Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (70 page)

Tovar laughed. “Did he say anything? Anything at all about where he was going or what he was doing?”

George thought back. “Not really,” he said. “Wait, there was one thing. He bought the girl a jacket. A leather jacket. I convinced him that if he was taking the girl on a bike she'd need one.”

“Commission sales?” Tovar asked.

“Nope, hourly,” George said. “But what's good for the store is good for me. It was this one here.” He pointed at a blue-and-yellow jacket with a big “S” for Suzuki on the back in a catalog. Tovar took a copy of the catalog with him and gave George his business card in return, telling him to call him if he remembered anything else.

* * *

As they drove together through the south side of Nogales, Ned didn't exactly come to trust Rodrigo, but he did lose much of his fear of him. Rodrigo opened up to him, told him about his family, his life. His was an old Sonora family, “real cowboys.” His ancestors had never owned any land or cattle, but were experts at herding them on the long trails from the ranches to the slaughterhouses, often hundreds of miles away. Of course, the national highway system and semi-trailers changed all that. “There is no art or beauty left to the production of beef anymore,” he complained. “Now they lock a cow in a closet, force it to eat shit, and when it's fat enough, they drag it to the truck and then drag it to slaughter. Not like the old days when it was man against beast.”

With no cowboy work to do, his father had a hard time finding work. When he died in a slaughterhouse accident, Rodrigo had to quit school and go to work. He had been working for Pemex ever since and had been padding his pay packet however he could. “I don't want you to think Mexicans are bad people,” he said to Ned. “These are just bad times.”

“What were the good times like?”

“I can't remember any.”

They pulled into a quiet neighborhood surrounded on three sides by high rocky hills. It was called Las Bellotas even though Ned had not seen an oak tree anywhere near the place. It was like any North American grid-plan subdivision, except the narrow houses were all made of the same color of poured concrete and every door and window had metal bars on it. Some of the houses had been painted, and Rodrigo pulled into the driveway of a yellow one on Calle Higueras. It was two doors down from a house that had been converted to a grocery store.

Out front there was a woman and three kids—a boy of about eleven, a girl of nine, and a smaller boy she was holding. Each of the older children had a shopping cart full of possessions and the woman had more items in a baby stroller. They stared at Rodrigo and Ned as they left the car. Ned hid his gun from the kids' view. He instructed Rodrigo to go in the house and come back out while he waited in the driver's seat. Rodrigo did as he was told. “Can I give you your gift now, Mr. Suspicious?” He smiled.

“I guess you can.”

Rodrigo handed him some keys. “The house, it is yours,” he said. “Yours to use, to live in. Your boss still owns it, though.”

Ned was surprised. He knew they'd get him a place to live, but thought it would be an apartment somewhere, maybe with some other guys, not what looked like a three-bedroom house. Inside, it was furnished with tables and chairs, beds, and sofas. All the big items of family life were there, but nothing small, the things you'd need for daily life, like clothes, blankets, or cooking utensils. Ned told himself he could get them later. He explored the house and decided he liked it far better than staying at the ranch house or even in the apartment Holsamex had set up for him.

In fact, it was quite nice. It even had a tiny backyard with some cactuses and a small fig tree. It was made very private with a high concrete fence and Ned could see himself eating breakfast out there. Satisfied this was where he wanted to live, he offered to give Rodrigo a ride back to the Pemex station. He agreed and they shook hands. Rodrigo had a warm smile on his face.

As they walked outside. The eleven-year-old boy shouted at Rodrigo. “Hey!
Pendejo!
Why are you taking our house?”

Rodrigo snarled at the boy and made a gesture that indicated he'd smack him with the back of his hand if he came any closer. “Ask your father!” he shouted back.

The boy, his eyes wild, then looked directly at Ned, spat on the ground, and ran his index finger across his throat.

There were a lot of things Ned needed to get used to in Mexico, but he never thought being afraid of children would be one of them.

