She’d felt it even before she saw him, in the ghostly dread that had preceded him. She’d known somehow, the light telling, the feeling in her chest. He’d come for her. He’d come for revenge.
Three years ago. Oscar is picked up on an anonymous tip. Sitting in a Cadillac in Koreatown, waiting on his side piece getting her nails done. Rollers roll up and snatch his ass. It’s quick, he’s not sure he even locked the ’lac.
He’s soft-spoken, quiet, but asks for his lawyer right off. He’s a gentleman, as polite as can be to Harbaugh when she walks into Interrogation. Ma’am, no thank you, yes please, all that shit.
She’s all business right back at him, short and snappy at first, white-lady voice, but then she gets a little spark going at him with her eyes. The idea isn’t to flirt per se, but to dangle an opportunity. Could be anything. A roll of hundreds on the floor, a cold Coke set in front of him. It doesn’t matter what it is, the idea is to give him the sense of a choice, a chance. Give him adjacent possibles.
So he can feel the loss. So she has something to take.
Her partner, Russell Childs, hangs back, just dropping in twice to say they are trying to reach Oscar’s lawyer. By now, she and Childs have their routine. He leaves her be, and she sits with the guy until it’s comfortable, until the tension isn’t legal in nature.
This is stupid for me to say, Oscar, but I’m going to do it anyway. You’re like a famous person to me.
Fuck outta here.
I’m for real, Oscar. You’re a big deal.
She pulls a notebook out of her bag, places it on the table. His notebook. His face drops for just a second, though he recovers quickly. She starts idly flipping through the notebook.
I know you’re not going to admit it, but this—this is a payout ledger. Well, more than a payout ledger. It’s got all those trucks you’re not personally affiliated with, and the DL numbers of your drivers. And your routes that change randomly. It’s all very tight. But that’s not what impressed me.
She turns the book around and points to an item. He flinches, just so, but he flinches.
Forty thousand dollars to a store in the garment district.
Not mine.
Okay, sure. I’m gonna keep going, though. So we got a subpoena for every joint in the garment district, right? All these purchase orders for Under Armour and Levi’s and Nikes for retail outfits in Baja, paid for in cash, in Los Angeles. By you, Oscar. Financial forensics worked forever to figure out how you got the money back to Mexico. But the mistake we made was following the money! They should’ve been following the T-shirts and shoes. Because Baja hasn’t paid for the T-shirts and jeans yet, have they? No, they give nice clean pesos to your broker, who takes a little cut and passes your money on to the cartel in Sinaloa. A little tariff fraud in the meanwhile to sweeten the pot. That’s how you get your money to Mexico.
She taps the notebook.
And it was all your idea.
I don’t know nothing about that. About the money. I’m just a low-level guy.
Low-level guy! Oh my god, that is so not you. You’re amazing, I’m amazed. This is next level! It’s really very sophisticated.
He closes the notebook and pushes it away. He gazes at the ceiling.
A sophisticated dude wouldn’t have lost the notebook, he suddenly says.
But you even handled that right! You were suuuuuuper cool. For nine months you laid low. For nine months I watched you sip beers on your front porch and go to the boxing gym and eat dinner with your girl. Girls.
He shakes his head at that. At all of it.
So nine months you drive the speed limit and drink club soda when you go out. I was worried you wouldn’t come back. Because you knew this notebook was out there. I was worried you’d just drop out and live on whatever capital you got stashed away.
Where’d you get it?
Hotel housekeeper. Her brother got picked up by ICE. She thought it might help him. And it did. But it helped us even more.
He closes his eyes, breathes deep. Counting his remaining chances.
I’m not saying shit. I’m not some wab just across don’t know he got rights.
Okay, Oscar, forget I said anything. I should just go. You’ve got a lawyer coming—
No! Sit down! Óyeme! Sit down!
