Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  The pickup whistled through my left forequarter, crunching off a great lot of metal and glass. Frye was mumbling in the passenger seat, plucking at his body harness. My Ford was turning on a fulcrum as the Volvo made contact again. Now it was gripping my back bumper, pushing me into the next wave of metal and gasoline. A Honda Accord, horn bleating, banged and shuddered all along my left side, its driver’s stricken face firing by me only inches away. Frye was emitting drunken, muzzy yelps of terror. The Ford shook like a rabbit in a wolf’s jaws. The interior lights quivered and died. Flames and smoke leaped from the dashboard in front of me. My car was spinning, crashes flinging me about, pieces falling away—headlights, windows, bumpers, gears. The Ford was being eaten to the core.

  Then, suddenly, the pressure on our rear ceased. Cars were still climbing each other around us, but now the Volvo was on my right. Glancing back, I saw the Ghia nibbling at its rear, Daly popping erratically at its Swedish-made bumper. Then the Volvo was past and its engine bellowed as the driver hit the gas and blazed away to the north through a pyre of smoking, tangled vehicles. Sirens were caroling in the distance. I looked around at the intersection. The car dealers of Phoenix would be having a grand day tomorrow. I glanced at Frye. He was sleeping again. I came shakily out of the Ford and leaned against it. Daly ran up and snatched my arm. A bit of scarlet splashed down from a cut above my left eyebrow and made a star pattern on the back of her hand.

  “Are you okay?” I could feel her fingers trembling. “How are you?”

  “Wet clear through,” I said, holding my hands away from my sopping pants. “Should have worn my bloody diapers tonight.”

  Fortunately, there were bash marks on my rear bumper and an inch-thick layer of rubber on the street showing I’d had the brakes full on, or the coppers would have had my guts for garters. Even so, they gave me a Breathalyzer test, what with Frye’s booze fumes polluting the inside of the car. After I passed the test, they wrote the whole thing off as a simple hit and run. I didn’t argue. No, I didn’t recognize the Volvo’s driver, and neither did Daly. And we’d missed the license plate, too. There had been none on the front, and Daly had failed to come up with the numbers on the rear. Still, there were acres of police reports to fill out and fleets of wreckers to be summoned. It was past midnight when we finally tucked Frye in and took the Ghia. He wouldn’t need it when he woke up. He’d have a bull’s-head of a hangover, and he lived downtown, within walking range of the newspaper.

  * * * *

  When we got home, I changed into dry pants, under and over, and fixed the drink for Daly she had decided against earlier in the evening. As she sipped at it, subdued, I went to the lock-box in the top of my hall closet. I removed my shoulder holster and my Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol, Model 1911. It had been sharpened up by a master pistolsmith, a naturalized citizen from South Africa named Robbie Barrkman, with high-profile sights, an extended safety release, a polished feed ramp, and a trigger with a 3½-pound pull. A 3½-pound pull is exactly right, you see. It’s heavy enough that you won’t fire by mistake, but when your intention is there, the shot comes out steady and true.

  I sat next to Daly on the couch—she shrank away, her eyes on the pistol—snapped the magazine out, worked the action and popped loose the round in the chamber, caught it and dry-fired at the bust of King Billy on the mantelpiece above my fireplace. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. The hammer fell like the snap of an icicle.

  “You need a permit for that,” Daly said. Guessing, of course.

  “I’ve got one,” I said, flapping my wallet window to show it to her. “Any clean Arizonan can have one. It’s an armed society.”

  “That’s a sad comment.”

  “But true.”

  “What’s the purpose of that gun?” Daly pressed, her voice low and her eyes down. She was quite remarkable—gutsy enough to knock away the car that would have killed me, but shunning real violence.

  I worked the action, dry-fired again.

  “One doesn’t know the purpose until the hour arrives,” I said. “It’s a contingency against the unforeseen.”

  A whisper: “Have you killed people with it?”

