by Joe Gannon
The cock continued to try and shake, rattle, and roll Ajax out of his waking blackout. Gladys was about to have another go at him when Horacio stepped on the plane. Carrying a satchel.
Hijo de puta, she thought. Who the fuck is this guy? No one had ever fully explained Horacio’s role to her—exactly what his portfolio was in the Revo. Yes, she knew he’d been a comandante guerrillero in the days before the Revo triumphed, although he’d been wounded and lifted out to Cuba before ’79, when Ajax had taken over his old command. She’d known he’d recruited Ajax to the Sandinistas when he’d been a teenager still living in Los Angeles. Hell, he’d even recruited Gladys out of the police academy where she’d graduated top of her class. He’d partnered her with Ajax three years ago, and before she knew it, nor understood why, she was reporting on him back to Horacio for reasons he’d not explained. It just seemed that everyone she’d known did Horacio’s bidding without question.
She’d done the same and had not questioned him even as the bodies piled up.
Then he had abandoned her to Krill and the Contras, let Ajax rot in prison and gotten him transferred to a nuthouse where he’d lost both mind and soul. Now Horacio was clearly letting her take Ajax out of Nicaragua with no papers and probably no approval other than his own.
She had no idea what the cops wanted or why, but here was Horacio again, alone, frail-looking, carrying only his cane and a satchel, getting on the plane and stopping the cock in his tracks.
She watched their whispered conversation. The cock’s obvious objections and Horacio’s calm reassurance that all was well. There was no shouting, no ordering. Just Horacio’s comradely pat on the shoulder and the cock and his posse trooped off the plane. Horacio barely glanced back at Gladys, did not look at Ajax at all, and left the plane after a quick and quiet word with the captain. The door was closed and in a minute Gladys felt the quickening as it lifted itself into the air.
She watched through her own reflection out the window until the moonlit land below gave way to the sea, certain that she’d never see her homeland or Horacio again. Miami was less than two hours away.
That’s when she noticed the satchel at Ajax’s feet.
Son-of-a-bitch.
Gladys waited until the flight crew came through with drinks and food and the cabin lights had been dimmed before she dared slide the satchel over, slip it under the blanket she’d pulled over herself, and have a look.
Money.
Stacks of yanqui hundreds and fifties. A number popped into her head: $125,000. She was certain of it.
That’s how much cash had been left over from the last case she’d worked with Ajax. The murder of a coffee grower named Enrique Cuadra had led to the downfall of Vladimir Malhora, the former head of the Revo’s DGSE, the General Directorate of State Security. A first-class come mierdo, hijo de puta, the J. Edgar Hoover of Nicaragua, Malhora had had at least eight people killed to cover up his larceny from years earlier when he and Ajax had both worked the DGSE chasing down the Ogre’s old National Guard and the CIA’s new Contra rebels.
Malhora had stolen it from an inept CIA mole, and she and Ajax had used it to make sure Malhora disappeared forever. The cash at her feet had to be that. She gingerly picked through it, making a quick count but not wanting to touch it, recalling the appalling amount of blood spilled over it, including Amelia Peck’s.
She got near the bottom of the satchel, sure of the count, when she saw it.
It.
The Needle.
Son-of-a-bitch!
The Needle was a wicked knife Ajax had carried since his early days in the mountains with the Sandinistas. It was long and thin like a knitting needle, but the upper half was forged into a diamond shape so that four razor-sharp edges presented to whatever flesh it was pressed into. It was a specialty blade, and Ajax had been a specialist with it. So good had he gotten at sneaking up on the Ogre’s Guardsmen and slitting their throats that he’d earned the nom de guerre Terrorifico. Spooky, in English—although The Terrifier would also be correct.
It was a blood-soaked and haunted tool, and she knew Ajax had used it to kill his way out of Krill’s camp, leaving a dozen corpses behind. The last time Gladys had seen it Ajax had the business end pressed up against the Honduran general’s jugular in order to save her ass.
Now Horacio had dropped it at her feet along with enough money to take care of the empty shell Ajax had become.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” she said.
