Shel tried to get up. Seeing her move, he pulled the gun from his belt and charged over, pulling back the hammer with his thumb.
“What did you tell them?” he said.
To the gun, Shel said, “Tell who?”
“Don’t fucking play games with me,” he shouted. Saliva dripped from his mouth. He was shaking.
“There was a doctor,” she said. “He came in with him.” She nodded toward Humberto’s corpse. “The doctor called you romantic. He wanted to know what you told me.”
Sweat beaded across his forehead and upper lip. “What did you say?”
“I said we talked about the squatter children. About the rain. The trees.”
He wagged the gun at her, grimacing. “They tried to kill me,” he said, and began to weep. Eyes clenched shut, he lifted the gun to his face as if to hide behind it. “Motherfuckers. Stupid fucking cocksuckers. And Pepe, of all people, they choose Pepe. The fool. Started reaching for his gun while he drove, like I wouldn’t see. I jumped on it, pressed the barrel into his belly and shot him with his own fucking gun, the asshole. He tried to crash the car. Went into a spin, almost went over, he got off a round.…” He inspected his arm, tugging at the blood-soaked fabric of his shirt, wincing. “Left him there by the road. Sorry piece of shit.”
He turned so that his wounded arm lay between him and the wall. Using his legs, he pressed his upper body against the lifeless arm to stem the blood or at least dull the pain. He grimaced, eyes shut.
“I said nothing that would make them want to kill you,” Shel told him. “You’re the last person I wanted dead. We had an agreement, remember?”
He laughed, and when his eyes opened they regarded her with terrifying bitterness. “Stop lying to me.”
“I don’t have the strength to lie.”
He turned toward her, pointing the gun. “Walk,” he said.
“I can’t.”
He stumbled toward her. “Walk, or I kill you here.”
Shel found herself staring into the gun barrel again. He pressed it to her forehead.
“Get the fuck up,” he hissed.
She lowered her eyes. Her glance settled on the picture of her in the newspaper clipping. Danny, she thought. He was trying to find her. Frank was dead, she’d have to deal with that sometime, but Danny was alive and doing everything he could. He’d come out here hunting, risking his life, and all that was asked of her in return this minute was to stand up. Walk.
She rolled onto one haunch, put her hands to the floor and tried to pull her legs up beneath her. With effort she squared them under her body, but the moment she tried to apply weight and rise they toppled beneath her like sand.
Cesar grabbed her hair, pulling her up. “Stop acting.” She flailed at his hand and his grip on her hair broke. He tottered back and in the same moment she found herself possessed of the rage and terror she needed and she rose, half on her feet, leaning against the wall.
They stared at each other.
He tucked the gun into his belt again and reached out his arm. He grabbed Shel’s arm and wrapped it around his shoulder. She tried to get her legs to work, but they wobbled beneath her and every two steps she fell. Without the help of the wall she couldn’t support her weight.
“I’m going to carry you,” he said.
He bent at the knees, leaned his shoulder into Shel’s waist and rose up under till her torso leaned across his back. He spread his legs, the better to bear her weight, and lifted her off the ground. It was like she’d drowned; he was carrying her from the river. Her weakness made her body all the heavier and he lunged sideways for the wall so they wouldn’t tumble to the floor. “Let me down, I can walk,” Shel said, but with a howl of determination he shoved off from the wall again. Extending his free hand toward the door, he adjusted her weight on his shoulder and staggered toward the opening.
They made it through, then toppled headlong into the mud of the root cellar, floundering there in a tangled sprawl of arms and legs, trying to get traction in the muck. Using one of the cobwebbed shelves, Shel clawed her way to her feet. “I’ll pull myself along, just give me your shoulder,” she said. He got to his feet, came up beside her and she reached her arm across his body as before. With the other arm she dragged herself shelf to shelf, hopping on the stronger of her legs. They fell twice again before reaching the wood plank stairs. She stared up through the hurricane doors at the dark sky. When he put his good arm around her waist, she told him, “No,” gently, preferring to drag herself up the stairs on her own, out into the drizzling night.
