“You’re telling me that you don’t actually have any direct knowledge that could lead me to Enrique Escobedo,” she said. “You have only guesses, except that I have to jump through hoops to try to figure out what you mean, when I’m so tired that even if you were talking sense, I’d have problems sorting it out. I have to say, if you’re trying to help, I wish you wouldn’t. You’re wasting time that I don’t have.”
She felt his touch then, the dry firmness of his skin as his fingers wrapped around hers, gently pulling her hand from her face. She looked into his eyes, dark into dark, and saw her torment reflected there.
“To every thing there is a season,” he stated, as if the words had never been said before. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” The repetition of the word alone was soporific; Mendez wanted to lay her head onto her arms right there on the picnic table. “Take up thy bed. And if we do meet again, why, we shall smile.”
“You’re telling me to go home and have a nap.” His eyes crinkled: Yes. “You’re probably right. But you haven’t told me what you wanted me to know, about Enrique Escobedo.”
“Those that have eyes to see, let them see.”
“Do you have any idea how irritating this is?” she snapped.
“The discourse of fools is irksome,” he agreed.
“So why do you do it?”
The crooked smile he gave her was filled with apology and empathy. He said, “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a beggar’s rags,” she told him.
But Brother Erasmus merely said, “Like him that travels, I return again.” He set the tip of his first finger against the table: Here. Then he spread both hands out on the dented wood, all fingers outstretched except the thumb of his left hand, tucked under the palm.
“You want me to meet you back here at nine o’clock?” she interpreted. “Tonight?”
By way of answer, he folded the paper around his half-eaten burrito, tucked it and the plastic fork and knife into his knapsack, and walked away, his staff beating a syncopation to his steps. The carved head was pointing backward; it seemed to watch her as it rose and fell.
She shook her head to get the ridiculous notion out of her mind. But in one thing, the man was surely right: she did need some rest if she wasn’t to be utterly useless. She phoned the station and told Scarlotti that she was going home and wasn’t to be disturbed for anything short of a catastrophe. Inevitably, he wanted to know what she meant by “catastrophe,” but she slapped her phone shut and tossed her debris in the trash.
She drove home, fed the cat, kicked off her shoes, and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over her head. And although she expected perhaps twenty minutes of fitful rest, Bonita Mendez slept like a babe in its mother’s arms, her dreams filled with the warm brown eyes of wise old men.
When she woke, it was dark, and the bedside clock told her it was nearly seven. She fried up some eggs, onions, and jalapeños, wrapping them in some of the tortillas her mother had made, topped with her sister’s fiery homemade salsa. Rested, fed, and warm inside, she then took a long, hot shower, washed her hair, dressed in plain clothes with a jacket to cover her gun, and went by the station in the vain hope that something – anything – had come to light in the case. There was nothing.
Mendez had no intention of meeting the old man. It was ridiculous, to waste her time listening to his colorful but meaningless talk, when she could be out reinterviewing the friends of Gloria Rivas she’d suspected hadn’t told her everything they knew, or -. That reminded her. She called the Torres number, got Jasmina’s mother again, and was told that no, Mina wasn’t home that day. She had been in earlier and went out again with friends to a movie. Did Sergeant Mendez have Mina’s new cell phone number? Yes, Sergeant Mendez had it, and now tried it, but the phone was either turned off or in one of the county’s numerous dead zones.
Mendez looked at the clock again: 8:52. Oh, hell, why not?
When she turned down the alleyway near the burrito stand, it appeared empty, until the old man stepped out of the shadows, a swirl of dark robes and a gleaming staff. He pulled open the car door, slid the stick inside with the ease of long habit, tucked himself into the passenger seat, and had the door shut again before the car had settled into stillness.
“Where are we going?” she asked, reaching up to flick on the overhead light.
He held out a scrap of paper, a torn-off section of the local AAA map, showing Rio Linda and the outlying countryside. Near the upper right corner, twelve miles or so from the center of town, was a penciled circle.
“You want me to go here?” she asked, tapping the circle.
In response, he pulled his seat belt around him.
She put the car into gear and drove off.
She didn’t have to check his map again – one thing Bonita Mendez knew, it was this valley. She had been born in the Rio Linda community hospital, had attended schools here, had gone to college just over the range of coastal hills, and had come home, after a brief fling with the bright lights of the Bay Area, to work and live. She’d learned how to drive on the roads near the map’s circle, remote farm lanes where a beginner could learn the intricacies of the stick shift without endangering the driving public; she’d patrolled there when she began at the police department; and she’d helped dismantle a meth lab a little farther along the road, five years later. Before that, she remembered, the INS had raided a farmworkers’ camp, carved into the hills by undocumented workers desperate to save every dollar to send to their families back home.
It was dark out there, miles from any streetlamp. When she let the car slow, the last house had been nearly a mile before; the last car they’d passed, ten minutes before. Even the headlights behind them had turned off at the final junction, when they’d left the main road.
“Okay?” she said, making it a question.
The old man’s hand moved into the glow from the dashboard, one long finger pointing straight ahead. She gave the car some gas, and in a hundred yards, when his finger shifted to the right, she steered down a gravel track between fields.
They went on that way for about a mile in all, gravel giving way to dirt, then ruts. Eventually, his hand came up, and she stopped.
She would’ve had to stop even without the signal, because she had reached the end of the road. The fields on either side came to an end at a creek with a cliff on the other side, thrust up by an underground fault line. Her headlights illuminated a dirt turnaround and a wall of greenery. The camp of illegals had been very near here, as she remembered – the men had used the creek for water, the hills for shelter, and the trees for concealment. In the end, it had been the smell of the cook fire that had given them away.
Just as the smell of smoke as she got out of the car gave this encampment away.
She had her hand on the weapon at her side, easing the car door shut with the hand that held the big Maglite. The old man, however, had no such urge to silence, and before she could stop him, he had slammed his door with a bang that could be heard for a mile.
The very air seemed to wince. Her companion walked toward the turnaround and spoke over his shoulder. “Venga.”
She was already moving before the implications of his command struck her. Unless he’d come up with a very short quotation from some Spanish book, he had just addressed her directly. She trotted after him, switching on her flashlight as they plunged into a shadow of a space between some bushes.