When it rains in Tijuana, it floods. My soaked shoes squished. Looky loo neighbors hovered around Hector’s front door.
They held their phones up high. Trying to capture a fragment of this controlled chaos. The flashing sirens. Cops, paramedics, and other strangers rushing in and out. They would later share those shards with family, friends, and other strangers online. Everyone who saw one of those shards would make up their own story. Everyone would get it wrong.
I pushed into the crowd and it parted like the Red Sea did for Moses. One look at a gabacho in a suit, and they assumed I possessed some sort of authority. They weren’t exactly right. They weren’t exactly wrong either.
When I crossed the threshold, my wet, muddy shoes touched Hector’s white carpet. Alicia, Hector’s girlfriend, screamed at me.
“What are you doing? You’re ruining my floor!”
At least a dozen other people had already beaten me to it. Hector’s floor was covered in footprints and a stretcher’s wheel tracks. Those tracks led straight to the bedroom.
“Take your shoes off, pendejo!” she continued.
I wanted to slap her. Alicia had always been a bitch but shock, or grief, or both had turned her shrill voice’s volume up to eleven. Instead, I complied with her crazy request. I stepped out of my shoes and peeled off my socks. I was the only one in the room who was barefoot. I was in shock, and grief too.
When she leapt off the couch and ran towards me, I braced myself for a slap. To my surprise, she threw her arms around me instead.
“Oh my God, Mike. I’m so sorry. I don’t know where that came from.” She began sobbing and buried her face in my chest.
I stood there with my arms at my side. I suppose I should have comforted her. I could have wrapped my arms around her and told her everything was fine. But it wasn’t and I didn’t feel like lying. Even in our shared loss, I didn’t much care for Alicia. I definitely didn’t trust her.
Looking over towards the couch, I noticed the two people who had been comforting Alicia. One I expected. The other was a surprise.
On the left, was El Moz. That was the nickname he gave himself and everyone went along with it. He did everything he could to make himself look like Morrissey’s Mexican twin. He copied his haircut and adopted a fake English accent. When you think about it, that’s not much. He went so far as to claim the real Morrissey knocked his mother up backstage at a concert in the early 90s. There were girls dumb enough to believe that. His real name was Jose something or other. Hector always referred to him as Hose B.
El Moz ran a stable of webcam girls. They worked in a maquiladora sweat shop getting naked for strangers who paid 5 bucks a month. The girls saw little of that. Their mothers and sisters who worked next door in the Amazon warehouse had a better deal.
I had tracked several of those girls down for their parents. Every story started the same. He would chat up a girl online. Meet in real life. Always on this side of the border. If she didn’t already use drugs, he would introduce her to them. He liked to call himself an entrepreneur and online marketing consultant. That sounded better than pimp.
On the right side of the couch was Grace Sterling. She was a celebrity self help guru. Her books, videos, and seminars had given her a cult following. What was a feminist empowerment expert doing with a drug peddling pimp? What was she doing at a Tijuana murder scene?
She had a Rehab Resort just outside Cabo. An incident with some paparazzi had led to a lawsuit. When that lawsuit threatened to turn ugly and tarnish her image, she called me.
I had only spoken with her on the phone when she first hired us. Hector had been handling all the legwork this side of the border. When I last spoke to him a couple days ago, he told me the case was a dead end. We could keep running up her bill but it would lead nowhere. He was supposed to meet with her and give her that news. I was not sure if he got the chance.
When I looked at her, her appearance surprised me. Like most famous people who looked stunning on camera, she was too skinny in real life. Her face was a series of sharp angles. She had one thing going for her that was even more impressive than her on camera image. Her blouse strained to keep her ample boobs contained. A hypnotic spiral pendant hung between her breasts. If I stared too long, I might sink into a trance. Her breasts were hypnotic, I mean. Maybe the spiral too.
With Alicia still attached to me, I nodded at both of them. Grace Sterling returned my nod. El Moz stared at me. Or through me. He was one of those men who seemed to always stare at their reflection in a mirror just behind you.
When I turned, I saw Lt. Octavia Johnson of the San Diego Police Department. She had a history with Hector and I. We had made peace with that history. Last I checked, Johnson hadn’t.
When Alicia released her grip from my body, I stepped back and then stepped towards the lieutenant.
“You’re out of your jurisdiction,” I said.
“You don’t even have one,” she told me.
I wanted to correct her. If anyone had jurisdiction here, it would be me. My best friend, hell more of a brother than my real brothers, and business partner lay dead, murdered, in the next room.
“What is SDPD’s interest in a homicide on this side of the border?” I asked.
“Don’t play dumb, Mike, you know our interest. It’s you.”
“You figure I did this?”
She shook her head.
“What did I just say about playing dumb? I know you. I know how you’re going to react when you see what’s in the next room. I’m here to remind you of the unspoken agreement you have with the department.”
“That’s the thing about unspoken agreements,” I said. “You’re not supposed to speak about them.”
If I still had my shoes on, I could take one off and bang the table. Octavia’s passive aggressive reminder pissed me off. I had a big speech I wanted to unload on her, the police department, and the whole city.
