Scorpion Rain Read online

  David Cole

  Scorpion Rain

  for W8VJD

  Life for life

  Eye for eye, tooth for tooth

  Hand for hand, foot for foot,

  Burning for burning

  Wound for wound

  EXODUS 21:23

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Victorio

  1

  It started with the breather.

  2

  I had to call. I had to tell them.

  3

  “What have you done?” Meg shouted.

  Laura

  4

  I drove to South Tucson because I wanted to call…

  Laura

  5

  “Laura?”

  Victorio

  6

  The Perryville State Prison complex was in Goodyear, Arizona, butting…

  7

  All skies should be so blue, all deserts so carpeted…

  Laura

  8

  LynnMay Martinez braced her hands against the dashboard, breathing heavily.

  9

  “Why do you keep talking to yourself?” LynnMay asked.

  10

  “You see that other van again?” Meg asked.

  11

  Nogales is a fairly small city filled with huge trucks.

  Laura

  12

  “Por favor, señorita,” the guard said. “Over this way. Over…

  13

  When I opened my eyes, an incredible cloud of hair…

  Victorio

  14

  “I love your hair,” I said again. “Uh…tell me…

  15

  I really wanted a mint julep, made with Maker’s Mark…

  16

  I knew, you see, I knew I was in shock.

  Laura

  17

  “Your car is ready, Señorita Emily.”

  Victorio

  18

  Don still not available.

  19

  He took me to the U.S. Government building, the rear…

  20

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  21

  The finger lay in the middle of her desk.

  22

  “It all started with kidneys.”

  23

  When I finished explaining, she took another of her folders,…

  24

  It wasn’t really Rey’s house, it was hers.

  25

  An old building with high ceilings, lots of oak paneling,…

  26

  Too late, too late.

  Victorio

  27

  The front room of Jo’s house was completely empty of…

  28

  “How did the kidnappers contact you?” I asked her. “Phone…

  29

  “How are the kidnappers supposed to contact you about the…

  30

  North on 19. Out of Nogales, out of the heart…

  Laura

  31

  “Does the money ever bother you?”

  32

  Somebody shaking me, gently, insistently.

  33

  “Is she telling the truth? That’s all I want to…

  Laura

  34

  Raging Sage was a small coffee shop on Campbell, just…

  35

  “Jack Zea,” she said, extending a long arm, clinking with…

  36

  “Let’s talk about kidnapping,” Michelle said, waiting for me outside…

  37

  Kyle sat patiently against the window wall, seated cross-legged, reading…

  38

  “I miss you,” he said, his face jerking on the…

  Laura

  39

  I ran down and up the exit stairs twelve times,…

  40

  “On the fourth day…” The man’s lips moved, but he…

  41

  The chopper set down several hundred feet from two small,…

  42

  “This is hopeless, Kyle.”

  43

  Far above us, a jet contrail stenciled the azure morning…

  44

  They moved gracefully below me, Kyle looking upward at me…

  45

  But just after Kyle disappeared behind another house, I heard…

  46

  “Have a sandwich,” Kyle said. “Eat.”

  Laura

  About the Author

  Other Books by David Cole

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  victorio

  dorogaya sestrichka,

  i have found them, dear sister!

  at last…both of the women responsible…it has been difficult, they are such secret women, such private women, hidden from us for so long…but no longer. i know where they will be tomorrow morning. and I have chosen wisely, chosen the right people, chosen the most careful plan…revenge at last!

  last night we harvested everything from both the man and woman…the major organs now in Phoenix, eyes and skin to Los Angeles, bones and the rest to a new buyer in New York…we hold two sources at the campo and only await the ransom payments before we harvest them…but, sestrichka, now that i know where to find the two women, it is time to end this phase…new identities, new laboratories and surgeries, new beginnings…i tire of this country.

  tomorrow, the two women…

  chto poseesh to i pozhnesh—they will reap what they planted.

  in her memory,

  v

  1

  It started with the breather.

  Nine weeks ago, I began getting a stream of hang-ups on my voice mail. Bored one afternoon, I ran the calls through some audio enhancement software and caught the breathing.

  Freaked me out, when I realized it was a breather. I do so much work with stalked and abused women with my friend Meg Arizana, but this was the first time I had been stalked myself.

  Fortunately, my office really isn’t an office you can visit.

  It’s just a room; sure, it’s an actual room, but small. I rent the space in back of the Hung Duck Wah takeout on Sixth Street, near Country Club. There’s almost nothing in it. No furniture, just two computers set on the floor, linked to three telephone lines. But no real telephone, just cables and connectors and double-thickness black velvet hung over the single window.

