Mel walked to the kitchen door, with Jack still whining, and Rocky trailing behind her. “You better be goddamn sure about what you’re doing, because win or lose, I’m afraid you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
FORTY-TWO
America watched Danny put his sleeping bag in his truck.
Not the department’s truck, but his own: a dark ’91 Ford Bronco with tan trim and a tan camper shell that she’d gone with him to buy at Sandy Dean Auto. Sandy had bought it from Billy Glaspy, who owned the Three Forks Ranch. He’d used it for years to run around the acreage and hunt, and had lifted the tires and made a bunch of other small modifications that America didn’t fully understand. Danny had needed something of his own to drive after his motorcycle was destroyed by Jesse Earl, and he’d been happy to find the Bronco at a decent price, even though it was scratched and dented and weathered—like a lot of things around Murfee. He’d told her the truck reminded him of his dad, who’d owned one like it when he was a kid.
She knew why he was refusing to use his deputy truck, like he was refusing to wear his uniform shirt or his badge. Instead, he was in jeans and a faded black long-sleeve T-shirt from a band she did not know.
Nothing they were doing was about being the law anymore.
* * *
—
HE WOULDN’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER, and refused to let her and Fox Uno and Zita go out to Sheriff Cherry’s house alone.
Just like he’d stayed with them in her apartment, he wasn’t going to let them stay out there without him, although the sheriff himself hadn’t agreed to that yet. Danny had told her to get together whatever things she wanted and he’d drive them all over to the Far Six. They’d argued about it, but not much. If she didn’t let him go now, he’d show up out there anyway, and the sheriff would have no more luck turning him away than she’d had. He was frustrated, angry, not only because she’d disappeared with Fox Uno, but because he’d been wrong about him all along. He’d been so convinced that Fox Uno was lying, he still didn’t want to believe the voice she’d heard on the phone. The voice Fox Uno had introduced to her as Oso Ocho . . .
Gualterio . . . the same Gualterio Zita had talked about.
But in a way, Danny had been right all along, too: when she’d spoken to Gualterio, it had become clear just how little her uncle had revealed to him or anyone in Nemesio about where he was or his next moves. Fox Uno really had been hiding, biding his time, working out who he could still trust or who had already betrayed him, and his own uncertainty and fear gave her some real hope.
Because if he truly wasn’t in control of Nemesio anymore, he had to risk himself and make a deal with someone to help him get what he wanted, and now that someone also had to deal with her.
I get it. Secret words and names, like Rana and Araña and Diablo. Little boys playing silly games. But when I picked up Rodolfo’s phone and dialed it all those years ago, someone did answer . . .
Someone just like this Gualterio. Fox Uno might never have made that call on his own until she’d dragged him off into the desert with a gun to his head, but it had worked once before with the sicario Máximo, and she was willing to risk Fox Uno’s life and hers that it would work again.
She had no better idea than he did about who would show up, or what would happen when they did, but if they brought her mama along with them to get to him, she didn’t give a damn.
* * *
—
DANNY SAID, “I’ll go up and get the rest of your stuff, then I’ll drive you guys out there. Once you’re settled, I’m going to head back into town. I have a few things I need to take care of, and I’ll get back out to the Far Six later tonight or first thing in the morning. You guys should be fine for the one night.”
She wanted to ask him what he needed to take care of, but he was in no mood to share; no more than she’d shared with him her plan to take Fox Uno out to the desert. But it was more than that, like he’d come to some decision on his own, something serious he’d been turning over since her call with Gualterio. Whatever it was had been weighing on him, still was, but it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it with her. For all their closeness of the last few months, she’d opened a cut that would take a while to heal, if it ever truly did.
“We’ll be fine. Gualterio only knows that we’re here in Texas, somewhere near Murfee. He won’t know exactly where until my mama is safely over the border.”
Danny shook his head. “I think it’s insane to use the word ‘safe’ to describe any of this.” His face was shadowed by the juniper they were standing under, his eyes hollowed by a lack of sleep. She wanted to take him by the hand and walk him upstairs and put him back to bed, wondering when he—or any of them—would get a good night’s sleep again.
“Lo sé, but I have to try. I can’t explain . . .”
“That’s just it, Amé, even though I don’t understand, I’m the last person you have to explain it to. But maybe someday you will have to explain it to Melissa, and the sheriff’s baby son.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“No, no, you didn’t. But here we are, all the same. That’s how it works, and you were the one who first reminded me of that after I’d lost my way with the Earls.”
While they were talking, Zita appeared at the top of the stairs, framed by the apartment’s open door. She was wearing one of the new dresses America had bought her, pink and white, and her hair was down around her shoulders. She was watching them, tentative.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, smiling up at Zita, but talking to Danny. “I don’t want you to do this.” As she said it, she meant it as much as she’d ever meant anything, but not for any of the reasons he probably imagined. She’d been more than willing to risk Fox Uno’s life and her own, but not Danny’s.
Not like this, not for this.
But as Danny just said, here they were, all the same.
