what the dead woman had looked like.
But then it wasn’t imagination he should be relying on, was it? That would only get him in trouble again.
“What was she wearing?” he asked. “Was she in her nun’s habit?”
Another dry chuckle. “You see any convents around here? She looked like a typical border bunny. Jeans and a T-shirt. First glance, that’s what the policia thought they were. A buncha wetbacks, headed for El Paso.”
Vargas bristled. “Are those the terms they used?”
Ainsworth studied him a moment.
“Look, Nick, you seem like a nice enough guy, but you start gettin’ all holier-than-thou on me, you’re not
