The Last Dawn

by Joe Gannon

  “But you’ve had a life, Gladys. You’ve got a life. Miami, your mother, the missing persons. You need to let the Revo go, let Nicaragua go. Go home. Do what you have to do to get a green card, then your private dick license…”

  She shoved him so hard he was on his ass before he knew it. Gladys looming over him, her bony fist in his face. “You are such an asshole. Ajax fucking asshole Montoya!”

  “Umm. Guys?” Even Jasmine was pulled from her trance watching the ruin of her city.

  “I have a life?” Gladys hadn’t even heard her. “I do? I go to bed with Krill every night and wake up to him every day. For three years. And you know what? I am afraid. Right here and now I am afraid. But I’ve been afraid for three years and for the first time I’m okay with that. Right here! Right now!”

  Her face was only inches from his now. And he saw all the truth of her life there. He reached out and rubbed a smear of dirt off her cheek, but really, he just wanted to touch her.

  “You’re a good man, sister.”

  He held out his hand and she pulled him to his feet.

  “And you’re a good sister, brother.”

  He brushed of his pants. “You caught me off balance, it’s why…”

  “Yeah I had to push you outta that time vortex.”

  They looked at each other for far longer than most friendships between a man and woman would allow. Ajax nodded his head. Gladys nodded hers. He held out his hand. She took it.

  “So we have a mission, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes we do, Captain.” She counted on her fingers. “Stay alive. Kill Krill. Find young Peck.”

  “And Liam Donaldson.”

  “Him too?”

  “Somebody dropped him into our laps.”

  “Okay. But what do we do?”

  “What do we got? You?”

  “My purse,” she opened it, “passport, some money, my mother’s credit cards.”

  “Mami gives you her credit cards?”

  “Fuck you. Whatta you got?”

  He searched his pockets.

  “Passport, pistol, some cash, maybe fifty U.S.” He didn’t list the Needle, the same as he wouldn’t list two arms and two legs. “And this.” He held up the ORDEN ID Little Max had given them. “It’s our get out of deep-shit free card. Got yours?”

  “Yeah. Wait.” She moved closer to see him in the dark. “Get out of deep shit? We’re not already in it?”

  Ajax took her arm and moved her to the rim of the canyon they’d climbed. “That shit storm down there is the best cover we could have. Without it, granted, Krill would have them all looking for us. But now? Gladys, they don’t know which way the tide of battle will go…”

  “The tide of battle?”

  “Yes, the tide of battle. It’ll be three or four days before it shakes out, maybe a week. In the meantime, chaos. We’ve got American passports for one side, ORDEN IDs for the other.”

  Gladys turned her back on him. Surveyed the combat below them. There was no letup in the explosions, the red tracers slicing the black. After a few seconds she held out her hand.

  “I get the gun.”

  He slapped it into her hand like a nurse passing a scalpel to the surgeon. It was a Browning 9mm. She slid out the magazine, checked the load, checked the chamber, put the safety on, and jammed it into her purse.

  “I won’t be taken alive by him.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Gladys seemed to flinch. “I don’t mean I want to … to … you know…”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, Jesus,” he said. “Now, where to begin?”

  “Claribel.”

  “Who?”

  “The puta at the party. You sent me to the bathroom to talk to her.”

  “Right.”

  “She knows Peck, called him Himmy. The asshole that hit her?”

  “Monkey Man?”

  “Yeah, she and Monkey Man partied with Jimmy.”

  “With that flat-footed gofer? He’s a hit man at best. We know Young Peck knows Jasmine, Little Max. They’re upper class—parties, soirees—it makes sense. Monkey Man’s street-level assassin.” Ajax could feel the weirdness of the time vortex slipping away as he stirred his cop’s brain. “Good intel. She just volunteered all this?”

  “You know, bathroom talk. We exchanged lipstick. I think she’s got the hots for me.”

  “Ooookay.”

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “No! It’s just, you know, she’s a … puta?”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.” He looked down the hill to the besieged city. “How do we find her in all that?”

