Fifty Grand

by Adrian McKinty

  “Well, you look great. I love the suit.”

  “Tailored. In Denver,” he said, and then, remembering why he’d come, muttered, “Uhm, María, we all need to be downstairs in, say, five minutes?”

  “Oh, no problem, I’ll see you down there.”

  He stood there for a moment. Something was on his mind. He got to it. “I don’t normally give people the choice, but, well, do you want to work what we call Malibu Mountain or would you prefer to be downtown, where it’s a bit easier? You’ll probably end up doing both, but the mountain’s good because in about two weeks they’re going to start giving out Christmas tips. Could be lucrative.”

  I had to work the mountain, there was no question about it.

  “The mountain,” I said.

  “I have an arrangement with the other girls. Remember, I get half of all the tips, no exceptions, ok?”

  “Ok,” I said.

  I’d be gone by Christmas. What the hell did I care?

  Esteban seemed relieved. “Great. Thought I’d remind you. Didn’t want to have to strong-arm you later.”

  “You think you could?” I asked with a smile, ironically flexing my skinny arms.

  He grinned. “I like you, María. If this works out maybe you could even work for me in our office on Pearl Street.”

  “Ok.”

  “Good. I’ll see you down there.” He turned to leave and then paused in the doorway. “It won’t be much, you know, don’t get your hopes up,” he said.

  I had lost the drift. “What won’t be much?”

  “The Christmas tips. When we used to clean the Cruise estate, Margarita and Luisa got a thousand bucks each. But these fuckers we do now, they’re all the lesser lights.”

  “That’s ok,” I said.

  “Hurry up now,” he said and finally left the room.

  I put on the maid’s uniform, a somber short-sleeved black affair with blue piping, but infinitely better than those I’d seen around the Hotel Nacional or the Sevilla. I smoothed the straggles from my hair, brushed my teeth, washed my face. I looked mousy but rested and fresh.

  Angela, a slender young thing from Mexico City, had made Nescafé in the kitchen. I took a few sips of the acrid liquid before joining her and the other girls in the back of Esteban’s Range Rover.

  Esteban sped off, talking as fast as he drove. “Luisa, Anna, I’m going to drop you on Pearl Street. A lot of people are jittery, but I’m not. If the INS still has agents in town—which I doubt—remember that they’re civil servants, so no one’s gonna be up and about before ten o’clock. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Both Anna and Luisa looked blank.

  “Jesus. Am I the only one who does any thinking around here? You gotta be finished by ten o’clock.”

  Luisa looked at me and Angela with an expression I couldn’t decipher but which Angela seemed to get. Angela nodded. Luisa leaned forward in the seat until her face was only a few centimeters from Esteban’s. “Don Esteban, how are we supposed to do all the businesses on Pearl Street before ten o’clock? We are not miracle workers. You must be crazy,” she said.

  Luisa was an older woman from Guadalajara, and I could tell that she was allowed a little more leeway with Esteban than the others; but even so, Angela and Anna seemed surprised to hear her speak so freely.

  Esteban stared at her for a moment, thought about one possible reply—almost certainly a profane one—but chose to select another. “Look, just do your best, Luisa. Make sure you cover the important clients: Hermès, Gucci, DKNY—you know, the big ones. Just get it done and get off the street before ten. We’re in a jam and we all gotta pull together.”

  He dropped Luisa and Anna outside Brooks Brothers and drove off toward the so-called Malibu Mountain.

  Before he’d gotten a block his phone rang.

  “Yes? . . . Yes? . . . Yes!”

  He hung up, reversed the Range Rover. Luisa was having a last cigarette while Anna was inside the store turning on the power. Esteban wound the window down and called Luisa over. He was excited. “They didn’t get Josefina. She was at her boyfriend’s house. Christ, when she didn’t show up I thought they’d grabbed her. But she got away.”

  “Josefina? Ok,” Luisa replied with considerably less excitement.

  “So it shouldn’t be any problem to get finished by ten, Josefina will be joining you,” Esteban said.

  “It’ll still be difficult to do everything,” Luisa said.

