The Last Second Chance: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  Old Pedro did have cheap locked up. And plenty. And a presence in just about every bar, cantina and cathouse in Juarez. Good thing, Silva thought. When a man wants strong drink, he wants it now. Finish and a little false color don’t matter.

  With the back of one hand, he wiped beads of alcoholic sweat from his brow and nose while grabbing for an ice water chaser with the other. A nod brought the bartender shuffling over the duckboards.

  Silva watched him hoist a bottle from the well. The bartender was old school -- a drooping, gray moustache waxed and parted in the middle of his lip, gray hair brush cut like a Prussian officer’s, black sleeve garters on a starched white shirt that covered a hard, round belly curving out and over his black trousers. Before pouring the shot, he presented the bottle as if it were a brandy of royal lineage. He murmured: “Otro?”

  A nod and the shot glass was filled and slipped within easy reach. Another murmur: “Suerte, señor.”

  Silva arched his back, hoping to loosen the damp cotton shirt that was stuck to his shoulder blades. It was too hot for the wrinkled linen jacket he was sweating through, but was too proud and careful to take off. His slacks were too tight around the gut. The jacket helped hide this, giving his body a thinner line. It also hid the outlines of the Browning Hi-Power stuffed in his waistband, its butt digging into his fat.

  He stuck a panatela between his lips. Quick, sulfury flame flared from a kitchen match, struck on the bartender’s hard thumb. Silva sucked in the fire, drawing the harsh smoke into his lungs. The bartender pinched the flame between thumb and forefinger. Silva noticed a puckered stump where a ring finger should have been. The bartender turned and Silva saw a long scar, white against brown, running from the front of the ear to the middle of the throat.

  Should have noticed that right away, he thought. Should soft pedal the Old Pedro and get sharp for that meet over in Tejasland. Some bubba and his puta wanting to take a quiet scoot across the border and safe transport to Matamoros.

  Which meant these two Anglos were hot property on both sides of the border -- American law to the north, most likely. Wasn’t that always the case for the free-thinking businessmen of El Norte? Too many rules up there for true commerce. Too many rules for anyone who didn’t already have enough money to buy a way past them.

  American law was always after free-thinking men of business like himself. They weren’t amused by his chosen profession. Coyotes -- that’s what he and his brethren businessmen were called, a name that came from their own countrymen. But when it passed the lips of a Border Patrol greenshirt or a suit from la migra, it always had a nasty spin on it, like the man was calling him a whore or a bastard.

  Coyote. The word was offensive to Silva. He saw himself as a clever operator, faster than any federale, but not furtive, doglike or the least bit parasitic.

  His self image was made of grander, swoopier stuff. A humanitarian, that’s what he was, offering opportunity to those who wanted to escape the poverty of Mexico or El Salvador or Guatemala for the dream they thought was America. Yes, that’s what he did -- he gave life to their dreams.

  Silva did more than run people across the border for a steep price. He was a full-service entrepreneur, working all phases of the most lucrative commerce in human flesh this side of pornography, prostitution and the old slave trade. While runaway inflation crippled his country’s economy and made paupers of its people, Silva’s business prospects were heightened by the resulting chaos. People were desperate to move north, pushed by civil war and poverty, pulled by dreams of more money. And the businessmen of El Norte were willing to hire them, motivated by the desire for ever-cheaper labor and an ever-lower bottom line.

  He had recruiters working the villages of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Campeche. He had scouts sniffing the routes of travel from Central America, looking for young, strong laborers. Single men without families were targeted because wives and children meant complications and costs the businessmen of El Norte didn’t want to pay and risks he didn’t want to run as he hustled people across the border.

  Silva had contacts at farms, ranches, factories and construction outfits from California to Chicago. He had forgers churning out Social Security cards and American driver’s licenses. He owned safe houses and shelters on both sides of the border -- rest stops for his cargo and another place to ring up another charge on the price tag for a new life.

  He had a villa in Puerto Vallarta, a home in the mountains near Guadalajara and a bone-white Lincoln Town Car with red-leather seats, a mobile phone and a TV in the dash. A twin-engined Beech Baron whisked him to rocky desert strips and busy, big-city terminals.

