Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [56]
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
The people at the bar and tables were mostly men, and all Hispanic. As we stood there, they stopped talking and turned to look at us. Dark eyes glittered, and faces grew hard and hostile.
I tensed, but said to John, “It’s okay,” and scanned the room. At the far end of the bar sat a lone man with a long, drooping mustache, hair to his shoulders, and skin so dark he could have passed for black. Luis Abrego. I started down there, felt John close in behind me. “Go have a beer,” I told him.
“No way.”
“I mean it!”
“I’m looking to protect myself, not you. They probably won’t knife a woman, and besides, you know self-defense.”
“All right, come on. But if you say one word—”
“You’ll feed me to the mean-looking guy by the cigarette machine.”
“Right.”
As we approached, Luis Abrego swiveled on his stool and got up to greet us. Soft, liquid eyes appraised us; then the mouth under the limp mustache spread into a grin. “You’re the lady Ana called about,” he said to me. “She wanted to make sure I waited for you.”
John made a sound like air escaping from a tire.
“Mr. Abrego,” I said.
“Luis.” He extended his hand and we shook.
“I’m Sharon, and this is my … associate, John. Can we talk?”
“Sure. Lemme get you a couple of beers. Take that booth over there.” He pointed.
The other customers had looked away and resumed their conversations by now. As we got settled in the booth, I said, “Still want me to protect you, big brother?”
“Fuck off, little sister.”
Abrego came to the booth, three bottles of Miller’s clutched between his hands. He passed them around, then sat across from us. “Hey, Ana told me you paid her the money she needed. She shouldn’t’ve asked for it. I told her I was gonna have it tonight, if this … job that I’m waiting to hear about goes okay, but would she listen? No, she’s too proud to take my money.”
I said, “I didn’t mind paying her. She helped me, and I’m glad I could do something in return.”
“Yeah, she’s a doll, that Ana.” His face grew glum, and he looked down at the table. “Bad break for her. She’s nice and smart as they come, going to college in the fall, even. Sort of a relative of mine—everybody from Santa Rosalía’s family somewhere along the line. I’d like to kill the bastard knocked her up, you know?”
“She’ll be okay now.”
“Maybe.” He looked up, eyes uncertain. “I don’t know, though. I think there’s something wrong with her. You see how sick she looks?”
I nodded.
John said, “I know somebody at the Woman’s Place Clinic in Hillcrest. I think they charge less than two ninety-five for the … procedure, and they’ll check her over for other problems. I’ll write down my friend’s name and number; you tell Ana to call her. Gina’ll make sure she gets good care.”
Abrego brightened and fished a finger-smudged piece of paper from his shirt pocket. John took it and wrote. As he passed it back, I squeezed his arm, but he just shrugged and looked away, embarrassed.
“So,” Abrego said to me, “you want to know about the guy who came up to Ana in the Holiday Market parking lot.”
“She told me you saw him again that night.”
He nodded. “It was down near the border on Monument Road. I was … you know what I do?”
“You help people get where they need to go.”
“Right. I had a pickup scheduled for Sunday night. Maybe around eleven, maybe later. What I do, I sit in my car across from the old dairy—sometimes most of the night—waiting for them and hoping they’ll make it through the canyons okay. Anyway, I noticed this guy because he was an Anglo, and you don’t see too many down there at night unless they’re la migra.”
“What was he doing?”
“Just sitting on a pile of broken-up concrete by the road that goes up to the mesa.”
“You’re sure it was this man?” I showed him Hy’s picture.
“Yeah, that’s the one, same one who bothered Ana. I watched him pretty careful. He was just sitting there on the concrete with a lit cigarette, but he wasn’t smoking it. He’d knock the ash off, and as soon as it burned down, he’d light another. Some kind of signal, I guess.”
That explained the