by Sam Hawken
“Bye,” Flip said.
As he headed into the crowded house, Flip realized that he was not ready for all of this tonight. He would have preferred to spend the evening at Graciela’s at her apartment, watching TV or doing other things. The noise and the music and heady clouds of smoke were too much and he could already feel himself getting a headache.
He grabbed a beer to try and quash the pain before it had a chance to take root, but it was already too late. Flip circulated to the very edge of the party, tucked away in one corner of the car park with the Lexus as a shield against the crush of bodies. The music could still get to him and the nauseating smell of cooking barbecue.
Flip wondered how long he would have to stay before he could make his excuses and get out of there. Graciela would be in no hurry to leave; she was in her element at these gatherings, always mingling, always talking. Everywhere there was someone glad to see her, even if it had only been a week since they last spoke together. Flip didn’t really understand it.
At one point he spotted Emilio, looking glum with his girlfriend Alicia on his arm. Flip knew Emilio’s court date was coming up, but nothing more than that. The less he knew about what the police did with his information, the less he could let slip if he was careless. Emilio spotted him watching and raised his bottle halfheartedly. Flip did the same for him.
After a while enough time had passed that Flip began to feel like he could make it the rest of the way without knuckling under completely to the pressure of the night. He was three beers in and finally they were starting to make a dent in the headache, but he was aware he hadn’t eaten. The barbecue smelled no better to him.
Nasario appeared out of the partygoers spilling out of the kitchen onto the driveway. Flip saw himself be spotted. Nasario zeroed in on him.
“Hey,” Nasario said when he came close.
“Hey,” Flip said. His bottle of beer was empty and he had the sudden, insane urge to smash it over Nasario’s head and run. He knew if he did that he would never get away.
“José’s been looking for you. He wants to talk.”
“Right now?”
“Right now. Come on.”
Flip allowed himself to be led back into the house and down the back hallway where Graciela had taken him what seemed like forever ago. They didn’t go to the bedroom, but found a door that opened onto a rear patio and a small yard. It seemed strange that no one would be there when everywhere else was packed, but when Nasario shut the door and closed the party out, Flip understood that the back yard was José’s place and his alone.
José offered Flip his hand and they shook. The odor of mesquite smoke clung to José. He probably didn’t even smell it anymore. “Flip,” he said. “Glad you could make it.”
“I never miss one of your parties, José.”
“I know. And I like that.”
Nasario stayed by the door, his back against it so no one else could come through. Moths fluttered around the light above him. It was still spring, but the mosquitoes were out. Flip could hear them buzzing his ears.
“How is Graciela?”
“She’s good, thanks.”
“When she graduates from school, I’m going to have something for her. Just a little gift. To get her started, you know?”
“Sure.”
José looked left and right into the adjoining yards. They were both dark and no one stirred. He turned to Flip. “I’ve got something I want you to do for me, Flip.”
“What do you need?”
“It’s Emilio. He’s been snitching.”
“Emilio? No way.”
“Yes way! Those pendejos at the District Attorney’s office, they got to be sweating him pretty good on that drug beef. And a lot of Indians are getting busted right now. I can hardly put a carnale on a corner somewhere without the police snapping him up. Somebody’s snitching. It has to be Emilio. He’s trying to buy his way out of doing real time.”
Flip shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”
“Well, start believing it. He’s been coasting for a long time, anyway. Now he’s snitching on the family? When’s he going to turn on me?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go to Juárez with Nasario and César. Tonight.”
“José, I can’t be going in and out of Juárez, I told you.”
José stiffened. “You saying no to me?”
“No, I’m not, it’s just—”
“You go to Juárez with Nasario and César. You take Emilio. I’ll square it so you can get back to our side of the border with no problem. I’m telling Emilio it’s to pick up some weed and bring it back. He’s done it before. Only this time you get him over there and you pop him.”
Flip’s headache was gone. He could not turn away from José though he wanted to, and he could feel Nasario’s eyes on him. The tiny, glass sounds of moths hitting the cover of the patio light were loud to him. “I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.
José took something from his pocket and pressed it into Flip’s palm: a stainless-steel pistol not even as long as his hand. “It’s loaded,” José said. “You down?”
“You know I’m down. What about Graciela?”
“I’ll tell her you had to do something for me. She doesn’t need to know what.”
Flip put the gun in his pocket. It couldn’t weigh much more than a pound. His heart beat against his chest so that it hurt. He wished for another beer.
José clapped Flip on the shoulder. “You’ll do all right.”
FOURTEEN
NASARIO PUT ON THE RADIO AS THEY DROVE to Juárez. Flip sat in the back seat next to Emilio, with Nasario and César in the front. The Mexican police at the border barely even glanced at them, though Flip felt the gun in his pocket weighing him down and so cold. He wondered if Emilio was carrying and what Nasario would do if Emilio pulled his own gun.
The car wound down dark streets with little lighting, past closed businesses secured with iron. Emilio seemed to know where they were going, or if he didn’t he didn’t seem to mind one way or the other. Flip was afraid Emilio would catch the look on his face and the whole thing would be blown. Emilio barely glanced at him.
