by John Donohue
They let me think about it. I heard the faint tinkle of ice in a glass, the murmur of distant conversation near the bar. I thought of Sarah and the things I could lose if I went. Then I thought of what I might lose if I didn’t.
“OK,” I sighed.
They nodded, but neither man seemed particularly happy.
“Listen up,” Art said quietly. “There’s no telling who’s watching you or watching us at this point in time. We’re gonna walk out of here and drive away. There’s an overnight bag for you up front with the cashier. Don’t go back to Yamashita’s. Take the bag and use the subway to get to JFK. Get on a plane to Tucson. Get this done…”
“One more thing,” my brother interjected. He handed me a black cell phone. “Take this.”
“I have a phone, Mick.”
“I’ve seen your phone. It’s a piece of shit. Take this, Keep it charged up and on at all times. If I find out anything, if I can do anything, I will.” But his voice was terse and devoid of any comfort. I’m not even sure that he believed what he was saying.
I took the phone and sat there while he and his partner stumped away, grim, unhappy, and vaguely guilty.
“This is what happens,” Yamashita told me with deep displeasure. I had gone back to see him before leaving, of course. There’s something deep in the Burke DNA that makes us congenitally incapable of obeying orders.
We were seated on the floor in the dojo. It was dim and silent, a vast clean expanse of space. I could hear my heart thudding as I tried to explain.
“I don’t know any other way out of this,” I told him.
His eyes were hollow slits in a rigid mask. My sensei doesn’t leak much energy, but when he does, you can feel it. It washed over me, a tide of anger and disapproval. I had spent more than a decade with this man, accepting his guidance, working for his respect. Now I felt as if every move I made was both inevitable and unacceptable to him.
I bowed slightly. “Moushiwake arimasen.” It’s the most formal way to say that you’re sorry to a superior. But Yamashita wasn’t buying it; he didn’t even blink in acknowledgement.
“Contrition is beside the point,” he said tightly. “Do you know what you are doing?”
“I do,” I began.
“Bakka!” he cut me off. Idiot. “You have no idea!” His rebuke stung: I rocked back on my heels. I opened my mouth to continue, but he made a chopping motion with his hand to silence me.
“This is their world, Burke, not ours. It is without rules. It… compromises your honor.”
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, Sensei.”
He looked to one side as if seeking patience in another location. “Please. You are like a child. What you meant to do and what has been done are two different things. It was why I warned you against getting too involved.”
I swallowed. I thought of Sarah and her dreams. I knew that something had to be done, even if Yamashita objected.
“But I am involved” I told him.
Yamashita sighed. “You are. As are others. And now, you will place yourself in danger…”
“It’s what you have trained me to do.” It was an almost involuntary comment, but I flinched; the relationship between a teacher and pupil in the martial arts isn’t one that encourages a free exchange of opinion.
Yamashita’s nostrils flared. “I have spent years training you. And now—to run the risk of throwing it all away…” His voice trailed off and we both sat in silence, stunned at the rare admission of concern.
We both knew about the danger I faced. The warriors of old Japan knew that every confrontation was more than likely to end in disaster. The dispiriting rule of the samurai: a superior opponent will certainly kill you; an equally matched opponent will probably kill you even if you manage to kill him as well; only someone vastly inferior in skill will permit you to emerge unscathed.
“It’s something I have to do,” I said quietly.
Yamashita fidgeted slightly. “I know,” he answered, his tone bitter. “But these are thugs… they are animals…”
“I have to stop them,” I added. “For Sarah.”
My teacher squinted at me. “There is on here, Burke, I know. On, the tug of human relationships. “But what of giri, your duty to the dojo?” He licked his lips as if the next question took some effort. “What of your duty to me?”
And I saw him with new eyes: an old battered man, sitting there in the dimness, wondering what the future was for his school and his pupils. His anger was for the possibility of a legacy squandered as much as it was generated by concern for me.
