by Неизвестный
Rey avoided talking, ordering another burrito supreme, then a third Negra Modelo. I couldn't stand the silence any longer.
“What?” I said. “What's the problem?”
“You show up like this. No calls for months, I don't even know where you live, and boom, you just show up. I don't do well with surprises like that.”
“Would it be different if I was a client?”
“Client? For my SWAT training?”
“Not for that. For, say, protection.”
“Hey! Are you in trouble?”
“No. I need somebody to watch my back. Ever since Tigger died, I've never used anybody else. I get all my work through my computers, cell phones, mail drops. I don't meet clients any more. But tonight, I have to meet a client. I need somebody watching my back, doing surveillance, following the client when he leaves me.”
“That's why you came to see me?”
“You sound disappointed.”
He drained the beer bottle, seemed ready to order another, but checked himself.
“It's. . . it's hard for me, seeing you all of a sudden. I get all these weird feelings, I'm not sure what to think about you.”
“Hey,” I said lightly, “just because I'm here doesn't mean we're engaged.”
I thought he'd laugh, but his face screwed up even tighter for an instant and then shifted to a neutral expression, as though he'd decided to distance himself from me.
“Backup. Surveillance. I don't know, Laura. Hell, I don't even know if your name is still Laura.”
“Yes.”
“You've changed.”
“How?” I was surprised.
“You're so. . . confident. In charge. I remember you as a neurotic mess.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I remember you as not being much happy about your life.”
“Do I seem happy now?”
“Funny thing is, you do.”
“Look, Rey. I'm glad to see you.” I reached across the table and grabbed both his hands. “I knew where you were all these months. I knew you took your part of the money and bought that warehouse, started the SWAT school. I knew all of that. But when it came to letting you know where I was living, I couldn't allow that.”
“So where are you living?”
“Up near Sonoita. But I don't have time to talk about it. It's almost one o'clock. By three I've got to be set up in Tucson for the client meeting with a backup person in place. I've got my routines and I need to follow them, but I'm rusty.”
“Yeah. Well. I remember what happened to your last backup person.”
“That's a low shot.”
“I didn't mean it that way. About Tigger. I just. . . I don't know what you need me to do, that's all. But if you're asking for backup, that means it could be trouble.”
“Unlikely.” I thought about Tigger and sighed. “Possible. But unlikely.”
He lined up the three beer bottles side by side. Picking up one bottle, he slid another sideways, and shuffled their order like a three-card monte dealer. He rearranged them again, tops together at the center, bottles radiating out sixty degrees apart.
“I'm not being honest here. I'm not telling you what I'm feeling.”
“Jesus Christ, Rey. You never told me what you were feeling!”
“Well, things change. I've changed. You've changed. Here's the thing. You showing up here, you've jumpstarted all my memories about you. I don't know if I want that. I don't know if I want you in my life.”
“That's honest. Why?”
He shrugged and tried to balance one bottle on top of another.
“You see how many beers I've had in just twenty minutes? Three. I've been dealing with alcoholism for the past six months. I've been managing. Surviving.”
“You belong to AA?”
“That's a bunch of crap. Twelve steps, higher power, my ass. I'm the power over my own life. I manage. A beer a day, that's my survival rate. And look at me. I see you and I'm already three beers down.”
“Are you telling me you don't want to be there today?”
“Forget I brought it up. I'll be sober. Just tell me, what time's the meet.”
“Four-twenty.”
“Where?”
“The Desert Museum.”
He lined up his three beer bottles, chinking them with his spoon, nodding his head in time to the rhythm.
“Okay. I'll meet you in the parking lot at three. I've got a dark blue Jeep Wrangler, ragtop and roll bars.”
“What's your fee?”
“Jesus Christ, Laura. You think I'd do this for money?”
“It's strictly business,” I said with my best Al Pacino godfather imitation, and he finally smiled.
“Nothing personal?”
“Of course it's personal. I don't trust anybody else. I don't even know anybody else I'd trust as a backup, not since Tigger.”
“Okay. Tonight we'll handle the business end. I'll follow the client, give you the rundown on whatever I find out. You got particulars?”
“No idea who it is. Thanks, Rey.”
“One other thing. Nobody knows me by that name. I am Ramon Vargas.”
“Are you serious?”
“You taught me a lot, Laura. Maybe when we can work out how to talk about things, I'll tell you what's happened to me since I last saw you. But remember. To anybody, to everybody. You don't know where to find Rey Villaneuva.”
“Ramon Vargas. That's the Charlton Heston character.”
“Touch of Evil. You see the director's cut?”
“Rey. This is unreal.”
“Ramon.”
“Whatever.”
“No,” he insisted, almost tapping me on the chest he was so serious. “I've got my own devils about being somebody else. For a while. Okay?”
“Has this got anything to do with Meg?”
“How do you know that?”
“I guessed.”
“You're spooky, Laura. Yeah. It's kind of about Meg. And Amada.”
“Why did she change it from Loiza?”
“When Meg got—crazy—last month, when she got on this Columbine kick about depressed teenagers and went off her meds, Amada couldn't stand it any more and came to live with me.”
