“It don’t have to be a joint with ice cubes in the urinal,” Shelby assured him. “Jist so it’s clean and they ain’t feedin us Mexican roadrunners and sayin it’s rabbit.”
“We find good place. I ask Soltero.”
“I’m gonna feel a lot better about meetin up with that dude when I got my little twenny-five-caliber pal in my boot,” Shelby said, and headed for the locker room, leaving Abel outside to chat with the overtime haulers.
After making sure no one was in the room Shelby unlocked the metal locker and reached up to the top shelf for the derringer, formerly owned by a Green Earth employee who’d been murdered by persons unknown in the Los Angeles riot during a visit to his aunt. When it had come time to clean out the dead man’s locker and gather up his belongings, Shelby had taken the opportunity to steal the derringer, which was the only thing the hauler had that was worth stealing.
When Shelby came back out to the yard he whistled for Abel, and while they walked toward Abel’s Chevy, Shelby said, “On’y thing that dead nigger did right was leave his derringer behind. Never yet met one a them North American porch monkeys that didn’t have a hideout gun handy.”
“We go to T.J. now?” Abel asked, hoping the ox had enough meth to last him. He didn’t want to buy drugs in Tijuana.
“We’re outta here, dude,” Shelby Pate said.
“Hold it!” Bobbie said, as Nell was getting ready to pull into the parking lot at Green Earth Hauling and Disposal.
“What is it?” Fin asked.
“That Chevy that pulled out down the block there? Follow that car!” Bobbie said.
Nell said, “Where’d you see that movie? Follow that car?”
“It’s them!” Bobbie said. “Pate and Durazo!”
“How can you tell from here?” Nell asked, but she accelerated and followed the brown Chevrolet.
“You sure?” Fin asked, as the car turned west toward I-5.
“I got twenty-fifteen eyesight,” Bobbie said.
“Trust her,” Fin said to Nell, and his head got jerked backward when Nell floored the Audi.
“Hey!” he said.
“Trust me,” Nell said. “I’m driving.”
After Nell got her temper and the Audi under control, Bobbie said, “Can I make a suggestion? How about we don’t stop them. Let’s see where they go.”
“You’re thinking of the shoes,” Fin said.
“Two thousand pairs. They’re worth a lot to the navy. Those dudes might lead us right to them.”
“They’re probably just going to some beer joint,” Nell said. “Following them is a waste of … oh-oh!”
Abel Durazo’s Chevrolet turned onto the freeway, heading south toward Mexico.
Nell had to hit the brakes when a Lexus cut her off at the on-ramp. “Bastard!” she said, then zoomed up to his bumper.
“You always drive like this?” Fin wanted to know.
The fact was, she didn’t. She was a careful driver, proud of the fact that she’d never been in an accident, not even as a cop. Nell realized how unreasonably steamed she was. She was not going to let this neurotic actor and this child do this to her, so she slowed down.
Abel Durazo’s brown Chevrolet was five minutes from the international border when Nell got close again. “I don’t think this is smart,” Nell said.
“Please, Nell!” Bobbie said. “Let’s tail ’em across. They gotta be going straight to the guy that fenced the shoes.”
Fin said, “This isn’t like in San Diego, Bobbie. It’s not possible to ring up the local constabulary and say come arrest our suspects and confiscate our shoes. That’s another country.”
“This is the point of no return,” Nell warned when she got to the last turnoff on I-5 south.
“Go for it, Nell!” Bobbie pleaded.
“I say that’s a good call,” Fin said, and Nell saw him aim another one of those simpering smiles at Bobbie.
“Good call,” Nell muttered, dropping behind a Toyota Corolla that was in the same lane as Abel Durazo’s Chevy, just as it crossed the international line.
The instant they were on Mexican soil, Shelby reached down inside his left boot and withdrew a bindle of meth. Abel glanced over nervously when the ox unfolded the paper and snorted the meth into both nostrils. Then he licked the paper.
“Wanna try some cringe?” Shelby asked.
“No, I don’ wan’ that stuff. Leetle marijuana good for you. No’ that speed. Bad, ‘mano.”