  “I’m sure they saw it that way.”

  “Didn’t you worry what God would say?”

  “Oh, he’s familiar with the process,” I said. “I rather think he understands too well.”

  She turned her head. “You are terrible person. Mr. Bracknall told me you had that gun.”

  I packed the round into the magazine, the magazine into the butt of the pistol. Then I clashed the action to bring a round into the chamber, engaged the safety, and slipped the pistol into the shoulder rig.

  “Yes,” I said, “Mr. Bracknall knows. He has good reason. What else did he tell you?”

  Her eyes were wet now, and she gripped her glass with both hands, like a child whose hands are small. “That you betrayed a Mexican woman.”

  And, oh, my heart felt struck through.

  “Mr. Bracknall finds it very important to destroy me in your eyes.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Probably not the way he tells it, but I betrayed many of them, women and men.”

  “How could you do it?”

  “I did it for Rhea. I kept quiet as they moved through the smuggling pipeline. So Rhea could make money.”

  Daly didn’t even protest at that or look angry. She merely shook her head abruptly, as if I were hurting her now the way I had hurt other people. I threw the holstered pistol on the couch and turned to her.

  “Bracknall and Morrison have got you focused on how Rhea died,” I said, “but they didn’t tell you how she lived, did they now?” I stood up. “Let me tell you. She was a trafficker in human beings. She operated border runners. Rhea turned the spigot, and human beings flowed out, human beings from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico.”

  Daly’s eyes were wet. “But that’s just helping people who want a better life.”

  “Yes, that’s what I told myself, too, when I first found out. What bullshit. It’s profiting in souls.”

  I paced about. The light in the living room was yellow. It softened the Art Deco prints on the wall by the French poster artist, M. Cassandre. A railroad train, an ocean liner, an album on a turntable. Graceful, quiet pictures. They calmed me, took the edge off the anger that threatened to take my arms and legs and make them lash out at my enemies, whether I willed it or not. I’d gotten that anger on the streets, and it wouldn’t go away. I punched the button on my stereo, and out came a bit of the old Irish: A Stor Mo Chroi, in the stranger’s land, there is plenty of wealth and wailing. While gems adorn the great and grand, there are faces with hunger paling.

  “And it’s not just the smuggling,” I said. “There are ways to make more profits, if you don’t give a damn. Rhea didn’t give a damn. She knew how to turn the screws. She knew her business.”

  Then I told her. Rhea had arrived in Phoenix two years before. She had a little money from somewhere. There were stories of stolen diamonds, a Ponzi scheme out of Florida, a misdirected shipment of cocaine. Some people even said she raised and sold Doberman pinschers, useful as attack dogs to protect drug houses. It was impossible to tell which stories were true, but the money was real. Through an intermediary, she used it to put a down payment on a club in Chandler—Rhea’s Place—and on a villa in the side of a mountain off Lincoln Drive.

  I’d met her on a murder case. Every so often, as Valley people stoked their noses and veins to deal with the new Millennium, someone killed a few innocents. A great deal of heroin and cocaine ran through Phoenix, sometimes transported by Asian or even Russian gangs, but mostly up from Mexico and handled by Mexicans. On a June morning in a ramshackle house in south Chandler, someone had used two Heckler and Koch submachine guns—high-class weaponry—on a mother and father, a teen-age son and a small boy and girl. The Ruiz family. From the method of m
urder, the killers were likely Sinaloan Cowboys, one of the most vicious Mexican gangs. The victims’ offense was obscure. Perhaps they hadn’t produced a load of dope they had been entrusted with, or were relatives of someone in that predicament, or perhaps they had simply been living next door to the wrong people.

