Don't Send Flowers

by Martin Solares

  The big guy’s jaw tightened. What Margarito was asking went against every principle of his modest occupation, but he agreed anyway.

  “Let me see … Yeah, here we are.”

  Panda opened a little locker and grabbed the key chain hanging from the peg marked with the number 33.

  “There aren’t many vacancies since it’s the high season and all, but I’ve got something for you. In theory, the owners are gone until next week, so it might work.” He checked the surveillance cameras to make sure no one was coming and added, “Follow me.”

  He led Margarito to a buggy stamped with the logo of the residential complex, told him to lie down in the back, then drove toward a huge roundabout with a fountain and a sculpture of a whale at its center. He swerved onto the broadest avenue leading off it and stayed on that road until he reached a street leading into the dunes.

  “It’s best if you’re not right in the middle of the complex. Wouldn’t want any of the neighbors to see you or come knocking on your door.”

  There were three or four houses set off on their own atop one of the dunes. The rent-a-cop took him to the one nearest the gated community’s perimeter wall. He opened the garage with a remote control he’d picked up, parked inside, and closed the garage door behind them.

  It was the perfect hideout. To get to him, they’d have to drive up the only street; since he had a clear line of sight on it, he’d have plenty of notice. Or else they’d have to scale the wall between the property and the beach, but first they’d have to get around the row of pine trees, and he’d hear them when they passed on the highway. But even if I did hear them coming—the thought struck him like lightning—I’d need a helicopter to get out of here. He couldn’t go back to the office to restock, so he had only one magazine on him. The rent-a-cop broke his train of thought.

  “Here’s the master key, which gets you into every room. You want me to bring you something to drink or some dinner, Chief?”

  “I’m all set,” Margarito replied, showing him the bag.

  “If you need me you can reach me on the intercom,” he said, pointing at the device. “Try not to turn on the lights.”

  The chief knew to keep a low profile, or it would mean trouble for the guard.

  “Thanks, Panda. You’re a lifesaver. Let me know right away if you see any suspicious movement.”

  As soon as he was alone, Margarito grabbed the bag with his things and went inside to check out the house.

  7

  Just as Panda had promised, the key slipped easily into the lock, but Margarito still had to throw his weight into the wooden door, which had been warped by the humidity. A fine layer of sand covered the floor.

  A large dining room led to the kitchen and laundry room. The wooden furniture was painted white and upholstered in fabrics that were quick to dry, a practical choice for the beaches of La Eternidad. He wanted to lie down right there, but the living room had too many windows and was accessed by two doors: one that opened to the garage and the other to the street. He could easily see the car that just pulled up and parked in front of the house across the way; assuming he could be seen as well, he decided to head upstairs.

  His body felt so heavy on the way up it could have been made of cement. It took him a while to reach the second floor, but when he eventually did, he examined the hallway and counted four doors. He chose the fourth and stepped into what was probably the master bedroom.

  Whoever owned the place had good taste. There was a kingsize bed with cotton sheets and half a dozen pillows under a mosquito net, two nightstands complete with reading lamps and piles of books, a sofa, and a small desk with a record player and a few LPs on it. The finishing touches to this room and its views of the Gulf were a wooden ceiling fan and the requisite industrial-strength air conditioner that could freeze a whole regiment to death.

  Because the room was on the second floor, he could see over the wall surrounding the gated community. The dunes and the sea peeked out to the east, and to the north he could see the highway that brought him there, where the only sign of life was a little grocery store brimming with activity. A few children played around a big dog; a group of people, maybe a family or a crew of fishermen, huddled around a small television intermittently broadcasting a soccer match. Little by little, he was able to make out a metal table emblazoned with the Corona logo, innumerable empty bottles resting on its surface, and three men sitting around it, motionless. Inside the compound, two teenagers started up a game of basketball in front of the house across the street.

  I’ll be damned, he thought. He couldn’t turn the light on without attracting their attention.