He’s begun to see a few moves ahead, what few moves he has left. His lawyer will come, he’ll get out, he’ll go home, his phone will be silent, no one will talk to him, he’ll bed down with his pistol, jump at every sound, he won’t sleep, he’ll nod off, startle awake . . . all his adjacent possibles trending in one awful direction.
Please, he says. Please sit. I’m asking you please.
He swallows. He blinks. He’s seeing that it’s all come down to her. She is his adjacent possible.
Oscar, your lawyer will explain—
He shakes his head. Theirs, not mine.
Right, the cartel lawyer. She knocks on the two-way mirror for Childs, knowing for damn certain no one’s called a lawyer yet. The call might not have even gone out yet. Let me check.
He keeps folding his hands together. They writhe.
I can’t be here. I’m a dead man.
You’re fine—
Alive ain’t nothing but a mask I’m wearing. ¿Sabé?
She sits. Crosses her arms. Time to take the last chance away. Now that he’s naked.
But you were saying you’re just a low-level guy. Right? Isn’t that right?
We don’t need to do that bullshit no more. I’m not playing here. This is the real now. You know what I am. And you know I’m fucked.
She sticks it in: Oscar, you can’t even see fucked from where you are.
Please, he says. Help me, he says.
She stands. His arms hang at his sides, his head lolled back in the attitude of someone freshly shot.
He stood totally still, no movement. Like his whole body was driftwood. He’d changed so much. The stress, the wire he’d been compelled to wear, the lies he was made to tell. The waiting for the end, the outcome. He had no cool, no dominance about him anymore. He’d been rotted out.
“Hey. Oscar. Remember when we first met? You thought you were a dead man. But look. You’re here. You’re not dead.”
“I could’ve died like a man,” he said, moving finally, a grim shaking of his head. “Gone out with pride. But no. I’m just one of your snitches instead.”
“But it doesn’t have to end like—”
“This is never gonna end,” he said, leaning his face forward, saying obviously to her, are you dumb, are you retarded, light from the lamp on the floor catching him for a moment before he moved back again into the blue dark.
“We’re just in a pause, Oscar. I was gonna call when I got back.”
“No. No.” The snap of his voice like a switch. “You trapped me. You made me weak. You liked me weak. Chingá, you actually got me to beg you. You had me so twisted up . . . and you made me think you cared about me. You put this dream in my head. You asked me to follow you, and I did. I am so stupid.”
His grip on the gun was loose, wrong. He didn’t handle a gun, had never been a killer. He was a manager, not some sicario.
Maybe he’d miss. Was it down to that? Bad aim?
“Oscar. This is normal. The stress, the feelings, they get intense. I feel them too.”
“No, no, you did it on purpose. This is your way. You made me dream this bullshit dream.”
She was no good at shit like this. She took options away. She cornered people. Doors, she closed. She didn’t give people a choice, choices, a chance. Not really.
Spin it. Spin this.
“You chose to cooperate, Oscar,” she said, and he winced at the truth in it. “And that was a brave choice, a good choice. You did the right thing.”
She yearned to believe what she was saying. She had to. She had to hope he could see the candid sympathy in her eyes.
“The right thing.” He shook his head. “No. This is the right thing.”
&
nbsp; He pressed the gun barrel to his own temple.
The gun flashed, and he dropped.
She gasped so hard it hurt. Her ears rang and hurt and her head tilted dizzily and then she realized she was stumbling toward Oscar on the floor. She kicked the gun away from his hand and knelt and felt for a pulse and then stopped. There was no remedy for this. The ringing slapped and syncopated in her ears, and she realized it was her own heart.
She raised her eyes to Bronwyn. He was still stuck there at the wall, as though something iron and strong held him fast.
Chapter Two
Green Light
The day she shows him the ledger, she leaves Oscar for the observation room. He needs to come to terms with what he’s committing to, how his days will be made more and more of lies. He’ll be a traitor, the old ways and connections gone forever. He won’t sleep. A nervous flutter will overtake his left eye, ulcers will burn his gut. Innocuous things—parked vans, strangers in his local bar, the sounds of the Pacific wind in the eaves of his house—will startle him. A life of small, incessant torment. But he has to choose this heedless leap himself. And he needs to know that he’s the one who chose.