He smiled. Sad, resigned. A smile only faintly mirroring her own. “I know, but I won’t let you do this on your own. There’s nowhere else I can be.” He waved at Zita, and she waved back, as Fox Uno appeared next to her, one hand on her shoulder. Danny’s smile faded, and he turned away from them both.
“Time to go. Let’s get this over with.”
FORTY-THREE
They showed up in the morning, not long after dawn, in two separate cars.
The first was a gunmetal-gray Suburban with tinted windows, big tires, and an even bigger engine. Eddy could hear it rumbling outside his trailer as it practically rolled right up to his front door—damn near through it—its big hood nudging the wooden steps. It sat there idling as the second vehicle pulled alongside it: a black Charger with equally dark windows. Now, that was a damn beautiful car, and Eddy knew by its own deep-throated hum it was a Hemi, big sucker, fast enough to escape gravity if it had to. That black Charger drank the morning light, and if a car could look mean, that one sure did, like it’d whip your ass and steal your money and fuck your girlfriend.
Eddy didn’t want to go out and meet his visitors and possibly get shot in the face, so he watched them from behind his blinds, turning over his options. He didn’t recognize the four men getting out of the Suburban, but he knew the type: nice jeans, boots, baseball hats, rolled-up shirtsleeves revealing taut arms, a few tattoos here and there. They had mostly short haircuts, and they were all pulling identical black bags out of the Suburban.
Heavy black bags. Like body bags, like these jokers were headed off to war.
Soldiers.
Or more likely, cops.
He did recognize the lone man who got out of the Charger. Eddy had seen him only a couple of times in person, once here at the trailer, the other times at a shitty bar in Rosenfeld where neither of them would be known. At those two meetings, he hadn’t driven that Charger, but it was the same guy.
Same haircut, same sunglasses. Same goddamn matchsti
ck in his mouth.
Apache.
It had never occurred to him that Apache—the cold-blooded motherfucker who’d hired Eddy to meet his drug mules crossing the river—might be a cop. He’d always assumed he was just another cartel guy, a real narco, which was bad enough.
But if he was an honest-to-god, badge-carrying cop, that was infinitely worse.
* * *
—
THEY MADE THEMSELVES AT HOME, dumping their bags and checking every nook and cranny of his trailer. They told him to sit the fuck down in his ratty chair, not move an inch, and the one called Ortiz—slimmer than the others, with a high and tight crew cut—kept a gun trained on him. Eddy could practically smell the piss on this one, figuring he was the newest, or youngest. The guy didn’t want to look at him, not at all, and that worried Eddy even more—like if Eddy coughed, the guy might freak out and shoot him by accident. So he sat quietly with his hands in his lap, as if he’d been called to the principal’s office. That got Eddy thinking about how he’d never finished high school, and maybe if he had, his life could have been different.
Who the fuck am I kidding? It was freeing in a way—goddamn liberating—to know that no matter what choices he’d made, he was always going to end up truly fucked.
The others talked among themselves, and he quickly picked up their names: the old, grizzled dude was Chavez. The big motherfucker was Roman, big enough to unscrew your head with his bare hands. The quiet one with the fancy snakeskin boots was Ringo, and if Eddy had money to bet, he’d take the odds that Ringo had a knife slipped down in those pretty boots. He had dangerous eyes, like eyes you’d see on a shark or something. Not like the pussy, Ortiz, who looked like he wanted to cry.
After they all got done tearing through his shit and turning things over, they started to unpack their own bags.
Big-ass guns Eddy didn’t recognize. Bulletproof vests. Handheld radios and knives and helmets and all sorts of other police-looking stuff. He could make out the bare Velcro strips on their vests that once held the patches or badges of whatever unit or department they worked for. These sons of bitches were cops, every one of them, but they weren’t here for official business. Eddy figured it had to be about those weird messages Apache had sent him, and it probably ended with him dead and floating in the river behind his trailer like those damn wetbacks.
That’s why they didn’t give a shit if he saw their faces or knew their real names.
Eddy Rabbit was well and truly fucked.
* * *
—
APACHE WALKED HIM OUT BACK behind the trailer, while the others pulled the Suburban and the Charger near the salt cedar and giant cane, hiding them from the dirt road leading up to the front of the house. The rest of them sat around drinking beers they’d brought, while Apache nudged him on down toward the water itself, where Eddy had seen the bodies. The path was all trampled down and easy to follow, first from where all the mules with their backpacks had walked back and forth to the riverbank over the last few months, and then where he and Danny had chased each other. Eddy figured other people had walked there recently, too, when they’d finally pulled those dead wetbacks out of the water.
Apache offered him a beer, a warm Budweiser, and Eddy took it. He knew Apache’s real name now: Johnnie, or Johnnie Macho. He’d heard the others use both, and he was the real ringleader of this circus.
Charity used to wear a ratty old T-shirt all the time: This is my circus. These are my monkeys. Looking at Johnnie or Apache or whatever the hell he wanted to call himself over the top of the warm Bud, hearing the other men who were now lounging around his property loudly cracking jokes and laughing, that seemed about right.
