Cabezón, the lion, Eddie, the gorilla, and Tony, the clown, stood mute.
“Bueno. Let’s take this party on the road.”
CHAPTER 29:
SLOW DANCE
The casino boat was full of people in costume, just as Pelón had said, except some of the scarier-looking ones had actually gone dressed as themselves. Everywhere people dropped money and appeared to have fun doing so. Slot machine bells and the sound of coins falling provided the constant illusion that the players—not the casino—were the ones who made money.
Cabezón, Tony, and I went our separate ways, since there was no need to stay together the whole time. Our appointed hour of announcing the holdup was an hour and a half later, at the halfway point in the cruise, as the boat turned, and by that point we would, according to the plan, have met in the men’s room, which was located exactly where Pelón said it would be, on the schematic he had drawn for us, on the coffee table, back at his place. For the moment we didn’t need to be together.
I walked around the casino and watched people gamble. I played a little slots and blackjack, like Pelón suggested, so the cameras wouldn’t pick me up just hanging around, which might create suspicion. A woman at the slot machine next to mine had come as a slut. I wished that all I had on my agenda that night was drinking and gambling with an easy woman. A simple life never sounded better. The gorilla suit felt like a wool blanket. I moved to the deck for some fresh air.
I tried to bring my heart rate down, to enjoy the moment of relative quiet and stillness that existed out on that deck, but it didn’t work. When I turned to go back in, I saw a couple, a man and a woman dressed as Tarzan and Jane, or maybe as cave people. They were out there in that cool night air, completely into each other. They tuned the rest of us out, and did a slow dance under the moonlight on the deck of that big boat, with no music. They didn’t seem to notice or care about me. I left them to their private wonder.
The appointed hour was upon us. I made my way to the men’s room. I waited outside a second and looked around to make sure that no one followed, or was onto us, but, of course, there was no way to tell. Abraham Lincoln and a pirate came out of the bathroom, laughing. If everything went according to plan, Pelón was out there, up the coast a ways, anxious to scoop us from shore. Coltrane and Johnson were on standby at their post, eager to stop the four of us and make off with the casino’s money. There was no backing out now. I walked into the bathroom.
Cabezón pretended to piss at a urinal, which would have been impossible, since there was no zipper on the front of his lion’s costume.
“Finally,” he said in Spanish. “Where have you been? We’re gonna be late.”
I checked under the stalls. Nobody else was in there—except for the clown shoes in the far stall.
“Tony?”
“Yeah.”
I turned to Cabezón. “Remember not to speak, don’t say anything, not one word. We don’t want to give them a clue who we are. Your Spanish will reveal a lot.”
“Don’t give me orders. And tell that other one to come out already.”
“Tony, you ready?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, I heard him snort a big hit. “Wooooeee!”
Somebody dressed as Napoleon came in and went to the urinal next to Cabezón’s. I went into the stall next to Tony’s, so as not to look like I was loitering in the men’s room. Napoleon finished and went out without washing his hands.
I heard Tony snort another big hit. “Feeding time!”
“Tony.” I spoke in a hushed tone. “You better relax.” His clown shoes looked even more ridiculous under the wall of the bathroom stall. “We gotta do this, now, c’mon.”
Tony flushed the toilet. I took out the 9mm I had stashed inside my gorilla suit, and took it off safety. I walked out of the stall. Tony came out of his stall still dressed as a clown, but with his wraparound shades on. The 9mm was in his right hand. He practically bounced. Cabezón saw that we brandished our weapons, and backed away from the urinal. Instead of holding his dick, he had been holding the sawed-off shotgun.
“¿Listos?”
I looked at Tony. He looked at himself in the mirror, held the gun up at his own reflection. “That’s right, player haters! Rock and roll!”
We walked out of that bathroom, a motley crew, an unfit unit, ready to bring noise like nobody on that cruise ever knew. Even though we had our guns out, and people immediately saw that we carried weapons, they didn’t react like they would in a bank or a liquor store, because it was Halloween. Many people were in costume, and it was easy to believe that our guns were fake, strange additions to our attire.
