The Dead Run (2 page)

 

CHAPTER 2

S
herry Richards walked down the tree-lined suburban street as fast as she could in flip-flops. Her hair was dripping wet, reeking of chlorine. She hated the smell, but showering hadn't been an option. She'd needed to get out of there as fast as possible.

Story of her life.

Being dropped into a new high school halfway through your junior year was like being dropped from a helicopter into a war zone—a war in which you didn't know the sides. Or the weapons. Or the history.

Now, six months later, Sherry had figured some of it out: The weapons were sex and popularity, access to alcohol and drugs. The allegiances were ever-changing, too mutable to trust. None of that helped her much. She was a girl without a country, her only weapon the carefully honed ability to disappear.

She'd gone to the community pool today precisely because nobody her age hung out there. It would be crowded, on a scorching summer day like this one, but she could move unseen among the splashing brats and bathing-capped old ladies. Lose herself in the burn of muscle and the cool of the water, remember there was something she was good at. She had the trophies to prove it—or used to, before her mother, in one of her weirdest flip-outs yet, had decided they counted as idols,
thou shalt worship no false gods,
and trashed them.

That was two moves ago, now.

The morning had started so well. She'd looked up from her fourth or fifth lap to see a guy from her math class, Eric Lansing, settling himself onto a poolside lounge chair next to the one she'd dumped her stuff on. He was okay. Smiled indifferently in the hall. Lent her a pencil once, when hers broke during a test. He was an athlete, soccer and swimming.

In an alternate world, they'd have shared a team bus to meets, Sherry thought as she sliced through the water—if her father were still around, to temper Melinda's capriciousness, talk her down, make her laugh at herself. He'd been so good at that, when she was little. But Melinda had pushed him out—outside the house, and then outside the law. She'd won, and Sherry had lost the only stability she'd ever known. Was he a criminal, as Melinda loved to claim? Did he deserve to rot in jail? Sherry didn't believe it for a second. Prisons were filled with innocents; you could ask anybody. And everything he'd done had been for her. She knew that. Believed it with a fervor that sustained her. Someday, he'd find her.

Or she'd find him.

Sherry finished her ten freestyle laps, then did another five of butterfly. Showing off a little, maybe. Climbed out of the pool just as the lifeguard's whistle sounded the end of adult swim, sensing Eric's eyes on her.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

A familiar feeling washed over Sherry as she toweled off. The way she dressed for school was designed to hide her body—her mother saw to that. No skirts, no tight tops, nothing revealing. After the move, her mother's friend Ruth—ex-friend, now, though Sherry had managed to quietly maintain ties—had driven her to the nearest mall and helped her pick out a scoop-neck lilac blouse, as part of her well-intentioned, ill-fated help-Sherry-fit-in initiative. The next afternoon, when Sherry got back from registering for classes, she'd found it cut to ribbons in her closet, still on its hanger.
No daughter of mine is going to dress like the whore of Babylon,
her mother had said when Sherry confronted her, then proceeded to quote scripture for another five minutes, still talking when Sherry stormed out the door.

She'd ended up walking around the block five times, slower and slower, then coming home.

Nowhere else to go.

And now, here she was in a Lycra one-piece, for all the world to see. Conservative as swimwear went, but Sherry could practically see Eric having a revelation about the quiet girl from math class as he pretended not to watch her arrange her legs on the hot plastic chair.

“So, uh, Sherry . . .”

She'd opened her eyes, shaded them with a palm.“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

He was kind of cute. A bit too conventional for Sherry's tastes—not that she'd thought all that much about what they were—but easy on the eyes. Dark wavy hair, full lips, a kind of lithe grace in his limbs.

A swimmer's body,
she thought, feeling herself blush.

“What?”

“How come I never see you at any parties?”

The question caught her off guard. There were so many answers. She opted for the simplest.

“Nobody's ever invited me to one.”

Eric laughed, in a friendly way. “That's not really how it works around here. You just, you know, hear about a party and show up. But okay. There's a thing tonight, at Shawn Chen's house. If I invite you personally, will you come?”

Sherry felt herself blush. “I—”

And then a pleasantly awkward situation became an awful one. She saw Eric's eyes flit past her, turned, and saw five more kids from her school walking toward them. One guy, another athlete whose name she didn't know, and four girls.

Bikinis, big designer sunglasses, mani-pedis. Iced coffee drinks in hand, celebrity magazines poking from their shoulder bags.