“Sensei,” I began, “you know what you mean to me…”
“And yet there is this rebellious streak,” he said coldly. “The dojo is your world, Burke. Not this other place…”
“How can you say that? You worked for the Kunaicho!” In years past, Yamashita had been deeply involved with the more clandestine activities of the Japanese Imperial Household Agency. The details were fuzzy and he didn’t like to talk about it much.
His bullet head nodded slightly and he sipped at the air. “Yes. And at the time, I thought I was doing what was right… but it brought only pain. You know some of this, Burke.”
Yamashita was gazing at the floor, avoiding eye contact or perhaps lost in painful memories from his past.
“And yet you did it,” I prompted gently. “Because you thought it was the right thing.”
“It brought only pain,” he repeated, as if to himself.
“Sensei…”
Yamashita waived me to silence. “Go. You will do what you will do.” He rose to his feet and, since we were alone, he did not mask the pain involved in the movement. “I had hoped…” he said, but paused as if something was caught in his throat. “I had hoped that as a teacher I could save my pupil from the same mistakes I had made—that I would find someone wise enough to heed me.” He looked up and his voice was old and raspy. “It was not to be.”
Before he turned away, I saw his eyes: glittering with regret and dismissal.
18 Into the West
The junkie’s skin was brown from the sun, but looked as if it had a faint covering of ash on it. His eyes were red-rimmed and furtive. There was a restless animal prowling inside his head, simultaneously wary, distracted, and frightened.
I watched Steve Daley work him. It wasn’t the questions he asked so much as the way they were delivered that made him effective: words that emerged like random gunshots from unexpected quarters, elliptical, phrased differently each time. His voice disoriented his victim and its tone demanded a response. Daley lightly pinched the back of the junkie’s stringy neck between the thumb and fingers of his hand as they talked. The touch transferred an oscillating current: alternately avuncular and menacing, a soothing touch or the prelude to a shake that could rattle what was left of the junkie’s brains around his skull like a stone in a gourd.
This was the last in a succession of informants he’d interrogated. It was always the same. And it wasn’t pretty to watch; this type of interrogation is about breaking people down. There wasn’t much left of a junkie like this one; the questioning felt needlessly cruel, one of a final series of humiliations that would dot the dizzy downward spiral of his life. Daley was oblivious to this, or perhaps he was just jaded. He ground at this latest junkie informant mercilessly, testing and probing for lies or inconsistencies, flaws in the answers. In the end, Daley wrung the junkie out. You would have thought that there was nothing left in that jumble of ashy skin and nerve but a consciousness that winked on and off like some distant, failing light, powered only by the need for its next fix.
“They all know things,” Daley confided to me. We were back in his car, letting the air conditioner wash the heat away from our bodies. He was tall and lanky, with long graying hair pushed behind his ears and a goatee that, along with the Hawaiian shirt and cowboy boots, completed an odd image: Jimmy Buffet channeling Buffalo Bill Cody. “But they all lie.”
“So what’s the point?”
“You see what they lie about—then you start comparing stories. And then you start drilling.” Daley slipped his sunglasses on and pulled the car out into traffic. His hands were freckled and the muscles on his forearms were long and ropy. Daley had been baked by the desert into a taut machine; most of the softness in him had been desiccated and worn until it had simply blown away. What was left was wiry and functional and supremely competent: sinew, bone, and the bright eye of a predator.
He had met me at the airport, standing at the end of the chute where arriving passengers were funneled like cattle away from the gate area. At the screening complex, the serious people from the TSA were warily searching carry-on luggage, alive to the possibility of exploding toothpaste tubes. Daley stood slightly apart from the other drivers, men in dark suits who held small whiteboards with the names of their fares written on them. Daley slouched in isolation and held up a ragged piece of cardboard with the single word “Burke” scrawled on it in bad handwriting. As I got closer, I noticed that he had used the top from a discarded pizza box.
