Make Them Cry
Page 6
“The hell you will!” Childs yelled.
The PA blared, the crowd roared and pleaded and swore, but Childs was as clear as a church bell. She let down the binoculars from her eyes to look at him, to make him repeat it. But then Molly’s Revenge suddenly surged in the thronged middle of the final lengths, riderless and wild, finishing somewhere near to third. All around them erupted alarm and surprise and questions. She couldn’t make sense of it.
“What the hell happened?”
“A horse lost a rider,” he said, and she followed everyone pointing at a commotion of trainers and officials running on the dirt, some trying to catch the loose horse, some directing the ambulance rolling toward the jockey, others waving and talking in walkie-talkies. She took in everything, all at once, the confusing spectacle.
“You’re going down there,” he said in the buzzy stillness, and for a moment she thought he meant the spectacle before them. “You’ll see what this guy has and be back before supper. And if you come back with a little something Dufresne can’t resist, something that’ll smooth over this Oscar bullshit, well, all the better. I know you. You’ve already looked into flights.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“When are we leaving?”
He was serious. It was sweet of him, but she couldn’t allow it.
“Oh partner, you can’t go AWOL too. Can’t have Dufresne gunning for both of us.”
“You’re not going to meet a cartel underboss without backup, Diane.”
“I need backup here. Dufresne and OPR are gonna have questions. For you. Besides, this Capataz wants me to come alone.”
“I’ll wait in the goddamn car! He doesn’t have to know—”
“Russell. Enough. You know you gotta stay.”
She expected more resistance, but a shout went up as the final announcement rang out. He looked at her ticket and then the scoreboard. He shook his shaved head.
“You won,” he said. “And one of your goddamn horses didn’t even have a jockey.”
“I’m having a helluva day,” she said, watching the replay on infield monitor. She finished her beer and stood. “I better go get my money.”
He grabbed her wrist.
“Every one of these fool gamblers has days like this.” He wasn’t looking anywhere else, though. Just right at her. “There’s no telling which way your luck’s actually running till the whole thing’s been played out. And by then . . .”
“By then what?”
“It’ll be too fucking late.”
Chapter Seven
The One Twin
It was the ninth month of the siege. Windrows of corpses littered the stone roads. All the children had long since perished. No dogs, cats, or kine. Every man in the keep verged on cannibalism.
The large warrior sipped the cold horsebone broth from his pot and surveyed the archers and pikemen sleeping behind him, piled up for warmth. He was not native to these lands. These were not his brothers. He was known as the Twin, no one asked him why. He weighed as much as two men—
Cough.
—but his drawn sad eyes yet gave credence to the idea that he lacked his other half—
And another.
—despite the absurd mass such a pair would necessarily make.
Fucking cough.
Tomás Jiménez Quiñones set The Twin Dawn: A Tale of the Novena Land on his lap. He regarded the faded cover, a loinclothed swordsman in the classic airbrushed-on-an-Econoline mode: sword overhead flashing with some unknown thrumming power, a three-breasted goddess affixed to the Twin’s thigh, the Frazetta-esque landscape, the sky a gyre of planets spinning off into the void.
“Ahem. Hey. Bro. When’s this El Codo coming home, eh?”
Tomás lifted his gaze to the American. Name of Sam. White-boy dreads, a neat pair of Dickies, Man U jersey, wallet chain, fattie behind his ear. So much chill tailored to broadcast the pot plantation millionaire he’d become.
Not that Tomás ever submitted to first impressions. He read people true. Beneath the cultivated patina of a quasi-rasta pot dealer, Sam was just another gabacho from the suburbs. His couch slouch from two decades at the Nintendo, the little baby fat jowling at his twenty-six-year-old neck—these gave up his Glencoe, Illinois, pedigree to Tomás. He was like that white boy—what’s his name?—on his day off from his day off.
“What’s that movie about that dude takes a day off?” Tomás asked.
“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” the dreaded one asked back, sarcastic as fuck.
“Ferris,” Tomás said, snapping his fingers.
