Sarah Cortez - Houston Noir

“Are you blaming me?”

“I have to blame someone!”

“Maybe Demetria said or did something she shouldn’t have.”

“Demetria was amazing. No one who knew her would want her dead!”

“No one’s a saint, Marisol.”

Yessenia made a hard right and skidded the Ford F-150 across three lands of the Beltway 8 feeder road. She’d always wanted to drive like that — like she owned the road. In her car, she’d been much closer to the street. In this truck, she could see everything. That was why she’d bought it several months before. It’d proven very useful.

Marisol was extremely proud of herself for figuring out who the murderer was. She yelled at Yessenia to drive faster, worried that another woman would be attacked before the night’s end. Yessenia did as commanded, as usual.

The truck rumbled into the parking lot. Marisol glared at Roscoe through the window.

Yessenia watched her watching him. “What if it isn’t him? I mean, what makes you so sure?” Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, but she ignored it. She wanted to hear Marisol’s answer.

“It’s totally him. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Plus, look at him. He just looks like a crazy loser. God, why does it have to be raining tonight?”

“You don’t know anything about him.”

“He just looks like he hates black and brown women. Plus, he’s, like, forty years old and doesn’t even have a car. Look — there’s no cars in this parking lot except us.”

Yessenia wanted to argue, but there was no point. Marisol saw what she wanted, never what was in front of her. She handed Marisol the gun. “Here — it’s a full clip,” she said.

“I mean, we’ll find out for sure. At the very least, I’ll scare the shit out of him and make his ass confess.”

Yessenia nodded solemnly.

“Hey, but... if this doesn’t work... ”

“You know what? You’ve got this. I believe it now.”

Marisol tried to hide her proud smile and assume a tough look. “After this is done... we should take a break. You know, before we start our business?”

“Sure. Anything you want.”

Marisol reached over and squeezed her friend’s arm. She’d been too hard on Yessenia — too mean. She’d taken her for granted. After this was all done, she’d tell her so. Buy her something nice, like a dinner or something. Marisol smiled again, to let Yessenia know she wasn’t scared, and slipped out of the truck.

Yessenia waited until she saw Marisol walk through the store, into the bathroom. She picked up her phone.

“Hey, baby.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to do this one yourself?” said the voice at the other end.

“No, amor. I’m still tired from Demetria and Bethany.”

“All right. I’ll call you know when it’s done.”

Yessenia hung up and put the truck into gear, pulling out of the parking lot, toward the freeway home. Behind her, Roscoe flicked off the store lights.

Westpark Corridor

There must have been an accident. Traffic on Westpark seemed unnaturally thick, even for four thirty p.m. Jules sat idling in her Malibu, studying the view of the Falls of Westpark apartment complex, the Presidium office building, and the brackish ditch that ran between. Today, a Home Depot cart enriched the vista, the telltale orange basket jutting toward the scrubbed aluminum sky. An afternoon breeze kicked up by a hurricane brewing in the gulf whipped a few plastic bags from their sticking places in the weeds. Empty soda bottles littered the tamped-earth trails on either side of the water, which resembled the aguas negras Jules had seen in Mexico as a child. She watched three or four day laborers head toward Windswept Lane, just parallel to Westpark and rife with low-rent apartment buildings, liquor stores, small markets, and casas de belleza that served the Hispanic population in the vicinity around the Houston Flea Market.

A text popped up on her phone: Glad you wouldn’t give me a ride bitch! Nice traffic. Looks like you’re fuked. This was followed by a smiley-face emoji.

It was Kelly, whom she’d left at the Triangle Club, after the 2:30 open-discussion meeting. He’d asked her for a ride home, but she’d begged off. She needed to shower and eat before her eight p.m. shift at Kroger, so he’d hoofed it to the Shell station, where his sister would pick him up to drive him back to his halfway house.

WTF! Jules texted back. I’ve been sitting here for 10 mins. Find out what’s going on and text me back. She eyed the engine temperature gauge on the control panel of her Malibu — the needle edging toward red.

She rolled about .3 miles over the next fifteen minutes before she saw the text from Kelly drop down over the top of her Instagram feed: Holy shit. Lady’s body found in dumpster outside of Westpark recycling center. K9 having a field day.

??!!!

Turn around and go the other way if I was you , he wrote.

Good idea. Jules did just that.

As she got ready for work that evening, Jules listened to an anchorwoman on the local news: “ Deputies are unable to identify a woman’s body that was found in a dumpster at the Westpark Consumer Recycling Center in the 5900 block of Westpark. Crime Stoppers is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest.”

The next day, before the 2:30 meeting, Jules and Kelly sat at the green plastic picnic table on the Triangle Club’s cobblestone patio, smoking. The Triangle Club occupied a dingy office flex space in the Westpark Business & Ed Center, an industrial park built in the 1970s. The club served as a space dedicated to the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Kelly had almost six years of sobriety; Jules, six months. Kelly’s style of dress rarely varied: he wore extra-large T-shirts, khaki or camouflage cargo shorts, Teva sandals. A Houston Astros cap often topped his graying pageboy. Despite his yellow-brown teeth and pocked face, Jules liked fellowshipping with him before the meetings, hearing his stories of what it was like before he got sober. He used to be able to drink three beers, he said, no problem, but somewhere between three beers and eleven, he’d find himself at the dope house. He’d gone nine years without drinking or doing drugs, he said — a dry drunk — before prison. Before prison, he’d had a wife, a full-time job at one of them big oil companies — all the things. When he lost his job during the Houston oil bust, when his wife left him, when one night he ran into his old drug dealer in the corner liquor store, then it was back on.

“I told my old dealer I ain’t got no money,” Kelly said. “ That’s all right , said the dealer, I can cover you. He knew that once I started doing that shit again, I’d be selling for him in no time. It got so bad: I was doing meth, cocaine, heroween . I went home to my dad’s house and asked him to lock me up in my old bedroom. He did. He cooked my meals and brought them to me. I was selling drugs through my bedroom window, but he found out and had them deep bars put up over them. But I figured I could get the customers to meet me a few houses away, so I would sneak out. I did that about two times, and when I got back to the house he was standing there on the porch, arms folded. You don’t even want to get well! he said, and kicked me out. Soon after that, I ended up in prison. That’s what it took for me to get sober, and not one or two years. It took four or five years for me to get it.”

Whenever Kelly acted like he was making some sort of pass at Jules, she reminded him: “Practice the principles. No thirteenth-stepping.” Her sponsor said that to her often. Even still, Kelly didn’t stop staring at her boobs. She figured it was an honest enough exchange: he’d share his stories; she’d let him stare. As long as his advances stayed visual, she could handle them. She was trusting her higher power to keep her safe.