The kid had freaked Ned out, but it didn't take long to shake it off. Rodrigo had asked to go home instead of back to the Pemex station. His wife said that she couldn't let Ned go back to an empty house, so she gave him some old pots, pans, silverware, blankets, and towels to bring back to his new home. She wouldn't accept anything in return, so Ned slipped each of their children a 100-peso note.

Since the money from the collections was in the trunk, Ned put the gifts from Rodrigo's wife in the back seat and drove back to the ranch house. Once he dropped off the money, he was basically free for the weekend. He had a house, a car, a gun, and some cash. Things were looking up. He planned on heading to the mall and grabbing some things to make his new home a little nicer.

Once he arrived at the ranch house, he handed the money off to El Guason, who was drunk, and thanked him. El Guason asked him why he thanked him. “The house, man,” Ned said. “It's great.”

“What house?”

“The new house, the house I live in now,” Ned said with one eyebrow cocked. “Rodrigo told me you gave it to me.”

“I didn't give anyone anything; I don't give anyone anything,” he answered, looking confused. “Are you sure he said me? Did he say El Guason or Antonio López Ortega?”

“Neither, he said my ‘boss.'”

El Guason laughed. “I'm not your boss, you stupid
guero
!” he cackled. “I'm just your teacher.” Then he put a more serious look on his face. “Wait, he gave you a fucking house?”

Ned was no closer to learning who “he” was, but he could tell El Guason was drunk and angry and it would not be a good idea to start asking questions. “Just a little place to stay,” Ned said. “Not too far from here.”

El Guason appeared to calm down. “I knew he had some plans for you, but that's pretty good,” he smiled. “Still driving that piece-of-shit car, though?”

Ned laughed in what he hoped would be taken in a self-deprecating way. “Yeah,” he said. “It beats walking.”

El Guason agreed and told Ned he'd have to have a party soon, invite everyone. He wasn't going to be around anymore, but someone would be able to reach him. Ned knew that El Guason was looking forward to going back to his regular job, but he didn't know exactly what it was or when he was leaving. He wouldn't miss him.

“So who's my contact gonna be on Monday?” Ned asked.

El Guason smiled. “Oh shit, yeah, the weed,” he said, as though he hadn't thought about it for a while. “Well, it was going to be Johnny Irlanda, but he's leaving the company. How about El Martillo, you like him?”

In fact, Ned didn't actually “like” too many of the guys he'd met at the ranch house, but he guessed that El Martillo, a guy who looked enough like El Guason that he thought they might be brothers, was tolerable enough. He certainly wasn't as stupid or quick to anger as most of the guys. “Yeah,” he said. “That's fine. Are you gonna tell him?”

“Yeah, yeah, over the weekend.”

That didn't inspire Ned's confidence. By now, he'd learned that El Guason came by his nickname (“the lazy one”) honestly. “Maybe I'll have one of the girls tell him,” he suggested.

“No!” shouted El Guason. “The girls know nothing.”

“But they're always around and you guys talk about everything in front of them all the time.” Ned was confused.

“The girls know nothing,” he was calming down. “I will tell El Martillo when I see him. Until then, take your shitty car to your shitty house and start making plans for a big party.”

Ned laughed, but only to please El Guason. He would miss neither him nor the ranch house. He ran upstairs to collect the few things he was storing under his bed, mostly clothes. It then occurred to him that he would not have to start from scratch again. All he had to do was head back to the old apartment he had lived in when he worked at Holsamex. The industrial district wasn't far from Las Bellotas anyway. The Subaru wasn't very big, but he could move all his stuff in a couple of trips.

Approaching from the south, the city more or less begins where the signs on Highway 15 start calling it the Álvaro Obregón. Ned was headed north when he noticed traffic was locked up just before the Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta overpass. Cars were stopped and didn't look like they were going to move again soon. There was no oncoming traffic and Ned actually thought about driving in those lanes to get around the jam, but he didn't want to draw too much attention to himself.

He noticed that people were getting out of their cars and walking, even running, toward the overpass. Curious, Ned put the car in park and turned off the engine. He pulled the keys out of the ignition and tucked them in his pants pocket, careful to keep the clown keychain well hidden. Then he took his gun out of the glove compartment and hid it in a paper bag, taking it with him to see what all the excitement was about. The crowd was murmuring, but it was too low for Ned to understand. None of the people would look him in the eye. The further he got into the crowd, the less noise they were making. When he could finally see what the commotion was about, he understood the solemnity.