Cabezón put an end to all of that underestimation when he pointed the shotgun at a camera above a blackjack table, where we were to set up our base and do all of our collecting. He fired off an explosive round.
BOOM!
The camera shattered and people screamed, ducked, ran, scrambled, and scattered away from us as if by a sudden and powerful gust. Tony jumped up on the blackjack table, waved his gun, and shouted, “Everybody down on the ground, now! Quiet! Shut the fuck up! Down on the ground!”
He fired into the ceiling. PAH! PAH!
“Down, bitches!” By that time, five to ten seconds into it, everybody cowered, some whimpered, some prayed, but everybody was getting down. Except one very pregnant woman dressed as Humpty Dumpty. She screamed and waved her arms.
I made sure not to point my gun at her. “You, miss, come ’ere.” I threw my arm around her neck. “You’re gonna be my hostage.” She screamed and I shouted, “Shut up!” I whispered in her ear, “Behave, I won’t hurt you,” but I don’t think she heard, because she continued to cry.
I pointed my gun at the nearest pit boss. “You with the slicked-back hair! Get up! Fill the bags my partners are handing you!” I pointed at a dealer that had handed me good cards earlier. “Lady. Help him fill the bags.”
They paused.
“Move!”
They were panicked, but their training was tight, because they jumped into the routine of collecting everything that was back there behind the tables.
Pelón had warned me not to get suckered by one of those exploding dye packs banks sometimes give robbers. They explode a few feet from the premises and cover you with dye that is almost impossible to wash off, so the police can track you and ID you after the job.
I said, “Don’t give me any of that fuckin’ bait money.”
The pit boss was sweating. “No, sir, we’ll cooperate. Please don’t hurt anyone.”
“Bring me the kid who knows how to operate the dinghy.”
“We’ll have to call him down on the radio.”
“Do it!”
The pit boss was a class act. He got on his radio and called down for the kid, and did it routinely, like nothing out of the ordinary was going on, nobody pointed a gun, no robbery was being committed, just a dinghy that needed operation.
“He’ll be down in a second.”
“Finish loading the bags.”
People sniveled and tried to stay off our radar. Tony was still up on the table, going over the room like a beacon, looking for that excuse to shoot someone. Cabezón stood sentry, five feet from me, shotgun at an angle across his chest.
“The bags are ready, sir.”
“Where’s the kid for the dinghy?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“He has ten seconds to present himself before I shoot you.”
The pit boss radioed whoever to send the kid down.
The report came back: “He’s afraid to go down there.”
The pit boss pushed his hand through his hair. “Negative. He must report down now. We need it lowered.”
“Tell him he don’t gotta get in it with us, we know how to run the boat. If we gotta go look for him, it’ll be worse for everyone. Especially him.”
The pit boss began to relay the message. Surely, an alarm had already been sounded. Surely, some cops were on their way.
&
nbsp; I talked over the pit boss as he delivered the message. “The sooner he puts it in the water, the sooner we’re gone!”
The pit boss spoke into the radio: “For the love of God.”
The crowd cowered, but remained under relative control. Some cried and prayed out loud—all of which was made ridiculous by the fact that many were dressed as cowboys, big chickens, historical figures, ghouls, or cartoon characters. The pregnant Humpty Dumpty under my arm shivered from fear, even though I shushed her. It had not been three minutes since we announced the holdup.
The kid for the dinghy appeared at the far entrance and walked slowly toward us.
“Hurry up, we just wanna get outta here!”
He picked it up. Tony jumped down from the blackjack table. He grabbed a bag; Cabezón grabbed a bag; I grabbed a bag. The pimply white kid walked ahead of us toward the back entrance of the deck. I released my pregnant hostage and she threw herself on the ground to thank God.
I put my arm around the kid for the dinghy. As we exited, I turned and said, “Happy Halloween, everyone!”
