The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  It was 2 A.M. on Monday, and the Best Rest had quietened down some as Harry helped Miguel, his bar manager, to clean up behind the counter and restock the beer and liquor. Technically the bar was no longer open for business, although anyone who wanted a drink at this time of night could still be served at the diner next door. Nevertheless, men continued to sit in the shadows, nursing their shots, some talking together, some alone. They were not the kind of men who could be told to leave. They would fade into the night in their own time, and of their own accord. Until then, Harry would not trouble them.

  A connecting doorway led from the cantina into the diner. A sign on the diner side announced that the bar was now closed, but the main door to the cantina remained unlocked for the present. Harry heard it open and looked up to see a pair of men enter. Both were white. One was tall and in his early forties, with graying hair and some scarring to his right eye. He wore a blue shirt, a blue jacket, and jeans that were a little long at the ends, but was otherwise largely unremarkable in appearance.

  The other man was almost as tall as his companion, but obscenely fat, his enormous belly hanging pendulously between his thighs like a great tongue lolling from an open mouth. His body appeared out of proportion to his legs, which were short and slightly bowed, as though they had struggled for many years to support the load they were required to bear and were now buckling under the strain. The fat man’s face was perfectly round and quite pale, but his features were very delicate: green eyes enclosed by long, dark lashes; a thin, unbroken nose; and a long mouth with full, dark lips that were almost feminine. But any passing resemblance to traditional notions of facial beauty were undone by his chin, and the tumorous, distended neck in which it lost itself. It rolled over his shirt collar, purple and red, like an intimation of the gut that lay farther down. Harry was reminded of an old walrus that he had once seen in a zoo, a great beast of blubber and distended flesh on the verge of collapse. This man, by contrast, was far from the grave. Despite his bulk, he walked with a strange lightness, seemingly gliding across the peanut-shell-strewn floor of the cantina. Harry’s shirt was streaked with sweat even though the AC was blasting, yet the fat man’s face was entirely dry, and his white shirt and gray jacket appeared untouched by perspiration. He was balding, but his remaining hair was very black and cut short against his skull. Harry found himself mesmerized by the man’s appearance, the mix of terrible ugliness and near beauty, of obscene bulk and irreconcilable grace. Then the spell was broken, and Harry spoke.

  “Hey,” said Harry. “We’re closed.”

  The fat man paused, the sole of his right foot poised just above the floor. Harry could see an unbroken peanut just beneath his shoe leather.

  The foot began to complete its descent. The shell started to flaten beneath the weight.

  And Harry was suddenly confronted by the face of the fat man, inches from his own, staring straight at him. Then, before he could even begin to take in his presence, the fat man was to his left, then to his right, all the time whispering in a language Harry couldn’t understand, the words an unintelligible mass of sibilance and occasional harsh consonants, their precise meaning lost to him but their intimation clear.

  Stay out of my way. Stay out of my way or you’ll be sorry.

  The fat man’s face was a blur, his body zipping from side to side, his voice an insistent throbbing inside Harry’s head. Harry felt nauseous. He wanted it to stop. Why wasn’t anyone intervening on his behalf? Where was Miguel?

  Harry reached out a hand in an effort to support himself against the bar.

  And the movement around him suddenly ceased.

  Harry heard the peanut shell crack. The fat man was where he had previously been, fifteen or twenty feet from the bar, his colleague behind him. Both were looking at Harry, and the fat man was smiling slightly, privy to a secret that only he and Harry now shared.

  Stay out of my way.

  In a far corner, Harry saw a hand raised: Octavio, who took care of the whores, absorbing a cut of their income in return for protection, and passing on a little of it to Harry in turn.

  This was none of Harry’s business. He nodded once, and returned to cleaning off the overspill from the beer taps. He managed to complete his task, then slipped quietly into the little bathroom behind the bar, where he sat on the toilet seat for a time, his hands trembling, before he vomited violently into the sink. When he returned to the cantina, the fat man and his partner were gone. Only Octavio was waiting for him. He didn’t look much better than Harry felt.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Harry swallowed. He could still taste bile in his mouth.

