Drought Page 7

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We have my local TV broadcast this evening. That’s at seven, isn’t it?’ He was breathing loudly through his nose, and there was perspiration on his upper lip, but apart from that he showed no indication that he had just been forcibly having sex with her.

  Saskia didn’t answer. Her teeth were clenched tightly together and she couldn’t bring herself to open them.

  ‘Who’s next on your agenda?’ he asked her.

  He was just about to repeat the question when she said, ‘Which son-of-a-bitch am I going to allow to rape me next? Is that what you mean?’

  He smiled and tilted his head to one side and tried to lay a consoling hand on her shoulder but she jerked away from him.

  ‘Come on, Saskia, you know what I mean. Which city department are you going to work your magic on next? You must have almost wrapped everything up here in San Bernardino, haven’t you? When do you move on to Palm Springs?’

  ‘Open the door,’ she told him.

  ‘Saskia … sweet cheeks.’

  ‘Open the fucking door, Halford.’

  ‘I just need to keep abreast of your progress, Saskia. That’s all.’

  ‘I’ll text you,’ she said.

  He unlocked the door and opened it and she walked straight out without saying anything else to him. She left the golf club building and crossed the hot, glaring parking lot until she reached the silver Traverse that she had rented for her stay in San Bernardino. She climbed into the driver’s seat and switched on the engine to start the air conditioning, but she didn’t immediately drive away. She sat clutching the steering wheel, her mouth puckered, doing everything she could to stop herself from crying, while the wetness between her legs grew colder and colder.

  SEVEN

  When Martin arrived at San Bernardino police headquarters on North D Street, he found that the steps that led up to the front doors were crowded with hot and angry people, and that police officers were standing outside, preventing anybody from going inside.

  ‘What do we want?’ the crowd was chanting. ‘Water!’

  Martin managed to force his way up through the struggling throng until he reached the front doors. A young police officer with fiery red cheeks held up his hand and said, ‘Headquarters is closed right now, sir. We’re asking everybody please to leave peacefully. There’s nothing the police department can do about the water supply.’

  ‘I haven’t come here about the water supply. My son’s been arrested and charged with homicide. My wife tells me that he was brought here.’

  ‘You’ll have to show me some ID, sir. What’s your son’s name?’

  Martin reached into his shirt and lifted out his CFS identity badge. ‘Tyler, that’s his name. And I have a lawyer coming in maybe twenty minutes, David Lemos.’

  The young officer frowned at the ID badge for a moment, and then said, ‘OK, sir. Follow me.’

  He opened one of the doors and as he did so the crowd surged up the steps behind Martin, as if they, too, expected to be allowed inside. Two officers with nightsticks immediately moved across to hold them back.

  ‘What do we want?’ the crowd kept on chanting. ‘Double-yah! Aye! Tee! Ee! Ar! – water!’

  Martin stepped into the chilly air-conditioned reception area. Once the door had been closed behind him, and the noise of the crowd was muffled by bombproof glass, it was eerily quiet in here, with only the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the polished marble floor, and the muted warbling of three or four unanswered telephones.

  ‘That kid they brought in from Baker Division,’ the young officer told the desk sergeant. ‘This is his dad.’

  The desk sergeant was bulky and bald, with eyebrows that joined in the middle and a large brown wart on the side of his nose. He looked across at Martin with deep suspicion, as if Martin had deliberately fathered Tyler with the express intention of giving him extra work to do.

  ‘Makepeace? OK. So far as I know your son is still here.’

  He picked up a phone and punched out a number. When he was answered, he cupped his hand over the receiver so that Martin couldn’t clearly hear what he was saying. Eventually he paused, and sniffed, and said, ‘OK.’ Then he looked up at Martin and said, ‘Won’t be too long, sir. Take a seat.’

  Martin waited for over fifteen minutes, sitting down at first on a very hard plywood chair, and then pacing up and down, and looking out through the windows at the restless crowd outside.

