Rule

by CD Reiss

  I pushed his chest so I could look him in the eye. “Enough of that.”

  I took his hair in my fists, I was so angry at him. How could he even consider that nonsense? Some idea that he was mentoring me for a life of misery?

  Cars had been blowing past us sporadically, so the presence of another car on the highway didn’t surprise me until it slowed down, and a car door slammed.

  “Oh, crap,” I said, pulling myself away.

  Antonio picked his head up while holding me down. “Stay.”

  “I’m naked.”

  “That’s why I’m staying here.”

  I heard the crunch of footsteps outside, and my door opened. Upside down, the man in the dark brown shirt looked ten feet tall, with a cowboy hat and a silver star like a sheriff in the old west.

  Just above me, the underside of Antonio’s chin cut a triangle into my view of the night sky.

  “Spinelli,” the Tijuana cop said with a tinge of annoyance.

  “Oscar.”

  “Hotel rooms too expensive for you?”

  “We couldn’t find parking.”

  “Get dressed, fucking gringos.”

  He slammed the door, and Antonio and I wiggled back into our clothes.

  “You know him?” I looked behind us. Looked like that cop and another, shorter guy.

  “His daughter.”

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at him.

  “She got into trouble with a guy.” He buttoned his pants. “Some drugs. The guy ran to LA, and I brought him back to TJ.”

  I jerked my legs through my jeans. “So he owes you?”

  He buttoned the last button of his shirt. “Why?” A smile stretched across his face as if he knew what I thought but let me meet him there.

  “How fast does this thing go?”

  “In fourth gear all the way? Even this shit American car can hit a hundred fifty.”

  I made the rest of the journey in my imagination. He’d start the car and take off. We’d be followed for a time so the cop could say he did his best, but they’d give up, report us, and move on. We’d have nowhere to go. No passports. No way back. Then for sure we’d never get back to Jonathan.

  Antonio caught my train of thought. “I don’t think he’ll chase us far.”

  I put my hand on his knee. “I have a better idea. There’re no passports coming, right? If the forger sold us out? There’s only one way out of here.”

  ***

  When we got out of the car, Oscar held out his hand to shake Antonio’s. Oscar looked older, early fifties, when I was right side up, and his deputy looked to be a couple of decades younger. We made introductions in the middle of the desert, the afternoon wind forcing us to shout.

  “You’re in the shit, my friend,” Oscar said.

  “Keeps life interesting.”

  “Okay, I get it, but letting you walk’s gonna cost you. You get outta LA with any cash?”

  “I did,” I interjected. I had a few hundreds in my pocket and no more. “But not to let us walk. We need to get back over.”

  Oscar looked at his deputy, then at Antonio. Tipping his head to me, he said, “Live one you got here. She know she’s jumping into the lion’s mouth?”

  “You can do it.” Antonio waved as if it was nothing. “You got a badge. You can do anything.”

  Oscar laughed. “How? Tell them not to look at you?”

  “Yes.”

  Oscar looped his thumbs in his belt as if they were too heavy for his shoulders to carry without support.

  “People see what they want to,” I said. “If they trust you, we can get across.”

  He laughed so hard his elbows shook. “You want me to be your coyote?”

  I didn’t want to look at Antonio. I didn’t want to see his disapproval or disdain. Didn’t want to see the thousand reasons this wouldn’t work. But I did look at him, and he was fixed on Oscar, steady and strong.

  “Yes,” I said. “We want you to be our coyote.”

  “You know what stinking coyotes get paid?”

  “Money isn’t an object, generally speaking,” I said, now totally out on a limb, “but transferring it can get sticky. So I think you may owe Antonio more than an escort out.”

  Oscar huffed. “One ride still pays for two.” He held up two fat red fingers.

  “I will find a way to pay you if we get across alive,” Antonio said.

  “And not into the hands of the Sicilians,” I blurted.

  “If they have you,” Oscar said, “you’ll be paying me from the grave.”

  four.

  SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER[→7]

  antonio

  didn’t know how I felt about her.

  I wasn’t used to thinking much about how I felt or what I wanted. If I wanted a woman, I made sure she was someone who knew omertà, the law of silence, and practiced it. I was a lawyer and former consigliere, and I had too much information in my head to leave unprotected. So I found women already in the circle. I never had to even tell them to keep quiet. I didn’t worry. If I was attracted to a woman outside the circle, I didn’t fuck her. That was all.

  But this one? Theresa? I wasn’t even in control of myself with her. It was easy to see her on the television and admire her. The way she stood brought out her curves, and her eyes let you into a mind that turned and churned with something spoken in a language only she knew. She was inaccessible through that screen. I didn’t have to think about what I wanted to do with her body because I couldn’t touch it.

  Then when I did, my mind was poisoned and I thought of nothing else.

  I fucked her to get it out of my system, then thought, maybe one more time. If I could crack her and hear that language spill, I’d be done.

  In the shop office, with Paulie giving me a hard time about the Catholic Charities donation from the day before, I thought about how I could bend her until she broke just one more time.

  And that was when Daniel Brower drove into the lot.

