by Chuck Dixon
The refrigerated air in the trailer sent a chill over Fausto’s forearms and across the back of his neck. The greasy sweat on his back turned to ice water. The touch of his suddenly frigid camp shirt was almost painful.
The trailer was partly an office and partly an entertainment center. Fausto took a seat on the corner of a crushed velvet conversation pit and pretended interest in a game show playing muted on a seventy-inch screen.
His eyes were on an excited contestant bouncing up and down, boobies moving like maracas under a flimsy blouse, while the show’s grinning host leered and stabbed at her mouth with a microphone in a way meant to appear obscene.
But Tio Fausto’s ears were focused on the conversation from the office at the rear of the trailer.
The jefe was speaking to his two sons.
“You did not fail. You played like heroes. You played well and with skill,” the jefe said. His voice was even like a stream moving over rough stones. “This game was stolen from you. You were cheated. Those pendejos from La Osca are devils in more ways than one.”
The jefe’s voice rose in volume while it deepened in timbre.
“This is not the baseball way! This is not honorable! To flout the rules in the way they did is to bring disgrace to the game! You know this! I know this!”
“Sí, papa, sí,” the boys murmured in reply.
“We will meet them again in one month’s time. And there will be no cheating at that game, I promise you on the grave of your mother. You will win by many points. Your skill will carry you to victory on that day as it should have done today.”
“Sí, papa, sí.”
“Do not blame yourselves, boys. Rather, you should blame me. This was my failing. I should have caught their deceit and stopped the game. I will not fail you again.”
The rest of the words were muffled so Fausto could not hear. He turned his eyes from the screen to see the jefe standing before a carved mahogany desk, hugging his boys to him and speaking so only they could hear his words.
A bar of blinding sunlight filled the trailer as the boys rushed out to rejoin their friends. Fausto stood as the jefe beckoned him into the office. Fausto took a chair he was offered and settled into the steer hide cushions. The jefe leaned back on his desk and lit a Marlboro with a lighter shaped like a fist-sized human skull.
Fausto began with assurances that the regular payments from the plaza in Alabama would see no interruption even if Fausto had to make up for any shortfall from his own pocket. He then laid out the troubles his plaza was enduring from these hillbilly cabrones. He closed by asking for the jefe’s guidance and counsel.
The jefe gave his advice to Fausto on what to do next and gave his permission for those same actions. The advice was good though the solutions his boss offered would prove expensive in both cash and lives. But what was money, thought Tio Fausto. There was so much more to be made across the border. And what were lives so long as they were Americano lives?
Fausto departed with many colorful expressions of his gratitude. The jefe waved them away with a tolerant smile. He walked to his car, gleaming like a beetle under the blazing yellow sky, awash in a fresh film of sweat. He did not notice the heat any longer. There was work to be done.
Three days later the newspaper in La Osca contained an article on page four lamenting the death of Javier Morales, the beloved coach of the local junior baseball team. Morales was found alongside the Becerros road.
He had been burned alive.
Chained to a tire hung about his neck.
36
The sign for the Almost Heaven Motor Lodge had faded since its glory days to pale pink and salmon. The multi-colored bulbs that once beckoned weary travelers and horny drunks in off of Trouble Creek Pike had been smashed years before by local kids. The sign was also punched through with buckshot and holed from rifles fired by visitors to the county during hunting seasons past.
The L-shaped building wasn’t in any better condition. The roof was green with mold. The office and twelve motel rooms sagged on its foundation. Windows were covered in plywood turned gray over the years. The asphalt lot was crumbled from years of weeds pushing up through its surface.
All but one of the doors to the guest rooms were nailed shut. The remaining door was secured in place with heavy steel hinges. A heavy brass barrel lock hung from a shiny hasp screwed in place on the jamb. The plywood screwed down over the window was newer than the stuff covering the other rooms.