Trouble.

“Um,
hi,
Eric,” said the blondest girl, in the smallest bikini. She plopped her bag down between Eric's legs, planted her hand on her hip. “Who you
talking
to?”

Eric did the best he could. “You guys know Sherry?” He made a back-and-forth gesture with his tanned arm. “Sherry, this is my girlfriend, Caroline, and this is Laura, Dave . . .”

The names didn't register. The way they looked at her was enough. Sherry threw herself out of the deck chair, started shoving her stuff into her lame cloth bag.

“Nice
bathing suit,
” said Caroline, looking her up and down. Her eyes lingered on Sherry's crotch, and she leaned back, cupped her hand over her mouth, and whispered something to her friend. Both of them giggled.

Caroline crossed her arms and looked down at Sherry over the tops of her sunglasses. “I know a great Brazilian wax place, if you're interested.”

“I've got to go,” Sherry mumbled beneath the laughter of the girls. She registered Eric's displeasure at their cruelty, filed it away for comfort later, and got the hell out of there.

She made it through the blocks of sprawling Victorians, the dried chlorine drawing her face taut, and passed into her familiar neighborhood of modest split-level ranches. Home was two blocks away. The house would be cool and dark and empty, her mother off at one of her marathon church meetings, gone until at least lunchtime.

The street was deserted except for a couple of missionaries, Jehovah's Witnesses or something, doing their doorbell-ringing thing up ahead, on the other side of the street. She tracked them idly as she walked: two men clad in dark suits and fedoras, climbing methodically up and down the identical front steps of each house on the block. They must have been unbelievably hot. One was slim and young, the other bulkier and older, the fabric of his suit stretched tight across his back. She couldn't make out anything of their faces, beneath those hats.

Sherry imagined seeing them on the other side of her screen door, rivers of sweat running down their cheeks as they brandished their earnest hellfire-and-damnation literature, and decided that their church could use a serious image overhaul. Then she thought about her mother. She'd probably invite them in, give them lemonade, and try to convert them to
her
church. Thank God she wasn't home.

Sherry was still watching the men when she heard a car slow down beside her. The window buzzed down, and she steeled herself, refusing to look. The clack of her flip-flops against the soles of her feet doubled the pounding of her heart.

“Yo, bitch,” from inside the car.

Sherry walked faster.

“I'm talking to you, you little slut.”

Sherry gave in, looked over. “Leave me alone.”

“Leave my
man
alone,” said Caroline. She was leaning out the passenger-side window of a late-model SUV, iced coffee still in hand. “Hello? You hear me, freak show?”

Sherry stopped short, cut behind the SUV, and crossed the street. That sent them into hysterics.

The driver accelerated, U-turned, and stopped a few feet in front of her. Caroline stepped out of the car, leaving the door jacked open.

“Are you
kidding
me? You have
got
to be kidding me, you fuckin' skank ho.”

Sherry sighed. Apologize? Roll over and play dead? She didn't have much else in her repertoire. She was so conditioned to dealing with her mother that defending herself no longer came naturally.

Caroline spread her arms. “Hel-
lo
?”

This girl wouldn't actually
hit
Sherry, would she? That seemed to go against the rules, but then what did Sherry know?

Great. Here came the Jesus nuts. The younger one shuffled quickly down the front steps of a ranch house, brow furrowed with concern, and stepped onto the sidewalk between Sherry and Caroline. The big one came shuffling after, his hat pulled low.

“Girls, girls. This is no way to behave. Jesus loves you both.”

Caroline turned and treated him to her hands-on-hips routine. The girl behaved as if her every action were being filmed for some awful reality TV show, Sherry thought.

“Why don't you mind your fucking business?” Caroline said.

He smiled, big and closed-lipped, face aglow with perspiration and belief.

“My business is saving souls.” He looked like he'd said it a million times and couldn't wait to say it a million more.

Caroline rolled her eyes at her friends, still watching from the car.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

The missionary took a step forward and raised a finger. “Yes. Yes. Exactly.”

Sherry decided to make use of the distraction while it lasted. She turned and walked, legs pumping double time, afraid to sprint lest she lose her flip-flops. She could still hear the man's soft, soothing voice behind her as she turned the corner.
Keep them occupied,
she thought.
Just keep them occupied until I can get home
.