I stopped in front of him. “I’m Burke.”
Daley had obviously spoken to my brother: he knew what I was up to and regarded me with weary skepticism He didn’t say hello and didn’t offer to shake hands, just jerked his head to indicate the direction we needed to go. He spoke quietly as we moved. “I can provide you with some support and information, Burke. I owe your brother that much. I can help you set this thing up, but it may take some time. And it may get dicey. I can’t guarantee how it’s going to work out.”
“I got it,” I said.
Daley looked at me with those washed out eyes. “You’re trouble, man. I can sense that. Know this: things start to fall apart, I’m out of there. End of the day, it’s your problem, not mine. We clear?”
I nodded. Great help, Mick. “I need to see about setting up some contacts. The Westmann Resort…”
He cut me off. “Forget it. Your man Xochi has gone to ground.”
“Whaddaya mean?” My basic plan was to get to Xochi and tell him that I was willing to trade the Westmann manuscript to whoever was trying to have me killed if they would just stop. You’d think that the long flight would have provided me with enough time to develop a plan of more elegance, or at least a part two.
I stopped in consternation, however, wondering what my alternatives were now that Xochi had disappeared. Daley never paused and I hurried after him as he turned right, heading past Ike’s coffee shop toward the parking garage.
“He’s dropped out of sight,” Daley continued. If he sensed my distress, he didn’t show it. “From what I hear, there are any number of people looking for him.” Now it was his turn to pause. He stopped for a moment and looked directly at me. “Angry people, Burke.”
But I was beyond the point where someone was going to scare me. “Any idea where he could be?”
Daley gestured toward the glass doors we were approaching. “Lots of space out there to get lost in. He could be up in the Santa Catalina Mountains. He could’ve high-tailed it down to the Papago Indian reservation. Then again, we’re only sixty miles from Mexico. Take your pick. But if I were him, I’d be burrowed somewhere way under the surface, waiting until all this blows over.”
“All this?” We moved out into the bright white light, across the blinding expanse of concrete, to the parking garage. His car was a dusty black Chevy Blazer. It had oversized tires and rust was eating away at the wheel wells. The interior was hot and stuffy; it smelled of dust, stale coffee, and old apples.
We settled into the car. My seat was lumpy and I could feel springs trying to sprout up through the fabric.
“You read the papers, Burke? We got quite a circus goin’ on down here. The drug cartels are at war with the Mexican government. The local gangs are at war with each other, trying to get control of the cross border trade. And the U.S. is on the losing end of a war on so many things I sort o’ have a hard time keeping track: a war on illegal immigration, a war on drugs, a war on terror… It’s mess. But it does keep us all busy one way or the other.” We left the airport and headed north toward Tucson.
“My brother said you had retired.”
Daley’s head turned slightly toward me. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses with dark lenses that shimmered blue and bronze and green; it was impossible to see his eyes, and I think he liked it like that.
“Partner,” he instructed me, “I worked long and hard to get as good as I am. It’s true that I left government employ. But the situation down here is so fluid that there are ample opportunities for someone like me to make a little side cash.”
“How entrepreneurial,” I said.
He grinned at that; his teeth were yellow and long. “That’s me,” he said happily. “An en-tre-pre-neur.” He spaced the word out like he was savoring the sound.
That was when we went looking for some junkies to question.
Mercifully, the sun was setting and Daley was done with his informants. We sat in the Blazer, parked in the shade of a Wal-Mart. I could feel the skin on my face, tight from the light and heat of the desert. Daley watched me for a minute.
“You reach on into the back seat, Burke. I got a few jugs of water stashed. You get some of that into you right now. The weather out here’ll kill you.” I realized how dry my mouth was. I twisted around to get the jug.
“Here’s what I think you got,” Daley told me as I got the jug. He waived the proffered water away with a hand. “Interesting situation. The street people say that the smack supply is—sporadic. Some dealers are scrambling to supply product, others have so much they’re discounting it.”