  I was sent to gather the usual quotes, and I wound up at Rhea’s Place. A lot of illegals drank there. Rhea, who’d picked up Spanish somewhere, made them welcome, kept her prices low and ran a safe place. It was just a sawdust-floored operation with a little dance floor, a piano, and a pool table. The lighted beer signs on the wall were from Sonora, antique and unusual, meaning she must have been traveling deep into the interior and doing deals out of her pocket. And there was a jukebox filled with a great number of Tex-Mex tunes and those newsy ballads the Spanish language stations liked to play. Even now, one favorite was “Joe Cocaine,” written years ago about a border Justice of the Peace who, the song said, was more interested in running the drug than suppressing it.

  Day laborers clustered at the bar, hunched over the tables. Sweaty felt hats, heavy work shoes and jeans, faces dark with far-away darkness. When I approached them, they said nothing and looked past me, but Rhea noticed my predicament and came over. She emitted a string of Spanish, addressing several by first names, and in good time they were giving me what I wanted. They wouldn’t discuss the Cowboys, of course. That was a death warrant. But they had known Ruiz. He had been a nice fellow who made sure to send his children to school. He was working as a landscaper, trying to make enough to move out to the country. Now he was gone, they were all gone, and it was sad.

  When I finished, I joined Rhea at the end of the bar. Of course, I tried to sort her out right away. The quick size-up was this: she was a shrewd businesswoman with a cash register for a heart. Pulling in illegals because they were tough to reach, but loyal once you had them, cash-and-carry customers. There wouldn’t be any worries about worthless checks, because there wouldn’t be any checks.

  Rhea’s genius at business was that she could keep your mind off business. Instead, she made you think of her. Of the way her mouth quirked, the warmth of her hand on your arm, the swing of her walk. And that was just for the paying customers. If she was dealing with a man as a man, she offered a bonus. A man likes a woman of a certain kind, wants to savor the flash of her eyes and her long shape and her hair so smooth it reaches for his fingers. And that was Rhea, too—a tall colt who seemed always just back from a brisk ride, her perfume smelling of sandalwood, her eyes blue as . . . well, there is no blue like that.

  “I’ve always admired writers,” she said.

  And that was her best ploy. Every reporter wants to be thought of as a writer.

  “And I’ve always admired women who admire writers,” I said.

  She smiled—a smile that appreciated laughter, that wouldn’t be beaten, that knew pain and made light of it. That was another ploy—obvious, but a good one all the same, one that would bear no resisting. That was enough. All my experience wasn’t proof against her, all my bitterness, all my knowledge. Instantly we were friends, and then more than friends.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “You mean, you were lovers?” Daly Marcus said.

  “You have such a simple way of putting things.”

  “But I thought you hated her.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I hate her still.”

  She opened her lips to say something, but hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  With her finger, she drew a pattern on the couch next to her. “Mr. Bracknall said that you tried to have sex with her, and she wouldn’t, and that made you mad and that’s why you hate her.”

  “Mr. Bracknall,” I said. “The fount of all wisdom.”

  She stood up, irked. “Well, it happens that way sometimes.”

  I looked her over. In the yellow light, she looked like Rhea. The blue eyes, the graceful neck, the firm chin. The right height and the right face and the right clean sweep of the shoulders. Just like Rhea. Except for the green hair and the innocence. Jesus.

  “How would you know how it happens sometimes?” I said. “You’re out here stumbling around in this sewer, planting your angels on the foreheads of corpses, telling me God’s got his face set against pistols and taking advice from the lowest kind of bastards on earth. You think Rhea turned me down for sex and that’s why I’ve got it in for her? If she had only done that one favor for me, I’d be a happy man today. I wouldn’t be waking up in the middle of the night seeing the faces of all the immigrants she banged up in some shithole in the West Valley, then butchered when their families couldn’t come up with ransom. Or left to die in some airless cargo trailer in the middle of the desert because the cops were sniffing around.”

  She was crying. That made me furious.

  “You’re a bastard yourself,” she said.

  “You’d better hope I’m a bastard,” I replied, “because there’s some damn bloody work to be done now, just because you thought you’d take a run among the slop buckets of Arizona. They’ve planted Arnie Sweeney, and for all I know, they did it because he was a link to you. And they’ve tried to do you and me. They thought you were in the car with me, don’t you see?”

