Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  When he dropped down, he softly wiped his hands and nodded like an inspector.

  “Tell him I have a message from the Eskimo.”

  She took this information without comment, utterly pliant. She performed the series of knocks on the door and looked over her shoulder again to see the man several yards back, leaning against the racks. He tipped his head as though he’d done this exact thing before. He was expert at it, and she was doing just fine. When Gustavo opened up, he had the gun to his own chin, and he let her in this way and bolted and locked the door behind them.

  “There’s a man out there,” she said.

  Gustavo’s hair was askew, and he straightened it in the little bathroom mirror. When he was done, he kept looking at himself. “He is not American,” he said, as if he knew already who it was waiting for him.

  “No. He says he has a message from the Eskimo. Who’s that?”

  “Es mi tío,” he said in contempt. “El Esquimal.”

  “The head of the CDG.”

  “The man waiting is a sicario. A Zeta.”

  He reached into his dopp kit and took out a baggie of cocaine. Did a bump in each nostril, then splashed water on his face and smashed down his hair with his bare wet hand.

  Wanting something to do with her hand as well, she took out her phone.

  “There’s no one to call,” he said, drying his hands on a washcloth. “He is outside the door now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Americans?”

  He did another bump.

  “Gone.”

  “Señor Moman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gustavo did another bump. Nodded and blinked. “This man is only one?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “One man. Tomás, he said his name was.”

  He cleared his throat. “You should have ran,” he said.

  Harbaugh wedged her hands into her pockets to hide them shaking. The man showed up and simply ordered her to get Gustavo, and he did it gently and firmly like a shepherd or a horseman.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He wiped water from his wet head off his shoulder. He’d shed his shirt, and his belly pooched out under his white tank and over the handle of the pistol. He’d gone grimy, wired. His jaw moved around. An agitation rising within him.

  “He said he had a message,” she said. “Maybe he’s just delivering it?”

  Gustavo was looking at her like one might a card trick, his tongue out the side of his mouth. Then some thought anguished and angered him and he began pacing. “You were supposed to get me away from here!”

  She didn’t know what to say. She just looked at the ground. She wanted to tell him she wished she’d been able to make it work, but that seemed too small of a thing to say. Little and late. Her hands were at her sides, balled in fists. She was useless. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help anything.

  Breathe.

  She uncurled her fists, spread her own fingers as wide as she could.

  “Let’s think,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Tell me why they want you, exactly.”

  “They don’t want me! They want what’s in here.” He tapped his head.

  “Which is what?”

  He grabbed the nine and the cocaine and seemed to be weighing shooting himself against doing more blow. “What I built for them.”

  “And what did you build?”

  He shoved the nine in his belt and tapped out a portion of coke on the desk and rolled up a bill and spread the coke around and just inhaled it.

  “Fucking everything. First I build houses in America to clean money. Mansions paid with cash. Easy, no problem. Then I think I can maybe do more. So I start to make safe houses with secret rooms. For hydro, for cash, guns, whatever shit we need to be secret. Rooms for our guys to hide out. So then I come down to Matamoros to make getaways for the boss, escapes . . .” He sat heavily on the cot and it cried out under him. He massaged his head and began shaking his legs, bouncing the springs. “You should have took me north,” he said. “Pero it’s not your fault, right? I am the stupid one called you.”

  Her head began to throb. The beer she’d drunk. The springs. This room. This man.

  “Did you kill all those workers?” She asked without thinking it through, just saying it because her head pulsed and she was as scared as she’d ever been in her life. “The men who built for you?”

  He bounced all the more.

  “I saw pictures, Gustavo. The American showed me. Stop that.”

  The springs cried under him as he pressed his head in his hands. The springs screamed.

  “Stop that!”

  He stood. The sudden quiet like a shot.

  “If I’m gonna die,” she said, “at least do me the honor of telling me just how much of an idiot I am. That I came down here to save a mass murderer—”

  “I had no choice about them,” he hissed. His face glistened with sweat or the water he’d splashed on it or both. He leaned forward, and his pinned eyes bored into hers. “Many of them, I knew for many years. Their families. They were the best. And they did the best work of their lives for me.”

  A hard thrum behind her own eyes, a coming headache as clear as a thunderhead. Get a drink, Hardball. Her father always said to stay wet if you’re drinking. At the track, he’d order a water with every beer, carry the program under his arm, and throw back the water, hustling to the betting window or trackside. His straw hat. His furry neck—

  “We built a tunnel.”

  A tunnel. You were right.

  “The best tunnel,” Gustavo said. “Many millions of dollars. Electric rails. Silent. Deep. The biggest project the Golfos have ever made. Top secret, I’m in charge.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes, trying to stanch the headache, to listen.

