The Last Dawn

by Joe Gannon

  “I always figured Mommy and Daddy had money. Let me have a look.”

  She handed over the binoculars. Ajax spied their prey.

  “Actually, Papi’s been dead a while, but yeah, Mami’s set. And she wants to meet you.”

  “Really? Heard all about me, has she?”

  “No. Well, yes. But like so many others she’s taken an intense dislike to you without really knowing you.”

  Ajax chuckled. “Me? Why?”

  “She says you’re my bad-luck charm.”

  He put the binos down and studied her face, but she had no comment on her mother’s pronouncement. “So what’s with tio coyote?”

  Gladys turned. “Two things. I been looking for him ’cause I got three families in Houston, New Orleans, and Miami looking for loved ones who signed on with him but never made it ashore.”

  “How so?”

  She smiled. “You think Miami’s all malls and ice cream, but it’s mostly drugs, riots, and refugees. Guatemalans and Salvadorans use coyotes, they can’t get asylum ’cause America backs their government. Nicas, like the Cubans, get in for free ’cause the gringos oppose the government. Coyotes like him meet the refugees who get as far as Jamaica, the Bahamas, maybe Haiti. They take cash to transport them here in cigarette boats, just like the narcos use.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  She smiled. “He’s Salvadoran.”

  Ajax felt his inner cop stir, a smile spread across his face like the Cheshire cat’s, if the Cheshire cat ate dogs for breakfast. “What’s his story?”

  “Supposedly he’s been here a while, got here in seventy-nine or eighty…”

  “So just as the shit hit the fan back home.”

  “Yep. Word is he was ARENA, death squads.”

  Ajax grunted. “He don’t look hard to me.”

  “No?”

  “No way. Look at him, Gladys.” He put the binos down. “Sitting outside so everyone can see him on his big fat phone. Sun gleaming off of his chains and his Jheri Curls. Any heavy lifting, he doesn’t do himself. Errand boy for people like Reynaldo there.”

  As he said his name Reynaldo stood, shook hands with the coyote, and walked to the curb. A moment later another car pulled up and whisked him away.

  Ajax suddenly felt the need to push the crazy button. “Let’s go brace the fucker.”

  “No!”

  Her grip on his arm had more iron than he’d expected—he wasn’t the only one who’d stayed fit.

  “He’s not dangerous, Gladys.”

  “It’s not about him.”

  Now he looked her over. “This about El Gordo?”

  “Yes! No! Ajax, you’re in hell for three years—prison, the nuthouse, playing catatonic for over a year. By a fucking miracle you get sprung and on the way out—you kill the guy!”

  “El Gordo was a dead man whether you came to get me or not. It was him or the doctor and every other woman in that place.”

  “Fine. Good. Then look at yourself. You’ve been free for two days and now it’s ‘Let’s go brace the fucker.’ This isn’t Nicaragua, the Wild West, you aren’t a hero here and no one will cover you for your shit!”

  “My shit?”

  “Your shit. You know if I had been your C.O. back in Managua I would’ve taken your gun and badge long before—”

  “Before what? Before you met me?”

  The look on her face was uncertain.

  “What do you want to know, Gladys?”

  She looked him over, Ajax could hear it: Can I trust you? “It’s not about if I want to go with you to find Peck.”

  “Young Peck.”

  “Young Peck. It’s that you can’t do this job without me and I need to know where your head’s at.” But her eyes went back to the mirror and her oleaginous coyote. “I wanna know if he’s taking refugees’ money and then stiffing them offshore, or if he’s dumping them in the ocean.”

  Ajax looked in the mirror.

  “Him? He’s no killer.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “Let’s find out.” And he was out the door and down the street, affecting a shuffle somewhere between drunk and crazy.

  “Oye, ’mano! Man, look at you, brother. Don Johnson in real life!”

  The coyote, like any normal person, ignored Ajax, assuming he could not possibly be talking to him.

  “Hey, man! Is that one of them teléfonos celulares, right? Bouncing off of spaceships and shit, right? Can I make a call, I can pay you?”

  Ajax took out a few crumpled bills, flashed it like a pimp roll. But the coyote now knew he was in crazy’s crosshairs.