Tony did one better and shot a slot machine, which made everyone scream and raise the volume on their prayers.
“Go ’head and follow us!”
We walked out on the deck. The kid said, “Climb in, hit that button there, it’ll lower the boat. You unhook there and there.”
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Brian.”
“Newsflash, Brian, you’re coming with us.”
His face reddened. “But you said—”
“Don’t cry, Brian. We just need you to operate the boat. We’re looking for our ride up the coast here. You take us to shore—after that, you do whatever the fuck you want.”
“Please, sir—”
I motioned toward the boat with the 9mm. “Move. Fuck this up and you’ll be sorry. Do as I say, and you’ll be telling this story for the rest of your life.”
The rest went without a hitch. We got in. Brian cried to himself, but he put the small motorboat in the water. We cruised across the surface in the direction we had sailed on the casino boat, just like Pelón had told us. The casino boat looked huge from the vantage point of the water, but it shrank and disappeared around a bend as we made our escape.
We saw the headlights, about where Pelón had said he’d be. He flashed them to let us know it was him.
“Over there, Brian.”
The kid guided the boat to our rendezvous. We three bandits jumped into the knee-high water with a bag of money in one hand and a gun in the other.
I said, “Go home, Brian. Fuck the shit out of your girlfriend the next time you see her, all right?”
The kid turned the dinghy around and put it in high gear.
The three of us threw our guns out into the middle of the river, although I kept an eye on Cabezón and made sure he tossed the sawed-off before I flung the automatic. We hustled up the muddy embankment to the getaway car.
CHAPTER 30:
TODO TIENE SU FINAL
We snaked along a lonely, unlit back road. The woods that surrounded us were etched in black ink, against a deep purple backdrop. The blackness was speckled with silver moonlight.
Our headlights cut the path. Tony and Cabezón were in the backseat. Pelón and I were up front. Pelón drove. I was wet to my knees and cold.
It had been three or four minutes since we got away from the river, but I was still out of breath.
Tony said, “We fucking blanked ’em, Pelón. I can’t believe they laid down so easy.”
Pelón stiffened at the wheel. “Tranquilo, nene. We ain’t done yet.”
“Fuck yes, we are. They ain’t stopping us now.” Tony put his hand on my shoulder. “Ready to count some money, G?”
I pushed his hand off, but did not look back at him. I heard Tony lean back in his seat.
“Now it gets easier,” he said. “I need a light.”
Tony’s elation turned the screw for me—the fact that he could even pretend to be at peace and satisfied, so soon after the horror of what he did to Roach and Chulo. I don’t know why. I twisted in my seat to look at Tony and say something. I don’t know what. Maybe I meant to curse him. Maybe I wanted to blame him for my own actions.
When I turned, I saw Tony’s greasepainted clown face all white, with the big red smile painted on, turned all the way up. The rock-and-roll shades were cocked at an arrogant angle on the top of his head. A celebratory cigar was pinched erect between his teeth. The depth of Tony’s eyes was there, even in that dark interior, connected to me like we were fifteen again.
He said, “It gets easy now. Doesn’t it?”
And that’s when Cabezón pulled the trigger on a .357 Magnum that must’ve been stashed in the backseat. The fucking thing detonated like a whole universe being born. And poor Tony missed it. He never saw a thing. His brains burst out the other side of his head in the rough shape of a thick black rose in bloom. What remained of Tony’s head snapped limp as the gray matter, which once contained his thoughts, smeared and peppered the backseat, the ceiling, the side and rear windows. The clown smile flipped upside down and the cigar dropped as Tony’s face became a mask of instant self-grief.
I screamed.
Cabezón swung the Magnum at me. I threw my left like a boxer and jerked to the side just enough to swat the barrel away and feel the fire of a second discharge burn the back of my hand, the back of my wrist, my forearm. I felt the heat of it on the side of my face. The POP! was so loud, it cracked my eardrum. I grabbed the barrel with my right and pushed it away from me.