The wind swept through the marigolds, the eucalyptus and the oak trees, combining with the rain to create a gentle, constant hiss. The car stood idling twenty feet away, headlights forming a corridor of light in the rain. A bullet hole had punctured the windshield just to the right of the steering wheel. A spray of blood marbled the shattered glass. Another bullet had shattered the driver’s side window, leaving behind a webwork of fissures circling out from a jagged hole.
She pulled herself to her feet, standing erect on her own for the first time in hours. Cesar came up beside her, offered his shoulder. She reached her arm across it, and together they made it to the car.
In the easterly distance, perhaps a mile away, a searchlight scoured the low winter clouds. Closer at hand, just beyond the eucalyptus trees, wood fires burned beneath the awnings in the squatter camp. The rust-eaten vans and trucks formed an arc around the fires to form a shelter against the storm. The children were out of sight, and Shel guessed someone had seen the bullet-ridden car pull up, or heard the gunfire from within the house. Only the adults remained outside. The women tended the fires, feeding them with scrapwood. The men, wearing straw Stetsons and ragged coats, sat in their folding chairs beneath the awnings, motionless as stones.
From one of the vehicles, a radio blared. As Cesar eased Shel down into the passenger seat, he stopped, listening to the tune. An ugly grin appeared. “Conjunto,” he said, as though it were a newfound insult. “Do you know what the words mean?” He stared through the trees at the squatter camp. “It’s about the ghost of some loca, a crazy woman, who killed her family. The woman wanders the river, the Rio Huixtla, looking for them.” He slammed the door and shambled around the front of the car through the headlights to the driver side. As he opened the door, the overhead light revealed the blood spattered across the door and smeared across on the seat. He sat down as though it weren’t there. When the door closed he said, “Spooks,” gesturing his head back toward the squatter camp. “We Mejicanos, we love our freaks and spooks.”
He turned the car around and headed out the gravel road flanked by the eucalyptus trees. The fires of the squatter camp faded behind them. Around the first bend a man’s body appeared, facedown in the road. Cesar put the car in park and removed a pearl-handled navaja from his pocket, flicking the blade open.
“I’d like to leave a message,” he said, as though speaking into a phone.
He opened the door, tottered out into the rain and knelt down beside the body in the mud. Resting one knee on the dead man’s arm, he began to saw at the wrist with his knife, cutting through the muscle and digging at the bone until the hand came away. He struggled to his feet, spat at the body, and tramped back to the car.
He was drenched when he collapsed again behind the wheel, his wet hair dripping in his eyes. He wiped his face and placed the severed hand on the dash above the steering wheel. It was flecked with mud. The skin was a yellowish-gray color, with a knot of bloody bone and tendon congealed with nerve endings coiled in the gore. It lay there on the dash like a freshly butchered oxtail, except with fingers.
“I know a back way out of here,” Cesar said, putting the car in gear again.
A half mile on he turned into a private road. It was slick with mud and grass. Twice the car’s rear end slid sideways, edging toward the culvert running parallel to the road. Cesar slowed down then, more so than he wanted, and Shel watched as he checked the rearview mirror every few seco
nds, whispering to himself in Spanish.
“Where are we going?” she ventured as they rounded a stand of pear trees.
Abatangelo drove Waxman to the Vallejo waterfront. As they waited for the San Francisco–bound ferry’s final call for boarding, Abatangelo asked for pen and paper, then began to print out instructions to the coroner’s people or whoever else might find his body that night. When he noticed Waxman staring in puzzlement, he explained, “I don’t want anything I shoot disappearing if it all goes wrong.” He handed the note to Waxman. “Read it.”
The note instructed anyone who discovered Abatangelo’s remains to hand over the cameras, the film, anything found on or near him, to Bert Waxman, care of the newspaper. Waxman nodded, handed the note back and said, “Thank you.”
Abatangelo put the note inside an envelope which he marked, IMPORTANT, then sealed it shut. He then perforated one end of the envelope with his pen tip, unlaced his scapular, threaded the lace through the hole in the envelope, knotted the lace back together again and hung the envelope around his neck. It lay flat against his chest beside the image of the dying St. Dismas.
