Fatal Divide Read online

  “Drink up, Dylan Chaves,” shouted JT, giving another belly laugh the rest of the patrons echoed. With no other choice but to try to get out without fighting, Dylan took a larger drink. He’d have to sleep it off in his pickup, probably, or maybe call Alex when she got home. If he finished the mug, much less the pitcher, he’d be in no condition to drive. Something was going on here he didn’t understand, and wouldn’t likely understand if he didn’t keep his wits about him. But JT was making it impossible for him to do that. He needed to work it out before the beer hit his brain cells.

  Dylan smiled, lifted his mug again in a silent toast to JT, and risked a look around. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and he could see there were at least a dozen men who could have been JT’s brothers, though some were less massive than he was. The clue was in their sleeveless leather vests. Their patch was a rendition of a devil with a top hat. Los Diablos was emblazoned on a curved patch that underlined the rather dapper-looking devil.

  Motorcycle club, just as he’d thought, and worse, outlaw MC, from the look of it. No Latinos, but the mixture of white and black looked about equal. Almost all, even the whites, sported dreadlocks or the tangles JT wore. Maybe dreadlocks under construction. One of these guys had undoubtedly been the guy Dylan had followed here a few months ago. He didn’t see the Latino who had driven the Jeep, but it was pretty clear what he’d walked into.

  And it seemed they knew him. How much trouble was he in?

  No one made an aggressive move toward him, and JT lost interest in him before his beer was half finished, though Dylan didn’t dare walk out without finishing - and paying for - the entire pitcher. Maybe they’d leave him alone after hassling him a little bit. He sipped at his beer, hoping that if he drank it slowly enough it wouldn’t hit him so hard. When his mug was almost finished, JT walked by again, tipped the rest of the pitcher into it, and then leaned down, resting his hands almost into Dylan’s space at the table.

  “What brings you here, Ranger Chaves?” he asked.

  “Just lookin’ for a drink,” Dylan slurred, forgetting he tried to order Coke at first.

  “That so? Well, we’re kind of particular about who we drink with, Smokey. We’ll let it slide this time, seein’ as you’re such a good customer. But, you may want to stay at your own bar after this.”

  Dylan nodded, saluted JT with his glass one last time and tried to drain the rest of the beer, spilling some he couldn’t swallow fast enough.

  “Stick to Coke, lightweight,” JT laughed. “I’m going to have a couple of the boys escort you home, ‘cause you seem to be a little confused.”

  “Tha’s awright, I’m-a sleep it off in the truck,” he said.

  “No, that won’t work, Smokey. We don’t allow loitering. You can drive home, just take it slow.”

  With no other choice, Dylan paid his tab and walked out with two Diablos, one on each side of him. He climbed into the pickup and fumbled with his keys a bit before starting his pickup. Two Harleys followed him out of the parking lot and all the way home, with him driving about ten miles an hour and drifting all over the road. He sighed in relief as he pulled into his spot in the driveway and waved at his escort. It wouldn’t occur to him until much later that the motorcycle gang now knew where he lived.

  TWENTY-ONE

  9:00 p.m.

  Alex was right about her dad not being home when she got there. She opened a can of tomato soup and put it on the stove to heat while she made a grilled cheese sandwich. It was only nine, not too late to call Dylan, but she didn’t get an answer. She left a short message, “Love you, need to talk.” That shouldn’t scare him as badly as he’d scared her with that ‘I need some space’ business. Wondering where he was, she set her bowl of soup and sandwich on the table and poured a glass of milk.

  As she ate her dinner, she jotted down the ideas she’d been thinking about on her drive home, putting a big star beside the ‘ask Daddy for digital recorder for Christmas’ item. One of her talents was a natural tendency to organize information, which would help her in her chosen career tremendously. Her list turned out to be very well organized, as she wrote down each item in order of priority.

  Under ‘Dylan’, she wrote talk to him about where to live, check out parenting book from library, and what about religion and heritage? These were subjects for people who were serious about their relationship. She was far more serious about Dylan than she’d meant to be, it seemed. All the more reason to get her ducks in a row about school, the blog, and the newspaper.

  Since Dylan hadn’t called her back by the time she was through eating her dinner and putting away the mess she’d made, Alex went into her room to get started on her homework. Tomorrow and the weekend promised to be busy between helping Dylan, getting ready for Nana and Aunt Jess to arrive for Thanksgiving, and doing the research she’d been assigned for her extra credit.

  The house was too quiet, so she set her iPod to shuffle and blasted some music as she created a spreadsheet for photography class on types of cameras and their capabilities. Around eleven, her dad came in and asked her to turn the music down. When she saw what time it was, she turned it off instead and got ready for bed.

  It had been a long day but tomorrow was a light one, and she expected to see Dylan tomorrow afternoon. She felt good — productive and content — as she drifted off to sleep with her phone set to vibrate. It didn’t wake her when Dylan called at midnight. He left a message, but she couldn’t understand a word of it when she listened to it the next morning.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Friday, 6:30 a.m.

  Dylan expected the hangover the next morning. At breakfast, Ange took one look at him and began laughing, until he clapped his hands over his ears and made a pained face that alarmed her.