  It’s a cutout, really. A security buffer between the virtual me and the real person. Clients leave messages on my voice mail, they send email which gets auto-forwarded. They can even leave me digital video-conferenced files, which I sometimes request so I can see what my clients look like.

  I never go there. Nobody ever sees me there.

  I live somewhere else. In East Tucson, way east, out toward Mount Lemmon, where there are very few houses nearby and I can still see javelinas at my backyard pool in the morning, roadrunners drinking from a dish, and a coyote so mangy that I think he’s left over from a bit part in Dances With Wolves.

  I never see Kevin Costner, though. I make it a point to see nobody that I don’t invite to the house. Like Meg, or my poker girls. And once in a while, a man, for a night, or longer if he cooks well.

  The breathing started at a bad time.

  My behavioral therapist wanted to get me off Ritalin for good. To banish my general anxieties, my occasional panic attacks, and my long time aversion to social interaction. Maybe, she said, we can even improve your sense of humor.

  No more Ritalin, she said. We’re going to fix these…these behavioral conditions, she calls them. She likes to accentuate unusual syllables to break the rhythms of familiar communication, to get my attention, to make me behave.

  Whatever success I’d made with therapy, the breather ruined everything.
At first, I kept it to myself, but after several sessions my therapist noticed.

  You have regressed, Laura, she said. Santayana, remember Santayana.

  I asked what the Alamo has got to do with me, but she knows my humor too well, knows that I do have some humor, but I mostly use it to offset my anxieties.

  George Santayana, the philosopher, she says with her knowing, smug smile, waving her index finger sideways so I’ll stop joking around.

  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  When the breather calls began, I’d cut back Ritalin usage to barely half a dozen every week or ten days, but I upped my dosage after the second call.

  Initially, I didn’t tell her. Stupid, I know that now. Anyway, I was keeping a journal for her, and after a few days of the breather calls, I decided to keep a permanent record of times and dates. But I stopped showing her my journal, which violated one of our rules, and she knew right away something was wrong. She knew that I did computer hacking, that I went after serious money theft, embezzlement, all kinds of white-collar crimes. She always knew when I had a difficult client.

  After the breathing went on for a month, I realized I was getting cranked daily, and was finally up to a dozen Ritalin a day. I had to get off it, I couldn’t get off it. The breather was getting to me because it was deliberate. I traced the phone calls through half a dozen jumps around the world, but gradually I could see a pattern in the routing and I knew it wasn’t just random calls or telemarketers.

  Then one day the breather started talking.

  The first message was simple.

  “This is Victorio.”

  Nothing else. For ten days, I got the same message, every day. I mentioned it to my partner, Don Ralph, but he wasn’t concerned. Our office was meant to be a contact point for clients, but Don assured me he’d totally isolated both the computers and the phone system from any links to our names, addresses, phone numbers…links to where we lived, links to our lives.

  On the eleventh day, there was a new message.

  “I know you’re somewhere close,” the voice said. “I’m halfway home to finding you. Won’t that be fun!”

  Could have been either a man or woman’s voice, old, young, unidentifiable because the breather talked through a sophisticated voice-altering device.

  That’s when I knew I had a problem with serious substance abuse, but I couldn’t do without the Ritalin. I’d long, long ago convinced myself that in times of stress the Ritalin helped me concentrate, helped me focus.

  A few days later, he said a name. Billie Holiday. A week later, another name. Johnstone Morgenstern. Five days later, when I got the third name, Debra Winfield McCartney, I started some computer traces.

  Usually, I didn’t do any work without consulting with my partner. Don Ralph lived near Milwaukee, but it really didn’t matter where he lived since all our business involved computers and the Internet. The year before, when I’d actually met him through Mari Emerine, Don was my hacker guru. I let him do almost all the financial tracking, while I carefully selected clients or did whatever tasks he gave me. When Mari died, Don disappeared for months. Then one day he emailed me and proposed that we set up a legitimate business front.

  Since we got a lot of spam email, and crank or telemarketer calls to the listed phone numbers were not unusual, I’d not said anything about the breather. After the third name, I still didn’t say anything, but I began running information searches on the names. Two weeks after I started, the breather gave me another name.

  Clarissima Douglas Bisbee.

  I finally told my therapist.

  Naturally, she threw it right back at me as my karma.

  Heaven sends you this opportunity, she said, unable at such times to avoid her born-again evangelicism. Conquer the fear, conquer the dependency on drugs.

