She was smiling. Her friend hadn’t said a word yet, but she was smiling too. There was a nice touch to the friend though, a sort of openness and friendliness that the girls at home never seemed to show him. Curtis smiled back.
“What do you do?” asked the first one. She was talking to Virgil.
“Me? I kill people. I’m here in Austin for a job.”
“Oh no! Who are you going to kill?”
“A rodeo clown.”
“I love rodeo clowns! Why would you kill one of them?”
“A circus clown is paying me. Rodeo slept with his wife.”
“Is there a lot of money in killing people?”
“No. You really need to be dedicated. What do you guys do?”
“I’m a stripper and she’s a Vegas showgirl.”
“I strip when the money runs low,” said the friend.
“How do you get started in killing people?” asked the first girl. “Is it a family business?”
“No. In fact, my brother is a priest.”
Both girls laughed.
“How does a killer have a priest for a brother?”
“He wasn’t always a priest. He was in finance, working for a fat cat in New York City. The fat cat got hired by the president for a big job in the Federal Reserve, and my brother went along for the ride. Later in life, he heard the call, gave away all his possessions, and became a priest.”
The girls both stared at him, apparently stunned that they might have heard the truth.
“Well, what I should have asked was how does a priest have you for a brother?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” he said, smiling.
Suddenly, one of the girls was addressing Curtis. It was the friendly looking one.
“He’s not going to kill you, is he?” she asked.
“Me? No. I’m going to drown.”
The conversation became awkwardly silent. Even Virgil didn’t have a quick recovery, but the look on his face was clear.
“I almost drowned as a kid,” said Curtis. “I took it as a premonition.”
“Wow,” said the friendly one. “What happened?”
“My father was teaching me to swim and threw me into the lake. He wouldn’t help me. He didn’t realize how much trouble I was in. My sister had to jump in and save me.”
“Your big sister?”
“No. My little sister.”
“Oh my God.”
“That’s why I moved to Texas.”
“Why?”
“There’s so much land.”
They laughed, but not the way they laughed at Virgil.
***
The library at St. Paul’s had been a beautiful room with a dark cherry wood on the walls. The stacks in Beaumont were plastic. There was no metal anywhere, for good reason. The men here would have used it to make knives.
A set of eyes caught his. There were sharp, conniving slits. The body attached to those eyes got up and walked casually into the stacks. Eduardo took a deep breath. He waited. Another man went into the stacks as well.
He found them at the end. The first was a thin greasy white convict in his mid twenties. He looked like his parents were brother and sister. He had cheap tattoos up both arms and the word “Taboo” was written on his neck.
“You Luke’s friend?” the greasy man asked. He said it and smiled. It felt like more of a leer.
“Yes, I am,” Eduardo admitted.
“I’m Avary,” he said, still smiling.
Eduardo looked at the man behind him. He was small, young, and nervous. He had unmarked white skin and a haircut that was growing in at funny angles. He wasn’t looking at Eduardo.
“Luke said you need something. I need something too.”
Eduardo passed a folded up bill to Avary, who glanced at it like a card player and then made it disappear. He wore that leering greasy smile again. He made some gesture to the young kid behind him, who looked around nervously. The sound of velcro tearing apart ran through the room. Eduardo turned to see if they had been noticed. He turned back as the kid reached into the rear of his jumpsuit.
“Is this a safe place to use it?” Eduardo asked.
“The librarian is deaf. You good.”
The young kid grimaced. Eduardo watched him. He was very young, maybe not even nineteen. On the outside, he looked like he could have made the bad boy image work for him. All Eduardo saw now was shame. The kid held it out to him.
It was a cloudy, filthy zip lock bag. It had never occurred to Eduardo where the phone might come from, or how it might be carried. In a pocket, maybe, or on loan from a guard, or in a fancy walnut case, bound in leather, and snuggled in velvet to look beautiful for generations of desperate prisoners. Luke hadn’t mentioned that this was how it was coming here, slathered in Vaseline and nastiness and daring Eduardo not to touch it. The kid dangled it with his thumb and forefinger. He didn’t do it to taunt Eduardo. He did it because he didn’t want to touch it either.
Eduardo had come too far to turn back now. He grabbed it.
“Ten minutes,” said Avary as they walked away.
The phone was warm.
Cashman – Austin, TX
Years ago, this horse would have killed him. Riding Maccabee was Sheldon Cashman’s greatest achievement. Maccabee was a big, dangerous horse, and Sheldon had broken him. The sun was sinking low in the west and Sheldon pushed him to the edge of the ranch, pulling to a stop by an embankment that overlooked the river. The big horse grunted appreciably. This beast craved hard work.
Sheldon Cashman caught his breath. On horseback, away from his work and his wife and Eduardo, was when he was at his best. He could ride a dangerous horse and ride him well. This was where Sheldon came and what he did when he needed peace.
Without a thought or a worry, he found his phone in his hand. He remembered Eduardo’s nickname for him. The Jewish Cowboy.
“Sometimes even a careful man makes mistakes,” he said to the horse.