  I wonder how La Muda is doing with her wards, he wondered. She’s been on edge ever since they iced the Bus. I hope she doesn’t slip up. He was dying to listen to the news.

  He opened every door along the hallway in search of a television set—Jesus! This guy doesn’t own a TV?—until he finally found a room dedicated to the purpose. He drew the curtains and turned on the set with the volume all the way down. A banner running along the screen announced that it was ten to six in the evening and that the news was about to come on with updates on what happened earlier that day.

  Then he went back to the bedroom and dug around in his bag until he found the opiates. He examined the translucent, amber-colored pill bottle the anesthesiologist had given him: the six white pills inside were either poison or a miracle cure. And if he stopped breathing? It didn’t matter; the pain in his arm was unbearable. He opened the bottle and took one of the pills.

  He didn’t feel anything right away. This arm could take a long time to heal, he thought. How the hell was he supposed to defend himself? He pictured the man who’d shot at him with an Uzi coming closer, closer. He managed to focus on the man’s features and was surprised by the icy look on his face. He was going to kill me like a dog. He remembered his surprised expression when he shot him in the leg and how frustrated he’d seemed when he was forced to drop his weapon and run. He remembered his son’s body, and the bitch named Sorrow returned to wrap him in a warm embrace.

  Jesus, he thought. They killed my son, but I was the one who was supposed to die.

  A fresh wave of pain in his arm forced him to lie down on the sofa. In the time it took him to recover, he convinced himself that the kid who’d sold him the pills was bad at math and took another. And then another.

  He waited for some indeterminate length of time, then turned off the television because he thought he heard a car coming. There were no cars outside, and night was falling.

  Driven by a strange feeling of lucidity, he thought back on his life over the past few years. He asked himself which of the two groups vying for control of the port would benefit more from his death. He couldn’t reach any conclusions, but he told himself the answer was there; it was just that sleep was clouding his vision. He sensed the blood moon rising again and heard people talking nearby, so he went to peek out the window.

  He saw a fisherman tying up to a float. For a moment, as the medicine began to flow through the policeman’s veins, the boat rose and fell, alone in the middle of the bay, and the chief thought how he was like that too: floating in limbo.

  His eyes fell on two men walking toward him along the beach. Aware that he was visible where he stood, he hid behind the curtain and observed them cautiously, weapon in hand. When they were even with his hideout, the men looked around and seemed to argue about something, staring at the gated community as if it were an immense pyramid, surprised that someone had built it there. Or maybe they were looking at him, figuring out how to get in.

  It was so dark already he couldn’t tell if they had weapons. He thought they might just be a distraction, that an armed crew was about to burst through the front door. He struggled to release the safety on his gun: either the pills or the exhaustion had left his fingers clumsy.

  He saw one of the men pull some kind of microphone out of his jacket, bring it to his lips, then hold it under the other man’s chin. T
hey were obviously communicating with someone. He was about to shoot them both, but then he saw the glow of two red points in the night and realized they were smoking.

  A few minutes later, they tossed their cigarettes with an irritated gesture, like they were being forced from their private paradise. Then they took off their shoes and walked toward the water’s edge, where a third man was already tossing a small net into the sea. More fishermen.

  Toward the other end of the bay, a sizable black rock seemed to be moving across the sand. It was a huge turtle, coming to rest. Then he saw the three men run toward the animal, and he realized their plan was to butcher it.

  Before he could scream in horror, a door suddenly opened at the end of the hall. A child, or something that had adopted the appearance of a child, stepped out. When he saw the policeman, he smiled and vanished as quickly as he’d come.

  After he managed to close his jaw, Margarito walked haltingly into the corridor, his eyes wide with shock.

  With every step, the feeling that what he’d seen hadn’t been a child but rather was something else made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  To his surprise, a door he hadn’t noticed earlier stood open at the end of the hall. Its frame was bathed in an intense light, as if it were on fire. He pushed through his inertia and stepped inside.