  “What did you do? No, never mind, I know what you did. I guess the question is why?”

  “It isn’t what you think, Ange...” he began.

  “You mean you don’t have a hangover?” Her sarcasm was tinged with humor.

  “Oh yeah, I have a hangover, but it’s not my fault.”

  “Oh, so someone forced you to drink too much?” More sarcasm. He wished she’d just shut up and let him tell the story. Not that she was likely to believe it with that attitude.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, they did. I had a choice between drinking a pitcher and getting my ass kicked by a bunch of bikers.” He screwed up his face, and gave her a defiant eyebrow lift. Now she could scoff as much as she wanted.

  “No shit? Bill’s been wondering about those guys.” Bill was Ange’s boyfriend, a deputy sheriff, but a good guy as far as Dylan knew. Not like that ass-hat Kevin Thurston.

  “What’s he been wondering?” he asked.

  “Whether they were going to cause trouble. Mostly they hang around the Stars, but sometimes they all go for a ride together, maybe a dozen of them. It makes people nervous.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. With good reason, too. I got a look at their patch. Looks like some branch of the Diablos.”

  Ange frowned and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “The original Diablos were an outlaw gang out of San Bernardino. These guys have added the ‘Los’ to it, but they aren’t Latino, unless they have more crew than I saw in the bar last night.”

  Dylan’s headache was beginning to be tolerable, now that he had some food in his stomach. He wasn’t too sure about his stomach, though. The food didn’t seem to be sitting too well.

  “Ange, I’ve got to get on the road to work. Do me a favor?”

  “Sure, if I can.”

  “Ask Bill to stop by this afternoon, if he can. Or as soon as possible. I’ll be home around four, four-thirty.”

  “He’s on midnights tonight. Won’t be up until around eight.”

  “That’s fine. I need to let him know what I saw and what happened to me. Those guys have some reason for being in Dodge, and I don’t think it’s because they bought a shitty bar.”

  “Got it,
I’ll tell him.”

  “Thanks, Ange. Do you think talking to him here will upset Mom? Maybe we could go to Alex’s.”

  “No, it should be okay. Hey, Dyl. How do you know so much about biker gangs?”

  “Studied them in school. They’ve been a big part of the drug trade coming up from Mexico. I heard there was a lot more cartel activity here than the Park is aware of. Seeing these guys made me believe it.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around.” Dylan needed to get Wanda over here at the same time as Bill, but it was time to head to work. Maybe he could find time to call her on his lunch hour, if he wasn’t out of cell range.

  As he left, he checked for messages from Alex. Nothing since her last one the evening before, which wasn’t surprising. She probably wasn’t up yet. He’d returned her call, but it went straight to voice mail. She had his return message.

  TWENTY-THREE

  8:00 a.m.

  On Friday morning, for the second day in a row Wanda drove to Sells. This time Hector came with her, insisting that it was too dangerous for her to drive around the rez on her own. She scoffed at him, but secretly was glad that he’d be with her. The long stretches of gravel road between villages would be less intimidating with him at the wheel. Even if he didn’t talk much, having him for company was better than being alone.

  Wanda wanted a look at the fence, too. The hated thing was an ugly scar on the land, but she needed the reminder of what she was fighting for, and against. Six years previously, she had been among the activists who attempted to stop the construction of the wall by marching from California to Washington, DC, to present the government with statements of the injustice. She personally walked from Gila Bend to Casa Grande, returning to campaign for her mayoral race.

  Of course, the march had done nothing to stop the construction. Wanda hadn’t had the heart to go there since then. Not only the fence, but the wide dirt road that was built, first to provide a way to get materials there for construction and now maintained to patrol the fence, had cut through ancient routes to gather traditional foods, trapped mountain lions within a more populated area of the rez, destroyed burial grounds, and more. Seeing it again reaffirmed her mission. While traveling there, Wanda asked the elders on scattered rancheros whether they knew of cartel movements, where to find the tunnels that funneled the drugs and illegals across, and if they had seen or heard of Jimmy Chaves’ whereabouts.

  The elders were cautious. Wanda looked like them in features, but she drove a late-model SUV and dressed like a white woman. They didn’t trust her, so they gave her very little information. No one admitted knowing of any tunnels or seeing Jimmy. When she was gone, telephone calls preceded her to the next house.

  One of them was answered by the wrong person in the household. As soon as Wanda and Hector arrived there, several armed men swarmed out of the door and gestured threateningly. Wanda slammed her hand onto the locks, but the guns aimed at their windows didn’t care about locks. One of the men made an upward motion with his, and Hector shrugged.

  “We’d better get out.”

  One of the men shoved Hector roughly as they herded the couple into the house. Hector stumbled and Wanda cried out, but bit back her words when someone shoved something small, round, and hard into her back. She turned toward the kitchen, prompted by the gun at her back, beginning to cry when she realized Hector was being pushed down the hall to the right.

