by Jim Nesbitt
He slammed the trunk lid. She jumped and yelped again. He laughed.
“Twitchy young thing, aren’t you, sugar?”
“Don’t sugar me, you sumbitch. Takes more than cheap tricks and slaps to scare me.”
“Not tryin’ to scare you, missy. Just messin’ ’round ’cause I’m bored.”
“Sweet talk won’t cut it either, bud.”
“For someone who’s so self-assured, you talk too soon and too much. If you’d shut up and quit baring your teeth for a second you might learn why you’re not dead. Yet.”
“I already know the answer to that question. I’m fishbait, baby. You need me to get to my husband.”
He laughed and flipped the cigarette into the darkness. A red cartwheel, a splash of sparks.
“There’s more than one reason, sugar. Again — you talk too soon and too much. Shut up and listen. There’s an art to doing that. Too few of us learn it.”
“Including you.”
He laughed.
“Including me. You know, technology is a wonderful thing. Our leaders keep telling us that, blabbing on about this Internet thing and doing your grocery shopping with your television set. It’s amazing stuff. It overwhelms a simple man like me. But about a year ago, I figured I better dive on into this hi-tech world or get left behind. Took a night course down at UNO.”
“Where would that be?”
Her voice dripped with disdain. His answer was rolled in a thick, y’at accent.
“N’awlins, sugar. Jazz n’ boo-dan n’ Pat O’Brien’s n’ the Cafe Du Monde for cawfee n’ beignets in the moh’nin. The Big Easy, sugar. `Cept nobody I know who lives there calls it that. Kinda like nobody in San Francisco calls it Frisco. Just the tourists.”
“Is there a point to this yarn?”
“Yeah, there’s a point. That course taught me how to drive a computer. Apple and PCs. Gave me enough knowledge to peek into that laptop of yours. Did it at a cafe up the road about three hours ago, back when you wuz in bye-bye land. Interestin’ stuff in there, sugar. Truly.”
He held his hand up in the scout’s salute.
“I might make a suggestion though. If you gonna have passwords for your laptop and AOL, you ought not scrawl them in the address book in your purse where any jerk can find it. Good thing it was an upright citizen like myself cruisin’ through your e-mail instead of some hacker fuck.”
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Immensely. Your husband says hello.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Himself. Jason Willard Crowe. Speaking to us through the ether. Dropped a thoughtful little note asking us to visit him at a place about five hours from here. Actually, the note was for you. It was sweet. Something about desert and destiny.”
“My husband’s a jock and a financier, not a poet.”
“He’s a dead man runnin’ up a blind alley.”
“Oh? He seems real alive so far. Alive enough to leave e-mail.”
“Which isn’t the smartest play I’ve ever seen.”
They stared at each other. He shifted gears.
“Got to hand it to ya. People think you got a pussy inside them jeans ain’t thinkin’ right. Ya got balls. Takes ’em to take out two pros like you did back at that safe house. And you got ’em, sugar. Big brass ones. Big enough to want to take me out as soon as you can. Think I hear ’em clankin’ right now.”
“Why don’t you quit comparin’ me to Mario Cuomo and tell me what you think you found in my little computer.”
“A suggestion that we have more in common than you might think.”
“And what would that be?”
“Call it a shared objective.”
“I’ll call it a bunch of bullshit. The only thing we have in common is the gravel we’re both standing on.”
He laughed and pulled out the cigarette case. He pulled out another Camel Wide and tapped it on the flat silver. When it was lit, he jetted smoke and pointed to her with the index and middle fingers of his right hand, the white cylinder of tobacco vised between them.
“You don’t listen. It’s a failing of people who think they’re smarter than they really are.”
He closed the distance between them before she could react. He slapped her twice then caught her arm when she tried to swing at his face.
“Like I said. Balls. But no brains. Maybe the phenobarbital scrambled your smarts a little. Put a little tarnish on that brass. Could that be it? You’re smart when you don’t have Class C narcotics washing around your bloodstream? Hmmm? What’cha say, sugar?”