Sheldon had a number in his head. It had been passed to him unknowingly by Eduardo Mendes, written on the back of a series of payment instructions. Sheldon had seen the mistake immediately, and he had said nothing. Instead, he filed it away.
A man answered on the third ring. His voice was country, southbound, and rough.
“Do you know Eduardo Mendes?” asked Sheldon.
“Who is this?”
“A friend.”
“A friend of mine or a friend of Eduardo?” Sheldon could hear the fight in this man’s voice.
“You did business with Eduardo. It suddenly stopped, didn’t it?”
There was no answer.
“He’s talking to the police about you.”
The line was quiet for a time.
“How do I know you’re real?” the man asked.
“Eduardo has clever nicknames for everyone. He refers to your people as the Hillbillies.”
Through the phone, Sheldon heard an exhale, and he knew, instinctively, that the man believed. Beneath him, the horse grunted.
Sometimes, he thought, even a careful man makes mistakes.
Strauss – Monterrey, MX
Unholy screaming filled Strauss’ ears as he stood in the blazing hot sun. He had been thinking of a woman who wore black lingerie. She had her hair up, and was smoking a cigarette. The smoke was lit by the TV screen. The screaming brought him back to the factory.
Angel was the most frightening person he had ever encountered, in Mexico or anywhere else. Angel was responsible for those screams. He had been responsible for many screams over the years. He was inside the old station house now, doing what he did best, bringing new screams into the world.
He knew Angel’s work for the day was done. The sounds had been far too intense for another round. There were men who can handle unthinkable amounts of pain. Fortunately, this kidnapper was not such a man.
Slowly, Strauss saw the shape emerge from the door. Bonasera, the lawyer whose son had been kidnapped, took small, uncertain steps as he came into
the light. He approached Strauss in a daze. They had entered into a contract, and it had been fulfilled to his ghastly specifications.
“Did you find what you wanted in there?” Strauss asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” said the very stunned Bonasera. Strauss opened the car door for him. He sat and stared at the wall. Strauss’s phone began to ring.
“I was given this number by a dead man,” said the voice on the phone.
“What dead man?”
There was hesitation.
“His name was Colon.”
“He gave it to you personally?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
More hesitation.
“It was sealed in a white envelope. There was a religious card.”
“What was written inside?”
“Nothing was written. It was only this number. He told me to memorize it and destroy the card. He said to call you if I ever need help.”
“You sound like you are in America.”
“Yes.”
“Are you in Texas?”
“Yes.”
“Is that where you need help?”
“Yes. It is.”
Angel appeared in the doorway to the station house. His features were obscured in the dark, but the sun glistened off his arms. He looked black and wet. He was covered in blood. He stood in the darkened doorway, waiting.
“What can I do for you, Mister Mendes?”
***
They walked into a bar just as the sun was going down in the west. Everyone else in the bar was around their age.
“I think I like this place,” said Virgil.
It was dark and mellow and had a restaurant on the other side. There was space to move without bumping their elbows. The bartenders didn’t need to be waved down in traffic.
“Tell me something about Colon that I don’t know yet,” said Virgil. “Something that isn’t in those boxes.”
“He had a midlife crisis.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t want to say. You’ll laugh at me.”
“Everyone laughs at you. At least I like you. Why?”
“He bought a Bentley.”
“If I were a Mexican drug lord, I’d get one too.”
“That’s the thing. He wasn’t a drug lord. He was a secret drug underlord. He didn’t want anyone to know what he did. He barely wanted anyone to know he existed. He had a system, and all of it was designed around the singular principle of not drawing attention. Then, one day, he buys a baby blue Bentley. When he died, I looked in his property bag. He had platinum cufflinks and a platinum tie clip. His suit had been hand made in England. His shirt cost three hundred dollars. He had started dining in fancy restaurants, very conspicuously. He was noted in the goddamn Monterrey society page. It was like he woke up one day and decided to be famous.”
“How did you see his property bag?”
“When he died, I went to Mexico and took his prints.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not obsessed.”
Curtis ignored him.
“It didn’t fit. Colon understood what was wrong with the business, and he did everything right for years. Then, he fires his fiercely loyal bodyguard and starts parading around town dressed like James Bond.”
Virgil waved down a bartender.
“I’ll have a martini. Shaken, not stirred.”
“Right away, Mister Bond,” said the waiter.
He turned back to Curtis. “Now I have James Bond’s drink.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“I’m sorry. Colon is a weird old guy who started dressing like a dandy. So what happened?”
“He lost his discipline.”
“You were in his accounts. Was he doing something different?”
“Maybe. But I think he was doing more than that. The transfer amounts decreased over time, but they decreased in a strict, orderly fashion. When you add it up, the difference between what they had been making and what they were making equals about three million dollars. That’s the money that I think is sitting in the desert.”
“Why would a guy who can afford a Bentley start burying cash in the desert?” Virgil asked. When he said it though, it wasn’t a real question. Curtis could see that he was just speaking his own thoughts aloud. He could see Virgil was thinking about it too.