  He noticed that there was a water cooler on the opposite side of the reception area, and that officers and other staff were frequently stopping by to help themselves.

  He was still staring out of the window when he heard the squeaking of shoes behind him, and somebody coughed. He turned round to find himself facing an earnest-looking detective in a short-sleeved shirt and tan linen pants. He must have been only about thirty-six or thirty-seven, with a smooth oval face and a triangular nose like a sundial pointer. His dark brown hair was cut very short and parted on one side like a character from a 1960s TV comedy like Bewitched.

  ‘Mr Makepeace?’ he said. ‘Corporal George Evander, sir. Detective, Northwest Division.’

  Martin found it hard to keep his voice steady. ‘My wife says that you’ve brought in my son for shooting some storekeeper.’

  ‘That’s correct, sir, yes. Your son was arrested in possession of a loaded firearm at Dan’s Food and Liquor on West Thirty-third Street, and the body of the store’s owner Emilio Alvarez was subsequently discovered behind the counter.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘You’ve made a mistake, detective. My son could never have shot anybody. It’s just not possible.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. He was in the company of numerous other young men, but he was the one who was holding the weapon.’

  ‘What other young men? He’s never gone around with a gang. He spends all of his time shut in his room playing video games.’

  ‘We don’t yet know the identity of his companions, sir. They all fled the crime scene when our officers arrived, and so far we haven’t been able to trace them. Your son has given us a couple of gang names, but none of our patrol officers has heard of them, so it may be that he’s simply invented them to protect his friends.’

  ‘He’s talked to you? Did you read him his rights?’

  ‘He’s over eighteen, sir. He’s legally an adult, and of course we read him his rights. He said he was anxious to clear things up.’

  ‘His attorney isn’t even here yet.’

  Corporal Evander shrugged. ‘If a suspect volunteers to talk to me, sir, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.’

  ‘Listen – I’ve told you. Tyler doesn’t have any friends. Well, only the kids he hangs around with at school. He doesn’t have any street friends, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Maybe he’s never told you about them, sir. Parents always think they know everything about their kids, but you’d be surprised how often they don’t know half of what they get up to. The point is, though, that he was caught holding what appears to have been the murder weapon, a double-barreled shotgun, which had been discharged twice and then reloaded. The storekeeper had been shot at point-blank range in the stomach, and probably died instantly.’

  Martin said, ‘I still don’t believe he did it. Not Tyler. He doesn’t have a single mean bone in his body.’

  ‘Our investigation isn’t complete yet, sir, not by a long way. Our forensic people are still examining the crime scene, and we’ll be holding an autopsy, too. And of course your son will have every chance to defend himself in court. However, I’ve formally detained him on a charge of felony murder. As soon as we can we’ll be booking him into the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga to await a preliminary hearing.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Martin interrupted him. ‘Felony murder? Isn’t that when you kill somebody while you’re carrying out another crime?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’ Corporal Evander ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Murder while engaged in robbery, or kidnapping, o
r rape, or sodomy, or sex with a juvenile, or oral copulation, or burglary, or arson, or train wrecking or carjacking.’

  Martin stared at him in disbelief. ‘So which one was it?’

  ‘Which two, sir, as a matter of fact. Robbery, and rape.’

  ‘Rape? Who the hell is he supposed to have raped?’

  Corporal Evander took a notebook out of his shirt pocket and flipped it open. He frowned at it for a moment and then said, ‘Maria Alvarez, sir. The store owner’s daughter, seventeen years old. She was sexually assaulted numerous times, possibly by all of the suspects involved, including your son. She’s in the hospital right now, but so far she’s been too traumatized to tell us anything.’

  Martin had to sit down. ‘I just can’t get my head around this, detective. Tyler – shooting a storekeeper and raping his daughter? That is so totally out of character. I know he liked the girl, for Christ’s sake. He told me about her a couple of times, but he always said that he didn’t have the nerve to ask her out.’