  I’d never seen a man so bold in my life. He walked onto my property as if he had a right to be there. As if he had an Aston Martin making a high rumble when low was required. I saw him across the lot, through my office windows.

  Paulie took his foot off the table. “What the—?”

  I turned my back to Brower, who still had half the property to cross, in his beige jacket and flapping black tie. Paulie stood and put his hand on his weapon, which he had no license for whatsoever.

  I waved my finger in the direction of his gun. “He’s alone, and I know what it’s about. Put that away.”

  Paulie had never looked at me with distrust in all the years I’d known him, but then, I saw it. It was so obvious, it jarred me.

  I caught myself. I was acting as if I had done something wrong. I wasn’t doing something wrong. I was doing something stupid. There was a difference.

  “This is personal,” I said.

  He must have read my face, because his body went slack at the same time he rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He was so American. “You banged his wife.”

  “They never married.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Spin. We agreed not to do this. We agreed no women get in the way of business.”

  I shrugged. She’d been more than worth it, but I couldn’t tell him that any more than I could tell him that I intended to do it again.

  A knock at the door before it cracked open, and Lorenzo poked his head in.

  “Let him in,” I said before Zo could announce him.

  Paulie stood and buttoned his jacket, which did nothing to hide the bulge under his arm. “Do not fuck with me on this.”

  Before I could decide if I should feel threatened or not, Brower came in. He looked naked without his security detail and trail of press.

  “Danny DA,” Paulie said with a thick coat of disrespect.

  “Mister Brower, come with me.” I indicated the door.

  Before Paulie could protest, Brower and I were on our way into the lot. I didn’t want to argue wit
h Paulie in front of the DA, and I didn’t want to shame him by asking him to leave.

  “I know what you’re here about,” I said as we walked behind the building. We barely had room to walk two abreast. Oil cans stacked against the chain-link fence blocked the view of the graffiti’d cinderblock wall on the other side.

  “You have no idea,” he replied.

  “One man’s trash,” I said, smiling. “You threw her away.”

  “Don’t tell me she’s your treasure. Let’s skip all that. Let’s not pretend you have a bone in your body that can feel anything. No one has time for discovery.”

  I didn’t care what he thought about me, or his opinion of my intentions with Theresa. I didn’t even know how I felt about her. But oddly, I couldn’t read him.

  “You have something,” I said. “So why not just tell me what it is?” I tried to act casual, as if he had nothing on me.

  “I know about your sister. I know there were four men who gang-raped her.”

  He did it on purpose. He used words that opened my glands and filled my bloodstream with violence. I wanted to choke him, and he smiled as if he knew it. He was trying to weaken me with my own bile, and I was letting it work.

  “That was in Napoli,” I said. “It’s not your business.”

  “Four Neapolitans from a rival family. Three are dead, and you took their territory.”

  “I already thanked God for striking them down.”

  “You lit a candle to yourself,” he said.

  “You going to arrest me? In the back of my property? No. You didn’t come here unarmed, by yourself, to take me in.”

  “I came to make a trade.”

  “This should be good.”

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  I wanted to check him for a wire was what I wanted to do. I wanted to walk away, because there was no good end to this. He wasn’t offering me anything that would benefit me. It wasn’t in his nature. But I wanted to hear it, because it would tell me more about him than about me, and he was not to be underestimated.

  I reached inside my jacket, and Daniel didn’t stiffen or flinch, as if he knew I wouldn’t pull my gun on him. He was confident of it even in his bones. That in itself was cause for concern.

  I took out my cigarettes and lighter.

  I poked out a cigarette for him, and to my surprise, he took it. I lit his, then mine, watching him for signs that he didn’t smoke. But he blew a ring.

  “I know what I did,” he said. “I know, in the end, it’ll fuck me. People don’t vote for men who can’t be monogamous. They think it means I’m not focused. Well, fine. Just fine. I’ll fix what I can and fuck the rest. But Theresa takes it on herself. She thinks there’s something wrong with her. And this is a problem for me, because there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “I agree.”

  I’d gotten to him, because his lips tightened. I knew he was imagining us together, and that made me happy. I’d fuck her again just to see that look on his face one more time.

  “I know men,” he said. “I know how we are. She’s not some whore. She’s not a tool in your drawer. She’s sensitive, and she’s been hurt enough.”

  “By you.”

  “By me.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do about it. You’re going to take whatever happened yesterday and file it under stuff in the past. You’re going to politely refuse to see her again. You’ll leave her the hell alone, and she’ll find someone else.”

  “How noble of you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No,” I said, stamping my cigarette under my shoe and speaking softly. “Fuck you.”

  I walked off, back to my office, to my life, to figure out what I wanted to do about this woman. I wouldn’t be told who I could and couldn’t fuck, but I wouldn’t be pushed toward her in the name of spite either.

  “Spinelli,” Daniel called behind me.

  He didn’t seem flustered. He didn’t shout, he just said my name, and that made me listen. I stopped at the corner and looked at him as he flicked his cigarette through the chain link.

  “I know where the fourth man is. If you want him, you know what you have to do.”

  five.