I wanted to remind them all about the worst riots in American History and how I put a stop to them.
I wanted to remind them how those riots broke out after Ryan King, my partner on the force, was gunned down by a hipster douche who happened to be the Governor’s nephew.
I wanted to remind them that America’s Finest City would have burnt to the ground if I didn’t hunt down the riot’s ringleaders and come to another unspoken agreement.
But it wasn’t about me right now. My best friend was murdered in the room next door.
“Who has jurisdiction right now?” I asked.
“Javier Castaneda, Inspector with TJPD. He’s a big fan of your work. Probably going to ask you for an autograph when you go in and meet him.”
“You trust him?”
“If he’s not the only honest cop this side of the border,” she said, “He does a good job hiding it.”
Honest cops were rare on our side of the border as well. I didn’t point that out to the Lieutenant.
I extended my right hand towards the door to Hector’s bedroom. “After you,” I told her.
The stretcher was shoved into the far corner of the room. There was no hurry to use it. Hector’s body lay under a blood stained sheet beside the bed. Frank, Hector’s dog, lay beside his master’s body. He snarled at the cops trying to get a closer look. Frank was a Rottweiler. He looked fierce but I had always known him to be a gentle dog.
He had three legs. It took effort for him to stand up. When he did, he hobbled around his master’s corpse, and sat at my feet. I reached down and stroked his head. The sorrow and confusion in his eyes made me choke back a few tears.
“Mr. Oakshott, I am Inspector Javier Castaneda.” A tall thin man offered me his hand. He didn’t look old enough to be a street cop let alone a homicide detective. When I shook his hand, I noticed he had blue eyes. Unusual for a Mexican. His English had a California accent same as mine.
“What can you tell me besides the obvious?” I asked.
“Mr. Quintanilla was shot sometime between midnight and 4 am. It was raining heavily and nobody will admit to hearing the shot. The shooter locked the victim’s dog here in the bathroom. He was barking loudly. A neighbor had enough of the barking and came over to put a stop to it when he discovered the body. He called us and here we are.”
“Hector was alone?”
“Yes. I have taken statements from Miss Lopez, Miss Sterling, and Mr. Corona. The three of them were down in Cabo for the weekend. They arrived after we did. They were expecting Mr. Quintanilla to join them. When he missed his flight, they returned.”
That puzzled me. I knew the connection between El Moz and Alicia. She used to be one of his girls. I had kept my mouth shut when Hector decided to play Captain Save a Ho with her. But I never trusted her.
What confused me was what an A-List celebrity like Grace Sterling would have in common with a creep like Moz. He doesn’t strike me as the type who needs any of her re-empowerment therapy. What were the two of them doing down in Cabo? Why was Alicia down there with them? Why was Hector going to join them?
Those were questions for another time. While she might appear to have an alibi good enough for this Mexican cop, she hasn’t acquitted herself to me, yet.
“We only get two kinds of murders here in Tijuana,” Castaneda said. “Cartel and jealous lover. This doesn’t look like cartel to me. No public display of the body as a warning to others. With Miss Lopez out of town, I don’t see a jealous lover. Unless he had another girlfriend. Do you know if he did?”
I shook my head. Hector wasn’t like me. He was a one woman man. Even if that woman was a hoochie like Alicia.
I returned my focus to Hector’s body. It was laying halfway between the bed and the door. Blood soaked the white sheet that had been draped over him. It trailed behind him back to the bed. Just out of reach of his outstretched arms was his artificial leg.
Hector lost his right leg in Afghanistan. Two other men in our patrol were killed. When that IED exploded, all I got was a few scratches and a lesson in life and death. I should have been one of those guys that got killed. Hector had shielded me and paid for his courage with his leg.
When we returned, Hector’s dream of becoming a cop was over. I felt I had to pursue his dream to repay him for saving my life so I joined the force. Hector did the next best thing and became a private investigator. While I was trapped in the web of rules, regulations, and procedures, I looked at my friend working on his own terms and felt jealous. We were each living the other’s dream.
I knelt down by Hector’s body and peeled back the sheet. He was naked. Massive exit wound in his lower back indicated he was shot in the gut. That was a slow painful way to die. His upper left arm had the same Globe and Anchor tattoo that we both got at a shop on Midway the night we graduated from MCRD. The inside of his lower right arm had a beautiful Virgen of Guadalupe. We would kid Hector about having that on his fun arm.
“That chair,” I said. I pointed at the leather armchair in front of me. “It doesn’t belong there. Hector kept it beside the bed. He would sit in it to strap his leg on.”
Castaneda nodded. “You think his killer moved it?”
“Yes. Sat in it and watched Hector crawl on his belly bleeding out.”
When I pictured Hector dying like that, my blood boiled. I had seen men die before. Men that I had killed. Men that deserved their deaths. Hector did not. Not like this. I made a vow to myself. I was going to catch this sick bastard. I was going to kill him with one bullet to his belly and watch him crawl just like he did to Hector.
I wasn’t making an idle vow. I had killed for vengeance and justice before. It’s what I do.
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