“They’re going to kill us all,” El Supervisor hissed.
Tomás leveled his pistol at the man’s head. This was no time for manifest anxiety.
“Shut up?” he asked. “Please?”
A man near the kitchen wiped his hands on a rag, yes, darker than everybody else, a little more fit, his arms swollen with bench presses and curls, a pot belly like a drum. Completely bald. The others parted for him. El Motown, presumably.
Tomás stepped forward.
“Commander,” he said, not knowing the man’s old rank. Not knowing what ranks existed in here.
The man’s face was pitted with scars that couldn’t be seen until he was close up. He looked closely at Tomás.
“Fuerzas Especiales?”
“How’d you know?” he asked, returning the man’s handshake. His hands, his grip, were tremendous. The room went at ease, after that. Talk. Games. Music. Tomás was one of them. He belonged.
“Come on, brother,” El Motown said, jutting his chin. “Follow me.”
They stood on a thick Persian rug, among framed pictures of classic cars, a decent-sized TV, a fridge and microwave, a butcher-block table splotched with white paint. Lightbulbs in wire baskets on the wall.
“Whiskey?” El Motown asked.
“If you are.”
From a cupboard on the floor in the corner, El Motown took a handle of Jim Beam, poured some into coffee cups. They drank. Tomás sat in a folding chair, El Motown on the bed.
“I need some men,” Tomás said.
“There are plenty of men on the outside.”
“Zetas.”
“Again, there are plenty. But you come here.”
“Topo Chico is on my way.”
“Why do you need Zetas?”
Tomás hesitated. He’d never been asked such a question. Zetas did what they were told. But this El Motown was acting like these men were his to dispense. Unbeholden to the cartel. How strange that would be, to question the orders. Not that he didn’t think about it, not that he didn’t bitch to himself. But he never questioned an order. He could hardly imagine it.
El Motown waved him off before he decided how to answer.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We don’t work for the Golfos anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not talking about anything,” El Motown said with a wry grin.
“No one quits the Golfos.”
El Motown took a drink of whiskey. He seemed to be considering how to respond. He had to know that Tomás would relay whatever he said back to the cartel. This strike or insurgency or whatever it was. He had to know that once the Golfos found out, they wouldn’t stand for it.
Assuming he let Tomás go.
He didn’t dwell on the thought. Death was always around the corner. Or perhaps sitting right in front of you, drinking whiskey.
“You know I have to tell El Rabioso about this. El Esquimal won’t allow it.”
El Motown smiled, though his eyes remained humorless. “You might be here one day.”
“Or dead. No one knows the future,” Tomás said. He sipped and the whiskey burned too hot in his throat to be the real thing and he held the cup in his lap.
“I know the future.”
“Then you know what happens,” Tomás said.
“More Zetas,” El Motown replied.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Compared to more doctors, maybe.”
“Soldiers make doctors necessary.”
“So does malaria.”
El Motown laughed. “This is true. But we are much more dangerous than malaria,” he said, looking out the door of the cell.
All Tomás saw was Zetas moving about, and El Supervisor and the guards in a little separate huddle. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.
El Motown laughed again. He drank and poured more whiskey into their cups, even though Tomás no longer wanted his.
“What happened here? Why did the others try to stop us from coming?”
“They aren’t keeping you out of here. They are keeping us in.” He watched to see how Tomás would react to this. “They are afraid you will open the gates and let us devils out.”
“But how do you survive? What do you eat? Where do you get the whiskey?”
“They bring us what we want.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise we would kill them.”
“But why?”
“Because we are Zetas.”
“You’re making no sense to me.”
El Motown set his cup down on the butcher block. He turned it slowly around with his finger as if it could be oriented in some meaningful way.
“Let me show you something.”
He rose, and the two of them walked through the block. Zetas played pool, dozed in the splash of rotating fans, opened beers, and played dominoes. They walked over broken glass. Somewhere a tattoo gun buzzed, and he looked into a cell where a man tied off and shot up. These soldiers had all gone to seed. A lorn aura of the shipwrecked hung over the place.