  Gladys pulled a slip of paper from her purse. “We could call her.”

  “You got her number.”

  “Yeah, I used…”

  “To be a cop, I remember.”

  He walked over to Jasmine, rooted to the lip of the ravine they’d scaled, still transfixed by the sounds and sights of destruction. He took her by the shoulders and gently turned her away from the edge.

  “Jasmine. We need shelter, a phone, a car, a driver, or a damn good map.”

  She nodded and waved vaguely over her shoulder. “Doña Estela.”

  20

  Krill explored the ruins of Max’s villa looking for a glass of water. The smell of cordite—of combat—was still strong over the place as the first bloodred rays of dawn smeared over the embattled city. Krill was both exhilarated and desolate. The firefight with the Farabundos had been fairly brief, but warm work. The most violence he’d experienced since those treacherous hijos de putas in Miami had agreed to the cease-fire with the piricuacos. La cupola, the leadership. Leaders? Rich, soft pussies with no stake in Krill’s war had sat down with the piris and decided Krill’s war was over.

  He stopped under the portrait of the generalissimo. Now there was a man, he thought. Un varón. A man’s man. But those shit-eating sons-of-bitches in Miami? Calero? Chamorro? Robles? Their names were like a stroll through Nicaragua’s society pages! Only one of them ever wore a uniform under General Somoza, and he, “Colonel” Bermúdez, had spent the fight against the Sandinistas in Washington, D.C. Civilians. Chicken-shits. And they had all given in to the gringos and signed the peace accords that castrated Krill’s army.

  “Mi general.” He saluted the portrait, saddened to see the old man had taken three bullets to the chest. “Over? They tell Krill his war is over! A la mierda hijos de puta! is what I told them. Krill will go back to his men and we will go back to our war.”

  He could not tell the generalissimo the next part. Could not say it out loud. They arrested me. Arrested! Put chains on my hands. And told me I could agree with the cease-fire or stay in Miami in protective custody. But it was they who needed protection, he knew it and so did those soft-handed, white-skinned vendepartrias. They had sold out Krill, sold out their country. Sold out their souls for green cards.

  He knew he’d had to restrain his impulses, so rather than slaughter them all, he’d acquiesced. For the moment. Then taken a bus to New Orleans and a plane to San Salvador, the last refuge of the varón.

  Krill walked on, turned down a corridor that led to the kitchen; he’d forgotten momentarily about the water. The house was quiet, the servants had fled. The sporadic sounds of combat came from far away. Maybe the Farabundos hadn’t known how many armed men would be at Max’s party. Their initial attack had been well-executed, he could admire good tactics even from communist shit-eaters. But they had either been undermanned for the attack, or only meant it as a hit-and-run. Less than half an hour after the assault began, they’d fled. There was a handful of dead on his side, mostly the poor bastards outside with the cars or the guys in the guard towers. They’d found no Farabundo dead. Mostly, Krill reckoned, because El Mayor’s men were just civilians, coked-up assassins who were good against some campesino or intellectual with their thumbs tied behind their backs, but they clearly knew nothing about fields of fire or
how to maneuver against an ambush.

  He stopped.

  On his way to the kitchen he spotted the small courtyard and washbasins in the servants’ quarters. And the steel door leading out. He found the door ajar and pulled it open, not yet ready to stick his head out in case they’d left a sniper behind. He would have.

  This is how she got out.

  He stepped back in and secured the door. As he did he caught his reflection in a mirror over the washbasin. Look at yourself. Jeans, a Tex-Mex cowboy shirt, shoes, not even boots!

  “Fucking faggot!”

  The sight of her, his angelita. No less miraculous than had it been Gabriel himself. His reflexes, his infamous reflexes froze. Infamous? Impotente! She had unmanned him. It was only when that motherfucking Montoya had shown himself that Krill had recovered. But he’d lost the two seconds he’d needed and they had slipped away.

  “Maricón.”

  He pointed his .45 at himself and pulled the trigger. Click! Empty.

  “Hijo de puta!”

