Hailey's War (14 page)

Shay said, “An accident? I thought you were going out of town on personal business.”

“It started out that way,” I said. “The accident was accidental. Hence the name.”

A new girl, olive-complected with springy black hair and a nose ring, was watching us now, alert to the prospect of drama.

“Why didn't you call in and let me know what was going on?”

My tone sharpened. “I couldn't, Shay. I nearly died; I was in the hospital a long time.”

“Oh,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“Listen,” I said, quickly moving on, “I lost all my personal stuff, too. I'm going to need a new key to the room.”

“The room?”

“My stuff's still up there, isn't it?”

My
Wheelock's
, my birth certificate, the picture of my father, my class ring, and cadet sword. Irreplaceable things. I didn't have any rental contract with Shay. If he'd assumed I wasn't coming back, and had pitched my things into the trash, I probably didn't have any legal recourse.

Shay let me wonder a long moment. Then he said, “Yeah, it is. I didn't think you were coming back, and I kept meaning to look into the law about how long I had to keep your stuff, but I never got around to it, and it seemed easier to store it up there than anywhere else.”

“Thanks.”

He said, “What about the rent, by the way?” He kicked his legs up on his desk. He was wearing shorts with sandals, revealing the impressive undiminished muscles of his legs. “I'm full up on riders, so I can't let you pay it off that way,” he said.

“No problem,” I said. I pulled out the two thousand dollars I had from Serena, kept in a rubber-banded roll. “I'm two months behind, right?” I began counting it out, enjoying the slight ripple of disbelief
on Shay's face. For all he knew, I'd been laid up and not working for two months. He hadn't expected me to be flush; in fact, he'd probably wanted me to grovel for the chance to work.

When he brought the spare key, he said, “Look, if you're around a lot, maybe there'll be some work I can throw your way. You know how it is.”

I understood why he was hedging. Shay always had new people walking in the door wanting to ride, but often they lost interest when they learned what demanding work messengering really was. Shay always needed riders he knew were reliable.

The truth was, I didn't know how much time the search for Nidia would leave me. And after two months of immobility, I wasn't sure I was in any shape for the street. But there was no point in antagonizing Shay. The most likely scenario in my search for Nidia was that I'd never find out who shot me or why, the money would run out, and then I'd be nothing but an unemployed bike messenger.

“Sure,” I said, and took the key.

Herlinda Lopez's house in Oakland was already dark at half past eight at
night, which was when I got there on foot, walking from the nearest BART station. At first glance, I thought maybe she and her kids had gone to bed quite early. Then I noticed that the geranium on the front step had turned brown, and the little strip of lawn was like straw.

The garage door had a row of narrow windows in it, just at sight level for an average man. I walked up the driveway, trying to amble casually as if I belonged there, then I stood on tiptoe to look in.

There was no car inside.

Maybe they were out. Maybe they'd never owned a car. It wasn't as if I'd looked in the garage when—

“Can I help you with something?”

I turned. The woman watching me at the end of the Lopez driveway was short and dark-skinned, but not Hispanic. Her accent was East Indian, or something close to it.

“Hi,” I said. “I'm looking for the Lopezes.”

“You're looking for them in their garage?” she said skeptically.

“Uh, not really,” I said, walking back down the driveway. “I'm not so much looking for them as for a friend of mine, Nidia Hernandez. Did you meet her while she was staying here?”

The neighbor shook her head.

“I thought the Lopezes might know where she's living now,” I said.

“They don't live here anymore. You're not from this neighborhood, are you?”

“No, I'm not.”

“Mrs. Lopez went missing,” she said.

“Missing? When?”

“About two months ago.”

Two months.

She continued: “The kids went to live with someone else. The house has been empty awhile.”

I said, “Has anyone but me been around here, asking for Nidia?”

She said, “I didn't even know there was somebody by that name living here. Even the police didn't mention her.” Her lips thinned slightly in suspicion. “Who did you say you were?”

“Just a friend of Nidia's. My name is Hailey Cain.”

“I have to go in now,” she said, nodding toward the house next door. “Be careful out here. It's late to be walking.”

MacArthur Station was probably my favorite place in the Bay Area. It was BART's
main transfer station, a raised platform right in the middle of a tangle of freeways. From the platform, you could see the campanile of UC Berkeley, the Oakland hills, the towers that surrounded Jack London Square. You could do a lot worse with your evening than to spend a little of it at MacArthur Station, taking a breath and letting the world roll off your back.

Except I kept thinking about one thing: I sincerely hoped that all the shit that was gonna go down in the Lopezes' neighborhood had gone down already, because if any of the guys from the tunnel came around doing cleanup work, and they talked to the neighbor lady, I'd laid it right out there:
Hailey Cain, looking for Nidia Hernandez
. Without that, the would-be assassins would have no reason to think I was still alive.

Sometimes I didn't really think things through.

At home, I took the Finlandia out of my little refrigerator, cracked the seal
, and drank. Then I called Serena and told her what I'd learned.

“I'm pretty sure Mrs. Lopez is dead,” I said. I was standing near the window, looking down at the street. “If she realized she was in danger and left town, she wouldn't have left her kids in danger. I think the guys from the tunnel picked her up, found out what she knew, and killed her so she couldn't warn anyone.”

“God,” Serena said. “This is getting serious, Hailey.” Like me nearly dying in Mexico and then later jumping her with a boning knife was all light sparring.

“What do you think she knew?”

“Well, where Nidia and I were going, for one thing,” I said. “I'd wondered how, if they were just tailing Nidia and me, they knew to get ahead of us and set up that trap in the tunnel. This answers that. Herlinda Lopez knew about the village.” I played with the drawstring of the blinds. “If Nidia told her something else, like what all of this is about, I still don't know what that was. That's the same guessing game we've been playing for days.”

