Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  “You’re making this up.”

  “No. The Shia are a violent group. You can’t imagine.” Saad tried not to blush. “It’s a dangerous situation, for sure. But, of course, I cannot do it from inside of a jail.”

  He didn’t see how an American federal agent could refuse this. What was one harmless Egyptian when put on the scale with an entire group of radical fundamentalists?

  “This cell is supported directly by the ayatollah.”

  “Khomeini? Guy in Iran?”

  “You are very well read, Tina.”

  She smiled. “You gotta give me something more solid, Saad. So far this is all pretty sketchy.”

  “They wish to purchase explosives and weapons.”

  “From you?”

  “Who else? I am told there is a man on the Marine base at Pendleton who can arrange for such things.”

  He watched her tense up. “Who?”

  “I knew you would be interested.”

  “I need a name.”

  “When I am released,” Saad said, annoyed that she didn’t understand the bargain.

  “No.” Tina stared at him, thinking, and Saad started to lose confidence. To make a good sale you never let the buyer think. “The cell is something you made up,” she said, as if reaching into his thoughts. “But the Pendleton thing is real.”

  Saad mumbled that he had no idea what she was implying. Women should not be asked to do these kinds of jobs.

  “You think you have access to military surplus. We’ve had rumors of a weapons black market for a while now. You were going to set up some poor Arab stiffs, but you know it wouldn’t stick unless there was actual hardware to change hands. You wouldn’t bring me over here if the Pendleton of it wasn’t real.”

  While Saad didn’t know what Tina was talking about, he felt confident he’d made progress.

  “This embark officer. Give me a name. Then we can talk.”

  “When I am released,” Saad said.

  “No.”

  Saad shrugged, bluffing. Tina got up to leave.

  “Albert.” Desperation made Saad blurt it out, and after he’d done so he worried that she’d ask him for a last name, which he didn’t know, but Tina just stood and looked at him for a long time, saying nothing, her eyes emptying as he waited.

  “All I have is this name,” Saad admitted, just to break the uncomfortable silence. “There. You have everything. I am at your mercy.”

  “You’re lying,” she said, finally. “You’re wrong.”

  Saad knew he could be. But about which part?

  —

  EMILIO, THE BODYGUARD, was watching a Mexican-league soccer game and clipping his toenails when Rose breezed past him, hands and fingers moving. He understood enough to know that she couldn’t find something, she was going outside to look for it. In the cars? His ten-year-old daughter had helped him learn a few of the deaf signs.

  Rose tended to glide through the house, her body so fluid, the slight vertigo she suffered causing her hips and shoulders to do a strange samba, all woman, and Emilio never tired of watching her. As long as he kept his eyes off her disfigurement, it was like an ever-giving gift from God. In and out of the room once, twice, and Emilio finally understood that she was searching for the experimental device his boss had brought home for her: a compact square polished silver microcassette player that, if she held it against her skull, under her ear, at the back of her jaw, allowed her feel the music that pulsed through it at a special frequency. She loved David Bowie.

  Emilio recalled the first week after Señor Nick brought the ruined woman home: the black rages, the shrieking, the bloody fingernail marks on Mahrez’s arms and neck. The only blessing was she couldn’t see herself, because they’d carefully removed every reflective surface before she returned. This went on for six, seven weeks, but slowly Nick had tamed her, rebuilt her, sculpted with his odd, relentless unconditional love a new world and new girl she could live in silence with and learn to love, too.

  It was slick work, Emilio thought. He himself probably would have romanced her until it became tedious, then sent her back to whatever cold, bleak, Scandinavian climate had spawned her.

  But Emilio was a practical man. Señor Stix Mahrez was a fantasist.

  A couple moments after Rose breezed through the room one more time, still signing and now vocally chirping about the device, he heard the security system chime, indicating an outside entry door that was opening, and she was going outside.

  Shit.

  “Señora Rose?”

  Of course, she couldn’t hear him.

