by Неизвестный
“But why, Meg? Why?”
“I have to experience why they're depressed so I can help them. I have to remember depression, remember the inertia, remember. . . anyway, that's the reason.”
“That's not a reason, that's just an excuse.”
“Don't push on me, Laura!”
“So you're off your meds. You're drinking, you're getting high. Are you eating? Sleeping? I remember you once telling me that when you get manic, you don't do either.”
“I sleep an hour or two at a time. Today, I've been up all night. So far, I've had five double espressos, a six-pack of Coronas, some Cuervo Gold tequila shots, a flour tortilla, no, a corn tortilla, at least a dozen ibuprofens, five lines of coke, and three orgasms with some cowboy I met in a Catalina bar. My gut is roiling, I've got so much pure adrenaline pumping that I could damn near carry this horse instead of riding him.”
“So you're still in the manic phase. What's going to happen when it rolls downhill so fast you can't get away from the depression?”
“Look,” she pleaded, “don't ask, okay?”
“Meg. Just tell me why you're doing this?”
“Please, Laura. I can see you're concerned and probably worried. I don't watch myself in the mirror any more, so I'm probably a lot wilder-looking than I realize. I appreciate that you care, that you love me, that you want to help me. But I have to go through this. Even if I really don't understand why, I have to do it. Okay?”
“And why the guns?”
She pirouetted, flouncing up her blouse to show off the handgun in back.
“I killed somebody,” she said with a grin that stretched too wide. “Changed my life when I blew away Audrey Maxwell. Even got the same kind of shotgun. The Mossberg. I go places, Laura, I've just got to be packing.”
“Packing,” I said quietly.
“It means—”
“I know what it means. You used to hate guns. Hate what they did.”
“So now it's a love-hate thing. Give me some space with this, Laura. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said finally. I tried to hug her, but she squirmed out of my embrace.
As the girl panned her camera around my yard, I caught her face in profile. It was the teenager who'd come to the Vegas hotel.
“Who are they?” I said quietly to Meg.
“Emerine. Mother and daughter. The kid's name is Alex.”
She must have seen the strange look on my face.
“You recognize her?”
“And the mother?” I said, avoiding her question.
“Mari. She shoots video documentaries. Said she wanted to do something about illegal immigration, how it's affecting the ranchers down near the border. You know, those people that are getting overrun with immigrants stealing water and food. We've been riding near Sonoita and Patagonia, but she wants to go further south. I told her, no way we're going near the border. But she just started writing me another check, and every time I said no, she wrote a bigger check.”
“What kind of cancer?” I asked.
“Left breast. She's still got two more chemo treatments. When her hair fell out, the daughter shaved her own head. For support, she told me. To be with my mom. I think it's silly, but hey. . . what do I know? Never had a kid. Did you?”
“I thought you had a daughter. Loiza?”
“Oh. Yeah, well, she says she's really not my daughter. That's a whole other story, and I'm so not going to talk about it. That kid and her mother, they've paid me a ton of money for a ride tomorrow. She thought maybe you'd like to come along. That's why we're here today.”
“Come watch,” the woman inside shouted at us.
“Well, kid,” Meg said anxiously to me. “How's your day so far?”
The anchorwoman wasn't smiling, but you could tell she was excited by the story, that she was smiling inside at her chance to be at the center of the network action.
“This new videotape contains violent images,” she said. “You may not want to watch, especially if you have children watching with you.”
“No kids here,” the teenager said.
“Shut up, Alex. It's starting again.”
“I'll shut up, Mom, if you don't crank up the fucking volume again.”
“Mari,” Meg said to the woman. “You need to chill out here just a little bit.”
Mari shook her head so abruptly that her bandanna flew off her head again. She was totally cancer-patient bald but not in any way concerned about her appearance. The daughter knelt beside her and lovingly adjusted the scarf, then nestled into her mother's lap. Alex had a New York Mets baseball cap turned backward on what was obviously a shaved head Both wore identical Orvis khaki shorts, pale green tank tops, Nike sports bras, off-white calf-high socks and L.L. Bean hiking boots.
