Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  “What happened to those assholes from State?”

  “No idea. I’m just sitting here wondering who’s gonna take this money off my desk,” he said. “You ever heard of a man having so much trouble getting rid of cash?”

  “Kind of, yeah,” she said, looking at her phone. “It’s hard to move money.”

  “You’re not gonna get anything in here.”

  “Anything what?” she asked, sounding more alarmed than she wanted.

  “Your phone,” he said. “You’ll wanna be on the loading dock to get any bars.”

  The sun was hidden behind cranes and smokestacks. The sky overcast, the air a heavy and wet astonishment in her nostrils. She started sweating as soon as she stepped outside. How the fuck does anybody stay dry here?

  She held up her phone, watched two bars and two new text messages appear—Bronwyn again—when she heard someone behind her stepping up, coming out. She whipped around. Carver emerged from the shade of the loading bay. She shoved her phone in her pocket.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Nice tradecraft, bro. Cool use of shadows.”

  “It’s the shade, hon. You’ve been in an icebox all day, so maybe you didn’t notice that it’s hotter’n balls out here.”

  “Where’s your pal?” she asked, running a hand through her hair, composing herself.

  “Mexico City. Trying to explain this charlie foxtrot to the ambassador.”

  “Charlie foxtrot? Are you twelve? Or—oh fuck—you were a jarhead, weren’t you?”

  He ignored this, asked, “Where’s the narco?”

  “Why are you so interested in him?”

  “You first.”

  “You know why. He’s a lieutenant in the CDG. And he only wants to deal with me.”

  “Oh, I know.” His eyes softened sadly. “You’re handcuffed to the sumbitch now.”

  Sumbitch. He didn’t have a southern accent, but there was a touch of the rural about him. His baggy pants. He was compact, but had rangy movements, eyes that darted and discerned. A hunter. Midwestern probably. Kansas or something. She didn’t have his number, but she had a few of the digits. Farmer, hunter, soldier, spy.

  “Why you, though?” he asked.

  She told him about the card. The call.

  “Now answer my question,” she said.

  “It’s classified.”

  “Is it now.”

  “You figure out how to get out of here yet?” he asked.

  “I have irons in the fire.”

  “Irons in the fire. Right. Wheels in motion. Forces gathering.”

  “Why are you still here?”

  “You sleep?” he asked.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked again.

  “I racked out in the SUV. I can sleep anywhere.” He grinned, openly, warmly. None of that keyed-up threat-assessment hardness to his face.

  “What. Are. You. Doing here.”

  “Awaiting word. Like you.”

  “From?”

  “Mom and Dad,” he said.

  “Mom and Dad?”

  “Condi Rice and whatever dipshit is running the DEA. State and DEA have to hash this one out.”

  “Sure. And maybe Langley?” she asked.

  His face did a little shrug at her. Like he was trying to shake off some worry or other. No, more like he was telling her this wasn’t a big deal, that she didn’t need to worry. Jesus, his whole affect was different now. This wasn’t the same guy who’d throttled her yesterday. He was too cool now. Calm. Which was annoying, considering what a psychopath he’d been the day before. He shouldn’t be able to stand there all calm. She wanted to bother him.

  “This isn’t gonna go your way,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s gonna get real gnarly before it’s all over.”

  Her phone buzzed, startling her. Carver didn’t even perk. He just turned sideways in a gesture of giving her the space of privacy. Raw consternation discomposed her face—she could feel it curling up her cheeks and forehead. Who the fuck was this guy today? Stubbornly baffling.

  She closed the message she’d started to Childs and opened up the longest single text in history, broken up into a bunch of different messages. It began with Bronwyn telling her to sit down and read the whole thing. That he’d worked out a lot of his thoughts, and she owed it to him to listen—

  Closing the phone, she muttered “Jesus” and sighed.

  He looked up at that.

  “What?” she barked at him.

  “It’s that guy? Bronson?”