  He heaved himself up, hoping Pachuca wouldn’t score while he was bringing the beautiful, broken diosa back inside.

  —

  HIS BORDER GROUND-BREAKING ceremony and photo op concluded, Mayor Richard Poole was shaking hands that his aide had strategically selected for him when a voice over his shoulder murmured, “You’ve been ducking my calls,” and Poole flinched. He finished a pleasantry he couldn’t even remember as he was saying it, and, still smiling professionally, pivoted into Nick Mahrez as if that was what he was expecting to do, next, all along.

  “You’ve left messages?” Poole’s lie was unconvincing. “Sorry, Nick. Gee. Dammit. My staff must be screening my—”

  “Grande Stix Mahrez! Hola, amigo!”—and there was Blanco, pushing imperiously through a restive, disappointed constituency hoping to glad-hand the mayor and buy a few seconds of his time to plead a cause; the Mexican’s big cold evil smile leered and his dead mirror Revo eyes fixed on Mahrez like a shark’s.

  “—Long time.”

  Mahrez said, “Not long enough.”

  Only Blanco’s chin registered the insult. Poole and his aide traded panicked looks for different reasons. The aide touched his watch. The mayor mimed helplessness and let his eyes drift back to worry about Mahrez as the Mexican talked shit; he wasn’t sure if his old friend recognized how much the world had changed.

  “Just the other day, I was asking, whatever happened to him? And then I remembered: Me! I happened! I took your business, yeah? You had to, what, go make like toys or something.” There was nothing but violence behind Blanco’s feigned good nature.

  “Surfboards.”

  “¿Qué?” Blanco tipped his Revos down for effect.

  “Surfboards was always my business, Juanito,” Mahrez said.

  Blanco winked. “Oh. Sí, sí. Of course. That and collecting melted whores.”

  “Your memory’s fuzzy.” Mahrez refused to be rattled by this thug. “Must be all the paint and glue you were huffing, between the fifty-cent blow jobs in La Zona, back in the day.”

  Blanco’s face flushed purple and his manner lost all its cheap bravado. Poole remembered how Vic had always pegged Blanco for success, even as he mocked him to his face for what Vic called Blanco’s “natural gifts of reptilian stupidity.” Mahrez never liked him, or trusted him, and thought that Blanco was the weakest link in their distribution chain, an unavoidable risk factor emboldened by his inexplicable ties to Gallardo, who gave Blanco carte blanche over the marijuana trade with Southern California, this peasant who could barely count to ten. Mahrez made Vic deal with him. Vic assured Poole it was like heeling a dog. And while Vic would return from Tijuana and Baja with fantastical tales of bacchanalian Cabo orgies, Mahrez was fairly convinced that Blanco had double-crossed Vic on a two-truck shipment of pot that got interdicted at the Mexicali border crossing, and which subsequently put Vic on a short list to be taken out by the Sinaloans.

  Poole pulled Mahrez away: “Would you excuse us, Señor?” They crossed the empty lot until Poole thought they were safely distant, and muttered, “Nice work. Christ on a cracker, Nick. Why don’t you just piss on him?”

  “You wouldn’t mind?” Mahrez made as if to start back toward Blanco, but the mayor grabbed his arm.

  “Enoug
h.”

  “What is a scumbag like Blanco even doing here? What has happened to you?” Mahrez had to ask, and Poole didn’t really know how to answer, except officially:

  “He’s part of their delegation, Tijuana sends who they want, I can’t—why are you so—”

  Mahrez cut him off. “Somebody tried to kill me, Dicky. Because word leaked that I came in to you wired. I guess the full story didn’t translate, the part where I warned you Feds were on your ass.”

  Poole had heard about the stabbing. “And you think I was the leak? Me?” He still couldn’t tell how much Mahrez actually knew, or what Vic might have told him in a stoned blear of candor, back when everything was boxes within boxes.

