Dora shook her head. “Too old now,” she said. “He should let the baby gangsters handle that shit, but he still liked the rush, you know? He’s about your age.”
“You get to liking it,” David said, “you’re never too old.”
“Mr. Savone paid for his lawyer and everything.”
“That’s why I’m here,” David said. “Mr. Savone needs a favor.”
“I see that,” she said. “You missed a spot on your forehead.” She licked her finger, wiped a smudge over David’s right eye, dried her finger off on the towel.
David said, “Ruben Topaz, you know him?”
Dora’s cheeks flushed red, but all she said was, “Since he was a peanut.”
“He’s dead,” David said. “And I need to get his body to his family. But when you see the situation, you’re gonna have a lot questions and I can’t give you any answers, except to say that he died like a soldier.”
Dora Lechuga reached across the table, grabbed David’s Coke, took a sip. “Who killed him?”
“One of the questions I can’t answer.”
“How do I know it wasn’t you?”
“Because I would have left him in the desert to get picked apart by coyotes and I’d be halfway to Paris by now.”
She seemed to consider this. “Is that his blood?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. It’s been a long night.” He pointed out the window, to where the hearse was parked. “He’s in a coffin. No need to open it. Not ever. Okay? Bennie’s going to take care of his family, and we’re going to make sure the people who did this pay, but right now, I need you to do this and do it quickly. I need to count on you to take it from here. Can I count on that?”
“He in pieces or something?” Dora asked.
“Or something,” David said.
She made a noise, unsettling.
“I’ve got ten minutes to get this taken care of.”
Dora walked over to her kitchen sink and threw up. Wiped her mouth off. Threw up again. Drank water from the tap. Took a deep breath. Cracked her neck. “All right,” she said. She took out a cell phone, made a call. David heard a phone ringing in the apartment upstairs. Dora spoke in Spanish to whoever was on the line, tears running down her face. David heard movement, doors opening and closing. She set her cell on the kitchen counter, took two more deep breaths, then said, “We got a storage unit in the back. It’s secure. Back your hearse up.” Down the hall, the baby started to cry. “Shit,” she said. “You need anything else from me?”
“You have any bullets?” David asked. “Jacketed hollow points, preferably.”
Dora opened a cabinet door, moved around some canned food, brought out a box. “Anything else?”
“No,” David said.
She started down the hall, then stopped.
“Did you really know Ruben?” she asked.
“I worked with him every day,” David said.
“Was he a good man? Because he didn’t come this way anymore. Mr. Savone made him promise. Like that was a condition of his parole or some shit. I never even met his wife.”
“He was . . .” David paused, looked then at Dora’s hands, saw that she had topaz rings on every finger, except for her wedding band, saw the tears running down her face, saw then a familiar nose, the same lips, saw how he’d always be in this moment in Dora’s memory, that these seconds would be her new eternity, that she’d probably need to change apartments, that she’d never sit at that kitchen table again without remembering that as the place she learned her brother was dead. “Ruben was a light in the darkness.”
TWENTY-FIVE
SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2002
TORREY, UT
THE SCHOOLHOUSE IN TORREY, UTAH, WAS AN OLD THREE-STORY REDBRICK structure turned into a bed-and-breakfast. The night before, the manager told Jennifer that the herb garden out front was where they got the ingredients for their homemade breads and salads, including the rolls William was already wolfing down from the basket of warm treats each guest received upon check-in. The fruit trees that lined the property helped with their fresh pies, which Jennifer could smell baking when they pulled up to the otherwise empty place. The manager was named Hanna, probably a year or two younger than Jennifer, but had such an easy personality that she seemed timeless, as if she’d minded this property since the early 1900s, when pioneers first came through these parts.
Not much had changed since then, Torrey a dot in the road, a place where three hundred people lived hard against the Capitol Reef National Park, their livelihoods predicated on whether or not people could still get excited about seeing the living past. Places like Capitol Reef made Jennifer uneasy. Seeing the footprints of dinosaurs in ancient sediment, or the cave-wall scrawling of native peoples, gave her feelings of vast insignificance. Here she was, in the middle of this gangster shit, and she’d be lucky to even be remembered by this woman explaining the schoolhouse’s Wi-Fi, lactose-free and soy milk options for breakfast, and how to operate the DVD player. You could manipulate a picture—it’s what Jennifer used to do at work all day—in such a way that you could stare into a person’s eyes and almost imagine yourself as them for a moment, could see yourself on that street in 1906 while the earthquake crumbled San Francisco, standing in that field watching the Hindenburg burn, pointing at the back of the car where Kennedy’s skull landed. Those people lived recently. But dinosaur tracks and cave drawings were like messages from an alien society. It made everything seem sad and small comparatively.
Jennifer wondered if she could live in a place like this, where the present and the past looked the same, frozen in the shadow of the mountains, only the periodic hum of a car on Highway 24 breaking up the dream. Could she find some old building and turn it into a business? An artist residency? A dance studio? A place to house dogs and cats once their owners died? Where she did something good?
“Do you love your job?” Jennifer asked. They were walking up the stairs to the Arithmetic Room, their space for the night.
“That’s a funny question,” Hanna said. “I guess so far so good. It’s nice knowing you’re someone’s good memory, you know?”
“I was just thinking that,” Jennifer said.
“Living in a small town is more crowded than you think,” she said. “I can’t avoid the people I really want to avoid. Different than living in Salt Lake or something. If you want to disappear, a small town is not for you.”
They reached the second floor, and Hanna unlocked the room. There were two queen beds, a bathroom, two large windows that faced out to an expanse of field, native grass about three feet high, an old yellow school bus rotting in the distance, about a hundred yards away. There was also a single tree in the field, Jennifer making out a tire swing dangling from a branch. Hanna opened the windows, let fresh air in.
“Do you get rattlesnakes?” William asked.
“We do,” Hanna said. She gave Jennifer a subtle wink. “They’re delicious. But they don’t grow on trees. We usually only find them under beds.”
