A Place in the Wind Page 5

  “After nine-eleven, they almost went out of business,” said Oscar. “They were Sikhs! From India! Not Muslims. Not Arabs! But the norteamericanos—they couldn’t tell the difference. A brown-skinned man with a piece of cloth on his head was a terrorist to them, plain and simple. To them, I’m the same as that cholero who bought beer at my store. Now, you tell me what will happen if they find out that he did something to that girl?”

  Chapter 5

  A heavyset white man stopped Wil Martinez as he rode his beat-up Huffy to the service entrance of the Lake Holly Grill.

  “You,” said the man. He wore a puffy black jacket and a knit wool hat that stuck up from his head like a used condom. “You speak English?”

  “Yes,” said Wil.

  “Well?”

  “Fluently.”

  He looked surprised. He obviously wasn’t used to Central American busboys with New York accents and perfect command of English. Wil turned away and chained up his bicycle. The man stepped closer and lifted his overcoat. Wil wasn’t sure if the man wanted to impress him with his gold badge or scare him with the gun in the holster at his hip.

  “Detective Greco. Lake Holly Police. Can I talk to you a moment?”

  “I’ll be late for my shift.” It was Wil’s job to slice the tomatoes and dice the onions (the worst job—and he always got it). He didn’t want his boss, Pedro, to yell at him if stuff wasn’t ready for the dinner crowd. Plus, he liked to grab a bite to eat before things got crazy. If he didn’t, it would be midnight before he’d have a chance to eat again.

  “The job will wait,” said the detective. Wil sensed neither he nor Pedro had much choice in the matter. “You heard about the missing girl?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” The detective raised an eyebrow. “You live under a rock or something, kid?”

  “I was at the library studying all day.”

  “Studying?” The detective said it like he didn’t believe him. “Got any ID?”

  Wil reached into his back pocket and pulled out a black leather wallet that had gone white at the edges. He opened it and fished out a Valley Community College student ID. He handed it to the detective. The detective squinted at the name: Wilfredo Martinez. He was named after his father, a good man who’d died too young in a country where just walking down the wrong street can be lethal.

  He’d dropped the other part of his name, Ochoa. From his mother. It was the norteamericano way. They had erased her from his name the same way they’d erased her from his life—with the stroke of a pen.

  The detective frowned as he held Wil’s college ID up to the light.

  “Next time, get a fake Social Security card like everyone else in there.” He nodded to the kitchen.

  “The ID’s not fake,” said Wil. “That’s really my name and I really am a freshman at Valley.”

  “Studying?”

  “Premed.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure.”

  Wil felt a slow burn in his gut. All his life, he’d had to cower before men in uniforms. First, to protect his mother, and now, to protect Rolando. But he was alone at the moment—and infuriated by the way the cop was treating him. So he pulled out another ID and handed it to the cop. His legal-residency permit.

  The detective barely glanced at it. “You’re one of those Obama kids—am I right? A DACA.” Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Wil could tell by the way the detective said it what he thought of the former president’s executive order that granted temporary legal status to young people who came as children without papers to the United States. There was a time when Wil thought DACA was going to be his bridge to a new life. But the world is never a stable place when you don’t have permanent papers. These days, the government seemed to be looking for any excuse to snatch it away. Every day on the news, Wil heard about undocumented immigrants being arrested in their homes and deported. Everyone was frightened.

  The detective handed both IDs back to Wil and pulled out a notepad. “Address?”

  “Of the campus?”

  “No, professor. Your address. You live in town, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Wil hesitated. Rolando had already been deported once. Wil wasn’t about to invite the law in to do it again. That was how his mother got deported three years ago. The cops ordered Wil to open the door of his mother’s basement apartment, and like the dopey sixteen-year-old he was, he obeyed. He only found out later that he could have refused.

  He hadn’t seen his mother since. He probably never would again, especially since the cancer was taking a piece of her every day, two thousand miles away. In a country he couldn’t visit. A country she couldn’t leave.