  Corporal Evander didn’t answer that, but Martin glanced up at him again and he could guess what was going through his mind. He probably thought that while Tyler and his companions were robbing the store, he had seen his chance with Maria, and taken it. Martin had seen young enlisted men forcing themselves on village girls in Afghanistan, even though they were probably as shy as Tyler when it came to dating the girls back home. But he couldn’t believe that Tyler would have done such a thing to Maria. Apart from anything else, he wasn’t stupid, and he would have known what the consequences were. Not just the legal consequences, but the consequences if Martin found out about it.

  ‘You can see him now if you want to,’ said Corporal Evander. ‘We won’t be taking him to West Valley for a while. We’re having some delays with transportation.’

  ‘My lawyer will be here soon,’ Martin told him. ‘You’ll make sure that he gets in here OK, won’t you?’

  At that moment, they heard shouting in the street outside, and a brick or a lump of concrete was thrown against the doors.

  ‘Getting a little hairy out there,’ said Corporal Evander. ‘Let’s hope we get some rain before we have a full-scale riot on our hands.’

  The chanting grew louder and louder, and when he stood up Martin could see that the crowd in the street had swelled by at least another hundred protestors since he had arrived here. The police officers were now standing with their backs pressed against the doors, and there was a sharp rattling sound as they were showered with coins and bottles and pebbles and fragments of broken brick.

  ‘What do we want? Water! What do we want? Water! What do we want? Water!’

  Corporal Evander led Martin along a shiny gray-painted corridor to the holding cells at the rear of the building. A black female officer was standing guard at the end of the corridor, and when they approached she lifted the bunch of keys on her belt and walked toward them, rhythmically shaking her keys like maracas.

  There were only two prisoners there. One was Tyler, wearing orange detention-center coveralls, and the other was a middle-aged man with wildly messed-up hair, two black eyes and only one shoe. Tyler was sitting on his bed looking pale and frightened. As soon as he saw Martin coming he stood up and came toward the bars.

  ‘Dad!’

  The guard unlocked his door and allowed Martin to step inside. Corporal Evander said, ‘I’ll let you two have some time together, OK? As soon as your lawyer shows up, I’ll bring him through.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Martin, although he wasn’t feeling very thankful for anything.

  The guard locked the door behind him and he opened out his arms and hugged Tyler tight. Tyler burst into tears and he was quaking as if he had a fever.

  ‘Dad, I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me! I swear to God, Dad, it wasn’t me!’

  Martin held him close for over a minute, without saying anything. Eventually Tyler stopped sobbing and took a step back and pulled up his T-shirt to wipe his eyes.

  ‘It wasn’t me, Dad,’ he repeated. ‘I wasn’t me, I swear it. I only went to the store to buy some bottled water like Mom told me to. I was in back when they shot Mr Alvarez, I didn’t even see them do it. There was this one guy who was like in charge of them all and he said his name was Big Puppet. I think it was probably him who did it because he was going to shoot me, too. One of the others was called K-Bomb and another one was called Buzzy.’

  ‘Who were they, these guys? They weren’t friends of yours, were they?’

  Tyler said, ‘No – no!’ He was so desperate that he sounded like a small boy again. ‘I didn’t know any of them! I think I recognized one or two of them from the Del Rosa bowling lanes, when me and Sandy went there, but I don’t know their names or where they come from.’

  ‘And what about Maria? They’ve charged you with raping her.’

  ‘He made me, Dad. Big Puppet forced me do it. He said that if I didn’t he was going to shoot her, too. I had to – or he would have killed her.’

  Haltingly, he told Martin what Big Puppet and his gang had done to Maria. When he had finished, Martin said, ‘Damn it. I mean, damn it! If only I hadn’t told your mom to stock up on water, this never would have happened.’

  ‘Dad, you couldn’t have known. I wanted to stop them, but I couldn’t. There were too many of them. And if the cops hadn’t showed up when they did, I think they would have shot Maria and me, too.’