El Motown led him through a curtain made of shower rods and bedsheets. A half-dozen green oil barrels. Traces of black and burgundy seepage from the sealed lids. A pungence that made his bones, his balls, ache. El Motown held his palm out, like a showman introducing a magic trick.
“Those Golfos would sneak into Fallujah, kill us, steal from us,” he said. “They even planted a bomb once. We’d kill them whenever we caught them, of course, but when we did this, they came to heel.”
He realized what he was looking at. He’d heard of the practice, but never seen it. He’d cut people, beat people, shot many people . . . but he’d never burned a man alive in an oil drum.
“You stewed them,” Tomás said.
“And we sent video over to the fuckers.” El Motown stated this as if it were the obvious strategy. “Now there is peace, you see.”
Tomás imagined the Stop Signs watching their comrades being burned alive in these drums. Even hardened men had a tough time seeing such things, someone you knew, someone who could have been you, who could be you, suffering in that way. No wonder they tried to kill him and the guards.
El Motown thumped his fingers on the barrel idly. The fumes were visible, and the man shimmered in Tomás’s vision.
“So you’ve turned on the Golfos.”
“This is the future. Zetas in charge. What happens here will happen out there. You’ll see.”
“A civil war?”
“How many Golfos did you kill on your way to see me?”
“There was no choice,” Tomás said.
“Spoken like a Zeta. That’s exactly what I’ve been saying to you, ’mano! No choice. Your mind doesn’t understand yet, but your mouth already knows. You were made for this, you were trained for it. There’s really no choice . . .”
Tomás grew suddenly dizzy and could not listen. The fumes. This talk. El Motown now going on about chaos and war and how in the future chaos wouldn’t be just a tool but the norm. The war coming from President Calderón and the Americans, the Always War, a world of soldiers and soldiers only. It was all churn, he said. New players and old. Cartels and gangs and bosses and alliances. He talked Tijuana, Sinaloa, Beltrán-Leyva, fucking Juárez, Golfos, Zetas. Tomás reeled.
“Please—”
“There is even rumor of a group nobody knows anything about except that they are called El Problema! The Problem? They are naming names like that now?”
A fucking Renfield story. Realms within realms within realms, as inside so outside, and so hard to understand.
“Please, may we . . .”
Tomás rubbed his eyes, started coughing. El Motown led him into an open area, patting his back, and Tomás breathed deeply and held his knees and then stood and looked up at the sun coming through the milky skylight. No clouds or sky gods, just the weak light of an occluded sun.
“The Golfos have been
around for a long time, friend,” he said. “But Zetas are newer, stronger, and more vicious. As are you. One cannot hide from his nature. Not for long.”
Tomás couldn’t get the smell out of his nose. He rose, taking deep breaths. They stood there against the wall for a while, watching the guards tend to their wounds, the Zetas getting high. One group of soldiers on the battlefield, the other on some kind of shore leave. El Motown handed him a slip of paper like a waiter handing over a check.
“What’s this?”
“Call this number when you need help,” El Motown said. “Now let’s get you some men.”
Tomás looked at the number and at El Motown. Maybe the fumes had made him stupid. But none of this made any sense.
“Why are you helping me, when I’m working for the Golfos?”
“I must help you,” El Motown replied, as if the answer were obvious, slapping him on the back of the neck, squeezing with his massive hands. “You’re a Zeta, compa.”
From the passenger seat of the van, Tomás looked at the road, pissed he’d forgotten the book somewhere in the prison. On the last page he’d read, the Twin had boarded a trireme with the ragged remainder of the Horde, and when they set off into the placid waters of the Loch, he’d marched up to the deck and beheaded the captain and quartermaster, announced that he would be commanding the vessel, and set course for the purple thunderheads, heading right into the storm.