  He found himself in what looked to be a storeroom or a studio, where the master of the house must have dedicated himself to strange pastimes. Aside from a few shelving units as tall as him and full of books and knickknacks that seemed vaguely familiar somehow, the only furniture in the room was a large wooden table. On it was a glass fish tank with a scale model of a boat inside. Nice, he thought. It looks like the Bella Italia—his first cabin cruiser, purchased back in his jackpot days—and he went over to take a closer look.

  What he saw nearly knocked him off his feet.

  There, in that fish tank, was an exact replica of the Bella Italia, the only boat that had ever meant anything to him. (He’d had two: the first sank in a hurricane and Los Nuevos took the second from him.) He’d bought the twenty-foot Bella Italia with somewhat ill-gotten gains early in his marriage: a white boat just like the one in front of him, with a small cabin where he and his wife and son could rest when the sun got too strong. Every weekend for almost six months they’d go out fishing for a few hours and eat their catch for dinner that night. Those days, before their marriage soured, were the happiest of his life. It was his wife who’d painted the name on the side of the boat, at his suggestion, and there it was, right there on the scale model. The boat rested on a wooden board painted to look like the sea, and there was something else: three little pieces of fabric, one with yellow and white stripes, like the Italian bathing trunks his wife had given him long ago, which he always felt so ridiculous in, and the bright yellow bikini she used to wear. That was it, he thought. It was all downhill from there.

  He realized something terrible was happening. He rubbed his eyes, but the little boat was real and it remained right there in front of him: a scale model of reality, sinister in its perfection. Jesus, he thought. Why did Panda send me here? Who owns this place? Who lives here?

  A flash inside the fish tank caught his eye: a hand span away from the boat stood an action figure the size of a tin soldier, holding a shiny pistol. The miniature had white hair and pitch-black eyebrows; was wearing a white shirt, gray pants, and boots; and had his arms and legs fixed in a combative pose. He recognized the figure as Elijah, the man who’d brought him to the force. He felt a chill run up his spine when he noticed that up close there were several vertical slashes in the man’s guayabera, right at the chest, and he was holding a coin between his teeth, as if the artists who built the model had gone to great lengths to reproduce the man’s horrible death. It can’t be. It can’t be, he thought. Only a few of us knew those details.

  There was another figure to the man’s right, a woman. It took him a long time to realize it was meant to be his mother: a fortune-teller everyone called La Santa. The doll looked like a Barbie, with tan skin and long dark hair, long legs, and a fiery gaze. She was draped in a flowing white dress that ballooned up like a flower in bloom. In her hands, she held a cross and a bundle of herbs. La Santa, he thought. It’s been a long time. She sat in a chair that looked just like the one she’d used in life to read her followers’ fortunes. Whoever made the model had gone to the trouble of leaving a miniature bottle of tequila at her feet; it looked just like the ones his mother had emptied day after day when he was a child. There was a suitcase on the floor next to her, and off to the side he saw the old Jeep from the precinct, the one he’d driven when he was just starting out. A black case rested on the passenger seat: he remembered right away where he’d found it, and what he’d done with it. A wave of nausea overtook him.

  There were three tiger cubs, too, playing with what looked like a rag but turned out, on closer inspection, to be part of a human torso, rib cage and all, belonging to a fat man with a bushy mustache. The rest of him lay on the ground between the paws of two bigger tigers going to town on the remains.

  A buzzing in his ears broke his concentration. The final element in the fish tank was a tanker truck just like the one that had blocked the road in front of his son. And with that, he was sure that some sinister being was observing and distilling his life.

  He wanted to defend himself, but he had no ammunition. To be defensible, he needed to have lived a different life.

  An intense light shimmering in the fish tank forced him to look away. He had to blink several times before it began to fade and he was able to feel his way to the door.

  He made his way down the hall and didn’t look back, not wanting to know who lived in that house. He stretched out in the master bedroom, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply until he calmed down.