A man's corpse hung from the overpass, spinning and twisting on yellow nylon rope. Ned's stomach spun in revulsion and horror. It was facing away from him, but he didn't need to see the face to know who it was. Dressed in the same kind of jeans, boots, and a bright shirt almost all Sonoran men wore, it could have been anybody. But Ned knew it was Johnny Irlanda, who had earned his nickname (“Johnny Irish”) because, like El Orangután, his repeated attempts to dye his hair blonde had caused it to turn bright red. So this was what El Guason meant by “leaving the company.”

Vibrations from a passing semi spun the body around. It was indeed Irlanda, but somebody had taken the time to paint clown makeup on his face. And there was a sign tied to his body. It was handwritten but very clear: “Poco Loco says: Don't Tattle!” Underneath was a crudely drawn smiley face.

* * *

Agent Meloni was impressed that Tovar and his intern Weise had managed to track down Sopho's jacket. He was more than intrigued by who ended up with it—Thor Andersson. According to them, the jacket and helmet had been found in a public garbage pail near the corner of 48th and 11th on Manhattan's West Side by Dave Lombard, an editor at a technology-related newspaper. He had given the jacket to his son, but sold the helmet online because he didn't want to encourage his son to ride a motorcycle. The boy liked the jacket, but found Andersson's business card in the pocket with a handwritten note on the back that read: “Please take me to Thor Andersson” and gave his business address.

The boy and his dad then went to see Andersson. They gave him the jacket—which he seemed surprised about, claiming never to have seen it before—and the dad offered him money for the helmet he had sold. Andersson took the jacket, but refused the cash, instead paying the boy a reward that the dad thought was a bit excessive, perhaps more than the jacket was even worth.

Lombard contacted police after an art director he worked with had shown him an article in a local tabloid that had pictures of the helmet and jacket and a telephone number to call. The story said that the items could be connected to some serious crimes. At the time, investigators called it a coincidence. “This Andersson guy's not some kind of criminal, is he?” he asked, concerned. “He seemed so . . . upstanding. Like a good guy.”

“That's all I've ever heard about him, what a great guy he is,” Meloni answered. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Lombard, I can't really discuss that sort of thing with you, but I
can
tell you that you are not in any trouble or danger.”

“That's a relief,” he said. “Can we keep the money?”

Meloni was unsure of what money he meant until he remembered the reward for finding the jacket. “That's not a problem.”

* * *

It took Ned all night to get back to the new place. A couple of army trucks came in and cut Irlanda down and restored traffic. By the time things were moving again, Ned had eaten a full meal since street vendors, eager to take advantage of the huge crowd, moved in immediately.

After a while, as the food and no small amount of beer and
pulque
circulated and music played, people calmed down and waited. It was a convivial atmosphere. Not quite a party, but far from the somber atmosphere that had pervaded the mob when the body was first discovered. Ned milled around in the crowd. Nobody paid much attention to him. After a while, he spotted one of his weed contacts. Alex was a tall and skinny young man who drove a minibus. Since most of the workers at the factories are women, the companies often supply small vans with drivers to bring them to work and drop them home again safely. Alex also sold Ned's weed to the husbands, brothers, boyfriends, and sons of the women he ferried back and forth.

Ned approached him. Alex acknowledged him grudgingly. Ned asked if he was working. “Yeah, just two left,” he said and motioned over to two middle-aged women sitting on a blanket drinking Diet Cokes. They did not look up. “But I don't have all your money yet.”

Ned smiled. “That's okay, dude, I'm not collecting right now, just stuck in traffic: I'll get you tomorrow morning, as usual,” he said. “What do you think of all this?”

Alex looked at him suspiciously. “It happens. I guess it's to show us not to do anything against the boss.”

“The boss?”

Alex looked at him angrily. “Yeah, your boss,” he said. “The clown.”

