by Don Winslow
You think I’m afraid of prison, Adán?
Where the hell do you think I am now?
Nora sets the magazine down and paces around the room. She’s done a lot of that over the past few months. First when they were weaning her off the drugs, then, after she felt better, out of sheer tedium.
She’s told them she wanted to leave a hundred times. A hundred times Brown Eyes has given her the same answer.
“It’s not safe yet.”
“What? I’m a prisoner?”
“You’re not a prisoner.”
“Then I want to leave.”
“It’s not safe yet.”
His were the first eyes she’d seen when she came to, that horrible night back on the Sea of Cortez. She was lying in the bottom of a small boat, and she opened her eyes and saw his brown eyes staring down at her. Not cold, like a lot of men have stared at her, not filled with desire, but with concern.
A pair of brown eyes.
She was coming back to life.
She had started to say something but he shook his head and put his finger to his lips, like he was hushing a small child. She tried to move but couldn’t—she was wrapped in something warm and tight, like a sleeping bag that was a little too small. Then he gently brushed the palm of his hand over her eyes, as if he were telling her to go back to sleep, and she did.
Even now her memories of that night are vague. She’s heard people on goofy talk shows tell about alien abductions, and it was sort of like that, without the probes or the medical experiments. She does remember being stuck with a needle, though, and wrapped in this thing like a bag, and she doesn’t recall being scared when they zipped it closed over her head, because there was a little black screen over her face and she could breathe all right.
She remembers being placed on another boat, a bigger one, then onto an airplane, and then there was another needle and when she woke up, she was in this room.
And he was there.
“I’m here to keep you safe,” was about all he’d say. He wouldn’t even tell her his name, so she just started calling him Brown Eyes. Later that first day he put her on the phone with Art Keller.
“It’s just for a little while,” Keller reassured her.
“Where’s Adán?” she asked.
“We missed him,” Keller said. “We got Raúl, though. We’re pretty sure he’s dead.”
And so are you, Keller added. He explained the whole ruse to her. Even though they had set up Fabián Martínez as the soplón, it was still better if everyone, especially Adán, thought that she had died. Otherwise, Adán would never stop trying to get her back or, alternatively, to have her killed. We’ll put out the word you died in a car accident, Keller said. Adán will know that you were “killed” in the raid, of course, and read the news as a cover-up.
And that’s all right, too.
It was weird when Brown Eyes brought in her obituary to show her. It was brief, listed her profession as an event planner and gave a few details of the funeral—calling hours, all that shit. She wondered who attended; her father, probably, no doubt stoned; her mother, of course; and Haley.
And that was probably about it.
A little while turns into a long while.
Keller calls in about once a week, saying that he was still working on getting Adán, saying that he’d like to come see her, but it wouldn’t be safe. The mantra, Nora thinks. It wouldn’t be safe for her to go for a walk, it wouldn’t be safe for her to go shopping, to a movie, to resume any kind of life.
Anytime she asks Brown Eyes about any of this, the answer is always the same. He looks at her with those puppy-dog eyes and says, “It wouldn’t be safe.”
“Just let me know what you need,” Brown Eyes tells her. “I’ll get it for you.”
It becomes one of her few sources of entertainment, sending Brown Eyes out on increasingly complicated shopping missions. She gives him detailed requests for hard-to-find, expensive cosmetics; very particular instructions as to the particular shade of blouse she needs; fussy, impossible-for-a-man-to-understand requests for designer clothes from her favorite shops.
He does it all, except for her request for a dress from her favorite boutique in La Jolla. “Keller says I can’t go there,” he says apologetically. “It wouldn’t—”
“—be safe,” she says; then for revenge she sends him out to buy feminine products and lingerie. She hears him kick-start his motorcycle and roar off, and she spends the hours that he is gone enjoying the thought of him stumbling red-faced through Victoria’s Secret and having to ask a saleslady for help.
But she doesn’t really like it when he’s gone, because it leaves her alone with the weird trio of the other bodyguards. She goes along with the silly charade that she doesn’t know their names, although she can hear them talking to one another from her room. The old man, Mickey, is sweet enough, and brings her cups of tea. O-Bop, the one with the kinky red hair, is just strange, but looks at her as if he wants to fuck her, which she’s used to. It’s the other one who really disturbs her—the fat one who incessantly eats peaches straight from the can.
Big Peaches.
Jimmy Piccone.
They pretend not to remember each other.
But I remember you, she thinks.
My first professional fuck.
She remembers his brutality, his sheer ugliness, that he used her so that she felt like a rag that he jerked off into. She remembers that night well.
So she remembers Callan.
It took her a while, especially as she was still so whacked-out when they first brought her here. But it was Callan—Brown Eyes—who eased her off the pills, gave her ice chips to suck on when she was so thirsty but was still throwing up everything, stroked her hair while she hunched over the john, talked bullshit to her during the bad insomniac hours, played cards with her all night sometimes, cajoled her into eating again, made her dry toast and chicken broth and made a special trip out to get her tapioca pudding just because she mentioned that it sounded good.