  “Just get on with it!” Esteban muttered, and the window whirred back up.

  “Good news,” Esteban said, turning to the pair of us. “Great news. Who wants a Starbucks? My treat, eh?”

  Angela rolled her eyes as if to say he’s only doing this to impress you. But I wanted coffee after three days without.

  “I do,” I said.

  Starbucks: my first experience of white America.

  The smell of vanilla. Paul McCartney singing a love song. Scruffy men in five-dollar flip-flops working on five-thousand-dollar laptops.

  White people serving us.

  Esteban ordered for us, got coffee, croissants, and cakes, and put a dollar in the tip jar.

  I sipped the con leche and it tasted almost like a con leche.

  “How do you like your coffee?” he asked.

  “It’s ok, thank you,” I said.

  Angela had gotten a beverage that was covered in whipped cream and required a straw to consume. “Mine’s absolutely delicious,” she said.

  “See, it’s not like Rome, sometimes we’re the masters,” Esteban muttered apropos of nothing.

  Esteban spotted a Fairview Post in the used newspaper rack. He grabbed it. The headline was “Tancredo Hails INS Raids.” Esteban read the story and passed it across to me. “Can you read, María?” he asked.

  “Letters and such?” I asked, doing my best peasant voice.

  “Just read it, see what I’m up against,” he said, ignoring the sarcasm.

  Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), hailed last night’s INS raids in Denver, Boulder, Fairview, and Vail, which netted an estimated three dozen illegal immigrants. “It’s only a small step but the message has gone out,” Tancredo commented from Washington, “that Colorado is not a safe haven for illegal immigrants from Mexico.”

  Congressman Tancredo, who is running for President, will be on Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN later today to talk about his new plan for dealing with the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

  A spokesman for the Mexican consulate in Denver noted, “Twenty-six Mexican citizens, all of whom have jobs and none of whom have a criminal record, have been detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their cases are under investigation.”

  With an estimated fifty thousand Mexican citizens living in Denver alone, an INS spokesman denied that these raids were only a cosmetic measure.

  “Without us this whole country would grind to a halt,” Esteban said.

  I was about to pass the paper back when I noticed an ad: “For sale: Thorpe hunting rifle new 750 dollars. Smith and Wesson M&P 9mm good con with ammo 400 dollars OBO,” with an address on Lime Kiln Road, Fairview. I carefully ripped out the ad, sipped the con leche, and said nothing.

  Esteban nodded at the barista. “Romanian,” he whispered under his breath. “Nothing to do with me. Whole different organization.”

  The girl was pale, blond, pretty, and, despite the hour, high.

  “What’s her story?” I wondered aloud.

  “Come on, let’s go outside. It’s not too cold today,” he said. Esteban sat us at a cast-iron table in the sun. It might not have been cold for Colorado in December but I was freezing. My teeth chattered and my hands shook as I sipped the coffee.

  “Romanians and Russians,” Esteban said. “I know you wanted to do nanny work, María, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Up here they want European nannies. Most of them are from Eastern Europe. Sheriff Briggs brings them direct from Denver. He’s the silent partner in the local company, S
uperior Child Minding Services—thinks it’s a big secret, but I know all about it. Dumb fuck. Not as smart as he pretends to be.”

  “I see,” I muttered, losing interest now.

  “Pays a lot more than housecleaning. They’re always desperate. Last thing the wives and girlfriends want to do when they come here is look after their own kids. The big guns have permanent help but the minor players are always looking. Shit, you can nail ’em for twenty bucks an hour and more. It’s a hell of a racket.”

  He examined me for a moment. “No. Forget it. Won’t even try, you don’t even look Russian. And we’re shorthanded as it is.”

  Of course I didn’t tell him that I spoke a little Russian.

  “Why do they want Russians?” I asked instead.

  “They want Eastern Europeans because the wives like bossing white chicks around and the husbands think they can fuck ’em—which, of course, they can. You know, you’re not bad looking, María, I can get you that kind of work if you want. Steady work. We cut in the Sheriff’s Department, but you could be earning four or five hundred a week.”

  “I already told you I’m not a whore.”

