“Oh, I’ve done something terrible,” Ramos said. “I’m sorry. I had no choice.”
Oscar raised the gun and almost pointed it at him and then lowered it. “Dawn!” he yelled even though she was quite nearby. “Get your shoes on!”
Dawn looked at each of them once and then dove for her sneakers, her gym bag.
Ramos had his hands out in front of him now.
“You son of a bitch,” Oscar said, the cliché feeling absolutely perfect in his mouth.
“They found my daughter, man, I’m so sorry, what was I supposed to do?” Ramos began to cry.
Oscar clutched his head, took a step in one direction and then another back toward Ramos. “How much time do we have?” he said.
Ramos gestured toward the door as if to say such things were outside of his knowledge and control, such capricious forces could scarcely be guessed at.
Dawn was now at his side. Oscar looked in her eyes for a single instant and saw that she was with him, and then in one step he was at the door and through it and she was a half step behind and they were running, the gun in his right hand and her free hand in his left. They took a right down the outside corridor toward the flight of stairs that would take them down to the car, sixty yards away beyond a long row of chipped blue doors set in white stucco, Ramos yelling something behind them, and made it three long strides before a figure hove into view at the top of the stairs, first just one boot and then his legs and then framed perfectly in the rectangular space. Oscar knew it was Matadamas before he saw his face, and he skidded to a stop with Dawn bumping into his back and he raised the gun and fired.
Dawn screamed. Wherever the bullet went, it had no noticeable effect. Matadamas ducked back behind the corner and they turned around in the other direction, toward the only other staircase at the opposite corner of the square-shaped layout. Oscar knew without seeing that there would be another man coming up those stairs.
There was a small alcove sheltering some vending machines and he pulled Dawn in behind him and moved through to the exterior side and poked his head over the wall. Twenty feet down to the pavement—too far to drop without risking a broken leg.
“What are you doing?” Dawn said.
Against the side of the structure on the outside was a trellis covered in some type of creeping vine. It was flimsy, no more than a quarter-inch thick of the type of wood used to box oranges, but it was arranged in a diamond pattern that might offer a toehold.
“Hurry,” he said and threw a foot over the edge.
Her head was poking back around the corner, looking back at where they came. “He’s coming!” she said.
“Then fucking hurry!” Oscar said, now with the toe of his boot wedged in one of the spaces of the trellis. He forgot the gun on the ledge.
One step behind him, Dawn jammed the gun in her pocket and vaulted over the ledge and landed with two feet in the trellis. They began to scramble down.
They made it a quarter of the way before the trellis gave out. Oscar felt it separate from the wall and bend outward with sickening momentum, the opposite motion of a pole-vaulter’s ascent. He had the odd sensation of quickly moving from vertical to horizontal, and while they fell he received a memory of Dawn throwing back the car seat in the parking lot the previous day.
They rode the collapse and toppled onto the asphalt below.
The earth punched Oscar in the shoulder and ribs and his wind rushed out of him as he rolled over. Dawn had also managed to roll and was already on her feet when Oscar stumbled up and then forward, his only thought to make it to the car, another fifty yards away.
The black pickup truck came around the corner with a surprising lack of speed, as if the man behind the wheel, who was not Matadamas, was looking for a parking spot. He did not yet see them although in another instant he would.
Dawn was one step ahead of Oscar, emerging out from the cover of a bush only a few feet from the driver’s side door of the pickup.
Oscar watched her raise the gun and thought, Oh no.
But she didn’t raise it far enough to shoot the man and instead leveled it to the top of the tire and fired. There was the report and then the slap of the tire blowing out. The driver raised his arms to his face and dove away over the gearshift. The truck continued to roll past them and they sprinted out behind it.
Oscar looked back when he was fifteen feet from their car, wrestling the keys out of the pocket of his jeans. The truck rolled into the side of the building fast enough to cave in the stucco of the lobby wall and shatter a pane of windows before coming to a stop. The rear side door opened and the man began to tumble out upside down, hands flailing for the asphalt.
Oscar grabbed the handle to the driver’s side door. Matadamas came around a corner, a third man behind him, both with guns in their hands. The other man raised his and fired. Muzzle flash blossomed in the early morning dark.
A hole appeared in the rear driver’s side door and then the front, and Oscar heard something mean and small burn the air over his head. He pulled open the door and jumped behind the wheel. Dawn was already in the passenger seat. He turned the key and the car came to life. Matadamas was thirty yards away, now running.
“Get us out of here!” Dawn screamed.
The car punched straight over the curb onto the grass. The engine roared, wheels grabbing nothing while the car bucked once through a decline in the turf and then biting in on the upslope on the other side, and then they were on road. He made one right and then one left, just gaining distance. They both panted for air. “Are you okay?” Oscar said.
“I’ve never fired a gun before.”
“What did you think?”
“Loud.”
“You could have shot that one guy.”
“I don’t really know if I was aiming at him or not.” Dawn jumped in her seat. “Wait. What about Ramos? Turn the car around.”
