by Shaun Harris
“We’re all agreed Thandy hired La Dónde, right?” Grady asked. “The bitch with the gun wasn’t lying, right?” He had been driving for over an hour in silence, his hands gripping the wheel at ten and two with white knuckles. The rest of us had spent the time catching each other up.
“Yes,” Digby said. He was somewhere near the end of my book, and he spoke as he read. “A man like Thandy prides himself on hiring the best. Samantha was not lying. La Dónde is looking for the suitcase.”
“I thought she was looking for you?” I said.
“She’s a multitasker,” Digby said.
“Who gives a shit,” Milch mumbled, poking his head out from under his jacket. He had been sleeping for most of the trip. I marveled at his ability to shut off his system like it had a switch. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure I would never sleep again. “I want to know why Samantha didn’t off us when we first showed up. Why did she go with the undercover shit?”
“I’ll tell you why,” I said. I had been working this problem out in my head since our escape, and I was happy to share my results. “Because we’re not the only part of the job. Thandy’s offering two hundred grand just for the suitcase. Samantha figures she can’t beat La Dónde the killer, but maybe she can beat La Dónde the treasure hunter, right? Levi said Chavez told that story all the time, right?”
“That’s what he said.”
“So Samantha probably heard about it. She decides to question Chavez, and he tells her to find the case you gotta go see Elmo.”
“But you gotta know somebody if you want to get in to see the wizard,” Grady said.
“Exactly. So she’s up shit’s creek. So what does she do? She figures she’ll wait to see if we show up. She makes Chavez pull a Lando Calrissian and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Still doesn’t explain why she didn’t kill us when we showed up,” Milch said.
“Because she didn’t have to,” I said. “She could afford to put on the act long enough to see what our next move was. When she found out we have an in with Elmo, she decided to make her move.”
“Dumb plan,” Milch said. “She couldn’t be sure Digby would cooperate. She should’ve just followed us.”
“She’s got competition,” I said. “La Dónde is after us, and the suitcase too. She couldn’t take the chance that La Dónde would say fuck the case and just kill us before we found it.”
“So what is our next move?”
“We go to Elmo’s,” Digby said. He cracked the back window, lit a cigarette, and slapped me on the chest like he’d just told a joke I didn’t laugh at hard enough. “You’ll be safe there.”
“You sure about that?” I said. Digby tipped his hat up with his thumb and squinted out the window.
“Mostly,” Digby said. “I have a plan. I’ll take you to the camp and then I’ll take the van and go.”
“You’re thinking she’ll go after you and not us,” Grady said.
“Hoping is more like it,” Digby said. He held up his hands, moving them like scales. “She’s gonna have to make a choice. Go after me or after you; for love or money.” He paused and added, “Actually more like for hate or money.”
“She hates you that much?” I said.
“She’s one of those women who tends to blow things out of proportion.”
“A drama queen who knows how to use a high-powered rifle. You know how to pick ’em, Digby,” Grady said.
“You’ll lay low at Elmo’s until it blows over,” Digby said.
“That could be never,” I said. “Thandy’s not going to give up on us or the suitcase. And what if he just sends people after us while she goes after Digby?” I asked. “He’s already hired two hitters. Why not more?”
“He’s not Lex Luthor,” Grady said. “How powerful do you think he is?”
“Thandy is a white rich southerner,” I said. “The classic motivations don’t apply with people like Thandy. Money, love, revenge, insanity—his pride is all four of them combined. It’s all a guy like him cares about. We hit him where he lives. He’ll hire an army if he can.”
“This isn’t a Tennessee Williams play,” Grady said, scratching his beard. “But, considering the shit we’ve been through, I’m beginning to think this suitcase isn’t worth it.”
“You want out?” Milch said, coming fully awake. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying Thandy’s pushed us out,” Grady said. “I got my pride and I got my money troubles, but neither of them are worth my life, you dig?”
“Unless Thandy calls off the hit, it won’t be up to you,” I said. “Right, Digby?”
