He thrust his hand inside the paper bag, felt the handle of his .38.
“Wha’s that? Money?” Roberto’s eyes gleamed with a sudden interest.
Luis said nothing, using the growing noise to slip the safety off. Feeling her eyes on him from the shadows across the room.
“What you doin’ here anyway?” Roberto turned his gaze on her, his brow creasing with suspicion. “You supposed to be at the game.”
Luis let the paper bag float to the floor, raised his arm. Roberto waved a hand at him dismissively, his eyes still on her.
“You go away, come back later. I don’ do business in the day,” he said.
That’s when the wave crashed over them all, the noise from the stadium suddenly one long, atavistic roar. He aimed the .38 at Roberto’s chest and fired, then he walked forward, firing again as fast as he could, making sure to steady the gun with both hands. The first shot tore through Roberto’s hairy bull chest and spun him around. The second one ripped into his back just under the shoulder blade, the third going through his neck and spraying a geyser of blood against the wall as Roberto fell forward over the sawhorses and Luis realized that he was almost on top of him, where his body was jackknifed like the butchered hogs that Luis loaded onto the trucks all day.
That was when he felt the blow in his side, just below the rib cage. The next thing he knew he was on the basement floor. Surprised by it at first, the gun skidding away from his hand and his head bouncing off the concrete. He was certain Roberto hadn’t had time to reach for a weapon, he hadn’t even had time to put his hands up, and Luis laughed to himself, thinking that he must have slipped on something. He struggled to raise his head from the floor, and he wanted to make a joke to Mercedes, but he realized he had been almost deafened from the sound of so many gunshots in so a close space, the cheers from the stadium still sweeping over him, even through the ringing in his ears.
He saw that Mercedes had her gun out too, and that she was approaching Roberto, her wonderful legs moving across the room in long strides. She took one look at him splayed over the sawhorses, then thrust the gun into the dying man’s hand; wrapping his fingers around it and making them fire another shot into the dark recesses of the basement. After that she went over to the wall, removed three bricks, and took a couple of packages out, pushing them up under her windbreaker before she replaced the bricks. Only then did she come over to Luis where he lay on the concrete, staring down at him, her big brown eyes thoughtful and almost sad.
“What?” Luis shouted into his deafness, still unable to understand that she had shot him. “Was this part of the plan?”
“Oh, yes it was, cara mia.”
She knelt on the floor beside him. Her cheek against his cheek, the exquisite smell of her flesh still redolent even through the metallic odor of the guns and the blood.
“You did just fine, amado!” she shouted into his ear, and smiled down at him more affectionately than she ever had before.
Then she ran out the basement door, screaming bloody murder.
Luis got off the elevator at his old floor — her floor now. He shuffled down the hallway, one hand still carrying his suitcase, the other one clutching the paper bag inside his jacket. He was not really surprised to see that the hall too was now immaculately clean and bright, and freshly painted; all the bags of garbage and the roaches were gone.
He walked down to the end of the hall, to his door — her door. There he stopped, frowning, surprised to see that it was slightly ajar. Suspicious, he gave it a soft push with one hand, just enough to let the door swing open another couple of feet, and dodged back to one side as he did so. But nothing happened. There was no noise, no reaction. Only a wave of heat emanating from within, something else he remembered well enough. That, and something else. There was a terrible smell of decay, something putrid, coming from deep within the apartment. He sniffed at it curiously for a moment, and silently lowered the suitcase to the hallway floor. Then he pulled the gun he had picked up at 124th Street out of its paper bag and went inside.
At the trial she was all tears and rages. Refusing to be consoled, pushing away the aunts who came to court with her, then folding into their arms. Proclaiming how much she loved Roberto from the stand, to the news crews outside. Dressed all in black, but with her hair uncovered and freshly cut, her picture on one tabloid or another for almost a week. Through it all, Luis had to admit that she was a fine actress, even if it was his life at stake.
And he had done fine, just as she had predicted. When the trial began, he was still weak from his long stay in the hospital, groggy from the painkillers. Learning to live with one kidney, with the knowledge that she could have done such a thing to him. All he had been able to do was make weak protests against the questions when it was his turn on the stand — admitting to the assistant district attorney that he loved her, claiming that he had never had anything against Roberto, claiming it was all in self-defense. Afraid to confess that they had planned anything together, knowing that it wouldn’t help him — knowing that they wouldn’t believe him anyway.
She had been all fire and ice on the stand, talking about how she had spurned his come-ons in the courtyard. A dozen other men from the building confirmed it, their pride unable to let them admit that anyone had succeeded where they had failed. She told the jury that she had never believed he would do such a thing, not a man like that — and they had believed her.
It hadn’t surprised him in the least when the thirty-year sentence came down, and he was transported on the prison bus for the long ride upstate. He had worried only about explaining it all to Mama, though he had no words for that, no words even to explain it to himself. What he regretted most of all was that he would never see Mercedes again.
Now he was moving steadily through the rooms of her apartment — his old apartment — everything both stranger and more familiar than ever. To his surprise, it all looked much as he remembered it, as if this were the only part of the building that hadn’t been refurbished. There was still the chipped, dingy, inch-thick paint on the doors, and the woodwork. The windows more streaked and dirty than ever, as if they had barely been cleaned at all in the whole time he had been away.
But stranger than any of that was how the rooms had been stripped bare. No clothes, no furniture, no TV in the living room, no curtains on the windows. Almost nothing at all, as if the apartment were still empty and no one lived here. He began to feel more and more apprehensive as he walked through the rooms of his former life — almost as shaky as he had been that day, going into the basement. He held the gun out in front of him, wondering when he was going to touch off the trap. Wondering — much worse — if she could have just moved. Then he turned into the kitchen, where the smell of corruption was worst, and there she was.
“Luis. You’re back.”
“Mercedes.”
She was sitting at the table where he and Mama used to eat their meals, a shriveled, white-haired woman behind a sea of pill bottles. Wrapped up tightly in an ugly pink robe that was much too large for her. Propping herself up at the table by her elbows, her head balanced on both hands.
“Mercedes.”
He said her name again, more as a question than anything else. At first he could not believe it was her, this husk of a woman. Her cheeks sallow and caved in on themselves, the rest of her a pile of bones and papery flesh. But her eyes, her eyes were just the same as ever, large and dark and fierce.