Accustomed to the Dark (6 page)

Back then, on that first visit to Santa Fe, seven years before I actually moved here, I had climbed up this hill to get some sense of the town, its layout, its physical reality. I suppose I thought that I might, by understanding its geography, somehow understand its spirit. It hadn't worked.

Tonight, maybe, I'd come up here to get some sense of my connection to the place, to this beautiful and tawdry town in the high desert that over the centuries had been home to American Indians, Spanish hidalgos, French trappers, Union soldiers, railroad men, politicians, cowboys, whores, gamblers, gunfighters, artists, writers, speculators, spies, flower children, junkies, remittance men, movie stars, private detectives, real estate agents, crystal gazers, tarot readers, fakirs and fakers, hustlers and grifters and drifters of every persuasion, and even the occasional saint.

And this hadn't worked, either. I felt removed from it all, from the town's past and from its present, from the people who lived in it and from everything they did, and everything they had done. I felt remote and adrift, more a part of the darkness that surrounded the place than a part of the glittering, relentlessly cheerful lights that made it up.

I didn't stay up there for very long. The wind was growing colder. And I was having trouble breathing again.

I did some serious drinking. I ran the Cherokee over to the lot on Water Street, parked it, called the hospital from a pay phone, learned there had been no change, and then hit a couple of nearby bars, places I'd never been to before. Despite the early hour, despite this being a Wednesday, in both bars the smoky air was dense with the buzz and clatter of wall-to-wall people. Most of the people looked maybe twelve years old, their faces bright and mobile and hopelessly unguarded. But they moved with assurance and grace, and they laughed heartily, and they spoke with conviction, and already they had apartments and jobs and serious long-range financial goals. They were getting good at impersonating grown-ups. Soon, like the rest of us, they would forget that it was only an impersonation.

No one was talking about the prison break and the dangers it might represent. Despite their grown-up postures, and impostures, these people were still immortal, and danger of any sort was irrelevant.

I don't remember how much I drank. I thought about Rita. I thought about Rosa and her husband, Robert. I thought about Ernie Martinez. Sitting there at the bar amid the warmth and the crush of young bodies, I grew slowly more remote and adrift, and more bitter. By the time I returned to the car, I was surly. I was also staggering. I shouldn't have driven, but I did. When I reached home, the telephone was ringing. It was Norman Montoya, calling to tell me that he'd located someone who had known Ernie Martinez and Luiz Lucero in the state pen.

7

F
ROM DEEP UNDERWATER
I could hear a distant beckoning chime. The sound insinuated itself around my body, a thin glistening wire, and slowly it grew taut. I couldn't see the faraway surface, but I knew that it shimmered up there like quicksilver, bright and blinding and lethal. I burrowed deeper into the sand, sliding my hands into it, against the grains of it, clutching, squeezing. The chime pulled at me, tugged at me, then abruptly it jerked me loose. Pale yellow sand drifted from the tips of my fingers like clouds of falling stars as I rose upward, slowly, relentlessly.

I opened my eyes and I pushed myself off the bed. Groggy, I fumbled my robe from the dresser and fought my way into it.

I didn't have a hangover. I had drunk so much the night before that my body hadn't had a chance to burn off the alcohol. I was still drunk, and I was feeble and dizzy with it.

I shuffled through the living room to the front door, peered through the peephole, and pulled open the door.

Jimmy McBride looked me up and down and his narrow features went concerned and he said, “Hey, Mr. Croft. I can come back. You want me to come back?”

“No,” I told him. “I want you to come in.”

I stood aside to let him pass and I closed the door.

McBride stood in the center of the room, looking around, nodding at everything with an admiration that needed a little more practice. “Real nice place you got here. Very livable, you know?”

“Yeah. Sit down.”

He sat on the sofa, a small skinny man in stained and wrinkled blue work pants and a wrinkled blue work shirt with an oil company logo on the pocket. His forehead was balding, thin wisps of hair above the shiny scalp forming a spidery outline of his former pompadour, like an afterimage. The genes that had stripped the hair from his head had grown a fine thick crop everywhere else. A single long eyebrow furred the ridge above his close-set brown eyes and his large irregular nose. Stubble darkened his hollow cheeks and his receding chin. A thick black pelt curled up his knobby Adam's apple and spilled over the limp neckband of his gray T-shirt.

He had been sent to prison for beating his three-year-old daughter so badly that he nearly killed her. It hadn't been the first time he'd beaten her. I had met him once or twice, before he went up, and I knew that he wouldn't have come here if he hadn't been frightened into it.

“It's a real shame,” he said, “about what happened to Mrs. Mondragón.” He was sitting forward on the sofa, his thin forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped tightly together. The bony wrist of his left hand was circled by an expandable gold-plated watch band. Coils of black hair were trapped between the tiny golden slats. “It's terrible,” he said, and he shook his head.

I nodded. “I'll be right back,” I told him.

I padded across the carpet, down the hallway into the bathroom. I stood at the sink and threw some cold water on my face, cupped my hands and sucked some up. I toweled myself dry and stared at the mirror. Gray pouches of flesh sagged against my cheekbones, bright red blood vessels forked through the whites of my eyes. I needed some coffee, but it would have to wait. Fear had herded McBride into my living room, and this wasn't the time for me to play Mother Hubbard.

McBride had eased back onto the sofa, but he sat upright when I returned to the room. I sat in the chair opposite him. “Okay,” I said. “What've you got?”

He leaned forward, confidentially. “Well, see, Mr. Croft, what I was told, I was told you'd slip me a little something—you know, a consideration—if I came through for you. Which I plan to do, naturally.”

“A consideration.”

He nodded seriously. “Yeah, right, that's what I was led to believe, yeah.”

“You were misinformed,” I said.