“Next you gonna ask me what’s the karate movie with that kid?” Dude laughed and laughed. “Or what’s that star movie about the wars?”
It was damn hard to accept a guy like this sitting on such a stellar grow. But sit he did.
And now he was sitting here to kill a guy. A guy by the name of El Codo, a Sur 13 boss who distributed stateside for the Golfos, in particular to this gabacho Sam here. Now that medicinal weed was legal and Sam had his own grow, he didn’t need El Codo’s muscle. He was smart enough to keep kicking up to the Golfos in Mexico, but it didn’t make sense to give an additional 15 points to Sur 13 no more, so he appealed and the Golfos sent Tomás to sort things out.
“Seriously, though,” Sam said. “When’s this chode supposed to be back?”
Americans hated to wait. They wanted what they wanted the moment they wanted it. Even ones like the dreaded Glencoe here, thinking he’s sitting in El Codo’s house to get the jump on him. But that’s not what they were actually waiting on. Tomás needed a Golfo ruling before going ahead, so they were waiting on a callback.
“Sometime,” Tomás answered.
He looked at his watch. A Timex he got in Juárez. Scratched to hell. Took a licking, all that. He had his own scars, of course. A couple of nasty indentures on the meat of his palms where a garrotte sliced him the time he forgot his gloves in Matamoros. The meter-long track across his stomach from that fool with the stiletto in Saltillo. The burns on his right thigh, like melted pink wax stuck to his skin, still weirdly tender, aching a little every time he sat down.
“These fuckers,” Sam said. “Never on time. And El Codo not even to his own funeral, right?”
Sam smiled and tossed his eyebrows at his joke, but what he’d said wasn’t funny, and Tomás didn’t laugh.
“I guess that’s just how they do,” Sam said, winding himself up. “Make like they’re all important and you’re not. That was always El Codo’s play for getting a piece of my shit. Be the big dude tells me how things go.”
“El Codo was your direct connect for a long time, no?”
“Shit,” Sam said, dismissive. “I mean, sort of. I mean, yeah, but that stopped, like, literally years ago. Now he’s just middle management. Meaning he don’t do shit. Sur 13’s an unnecessary layer. Time for layoffs, know what I mean?”
Sam waited for a response from Tomás, who didn’t give him one. Sam went on anyway.
“Weed’s medical now, and El Codo thinks he gets fifteen points for nothing? My entire op’s aboveboard and clean. El Codo don’t do shit for me.” Sam turned his head up and pushed some kind of white-boy grito at the ceiling. He seemed to be proud of how untroubled he was.
Tomás wasn’t particularly impressed. “Sur 13 made your grow possible,” he said. “They are part of the business.”
“Sur 13 are leeches. Like the goddamn government. It’s all the same shit racket.”
Sam looked at Tomás again as if expecting something, agreement maybe, or at least acknowledgment he’d made a good point.
Tomás simply crossed his hands over his lap like a patient priest.
“Anyways,” Sam said. “El Codo don’t know I can call guys like you up.”
“You didn’t call me,” Tomás said, regretting it as soon as he said it. He wanted this conversation to end. He wanted to read.
“I called the dudes who called. I called my actual investors, and they sent you up.”
“I’m paying cold, hard for your services,” Sam said, tapping a pocket of his crisp jeans. “Don’t forget.”
Don’t forget, I bought you—the huevos on this gabacho.
Tomás tried to let it drop. It wasn’t like him to let some bro get on his nerves. But shit had been gnawing at him lately. He’d even popped off to El Rabioso, the plaza boss, the other day. Tomás was definitely off his game, no idea why. Or maybe it was the game was off.
Outside, a rooster cockadoodled, even though it was 11:37 in the morning. LA roosters, late risers like all the wannabes on the other side of the 101. Or maybe this rooster was already famous. Who knows? Tomás had just seen una chica muy famosa down here in Silverlake. The starlet who’d wrapped her car around a tree. Or maybe she’d knocked down all those parking meters. Something. She’d fucked up her fancy Audi—he remembered seeing it all smashed on TV. Then seeing her in real life walking out of some pipirisnais white-girl shop that used to be a TV repair joint.