  Easy for her to say, easy for her to embellish it over the top.

  As we grow older, wiser, more mature, we convince ourselves that we have learned from the past, and that we will profit from this learning and understanding. But actually, we just learn how to lie to ourselves.

  I had a different take on history.

  We learn to unlearn.

  If I’m smart, maybe, just maybe, I’ll never repeat the past. In the meantime, in the short run, I was really anxious to find out about this breather and get rid of him. I was anxious about talking to the feds.

  After my serious problems with federal agents a year before, when I was almost charged with killing a U.S. Assistant Attorney, after all of that, I avoided law enforcement people more than ever. But once the breather gave me the fifth name, Margaret Admiral, I knew I had to call somebody in law enforcement.

  No, that’s not why. I’d been ready since early in the morning. When I checked the answering machine, there were fifteen messages waiting. They were time-stamped exactly fourteen minutes apart. The last one astonishing.

  It might have been a man’s voice, maybe not. Whoever was calling had a very sophisticated digital voice disguiser, and the weird thing was that I recognized the voice; I tell you, it was a very familiar voice and at first I couldn’t place it.

  Totally freaky.

  Then it hit me. It was Anthony Hopkins’s voice.

  “Hello, Clarice,” he said. “Be sure to watch CNN today.”

  2

  I had to call. I had to tell them.

  The story ran on CNN every ten minutes, somebody in Atlanta had already given it a working title.

  Breaking News

  Tucson Socialite Kidnap/Murder

  Calling the feds went against all my codes of privacy. I promised my clients anonymity for whatever reason they wanted my computer hacking: tracing embezzled money, white-collar money stock manipulations, or wire-transfers to offshore illegal banks. For the past year I’d specialized in financial crimes.

  Follow the money, get it back.

  I only focused on the money. If somebody else wanted to arrest the people responsible, not my call. But kidnapping…murder…I had to call somebody.

  The Phoenix telephone book didn’t have the right listing. I called Directory Assistance, got numbers of different U.S. governmental agencies, made the call.

  “Immigration and Naturalization Service,” the woman said. “Tucson Sector. How may I direct your call?”

  “I’ve got information about the kidnapping.”

  “Which kidnapping is that, ma’am?”

  “Margaret Admiral. The woman who’s all over the news right now.”

  “One moment.”

  On MSNBC, the news had made it into the crawl at the bottom of the screen. I switched to FOX, but they were doing a conservative talk host rant program. Back on CNN, a woman reporter was doing a remote standup from somewhere in the middle of a desert.

  “Border Patrol.”

  A young Hispanic woman’s voice.

  “I want to tell you something about the Admiral kidnapping.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Laura Winslow,” I said without hesitating.

  “Address?”

  “No address. I live on Bucking Horse Road, up near Catalina.”

  “What’s the house number?”

  “No number. It’s just a dirt road. Listen, please, I have this information, I think I might know…who am I talking to?”

  “Why are you calling, please?”

  “It’s all over TV,” I said with some exasperation. “Margaret Admiral. Look, I know why she was kidnapped.”

  “One moment.”

  Incredibly, she put me on hold. I heard a heavy-metal rock station playing. Another woman’s voice came on. An older woman, her voice somewhat stressed.

  “Are you at home, Miss…Miss Winslow?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “You have information about Mrs. Admiral?”

  “I should have said…I mean, I know there was a ransom payment.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s what I do. Are you in charge?”<
br />
  “That person is not available.”

  “Can I leave a message? For whoever is in charge?”

  “I’d be glad to take the message.”

  “Just give me the person’s voice mail,” I said, beginning to feel sorry I’d called. “Just let me leave a message.”

  “Look,” the woman said, a touch of anger flaring, but I could tell she was really frustrated with the situation and not with me. “We’ve now received over one hundred crank calls. Somebody in Mexico leaked this story. The caller clearly identified himself as a member of the Peraza drug cartel. Even gave his name. Could be a fake name, but the Perazas have such protection from the Mexican authorities, so who knows. Anyway. Said there was a body buried in the desert, gave us an exact location. Said the body was mutilated. If you’re just another crank call, I’ve already recorded your cell phone number and will file a federal warrant for your arrest. So, if you’re really who you say you are, give me the amount of the ransom and the bank account.”

  I read some figures off my computer monitor. I heard the woman gasp and whisper to somebody else. There was a long, stunned silence before she came back.

  “That is correct. What else do you know?”

  “Let me leave a message.”