The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

– Web.

She held up the bullet.

– This isn't from my gun.

She set it on the dash.

I stared at the bullet.

– Well. Good.

She dragged fingers through her hair.

– But if you got that bullet from Jaime, it's from one of my dad's guns. And I did drag you into things. And I was involved with Harris and those guys.

I slapped my forehead.

– Awww, man! I knew it.

– Listen.

– This is fucked.

– Listen, goddamn it!

I listened.

She stared out at the spray-painted wall and I listened.

– Web, my dad, he was, he was great. A great dad. But he was a dirty businessman. No, that's not true. He was a criminal. A smuggler. And I knew. For a long time. And not just almonds. Other things.

An eighteen-wheeler washed past, its wind rocking the Apache on its shocks.

She watched it disappear down the ramp.

– People. Human trafficking.

She went through her clothes.

– I'm out of cigarettes.

She opened the ashtray and found the longest butt she could. She fitted it to her lips and blew through it, then lit it, and the cab filled with smoke.

– Chinese. These people, poor as hell. Poor as. We don't have a frame of reference. They just want a new life. Or something. Freedom. Or something. I don't know. They get locked inside a cargo container. Forty, fifty people. Two weeks on the ocean. A chem toilet. Packaged food. Bottled water. Sometimes, their container gets loaded out of sequence.

She cracked a window and some of the smoke drifted free.

– The people who set this up, they try to arrange it so these cans get loaded onto the ships last, at the top of the stacks. In the air. Sometimes something happens. A can gets mixed up, ends up loading in the hold instead of the deck, buried under dozens of other cans. The heat. No air.

She dropped a spent match out the window crack.

– One time that happened with a can my dad had helped to set up. They all died. Forty.

She looked at me.

– And I found out about that. When he started getting sick, I began taking care of some of the business for him, and I found out about that.

She looked away from me.

– But I didn't. You know, I never did anything. About that. Except I had to talk to him. I. Jesus. It was. He was my dad and he'd been involved in this awful thing and I never. I mean, how was that possible? How did he live? Right? I couldn't begin to fathom how he could get up and go to work and, and he was still smuggling. After that. Like. So. And I thought, Maybe I'm wrong. I have to be wrong. He couldn't have done that. He couldn't have been responsible for those people and let them die and hid it and never had it show. Because he didn't, you know? Let it show. In himself. I could look at the dates, after I put it together, see when it happened, remember that I was fifteen, remember how there was never a change in how he behaved at home, around me. So I had to be wrong. Because people can't be like that.

She took a drag.

– So I asked him.

She exhaled through the crack, into the air outside.

– I asked him, I asked him if it was true.

She watched the cigarette burn for a while, got tired of watching.

– And he told me it was. He told me he didn't do it anymore. That he'd stopped after that. But it had happened. Those people, they come over, they promise to work for someone, pay off the fifty thousand dollars it costs to get here. They become slaves. They go from these miserable lives, to worse. And some die horribly. But he said, he promised, that he didn't do it anymore. Like that made it better.

A crease formed between her eyes.

– And I told him what I thought of that.

She stuck her thumbnail in the crease and pressed till the flesh around it turned white.

– That night he killed himself.

She pressed harder.

– Which could have been his plan all along. Or not. His note didn't spec-ify

She looked at the butt in her hand, frowned, rolled the window down a little more and tossed it out.

– He was wrong about that whole blowing through the filter thing. Doesn't make it any better at all.

She looked at me.

– So where to now?

I started the truck.

I could have told her about her dad's continued interest in human trafficking. I could have told her what else he might have been thinking about when he wrote that note. But I didn't much see the point. She was going to know soon enough that he'd broken that promise. And I didn't feel like being the guy to tell her.

So instead I headed up the 110 toward home.

– I was getting these calls, these guys I knew my dad had a deal going with. He'd gotten involved with these truckers or something. It was a quick thing, I guess. Cash. A lot of it. And Dad, he liked the fast action, so he took it on. And now they called and I told them he was dead and they started freaking out. Threatening to go to the cops and. I don't know. I should have realized they wouldn't do that, but I was. Confused. I didn't. The cops. They would have dug into everything once they found out Dad was involved in that. I mean, these days, post 9/11, any kind of smuggling and I figured they'd dig up his whole life. I didn't want people to know. What had happened before. I didn't want them to know I had known. And that I'd confronted him. And what happened after. I.

She jammed the heels of her hands against her eyes and pressed.

I took the interchange to the 10 West, the traffic loop circling, a lone apartment building jutting high enough from its center for me to be able to see into an uncovered window on the top floor, a glimpse of a woman in front of a vanity mirror, rubbing away the day's makeup.

Soledad uncovered her eyes, looked around.

– Where are we?

I pointed north.

– I need to make a stop.

– Jaime stole the gun.

She was staring out the window at the gated faces of the businesses along Fairfax.

– I mean, I assume he did. He knew my dad had two. A set of them. Those pistols. They were fancy or something. Dad knew Jaime liked that kind of shit and showed them to him once. After I called and asked if he could help with the truckers and their fucking almonds and he came over, he must have stolen it from Dad's desk. The one the cops hadn't taken. The one Dad hadn't used.

We passed the Silent Movie Theater just before Melrose. Her Grave Mistake on the marquee.

Soledad read it and turned and smiled at me.

– Now that's funny.

– I was with him at the motel. When I called you to clean up after Talbot. I didn't take a cab down there. I went with him to meet the guys to make sure Jaime didn't completely screw things up. I mean, by then I was a little more clearheaded. Fuck. If it had just been a matter of sending the almonds on their way, I could have done