“Thing it does for me is, it makes me harder than a tax return. I could do the Sisters of Mary or the whole Mustang Ranch when I got some go-fast in me. So you better find us some babes tonight.”
“I try,” Abel said.
“It’s my old lady’s fault,” Shelby said. “That bitch could douche with battery acid and never feel it. Cold. She’s cold, man. She says she wants a baby! I says to her, ‘You’d end up with a frozen fetus.’ A womb or a tomb, in her case it’s all the same thing. She’s cold.”
Abel Durazo looked at his watch and said, “We going to park down by Frontón where they play the jai alai. We going to walk for leetle while. We going to be late.”
“Why?”
“I wan’ Soltero to wait. Let heem wait teel seex o’clock. We eemportant peoples too.”
Shelby was feeling the methamphetamine rush. He grinned and said, “You may end up bein glad I brought my little chrome-plated pal along.”
“Be careful, Buey. We een Mexico.”
“You don’t hafta remind me,” said the ox.
He looked with trepidation at the lanes of cars crawling along beside them, all heading into the center, some for a Saturday night on the town. Many of the Mexican cars had religious medals or good-luck amulets or rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirrors. This troubled Shelby. He didn’t want to admit it to Abel, but all those dangling charms and trinkets and religious symbols bothered him.
“Voodoo,” he finally said.
“Huh?”
“All that fuckin shit hangin from the mirrors. Like voodoo, dude. My bitch is a Catholic and she wears a medal and talks about Holy Ghosts and all that voodoo shit.”
In that Abel didn’t understand the ox most of the time, he just shrugged and smiled.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve driven to T.J. without buying Mexican car insurance,” Nell said.
“Most U.S. policies cover you twenty-five miles from the border,” Fin said.
“If something happens to this car …”
“It sure is a nice car,” Bobbie said. “For a while there everybody thought Audis were like Christine in the Stephen King movie. The car from hell that took off when you stepped on the brake.”
After Nell drove across the Tijuana River, Fin said, “They’re turning down Avenida Revolución.”
“Predictable,” Nell said with disgust. “They’re not going to see their fence. They’re going to a skin joint for a cheap night out.”
“We’ve come this far,” Bobbie said. “We can’t give up.”
Abel drove down Avenida Revolución and parked by the Palacio Frontón, the Tijuana landmark where jai alai players from Spain and Cuba join the Mexicans in the art of hurling hard rubber balls from wicker baskets lashed to their wrists. The Palacio was huge, with Moorish arches and a fountain in front near a statue of a jai alai player leaping in the air.
Abel had once tried explaining the game to the ox, but Shelby was a lot less interested in hearing about a goat-skin sphere that travels 180 m.p.h., than he was in knowing that he could wager on the men, like they were horses or greyhounds.
Abel was directed to a parking place by a kid in a Dodgers baseball cap, and after Abel parked, Shelby gave the boy five dollars, telling him to watch the car.
“We geev the boy too much,” Abel said.
“So what? We’re gonna be rich,” Shelby reminded him.
The Mexican kid then ran toward a Cadillac driven by an elderly American and waved the guy toward a parking space near Abel’s car.
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Shelby Pate wondered if under that Dodgers cap the kid had ringworm.
Momentarily losing the Chevy in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Avenida Revolución, Nell wheeled into the Frontón parking lot just to turn around. She practically ran over Abel Durazo, who had to jump out of her way!
“Kee-rist!” Fin said, turning his face away while Bobbie ducked down in the back seat.
“He didn’t recognize us!” Nell said, speeding toward the rear of the parking lot, ignoring the man who was trying to direct her.
The guy yelled something in Spanish, but after Nell parked, Fin jumped out and handed him ten dollars. The guy nodded and said, “Okay, okay,” and allowed the Audi to stay where it was.
The three investigators followed Abel and Shelby at a distance of half a block while the truckers strolled through the weekend throngs. The sun had begun its quick autumn descent, after which the city would come to life in all its vibrance.
Shelby stopped at one of the leather shops at the corner of Calle 5, to check the prices on bomber jackets.
“I make you good deal,” the shopkeeper said.
