Bettina thanks her, and Jean smiles, but Bettina feels her usual annoyance with the boring city hall stuff, the puff pieces on Laguna’s several art festivals, the tedium of the weekly entertainment calendar. Just as she told Felix during their long wait at the border yesterday, Bettina likes stories that matter.
She follows her boss’s gaze out the window, to where LBPD officer Billy Ray Crumley is pushing his patrol e-bike toward the Coastal Eddy front door. He’s got on his helmet and his navy-blue Bike Team uniform: shorts, a shirt, and a blue LBPD windbreaker.
“Here’s Billy, right on time.” Jean Rose winks pleasantly and rises.
Bettina hears him out in the lobby, greeting Marin, the receptionist. Billy has a pleasantly forceful voice and he’s a talker if there ever was one. She can’t hear his words, but she tracks his movements just by their sound: first a greeting to millionaire Coastal Eddy publisher Herb Sutton in his private office; then brief newsroom chatter with the city editor, the sports and business writers, then the arts and entertainment editor, Bettina’s own Jean Rose. Bettina’s cubicle is down the hall, on advertising row, because she’s the latest hired and the editorial newsroom was full. Which to her was a good trade for the views of the city and the snippet of ocean beyond.
Billy works his way down advertising row and spends extra time with Allison, whom Bettina believes is secretly crushing on him, and finally, he’s here, balancing his bike on her cubicle partition as his soft brown eyes behold the dog, who wags his tail.
“I just got to meet Felix, Bettina.”
“He doesn’t care for strangers, but sure.”
Billy Ray, tall and rangy, balances his patrol bike against the cubicle wall, hangs his helmet on a handle bar, covers the space in two strides, and kneels in front of the dog.
Felix sits and looks him in the eyes. It’s an interesting face-off; then it’s Billy, not the dog, who cocks his head. Then the dog goes closer and lets Billy pet him. Bettina watches his fingers working the dog’s throat and chest. Felix squints with pleasure, leans into it.
“He likes you,” says Bettina with a twinge of jealousy. Wonders if gregarious Billy Ray Crumley likes that everybody likes him.
Billy gets one hand behind each ear, jiggles them gently, flaps relaxed and flopping. Felix aims his pleasure-squinted eyes into Billy’s.
“Yeah, boy,” says the Texan. He breaks his gaze with the dog to look up at Bettina. Billy Ray has this way of looking right into her, and Bettina takes it in. She’s pretty sure she looks into him too. He’s always pleasant. Always here. Some of the Coastal Eddy staff tease her about him. He’s dark haired and good looking and five years older than Bettina. He’s rumored to have left a bad marriage back in Wichita Falls, Texas, but he’s never once shown any interest in seeing Bettina other than right here, on his Coast Highway Bike Team rounds. So she might just be part of the furniture.
“Bettina, this is one fine dog. You did good. Your video is going crazy, so now this little street dog is famous.”
Billy stands and gets a kibble from his windbreaker pocket — lots of dogs in Laguna — and lures Felix back to his place in the sun with it.
“Well, Bettina, it’s really fine to see you again.”
“And you, Billy.”
That look of his.
“Rain later this week,” he says. They always note the weather.
“Cool too.”
“Spring’s just a couple of weeks away.”
“That means orioles on my bird feeders, and tourists crowding into town,” says Bettina.
He puts his helmet on, leaves the strap undone, and rights his bicycle, its saddle knocking against the gun holstered high on his hip. He tips the helmet visor with one hand, like a movie cowboy, which Bettina finds funny.
“I’ll drop by tomorrow, if that’s all right.”
“I have interviews in the morning.”
“Afternoon, then.”
As the man with the Bike departs, Joe smells the familiar scents of men’s shoes and socks and the sweet, attractive smell of gun oil and leather. Hoppe’s is not in Joe’s vocabulary, only in his immense, evolving encyclopedia of smells. It’s the same gun oil Dan uses. A sweet, comforting smell. He wonders if Dan knows this guy.
He thinks that her name is Bettina and his is Billy.
After grinding out the calendar and city hall stuff and setting up some Festival of Arts interviews, Bettina uses her work computer and Coastal Eddy’s fast internet to get the Tijuana newspapers.
Tijuana is a big city, awash in newspapers and tabloids. There’s Frontera, La Crónica, El Sudcaliforniano, La Voz, Razón, Zeta. There are dozens of online publications, too, from Restaurant Week to the Gringo Gazette.
Her favorite is the daily Sol de Tijuana, for its handy translation button and good archives.
She goes back to the second of February, the day after the boy took Felix to the clinic, but the story of the shoot-out happened too late to make the edition.
But there it is on February third, the lead article:
Six men were left dead Wednesday night in a bloody gunfight that started in the Furniture Calderón factory downtown.
“Some of the victims appear to be Sinaloan Cartel soldiers while others are members of the New Generation Cartel,” said Municipal Police captain Benecio Zumbaya Bertrán. “It appears that the Tijuana narcos were attempting to steal drugs and cash belonging to their rivals. This inter-cartel fighting is increasingly deadly. This is part of the reason Tijuana is the bloodiest city in Mexico.”
Bettina knows that Tijuana was the murder capital of the world just two years ago, and is on track to regain its title in this still-young year.
The Calderón shoot-out pictures of the dead are unpublishable by US media standards — bodies shot to ribbons, blanched and bloody in the camera flashes. Two on the street. Four in the factory. The details aren’t great, but four of the men are dressed in street clothes and two in military-looking tactical wear.
Zumbaya himself is a grim-faced man with fierce black eyes and pockmarked cheeks. His coat lapel is studded with stars and decorations.
She reads on:
Captain Zumbaya stated that no drugs or other contraband were recovered and that four automatic rifles of North American manufacture that were left behind have been confiscated as evidence.
“We believe that several of the gunmen escaped in a white van that was parked on a side street west of the factory,” he said. “Increasingly, automatic weapons are being used in cartel violence against each other and against law enforcement. The cartels have more firepower than we do.”
Witnesses say that the shooting began inside the Furniture Calderón factory and warehouse, and soon spilled into the downtown streets. No bystanders suffered injury. The factory itself sustained bullet damage, and several chairs and sofas were riddled, according to owner Juan Calderón.
“Nothing like this has ever happened here before,” he said. “This is a peaceful neighborhood. Furniture Calderón has been here for forty years.”
Bettina figures that the police found no drugs or money, because the victors took it all away in the white van. She wonders, with her reporter’s suspicion, whether Juan Calderón had been questioned, and how Captain Zumbaya knew it was the New Generation ripping off the Sinaloans, and not the other way around. Did it matter?