“Good. Let’s get the other one.”
We dragged Bob to the truck and before we hoisted him up I pulled the knife from his forehead. It made a terrible sucking sound. I’d hit him so hard that I’d punched all the way to the back of his skull, and as we lifted him into the truck, his cranium cracked. Daylight streamed through the hole in his head, sky where his face had been. Sky and brains and blood. Pedro began to throw up but Francisco and I kept at it, heaving Bob into the cab and dumping him in the driver’s seat.
“Damn it,” Francisco said, wiping goo off his shirt.
Bob’s brown eyes were still looking at me. Half accusation, half amazement. I wasn’t going to take it. Fuck you. Is this what you wanted, Bob? Is this what you thought would happen when you got up today, when you had your coffee and met up with your good buddy Ray? Save your look, friend, save your accusations, you had a dozen chances to let this go.
I closed his eyes with my knuckles.
“Let’s give them something to think about. Gimme one of your bags of coke,” I said to Pedro.
“I’m not a dealer, it’s just to keep me awake,” Pedro said defensively.
Mother of God, what was his problem? Was he sniffing cop? Maybe I was being a bit too professional, a bit too cold. If only he knew how sick I felt inside, fighting back the waves, pushing them deep where no one could see.
“That’s ok, man, we just need to give the feds something to worry over,” I said. He gave me a dime bag of his stash and I opened it and poured a little on Bob’s pants.
“Make ’em think it was a double cross,” I said.
“Yeah,” Francisco said. “I can help with that.”
I wiped prints everywhere I thought they’d be and Francisco dipped the knife in the blood and drew a T on the windshield. We both knew what it meant. CSI would pin this on the Tijuana cartel. At the very least it would set them off on a tangent.
“Ok, now we can-” I began but was interrupted by Bob’s cell phone. The ring tone was one of those jazzy Vince Guaraldi numbers from Charlie Brown Navidad.
We stiffened.
“What do we do?” Francisco asked.
“Well, we don’t answer it,” I said.
We let it ring and ring and then we walked back to the Land Rover.
“Now what?” Pedro asked, his face ashen, his eyes exhausted.
“We continue on like nothing happened,” I said.
“How can we just go on?” Francisco muttered.
He was cold, trembling. I put my arm around him. Poor kid. He’d lost about seven years. Thirteen again. Now I wasn’t the next privileged chiquita in line for his attentions, now I was his way-too-young mother comforting him on the dirt floor of some Managuan shanty.
“It’s going to be ok,” I said.
He nodded and tried to believe it. And then he turned and looked at me. “What about you, are you ok?” he asked.
I hadn’t thought about it.
I wanted to fall down, I wanted to scald my body, turn it inside out. He had touched my hair, between my breasts, my legs.
“I don’t know… I think so.”
“Did, did they?”
“No.”
He nodded and stared at the yellow sand spiraling around his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s ok. We’re alive and in one piece,” I said.
It was one of Hector’s lines. We’re alive and in one piece and we’re not in a DGI dungeon.
Francisco frowned, said nothing. He was a bit fucked up, but really it didn’t matter if Francisco was fucked or not. Pedro was the one we needed. He knew the way.
I walked to him. He had stopped throwing up. He was trying to light another cigarette. I cupped the match and helped him.
He inhaled, coughed, inhaled again.
“Ok, Pedro, tell me the story, what were you supposed to do? What was the original plan?”
But he was too shaken and couldn’t yet manage an answer.
With the patience of Saint Che I gave him two minutes to drain the cigarette and then repeated the question.
“I-I’m supposed to drive you up through New Mexico. We meet the 25 and then we stop at a motel we use in Trinidad, Colorado.”
“How long will that take?”
“I don’t know, ten hours.”
Could I keep my breakdown away for ten hours? I’d have to. I took the keys from his hand, lit him another cigarette, opened the driver’s-side door of the Land Rover, reached across the seat, and turned the ignition.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Ten hours, hermano. We’d better get moving.”
3 HABANA VIEJA
Tears. Tears at the rise of the moon. Tears under a starless sky. Tears down my pale cheeks while Death busses tables in the restaurant.
I sip the mojito, stare at the busboy, and shake my head.
That’s a guilty man if ever I saw one. Hector’s right. The baby’s dead.
I dab my face with a cocktail napkin and shake the glass. The ice melts a little.
It is, as my mother would say, a close night. Every night for her is close. Way back her family is supposed to be from Galicia, which means, she says, that she is a martyr to the heat.
“What are you doing over there?” Hector asks in my earpiece. His voice is mock serious, sonorous, gruff. He talks like someone from the provinces who has tried hard to lose the accent, which, of course, he has. “Come on, Mercado, we don’t have all night,” he adds. You can hear the twang of Santiago in some of his vowels, but the way he enunciates is more Castilian Spanish than anything else. I know he watches a lot of illegal U.S. and European DVDs; maybe he’s picked that up from them.
I raise the Chinese cell phone, which I’ve switched to walkie-talkie mode.
“Take it easy, Hector, I’m having a drink,” I tell him.
“Did you make the arrest?”
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Father my babies, Hector. They’ll be ugly sons of bitches, but with that big brain of yours I’m sure they’ll go far,” I say into the mouthpiece.
He doesn’t respond.
A kid comes to the rail. Normally you don’t see beggars in the Vieja because the CDR goons will chase them away with baseball bats. Whores aplenty but not beggars, because pimps have dollars to kick back. The CDR is something between a police auxiliary and a neighborhood watch. Real cops hate them because they’re even more corrupt than they are. Than we are, I should say.
The panhandler is a skinny little boy with long black hair. Picked a good spot. Stone’s throw from the plaza, which is packed with Canadians and Europeans. Behind me the cathedral is lit up by spotlights and the relentless music from the street musicians is entertaining those tourists who don’t realize that they’re having their pockets picked.
“You’re too old to have babies. A woman of your advanced years,” Hector says in my earpiece. I’m twenty-seven, Hector, I almost yell with indignation, but that’s what he wants.
“In a minute and ten seconds that’s the best line you can come up with? You should tell Díaz to write you some fresh material, he’s got the filthiest mouth in the station,” I say instead.
“Can you see us?” Díaz asks.
Certainly can. A bright green Yugo near the Ambos Mundos with the windows wound up and the two of them looking as suspicious as hell. If they weren’t cops they were Interior Ministry secret police or something. All the pimps and dealers had cleared out of here twenty minutes ago.
“Yeah, I see you.”
“Watch this.”
I see him wave at me from the front seat of the car, a wave that quickly becomes a sexual pantomime I can’t really follow. Some kind of insult, I’m sure. Díaz was originally from Pinar del Río, and they’re an odd crew over there.
“I feel lucky to have met you, Lieutenant Díaz,” I tell him.
“Oh yeah, why’s that?” he asks, taking the bait.
“To know that such an idiot can rise so high in the cops gives hope for all of us junior detectives.”