She said nothing. He shoved her so she took an involuntary seat on the trunk lid. Then he stepped between her splayed out legs and grabbed both arms, leaning close.
“Let’s wrap this up because we still have some serious road time in front of us. We both want the same thing — the money, honey. The greenbacks your husband ripped off some gentlemen associates of mine back in N’awlins.”
“You’re their catchdog. Go fetch what they lost and bring it back. Get a pat on the head and a biscuit for your trouble, right, bud?”
“That was the game plan.”
“So it’s like I said before. I’m fish bait and you’re just followin’ orders like a good little Nazi.”
“You still talk too much and too soon.”
“You keep sayin’ that but I don’t hear anything to make me think different. I mean, they own you don’t they?”
“So you say. So they think.”
“So it is.”
“Maybe not. Been hired muscle for these gentlemen for years. Always efficient. Always loyal. But I’ve decided to play this one for me, not them. I’m a free agent. Undeclared.”
“Why tell me this?”
“To suggest to you that it might be in your best interest to play ball with me instead of whack me at the first opportunity. To show you that there is a mutual interest here. To highlight the idea that the only way we’re going to get our hands on what your husband’s got is to team up and outsmart him.”
“Plus, you need me as bait.”
“There’s that, too. I need a new partner though.”
“A partner?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I lost my old one.”
“And you want me to take his place? How stupid do you think I am?”
“You’re lookin’ at the wrong side of the coin, sugar. It’s how smart I think you are that matters.”
“You want me to believe we’ll be partners, playin’ halvsies, instead of you leavin’ me with a bullet in the back of the head out there in the desert when you no longer need my services. That’s about it, isn’t it?”
“It’s as good an offer as you’re gonna get, sugar. Get in the car.”
She walked to the passenger side and stared at him across the roof. He caught her look and returned it.
“What?”
“Just wonderin’.”
“Wonderin’ what?”
“If I’ll have to fuck you before I have to kill you.”
He laughed, his cheeks rising up and making quarter-moon slits out of his eyes.
“Never can tell, sugar. Never can tell.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Safe in the rat hole. Beer in hand. Pistol on the table.
A new set of wheels outside in the searing heat. A new band of the color spectrum shot through his brush-cut hair. Dark brown. Like a cow patty.
No chestnut highlights. No bounce or shine. Flat. Like the weathered finish of his new ride — a `71 Chevy C-10 pickup.
Crowe stood in front of a wheezing air conditioner, naked and dripping from a cold water shower, rolling the cold bottle across his forehead, enjoying the blast of air that hit his chest. His left hand dropped across his left thigh, fingers spreading the flesh so he could examine the red teeth marks that stung to the touch.
Marta. Hand on his cock, lips pouting in the promise of a blowjob that she hoped would buy time, her sudden strike blocked by a turn o
f his hip and leg. And a forearm shot to the face that snapped her head back and knocked her senseless. But not before her teeth sunk into the flesh of his thigh. Deep. That earned her three silenced slugs to the brain when he stepped back into the bedroom after trussing up Mueller.
Too bad. She had been a sweet, wild fuck, all too willing to let him backdoor Mueller anytime he flew into town. Which was more often than Mueller ever knew. His cock stirred at the thought of her. He looked down as it hardened. Down boy. No time for you.
Marta wouldn’t leave his mind. His cock continued to rise. It would be nice to have her here now, nice to step up and take her from behind, her hands on the window frame, the cool blast of the air conditioner playing over their mutual heat. Nice, but a complication he couldn’t afford.
He had known that before he knocked on her door. And she had known something bad was about to go down as soon as he walked into her apartment. He was smiling and full of charm, his mind made up and his motives hidden behind a friendly mask, but he saw that she sensed a vibe he couldn’t suppress. He saw her fear and turned on a brighter smile, letting a hint of lust cross his face. She played along. More than played. Her tongue entered his mouth, fierce and hungry. She led him into her bedroom and unbuckled his jeans. And tried to bite his cock in half.
