by Sam Jones
“I’m just surprised anyone could survive a first date with you, let alone a marriage.”
“We only survived a couple of Christmases.”
“Who was she?”
The recalling of the sweet and sour memories was making Billy want to drink. But oddly enough, talks of unpleasant memories seemed infinitely more tolerable than the direr ones about to be made.
Talking nonsense was a pleasant distraction.
Maria leaned forward. She propped up her arm and rested her chin on her palm, waiting for his reply. She left him to his drink but held her gaze on him like she would a perp.
She asked him a question. She wanted an answer.
It was all a pleasant distraction for her as well.
“Her name was Elizabeth,” Billy said, finally caving, “but she went by Lizzy.”
“Went by?” Maria said. “Is she—?”
“No. She’s still around. Denver, last time I checked.”
“How long were you married?”
He had to think about it. “A year and a half,” he said. “I’m surprised it even went a month. Hell, even a week.”
“Just didn’t click, huh?”
“No, we clicked. I just…didn’t know when to shut up and went to speak up.”
“What do you mean?”
Billy thought about it. “I’m tough to be around sometimes,” he told her with a slight depletion in his tone.
“Well,” Maria said smugly, “that we all know.”
“I suck in social situations; let’s put it that way.”
“Example?”
Billy breathed in and thought of a specific memory. There were a few to choose from. All different contexts with the same end results. “Me and Lizzy were in LA,” he said. “We were at a party. Maybe thirty people. Some kind of…housewarming thing.”
“You said that like it hurt.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to describe it. I mean, I can sit in a room with a drug dealer and not feel phased in the slightest. But if you invite me to a potluck with a bunch of Average Joes…” His eyes went spacy, saturated with a guilt-ridden kind of glare. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just can’t do it. I can’t talk to people in a normal setting.”
Maria motioned around. “This doesn’t count?”
“A beer break in the middle of trying to not get killed by a good friend of mine? No, I wouldn’t call that normal.”
Maria snickered. “Why do you think you can’t handle a ‘normal’ social situation?”
“Because,” Billy said, “I’m always assuming the worst in people. I’m always on edge. When I’m not working, when I’m supposed to just function and go to the store and cook my dinner and go to a party, I’m still treating people like a suspect. I think everyone is being duplicitous. I just…I just can’t turn off my brain from thinking in that overly critical kind of way.
“Plus, I get twitchy. I can’t act like…I don’t know…myself.” He raised his bottle and swirled the contents like a scientist with a beaker full of liquid. “Lizzy got tired of it,” he said. “And I completely understood.”
Maria was torn. Part of her felt slightly fed up with these kinds of stories. She had heard enough hard-luck tales about cops and agents who lived on the edge: adrenaline junkies, thrill seekers, guys who wanted to pretend they were stuck in one of those cyclical “Eastwoodian” plots.
It was nothing new. It was nothing extraordinary. It was almost a worn-out narrative, really. But the other part of her felt invested in the story because Billy Reese seemed like a genuinely good guy. She could tell the guy operated with a significant amount of strife in his heart that drove him to do the things he did, to be the person that he was. She could see that Billy Reese was a man in pain, uncomfortable—and even unfamiliar—with his own identify, and he was trying to use that pain and confusion as best he could to prevent others from feeling the way that he did. And like Maria, he had chosen the path of being a force for good as a way to remedy that. It was just that his methods of approaching that crusade were a little…unorthodox.
But Maria knew, at the end of the day, that Billy Reese wasn’t a loose cannon. He wasn’t suicidal.
He was just frustrated as hell.
“What about you?” Billy asked her, turning the tables. “What makes Maria go tick-tick-tick?”
“I’m a lot easier than you,” she said.
“Do tell,” Billy said as he waited for the backstory.
Maria sat back in her chair. “I’m from LA. The Valley. I got good grades, I went to church, and I never pissed off my parents.”
Billy clapped his hands together. “No way,” he said. “You’re from LA? I’m from LA.”
“Seriously?”
“Big time. Where do you think I got this beauty?”
He pointed to his Eagle Rock High Phys. Ed shirt.
Maria held up her bottle in a toast. “Well, here’s to Eagle Rock then.”
“You didn’t finish your story,” Billy said. “It was already boring me, but please feel free to wrap it up.”
Maria smirked—Asshole.
“It was a boring story,” she said. “That’s why I decided to shake things up my first year of college.”
“If you joined a sorority, I swear to God…”
“I met a girl in class who was wearing a shirt from Paris.”
“Fascinating.”
“It inspired me.”
“To learn French?”
“No. To drop out of school and not tell anyone.”
Billy clutched his beer like a bucket of popcorn. “Continue…”
“I left the country,” Maria continued. “I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I didn’t tell them where I was. I didn’t tell them anything. No phone calls. No messages. Nothing. For an entire year I was a ghost. Parents put out missing posters and everything.”
“Where did you go? Paris?”
“Brazil.”
