For a second, R.C. thought Negrito was going to pull the tape from his mouth so he could answer. Instead, Negrito’s head jerked around and he stared again into the darkness, his nostrils flaring as though he had caught a scent on the wind, the thumb of his right hand hooking over the butt of his holstered. 45. He walked up to the flat place and stood among the row of depressions, looking from one side of the hill to the other. “?Quien esta ahi? Somebody out there want to talk to me?” he said to the wind.
He waited in the silence, then returned to the rear of the car, glancing once behind him. He squatted down and ripped the tape from R.C.’s mouth. “I’m gonna ask you this question once, no second chances,” he said. “Be honest with me, I’m gonna be honest with you. You had somebody with you tonight? Or maybe you had somebody following you? ’Cause that’s the feeling I been having all night.”
R.C. tried to think. What was the right answer? “No,” he said.
“That’s the problem you gringos got. You’re always trying to figure out what kind of lie is gonna work, like right now you’re wondering how stupid is this Mexican man you got to deal with. I’m gonna be honest with you even if you ain’t been honest with me. You’re gonna have a bad night, man. You can cry, you can beg, you can pray, but only one thing is gonna happen to you, and there ain’t no way to change that. Don’t try to fight it. Tonight is gonna be a son of a bitch. Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe you’re gonna catch a break.”
“I’m not a narc,” R.C. said.
“Maybe, maybe not. But the people I sell you to are gonna find out.” Negrito stood up and opened one of the back doors of the car and returned with a shovel and a gas mask that had an extra-long breathing hose. “See this?” he said. “It’s your chance to live. You just got to have a lot of self-control and not let your thoughts take over your body.”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“It’s out of my hands, Tejano boy. I was just having a drink in the cantina. You came into the wrong place and put your nose in the wrong people’s business. Now you got to pay the price.”
“The other guy said to turn me loose.”
“You talking about Krill? He ain’t never gonna know what happened to you. Krill thinks he’s smart, but most of the time, his thoughts are in the next world, where he thinks his dead kids are.” Negrito brushed a piece of dirt off R.C.’s cheek with his thumb and smiled. “You’re a gringo cop who has a flat tire and ends up drinking in a whorehouse that has a bartender who works for La Familia? I hope in the morning you get a chance to tell these other guys that story. It’s a very good one, man. You got to tell them the joke about the golf course, too. They’re gonna really laugh.”
After Hackberry and Pam Tibbs left the bordello and got in the Cherokee, Pam remained silent for a long time. Then she started the engine and looked at him. “Where to?” she asked.
“Back to the cantina. That bartender was lying,” he said.
“I was a little worried in there.”
“About what?”
“When you cracked that guy in the mouth.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“I’ve never seen you like that.”
“I don’t like child molesters.”
“You told those two guys in the living room you’d blow their heads off. I could hear you breathing when you said it.”
“That’s because I meant it.”
“That’s what bothers me.”
“Let’s get on it, Pam,” he said.
On the way back to the cantina, Hackberry lowered the brim of his Stetson and shut his eyes, wanting to sleep for an eternity and forget the violence and cruelty and sordid behavior and human exploitation that seemed to become more and more visible in the world as he aged. According to the makers of myth and those who trafficked in cheap lies about human wisdom, the elderly saw goodness in the world that they had not been allowed to see in their youth. But Hackberry had found that the world was the world and it did not change because one happened to age. The same players were always there, regardless of the historical era, he thought, and the ones we heeded most were those who despoiled the earth and led us into wars and provided us with justification whenever we felt compelled to commit unconscionable acts against our fellow man. Maybe this wasn’t a good way to think, he told himself, but when you heard the clock ticking in your life, there was no worse disservice you could do to yourself than to entertain a lie. Death was bad only when you had to face it knowing that you had failed to live during the time allotted you, or that you had lied to yourself about the realities of the world or willingly listened to the lies of others.