Digby lit a new cigarette off the one in his mouth and flicked the old one out into the brush. “That’s about the size of it,” he said.
“And I’m telling you this Dixie fuck is not going to let this go. He wants to win,” I said. The embryo of a plan was gestating in my tired mind.
“So what do we do?” Grady asked.
I smiled and turned on the radio. There was nothing, but static so I turned it off again. “We play to lose,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Love, while having the power to spur revolution, is itself evolutionary. History has shown that man’s natural inclination is toward fear and hate, but it has also shown that Love can conquer both. Love destroys these loathsome ideals not through one glorious death stroke, but rather it filters them out through the charcoal of generations striving to be better than the one before.
The ones who live here do so with distilled souls.”
—Elmo Booth
The words had been carved into the rock with an artisan’s deft hand. The rock stood to the side of what we had been calling the road. It was a massive stone, its edges rounded smooth and the face polished to a reflective sheen. It was meant to mark the boundary of the camp, but it was more than that. Depending on who came upon it, the stone was a mass rock, threshold to sanctuary, anchor, or, simply, a line in the sand.
“Your friend’s a preacher?” Grady asked after reading the words through the windshield. Digby had stopped the van several yards from the rock and cut the engine.
“He is certainly that,” Digby said, rubbing the weariness from his eyes. “But think more Pale Rider than Pat Robertson. Stay in the car.”
He opened the door and held his hands above the headboard for a moment before getting out. He took a step, then another. The wind picked up and dust swirled in small tornadoes around his boots. He opened his coat, showing the holstered gun and belt for a moment, and then let it close again. He reached the stone and stood by it like a man standing on the edge of a deep canyon.
Even the landscape cowed to the rock and its boundary. The last fifteen miles had been a dust-strewn stretch of barren debris, another victim of the ejidos. We were facing east, the wind at our backs. The rock marked the beginning of a field of thick green grass spreading well out of our vision to the north and the south. The breeze blew over the lush blades, kneading them into waves that seemed to rise, crest, and crash against twin mesas about half a mile away, ascending from the sea like a couple of raging Poseidons. The sun was setting behind us and it bathed the mesas in a furnace of red. Despite the brilliant light there were still dark pockets of caves and crags, like aphotic blemishes on the mesas’ faces. I imagined nefarious men huddled in those hollows, plotting against us down here in the open desert.
Digby was staring at one of these caves in particular. He held his arms up over his head and crossed them, forming an X. After a moment he brought his left hand down, but held his right aloft with four fingers showing. A small cloud of dust puffed up between his feet, and half a second later we heard the corresponding rifle crack. Digby didn’t flinch. He didn’t even turn around. He waved us on and walked without waiting.
We climbed out of the van, groaning, grabbing our backs, and stretching our legs. As an afterthought I reached back under the front seat and grabbed the leather satchel containing the manuscript. I had to half jog to catch up
to Digby, who still had his eyes on the cave up in the mountain.
“What about the van?” I asked.
“We go on foot from here,” he said.
“And we just leave it there?” Grady called. He was behind us, walking, refusing to hustle. Milch was strolling next to him.
“It’s fine,” Digby said. His fingers, which had been floating over the tips of the tall grass, formed a gun and he pointed it at the top of the northern mesa. “Juan is watching it.”
We neared the camp and as the sunlight dwindled, bits of light bloomed all over the sides of the mesas. Some were the crimson hues of kindling fires, but there were a great many with the unmistakable amber glow of electricity. Digby sensed what was perplexing me and he pointed to the top of the flat peaks and said, “Solar panels.” Then I was suddenly aware of the humming that had grown steadily with each step we took. It must have been the generators.
“The whole place used to be an Apache stronghold,” Digby said casually. “You know Elmo’s great-great-grandfather was John Wilkes Booth.”
“Booth didn’t have any kids,” I said.
“Not before he killed Lincoln,” Digby said. I recognized the smile on his face. It was the I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin found most frequently on gossip artists, older siblings, and serial novelists. It was a pleasant shock; the Hotel Baja’s laconic handyman was in truth a fellow storyteller. “He had a few of them when he got to Mexico.”
