Hailey's War

“Listen,” I said, quickly moving on, “I lost all my personal stuff, too. I’m going to need a new key to the room.”

“The room?”

“My stuff’s still up there, isn’t it?”

My Wheelock’s, my birth certificate, the picture of my father, my class ring, and cadet sword. Irreplaceable things. I didn’t have any rental contract with Shay. If he’d assumed I wasn’t coming back, and had pitched my things into the trash, I probably didn’t have any legal recourse.

Shay let me wonder a long moment. Then he said, “Yeah, it is. I didn’t think you were coming back, and I kept meaning to look into the law about how long I had to keep your stuff, but I never got around to it, and it seemed easier to store it up there than anywhere else.”

“Thanks.”

He said, “What about the rent, by the way?” He kicked his legs up on his desk. He was wearing shorts with sandals, revealing the impressive undiminished muscles of his legs. “I’m full up on riders, so I can’t let you pay it off that way,” he said.

“No problem,” I said. I pulled out the two thousand dollars I had from Serena, kept in a rubber-banded roll. “I’m two months behind, right?” I began counting it out, enjoying the slight ripple of disbelief on Shay’s face. For all he knew, I’d been laid up and not working for two months. He hadn’t expected me to be flush; in fact, he’d probably wanted me to grovel for the chance to work.

When he brought the spare key, he said, “Look, if you’re around a lot, maybe there’ll be some work I can throw your way. You know how it is.”

I understood why he was hedging. Shay always had new people walking in the door wanting to ride, but often they lost interest when they learned what demanding work messengering really was. Shay always needed riders he knew were reliable.

The truth was, I didn’t know how much time the search for Nidia would leave me. And after two months of immobility, I wasn’t sure I was in any shape for the street. But there was no point in antagonizing Shay. The most likely scenario in my search for Nidia was that I’d never find out who shot me or why, the money would run out, and then I’d be nothing but an unemployed bike messenger.

“Sure,” I said, and took the key.

twenty

Herlinda Lopez’s house in Oakland was already dark at half past eight at night, which was when I got there on foot, walking from the nearest BART station. At first glance, I thought maybe she and her kids had gone to bed quite early. Then I noticed that the geranium on the front step had turned brown, and the little strip of lawn was like straw.

The garage door had a row of narrow windows in it, just at sight level for an average man. I walked up the driveway, trying to amble casually as if I belonged there, then I stood on tiptoe to look in.

There was no car inside.

Maybe they were out. Maybe they’d never owned a car. It wasn’t as if I’d looked in the garage when-

“Can I help you with something?”

I turned. The woman watching me at the end of the Lopez driveway was short and dark-skinned, but not Hispanic. Her accent was East Indian, or something close to it.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for the Lopezes.”

“You’re looking for them in their garage?” she said skeptically.

“Uh, not really,” I said, walking back down the driveway. “I’m not so much looking for them as for a friend of mine, Nidia Hernandez. Did you meet her while she was staying here?”

The neighbor shook her head.

“I thought the Lopezes might know where she’s living now,” I said.

“They don’t live here anymore. You’re not from this neighborhood, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Mrs. Lopez went missing,” she said.

“Missing? When?”

“About two months ago.”

Two months.

She continued: “The kids went to live with someone else. The house has been empty awhile.”

I said, “Has anyone but me been around here, asking for Nidia?”

She said, “I didn’t even know there was somebody by that name living here. Even the police didn’t mention her.” Her lips thinned slightly in suspicion. “Who did you say you were?”

“Just a friend of Nidia’s. My name is Hailey Cain.”

“I have to go in now,” she said, nodding toward the house next door. “Be careful out here. It’s late to be walking.”

MacArthur Station was probably my favorite place in the Bay Area. It was BART’s main transfer station, a raised platform right in the middle of a tangle of freeways. From the platform, you could see the campanile of UC Berkeley, the Oakland hills, the towers that surrounded Jack London Square. You could do a lot worse with your evening than to spend a little of it at MacArthur Station, taking a breath and letting the world roll off your back.

Except I kept thinking about one thing: I sincerely hoped that all the shit that was gonna go down in the Lopezes’ neighborhood had gone down already, because if any of the guys from the tunnel came around doing cleanup work, and they talked to the neighbor lady, I’d laid it right out there: Hailey Cain, looking for Nidia Hernandez. Without that, the would-be assassins would have no reason to think I was still alive.

Sometimes I didn’t really think things through.

At home, I took the Finlandia out of my little refrigerator, cracked the seal, and drank. Then I called Serena and told her what I’d learned.

“I’m pretty sure Mrs. Lopez is dead,” I said. I was standing near the window, looking down at the street. “If she realized she was in danger and left town, she wouldn’t have left her kids in danger. I think the guys from the tunnel picked her up, found out what she knew, and killed her so she couldn’t warn anyone.”

“God,” Serena said. “This is getting serious, Hailey.” Like me nearly dying in Mexico and then later jumping her with a boning knife was all light sparring.

“What do you think she knew?”

“Well, where Nidia and I were going, for one thing,” I said. “I’d wondered how, if they were just tailing Nidia and me, they knew to get ahead of us and set up that trap in the tunnel. This answers that. Herlinda Lopez knew about the village.” I played with the drawstring of the blinds. “If Nidia told her something else, like what all of this is about, I still don’t know what that was. That’s the same guessing game we’ve been playing for days.”

I tipped my head back and drank again, the vodka cool and antiseptic on my tongue.

“You still there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking, this doesn’t make me feel good about cousin Lara being unaccounted for. Maybe she really did fight with her mother, but she knows the stuff Mrs. Lopez knew, maybe more, and recent events are proving that’s not a safe position to be in.”

Serena said, “Be careful, okay?”

“I don’t know how to do that and still find anything out,” I told her. “Being careful would be forgetting all about this. Either I’m going to do this or I’m not. In fact…”

“In fact, what?”

I drank again, then leaned on the window frame and looked down at the street. Cars shuttled back and forth,