  She stared. This wasn’t working for her. Yet. “You think you can wave a crucifix at these people and they’ll shrink back in horror? Something is going on, and I’ve got to sort it out myself, because I’ve got no-one to turn to. If I lay this buffet in front of Halvorson, I’ll get the sack. If I go to the police, they’ll laugh in my face. If I tell how much I got involved with Rhea, I’ll be indicted.”

  This hooked her. “What did you do?”

  I tried for a sneer. “Oh, I just played the insider, the undercover reporter turning the tables on the bad people, to write the real story, the prize-winner.” I got up and paced to the fireplace. “I’d begun to see hints of Rhea’s violence. Bracknall told bloody stories that were supposed to be funny. Morrison would jump about like a cat when the subject of kidnapping migrants came up. I played along. I tried to give Rhea the benefit of the doubt. But I had to find out for sure. I don’t know if I fooled her—few did—or whether she was looking to trap me. In any case, she did. She asked me to run in a load of illegals for her, and I agreed. She was looking to involve me, I was looking to expose her. What a first-person account that would have been. Well, one of them died on the way.”

  I didn’t bother to look at Daly. She’d be revolted. Why not? So was I.

  “He’d caught pneumonia sleeping out after they’d got through the fence, but the others covered for him. I picked them up in Nogales, in a bar on Morley Street near the placita. He got worse on the run to Phoenix. Outside Casa Grande, he was coughing and choking. I told them we had to get him to a hospital. Most of them agreed.” I drew a hand over my face. “But Rhea had planted one of her own among them, a brass-balled coyote with a pistol in his pocket. He wasn’t going to have the shipment jeopardized. So the man died. We put him out in the desert.” I paused. “Rhea had me then, and that was the end for us. I told her about the migrant. I looked into her eyes and saw her check that man off like you’d cancel an entry in a ledger. ‘This will bring us closer,’ she told me. Then it was, ‘You’re in deep, Michael.’ That was the last I heard from her. She thought I would go away. But I didn’t, I didn’t. I kept after the story until she died.”

  I looked at Daly then, and she had a queer expression on her face.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “Not about that.”

  “You must be lying. You make it sound as if Rhea was always in control. But she couldn’t have been.” She held up a finger. “Look what’s happened. The others had her killed. They arranged that car crash. That means they were running things. Maybe she was trying to stop them, and they killed her for that.”

  Some of that was possible, except for the part about Rhea trying to thr
ow a spanner in the money machine.

  “I don’t know what she was doing, not exactly. If I had been able to prove it, I would have splashed up some headlines and given evidence,” I said. “But, for all that, she’s dead now, and we could get dead, too. If you want to prevent that, you’d better tell me about her. You know something important, so Morrison and Bracknall think.”

  I took a chance, then.

  “Tell me why they’re chopping up those illegals.”

  “Chopping up?”

  She looked shocked, but that could be a ploy.

  “They kill some they can’t ransom,” I said. “Dump them in the desert, out in the southwest Valley, in the Salt River bed. Hands bound, bullet in the head. Corpses whole, until recently. But as of a month ago, they’ve been badly chopped. And missing organs. Kidneys, livers, hearts. There’s something happening there, something profitable.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  She thought it over. It took her a while, but at last a light came into her eyes.

  “You know what you’re seeing?” she said. “It’s the alien mutilations. Everyone knows about those. They’ve been seen all over the world since the 1960s. It’s cattle, usually. They cut off the jaw, slice out the tongue, remove an eyeball, slit out the sex organs. It happens at night, and there are no tracks. That’s because UFOs do it.”

  I searched her face for mockery—the lip corner tightened and slightly raised—or the lopsided, fleeting expression of deceit. I detected neither.

  “Or perhaps chupacabras,” I said.

  “What?”

  I had meant to be jocular.