Levon Cade stood under the shelter of the fiberglass awning that ran across the long length of the ‘L.' The night was quiet but for a rising and falling tide of cicadas chirruping in the woods either side of the road. He listened to the surrounding dark — no sound or lights from the roadway. The motel sat alone on a long stretch of Trouble Creek. In the hours before dawn, there was no traffic on the road.
He worked a pry bar around the plywood sheet covering the window of the locked room. The screws came out of the frame with a squeak. He tossed the sheet to the cracked sidewalk. A single pane of dusty glass covered the window below a strip of frosted louvers for ventilation. Levon tore strips of duct tape from a roll and made a crisscross pattern on the glass before punching it in with the hooked end of the pry bar. He swept the jagged edges away from the frame to drop into the room in a tangle of tape.
Hands in heavy gloves, he leaned into the frame to inspect the room inside. The moonlight revealed steel drums, plastic gallon jugs and stacked cases where a bedroom suite should have been. This was a storehouse for the Mathers clan just as Dale described. In the containers were the chemicals needed to cook meth in significant amounts. Lamp oil, hydrochloric acid, ammonia, lye, paint thinner and more.
Pseudoephedrine was the key ingredient in the recipe and getting harder and harder to come by. He couldn’t expect to find it here. That precious commodity would be kept in an even more secure location closer to the labs dotted around the county. It was worth more than its weight in gold.
Back in the day, a hidden storeroom like this would be stacked with sugar sacks for the stills. The worse danger to it was ants. Now, each storage site connected to the crank trade was a potential superfund toxic waste site waiting to happen.
He leaned in farther to confirm his decision to enter through the window rather than the door. A heavy chest of drawers left over from Almost Heaven's days as a hot sheet joint sat just inside the doorway. It was turned athwart the entrance. A twelve gauge double barrel was secured to the top of the dresser with the use of a pair of hose clamps screwed down tight into the wood. The shotgun lay upside down on the dresser top, its twin barrels aimed square at the door. A thin piece of wire ran from the triggers to the doorknob leaving only a shallow loop of slack.
His boots crunched glass into the matted carpet as he stepped inside. He removed the hoop of wire from the doorframe before shoving the dresser aside. The stacked cases contained two-liter cans of toluene, highly flammable paint remover. He took two cans from a case and stacked them by the window. With the blade of a clasp knife, he broke the seals on the caps of all the drums. Thick, greasy fumes of lamp oil rose up in the stifling hot air to fill the room.
Levon lifted the pair of paint thinner cans and stepped back through the window. He punched holes in one of them with the blade and tossed it back into the room. The thin liquid glugged from the punctures to pool on the carpet. He stepped back onto the lot. He could see the air swirling where the vapor building up inside was escaping around the top of the sill. The little room was filled to capacity with the fumes from the barrels.
He unscrewed the top of the remaining can and dipped a long length of twisted t-shirt cloth down into the spout until it was sodden with thinner. Levon wiped his hands dry on the legs of the dark mechanics overalls he wore. With the flame of a Bic lighter, he lit the end of the cotton rag before flinging it underhand through the window.
A ball of blue flame whooshed through the window with a blast of scalding air that melted the fiberglass awning. Levon was alread
y away across the lot and heading for the road. By the time he was into the woods, the first of the barrels inside the motel had exploded with a clang and a boom. The leaves all around turned to gleaming gold for a second with the glow of the sudden inferno.
As he climbed the hill through the woods, he could hear muffled thunder as each barrel went up, building the blaze to a furnace heat. The roadway below was filled like a bowl with a brimming cloud of black smoke. Within the cloud was the incandescent heart of the fire as Almost Heaven was consumed in a furious maw of chemical heat.
The sky behind him glowed orange from the blaze even as the ridgeline before glowed with a ghost light of coming dawn. He topped the ridge to climb down to where he left the Toyota parked at the end of a drive behind a transformer station.
Before getting into the SUV, Levon punched keys on a cell phone he’d picked up the evening before at the Walmart in Haley.
A voice answered after eight rings — an angry voice with the edge of sleep.