  A silent, consumptive Texan named Slick McCoy served as his personal pilot -- thin as a communion wafer and jaundiced from too many bouts of malaria, heptitis and the clap. Referred to him by his sometime business partner, Lefty Moore, Slick was an aging action junky, a retired Army forward observer who flew L-2s in Korea and the early years of Vietnam and made opium runs in Laos for Air America.

  A tidy little enterprise, all because he was a free-thinking businessman, smart enough to keep track of every phase of his operation and nervy enough to still make a lot of the border runs himself -- the best way to make sure everything was running right.

  American law paid too much attention to their rules to appreciate such zeal and professionalism. Mexican authorities took a more worldly attitude as long as they got their mordita. He didn’t mind that little bite as long as it stayed that way. When they got too frisky and wanted too much, they had to have their snouts slapped.

  Mexican law sure as hell wouldn’t care about Gringo y Gringa Equis. He’d bet on that. So, who the hell was after them on this side of the river? Or, who did Senor y Senora Equis not want to know they were across the border? Interesting and entertaining questions that Silva turned in his mind as he signaled the bartender for coffee, making a saucer out of one hand and raising an imaginary cup to his lips.

  Interesting, entertaining and possibly profitable. Silva didn’t know for sure. All he had was a time and a place to make the meet, courtesy of a call from Moore. That and the sure, easy 10 K he would pocket just for playing it straight, bringing these people across the river and quietly shepherding them to Matamoros.

  Ah, but he was a free-thinking businessman, his mind warm and glowing from Old Pedro, coffee and the thought of other angles in the offing, more money for his pocket if he could find out who was interested in Gringo y Gringa Equis on either side of the river.

  The coffee was sugary and half cut with cream. Its heat added to the flush of alcohol that was already drawing dark circles under his armpits, another beaded line across his flat, twice-broken nose and a cap of moisture that mixed with the sweet oil of his slickened black hair.

  Silva had a broad forehead, bumpy with bone and a dark slash of eyebrows, like the Anglo actor, Burt Reynolds. He had heavy-lidded eyes that were out of kilter. When he got high on weed or far drunker than he was now, one eye would stay wide open while the lid of the other would droop half shut, following its own notion of the proper response to intoxication. Moore and his other Anglo business associates dubbed him Ol’ Dope Eye and got a good laugh at his expense. Which was fine with Silva -- while they laughed, he took their money.

  His bladder gave a call. He strolled back to the excusado, easing the Browning away from the spot where its butt dug into his belly. As he listened to his piss hitting the back of the galvanized trough that served as the bar’s urinal, he rolled his head back and stared at the gray ceiling, thinking about who he could call to get his questions answered.

  Another sometime associate came to mind. El Rojo Loco. Silva laughed and tucked himself back inside his slacks. That one was after everybody. All the time. Lately, everybody seemed to be after El Rojo Loco. And why not? The man had a habit of killing his partners. Not exactly the mark of a stable, free-thinking businessman like himself.

  He walked back to
his place on the bar. The bartender topped his cup and reached toward the well with a murmured “Otro?”

  “Bastante.”

  A nod from the bartender and a quiet retreat to his station on the duckboards at the middle of the bar. Silva sipped more hot coffee and thought of angles, El Rojo Loco and the Gringo y Gringa Equis.

  Chapter 30

  Carla Sue watched the waves of midday heat rise from the tin roof of the barn and the flat, gray sand of the yard and the broken brush hills beyond the fenceline. This wasn’t the wet `n hot of Dallas or Houston, where prickly heat, air conditioning and a can of Desenex were the constants of suburban survival. This heat sucked a person dryer than a Baptist prayer meeting and left the body with parched lips, a layer of gritty salt on burned skin and a light head that saw visions in the shimmering bands of heated air, snaking skyward, blurring the view of the Hueco Mountains far to the north and the Finlay chain to the southeast.

  She took a sip of tepid water from a Bell jar with a rusty rim. Its taste was soapy and metallic, like a trace of iron filings mixed with Ivory powder. She took another sip anyway.

