“They’re going to kill you,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Are you going to keep pushing it?”
“I don’t know.”
They came to a soft drink stand at the end of the park. Héctor drank down an entire grapefruit Titan in one long gulp. The woman with the ponytail looked at him disapprovingly. He was a mess, and he drank those disgustingly sweet sodas all the time. Héctor ignored her and gulped down a second soda, trying unsuccessfully to wet his parched throat, which kept wanting to close up tighter and tighter, suffocating him.
***
They’d agreed to get married later that same day at the courthouse in Coyoacán. Héctor spent the rest of the morning wandering through nameless streets, tripping over his own feet, letting the accumulated tension slip away, sweating it out through his pores in the form of a sticky, nervous perspiration. He was lost in the clouds, walking on soft cotton, filled with a diffuse pain that spread out from his leg and the wound on the side of his forehead. He didn’t have anywhere to go, the whole story was suddenly off limits to him. Shut off from him as much as the whole of the last three years were now, three years in which he’d broken with the dreams of a successful engineer and entered into the dream of a lone and independent detective. Dreams, loneliness, the newly unfamiliar city dominated by the shamelessness of power, choked with the corrupt and spoiled air left behind by this whole chain of events. It was inevitable. Carlos had been right three years ago when he’d warned him that you couldn’t just skate along forever on the edges of the system, that you had to acknowledge the way things really were. But hadn’t he done that? Hadn’t he accepted things for what they really were? Hadn’t he chosen sides?
The judge was named Leoncio Barbadillo Suárez, and for five hundred pesos he was willing to bypass the usual red tape and also accept the forged blood tests that Héctor had bought in a nearby store. While he waited for the arrival of the woman with the ponytail, Héctor recruited the witnesses they would need for the ceremony from a busload of tourists who had disembarked outside the courthouse: a bookstore owner from Gijón named Santiago Sueiras and three triplets (singers, apparently) named Fernández.
But, despite all his preparations, she never showed up.
Chapter Thirteen
Until we die, maybe some day…from loneliness or anger…
out of tenderness…or some violent love; surely of love.
—Alfredo Zitarrosa
Nothing belonged to us. Nothing at all. The city had become foreign to us. The earth beneath our feet was no longer our own. Neither was the nasty little breeze that turned up our jacket collars at eight o’clock at night when we didn’t have anywhere to go, when we had no saint with whom to take refuge. The city was no longer our own, not even its sounds. Unfamiliar sounds in back streets illuminated by storefronts and streetlights every twenty-two yards, interspersed by islands of darkness you still couldn’t hide in, exposed to the revealing headlights of passing cars. That night in which nothing was our own, after which nothing would belong to us ever again. This country, our homeland, closed itself to us, reduced to the spoils of petty opportunists, cheats and liars, a cynicism dressed up in words that no one believed anymore, words spoken out of force of habit. The country sent the defeated out into the sewers, into the endless night.
Walking and walking, hoping to win a few hours in this race with fear. Walking without a compass, without ever hoping to arrive, hoping never to arrive.
Our lady of the lightless hours, protect us, lady of the night, watch over us.
Watch over us, because we are not among the worst that is left to this city, and yet we have nothing, we are worth nothing. We aren’t of this place, nor do we renounce this place, nor do we know how to go to another place from which to yearn for these abandoned streets, the afternoon sun, banana licuados, tacos with salsa verde, the Zócalo on the sixteenth of September, the baseball diamond in Cuauhtémoc Stadium, the Christmas specials on Channel 4, this terrible loneliness that torments us with its stubborn pursuit. And this awful fear that forgives nothing.
***
His steps led him to Bucareli, full of light and traffic, back to his noisy office, the old furniture, the old feelings. Dangerous ground, but familiar.
It was raining hard when he got off the bus on Artículo 123. It shouldn’t have been raining in December.
The sound of The Platters singing “Only You” came from the record store on the corner, the magical song of so many teenage parties, the song of middle-class apartment blocks and dirty school playgrounds.
He crossed the street in the rain, jumping puddles, trying to see through the thickening downpour.
“Don Jelónimo, three coffees and a dozen donuts to go.”
“Don’t call me Jelónimo,” said the Chinaman.
Héctor gave him his best smile.
While he waited for them to pour the coffee into Styrofoam cups, two cars pulled up in front of the office building across Artículo 123. With his back to the street, Héctor counted out the money, then picked up the bag of donuts and the three coffee cups covered with napkins (all the same, they were going to fill up with water just crossing the street). He balanced it all like a Chinese acrobat and went out into the rain.
One of the drivers saw him coming at the same moment that Héctor perceived the danger waiting for him in the shadowy black cars soaked with rain. The first shot missed by three feet, shattering the window of the Chinese restaurant and burying itself in the arm of a shoeshine boy who had gone inside to get out of the rain. Héctor threw the coffee and donuts to the ground, grabbed his gun, and ran diagonally across the half-flooded street.
He fired as he ran. His second shot hit one of the Halcones trying to get out of the car without sticking his feet in a sewer grate. His next shot hit another one in the leg. He’d almost reached the cover of the newspaper kiosk on the corner when a shotgun blast caught him mid-torso and lifted his torn, broken body into the air.
He fell facedown in a puddle, near death. His hand groped in the dirty water, trying to grab on to something, trying to stop something, trying to keep something from slipping away. Then he lay motionless. A man approached and kicked him twice in the face. They got back into their cars and drove off.
The rain continued to fall on the shattered body of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne.
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No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 13