The Arraignment

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I take I-5 south from the Coronado bridge and accelerate into the middle lane, past Logan Heights. At National, I take the freeway off-ramp and head east. In my rearview mirror I can see the giant vapor lights from the naval shipyard as they infuse their eerie orange glow into the looming cloud deck that hangs over the bay.

It is nearly nine o’clock. Midweek traffic at this hour of the night is light. A fine mist covers my windshield.

The streets are empty except for a few souls wandering aimlessly. The only businesses lit up at this hour are liquor stores and a few taverns.

It takes twenty minutes to find the street Espinoza mentioned during our last conversation at the federal lockup. I have confirmation that at least this much of what he told me is true.

The neighborhood exudes the kind of aura picked up by a sixth sense that lingers and lifts the hair on the back of my neck. It is not a place I’d want to walk my dog at night unless the pup has sharp teeth, likes red meat, and can outrun a bullet.

I see lights at the next corner, so I slow down. As I get closer, I see some teenagers, one of them in a dark hooded sweatshirt leaning into the passenger window of a car stopped in the middle of the street halfway into the intersection. The car is rocking to the beat of salsa jive from a sound system that vibrates the roots of my teeth whenever it hits bass.

The kid in the sweatshirt and his two friends check me out as I drive by. Maybe I’m a customer or maybe I’m undercover. They lose interest as I head down the street.

I’m moving slowly, looking for street numbers. The drizzle and the lack of streetlights make it impossible. I check the scrap of paper on the console next to me, the notes I’d made following my meeting with Espinoza at the lockup earlier in the week. This is the place. Espinoza was cryptic, but he did give up some information.

According to him, the man Jaime had an alternate hangout whenever he was in town. He had gone there several times for meetings and on two occasions did not return at night. Espinoza told me that he drove Jaime to this place once, just before he left San Diego for Mexico. Espinoza dropped him off and said the number was either 406 or 408, he couldn’t remember. But he told me that he saw the man that Jaime met. The guy was tall, over six feet, and skinny. Like a pole, according to Espinoza. The man was Hispanic and had a straggly dark beard, black hair, and wore a dirty gray felt hat. He watched this man talk to Jaime for a few seconds out in front of the house before the two of them went inside and Espinoza drove off. The only other thing he could remember was an older-model Chevy Blazer parked along the side of the house. He said he remembered it because the large window in the back was smashed in and someone had covered it with a large piece of black plastic wrapped in duct tape around the window frame.

I drive past kids’ toys on the sidewalk. Over the front door on a house near the end of the block, I see what appear to be three rusted metal numerals nailed to the frame in the shadows. I squint, trying to penetrate the darkness. It looks like 486.

I drive on, and this time I turn at the corner, pull a short distance up the cross street, and park at the curb, turning off my lights.

I had changed from my suit and tie at the house. I’m wearing an old pair of jeans, a navy blue slipover shirt, and a faded denim jacket I use for outdoor work. On my feet are a pair of running shoes.

I step out of the car, lock the door, then check my watch. It’s almost nine-thirty.

It takes only a few seconds to make my way back to the corner and head down the street. I stop two doors down at the house where I saw the street number over the door. The drizzle has turned to a light mist, so in the dark I cannot see rain falling. Still I can feel wet pin pricks of moisture on my forehead and the back of my neck. I turn the collar of my jacket up and walk down the street. Moving slowly on foot, and being closer to the house, up on the sidewalk, I now have no difficulty making out the number over the door. As I approach the bottom of the steps, the tin numbers 486 are clearly visible above the front door. Even numbers are on this side of the street. Unless Espinoza has sent me on a goose chase, the house I’m looking for is on this side.

I hear the hot salsa and see the red taillights from the vehicle a block and a half down still stopped in the intersection. I move quickly down the sidewalk until I’m two doors from the end of the block, when suddenly a beam of light bounces off the wet pavement in the center of the street. The headlights are coming from behind me and moving fast. I skip across a damp patch of grass in front of one of the houses and duck under the front stairway. I have no desire to be silhouetted from behind for the crowd around the car, now just a little more than a block away.

I take a deep breath and settle under the stairs for a couple of seconds to get my bearings. Just as I’m about to step out, I look behind me. There on a door leading to a ground-level apartment is the number 406A. It is stenciled in faded block letters. I can hear the muted sounds of a television from somewhere inside, either upstairs or beyond the door behind me.

I step back out to the sidewalk and check the car with the salsa crowd still in the intersection at the end of the next block. Another vehicle has now joined them, pulling up behind the first car. The guys on foot have now divided forces, talking commerce through the open windows of both vehicles.