  The stubborn quilt of inland clouds scudded, horizon to horizon, blemishing a vault of turquoise sky. Mahrez said nothing, patient to see how Poole would react, and Poole’s eyes slid this way and that as people circled them, making eye contact, closing the distance on the mayor again with their endless agendas, and he had to have his mechanical politician’s reassuring smile in overdrive.

  “Tell me that you don’t know what Blanco does for a living.”

  “I’d be lying,” Poole said. “But I’m not stupid, Nick. He’s also a Mexican government official. Someday he could be useful. He found us some private foundation money for the center. And nobody of import over there is clean.”

  “The leak was you, or the Feds.” Mahrez kept his voice conversational. “And the Feds have too many reasons to keep me safe and happy, most of which relate to what they think I know about you.”

  A new silence not born of awkwardness. Poole felt an acid rise in his throat, the way it had in his office. He rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his shoulders to release some anxious tension. Blanco was still staring darkly at them from across the lot.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing,” Mahrez said. “Yet.” He walked away.

  Poole barked after him, more a hope than a warning, “Because you don’t know anything, man. You don’t.”

  Mahrez didn’t look back.

  —

  BY THE TIME EMILIO REACHED the open front door, Rose was halfway down the front walkway pavers. Two of the newly hired private security guys were up at the driveway entrance, standing sentry behind the electric gate, big handguns strapped to their hips, backs turned to the street, watching Rose make her way to the car just like any man should watch her, not so much wishing he could have her as appreciating, like Emilio, that such a thing, even sadly damaged, could exist.

  The Guatemalan called out, “Let me get it for you, Miss Rose,” and quickened to catch up with her because he knew she couldn’t hear him, but his feet were bare and the walkway was peppered with painful stubs of broken acorns from the huge evergreen oaks that overhung the house.

  She was in the driveway, threading awkwardly through the small fleet of cars to the newly detailed, gleaming 928, finally turning, looking back at Emilio, smiling, eyes alive, hands up, signing: It’s in the Porsche. Emilio glanced guiltily to the guards at the gate and hoped they wouldn’t say anything later; Señor Nick’s constant fear was that the men who had disfigured the girl would come back to finish the job, and that was why he insisted that Emilio never let her leave the house alone.

  The alarm on the Carrera chirped, and Rose had the driver’s-side door open before Emilio could finish gingerly navigating the walk, dust off his tender soles, and catch up with her.

  He touched her lightly. “Miss Rose, please, let me get it for you.”

  She ignored him, stubborn. Vocalizing and signing, “I can do it.” Climbing in, she reached down the front of the passenger seat and found her music box wedged against the seat frame. Holding it up:

  “See?”

  She climbed out again, using Emilio for leverage. Her hand was like a child’s. She brushed against him, angular and soft, flush with soap and cotton.

  She signed: Thank you, Emilio.

  He couldn’t help but smile at her. In another life, he thought wistfully, I’d have to make her turn her face. Once she found her balance and slipped past him, he closed the door, gently, and the car exploded in a fireball.

  7

  “I DON’T HAVE any illusions about what we’re doing. People get crushed, lives are destroyed.” Kirby tried to shake images of the long grim afternoon from his head.

  The smell.

  Mahrez’s face.

  Emergency personnel milled like an opera’s chorus, the driveway taped off. A hushed, dutiful, disorganized jitter of pointless efficiency had passed in front of Mahrez as he stood apart, numb, and watched from the front yard of his house. Arms folded and pressed against his chest, legs planted, motionless, he looked hollowed out. No one spoke with or approached him.

  Bottomless grief. Inconsolable.

  “But to use the guy like a ladder, set him up, hold him, and climb him to try and get up where you want . . .”

  C-4 explosives, military grade, had been rigged under the driver’s seat, primed when the door opened, to detonate when the door closed. The Guatemalan bodyguard was blown to pieces, practically vaporized. Rose had been tossed a hundred feet, but mercifully killed instantly by the concussive force of the bomb.

