Angel Baby

by RICHARD LANGE

  “Do you know somebody who can get them?” Flaco says.

  Rolando assures him that the purchase can be arranged, give him a couple of days. All it’ll take is a call to San Diego. He might even have them bring up an extra one for himself. He asks the boy about his mother. She had an operation recently, some kind of cancer. His phone rings as Flaco begins to respond, and Rolando raises his hand for silence when he sees that it’s Jorge, one of his street guys.

  “Boss,” Jorge says. “Something fucked’s happened.”

  He stopped by the house to collect some money El Toro owed him but got worried when the big man didn’t come out to open the gate. Climbing the wall surrounding the property, he saw that the front door of the house was wide open and decided to investigate. Inside, he found El Toro and Maria shot dead and Luz missing.

  “I’m in the yard now,” he says. “What should I do?”

  “Do you have a gun?” Rolando asks him.

  “Simón.” Of course.

  “Stand guard until I return. Don’t let anybody in.”

  Rolando punches out and hits the button for Luz. Her phone rings and rings until voice mail picks up. “What the fuck is going on?” he says. “Get in touch with me as soon as you can.”

  Everyone’s staring at him, wondering what’s happened, but all he can think about is Luz. The men responsible for this will hurt her, he knows. Women, children—nobody’s off-limits anymore. He covers his mouth with his hand, keeps himself under control, but a scream still echoes in his head: Where are you, baby? Where are you?

  He spends the drive back to Tijuana trying to figure out who killed his people and kidnapped his wife. Carlos Avila was squeezed out when the cartel gave Rolando his territory, and word is that he’s still holding a grudge five years later. There’s also a rumor that the cartel intends to do away with independents like Rolando and take over the heroin business in addition to cocaine. This might be their first move.

  Then again, it could have been someone he brushed against on his way up, someone whose brother he killed, whose sister he fucked, whose son OD’d on his dope. A powerful man has enemies, a successful man breaks hearts, and the losers will always try to destroy the winners and drag them back down into the mud.

  Whoever it was, he’s dead. He’s dead, his family’s dead, his friends. Even the memory of him will be erased.

  The road hugs the coast, passing luxury condo developments filled with American retirees and tumbledown fishing villages where dogs fight over garbage in the streets. Behind it all is the Pacific, the first flash of sunset imparting a pink tinge to the surf that batters the rocky shore.

  Rolando learned to swim there, learned to catch and ride a wave. He remembers being out in the water at this exact time of day some long-ago summer, how the sea cooled his sunburned skin, how the spray solidified the light, how humbling it was when the sea took control, lifting him, cradling him, then hurtling him toward shore. He had friends who never needed anything more than this, and he used to tell them it was because the salt water had softened their brains. But they were the smart ones, he sees that now, Paulito and Juan and El Gato; Chino, Zap, and Sid Vicious.

  Dusk is settling over Tijuana by the time they get back. The dusty air gilds every tire shop and shack cantina with a golden aura, and evening’s shadows soften the daytime glare. The city’s roar has quieted, and worried wives let out sighs of relief when their husbands return home safe from work.

  The twilight calm does nothing to ease Rolando’s mind, however. The house is dark when they pull up in front, and as the gate slides open, he wonders whether he might be walking into an ambush. He climbs out of the Escalade with his Beretta in hand, ready for anything.

  “Here I am, boss,” Jorge says, stepping out of the dark, hands over his head.

  “You’re alone?”

  “Only me.”

  “You didn’t see Luz?”

  “I didn’t see nobody.”

  Rolando turns to Esteban and Ozzy. “Keep watch out here,” he says, and motions for Jorge to accompany him into the house.

  The two men walk up the steps leading to the front door. Rolando starts to push the door open.

  “Get ready,” Jorge says. “They’re right here in the hall.”

  Rolando turns on the light in the foyer. A huge crystal chandelier throws a lacy pattern over the walls and floor. The bodies lie in a heap in front of the office. Rolando moves toward them and switches on another light. Blood everywhere, and the smell of it too. Flies buzz around the corpses, skittering across their dull, dead eyes and darting in and out of their noses and mouths and the new holes the bullets made.

