“You can walk,” he hissed. “You know you can.”
Propelling herself from one filthy car to the next, one arm wrapped around his shoulder, she hobbled beside him as they passed an abandoned Datsun with SHIT HAPPENS finger-written in the grime on its windshield. Shit doesn’t just happen, she thought, pulling herself along. It hunts you down. The row of cars ended, and without anything to push against, she fell. Cesar just kept moving, pointing toward one of the apartment buildings as he dragged her up and along. At such moments she found it was true, she could walk. The way a dying woman walks.
Cesar led her to the breezeway of the apartment building nearest the cliff. Vato graffiti snarled across the wall. The stairway was steep and stank of piss. A shaft of dust angled down through a grime-smeared skylight. Their steps rang out on the metal stairs as they climbed to the top, by which time her head was spinning. Surfaces rippled at the edges. The floor swayed. With one hand on the wall, the other around Cesar, she made it to the end of the hall. He knocked at one of two facing doors then tried the knob.
The door, unlocked, eased open.
“Primo,” Cesar called. No one answered.
A guttering haze beckoned from within, created by candles burned down to the quick. The entry gave way to a dark hallway, down which successive doorways glowed with the same twitching light.
“Something’s wrong,” Shel said, looking at a table awash in melted candle wax.
“It’s weird,” Cesar agreed. He glanced around a corner into the first empty room. “I’ve never been here when there wasn’t somebody hanging out. Hidalgo’s junkie pals. The chicks who come up to boost spikes, raid his stash cans.” In the next doorway, another flickering ooze of candle wax greeted their stare. “He’s a nod, he knows a dozen other nods, and on any given day, half of them are here.” He shuddered. “Never seen the place this quiet, even when everybody’s swacked.”
He walked stiffly from pain and dizziness, turning his whole body to look inside each room. Shel staggered behind, using the wall for support and mesmerized by the Rorschach of smeary bloodstains across the back of his jacket and trousers. Finally, at the end of the hallway, they peered into the last room and came upon a near-naked youth, sprawled across a bare mattress with a tangled sheet kicked onto the floor. The young man had indio features and a body turned gaunt from excess. Dressed only in socks and underwear, he rubbed his arms, eyes glazed as he stared at the ceiling with an impersonal smile.
“Primo,” Cesar said. “Hidalgo.”
Hidalgo lowered his glance from the ceiling, his eyes milky as he tried to focus on the figures in the doorway. Dried saliva clung to his lips which moved but no sound came out.
“I don’t think he can hear you,” Shel said. “He always like this?”
“No. Which is why nobody stuck around, is my guess.”
With an air of wanton grace Hidalgo finally recognized Cesar. He lifted his hand, his lips cracking into an oblivious smile as his fingers twitched. He was waving hello. Leaving Shel propped in the doorway, Cesar tramped over to a soiled pile of clothing balled up in the corner and searched the pockets, finding a small bindle of wax paper. He also discovered a modest wad of bills, which he pocketed as Hidalgo’s head fell back onto the mattress with a heaving, oblivious moan and his eyes closed.
Returning to Shel, Cesar showed her the bindle and said, “You may need this. You want it now or later?”
Shel felt ashamed at how conflicted she felt. The craving already had her by the throat, not because of the pain.
“Later,” she said, swallowing.
Cesar put the bindle in his pocket. “Maybe there’s some thread in the kitchen, a needle.”
“For what?”
“My arm,” he shouted, instantly furious, as though she should know. “Stitch it up.”
In the kitchen he found some rum. He removed his jacket. Much more gingerly, he removed his shirt. The sleeve came away like a sheath of skin and he screamed through his teeth. Blood seethed from the wound again. He rinsed it in the sink, wiping away the dried blood and the seared flesh, and discovered that the bullet had gone straight through. There’d be no need to dig it out. This seemed a good sign, despite the fact he had no strength in the arm. The rim of the muscle hung in shreds.
“All we have to do is clean it up and sew it closed, both sides,” he said. “Find a towel.”