Apt, that. He didn’t need a book. The Zeta driving took a long hit from the meth pipe and held it out for Tomás, who declined. He’d never much liked speed. The driver shrugged and passed it to the back of the van, where his fellows were cleaning their guns and chattering and laughing. They’d come from a prison within a prison, they were ripping high, they were headlong for trouble, they were the trouble itself. As they headed to Tampico, the sunset behind them was blood red in the side mirror. And the air had a bloody tang as well, and to Tomás, it felt electric and bristling, it smelled like death and rain.
Chapter Twelve
La Nada
She’s on the moon now. She doesn’t yet know she is dreaming, so it’s all unnerving, the moon is perilously small, she could walk the circumference in minutes, but her body is stuck to the thing, pressed into the rock by an immense gravity. As the moon spins, she has the strange feeling of being pinned down and going head over heels, and she is grateful at least to be hard-pressed into the dusty surface. She seems to know intuitively that if she stood she would fly free.
It won’t be long now, he says.
Who says?
She turns to look. She is holding his gloved hand in her own gloved hand, and she knows when she looks that it is Oscar and he is dead. She knows that she is not dead, that a craft is en route for her, she will go home, but the stars spin above them and she wonders how it will all play out, how long she will have to wait. Because he is going the other way because he is dead.
Oscar sits up. The moon continues rotating backward. The stars rifle overhead. She has an urge to put her foot on the floor, like she would do if she’d had too much to drink. To stop the spins. But the moon is the floor.
Oscar lets go of her hand and stands.
She can’t see his face, just his boot as he leaps and floats away and toward the horizon as the moon turns. He is at the horizon so quickly. No resistance in space. The sun flashes through her visor. The quiet is total. She is alone and afraid.
Wait, she says, sitting up. Standing up now. She crouches and leaps. The moon falls away. She knows how cold it is outside the foil of her suit. She looks up (but what is up?). He’s turned to face down at her (what is down?), and she floats to him. In the cold vacuum, they turn slow. For a while together they tumble.
And tumble.
Where are you going? she asks, knowing already she cannot go with him.
To finish.
To finish dying?
No answer. His breath on his visor. Their suits are vivid silver and flash as they rotate in the darkness, the spotlight of sun, the soundless hum of the heavens. She imagines the vibrations of the rings of Saturn, the rungs of Jacob’s ladder, she remembers his tattoo, the one of the Virgin Mary on his chest, el corazón inmaculado floating in between her perfect palms.
They arrive at an edge of overwhelming blackness.
La Nada.
He extends his hand and it disappears into the black and he turns to look at her and nods gently inside his helmet, his breath frosted all around the visor, nodding as if to say I gotta go, cielito, and she holds his hand yet as he goes in and allows him to pull her hand in too and in the startling shock of La Nada she lets him go. He is gone.
A pane of blackness like still dark water inches from her face.
Oscar. Oscar.
There is no fear. Only wonder. That vast finality.
She puts her head inside.
Big mistake.
A terrific blast of Pure Noise, a malevolent horn, a distortion, a terrible quake to make her eyes shudder, water, and close.
She is out. She looks down through blurry eyes, the plane stretching forever, reflecting nothing, not even starlight, taking everything.
The Pure Noise again. She kicks and swims and spins around. Stars. She wants stars, those lights, however far, however cold those lights.
Silence. Her breathing.
The Noise again. . . .
Her eyes flutter open.
Someone shouting in Spanish. The box. Mexico.
The Noise again. Like a buzz on metal. A filing cabinet.
What cabinet?
Where you put your phone.
Gustavo.
Tampico.
Buzzing again so loud. Fuck.
More Spanish spilling out, so fast she cannot follow. Her eyes are open. She’s in the box.
“My phone. It’s my phone, Gustavo.”
Curses, mumbles, his pillow over his face.
“I’m sorry.”
No reply.
“There, it’s off now.”