  Wil straightened and tried to wring the shakiness from his voice. “Can I ask what this is about?”

  “We’re looking for anyone with information about this girl’s disappearance.”

  “A little girl?”

  “A high-school student,” said the detective. “She left La Casa last night after tutoring English. No one’s seen her since.”

  “A . . . high-school girl. At La Casa.” The words felt heavy on Wil’s tongue. The implications felt even heavier. “You think . . . one of the students did something bad to her?”

  “We’re just trying to cover all the bases.” The detective’s tone was casual, but his eyes betrayed a wolfish hunger. Wil had a sense the police were already zeroing in on the men who were at La Casa last night. Rolando. Wil’s gut felt like someone had thrown it in a trash compactor. He thought of his brother’s conversation this morning. He’d mentioned a girl: “I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help myself.”

  “You know La Casa, right?” asked the detective.

  “Yes.”

  “Know anyone who was there last night?”

  “I don’t go there.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” said the detective. “I asked if you knew anyone who did.”

  Yes. No. Wil couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. This was his brother. His flesh and blood. The only part of Wil’s family left in this country. Wil loved him. But more than that, he owed him. Always would. Ever since that day in Monterrey. That was thirteen years ago. A moment in a dusty freight yard that changed everything. For as long as Wil lived, he would never forget that burning Mexican sun. The stench of diesel smoke and soot. People called the freight trains that traveled fifteen hundred miles north from Guatemala to the U.S. border, the “beast.” For good reason. Catch a ride, tie yourself on, avoid getting crushed by the wheels or beaten by the Mexican police, and you just might make it. One slip, and it was over.

  Wil was six when he made that one slip, losing his grasp and tumbling to the gravel and trash below. He got to his feet, bruised and bleeding and stood frozen by the enormity of his situation. The train he was supposed to catch was lumbering out of the freight yard, carrying his mother and fifteen-year-old brother away forever. He was alone. In a foreign land. Without family or money.

  He would have died if not for Rolando.

  What happened next, Wil would only ever be able to recall in freeze-frame snatches. Rolando’s leap from the train. The way he ran over, grabbed Wil, and then half lifted, half threw him up to the people on top of the boxcar. The angry faces of the Mexican police officers who raced after them with raised batons. His mother’s cries. One minute, he was in Rolando’s arms. The next, his brother was losing ground as he ran alongside, growing smaller and smaller as the train gathered speed.

  “My son!” his mother cried. She tried to jump from the train. Some people held her down. Others made the sign of the cross.

  “You can’t help him,” they told his mother. “You can only help your younger son now.”

  Wil barely paid attention to any of the people on the train. He was focused on the freight yard, on the Mexican police as they encircled Rolando, kicking and beating him. In dreams, he saw the gravel where Rolando fell stained with blood. He heard his brother’s anguished cries. His mother said h
e imagined that. But it didn’t make it any less true. For six long weeks, the police kept Rolando in a Mexican prison. They beat and tortured him in an effort to extort money from him or a contact in his family who would pay for his release. By the time they gave up and deported him back to Guatemala, the beatings and torture had taken their toll. Rolando looked outwardly normal. But some essential part of him felt missing. It was nine years before Wil saw his brother again. The fifteen-year-old he’d known—gentle and shy—had become a tattooed, scarred man who used alcohol to drown his pain. Wil could never look at his brother and not wonder how different both their lives would have been if Rolando had not jumped from that train.

  The big cop tapped his pen on his notebook and stared down at Wil.

  “Look, kid, you may be this whiz-bang premed at Valley. But right now, you’re brooking an F in straight answers. I have half a mind to haul you down to the station house and make you sit there while I run a check on that precious ID you’re so quick to wave about. So you can either start cooperating or you can tell your boss why you won’t be working tonight. Which is it gonna be?”

  “I don’t know anyone who was at La Casa last night,” said Wil.

  “You’re sure about that?”

