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His torso had been turned into a sieve. Thirty rounds from an AK-47 will do that. From his crotch to his throat, he was riddled with bullets. He’d been shot through each eye, and the duct tape affixed to his mouth.
She had a whole gallery of gruesome images inside her skull, but this was the worst.
Overkill.
No—
Overkill squared.
Tess had what her new partner, Da
She was the most popular girl in school.
But already there were too many suspects. This homicide, in the rickety old ghost town of Credo right on the border between the United States and Mexico, looked like a hit. It looked like a hit by an enforcer for one of the Mexican cartels—either Sinaloa, which owned this part of the world, or the Zetas, or the violent upstart group, Alacrán—Spanish for “scorpion.”
George Hanley had been riddled with bullets and then “silenced” by duct tape. All of this pointed to a message being sent.
But to whom?
“What d’ya think?” Da
“What do you think?”
“Looks like a cartel hit to me.”
“A sixty-eight-year-old white guy?”
“A sixty-eight-year-old white guy who used to be a homicide dick.” Da
“He was?” Tess stepped carefully to peer over Da
“See? He was on a reality show—The Ultimate Survivor.”
“Huh.”
“And this. You’re not going to believe this. This is why.” He pulled up the article for her.
She read the headline.
“Kind of weird, huh, guera?” Da
Pronounced “Wetda.” He called her “guera,” which could mean anything from “blonde” to “Anglo” to “white,” ostensibly to get under her skin. But in the couple of months they’d worked together, it had become more of a pet name.
Da
“Until he wasn’t.” Tess grabbed his phone and scrolled through the article. In 1991, Hanley, then a veteran homicide detective with Phoenix Metro PD, was shot multiple times in a gun battle with a street gang. He died twice on the operating table, but was resuscitated. He returned to work but had to take a desk job. Eventually, he worked his way up to lieutenant.
“The lottery, man,” Da
Tess was barely listening. She was reading the part where ten-year-old George Hanley had been home sick the day his mother drove his sister four blocks to the elementary school. The car had been T-boned on the passenger side, his sister was paralyzed.
“Lucky Lohrke,” Tess muttered.
“Who?”
“Somebody else who was lucky.”
CHAPTER 2
“So who was this Lucky Looky guy?” Da
“Lohrke,” Tess said. “Not Looky.”
“Who is he? Somebody who was lucky, eh?”
“He was a baseball player,” Tess said.
“You like baseball?”
“Nope. I just saw his obit in a magazine.”
“Bet you don’t like soccer, either.”
“You’re batting a thousand today.”
“So let me guess. You remember every detail of this obit, am I right?”
“Yup.”
“Weren’t you, like diagnosed or something? What’s it called? Superautographical—”
“Superautobiographical memory.”
“Yeah, that. If I give you a date you can tell me what day it was and what you were doing.”
“True.”
On May 2, 2009, she’d picked up a Time magazine. It was a Monday in Albuquerque, su
Jack “Lucky” Lohrke’s obituary.
“So what made this Lorhke so damn lucky?” Da
“In World War II, the two guys on each side of him were shot and killed.”
“So? That doesn’t sound so unusual.”
“Okay. After the war, he was bumped from a transport flight home by a high-ranking officer at the last minute…”
“Just him, right?”
“I du
“So let me guess…the plane crashed.”
“Killed everyone aboard. But that wasn’t all.”
“Oh, do tell!” Da
“Your accent needs work.”
Da
“That’s her problem. You want the rest of the story or not?”
“Oh, yeah, don’t stop now, chiltepin.”
Little chili pepper. Jeeze. “Let’s stick with guera, okay? Fast-forward to 1946,” Tess said. “Jack Lohrke played Triple A Baseball with the Spokane Indians. That’s good, right? Triple A?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s good. Which you’d know if you liked baseball.”
“So Lohrke got word on the road that he was just traded to the San Diego Padres. They stopped to eat at a diner. He decided right then and there he’d hitch a ride and join up with his new team. So he left them there.”
“This does not bode well.”
“Nope.”
“So what happened?”
“They were about to drive up into the Cascade Mountains. It was snowing up on the Snoqualmie Pass. The team bus went off the road, through a guardrail, and crashed down the mountain. Burst into flames. The manager and nine members of the team were killed. The survivors were in bad shape, too.”
“Holy shit. He really was lucky.”
“I’d say so.”
“Like George Hanley,” Da
The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached Rio Rico, where George Hanley’s daughter and her husband lived. They waited at the door of an older brick ranch in a nice neighborhood. You knew it was a nice neighborhood because there was open space between the houses, and because the houses were on top of a hill for a valley view.
Da
“Very carefully.”
They’d both said it at once.
Da
“Me, too. Let’s not do that again.”
The outdoor light came on.
Tess cleared her throat.
They were both aware of the politics involved. The deceased was an ex-cop. The shooting looked like a cartel hit. Not to mention Hanley’s death could spur widespread fear among the retired people who populated this area.
As they waited, Tess said, “I don’t think we go into the extent of his injuries right now.”
“Yeah,” Dan replied. “Dead’s dead.”
So they played it that way.
The door opened.
The daughter, Pat—she was in her midfifties—took it hard. Her husband, not so much. He seemed more a
Pat Scofield started weeping, saying she should never have asked her father to move here, it was all her fault, who would do something like that?
Bert Scofield had been watching a baseball game and his gaze kept straying to the TV set, which his wife had turned down.