Oscar looked at her. “Dawn—he brought them to us.”
“He’s a coward. It’s what I would have expected. You might have done the same. I won’t leave him behind.”
Oscar said, “Are you kidding me right now?”
“He’s my partner. Yours, too, actually.”
“You’ve already forgiven him for leading them to us. To kill us.”
“No, I haven’t. But that doesn’t change things. I know you don’t think so but he’s a good man. That should matter. It matters to me.”
Oscar knew that to abandon Ramos now was to guarantee his torture and death. Maybe, he thought, perhaps Ramos’s blood would even satisfy Matadamas, lead him to call this whole thing off.
He saw safety ahead of him, the sign for the on-ramp to the highway half a mile away. If he could only turn off his moral sense like the flip of a switch, close down his receptors to Dawn’s pleading, he could free himself from guilt and his body would do the rest, hit the on-ramp, get them the hell out of here. What choice did I have? he would say later.
“Please. Stop the car. For me. I know it’s scary. I’m scared, too. But please, Oscar.”
In his mind, Oscar saw St. Germaine lean forward in his chair and say, “You are not you.” And Oscar saw that he was right. Oscar was not Oscar. Oscar was his cowardice, Oscar was his fear, Oscar was his desperate will to survive.
And yet, when he told his foot to apply pressure to brake, it did so, and the car slowed. He could barely believe it.
“Ah, Christ,” he said.
“And let me drive,” she said.
Oscar pulled over.
21
They’d made it less than a mile from the motel when they turned around. One hundred yards from the entrance to the parking lot, they waited at a red light. It seemed as if the fabric of society had not yet felt the ripples of what had transpired there moments before, despite the gunshots. No sirens could yet be heard. Theirs was the only car at the intersection.
From the passenger’s seat, Oscar asked, “Dawn, what are we doing here?”
“We’ll know in just a few seconds.”
The light turned green and they advanced slowly toward the scene they had just fled. The breech in the collapsed motel office wall was empty, the truck gone. Two middle-aged men in shorts stood around the rubble of the wall, scratching their heads and pointing in various directions, but otherwise, there was nothing else that could be called a response to what had just happened here. Oscar could have convinced these men that they had been awoken by a bad dream, and that the crumbled wall was an odd coincidence.
“Look,” Dawn said and pointed to a divot in the turf by the curb. The truck must have dug it with the rim of the wheel with the blown out-tire. The grass was chewed up in an arc that led away from them, down the road.
“Keep going,” Oscar said.
A plastic chunk of the truck’s fender lay on the curb. Beyond it, more small pieces. They were headed in the right direction.
“This is a bad idea,” Oscar said.
“Is that an observation or an objection?”
* * *
He decided that since they still had a fully functional vehicle while the narcos probably didn’t, they could try to observe from a safe distance and figure out what could be done once they had gathered whatever information they could gather.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” Oscar said.
“Okay.”
“Back there, upstairs? I didn’t mean to fire the gun. I just raised my hand toward him reflexively and it went off.”
“Okay.”
“I just feel like that’s worth mentioning given that he didn’t shoot at us fir—”
Dawn braked hard and pointed. “I bet they’re over there.”
“Let me hold the gun,” Oscar said.
22
Once, years ago, there had been industry here, but it had taken its leave and its jobs with it and left its trappings behind. Dawn piloted the car onto the tarmac of an abandoned facility that looked like it might have once been involved in the production or transport of crude oil, a flat expanse of concrete dotted with tanks and storehouses and piles of rusty metal of unknown use.
“There!” she said.
The truck was parked in the lee of a warehouse some two hundred yards off, fully occluded from sight of the road. There was another vehicle as well, a smaller silver sedan, parked nearly nose-to-nose with the truck. Figures moved about.
“What do we do?” Oscar said.
“I thought I would know by now.”
“Is Ramos there? Can you see?”
It was too far away to differentiate their faces, but it looked as if several of the figures were moving things from the damaged truck into the car. They were manhandling someone, moving him up against the wall by his wrists, which were behind his back. Oscar could tell by his bright white sneakers that it was Ramos. His pulse quickened.
“Get closer,” Oscar said.
Dawn crept the vehicle forward. A large gas tank partially blocked them from view and she used it as cover as they approached. It was not yet obvious if they had been spotted, but soon they surely would be.
“Should we call the cops?” Dawn said.
Oscar opened the door and stepped out.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled at him. “Oscar! Get back in the car.”
“Stay here,” he said. “Leave it running.”
There was a moment Oscar was sure, absolutely sure, that he was not in control of his actions—he had no other way to explain what he was currently doing—but then the feeling of agency returned, descending around his head like a halo. He looked at his hands and moved his fingers just to check, although he knew that was no proof.
He felt that he actually had a pretty good idea of what it would feel like to get shot, the brute impact, the oddness of the foreign body in his flesh like chewing on tinfoil, the shock, the delayed pain. God, that would suck so much, he thought. He was so scared and yet still moving. Morality is not worth this, he thought. Turn back. Turn back now.