“Nice to see you again, Eddy,” Johnnie said, sizing him up with a long stare.
“Look, if you’re here about that shit that went down, I didn’t say nothin’. Not a goddamn thing,” Eddy said. “See, it all started with my girl, Charity. She was shootin’ off her goddamn mouth and—”
Johnnie stopped him with a slap across the face. Slapping him like Eddy was his bitch. “No, Eddy, it’s not about that. I don’t give a shit about those dead mules. They were a fucking business expense, a write-off.” Johnnie took the unfinished beer from Eddy’s hand and tossed it into the water. Eddy had only gotten two deep swallows. “But you’ve been slow answering my messages.”
Eddy rubbed his jaw, although the slap hadn’t hurt much at all. “It’s not like that. I did answer ’em. You wanted to know if I’d seen some old Mexican in Murfee, and I told you that’s all Murfee is full up of.” Eddy waved at the river and the trailer. “Look at where the fuck I live. Do you think I’m just running into folks on the street out here?”
Johnnie laughed. “You’re being funny, I get it. But here’s the thing, our friends, these fucking Indians we both work for, don’t have a goddamn sense of humor. Not like me. Hell, I like a good joke. But they want this old man found, Eddy, like yesterday, and they’re more convinced than ever he’s here in the Big Bend, in Murfee. Possibly shacked up with a female deputy named America Reynosa. You know her?”
Eddy gave his own best bullshit grin, bracing to get slapped again. “I think I saw her when I got arrested, but you know, we didn’t really socialize. I’ve heard about her, from around, but that’s it.”
Johnnie chewed his matchstick. “You heard about her? ‘From around’? What the hell does that even mean?”
“Exactly. Exactly what I said. As you can imagine, since I got pinched, my dance card’s been a bit light.” Eddy figured he was going to get slapped around some more if he kept talking Johnnie around in circles, but fuck it. He pressed ahead. “You know, if you want, we can just take a drive up there to Murfee together and look for this old guy.”
“No . . . no. You’re a known felon, and I don’t need my face plastered around town, not with you.” Johnnie watched the water. “This old man probably is hiding in plain sight. I can see how parking his ass in the center of town, with a cop, makes a righteous kind of sense given the sort of people who want to get their hands on him. No, we’re just gonna hang out here with you for a few days until we figure out exactly where he is and what he’s up to. We gotta wait for a good moment to make our move, and trust me when I say our friends are hard at work finding that moment. Or making one happen.”
“You just gonna grab this guy? Then what?” Eddy thought about all the bags, the guns, spread across his trailer.
“That shit doesn’t concern you, amigo. Be glad we’re looking for him, and not you. It’s a good thing you didn’t run off after fucking up and getting arrested. I smoothed that over for you, but let’s be honest: we’re still gonna have a talk about it. Fortunately, it’s going to be a much different conversation than it could have been. Understand?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“So, your dance card just got filled up, Eddy. You’re going to be my eyes and ears, maybe my fucking tour guide, if I gotta find my way around this place. Jesus, don’t you people put signs up anywhere?”
“It’s the Big Bend. It’s supposed to be easy to get lost,” Eddy said, shrugging, turning his attention to the river, too. It was flat and still.
“Last time I saw you, Eddy, pardon my saying, but you looked like death warmed over. You’re looking a mite better now. You finally off that shit?”
“They had me locked up for a few days. It kinda flushed my system, and I was all out of stuff anyway. They took everything.” But that wasn’t true. He’d had his bag in the Admiral fridge, packed heavy with his stash, and he’d held on to it for two days, practically sleeping with it, before tossing it into the river they were now both staring at.
He’d kept Apache’s—Johnnie’s—phone, though. That’s what he should have thrown in the goddamn river.
“You don’t have any on you, do you? A little bump?” Eddy asked. “I sure could use it.”
Johnnie took his matchst
ick out and stared at the end of it, before slipping it back into his mouth. “Fuck no, I don’t do that shit. It fucks with your brain, Eddy, fucks it up good.” He tapped Eddy on the side of the head with a sharp finger, hard, and Eddy resisted the urge to pull back. “It’s gonna be fine, though. Once this is all over, it’s back to the usual. Even better. I think this old man is the competition, Eddy, and once he’s out of business, our friends are gonna have a goddamn monopoly around here. In fact, you’ll be the only store in town, practically one-stop shopping. Isn’t that what they used to call you? Fast Food, Take-Out, something squirrelly like that?”
“Nah,” Eddy said, “not so much anymore. That ain’t me.”
Johnnie flicked his match into the water and made another appear from somewhere, clenching it between his teeth. “Then smile, Eddy, you practically just got promoted to manager.”
* * *
—
I SMOOTHED THAT OVER FOR YOU, but let’s be honest: we’re still gonna have a talk about it.
Fortunately, it’s going to be a much different conversation than it could have been . . .
Later, when they tied Eddy to his chair—Ringo checking to make sure the restraints they’d made from his bedsheets were tight—Eddy wondered just how much worse that different conversation would have gone . . .
* * *
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