Billy was more than intrigued at the left turns the story had taken. “Why?” he asked her. “I mean, aside from men in banana thongs, why do you think you did it?”
Maria thought back on the memories. “I didn’t like who I was,” she said. “Before I ran away, I felt like I was a nobody. Just another denizen. I wanted to…I wanted to be someone else. Live in the streets. Scrape and lie to get by. So I did. And I was good at it, too.”
It was easy for Billy to piece together how Maria Delgado paved her own way to being a cop. Undercover, more specifically.
“Who recruited you into undercover work?” he asked.
“This man named Kelso,” she replied. “I met him in Brazil. He was working for the DEA. Good friends with my vice lieutenant. Anyway, one day he was staking out this politician with drug ties that had being targeted for a hit when he caught me picking some wealthy tourists’ pocket on the sidewalk outside an apartment they were running surveillance in. It was completely random. He just happened to be there. It was…fateful, the way I see it. I just happened to be there, on that day, and this guy, a cop, happens to catch me picking pockets. It was truly was the wrong place and the right time. Or vice versa, I’m not really sure.
“Anyway, Kelso catches me picking this guy’s pocket, he pulls me in, runs my name—my real name—and when he found out who I was and where I had come from, he asked why I was preferring to live on the fringes. I explained the situation, he offered me some advice, one thing lead to another, and before I know it…”
Maria gestured around—This is where I landed.
Billy pouted his lip out.
Maria mimicked his expression.
“What’s the draw for you?” he asked. “Being a cop?”
“Putting bad guys behind bars,” she said.
“That simple, huh?”
“I don’t like bad people. I relish in making sure I can get rid of as many of them as I possibly can. If that’s simple, then I’m glad it’s simple.”
“Nothing’s ever simple. You’ve been around long enough
to know that by now.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“North of forty, based on the crow’s-feet.”
Maria crumpled up the cloth napkin on the table and threw it at Billy.
“I’m kidding,” he said.
“I know…” she said, a twinkle in her eye. “But not everything has some deep psychological backstory, Billy. I’m just not one of those people. Some of us just want to do some good. I know who I am. I always have. I’m a confident person, and it hasn’t made me cocky in the slightest.”
“Sounds like it.”
“You’re a real button-pusher, you know that?”
Billy flexed his eyebrows and showed his teeth.
His ex had expressed the same sentiment to him on more than one occasion.
“Seriously, though,” he said to Maria. “Why do you do what you do? Everyone has a reason.”
“No one hurt me or anyone else I knew that forced some kind of imprint that led me to a life of law enforcement,” she said. “I’m just someone who likes locking up bad people and kicking the crap out of them if they try to fight me on the matter. Bad people suck, and they need to be dealt with. The end.”
“The end, huh?”
Maria tsked. “You’re getting at something.”
“The part where you ran away,” Billy said. “That was a big deal. This whole ‘feeling like a nobody’ thing means something. It means a lack of identity. It means that undercover work, pretending-to-be-other-people work, is the best solution to that kind of problem.”
“Oh, Billy,” she said. “I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong you are.”
“How so?”
“I found myself when I ran away. You didn’t take that into account. It changed everything.”
Billy said nothing.
“I’m a headstrong person, Reese,” Maria said with a notable amount of assuredness. “And not everyone is like you.”
Billy felt the sting. “Hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You use this job,” Maria said, “this way of living to cover for something. Kind of like how a comedian hides through humor to mask pain.”
“Please tell me that you’re not going to start in on that Pagliacci bit.”
“My point is that you’re running from something, something about yourself that you have a hard time staring in the face. Do yourself a favor—deal with it and move on. You keep projecting your condition on other people.”
“Condition?”
She leaned forward. Lowered her voice. “I think you’re scared of yourself. Scared of who you are, and that’s why you’re more comfortable pretending to be other people.”
Billy’s felt tightness around his throat.
He said nothing.
What the hell can I say?
I think she’s right.
He squinted.
Oh, man…
“I like you Billy,” Maria said. “You’re an acquired taste, but I like you. You’re an okay guy. And take comforting in knowing, like you said before, that we’re both a pair of walking clichés.”
“Walking clichés,” Billy said. “Indeed, indeed.”
She smiled.
He smiled.
Where have you been all my life?
She was smart. Capable. Had her shit on lockdown. If anything, Billy was just inspired—perhaps disconcerted—at the fact that she had more of her act together and he didn’t.
Billy Reese was good at what he did.
But he definitely had some wrinkles on his shirt that needed ironing out.
And he truly admired Maria.
In more ways than one…
He ordered a final pair of beers for both of them. Right before the bartender returned with a fresh pair of cold ones, a local had gotten coerced to the front of the bar where a man in a bolo placed an acoustic guitar in his hands. After some back and forth with a woman who appeared to be his girlfriend, the bartender had turned off the house speakers and the local with the long hair began doing a Spanish cover of Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”
And it was damn good.
Billy and Maria soaked in the music for about thirty seconds before raising their beers, clinking them together, and throwing them down their hatches.