Sam sank into the couch opposite Tomás, looked around. There wasn’t much to look at. A couch, leather chair, floor lamp, nothing matching. Two walls of bookshelves. Sam drummed his hands on his knees like they needed a video game controller. All those buttons, how did these dudes even play on them? Then Sam took his pistol from inside his jacket and tapped it on his knee. Antsy for a stoner.
Probably toked the sativa when he needed the indica.
Probably was nervous.
Probably hadn’t done anything like this before.
So ignore him.
Tomás began to read again.
“Why you reading that?”
¡Chingale! Este güey just will not stop talking.
“It’s from that package on the table,” Tomás said, gesturing at the open Amazon box and another couple of paperbacks there, turning back to the book.
“Just helped yourself, huh?”
Tomás shrugged.
“Looks pretty stupid,” Sam said.
“There’s a woman with three chichis on the cover.”
Sam scoffed. Got up and touched through the shelf of books. Paperbacks, all of them.
“Everything here’s swords and wizards,” he said, lifting up a vintage issue of Heavy Metal and an Elfquest graphic novel. “What a fucking tool. I’m surprised he reads at all. What kind of gangster reads this shit?”
Tomás set The Twin Dawn back down.
“What should he read, then?”
“I dunno, real stuff. Definitely not what an author just made up sitting behind a desk.”
“Real stuff like . . .”
“Philosophy, fucking theology. Something deep. Like Carlos Castaneda. That will blow your ears back. Dude changed my whole perspective.”
“On what?”
“On reality, what the fuck else? I’ve discovered that this”—Sam gestured at all the books—“fictitious bullshit is just a waste of brainpower. Authors are like . . . what is it they call those dude witches?”
“Warlocks.”
Snapping his fingers. “Yeah, that. Warlocks. Hella cool word.”
Tomás stared at him.
“Writers get their power making stuff up,” Sam continued. “And that’s power over you.”
At that, Tomás couldn’t help but smile. “Me?”
“The person reading. See, I don’t read nothing fictitious, nothing somebody just made up. But, hey, you want to, go ahead. Seriously. Don’t let me stop you from tearing through El Codo’s library.”
“You can tell him when he gets here,” Tomás said, picking up the book again. “And then maybe recommend a few titles before we kill him.”
“For real, though. You actually think that book’s good?”
“What I actually think,” Tomás growled, looking for his place, “is no one should tell me what to do.”
Sam slumped down in the bean bag. Wouldn’t look at Tomás now. Just glared at the books. Knew better than to keep arguing, though.
But why hadn’t Tomás just let it go first? Something had really gotten into him, arguing with this gabacho about books. Some kind of cloud was darkening his way. Like a spell put on him. Maybe the white boy wasn’t wrong to be talking about witches.
Sam took the joint from behind his ear, lit it, sighed. Again and again he kept on sighing. No talking, thankfully, but now all this pinche noisy sighing. The guy doing it just to be annoying. Same as Tomás’s big brothers would when sus mamá told them to leave him alone. They’d fart and burp, try to distract him by just sitting there being bored at him. His brothers hated him reading.
And they really hated what he read. Coming up in Monclova, that wizard shit was weak. It’d get you beat down. Definitely he should’ve grown out of it at the first wisp of a mustache. But then Mamá kept buying D&D setups and Tolkien books, hoping to coax him into a proper education. Sure enough, his English got better. And he was staying home off the streets.
But she wasn’t keeping him out of trouble by keeping him el niñito. And when his brothers—ignorant dumb-asses, each one—found his stash. . . . ay chingao. Drawings of shirtless warlords and dwarves! Self-portraits as a knight! Love letters in sloppy medieval script to damsels and wenches!
Soon enough his brother Santiago started calling him El Frodo. At first Tomás played it off and didn’t react, but then, one day while playing fútbol in the street, all four of them started saying it over and over. El Frodo, El Frodo. He was terrified the nickname would stick. Which of course it did. In Monclova, you couldn’t get away with that. The magic in those books seemed so literally gay. Tights and elves. Fairies and hobbits. So British, so soft. He might as well have been an actual joto for having such books. Zero-percent-nothing is cool about The Chronicles of Prydain.
