North of Montana

North of Montana Read Free Page A

Book: North of Montana Read Free
Author: April Smith
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works. Only now there is no one because she is dead.”
    “How was she killed?”
    “She was shot down in the street, on Santa Monica Boulevard only two blocks from here. She was shot up so bad that her hands were gone. When they laid her in her coffin they had to put white gloves on the end of the arms.”
    “What did the police say?”
    “They don’t know anything.”
    There is a breath or a sob and the woman’s tone becomes desperate: “Who will take care of the children?”
    The professional response comes easiest: “I will put you in touch with a city agency—”
    She interrupts: “The last lady Violeta worked for still owes her money. If you can get the money, I will take care of the children until they find a home not with strangers … but with family.”
    The way she says “family”—with intimacy and conviction, the way religious people speak effortlessly of God—is embarrassing. My only living family is my grandfather and my lifestyle is aggressively without God: the furnished one-bedroom in Marina Del Ray. My 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible. Sixty, a hundred hours a week at the Bureau, a diet shake for lunch, and a mile in the pool every day. A career timetable so tight you could plot it on graph paper—a straight line to Assistant Special Agent in Charge or even the first female Special Agent in Charge of a cherry field office like Denver, which, because I am a woman, will require at least five more years of crossing each square perfectly, never one millimeter off; no messiness, no mistakes, no fat.
    Reaching for my Rolodex, “I’m going to refer you to a social worker.”
    “No,” insists this stranger with absolute authority, “it is not right. These children are of your blood.”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    Violeta and your father came from the same village.”
    “Which village?”
    “La Palma.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “She told me it is a small place, maybe one hundred miles from San Salvador, with a black sand beach.”
    Of the few fragments remaining of my father there is a relic as real yet mysterious as a shard of wave-polished glass: “ When your father was a boy, he played on a black sand beach.”
    It shakes me.
    “Mrs. Gutiérrez—I’m sorry, but I have to take another call. Good luck to you.”
    I hang up and stare at the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise. The sleeves are empty. The heart, weightless.
    After a moment I realize the intercom is in fact buzzing. Barbara Sullivan has something for me on the bank robbery.

THREE

    ONE ENTIRE WALL of Barbara Sullivan’s office is covered with still photographs taken by surveillance cameras of bank robberies in progress. To the untrained eye, except for gross differences in gender and race and type of weapon, they all look pretty much the same and walking in there can actually make you feel nauseated, overwhelmed by the tang of film developer, confronted by a floor-to-ceiling sea of gray images, most so grainy and out of focus you need a magnifying glass to get any detail.
    But to the Human Computer the surveillance photos are daily bread, to be carefully chewed, swallowed, digested, and turned into masses of information stored in the brain for instantaneous retrieval. The Human Computer forgets nothing, including the minutiae of one’s personal life. Before she got married to another agent, Barbara and I used to pal around police bars together and she can still repeat the time and place that I met every one of my liaisons. She even remembers their ranks and names.
    The job of the bank robbery coordinator is to find connections between the more than two thousand bank robberies committed each year in Los Angeles County. Most individual robbers will repeat ten or fifteen times for less than a thousand dollars a take, easily losing themselves in a tangle of freeways or a robber-friendly matrix of underinformed and understaffed law enforcement. Now that gangs have become involved, resources are stretched even thinner.

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