The shopkeeper was about Shelby’s age, with a barrel of a torso. He wore a fake Rolex and fake diamond rings on both hands, and had the thickest black hair Shelby had ever seen.
Shelby said to the guy, “I saw one back there in that other joint for fifty bucks less.”
“That ees no good leather. No good,” the shopkeeper said. “You like thees one? I sell to you, fifty dollar off the price. Okay?”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Shelby said, but the man followed him toward the sidewalk.
All the shops were wide open to the masses on the avenue, and when they were disappearing into the crowd, the man yelled, “Seventy-five dollar off the price!”
“Damn!” Shelby said to Abel. “That’s a good deal, ain’t it?”
Abel shook his head and said, “After we get money we go to good place for jacket. Don’ worry, Buey.”
“Kin we stop fer a tequila?” Shelby asked, looking at Abel’s wristwatch. “I’m goin shithouse waitin fer the fuckin little hand to get on the six.”
“Okay,” Abel said. “We got time.”
A man walked out of a saloon that had a glass-covered collection of photos on the door, pictures of curvy bikini-clad women dancing on a stage.
“Come!” he said, taking Shelby’s arm. “Good show here, amigo!”
Shelby turned to Abel and said, “Whaddaya think, dude?”
“Okay,” Abel said. “But lousy dancer. No good. Lousy.”
There was a large elevated stage in the center of the barroom, with twenty tables surrounding it. Booths lined two walls, and the third wall was taken up by a long bar. It was dark, dank, seedy and wet.
Shelby said, “Gud-damn, the fuckin floor’s covered with water jist like that street up there where Soltero’s momma lives. Ain’t there no plumbers in this fuckin town?”
The floor was so uneven that the puddles only settled on one side of the saloon, so Abel led Shelby through the darkness to the far side where exhausted-looking women in frumpy dresses tried to smile at passing male customers.
One of them looked at Shelby and patted the plastic bench next to her.
Shelby said to Abel, “These babes’re thrashed. I’d rather get cranked and jack off. That way I can have anyone I want instead a these bowsers, right?”
Abel said, “We go to good bar later.”
They took a seat at one of the tables next to the stage, where Abel had to shoo away two blowsy women. Shelby was busy looking at the redheaded “dancer” on the stage and didn’t pay attention when Abel ordered two double tequilas and two beers.
She wore hip-hugging black shorts, white cowboy boots, and a red tube top. Shelby figured she was forty, but Abel said she was no more than thirty. She was already forming serious cellulite, and up close, Shelby saw a surgical scar across her abdomen. It looked like someone had hand-troweled the pancake makeup onto her face.
Three times during the performance, she lifted the tube and showed Shelby her sagging tits. He stuck a dollar bill inside the waistband of her shorts every time she did it, and went “Wooooo!” ending in a giggling, high-pitched snuffle.
Her number consisted of sliding each foot six inches back and forth out of time to taped soft-rock music that Shelby couldn’t identify. After a thirty-minute set she shuffled off the stage and disappeared into a closet-sized dressing room.
Shelby slipped another bindle out of his boot and dropped his head below the stage level. When he came back up he downed a tequila and sucked the juice from a Mexican yellow lime protruding from his beer bottle.
Then he grinned and said, “My old lady got better hooters, but I bet that dancer’s a nicer person. Right now, I’ll settle fer anything wet and warm with a pulse.”
Abel looked at his watch, drank his tequila, and said, “We go now, Buey.”
Fin Finnegan got up from his stool at the opposite end of the long bar, put three dollars next to his glass, and followed the truckers out into the vanishing twilight.
Nell and Bobbie spotted the truckers and quickly turned their backs, examining a sidewalk display of black-velvet paintings: Madonna, Elvis and Batman. Nell picked up Batman and turned it toward the light inside the shop.
Abel and Shelby walked directly behind her, and she heard Shelby Pate say, “Know what, dude? This town ain’t half as grimy as L.A., and it’s gotta be a lot safer, right?”
Fin trotted up to Bobbie a few seconds later, saying, “Let’s give it no more than an hour. Okay?”