Cabezón pushed back and tried to point the smoking barrel. He cocked the hammer, and on instinct, because I’d seen it on TV once, I slipped my thumb into the space between the hammer and the firing pin. Cabezón gritted his teeth and squeezed. The hammer snapped onto my thumb. I winced, but the gun didn’t fire. Then the Magnum jerked free from my grip. I fell back into the dash. I rebounded toward Cabezón, arms out, only to catch an explosion at an angle across my chest.
The pain was shocking, unbelievable and immediate, even as my body flew backward into the dash. Still, I understood that Cabezón was about to bring that Magnum back down, and point it at my forehead.
I flopped myself, with all my weight and all my pain, against Pelón, and the steering wheel flipped 180 degrees. The car cut across the road at an impossible angle, tires screaming over the double yellow line, across the edge of the road, over the gravel on the side, down an embankment. I think now that Pelón must have tried to throw the wheel back toward the road, because the car flipped like it had no weight at all. We rolled, turned, and crashed into each other like lottery balls.
Metal crunched. Glass turned to dust. Somewhere in the backseat the gun went off. I thought I saw Pelón fly through the driver’s-side window, but then my head slammed into something, and everything was painted black.
It ain’t like you think over there. Saint Peter doesn’t wait by the entrance. Neither does Satan. I did hear music. Ancient, childish music. Simple, but not crude. I can’t say if it was harps. But everything was crisp and clear, like when you try on prescription glasses for the first time. Except that isn’t the sense I’m talking about.
I spun, like when you fall asleep, or maybe fall in love. There was fog. I recognized the music. I was going in circles.
I was at Coney Island again, on the merry-go-round. The horse was wooden, but it had a heart that pumped buckets of blood. The beast twitched between my legs.
I saw my father. He stood by the side and watched me go round. He still wore the suit that he was buried in, but he was not dirty, and there were no maggots. I wanted to call to him, to get off the carousel.
A poem formed on the blackboard of my mind:
Remember when I was a crow,
Perched at the end of a limb,
At the edge of a forest
Of headstones,
And you dropped to one knee,
Because you thought you were alone?
&
nbsp; The merry-go-round spun faster. My father became a strobe. He winked. And then he was gone. The music got loud. The horse began to snort. It arched its muscles like a giant bow that would make an arrow out of me. The spinning got faster. I floated to the surface.
When I came to, I was facedown. My face pressed into what had once been the ceiling of the car. I was disoriented and did not immediately know where I was, what had happened, or, for that matter, who I was. All that existed was ignorant consciousness. Awareness of nothing.
But then, I felt something warm on the back of my neck, heavy and thick as ink. I tried to move, and it was as if my body did not understand what I wanted it to do. Finally, like some insect when it breaks its cocoon, I was able to move my arm. And then I touched what was on the back of my neck, and understood what it was. I didn’t scream. It was too late for that.
Tony’s corpse was on my back, bleeding onto me. I struggled out from beneath him, and pulled myself from the wreckage, through the tight opening that had once been the front windshield. I scraped myself on the twisted, jagged metal and shattered glass.
I threw up while still on all fours, heaving until I had nothing left, just air and acid that burned my throat in a way that confirmed that I was still alive. This was not Hell.
My chest hurt. I pulled myself up, leaned against the car like a drunk, looked around. Nothing. No bodies where they had been thrown from the car. No money bags. Pelón and his brother were gone, like true thieves.
There were no witnesses around. No sound of police in hot pursuit or an ambulance. Nothing. Nothing but the trees, and the sound and smell of the trees, and the stars, and the slight, faint, unhappy moon. Slowly, in excruciation, I peeled off the gorilla suit. It was heavy with river water, my sweat, and Tony’s blood.
Beneath the costume I wore black jeans, a T-shirt, and a bulletproof vest Coltrane had given me as part of our deal. I removed the vest and looked at the Magnum-sized dent in it, felt it with three fingers, and dropped it to the ground.
Gunmetal Black Page 30