He wondered if that was her plan of attack or if she had tried to use sex as a form of denial, a sensual way to lose track of danger and stubbornly ignore its existence. Even as you fucked it. Or started to and lost your nerve. An interesting mental exercise. And it helped deflate his hard-on.
Too bad. For him and her. His mind turned to another woman. His wife. The lovely and treacherous Savannah. That’s how she sees herself; that’s how she’d love to be introduced in a novel or a prime-time soap. And why not? She was a looker and about as trustworthy as a cat in heat.
Always scheming. And if a man let her ravenous hunger for sex and wildly unpredictable demeanor blind him, he was easy meat. If he fell in love he was a walking dead man. He had dodged all of those traps. But she had taken his money anyway. He didn’t bother to ask why. The answer was easy — he was a man in a hurry to get long gone, harried by bigger predators who occupied his attention, shoving her into the background of his consciousness, the ground clutter of his warning net.
He thought about this with cool detachment. He allowed himself a chuckle about his stupidity and her brazen moves. He had to hand it to her — she kept her play covered, allowing him to think he was duping her, finding a computer wizard to crack his system, siphoning his money quietly from the most vulnerable point in his complex web of accounts.
He laughed again. Out loud. Head back. But not at his own foolishness. Lovely and treacherous Savannah would have a moment of surprise and shock once she learned where he was right now. A moment only, because she had tremendous mental balance, on par with a cat’s physical ability to right itself in mid air.
He imagined her keying up his electronic message, her quick mind overcoming any fear or dread and instantly figuring out where he was and what led him here. He imagined the small measure of self-recrimination she would feed herself, the bitter taste of knowing that he had used information she had fed him during another attempt to gain access to his icy spiritual innards, the knowledge that he had sidestepped her again and was always above her, out of reach, beyond her control.
Savannah had revealed this place to him in an attempt to make him jealous about an old lover. The white chapel. The abandoned mining town. The stark spines of the Sierra del Carmens and the Santiagos. The desolate beauty of the Big Bend country, where the Rio Grande came roaring through canyons named Santa Elena and Boquillas, where vestigial outriders from the Rocky Mountains, running a course from northwest to southeast, collided with the forgotten cousins of eastern mountains, lumbering from northeast to southwest.
Savannah was struck by the isolation. He heard the awe that shaded her voice and his ears pricked. At the time, he was looking for a backdoor, an outpost for his own operations, a transit point for business conducted outside the realm of New Orleans. A perfect place for the discreet movement of small shipments. On an irregular basis. To powder the noses of his clients.
It was prime. He could fly himself into a long dirt airstrip at Stillwell’s Crossing, where an old mining engineer and prospector was trying to turn the abandoned headquarters of a mining company into a hunting lodge and base for outback trips into Old Mexico. He could have the run of the place as long as it wasn’t deer season. Best of all, New Orleans money paid for these side trips, short diversions from the main business of checking on his string of maquila operators, of which Mueller was one of five.
When he visited Stillwell’s Crossing, he passed himself off as a writer seeking isolation, spending long hours talking with Curt Danko, the bearded, bear-like proprietor who spent his youth packing into the Sierra del Carmens, searching for signs of gold and silver ore.
Curt drove him across the river in a heavily dented yellow Ford F-150, rattling across the single-lane bridge and past the sullen customs guards, grinding through washed-out sections of gravel road, past the boarded-up barracks where the miners once lived and the rust-pocked graders and dump trucks of the old machine shop, up onto the plateau where the white chapel kept to its solitary self, above the wreckage and remains of a thriving place now dead, standing apart from a carcass picked over by the scavenging villagers of La Linda.