“This better be fucking important,” the voice said.
“I am calling to tell you we have sent Almost Heaven to Hell tonight. This is but the beginning of your payment for killing our cousins and robbing us,” Levon said in perfect Colombian accented Spanish.
The voice at the other end blustered. The only words he probably understood were ‘almost’ and ‘heaven.’ But the message was sent.
Levon tossed the cell phone over the fence of the transformer station. He peeled off the heavy canvas gloves, BIC lighter and mechanics overalls, all recent Walmart purchases, and threw them over the fence as well.
He passed no one on the way back to Uncle Fern’s as he drove the silent road home through the woods. The only sounds to reach him through the open windows was the rush of dew-damp wind and the distant wail of sirens.
37
“Fuck it,” Lou Bragg said to himself.
He rattled two Advils out of the bottle into the palm of his hand. He popped them in his mouth. They washed down with a mouthful of room temperature coffee gone cool with the phone calls coming in all morning.
His head was pounding so hard he couldn’t remember if he already took any Advil. Two more wouldn’t kill him. He sat at his desk and dared the phone to ring again, dared some dumb son-bitch to call him and add to the pain in his ass as well as his skull.
Lou punched a button on a console by the bank of phones. The vertical blinds covering the southward-facing wall of windows responded, gliding closed with a series of muffled clicks. The blinds shut out the watery early morning light and iron-gray sky hanging low over the office towers of downtown St. Louis. He paid a goddamned fortune for a suite on the twentieth floor with a view of the Mississippi. All he wanted now was healing darkness. The bulging ache behind his eyes eased a bit as the room dimmed.
He keyed another button.
“Carlotta, can you take this damn coffee away and bring me in an iced tea?” he said.
“A regular sweet tea?” Carlotta voice said from the speaker box.
He considered that. He glanced at his Rolex. Not even ten o’clock.
“Yes, darling. Regular sweet tea and a boot-load of ice.”
“Anything else, Mr. Bragg?” It was “Mr. Bragg” in the office but “Lou” on their regular Wednesday nights over at Carlotta’s condo loft in Tower Grove. A condo listed as “additional office space” on the ledgers of Gateway Realty and Title.
“Is my worthless cousin in his office yet?” Lou said.
“In fact, he’s right here, Mr. Bragg.”
“Tell that son-bitch to stop sniffin’ around your desk and get his ass in here.” Lou released the key and leaned forward, elbows on the table to rub his fingers into his temples.
His wife said his headaches were just part of a permanent hangover and cautioned him to slow down on the bourbon. His doctor suggested they were a food allergy. Carlotta assured him he just had a big old knot in his head that would come loose with enough tugging. The girl sure worked on that theory on their Wednesday evenings, bless her heart.
Lou Bragg knew it was all the pressure of running Gateway. It all appeared so sweet on paper. Owning an escrow company looked like a perfectly legal scam. The firm had almost a billion dollars in funds on its books. All of it was in separate escrow accounts for pending real estate deals or, by following the laws of the land, profits from deals held in tax-exempt accounts awaiting reinvestment in future land and building contracts. A shifting, morphing heap of ready cash at his disposal and all without the more formal oversights of owning a bank. As long as the books balanced when the escrow’s maturation came up on the calendar, no one was the wiser whether money was actually in the fund or perhaps out on the street somewhere earning value.
The perfect slush fund and money laundering vehicle for Lou and his associates’ many, less-than-legal interests.
But keeping track of all it was a migraine in waiting. Each account was a ticking clock. The money went in upon settlement or agreement of a real estate sale and it all had to be there on the assigned date at the end of the legal term for such accounts. They were usually six months in duration. That being the legal length of time allowed for money to be held tax-free between investments.
Sometimes it was a race to rake it all back from operations across five states. It was always messy. Loan sharking, guns, gambling, dope, prostitutes, cigarette smuggling, and shot houses were all highly profitable enterprises, to be sure. But they didn’t always pay out as steady as they should. Lou and the firm skated damned close to a few shortfalls when commercial real estate developers wanted their funds handy in a hurry to make an unanticipated bid.