  “Ve te, loco.” Get lost, crazy. He pretended he had to make a call.

  “No, serious man, de veras, I got people in the Bahamas, paid some fuck-face coyote to bring them ashore, I ain’t found ’em, primo. Help me out, cuz.”

  The coyote, Ajax was certain, thought he was being jacked, and looked around for Ajax’s accomplice, but he didn’t make Gladys as the backup. He did, however, clock that all eyes were on him, and Ajax knew his macho pride was about to make a mistake. The coyote dropped the cellular phone into what seemed a holster big enough for Ajax’s old .357, tossed some bills on the table, then made what he must’ve thought was a fast move on Ajax.

  Ajax grabbed the wrist of the hand reaching for him, twisted the arm straight out and a little back, rabbit punched him in the kidneys, sat him down in the chair, lifted his phone, pulled out the antenna, and whipped the coyote across the cheek with it.

  “AHHHHHH!!!” The coyote screamed as a crimson welt raised up like invisible ink revealed. To Ajax’s amazement he made to take a swing, so Ajax whipped him on the other cheek.

  “Ajax!”

  “It’s alright, Gladys. I got this.”

  “Behind you!”

  Shit. Ajax knew the coyote was not a boss, but he’d forgotten that even underlings can have minions, and three of them were rushing Ajax from inside the café. The minion closest to Ajax, a terrier of a man, took that one second to eyeball his boss, cradling his stinging cheeks. It was all Ajax needed to recover. He fake-stumbled back one step and when the terrier went for him, whipped him across the face too. When the terrier reached for the wound Ajax let him have it on the other cheek, then kicked him in the nutbag. But there was no time to admire his handiwork as the second minion hurled a chair at Ajax’s head. So Ajax threw the phone and nailed him in the forehead.

  Ajax was just about to admire all his handiwork when a scream slit the air.

  The third minion had Gladys in a bear hug.

  “Let go! Let go! Letgoletgoletgo!!!!!!”

  Ajax had seen Gladys in action before. She had an unconscionable deference for authority, but if you got her beyond that, in a tight spot she had some sand and usually took no shit from any man.

  But this was hysterics.

  Gladys writhed like an eel in the minion’s grip. Her arms and legs flailed like a child in a grotesque temper tantrum, or an epileptic in the grandest of grand mals.

  Everyone, including the minion holding her, recoiled at the outburst. The minion released her as soon as Ajax made a step in his direction. Gladys fled into the café. The coyote was still cradling his whipped face, so Ajax patted him down, yanked a fat wallet from his pocket, and rifled through it for his driver’s license.

  “‘David Gutierrez.’ Look at me. Look!”

  The coyote lowered his hands, peered almost tremulously over his fingers, all fight gone, as was the case with most bullies. Ajax reached into the dark, stinking outhouse in which he had hidden the dark stinking shit of the last three years and took one quick whiff before he swiftly shut it again.

  “Do you know who piggy is?”

  “What?”

  “DO YOU KNOW WHO PIGGY IS?”

  Ajax could see and smell the fear now, as he wanted and needed to.

  “You’re my little piggy. You charge people their life savings to get them into Miami. From now on, piggy, you either bring the
m here or stop taking their money. Otherwise you’re gonna wake up one night,” Ajax read the license, “at eleven forty Sixteenth Street, apartment three, and find me standing over you holding a stick sharpened at both ends. Comprendes, piggy?”

  The coyote held up both hands, a look of awe making his eyes huge. “Yeah, yeah. Comprendo.”

  “Good. Now sit down.” Ajax eyeballed the minions who, as their boss had backed down, did likewise. Ajax righted the overturned chairs, retrieved the cell phone, and gave it back.

  “Reynaldo,” Ajax said.

  “What?” The coyote seemed genuinely confused like Ajax had spoken Latin.

  “Reynaldo Garcia, he was just here. You know him and so do I. He gave me some photos a little while ago, gruesome shit. I think you gave them to him and he gave them to me.”

