Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  Lamar slid back from the counter and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. When he straightened his back, the big Browning semiautomatic ground into him like a knuckle. He reached behind himself, checked the crowd, and made sure the Browning stayed under his shirt. They’d been forced to find a joint with counters to eat at ’cause the only booth Chub was fittin’ in was a tollbooth and maybe not then neither.

  Chub ate like every bite might turn out to be his last. He was on his sixth steak-and-shrimp taco, savoring every great white bite he took, which was about two per taco.

  “Well . . . we showed that picture to about every damn person in this town. I’m thinkin’ it might be time to update our plane reservations and report back to the brass.”

  Chub finished chewing, downed half a beer, and set the taco back in the little checkered container. “Told you, man . . . you wanna go . . . go.”

  “What else is there to do?” Lamar wheedled. “We already done everything.”

  “We still ain’t done the south end of town,” Chub said as he manhandled the second half of the taco into his mouth. “So . . . go.”

  “I can’t do that, man. A major part of my job is to get both of us back up north safe and sound.” Which had seemed to Lamar way better than telling the big guy that what the Brotherhood really wanted was for Lamar to blow his fucking head off. “I leave you here and come back without you, those Brotherhood fucks are gonna be all over me like ugly on an ape. Nope, man . . . where you go, I go.”

  “We’ll sleep in the truck,” Chub said around a belch.

  It was at that moment when, for the first time, Lamar began to seriously consider the possibility that he might, before this was over, have to maneuver Chub someplace where they could be alone and then turn out his lights. The idea scared the living shit out of him.

  Took us about twenty knee-knocking minutes to walk back to Newport Avenue, where a couple of mahi-mahi tacos and double margaritas at the South Beach Bar & Grille eased our pain considerably. An hour or so later, we were spent but still saucy, and the streetlights had just hissed to life as we turned onto Del Monte Avenue and started hoofing it up the block to the building.

  If we’d had any wind left in our sails, it surely would have luffed out at the sight of Sergeant Saunders standing on the sidewalk in front of our building, trying not to look like a cop.

  “Wonder what she wants,” Gabe whispered sideways. We were both thinking the same thing. Maybe she had some news about my tests. Hold your breath time.

  I gave her a small wave. “Sergeant,” I called.

  She was wearing blue pants, but without the badge on the belt. No jacket. Just a plain white blouse. She was standing in the entranceway, with a red file folder clamped under her arm, wedged between the wooden fence and the little hedge. I surveyed the area, looking for her partner. Nowhere in sight.

  “I need to have a word with you two.”

  She saw Gabe and me pass a look. “This is something new,” she said.

  Gabe’s flattened lips meant what the hell, so I gestured with my hand, and the three of us tromped up the stairs and into the apartment.

  Five minutes later, everybody had something to drink and a place to sit.

  “So?” I said.

  “So . . . ,” she began. “Before we got the cause of that boy’s death from the ME, I did what I always do: I sent samples to the lab for analysis. Standard procedure in a case like that. When it came back that he’d died of the flu . . . well then, that made further analysis kind of a moot point.” She wagged a hand. “But . . . you know . . . at least we’d have a DNA profile in the system in case anybody ever came looking for him.”

  “And?” I prodded.

  She looked embarrassed. “It bothered me. You know. A kid like that. It just pissed me off to see something like that happen.”

  “Bothered me some too,” I admitted.

  She took a deep breath. “This is where it gets dicey for me,” she said. “Like I said, I was bothered . . . so . . . when I didn’t get a match from the system, I also sent the DNA profile to an open-source registry.”

  “Like they did for the Golden State Killer,” Gabe said. “They traced him through his family tree.”

  Saunders nodded. “Definitely outside of protocol, but you know, it was in the news and on my mind, and like I said . . .” She looked from one of us to the other. “I could get fired for this,” she said. “Swear to God, I was just gonna let it go at that. Get it behind me and get on with my job. You know . . . onward and upward.”

  “But?”

