Chapter 17

After lunch I had a choice – more of the same, or try running down the two anomalous names. More of the same would have been easier, since there were addresses on the west side I could try, but I wanted to finish the thing. Someone had murdered Larry and I wasn't going to piddle around with side issues. Someone was going to pay – and I was going to see to it.

I closed what I could close, and wrapped everything in the bag I'd carried it out of the store in. It had been a long time since someone had asked me if I wanted paper or plastic, and longer since the only choice had been paper. There'd been a time when I could open a folded paper bag with one motion and an authoritative sound; there'd been a time when I could scoop stuff off the conveyer belt at a register and put it into an open paper bag without looking where my putting hand was going or what it was doing. I'd been a bag boy for a while in Needles, before I decided that the commute was too much and I'd wangled the job punching cows on the OX Ranch. That hadn't lasted terribly long either – working cattle is a major full-time job and I was trying to do it while getting through my last year of high school. Maybe I could have gotten back on with the ranch when I graduated – I was doing a pretty good job and getting better when I quit, and they'd been sorry to see me go – but instead I did other things.

I'd not planned on being so far from where I knew the eating joints, so I'd not brought anything in which to put leftovers. I'd have to check the lunch meat when I got home; it was winter and chilly, but the meat might still go bad sitting in the vehicle half the day. I shrugged. I could afford it, even if I hate wasting food; I could afford, if I got right down to it, a mansion in the far Heights and a Rolls to drive and a lot of other things that just don't interest me. Being able to afford a thing doesn't mean you've got to do it, and it doesn't mean you want to do it either. I've never understood the people who, when they come into money, suddenly go into conspicuous consumption overdrive. I liked what I liked before I had money, and all those little numbers on the computer screen didn't change my tastes. I shrugged again – contemplating the bad taste of the suddenly rich wasn't profitable. I started the engine and drove.

Neither of the people I was looking for was precisely crooked. They weren't precisely law-abiding, but they skated the edges of the law. I therefore wouldn't go looking for them in the fancier parts of town. In Albuquerque most vice has settled in along Central Avenue. It's not that there's no crime elsewhere – the one shooting I've been in was in the Northeast Heights, and the gangs are everywhere – but that Central has for years been the magnet. Probably it has something to do with the fact that before I-40 opened, Central was US 66 – the same highway I'd grown up along in California, though "old 66" hadn't been a US highway since 1931, when they realigned 66. Central had once funneled a nation through Albuquerque, and the motels and restaurants and such were still there, their romance faded maybe, but habit dies hard.

The easiest route was down Golf Course to Montaño, and then east over the river to Rio Grande. No one in Albuquerque ever says "boulevard" or "street" or "avenue" or whatever ... come to think of it, I've never lived anywhere they did. In Dallas the only streets that got a designation were lanes – Josey Lane, Forest Lane, like that. At least that was the rule – people did say "Jupiter Road," I remembered, but exceptions just prove rules. In Needles, where I went to school all my life, Broadway was just Broadway, and in Red Hawk I never learned more than a handful of designations – the streets were just East or 1^st or Main or Boundary or whatever. Here in Albuquerque people just say Juan Tabo, or Eubank, or California, or Montgomery, or Carlisle, and never bother with whether it's a street or a road or whatever. I certainly don't, and I don't know because it's just not part of the culture; I've never had to learn which are boulevards and which are avenues, which anyway are arbitrary designations.

I headed south on Rio Grande. It strikes Central right by Old Town. I pulled into the Walgreen's parking lot on the northwestern corner to check my list. I remembered that I'd followed a woman to Old Town, and seen her meet with her brother, a husband I was hunting, in the San Felipe Neri building on the plaza. I'd followed him into the Walgreen's, and then noted the plate number of the car he drove off in. That had broken the case, though it hadn't ended it. Cecelia and I were still friends with the client – the first time that had happened, and only the second time in my life I'd gotten personally involved with a client. The other time I wound up getting married.

The closest address of the two I wanted was down near the zoo, on Cromwell. I wondered idly whether it was named after Oliver. Almost certainly James Cromwell wasn't involved, though I like his deadpan acting style. I put the Blazer back in gear and rolled. The light let me cross Central, and I went down to Alhambra, and took that to San Pasquale. This was the old Country Club neighborhood, which isn't as fancy now as it originally was when all the built up area of the Heights was still bare land. Where I was going is Barelas, which isn't nice – though it's around the zoo, where everybody can safely go, it can be a tough neighborhood. Although, I reflected, the way Albuquerque's gangs are any neighborhood can be tough; they have shootings in places where you wouldn't expect 'em if you didn't know the town.

I located the address after navigating through old, narrow, short streets, all crammed in between the river and the railroad tracks. It was a run down place, with a dirt yard in front. As I got out of the Blazer I heard loud rap coming from inside. I had to decide whether to wear my gun – I decided not to, and locked the door behind me. I wasn't yet in a situation where I really expected violence to be a potential.

I doubted the doorbell worked, but I tried it anyway. Even if it did, I don't know whether anyone would be able to hear it. The bass was rocking the house, and the angry-voiced chanting would have drowned out a bull elephant in a rage. I pulled the screen door open and pounded on the door with the side of my fist. The tongue of the latch was loose in its socket, and the door moved and rattled with a satisfactorily loud noise. That perhaps might get someone's attention. I like my music at volume, but I could barely hear myself think; it had to be worse inside. I couldn't imagine what someone might be doing with that kind of noise as a backdrop – if you can call something a backdrop when it's so loud it's the single most noticeable feature of your environment.

I didn't get any response to my banging, so I did it again. No response. I kicked the base of the door several times. Nothing. I let the screen clap shut and walked around the left side of the house. It appeared to be an adobe, though sometimes they'll build houses out of cement block and then stucco 'em to have rounded corners, and let people think it's an adobe house when it's not. There wasn't a fence, and I walked on the dirt – quietly – to the back yard. It was dirt too, and there was a car there, with patches of rust and primer showing. There were parts sitting on an old kitchen table with folding legs, the kind you might expect to see in a two room flop. The Formica table top had plenty of missing chunks, showing long and hard use.

There was a male, his back to me, leaning on the front fender of the car and doing something under the hood of the car. I'm not a car guy and never have been, so I had no idea what the parts on the table were or what he might be doing. He was wearing baggy pants with grease stains on them, and a strap undershirt that had once been white. I suspected that whenever he went out he put on clothes that showed less evidence of actual work; gangsters and those who want others to think they're gangsters don't like to appear to be productive people.