  She was sitting on the porch of a tarpaper shack, in the middle of a deserted ranch in the desert east of El Paso, thirty miles north of Fabens and the border. The shack once housed the rancho’s top horseman; the corral and the barn were where the wild horses were tamed and the tamed horses housed.

  Through the shack’s screen door, Carla Sue could see broken bridles and worn saddles piled in the middle of the floor. A pot-bellied stove, a bunk bed, a table and two chairs and a galvanized sink with a hand pump hooked to the side made up the rest of the shack’s inventory.

  Bills and newspapers, yellowed with heat and age, fragile as an old man’s bones, were scattered on the table. Carla Sue had browsed through them. Those that didn’t crumble at her touch told her the ranch was called the Diamond R, the last wrangler was named Hub Rawlins and the subscription to the Sunday edition of the El Paso Herald-Post ran out around the time Elvis died.

  She looked at the Bell jar and considered another sip. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. She dumped the rest of the water over her head and shivered as it ran through her lank, blonde hair, over her face and chin and down through her open shirt and cleavage.

  That felt so good she stepped into the dark, close air of the cabin and pumped up another full jar. She stood on the porch and slowly poured the water over her head, feeling a streak of electricity move from the back of her neck, down her spine and up to the base of her skull again. It made her shake like a dog.

  Big ‘Un had been gone since dawn, raising a streak of chalk-white dust that billowed off the ranch road in the flat, rising light and sucked up the slipstream of the white F-150 they picked up at a used car lot in Van Horn.

  No Bucky Roys this time, no dances in the dirt to dodge a stream of tobacco juice, no high-spirited dickering to make her laugh. Just a simple deal with a simple little man in a plaid shirt and chinos who looked a lot like Bob Newhart.

  “In’ersted in this truck?”

  She nodded. He handed her the keys, shifting his gaze back and forth between her face and the broken concrete of the car lot like a dog waiting for its owner to unlatch the leash and let him get to the food dish. She took a test spin and brought the truck back into the lot.

  “It’ll do. Rack it up.”

  He nodded and shuffled off to start the paper work. Big ‘Un waited at a cafe up the street -- Darly’s Coffee Pot, Home of the Bottomless Cup, 35 Cents. It wasn’t the popular breakfast spot. That was up by the courthouse, its parking spaces filled with pickups and squad cars. Darly’s was darker and had a thinner clientele, none of them sporting suits or stars or uniforms or pistols on the hip. Some of them wore hungover faces and the dead eyes of another dull day of minimum wage.

  It was a five-table-and-counter joint, full of grease and fly carcasses, squeezed between a hardware store and a discount dress shop. These were the last, threadbare outposts of the main commercial drag, out where the road changed from main artery to the quickest way to get out of town. It was a good place for one of them to hunker down, sip bad coffee and wait for the car lot to open.

  The Graydog had brought them to Van Horn from Fort Stockton. Big ‘Un dropped her off near the bus station with their gear, then dumped the GMC in the carport of a vacant house near the edge of town. The wait had been a long and nervy one, sitting in the station with two tickets to El Paso and a Colt in her purse and two olive drab cargo bags of automatic weapons, clothes and bundles of cash at her feet.

  She leafed through a Texas Monthly, idly looking at pictures from the Cullen Davis murder trial, the cutlines barely registering. She wondered if Big ‘Un would show up. An hour passed. Then ninety minutes. In another thirty minutes, the westbound bus would pull out. He walked in, his shirt dark with sweat, a duffle bag slung over his shoulder.

  Where the hell did he get that? What the hell was he up to? She forced herself to look at the magazine. He walked up to the ticket window, passed some cash across the counter and walked away, tucking the pass into his back pocket. He glanced her way, his eyes as flat and lusterless as the black bottom of a frying pan, then took a seat at the far end of the station, picking up a discarded newspaper.