  “Not a whore—a high-class call girl. Do it for a year or two, you’ve got enough saved for a little restaurant or something back in—where you say you were from?”

  “Valladolíd in Yucatán.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you want to live there, but you could move to the DF. Think about it. Anyway, finish up, enough chitchat, we’re running late.”

  We finished our coffee drinks, got into the Range Rover.

  Maybe now was the time to ask him about the dent on the front left.

  “It’s a really nice car,” I said.

  “My pride and joy.”

  “What happened to your—”

  “Oh, fuck,” Esteban interrupted and hit the brakes. Sheriff Briggs’s shiny black Escalade pulled to a halt next to us. To my surprise I found that my hand was shaking. He wasn’t on Ricky’s list but that man made me nervous.

  The Escalade flashed its lights.

  “What does he want?” Esteban groaned, turned off the engine, and zipped the window.

  Sheriff Briggs and Klein, his skinny, nasty-looking deputy, got out of the Escalade. Unlike yesterday Briggs was in full uniform. Black boots, dark green trousers, green shirt with a gold badge on it, dark green cowboy hat, black leather jacket, nightstick, flashlight, gun. The hat flipped me. Made me think, Mierde, I’m in America.

  Briggs leaned into the driver’s-side window of the Range Rover and took off his sunglasses. He stared at Angela and me in the middle seat before turning his attention to Esteban.

  “Seem in an awful hurry,” he said.

  “I’m running late,” Esteban replied.

  “Hmmm,” Sheriff Briggs said, then caught my gaze and smiled.

  “Morning, ma’am,” he said.

  “Good morning, Sheriff,” I said in English.

  “How do you like our little community now that you’ve had some time to adjust?” Briggs asked.

  “It’s very beautiful,” I said.

  “That it is, that it is,” he replied.

  “Excuse me, Sheriff, but I really should get going. As you can imagine, today is not a good day to be understaffed,” Esteban said.

  Briggs nodded. “Oh yeah, almost forgot, how many did you lose?” he asked.

  “Apparently seven got taken to the detention center in Denver. My lawyer thinks we can get one of them out tonight, Inez—she’s engaged to an American—and there’s another girl, Juanita, who Flora says is pregnant, so we might be able to get her out too. Won’t release any of the men, of course. And that means we’re still shorthanded at the site on Pearl.”

  Sheriff Briggs turned to his deputy. “Things are looking bad for our buddy Esteban here,” he said.

  “Looks like it, Sheriff,” Klein replied.

  “Not enough men to do the job,” Sheriff Briggs went on, still talking to the deputy.

  “But Sheriff, didn’t you conquer the town of Subhan in Kuwait with just half a platoon?” Klein said, clearly having heard that particular story a couple of hundred times.

  “I surely did, A.J., but it’s well known that half a platoon of United States Marines can do just about anything in this world.”

  “Amen to that,” Klein replied.

  “Your Mexican, though. Takes a whole army of Mexicans to do the job of a few white men, ain’t that right, Deputy?” Briggs said.

  “I believe that you’re speaking the truth,” the deputy responded. “From the halls of Montezuma, as the song says.”

  “From the halls of Montezuma indeed,” Sheriff Briggs agreed with a laugh.

  Esteban was becoming impatient. “Sheriff Briggs, it is always a pleasure to see you, but today we are very late and some of my clients will need reassur—”

  Sheriff Briggs cut him off. “Get out of the car, Esteban.”

  “What is this about?”

  “Just get out of the car.”

  Angela started to undo her seat belt.

  “No, no, you two little ladies can sit tight,” Sheriff Briggs said.

  Esteban got out of the car. The deputy turned him around and put Esteban’s hands on the roof of the Range Rover.

  “Nice monkey suit,” Klein said, and both he and the sheriff laughed.

  “Look, what is this about?” Esteban protested.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Sheriff Briggs growled and cracked the end of his nightstick into the back of Esteban’s legs.

  The sickening crunch of metal on bone.

  Esteban ate asphalt.

  Sheriff Briggs hit him again, catching him twice more on a defensively raised arm.