  The coyote’s eyes roved around in their sockets trying to adjust to the sea change in the conversation. As he did, a Miami prowl car cruised by, the two cops maybe having sensed some trouble. Ajax gave them a smile and a wave. The coyote eyed them.

  “Go ahead, puto. We’ll tell them about your missing cargo.”

  The coyote turned away and the cops rolled on. Ajax was certain that Gladys was right about him.

  “The pictures, the dead body. Where’d you get them from?”

  The coyote made a show of rolling his shoulders, all nonchalant, but Ajax knew he was just making sure no one could overhear.

  “I got a fax.”

  Ajax nodded like he was inspecting him for honesty, but really he had to think for a moment to recall what a fax was—he remembered his ex-wife had one, those papers rolling out of the phone. He guessed you could send a photo over it.

  “From who?”

  He shrugged. “Friends. Reynaldo told me to check around, some redheaded gringo. I got those photos this morning. Passed them along as asked.”

  “From who?”

  “Look, man, I don’t know. The people who hook me up with … my clients. I don’t know where they got it from, I haven’t been in El Salvador for ten years. Reynaldo asks, I pass it along, they pass it back. A fax is what I got, I gave it to him.”

  Ajax gave him the dead-eye stare. It was a trick he’d picked up in the old days in the mountains interrogating captured enemies: you look them in the eye while thinking of someone you’d killed. It never failed. The coyote swallowed.

  “You heard what I said about them refugees.”

  “Hey I…” The coyote reconsidered. “Yes. I heard.”

  * * *

  Inside the café a waiter nodded to the restroom when he saw Ajax scanning for Gladys. He heard her sobbing through the closed door. He tried the knob and opened the door a crack when he found it open. Inside Gladys had her shirt off, wearing only a black bra. She’d ripped open the paper towel and soap dispensers, filled the sink with them, and was frantically scrubbing herself. She was covered in soap from fingernails to shoulders whispering, “Get off me, get off me, get off me.”

  Ajax quietly shut the door. What had been soiled by Krill could not be cleansed with soap and water.

  14

  Gladys worried about the manatees. She sat on the deck of her mother’s home in Coral Gables watching the boat traffic in the late-afternoon light and wiping down her hands with a moist towelette. She tore the little package three-quarters open, removed the towelette, and used her right hand to clean her left. First the fingers, always from tip to base, then the cuticles, under the fingernails, and then the palm and finally the back of her hand. Then she always refolded the towelette as best she could and stuffed it back into its package and then folded the package into as small a square as possible. Then the right. Sometimes once was enough. Sometimes not. She didn’t always have time on the fly to do it this way, but here, on her mother’s deck, there was always time to try and cleanse herself.

  When she’d first arrived to her family’s house, or rather, when she’d first ventured out of her darkened room, her mother had told Gladys about the manatees in the channels. Gladys had thought she was making it up: a walrus crossed with a cow and a bit of puppy thrown in! But then one evening, one just like this, Gladys had been sitting on the deck, rubbing herself down with a moist towelette (about the first one, how many ago had that been?) when a whiskered head had bobbed out of the water chewing on a stalk of something. It was the most ridiculous living thing she’d ever seen and she’d giggled at the sight. Giggled! Then a passing yacht had sent the creature back underwater. As it’d slipped away Gladys had seen the three long scars down its flank, caused, her mother had explained, by boat propellers.

  She’d never told anyone about the scarred beast, but she might tell Ajax, if he’d stop staring at the back of her head and sit down.

  “You tryin’ to burn a hole in my head?”

  “Didn’t want to interrupt the revelry.” He sat down and eyeballed the towelettes. “Mind?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He did and she watched him wipe down his hands and face, his forearms, then his chest and armpits.

  “Puta! Mami’s got a shower inside, you know.”

  “Sorry. It’s how we did it in prison. ’Course the towelettes weren’t so moist.”

  He finished his sponge bath and looked around for some place to toss it. Finding none he folded it up and put it in his pocket. “I’m sorry about today. It was your case. I shouldn’t’ve interfered.”

  “It’s alright. Truth is I didn’t mind much seeing you flog that coyote with his own phone.”

  They sat in silence as the sun slid down—going, going, gone.