He felt his body rock forward when Pam touched the brake in front of the cantina.
“Take it easy in there, okay?” she said.
“I wonder what kind of night R.C. is having,” Hackberry replied.
“You can really drive the nails.”
“If we mess up here, R.C. dies. Inside that stone building on the corner are men in uniform who would gladly work in an Iranian torture chamber for minimum wage. The meth being funneled through this town probably originates with a bunch down in the state of Michoacan. These are guys who make the cops in the stone building look like the College of Cardinals.”
She turned off the ignition and stared straight ahead, her hands resting on the wheel. “I wasn’t criticizing you back there. I just worry about you sometimes. You don’t handle regret very well.”
“The person who does is dead from the neck up.”
“One of these days I’ll learn to keep my counsel.”
“Watch my back. I don’t want those rurales coming through the front door and planting one in my ear.”
“R.C. is a tough kid. Give him some credit,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Put it in neutral, Hack.”
“Cover my back and lose the bromides.”
“You got it.”
Hackberry had already gotten out of the Jeep and crossed the sidewalk and entered the cantina before Pam had reached the curb. The bartender with the enormous swastika was stacking chairs on a table by the small dance floor in back. He grinned when he saw Hackberry. “Hey, amigo, you decided to come back and have dinner with me! Welcome once again. You brought the lady, too.”
“Who wouldn’t love a place like this? Excuse me just a second,” Hackberry said.
“What are you doin’, senor?”
“Not much. When I played baseball, I was a switch-hitter. I sometimes wonder if I still have it,” Hackberry said. He pulled a pool cue off the wall rack and grasped the thinly tapered end with both hands and whipped the heavy end across the bartender’s face. The cue splintered with the same hand-stinging crack as a baseball bat when it catches a ninety-mile-an-hour pitch at the wrong angle. The weighted end of the cue rocketed into the wall, and the bartender crashed over the table into the plastic-cased jukebox, blood pouring from his nose.
The bartender placed the flats of his hands on the floor and tried to straighten himself against the jukebox. Hackberry raised his right boot fifteen inches into the air and stomped it down into the bartender’s face. The man’s head pocked a hole the size of a grapefruit in the jukebox. “Where’s my deputy?” Hackberry said.
“I don’t know,” the bartender said.
“You want another one?” Hackberry said.
Three men at a table by the dance floor got up quickly and went out the back door. A fourth man emerged from the bathroom and looked at the scene taking place by the jukebox and followed them outside. Hackberry could hear a whirring sound in his head and behind him the sound of Pam Tibbs chewing gum rapidly, snapping it, her mouth open. “Hack, dial it down,” she said.
“No, Bernicio here wants to tell us where R.C. is. He just wants the appropriate motivation. Right, Bernicio? You have to explain to your friends why you cooperated with your gringo dinner guests.” He brought his boot down again.
“Oh, shit,” Pam said, her voice changing.
Hackbe
rry turned and saw two Mexican policemen in unpressed green uniforms come through the front door and walk the length of the bar. Both of them wore lacquered-billed caps and were short and dark-skinned. Both wore brass badges and shiny black name tags on their shirt pockets and semiautomatic pistols on their hips. One of them wore thick-soled military boots that were spit-shined into mirrors, the laces starched white. He had tucked the cuffs of his trousers into the boots, as a paratrooper might.
“?Quepasa, gringo?” asked the policeman with the shined boots.
Hackberry opened his badge holder and held it up for both policemen to see. “My deputy was kidnapped from this cantina. We were having a discussion with Bernicio as to my friend’s whereabouts. Thank you for your assistance.”
“Chinga tu madre. Tus credenciales valen mierda, hombre,” the policeman in shined boots said.
“My badge is worth shit? I should fuck my mother?” Hackberry said. “I’m not sure how I should interpret that.”
“Venga,” the policeman said, crooking two fingers.