  “Luz!” Rolando shouts. His thought is that she might be hiding somewhere, too frightened to show herself. “Luz!”

  One of the parrots in the living room screeches. Rolando calls Luz’s phone again, hears it ringing upstairs. Taking the steps two at a time, he races to their bedroom, bursts in, and finds the phone on the nightstand.

  Room by room he searches the rest of the house, checking inside every closet and under every bed. Don’t be frantic, he tells himself, be thorough. There’s no sign of her, but also no signs of more violence.

  “Send in Esteban,” he tells Jorge.

  He kneels next to the corpses. The shock has passed, and now his anger is building. Two people he trusted, who trusted him, gunned down like dogs.

  Esteban comes through the front door and walks over to stand beside him.

  “Jesus Christ,” he mutters when he sees Maria and El Toro.

  “Get rid of the bodies and clean up the mess,” Rolando says.

  He enters his office. It’ll be an easy matter to find out what went on here today. There are cameras all over the house, inside and out. They record everything that happens and feed it into his computer. A better setup than the president’s, the salesman said.

  He sits at his desk and turns on his laptop. He left the house at 9:45, so he starts there, cycling through various cameras. The footage jumps forward one minute with each tap of his finger. At 10:06 Luz goes to the bedroom and lies down. The rest of the house is quiet, just Maria puttering about. At 10:15 Maria walks upstairs to fetch the laundry, then, with the next tap of his finger, she’s gone. Luz gets out of bed. She dresses quickly, puts a few things into a backpack, and Rolando tracks her as she walks downstairs.

  The muscles in his back tighten when she approaches his office. He switches cameras and watches her open the safe. She removes the money and the gun he kept in it and puts them in the pack. Then she turns and looks right into the lens, right at him. She knows about the cameras, knows he’ll be watching her, but doesn’t care. In fact, something like triumph shines in her eyes.

  Two cameras, one in the office and one in the hall, capture what happens when she turns to go. He watches the footage again and again, hoping each time to see someone else do the killing, but it’s always and from every angle Luz who pulls the .45 from the backpack and, in a series of blinding flashes, guns down Maria and El Toro, then runs out the front door and through the gate.

  He didn’t have to marry her after he took her from El Samurai. The old man treated her like a whore, and he could have, too, could have used her up and thrown her out with the trash. But little things about her got to him. The sadness that made her every smile a gift, the tender heart revealed when she dropped her guard, how she’d reach for him sometimes, so desperately, as if she really needed him. He fell for all of it, even though in the next instant the bitch would slice him open with a hooded glance or hateful word. That was her real power, that she could hurt him. She knew all his fears, all his weaknesses, and how to use them against him. And that’s why he married her, he sees it now, the real reason: to keep his greatest enemy close.

  He makes his decision quickly, has been formulating it ever since her betrayal began to play itself out on the computer screen. The money and the gun mean nothing to him, but he does want her. When she ran last year, he put it down to the drugs. This
, however, is something different, something she planned. She killed Maria and El Toro, stole his money, and made him look like a fool. As much as he loved her yesterday, he hates her now, and this won’t end until she begs him to die. He’ll catch her and bring her back, start on her with his fists and move on to the knife.

  Esteban is preparing to roll Maria’s body onto a tarp he brought in from outside. He crouches beside the corpse and takes hold of her dress.

  “Before you do that, call our friend at La Mesa,” Rolando says. “I want to see El Apache.”

  “Now?” Esteban replies, exasperated.

  “Yes, now,” Rolando snaps, then goes back to his desk to once again watch Luz look up at him, point the pistol, pull the trigger, and run out the door like a woman on fire.

  6

  JERÓNIMO CRUZ, EL APACHE ON THE STREET, REACHES UP TO adjust the reading lamp mounted on the wall above his bunk, shifting the beam to better illuminate the pages of the worn paperback romance novel that he’s a few pages from finishing. He’ll forget the story as soon as he’s done, but books are scarce in La Mesa, so he reads everything that comes along, in Spanish or in English. One week it’s Stephen King, the next something about white women shopping in New York. Doesn’t matter to him. He can only pump so much iron and watch so much TV. Reading forces his mind to work, helps pass the time, and keeps him off the yard, which is where most trouble starts.

