The door to the walk-in closet stood ajar. She stepped around the stains, crossed the room, opened the closet door, and discovered a wheelchair. The woman in the chair faced away from Minette, into the closet, her head tipped to the right. The back of the woman’s head was broken open. A dangling chunk of skull bone was suspended by a flap of skin and strands of hair.
Minette remembered this, remembered seeing the face now turned away from her. In fact, she herself had moved the wheelchair into the closet.
Minette’s heart—
Sitting at the kitchen table, hands clasped around a mug of hot coffee, Minette Butterworth felt her heartbeat subside from a gallop to a more ordinary pace, and it no longer knocked against her breastbone. Paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, an acceleration of the heart when no cause was evident, had troubled her grandmother, and perhaps she had inherited a propensity for it. The condition wasn’t life-threatening. Ventricular tachycardia, on the other hand, could lead to a sudden cessation of the heartbeat and was far more serious than the supraventricular form, requiring a pacemaker. But her grandmother hadn’t needed one, and neither would Minette.
She didn’t worry about the episode, because an inner voice said she had nothing to fear. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing. Nothing. All would be well if she made herself useful.
When Bob came into the kitchen, showered and shaved and dressed for the day, he drank his coffee while standing. “We’ve got to get moving, Min. We have our assignment, places to look, people to see. A helluva lot of them.”
Getting up from the table, Minette said, “That poor little boy must be terrified. What kind of people kidnap a helpless child?”
“We have more damn crime in this country than the big shots in Washington will ever admit,” Bob grumbled. “It’s only going to get worse.”
He drove their Toyota Tacoma pickup. She didn’t need to give him directions. He’d memorized the assignment, which was unusual. Minette had a facility for memorization, especially when it came to poetry, but not her Bobby. He was an excellent teacher, but if she didn’t give him a written list, if she just rattled off five items for him to pick up at the market, he would forget one or two. Yet he remembered every detail of their complicated assignment as if he were programmed.
Happily, they didn’t need to check on any of the folks in the other three residences on their little lane. Those people, too, had volunteered to assist in the search. They were darn good neighbors, and they were darn good people. Thinking about all of them wanting to help save that precious little boy, Minette was filled with a warm sense of community. She almost wanted to cry.
14
AT 10:38, AHEAD OF SCHEDULE, Enrique De Soto’s deliveryman, Tio, arrived with the Tiffin Allegro motor home, towing a white Chevrolet Suburban. The gate guard instructed him to park at the back of Ferrante Escobar’s fenced four-acre property and summoned Elinor Dashwood—Jane—from the client lounge.
Tio was maybe thirty, the ideal height and weight to be a Thoroughbred-racing jockey. A white welt of scar tissue across his throat suggested an encounter in which his adversary had failed either to kill him or rob him of his voice.
The man who would drive Tio back to Nogales, Arizona, followed in a Porsche 911 Turbo S. He parked near the motor home with the engine running and the air-conditioning on, and he never got out of the car.
The repainted Allegro was a sparkly midnight blue, not a color in the Tiffin catalog. The company decorated their vehicles with bold multicolor wind-stream stripes flaring along the flanks. Ricky had refined this motif so that there were fewer and smaller stripes of lower contrast with the base color, rendered in a single shade of high-gloss ruby red. The vehicle was so eye-catching that no one would imagine that it was on a clandestine mission.
Carrying her tote bag, Jane followed Tio into the motor home. Except for the windshield, the windows were tinted, and the vehicle carried a cargo of shadows.
She and Tio settled into the dinette booth, facing each other across the table.
She gave him the plastic-wrapped brick of money. “A hundred twenty K, as agreed.”
Tio put the cash in a tote bag of his own. “Enrique, he tells me don’t check is it funny money and don’t do a count. He wants you should know he trusts you like no one else. You should trust him the same once you’re over this widow thing.”
Jane smiled. “He’s one hell of a romantic guy, my Ricky.”
“Yeah, all the ladies love him, and that’s no shit. Plates on both vehicles, registration and proof of insurance in the consoles. Special plates for the Suburban and the other stuff you wanted”—he gestured toward the rear of the motor home—“it’s all there in the bedroom.”
Sliding out of the booth, she said, “Wait here.”
“You really gonna look it’s all there?”
“I really am.”
When nervous, Tio fingered the scar on his throat. “I tell Ricky you don’t take it on faith, it’s gonna break the man’s heart.”
“I’m sure it’s all there. But before I’m in the middle of this business deal I’m setting up, I want to be certain I’ve got exactly what I need, that there’s been no misunderstanding about what I asked Ricky for. Anyway, let’s not tell him I had to do inventory, spare him the heartbreak.”
“That’s good with me. I hate to see the man sad.” He stopped fingering the scar. “You never know what crazy shit he’s gonna do when he’s sad.”
When she returned from the bedroom, Jane said, “Everything’s just as it should be.”
Tio gestured to the booth she had vacated. “Park yourself and let me say some shit.”
She sat but said, “I’m expecting my partners very soon.”
“I’ll keep it quick. I want you should know some important truths about the man.”
“Ricky?”
“What other man we been talkin’ about?”
“Go on.”
“First, he’s hung like a horse. Un enorme gara?ón.”
Jane said, “I’m willing to believe that—but how do you know?”
“I stood beside him at urinals a hundred times. Understand, I don’t look on purpose. I mean, I don’t have no interest. But you take a piss with a guy often enough, you notice sooner or later.”
“Understood.”
“The first couple times with a new girl, maybe he goes off too quick. But after that, she’s not so fresh to him, then he can last longer than any stud you ever knew. Twice as long.”
“And how would you know that? Not saying I doubt you.”
Tio held out his right hand, so she could see the tattoo on the back. A red heart was enwrapped with a rippling blue ribbon on which red letters declared in Spanish, MAYA OWNS TIO FOREVER. “She’s my girl.”
“She made you put her brand on you?”
He regarded Jane with an expression of pity. “Maybe you don’t read guys too good. No bitch makes Tio do nothin’. I did it myself for love.”
“That’s very moving.”
Tio ducked his head, embarrassed by his sentimentality. “Maya, she was Ricky’s best girl, but he moved on. So then me and Maya, we found this special thing together, like destiny or somethin’. She’s hotter than hot.”
“And that’s how you know Ricky has staying power. Pillow talk between you and Maya.”
Tio shrugged. “You know how it goes. You get off together, it’s so great, and then after, while you’re layin’ there, you gotta talk about somethin’.” He realized Jane might infer the wrong thing from what he’d said. “Just so you know, I’m a marathon guy in the sack, just like Ricky. Lo puedo hacer por horas.”
“I can tell just by looking at you,” Jane said.
“Yeah, but I’m not talkin’ me here. I’m talkin’ Enrique, what you need to know.”
Jane felt as though she had been swept into the role of Roxane in a grotesque parody of Cyrano de Bergerac, with Tio as a less than eloquent Cyrano, Enrique offstage as the even less verbally gifted Christian de Neuvillette.
Smiling, Tio put his hands together in prayer mode as if to suggest that God was witness to the truth of his words. “Ricky, he never hit no bitch in his life. He never would hit no bitch. He treats them all like ladies.”
“If he ever hit me,” Jane said, “he’d have one less hand.”
Tio’s smile froze.
“I’m just sayin’,” Jane added.