But to the agents watching and taking bets in the observation room, that’s not what’s most important: they are waiting for tears. They stand in front of the two-way mirror. Dufresne in the back. Childs in a folding chair right by the glass. Urlacher, Hemmings, Grant, Rivera, Watson, and almost all of Group 11 watch Oscar consider all the important things, and the coming ruin of his life, but the only thing they’re really watching for is tears, his face wet, pink, stained.
Good job, Childs says when she comes in. You got this dude.
She sits down. She watches Oscar too. When he obliges them, first with a single long track down his left cheek and then with a wet sob, a racetrack cry goes up in the observation room, and they say Goddamn, every time, how does she do it, every motherfucking time. And he’s really bawling now, hyperventilating, holding the table and then holding his head, running his hands over the black stubble of his skull, snot issuing out his nostrils, Good god, this one’s a gusher, they’re all gushers from Harbaugh, fuckin’ A.
And from the back of the room Dufresne clears his throat. Says, He’s just been born.
Born? The fuck you mean born, D?
Like a baby in the cold world.
Cold world, my ass. This one’s a little bitch.
Nah, not a bitch, Urlacher. That spanking new CI is as crafty as they come. Harbaugh pulled him into a whole new place and whapped him on the ass to let him know. He’s born again, I tell you.
Gentlemen, Childs says. The cash. He has his palm out.
Harbaugh doesn’t even turn around. Truth is, she can’t stop watching Oscar cry.
Don’t know how she does it, Urlacher says, handing over his bills.
She’s the Midwife, Dufresne says, and she turns around to look at him, she wants to see the man’s face after he’s named her like this, but he’s already gone.
It took the Michigan State Police an hour to arrive on the rutted back roads to the cabin. Harbaugh had walked three miles in the direction of civilization for cell service to try them, and then she’d called Dufresne, quickly and calmly telling his voice mail what had happened. She rode back to the house in a highway patrol car, explaining who she was, who Oscar was. She showed them her credentials. When the police said they needed recorded statements, she ran to Bronwyn’s rental car without her coat. Dufresne had left messages returning her call. It had rung when they arrived at the station. She’d kicked it to voice mail and texted him: I’m walking into the police station now.
He texted back.
where
Sault Ste. Marie.
the hell is that
Practically Canada. Michigan.
Bronwyn went to the front desk and then beckoned her into the back with him, where they sat by a detective’s desk.
you okay? Dufresne asked.
A little spooked. But ok.
are you with anyone
Yeah.
whose your trauma team contact?
Dunno. I’m fine. Really.
I’ll look it up
She barely heard Bronwyn and the detective decide he would give his statement first. She sat alone, regarding the scarred tile, the humming fluorescent lights, watching her phone. It buzzed with Dufresne’s new message:
it’s me.
Oh. I filled the contact form out when I started. Before you became my boss.
hang in. there soon.
You don’t need to.
Of course there was no response. When Dufresne made up his mind, it stayed made.
Oscar’s body had been taken to the Chippewa County Medical Examiner’s Office, but no one did anything about his blood on the floor, the walls. Bronwyn brought her coffee in the bedroom, he touched her knee, her neck. She let him. She smiled at him and leaned her head to his gentle handstrokes and took it back when that seemed all right to do.
“You wanna talk?” he asked.
There was nothing she wanted less. She shook her head no, registered how helpless this made him, but she felt no obligation to do anything about that. She tucked her lips together and tried to grin in gratitude.
“What can I do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said and immediately regretted because it sounded like she couldn’t be helped. But she didn’t need help. She only wanted to close her eyes and wake up alone. But he needed to be needed. Because he’d just stood there when he spotted the gun, because he’d been helpless, pinned to the wall. She felt for him, she did, but there was nothing to be done—by him for her or by her for him.