  Wanda understood too late that she should have left word somewhere, or at least left a note in the house. No one in Dodge knew their whereabouts. Only Dylan knew their mission. Since she was on leave, no one would miss her for days, unless Dylan checked. She prayed to both the Catholic God she’d been raised to worship and to I’itoi, Elder Brother, for their safety. Something told her that she and Hector would need all the help they could get.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  10:00 a.m.

  At mid-morning, Kevin Thurston took a call from the O’odham tribal government in Sells. A woman named Anna, who claimed to be the tribal vice-chairwoman, informed him that Wanda Lopez had been in Sells bothering some of their elders.

  Anna was distressed to have to make the call, because Wanda was a friend, but she felt it her duty to let him know Wanda was convinced her grandfather was killed by a cartel enforcer. She asked if he would do a well-being check on her. Anna was afraid the strain of her grandfather’s death had caused Wanda to have a mental episode, as she put it.

  Thurston hung up the phone and thought for a while. He didn’t believe Wanda had a mental episode. He’d known the woman was lying when he questioned her about her grandfather’s enemies. It seemed she knew a little more than she should about cartel business. Before checking on her, he took the information to the county judge and obtained a search warrant for the Lopez house.

  Thurston and two deputies went together to serve the search warrant, but found no one at home. With the legal right to do so, they broke into the house and executed the warrant, confiscating a number of files from Wanda’s office to look through at leisure. The front door lock was broken in the process, but everyone knew Dodge was a very safe place, so they made no attempt to repair it, leaving the house in a state of disarray that looked like it had been ransacked. That wasn’t far from the truth.

  From there, Thurston returned to his office and read the confiscated files at leisure. With growing anger, he found records of Wanda’s many letters to federal officials protesting the building of the wall through O’odham lands. Everything he read convinced him that she’d been lying through her teeth when she campaigned and won the mayoral race.

  The kicker was a sticky-note he found on one of the file folders. Inside were clippings from Tucson and Casa Grande newspapers, articles having to do with cartel-linked crimes in both cities. A few clippings were from the local weekly. Those were all about the murder of Rufio Mendez and the resulting crimes committed by his deputy, Joe Hendricks. The sticky-note had hand-written notes that said

  Jimmy at grandfather’s, asked me to say nothing, hiding from cartel, which? Grandfather’s death an execution? Where is Jimmy? Elders may know, per Anna. Find Jimmy, get to safety.

  Who was Jimmy? Did Wanda believe he’d killed Alvarez? If so, why would she want to help him escape? Thurston’s only conclusion was that Wanda had been aware of the crime, either before or after, and meant to hide the perp.

  He compiled a report, complete with copies of the files in question, made two more copies of the whole thing, and set the original aside to present to the next city council meeting. One copy went into his own filing cabinet.

  The other he took back to the judge and made a case for obtaining a warrant for Wanda’s arrest on the grounds of conspiracy to commit murder. He intended to serve it as soon as she turned up, assuming she hadn’t already run. Since she wasn’t home, that was a distinct possibility.

  He spared little thought wondering whether the Anna in the notes was the Anna who tipped him off. Maybe, maybe not. It didn’t matter. Maybe Wanda had gone to her for help, gotten it, and then Anna got cold feet in case Wanda offed some more old people. He’d worry about her if and when he had Wanda, and the mysterious Jimmy from the note, in custody.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  11:00 a.m.

  Alex had awakened a little later than usual, thanks to having set her phone to vibrate. She’d done her homework the night before, so she could get a head start on her work at the Times.

  There was a hum of activity in the back room, where the two employees her dad kept on besides her were typesetting a print job of some sort. Dad’s office door was closed, as usual. She knocked and called, “Dad, it’s me.”

  “Come in, kiddo,” he called back. Alex wasn’t sure she was happy that the new nickname was sticking, but it was better than Baby Girl.

  “Hi, Dad. Anything interesting going on today?”

  “Not sure. The scanner’s been going off, but they’re talking in some kind of code. I can’t figure out what it is.”
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br />   “That’s odd. Should I run over to the cop shop and see if someone will tell me?”

  “No, they sound busy. Plenty of time, we’ll get it when they settle down. Did you need something else?”

  “Yeah, Dad, I wanted to talk to you about something my journalism prof told me yesterday. Do you have time?”

  “Give me a few minutes, then we can discuss it over lunch. My treat.”

  “Sounds good.” She went to her desk and called the first of the women she called her gossip ladies. The three women could be counted on for human-interest fillers and the About Town section that was her responsibility. Not that any of it would be news by the time the next edition came out on Wednesday, but she had a strong suspicion it was the reason most people read the paper. The suspicion was based on the number of calls they received on Wednesday afternoon regarding the About Town section as opposed to the front page.

  She finished her call just as her dad came out of his office, shrugging on his suit jacket. Most of the year it was too hot to wear one, but he took every opportunity to look professional during the cooler months.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” he asked, talking around the large bite of deli sandwich he’d just taken. Alex couldn’t look at him. Nana had taught her not to chew with her mouth full; how had she failed to teach her dad?

  “You know I’ve been talking to you about putting up a website, where people can read the news while it’s fresh,” she began.

  “I’ve told you before, that defeats the purpose of having a weekly print run,” he interrupted.