  Wil felt like the big detective with the condom hat could see right through his lies. His chest burned like he’d run a marathon. The back of his throat felt fizzy like he was going to hiccup.

  “Yes.”

  “And where were you Friday night?”

  “Home. Studying.”

  “Where is home?”

  The cop wasn’t going to let up until Wil gave him an address. So he rattled off an old address—the one he and Rolando lived in before Rolando lost his last job and they had to move to something cheaper. Wil figured he could claim he’d misunderstood if the cop ever came back.

  “You live by yourself?”

  “Yes.” He was keeping Rolando out of this.

  “Did you attend Lake Holly High?”

  “For a short while.” He attended every school for a short while. His mother was forever looking for someplace cheaper to rent.

  The detective reached inside a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a flyer. He handed it to Wil. “Maybe you know her. She’s only a couple of years younger than you.”

  Wil stared at the flyer. He had the sensation of falling from a great height.

  “This is the missing girl?”

  “Yes,” said the detective. “Catherine Archer. Her family owns the Magnolia Inn.”

  She was wearing a crisp white shirt beneath a turquoise-colored V-neck sweater. A silver chain glinted from her breastbone. You couldn’t see the pendant at the end of it. But it was there. Hidden. Like so many other parts of her. Her eyes locked on Wil’s. There was a questioning look to them that mirrored his own.

  “Do you know her?” asked the detective.

  It took all of Wil’s energy not to collapse against the metal railing where he’d just chained his bike.

  “No.” The word felt like it had a hundred syllables and ninety-nine were still lodged in his chest.

  This can’t be happening.

  But then, so much else that had happened shouldn’t have either.

  Wil closed his eyes and saw himself and Rolando in that freight yard in Monterrey again with the train slipping away.

  Only this time, neither was on it.

  Chapter 6

  The Oyster Club was packed on a Saturday night. Sweaty bodies swayed to the kinetic beat of rock, blues, and Latin pop. Colored spotlights strafed the gauzy purple silks that hung from the ceiling. Glasses clinked. Laughter and chatter rose over the grind of the bartender’s blender and the thumping bass of the music. The whole room vibrated with excitement and energy.

  Jimmy Vega drank in every minute. In life, he felt shy and tongue-tied. But behind his Gibson Les Paul or Fender Stratocaster, he could let his fingers do the talking—dancing across the frets as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. Or coming in low and slow on a backbeat until the rhythm grabbed and lifted him, breaking like a wave on the dance floor. Even singing came naturally. It didn’t matter if it was R & B, salsa, rock, or reggae. The adrenaline rush was the same. As sensual as sex. As comforting as a good woman.

  Music was in his genes, Vega supposed. His father had been a part-time bass player before he became a full-time deadbeat dad, splitting from Vega’s mother when Jimmy was two. Vega himself had planned a music career—until Joy came along unexpectedly. He’d had to ditch those dreams for his daughter’s sake. But it was hard not to wonder, as he did on a night like tonight, with the band in perfect sync, no missed cues, everybody grooving on the dance floor, what life might have been like had he followed his heart instead of his head.

  He wouldn’t have killed a man, for one.

  But no. He wasn’t going there. Not tonight. Instead he sang until he was hoarse and played until the sweat poured off his body and the calluses on his fingers felt like well-earned battle scars.

  He wished Adele had been here to see Armado play the Oyster Club. He loved when she came to his gigs. She couldn’t sing for her life, but she was a great dancer. Vega enjoyed watching her from the stage, the music a shared thread between them—always a prelude to their lovemaking.

  “You think Jerry will invite us back?” Vega asked the keyboardist, Danny Molina, when they were taking a break between sets. The club owner, a guy named Jerry, was a childhood friend of Molina’s. That’s how they got invited to play.