  Martin put his arm around Tyler’s shoulders and gave him a reassuring squeeze. Just then, Corporal Evander came along the corridor, accompanied by Martin’s lawyer, David Lemos.

  David Lemos was rotund and round-shouldered, with a shiny gray comb-over and wobbly cheeks and dark rings under his eyes. He was wearing a double-breasted suit in pale-green linen that flapped as he walked.

  The guard unlocked the cell for him and he stepped inside and shook Martin’s hand. Then he turned to Tyler and said, ‘So – you’re Tyler.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Tyler.

  ‘I won’t beat around any bushes, Tyler. You are in very deep shit.’

  Martin spent an hour with Tyler and David Lemos, going over every detail of what had happened in Dan’s Food & Liquor again and again.

  David Lemos made Tyler give him exact descriptions of as many of the gang members as he could – what they said, what they were wearing, what kind of vehicles they used to make their getaway. He recorded it all on his iPad, but when he had finished he said, ‘Keep on thinking about it, Tyler. I know how disturbing it is, to go over it again and again. But each time you recreate it in your mind’s eye, you’ll think of something that you thought you’d forgotten, and that may be the one clue that saves your life.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘You do realize that felony murder potentially carries the death penalty, don’t you, or a minimum of twenty-five years in jail?’

  Martin took hold of Tyler’s hand and gripped it tight. ‘Don’t you worry, Tyler. It won’t come to that. I’ll find this Big Puppet character, I swear to you, and the rest of those animals, and I’ll make damn sure that they pay for what they did.’

  Tyler, teary-eyed, gave him a nod; although he didn’t look convinced.

  He almost had to fight his way out of the police headquarters because the crowd had grown so large and so angry. He guessed that there were at least four hundred people gathered here in North D Street, most of them blue-collar or poor by the look of them. Some of them were now waving improvised cardboard signs that said WATER! and WE’RE THIRSTY! and U R KILING US!

  The street was blocked now and Martin could see more vehicles arriving in the parking lot opposite. Obviously the protesters had called for more people to join them.

  As he crossed the street back to his own car, he saw that the police officers who had been standing at the top of the steps were now disappearing inside the front doors. They were being replaced almost immediately by fresh officers in full black riot gear, carrying plastic shields. The crowd roared their disapproval, and started to throw an even more furious blizzard of coins
and rocks. A group of them started to use car jack handles to break away the red-painted curbstones that had EXCEPT FOR POLICE VEHICLES stenciled on them.

  Only a half mile further south on North D Street, Martin heard another roar, almost as loud. An even larger crowd was gathered outside the Civic Plaza, where the Water Department building was located. He could see bricks and debris flying in the air there, too, and a billow of black smoke. It looked as if a white panel van had been set on fire.

  He climbed into his Eldorado and pulled out of the parking lot with his tires squittering on the molten tarmac. He headed west on 4th Street to Carousel Mall, back to the office. The streets downtown were unusually deserted, with hardly any traffic and only a few people on the sidewalks, and most of those seemed to be hurrying in the direction of D Street. He could almost have believed that a UFO had landed, and abducted everybody except a last few stragglers.

  When he had parked in the basement and gone up in the elevator, he found that the office, too, was oddly quiet. There was no Brenda behind the reception desk, scowling at him; and when he knocked on Arlene Kaiser’s door and opened it, there was no sign of Arlene, either. A cold cup of coffee stood on her aircraft-carrier desk, next to a half-eaten donut.

  In the large open-plan office at the back, he found Shirelle Jackson, sitting at her desk and squinting at her laptop as if she were trying to decipher a message in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Shirelle was skinny and black with upswept spectacles and beaded dreadlocks and teeth like a horse.

  The only other person in the office was Kevin Maynard, a plump and officious CFS employee who was always ready to take children away from their dysfunctional parents, no matter how much their children loved them. He was talking on the phone in a nasal, repetitive tone to somebody who obviously didn’t agree with him.