“John Wilkes Booth died on the porch of a Virginia farmhouse,” Grady said, surprising me. He never struck me as a student of American history.
“That’s what they told you, huh?” Digby said, eyeing Grady over his shoulder. “They tell you Hemingway asked a guy to steal his own suitcase? They don’t always get the story right, do they?”
“To be honest, I never heard of Hemingway’s suitcase until someone tried to kill me over it,” Grady said. “But I think they do tend to get the big stories right. Don’t you think the army would have torn through the South looking for Booth if he’d survived?”
“Ever see The Outlaw Josey Wales?” Digby asked. “All those ex-confederates heading down to Mexico rather than surrender? Think they wouldn’t have taken the man who shot Lincoln with them? It’s not like they had an effective border patrol back then. They don’t even have one now.”
“I’m not saying he couldn’t have escaped. I’m saying he didn’t,” Grady said. “Who did they shoot in that barn?”
“I don’t know who they shot,” Digby said. “But I imagine it’s a good thing they shot someone. Guy like Booth running around could’ve ignited another rebellion. I imagine the higher-ups thought it better to end it right there and say he was dead. No TV back then. No Internet. Who was gonna say different?”
“Sounds like bullshit,” Grady growled. He picked a long blade of grass and stuck it between his teeth.
“There are eighteen sides to every story,” I said, trying to be helpful. “And they’re all bullshit. You believe it, Digby?”
“I believe Elmo believes it,” Digby said. “That’s more important than it being true. He tells me Booth and a bunch of former confederates escaped to Mexico and founded this camp. Their plan was to regroup and launch another uprising. They got sidetracked. The Monte can have that effect.”
“So this is a camp full of the-South-will-rise-again shit-kickers?” Grady said, throwing up his hands. “I put up with enough of that shit in New Orleans.”
“They gave up on that plan after Booth died. Instead, they made a good living wiping out the remaining Apaches in the Monte for the US and Mexican governments. They signed up with Pancho Villa for a while but were really just privateers working on horses instead of ships. Raided various towns, robbed banks, raped the women, that sort of thing.”
“They don’t sound like my kind of people,” I said.
“Mine neither,” Digby said. “It ain’t like that anymore. Control of the camp has been passed down to each generation of Booths. Elmo took over in the late sixties and changed everything. It started with taking in American draft dodgers, for a fee of course. After a while the racists and shit-kickers died out, sometimes Elmo helped them on their way. Now, it’s more like a halfway house for desperadoes tired of the way of the Monte. Trust me, I used to live here.”
“You’re a little young to be a draft dodger,” I said, reaching instinctively for my notebook.
“Like I said, it’s a place to go when you’re tired of the Monte,” he said. “I was tired of the Monte.”
We reached the mesas and walked between them until we were enveloped in darkness, the surrounding light somehow unable to reach us. I flipped open the cap on my lighter. Someone’s hand folded over it before I could flick the striker, and another one patted me on the shoulder. It was Digby.
“Shit, I thought Juan was screwin’ with me,” a voice said from the darkness. The sound bounced off the walls, making it unnervingly omnipresent. An orange light appeared to my right as if the rock had caught fire, but then the light became a straight, widening vertical line, and I realized it was a door sliding back. When it was open, I could see the start of a tunnel tall enough for a power forward to comfortably fit through, lit by small torches set into the walls. A set of stairs was carved into the rock just at the end of my vision.
A squat figure stepped into the light. He was backlit and mostly in shadow, but I could see it was a man wearing a scruffy Henley shirt and faded jeans. He tilted his head and absentmindedly scratched his elbow as he considered our crew.
“You gonna come up and see el Jefe, man?” the man said with a California drawl I had missed the first time.
“No, but give him my best,” Digby said. He stepped around me and reached out his hand. The other man took it and they shook once. Digby took the man by the elbow and led him away from us. They had a brief, muted huddle and Digby passed the man something, but it was difficult to see in the gloaming. He said loudly enough for us to hear, “For Elmo. I need to be out of here before Pieta shows up.”