  “Better we forget, you understand?” said Octavio.

  “Yeah, I get you.”

  Octavio gestured to the bar, pointing out the bottle of brandy on the top shelf. Harry took the bottle and poured the alcohol into a highball glass. He figured that Octavio didn’t need a snifter, not this time. The Mexican put a twenty on the bar.

  “You need one too,” he said.

  Harry poured himself a glass, keeping his hand heavy.

  “There was a girl,” said Octavio. “Not local. Black Mexican.”

  “I remember,” said Harry. “She was here tonight. She’s new. Figured her for one of yours.”

  “She won’t be back,” said Octavio.

  Harry lifted the glass to his lips, but found that he couldn’t drink. The taste of bile was returning. Vera, that was the girl’s name, or the name she had given when Harry had asked. Few of these women used their real name for business. He’d spoken to her once or twice, just in passing. He’d seen her maybe three times in all, but no more than that. She’d seemed pretty nice, for a whore.

  “Okay,” said Harry.

  “Okay,” said Octavio.

  And like that, the girl was gone.

  There were only three rooms occupied at the Spyhole Motel. In the first room, a young couple on a road trip to Mexico were bickering, still argumentative after a long, uncomfortable journey. Soon they would descend into uneasy, prickly silence, until the boy made the first move toward reconciliation, heading out into the desert night and returning with sodas from the machine by the office. He would place one of the cans against the small of the girl’s back, and she would react with a shiver. He would kiss her, and tell her that he was sorry. She would kiss him back. They would drink, and soon the heat and the arguments would appear to be forgotten.

  In the next room, a man sat in his vest upon a bed, watching a Mexican game show. He had paid for his room in cash. He could have stayed in Yuma, for he had business there in the morning, but his face was known and he disliked staying in the city for longer than he had to. Instead, he sat in the remote motel and watched couples hug each other as they won prizes worth less than the money in his wallet.

  The last room on this arm of the motel was taken by another solo traveler. She was young, barely into her twenties, and she was running. They called her Vera in Harry’s Best Rest, but those who were seeking her knew her as Sereta. Neither name was real, but it no longer mattered to her what she was called. She had no family now, or none that cared. In the beginning, she had sent money home to her mother in Ciudad Juárez, supplementing the meager income she gleaned from her work in one of the big maquiladoras on Avenida Tecnológico. Sereta and her older sister Josefina had worked there too, until that November day when everything changed for them.

  When she called home Sereta would tell Lilia, her mother, that she was working as a waitress in New York. Lilia did not question her, even though she knew that her daughter, before she left for the north, had frequently been seen leaving the gated communities of the Campestre Juárez, where the wealthy Americans lived, and the only local women admitted to such places were servants and whores. Then, in November 2001, the body of Sereta’s sister Josefina was one of eight found in an overgrown cotton field near the Sitio Colosio Valle mall. The bodies were badly mutilated, and the protests of the poor increased in volume, for these were not t
he first young women to die in this place, and there were stories told of wealthy men behind barred gates who had now added killing for pleasure to their list of recreations. Sereta’s mother told her to leave and not to come back. She never mentioned the Campestre Juárez to her, and the rich men in their black cars, but she knew.

  One year later, Lilia too was dead, taken by a cancer that her daughter believed was a physical manifestation of pain and grief, and now Sereta was alone. In New York, she had found a kindred spirit in Alice, but that friendship too had been sundered. Alice should have stayed with her, but the grip of the sickness was tight upon her, and she had made her own choice to remain close to the big city. Sereta, instead, had headed south. She knew these desert places and how they worked. She wanted those who were pursuing her to think that she had crossed into Mexico. Instead, she planned to skirt the border, making for the West Coast, where she hoped to disappear for a time until she could figure out her next move. She knew that what she had was valuable. After all, she had listened to a man die for it.