“That an adjective or a noun,” the catatonic asked.
10
Captain Ajax Montoya smiled, and his smiling muscles ached merrily from lack of use, just like the Tin Man’s joints must’ve ached after he’d been freshly oiled. A joyous pain. Ajax put a finger to his lips.
“Shh.”
Then he used the finger to close Gladys’s gob-smacked mouth.
“No fucking way,” she whispered.
“Catatonic opossum.”
“No fucking way.”
“You must’ve suspected.”
“No fucking way!”
“Then why’d you make so much noise when you got to the hospital?”
“I was pissed off!”
“Shh.” Ajax nodded to the first-class cabin. Gladys had a peek behind her. The Pecks and the other passengers seemed unaware that Lazarus was in their midst and rising like a motherfucker.
“You gotta explain, Ajax.”
“I was getting by okay in the penitentiary outside Tegu,” the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, “when one day…”
“Wait, ‘getting by okay’?”
“Yeah. Turns out being in prison is not all that different from fighting an insurgency. Like the Frente back in the day, we fought each other as much as the National Guard, then we got unified. It was helping the guys see it was the Guards who were the common enemy…”
“What, you persuaded them?”
“That, and a bankroll? Did you smuggle in that money to me?”
“No.”
Ajax saw her face fall.
“I tried, Ajax. Tried to get…”
“That’s not what I meant, Gladys. Someone did. Five grand. American. Maybe it was Gio.”
Gioconda Targa, Ajax’s extremely ex-wife and the Revo’s most glamorous vice foreign minister.
“Why her?”
“Don’t know, seemed like a woman for some reason. Anyway, I was using that money to get by pretty well. Loans, drugs, women.”
Gladys’s mouth dropped open again. Again, Ajax shut it for her.
“It was prison, Gladys, it was either that or be everyone’s piñata.”
“But Horacio said he’d bought you protection.”
“He did. But protection is to longevity what a life insurance policy is to a healthy lifestyle.”
Her mouth began to drop open again.
“Quite the drawbridge you got going there, Gladys.”
“So you mean…”
“That a life insurance policy ain’t nearly as important as healthy living.”
“So you became a criminal?”
Good ol’ Gladys. She’d always been a true believer. First in the Revo, then in Horacio, and then in Ajax. How she had held on to her black-and-white morality after what she’d been through was a mystery he’d get around to solving. But first he’d enjoy the look on her face, like someone too old to believe in Father Christmas, yet unable to resist the allure of the fairy tale he was spinning. She didn’t believe, but really, really wanted to.
“A regular kingpin actually. Controlling stake in the three C’s: conjugal visits, cigarettes, and coke.”
“Not the soda.”
The drawbridge quivered, but when he reached for it she slapped his hand away.
Cocaine. That’d be tough for Gladys to accept, he knew. The last case they’d worked ended up being, in retrospect, about Malhora’s larceny. But it had begun as a murder to cover up a cocaine smuggling ring Malhora had been running as a black-bag operation against Uncle Sam. America’s then cowboy presiden
t, Ronald Reagan, had mercenaries like Krill to unleash a shit storm of misery and death on Nicaragua in order to bleed the Revo to death, which in truth he had—the gringo cocksucker. Malhora had conceived of cocaine as a “poor man’s weapon of mass destruction” and concocted an absurd scheme to wage a kind of chemical warfare in America’s inner cities with the cheap white powder.
“I know, Gladys, but in prison if you don’t provide a commodity, you become one.”
“Okay. So…”
“So one day about every guard in the joint shows up at my cell door and gave me minutes to pack my shit and go. An hour later I’m on a plane to I don’t know where but it seems Managua. A private plane too. Two pilots, one stewardess, and me. She brings me a cup of coffee like I’ve never had, like some elixir of the gods, which reminds me…” Ajax pushed the call button. “Order me a Coke with lots of ice and limón.”
He went catatonic until the stewardess returned with a setup and upended the can into a frosted glass. He listened joyfully as the cola fizzed over the lip and slid down to make a perfectly round ring on the cocktail napkin.