Just looking bullets at her.
“I’m gonna go out now. Sorry, I’m sorry. Can you get the door?”
He nods, finally.
The warehouse—midday-hot but fluorescent-lit—was empty. Her steps slapping on the concrete, echoing off the walls and floor. Her heart raced yet, a little rabbity stutter to it. No one around. Good.
But lonesome.
The disorientation of waking up didn’t dissipate. No, not disorientation. Worry.
She read the screen to see who’d called. Of course. Bronwyn.
Not Childs. Not Dufresne. No one from the DEA. No one she needed.
Goddamnit. She stopped walking wherever she was walking. Orient yourself. Work backward.
She’d fallen asleep.
Before that, hour upon hour just sitting with Gustavo, just trying to keep him from Oscaring himself. All night. Waiting for Dufresne to call her back. Before that, waiting for Childs to call her back. She’d pretended this was all normal, to be expected. Told Gustavo her supervisors were following expedited protocols, but protocols nonetheless. Things could only move so fast. He’d fought sleep, tossed and grumbled, but then his breathing grew steady and she sat down. His snores were outrageous. She didn’t think she could nod off. But she did. Deep sleep, deep space—
She shook it away. She didn’t want to go back to that dream.
She fired a WTF?! to Childs and another to Dufresne and went in search of coffee. She found an empty break room in the office area. Just cigarette butts in the small metal ashtray and a few empty Jarritos bottles.
The fluorescent light pinged above, and one of the bulbs went out. She looked in the cabinets for coffee. Nothing. Her head had begun to throb. She rubbed her eyes and swept out of the break room and down the hall, passing offices, trying to clear this foggy head of hers. She stopped at the sight of Travis at his desk, doing something on the computer, figures on a spreadsheet. Tongue out like a kid at algebra. Noticing her, he sat up. The cash still on the desk.
> “Agent Harbaugh.”
“Mr. Moman.”
“Where’s El Capataz?”
“Asleep. Or was. My phone rang. Is it really six p.m.?”
He didn’t have a clock or watch, and he peered at the corner of his Dell.
“So it is.”
“Jesus.”
Travis leaned back in his chair. Fixed his hands over his belly.
“Y’all don’t seem to be in much of a rush,” he said, with a grin indicating that she had better be.
“It’s all in hand,” she lied. “Should have an exfil plan soon. Just waiting on the paperwork from Mexico City. Approvals and such. You know.”
“Probably I don’t.” He squinted, took a slow deep breath, and paid out a sigh through his nose.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what exactly?”
Sorry she’d come down here half-cocked. Sorry she couldn’t raise anyone on the goddamn phone. She had no plan, that’s what she was sorry about. Embarrassed really. And she was sorry she was lying to him about it.
“The inconvenience?” she suggested.
“I don’t want to know what’s afoot,” he said. “I wanna be as see-no-hear-no as possible. So don’t feel like you actually gotta answer this.” He paused, exhaled ostentatiously. “But can’t y’all just leave?”
Despite Moman’s request otherwise, she had half a mind to explain everything. To tell him that she was doing this all by herself, that she’d come down to get a big win and whisk herself out of trouble. But there was no support, it was just her, alone, having to figure this shit out, and she and Gustavo couldn’t just take a commercial flight or walk across the border, no one was waiting for them. She wanted to tell him that she’d thought it would’ve all been sorted by now, though. That someone would’ve called. She couldn’t really imagine what was in store, what the conclusive event would look like. The CIA guy. Blue Linen. Carver, if that was really his name. What was behind him. The mind reeled. The might of State or the Defense Department or the Mexican police. Would this end in a raid? With Gustavo shooting himself before anyone else could? Him dead? Her dead. Everybody dead. Maybe a boat would do the trick. She wanted to ask Moman if he had one—
He was watching her ponder these things. Perhaps dimly aware of the scope of her problems. Instead of answering, though, she just ended up asking a question back at him.
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