“He was going to retire. He was going to disappear,” said Virgil.
Curtis beamed.
“Finally, another person sees it. I’m not crazy.”
“That remains to be seen. What went wrong?”
“I think, and this is just my theory, but I think that his son-in-law Villareal found out that he was going to close up shop, and he had him killed. Then Villareal started over right where Colon left off.”
“Let me ask you one thing. You’re screwed at work, maybe. They’ll never put you in charge of anything ever again. But you still have a job. They pay you good money to do the basics, right? You can do the basics in your damn sleep. Why in the world would you want to throw that away on a trip to Mexico to find a pile of money that you don’t need?”
“I do need it.”
“Not the same way I do.”
“No, but I need it. And it is there. I know Colon.”
“I believe you. For the first time, I saw you actually become great at something. I understand. It all went up in smoke.”
“I’m a laughing stock at work. I’m the accountant that reached too far and thought he was a cop.”
“Who cares?”
“I care. I can sit at a desk and do nothing for twenty years. I can get old and wear the same clothes every day and grow cobwebs from my elbows. I’ll watch people who aren’t half as smart as I am but have social skills climb up the ladder while I sit at the bottom and take orders from them, but you know what? I want to be laughing on the inside. I want to be quietly sitting on a pile of cash that grows larger every day, and while they’re busting their asses to get a slightly bigger pension that’s going to be taxed into oblivion, I’m sitting there with more money than I need, not a care in the world, untouched by their rules, and with a secret that they will never, ever know.”
The bartender placed a cocktail glass in front of Virgil, who pulled a messy stack of mixed bills from his pocket.
“That’s been taken care of, sir,” said the bartender.
“By who?”
“The ladies.”
There was a drink for Curtis as well. The two ladies, like everyone else, were in their mid-thirties. They said their names were Liz and Caroline. Curtis noticed that Caroline hadn’t taken her eyes off of Virgil.
“What do you do for a living?” she asked him.
“I’m a disgraced Boston Police officer, but probably not for much longer.”
“What’s not for much longer? The disgraced part or the police officer part?”
“Either.”
“My dad was a cop,” she said. “He swore his entire career that he hated it, and when he retired, he spent all his time talking about the good old days on the job.”
“It happens to the best of us disgruntled cops.”
“You’re not from here.”
“No, I’m not.”
“How did you end up in Austin this weekend?”
“Old friend,” said Virgil, pointing a thumb at Curtis. “He thought I needed to get out of town for a while.”
“What do you do?” asked Liz. She was talking to Curtis. She was thin and had blonde hair. She smiled nicely. She looked like an athlete.
“I’m just an accountant,” he said. “I’m with the IRS.”
“How did you get into that?”
“I asked for the most boring job on the planet and this is what they came back with.”
She laughed. They both laughed.
Liz had a tiny crook in her nose, like she had broken it years before. Curtis wanted to ask her about it, but didn’t. Her pants were fitted, and she had strong, solid thighs
. She said she had ran a marathon. Curtis asked her which one, but she was listening to something Virgil said. Curtis couldn’t hear what Virgil was saying, but his girl seemed to like it. She smiled and laughed all the way back to Curtis’ apartment.
She stopped laughing there. She showed Virgil big round serious eyes, and the two of them disappeared wordlessly into Curtis’ bedroom. Curtis kissed Liz on the couch and she tasted delicious. Her thighs were solid. He could feel their power and potential. He had unbuttoned her shirt when the ungodly moaning began to pour through the thin walls. The moaning was replaced by screaming. The black and white photo on the wall of the CITGO sign that loomed over Fenway began to clatter. Liz stopped him and smiled and the two of them looked awkwardly at one another as her friend screeched as if she was being murdered.
“She just got out of a bad relationship,” said Liz.
Curtis didn’t have any response. He inched closer to her mouth.
“I have to get up early in the morning,” said Liz. She was still nice.
“Okay,” Curtis said softly. She called for a cab after the screaming had stopped. Curtis remembered seeing her in the doorway as he was falling asleep. There was a bright light from outside that lit her up, and she didn’t turn back.
In the morning, Curtis heard the clacking of heels and the door open and close. It was daylight, and his mouth felt as if it had been filled with sand. Then he heard bare feet on wood. He opened his eyes. Virgil looked invigorated.
“I’m in,” he said.
Chapter Five
Curtis – Austin, TX
Curtis’ phone was ringing. He was ignoring it as he pored through pages of documents from the boxes that overwhelmed the small apartment. Curtis silenced the ringer and went back to work.
“You can’t bring your phone to Mexico,” said Curtis.
“Do Mexicans have something against cell phones?” asked Virgil.
“Your phone will bounce off the nearest tower everywhere we go. There will be a record of it. It will be like a trail of breadcrumbs leading right back to us. When we leave, your phone stays here.”
As Virgil spoke, Curtis had his phone in his hand. He looked at it and pressed buttons quickly, immediately deleting a message.
South of Evil Page 8