It was when she had pretty much detoxed and was feeling better that she remembered where she’d seen him before.
My debut as a hooker, she thinks, my coming-out party to be introduced to john society. He was the one I wanted for my first, she remembers, because he looked gentle and sweet and I liked his brown eyes.
“I remember you,” she said when he came into the room with her lunch, a banana and some wheat toast.
He looked surprised. Said, shyly, “I remember you, too.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“A long time.”
“A lot’s happened since then.”
“Yeah.”
So although it was boring in her “confinement,” as she came to call it, she was really doing all right. They got her a television and a radio and a Walkman, a collection of CDs and a whole bunch of books and magazines, and they even created a little outdoor workout area for her, Callan and Mickey putting up a wooden fence even though there wasn’t another house around for miles, then going out and getting her a treadmill and a stationary bicycle. So she could exercise and read and watch TV, and she was really doing all right until the night she settled into bed and PBS came on with a special hour about the War on Drugs and she saw footage of the massacre at El Sauzal.
She felt the breath catch in her throat as the narrator speculated that the entire family of Fabián Martínez—El Tiburón—had been executed in reprisal for his becoming an informer to the DEA. Her entire body trembled as she saw the footage of the corpses splayed around the courtyard.
She made Callan get Keller on the phone right then.
“Why didn’t you tell me?!” she screamed into the phone.
“I thought it better that you didn’t know.”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” she cried. “You shouldn’t have done it . . .”
She went into a tailspin after that, a lie-in-bed, fetal-position, not-get-up, not-eat depression.
Nineteen lives, s
he brooded.
Women, children.
A baby.
For me.
Her bodyguards were terrified. Callan would come into her room and sit at the foot of her bed like a dog, not talking or anything, just sitting, as if he could protect her from the pain that was slicing her up from the inside.
But he couldn’t do anything.
Nobody could.
She would just lie there.
Then one day Callan, looking very serious, handed her the phone and it was Keller and he said simply, “We got him.”
John Hobbs and Sal Scachi also react to the news of Adán’s capture.
“I really thought that Arthur would simply kill him,” Hobbs says. “It would have been simpler.”
“Now we have a problem,” Scachi says.
“We do, indeed,” Hobbs says. “This has become something of a mess. We need to start cleaning it up.”
Adán Barrera dead is one thing. Adán Barrera alive and talking, particularly in court, is another. And Arthur Keller . . . it’s difficult to know what’s on his mind these days. No, it’s prudent to make other arrangements.
John Hobbs gets on the phone to do just that.
He makes a call to Venezuela.
Sal Scachi goes to clean things up.
The teakettle whistles.
Harsh, loud.
“Will you shut that fucking thing off!?” Peaches yells. “You and your fucking tea!”
Mickey grabs the kettle off the stove.
“Leave him alone,” Callan says.
“What?”
“I said don’t talk to him like that.”
“Hey,” O-Bop says. “We’re all a little tense here.”
No shit, Peaches thinks. Locked up in this cabin in the barren hills north of the border for months with Adán Barrera’s mistress in the back room. The fucking cunt. “Mickey, I’m sorry I yelled at you, okay?” Peaches turns to Callan. “Okay?”
Callan doesn’t answer.
“I’m going to bring her tea in to her,” Mickey says.
“The fuck are you? The butler?” Peaches asks. He don’t want Mickey getting attached to this woman. Guys who’ve done heavy time are like that. They get sentimental, they get attached to any living thing that ain’t actually trying to kill or cornhole them—mice, birds. Peaches has seen old cons get weepy over a cockroach died of natural causes in the cell. “Let someone else do room service. Let O-Bop—he looks like a waiter. No, second thought, Callan, you do it.”
Callan knows what Peaches is thinking and says, “Why don’t you bring it in?”
“I asked you,” Peaches says.
“It’s getting cold,” Mickey says.
“No, you didn’t,” Callan says. “You didn’t ask, you said.”
“Mr. Callan,” Peaches says, “would you pretty-please bring the young lady her tea?”
Callan picks up the mug off the counter.
“God, the shit I have to go through,” Peaches says as Callan walks toward Nora’s room.
“Knock first,” Mickey says.
“She’s a whore,” Peaches says. “Nobody’s ever seen her naked, right?”
He walks outside onto the porch, looks out yet again at the moonlight shining on the barren hills and wonders how the fuck his life came to this. Babysitting a whore.
Callan comes out. “The fuck is your problem?”
“Barrera’s cunt,” Peaches says. “We’re just supposed to turn her over now? I should cut her fucking hands off, send her back to him.”
“She didn’t do nothin’ to you.”