“What? Poco Loco is my boss? The Poco Loco?” Ned said, confused. El Guason said that neither he nor El Martillo were his boss, just his teachers. Ned was flooding the area with weed, but had no idea where it came from. El Guason had said something about the Jalisco Cartel, but that meant nothing to Ned. Obviously, the clown figure was some kind of symbol to these men, but how could he be anything more? Up until then, he had thought the Poco Loco thing was a gag, or perhaps someone's nickname, but now with all the strangeness of Mexico unfolding in front of him, he couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't.

“Poco Loco? Isn't he dead?”

Alex looked aghast. “Not so loud! You'll be a dead clown, like your friend up there,” he grabbed Ned by the arm and led him to a more secluded area. “The very last thing I want to do is piss off a man in your position, but I think you really should know more about exactly who you are working for.” Alex then separated from Ned and said, “With all due respect to you and the organization, I really don't think it's a very good idea for us to be seen together right now.” Then he turned and walked toward the two women on the blanket.

* * *

Back in Andersson's office, Meloni told him he just had to ask a few questions that had come up relating to the Ned Aiken/Eric Steadman case. Andersson said he would do everything in his power to help.

“Great, do you remember receiving a blue-and-yellow leather jacket with a Suzuki logo on the back?” Meloni asked. “It was brought to you here at the office.”

Andersson looked genuinely surprised. “Yes, yes I do remember that jacket,” he said. “A man and his son brought it in all the way from New York City. I had never seen it before, but they said that it had my name inside, so I accepted it and thanked them.”

Meloni nodded. “Actually, it was more than that, they said; it actually had your business card in a pocket,” he said. “And a handwritten note that said ‘Bring me to Thor Andersson.'”

“Really? I didn't get that detailed in my discussion with them,” he answered. “I was very busy and considered the jacket almost a trivial matter.”

“Don't you find that odd?” Meloni pressed. “I mean, here we have a leather jacket you have never seen before, one specifically designed for protection for motorcycle riders—a jacket made for a child but that has your name in the pocket?”

“Yes, yes I do,” Andersson said, seemingly without worry. “I thought it was strange at the time, too.”

“And the fact that it said ‘me' and not ‘this' bothers me a little,” Meloni told him. “I mean, who calls their jacket ‘me'?”

“There are lots of people with poor language skills out there,” Andersson grinned. “And several of them work for me.”

Meloni chuckled. “It is definitely true that few people pay enough attention to grammar,” he said. “But it just makes me think.” Realizing Andersson would reveal no more about the note, he turned to the jacket itself and he changed tones from jovial to inquisitive. “So why did you even take the jacket? I mean, the little boy really seemed to like it.”

Andersson laughed. “Yes, yes he did,” he agreed. “But my feeling was if it was brought to me, it must have been for one of my employees who thought the office was a safe place to deliver it.” Then he smiled. “And to tell you the absolute truth, it looked a little bit . . . uh . . . girly on him, you know, too feminine—I was saving him from himself,” he said. “And if someone wanted me to hold onto the jacket for them, who am I to argue?”

“But who would want you to have a jacket like that?”

“I have no idea,” Andersson told him. “I held onto it for thirty days, put a sign up in the lunchroom, but nobody claimed it.”

“I see.” Meloni paused, hoping to make Andersson uncomfortable, but it didn't seem to work. “If you remember anything else about the jacket, please give me a call.”

Andersson said he would.

“He won't call,” Meloni thought to himself, “but I will come back when I have something more concrete.”

* * *

While getting ready for a much-needed day off from delivering weed, Ned was surprised to hear the buzzer for his intercom as he stepped out of the shower. Whoever wanted to talk to him was persistent and did not seem likely to go away. Ned wrapped a towel around his waist, grabbed his gun, and looked at the intercom's tiny monitor. It was one man, alone. He was almost bouncing with nervous frustration. He had the same kind of Guatemalan or Mayan look as the unfortunate El Chango, but was dressed in the collared shirt, boots, and jeans that all men over a certain age in Sonora seemed to wear. He had a baseball cap on that made him look younger than his thirty-five or so years.