“What I said back at the hotel,” Abatangelo said, “about Shel, if she isn’t dead already, you killed her? That was unfair.”
Waxman shrugged. “I suppose,” he replied, “when all is said and done, there will be blame enough to go around for everybody.” He chafed his hands between his knees, trying to warm them. “I still maintain it would be best if the authorities were notified.”
“No, Wax, no authorities. I lack your confidence there.”
“Confidence has nothing to do with it. People like Moreira and Facio wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the authorities.”
“Nicely put.”
“But we’re talking about a crime.”
“I don’t know about it,” Abatangelo said. “I heard some garbled trash from a suicidal tweak. You don’t know anything, either, Wax. Everything Frank spewed out is just stuff. Until I come back with the goods, you’d be a fool to believe him. Besides which, if the boys in Homicide didn’t believe you when you told them what I said, I hardly think your credibility will get better when the source is Frank.”
Waxman made a helpless gesture of acceptance. With difficulty, he confessed, “I’m afraid for you.”
Abatangelo smiled at the thoughtfulness. He’d put Waxman through a lot these past two days, manipulating him, cajoling him, accusing him of falsity and begging off when it came time to need him all over again. And in the face of all that, Waxman, for all his faults, had demonstrated a mindful persistence that, in light of his obvious fear, spoke of real courage. Now, Abatangelo thought, he’s saying he fears for me.
“I won’t be any safer if you call the law, Wax,” he said. “I’d probably end up getting tagged with everybody else, and in jail I’m obscenely easy to kill. Besides which, if this trade really is going down, and the cops walk into the middle of it, things’ll go crazy. And in that kind of chaos, with people like this and the heat I’m sure they’re going to bring, Shel’s life won’t be worth the breath it takes to talk about it.”
The ferry for San Francisco began boarding. Waxman glanced at it, then asked, sensing time was short, “Do you honestly think she’ll be there?”
Abatangelo smiled despondently and looked away. “Yes. I honestly do.”
“Alive?”
He remembered the article Waxman had recited to Facio, about the woman left bleeding in the jungle for the insects, the women hung from trees with their dead babies tied to their backs. “No,” he confessed. “But if her body’s there, I want to be the one to claim it.” The ferry sounded three short blasts from its whistle. “Thanks for all you’ve done, Wax. I mean that. Do the story proud, you tweedy motherfucker. No matter what I bring back. Or don’t bring back.”
Waxman blushed and adjusted his glasses. “Yes, sir. Good luck.” He exited the car and waved like a man trying to convince himself the farewell was not final. Then he turned away and hurried through drizzle up the slick gangplank and onto the ferry.
As Abatangelo drove back to the marina, the mist created a slick, oily veneer across the asphalt. It sent a chill through the air, too, and he warded off intimations of death as he peered past the wipers and the rain-streaked windshield at the road. He considered stopping at a liquor store, a pint for warmth, but decided drink would only make him moodier. Get any more depressed, he thought, and you’ll start singing.
When he got to the marina he drove through slowly. The boats sat high and dark in the rising tide, hulls bumping faintly against the sagging pier. No dogs barked as the car drifted past, nor was anyone about to scowl at his presence. It made him wonder if a little forewarning had gone around. He came abreast of the sawhorses he’d seen that afternoon and spotted what he wanted among the debris.
Turning off the ignition he sat awhile, listening. Steam purled off the hood. A wind chime made of sawed-off bottles rattled dully in the rain. He opened the door, navigated the mud troughs in the road, and gathered up a paint-spattered tarpaulin. Scudding back to the car he folded it into his trunk.
Wiping his hands on the upholstery, he drove on to the wall and looked out across the funnels of tall damp grass caught in his headlights. With the rain he’d leave a visible trail, so he’d have to go in from the back.