This street was empty. She took a deep breath and let it out slow.
Wait to cry,
she told herself.
Five minutes, and then the rest of the day is all yours.

She heard a car behind her, spun before she could stop herself, saw Eric pulling up beside the girls' SUV in a mud-spattered Jeep Wrangler.

For the briefest of instants, their eyes met and Sherry saw the consternation in his gaze. A pang of regret hummed through her, followed by a flash of anger. There was so much the Erics of the world could never understand about a girl like her—so much they only thought they wanted to.

She sighed again, turned forward, and ran straight into someone.

It was the older missionary. He clamped an arm around her. It was like steel.

“Hello, dear,” he said. “I'm Mr. Buchanan.”

Sherry opened her mouth to scream. Before she could summon sound, Buchanan pressed something over her mouth, her nose—something that lightened her head, sapped her strength. She was trapped within herself, her body unable to respond to the terror pulsing in her veins. She felt her knees go weak, her head loll back on her neck.

The last thing Sherry saw before the chloroform took her under was his face, beneath the low brim of the hat: a mottled patchwork of bloodless white and charred black, as if he had been burned, or skinned, or both. His eyes were ice blue, and they stared at Sherry with a calm more terrible than anything she'd ever known.

 

CHAPTER 3

S
heriff Bob Nichols's phone rang.

Spitefully, if such a thing were possible.

It was an old phone, the color of dried blood. Rotary dial, for Christ's sake. Nichols stared across his desk, wondering how many rings the goddamn thing had left in it. More than he had hellos left in him, that was for sure.

He reached forward, sucked down a belt of iced coffee. Meltwater by this hour of the morning, the cup sweating a ring onto the napkin. The air conditioner wasn't officially broken, but the racket it made was unbearable, worse than the heat. Nichols mostly used a fan he'd brought from home. It kept the flies off balance.

Take the call,
he told himself
. It's probably nothing. Then you can go to Dippin' Donuts, get some more caffeine
. The only way to make it through the days was with a hundred little if-thens. The summer days, especially.

He let it ring a few more times. No sense picking up unless they were serious.

They were.

“Del Verde County sheriff's office. Nichols.”

Already, the phone was making his ear sweat. He promised himself an egg-and-cheese, to go with that iced coffee. No sausage, though. A man was nothing without discipline.

“Buenos días, Señor Nichols. Sitting in your office, scratching your huevos?”

“And thinking of you, Señor Fuentes.”

His Mexican counterpart. Their offices were sixty-seven miles apart, and anything that happened in the barren desert between was both their problem. It was a gray zone, both Texan and Mexican. The kind that doesn't appear on any map.

“I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to put away your copy of
Anal Gay Sex
magazine and take a drive.”

“Actually, I'm reading
Tiny Mexican Cock
today. Love your photo spread. The nipple tassels are a classy touch.”

Fuentes cackled. Nichols tossed his coffee at the trash can across the room, banking it in with a satisfying thump.

“Let me guess. Another gringo asshole with a backpack full of drugs?” It would make the fourth this month.

“No, no.” Fuentes paused. “This is something else. A girl.”

“Alive or dead?” asked Nichols, palming his chin. The Mexicans were vague about the strangest things.

“Muerta.”

“American, or you don't know?” Instinctively, he swiveled toward the file cabinet, reached for the Missing Persons folder.

“We don't know.”

“Well, what makes you think . . .” Nichols sighed. “Forget it. Where should I meet you?”

Instead of an address, Fuentes gave him a mile marker. Great. An hour's drive to stare at a corpse lying in the middle of the desert in what was, on a good day, another country. Nichols tacked a cruller onto his Dippin' Donuts order, proud of himself for making the bribes junk food rather than whiskey shots.

“Cause of death?” he asked.

“Indeterminado. My men just found her. We got an anonymous tip—guy called in, said he came across the body while he was sneaking across the border.”

“Community-minded chap,” said Nichols, resting his forearms on the thick folder full of hopelessly open cases. “I'm telling you, Fuentes, these boys you all keep sending us are the salt of the earth.”

Nichols didn't get the laugh he'd been expecting. Silence on the line, and then Fuentes said, “We'll wait for you. But . . .”

Again, Fuentes paused. In the silence, Nichols could hear the bustle of the Mexican police office: voices speaking impossibly fast, phones ringing. Even the hum of an air conditioner, though that was probably his imagination.

