BULLETS (20 page)

The shower turned off and that helped ease the distraction. He walked back toward the open kitchen counter, picked up his tea and sipped it. It scalded his lip, which was a good thing because he needed to be snapped out of this hormonal stupor. The bathroom door opened and she came back in covered in a big fluffy robe, her hair wrapped in a towel. He held out her cup of tea and she took it with a big sigh.

“Thank you. Sorry to make you wait, but I can’t seem to think straight in the morning until I’ve had a quick shower, I don’t know why.”

Slick thought that she must rarely wear makeup since, as she stood there before him now, she obviously had none on at the moment and he couldn’t tell the difference between before and afterwards. Evidently she didn’t need any. She sipped her cup and shot a quick smile at him.

“Most people around here are big coffee drinkers, but I’ve always been a tea person.”

“Me, too. Herbal especially.”

“I had you pegged as a coffee guy.”

“Not usually. Only when I need to stay awake and there’s nothing else.”

“No Red Bull?”

“Uh-uh, not for me, too much of the evil version of sugar. I’ll only do coffee if I need the jolt, and even then, if I can get green tea, the real stuff, not the bagged store bought version, I go that way. It’s got more caffeine and it’s healthier for you.”

“I’ve heard that. I need to try some of that.”

“It’s good stuff.”

They sipped their tea, a comfortable silence between them. Slick rarely felt self-conscious, but he was feeling that way now. He was very conscious of the fluffy robe she wore and nothing else. And he could smell her wet hair and the shampoo she used. Scented shampoo that smelled like mango. He had to think of something else, and quick, so he nodded at the pictures on the mantel.

“That’s your mother and father?”

“Mommy and Poppy, yes. Still together after forty years.”

“He looks like a tough egg. They both do. You have your father’s eyes.”

“Thank you. Here I am with my brothers and sisters, all of us together. This one, my older brother, Raphael, in Mexico last year, on vacation.”

“What’s he do down there?”

“He builds bridges and power plants. He’s very smart.”

“Who’s this?” Slick pointed at a picture of her with an older white man, silver haired and in an expensive suit.

“That’s my boss. That’s George and his family.”

Next to Camilla in the picture, an older white man stood with his arm possessively around his wife, middle-aged but well preserved with blonde, frosted hair. She had her three kids in front of her, two girls and a boy, the oldest barely in their teens, youngest about ten. Everyone in the picture grinned widely.

“That was taken ten years ago, the night of his election to District Attorney. He’d asked me to join his staff earlier in his campaign and this is the moment just after we got word that he’d won. I keep it because, well, it’s the night I realized my dream. This job. I know a lot more now about the world than I did back then, that’s the other reason I keep it up there—to constantly remind myself of why I chose this path. It’s easy to forget sometimes. I look back to when I still had my ideals intact and unblemished, in order to remember.”

“Your ideals don’t strike me as blemished.”

“You’d be surprised. But if I didn’t work at it, they’d be much, much worse. Occupational hazard.”

“Every field has them.”

“That they do,” she said after a moment. “So.”

“So.”

“So okay, here’s my idea. This way.”

She led him back toward her home office and sat at her desk, setting the cup down. She cleared some files off of a spare chair and slid it close so he could see as she fired up her laptop. The scene of mango shampoo filled his nostrils as he sat.

“As I said before, that park was a hot spot for all kinds of low level criminal activity, one reason we cleaned it up. But before the cleanup happened, we got some DEA money funneled our way and used it to set up a few cameras around town, including the park, which was done BEFORE the cleanup, to catch some criminal activity and jack up our prosecution numbers. George always thought like that.”

“So you’ll be able to go back and see Pedro at the cleanup on camera.”

She turned and smiled at him. “I hope. We only have a few cameras in town, it was supposed to be a bigger project in terms of cameras when we got federal funding and it was going to cut down on crime everywhere, it certainly made my job easier, but some citizens of a certain political bent sued the city to halt the addition of any more. Ironically enough, the suit came from a couple of activist citizens who originally championed the cameras in the first place, only to change their mind once the scope of the project became apparent, that it would cover the entire city. They didn’t want Big Brother catching them running a red light or driving drunk.”