“Last question,” Billy said. “And it has more to do with the job itself.”
Maria waited a beat. “All right,” she said approvingly.
Billy leaned forward, arms crossed, treating her like the perp.
“Do you like doing what you do?” he asked her. “Do you feel…accomplished?”
Maria thought about.
And thought about it…
It wasn’t something she had been asked before. It was something she never really consciously thought about before either, so she wasn’t quite sure how to answer.
She winked and picked up her beer. “Ask me again tomorrow,” she said to Billy as she took a cold swig.
Billy raised his beer in reply. “Fair enough.”
The longhaired local finished his cover of “Wonderful Tonight.” Everyone applauded, Maria and Billy included.
Then they fell silent, once again consumed by thoughts of the trek ahead of them. The risks. The uncertainties.
Kruger had already defeated them. Billy and Maria both understood that. Whatever was happening in Bogotá was going to proceed without any interference from either of them. Kruger putting the pressure on Billy to back off by hanging his own family over Billy’s head did the trick just fine in securing that victory, and whatever he was sending in to Bogotá would now arrive without a hitch in the plan. Kruger would collect his payday, and Billy Reese’s aim to figure out who, how, why, and when no longer mattered, because Kruger, essentially, had won.
The end.
Billy could only think of one way to describe the lethal cocktail of feelings brewing inside of him.
Sucky.
But none of that mattered now. All that was left was for Billy to save Heather and Tommy.
And how am I going to explain to Heather and Tommy that Skyes is (technically) still alive if I pull it off?
Hell if I know…
As for Maria, the way she saw it, the red-eyed man was all she had left. That girl, the one she was looking for could still be out there somewhere. She knew it was a strong chance she might be dead, but Maria had already come a long distance for her and felt she would be damned if she didn’t walk every inch necessary in bringing that girl justice.
She he knew that Mr. Thompson was the closest thing to finding her, to knowing the truth. She had questions, and it seemed that only that rat-eyed freak had the answers, and this time she wasn’t going to abide by the rules that came with her little gold shield to get what she needed.
Just like Billy.
This was a kamikaze operation. They weren’t fooling themselves into thinking otherwise. Whatever happened, whoever came out the victor, win or lose, live or die, Billy and Maria knew they would face consequences upon their (possible) return.
Both of them, though they were completely unaware of it, had the same exact thought at the same exact time regarding their predicament.
Screw it.
Maria, her eyes on the ocean and the sun dancing along the tide, asked Billy, “What do you think our chances of surviving this are?”
Billy tried to deduce the most honest and accurate prognosis.
“It’s an honest fifty-fifty,” he said. “We’ll go in slow, scope the location out, go from there. We’ve got no backup, and no one but each other. Other than that, the rest is up to God.”
“Seems to be a lot of God talk tonight,” Maria remarked.
“Is there?”
“Seems like it.”
Billy snickered. “Kind of fitting, don’t you think?”
Maria said nothing. She just continued to stare out at the water.
Then the man with the guitar started gesturing to a couple of men off to the side to join him. Moments later, three other men stood alongsid
e him on his little stage area with wind instruments in their hands: a pair of trumpets and a sax. The man with the guitar then said that these were his bandmates who had arrived late to the party, and now that they were here, it was time to throw a proper fiesta. He then started in on a cover from a group called The Champs, and their well known and semi-dated hit that had somehow managed to survive the decades, “Tequila.”
Billy didn’t even realize he was tapping his foot to the beat until Maria pointed it out.
“Hey,” he said, “I might start joining these people.”
Moments later, the bartender came up to the table. “Someone left this for you two,” he said in Spanish.
He placed a folded paper napkin down on the table. Billy scooped it up as Maria took a look around for any suspect characters.
Nothing.
She turned back to Billy. “We got it?”
He held up the napkin with a series of new coordinates. “Time to boogie.”
44
FIFTEEN MINUTES TO zero hour.
The sun was in the early stages of setting. Billy and Maria, the back of their necks burnt red from a couple of hours in the sun, found themselves turning off Federal Highway 3 and entering the foreboding vastness of the Sonora Desert, surrounded by nothing but a seemingly illimitable expanse of brown hills ripe with groupings of cacti, staghorns, and ironwoods. A stretch of jagged dirt road ahead of them snaked through the desert like a twisted yellow brick road, and they were flanked by mountains peppered with organ pipes and predators hiding out among the shadows.
Waiting for them.
Watching them.
Billy and Maria were drenched with sweat, Billy behind the wheel of the beat-up black Ford Granada licked with rust stains they bought on the cheap from a man in town, the kind of car meant for nothing more than a one-way ride to the scrap yard so it could be junked.
More than fitting.
The Granada was puttering out its dying breaths as they arrived just outside the coordinates Kruger had given them, Maria tracing their route with the map they picked up back in Playa Encanto on her lap and her Beretta at her side.
They had no backup, no contingency plan, and no way of knowing what was going to happen next. All they had was a belly full of rage, fully loaded weapons, and each other.
It was good enough for them.