  “You had my phone for thirty seconds, and this is what you read?”

  His eyes all furrowed. As if vaguely concerned but personally untroubled.

  “Tell him the chemistry was off. Or that you got back with an ex. But give the guy closure.”

  “Yeah, this is a ton of your business.”

  “Nature abhors a loose end.”

  Loose end. Interesting.

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “To give you fantastic advice? Hardly.”

  “You’re the one created Gustavo’s TILLER file, aren’t you?”

  He put his hands on his hips and looked at the ceiling in approximation of someone working out an answer, an answer she knew would be mostly smoke.

  “Why didn’t you just call me?” she asked. “Or maybe he pulled my card because he’s running from you?” She wasn’t going to let him off. “You’re here to tie up a loose end.”

  He scoffed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “That dude’s main ingredient is loose ends,” he said. “A couple hundred at least. Not someone you wanna room with. But you do you.”

  He looked hard at her, almost urging her to listen. He meant something specific by “a couple hundred,” but she wasn’t sure what. Murders, she assumed, like that was supposed to shock her. What was Carver’s agenda? He had come at her so explosively off the bat. In fact, a theory had gripped her as soon as he’d grabbed her by the throat: Gustavo was involved in some shady intelligence operation. Like the shit she’d pulled with Dufresne. Different scale, but the same kind of thing. She’d reckoned with this idea so much last night that it had slowly acquired more credence and had actually become a fact in her mind. But now, she wasn’t so sure, looking at Carver shaking his head and rocking on his heels. He seemed worried. Gustavo could be something far worse than she’d imagined. Maybe the man in the box wasn’t just a narco, maybe he was something she didn’t yet understand.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  “Can’t wait to hear it.”

  “How about some interagency cooperation? Unless you’re just waiting for another chance to choke me out.”

  He didn’t say anything back. Not right away. She perceived his regret, maybe it was even shame, but only in a slight and softening way. His eyes, that’s where it came through. As though he were actually thinking of her for the first time. He had clouded things barging in and trying to take control yesterday. She’d thought his purpose was to thwart her, dispose of her. When a man grabs you by the throat, your first thought isn’t that this is a rash act of panic. But maybe Carver had less power than she assumed. Maybe she’d been fooled by the neck grab, by his whole fiery aspect.

  “You have an inflated opinion of my control of this situation.” He walked back to where he’d been hiding among the racks, where he picked something up off a shelf. When he reappeared, she saw he was holding a dripping-wet plastic sack and a paper one, stained with grease. He held out one of the bags toward her. An offering.

  “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “Interagency cooperation. You two gotta be starving.”

  He nodded toward the back of the warehouse. His face was soft and open. Handsome, even.

  She took the paper sack. A warm aroma of hominy and cumin when she opened it. Tamales, salsa tied up in Saran wrap, napkins. He pulled a beer out of the plastic bag and gave it to her.

  “Run this back to him,” he said. “There’s plenty more if yo
u change your mind.”

  She stood outside the box right under the vent, the AC blowing straight down on her. Outside, a plane passed overhead, the sound of it echoing in the warehouse. Somewhere deep within, a forklift engine kicked on and beeped, backing up.

  She realized then that she was ringing too. She set the beer and tamales on a shelf, dug out her phone.

  Dufresne.

  “Finally.”

  “You need to come back.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can, and you have to.”

  “You can help me, Brian.”

  “Help you?”

  She could hear him breathe. She could just see his pained grimace. She had to try a new tack.

  Revise the past. Relitigate that shit.

  “Okay, listen. I’m sorry I said . . . those things. About everything I did as DA. I did all that on my own. If I gave the impression that I expected a job—”

  “Stop.”

  Don’t stop. Negotiate. Give him things.

  “And the trouble with my CI? You can have my phone. I’ll manage OPR, it’ll be fine—”

  “Let me assure you, it will not be fucking fine with OPR.”