“They've got another tape,” Alex said excitedly. “Cool!”
A white placard with hand-lettered words appeared on the screen.
“This is Albanian,” the anchorwoman said in a voiceover. “Translated, it reads 'You want freedom?' ”
The four of us watched, silent, on edge.
Two naked bodies lay twisted on the desert floor. CNN's editors had created digital blurs over the women's faces, breasts, and genitals. Not entirely naked, I realized. Shreds of clothing clung to parts of the bodies. Bits of green, red, blue, yellow, perhaps part of a blouse, a skirt, jeans, a bra, but hard to identify as actual clothing. More like confetti pasted onto the bodies.
Not all confetti.
Both bodies had multiple scratches, bruises, wide patches of skin rasped totally off, bloody bits of confusion that CNN had not bothered to cover with their flickering digital blurs. Both women lay haphazard, arms and legs out at odd angles, one woman's head bent sideways at an impossible angle. Both had a rope tied around their ankles, the rope extending a few feet.
The camera panned one hundred and eighty degrees. Nothing but desert. The lens zoomed into a patch of jumping cholla cactus, and I realized that the women had been repeatedly dragged through the cactus patch.
I couldn't watch any more, but just at that moment the videotape ended abruptly. The two women's pictures again appeared.
Veraslava Divodic.
My eyes flicked quickly to the other photo.
Ileanna Fortescu, with raspberry hair.
“Please,” I said. “I don't want to watch this. I'm turning off the TV.”
“Not yet,” Mari said. “I'll explain.”
I cut my eyes to Meg. She stared down at her folded hands, her mouth pressed so tight her lips flattened out to a thin line.
Another lettered sign appeared.
“ 'Death,' ” the anchorwoman said. “ 'Death. That is your freedom!' ”
Without warning, the anchorwoman's face went into a fade, and an instant later we were watching a Toyota four-wheel-drive SUV roaring up a mountain road. Alex reached slowly toward the TV set and hit the Power button.
We sat in silence, all of us staring unfocused at the darkened screen.
I have crossed some strange, emotional border, I thought. I'm lost in a completely different country. Facts are so elusive that “truth” and “myth” crisscross from one moment to the next. I felt a touch on my shoulder.
“I'm sorry,” Mari said quietly. “I'm really sorry for bursting into your house and hijacking your television. Hijacking your quiet day.”
“It's okay.”
“No, it's not. But I get crazy from the chemo treatments. . . and I just kinda lose it if I'm excited. I heard the story on my transistor radio while we were horseback riding. I saw on my wireless PDA that a second videotape had been released. I asked Meg where we could find a television, and she said you lived close by.”
She shrugged in apology.
“Hey,” she said. “Whadya say, early tomorrow morning you come for a horse ride with us?”
“I've got another question,” I said.
“Okay.”
“A private question.”
“Honey,” Mari said to her daughter, �
��why don't you and Meg go outside?”
When they'd left, Mari started to say something, but Alex burst back through the screen door.
“You cool, Mom?”
“Yes. I'm fine, now that I'm out of the sun.”
“No. I mean, are you cool, are you feeling okay? Do you need me for anything?”
She sat at her mom's feet and they locked eyes, entered a private universe.
“I'm fine, Alex.”
“Okay. Then Meg is going to take me riding for a bit. Wants to teach me how to steer the horse. Or guide him. Whatever. Be gone for an hour. That okay?”
“Yes.”
Alex left. Mari studied me again, pulling off the scarf to scratch her head. She blinked as a wave of pain shuddered through her body. She held her eyes shut tight and began breathing deeply, rhythmically, until the pain subsided.
“Who is she?”
“My daughter.”
“Alex.”