I look back at the house. There’s a large bush against the front. Behind it partially concealed is a ground-floor window through which I can see the flickering translucent blue light of a television reflected against the pulled-down shade inside.

I look to my left at the house next door, and notice that there’s a ground-level apartment under its front staircase as well. Running in from the sidewalk and dead-ending against this other house is a double strip of concrete each a little wider than the width of a car tire. Between them is a little gravel and what is now wet, packed hardpan with a light rainbow sheen of motor oil floating in the puddles. This driveway dead-ends into the front of what used to be a garage, now finished off as the exterior wall of a downstairs apartment.

I step across the two strips of pavement, through the grass and look at the door under the stairs of the second house. It is numbered 408A.

I walk back out to the sidewalk and check 406. There is no driveway on the other side. Here the long blades of grass on both sides of the stairs stick up like spikes. I’m not a gardener, but it doesn’t take an expert to tell that these weeds and crabgrass have not been crushed under the wheels of a heavy vehicle anytime recently. Nor is there a ramp through the curb to the sidewalk.

If Espinoza was telling the truth, and his memory wasn’t clouded as to the Blazer with its broken rear window and where it was parked, I’m betting that 408 is the address for the man with the beard and the felt hat.

I look over again. The downstairs apartment appears dark, as least as much of it as I can see through a small side window on the house. I back away, all the way to the sidewalk, and check the action in the intersection to my right one more time. There’s a regular traffic jam there now. Enough cars that I can’t count them all. A land office business, some coming, some going, music and the sound of voices, what passes for the commerce of the night in this neighborhood. I check my watch. It’s now after ten.

Espinoza didn’t say whether Jaime and the other man, the one in the felt hat, went up the stairs or underneath them when they went inside. Not knowing the layout, I could not anticipate the question or think to ask.

From the sidewalk I check the upstairs windows at the front of 408. On the first floor one of them shows the glow of a television. Another smaller window, perhaps a bathroom, has a light on inside.

On the top floor everything is dark. I walk down the sidewalk twenty feet or so and check the left side of the house. There are windows, but they’re all dark. I go back the other way. One light toward the rear on the first floor. I can’t tell how many apartments there are.

I check to make sure no one is watching from a window or one of the dark porches across the street. I would never hear the end of it from Harry if somebody called the cops and he had to come down and post bail on a peeping and prowling charge.

From what I can see, it looks clear, so I climb the stairs and find the mailbox on the porch. Underneath each slot is a name on a slip of paper slid into a groove, some of them typed, some written in pencil or pen. I take out my house keys. Attached to the key ring is a small light. I press the button on the side of this, and the muted red beam flashes on the names.

APT. A: JOHNSON

APT. B: HERNANDEZ

No initials.

APT. C: ROSAS, JAMES

APT. D: WASHINGTON, LEROY

APT. E: RUIZ, R.

APT. F: MORENO

Again no initials.

APT. G: SALDADO, H.

Using the light and a small notepad from my pocket I make notes with a pencil. Completing this task, I head quickly down the stairs. I retrace my steps to the car, and in less than a minute, I’m parked across the street half a block from the house with the driveway. I park between two other vehicles facing toward the house where I can see the front porch and the apartment underneath.

I check my watch. It is almost ten-thirty. Sarah should be getting home any minute. She has a key. I told her not to wait up. At fifteen, she is a good kid, straight As, and quiet. She is the one person I think about before accepting any cases I suspect might involve risk or before doing foolish things such as I am doing tonight.

I settle in, one eye on the cross traffic a block away. For some reason all of this business seems to approach in the perpendicular direction of the cross street. Why I don’t know, but it keeps the approaching headlights to a minimum so that slumped down in the driver’s seat it’s not likely anyone is going to see me.

I snooze a little, one eye open. Every once in a while as business becomes thick at the intersection, traffic jams up, and a car will turn this way, forcing me to slide down a little deeper into the seat.

I don’t know how long I’ve been dozing, but both eyes are closed when I wake to the sound of tires squealing on pavement. I open my eyes and try to quickly gain my bearings. The street vendors a block down have all disappeared. All I see is the fading glow of taillights from the last car that turned and headed away from me. Within two seconds, they turn on another street and are gone. The intersection is now completely deserted.

I sit, slumped in the front seat, wondering what’s happened. It doesn’t take long before the answer arrives. It comes in the form of a police cruiser trolling slowly through the intersection, its light bar flashing disconcerting strobes. The cops inside use their spot to light up the bushes and the shadows against the house on the corner. They do a slow drive through the intersection and check the front of the house on the opposite corner. They keep moving slowly, and suddenly, as quickly as they arrived, the reflection of colored light is gone.

