13 Stolen Girls (25 page)

Command vehicles and military trucks crowded the driveway. Two more dormitory buses were parked behind the one Remington had driven in on. The chaos of the morning lay everywhere around her, but it couldn't compete with the immediacy of memory. Nothing could.

“You all right?” Velske asked her.

Now he was going to say,
You look like you've just seen a ghost.
But he didn't. He didn't understand. She hadn't
seen
a ghost. She had become one herself.

“I know this place,” Remington murmured.

“They've got coffee and some sort of canteen set up over by the garage. Nothing edible, but my God I was hungry. There's some portable showers, too. You've got a heavy debriefing coming up, Detective. They're waiting for you.”

Ah, but Deputy Velske, ghosts don't eat. They don't shower. They don't debrief.

Wildermanse. The home of the Loushane family.

Everything that was supposed to happen to a child growing into adulthood happened to Remington right there at Wildermanse.

She first fell in love.

The boy died, so she had come to understand loss, too.

Ten years and a lifetime ago. That was now, and this was then.

In the fall of 2005, seventeen-year-old Simon Loushane found himself in the midst of a party rocking the fourth floor of a balconied, concrete-block-and-stucco building on Avenida Revolución in Tijuana. A sign on the façade ID'd the place as Hotel Baja California. Crazed
banda
music worked itself up from the street-level disco down below until Simon could feel the beat deep in his crotch.

He was drunk and high. He had never not been drunk and high while in Tijuana. Getting stoned was what everybody did. “Tijuas,” Simon and his friends called it with easy familiarity, even though the most they knew of the city was a couple of party streets close to the border crossing. So linked was it with drunkenness that in Simon's mind the town seemed to spin on its axis like some massive carnival fun ride, as though it were wholly detached from solid ground.

“Come along with me,
pobrecito
.”

Hermana. She had picked him up a half hour earlier on the dance floor downstairs, coming on real strong, giving him tongue on the first kiss, grinding her body against his. Whoring was another activity Simon and friends devoted themselves to in Tijuas. But Hermana wasn't some skeevy, used-up Zona Norte hooker. She was a real girl. Something about her looks, the confident way she carried herself, attracted Simon right from the start.

Now here they were, the two of them in a hotel room packed with dancing partiers. The space more resembled a suite or an apartment. A boom box played a loud, distorted
narco-corrido
classic. The song battled it out with the disco craziness from downstairs.

People danced on the bed, on the tabletops, out on the balcony. The singer told about his “three animals”—rooster (weed), parrot (cocaine) and goat (heroin)—and how they would destroy
“la gente,”
the middle-class white folks who dared to tangle with them.

Mis animales son bravos

Si no saben torear, pues no le entren

Those who aren't matadors shouldn't fight bulls. The lesson might have been lost on Simon, since his Spanish-language skills were pretty much limited to the word
cerveza.

Hermana led him away from the crowd and into a tiny kitchen. They had scored from an acquaintance of Hermana's named Armando, who now opened the glassine deck and spilled out a thumb-size pile of powder. Simon gave Hermana a wicked smile, thinking at first that it was cocaine. But the way Armando treated the stuff indicated that it was dope, scag, heroin. Not some dirty Mexican Brown, either, but real China Dragon, pure and pretty and white.

Hermana was all over Simon, sitting on his lap, nuzzling his neck. “You'll love this,
pobrecito
.”

The dude Armando was like some sort of dwarf or small person (“Say hello to my little friend,” Hermana said mockingly when she introduced Armando to Simon, playing off the famous line from
Scarface
). He didn't stand much taller than Simon's chest. One of the reasons that Simon followed the two of them upstairs from the disco was that he figured he could handle a midget if the deal turned out to be a hustle.

Armando smiled.
“Usted va a volar al paraíso.”

“He says you are going to fly right off to heaven.” Hermana lit a candle. She opened a leather kit bag, took out a hypodermic syringe and started to transfer the dope to a spoon.

“Nuh-uh.” Simon's words came out slurred, but his meaning was clear enough. “I'll snort it.”

