Out the window a few miles to the southeast a small jet was landing at the Nogales International Airport. Why build the airport next to a mountain Sunderson wondered, but there was very little in the way of flatland in the area. Everywhere the substance of earth was rising up in the form of rocky hills and mountains, which gave Sunderson vertigo. Why did white people settle here? Why hadn’t it simply been left to the indigenous Apaches? It might have been easier to digest this landscape if every plant and bush and tree weren’t alien to him excepting the cottonwoods, which were obvious relatives of the popple in the U.P. Why were their so-called oaks a fake-looking green in November? He had touched a simple plant in the yard and the contact had drawn blood from a finger. Certainly he was ingenious enough as a detective of long experience to kill Dwight-Daryl and get back home scot-free. There was no hurry because it was nearly six months until the opening of brook trout season. He suddenly recalled one morning in the hospital when Melissa had pushed in a portable heart monitor on wheels. She had stooped to get something out of a cabinet and while dazed with Oxycontin he had received a clear view up her white nurse’s uniform to her pubis. She sensed his gaze, blushed, and swiveled her hips so he could no longer catch the view. Now at the window this memory made him tumescent, a clear rush of life. His mind segued helplessly to the image of a nude Mona through the peek hole in his library. His hard-on twinged with pain. He was homesick. He dialed the phone.
“Hello, you big old darling. I miss you.” She sounded high.
“I miss you, too. Are you high? It’s illegal,” he joked.
“Just an after-therapy toke. I’m told I may be bisexual.”
“I’d rather not think about it.” He was regretting the call.
“Don’t be squeamish. Genitalia are simply genitalia. It all starts in the mind.”
“Sorry. I lost my confidence when I left home.” He was surprised to admit this.
“I can’t imagine you without total confidence.”
“Well it’s true. My first trip to a foreign country has been a disaster. I mean it’s technically part of the United States but I don’t believe it. You wouldn’t want to look at me.”
“I know it. Marion said that he talked to your sister Berenice a couple of times and she said that every time she left your hospital room she sobbed.”
“Thanks for all that material you sent.” Sunderson was trying to get the subject away from himself.
“I’ve done some more poking around. Our Dwight-Daryl had an underage-sex charge in Choteau, Montana. I think he bought off the parents like big shots do. He made another mild threat to me so now I’m doing anything touchy through a cousin in Pittsburgh who’s an ace hacker.”
“That’s a good idea.” Sunderson had no real idea of the technology involved but other suspicions suddenly niggled at him. “Have you ever met anyone named Carla?” He wondered if Carla or Queenie were acting as Marquette spies for Dwight-Daryl.
“You mean Carla the dyke?” Mona laughed. “She made a pass at me at the tennis barn. She’s a buddy of my so-called therapist who says my root problem is my disappearing father.”
“Just avoid her at all costs.” There was a knock at the door. “Looks like I have to go to dinner. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Sunderson ate like a fool at a restaurant called Las Vigas in downtown Nogales. At first he thought the restaurant sign was misspelled but Alfred told him that vigas in Spanish meant beams as in roof beams. Alfred walked him through the menu and they both had chicherones, fried chunks of beef intestine, a side of guacamole, and then machaca, which was dry, fried jerked beef with chile and onions. Alfred’s wife Molly was just finishing her second session of chemo and had to limit herself to soup. Her wig kept slipping and she would merrily push it back into place. She spoke Spanish fluently with a waiter named Alphonse. They were telling jokes about the Border Patrol and a ton of cocaine found on a vegetable import truck the day before. When Molly translated for him Sunderson was boggled having never busted more than a kilo in his career and that was a cumulative amount.
“Someone is waving at you,” Alfred said, nudging him away from his food.
Sunderson looked up and about three tables away there was Melissa and her little daughter and a man. He felt his blood heating in his face and he swallowed a bite of machaca with difficulty. He got up slowly fearing the effects of a large margarita.
“It’s so good to see you,” Melissa said. “This is my brother Xavier and my daughter Josefina.”
Xavier stood and Sunderson shook his left hand because his right was withdrawn. Sunderson restrained his startled reaction to Xavier’s appearance. The man was dressed in a fine dark suit and red tie. His appearance was more than vaguely effeminate but his face had the pale specific edge of the ominous, the feral as if all of his schooling, his life in fact, had taken place at night.
“Are you liking our area?” Xavier asked with a cool smile.