  THE RETURN TO LOS ANGELES

  theresa

  scar had gotten us into the back of a truck without being seen. He kept making jokes about being a newly minted coyote, since it seemed Antonio had rescued his daughter from one. I sensed an edge to the jokes.

  “You didn’t sleep with her, did you?” I’d whispered in a free moment at the depot.

  “No. Can’t speak for Paulie though.”

  “Jesus. He’s not going to try to get back at you for that?”

  The truck had come before he had a chance to answer, and we were all smiles and handshakes.

  Hours into the journey, I’d forgotten all about Paulie’s indiscretion. I was getting antsy in the back of the truck. It was dark outside, so it was black inside. The hours blew by in the hup-shh hup of the tires hitting regular seams in the road. The heartbeat sound made me anxious about Jonathan. We’d made the deal to take us all the way to Los Angeles, and the drive seemed to take forever.

  “Do you smell that?” Antonio said in the dark.

  I felt him next to me, a stalwart presence that kept my pounding heart from exploding. “Smells like trees.”

  “Olive trees. There are olive orchards in southern California. We must be passing a stretch along the 5.”

  I nodded and took his hand, memorizing that scent. It was important to Antonio. It reminded him of his childhood, and it seemed as if knowing an olive orchard when we passed it brought him closer to me.

  “What’s your mother like?” I asked.

  “Sick, always sick. Since Nella… since the thing with those men, she doesn’t get out of bed much. But she talks on the phone and leans out the window. When you meet her, she’ll make you listen to opera. She’ll tell you Italian culture has nothing to do with crime. And she’s right. We’re aberrations, my father and I. She’ll show you art and read you poetry. She’ll play you opera until you can sing it in the shower.”

  “I love opera.” I was charmed by the idea of meeting his mother. It seemed like a fantasy that could happen. “And your dad?”

  “Never. You’ll never meet him. By running away from this marriage, I put him in a terrible position. If I see him again, fifty-fifty chance he’ll kill me. Let’s stick with my mother for now.” The dim light glinted off his teeth when he smiled, but what he said couldn’t be more serious.

  “Opera and art then.” My mind wandered to my own mother, her cultured aloofness, and my brother’s love of art.

  “Jonathan’s probably fine,” I said into the dark after a long silence.

  “Yes. Probably.”

  “Fine. I’m sure of it.” I recited it more than said it. “Fine.”

  Because I couldn’t see Antonio, when he squeezed my hand, I felt every bit of his skin, his warmth, the pressure of his touch. We’d be home soon. The border patrol hadn’t checked the back of the police van. We just withstood the heat, the stink of gunpowder and old sweat heavy in the bare box.

  Oscar had been so confident, he’d sat us in the back without a contingency plan, and he’d been right. He’d taken our guns though. Antonio had been reluctant, but Oscar wasn’t moving armed passengers. End of story.

  Antonio and I sat next to each other on the wood bench, barely moving, ready for everything to go wrong. We weren’t resigned to failure, only sitting in a state of preparedness.

  “I don’t know how I can face my family after what I’ve done,” I said. “I hurt them. I try not to think about it… but I’ll have to deal with it.”

  “Don’t explain to them. You’re back, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “I’m not worried about explaining. It’s… of everything I’ve done… I wronged them. All of them. They love me, and I made them grieve for not
hing.”

  “You should sleep,” he said.

  “I can’t. I can’t think about anything but losing you and facing them.”

  “Do you still have the medal I gave you? The St. Christopher?”

  “Yes.” It lay flat against my chest. I forgot it was there most of the time.

  “Touch it.”

  I did. I couldn’t discern anything but an overall bumpiness on the nickel-sized charm. He put his arm around me and pulled me toward him. I didn’t feel as though I was resisting, but apparently I was.

  “Down. Put your head on my lap.”

  I rested on him, letting his thumb stroke my cheek. “That medal came from my great-great-grandfather, one of the first camorrista. It protects you from harm. All harm. Even when you beat yourself, you’re protected.”

  “What about you?”

  I felt a shrug in the movements of his body. “I don’t need as much protecting.”

  I sighed. Arguing was pointless. “You should sleep too.”

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  “Stop that.”

  He pulled my hair off my face, stroking it gently back. “It’s inevitable. One day, Theresa Drazen will close her eyes.” He drew his fingers gently across my eyelids and down my cheek. I felt the need for sleep cover me like a blanket, as if my limbs and senses were in the first stage of shutting down. “She’ll close them while thinking a happy thought. About when she was younger, and she and her husband drove across the border in a police truck, before he got old and ugly.”

  “You will never be ugly.” It took an enormous amount of energy to get those five words out, but they needed to be said.

  He continued as if I hadn’t said a thing. “This is the day she’ll remember. The day her brother’s heart was healed, and she and her husband made peace with the Sicilians. The day they went to live in the olive orchards. When you close your eyes for the last time, it will be this day you remember as the first day of the long happiness of your life. You will smile your whole journey to heaven.”

  I didn’t know if he said anything else. My thoughts started to go pre-dream, and I was far away from the heat and smell of the truck, held down only by Antonio’s touch on my cheek and the thrumming of the wheels on the road.