  Ronald McDonald pokes his head into the cell, his bright red hair standing up like he just saw something that scared the shit out of him. He has freckles, too, and the joke is his mom fucked a clown.

  “Spare a Fanta?” he asks.

  “Go ahead,” Jerónimo replies.

  Ronald slips inside and bends to pull a cold can of soda out of the small refrigerator under Jerónimo’s bunk. “They locked the block up early,” he says. “I can’t get over to the commissary.”

  “The Jew isn’t open?”

  Ronald backs out and looks down the tier to where the old man called the Jew peddles soft drinks and snacks out of his cell. You can buy whatever you want in this place, from tacos to dope to TVs to birthday cards for your kids. Jerónimo has never seen anything like it in any of the prisons he’s done time in on both sides of the border.

  “He might be in the infirmary,” Ronald says, stepping back into the cell. “I heard his liver is fucked.”

  “Have a seat.”

  A square of plywood covers the open toilet, and there’s a cushion on top of it for visitors. That’s where Ronald sits now and sips from his Fanta.

  “I heard something else too,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “That pendejo Salazar over in B Block says he’s going to kill you for disrespecting him.”

  “I didn’t disrespect him,” Jerónimo says.

  Ronald shrugs.

  “He asked me to play cards, and I didn’t want to,” Jerónimo continues.

  He’s made an effort to keep to himself this time around, and a year into his three-year bit has only had to fight twice. That’s an accomplishment, considering what a sensitive bunch convicts are, always looking for reasons to get their feelings hurt and stomp a mudhole in someone’s ass.

  That he’s under the protection of El Príncipe helps, because nobody wants to piss off the Prince. But the association also leads to resentment. Less well-connected prisoners see his one-man cell, his TV and microwave and electric fan, then look around the filthy, sweltering dormitory they share with five hundred other snoring, farting, stinking prisoners and say, “Fuck that ass-licker.”

  Salazar is one of the jealous ones.

  “You’re too good to play with us, huh?” he said when Jerónimo declined his offer to join the poker game. “So go to hell then.”

  The kind of threat Ronald just reported usually goes in one of Jerónimo’s ears and out the other, another dumbshit talking tough. But Salazar is something else. He’s serving max time for murder and has killed two other men while inside, left them holding their guts in their hands. A loco like that, you take seriously.

  Somewhere on the block someone starts singing a hymn at the top of his lungs. Another prisoner yells at him to shut up.

  “Jesus is coming,” the singing con roars, slurring drunk. “Better get ready.”

  “Jesus can suck my cock,” is the reply.

  Ronald hands Jerónimo a cigarette, and he sits up on his bunk and leans forward to reach the match.

  “They say Salazar cut someone’s head off during the riot,” Ronald says. “Then ate the guy’s eyes.”

  In 2008, before Jerónimo began his stint, the inmates here rioted to protest the overcrowded, unsanitary condition of the prison and the brutality of the guards. At that time eight thousand men and women were packed into the facility, which had originally been designed to hold three thousand. The authorities regained control after three days by storming the cellblocks and opening fire on the rioters. The official death toll was twenty-one inmates killed and scores injured, but darker rumors swirled that hundreds of additional bodies were bulldozed into a common grave in the prison cemetery.

  Everyone who was here then has a riot story: nightmare atrocities committed by prisoners or guards, harrowing close calls, selfless rescues performed under fire. A whole new pantheon of heroes and villains was born out of the blood and flames. Jerónimo listens politely to the tales but doesn’t put any stock in them. He’s spent enough time behind bars to understand that myth quickly eclipses truth in places where the truth is always suspect.

  So, “Ate his eyes?” he says to Ronald. “Fuck.”

  “Just so you know,” Ronald says.

  “What I’m up against, huh?”