  “I got a familial match.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  “All those people giving each other DNA test kits for Christmas . . . you know, 23andMe, AncestryDNA, Living DNA, all those kinds of things. All the samples are given voluntarily, which means people like you and me don’t need a warrant to annex the database, so I did.”

  “So what’s the rub?” Gabe asked.

  “The match is a twenty-three-year-old Mexican national.”

  I shrugged. “Close as you guys are to each other, there must already be some sort of procedure in place to deal with that sort of thing.”

  Saunders was shaking her head. “First of all, it’s not my case anymore, which in the SDPD is either a suspension or a firing offense, depending on who it is you piss off. Secondly, we got a president claiming he’s gonna build a wall and make them pay for it. We got the State of California suing the city of Tijuana over polluting the Pacific with its sewage runoff. Was a time I could have made a couple of calls and gone down there myself and followed up on this thing, had a nice lunch, and come back. These days, cooperation is a thing of the past. They’re strip-searching American grandparents.”

  When neither of us said anything, she went on. “Even on our end, open-source information is not welcome in court. Things like crime scene integrity, contamination, chain of custody, transportation, and storage of the DNA samples have yet to go through the U.S. court system. You spit in a container, which may or may not already be contaminated, then send it off to be handled by multiple people, who then mail it off to God knows where, to be processed by God knows whom. All that crap still needs to be worked out for open-source information to be legally viable.”

  Gabe frowned and leaned forward. “So you’re telling us this why?”

  I watched as she began to color. “I was thinking . . . hoping, really . . . that I could talk you two into going down there and following up on this thing.” She waved a breezy hand. “You know, like a little Mexican vacation.”

  “Where in Mexico?” Gabe pressed.

  “Tijuana.”

  “A true garden spot.”

  “Real close, though,” Saunders said. For the first time since I’d met her, she made a joke. “Besides . . . when am I ever gonna have a pair of pistoleros like you two at my disposal again?”

  “Nobody’s called me a pistolero for years,” Gabe said with a laugh.

  “Surely an egregious oversight,” Saunders threw in.

  “But there’s no way we can show up at the border with guns,” Gabe pointed out.

  “No way,” Saunders parroted.

  “We’ll be fistaleros, then,” I said.

  “Not sure I like the sound of that.” Gabe swallowed the smile.

  “What have you got for a match?” I asked her. “How close a relative?”

  “Half brother—they’ve got the same mother.”

  “And how are we supposed to find this guy?” Gabe asked.

  “I know where he lives, where he works, and where he likes to drink.” She looked over at Gabe. “Your sheet says you speak Spanish.”

  “I worked for a Hispanic gentleman for a number of years,” Gabe allowed. “You pick it up.”

  Saunders lifted the file folder from the coffee table. Pulled out a sheet of paper. “Here’s all the information on Henrique Asevedo,” she said. “I made a few calls and am assured he’s still alive and kicking around the neighborhood. He’s ma
rried and got two kids.”

  Gabe and I were still reading when she reached into the folder again and came out with a photograph. The dead kid, but with eyes this time.

  “I photoshopped eyes back into his face,” she said. “I don’t know how accurate they are, but I couldn’t see how anybody could show it around . . . you know . . . with the eyes pecked out like that.”

  Nobody disagreed.

  I looked over at Gabe. “Whatta ya think?” I asked.

  “I’m thinkin’ she’s got us by the short hairs,” Gabe said. “That this is one of those one hand washes the other moments . . . You know, like how she’s holding on to our little secret and hoping like hell we’ll feel like we have an obligation to return the favor.”

  “Whatta ya say?” I asked.

  Gabe gave me the what the hell? face. “I think she may have a point.”

  “I’d sure like to find out what happened to that boy,” I said.

  Gabe was nodding. “Me too.”

  Borders are lines in the sand. Bloody lines. Lines that people fought and died for. Perhaps that explains the otherworldly flow they have about them, like walking in the front door of a strange house and then out the back, without ever bothering to look around. Always feels as if my identity has been canceled and I’ve been reduced to merely a number in transit, neither a piece of the continent nor a part of the main.