“What’s it mean?”
Daley reached into a sack and pulled out an apple. He sunk his ivory teeth into the fruit and I could hear the sucking sound as he pulled the juice out before he completed the bite. He chewed for a minute, then continued. “If I were still writing reports for our government I’d say that there’s a shift in distribution taking place. But that doesn’t really get to the meat of it. There’s a turf war taking place, Burke. Coupla different groups fighting to control the trade. Old gangs being pushed aside or rolling over. New ones coming in. It’ll be a mess for a while.”
“TM-7?” I asked.
Daley nodded, biting the apple. “That’s one crazy bunch of inked-up motherfuckers,” he said. “Your brother likes them for the attempted hit in New York.” He lowered his sunglasses and peered over them at me. “Hard to believe you walked away from that one.”
“The world is full of surprises,” I told him. Not that I really walked away.
Daley snorted in amusement. “Border’s always been a crazy place, Burke. Dangerous enough as it was. But now we got various cartels working hard at controlling a huge expanse of highly profitable activities. And the greater the money to be made, the crazier they all get. You’re a case in point. Why in God’s name did they put a hit out on someone like you?”
“I stumbled on a manuscript with some pretty detailed descriptions of old trails that crossed the border…”
He snorted again. “Lots o’ ways across the border, my man. Every chollo with some ambition and a connection knows that.”
“These are ancient Indian trails,” I explained. “Long forgotten. They’re not used very often…”
“So theoretically they’re off the Border Patrol’s radar,” Daley commented, although he sounded skeptical. “Nice, if it’s true. I suppose that fraud Xochi was involved in this?”
“What do you know about him?”
Daley slid his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose and peered at me. “I made some inquiries. He’s a man on the make, my friend. Workin’ more than a few angles. He’s pushing all that Native American desert mysticism bullshit with the tourists. Though I hear his backcountry skills are real enough. He’s also been known to help out with a special border crossing now and then. And lately, he’s been trying to peddle his alleged knowledge of secret trails to the highest bidder…”
&nb
sp; “TM-7?”
Daley pushed his shades back into place and stared out through the windshield. “He was originally talking with some other group, but I guess the negotiations got …” he licked his lips, “co-opted by our friends from Todos Muertos. I don’t think he knew what he was getting into. If he’s snowing them…” He shrugged. “My guess is that Xochi promised that he could provide them with some cherry routes across the desert. And the kicker is that supposedly he’s the only one who knows. ‘Knowledge of the ancient ones’ and all that horseshit. I don’t know how he conned them, but he did.”
Daley sat for a while, pausing in admiration of Xochi’s accomplishment or appalled at his stupidity. Then he stirred and tapped me on the thigh. “Then you come along and complicate things. Ha! TM-7 are a bunch of lunatics, Burke, but they like a nice tidy package as much as anyone. You, roaming around with a manuscript that contains info on their allegedly secret trails, most certainly would have pissed them off. They thought our man Xochi had a monopoly on that knowledge.” He grinned tightly, an unpleasant wrinkling of leather skin and teeth like old bone. “Imagine their—disappointment. So they went looking for you in the wilds of New York. Obviously, from what your brother tells me, complications ensued. Xochi realized he was probably next on their list and did a fast fade.”
“Do you know who he was dealing with?” I asked. Ultimately I had to get to whoever was directing the hits.
He shook his head slowly, ruminating. “Nooo,” he said, drawing the word out as he pondered. “There are a few likely suspects. Guy known as El Carnicero is a big man with the local TM-7. He’s a bit of a freak. Enjoys working on people with a blade. Hence the nickname: the Butcher. Likes to keep things personal, ya know? But if you’re going into harm’s way, it would be wise to make sure that it’s gonna solve your problem and not just piss off a new set of gang bangers. This particular circus is filled with freaks. It could take some time to narrow down the list to anything actionable.”