  Shit. New tack. Just listen to him.

  “Cromer and I just got off a conference call with the State Department asking how in the hell we have an agent who goes to a sit in Mexico without following a single fucking protocol.”

  She heard him seesaw a pencil on his desk between a thumb and forefinger. A thing he did when he was frustrated. She knew this about him, knew a lot about him.

  “Let me tell you what I got,” she said. “I have a lieutenant in the CDG who wants to come to America and spill everything he knows. The reason why anyone knows I’m here is because the CIA wants him too, but he only wants to deal with me. All I need is a plane. None of the brass will give a shit what we’ve done once this dude strolls in and we debrief and proffer him. Please. Brian, it’s me.”

  She’d never begged him for anything. He just had to see she was for real. He’d quit tapping the pencil. She could hear the casters on his chair move as he leaned back and turned around to look out the window.

  “I’m not going to help you,” he said softly.

  She took the phone away from her ear. Hearing that hurt, and there would be more pain if she kept listening. Everything all gone to hell. He was still talking and she didn’t know what the words were but they all meant the same thing. She was done.

  “You hate me,” she said.

  “I hate that you didn’t tell me you were going,” he said. “I hate that you didn’t come to me when the call came in. I hate that Childs told you to go. I hate . . . I don’t hate you. I hate what’s happened.”

  He sounded like someone on the stand. Like someone in a pretrial deposition, in an interview with the DA. Parsing. She could hear him breathing, and that was all. She couldn’t imagine what he was doing. She couldn’t see him.

  Then he hung up.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Exculpatory Evidence

  A slender moon shone in the evening sky. Beneath a grove of palm trees Carver sat on the bumper of an open black Explorer. A wooded spread of pecans and figs and bastard scrub and more palms stretching behind him. Deep shadows there, the sun falling quickly. She turned her face into a small breeze.

  “These aren’t bad,” she said, handing Carver two empty corn husks. She swallowed the last bite of tamale. “I could use a beer.”

  He smiled and pulled a can of Modelo out of the plastic bag sagging with ice and beer, offered it to her. She cracked it open, took a sip. She sighed. The things on her mind.

  “If anybody other than me knocks on that door,” she said, “he’s gonna blow his brains out. You appreciate that, right?”

  “I do.”

  “I meant, do you care?”

  “A great deal, actually,” he said.

  “That’s hard for me to believe.”

  Her phone buzzed. Bronwyn again, surely. She looked to confirm it: Call me. I want you. I don’t want to lose your love please call. I’m so mad at myself more than ive ever been. please

  She typed: Not now. Stop.

  She put the phone away.

  “Him again,” she said.

  “Persistent.”

  “We saw my informant kill himself. He saw my informant kill himself.”

  Watching Carver not quite spit-take, but stopping mid-drink and wiping his chin, she wasn’t sure why she’d told him this.

  Though she did know, of course. It was time to talk about it.

  “Less than a week ago,” she said.

  “Holy shit, that’s . . .” He trailed off, took another sip of beer. “Civilian, right? This Bronwyn?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s tough. Man.”

  “He followed us all the way to the Upper Peninsula.”

  “Michigan? Your informant tailed you?”

  “I must’ve told him about the cabin at some point, I dunno.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to tease you earlier . . . and get all up in your business like that. Or I did mean to get in your business, but now I feel bad about it.”

  She laughed. “You do that a lot?” she asked.

  “Get in people’s business?”

  “Feel bad.”

  “No. Can’t say that I care for it.”

  They stood in the silence, in the lee of the palms where the air was cool. They drank their beers. She rather liked his new, chastened demeanor. Maybe that’s why she’d wanted to tell him. To see of what else he was made.

  “My boss came out to investigate—he actually flew up to the Upper Peninsula—and was instantly suspicious about the whole thing, and then he and I had a blowup—”

  “The guy or the boss?”

  “The boss. It was . . . stressful isn’t the right word for what I felt. I said things.”