“Hey, man, why you driving so slow?” Emilio demanded of Nasario. “I want to get back before the party’s all over.”
“We’re almost there,” Nasario replied. Flip clenched his hands until he thought his knuckles would burst.
They drove slower and slower until they were barely crawling along. Nasario peered into the empty spaces between buildings where there were no lights at all. Finally they stopped before a broad vacant lot. Nasario killed the engine.
“¿Que carajo?” Emilio asked. “This isn’t Octavio’s place.”
“We’re gonna wait for him here,” Nasario said. “Let’s get out.”
Flip was the last one out of the car. Emilio was already complaining about the stop, about the delay. Flip saw Nasario had his gun out and by his side as he rounded the car.
“I’m telling you, esé—” Emilio said.
Nasario shot Emilio through the neck and Emilio danced sideways. César drew his pistol from the waistband of his pants and put two rounds into Emilio’s chest. Flip fumbled with his pocket, trying for the pistol there, as Emilio staggered out into the lot. His mouth was working and blood was coming out.
Nasario and César shot Emilio six more times before Emilio fell. Flip finally had the little gun in his hand, but he was trembling so hard he nearly dropped it. He watched from the side of the road as Nasario came close to Emilio and shot him twice more in the head.
They came back to the car. “Gracias por tu ayuda,” Nasario said. “You want to take a shot now?”
Flip shook his head. He was breathing shallowly and words wouldn’t come. The pistol was gripped in his hand as if he were ready to throw it, not shoot it. Already Nasario and César had put their weapons away.
“Get in the car, man,” Nasario told Flip.
He thought to d
rop the gun right where he stood, but his fingerprints were all over it and surely the police weren’t so stupid that they wouldn’t be able to find him. Flip stuffed the gun back into his pocket and climbed into the back seat, sitting right where Emilio had.
Nasario turned the engine over and gunned down the road with his high beams on, making for a bend up ahead and then a sharp turn north. They were within a mile of the border. If Flip looked toward the United States, he could see bright lights coming from El Paso.
The car crisscrossed its path several times and then they drove on a road parallel to the border fence. Flip couldn’t make his hands be still. The bridge wasn’t far.
“Here,” Nasario said and they turned into the lot beside an auto shop. Cars were parked haphazardly, butting up against each other like insects in a hive. They came up alongside a long dumpster piled high with metal scrap. Nasario stopped. “Give me your piece, man.”
Flip was happy to be rid of it. He pushed the gun away from himself as if it were a diseased thing and Nasario took it out of the car to the scrap loader. César went with him. Flip watched them use a red mechanic’s rag to wipe the guns down and then toss them in with the metal. They came back to the car in a hurry. Within a minute they were back on the road.
He could still feel the gun in his pocket, only now it was a void where the weapon had been. Anyone who looked at him would know he had just seen a man die, he was sure of it. “Pull over,” he told Nasario.
“What? We’re almost there.”
“Pull over!”
Nasario turned the car onto the shoulder. Flip barely got his door open before the beer in his stomach came boiling up and he vomited into the dust. He spat to clear his mouth, heaved again on an empty stomach and then closed himself in again.
César laughed and Nasario cast a smile over his shoulder. “You didn’t even do anything, dumbass,” César said.
“Don’t tell José,” Flip managed.
“Don’t worry, we won’t tell José nothing.”
Nasario turned up the volume on a song by MC Crimen and they went on. Flip leaned his head against the window and felt the cold glass against his skin. He was not sick again.
FIFTEEN
THE FIRST THING CRISTINA THOUGHT WHEN she woke was that the ringing phone on her bed stand would wake Freddie. She smothered the phone with her hand and answered without checking the incoming number. It was four o’clock in the morning.
“Hello? Who is it?”
“It’s Flip.”
“Flip, it’s awfully early to be calling me.”
“I got to talk to you.”
Cristina sat up in bed. With one ear she listened out for the sound of Freddie’s feet hitting the floor, walking the short distance down the hall to her room, but it was quiet. If she was lucky, he was still deeply asleep. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I saw something tonight. I saw a guy get killed.”
Now Cristina was fully awake. It was not chill in the bedroom, but her skin prickled. She slipped out of bed and found her robe. The little bit of light coming through the bedroom window was enough to see by. “Who? Where did this happen?”
“In Juárez.”
“You were in Juárez again? You can’t keep crossing like that, Flip.”
“I didn’t have a choice!”
“Tell me everything from the beginning.”
She listened as Flip told the tale. The party. The order. The killing. Cristina could hear his voice quavering as he spoke and knew it was all the truth. He had never lied to her or Robinson, and this was assuredly the truth.
“Are you sure Emilio is dead?” Cristina asked. She sat in a rocking chair in the corner, and set it to moving with her foot. It did not relax her. “Absolutely sure?”
“There’s no way he’s still alive,” Flip said. “They shot him too many times.”
“And you didn’t pull the trigger?”
