Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

By the time he was eleven, he was well on his way to being hooked. Vincent sent him away for treatment, first to a rehab facility in Mexico City and then to one in Pennsylvania. Both times the cure had been pronounced successful; both times he had relapsed. By the second time, the use of meth had become a little more widespread, and Tony took up with another kid from a nearby village who had also developed addiction problems.

“Huicho,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Huicho Lozada. Now there’s someone I haven’t thought about for a long time. Jesus, he was in worse shape than I was, but we were both meth heads, plain and simple,” he said. “Tweakers. And we got ourselves into a lot of trouble on account of it. I mean, a whole lot of trouble. Not as much as I got into later-now, that was real trouble-but enough.” His mood had darkened. The others had grown more grave as well, except for Preciosa, who was smiling possessively at him, almost like a mother at her child.

He had run off at sixteen, unable to live with either the unavailability of the drug or the unrelenting pressure from his father about shaping up and eventually taking over the ranch. And then had come the “real” trouble. Life on the streets and in the twilight worlds of Oaxaca, of Miami, of Tijuana, of Cleveland; wherever a supply of methamphetamine could most easily be gotten. More than once he’d awakened in the gutter-literally-or in some filthy doorway, not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there. He had robbed and been robbed, he had beaten people up and been beaten up, he’d been arrested five or six times-he couldn’t remember how many or even where. And he’d been convicted and jailed twice, both times on drug charges, once in Las Vegas for sixty days, and then in Mexican prisons for almost four years, from the time he was twenty-one until he was twenty-five.

“How horrible,” Julie said. “That must have been… I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

“Sure you can,” Tony said. “Just think about what you’ve heard about Mexican jails-you know, movies, TV-and what frigging nightmares they are. Okay? Got a mental picture? Now multiply it by a hundred. That’ll give you a small idea. I’m here to tell you, once you survive that, you can survive anything. The only good thing was, I could still get meth on the inside, at least for the first two years, when they had me in Tijuana, and that was all that mattered-although, trust me, you don’t want to know what I had to do for it.”

But even that dismal comfort came to an end when he was transferred to the infamous Reclusorio Oriente, the high-security prison in Mexico City, for the last two years of his sentence. There it was either lick his addiction cold turkey or commit suicide. More than once he had been on the very edge of the latter, and of his sanity as well, but an older fellow prisoner, a grizzled Mexican double-murderer serving a life sentence, had taken an interest in him. It was thanks to that old convict’s kindness, Tony said, that he not only survived the ordeal, but eventually walked out of prison free of drugs and determined to stay that way. And he had.

Tony’s story had taken them through coffee and a simple, luscious dessert of platanos asados -soft, tiny grilled bananas with cinnamon and cream, served family style.

“That’s quite a story,” Gideon said, helping himself to another couple of bananas and dousing them with cream. “It’s not often that people can turn their lives around like that.”

“I’ll say,” said Julie. “I had no idea, Uncle Tony. I mean plain old Tony.” She reached over to give his hand a squeeze.

“Well, I don’t want to brag,” Tony said, “but, what the hey, it’s true. I did come a long way. And I owe it to two people: Lalo Arenas-the old guy in prison; he’s dead now-and my father. My father-” He knocked twice on the table for emphasis. “My father never lost faith in me. Never.”

“That’s so,” Jamie put in. “I was only a kid, but I remember, while you were gone all those years, Dad used to tell us-Blaze and me-‘Don’t you worry about your big brother Tony; he’ll be all right. He just has to get it out of his system, that’s all. He’ll be back.’ ”

“Yeah,” said Tony quietly (for him). “Dad was great. He died while I was in jail, you know, and when I found out he left the ranch to me, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, talk about faith. There I was, rotting away in this hellhole, a loser through and through. I hadn’t even bothered to get in touch with him for years… and he trusts me with his precious ranch.”

“You were his firstborn,” Jamie said. “He loved you. From the day you were born, you were the one who was going to inherit.” If there was any resentment behind the words, Gideon couldn’t see it.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Tony said with a wondering shake of his head. “And his trusting me like that was what really turned me around. I had to deliver. Still, it was a little tricky when I first came back. I still feel bad about… I mean, I feel like part of it’s my fault that-” He shot a brief, wary glance at Carl. “Well, never mind, doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Your fault that what?” asked Julie, not nearly as perceptive as she would have been without the beers.

“I said never mind, okay?” Tony barked at her, abruptly, surly.

He slapped his napkin down on the table and stood up. “Shit. Look, it’s been a hell of a long day. What do you say we call it a night?”“BUT what did I say?”a stricken Julie asked Gideon as they walked back to their room in the cool night air.

“Julie, I have no idea. Well, some idea-it had something to do with Carl; I could see that much.”

“It must have been something about Blaze, then,” Julie said, shaking her head. “Honestly, I don’t remember everybody being so sensitive before. You really have to watch your step around here, don’t you?”

“Like walking on eggshells,” Gideon agreed. “All the same, I think the guy owes you an apology. That was really uncalled for.”

“Oh,” she said, sighing, “that’s just Tony. It’s just the way he is.”

Every forensic anthropologist will tell you, and every homicide cop too, that after a while you become hardened to looking at the remains of murder victims; you can divorce yourself from them as once-living human beings and view them simply as cases, clues, evidence. When you go home at night, you put your thoughts of them aside and relax or get on with other things.

With one exception. No one ever gets used to looking at murdered children. No one manages to completely overcome the internal shudder of sadness and horror-of despair at the wickedness of people-when dealing with the remains of a murdered child. There is always a desire for vengeance mixed in with it too-for justice, certainly, but mostly, if you are being honest, for vengeance. You want to do every possible thing you can to put the bastard away. Forever. And if he should resist arrest and get the bejesus beat out of him by somebody his own size, well, gee, wouldn’t that be a shame?

These were very much Gideon’s feelings as he stood looking down at the contents of the one-by-three-foot fiberboard carton containing Caso Numero 08-Teo dV 1-1, now tenderly laid out by him on two sheets of newsprint atop the desk in one of the unoccupied cubicles at police headquarters, a few yards down the corridor from Marmolejo’s office. The carton had been waiting for him when he arrived, and when he removed the lid, a single glance had convinced him that Orihuela had been right in classifying the remains as those of a teenager; the bones were small and gracile, and at least some of the epiphyseal unions were incomplete. Not as unsettling as a baby would have been-a baby, so utterly trusting and defenseless, was the worst-but plenty bad enough; a fresh young life, innocent and unworldly, barely started and bursting with promise, cut off before it could be lived.