El Frodo. The name still burns.
So he tossed out all the books and comics and posters and dice and figures. Just fútbol, all day sometimes, and then basketball and baseball too. He started lifting weights, he got faster. He learned the politics of friendship. He took chicas, the Abriles and Mercedeses and Gracielas, to the Observatory and Xochipilli Park and became a real cherry popper.
One day he heard someone say it behind his back, or maybe he just thought he heard El Frodo El Frodo El Frodo and he lost it. He threw chingazos at the first fucker he saw and then at any fool wants some. Broken noses, bruises, kicking dudes when they fell, he kept kicking, he fucked up like five putos by himself. And then everyone says Tomás está bien loco, he don’t give no fucks, a este güey le vale madre.
He’d rather die than get shit-talked.
So he turned himself into something no one would even think to talk shit about ever. He watched Bruce Lee and Freddy Krueger. He watched bootleg tapes of motherfuckers actually dying, bootlegs way better than Faces of Death. He studies the bloodiest tabloids—la nota roja—like they were homework. He found pics of encobijados and stared hard at these bodies wrapped in blankets covered with messages, the skinned skulls, detached limbs. He came to understand the deep codes these deadly men always spoke in. He looked until gore didn’t push his gaze away, weaponized his mind to better weaponize his body. He learned to box properly and went 13–1, four KOs. For a minute, he was even scouted for the Olympic team. But his project wasn’t sport. He was making himself as death-dealing and hard as those badass characters he grew up reading about. But for real-real.
And then one hot summer day he rode his new motorcycle to the recruiting station, and signed his life away with ejército mexicano.
His mother wept. But no one—no one—ever called him El Frodo again.
Tomás read on. The Twin got himself in trouble when he went AWOL from the keep. Joined up with a new crew, the Horde, having to prove himself in one-on-one combat. Chapters ending with him passed out facedown and suffocating in the mud or otherwise on death’s brink, revived or healed by magic a few pages later.
The writing was crazy, a fantastic hardcore bloodbath. The “corded gouts of blood” from the �
��pulsating neckstem” of his foe. The “volcanic waves of his roar” that set the wolves of the mountains “howling in winsome brotherhood.”
It was silly.
It was awesome.
Tomás flipped to the back cover to have a good look at the author. A black-and-white photo of a dandy with a thin mustache, his mouth full of pipe smoke. An arched, amused eyebrow. As though he knew sooner or later you’d want a look at him, wondering what kind of sadistic genius you were dealing with. This one, the author photo said. Julian Renfield at your service, you sick fuck.
Tomás flipped to the front pages. Published in 1973 by Darkling Rose Press. He was surprised he’d never seen it before. Because this was his kind of shit. The titillation, the gore, the fancy wordplay, which honestly, he dug, he’d always dug, the way these British guys had a million words and expressions. But the Twin too. His kind of hero. Irresistible and murderous. A mysterious past. His initiation into the Horde where the motherfucker thought he was dead rang true—the Zetas did recruits like that now. Pretending they’re about to kill you, taking you all the way down before lifting you up, born anew, back up to the light. Renfield knew what he was talking about. With a hearty swallow gulping down the distilled grain, he’d earned another day through strength and cunning . . .
Tomás could go for a drink himself. A bump, a blunt. Something.
He could feel the kid looking at him. Meaningfully. Wanting to talk. Again.
“What?” he asked, his eyes still on the page.
“Thanks for doing this, man.”
Tomás vaguely nodded.
“Things just had to come down to this. I known a long time El Codo wasn’t gonna negotiate. Had to go to the Golfos.”
Tomás nodded again, tried to read again. But he could sense Sam getting ginned up to share yet another notion.
“So,” Sam asked, “what happens with his house, you think? Like, after we kill him. When he ain’t around no more.”
“This house?”
“Yeah. ’Cause El Codo’ll be a rich corpse, owning this. Place’ll be worth a fortune in a couple-few years.”