He grew tired of waiting. “All right, well—”

“Murder,” Fuentes blurted.

“That a fact or an opinion?” Nichols shot back.

“An opinion.”

“I don't do opinions, Fuentes. You know that. See you in an hour, pendejo.”

N
ICHOLS SPENT THE
drive playing a game called In a Real Department, one of his old standbys.

It went like this: In a real department, the sheriff would have a real car, not a broken-down hunk of crap that overheated if you pushed it past sixty. Fifty, if you ran the air.

In a real department, that sheriff would have had more than eight men to patrol a county three times the size of Rhode Island, and in a real department half those men wouldn't have been drinkers.

In a real department, he'd have had a forensics kit on the seat next to him right now instead of a balled-up McDonald's bag. Better yet, a cop who knew how to use it.

Then again, in a real department, the sheriff wouldn't have been elected mostly because he'd quarterbacked the high school football team to a state championship twenty-six years earlier.

A couple of Gulf War medals, a degree in communication from Arizona State, and a semi-successful stint selling insurance wouldn't have sufficed as qualifications in a real department. Especially not one charged with patrolling a massive no-man's-land at a time when immigration and terrorism were the biggest issues in the entire country. Whenever Nichols saw politicians on TV, talking tough about that stuff, he wanted to laugh. Either that or invite them all down to Del Verde for a few weeks to see how things really were.

It wasn't fair to say the job had cost him his marriage, though a casual observer might have pointed out that the two had only overlapped by a few months. More accurate would be to say that Nichols wouldn't have run for office if things had been hunky-dory on the home front, and more accurate still would be to marvel at the fact that he and Kat had kept at it for as long as they had. The quarterback and the head cheerleader—it didn't get any cornier than that, even if Kat was also the editor of the newspaper and the valedictorian. She'd stayed with him through three deployments, allowed herself to be swayed by Nichols's argument that it made no sense to start a family until he got his life back, that he didn't want to leave her alone with a baby any more than he wanted to miss the kid's first words or come home to a toddler who barely recognized his face. It made sense; she saw it, too. And they were young. They had plenty of time.

Six years later, Nichols was a civilian again. Let the baby-making begin.

The first few months of trying were fun. The next six were all timing and thermometers, dashed optimism and creeping doubts. Then came the doctors, the fertility clinics. The fifteen grand, borrowed from Kat's old man, for in vitro fertilization. And the fifteen grand they couldn't afford to try again.

Then came the bitterness, vague and sharp at once. The talk of adoption, trailing off when it became clear that neither of their hearts was in it. The guilt over that. The glacial drift apart: an inch a day, every day, until they could only hear each other if they shouted. The fights, the couple's counseling, the unspoken abandonment of hope, the run for sheriff. Kat was living with a woman now, in Austin. He sure as hell hadn't seen that coming. They sent each other Christmas cards and birthday e-mails, kept things nice and cordial.

Nichols reached the mile marker at noon on the dot, the hottest minute of a scorching day. He'd sweated through his uniform, dark circles under both arms and a wet patch at the small of his back. As if the Mexicans gave a shit what he looked like. But vanity was a hard thing to put down, even if you weren't so pretty anymore.

Still prettier than most, though,
he told himself.
And not in bad shape, either, considering the crap diet and the fact that I only make it to the gym a half a dozen times a year. I bet I could still throw for sixty if I had to. How many goddamn sheriffs can say that?

He pulled off the road, rambled the cruiser toward the two Mexican police cars parked a hundred feet away. Dust kicked up around him. The second you pulled off the asphalt, you were in the wilderness. Darting lizards, cacti, the whole nine.

Fuentes turned and nodded. He was a stocky guy with salt-and-pepper hair, a little bit of a paunch. Always seemed to have a toothpick in his mouth and a couple of fingers on the toothpick. His three deputies were all taller than he, Fuentes short even by Mexican standards. Nichols towered over them all.

“What have we got?” he said by way of greeting. The cops stepped aside to give him a look.

In a real department, the sight and smell wouldn't have made the sheriff's stomach turn. Or hell, maybe they would. Yeah, probably so.

The vultures had been at her. The vultures, the sun, the bugs. She lay on her stomach, the top half of her body buried in the sandy, silty dirt.

From the waist down, she'd been picked at—not picked clean, though you could see stark white flashes of bone peeking through in some places, but torn apart pretty good. Even vultures stopped eating once the meat went rancid, and in this heat that had happened fast. The flesh was bloated, purpled, falling from the bone, and the maggots were working at her from the inside.

