St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

I’m as close to a family historian as the Sandovals have.”
    “Wonderful!”
    Carly’s enthusiasm made Lucia smile for the first time.
    “I’m not organized, you understand,” Lucia said quickly. “I just kept the old pictures and mementos that other family members couldn’t find room for.”
    A sleepy voice came from the back of the house. Lucia answered in Spanish that was as fluent as her English, telling the boy to go back to sleep, everything was fine, his aunt was here to take care of him.
    “Where is his mother?” Dan asked. He didn’t have to ask where the father was. A man who was caught with twenty pounds of Mexican brown heroin spent time in prison, no matter how good his lawyer was.
    Lucia lifted one shoulder. “She went back to Mexico with the girls. The boys stayed. It was what Armando wanted. Perhaps when Eduardo is free again…”
    Carly started to ask a question, caught the slight negative shake of Dan’s head, and made a sound of frustration. She was tired of swallowing questions around him.
    Pretending to search his pockets, Dan leaned down and said very softly in Carly’s ear, “Later.” Then he straightened and said to Lucia, “Miss Winifred asked me to give you this.”
    Lucia took the money. When she saw the size of some of the bills, her eyes widened.
    So did Carly’s. The money had multiplied many times over in Dan’s pocket. There were several hundred dollars now.
    Tears gleamed in Lucia’s eyes for a moment. She tucked the money out of sight, deep in the pocket of her worn jeans. “Miss Winifred is a saint,” she said huskily.
    Dan doubted that, but didn’t say it aloud.
    “Sit, sit,” Lucia said, gesturing toward a clean threadbare couch covered by a colorful weaving. “I will bring the photos and coffee.”
    Carly sat down in the middle of the couch, rested her fingers on the recorder at her waist, and wondered if she should bring up the subject of recording the conversation. The couch cushion next to her sank beneath Dan’s solid weight.
    “Don’t ask to record anything,” he said quietly.
    She jumped. “What are you, a mind reader?”
    “Nothing that fancy. I saw you touching the recorder. And don’t ask about the missing husband and his brother, Eduardo. The brother is doing hard time for selling Mexican brown. The husband, the husband’s father, and his uncles on his father’s side run the smuggling organization that gives Rio Arriba County the highest rate of heroin overdose deaths per capita in the United States.”
    Carly didn’t know what to say. Dan’s words were as disorienting as falling down stairs. Sure, she knew that drugs came up from Mexico into New Mexico, but it wasn’t real to her. It wasn’t something that ordinary people dealt with. She took a slow breath and looked around the room. Nothing showed the kind of wealth she expected from the wife of a man who had a successful heroin smuggling business.
    “This isn’t Armando’s house,” Dan said. “It’s Lucia’s.”
    “Now I know you’re a mind reader.”
    “Just a trained observer with a working knowledge of human psychology,” Dan said. “Drugs equal wealth if you’re selling them, poverty if you’re taking them. Lucia isn’t taking them and doesn’t want to know anything about the heroin business. She lives on her income from working for the Quintrells. Her husband, Armando, lives with her when he feels like it. Right now, he’s probably in Las Trampas bragging to the homeboys over mugs of homemade pulque about how he outwitted the Anglos again.”
    “Armando, the cockfighter?”
    “That’s him. When he’s not smuggling drugs.”
    “Right.” She swallowed and hoped Armando didn’t plan on visiting his wife tonight. “So what is it safe to ask about?”
    “Anything that the statute of limitations has run out on.”
    At first she thought he was joking. Then she realized that he wasn’t.
    “That doesn’t help me,” she said. “I’m a personal historian, not a criminal lawyer.”
    “Thirty years in the past is okay, especially if your recorder is off. Otherwise, I’d go for fifty years. The Sandovals make bad enemies.”
    Carly swallowed her response as Lucia came into the room with two mugs of coffee on a battered tray. She held a large worn manila envelope clamped between her right upper arm and her body.
    “Milk? Sugar?” Lucia asked.
    “Not for me,” Dan said.
    Carly thought about asking for something just to get Lucia out of the room long