“So they were fine with pointing cameras in the flats at the poor brown people twenty-four hours a day, but not in the rich, white neighborhoods.”

“Basically. So we don’t have all that many cameras in town and only two in the park, but they’re still operating. The footage is streamed into our main database and stored into a dedicated server, and everything should still be there since they were installed. I used this once before for a solicitation case and had the tech guys walk me through so I could do it at home from my laptop whenever I needed to.”

She brought up the login screen, glanced at him and cleared her throat.

“Sorry,” he said and looked away to give her privacy while she typed her password in.

“Okay. Here we go. There were a lot of people there that day, so it’s going to be difficult. It was a two-day event, too. I’ll start with Saturday first.”

She typed a date into it and a duel camera screen popped up of a deserted park early in the morning. Camilla fast forwarded it and stopped it when people began to arrive. She hadn’t been exaggerating, there were a lot of people. They gathered at the base of a statue of a woman holding a bible placed near the entrance of the park. The statue was covered in graffiti and people went to work immediately scrubbing and cleaning it. More people showed up to help.

“I told you it was crowded. This is going to be difficult.”

“You can’t zoom in?”

“Not from here, and not really. Back in the office we have someone who can do that, but it just blows the picture up, it doesn’t zoom.”

“Do you have the facial recognition program that we could plug this into?”

“Uh, no, this is still just a small township, after all, those programs are expensive. I could ask Javier to help us with that later on if we can’t spot him ourselves.”

“Okay. Let’s see if we can do it. Fast forward, but not too fast. If we do regular speed, it’ll take forever. I’ll take this side, you take that side.”

She did so and they both scanned the pictures. Images of people rushed by in a blur of unnatural movement.

“He might not have been there on Saturday either. Father Jose said Sunday.”

“Okay, let’s go to Sunday.” She typed it in and new images came up. “There we go, Sunday.”

She fast-forwarded it as slowly as she could as people arrived.

“Hey, I saw you!”

She put it on normal speed. “Where. Oh, yes. There I am. Ugh, I hate those red pants I’m wearing, I look like a tugboat. That’s George and his family next to me.”

“They’re all dressed up for the part, too. Overalls?”

“Yes, it’s all for show, at least on George and Matilda’s part. They raked a few leaves, I think, had pictures taken and pretended to eat barbecue. They don’t care to get dirty. Their kids were much more help, but kids often are.”

They watched silently as the onscreen Camilla socialized with everyone and helped clean. After a few moments she disappeared into the crowd of volunteers.

“Even more people were there on Sunday. That’s when we scheduled the band and free food, so there was a good turnout.”

She shook her head as they watched the footage.

“What is it?” Slick asked.

“Nothing, it’s just … it’s rare that you see a crowd of people this diverse working together toward a common goal. Around here, anyway. This was a weekend when we had people from every neighborhood, every economic stratosphere, pitching in to do something good. Both from the wealthy district and the flats, we all wanted the park cleaned up and safe. No one was fighting about anything, skin color, citizenship papers, nothing. Only focused on making the park a better place.”

She sighed. “Everything should be like that.”

“There’s Ted.”

“Yes. He just stood and watched with his deputies. Maybe made a few jokes about free labor, if I recall. God, I can’t stand that man.”

“I notice brown people avoiding him like the fucking plague.”

“That’s how he’s viewed in that community. Wants everyone to show their papers like it’s 1940s Germany. Of course, he only asks non-whites for papers. God forbid you leave them at home, because if you do, you’re immediately detained. I’ve had so many arguments with him about that.”

She scrolled through more images and eventually Ted disappeared from the scene.

“Stop,” Slick said. “Go back.”

She did as he asked.

“There he is. Pedro. Look.” He pointed.

Onscreen, Pedro sat at the foot of the statue, eating a hot dog and watching the crowd. He was dirty, so evidently he’d been working somewhere in the park. He smiled widely at everyone near him. Onscreen, Camilla bustled right by him, talking and laughing with another volunteer and dragging some brush.