It was hard to remember that this had very recently been a human being. A woman. Someone you could laugh and joke with, someone you might love.

Hard to remember, yet impossible to forget.

Nichols spoke through his handkerchief. “This is how you found her?” A stupid question—
no, señor, we thought it would be fun to bury her
—but you had to ask.

“Sí.”

“Well, let's dig her up. Carefully. Con mucho cuidado.”

From the car trunks came the shovels. Nichols watched them work. The way she was lying, it looked almost as if she'd dug herself in—like she'd been working on a shallow tunnel, and it had collapsed. That was ridiculous, of course. But so was half-burying a girl.

Within minutes, the deputies had nearly unearthed her. Nichols could see the contours of her body beginning to emerge, and he told Fuentes to have his men drop their shovels and do the rest by hand, as if they were archeologists removing a prized artifact from the earth. To his surprise, Fuentes complied without debate.

The smell was overpowering, but the cops didn't complain. It was more than Nichols would have been able to say of his own men in this situation. Soon they were dusting the corpse, scraping the dirt from her back, her arms. She was still a person from the waist up. Decomposed, but human. Probably no more than two days gone.

“Turn her over,” he ordered, glancing at Fuentes. The jefe toyed with his mouth lumber and said nothing.

The deputies grunted and bent over her. The woman flopped onto her back. Nichols jockeyed for a better view. Fuentes, too, edged forward, raising his bushy eyebrows.

Suddenly, all three deputies darted back, quicker than anybody had any business moving in this heat. As if the corpse had winked at them. All three men began speaking, the Spanish too agitated for Nichols to follow.

“Que pasó?” he demanded, trying to push his way through. All he could see was an arm, up to the elbow. The deputies paid no attention. Too busy crossing themselves and praying.

“Get the hell out of the way!” He grabbed the closest one by the elbow and yanked.

The man turned, clamped his hand around Nichols's wrist, and looked at him, wide-eyed. It didn't take a psychologist to see that he was scared out of his mind.

“Ella tiene el beso demonico!” he hissed. “Mira en su pecho!”

Pecho,
Nichols knew.
Chest.
He took a deep breath, held it, and knelt next to the girl. Between her breasts was what looked like a stab wound, or a cluster of them. It was hard to tell; decay had rendered her body grotesque and mysterious, and Nichols was no doctor. He raised a hand, as if to touch the mark, then drew it back.

When he stood, Fuentes was right behind him.

“ ‘Beso demonico' is ‘kiss of the devil,' ” he said, and turned to glance at the deputies. They had retreated to their cars, clearly eager for permission to leave. One was still crossing himself, over and over. He looked like a third-base coach, perpetually signaling a runner.

“What does that mean?”

“Just an old superstition.” Fuentes waved a hand. “But as you can see, to some it's very real. Look at them. Policía one minute, pinches muchachos the next.” He flung his toothpick to the ground and clapped Nichols on the shoulder. “I think she's a gringa, my friend. In fact, I'm sure.” Fuentes nodded to his men. They jumped gratefully into their cars. He climbed into the backseat, buzzed the window down.

“She's all yours, Bob.” A new toothpick bobbed between his lips. “Have fun with her.”

“What the hell, Fuentes? You know I can't haul her by myself.”

“Leave her be, pendejo. Let the desert finish the job.”

“Kinda fuckin' cop are you?” Nichols grumbled, already turning away, resigned to the futility of it all.

But the dig had gotten Fuentes's ire up. He ratcheted the door, stepped back into the sun. “What kind of cop am I? An honest cop, ese. Maybe the only one left in this pinche country, me entiendes?”

Nichols met his eye and nodded. Fair was fair.

But Fuentes was on a roll now. “The shit you bitch about? Shitty cars, not enough men? Try walking in my shoes sometime, compadre. Try Federales in bed with narcos in bed with politicians. It's all one big orgy, and I'm the fuckin' eunuch in the corner, 'cause I play it straight. I can't even
sleep
at night, I got so much rage in the belly. Ah, basta.”

He threw up a hand, then slid back into the cruiser, sighing as the cool air hit his skin. “Even I have my limits. We're only here for the living. Try to remember that, amigo.”

The window rose, and the cars rattled off. It was just Nichols, and the heat, and the girl.