“Alexandra. When she was born, I was in Egypt and was actually reading Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.”
“She told me her name was Kimberley.”
“One of her user names. She's Kimberly, Ashley, Amber, Lucianna, and a lot of other names I don't even remember. When I ask why she switches her name so much, she says 'Like, Mom, it's chat room stuff, LIKE, you never use your real name in there.' ”
“She's right,” I agreed. “Listen. You'd better tell me why you're here. Okay?”
“I'm going to freak you out,” she said, smiling weakly.
“Doesn't bother me,” I said. “The cancer, I mean.”
“Not that.”
I waited.
“What?” I finally said.
“Well. Okay, then. Here goes. I'm the package you've been waiting for.”
“The package,” I said, not understanding what she meant, and she saw it.
“Bobby Guinness. Said you'd get a package today.”
“So?”
“Well. I'm the package.”
“This is totally fucked,” I said. “I can't deal with all of this.”
“There's more.”
Oh, Jesus Christ, I thought. Goddamnit, just go away, woman, just leave me alone.
“I'm also Bobby Guinness.”
6
That's kinda weird, no?“
She got up and went into the kitchen. I heard her clinking through bottles in my refrigerator, and she returned with a Diet Coke. Zipping her fanny pack open, she took out a baggie and carefully selected five pills.
“Some days, I think I need the sugar more than the pills.”
I could see several Zuni fetishes in the baggie.
“What are those?”
She lined them up between us.
“Bear. Healing, curative powers. Owl. Carries prayers to the clouds, prayers for clouds, for rain, for blessings. This guy here, he's my favorite. Mountain lion, carved from amber. Safe journey. Successful journey. Here. Take him.”
“I can't do that,” I protested.
She pressed the small figure into my hands. Scarcely an inch and a half long, with carefully delineated paws, his tail looped over his back and down the left side. Small, pale blue turquoise eyes, and a turquoise heartline running across his left side.
“I've got three more like him. Take it. For your journey.”
“Okay. But. . . what journey?”
“Don't think real trips. More cosmic. Life's a journey. Enjoy the ride.”
“Life's a beach, and then you die.”
“Please,” she said. “I am dying.”
“I don't like talk like that.”
“It is what it is.”
“Why are you here?”
An upturned palm, eyes sideways, a slow smile. Lost in her world for a moment, but the smile faded as she locked eyes with mine.
“I don't understand all this,” I said.
“Simple. My cancer has metastasized.”
“How bad is it?”
“You don't want to know. And it doesn't matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“Well, sure, but I don't want to talk about it. Alex thinks I'm okay, because I told her that the mastectomy was successful. No cancer cells at the margins. There were cells everywhere. But she thinks I'm in remission, thinks I'm going to recover, and for now I want her to keep believing that. I'll tell her the truth, when I figure it's the right time. But forget that for a while, okay?”
“I just met you,” I said. “I'm hardly going to tell any of this to your daughter.”
“More important, you need to know, you need to trust that I'm really the person behind Bobby Guinness, behind all the scores we've pulled down this past year.”
She rubbed her right shoulder and grimaced.
“You got any pain pills?”
I jumped up like a marionette and she smiled.
“Not the cancer. I jammed my shoulder, getting off that damn beast out there.”
“Vicodin,” I said. “Percocet. OxyContin. Codeine number three.”
“Heavy duty,” she said.
“I fell off my horse a few months ago. Had some serious sprains, aggravated my arthritis. When I need it, I take a Vicodin.”
“Just some ibuprofen,” she said. “I can't take anything stronger. The chemotherapy treatments fuck me up so bad, if I take anything else I'm flat out of the world for a day or two.”
I brought her a bottle of generic ibuprofen and she swallowed four tablets.
“So? Do you trust me? Want to ask a few trick questions?”
“I believe you. Trust—that's another thing. I mean, what are you doing here? And who's that man I always talk with?”
