Michael McGarrity - Nothing But Trouble

Johnny nodded and edged his chair close to the table.

The apartment Kerney was to share with Johnny had two small bedrooms separated by a bath, a galley kitchen with an adjacent dining nook, and a living room furnished with a couch, one easy chair, a couple of end tables with lamps, and a wall-mounted television set. The groundskeeper who had been watering the lawn when Kerney arrived had told him the building had originally been used to provide temporary housing for visiting company employees and executives from the home office.

Johnny wasn’t around, so Kerney dumped his travel bag in one of the bedrooms and went to the mercantile store to grab some dinner. A large motor home parked by the entrance had a sign painted on it that read:

WESTERN SCENE CATERERS PURVEYORS OF FINE FOOD TO THE FILM INDUSTRY

Inside the store, rows of cafeteria tables and chairs had been set up, and a buffet meal was available at a serving table filled with warming trays of food, drink urns, dinnerware, and utensils. Kerney chose the vegetarian entree and joined two men at one of the tables, who introduced themselves as Buzzy and Gus.

In their early fifties, both men had an easy style about them that made Kerney feel comfortable and welcome. Over dinner he learned a good bit about the complexities of photographing a motion picture.

Gus, the key grip, explained that his job was to set up diffusion screens and large shades to modify light for the cameras, operate camera dollies and cranes, and mount cameras on vehicles and airplanes. Buzzy, the gaffer, supervised the lighting for each scene and ran the crew responsible for setting up the lamps and generating the power.

Kerney asked them if Usher’s decision to change the ending of the screenplay was common practice.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Gus said with chuckle. “Any good director puts his own stamp on a film. There will be dialogue rewrites, camera-angle changes, scenes that get dropped, altered, or added-the list goes on and on.”

“We’ll have most of it sorted out at a final production meeting once we’ve visited all the locations,” Buzzy said. “That’s when we’ll know basically what stays and what goes.”

“Don’t the producers have a say?” Kerney asked.

“Not creatively,” Gus replied. “Charlie Zwick will have his hands full dealing with production delays, weather changes, sick or ill-tempered actors, continuity problems, staying within the budget-you name it.”

“Fortunately, Charlie and Malcolm have worked together before,” Buzzy said, “so it should go smoothly.”

After dinner with Gus and Buzzy, Kerney took a stroll through the empty, silent streets of Playas, past rows of dark, vacant houses. As daylight faded, streetlights in the dormant town flickered on, casting eerie shadows through an occasional dead tree. It felt almost otherworldly, as though some invisible catastrophe had annihilated the population of the town, leaving behind the houses as a mute testimony to the disaster.

He turned the corner on a residential street near a shuttered building that had once served as the town library, and caught sight of a roadrunner scooting around the rear end of a Motor Transportation Division patrol car parked in front of an occupied house.

Part of the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, the MTD primarily enforced federal and state safety statutes of commercial motor vehicles, including hazardous-material and drug-interdiction inspections. Although its officers had full police powers, most of the agency’s resources were allocated to traffic safety, commercial vehicle over-the-road compliance, and drug trafficking.

Farther on Kerney passed another occupied house with a Hidalgo County sheriff’s squad car parked outside. He was on the tail end of his walk, heading down the hill in the direction of the town center, when his cell phone rang.

“I’ve got information on that license plate,” Flavio Sapian said after Kerney answered. “The vehicle is registered to Jerome Mendoza.”

“Tell me about Mr. Mendoza,” Kerney said.

“It’s interesting stuff. Mendoza is an MTD officer assigned to the Lordsburg Port of Entry. Single, age twenty-eight, he’s got a home address listed in Playas.”

“I just passed by his house,” Kerney said. “What’s his connection to the smelter?”

“Unknown. I’m going to call his supervisor after we hang up.”

“I suggest you hold off on that,” Kerney said. “If Mendoza is involved in any wrongdoing, you’d be giving him a heads-up.”

“Why wait?” Sapian asked. “As it stands, I have no evidence that proves a crime was committed, nor can I actually put Mendoza at the scene of the accident.”

“I understand that,” Kerney said. “But for now you might want to treat him as a person of interest, until you have a few more facts.”

“Such as?”

“The victim’s identity, for starters,” Kerney said. “What if it turns up that Mendoza knew the victim? You’d look pretty foolish if you didn’t have that information before approaching him. When will you know something?”

“Tomorrow,” Sapian replied.

“That’s soon enough,” Kerney said. “If he’s clean, it leaves his reputation intact, and if he’s dirty, well, that’s a whole different matter.”

“I hear you, Chief,” Sapian said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

Back at the apartment Johnny was nowhere to be found. Grateful for the solitude, Kerney read several chapters in the first volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s planned autobiographical trilogy before rolling into bed. He wondered what kind of story Marquez might fashion about the town of Playas. Surely it would be filled myth and magic, enriched with intrigue and imagined dreams.

He was almost asleep when he heard someone pounding on the apartment door. Thinking it was Johnny, Kerney opened up, and two men in suits flashed U.S. Customs agent shields and invited themselves inside.

“You’re Kevin Kerney, right?” an agent with a hook nose asked as he closed the door behind him. He was fortyish, dark skinned, and spoke with a slight Spanish accent.

Kerney nodded. The man’s partner, a blond-headed, blue-eyed, baby-faced man, made a quick inspection of the apartment and returned to the living room.

“He’s alone,” the man said.

Barefoot, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, Kerney held up his hand to stop any further questioning. “If you know my name, you probably also know I’m a cop. Let me put some clothes on, and then we can talk.”

Hook Nose nodded and said, “We’ll watch, if you don’t mind.”

“Come along,” Kerney said, “if that kind of thing turns you on.”

In the bedroom Kerney fished his badge case and police credentials out of the pocket of his jeans and tossed them to Hook Nose before dressing. He looked them over as Kerney pulled on jeans and a shirt. Back in the living room Kerney asked to see some identification. Hook Nose was Supervising Special Agent Domingo Fidel. His partner was Special Agent Ray Bratton.

“Okay,” Kerney said. “Tell me what this is all about.”

“The man you found on Highway Eighty-one was an undercover officer,” Fidel said, “who’d spent the last six months infiltrating an illegal-immigrant smuggling ring operating in this area. He was on his first solo run across the border from Mexico with ten aliens who’d paid two thousand dollars each to be brought across.”

“He looked like a Mexican teenager to me,” Kerney said. “Was he a fresh young recruit right out of your academy?” Many officers were assigned to undercover duty immediately after completing their training in order to reduce the risk of having their cover blown.

“Exactly,” Fidel said. “He was supposed to bring his cargo up to a remote ranch road west of Antelope Wells and then walk them to a place where a vehicle would be waiting for him with instructions on his final destination. We couldn’t stake it out because he didn’t get the route information until just before he left.”