She tried to get up from her chair but her legs collapsed beneath her. He pulled his gun out from under his belt and slammed the butt against the counter. “I’ve had enough of this,” he shouted. “When the mood hits, you walk. Do it. Now.”
She drew herself up using the chair and the table, then lunged across the kitchen to the cabinets. She reached them on her knees, pulled herself up, sucking air, and searched drawers until a towel appeared. She had no idea if it was clean.
“Here.” She held it out for him to take.
The floor was sticky and there was a smell of mildew brewing in the sink. Cesar snagged the towel, dried his arm, and said, “Come over and sew up the holes.”
“I was never much at girl stuff,” she began, but he aimed the gun at her.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he said, in a mocking whine.
“You can’t just darn it up like a sweater.”
“Do it.”
He kicked a chair across the room for her and, using it like a walker, she forced herself around the room, pulling open the drawers she hadn’t already checked. One drawer seemed the catch-all: In a tangled heap lay buttons, matchbooks, a church key, dice, string, safety pins, pennies, rubber bands, candles, a shoelace, gum—and a spool of black thread with a single needle.
She worked her way back to the table, sat down and wet the thread with her tongue. Her hands shook. He told her to hurry, pressing the towel to his arm to keep the wound clean and stay the blood. Finally, she had the needle threaded and told him to bare the wound. He drew the towel away and she gagged. The flesh was black and mangled. Muscle and bone gaped through the tear.
“You need a doctor,” she said.
He slammed the gun butt down again, this time on the table. “What I need is you to do what I tell you. Stop telling me why you can’t.”
She took a moment to regain control of her hands. Once they stopped trembling, she started with the wound on the upper side of the arm, where the skin was softer. She set about looping the thread through his skin, aiming the needle tip at a shallow angle, having no idea if she was doing it right or wrong. Her hands grew sticky with his blood. Cesar drank from the rum bottle, he cursed, he bit his fist. The thread broke twice, his skin ripped where the thread tried to hold and the whole thing fell apart. He savaged her with obscenities then told her to try the underside, where the skin was thicker. That was when the needle broke. He jumped up, screaming. He pulled back the hammer of his pistol and pressed the barrel to her head.
“You are trying, goddamn trying, to fuck me up,” he shouted.
She sat there, holding a bloody length of thread, her eyes closed, waiting to die.
“I saved your life,” he told her.
“I didn’t ask you to.” She looked up past the gun into his eyes. “I asked you, if they were going to kill me, to make sure you were the one who did it.”
He grinned, thumbing the hammer down gently. “Same thing.” He lowered his chin onto his chest and laughed. Closing his eyes to hide his tears, he put the gun down and wiped his face. “Check the bathroom,” he murmured. “Maybe there’s some gauze, some bandages. Anything.”
She pulled herself up on the chair she used for a walker and hobbled down the hallway, stumbling twice, one time banging her teeth against the chrome back of the chair. In the bathroom she checked the medicine cabinet for anything that might ease her pain, finding nothing for her effort but toothpaste, hydrogen peroxide and laxative. Never go to a junkie for drugs, she thought.
Closing the cabinet door, she saw a stranger’s reflection in the mirror. Good God, she thought, as recognition finally
claimed the image. A sensation of cold swept through her, and she associated the chill with something her grandmother used to say: Someone just walked across my grave. The phrase evoked an image: a tall cloaked figure stepping across fresh earth. It’s not my grave, she realized. It’s Danny’s.
Live, she thought, clutching the sink to keep from falling. Whatever happens, to me or anybody else, please live.
She pulled herself away from the mirror. In the drawer she found gauze squares and an Ace bandage. Shoving them down into her pocket, she turned her chair about and trounced back toward the kitchen where Cesar sat, his head buried in the crook of his good arm, the other arm hanging at his side. Blood dripped from his fingers to the floor.
“Talk to me,” she said, tearing open the wrapper of one of the gauze squares. “Tell me about Hidalgo.”
“I already told you. He’s a spike.”
She applied the bandage to the underside of his arm, covering the exit wound, which seeped blood. “Hold that there,” she told him. He obeyed. “How do you know him?”
