The answer was simple: He couldn’t think of a single goddamn reason.
Not the way things were now. Almost everyone he knew was an asshole or a drug dealer or a crackhead killer like the V-man. The girl, Tula, was a weirdo Jesus freak, but she had hit the nail on the head when it came to the life he was living. It was a dirty life. It made him feel dirty-Squires could admit that to himself now that he was on the run from a murder rap. So why not make a change before it was too late? Maybe going to Mexico wasn’t such a bad idea.
He said to the girl, “I drove to New Orleans once and it took me twelve hours. How much farther is the border? I think you have to drive clear across Texas, too.”
Squires placed the tequila bottle, then the revolver, on a magazine stand, and sat up a little as he tried to picture the geography of the southern United States. In his mind, everything south of Texas was just a hazy design, with curves and bulges bordered on both sides by oceans.
“First,” Tula reminded him, “we must go to Immokalee and ask about my mother. I’m not going home without my family. People call her Mary. Mary Choimha. Or Maria sometimes, too. She lived at your trailer park for a while, that’s why I went there first.”
“Every chula in Florida is named Mary or Maria,” Squires said. “I can’t keep track of everyone who rents at my place. You Mexicans are always coming and going.”
Tula said, “Then you lied to me. You said you had met her, that you could take me to her. You told me that at the trailer park last night.”
Squires shrugged. “So what? We’re not all perfect like you.”
“You would remember my mother,” the girl insisted. “She’s very beautiful-much prettier than me. Carlson said, last year, he saw your wife talking to my mother. That she gave my mother a cell phone… or maybe you gave it to her, Carlson wasn’t sure. But the phone stopped working two months ago, which is why I came here. My mother would have called me if her phone was working.”
Squires told the girl, “I don’t have a wife, especially not the bitch you mean,” as he leaned back to think about what he’d just heard.
The information was disturbing. All kids thought their mothers were pretty-Squires all too aware that he was a rare exception, because his mother was a chain-smoking witch. But why would Frankie give Tula’s mother a cell phone unless Frankie had something to gain?
Squires had given dozens of cheap phones to Mexicans, the cell phones that charged a flat fee with a limited number of minutes. Usually, he gave them to men who were good workers-and it was always for selfish reasons: It was a way of controlling the guy, make him indebted, and a little scared, too, that the phone would be taken away or the service canceled.
Christ, Frankie had run so many Mexican girls through the hunting camp and their double-wide at Red Citrus, he would have needed a calculator to keep track.
Was it possible that this kid’s mother was one of the chulas Frankie had used? Squires considered the girl’s age, which would put the mother in her mid- to late twenties, Mexican girls being prone to marrying young.
The possibility was too upsetting, though, and Squires decided that it wasn’t something he wanted to think about. He stared at the girl intensely for a moment, then looked away, suddenly aware there was something eerily familiar about the girl’s eyes and high cheekbones.
“Why would you listen to that crazy old drunk, Carlson?” Squires said to the girl. “I don’t want to hear any more about your mother. Understand?”
Aware of the man’s sudden mood change, Tula said, “Let me fix you some food while we talk. You need to eat for strength if we’re going to drive to Immokalee.”
The man laced his fingers together-Tula had never seen hands so huge-and sat up in the recliner. He was trying to remember how many Marys and Marias he or Frankie had screwed or used one way or another. But then felt a withering guilt descending, so he stopped himself. Instead, he let his mind shift back to the girl’s idea about leaving Florida.
Squires had thought of traveling to Mexico many times. Most of the big steroid manufactures were there because it was legal to make and sell gear. Hell, the place was bodybuilder heaven. In fact, Squires’s first supplier, before he got into the business, was an Internet place called mexgear. com. Mexgear’s shit was good to go, and they had good prices. Squires had bought Test C, Tren, EQ and Masteron from the online Mexicans there for less than fifty bucks a vial, and they’d always thrown in some extra gear if it was a big order.
The fact was, he didn’t need Frankie to continue his steroid operation. He could set up an underground lab just about anywhere, plus he spoke English, unlike the Mexgear guys, which always made it a pain in the ass to deal with them.
Speaking English was definitely to his advantage, Squires decided, even in Mexico. Most bodybuilders were Americans or lived in Europe, so it would be a smart way to expand and maybe make a lot of money. He couldn’t wait forever for his rich mother to die.
“Go to Mexico for a few months,” Squires said aloud, testing the idea on his ears.
He looked toward the little kitchen as if he’d just awakened from a doze. “I don’t need any food. Not now. But I could us a little pickme-up. Come with me-I’m not taking my eye off you for a second. If you want to cook, that’s up to you. Here, I’ll show you how to turn on the gas.”
Tula watched the giant get down on his knees and open a cabinet beneath the sink. He told her, “There’s a red knob under here and an emergency-cutoff switch. But first check and make sure you turned the burners off or one spark and this whole place could go up.”
Squires stood, the trailer creaking beneath his weight, and Tula followed him out the door, past the peeping baby egret that she had placed in a box after feeding it water and a few drops of condensed milk with an eyedropper. Squires had refused to help her catch and mash up minnows from the pond, which is what Tula believed that baby egrets ate, but maybe later he would.
Or maybe the mother egret, which was still flying around, occasionally landing near the box, would figure it out and bring the fledgling some food.
A few seconds later, Squires removed two padlocks from the homemade-looking wooden building. He lifted a steel bar, and soon Tula was inside a dark space that smelled of chemicals and propane.
When her eyes adjusted, she saw a row of gas burners on a counter that were connected by hoses to tanks beneath. It explained the propane smell, just as shelves filled with bottles and stacks of paper filters explained the odor of chemicals.
“What do you make here?” the girl asked Squires.
“You ask too many questions. Forget you ever saw this place, that’s my advice to you,” the man replied as he touched a switch, neon lights flickering overhead. That done, Squires took a pack of syringes from a drawer, then opened two small boxes that contained rows of unmarked vials.
Out here, the propane burners had steel manual lighters, like lanterns the girl had used. She stood against the wall, out of the way, as the man put a pot of water on, flame low.
“I always heat my vitamins first. It’s cleaner, plus it shoots smoother,” he told the girl as he loaded a syringe with oily-looking liquid from three different vials, then dropped the syringe into the water.
“I got a shot once,” Tula said, pleased they were having a conversation. “A doctor came to our village. He was British, I think, but still a nice man. The needle was a vaccine for mosquito bites, he said, not vitamins.”
“Vitamins keep me strong and healthy,” Squires replied in a tone that told Tula he was lying about something, she wasn’t sure what.
Fascinated by what she was seeing, Tula watched as the man stripped off his shirt, then rubbed what smelled like alcohol on his left shoulder. Never in her life had she seen such huge muscles. Squires really was a giant. He looked as if he had been carved from stone, gray stone, the sort her ancestors had used to build pyramids.