Sunrise Highway Page 29

  She stopped short and tried to stand again, afraid of what would happen if a live power line fell in the water. Would every living thing get electrocuted?

  She gave out a long, fierce, inarticulate scream, a gutbucket howl of terror and frustration. When it was done, she heard other human voices. Not answering her, but calling out to each other. The water had receded a little, to just below her waist, and she fought the current as she splashed to the corner. She looked right and saw flashlight beams swinging and searching. It looked like a scene from Titanic. A half-dozen people were clinging to a long rope stretched across the avenue, hanging on to each other and dear life in the floodwaters. She called out, like she was trying to rejoin the human race.

  A wave knocked her sideways and pushed her under. She flailed and bubbled beneath the surface as it dragged her along, glimpsing a baby doll and a wicker chair as her eyes opened underwater.

  When she finally found her feet again, the people were no longer in sight. She was in another part of the neighborhood. The water was only up to her hips here. But her body was that much more exhausted from the effort. She began to weep from having been so close to rescue, her tears indistinguishable from the rain. She now realized the roar she’d been hearing was from the street drains overwhelmed by the deluge, the mouths only able to take in so much.

  But then she saw another light in the distance, less steady than the yellow one she’d seen earlier. It was so faint and flickering at first that she thought it might be a boat getting tossed across the bay. But then it began to grow stronger as it leveled off and came toward her. It split, defining itself as a pair of headlights, one seemingly brighter than the other. A car with a driver in it, heavier and sturdier than the ones she’d seen floating away. Maybe a Jeep or a Land Rover or a truck of some kind.

  She raised her arms, praying it would stop and pick her up. She remembered the people she’d just seen clinging to the lifeline and to each other. She’d tried to tell herself that was the brighter light of human nature. That more people would help you than harm you, given a choice. That even most of the men who’d paid her for sex were just lonely and desperate, and no more cruel than they had to be. Some were even kind enough to give her a ride when she needed one. It was her own fault for drawing the darkness around her. But that was over now. There was a life growing inside her. She was no longer blocking the blessings. She threw her arms up as the high beams washed over her like a movie star.

  The car stopped about ten yards in front of her and the driver’s side door opened. She saw the silhouette of a man getting out and coming toward her.

  “Renee,” he said.

  The water she was standing in seemed to get warm and then become instantly frigid. She turned and started to run.

  46

  OCTOBER

  2017

  Joey had two separate files open on his desk when Officer Octavio Ramirez came in and closed the door behind him.

  “Have a seat, officer. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Ramirez settled before him, a boxy man with a round face and a flat affectless stare that had probably served him well on the handful of undercover gang assignments noted in his file. But that burgeoning paunch was clear visual evidence to his chief that the officer had spent too much inactive time in his car for highway patrol or sitting around the dinner table with his extended Mexican family in Brentwood.

  “Sir?”

  Joey donned a pair of reading glasses, turned the pages of the personnel file, and stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “How you doing there, Octavio?”

  “Fine, sir. Thank you for asking.”

  “Not too bothered from the fallout of that Robles arrest, are you?”

  “No, sir. Bad press comes with the territory. Like you always say.”

  A part of Joey still wondered if he should have had Charlie Maslow or some other mid-level supervisor handling this conversation. To put another layer of insulation and deniability between what was said in this office and what was done on the street. Usually it was better if the buck stopped there, not here. Management 101. But he’d been through this before, and the cost-benefit analysis said to limit the circle. Don’t bring in more eyes and ears than you need to.

  “I just want you to know how much I appreciate your dedication and discretion,” Joey said. “And I want to continue to encourage you to take the sergeant’s exam, to move you up in the ranks.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Ramirez nodded. “I’m planning on it.”

  “Meantime, I have another job for you.”

  Ramirez became very still in a way that reminded Joey of how livestock acted right before they got a second branding mark.

  “Sir?”

  Joey liked the way the officer’s voice changed as he spoke. The little servile upturn. Like he knew that despite his uniform and the house he’d worked so hard to give his family, he could be reduced to Mexican peasant status in the blink of an eye.

  Joey opened the first file and held up the Missing Persons alert. “Officer, have you seen this notice before?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ramirez took the printout. “We’ve had it for several months. Like most of the other police departments in our area.”

  “Do you recognize the woman in the picture?”

  Ramirez dutifully narrowed his eyes. “Not personally, sir. But I’m assuming she’s a relative of the woman we arrested on the highway. There’s a family resemblance.”

  “It’s Detective Robles’s sister, Ysabel. We have reason to believe she was working as an escort on the Island at some point in the last eight or so months. I want you to ramp up the search for her. I know you have contacts at some of the local homeless shelters and outreach centers in the various communities.”

  “Yes, sir. My wife works in a soup kitchen and my sister-in-law is involved with a number of church groups.”

  “I know that,” Joey said. “And these are resources most of our regular Anglo officers don’t have. Maybe some of the local day laborers have been with her. Maybe she’s been living on the streets or sleeping in someone’s van. I want you to tap into those resources immediately. I’m sure you have a group of officers you can trust to assist in this. If they can keep their mouths shut, there’s money in the budget for them.”