“Amada.”
“Loved one. That's what it means in Spanish.”
“I know. It's just a little strange. Changing her name and all.”
“That's her business,” Rey snapped. “We've both learned from you, Laura. Keep our lives private. Change our names. Just like you.”
Okay. My legacy. Convincing my friends to have secret identities.
“Four o'clock,” he said, standing up so quickly he jiggled the table and the beer bottles fell over and rolled off onto the dirt. “Let me get you back to your car, and I'll run those Pasadena cops extra ragged and tell 'em it was your idea.”
“Why Ramon Vargas?” I asked.
“I wanted to see what it was like,” he finally said.
“To be anonymous,” I said, knowing this was what he meant.
“Yeah. To be somebody you're not. I spent five months at my father's place drinking and shooting apart that screening on his porch. You remember that day we visited and he paid me no mind, just kept shooting holes in that screen? After I buried him, I must have worked through fifty boxes of cartridges, blasting that screen while I blasted my head with tequila. One day I shot clean through one of the main roof supports and the porch collapsed on my head. So I got sober, bought a new identity, and opened my business in Nogales. True story. Nobody knows who I am.”
“I do,” I said. “Except you've changed. You don't avoid talking about things. You don't throw me lines from some movie and leave me to figure out what you mean.”
He avoided my question, watching an old woman push a fruit and vegetable cart down the dusty street. The cart was almost empty except for a few limes and several dozen bruised plantains. The woman hesitated in front of us, her head tilting sideways at me. I caught her eyes and quickly look
ed away, but not quickly enough. She silently held five plantains in the palms of her gnarled, brown hands. Rey gave her several pesos and she started to push the cart away as she furtively glanced up and down the street.
“Cocaina?” she whispered. “Heroina?”
“Are you selling drugs?” I said, incredulous.
“Nieve? Chiva?”
Thinking we were buyers, she unfastened the straps of her skirt to display several cloth bags hanging underneath. Rey flicked a hand, urging her away.
“Arrestado,” he threatened.
“Carajo!”
With her curse, the woman spit at his feet and pushed her cart rapidly down the street. He laid the plantains on the cigarette-scarred tabletop, dusting his hands together, winding his fingers into knots.
“Yeah. Well. It is what it is. DeNiro says that to Pacino. In Heat.”
“So you haven't totally changed.”
“Except now I realize what I'm doing. It's like acting, this thing of mine. By being Ramon Vargas, instead of being myself, I get this weird freedom to say things I wouldn't. Is that how you feel when you use another name?”
“This whole conversation is weird,” I said. “What I really want to know is if Meg is going over the edge.”
“No. She's not. I had my really bad times, I got out of it okay. Now it's her turn. But she's going to be okay. Just give her some time.”
“You've both changed. How did that happen?”
He rubbed his temples, hard, first with his fingers and then actually pressing his knuckles so tight against his skin that when he took his hands away he left whitened dimples on his darkened skin.
“The simple answer is Columbine High School. But, really, Meg's been sheltering abused women for almost ten years. She now has safe houses all over Arizona, and more and more of the women showing up there are illegals. Undocumented workers, that's the politically correct new term. And most of these women are incredibly depressed, even though they've just been offered freedom from abuse. I guess Meg felt she could help them even more if she just understood why they were so depressed.”
“And the guns?” I asked. “A year ago she had such a horror of gun violence.”
“She killed a woman, Laura. The killings at Columbine just set off an explosion in her head. She had killed, she was alive, and she felt enormously guilty. It's ironic, no? I stopped using guns, she started.”
“Except you teach people to kill.”
“Only because it saves lives,” he insisted.
Kill to save lives.
A paradox of our times, I thought. Life is short enough, but if you kill somebody quickly, you grant longer lives to others.
9
Rey leaned against the left side of his Wrangler, put his hands straight out onto the hood, and started what looked like bench presses in reverse. His body rigidly straight, he lowered himself slowly to within an inch of the hood and held himself there for thirty seconds, pushed himself vertical, and repeated the whole routine.
I watched him for ten minutes and couldn't stand it any more. Parked three rows away, I slammed my pickup door hard, the sound like a pistol shot. A family of five, getting out of a van thirty feet away, looked abruptly around the parking lot, the woman with a hand to her mouth, looking anxious. Rey finished his last pushoff and waited for me to join him.
Diamond-lensed sunglasses covered his eyes. The sunglass temples didn't go above his ears but were positioned higher on his head, on either side of an Arizona Cardinals gimme cap. He wore a light blue tank top tucked neatly into unpressed khaki Docker slacks. The tank tops straps were extra wide, about two inches, and I wondered if he'd had it specially made. Everything fit tight against his body.
His hair had just been restyled in a fade cut. Razored almost to the skin, from neck to an inch or so above his ears, then cut progressively longer until the inch-and-a-half top hairs. I couldn't remember his hair being totally black and wondered if he dyed it. He extended his arms out from his sides and turned completely around.
“I hope you didn't want firepower,” he said.
“No. Not really.”
“Good. I don't shoot guns any more. What's the drill?”