  “We don’t have to go, Gladys. Hell, we got American passports, we could go anywhere.”

  “Fuck you Ajax-fuck-you-Montoya. Like you’re fucking thinking about not fucking going? Fuck you.”

  Ajax took the towelette out, unfolded it, and wiped his forehead down.

  “Okay. I’m going, you don’t have to.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a one-man job…”

  “No! Why are you going? Huh? How much time did you have with her? Three weeks?”

  She didn’t know why but it infuriated her, his devotion to this dead gringa he barely knew.

  “More like three days.”

  “So?”

  It was, Ajax had to admit, a good question, So what? How to explain? All his adult life, since he’d joined the Sandinistas at nineteen, had been duty, obligation, and patriotism. Guerrillero. Comandante guerrillero. Then Captain Montoya, then major, colonel, and back to captain. Shit, even his marriage to Gioconda had been part of the Revo—the dashing guerrilla and the glamorous compañera.

  Amelia Peck had been the one event in his life that had not sprung from duty. The one thing that had surprised him—astonished him. It was time to admit that.

  “I need this case, Gladys. You’ve got a life here.” Ajax waved at the waterway. “Family, even a career as a private dick.”

  “Gross.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You could have a life here too. You got family in L.A., you’re an American citizen, right? You were born here. Things have changed since Reagan. The Bush people aren’t so fanatical; look what Teal was able to do. It might take some time but you can get your passport back.”

  “Me?” Ajax laughed. “I never had an American passport. There’s no paper on me here. My parents were mostly illegal when I was born. No birth certificate, driver’s license, no passport. Maybe some high school transcripts in North Hollywood.”

  “So, you’re a man without a country.”

  “I got a country, Gladys. So do you. That country has fucked us about, but that bothers you more than me because you’ve never served in a war.” He paused. “Or been married.”

  She was about to demand he make that link when a motion offshore drew her eye. A little alien face with long whiskers popped out of the water and looked around like a tourist getting his bearings.

  She whispered, “Look!”

  “What is it?” />
  “Manatee.”

  “Oddball-looking thing, like a walrus crossed with a cow and a bit of puppy thrown in.”

  Gladys’s mouth dropped open. “How did you…” She caught the mischievous smirk on his face.

  “Your sister told me. She says most of them have scars from getting run over by boats.”

  “Most of them, some worse than others.”

  “Why don’t they just move where there’s no boats to hurt them?”

  “This is their…” She caught herself before it slipped. But there it was.

  The gorgeously silly creature bobbed on the surface, seemed to have found its bearings, then dived away. They watched the spot where it had submerged. Both of them alert now to how the liquid membrane of the water concealed all sorts of comings and goings from miles away. Gladys knew the manatee would not be back that night. Nor would it leave its home, despite the dangers.

  “So young Peck’s not dead,” she said.

  “Seems so.”

  “So it’s a missing persons case.”

  “That it is.”

  Gladys tore open another moist towelette and gave her hands a thorough going-over.

  “Think we can pull it off?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Finding young Peck or getting out alive?”

  “Fifty-fifty the former, sixty-forty the latter.”

  “I’d give us better odds than that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She stood up. She really was ready to go. “We’re a good team.”

  “Said the traumatized obsessive-compulsive to the homicidal catatonic.”

  She held out another moist towelette and for a moment Ajax took one end while she held on to the other. She studied his face in the vanishing light—night coming on like a line of skirmishers leading an army of stars onto the battlefield. That face, Saint Ajax. He wouldn’t not go, and so she couldn’t not go.

  * * *

  Ajax packed a few things into a suitcase. He’d been careful not to buy a brand-new kit. The suitcase was borrowed from Gladys’s sister. He’d bought used clothes on Calle Ocho, using Reynaldo Garcia Gavilan as a model, estilo cubano—guayabera shirts, cotton slacks, loafers, and a Panama hat that he really thought looked fetching on his head. He’d been working a few minutes on peeling back the suitcase lining. He didn’t need much space to hide the Needle and the concealment would not stand up to professional scrutiny, but he would not go without the blade, and if they really were VIPs they should sail right through customs in San Salvador.