  When he finally awoke, it took him a long time to remember where he was. When he saw the sinuous, fleeting tendrils of light that intermittently played across the room, he thought he’d been thrown to the bottom of a swimming pool. He felt something vibrate in his pocket and realized it was his cell phone: someone had been calling him.

  He felt heavy, like he’d been tied to a block of cement. His neck hurt so much he wondered if he’d been run over by a Jeep, and his arm was so unresponsive it didn’t seem to be attached to him anymore. From what he could tell, the horse tranquilizer he’d ingested was having contradictory effects on his body: one minute, he felt like a lead glove tossed into the corner of the room, and the next like a fizzy beverage made of equal parts anger, sadness, and a beast driven by furious longing, though he didn’t know for what.

  He was still trying to understand what was going on when something hard and pointy walked across his right hand, which was resting on the floor. He pulled it back with a jerk, picturing a scorpion, but the threat proved to be only a small, pink crab that scurried backward, its pincers at the ready, toward the half-open drain grate on the floor of the adjoining bathroom in an attempt to save its little life.

  For a moment as long as an Olympic pool, Margarito was a body without a brain stretched out at the bottom of the ocean. As he tried to recall who he was and how he’d gotten there, he felt the sleep leave his body, as if by sitting up in bed he’d spilled a delicious liqueur that could never be recovered. The bitch Sorrow immediately came and sat by his side; moving her huge, dark form, she clasped her jaws around the policeman’s head until he hated the whole world. Then, since there was no way around it, he went back to being himself.

  I feel like I’ve been looted, like a car that’s been stripped.

  The warped wooden doors, the rust clinging to windows and furniture, and above all, the layers of sand scattered across the floor seemed to suggest that the world had ended the night before and no one had thought to inform him.

  He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but he could tell from the tendrils of light pushing their way through the slats of the blinds that the sun was setting. With a heavy sigh, he decided it was pro
bably best to wait a while longer before contacting La Gordis or the general.

  He looked at his cell phone. His battery was down to ten percent, and he had fourteen messages and thirty missed calls, four of which came from the public phone La Muda used for emergencies.

  Shit. The girl. His plan had been to let her go that afternoon after turning in his resignation, but the afternoon was almost over. Jesus, he thought. Her father must be beside himself, waiting to hear how he was supposed to pay the ransom. By that hour, the handoff should have happened already, but he hadn’t counted on La Tonina, his assistant in the deal, getting killed in a firefight.

  He was fucked. He couldn’t call La Muda from his cell phone, much less from the house where he was hiding out, without implicating himself in the kidnapping. He had to get out of there and find a public phone.

  He tucked his gun into his waistband, stood, and opened the blinds halfway. The strange light was the result of an intense electrical storm punctuated from time to time by waterspouts. It was an unusual storm, with bursts of light in the clouds looming over the port city answered moments later by lightning on the other side of the bay, not far from the gated community where he found himself. Sometimes lightning would strike two or three times in the same area with varying degrees of intensity before striking once on the other side, so that one lightning bolt in the city would spark frenetic calligraphy across the sky above the open sea; it seemed like an ongoing conversation or the transcription of an urgent message. Or as if two gigantic beings were playing a game of tennis well beyond the grasp of human minds.

  Margarito didn’t believe in divine beings. Except for that time he was sure he’d met the devil himself.

  Margarito would never forget how, during one of the worst crises of poverty he’d experienced as a teenager, when for weeks it had seemed as if things couldn’t get any worse but they managed to anyway, he went to police headquarters. He asked for Lieutenant Elijah Cohen, because his mother had told him Elijah was a friend of his father’s—back when his father was still alive. They told Margarito he was busy and sent him away, but he tried again every other day or so for a week until he got tired and gave up. When he’d lost all hope, one Monday around midnight a man in a gray suit knocked on the door of the shack where he and his mother lived back then.