The Dead Women of Juarez

Quintero vanished the card into a pocket of her jacket.

“I should go. I’m sorry about the breakfast. Perhaps some other time,” Quintero said. She turned to leave.

“Of course. I understand. And senora?”

Sevilla caught a faint trace of something passing over Quintero’s face when she stopped, but she smiled and it went away. “Is there something else?”

“Paloma Salazar was a good woman. She worked hard for the dead women of Juarez. That this happened… it’s not right. We owe her the very best for her sacrifice.”

“I assure you she will get nothing less.”

“I will take your word for it,” Sevilla replied.

“Goodbye,” Quintero said.

“Goodbye, senora.”

Sevilla watched Quintero go. When the doors to the emergency room closed behind her, Sevilla walked the pavement to the parking garage, letting the morning sun penetrate him where he was cold inside. He found his car where he left it, but a scrap of paper under the wiper was new.

He expected a nasty note from a doctor angry at the lost space. Instead, the note read, They tried to kill the American.

Sevilla crushed the paper in his hand. He looked left and right, but the garage was still, and even the sound of engines was absent. When he unfolded the note, the words were the same; he was not mistaken.

It occurred to him to use his phone, but he didn’t know who he could call. Quintero was with Kelly and before that she had been with him. The police outside Kelly’s door had all been there when he left, but what about afterward, while Sevilla and Quintero were outside?

This time he folded the note and put it away inside his jacket. He unlocked the car and got behind the wheel, but didn’t put his keys in the ignition. For a long while he sat. He pulled the hood release and got out again.

The engine looked normal. Sevilla lowered himself onto one knee and peered beneath the frame. He felt foolish, but his mind raced ahead of him and he checked the concrete for fluid that might have leaked from a severed line. There was nothing.

He started the car and let it idle for a full minute before putting it into gear and backing out of the space. His eye strayed to the spot beneath the wiper where the note was lodged. He forced himself to feel for strangeness when he depressed the brake, but there was none. His paranoia was embarrassing; out on the street he felt his face reddening though there was no one around to know what he was thinking.

Work and his office were both south, but Sevilla turned east. He fell in behind an American tour bus and into the clogged-heart rhythm of morning traffic through downtown. Already in his imagination he mounted the steps to Kelly’s apartment and got inside. He would begin in the bedroom and work his way out to the front room and the kitchen. Searching the whole apartment would take less than an hour because it was small and Sevilla knew what to do. The drive there would take longer.

Sevilla drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He opened the windows and let the polluted morning air fill the car. He did not play the radio.

FOUR

HE DIDN’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT the way to Kelly’s apartment; he’d driven it many times over the years for his unexpected visits. Not to roust Kelly, but to talk and put a little pressure on, chat by chat. Droplets of water could cut through a boulder, and so it was when it came to cultivating informants. Sevilla hoped Kelly would give one day, because a man like Esteban would never succumb. He was too far inside, while Kelly was always going to be on the outside no matter what else he might aspire to.

Sevilla only had to look at the neighborhood where Kelly settled to know something about him. This place, with its flat-roofed and unremarkable blocks of apartments and little businesses catering to the working poor, was far better than many around Juarez. A neighborhood like this spoke of hope and hanging on to a modest sort of success that the desolation of the colonias had abandoned long ago. Kelly could have gone headfirst into the sewage that streamed constantly from the clubs and bars and brothels, but he chose here instead.

The street was still when Sevilla parked and even the traffic sounds of the city seemed distant when he got out. He did not feel eyes on him because there were no eyes to feel; people minded their own business in a neighborhood like this one. And when there was nothing to hide, strangers weren’t a worry.

He mounted the steps one at a time. He felt heavy, and not just because temperatures were on the rise. When he got to Kelly’s door there would be no one home, and what was left behind was the terrible scene in El Cereso. What he did, Sevilla did for Kelly’s good, but that did not make the burden any lighter.

In America the police might have sealed Kelly’s door with bright yellow tape, but there were no such markers here. Sevilla paused by the railing and looked north. It was possible to see Texas from this spot, though the demarcation between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso was not a prominent one. From this perspective it all seemed washed together along the banks of the Rio Grande in the wake of a flood, with only luck determining who came to rest in the land of opportunity and who was left in Mexico.

Sevilla had a key for Kelly’s apartment. Sevilla paid the apartment manager for it with the idea that he could slip in for a search from time to time. This was how he knew Kelly was clean — except for the motivosa, of course — and how he came to know Kelly better through the evidence Kelly left when he felt no one was paying attention.

Inside, the police had turned Kelly’s home into a scattered mess. Even the few dishes were broken as the cabinets were cleared, dismantled and searched. Sevilla paused in the door, once again taken aback by the spiteful chaos, and then he went in.

He didn’t think to find anything the other police had missed. For all the disdainful talk of the cops across the river, cops in Ciudad Juarez knew how to go about their business. Or at least they could dismantle a suspect’s apartment without leaving any secret behind. Sevilla wanted… he wasn’t certain what he wanted. He simply wanted to be here.

Sevilla drifted from the front room to the bedroom and back again. Out on the rear balcony the heavy bag was unhooked from its spot, dashed to the concrete and slashed open. Stuffing and sawdust drifted from its corpse.

The remains of a sofa cushion were still enough to pad a seat, so Sevilla made himself comfortable where he had done so many times before. He lit a cigarette and looked at his reflection in the cracked face of Kelly’s broken television. It wasn’t here, that essence of Kelly, and being here did not help Sevilla understand.

A shoe scuffed on the doorstep and Sevilla looked over. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

Enrique Palencia lingered in the open doorway as if unsure whether to enter or turn away. He was a young man, seeming younger still despite the little goatee he tended into neat life. With Sevilla watching, Enrique put one foot over the threshold before drawing it back. He had guilt on his face.

“Well, come in if you’re coming in,” Sevilla said. He looked for somewhere to stub out his cigarette, but the sidetable was overturned and the ashtray was gone. Enrique came in and closed the door behind him. Suddenly the front room was very dark.

“I don’t want to disturb you,” Enrique said.

“You aren’t disturbing me. How did you know I was here? Did that pendejo Garcia send you?”

“Captain Garcia doesn’t know where I am. I took the day off.”

Enrique stood awkwardly by the door. Sevilla watched him until the heat of the cigarette nibbled at his fingertips. He put the butt out on the sole of his shoe. Enrique Palencia looked as though he had slept in his clothes not one night, but maybe two.

“You know, I can put up with almost all of it,” Sevilla told Enrique at last. “The things we do… I’ve done worse in my time. And I helped when old cops, wise cops, did terrible things to get at the truth. I’ve smelled the blood. I’ve had it on my hands. Now it’s your turn.”

The young cop didn’t answer. He moved into the kitchenette, crunching over broken glass and shattered dinnerware. He looked in the refrigerator where even the shelves were yanked loose. When he chanced a look in