I continue to watch the intersection for several minutes. Nothing. No action. It appears the cops have scared them off.

Then all of a sudden, vehicle lights round the corner behind me. I slump down deep into the seat so that I am now mostly under the steering wheel, my legs folded at the knees up under the steering column. My head and shoulders are leaning off toward the passenger seat, so I am hunched down below the driver-side window.

The car approaches slowly. I hear its wheel crushing gravel on the pavement outside. Now I can make out the call signals on their police band even with their windows rolled up.

They strafe the three parked cars with the spotlight. Jets of streaking bright white flood through the windows, and suddenly the light bar comes on again. If they catch me lying on the floor, parked a block from Super Narco, they are likely to take every screw out my car looking for drugs. They will take my name off my license whether they find anything or not. Within twenty-four hours I’ll be drawing curious glances from prosecutors and clerks in the courthouse. Judges will be peering into my eyes, looking for that glassy stare. God help me if I show up sleepy in court some morning, like tomorrow.

The patrol car stops next to the vehicle parked behind mine. A door opens. The police band is now loud enough that I can hear the static between calls. Footsteps outside.

He pulls on the door latch of the car behind me. It slips out of his fingers. Locked. He won’t have this problem if he tries mine. It’s too late to lock it. Besides I know he’s looking through the window with a flashlight.

I get a mental image. He pops the door and finds me unconscious under the steering wheel. They have to call for the Jaws of Life to pry me out.

I can tell he is checking carefully now, looking through the windows with a flashlight. A beam moves around through my rear window.

“Jimmie.”

“Yeah. I see him.”

My heart is pounding.

A car door slams with a thud. Suddenly the engine hits on all cylinders. Tires screech next to my ear, just outside the door. In an instant, it’s dark again, quiet. I hold my breath, waiting. It seems like an eternity. Probably fifteen seconds. I ease my head up, like a turtle coming out of its shell. I shimmy up past the steering wheel, wondering how I fit beneath it. The mysteries of adrenaline. My lower back is killing me.

Near the intersection of action I see the patrol car stopped, the light bar sparkling in its disorienting rhythm of red and blue. Spread across the front of the police unit is the kid in the dark-hooded sweatshirt. The hood is now pulled down so that a buzz cut is visible, dark stubble on his scalp.

One of the cops spreads his feet, then speed cuffs the suspect’s hands behind his back. His partner is gingerly going through the guy’s pockets.

The cop doing the search keeps depositing little discoveries on the hood of the car, poking different ones every once in a while with a finger, examining it under the glare of a flashlight like a miner checking for nuggets.

The other cop is down on his haunches now, feeling around the kid’s ankles. Maybe looking for a gun.

Then suddenly, Eureka! I can almost hear him. When he stands up he’s holding a roll of bills from inside the kid’s sock, along with what appears to be some product, some little plastic packets. I can see them glitter in the beam of the spotlight that is now focused on the hood of the patrol car.

Another police car, a backup unit, approaches from the opposite direction. Within seconds there’s a convention of blue standing in the middle of the intersection, light bars flashing.

They continue searching the kid. One of the cops comes up with a shoe in one hand and a sock in the other. He looks in the shoe and flips it on the ground. He starts shaking the sock. Little white packets fall out all over the hood of the car.

His colleague keeps shaking the sock. Things keep falling out. A regular horn of plenty. There are smiles all around from the guys in uniform.

Another patrol car pulls up. I’m starting to get nervous. They may camp here for the night, decide to go on a safari looking for the guy’s friends.

Enough excitement for one night. I check my watch. It is now nearly one in the morning. The house across the street is pitched in darkness all across the front. The glow of the television in the upstairs window is gone. I’m wasting my time. Espinoza is jerking my chain. He’s probably given me the address of one of his coyote caves, a place where he deposits illegals, part of the underground railroad to the promised land.

I watch as the cops put the kid into the backseat of one of the patrol cars. Ten minutes later, it begins to mist again, and the street party breaks up. Light bars extinguished, they head off in different directions. No doubt they figure they’ve chilled the action at the intersection for the night.

I reach for the key and I’m just about to turn the ignition, when I see the silhouette of a figure across the street.

He has stepped out of the shadows near the front door where I couldn’t see him. He leans out, looks to see if the cops are gone. I can see him from the thighs up, as he leans against the solid three-foot-wall of the porch railing, both hands slipped into the pockets of his jeans. He is tall, slender, the dark outline of his head rounded to a point. He is wearing a hat to ward off the rain, a felt crusher with the brim turned down.