“Hidalgo? I know him from home. His old man’s a jefe like mine.”
“What’s that?” Shel ripped open the next bandage.
“Jefe? It’s like a boss. Guy in the community who’s connected. Hidalgo’s family lives in Netzahuacóyotl, east of the airport.”
“Is that nice?”
“It’s a slum. For garbage pickers. Which means it’s paradise compared to Chalco.”
She remembered the name. “That’s where you’re from,” she said, overlaying the first square with the second, forming a Star of David.
“Yeah.” He held the two pieces of gauze in place as she opened the next. “Hidalgo’s people know my people. They look down their noses at us. Fucking garbage pickers. Can you believe that?” Shel applied the next bandage to the wound on top of his arm. It was the smaller of the two. Cesar spread his hand, to hold both the top and bottom bandages in place at once. “The joke is,” he continued, “they can bitch about us all they want. We’re family. There’ve been a couple of marriages. I met Hidalgo as a kid at one of the weddings.”
“You’re related.”
“He’s my cousin,” Cesar said.
Shel began unraveling the Ace bandage. Cesar gestured with a nod back toward the room in which Hidalgo lay in his stupor. “What should I tell his people?” he said. “I’ve seen him loaded dozens of times. Never like this.”
“Is that where you’re going?” she asked. “You’re going to hide with his family?”
Cesar cackled. “Papa Cleto wouldn’t waste a fucking second to decide. He’d sell me to the highest bidder.”
“That’s your uncle?”
“Hidalgo’s old man,” Cesar confirmed.
“What about your own family?”
“Worse.”
She wrapped the elasticized bandage around his arm as tight as she dared, enough to hold the bandages in place, not so much as to cut off circulation and risk gangrene. “If you can’t trust your family, where are you going to run?”
“We,” he corrected. “Where are we going to run.”
The sound of a tow truck from the street below interrupted them. Cesar stood up, hobbled to the window over the sink and peered out from the edge of the curtain.
“Fucking hell,” he whispered.
Coming up behind him, Shel saw a patrol car and a tow truck positioned at opposite ends of the car. The tow truck’s yellow light spun in the opposite direction of the cruiser’s blue-and-red flasher, the beams intersecting in circles across the grime-caked cars parked along the cul-de-sac. The cop pointed his flashlight through the windshield, holding it like a spear. The light refracted through the shattered glass, creating an etchwork of shadows across the bloody upholstery. Wait till he finds the hand stuffed under the seat, Shel thought.
“Get back,” Cesar hissed as a second cruiser pulled up behind the first.
He pulled her away from the edge of the window. There’d be other cruisers soon, they both knew that. Turning his back to the curtains, Cesar put his hand to his head, gritting his teeth. Eyes closed, he started pounding his forehead with the heel of his hand, whispering, “Think, motherfucker, think …”
Shel clutched the kitchen counter for balance. Through the fog of her pain and fear an idea took form. “We get out of here somehow,” she said, “before they start doing a door-to-door. Hole up in the bushes if we have to. Tomorrow morning, we make the ferry, I know a guy in San Francisco. Name’s Eddy, owns a body shop out in the avenues. We can get a car.”
Cesar cracked his eyes, which were milky from tears. He turned toward her, unsteady, grinning. “You said, ‘we.’”
CHAPTER
23
A half hour after the rain stopped, a line of seven cars appeared and rolled slowly past the marina. Abatangelo rose onto his knees and sighted the caravan through his viewfinder. The cars sagged from the weight they carried, their suspensions creaked. The procession crept steadily across the loose muddy gravel until all seven cars lined up parallel to the windbreak wall.
The men got out, Latinos, three dozen or so. No more than six looked older than twenty, and the older ones had the yeomanly manner of hired men. They wore identical jumpsuits, like prisoners. Some wore black hooded parkas, either pulled over the jumpsuit or wrapped around the waist, sleeves knotted in front. A few of the young ones sported a hint of jewelry, a bit of personal flash. Abatangelo thought of Moreira’s press release, his promise to lift young pachucos off the street and offer them steady work.