  Sereta too was watching television, but the volume was down low. She found the glow comforting but did not wish the babble to disturb her thoughts. Money was the problem. Money was always the problem. She had been forced to run so suddenly that there was no time to plan, no time to assemble what few funds she had to her name. She had a friend bring her car to her, then drove away, putting as much space between herself and the city as possible.

  She’d heard about the Best Rest in the past. It was a place where nobody asked too many questions and where a girl could make some money quickly and then move on without any further obligation, as long as she paid her cut to the right people. She took a room at the Spyhole, negotiating a pretty good deal, and already had nearly $2,000 put away after just a few days, thanks in part to a particularly generous tip from a truck driver whose sexual tastes, messy but harmless, she had indulged the night before. Soon she would move along. Maybe just one more night, though, she thought, even as, unbeknownst to her, her existence had already bound itself to the lives of those who had taken her sister.

  For far to the north, the Mexican named Garcia might have smiled familiarly at the mention of Josefina’s name, recalling her final moments as he busied himself with the remains of another young woman . . .

  There was only one other person on the motel property. He was a slim young man of Mexican descent, and he was seated behind the reception desk in the office, reading a book. The book was entitled The Devil’s Highway, and it told of the deaths of fourteen Mexicans who had attempted to cross the border illegally not many miles from where the motel lay. The book made the young man angry, even as he felt a sense of relief that his parents had made a good life here and that such a death was not destined to be his.

  It was almost 3 A.M., and he was about to lock the door and retire to the back room for some sleep when he saw the two white men approach the office. He had not heard their car pull up, and supposed that they must have deliberately parked some way off. Already he was on his guard, for that made no sense to him. There was a gun beneath the counter, but he had never had cause even to show it. Now that most people paid by credit card, motels provided poor pickings for thieves.

  One of the men was tall and dressed in blue. The heels of his cowboy boots clicked upon the tiles as he entered the office. His companion was absurdly corpulent. The clerk, whose name was Ruiz, believed that he had never before seen a man who looked quite so unhealthy, and he had seen many fat Americans in his young life. The fat man’s belly hung so far between his thighs that Ruiz guessed that he must have been obliged to lift it up each time he made water. He carried in his hand a tan straw hat with a white band, and wore a light jacket over a white shirt, and tan pants. His shoes were brown and polished to a high sheen.

  “How you doing tonight?” asked Ruiz.

  The thin man answered.

  “We’re doing well. You full up?”

  “Nah, when we’re full we turn on the ‘No Vacancies’ sign out on the road to save folks a trip.”

  “You can do that from here?” asked the thin man. He sounded genuinely interested.

  “Sure,” said Ruiz. He pointed to a box upon the wall, lined with switches. Each was carefully labeled with a handwritten sticker. “I just flick a switch.”

  “Amazing,” said the thin man.

  “Fascinating,” said his colleague, speaking for the first time. Unlike the other man, he did not sound interested. His voice was soft, and slightly higher in pitch than a man’s voice should have been.

  “So, would you like a room?” asked Ruiz. He was tired and wanted to get the two men booked in and their cards processed so that he could catch up on his sleep. He also, he realized, wanted to get them out of the office. The fat man smelled peculiar. He hadn’t noticed any stench from the one in blue, but the tubby guy had an unusual body odor. He smelled earthy, and Ruiz involuntarily found himself picturing pale worms breaking through damp clods of dirt and black beetles scurrying for the shelter of stones.

  “We may need more than one,” replied Blue.

  “Two?”

  “How many rooms do you have?”

  “Fifteen altogether, but three are occupied.”

  “Three guests.”

  “Four.”

  Ruiz stopped talking. There was something wrong here. Blue was no longer even listening. Instead, he had picked up Ruiz’s book and was looking at the cover.