  “Sure hope so.” Molina was a large, stocky Port Carroll cop with a perennially cheerful disposition. Every Christmas, he played Santa Claus at the local community center. He didn’t need much stuffing. Molina toweled the sweat from his face and shaved head as he and Vega stood by the rear door of the club, both of them cooling off in the frigid breeze and eyeing the customers grabbing a smoke in the parking lot. They were musicians, sure. But they were cops too. They always had an eye out for trouble.

  Vega and Molina checked their phones for texts. Vega had one from Joy to confirm she was safely at her father’s house, dog-sitting Diablo. He had another from Greco, telling him the Lake Holly PD had bagged the lottery play slip from Hank’s Deli and was testing it for fingerprints and DNA. He had a third from Adele, wishing him luck at the gig. She didn’t say how things were going on her end, only that Sophia was back with her and they were sharing a quiet evening together. He texted back that he missed her and that he was playing her favorite song by Bruno Mars last, in her honor.

  A pretty young cocktail waitress in a miniskirt and high heels poked her head out the back entrance where Molina and Vega were standing and pressed two beers into their hands.

  “Compliments of Jerry.” She blushed when she handed a beer to Vega. Molina grinned as the waitress left. He clinked his bottle against Vega’s. “You charm ’em every time.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “If Adele were here, she might say otherwise. How’s she doing with that situation in Lake Holly?”

  “So you’ve heard.”

  “It’s all over the news,” said Molina. “The aftershocks are already being felt down here in Port Carroll. The immigrants are afraid. Our day laborer center at St. Augustine’s got a death threat this afternoon.”

  “Aw, man.” Vega was afraid this would happen. He just didn’t think it would start so soon.

  “I hate to say it, Jimmy. But I think one of those guys offed her.”

  Vega stared out at the parking lot. A light snow blanketed the cars and softened the black waters of the harbor beyond. Everything was silent and white.

  “It’s not hard to imagine one of them doing this,” Molina continued. “She attracted men easily.”

  “You’re talking like you know her.”

  “I do. A little,” said Molina. “She works as a hostess sometimes at the Magnolia Inn. Her family owns it.”

  Vega gave Molina a once-over. “Port Carroll cops get a discount there or something? I couldn’t affor
d a toothpick in that place.”

  Molina laughed. “Hey, I wasn’t eating. I was working. I fill in for their regular pianist sometimes at their bar. The cash comes in handy. My daughters’ Christmas wish lists get longer every year.” Molina had two preteens. Vega didn’t envy him.

  “The hourly rate sucks,” Molina continued. “And you have to wear a tux. But the tips are great. People in those circles? They show off. Request a song and then try to impress their friends and associates with how much money they can throw down on little guys like me.”

  Vega grinned. Molina used to play defense for his high-school football team. “Since when were you a little guy?”

  “Since being one got me fifty-dollar tips.” Molina rolled his beer bottle between his fleshy palms. “Tell you one thing, Catherine was very much noticed by the kitchen help. There was this one good-looking waiter? He was always flirting with her—until Catherine’s brother fired him.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A couple weeks ago,” said Molina. “Not long after the holidays.”

  “You remember the waiter’s name?”

  “Not sure I ever heard it. But the Archers would know. Especially her brother, Todd.”

  “Any sense this waiter was doing more than flirting?”

  “From what I could see? No. But her brother fired the guy, so who knows?”

  “I’d have fired him too, if he was hitting on Joy,” said Vega. “Why wait until something happens?”

  “You got a point.” Molina drained the rest of his beer. He looked like he was thinking of his own two girls. “I get the impression Catherine’s parents keep her on a tight leash.”

  “Yeah,” Vega agreed. “All anyone can tell me is that she’s an honors student and a varsity tennis player. No boyfriend. And more interesting, no close girlfriends. Either she was being raised in a bubble or . . .” Vega’s voice trailed off.

  “Or what?”

  “Nobody the cops talked to so far really knows her.”

  “She was close to Todd,” said Molina. “You could see that. He was very protective of her. I’m sure that’s why he fired that waiter. He didn’t want someone like that taking advantage of his kid sister.”