  “Impossible not to say shit to bosses,” he said. “I literally can’t not say the worst things to them.”

  She laughed again.

  “So then this call comes in”—she pointed over her shoulder toward where Gustavo was sealed up—“and I get here last night and it’s like, fuck, here’s another one’s gonna blow his head off.”

  Carver’s turn to laugh. A full-on astonished one. “I thought I had a bad week going.”

  “Your week can suck my week’s dick,” she said.

  They both laughed. He settled against a few duffel bags in the back of the Explorer. She noticed his boots, thick black soles, some kind of mesh, plated. High-end, military-contractor issue.

  “And so this Bronson,” Carver said, “he’s worried about you and contacting you all the time.”

  “Bronwyn. Not that it matters. But you were right about him. He’s pining.”

  “It does make sense he’d be worried about you. I were him, I’d worry.”

  He was trying to revise what he’d said, tell her maybe she was a little bit right, make her feel better. It was sweet.

  “After it happened,” she said, thinking how exactly to put it, “I felt this really unfair feeling.”

  “Unfair?”

  “He’s a good guy, actually,” she continued. “He’s handsome and strong and not dumb. He’s nothing like the guys at the office, the cops and jarheads. But when Oscar showed up and killed himself like that, I . . . this is awful to say, but I couldn’t stop seeing Bronwyn standing against the wall, just scared shitless. One minute I was imagining every Thanksgiving at his parents’ place in Montecito, and then the next . . . I was just out.”

  She paused to hear herself. It was the first time she’d even put these thoughts into words. She wasn’t talking to see Bronwyn clearer. She was talking to see herself clearer, and she knew she could only do that with someone else listening.

  Carver crushed his beer can on the ground and fetched out another. Quietly, unselfconsciously, he burped. He started to apologize, but she waved him off. She was talking.

  “I di
dn’t want to see him. I didn’t want him to touch me. I knew that pretty much instantly. I guess I just expected him to know how to handle something like that without shrinking away. God, is that awful of me? It is. I’m awful.”

  Carver shook his head. “I’ve seen guys panic in firefights, and afterward? Everyone in the FOB knows. No one has to say a word. The survival instinct is amoral. A whole platoon will unattach from someone who ain’t gonna make it. It’s brutal.”

  “Yeah, all right,” she said. So he was military. Or ex.

  He cracked his beer and drank. She wondered what else he thought. What else he would think about what else she was thinking. What she could tell him. What she couldn’t.

  “So the informant, what was his malfunction?” he asked.

  “Oscar?”

  “Yeah. Why’d he off himself?”

  She’d been on the other side of these situations often enough to know what happens. If she went on just a little bit more, she knew she would spill everything. She’d seen it so many times, that moment when the men she arrested decided they’d tell it all, round and true.

  You don’t decide anything anymore after that, after you tell.

  “He went crazy,” she said. She was going to keep on talking. She knew she shouldn’t, not with somebody she didn’t know, with somebody who had just fucking choked her, but she was going to talk. It was stupid, but she’d always been stupid in this way—Dufresne, Bronwyn, Oscar, too much quick intimacy with all of them—but he was here and he was listening and she needed that.

  “When he showed up,” she continued, “he didn’t look like himself. I didn’t even recognize him. I’d seen him be really brave, but I’d also seen him bawl his eyes out.”

  “You were close,” Carver said softly. Kindly, without any reservation or judgment in his face. She felt intense, almost profound relief. And fear. He was a strong listener. She couldn’t hide things in words.

  Is this what it’s like?

  To sit across from me?

  To let all the defenses down?

  To be open?

  She sat next to him on the back of the vehicle, the sun almost gone beneath the city behind them, the sky a deep pink down to a bruised darkness swelling on the eastern horizon somewhere over the Gulf. Gulls called and swarmed. He didn’t say a word. He sat still, letting her gather her thoughts.