He stared at me blankly for a moment, then he raised his head slightly. “Come on now, Mr. Croft,” he said, his voice thin and wheedling. “You gotta understand my position in this thing. I took time off from work to get over here. I'm supposed to punch in at nine. I got a good job now—over at the Texaco, on Cerrillos?—and my paycheck's gonna get docked.”

That voice of his was squeaking along the edge of my nerves like a Magic Marker on cardboard. I said, “You were told to come here and cooperate. By someone connected to Norman Montoya. You want me to put out the word that you didn't co-operate?”

“Hey,” he said, and raised his hands to show me his palms. They were pale and surprisingly clean. “I'm here, right? I'm co-operating, right? You can't say I'm not cooperating, Mr. Croft.”

“I haven't heard anything so far.”

“I only just got here, just now. But I'm absolutely ready to go with this, you know?”

“So go.”

“Right,” he said. “Sure.” He slapped his breast pocket, took out a crumpled pack of Viceroys. “You mind if I smoke?”

“I don't care if you burn to a crisp.”

“Right,” he said, and smiled weakly. He looked around the room for an ashtray.

“On the table,” I told him. I hadn't smoked for years, but I had friends who still did.

“Right, yeah, thanks.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth, pulled a chrome-plated Zippo from his right pocket. He flashed his left hand over the top of the lighter, slapping it open, and then flashed the hand back again, smacking the striker. He leaned forward and dipped the tip of the cigarette into the flame, puffed smoke from the side of his mouth, sat back, flicked his wrist to snap the lighter shut, slipped it into his pocket again. In Jimmy's circles, a routine like that was probably a valuable social skill.

He exhaled a blue plume of smoke. “Okay,” he said. “What is it, exactly, you want to know, Mr. Croft?”

“How well did you know Martinez and Lucero?”

He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Well, you know how it is. In the joint, I mean. Everybody knows everybody else, right? It's one of those closed societies, you know? And Lucero now, well, shit, everybody knew who he was. He was famous, you know? Big-time drug dealer, lots of cash on hand, plenty of pull, and the way he killed that guy down in Albuquerque—you heard about that?”

“Yeah.”

“Shooting him in the eyes.” He shook his head with something that was supposed to look like dismay but may have been envy. “But he's got a set of balls on him, you got to give him that. A real set of balls.” He heard himself, and backtracked. “But basically, you know, he's one of those psychopaths. No regard for human life, you know what I mean? Like that Hannibal Lecter guy. In the movie?”

“Was Lucero dealing drugs up there?”

He shrugged again. “Sure. I mean, not directly, not his own self. He had guys, you know, did it for him. Associates.”

“How was he getting the stuff in?”

He held up his right palm, like a traffic cop, and his expression became infinitely sorrowful. “See, Mr. Croft, this is where things could maybe get complicated, you know? Maybe right here is where we come up against a brick wall. I mean, I tell you what I know, and maybe Lucero finds out about it, down the road, you know, and life could get kind of rough for me all of a sudden.”

I smiled. “It could get kind of rough for you right now.”

“Right, right. Sure, Mr. Croft, I know you're not the kind of guy to fool around with. But that's the point I'm tryna make here, exactly. I appreciate your position, I really do. The thing is, you gotta appreciate mine. I got to balance my priorities. I got to make sure I'm making a decision that's not detrimental in the long run, you know? For yours truly.”

I nodded. “Let me see if I can clarify your priorities for you, Jimmy. My partner is lying in a coma in a hospital room. I'm very unhappy about that. I'm going after Martinez and Lucero. If you don't tell me what I want to know, I'll pound the shit out of you.” I shrugged. “How's that?”

He held up both hands now. “Hey now, Mr. Croft. There's no need for that kind of talk at all. I came here of my own free will. All I'm tryna do is establish—”

Maybe it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been surly and impatient, and sodden with last night's liquor. Or if Rita hadn't been in the hospital.

I stood up. He was out of the chair before I'd taken two steps, but there really wasn't anywhere for him to go. He flailed his hands at me spastically, like a child, when I grabbed the front of his shirt. I pivoted on my left heel, swung him as hard as I could toward the south wall, where he wouldn't break anything, and let go. He yelped as he sailed backward, his eyes wide, his arms pinwheeling. His shoulders smacked hard against the wall, and then his head did, and he gasped. I came toward him.

His body was crouched away from me and his hands were up again, pushing frantically at the air. “Hey hey
hey!
Okay
okay!
”

My heart was thumping against my ribs. My palms were damp. Adrenaline overload. I took a breath, tightened the belt of my robe, jerked my head toward the sofa. “Sit down, Jimmy.”

I stalked back to the chair, feeling extremely proud of myself.

He was close to being subhuman. If I were smaller and weaker, if I were a three-year-old girl, he would have had no compunctions about using violence on me. He understood violence. It was a form of currency for him. Probably he was a scrupulous debtor, and he had spent most of his life trying to pay back the violence he had been paid. Probably he hadn't succeeded, and probably he never would.

But I outweighed him by as much as he outweighed his daughter. My brutalizing him wasn't all that different from his brutalizing her, and it had left me feeling sickened and soiled.

And I knew that I had just enlarged the size of his personal debt.

He was sitting forward on the sofa, looking aggrieved, wincing as he ran his hand along the back of his scalp.

I sat down, crossed my legs. “How did Lucero get the drugs into the pen?”

He was still stroking the back of his head. He winced again. “Jeeze, Mr. Croft, you don't have—”

“Jimmy?”

Once more, quickly, he held up the hand. “Okay, okay.” He looked down, frowned, whisked the hand down the rumpled front of his shirt, flattening it. He sighed with elaborate hopelessness. He had been backed into a corner. He was always being backed into corners, left with no choices. By events. By people like me. People like his daughter.