  They took separate seats. She could feel him behind her, seven rows back, slumped in an aisle seat on the opposite side of the bus. She could feel that dead stare on the back of her neck, like the look of accusation from a cheated lover. It pissed her off. You got us into this! We should be in Mexico by now, safe from the law, planning our run at T-Roy. But you had to play it safe and slow. Play it like a sucker, more like. Just where in the hell do you get off, looking at me like that? What did I do? I mean, I’m sorry your ex is dead, but at least she went quick. I’m sorry it busted you up, but it’s not my fault. I’m sorry you got to suck it up or get dead or go to prison forever, but that’s the way it is. Just take those eyes off me, Big `Un. They make my skin crawl and make me feel lousy. I mean it, now. I mean it!

  She spun in her seat and started to rise, angry words in her throat. In the dim light of the Greydog’s swaying interior, she could see Burch was asleep, his head canted back, his mouth open in a snore she couldn’t hear. His eyes were closed.

  “Sorry, m’am, was I snorin’?”

  “What?”

  “I said I was sorry if my snorin’ disturbed you.”

  She looked into the watery eyes of an older man with rubbery jowls and wisps of white hair sticking out from under a Jack Daniel’s gimme cap.

  “No, you weren’t botherin’ me. Not at all.”

  “Ummm. Well, you spun round so quick, it gave me a start. Kinda reminded me of Myrtle elbowin’ me in the ribs if I drifted off in church. She’s dead now.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Myrtle. That’s my wife. Or was. Been dead now twelve year.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Thank you, but she’s been gone long enough that it don’t hurt so much. And I don’t miss her like I did at first. `Cept when somethin’ happens that brings her to mind real sudden. Like right now. Felt like ol’ Myrtle was spinnin’ round to tell me to quit snorin’. Somethin’ like that happens and it’s like she’s right here, naggin’ at me to quit smokin’ or quit drinkin’ or quit eatin’ like a pig or somesuch nonsense. Always after me for somethin’. Told me I better take better care or I’d die of a heart attack or a cancer or a stroke.”

  The old man paused and snorted a short laugh.

  “A cancer took her. After worryin’ about my health, it gets her. Goes that way, don’t it?”

  “Yessir, it does. I’m sorry I startled you.”

  “Tell you the truth, so am I. You brought Myrtle back and I’m gettin’ too damn old to keep buryin’ her.”

  She turned back in her seat and slumped down in silence. She could hear the old man breathe then start to snore s
oftly. Part of her wanted to spin into his face and yell: It’s Myrtle comin’ at ya, old fart! Quit your damn snorin’ or I’ll haunt you forever! Shake him like a rag doll, knock his damn cap off his head, cause his bald scalp to sweat and then get chilled by the draft of air conditioning passing overhead. Make me feel like shit, old man, and you’ll wish it was just Myrtle in your face instead of me. I’m a hundred times worse than bad dreams about your dead wife. You hear me or do I have to buy you a damn hearing aid, stuff it in your ear and shout!

  Wonderful. Getting all bloody-minded about a sad and polite old man. She stared out the window, watching the darkness roll by with its black shadings of things barely seen or not seen at all -- a lifeless house or an old barn; a ridge in the distance or a line of clouds; an oil pump slowly lifting up and down, attended by a cluster of tanks; a rank of old cars that would never be called on to roll again. Maybes all, shapes to guess at, their shrouded details filled in by a mind that always tries to cast light on things that would rather remain in half tones and shadows.

  Too tired to snap at a harmless old man. Get a grip and enjoy the bus ride. See America as a fugitive. Oh, yeah -- the David Janssen tour. Just where in hell is that one-armed man? And when will I get a tap on my shoulder from a cop with white hair, a beefy face and a snap-brim hat? She kept looking out the window, feeling herself grow sleepy but refusing to give in and close her eyes. The shapes blurred into faces -- Eldon, Uncle Harlan, that black killer in the cave, his bulging-eyed rage frozen in place after Big `Un sent one into his forehead, Neville with his hair on fire, crying that death cry that just begged for leaded release. They can’t be out there, can they? I must be asleep. I can’t be seeing them in the window of this bus, can I? I must be asleep. Wish I had a Myrtle to poke me in the ribs and tell me to stop snorin’. Wish I wasn’t on this damn bus. Wish I was in Mexico gettin’ ready to kill T-Roy.