I tipped my head back and drank again, the vodka cool and antiseptic on my tongue.

“You still there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking, this doesn't make me feel good about cousin Lara being unaccounted for. Maybe she really did fight with her mother, but she knows the stuff Mrs. Lopez knew, maybe more, and recent events are proving that's not a safe position to be in.”

Serena said, “Be careful, okay?”

“I don't know how to do that and still find anything out,” I told her. “Being careful would be forgetting all about this. Either I'm going to do this or I'm not. In fact …”

“In fact, what?”

I drank again, then leaned on the window frame and looked down at the street. Cars shuttled back and forth, red brake lights flaring and fading. I said, “Maybe it's best they know I'm out there looking for her.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I have no idea who these guys are,” I said. “I could look for them the rest of my life and not find them, but if they come looking for me, that'll streamline things, if nothing else.”

“Don't streamline yourself into an unmarked grave,
prima.”

What little there was to know about Herlinda Lopez's disappearance, I
learned from the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

She was apparently taken from her own garage, in her own car. The garage had a back door that opened directly onto the Lopezes' small yard, and then another into the house. The investigating officers found that the door leading into the yard had been pried open, its cheap lock broken. A short time after that, Herlinda's old crimson Toyota was found in a parking lot in a quiet, light-industrial area. The implication was that whoever had taken her had broken into the garage in the small hours of the morning via the yard door and simply waited for her to come through the house door to her car, which she'd done at five that morning, on her way to her bakery job. She had raised no cry when confronted, probably intimidated by a gun and aware that her children were still sleeping in the house. She apparently let her attackers drive her away in her car, then they transferred her to a second car in the parking lot, where the trail stopped.

There had been an unfortunately long lead time on the case, because her coworkers at the bakery had been patient with her failure to show up, assuming that responsible Herlinda must have had a good reason to be tardy. They didn't call her home until ten, long after her kids had left for school through the house's front door, never going into the garage or seeing the broken door there. No one knew she was missing until her daughter played the answering machine message at four that afternoon.

The accounts of Herlinda's disappearance shed new light on the men who'd taken Nidia. My theory had been that they had waited to
take Nidia in Mexico because it was too risky to try to kidnap someone from a dense urban area with lots of potential witnesses. That was true enough; the neighbor lady who caught me looking through the garage windows was proof of that. But with Herlinda, these guys had proven themselves capable of an urban kidnapping. That suggested that they hadn't known where Nidia was until just before I came to get her. If they'd had time, they would have done the same job on Nidia that they'd done later on Herlinda.

So they'd tracked Nidia down, but before they could move, I'd come and gotten her. That had forced their hand. Almost on the fly, they'd put together their plan to kidnap Herlinda and find out where Nidia and I were going.

That worried me more than anything else. These guys could think on their feet. The way they'd extracted Herlinda from her house had been almost surgical, and that had been their Night at the Improv.

This was where I should have been saying,
Imagine what they could do with a little lead time
, but I didn't have to imagine. I'd seen it, in the tunnel.

I didn't learn anything else useful that day
.

Serena called me and told me that no one had a line on Nidia's cousin Lara Cortez, and that Nidia's family was somewhere in California's vast agricultural-worker community. That could have meant picking strawberries near Santa Maria or garlic in Gilroy. Though I would have liked to talk to them, when I thought about what had happened to Herlinda Lopez, I was glad Nidia's family weren't anywhere they could easily be found.

West Point prides itself on being a four-year university with a broad, well-
rounded curriculum. But it's also very much an Army post, and from your first day there, you're a soldier.

That was why, when I surfaced from BART and walked up onto the campus of UC Berkeley the next day, I stopped for a moment to look around at the student body all around me. I'd gone to college in a sea of cadet gray, and after all this time, the sight of a civilian student body gave me culture shock. Some wore jeans and Cal-logo T-shirts or caps, like the model students in a course catalog, but many more wore clothing as diverse as costumes: motorcycle boots, skater motley, Buddy Holly glasses, Afros, Birkenstocks, minidresses. Some wore tank tops and cutoffs that showed amazing amounts of skin; others were swathed almost head to foot in flowing ethnic prints. They drank lattes on the steps of Dwinelle Hall and Web-surfed on their phones. I'd nearly forgotten that students lived this way.

I wondered what they would do if they knew the student with the blond ponytail and the birthmark on her face had a loaded SIG Sauer in her backpack.

I was here to look for an obituary, that of the mathematician whom Nidia had cared for until his death. I didn't have a name, except Adriano, which Nidia might have Spanicized from Adrian. That would have made searching the
Chronicle's
obits difficult. And if this guy hadn't done anything of real note, his death might not have made the
Chronicle
at all. I was fairly certain, though, that the university paper would have covered it.

So that was how I ended up outside the offices of the mathematics
department, looking at a glass case on the wall where news and events were posted. There it was, an obituary for Adrian Skouras. Both the
Daily Californian
and the
Chronicle
story were posted. When I saw the accompanying photo, I had a dawning sense of understanding.

All along, I'd made a sloppy assumption: that a professor dying of cancer would have been a white-haired old man. But cancer is indiscriminate. Adrian Skouras had died at thirty-three. The photo both papers used had probably been taken years before that. The young man the camera had captured had almost sensual features—he was obviously olive-complected, though the photo was black-and-white, and he had dark curly hair and deep-set eyes. The effect, though, was offset by the thin sharpness of his face and his wire-rim eyeglasses, and like many people unused to attention, his smile for the camera was almost a wince.