“How’d you get like that?” Shelby cried out to the little man. “Did they dump poison in your momma’s water supply?”
Of course the man didn’t understand Shelby, and may not even have heard. He just plodded on. Shelby followed him. He watched the little man laboriously climb every step, one stump at a time, toward the avenue above.
“WAS YOUR MOMMA POISONED OR WHAT?” Shelby bellowed.
He was reeling now, and he pawed at the concrete wall of the passageway for support. His hand pressed not concrete but a molded plastic face: a death’s-head. Lining the wall for a distance of twenty feet were the faces of death, like the skulls painted on the drums of poison.
He was hollering for Abel when the young Mexican appeared and grabbed him by the arm, saying, “Why you yell, Buey? Wha’ happen, ’mano?”
“Oh, man!” Shelby blubbered. “Where you been? I got lost! It’s weird down here! Get me back up to the world!”
“I tol’ joo, Buey. Speed mess up the brains!” Abel said.
Fin, Nell, and Bobbie had split up, with Bobbie trailing behind Shelby Pate. She’d witnessed his extraordinary behavior: flailing at piñatas, running in terror from a boy selling chewing gum, yelling gibberish at a pathetic legless man. He was hopelessly drunk or wired on drugs, or both.
When Shelby and Abel wandered along the last passageway, Fin joined her and he said, “Don’t follow there. Wait’ll they climb the steps.”
“Was that Pate doing the yelling?” Nell asked when she joined them.
“Yeah,” Bobbie said. “I got a feeling he isn’t doing much for U.S.-Mexican relations.”
“You shoulda seen him at the Bongo Room,” Fin said. “He enters a joint like a Molotov cocktail.”
Nell asked Fin something that she was curious about. “What goes on in those nightclubs?”
Fin said, “The animal rights people who never appreciated what women used to do for the welfare of Great Danes and burros apparently have had their way. Their stage shows’re about as racy as a high school assembly.”
Shelby Pate was drenched and popeyed by the time Abel led him up the concrete stairway.
“I feel like there ain’t no more world up there!” Shelby said as he climbed, looking at a patch of sky as gray as ashes.
“The world ees there,” Abel said, “but joo won’ be een the world berry long eef joo don’ stop the speed.”
When they were halfway up the steps, Shelby started taking in massive gulps of air. Suddenly, he grabbed Abel by the front of the shirt and said, “You gotta tell me, dude, about them dead kids! If you put out toys ’n cake ’n stuff, how do ya know the kid’s gonna find the right house?”
“The dead peoples, they know, ’mano,” Abel assured him. “Ees hard for them to remember the way but they weel find eet. They find their way home.”
Shelby held on to his partner and said, “Will that kid come home tomorra? Will he get to see his momma again? That kid with the ringworm?”
Abel cried, “Goddamn, Buey! I get seek and tire’ of goddamn reeng-worms! I don’ wan’ to hear no more goddamn reeng-worms!”
“But will he come home, Flaco?” Shelby demanded, with inflamed horrified eyes.
CHAPTER 24
The traffic on Revolutión was nearly bumper-locked. Young Americans hanging out of car windows were whistling, clapping, yelling, thumping on car doors, flipping the bird at pedestrians, cutting off cars, mooning any female older than twelve, and spewing the contents of their stomachs onto the streets of a country they considered third rate and Third World.
In short, it was a scene that might be replayed in just about any U.S. city if the police were underpaid, underfunded, undermanned, undermined, and as desperately corrupt as the police of Tijuana.
At the corner of Calle 5, two U.S. servicemen in civilian clothes with telltale whitewall haircuts were involved in a punch-out with three students wearing UCLA sweatshirts. Fin stopped to watch for a few seconds, then turned to Nell and Bobbie and said, “That’s a mismatch. UCLA students’re for Clinton, and everyone knows that white Democrats can’t fight.”
“Who’re you voting for?” Bobbie wanted to know.
“Perot, of course,” Fin said. “He’s not a professional politician.”
“Neither was that other nut, Rasputin,” Nell said, “but he still managed to wreck his government.”
“Perot’s not a bad choice,” Bobbie said. “He was a navy man.”
“Puh-leeze!” said Nell, but then she spotted trouble, and said, “Uh-oh. One of our boys needs to call nine-one-one. Or nueve-once, as they might say down here.”
Shelby Pate had just become one of the hundred or so Americans who would throw up on the streets of Tijuana that evening.
“Gross!” Bobbie said. “He’s hunkin all over the sidewalk!”
“Let that be a lesson,” Fin said. “Stick to high-grade tequila. And none of that stuff with a worm in it, even if you’re sure the worm’s dead.”
Nell said, “Wonder if he’s puking up live animal parts, or what?”
After Shelby got finished vomiting, he and Abel continued to weave their way along Revolución, pausing only for Shelby to terrorize a bunch of college kids. They were blocking the sidewalk and encouraging a frat brother to do a semi-striptease for the benefit of a coed hanging out the window of a restaurant overhead. The stripteaser danced to heavy-metal sounds coming from a boom box that could knock the fillings right out of your mouth.
Bobbie said, “They’re all trying not to notice Pate.”
Fin said, “Only reason anyone ever risks eye contact with a guy like that is so they can describe him later to a police artist.”
Nell said, “I hope little Juliet dumps her chamber pot on Romeo while he’s boogeying.”
The investigators watched as Shelby Pate staggered up to the striptease kid, grabbed him by the neck, and sailed him like a Frisbee into the traffic lane, where another carload of college types had to brake to keep from running him down.
While Abel pleaded with Shelby to move on, the ox planted his size 13 EEE’s and glared at all the other students. They took a gander at this blazing destroyer in his nightmare costume of biker black, and suddenly started to get extremely interested in shop items, such as silver buckles, Mexican blankets, and velvet paintings of Michael Jackson’s gloved hand.
Nell said, “Before the night’s over I bet he just about wrecks any chance of ever getting elected to public office.”
Bobbie said, “Wonder what’s it like for Durazo, being on the town with that nonevolved mammal?”
“About like being circumcised with draft beer as an anesthetic,” Fin said. “He’s doing his best to get killed.”
“Not quite his best yet,” Nell said. “But he’ll flat-line before he’s much older.”
Bobbie said, “Dudes like him’ll violate any law, including gravity. A walking reign of terror.”
Fin said, “I bet he’s never changed those jeans. Just puts on a different rocker T-shirt and away he goes.”
“He’d be easy to buy for,” Nell said.
The truckers stood looking in the window of a pharmacy where a line of worried, hopeful, or frightened Americans were buying Retin-A, minoxidil, and AZT over the counter. Then they moseyed around the corner and vanished.
The three investigators ran to the next corner but Abel and Shelby were nowhere in sight.
Nell crossed the street and discovered a narrow passageway. Ten feet inside the dark passageway was an arch lit by a pencil of neon. It said, SOMBRAS.
“Find something?” Fin called out.
Nell yelled, “This must be a nightclub or restaurant. Let’s try it.”