Down Among the Dead Men

46

Rojas wasn’t in his office.

Even though Vargas had gotten a 3:00 A.M. start, the drive to Juarez had been interminably long and almost unbearably hot, and by the time he reached the state police station he felt as if he’d taken a bath in his own sweat.

The bandage on his head had become so drenched that he’d pulled it off and left it off, simply covering the damage with his new baseball cap. The bleeding seemed to have stopped anyway.

Parking his car, he went inside to blessed air-conditioning and found the homicide unit. The office looked the same as before: A reception counter adjacent to a waist-high entry gate. Dingy beige walls decorated with newspaper clippings and photos of wanted suspects. A half-dozen cluttered desks butted up against one another.

Today, they were all empty except one, where a young detective was leaning back in his chair, talking on a cell phone. Vargas remembered seeing him the last time he was here, but they’d never been introduced.

He waited, trying not to listen in on the conversation. The detective was speaking Spanish, but Vargas had no trouble understanding him. Growing up, Vargas had been trapped in a kind of limbo between two cultures, raised in a country that spoke English by parents who rarely ever did. A lot of the time he found himself thinking in Spanish, but in these last few days he’d been bouncing back and forth between the United States and Mexico so frequently that he’d begun to blend the two languages, sometimes forgetting where he was.

“Come on, Carmelita,” the detective said. “You know she means nothing to me. She asked for a ride, so I gave her one.”

He nodded to Vargas and held up a finger, indicating he’d be with him in a moment.

“No, baby, that’s not true. If I wanted to be with her, I would have stayed married to her. Look, I gotta go. You still want me to come by tonight?” He listened a moment, then smiled. “That’s my girl. See you around eleven.”

He clicked off, looked up at Vargas. He was a handsome kid with a wisp of hair above his lip that was supposed to be a mustache. He kept his piece in a shoulder holster, trying hard to look like Steve McQueen in Bullitt but not quite pulling it off.

“You have a girlfriend?” he asked.

Vargas shook his head. “Not lately.”

“Do yourself a favor and keep it that way. I give my ex a ride home, and now I’ll be spending the night apologizing for it. Women are nothing but trouble.”

It was Vargas’s experience-with few exceptions-that women were only trouble if you treated them that way, but he wasn’t about to argue with the guy. Someone his age wouldn’t get it anyway.

Instead, Vargas said, “I’m looking for Rojas.”

The detective got to his feet, came over to the counter. “You’re the reporter, right? You were here last week.”

“That’s right,” Vargas said. “Is he around?”

“Not at the moment, no. You here about the casa murders again?”

“Yes.”

“That case is as good as dead. Not one lead. I did some of the footwork on it, and we got nothing.”

“Maybe I can help you with that.”

The detective’s eyebrows went up. “You have information?”

“Yes,” Vargas said, “but I’ll only talk to Rojas.”

“I told you, he’s not here. Why don’t you tell me what you know and I’ll-”

“Not gonna happen,” Vargas said, making it clear by the tone of his voice that he was leaving no wiggle room. It was Rojas or nothing.

The detective nodded, then held up a finger again. Moving back to his desk, he picked up his cell phone, dialed, then waited a few moments before speaking quietly into it.

Vargas couldn’t hear him this time but knew what was being said.

After a few moments, the detective clicked off, then stuffed the phone into his back pocket.

“You hungry?”

Vargas shrugged. Truth was, he was famished, but he saw no reason to point that out. “I could eat.”

“Good,” the detective said. “Rojas has invited us to breakfast.”