  “Sir, shouldn’t we be doing that anyway in partnership with the other departments?”

  “Octavio, ol’ buddy, can I let my hair down a little?” Joey smiled, passing his hand over his shaved pate. “This needs to be done off the books. Do you understand?”

  “Sir?”

  “If you find her, I don’t want her put into the system. I want her brought to me and I want no official paper trail on her. Understood?”

  It was no easy task reading Ramirez’s slightly squashed expression with his small black eyes hiding deep in their prematurely weathered sockets. A man who’d retreated deep inside himself to attend to his private sorrows.

  “Sir,” he said after a long pause. “Is that all right to do?”

  “I’m your chief. I’m directing you to do it.”

  “I understand—but permission to speak freely?” Ramirez waited for the chief’s nod. “I could get in a lot of trouble for that, couldn’t I?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I mean, there’s already a lot of questions about the highway stop we did with Detective Robles. I don’t want to get put in a position where I get fired and then can’t get hired by another department.”

  Joe reached for the second file, having guessed pretty much where this bump in the road would come.

  “Officer Ramirez,” he said. “Haven’t we discussed the tragic death of your son recently?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ramirez swallowed. “Heriberto got hit while he was helping my brother change a tire on the Southern State Parkway last year. It’s one of the reasons I asked to get transferred to the highway unit. To make sure things like that don’t happen to someone else’s children.”

  “Very admirable.” The chief nodded. �
�I spent a lot of time on highway patrol myself. Important work out here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And have we discussed the other family you have living with you?” Joey took his time removing the letter from the school board in his file. “An Eduardo Cardenas. Am I saying that right?”

  Joey smiled as if he was proud of pronouncing the name with an appropriate Spanish flourish, though truly he was more enjoying the way Ramirez was beginning to shift and cross his ankles with unease.

  “The son of my aunt,” Ramirez mumbled. “He’s a good boy.”

  “Yes, it’s coming back to me.” Joey nodded as he pretended to read. “Ten years old, smuggled here from Juarez. Better prepared than most. Speaks good English. Works at your wife’s flower store on weekends. Able to handle eighth-grade-level math…”

  “Yes, sir, and I’m grateful that you didn’t report him to Immigration earlier,” Ramirez said, referencing the conversation they’d had right before the chief ordered him to pull over Robles on the highway.

  Joey took his time turning to the next page and drawing out the officer’s discomfort. “And look at this. It says here that he’s keeping up with kids four years older than him at your son’s old middle school. His math teacher says he’s killing it in trigonometry.”

  Ramirez turned sideways and looked out the window, as if he was starting to see where this was going. “Que deseas?” he murmured. What do you want?

  “The problem is that Immigration is tightening up a lot lately. Before it was just a matter of nobody going out of their way to report him. But now that he’s in the school system, he’s much more vulnerable to deportation. It says here that his math teacher admitted the boy was here illegally and was going to school under your dead son’s name when she was questioned by another cop responding to a recent incident at the school building. Is that true, Officer Ramirez?”

  “Chief, I think I’d like to talk to my union lawyer.”

  “Now let’s not get too carried away.” The chief took off his reading glasses. “Obviously, you’re trying to do right by your people, taking this poor kid in and giving him chances your own son never had.”

  Ramirez took a long breath in through his nose, knowing the dive was only getting deeper. “Sir?”

  “The worst-case scenario for your family is that this gets played by the book, and our police department reports this child who’s here illegally to ICE and he gets deported back to a war zone. I’m sure you’re aware that we’re living in a time when the president is threatening to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities. A lot of people could suffer for that.”

  “I do understand that, sir.” Ramirez nodded as if an unseen hand was on the back of his neck.

  “So what shall we do?” The chief spread his arms, in mock bewilderment. “Shall we break the law and look the other way all the time? Knowing that thousands of dangerous criminals flood into our country because of lax border enforcement? Or do we think about this more humanely and try to make the occasional exception to the rule?”

  Ramirez bowed his head. “Sir, I’m hoping we can find a way to let the boy stay,” he said.

  “You do know that would involve bending the rules, officer. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you believe it’s necessary sometimes to bend the rules to do the right thing?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you’re an intelligent officer and intelligent officers can do well under this administration,” Joey said, shoving the Missing Persons notice back at Ramirez. “This person could help an investigation we’re conducting. We need to find her as soon as possible, by any means necessary. And we need it quietly. Comprende, amigo?”

  “Yes, sir. I understand.”

  There was almost no chance that Ramirez would be recording this conversation, given the situation with the nephew living here under an assumed name, but it never hurt to measure your words. Ramirez got up to leave and then stopped.

  “Sir?” he asked. “Does this mean we should keep the boy home from school so he doesn’t get picked up by ICE?”

  “Of course not.” The chief waved him off and went back to his paperwork. “Keep sending him. This is America. He can be anything he wants.”