“You just want to fuck her,” Peaches says. “Tell you what, let’s all do her.”
Callan nods slowly. “Hey, Jimmy? Start to touch her, I’ll put two between your eyes. Come to think, I should have done it years ago, first time I saw your fat ass.”
“You wanna dance, Irish, it ain’t too late.”
Mickey comes out on the porch and gets between them. “Knock it off, you two jerks. This is going to be over soon.”
No, Callan thinks.
It’s going to be over now.
He knows Peaches, knows the way he is. He gets something in his head, he’s going to do it, no matter what. And he knows how Peaches thinks—Barrera killed someone I loved, I kill someone he loves.
Callan goes inside, walks past O-Bop, knocks on Nora’s door and walks in. “Come on,” he says.
“Where are we going?” Nora asks.
“Come on,” Callan says. “Get your shoes on. We’re leaving.”
She’s puzzled by his attitude. He’s not being sweet, or shy. He’s angry, hard, bossing her around. She doesn’t like it, so she takes her time getting her shoes on, just to show him he’s not going to boss her around.
“Come on, hurry up.”
“Chill.”
“I’m ice,” Callan says. “Just get your ass in gear, all right?”
She stands up, glares at him. “What gear would you like it in?”
She’s shocked when he grabs her by the wrist and pulls her out. He’s being a typical asshole male, and she doesn’t like it.
“Hey!”
“I don’t have time to fuck around,” Callan says.
I just want to get this over with.
She tries to pull away but his grip is too strong so she has no choice but to follow him as he pulls her into the other room. “Stay right behind me.”
He pulls his .22 and holds it in front of him.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer, just pulls her into the main room.
“The fuck you doing?” Peaches asks.
“Leaving.”
Peaches reaches for the pistol tucked in his jacket pocket.
“Uh-uhn,” Callan says.
Peaches thinks better of it.
O-Bop whines, “Callan, what are you doing?” He starts to ease his hand toward a shotgun lying on the old couch.
“Don’t make me hurt you, Stevie,” Callan says. That would be too bad, seeing as how all this, all this, started with him trying to save O-Bop’s life. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”
O-Bop obviously decides he don’t want to be hurt, either, because his hand stays where it is.
“Have you considered this carefully?” Mickey asks him.
No, Callan thinks, I ain’t considered nothing carefully. Only that I’m not letting anybody kill this woman. He keeps himself in front of her and backs out the door, his gun trained on his old crew. “I see any of you, I kill you.”
“Hop on,” he tells her.
He gets on the bike.
“Hold on to my waist,” Callan says.
Good thing she does, because he rabbit-starts the bike and it shoots like a missile out of there, sending up a thick cloud of dust behind it. She holds on tighter when he steers onto a dirt track up a steep hill, the back wheel fishtailing around in the soft dirt. He stops the bike at the top of the hill, a shallow, dusty patch stripped bare by the fierce Santa Ana winds. Around it, nothing but thick chapparal.
He says, “Hold on.”
Then she feels herself falling.
Plunging down the hill in a free-fall.
Gunshots chase them.
Callan ignores them, concentrates on driving the bike.
Past the shack, past some cars, past the men who scramble behind the cars, then reach for guns, then duck as the lead splatters into glass, but she can barely see any of this, it’s a blur, and she can hardly hear the shots, the bullets zipping past her ears, the startled shouts. All she can really see now is the back of his helmet as she lays her head into his shoulder and holds on. It’s as if she’s in a wind tunnel, the force of the wind trying to rip her off the back of the bike, they’re going so fast, so fast, so fast.
Down this dirt road, it’s dark now, blackness closing in around her in this tunnel of speed. She’s knows now they’re running for their lives, racing toward their lives, throwing fate to the wind, faith to the wind, her faith on the back of t
his madman driving, the rough dirt road rattling her, bouncing her, suddenly they’re in the air, airborne, airborn, hurled at this speed into the night sky by a small bump. She’s flying, flying with him, the stars, the stars are beautiful, they’re going to crash, they’re going to die, their blood will pool on this dirt road, their common blood, she can feel her blood pumping, she can feel his, their blood coursing as it soars through the night sky, then they land, the bike tipping over out of control into a long skid. She holds on tight, she doesn’t want to die alone, she wants to die with him in this long slide to death, this long slow fast slide to oblivion, a moment of agony then nothing, then nothingness, then peace. She always thought you flew to heaven, but you fall, fall, fall, falling, she holds him, hugs him, embraces him, don’t let me die alone I don’t want to die alone and then he rights the bike, they’re up again, racing, the air is cool around her ears the leather warm against her skin, against her face. He takes a deep gulp of the cold air and she swears she hears herself laugh over the engine’s thunder—or is that her heart?—but she hears herself laugh and hears him laugh and then it’s suddenly smooth under the wheels, smooth and black as they hit asphalt, beautiful slick black American road, American highway.