He considered, a number of times, making a suggestion to the boys to sell the firm and go back to the old ways of hiding income. Retail stores, restaurants and the casinos had their own complications when it came to washing cash. But, damn it, that had worked for them and their pappies and their pappies before them. Only trying to explain that selling off a golden goose like Gateway Realty and Title because it was giving him killer headaches could cause problems of perception for Lou. The boys might see him as weak. The boys might decide maybe Lou Bragg wasn’t as big a man as he’d convinced them he was.
One of the brass-bound double doors swung in followed by Merle Hogue slouching toward the high backed guest chair upholstered in tobacco-colored leather. Merle was his mom's sister's oldest and dumbest. The man wore a gray Men's Wearhouse suit too tight by one size. His belly strained against a cheap ass J.C. Penney shirt. His pant legs were speckled with hairs off the pack of hounds he kept in the yard at his redneck mini-mansion out in Olivette.
“Damn, cousin. Spruce yourself up,” Lou said.
He tossed Merle a lint roller from inside a desk drawer. Merle went to work running the sticky surface over his pants until the roller was a furry log.
Carlotta arrived with a tall tumbler filled to the top with ice and chilled tea. She swiveled to the desk, gliding silent over the thick pile carpet. A stripper’s body in an Ann Taylor suit. Lou’s headache backed off a pace. He wished, by God, it was Wednesday instead of Monday.
“Thank you, darling,” Lou said. He took the glass from her manicured fingers and pressed it to his throbbing forehead.
“Is there anything else I can do for you right now, Mr. Bragg?” she said. Her smile was lovely and as fixed on her face as a Texas beauty queen.
“There is not, Carlotta,” he said. He watched her walk to the double doors and admired, as he did each time, the pneumatic gift of nature that is woman at her finest.
“There something you needed from me, Lou?” Merle said. “’Cause I needed to run out ’cross the river and look into the matter you and me talked about last week.”
Merle talked in ambiguities, practically a second language for him. He insisted on skittering around without ever being specific, or providing details, from his end of any conversation. Merle believed, at any moment, law enforcement agencies—state, local and federal—might be listening in
.
Lou had no patience for it this morning. He found Merle’s precautions annoying in particular and Merle Hogue annoying in general. Besides, he was paying a security firm a shit ton of cash each month to make certain his office suite was as fortified against all manner of electronic surveillance as the Kremlin.
“Got a call from Roy Mathers down in Haley. I need you to head down there,” Lou said.
“What’s it about? Not sure I know the guy,” Merle said.
“Delbert Mathers’ oldest boy down in Alabama. They’re having trouble with Mexicans down their way. Got dead Mexicans. Del and some of his family got killed.”
“What am I supposed to do about it, Lou?”
“Go down there and do what it takes to straighten things out. The Mathers outfit isn’t so big but they earn steady. Always pay up to us with no hiccups. You get your ass to Alabama and make sure it stays that way.”
“Mexicans. You mean like a cartel?” Merle said. A bit of color drained from his face.
“Probably cartel. That a problem for you, Merle?”
“Those greasers don’t fuck around. I’m as likely to wind up with my throat cut some night.”
“Take some of our boys with you then. Granger and Gary Bush maybe. Some of their crew. Tell them I’ll cover them on it. Those Mexicans will back off once we put enough of a hurt on them. They’re all business, just like us. You need to make it too expensive for them down there.”
“I’m gonna be sleeping with one eye open for a while, tell you what,” Merle said.
“Today. Get what you need and drive down there. Carlotta’ll give you Roy’s address. Call me tomorrow with what you find out.” Lou sat back in his chair and took a long pull of sweet tea.
Merle knew he’d been dismissed. He rose from the embrace of the guest chair and left the office. The big brass door glided closed, silent on oiled hinges.