  47

  OCTOBER

  2012

  Plunger got the call right as the storm was hitting, boats rocking at the marina, weather people in ponchos on the TV. But here was “the Chief” on the line, pushing his buttons, telling him to put his galoshes on. There was another girl on the loose, and if someone else found her first, it was going to be a problem.

  Just like that, Joey could reach past thirty-five years, through the double-glazed storm windows of a two-story woodframe house in Atlantic Beach where the mortgage had just been paid off, and into a recently renovated kitchen that was equipped with jugs of fresh water and flashlights with fresh batteries in case the power went out. Just like that, he could pull the string and make his old friend Plunger feel like they were back in the woods behind the football field, covered in clammy sweat, bugs crawling all over his arms and mosquitoes buzzing around his ears. Another lifetime but still on the hook for it.

  Plunger found his raincoat and made sure there was gas in the generator and food that wouldn’t spoil for the rest of the family. Then he got his keys, climbed into the Land Rover he used to take the kids to soccer practice, and drove out into the miasma.

  The wipers could barely go fast enough to clear away the fat drops blotting his windshield. Maybe ten feet of visibility even with the fog lights on. Not another soul on the road. Who in their right mind would be out on a night like this anyway? Every time the wipers cleared his view for a half second, it looked like the world was getting washed away. Black sky, roiling mist, smeared red lights through the glass.

  He prayed the Atlantic Beach drawbridge would be up and give him an excuse not to make it into Rockaway. It looked like Reynolds Channel was overflowing onto Bay Boulevard and Rescue Road. But no, goddamn it, both sides were down. Because what kind of lunatic would be out trying to pilot a boat during a hurricane? Only someone who had absolutely no choice except to obey. A human toilet implement thrust down into the muck to suck out some hideous problem no one else would touch. He dropped down to ten miles an hour, visibility down to maybe three feet, as he edged across the span, wipers on double time, water halfway over his wheels, as he tried not to lose control and crash into the side rails. The lights were on at the toll plaza but the booths were unmanned as he steered around the barriers, heart in his mouth so he could almost taste his own blood.

  Far Rockaway looked post-apocalyptic as he made the turn onto Seagirt Boulevard. Rowboats and garbage cans floating in the streets, stray trash bobbing on the surface, lighter cars drifting unmoored into his path. There was an orange glow in the sky to the west and between weather updates 10-10 WINS on his radio said houses were on fire in Breezy Point, at the other end of the peninsula. Plunger’s vehicle kept hydroplaning as he followed the directions Joey had given him, the Land Rover threatening to spin off the road and into a lamppost, or maybe someone’s living room.

  This was madness. The ocean and the bay were joining together over the peninsula, and his headlights were nearly underwater. Even if he did manage to make it to the address, the girl would surely be gone with the tides. Probably facedown and drowned somewhere. And therefore no longer a problem. He made the turn onto Rockaway Beach Boulevard and thought of turning around. But then the water began to recede a little and he saw a lone figure in the distance, a staggering silhouette in his high beams.

  He kept his speed at a steady twenty miles an hour, going over ruts and potholes, afraid he’d stall out if he went slower. Lank dripping hair told him it was probably a girl. Pale brown. Holding her arms out at her sides, with a handcuff and a chain off one wrist. Looking around in a daze, as if she didn’t know where she was. Wearing an oversized white t-shirt, like the one J had described. Tiny and hollow-eyed. Under normal circum
stances she’d be as scary as a sparrow. But in these conditions, she was a grotesque incomprehensible thing that had to be destroyed.

  She froze in his headlights as the water cleared enough for him to stop. He got out of the car slowly and left the motor running, so he wouldn’t have trouble starting it again.

  She was younger than he’d expected. And softer looking. He thought J preferred hard, angry women who wouldn’t be missed by anybody. But this one was a heartbreaker. Which was what made her a danger to both of them.

  He said her name evenly, hoping it would relax her and make it easier to get her in the car. Instead her bony shoulders went back and her eyes went wide. Like he was the monster, not her.

  She turned and ran away through the ankle-deep water. He tried to slosh after her as she disappeared around a corner, but his tennis knee wasn’t having it. He doubled back to the Land Rover and went slowly after her, narrowly avoiding collision with a floating chunk of boardwalk and a woman pushing a surfboard with two pet carriers strapped to it.

  He was on a side street, not far from the beach, the rain still loud and heavy as wreckage falling on his roof. Even with the handcuff chain, the girl had somehow managed to make it across a lawn and onto the front porch of the only house on the street that had lights. The sight of her frail, sopping figure under the bulb caused a wild churning panic to take hold of him. If she made it inside, it would all be over. Everything they’d constructed since that night behind the football field. The dream of the lives they’d had. All wiped out and swept away, leaving the hideous foundation exposed.

  Plunger watched her ring the bell and hug herself as she waited for a response. His own sense of powerlessness at this moment made him want to throw up all over the steering wheel. If he ran up and tried to grab her, her scream would open the door or bring neighbors running from the watery shadows.