Gladys peeked around the cabin. “Clear.”
Ajax slid his hand around the glass, felt the icy coolness in his palm. It was almost erotic. He actually giggled.
“I haven’t felt cold in a while.”
“You want something in that?”
He shook his head.
Ajax took a long, slow drink and swallowed with difficulty. But the sensation down his throat was heavenly. “So I am on the plane out of Tegu, drinking that delectable cup of coffee, but before I can get a refill whatever she put in the first one had me out cold. I woke up in an ambulance in a straitjacket pulling into Kilometro Cinco.”
He emptied the can refilling his glass. The effervescence made him giggle again; it seemed so silly.
“I thought it was an invitation to walk out, but the first time I tried to escape…”
Ajax set the glass down. There was slight tremor in his hand. He saw Gladys see it, and didn’t try to hide it.
“What’d they do to you?”
“The first time, whatever they gave me sent my body into a shock, convulsions, like every muscle and tendon seized and cramped, locked down.” Ajax looked at his hand and bent the joints into a twisted arthritic claw.
“That cute Spanish doctor?”
“No. Male. Five-ten. Late fifties. Soviet Bloc from the look of him, maybe East German. He didn’t talk much, but once or twice a week he shot me up with some shit.” Ajax shook his head and blew out his lips. “I started to see myself moving further away from me, like,” he pointed to the plane’s aisle, “like I was standing at the cockpit but seeing myself at the ass end of the plane. Telescoping into the distance.”
He rubbed a finger over the puckered scar on the back of his hand. “El Gordo burned me with a cigarette and I could see it happen to me, way down there, but not feel it…”
He turned and looked at Gladys.
“Gladys, I wasn’t in that shit hole outside Tegu five minutes before someone tried to put a blade in me. But that needle…” He shook his head.
“You were frightened.”
He looked Gladys in the eye—she seemed to want him, to need him to confirm he was afraid.
“Anyway, they wanted me quiet, compliant—I gave them catatonic. After a while it stopped.”
“I could fucking kill Horacio.”
“Yeah. I’m sure he explained to you Kilometro Cinco was a kindness of some kind?”
“He tried to. But then, if Horacio had the go-ahead to let you go, why did those cops try to take you off the plane?”
Ajax had another long pull on the soda and let it slide orgasmically down his throat.
“I’m sure the cops came ’cause they found Chepe.”
Gladys caught the drawbridge lowering and restored it to closed.
“Yes, that Chepe Huembes,” he clarified.
“El Gordo Sangroso was in Kilometro Cinco? With you?”
Gladys had been with Ajax at the airport three years ago when the Costa Ricans had returned Nicaragua’s only serial killer to their custody. The fat fuck had tried to escape during Senator Teal’s press conference and the ensuing melee had landed Ajax in deep shit and on the front page, again.
But she also recalled it was how he and Amelia Peck had met.
“Wait,” she said. “‘Found Chepe’?”
Ajax took another long drink, drained the glass, sucked out the lime, and chewed it.
“Ajax?”
“All three hundred pounds of suet-colored suet of it.”
Gladys peered around the cabin, front and back, again.
“You…?”
“Gladys, you liked that Spanish doctor?”
“She’s gorgeous.”
“Now she stays that way.”
“You mean…?”
“He thought he was some Aztec priest, was gonna make me his altar boy.”
“You killed him?”
Gladys sat back in her seat. She looked at him, then shook her head.
“You get soft and squishy on me?” he said.
“No.” She shook her head. “But … I thought I was coming to save you.”
“I don’t need saving.” He smiled. “But you did rescue me.”
Ajax turned in his seat, kept half his face hidden but one eye free to observe the Pecks three rows back.
Margaret Mary had a blanket over her, her head tucked into Big Jim’s shoulder. But she didn’t sleep. She just stared into her lap. Big Jim had ill-fitting earphones stuck on his grizzly sized head, his eyes staring at but not seeing the private viewing screen hanging in mid-aisle. The wife held her husband’s hand and slowly ran her thumb the length of it, from wrist to knuckle. It seemed an old habit, Ajax thought. So old she might’ve made a rut on his hand, like some old groove in a rock.