“I never did.”
“People are going to ask me what you were doing there. Whether or not you took a shot. Only one bullet and it’s enough to nail you.”
“I know, but I never shot him.”
“They’re going to say this is a lot like last time. When you went up.”
“It is the same.”
“Only this time you knew there was going to be a murder.”
Flip was quiet. Cristina rocked the chair quickly. This is the chair she sat in when she nursed Freddie and when he would take long rests as a baby. Now the movement was as nervous as she was.
“Flip,” Cristina said, “what do you want to do?”
A sigh. “José suspects me.”
“No, he doesn’t. José wouldn’t bring you in on something like this if he didn’t trust you. You’re on the inside, Flip. All the way. And now that you’ve done this for him, he’s going to trust you even more because he thinks he’s got his hooks into you for a killing. Don’t you see, Flip? He’s blooded you, just like Enrique Garcia blooded you at Coffield.”
“That time it was a stabbing. I wasn’t out to kill nobody.”
“The stakes are higher now.”
“What happens when I keep telling you stuff and you keep hassling José’s people? He’s going to know it wasn’t Emilio and he’s going to start looking again.”
“We’ll back off,” Cristina said. “We’ll wait a few weeks and let things cool down. If José thinks he’s got the right guy, he’s not going to turn his eye on you or anybody else. We can afford to give him some breathing room.”
Flip paused, and then he said, “Sooner or later, it’s going to come back on me.”
“I don’t believe that. But if you really want to put a stop to it, then I’ll revoke your CI status and you can go back to being one of José’s Indians. That means no more cover from the police department. You’ll be on the hook for everything you do.”
“You would do that?”
“I’d have to. But it’s up to you, Flip. I can’t make that decision for you.”
“I want to do the right thing.”
“Sure, I understand,” Cristina said. “We all want to do the right thing.”
“But…”
“Just say the word and I cut you loose.”
Flip sighed again. “You don’t make it easy.”
“It’s not my job to make it easy. My goal is to put José Martinez in prison and I’ll do that sooner or later. With your help it’ll be sooner, but I can wait. Right now we’re talking about how you can do for yourself.”
Cristina turned on a lamp and lit the corner. The sudden light hurt her eyes. She concentrated on the phone, listening to Flip’s breathing, trying to divine his thoughts out of the silence. What she wanted him to say was that he would go on and the case against José would keep building, but she knew that Flip was on a knife’s edge.
“You’ll talk to your people about Emilio?” Flip said after a long while.
“I’ll tell them exactly what you told me: that you didn’t have a hand in it, that you saw it all go down. But there are going to be questions when the time comes. I’m not going to lie to you about that.”
“Okay. Okay,” Flip said.
“Does that mean we’re still in this together?” Cristina asked.
“Yeah. I’ll do it.”
Cristina could hear the reservation in his voice, in the way he dragged the words out. She could not know what he was feeling, not really. Anything she thought would be speculation. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
“I guess I have to be.”
“I’m here if you need to talk. Anytime.”
“Yeah, all right,” Flip said and killed the connection.
Cristina sat a while in the rocking chair, her mind working, and thought of Flip wherever he was, with the weight of death pressing on his shoulders.
SIXTEEN
MATÍAS PICKED UP THE PHONE ALMOST before it finished its first ring. “Segura,” he said.
“Matías. It’s Felix. I’ve got a body for you.”<
br />
He looked around. “Felix, I’m not doing bodies right now. I have things going on.”
“Oh, right, you’re not interested in Los Aztecas anymore.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then come out and see this body. You’ll find it interesting.”
“Okay. Where?”
Felix told him and Matías wrote it down. When he hung up, he gathered his jacket from the back of his chair and headed toward the elevators.
It took twenty minutes for Matías to reach the neighborhood Felix had called from. He made note of how few houses there were here and how many little businesses with chain-link fences or corrugated tin walls. The broad vacant lot where the body lay looked like it used to be something before the building there had been cleared. Lines of concrete still showed in the dirt.
The body was worth only a handful of police. Felix was the lone federal presence, the other cops part of the local force. Stakes had been driven into the ground and police tape strung between them. A white van from the city stood by to take the corpse away.
Matías shielded his eyes from the sun when he left his car. The day was dry, tending toward hot. Summer crept further and further into spring every year. The scientists called it global warming. What would it be like when he was old? Would they ever see a winter?
“Matías,” Felix said when Matías came near. “Man of mystery. What do you have cooking in those offices of yours?”
“Show me the body.”
“Over here.”
The corpse was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt heavily stained with blood. Its face was deformed by a pair of bullets put through the center of the skull. Matías tried to estimate the number of entry wounds, but it was such a mess he couldn’t tell for sure. “Expensive shoes,” he said at last. “Nikes.”
“He still has his jewelry and his wallet was in his pocket,” Felix said. “You’ll like this: he’s an American.”
“Really?”
“Emilio Esperanza. Address in El Paso. And look here—” Felix bent down to push the dead man’s head to one side, exposing a tattoo with the stylized numbers 21.