  “Luis Urrea,” he read. “The Devil’s Highway.”

  He turned to his companion.

  “Look,” he said, displaying the book to him. “Maybe we should buy a copy.”

  The fat man glanced at the cover.

  “I know the route,” he said drily. “If you want it, just take that one and save some money.”

  Ruiz was about to say something when the fat man struck him in the throat, slamming him back against the wall. Ruiz experienced a sense of pain and constriction as small, delicate parts of himself were crushed by the blow. He was having trouble breathing. He tried to form words, but they would not come. He fell against the wall and a second blow came. He slid slowly to the floor. His face was turning dark as he suffocated, his windpipe entirely ruined. Ruiz began to claw at his mouth and throat. He could hear a clicking noise, like the ticking of a clock counting down his final moments. The two men were not even interested in his suffering. The fat man walked around the desk, stepping carefully over Ruiz. The dying man again caught the smell of him as he switched on the “No Vacancies” sign out on the highway. His companion, meanwhile, flicked through that night’s guest registration cards.

  “One couple in two,” he told the fat man. “One male in three. The name sounds Mexican. One woman in twelve, registered under the name Vera Gooding.”

  The fat man didn’t acknowledge him. He was now standing over Ruiz, watching blood and spittle trail from the corners of his mouth.

  “I’ll take the couple,” he said. “You take the Mexican.”

  He squatted down beside Ruiz. It was a surprisingly graceful movement, like the dipping of a swan’s head. He extended his right hand and brushed the hair from the young man’s brow. There was a mark on the underside of the fat man’s forearm. It looked like a twin-pronged fork, recently burned into the flesh. The fat man turned Ruiz’s head from left to right.

  “Do you think we should bring it back for our Mexican friend?” asked Blue. “He works well with bone.”

  “Too much trouble,” said the fat man.

  His tone was dismissive. The fat man gripped Ruiz’s hair, turning his head slightly, then leaned in close to him. His mouth opened slightly, and Ruiz saw a pink tongue and teeth that tapered to blunt ends. Ruiz’s eyes were bulging now, and his face was purple. He spit red fluid, and as he did so the fat man’s lips touched his, his mouth closing entirely upon Ruiz’s, his hand clasping the young man’s face and chin, keeping his jaws apart. The Mexican tried to struggle, but he could not fight both the fat man and the end that was c
oming. A word flashed in his head, and he thought: Brightwell. What is Brightwell?

  His grip upon the fat man’s shoulder loosened, his legs relaxed, and the fat man drew away from him and stood.

  “You have blood on your shirt,” Blue told Brightwell.

  He sounded bored.

  Danny Quinn watched his girlfriend as she carefully applied the small brush to her toenails. The polish was a mix of purple and red. It made her look as though her toes were bruised, but Danny decided to keep this opinion to himself. He was content to bask for a time in the afterglow of their lovemaking, taking in her concentration and her poise. At times like these, Danny loved Melanie deeply. He had cheated on her, and would probably cheat on her again, although he prayed each night for the strength to remain faithful. He wondered sometimes at what would happen if she found out about his other life. Danny liked women, but he distinguished between sex and lovemaking. Sex meant little to him, apart from the satiation of an urge. It was like scratching an itch: if his right hand was broken and his back was itchy, then he’d use his left to deal with it. All things being equal, he would prefer to use his right hand, but an itch was an itch, right? If Melanie wasn’t around — and her work with the bank sometimes required her to be away from home for two or three days — then Danny would go elsewhere for his pleasure. Mostly, he told the women involved that he was single. Some of them didn’t even ask. One or two had fallen for him a little, and that had created problems, but he had worked them out. Danny had even used hookers on occasion. The sex was different with them, but he did not consider sex with hookers as cheating on Melanie. There was no emotion involved at all, and Danny reasoned that without emotion there was no real betrayal of his feelings for Melanie. It was clinical, and he always practised safe sex, even with the ones who offered a little extra.