“Like a little pussy?” She mashed her face against his lips. “Huh? A little gringo pussy?”

“Él es un novato,”
Armando said. “He's a rookie.” The little man reached over and grabbed Hermana by the wrist, but she shrugged him off.

Hermana whispered into Simon's ear. “I'll take care of you real good, baby. You're going to get higher than you've ever been in your life.”

The syringe came still sheathed in its plastic wrapper. She waved the hypodermic proudly. “See? Fresh for you. No sharing, no SIDA.”

Simon watched the process, mesmerized. Hermana cooked, filtered the liquefied H through a scrap of cotton fabric and drew the product into the barrel of the hypo with the plunger. He knew that he should call a halt to the whole business, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it.

The dwarf started to speak to Hermana in rapid-fire Spanish. She kept up with the cook, shaking her head, telling him “No” at intervals.

Armando stood. A big
vato
peeled away from the insanity in the next room and propped his muscular frame against the doorway. He gazed lazily at the frozen drama playing out at the kitchen table. For some reason, the guy's insolent, knowing expression struck Simon as maddening. It read like a challenge.

The three of them—Armando, Hermana and the big
vato
—stared at him. For the first time Simon felt a thrill of fear.

He flopped his right arm down on the table in front of Hermana. “A skin pop,
chica.
No veins.”

Armando smiled and nodded. Then he left the hotel room, shoving his way through the crowd and vanishing. He disappeared so quickly that it was comical.

Simon laughed. “What's with him?”

“He's a leprechaun.” The word, pronounced in Hermana's light Hispanic accent, again made Simon laugh.

She pulled a latex tube out of her kit of works. “Which one?”

Simon hesitated. “No, no, that one's for you. You do it.”

“Come on, it's just a single point, that's all. Nothing to worry about.”

“Just a skin pop,” Simon repeated.

But she tied him off and mainlined him.

The hit, when it came, knocked Simon back in his chair, mouth slack, head flopping forward like a sunflower stalk. He embarked on a trip to Planet Yum.

The
vato
unfolded his tall-drink-of-water form, left his post at the doorway and approached the nodded-out
americano.

“Deberíamos hacer lo aqu.”
We should do him here.

Hermana shook her head.
“Así que va a sentir dolor?”
Asking if Simon deserved such a pleasurable death, getting snuffed in the midst of a heroin high. She got up and retrieved a coffee-can ashtray from a nearby countertop, returning to the table just in time to catch Simon's first spew of vomit from the effects of the dope.

“Sweet Jesus.” He bent over and puked into the coffee can a second time, then re-surfaced wearing a crooked, sick-stained grin.

“Up on your feet,
tío
.” Hermana cheerfully pulled him erect. “We get you outside, you'll feel better.”

With the high-quality dope singing through his veins, Simon's mind was a shade overwhelmed. He had just a firm enough grasp on exterior reality to notice something odd about the two figures looming over him.

“You're like a pair of freaking twins.” Mumbling the words.

Hermana and her male double paid no attention. They escorted Simon through the party room. The music and the dancing melded into his kaleidoscope drug rush. He tried a shuffling dance step himself, and muffed it. Faces loomed out of the dope-smoke haze, leered at him, fell away.

The night air on the balcony felt glorious. Hermana and the tall
vato
braced Simon, jostling aside the dancers, maneuvering through the crowd toward the front railing. Beneath them, the midnight street scene was booming and zooming.

“I love it here!” Simon called, staggering forward and raising his arms like Rocky.

The two strangers he had just met boosted him up and over the tubular, white-enameled bars of the balcony railing. They launched him, or he launched himself—it was difficult for the distracted bystanders to recall. On the pavement below, a T-shirt vendor (“Tijuana—City of Tomorrow”) happened to be looking up. He told everyone who would listen that the boy came down gracefully, arms spread like wings,
“como un cisne,”
as though he were a swan.

Courtesy of the diacetylmorphine shot he took in the median vein of his right forearm, Simon Loushane was flying as he fell. The dope in his bloodstream might have cushioned his crash onto the speckled concrete of Avenida Revolución, but not by much, and not nearly enough.

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