The Black Minutes

3

He was up writing his report until three in the morning. Like usual, he hit a wall eventually; he couldn’t do anything else and there was no other choice but to wait. El Chicote was snoring at the front desk, and Crazyshot had gone to sleep in his car. The last person to come in was at one o’clock, when Wong came back from interviewing the parents at the funeral home.
“The parents don’t suspect anyone, the father doesn’t have any enemies, and no one has seen anyone suspicious on the street. It’s the same thing as El Palmar.”
Wong was a good officer. He identified leads quickly and pointed them out so the investigation could proceed. Thanks to him they were able to establish the approximate time when the killer went into the bathroom. As soon as Rangel proved the murderer had climbed through the window, Wong had found out that two of the regulars had heard a noise around 2:30. It was the psycho, thought Rangel.
Now we’re getting somewhere, Wong cheered, we can move forward. Rangel said yes, even though deep down he had the feeling that the investigation wasn’t going anywhere. All he had to do was close his eyes and remember the bizarre way the body was found. There was something about all this that was irrational, hidden, reminiscent of something else; as if someone were sending a message he couldn’t decipher. Shit, he said to himself, how could he break the code?
As Rangel wrote his report, El Chicote dropped off the latest edition of El Mercurio, hot off the presses: THE JACKAL IS BACK. Ah, cabrón— and he suddenly felt sick to his stomach—how irresponsible can they be? Now they had really gone too far giving the murderer a name: the Jackal. In the article, the reporter wrote he was shocked by the number of rapes in the city: “At least three every month, according to official statistics.” I didn’t think there were so many, Rangel thought. The reporter argued that the guilty party was “a real-life jackal.” They said men who attacked minors were like jackals, predators that hunt in a pack and when they’re sure their prey is small and defenseless. “The authority’s ineptness is what laid the foundation for the Jackal to emerge.” Just a second here, Rangel said to himself, I don’t like this one bit.
The article was by a new columnist, Johnny Guerrero, a guy from Chihuahua. Rangel didn’t like his style. From the first day, he was writing articles attacking the chief, like he was on the mayor’s payroll. He interspersed his opinion with the facts and he exaggerated things, but more than that he seasoned his writing with flowery words: he made a bum into a derelict, a prostitute into a strumpet. For him, an autopsy was the legal necropsy and he wrote mean-spirited captions under photos: This is the miserable construction worker; Here we find the despicable ranch hand. The first time Johnny tried to interview him on the phone, Rangel took an immediate dislike to him. He imagined him as crippled, fat, squat, and greasy-faced. And he didn’t get the reporter’s sense of humor, which seemed to require that someone else be humiliated.
Rangel read this article quickly, because he already knew what it would say: Efforts in vain, murderer on the loose, defenseless public, incredibly slow, disgraceful investigation, police incompetence. Incompetence? He said to himself, F*ck him! I’d like to see him in my shoes, the piece-of-shit reporter. The article was cut off abruptly: Continued on page 28. He set the main section of the paper aside and looked through the rest until he found, in the section with the horoscopes and comics (Continued from page 1): because we can’t expect anything from this system. A lead could stare them in the face, and they wouldn’t even notice it.
F*cking jerk! The column was an attack on his boss, but for a second Rangel took it personally. Of course. Johnny was in complicity with the mayor.
He was brooding unhappily, about to close the paper, when he noticed an unusual headline on the opposite page: UFO’S IN PARACUáN. Damn, what’s this about? Above the head, there was a note in italics explaining that, thanks to an agreement with the AP, El Mercurio finally had access to the most interesting column to come out in the last few years, straight from the ranks of the FBI: ALL ABOUT UFO’s by Professor Cormac McCormick. Oh, man, what’s up with this?
In today’s installment, the daring investigator was reporting on the strange case in the town of Yuca in Wyoming, where Martians were believed to be taking possession of the bodies of earth-lings. They arrived at nighttime, witnesses said, hid their ship, and entered houses. They took over their hosts’ minds and bodies. The only thing that stopped them was the presence of a mineral called Mobdolite. The professor quoted a woman named Stark: “They have Bob.”
Mobdolite, thought Rangel, that stone is going to sell like hotcakes.
He threw the newspaper onto the desk next to him and walked to the end of the hallway to get some coffee. He thought he saw someone watching him from behind the window. Ah, cabrón, who’s that? He was so tired that his own reflection surprised him: long hair, a Sergeant Pepper mustache, thick sideburns, and a white shirt—always a white shirt—brown boots with white stitching, and blue jeans. Why didn’t I recognize myself, maybe because I don’t have on my dark glasses? Someone needs to tell the chief to buy a new coffeemaker. This one doesn’t work; it spews the coffee out of the pot.
Whenever the conditions allowed for it, Rangel wore his dark glasses, to hide the fact that he had one brown eye and one green one. One for each side of reality, like Mr. Torsvan had told him.
Once he was at his desk, he picked up El Travolta’s report on the body found in El Palmar and read it through quickly. Then he reviewed his own notes: A fracture of the pelvis . . . legs separated from the body with a serrated object . . . white fuzz . . . a cigarette. All of a sudden, he said to himself, What a coincidence, the other girl also died on the seventeenth! But he didn’t find this detail important and filed the random fact deep in his subconscious.
If he didn’t solve this problem soon, the reporters were going to get even more aggressive. Why I am doing this? I shouldn’t be here, he said to himself, my back hurts. As usually happened at this hour, his body began to mirror his tension. The proof came when he tried to pick up a pencil and it slipped through his fingers. Whenever he was under extreme pressure, unavoidably, his hands would sweat for hours, and a moment would come when they would start to bleed. He couldn’t stop it, not even by taking a tranquilizer or wrapping his hands in a handkerchief. First, his hands would start to itch all over; a few hours later, he would have to dry the sweat off his hands every few minutes, and then soon he wouldn’t be able to feel the texture of things. The worst came after that, because he couldn’t touch things that were very hot or cold without pain, he was unable to touch certain things at all, and even something as simple as reading became complicated: to drink coffee he had to wrap the mug in a handkerchief, to read he would wet the tips of his fingers with saliva. A moment would come when his hands would finally dry out, but this false sense of relief just told him he was in the eye of the hurricane. If his worrying continued, from that point on, there was no cream or oil that could prevent the arrival of cracks and slits, and when his hands dried out completely, they started to bleed: sometimes at his fingertips, sometimes in the middle of his palm.
The last time his hands bled was in September, when he was investigating a bank robbery, a suspicious attack on the governor’s own bank. A really wild case that caused me a lot of problems, he thought, and he rubbed his eyes. What am I doing here? I’m not trained for this, what they need is a real expert in sex crimes, not a dozen people making it all up. As had happened before, Rangel told himself it was time to throw in the towel and do something else for a living. Even though he was hearing good things about his work, the way he tracked down criminals, Rangel knew it was all based on misinformation: he didn’t have an infallible sense of intuition, he wasn’t particularly cunning, and he didn’t know anything about martial arts. It had been more than a year since he’d been in an actual fight. The truth was he was a musician, or at least he thought so; how had he allowed things to go this far? And if El Travolta hadn’t been able to solve the case, how was he going to do it?