Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) Read Online Free

to. The others kept going.
    I listened to their footsteps move away.
    They knew nothing about La Llorona. She was a beautiful
woman who had killed her children over a man, and now she
roamed the riverbank searching for them, or for some other
kids to replace them. That's what my mother had told me,
before she died. She was lying in her bed, and I was six, and
she didn't want me wandering.
    She didn't know I'd watched in the night after the two babies came out of her, with the old woman from up the ranch to
help. My mother was very sick. The babies were born too small,
the size of small puppies. They were wrapped together in a white
cloth and then my father took the bundle outside to the rose
garden and pomegranate tree my mother loved.
    They couldn't have been babies yet, with skeletons and
hearts, or they would have gone to the priest. But my mother
was crying and coughing, and the old woman said in Spanish
to my father, "No mas."
    And my father said to her, "Don't tell anyone. No one.
Those Hernandez women keep saying she's got the evil eye."
    By the time I was eight, my father didn't care if I wandered
off, as long as I did my work. We'd go up to Brush Canyon, the
ranch kids. We dug a deep mine, with hammers and picks and
shovels, looking for gold. We found piles of mica-fool's gold
we thought we could sell.
    The darkness fell completely, and I waited for my eyes to
adjust. I heard nothing.

    In Bee Canyon, I'd had nothing to dig with, to bury the guy.
    I hadn't gone up there to shoot rabbits. I'd been CHP for
about a year then, and I'd come to my father's house on my
day off to help him take out two dead lemon trees. Gophers
were bad that year.
    I was covered with sweat and dirt and crumbled roots
that flew up when we finally pulled out the stumps. We chainsawed the branches and trunk for firewood, and then I piled
the green wood on the south side of the house so it could dry
out for my father to burn in winter.
    I told him I had trouble with the service revolver. It wasn't
like the rifle I'd been shooting since I was a kid. "The kick is
weird," I said. "And the way you have to look at the target.
They keep messing with me at the range. Their favorite word
is wetback. Go back to a hoe if you can't handle a gun." I felt the
rage rise up in my chest like hot coffee swallowed the wrong
way. "I want to tell them I'm not used to shooting something
that ain't alive. But I can't say shit. Hueros."
    "You been shooting all your life," he said. "A gun's a gun.
Go up there in the hills and find something to aim at."
    I put my T-shirt back on, even though my skin was sticky,
and then my shoulder holster. I grabbed a flannel shirt to cover
the holster. I was still sweating when I left the grove.
    I walked a couple miles that day, along the river where
the wet sand smelled like aspirin from the willows, and then
I turned toward the hills. The cattle grazed up there, three
thousand acres or so. We had three hundred acres of citrus.
    I remember I was already thinking about the phantom
when I crossed the tracks, because he'd thrown rocks a couple
of times by then and downed the smudge pots. I'd seen a bridge
made out of vines and cable over the arroyo under the train
tracks, but everyone said that was old, from a Vietnam vet.

    I figured I'd get far enough into Bee Canyon so no one
would hear me shoot at beer cans set up on a rock.
    I found tall Coors cans in the shade under a little pepper
tree, like I knew I would. In high school, lots of people came
up here to drink beer. Always Coors and Marlboros and weed.
The cans were old and faded. Perfect to shoot.
    I stuck four fingers into the four sharp tab holes and kept
walking. A car was parked in the dirt at the mouth of the canyon. But maybe the people had gone back toward the river. I
listened. No laughter from the canyon. It was dim up there
now.
    I kept going, and then I heard a huffing-huh, huh, huh.
Breath like a hammer. Huh, huh,