By his second trip, Crowe was driving himself over the river in Curt’s pickup. By his third trip, Crowe had made the proper contacts and spread the right amount of la mordita to those who required it. By his fourth trip, he was packing out small packages of powder deep into his duffel bag. But he only made three more runs with cargo, his instincts assigning a different value to the isolation of this place, a different role in plans that were still gestating in his unconscious.
He kept up the contacts, especially a man named Enrique Salazar, advising this local patron how to smooth out his delivery routes to El Norte and how to invest his profits. He played to the man’s greed, his ambition to make his little village as important and feared as Ojinaga, an outlaw town opposite Presidio where gunfights between rival drug lords were a common thing and a narcotraficante named Pablo Acosta controlled the action until he was gunned down in the late ’80s.
Slow and easy, jefe. Slow and easy. Take little bites. Until you are strong enough to take them. Slow and easy. Don’t make a move until I’m just a memory.
Crowe didn’t whisper that last line in Salazar’s ear, but his counsel of caution seemed to take. And he kept spreading his money around, buying friendship and time.
He was also buying a rat hole. An escape hatch. A small two-room shack in the foothills above La Linda. A small network of eyes and ears on both sides of the river; the cousins, nephews and sons of Enrique Salazar, a man unknown to his regular contacts. In Houston. And New Orleans.
Money bought Crowe the right to slip on down here without question, with little notice, into friendly arms. As friendly as the face on a hundred dollar bill.
He smiled and took another tug of beer, enjoying the cold, bitter bite of Mexican brew done in the old German style. Bohemia. In the brown bottle. None of the airy nothingness found in a clear bottle of Corona or Sol. And none of the low-cal blandness of American beers, calibrated to eliminate all the sharp differences of bitter and sweet that once distinguished the product of different breweries.
He hated the sameness of the big American brands. Not out of any romantic sense of Old World craftsmanship but out of resentment of a choice denied him, a calculation made for him, without his say. He had equal contempt for the microbrewery movement and its scheming play on America’s unquenchable lust for a past that never was.
Another pull. Bottle almost empty. A swig or two left. He checked his reverie about beer.
He listened to the hum of the gas motor that doubled as water pump and generator. He stepped away from the air conditioner and picked up the pistol. One of Muel
ler’s .357s. The Smith. He swung out the cylinder and emptied the six long rounds onto the table. Winchester Silvertips. He dry fired the gun several times, from full cock and in double action.
A grunt of satisfaction. He preferred semi-automatics but this would do. The trigger pull was smooth and glassy. The heft and balance made for a natural fit in his palm. He slipped the hollow-points back into the cylinder and carefully placed the pistol back on the table.
A loud, burring noise caused him to reach for the pistol. He relaxed and walked over to a squat and battered rotary phone sitting on a scarred pine counter, the clapper in its bell clearly bent, causing it to sound more like a rattlesnake than a ring.
“Bueno.”
“Señor Salazar sends his greetings and wonders whether you’d care to dine with us tonight.”
“Tell el jefe that nothing would give me greater pleasure. Tell him I will come with a gift and a favor to ask.”
“I will.”
“Gracias.”
“Por nada, señor. Por nada.”
He hung up the phone and reached for the leather briefcase resting on a straight-backed wooden chair. The briefcase was richly tooled with an acorn and leaf pattern, like a saddle, with straps running out and down from the center of nickeled silver conchos to buckles made of the same metal.
He reached inside and pulled out a leather pouch the size of a quart Ziploc bag. Inside that bag was another pouch made of chamois, a thick trifold. Crowe opened the chamois and shook free a glittering slide of ice blue flash. Diamonds.
He counted ten stones. A gift. Better than money. For a bigger favor than mere friendship could buy.
TWENTY-FIVE
He smiled through a blast of cigarette smoke and cleared his head with an icy gulp of bourbon. Krukovitch’s face ballooned in front of his, scowling and gesturing with a Carlton burning between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.