“Smart,” the man said. “Ran into her a couple of months ago out on one of the farms. I mentioned your name and she got . . .” he paused, looking up at the stars starting to appear between the gap in the mesas. He looked back at us, and I could see the edge of his smile in the firelight. “. . . pissed.” He said this as if “pissed” had myriad connotations and that Pieta had exhibited every one of them.
“I expect she would,” Digby said. I heard his boots scrape in the sand as he turned around, then his steps echoing off the walls like tympani drums. “Good luck, boys,” he said. We watched him go, disappearing into the night, and I felt like a mountain climber clinging to my crampons, watching my Sherpa walk away into a blizzard.
The man he left us with turned and walked into the tunnel.
“I’m Dutch,” he said over his shoulder. His drawl pushed each word together like elephants walking trunk to tail, and his rhythm made each sentence sound like a punch line. “I’ll take you to el Jefe.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Despite the torches, it was cool inside the rock and I welcomed the relief from the heat outside. Dutch moved swiftly up the stairs, and we stumbled in the low light, trying to keep up. The stairs twisted and turned at random, often passing more tunnels with lights and strange sounds, some of them musical and others of the animal variety. My joints ached and my body begged for rest, but I didn’t dare stop. It was clear that if we lost Dutch, we would certainly never find our way out of here.
“Hey, Dutch, you know La Dónde?” I asked. Dutch looked over his shoulder and raised his hand with the palm down and shook it in the more-or-less gesture. “She ever miss? I mean, when someone hires her, is there any chance they don’t end up dead?”
“Pieta miss? Not that I know of,” Dutch said. “Unless the contractor calls off the hit. But that never happens.”
“What about Digby?” Grady said.
“Who?”
“The guy we were just with,” I said, and
remembered Digby’s penchant for aliases. “He goes by a lot of names, I guess.”
“Around here, he’s Sully,” Dutch said. “And Pieta didn’t miss. She let him go.”
“Why?”
“Matter of the heart,” Dutch said.
“Do you think she’ll go after him instead of us?” Grady asked.
“Maybe,” Dutch said. “It’s possible. Pieta’s hard to read on shit like that.”
“What’s her beef with Digby, I mean Sully?” Milch asked. Dutch stopped under a torch, and his features danced in a mix of shadow and light.
“It’s Pieta, so the answer’s both simple and complicated,” he said. He fished into his shirt pocket and came up with a fat, tightly wrapped joint. He wet the end with his lips and struck a match against the wall. After taking a long hit, he offered it to us. Only Grady refused. Dutch continued, “I ain’t the one to ask, not my place, but Pieta, she’s a passionate lady, even if she is a cold-blooded killer.”
“And she never misses,” Grady said, crossing his arms.
“Look, I ain’t the one to ask,” Dutch said. “I’m just in charge of the crops.”
“What crops?” I asked.
“I already said too much,” Dutch said.
“OK,” I said. “Just tell us what Digby did to her.”
“He was her casamentero,” Dutch said, the joint bobbing up and down on his lip as he spoke. “You know what that is? Good, so he got her jobs. She was a killer’s killer. I mean she didn’t give a fuck. Killed women and children. Heard one time she kidnapped and castrated the twelve-year-old son of one of the Cali cartel’s higher-ups just because he didn’t pay her on time. I mean she didn’t give a fuck.”
“So what happened?”
“Sully started to give a fuck.” The charred paper on the end of the joint touched Dutch’s lip, making him spit and jump. “I already said too much. Let’s get you boys up to see Elmo and get you a room. Pieta’s supposed to be on her way.”
The stairs ended and turned into a ramp. At the top we could see a rectangle of light, the outline of a door. There were drums, and as we neared the top the rhythm became familiar. Then there was a piano and finally the vocals. It was the Stones’ “I’m Not Signifying” playing on an old turntable.