  He needed ammunition. No, he needed weapons, ammunition, and transport. El Mayor’s assassins and the army had their war. Krill had his own fight to finish. But first he had to finish with Max.

  He filled a bucket with water and went back upstairs. He’d found that ridiculous piece of shit coming out of his safe room—a closet-sized mini-bunker hidden at the back of his actual closet in the bedroom. Krill had tied him to a chair for interrogation and found him there when he returned with the water. He tossed the bucket into Max’s bruised face and revived him.

  “Please.” Max’s speech was a little slurred. “Please, my friend, we are on the same side.”

  Krill leaned over, almost nose to nose. “You brought those piricuacos here.”

  “I didn’t know, no one did! They have American passports. No one knew. Please.”

  “You didn’t know they were Sandinistas! Who does your intelligence?”

  “They had contacts in Miami, Cubans, friends who vouched for them in Miami!”

  Fucking Miami, Krill thought. Not for the first time he pledged to burn fucking Miami to the ground.

  “Again: Where were they staying?”

  “Here, I told you.”

  “Who were their contacts?”

  “Only me. And my cousin Jasmine.”

  “Jasmine. And their mission?”

  “Relief supplies, medicines, toys. But listen, listen.” Max wet his lips and tried to catch his breath and calm his voice. “We were using them, we didn’t take them seriously, we were using them for propaganda! Please. I have money, more than you could imagine…”

  “Shh. Shh.” Krill patted Max’s cheek. It was time.

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry. No se preocupa, Don Maximiliano.”

  Max stopped blubbering. As Krill knew he would. Change from the informal “tu” to the formal “usted,” put a “don” in front of their name, and these rich pendejos would feel safe every time. He could sense Max relaxing. As he did, Krill took stock: the house was full of weapons, money, cars in the garage. Krill had two passports, a Salvadoran identity card, and one lead: this Jasmine, if Montoya or the Farabundos hadn’t already killed her.

  Krill looked around, he needed a place. “That safe room, it’s very good, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Farabundos didn’t know about it, eh?”

  “No. No one knows.”

  Krill saw the dawning realization on Max’s face as clearly as dawn crept in the windows. But for Maximiliano Hernández Martínez III it was the last dawning. Krill tipped him back in his chair and dragged him into the closet. Any port in a storm, he thought, any room for a tomb.

  * * *

  Krill finished searching Gladys’s suitcase. There was nothing that hinted at where she might be, or go. He’d found nothing in Montoya’s room either. He had found the little hidey hole in the suitcase and wondered what he’d needed to smuggle in. Could it be that blade that had carved so much carnage in Krill’s camp? He picked through Gladys’s things and watched a brief war between his hand and head—he picked the blue blouse up, put it down, picked it up, and put it down. Then he let the hand win and pressed the cloth to his face. He inhaled deeply. The smell was unknown to him, new. But it stirred an old longing.

  Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! He’d been searching the house for an hour or so, and in that time he had murdered Montoya many times. Butchered him. Hung him upside down so he couldn’t pass out and inflicted every pain in his well-stocked repertoire, and some even Krill had only ever heard of. But he had not so imagined his angelita.

  Cobarde!

  He hurled the suitcase into the mirror and shattered himself into a hundred pieces. He hurried out, down the hall to Jasmine’s room. It was even more than he’d expected.

  Ricas! Rich girls. Max had said she’d only stayed here occasionally but her closet held enough clothes to outfit a brigade, enough shoes to shod a battalion. Enough purses … Purses. Lined up by the dozen like sentries. But one set apart, already on duty. He scrounged through it and came up with what he’d hoped for: a beautiful red leather notebook attached to what Krill knew was a real gold-plated pen. He flipped through it, her address book, page after page of names, numbers, and addresses.

  It was the only lead he needed.

  21

  The news was good, Gladys thought. Good. Well, maybe not if you were Salvadoran, or if you were a noncombatant. Or if you were with the government, given the pictures they were watching on the TV news. Of course, if you were with the FMLN the news was not so good either, given the images of helicopter gunships laying waste to entire city blocks. But at least for her and Ajax the news was good, as no mention had yet been made of them and their faces had not appeared on the news. But they might, at any moment.