He stepped out from behind the gas tank. He tucked the gun, which he calculated probably had two rounds left in the cylinder but now that he thought about it, too late to check, maybe had zero, in his waistband at the small of his back.
He approached the group with his empty hands at his sides. He was fifty, then forty yards away from the vehicles.
There were six humans: Matadamas, the two others that he recognized, two more that he did not, and Ramos, hands bound behind him, in the middle of the group, cowering at the base of the wall. One of the other men kicked him in the ribs.
What was my life, anyway? Oscar thought. There were periods in which he thought his life was quite good, and periods in which he felt perhaps even more strongly that it was quite bad, but the two never seemed very different from each other, and nothing ever happened to settle the issue one way or another. He was one of many billions and billions who had lived and died. Who was he to demand or expect that his life have meaning when the status had been awarded to so few, if any, before him?
In fleeting moments, he sometimes found himself imagining the lives, and particularly the deaths, of people whose existences had been entirely lost to human memory. The appeal of the exercise was in pairing the very realness of the fear and pain of these people with their complete insignificance, to imagine a feeling that was once so strong but that was now completely and utterly vanished, how real the person once felt to themselves compared to how unreal they now were. As he walked toward Matadamas and his men, several of these images reoccurred to him, bundled into one instant:
* * *
A Roman soldier feels his own ranks begin to crush in around him as the legion is surrounded at Cannae. He can hear the butchery that has begun at the flanks, but it will take four more hours before it reaches him. He cannot see over the helmets of the men next to him, but he can hear the cries of the centurions attempting to establish order over the panic. They are soon drowned out by screams. His last thoughts are of a small dog he had seen and played with, only twice, as a child in his village very far away.
* * *
Suddenly her first experience of light and cold, and such noise! People leaned over her, yelled at each other. This is no place to be at all, she thinks in a pure thought entirely unadorned with language, it’s terrifying and loud, and what happened to that heartbeat? She dies quickly of a condition that her parents had been told might have been a risk.
* * *
Somewhere over the Rhine River Valley, a B-17 that contains ten human minds which in turn each contain absolute confidence that they will not survive this run takes a flak shell directly to the cockpit and plunges immediately straight down into a nosedive, the g-forces pinning each man in his position against the interior of the fuselage. As the screaming plane noses over, the small man in the ball turret has his field of vision reversed from the earth to the sky, and he watches the clouds as he falls from them, already in mourning for himself.
* * *
Near a cave in France, one of the first creatures who could be called human doubles over and clutches his stomach in agony. He knows nothing about the bad meat that he had eaten, nor do the figures crowded in concern around him; they know nothing about the world at all besides a few of its dangers. They huddle together at night and stare up into the stars without even the benefit of myth. The man knows only his pain, and when he dies he does not even have a name by which he can be remembered.
* * *
“Hey, fuckface!” Oscar shouted. Ramos was the first to see him. He looked up for an instant, his face bloodied and leaking, and they made eye contact. His upper lip curled in confusion, a flash of white teeth parting the rivulets of blood that ran from his nose. The man who had kicked him followed his gaze.
The man said something in Spa
nish and all the others turned to look at Oscar. Then they quickly shared a look among themselves, and then laughed, all of them except Matadamas.
Matadamas turned to face Oscar. He smiled and his hands shot up into the air in a V as if greeting an old friend.
“Oscar!” he called out. “I was just talking about you.”
Oscar stopped moving toward the assemblage.
“You are a very interesting case, Oscar,” Matadamas said, wagging his finger. “I think you might be crazy, even.” He looked around to his men. “This is the fucking guy who fucking tried to shoot me! With my own gun! I have plenty by the way, Oscar.” From inside his denim jacket he drew a much larger revolver than the one that Oscar had taken from him.
“Call me old-fashioned but I do prefer revolvers. It just seems like a more honest piece of machinery to me, the way you can see exactly how it works.”
“What do you want?” Oscar said. By now he was used to it, this feeling of watching himself do things that he knew he couldn’t actually be doing, saying things he would never say.
“Well, primarily the drugs, of course, yes? Or the money, if you’ve already moved it. Your friend has told me most of what I need to know. But your implication is correct—there is something more. Back when we first met? I’ve never had someone get one over on me like that. Total fluke. Really pissed me off, if we’re being honest, and it left me thinking, how you were still out there somewhere, proud of how you had escaped me, and it angered me significantly. It felt like there was an imbalance that needed rectification. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m very much looking forward to killing you.” He looked down at the massive revolver, then back up at Oscar, as if to say, you get it.
“I thought that might have been the case,” Oscar said. “But you’ve got a business to run, and you’ll want some kind of return on this investment of your time. I can probably get you the money. But I’d like you not to hurt this guy.” He gestured to Ramos. “I don’t think you’re really very interested in him.”
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