The Dead Women of Juarez

“What happened?”

The cut over Sevilla’s eye was swollen and his vision reduced to a slash. He ran his tongue thickly over his teeth. They were all there. When he flexed his hands he knew his arms weren’t broken but his knee was a white- hot coal of agony. He would have to stand to know whether he could even walk.

“Give me something to drink,” Sevilla managed.

Ice jingled and whisky was poured. Sevilla knew it by scent before it touched his lips. The drink was hot and healing in his stomach and reached out for his other pains to smother them in coils of soothing warmth. He swallowed more and finished the tumbler and then sucked an ice cube until it, too, was gone.

He was ready to sit up. Enrique helped Sevilla prop himself against the ruins of a gutted sofa. Stuffing was scattered everywhere in tufts and gobbets. A slowly turning ceiling fan stirred the mess.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Have you seen the place?” Sevilla asked.

“Yes. It’s all like this.”

“Then it’s done.”

“What do you mean?”

Sevilla wanted to close his eyes and sleep again. Just the act of sitting upright drained him. But the bed would be stripped and broken, too, and sometime the housekeeper would want access and everything would be revealed. In his mind Sevilla was packing already, planning his retreat.

“The picture.”

“It’s here,” Enrique said. He pressed it into Sevilla’s hand. It was out of the frame completely now and flecked with blood Sevilla knew was his own. Tears threatened to well up. His eyes burned.

“More whisky.”

“Not until we talk.”

“Goddammit, Enrique, what is there to talk about? It’s over. They know.”

“How could they know? What happened today?”

Sevilla shook his head. The gesture made his spine hurt at the base of his skull. “I thought I had them fooled, but I must not have. It was Sebastian. He let his father keep me busy while he…”

A wave of the hand encompassed the suite. Everything was broken, even the pots of the plants, their dirt scattered.

“How could he possibly know?”

“Maybe I ate with the wrong fork,” Sevilla said. He didn’t laugh at his own joke and Enrique only frowned. “Damn me, I’m a fool.”

Enrique let Sevilla have the bottle of single-malt whisky. He stalked the shattered rooms while Sevilla drowned the rest of his pain in spirits. Outside, the sun was going down. At the pool all the mothers and children would be out playing in the cool evening air before dinner. The windows were too far to drag himself.

“There’s no way they could have known,” Enrique said at last. “There’s nothing here.”

“Exactly,” Sevilla agreed. “There’s nothing here. No backstory, no paper trail, no nothing. I thought I could convince them with my word. There was no way. It was stupid.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” Enrique returned. “You had no way to know.”

“I knew I was too old for this kind of game,” Sevilla said. “It should have been you. Sebastian might have trusted someone closer to his own age. But I thought… I don’t know what I was thinking. That they would confess to me? ‘Yes, I had Paloma Salazar killed. I ordered the death of her brother, her lover. I did it all.’”

The whisky was fully in Sevilla’s brain now, soaking up his thoughts and pushing away worry. In a way he was clearer than before. His body was almost numb. If he drank more he would be entirely numb and unconscious on the floor. It took all his will to set the bottle aside.

“If they knew you were a policeman, why do this?”

“They didn’t know; they mistook me for a confidence man. In a way, I suppose I’m lucky.”

If there was anything else to say, Sevilla couldn’t think of what it might be, so he merely sat and waited for the minutes to pass. It was easier with the whisky in him. How many times had he done the same thing on his own, sitting in his car with the bottle between his legs, drifting on the currents of his own languid thoughts?

“I did what you asked,” Enrique said at long last. “I followed Ortiz all day. I know where he’ll be on Friday: at the palenque with his birds. We could lean on him. He’s the connection, like you said. He’ll tell us what we want to know.”

“He’ll tell us nothing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because… I don’t know.”

Enrique helped Sevilla to his feet and into the bedroom. The men had torn the bed practically in half and gouged deep wounds in the mattress. Enrique wrestled the mattress back into place and put Sevilla there to rest. He began to pack. “Tell me everything,” he instructed Sevilla. “Leave nothing out.”

Sevilla did as he was told. He held the picture of Ana and Ofelia tightly, but he never crumpled it. There was no other copy. He was more grateful for this than he was for his life. The men from Madrigal could have taken both from him.

“Now I’ll take you home.”

ELEVEN

SEVILLA RESTED IN HIS OWN BED for a day of nearly unbroken sleep. When he woke the swelling in his eye had subsided and the pain in his knee was bearable. He was in his pajamas, though he didn’t recall changing into them. Enrique put coffee on his bedstand. The man looked alien standing in his bedroom. He seemed bursting to speak; Sevilla saw it all over him.

“How long have you been here?” Sevilla asked.

“A few hours.”

“Get out of my bedroom.”

Looking at himself in the mirror was as shocking as Sevilla expected. A butterfly bandage held the cut over his eye closed, but his face was blotched with deep bruises. A scrape on his nostril was livid.

His body was no better, and when he urinated he did see blood. Washing himself took a long time, but four aspirin taken from a bottle in the medicine cabinet brought the worst aches under control. When he brushed his teeth, his mouth no longer tasted like blood.

Enrique was in the kitchen with coffee of his own. He had buttered toast and half a grapefruit set aside for Sevilla. They ate in silence.

“Marco Rojas, he’s the cousin Madrigal spoke of?” Enrique asked at last.

“I don’t know. Is he?”

“A maternal cousin, yes,” Enrique said.

“How did you find that out?”

“Computers,” Enrique replied. “I checked the records overnight. Gabriel Madrigal and his cousin, Marco Rojas, were both convicted of drug charges and rape in New Mexico. Madrigal overdosed on contraband heroin after three months in prison. Rojas is still there.”

Sevilla put down his spoon. “Rape?”

“Yes,” Enrique said. His eyes gleamed. Sevilla understood.

“You know where Marco Rojas is?”

“A place called Hiatt. A state prison. North of El Paso.”

“You’re already going to go,” Sevilla said.

This was the thing Enrique had been waiting to say. He leaned across the table and the words came quickly: “The government has been trying to bring Rojas back for four years but his lawyers in America have been fighting for him to stay in a Texas prison. I looked, I know that the Rojas family is as wealthy as the Madrigals. If Marco Rojas came back to Chihuahua he would be turned loose in months, maybe weeks. It makes no sense!”

“No, it doesn’t. Unless he fears Madrigal’s wrath. Then there would be no release. He’d die like Esteban Salazar… or end up like Kelly.”