“With respect, we’re not going anywhere with y’all except maybe to find my friend,” Hackberry said. He repeated himself in Spanish and then said in English and Spanish, “Right now we’re wasting time that we don’t have. My friend’s life is in jeopardy. The man on the floor is a criminal. You know that and so do I. We are all officers of the law, separated only by a few miles of geography. I ask your cooperation, and I say all these things to you out of respect for your office and the importance of your legal position in the community.”
“We are not interested in your evaluations of our community. You’re coming with me, gringo,” the policeman replied, this time in English, once again crooking two fingers. “You have no authority here, and you have assaulted an innocent man.”
“How’s this for authority, dickhead?” Pam Tibbs said, pulling her . 357 Magnum from her holster and aiming it with both hands at the policeman’s face.
“You are very unwise,” the policeman said.
“That’s right,” Pam replied. She cocked the hammer on her revolver with her thumb. “I have little judgment. That’s why I’m two seconds from flushing your grits.”
“Flushing? What do you mean, ‘flushing’?”
“Don’t test her, partner,” Hackberry said, surprised at the level of caution in his voice.
“No entiendo,” the policeman said.
Hackberry could feel a band of tension spreading along one side of his head. It was of a kind that he had experienced only a few times in his life. It stretched the blood veins along the scalp into knotted twine. You felt it seconds after hearing the spatter of small-arms fire, a sound that was as thin and sporadic and innocuous as the popping of Chinese firecrackers. Or you felt it when someone shouted out the word “Incoming!” Or when it wrapped itself around your head like piano wire as a monstrosity of a human being in a quilted coat slathered with mud on the front and mucus on the sleeves pulled back the bolt on a Soviet-manufactured burp gun and lifted the muzzle into your face.
Hackberry could smell the stagnant water and expectorated tobacco juice under the drain covers in the concrete floor, and the stale cigarette smoke in the air and the residual odor of dried sweat that seemed layered on every surface of the cantina. From the cribs in back, he could smell a stench that was like fish roe in the sun and human waste leaching from an open ditch. He could hear a drunk singing in one of the cribs in the alleyway. He could hear his own heartbeat starting to crescendo in his ears.
“She’ll kill you, buddy. Don’t lose your life over a man who wears the tattoo of a self-important fool on top of his head,” Hackberry said.
What followed was a phenomenon that Hackberry had seen perhaps no more than a dozen times in war and during his career as a lawman. Perhaps it could be called a vision of mortality. Or a moment when a person simply calculated his risk and evaluated what was to be lost or gained and then made his bet with full knowledge that his foot rested on the edge of the great precipice. Sometimes the heart-stopping pause that took place before the die was cast, when the filmstrip seemed to freeze inside the projector, dissolved into what Hackberry called “the blink.” The blink was not in the eyes but deep down in the soul, and the effect was immediate and as real as the brief twitch, like a rubber band snapping, that shuddered through the person’s face.
“I see nothing either exceptional or of value here,” the policeman with shined boots said. “This is not worthy of official attention. Serious men do not waste their time on situations such as this. Good evening to you, senor and senorita.”
With that, he and his companion walked out of the cantina and into the street.
Hackberry heard Pam release her breath and ease down the hammer on her revolver and return it to its holster. “I don’t want to ever relive that moment or even discuss it,” she said.
“Neither does Bernicio,” Hackberry said, looking down at the bartender. “Right?”
“Fuck you, man,” the bartender said.
Hackberry knelt on one knee, the splintered felt-tipped end of the pool cue still in his hand. He glanced at the front door to ensure that the policemen had not returned. He knew at some point they would try to back-shoot him and Pam in the street or call their friends to devise a means to get even for having their faces put in it by a woman. You didn’t shame a Mexican cop without running up a tab.
“You know where my deputy has been taken,” Hackberry said. “Not approximately but exactly. If you claim to not have this information, I will not believe you. The continuation of your life depends entirely upon your ability to convince me that you know where my friend is. Do you understand the implications of what I have told you?”