  “You can’t do this to me, I’m a U.S. citizen,” Esteban pleaded.

  “Do what I damn well please in my town,” Sheriff Briggs said, and he kicked Esteban in the legs. “Show him, A.J.”

  Klein reached into his pocket and threw a plastic bag that landed on Esteban’s chest.

  I sat up in the seat to get a better view.

  “What is this?” Esteban groaned.

  “That is five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce British Columbian hydro-fucking-ponic quality four-twenty.”

  Esteban tried to get up. Klein drew his gun and pointed it at him. I caught Esteban’s eye through the car window. He stared at me. He didn’t look scared and I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging nod.

  “Is that what this is about?” Esteban asked.

  “Yeah,” Sheriff Briggs said. “That is what this is all about. Our deal was for cocaine from Mexico and you’ve been dealing ice and meth and pot, bringing it in from fucking Canada. Who do you think you are, amigo? Where do you think you are? Nothing escapes me, Esteban. Nothing. I know everything that goes on in this town. Everything you or anybody else tries to do, I fucking know it. Never forget that.”

  Esteban got to his feet and rubbed his forearm.

  “Is that why you brought in the INS? To fuck me up?” Esteban asked.

  The sheriff spat. “The feds don’t tell us when they’re coming. That’s nothing to do with me.”

  Esteban nodded and closed his eyes for a second. Thinking. He opened them again and forced a smile.

  “I’ll come clean with you, Sheriff. You’re right about this. It’s an angle. I brought in the first small shipment as a trial. An experiment. I was going to tell you if it worked out.”

  “Apparently it has worked out,” Sheriff Briggs said.

  “Yeah. So far. Risky work, though. The real stuff is coming in tomorrow and then every month, once a month. I’m bringing in ice and pot. Good stuff. With your approval, of course. I was going to tell you all about it,” Esteban said quickly.

  “Sure you were,” Briggs said.

  Esteban appeared unfazed. “I can show you the paperwork. I’m being straight with you. I’m laying out thirty thousand capital for an expected hundred-thousand take. That’s seventy net. I can give you twenty on this and every batch.”
>
  Sheriff Briggs nodded and hit his nightstick into his hand. “Thirty-five,” Briggs said.

  “Thirty-five? I’m taking all the risk,” Esteban protested.

  “Thirty-five and I want it by the end of the week.”

  “That’s impossible! That’s a month’s supply, it’ll take me weeks to deal it. I’m not unloading to some middleman, I’m selling it carefully to a very select group of people.”

  Sheriff Briggs looked at Deputy Klein. Klein grinned and hit Esteban hard in the gut with his nightstick.

  Esteban staggered backward, caught himself on the hood of the Range Rover, bent over, and threw up part of a croissant and coffee.

  “I guess you didn’t hear me. Thirty-five by the end of the week,” Briggs said softly.

  Esteban grunted.

  Sheriff Briggs nodded at his deputy. “See, I told you this was nothing to worry about. I was sure we’d be able to come to an arrangement, even if it is a bad time,” he said.

  Sheriff Briggs got back into his Escalade.

  “What about the four-twenty?” the deputy asked.

  “Oh, take the pot, I’m sure our old buddy Steve won’t mind,” Sheriff Briggs said, his dark eyes wide with pleasure.

  The two cops got into the prowler, revved the engine for ten aggressive seconds, and drove off along Pearl.

  No one had seen the incident, except possibly the Starbucks workers, and they knew better than to say anything about it.

  “How often does this happen?” I whispered to Angela.

  She put her finger to her lips. “You don’t have to worry about any of this. We’ll talk later,” she whispered.

  Esteban said nothing when he got back into the car. He dabbed his face with a silk handkerchief, got his breath back, and started the engine. He didn’t look seriously hurt but I saw that he touched the wheel only with his left hand. In Cuba, where no vehicles had power steering or automatic gear-boxes, he couldn’t have driven at all, but here he managed.

  He eased the Range Rover along Pearl and up the Old Boulder Road.

  The Old Boulder Road. Ricky’s black-and-whites. The phone call the day after my birthday.