  Gabe and I crossed the border at San Ysidro at a little after seven A.M. and followed the trickle into Tijuana on foot, past the historical markers and the roundabouts and all the fierce, rearing statues of the nation’s heroes.

  You know how people like to pretend they’re more familiar with places than they really are, so that they can be the one who knows the way? That was us. We were looking for a little restaurant named Las Morelianas, where we’d eaten several times before, but neither of us wanted to admit we didn’t quite remember the way, so as we’d also done before, we’d hooked a wrong turn somewhere among the maze of streets and had wandered about the adjoining neighborhood for half an hour before realizing our mistake and sheepishly asking a truck driver for directions.

  Thus frustrated and overly exercised Gabe ordered an Omelette de Chicharron y Lengua big enough to feed a Malay village. As for me, I wasn’t much in the mood for breakfast, so the staff graciously kept the eye rolling to a minimum and whipped me up Chilaquiles Marevca, even though it wasn’t what sane adults ate first thing in the morning. The best news was that they weren’t playing the usual earsplitting mariachi music this early. Some days are better than others.

  It was five past nine by the time we stepped back into Elkalla Street, suitably fueled and ready for action. Gabe let go with a belch that rattled the windows of nearby shops. “That was some good shit,” Gabe said with a shake of the head.

  “We keep eating like that and we’re gonna need to order the Metamucil Mole for lunch,” I said.

  Gabe smiled. “Where you wanna start?”

  I shrugged. “It’s after nine on a weekday. I’m betting he’s at work,” I said.

  Gabe got directions from a traffic cop, and we took off walking the streets. Remnants of the onshore flow drifted among the buildings like airborne gauze. The weather was at the hot in the sun, cool in the shade stage of things.

  When you’re at large on foot in the Third World, the first thing you notice is that things are much more in flux than they generally are in America. Everywhere you look, buildings are going up, buildings are going down, and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. In this part of Mexico, change was the permanent order of the day. If that makes any sense at all.

  Twenty minutes later, we were standing next to a square city block of pollution, plastic, and aluminum scaffolding running up about five stories. We stopped at the battered trailer they were using as an office and asked the guy behind the desk for Henrique Asevedo. He spoke into a handheld radio and then told us that Henrique would be right down.

  We saw his boots first, as he climbed down from the scaffolding. Work boots, jeans, then white tank top, yellow helmet. Henrique Asevedo was a young-looking twenty-three. Didn’t even look like he shaved yet. Hard to imagine he had two kids of his own.

  “You asking for me?” he asked in perfect English.

  We introduced ourselves. He didn’t offer a hand. Just stood there with his hands on his hips, shifting his eyes back and forth between Gabe and me. So I reached into my pocket and pulled out the photoshopped image of the boy, unfolded it, and held it up in front of his face.

  “You recognize this young man?” I asked.

  He slid his eyes over the image and then quickly looked away.

  “Nope,” he said. “Who’s that?”

  But he did. I could tell by the way the blood began to rise to his face, by the pulsing blood vessel in his neck and the sudden problem he was having keeping his feet still. “You get one of those genetic tests done lately?” Gabe asked.

  He folded his muscular arms across his chest and jutted his chin way out.

  “What about it?”

  “Genetic science says you and this young fellow have the same mother,” I added.

  He tried to slough it off. “Must be some kind of mistake,” he said with a violent shake of his head. “Computer must have fucked up.”

  “Probably not,” Gabe said.

  Henrique Asevedo swatted at the dusty air. “Hey . . . you two got no cause to be comin’ down here to where I work, talking about my family. I got a job to do here. And like I told you, I never seen that kid before.”

  He did an abrupt about-face and stalked off, sweeping aside a black plastic tarp and pushing his way into the darkness beyond.

  Gabe looked at me. “He knows.”