“No, I do not understand these things. Your words are mysterious and confusing. Why are you doing this to me?” the bartender said, blood glistening on his upper lip.
“Because you’re an evil man.”
“No, hombre, I am not evil. I’m a worker. I am part of the revolution.”
Hackberry placed his knee against the bartender’s chest and leaned forward and forced the shattered end of the pool cue over his teeth and into his mouth. “In five seconds I’m going to push this down your windpipe and out the side of your neck. Look into my face and tell me I won’t do it.”
He could feel Pam Tibbs’s hand clasp the top of his shoulder and squeeze. “Hack,” she said softly.
He paid no attention.
R.C. massaged his wrists, then picked up the shovel by his foot, as the man named Negrito had told him to do. The sky was black and hazed with dust, and the shooting stars above the hills looked like chips of dry ice that were melting into nothingness. R. C thought he heard a train whistle in the distance and the sound of boxcars with their brakes on sliding down an incline, the wheels shrieking against the rails.
“What are you waiting for, Tejano boy? Start digging,” Negrito said.
R.C.’s hands were propped on the shaft of the shovel, the worn, rounded, silvery tip an inch into the dirt. Strips of severed duct tape hung from his boots. He could feel his heart beating against his ribs and a line of sweat starting to run from each of his armpits. Negrito was squatted on a rise fifteen feet away, his 1911-model United States Army. 45 gripped casually on one knee, his fingers loose around the trigger guard, completely confident about the situation he had created. His leather hat hung on the back of his neck, the chin cord taut against his throat. He picked up a dirt clod and threw it at R.C.’s head.
“I’ve been kind to you,” he said. “Don’t abuse my charity. I’m not a nice man when I’m provoked.”
“I cain’t do it,” R.C. said.
“Si, puedes.”
“I ain’t. That’s what I meant to say.” Even to himself, R.C.’s voice seemed full of broken glass, his words thick, the worst fate he could imagine about to be realized only a few inches from where he stood.
“Meant to say what, Tejano boy?”
“I meant to say I ain’t gonna dig my own grave,
” R.C. replied. “And I ain’t no boy.”
“It don’t matter what I call you, man. You’re gonna dig.”
“No matter how it plays out, I ain’t gonna he’p you. No, sir, I won’t do it.”
“That’s what they all say. They buy a little time that way, and it makes them feel less bad about themselves. They want to believe their friends are gonna come over the rise and kill Negrito and take them home to their mothers and fathers and wives and husbands, but finally, they dig. You don’t got to feel bad about it.”
R.C. raised one foot and rested it on the top of the shovel blade, still gripping the shaft with both hands, his eyes stinging with sweat, a vinegary stench rising from his armpits. His heart felt as though it had been invaded by threadworms and was slowly being reduced to the point where it could no longer pump his blood.
“I make twenty-six thousand dollars a year. I break up domestic fights and run in drunks and wets and nickel-and-dime meth mules.”
“So?”
“Your friends won’t pay money for me.”
“You want me to shoot you, man?” Negrito raised the. 45 and pointed it at R.C. and playfully sighted down the barrel. “Ever see one of these hit a kneecap? Or a guy’s foot? I use hollow-points.”
R.C. swallowed. Each time the gun’s muzzle swung across his person, his colon constricted and his entrails turned to water.
“I’m gonna shoot you in a place that hurts like a son of a bitch, man,” Negrito said. “Then you’re going in the ground with all that pain while you try to breathe through the gas mask. Why you want to do that to yourself?”
R.C.’s head was spinning, bile rising from his stomach, his fear so great and his anger at himself and his despair so intense that he could feel himself walking through a door into a place where nothing mattered anymore. “I just remembered what you look like. I couldn’t think of it. But it’s real clear in my head now,” he said, breathing hard through his mouth.
“Why you always got to talk, man? You are like a woman, always talking, filling the air with sounds that grate on the ear.”
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