  So maybe the news was not so good.

  Doña Estela was a glorious grand dame, who, much like her house and household servants, was aging divinely so long as you looked in the right light. Too close an inspection revealed the decades of built-up dust, water stains, and cracks in the foundation.

  She clucked her tongue at the images flashing across her TV like a stern librarian shushing noisy teenagers. She was a graying matron, widowed, and lived in a large house just half a mile from Max’s villa. They—Gladys, Ajax, and Jasmine—had made their way down the ravine to doña Estela’s back door just as dawn stole their cover. She’d welcomed them like they’d been survivors from the Titanic washing up on her porch. They’re Americans, Jasmine had said, and the old lady had clucked her tongue, Pobrecitos, que desgraciada. What a disgrace, as if she were embarrassed that strangers had gotten caught in a family feud.

  She’d ordered her clearly terrified servants to feed them and within an hour they’d been fed, coffeed, and washed.

  “Jasmine!” Estela leaned forward into the television as the news cut to a press conference. “Jasmine, come here! It’s Freddy.”

  Jasmine hurried in, looking, Gladys thought, stunning even in an old lady’s housecoat that she’d cinched tight around her waist with a slit of cleavage showing, like a cleft in a very soft rock. Ajax came in, too, down from the roof where he’d been following the combat with a practiced eye. Not for the first time Gladys was relieved to be with him. There was just something about him, a confidence, and a cool that wafted off him like body odor. Only instead of pinching your nose at the smell, you wanted, like a dog, to roll around it, get that scent on your own body, to be able to at least smell like you have that much composure.

  She’d been horrified by his penchant for violence, since the first time she watched him beat up two State Security agents in Managua because he objected to their presence at a crime scene. True, much of the worst of it had been done out of her sight. The massacre at Krill’s camp, even El Gordo at the hospital. Once, they’d been chasing leads at a coffee farm way up in the mountains when Vladimir Malhora had sent assassins to finish them off. Ajax had woken from a dead sleep and worked out a counterassault that h
ad gone exactly as he had said it would. At least until Gladys got shot and Krill had arrived with his men.

  And then his rescue of her from the Contras. He’d explained it as simply as a housewife would a favorite recipe: Ajax had staked out Krill’s camp for two weeks. He’d noticed the big Jeep Wagoneer coming and going, had deduced who might be in it, and one day Ajax had put on a sentry’s uniform, taken his post, stopped the Wagoneer like he was in need of a light, and seized two high-value hostages.

  Pop it in the oven and wait half an hour!

  Cool. Cool was the only way to describe him. Cool under fire, cool under pressure. Cool.

  And yet. And yet.

  When Ajax told her he’d taken over the sentry post, she’d known he meant he slipped the point of the Needle into the man’s throat and sliced it out through arteries, veins, and voice box. She wondered if all that cool did not disguise a coldness, a glacier inside of him that entombed a very vulnerable part that, while it might weaken you, also made you human. Even at Max’ s party—and all she’d wanted was to flee Krill—she’d grabbed Monkey Man around the neck, knowing that if she hadn’t Ajax would’ve killed him on the spot. But so what? They were alive, again, thanks to him.

  She watched him come into the room, lean, alert, hair unkempt, and for some reason she recalled a line someone had said back in Managua: diplomacy is the art of learning to say “nice doggy” while bending down to pick up a rock.

  Ajax could be that rock. He could also be the dog.

  On the TV, Alfredo Cristiani, president of the republic, took the podium at the presidential palace press room. He had the haggard look of someone who’s been startled awake by such bad news, the shock of it was imprinted under the bags in his eyes. Freddy was dressed in a white, long-sleeved guayabera and flanked by military men—generals, colonels, and Benivides, whom Gladys remembered from Max’s party.

  “He’s wearing body armor,” Ajax said. “The president, under his shirt.”