  I pushed the black plastic aside and started after Henrique. The tarp was intended to shield one side of the massive project from the other. As I stepped inside, I could see Henrique double-timing it away from me in what was now a plastic tunnel beneath what seemed like the spiderweb of scaffolding overhead. Here and there along the plastic corridor, shafts of brilliant sunlight streaked diagonally across the space, illuminating the floating dust motes like tiny stars. I picked up my pace, stretching my legs now, gaining ground. I could feel Gabe close behind me. A sudden blast of sunlight told me that Henrique had punched his way out the other side. I held up a hand to ward off the glare and started to jog.

  We burst out into what turned out to be the alley behind the construction project. Narrow. Filthy. Bent-up burglar bars covering the back doors of whatever was on the next block. Overflowing dumpsters. Mangled wooden pallets. Loose trash. Coupla mangy dogs and maybe half a dozen feral cats lurking here and there amid the putrid squalor.

  The air swarmed with airborne construction debris, the roar of machinery, and the smell of rotting organic matter. Rodeo Drive it wasn’t. And that was the good news.

  The bad news was that Henrique had found four burly members of the construction crew, and it didn’t look much like he was extolling our virtues. As I stepped out into the filthy air, Henrique was gesturing in my direction with both hands. I could feel everyone go tense.

  Gabe leaned in and whispered in my ear. “When this starts here—and it’s gonna—pick somebody and knock him out. The odds will be a lot better that way.”

  I nodded. I was in the process of deciding who got the honors when Henrique and his pals made up my mind for me. The big guy on the far right started sidling his way around us. The guy on the left slid a claw hammer from his tool belt just about the time all five of them started to inch forward. Apparently, further discussion of Henrique’s family tree was not on this morning’s agenda.

  So I made a hard right turn and bull-rushed the guy who was trying to flank us. I swallowed the eight feet that separated us in two quick steps. He saw me coming but wasn’t quick enough to do anything about it. I feinted a left hook at his head; he brought up a thick hand with a cross tattooed on the back. I bowed my neck and head butted him right in the middle of his Emilia
no Zapata mustache. I felt his front teeth fold inward and heard the cartilage in his nose crinkle flat. His anguished howl pinballed off the buildings. As he brought both hands up to his flattened face, I stepped back and aimed a straight right at his solar plexus. I started the punch from my toes up, pushing off my right foot and following through like a pitcher delivering a fastball to home plate.

  My fist landed just above the spot where his bulbous gut began. Felt like it sunk all the way to his backbone. From the expression on his face, it felt that way to him too. One second he was sucking air, next he was bug-eyed, slack-jawed, clutching his chest like he’d just had the big one. A red-handled drywall knife dropped to the ground in front of him. He collapsed to his knees as if to pay homage and then bent at the waist, put both hands on the ground, and puked all over it.

  I turned back toward Gabe just in time to see the guy with the hammer learning to fly. Gabe’s left foot landed solidly in the middle of his chest as he leaped forward; it caught him in midair, with the hammer raised above his head, growling like a hound from hell.

  The kick not only stopped his forward momentum but actually propelled him back in the opposite direction, sending the claw hammer pinwheeling off into space. And then for a second or two after the hammer clattered to silence, the only sounds filling the air were those of two guys gagging bile while desperately trying to force air into their deflated lungs. The alley’s feral menagerie was suddenly nowhere to be found.

  Counting Henrique, there were three of them left standing upright in the alley, but I could tell right away these guys were fresh out of fight. Apparently loyalty to a coworker was one thing, but getting your ass kicked by a couple of professional thugs was something else entirely. All three of them took off running up the alley. The two new guys went right. Henrique veered left.

  “Aw Jesus . . . another fucking track meet,” I heard Gabe mutter in the seconds before we took off after Henrique.

  Twenty yards up the alley, we burst out onto a street—a big-time under-construction street. Looked like they were expanding the sidewalks and putting in new sewer lines as well. Three wide ditches ran down the middle of the street. Henrique was tight-roping across a one-board bridge spanning the nearest ditch. That’s what saved us. This wasn’t a running track; this was an obstacle course.