“Donald Ralph,” she said with a smile. “That's a whole other story, how I hooked up with him. What you need to know is that this is my last score.”
“Jesus Christ, Mari. You're hitting me with waaaaaay too much stuff here.”
“I know. I know. But we've got to move quickly. Can you—can you just put aside questions about me, about the cancer? Just talk business? Like you were talking to Bobby instead of me?”
“Is Mari your real name?”
“Yes. I am really Mari Emerine. My husband, Dennis, was a helicopter pilot, killed in Desert Storm. I was in Desert Storm. An army captain. Intelligence. Electronic surveillance, digital recognition software, all that stuff.”
“Surveillance.”
“Actually, intelligence. Intel, for short. You've seen the live video. Satellite recon, laser-guided missiles and bombs. Totally useless in the real world. But the concept of intelligence, that's discipline. Alex can do anything with a computer. Better than you, maybe. But she has no discipline, no real skills, no real experience. I hear she found those hackers who were manipulating some of the Caribbean online gambling sites.”
“So I hear,” I said. “But I still don't understand much of this.”
“Almost done with my life story, all right?”
“Sure. But I've got to tell you, Mari. I don't think I want in on this contract.”
“Somehow,” she said, avoiding my comment, “somehow I picked up whatever weird cancerous stuff the US government sprayed during Desert Storm. Two years ago, when it was obvious the government wasn't going to acknowledge that it caused my cancer, I had to look for a way to make a lot of money. I set up my network, recruited people like you.”
“How did you find me?”
I had to know, you see, had to know how she found me.
“Anybody who does what you do leaves tracks.”
“Not me.”
“I'm here. Isn't that proof enough?”
Actually, it was devastating. If she could track me, anybody could. Against my will I started running through all the different identity kits I'd created, thinking it was time to move on and be somebody else.
“But I phased out everybody else. Now, they're all out of the loop. You're the best, and you're all I've got left.”
“Why me?”
“Why not? Wait. I've got
something for you.”
We went out to the horses. She pulled a envelope from a saddlebag and looked around my garden area.
“Can we sit in the sun?”
“It's ninety degrees. Can you tolerate the sun?”
“I need heat. Warms my bones, warms my blood.”
We sat in ancient lawn chairs next to an old wooden cable spool that Heather Aguilar had made into a table. She bent her head toward a creosote bush, got down on her hands and knees.
“What's this?” she asked, pointing at a round hole about an inch in diameter. “You got big ants around here?”
“Some kind of mouse.”
She poked a finger into the hole.
“Hey! It's closed up about two inches down.”
“They seal in humidity.”
“Cool!” she said with real excitement and curiosity. “What kind of mice?”
“Cactus mouse. Pocket mouse. Plain old house mouse.”
She sat at the table again, ripped open the envelope, took out four sheets of paper, and handed them to me, watching as I leafed quickly through them. They were financial records of what looked like the transfer of money from Mexican banks to places in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland.
“You want me to track this money?”
“For starters, yes. Here's some background. What do you know about the Zedillo government that got voted out in Mexico?”
“Nothing except who lost and who won.”
“Vicente Fox. He's trying to clean up a lot of corruption. Some of it related to government and military officials who embezzled money from their agency funds. Some of it related to police corruption, payoffs from smuggling drugs and people. My client is a private citizen. He just wants to get the money back.”
“He?”
“Why did you ask that?”
What's in a name? I thought. Anybody can be anybody.
“You're right,” she said. “A man contacted me originally, but the client could be anybody. Forget gender. Just look at the money trail.”
I ran my fingers down the pages.
“This in pesos? Dollars?”
“Dollars, pesos, francs, marks, Dutch guilders, some Asian currencies I can't even pronounce. I figure, rounded to top dollar, hundreds of millions. My client isn't asking to get it all back. Just what I can find. My fee is twenty percent of what they recover. No questions asked by the Mexican government. Can you trace these things?”