The Black Minutes

26

This is the Jackal? Rangel thought. The guy who killed the little girls? On first impression, the man looked like he couldn’t kill a fly. He was thin, with blond hair and blue eyes that were about as expressive as a wall. No one would look twice if they saw him on the street. His name was Clemente Morales and he worked for his twin brother, Edelmiro, supervising the union’s work. As the older brother became the leader of all the teachers in the whole state and built schools, his twin spent his time killing the female students.
In the last year, Professor Edelmiro Morales had built four schools to consolidate his power. The buildings were impractical, with inadequate light and ventilation, designed irrationally, completely illogically, with no emergency exits. Professor Edelmiro had a strategy: when they were done with the construction, they noticed there was no budget for their maintenance, which wasn’t really serious, because they’d already paid the builder. A few of them closed after a few months. The remains of these schools can be seen throughout the city.
The mother of the Hernández girl had reported that while they were expanding the public school behind her house, Morales saw her and became obsessed. When her husband wasn’t at home, the man would try to seduce her; because she always rejected him, the man had promised to get his revenge in the most hurtful way possible. Eight days later her daughter disappeared, and out of fear she didn’t report it: she knew Edelmiro Morales was extremely powerful.
The day of his arrest, the Jackal rode along in silence. Sometimes he closed his eyes, sometimes he looked at the floor of the patrol car. He yawned once: he had a crooked canine tooth. As for El Chuy, he stared at the scenery. “Don’t get distracted, Romero,” Rangel said to his partner. “Even though they’re handcuffed, anything could happen with two guys like this.” That’s why Romero pointed his pistol at them and didn’t take his eyes off them, especially the Jackal. If he could have just one wish granted to him, Romero would’ve asked to know what the guy was thinking. There was a moment when the Jackal seemed to be smiling, so the Blind Man pointed the gun at him and demanded, “What’re you laughing about?” The Jackal, surprised, continued to stare out the front of the car. “Don’t pressure him; you don’t want him to get nervous,” Rangel said.
“If he tries anything,” said Romero, “I’ll belt him one and throw him in the trunk.”
He didn’t have to. The guy in the backseat got very, very calm.
Each one of them made their own plans. We’re gonna get a shitload of money, the Blind Man said, even after dividing the reward up between us. As for Rangel, he was going to leave the state and start somewhere else. Maybe in Mexico City, maybe on the border. . . . Maybe he’d ask for work from Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, that is, if he could get in touch with him. For his part, Romero was going to buy a present for his wife and his girls; that is, after he paid six months of back rent. He’d take his wife to Acapulco on vacation and he could open a business, maybe a lunch place.
“Hey, Romero,” said Vicente, “what does your wife have to do with you using electric shock on suspects?”
“Thing is, when my old lady doesn’t go to work, I send her out to take a walk. Then I take her clothes iron, plug in the cord, and, damn, anybody’ll confess. I sit the suspect down in a full tub with just his underwear on, and I graze his wet knees with the tip of the cord. I say, You like 110 volts? ’Cause you can also get 220.”
“Holy shit.” Vicente shook his head. “Just tell me one thing: is this gonna be in the papers?”
“Why do you ask?”
“’Cause you’re the snitch, Romero. You went to Klein’s last Monday. You had a date with some reporters you thought you could get some money from, and you ran out when you saw me walk in.”
The lackey looked straight ahead. “Swear you won’t tell the other guys; they’d come after me. I’ve gotta make a living somehow. I don’t make anything at the station, even though they f*ck with me all the time.”
Rangel turned on the radio. They were playing that Pink Floyd album, the one with the clock ticktock sounds and a woman yelling like she’s scared: Dark Side of the Moon. By free association, he remembered the German who gave him the coin as a present. Soon he’d be able to go looking for the B-side of his life, he told himself. He who started out a musician and ended up a cop.
Romero noticed a billboard on the side of the highway that advertised a luxury auto dealer: THERE’S A FORD IN YOUR FUTURE. He took out a pen from the glove compartment and scribbled down the phone number on a paper: 31539.
“What do you want that for?”
“You never know.”
The one time they stopped was near González to fill up on gas. As he was paying at the cash register, Rangel saw the front page of the paper and his smile faded fast.
ARRESTED FOR DRUG TRAFFICKING. The picture was of Agustín Barbosa, Ciudad Madera’s mayor.
F*cking A, he thought, f*cking A. And he showed the paper to Romero.
“Hmm,” Romero sighed. “What’re we gonna do with these guys? There’s no way we can take ’em back. What do we do?”
“The only choice,” he said, “is to try to turn him in to Chief García. We’ve gotta take that risk.”
They called García from a pay phone, even though it was three in the morning. Do?a Dolores answered. “My husband hasn’t come back from the capital; he should be here any minute.” Vicente explained that they had the Jackal under arrest and he’d confessed. The woman asked who it was and Rangel told her, summing up his investigation: the cigar and the wool, the report, the stains on the girls’ shirts, the circumstances of the man’s arrest, and the spontaneous confession. Do?a Dolores understood.
“Go turn him in at headquarters. I’ll tell my husband to meet you there.”