“Let’s just sleep,” she said.
Dufresne arrived the next evening as Bronwyn was cleaning up the blood. At the knock Bronwyn lurched up, rag in hand, asking who was at the door. She was by the fire, looking at the flames.
“It’s my boss,” she said, having looked through the window as she crossed the room.
“You didn’t say anyone was coming.”
She shrugged in a kind of non-apology as she opened the door. Dufresne was there, hunched against the cold in his thin jacket. He’d gone bloodshot. The man couldn’t sleep on planes. He hadn’t shaved, and his thin gray hair was flecked with snow.
“Hey, Hardball,” he said.
“Hey, old man.”
She let him in and let him hug her and have a look at her. His eyes were kind and tired and a skosh worried. She smiled to put his mind at ease. Tried to, at least. She then turned around to introduce Bronwyn, who was wiping his hands on his jeans as he came to shake Dufresne’s hand.
“This is Bronwyn. He was here too. When it happened.”
They all stood quietly like this a moment in Dufresne’s calculated reticence. He never said the first thing. Bronwyn shifted in place.
“Well, I don’t know what to say either!” she blurted out.
Dufresne laughed. Bronwyn cleared his throat, nodded succinctly at each of them, and started back for his bucket.
“Bronwyn,” she said too sharply.
“What?”
He turned around and looked at her, and Dufresne did too. She still didn’t know what to say.
“Booze,” she said, as if she’d just then invented the concept, and fetched a bottle of Maker’s Mark from the cupboard and poured three messy splashes into three mismatched glasses and handed them around the butcher’s block where they’d gathered.
Bronwyn took the glass, looking quizzically at her, as if to ask her a couple different how-comes and what-fors. Why is he here? What’s happening?
Dufresne looked into his glass. “To you two being okay,” he said.
They clinked. Dufresne drank last.
“Oh Bron,” Harbaugh said, “you got blood on you.”
He looked at the pink line around his wrist, at the bucket, and then at the floor where there was still more blood, watered down, but yet to be sopped up. She wasn’t sure what kind of move to mak
e. She wasn’t going to wash his hands for him. If they were engaged, though, would she wash his hands? Chide him into it, maybe?
They weren’t engaged. That idea was from before.
“I’m okay,” Bronwyn said, sipping the last of his whiskey, setting down the cup.
She started to pour another for him.
“I said I’m okay.” That quick grin at Dufresne again. “I’m gonna take a walk.”
He tossed the rag into the bucket of pink water and whipped his coat and hat off the peg and swept outside. The shallowness of the nothing she felt didn’t upset her, just sounded off like an alarm behind a closed door.
Bronwyn’s footsteps receded away in the new snow. In the fresh silence, Dufresne swirled the remainder of his drink and looked around, lightly taking the place in.
“This is nice.”
“Family cabin. Spent a lot of summers and winter breaks up here.”
He nodded in the direction Bronwyn had gone.
“Is he family or . . .”
“Or.”
“Or?”
“What? He’s . . . Bronwyn. You want to know if we’re getting married or something?”
“You have this tendency, Diane,” he said, “to think your mind is easily read.” He took a sip. “Just populating the cast of characters here.”
“He’s a lumberjack,” she said.
“A local, then.”
“From Santa Barbara.”
“A Santa Barbara lumberjack,” Dufresne said with a touch of smarm.
“I mean he’s a lumberjack at heart. His dad’s a lawyer and his mother’s a banker, but he won’t soil his neck with a white collar. He makes these tables that are almost sculptures, kind of functional, I guess. He runs a recycling center. That fill it in enough?”
She could feel Dufresne seeing into her with his soft brown eyes somehow, coaxing her. He’d always had her number, even as far back as Sacramento. He didn’t say a word.
She finished her whiskey.
“Who am I kidding?” she said. “He’s slumming. It’s all daddy money.”
“This is hardly a slum,” he said, softening his searching eyes.
Make Them Cry Page 2