A False Dawn

THIRTY-ONE

I saw a tall figure approaching. The figure wore a Mardi Gras mask and pushed a dressmaker’s dummy in a wheelchair down a dark, brick alley. Homeless people rummaged silently through garbage spilling from cans, the trash littering the alley. Smoke drifted up from crushed boxes and food waste smoldering in a steel drum. Two homeless men stood by the open barrel, warming hands black from street filth. I ran down the wet, timeworn bricks. Running toward a police car at the far end of the alley. The pulse of cherry red light bounced off a wall scrawled with graffiti and a body lying in the rain. I couldn’t get my footing on the wet bricks. Slipping. Falling hard. The taste of blood across my tongue.

I sat straight up in the hard bed. My T-shirt was soaked in sweat. I looked around to gain my bearings. Sheets of rain drummed against the window, and the bluish light cast from the Lakeside Inn sign illuminated the room with a surreal feel of calm in the blue eye of the storm.

Earlier, around ten p.m., I had to wake the desk clerk to get a room. It was now 3:37 a.m. The air conditioner rattled, blowing lukewarm air that smelled like it came from a blow dryer with a burnt hair trapped inside.

The thin blanket reeked of stale cigarette smoke and clothes that had been kept in the trunk of a car for weeks. I climbed out of the cot disguised as a bed and stood next to the window. The motel was 1950s circa. All twenty rooms faced the parking lot, a lot dotted with potholes and flattened beer cans. Cigarette butts floated in holes pooled in rainwater.

The taste in my mouth was similar to wet ashes. At that moment, I wanted two ounces of Irish whiskey. I watched the skinny fingers of rainwater roll down the glass. The letters in the Lakeside Inn sign pulsated vacancy in a neon rain.

Dawn was still a few hours away, but I knew sleep wouldn’t come again tonight. The funk of the room was oppressive with the yellow walls, the burnt orange carpet spotted with cigarette burns, and the smell of night sweats that Clorox couldn’t erase.

I washed my face, brushed the taste of fungus out of my mouth, dressed, tucked my Glock under my shirt, and stepped out into the rainy indigo night.

Twenty minutes later I was driving down a desolate country road, watching lightning rupture the dark, sending a strobe of light across the fields of tomatoes and cucumbers. I glanced at the windshield wipers for a moment, wondering where the killer was at that instant. I was now a bounty hunter with no contract except the one I made to the girl I’d found.

I drove toward the migrant camp. I didn’t know why, but I just drove in that direction. Maybe the closer I got to where I thought the first victim came from, the more I’d find something that would fit in the puzzle. I felt that Gomez, Ortega, Davis and the Brennens were part of the chain of events that caused the deaths.

I pulled the Jeep off the road, parked it behind a small clump of pines, and walked in the rain toward the camp. Even in the drizzle, I could smell the odor of burnt garbage before I got to the migrant camp. I pushed my way through a perimeter of wet banana trees and scrub pines. All of the trailers, except the one I assumed was a store, were dark silhouettes.

I started to cross the road, which was muddy and flowing in torrents of rainwater, when I saw headlights coming. I ducked behind the dumpster and waited. An old pickup truck lumbered into the camp, its tires splashing through the mud and water. The driver stopped in front of the camp store. When the passenger-side door opened, the interior light turned on, I could see that three men were in the truck. One got out and unlocked the door to the store, entering and turning on the lights. The driver then drove toward the two converted school buses parked in a clearing between the rows of trailers.

A second pickup truck, a new model, drove into the camp. I could tell that Silas Davis was behind the wheel. A Lincoln Navigator, driven by Juan Gomez, followed his truck. He parked in front of the store and got out. His cousin, Hector Ortega, wasn’t with him. Gomez entered the store while Davis went from trailer to trailer, unlocking each door. Even in the rain, I could hear him shout. “Let’s go! People, get the hell up!”

A minute or so later, weary farm workers, stiff and tired, spilled out of their housing, walking to the buses, their diesel engines idling, fumes belching an acrid smell.

The night was yielding to light in the eastern sky. I slipped into the tomato fields behind the trailers and went about fifty feet down one row. I wanted to retrieve a few soil samples to have them tested. Just maybe I could prove the soil from the shoe Max found came from here. A remote chance, but worth trying.

I took a Ziploc bag from my pocket, knelt down and used my fingers to scoop some of the soil into the bag. I moved a few rows over and scooped up a handful of soil into a second bag. The gray clouds moved like giant tumbleweeds rolling through the sky, their bellies blooming with the pulse of scarlet hiding the morning light. The clouds opened to reveal a hint of sunrise, a ray of illuminating rows of tomato plants that seemed to stretch to the ocean. Then the opening in the clouds closed and the shawl of a brooding storm closed like curtains drawing around the fields.

Some of the plants were heavy with green tomatoes. I saw areas where a few tomatoes had dropped from the plants, scattered down the long rows.

Something stood out among the green tomatoes on the ground. It was red. A woman’s shoe. At that moment, it looked so small and so abandoned in this field of a false dawn.