“Then what?” Bobbie asked, as Fin went scurrying after the truckers.
“Then we go home and we bust them Monday morning like responsible mature investigators,” Nell informed her.
Nell and Bobbie had to trot to keep up with Fin, who was threading his way through the early Saturday evening mob of U.S. teens and young adults who descend on Tijuana to get drunk, slam-dance in nightclubs, fight, bleed, vomit, and in general, have a wonderful time.
CHAPTER 23
The thing was, nobody would do a serious investigation into the death of a Mexican citizen on Mexican soil, Jules was certain of that. He was not going to have to face federal officers, or San Diego police, or even that busybody bitch from the District Attorney’s Office. It would just play itself out and pass from his life. A pity that the Mexican kids had been contaminated, but there was nothing he could do about it. Everything would work out just fine.
Sitting in the hot tub, Jules took a sip of Scotch and for a brief instant convinced himself that things simply couldn’t go wrong. Except that there were several layers to the rotting onion that Shelby Pate could drop into his soup. In the first place, if Southbay Agricultural Supply was brought into it, Jules was sure that Burl Ralston would panic and confess. For an agreement to testify, the authorities might give immunity to the old bastard. They might even grant immunity to the idiot truckers who caused this whole misery. That, in order to convict a real environmental threat: the owner of Green Earth Hauling and Disposal. Jules could become a sacrificial lamb to the green administration of Clinton-Gore: a prosperous and greedy waste hauler who illegally manifested hazardous waste that ended up killing a child of the Third World. Good press for the new administration.
Jules thought about offering Shelby Pate $10,000, more than that imbecile had ever seen in his miserable lowlife existence. Jules might even raise it to $20,000 if he could be guaranteed that both Durazo and Pate would maintain their silence. But what if they turned over the manifest to Jules only to blab to the authorities at a later time? Burl Ralston would then be contacted and he’d spill his guts the first time a cop mentioned jail. If Burl Ralston had a fatal heart attack it would be very helpful to Jules’s predicament. If Shelby Pate and Abel Durazo died suddenly it would be a time to rejoice.
If Jules paid extortion money, what would be his assurance that six months down the line he wouldn’t get a visit from Pate and Durazo showing him a
photocopy of the manifest? A little something they’d set aside for a rainy day. The fact was, Jules’s only real safety lay in the destruction of the manifest, Pate, and probably Durazo, in that order. There was no other way. How could he come this far, with his entire life about to be transformed, only to let it all be controlled and ultimately doomed by two morons?
Even though he had no experience whatsoever with acts of violence, Jules Temple felt certain that he could do what he had to do. They had forced this course of action. There was only one question left in his mind: How?
Abel and Shelby were working on their second drink, but still Soltero hadn’t arrived. The Bongo Room was a cut above the last bar they’d visited. At least this one had some bamboo paneling nailed to the walls, and some blinking colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling. There was a similar stage and a similar long bar, and all too similar women sitting in booths and tables, not looking hungrily at gringos with bucks, only looking shabby and tired.
So much so that Shelby turned to Abel and said, “I think they feed downers to the babes around here. Or maybe they’re all shootin that Mexican tar heroin. Now that’s bad stuff. Me, I never even shot meth. I’m scared a needles.”
With that he leaned over and snorted what was left of a bindle of methamphetamine.
“Hey, Buey!” Abel said. “We got work to do!”
“I kin handle it, dude,” Shelby said. “Anyways, I think there’s somethin wrong with this cringe. I ain’t feelin a rush.”
But Abel knew that was a lie. The ox was twitchy. He kept looking around, twisting up his cocktail napkin, blinking, sniffling.
“Hey, baby!” Shelby yelled to the waitress. “Bring us two more mega shooters!”
After the tequilas arrived, a man slid into the seat beside Abel and said, “I am buying your tequilas, please.”
“What’re you, a fag?” Shelby wanted to know.
The man smiled and spoke to Abel in Spanish. Shelby recognized one word that was uttered several times by both men: Soltero. Abel looked like he was getting mad, but the man raised both palms as if to say, “It’s not my fault.” Then he got up and left the saloon.
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