He drove down to where the access road turned back toward the highway and parked deep in a tree-high thicket of oleander. Opening the trunk he moved the tarp aside and opened his canvas camera bag. He wished he had a clearer idea of what might actually happen. As it was, he’d just drag everything out to the incinerator and improvise. Anything was possible, a shoot-out, a wank fest, a lot of rough talk followed by business as usual. His hands shook. He put the car jack in the camera bag then zipped it closed, hefted it from the trunk and started back, the tarp folded beneath his arm.
His shoes skated along the grass and mud, and by the time he made it to the lone oak tree looming above the grass, he was soaked to the skin. He took a moment in the shelter of the tree to get his bearings, then headed in across the field, keeping to the fence line until he was right behind the incinerator, then made straight for it from the rear, taking long strides to leave as few marks as possible in the sodden grass.
Once inside the incinerator shelter he knelt down, threw the tarp over the top and took out the jack. Assembled and at full height it pushed the tarp up just slightly, enough for a window. He loaded each of the cameras with 3200 black-and-white, feeling the leader onto the sprockets in the darkness. Removing the lens from one camera, he screwed the Passive Light Intensifier onto the camera body, then fit the lens onto the end of the PLI. He set up the tripod and adjusted its height, securing the camera onto it, then looking out through the viewer at the shimmering green phantoms, the grainy, vaguely 3-D effect. He could make out individual bricks in the windbreak. Beyond it the water resembled a stretch of whitish, undulating sand. The vertical and horizontal hatch marks of the sight met in a central circle which he focused straight ahead at a point ten yards beyond the nearest stretch of wall.
The second camera he fitted with a flash and a 35-105 zoom, setting it for autofocus and hanging it from his neck. If he ended up close to anybody he’d let go with that, using a fill flash to make sure he got a decent exposure. The third camera, fitted with a standard 55 and a second flash, he left in the bag in case one of the other two jammed.
He settled back to wait. Over time the rain stiffened, the wind picked up. His legs cramped from the cold and he chafed his wet clothing for warmth. The wound at his temple inflicted by Frank started throbbing again. Eventually he withdrew Shel’s letter from inside his coat pocket and fingered it. He reached inside the envelope, felt the hand-worn paper, recalled the spidery handwriting, not needing light to see it. He pictured her not as he’d seen her last, brutalized by Frank, but as he’d known her long ago, when life still seemed tinged with luck—saw her in a denim shirt and painter pants, sitting barefoot on the porch of a
rented beach house near Santa Barbara, wind in her hair, staring out across the ocean with a beer bottle lodged between her legs. The West Texas drawl. The tomboy wisecracks.
He pictured her suddenly appearing then, real as the moon. She stuck her head in beneath the sagging wet tarp and said, Don’t. Not for me. Live, you idiot.
Cesar reached the cross-county highway and turned east toward the interstate, where he veered south. He got off at the final exit before the Carquinez Bridge and headed for a cluster of run-down apartment buildings overlooking the Maritime Academy.
“Where are we going?” Shel asked, her voice so weak she barely heard it herself.
Cesar parked at the end of a cul-de-sac. An empty field sat beyond the apartment complex, dotted with sickly trees, where a hulking figure in a hooded sweatshirt walked two mottled pit bulls through the trash, weeds and broken glass. The pits swaggered through the debris, noses down, ears erect, moving with a gait as close to a pimp roll as a dog could manage.
“Who lives here?” Shel asked. A whisper.
The craving had intensified, the result of no more boosters of whatever it was the doctor had given her. The withdrawal created an aching body sickness that, combined with the throbbing pain in her head, redoubled the weakness in her legs. She lacked faith she could duplicate the efforts to walk she’d managed back at the house. At the same time she knew Cesar would never let her sit out here alone. He’d lost a lot of blood, almost fainting at the wheel twice. In the end he used rage to fuel his will, wagging his gun, calling her names. Once or twice she’d thought he’d finally decided to be done with the bother and was pulling to the side of the road, ready to kill them both.
Breathing through his mouth, Cesar checked his bloody arm, then removed Pepe’s severed hand from its resting place above the dash and stowed it beneath the seat. Murmuring inaudibly to himself, he got out, the cloth of his jacket and trousers sticking to the bloody upholstery, then came around, opened the passenger-side door and dragged her across the seat.
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