Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

The law was one of them. It wasn’t about him or his papers, of course, but about the extended family that lived in and around the mobile home he rented at the end of a dusty lane in Spanaway.

Tavio’s legs started twitching as he drove and he winced. He’d missed his last chance to take a leak at the McDonald’s he’d passed ten minutes ago as he drove the long stretch of flat roadway along the Puyallup River. It was dusk, the end of the day, and he knew when he pulled off the roadway to relieve himself, he’d be able to do so in complete privacy. It was a familiar place to him. He and his brother Michael had often stopped there on their way to and from the Indian smoke shop where they bought discount cigarettes.

Tavio parked his battered Ford pickup and looked up and down the riverbank. He could see a couple of white guys hooting it up as they fished about fifty yards away. Other than that, the coast was clear. The truck still running, mariachi music playing, he widened his stance and assumed the position and unzipped. Ah, relief!

As the stream of urine weakened and he shook off the last drops and zipped up, something in the grass caught his eye. For a second he thought it was a child’s toy, or maybe even a photograph from a magazine.

It looked a little like a hand.

Tavio, curious more than anything, swung the truck’s door closed so he could walk past without stepping off the narrow pathway through the bramble of blackberry vines and the scourge of the Northwest, Scotch broom. He wanted to see just what he was looking at. The hand. The photograph. The doll.

Whatever it was.

As he inched forward, a smell, a hideous odor, wafted into Tavio’s nostrils and he pinched them shut with his grimy fingertips.

Three steps closer and he knew what he was looking at something very, very wrong. His heart rate quickened and he knelt down a little, his eyes following the hand up a slender arm attached to a girl’s body. She was lying facedown and he noticed that it appeared that an arm, maybe a leg, was missing. Her dark hair was tangled around her neck. He captured what he needed. Nothing more. Tavio knew she was dead. He knew that because of the smell, but also because of the peculiarity that comes when a living thing is no longer so. It was strange, scary, and he wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could.

By his feet he saw a crushed cigarette pack. Its brand was familiar. Too familiar. He bent down and picked it up, his heart rate accelerating by the nanosecond. Tavio spun around and ran for his truck. As he backed out, he told himself to do so slowly. He didn’t want those white guys fishing and drinking beer to notice him. He knew that the girl had been murdered and hidden there, but he didn’t want to be the one to tell the police. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel frightened and sick for the girl and her family, because he certainly did. He remembered how his young brother, Juan, had been killed coming across the border between Nogales and Tucson when they were boys. No one in his family could say a word because no one wanted to be face-to-face with the authorities. Tavio knew that sometimes silence was an awkward protector.

His right to be there, to be a responsible young man in world of possibilities-all of it would come into question. Back then, there was no doubt that he’d have been deported to Mexico. That couldn’t happen now, but even so there was always the risk. They’d question him. Why were you there? They’d want to see his ID. They’d ask his wife all sorts of questions he didn’t want asked. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want Mimi to know that his papers were forgeries.

Instead, Tavio drove home as carefully as he could. He didn’t want to be stopped. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He rolled his window down low and hoped that the stink that had coated the inside of his nostrils hadn’t found refuge on his clothes.

Tavio hadn’t seen the girl’s face, but he had an idea who she might be.

The night before, he’d seen her mother on the news. She was a nice-looking older white woman with the saddest eyes he’d ever seen. She looked like she was middle class or better, the kind of person who would hire him to work in her yard. She looked kind. But more than anything, the mother of the girl he’d seen on TV was very frightened.

“If anyone knows where she is,” she had said, tears rolling down her smooth cheeks, “please help the police. Please help bring our daughter home.”

Tavio remembered thinking as he watched that the mother did not seem very hopeful that her daughter would be coming home anytime soon. Or at all.

As he pulled into the driveway in front of the trailer he and his wife rented in Spanaway, Mimi emerged from the open door. As always, she was a vision. Her black hair tied back, her brown eyes accented by a pale cocoa eye shadow, and her full lips, red. The instant he saw her, he knew that she was, as he always called her, his “angel.”

“Dinner’s ready,” Mimi said, calling from the front steps as her husband emerged from his truck.

“Hungry,” he said, unconvincingly.

Mimi picked up on that. “You all right?” she asked

Tavio shrugged a little and rubbed the back of his neck. “Hard day,” he said.

“I’ll make it better,” she said, putting her arms around him and planting a kiss on his lips.

“I probably smell like manure,” he said, though he hadn’t touched the stuff all day. It was that other smell and though he doubted that it clung to him, he felt he needed to lie. Make an excuse. It felt funny that he didn’t want to be close to his wife. Tavio didn’t like holding back, but he knew that Mimi would tell him to go to the police. He knew she’d be right, too. He didn’t want to tell the police because they’d question him, but something more was weighing on him, heavier than an anvil laid across his throat.

It was Michael, his brother.

“Michael home?” Tavio asked as they walked up the narrow concrete pathway to the front door.

“Nah. He’s out again. Seems like he’s always out now.”

“I thought he was sick.”

“Must be better now. He left just before you got here.”

“I haven’t talked to him for three days.”

They went inside; the wonderful smells of his wife’s cooking-a roast chicken and vegetables-would have brought a river of salivation from his mouth down his throat on any other day. Tavio had no appetite. None at all.

“I’m going to shower before we eat,” he said. “Need to get the stink off me.”

Mimi patted her abdomen.

“Baby kicking today?” he asked.

She smiled and nodded. “Your son is a future soccer player.”

“Baseball,” Tavio said.

He turned and went toward the bathroom, his heart pounding and the look on his face far from the joy of the moment. He pulled the cigarette package from his jeans pocket and proceeded to tear it up into little pieces. He lifted the lid to the toilet and the confetti of paper and cellophane fluttered into the bowl.

He flushed and the bits of paper swirled downward. Tavio was shaking then, hoping and praying that what he was thinking would not be true.

Could Michael have done this?

That night Tavio Navarro couldn’t sleep. With Mimi curled up next to him, he tried to stay still and not wake her. She was a light sleeper and needed her rest. Every day she woke up at 4:30 to make her husband’s lunch before she left for the school cafeteria where she worked preparing breakfast and lunch, then off to classes at Tacoma Community College. Mimi Navarro worked hard. They all did. As Tavio stared at the ceiling, he reminded himself that there was nothing but worry to be gained by making assumptions about someone. Although he’d never had the kind of brush with the law that his brother Michael had experienced, he’d been looked at with suspicious eyes in the past. He figured it was always the other guy’s problem, not his. If they wanted to think poorly of him because of his light brown skin, black hair, the accent in his speech, so be it. He could not stop them. He couldn’t explain what they could never understand: He was just like them.