“You’re going to have to make this up to me.”
Bob felt good. He rolled off Felicia, their bodies slippery from sweat, and lay on his back gasping for air. She rolled on her side and looked at him.
“Oh, Roberto.”
Bob didn’t know what to say, so he ran his hand down her body until he found her hand. He held it tightly.
Felicia let out a sigh and curled up next to him, drifting off to sleep. A contented purring sound rising from her throat. He felt her breasts pressing against his ribs, felt the weight of her leg as it rested on top of his. Her warmth. The rise and fall of her breathing. The blood flowing just under that soft brown skin. He wanted to stay here, in bed, with Felicia for more than a few weeks or months.
Bob’s brain slammed on the brakes. He came to the shocking realization that he wanted to stay with Felicia for the rest of his life. He was in love.
He wanted to stay alive and enjoy this for as long as he could. Until something happened and the two of them tore each other’s hearts out and went their separate ways. Although Bob held out a good deal of hope that you could actually have a long-term, mutually satisfying relationship that didn’t end in heartbreak. Perhaps he was naive. But he didn’t care.
It seemed like for the first time in his life he’d been lucky. All those times when the other guy got the girl, the job, the last copy of the collectible first-edition comic that he had spotted. Yeah, he was due for a little luck.
Still, luck runs out. You always hear that. Somebody’s luck ran out. Bob realized he’d need more than just luck. It was time he took an active interest in his long-term survival. Particularly if he wanted to continue being employed in this new line of work.
He catalogued the various methods of self-defense. Learning to shoot a gun seemed obvious enough. But guns have drawbacks. They go off a little too quickly. You could shoot someone accidentally. You could get arrested for carrying them. Bob realized that guns had a negative vibe for him. He just wasn’t a gun person.
He wasn’t a knife person either. Too messy. Maybe he could learn kung fu or some equally deadly martial art. He’d discuss it with Esteban. Learn from the old pro. Stay alive.
Bob drifted off to sleep.
It took a few minutes for everything to come into focus. It was like a dream. Diffuse light glaring through the curtains. The hundreds of little holes in the ceiling tiles. You could count them. Across the room, some dark silhouette watching TV. The sounds of a baseball game.
Martin was groggy, disoriented. He had the pleasant sensation of being stoned on some kind of painkiller and the unpleasant sensation of having his arms and legs strapped down onto a bed. With some effort he lifted his head up.
He could see his hands, with little plastic tubes going into his arm. Something — water, food, drugs — was being fed directly into his body from above. He tried to move his arms again, this time seeing the thick nylon straps that secured him to the bed.
Now what?
As the room came more and more into focus, so did several extremely unpleasant physical sensations. His throat, for one, was parched. As though the membranes had shrunken and cracked like a dry lake bed. His head, where that fucker Roberto had clobbered him, hurt with a kind of insistent slicing pain. And, oh, this can’t be happening, there was some kind of tube shoved up his penis and into his bladder. He was catheterized.
“Water.”
Did he say that? If he had, he hadn’t meant to. He’d wanted to keep quiet until he came to his senses.
“Water.”
That was him. That croaking sound was coming out of his mouth.
“Thirsty?”
“Water.”
The silhouette stood and came over to him. Martin could tell right away that it was some kind of law-enforcement person. The man held out a plastic cup. Martin lifted his head and grabbed the flexible straw with his lips. He slowly sucked the icy fluids down. Nothing. No drug, no sex, no fabulous food, nothing ever tasted so good.
“Don’t drink it all.”
The officer pulled the cup away. Martin laid his head back.
“Glad to see you’re awake. We didn’t know when you were going to snap out of it.”
Martin didn’t know what to say.
“We’ve got a lot of questions for you.”
“What?”
“I’m the sheriff out here, and you’re our mystery man.”
The sheriff stood up and patted his beach ball of a beer gut.
“What were you doin’ out there? Didya think you could sell heroin in the desert?”
Martin was confused, and then he remembered. The packets of smack he’d taken from Norberto. The ones he’d planned to stick in Roberto’s pocket.
“Marijuana possession. Heroin possession with intent. Possession of an unlicensed firearm.”
The sheriff gave him a sincere look.
“You want to tell me what you were doing out there?”
What Martin really wanted was time to think. He wanted to put his feet up, fire up a jumbo, and consider the various possibilities, scenarios, etc.
“You’re looking at five to fifteen in Soledad.”
He’d be what? fifty when he got out. What would his parents say?
“I want to make a deal.”
It came out so quickly and so easily.
The sheriff smiled.
“You want to tell me who you bought this crap from?”
Martin blinked.
“I want to talk to someone from the FBI.”
“Oh, you’re a bigshot.”
The sheriff sat back down on the bed, only this time he wasn’t careful, and the catheter in Martin’s penis shifted. Martin winced.
“Looks to me like you bought your drugs in California, you were trying to sell your drugs in California, and you are in California. That ain’t what we call a federal problem. That’s a state problem.”
Why was he being so difficult?
“I want to make a deal.”
“I heard that.”
“I work for the Mexican mafia.”
The sheriff stood up.
“That’s a good one.”
He started for the door. Martin didn’t want him to leave. He didn’t want to be left alone. The image of the Ramirez brothers in their car flashed back to him. He was suddenly scared. Very scared.
“You’ve got to protect me. They’ll find me and kill me. You’ve got to protect me.”
The sheriff stood in the doorway.
“I’m gonna get a cup of coffee, and when I come back, you’re gonna tell me the truth.”
Esteban hated going into places like this. A dark bar in East LA. If he was looking for trouble, he could find it here. He had asked Amado to come with him. But Amado said he was busy working on his telenovela script. Esteban was tired. He didn’t want to argue. He knew that if he’d told Amado who he was going to see and where, he’d have come. But sometimes El Jefe’s got to show his huevos. So Esteban stuck a fully loaded, semiautomatic, nine-millimeter handgun in his sports coat and went alone.
Theoretically he shouldn’t have been nervous. The Ramirez brothers were his employees. They should be loyal, protective. But things were getting weird. Esteban didn’t feel the bluster and confidence he normally carried with him. He was starting to look over his shoulder.
The Ramirez brothers, Tomás and Chino, were sitting in a back booth. They had a couple of long-neck Pacificas in front of them, a little bowl of lime slices, and several thin white lines of crystal meth. They hung their heads when Esteban entered the bar.
“¿Qué pasa, amigos?”
Esteban sat with them. He nodded toward the bartender, a man who’d spent the last twelve years in prison on a trumped-up manslaughter charge, for another round.