They unloaded firearms from the car trunks in a steady, methodical hush, carrying the weapons in their arms like firewood, passing them over the wall to companions standing ankle-deep in the grassy mud. There were pump guns and bird rifles, sighted hunting carbines. Then came the serious stuff: riot guns, streetsweepers, strikers, one or two MAC-10’s for the hirelings. Ammunition boxes followed, passed hand to hand, along with cartons filled with jars of gasoline, knotted rags, cans of spray paint, the stuff of hand-to-hand street combat.
The men jumped the wall, spreading out in both directions, as the cars pulled away. One of the leaders signaled back toward the marina with his flashlight, kicking the gravel around to hide the tire tracks. Abatangelo fixed him in the telephoto lens, everything rendered vivid and immediate through the PLI. The man’s skin became the dark green of leafage; the background resembled the rippled green of pool water.
Three tottering vans appeared in the distance. They were old and rusting along the chrome lines, the wheel wells. The vans queued past the marina and, guided by the leader with the flashlight, pulled in slowly along the wall. The gunmen spaced themselves between the vans and on either end, setting up their ambush, stacking the rifles side by side along the wall, barrels up, stocks in the high wet grass. Abatangelo honed in on faces as the men loaded beehive rounds into the pump guns, deer rounds into the hunting rifles, then passed the jars of gasoline, the rags, the spray cans, up and down the line, setting them down with care. The parkas came on for shelter from the rain. Once the men were settled, one by one they removed handcrickets from their pockets and signaled down the line.
Abatangelo settled back on his haunches. Even if Shel was down there, he thought, inside one of the vans, the Mexicans had no intention of simply handing her over and being done with the matter. That much was obvious from the manpower and weaponry. They’d had their war council. Felix Randall and his men, if they bothered to appear, were low enough, hated enough, to take down without fearing much of a manhunt. Nobody at the Justice Department would so much as yawn. As for the locals, who cared? It actually made things simpler, tidier, if the Mexicans ran the meth trade. No more renegade biker romanticism, no more Aryan warrior myth. They could all join hands against the foreign menace. Blame immigration.
Abatangelo leaned forward again, returning his attention to the vans. The drivers remained in place, swallowed up in shadow, behind which firewalls separated the cabin and cargo areas. There’d be no
telling if Shel was there, inside one of those vans, or even if she was alive, until they opened the doors and either brought her out or didn’t. He pulled away from the viewfinder again and massaged his eyes.
An intimation of the lunacy, the pointlessness of his being there, overwhelmed him. It combined with a gutting sense of loss. She’s dead, he thought. If they haven’t done it already, they’ll make it part of the show. And I’ll be here, he thought, peering through the viewfinder as she gets dragged from one of the vans, marched to the middle of the gravel road, given a little shove so the gunman can get a proper aim, then murdered.
Don’t do this, he told himself, shaking off the image.
He considered giving up the subterfuge, revealing himself and walking down, trying to barter for her. They’d kill him on the spot, he realized—drag his body into the grass and go back to waiting for Felix Randall’s men. A minor distraction. A little sidelight before the main event.
There’d be no saving her. Not here. As that sank in, the full weight of Shel’s death, already accomplished or imminent, bearing down, he thought to himself, “I’m sorry.” The words felt foolish, the sentiment wretched and small. If he’d simply had the courage to want her, like Wax said—the courage to comfort her when she came for help, be thankful for her being there, not connive some inane, scheming justice—she would very likely be safe and well. Frank might even be alive, he thought, or at least the blame for his death would lie elsewhere. He remembered Waxman, after the explosion, confiding he was afflicted with the image of a schoolbook drawing, Icarus in flames. What he left unremarked, of course, was the other half of the story—the vanity of Daedalus. His vanity and, in the end, his guilt.
He returned his eye to the viewfinder and photographed every grouping of shooters along the wall, as well as the drivers slouched down inside the vans. It might provide leverage later, he thought. Somebody with his face in a picture would add just a little more to the story to save himself. And if that didn’t end up keeping anyone alive, it would at least tell the tale.
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