Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [100]
Hy said, “I’m just as glad that decade’s over.”
“They don’t know it ended.”
“Now that I think of the seventies and eighties, maybe they’re not so bad off.”
“What about the nineties?” I asked lightly.
“Too early to tell. You hold any hope for them?”
Our eyes met; I felt a stirring of our old wordless communication. “Some parts of them I do,” I said, entwining my fingers with his.
* * *
Tomás didn’t arrive until after ten. As he got out of an old pickup with a winch for hoisting a boat on its bed, he looked grave. Hy unlocked the back door of the rental car; Tomás got in, cupping his hands and lighting a cigarette in an odd furtive manner. As he spoke with Hy, I was able to follow most of what he said; when I couldn’t, Hy interjected a translation.
The police had come to the riverbed and questioned everyone about a drifter who had been seen on the beach and in the village—a tall, thin man with a craggy face and a stubbly beard. They were also interested in an American woman who had been sitting on the beach with an expensive camera around sunset the previous evening. The police wanted to talk with them about a shooting that had occurred outside Fontes’s villa at about five that morning.
Hy asked, “Que?”
A young blond woman, Tomás told him. She had been shot in the back on the beach and sustained a punctured kidney. The helicopter had taken her to the trauma unit at Ensenada.
Diane Mourning.
I told Hy to ask if anyone had gone with her.
No, Tomás replied. He’d been curious about the situation at Fontes’s house himself, so he’d gone into the village and asked around. The woman had gone alone, and no one else had left there since. The automobile gate was locked, and no one intended to fly anywhere; Fontes’s pilot had been given the day off.
Hy continued talking with Tomás, but I lost the thread of the conversation, thinking back instead to around five that morning, when I’d been outside the shack. Mourning could not have been shot on the beach; it was a place where sound carried, and I’d heard nothing. Why had the people at the villa lied to the police? To shift attention away from themselves? Perhaps they’d seen it as a convenient opportunity to focus suspicion on Hy and me? But that didn’t feel right. The last thing they would want was for Hy to tell his story to the authorities. And so far as I knew, they weren’t aware I was in El Sueño.
Tomás was shaking Hy’s hand. He nodded to me, then slipped out of the backseat and walked toward his truck. “Where’s he going?” I asked.
“Home. He’s lost his morning’s fishing as is.”
“What about us?”
“We can’t go back there.”
“I know. But now what?”
“Good question.”
We were silent for a while, watching the gray of the sea pale as the sun silvered the cloud cover. The VW bus started with a puff of dark exhaust, lurched into reverse, then drove toward the road. As it passed us, its driver waved jauntily.
I said, “Mourning wasn’t shot on the beach, you know,” and explained.
“You think she was shot inside the villa, then.”
“Probably.”
“By whom?”
“Salazar?”
“Guy’s got to be the world’s worst shot, then. And why’d he let her live?”
“I suppose it could have been an accident.”
“So they moved her to the beach and tried to throw suspicion on us.”
I shook my head. “They may have moved her, but I don’t think they were the ones who alerted the police to us. What probably happened was that the Federales canvassed the neighbors and came up with our descriptions.”
“Huh.” He was silent for a moment. “Back to the immediate question: what do we do now? We can’t stay around here.”
“Go back to San Diego?”
“And do what? Besides, look at us. You’re grubby, and I’ve seen spiffier guys than me being brought into detox. You really want to brave the border control in this condition, when the Federales may have requested them to pick up and hold?”
“No, but I suppose