  Ronald finishes his Fanta and checks his watch. “Malcolm in the Middle’s on,” he says. He has a cell to himself, too, and a TV, paid for by his parents. He’s halfway through two years for beating his wife and says he’d do it again tomorrow if the bitch spoke to him like she did the night he lost control.

  Jerónimo shuts out the light when Ronald goes, lies back on his bunk and closes his eyes. He thinks about his own wife, Irma, and their kids, Jerónimo Jr. and Ariel. They’re living with Irma’s sister now, and Irma says everything is fine, there’s enough money, enough room, and the children are happy. She offers to bring them to visit, but Jerónimo won’t let them see him here. He won’t let Irma come for conjugals, either, because he isn’t even sure he’d be able to get it up in one of the dirty little rooms they stick you in. Junior will be five when he gets out, Ariel, seven. Three years for kids that age is half their lives. They’ll barely remember him.

  Before Irma, before the kids, he didn’t give a shit about anything, not even himself. He was born in El Paso, the fourth of eight children. His mom and dad were illegals but got amnesty in 1986 and moved the family to L.A., to Inglewood. Dad repaired sewing machines in a clothing factory downtown, and they lived in a converted garage off Prairie, near Hollywood Park, the four boys sharing one bedroom, the four girls the other. They had decent food, clean clothes, cable TV, but Jerónimo always felt like he was just crashing there. One of his sisters was retarded, so she got most of Mom’s attention, and all his dad did was work and sleep.

  His oldest brother, Arturo, joined Inglewood 13 at age twelve and was wounded in a drive-by a few years later. He’s been sitting in a wheelchair and shitting in a bag ever since. Tony, two years older than Jerónimo, joined the gang next, and at sixteen was tried as an adult for the murder of a liquor store clerk and sentenced to fifty years. Jerónimo was jumped in shortly afterward. He started as a lookout for one of the set’s drug corners, soon wound up slinging crack himself, and then became a tax collector, shaking down local merchants and forcing them to pay for protection.

  He committed his first murder at eighteen, killed some punk who was messing with his crippled brother, trying to muscle in on the little slice of the dope business the gang had given him. Jerónimo warned the dude a bunch of times to back off, but he wouldn’t listen, so
Jerónimo stepped up to him one day, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. He didn’t feel any guilt afterward, had no nightmares or regrets. It was something that had to be done, and he did it. Like a soldier.

  The cops never even came close to solving that one, but his luck ran out soon afterward, when he put together a crew of his own and began robbing other drug dealers, relieving them of their stash and cash. The money was rolling in until they hit a rock house that turned out to be an LAPD sting operation. Jerónimo ended up doing five years in Corcoran behind that.

  He got out when he was twenty-four, went back in at twenty-six for robbery, got out at twenty-eight, and was back in by the end of that year for some bullshit assault charge. Looking at serious time if he was popped in the U.S. again, he moved down to Mexico, to Juárez, after his release. A cousin there set him up with a job at a maquiladora, a place that made TVs. It was supposed to be a new start, but six months later he was busted for selling flat screens he’d smuggled out of the factory.

  An inmate laughs maniacally, another gives a grito. Steel doors clang, toilets flush, and someone bounces a basketball off a wall. Jerónimo is usually able to block out the ceaseless cacophony of prison life, but not this evening. Tonight every sound makes him squirm.

  He rolls off his bunk and washes up at the sink, shaves his face and head, then changes out of his shorts into a prison-issue gray T-shirt and sweatpants. Leaving his cell, he walks down the tier to see Armando. Armando is a little guy with one eye who also did work for El Príncipe on the outside. He has a phone hidden in his cell.

  “You know anybody in B Block you can call?” Jerónimo asks. He doesn’t have to say “anybody you can trust.”

  Armando looks up from a magazine. “Sure.”

  “Can you find out which bunk Salazar’s in? You know, the killer?”

  Armando has Jerónimo keep a lookout while he retrieves the phone from behind the air shaft grate and makes the call. Two minutes later Jerónimo has the information he needs: last row, last bunks, bottom.