I wanted to ask why a paint gun was different than a Glock, but I thought I'd better let that one slide, not knowing what he'd been through in the past eleven months to deal with his explosive tendency to solve problems with violence. His voice was pitched lower, his tones more neutral than when we'd spoken a few hours earlier.
“What's the drill?” he repeated.
Okay, I thought, for now we'll play it just like a business agreement. I took out my equipment toolboxes from the back of the crewcab. I gave him a cell phone, a belt holster, and a plug-in wire for microphone and earpiece.
“Do you have a shirt? A jacket?”
“Why?”
“I don't want people to notice how wired up you are.”
He took a canvas jacket from the Wrangler backseat and shrugged it on. Once he'd rigged the holster on his belt, I helped him adjust the wire, but he immediately took the whole thing off.
“Too hot, too unnatural, wearing this jacket. Besides, if this place is anything like the world, half the people in there will be talking on cell phones.”
I spread a map of the Desert Museum on top of the Wrangler's hood and pointed to the Desert Walk in the far eastern section of the property.
“It's getting near closing time. Not too many people will be out this way, but there'll still be a lot of visitors, so you can mingle in anywhere.”
I unslung my Nikon camera bag.
“You know how to use this?”
“Nikon F5. Autofocus, rapid shutter. Long lens. You got plenty of film?”
“Four rolls of thirty-six exposures. Should be enough. And here, take this.”
I unslung the binocular case from my other shoulder. He nodded in admiration.
“Ten by forty-two. Birding glass. I'll just be another turista, que no.”
“Exactly.”
“So what does this client look like?”
“No idea. So you'll have to pick him up when I start the meet. When it gets near the meet time, I'll call your cell phone from mine. When the meet's over, you follow him out to the parking lot, get pictures of the vehicle, then follow him.”
Following the Desert Museum map, I wandered to the far end of the highlands trail and sat on a rustic oak bench across from the bear enclosure. With the waterfall adding background noise, I figured it was the easiest spot to avoid anybody listening without getting so close I'd notice them. Fastening my cell phone microphone cord, I couldn't help looking about to see where Rey was located.
I punched in the numbers of his phone and hit talk.
“Yes,” he said immediately.
“You've got me?”
“Yes.”
“Camera ready? You've glassed me with the binoculars?”
“Just get it on,” he said shortly. “I'm going to start talking to my girlfriend.”
“Don't make another call, Rey. Stay with me.”
“Jesus, Laura. There's no girlfriend. But I'm standing here with this phone to my ear. I've got to make up some kind of conversation. Just don't pay attention.”
“Where are you?”
“Twenty away. Around the curve, in front of the Mexican gray wolves.”
“Stay out of sight.”
“So are they.”
“Say what?”
“The wolves. A dozen people standing here to see those wolves, but they're holed up in back. Probably sleeping. Fine thing. Here I've lived in Mexico half my life, spent months in the desert, never seen a wolf.”
I took out my earpiece, spread the Desert Museum map on my knees, and looked at my watch. 4:19.
A young couple strolled by the bear enclosure. They walked slowly, hand in hand, toward me. I jammed the earpiece into my left ear.
“Rey. Heads up.”
“I see them.”
They were young, maybe mid
to late-twenties, both wearing faded denim jeans and tee-shirts. The front of his tee had a graphic of a two-door lowrider coupe painted a vivid cranberry with lots of yellow pinstriped patterns. When he turned for a moment, I read the back of the shirt, which said 82 olds cutlass. Her yellow tee had nothing on it. She wore it over her jeans with a Navajo silver concho belt tied loosely around her waist. A soft leather purse hung from a strap over her left shoulder She was extraordinarily beautiful.
They ambled along the path, looking around. She was cool and ignored me. He couldn't. Standing finally at the edge of the bench, she swiveled slowly in a complete circle, looking to see who else was around. Since it was only a half-hour before closing, visitors were walking away from us to the exits.
“Who are you?” she said without looking at me.
“Call me whatever you want. It really doesn't matter.”
“I shall call you. . . Ishmael.”
She spoke with an obvious European accent, but she looked Hispanic.
“Ishmaela,” she said with a smile. “You've read Moby Dick?”
“I saw the movie,” I said. “And who are you?”
“Another Ishmaela,” she said wistfully as she sat next to me. “Luis. Can you go back over to find the wolf?”
“You'll be all right?”
“Luis, it's only thirty feet away. Yes. I'll be all right.”
He left us alone. She avoided looking at me, and a line of sweat came down just outside her left eye. She wiped it away with a quick, nervous gesture. Looking me in the face, she frowned at the wire that ran from my earpiece.
“Oh, Mary and Joseph,” she said. “Please, please tell me that you're not a cop.”
“Just a cell phone.”
“Cops use cell phones. I'm leaving.”
“No, no. It's connected to my backup man, okay?”
“I don't trust you.”
“I don't trust you either. But here we are.”
She looked down and to the left. Her lips moved slightly as she thought things through for herself, then she looked up.
“Okay,” she said.
“This is a weird moment for both of us. So take a few breaths, look me over all you want for a minute or two, then tell me what you want from me. You're a potential client. That's all I care about.”