“I walked by him!” Camilla said. “Walked right by and didn’t even look at him.”

They watched as Pedro finished his hotdog, got up and put his trash into a nearby garbage can. He waved to someone unseen and slipped away into the crowd.

“Who did he wave to? Did you see?”

“I couldn’t make it out, too many people,” Slick said. “But yeah, he had someone there. He didn’t eat lunch with them, but he knew someone.”

They watched more footage scroll by, but couldn’t make out anything else. Finally Camilla yawned widely.

“Oh, sorry about that.”

“No worries, it’s not like you’ve been up for twenty-four hours or anything.”

“I know, right? I don’t think I can look at this anymore, my vision is blurring from exhaustion. We should probably take a break. I haven’t done an all-nighter since law school.” She leaned back, stretched and yawned. Slick tried hard not to stare as she did so, but it was difficult, very difficult.

She picked up her cup of tea and smiled at him.

“So you know about my family, saw the pictures. What are your parents like?”

“Didn’t know my father. My mother, she was cool and tough. She told me … never take any shit from nobody. Never. I always remembered that. She died when I was fourteen or so.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, it was a long time ago. I’ve made my peace with it.”

“Were you a ward of the state?”

“For a while, yeah.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“It wasn’t pleasant, that’s for sure.”

“And now you play cards?”

“For money, yeah.”

“Are you good?”

“I am very good.”

“Have you ever been on television? I see poker players on TV all the time.”

“Not me, I avoid it. I mostly play cash games, specific games that are under the public radar, big ticket money events among those who want to play privately. The thing about TV is folks can study you, learn your tells and tactics. Gives your game away. I guess a lot of players make TV money from it, which is good, but I prefer card money myself. There are other players like me, great poker players you’ve never heard of. And I guess I just don’t want to be famous. I prefer anonymity, to be able to go where I please and not be known or recognized. I like that. I like my life as it is, it’s what I worked for and have no ambition beyond it.”

“I didn’t think there was anyone left in America who didn’t want to be on TV.”

“Sure seems that way sometimes, don’t it? People go on TV to lose weight, go through rehab or find a wife, it’s nuts.”

“So I guess you’ll eventually move on from this town, sooner or later?” she said with a touch of forced casualness. Slick took a moment to consider that.

“Perhaps. I like to decide for myself on that, and as of now I’d prefer later, but it seems that it has to be sooner, lest your very good friend Javier will have me detained and thrown into a deep, dark hole in Gitmo where my lawyer won’t be able to find me.”

“What?”

“It’s what he said, anyway. He let it be known that I need to be moving on ASAP, or he’ll move me himself.”

Slick could see that steamed her but she controlled it.

“It’s okay, it happens,” he said. “He’s protecting you. I’m not offended by it.”

“I am. He has no right. He shouldn’t have said that.”

“I understand his position, I do. He’s simply worried about you. He blames me for you being in harm’s way last night. It was an understandable reaction from him, even though I don’t agree with it or like it.”

“So … you’re leaving?”

“I’m thinking about it. I don’t like anyone, no matter who they are, Ted, Javier, even the president, telling me I gotta hit the road when I don’t wanna go. It’s a thing of mine. I like that I can come and go when I want to. I really want to see the Pedro problem through to the end first. And there are … other reasons I’d like to stick around.”

“Other reasons?”

“One or two, yeah. So I’m mulling it over.”

“Anything that I can say that might influence you one way or another?”

“I can think of many things you could say that would influence me.”

Camilla smiled and sipped her tea, her eyes on him. “I wouldn’t let Javier throw you in Gitmo. And even if he did, I’d find and rescue you.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“I would.”

They looked at each other for a full moment.

“You know what the nice thing is, about being our age?” she asked him. “And by our age I mean being much closer to forty than we are to thirty.”

“What’s that?”

“At our age, when it comes to certain matters of the heart, mind and body, we no longer see a need to fuck around. If we want to do something, we can simply just do it.”