“Anything. I owe you.”
“I want you to stop drinking. I want you to stop the bullshit. I want you to live an exemplary life. I want you to become engaged with the world. I want you to give a sizable portion of your income to charity. I want you to go to Africa. To India. I want you to improve the lot of Mexicans who work in your town. The invisibles. You can still act, that’s what you do, you can still make movies, but I want you to be a force for good.”
He nods. Really bawling now. “Of course. I will. I’m lucky. I’m lucky that you were the one, that it was you. I, I’ll never be able to bring back your dad, I can’t do that, but, but, I’ll do what you say.”
“I don’t need to threaten you. You know what will happen if I discover you’re caught with cocaine or DUI-”
“It will never happen. I promise.”
“Good. Ok. Now, here’s how we handle Paco-we’re going to pin this on Youkilis. We’re going to tell him that he was driving you from the bar and he hit my father and covered it up. Paco’s sharp. He can spot a lie so I’m going to have to hide the truth. I’m going to tell him that Youkilis wouldn’t confess to it, but I’m sure it was him.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say nothing. Nothing at all until I tell you to talk. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, shut up, here he is.”
Paco. Grinning, rifle slung. Knight in fucking shining. My hero. I hug him and burst into tears.
“You saved me,” I whisper in his ear.
“Damn right.”
“I told you to stay out of it.”
“Man, I haven’t seen this much action since I was eleven.”
“Christ, you saved me.” I kiss him on the mouth. Hungry for him. This kid.
“What about this one?” he says, pointing the rifle at Jack.
“Nothing to do with it.”
His eyes narrow. “Who killed your father, María?”
“Youkilis. I think.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“It was Youkilis.”
“You’re not lying to me, are you?”
Jesus, Paco, I was lying to you from the very beginning. My name’s not even María… But, nevertheless, I want you to believe me. I want this to end.
“It’s over, Paco. Youkilis is dead and Briggs is dead. It’s finished.”
“You’ve come all this way to find the person who killed your father and you’re going to leave it like this?”
“I’m tired and I have to get back. If I don’t a lot of people I care about will be in trouble.”
Paco takes a step away from me and sights the rifle at Jack. Jack puts up his hands, cowers, whimpers. Oh, Jack, please, act the man for once in your life.
“It was him, wasn’t it? Youkilis covered it up to protect him. He was in Fairview that night. He was drunk.”
I shake my head and look hard at Jack: “Tell him. Tell him what you told me.”
“I was after this part and then I was at a bar and Paul, well, Paul,” Jack begins hesitantly.
“Just tell him about the drinking and the drive home,” I interrupt.
“I’d had a few beers. I was too hammered to get back up the mountain. I called Paul and he came and picked me up. He didn’t even know I was in town. He thought I was in L.A. He’d had a few too, but not many. He wasn’t drunk. We were going up the mountain and I’m in the backseat and Paul’s turning around to talk to me, you know, and we hear this sort of clumping noise. Paul looks forward and doesn’t see anything. We stop the car but we don’t see anything. So we drive on. Day after that we read about the dead guy by the side of the road. We put two and two together. Course, by then we’d left the car at the shop. That’s how Briggs tracked us down.”
I’m staring at Paco.
Don’t hit him, please, he’ll crack like the first huevo of the day. Let him be.
Paco looks at me. “This is good enough for you?”
“We’re done here. Finished.”
“But this one, he will go to the police,” Paco says.
“We’ve talked that over. He covered up a crime. He’s an accessory to vehicular manslaughter. He’ll get jail and it’ll destroy his career.”
Paco closes his eyes. Thinks. I take his hand, squeeze it. “No more death,” I whisper.
Two in New Mexico, two here. Four men I’ve killed. Four too many.
“You’re bleeding,” he says.
“Yeah. I got shot.”
“You got lucky.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go,” Paco says.
Two bodies under the ice.
A third and fourth faceup, staring at us.
“What about them?”
“Sink them.”
“They’ll come up,” I say.
“Their vests will drag them down.”
“Three cops go missing. Bound to be an inquiry.”
He points at Briggs. “Does this one have a phone?”
“I don’t know.”
Paco hands me the rifle, searches Briggs. He removes a silver cell phone and a wallet. He skims the wallet. About a thousand dollars in scratch, which he puts in his pocket. He takes out his own cell and smiles.
“Find Briggs’s number,” he says. “It’ll be on his menu.”
I flip Briggs’s cell, find the number, and tell Paco.
Paco dials it. Briggs’s phone rings and Paco waits for the voice mail. He grins at me and affects a chingla Mexican accent. “Briggs, man, where are you? We got the fucking stuff but we don’t see you. We went through a lot to get here. If you don’t show, or you try to pull something, man, you gonna be sorry.”
He hangs up. Grins.
“They won’t buy that,” I tell him.
“It’ll give them something to think about. We’ll sink the bodies, put Briggs’s phone in his car, leave the car where someone will find it. Ok, let’s go. Can you guys help?”
Paco stares at Jack and me. We’re both exhausted.
“Hell with ya, I’ll do it,” he mutters in Spanish.
He walks to Briggs, slides him into the nearest ice fissure. Briggs rolls over, floats for a second, and then sinks in a froth of bubbles. Paco does the same to Crawford, who joins his buddies at the bottom of the lake.
Carefully Paco picks up all the shells and puts them in his pocket. He points at Jack. “Ok, we go back. You first, and you better not run and you better not fall in the fucking water.”
Jack begins walking to the shore. Paco puts his arm around me.
“I think we’d better kill him,” Paco whispers.
“No,” I insist.
“Are you sure it wasn’t him?”
“It wasn’t him. Just an unlucky guy. A passenger. Wrong place, wrong time.”
Paco nods. “What’s that you’ve got?” he asks, looking at my father’s gun.
“You can have it,” I tell him. I’m done with guns.
We get to the shore. Paco starts telling Jack about the cars. We’ll drive one each. Jack will take Paul’s BMW. I’ll take Esteban’s Range Rover, which of course Paco drove here since Esteban isn’t expected back until tonight-a white lie of his that nearly got me killed. Paco will drive Briggs’s Escalade. We’ll dump the Escalade at a truck stop on I-25 and Paco will drive Jack back in the Beemer.
The plan seems sound.
I change my sweater, smoke a cigarette, take a last look at the lake.
Cracks already freezing over.
It reminds me of a poem by Basho: An old pond / a jumping frog / ripples.
This was not the way I wanted it to be. I don’t really know what I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t this.
Blood, gore, corpses under the water.
Hector’s niece is a nurse who works in a hospice for terminally ill babies. Babies who won’t live out a year. She feeds them, and cleans them, and loves them, and every night she whispers over them, “Grow, little baby, grow.”
That’s what a hero does.
Not this.
I shiver.
Paco puts his hand on my back. “Ok,” he says. “Let’s go.”