After a while he turned away.
“So what do you think,” he asked.
“About you needing saving?”
Gladys was breaking his balls, which was a good sign.
“About the mission.” He nodded behind them. “Young Peck. El Salvador.”
“You going?”
“Thought that was why you brought my crazy ass out.”
Gladys set the satchel on the floor between her feet and slid it under the seat in front of her. “It is why I brought your crazy ass out.”
She didn’t mean it the same way he did, but Ajax sensed commitment in her voice. He peeked around his seat one more time. But it wasn’t the Pecks that made him whip back around. The seat behind Margaret Mary had been empty, the only empty seat in first class.
It wasn’t empty anymore.
Ajax reached under Gladys’s feet, yanked out the satchel, and opened it.
“I was going to tell you after we landed,” Gladys explained.
Ajax studied the stacks.
“Malhora’s money?”
“What I figured, the one-twenty-five left over.”
Ajax shook the satchel, spotted the Needle on the bottom.
“Ah.” He didn’t want to unsheathe the blade, so he ran his finger along the handle. “That would explain it.”
“Explain what?” Gladys asked.
Ajax smiled. “Good luck getting this through customs.”
Gladys frowned. “Should we ditch it?”
Ajax smiled. He looked back over his shoulder. In the seat behind the Pecks that had been empty a familiar face stared blankly: The boy with the long eyelashes. The ghost of the boy with the long eyelashes, if Ajax would name him fully, sat in the empty seat, a little slumped, like a tired traveler with a thousand-yard stare.
Ajax turned back to Gladys.
“It’s okay, no worries.”
“You sure?”
Ajax checked again. The ghost was still there.
“Yeah.”
11
Miami, November 1989
Gladys left her guest and pounded up the stairs to her apartment in N
orth Miami Beach. Some of her neighbors stood outside, hands to their ears against the booming music crashing out her windows like heavy horse cavalry pounding down on an undefended town. She flew through the door. What the fuck is he doing? Everything seemed undisturbed, except for her stereo in the living room that vibrated so hard the speakers shimmied across the hardwood floors. She cleared each room, the kitchen, the spare bedroom she’d given him, even her own bedroom. Then she saw the bathroom door closed. She ran to it, but stopped, her hand almost on the knob. An unbidden image crossed her mind—a blood-splattered bathroom, the Needle in the tub with him, his lifeless body half submerged. Why had she left him alone? Her hand shook. Krill had told her more than once the story of Ajax’s escape from Krill’s camp. He’d regaled her with the story of Ajax slithering amongst Krill’s sleeping troops like the Angel of Death, cutting throats to escape, until, Krill always insisted, blood flowed downhill like a fresh stream out of the Earth’s heart.
She’d feared for Ajax’s safety, his sanity, since she’d brought him home two days before. Now, now what? She pulled her hand back, readied her nerves, and kicked the bathroom door in.
The sight was worse than she’d feared.
“Gladys, what the fuck are you doing!”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m having a bath!”
Jesus Christ, he was.
Ajax sat in her tub, soap bubbles up to his chin, surrounded by electronics as if he was planning the six best ways to kill yourself while bathing. He had her Walkman in one hand, the earphones stuck on his head, her little sixteen-inch TV perched on the edge, a clock radio balanced on the TV, and her hair dryer in his other hand.
Her hair dryer?
“Get out!”
He was screaming over the music, which she’d not turned down. Gladys quickly unplugged every goddamn thing and then killed the stereo. Silence restored, she waved apologetically at her neighbors through the windows and drew the curtains. She stomped back to the bathroom. “What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like?”
“A bubble bath?”
“Get the fuck out!”
“Any of this shit falls into the water you’re dead, right?” She lifted the TV and clock radio out of the danger zone. “The laws of physics escape you during your confinement?” She picked up the hair dryer. “This in particular will kill you in a fucking heartbeat.”