  Now, hours later, Kirby was at the window in Colter’s office considering the skewed geometric grids of downtown lights, his hands shoved in the pockets of another nice suit. He was wishing that the night would erase him. That he might go back and start over. But how far?

  Time travels in one direction. The eddy corkscrews, a maelstrom, counterclockwise.

  “I feel dirty and complicit and helpless and duped. We’re supposed to be the good guys. Or at least the smart guys. We—me—you—should be ashamed of ourselves. We should have given him and his girl protection.”

  Behind her desk, Colter swiveled back and forth, back and forth, in the chair that looked too big for her, sucking on a hard candy to complete the picture of the petulant precocious child; she leaned forward finally on hands folded as if to say grace and observed with a truly callous cold indifference that “Stix Mahrez is a drug dealer. Or was.” And then, pretending to be thoughtful, added, “Maybe it was God’s will.”

  Kirby just gazed out into America’s Finest Darkness.

  —

  THE FRACTURED FAST-FORWARD SHUFFLE through surveillance videotape from Stix Mahrez’s extensive security system went on and on. Multiple screens, multiple views: front door, back door, driveway, backyard, figures jerking and smearing through their day in fast motion, mundane, a scenario pathetic in its unremarkability, tragic in its failure to foreshadow the pandemonium and carnage soon to come.

  Dregs of morning coffee were congealing in the Krups carafe; the assorted pastries Kirby had brought reduced to crumbs.

  Having spent his night studying the tapes, one of Tina Z.’s colleagues, an agent they called JoJo, the local bureau’s security cam specialist who, as far as Tina knew, had never qualified for fieldwork because he was, in a word, obese, loomed over their shoulders, hers and Kirby’s, smelling of Egg McMuffin and unwashed chinos, and narrated, “Mahrez came home from jail about ten-thirty, he went out again, by himself, around three.”

  The visuals on all the screens had been captured in step-motion, at progressive ten-second intervals, meaning Mahrez presented as a streaking, blurring apparition, here, there, gone.

  “No deliveries, no visitors, except for the private security detail that showed up midday, and took instructions from the bodyguard, after which a team of two stayed on. But these guys—” JoJo punched a button and froze the screen: the Wash-Tech car detailing van had magically been conjured in the driveway. “This crew was already there in the morning when Mahrez came home from county lockup.”

  Tina Z. studied the image. Something (or someone) in it had begun to make her queasy, a bitter jolt of déjà vu. “Working on both cars. You g
ot a line on them?”

  “Not yet.” JoJo resumed the quick-scan. Images skittered past. Kirby leaned in and studied the video. Wash-Tech. Arriving. Attending the cars. Leaving. Tina tried to locate the source of her disquiet. It wasn’t just what Saad had said about Bert. This was something else.

  “Stop,” Kirby said. JoJo complied. “Now, can you enlarge that?”

  “It’ll get grainy.”

  “JoJo.”

  “Ho-kay.” Mouth breathing, adding a hint of sour institutional coffee to his fast food and pheromone array, the fat federal photo tech manipulated the image and magnified the frame for Kirby. Everything went soft and blurry as the VHS picture zoomed. On the back doors of the van, the small cursive hand-painted lettering was purely promotional; slanted looping dark letters that made for a smeary abstract in the enlargement, almost impossible to decipher. But after a moment, Kirby read it out aloud:

  “‘Another Courtesy Cleaning . . .’”

  And Tina finished for him, “‘. . . from Del Rio Motors.’”

  —

  THE PARKING LOT was deserted at the Stix Surfboards factory when Kirby’s car pulled up and ticked quiet. The leaden day pressed down, languid, viscous.

  Inside, the building was still literally lifeless when Kirby came through the front and into the main factory floor. It was a giant warehouse space containing God only knew how many hazardous chemicals, hopefully ventilated by an air-filtration system that was not presently in operation, with specialized stations for shaping, glassing, and finishing.

  Light-headed, Kirby wondered if he should be breathing the funk he felt lacquering his lungs.

  He walked past orphaned upright racks of snow-white foam blanks.