  “I tried to protect them. I took precautions. Their buses had no windows. They lived on the jobsite. These men, they don’t know where we are. They only know me, they’re my guys, not cartel guys. Nobody was going to the police, nobody. But El Esquimal, mi tío, he don’t care, he don’t want to take no chances. When the work is finished, he says to me, ‘Delete them.’ Everyone, all the men. I tell him no, maybe we kill just the drivers, only the men maybe who know how to get to our location, how does that sound? But El Esquimal says ‘No, everyone, kill them all.’ Because no person can know. Take no chances. That is the most important part. Keep secret. Silencio. Nadie lo sabe. Word get out, the tunnel is worthless. It must be secret or the tunnel is just millions of dollars thrown away. So I got no choice. I delete them. He orders me. Kill them all.”

  She took her hand from her face and looked at him.

  Do you believe him?

  I don’t know. I need water.

  Does it matter even if he’s telling the truth?

  “I need water,” she said. She walked past him into the little bathroom. A sink to blanch at, the bowl dirty red. Rust the color of blood. His dopp kit. Razor and deodorant and toothbrush and pomades in one side. Baggies of coke in the other. She turned the tap and a burst of gray aerated water spewed out. She cupped her palms under the flow. Potable, if dank.

  Gustavo sat on the desk, where he could see her.

  “I tell everyone we are going to celebrate, get on the buses. But they don’t go to a party. They meeting Zetas in the desert. But I don’t even see it! I’m not even there!”

  Do you believe this?

  Maybe. I don’t know.

  “Mi tío kill my best workers and maybe he don’t like me complaining about that, no? Maybe he’ll kill me, tambíen. That’s why I run here, away from them. I called you for help. You.”

  She looked at herself in the little mirror over the sink, the circles under her eyes. She pulled her hair out of its tie and shook it out and gathered it in her shaking hands. Understanding didn’t help. She looked at her own face with something like pity. She’d really done it this time.

  “I’m the only one alive know where this tunn
el is.”

  She stuffed down a sob and turned to look at Gustavo. “What do you want to do?”

  “Ay chingao, abre la puerta,” he said, letting loose from his mouth something like a whistling sigh and pulling the pistol from his jeans. “Let him in.”

  For a few moments, time did not move.

  As she rose from her chair.

  As she took one step to that heavy door.

  As she took another heavy step to that heavy door.

  That shepherd was out there and time did not move.

  Everything was at once.

  This headache.

  The program folded under her father’s arm.

  The back of his neck, his ear seen from below.

  Oscar on the floor crying. Dufresne tapping his pencil.

  Her pet turtle, a crayon melting on a pie tin in the sun, a finger-written message on a frosted windshield, a cigarette in eighth grade, a stick of gum, frothy rum drinks that tasted almost too good.

  This heavy door swinging open.

  The shepherd shooting her in the face.

  La Nada.

  But Tomás did not shoot. She was still here. There was light yet, she was alive, so she hadn’t been shot or killed, not yet. Not yet.

  The man stepped inside and inventoried the space. He sniffed at the close, cooled air, which couldn’t circulate enough to evict the smell of Gustavo’s cologne, his body odor, his food, the persistent kept reek of him.

  She backed up against the file cabinet. Gustavo put his own Taurus 9 mm to his temple. His FN was stuffed in his pants, in back. The low ceiling loomed like the lid of a tomb. He grinned harmlessly.

  “No tienes que, no es necesario,” Tomás said about the gun Gustavo had to his head.

  “¿Quién es?”

  “No importa.” He tilted his eyes down, a subtle show of respect. “Pero soy Tomás Jiménez Quiñones.”

  “No, you a pinche Zeta.” Gustavo turned to Harbaugh. “He’s a sicario.”

  “All right,” the sicario said to both of them. “Let’s calm down. No dramatics, please. Today, I am just a courier.”

  “Courier?” Gustavo shook the pistol at his head. “I’ll courier myself, cabrón.”

  “All I came here for is to talk,” Tomás said, reaching very slowly into his own coat, withdrawing his .40 Smith & Wesson, and handing it grip first to Harbaugh. “So put that down, please. Mira.”

  Harbaugh’s hand shook as she took the pistol. She grabbed it tight. Wondered if either man noticed how scared she was.

  The sicario, this calm shepherd named Tomás, again gestured for Gustavo to hand over his gun to Harbaugh. “Solo quiero hablar,” he said. “De veras.”

  Gustavo sniffed and filled his chest up, and she felt her own breath leave her body. But then he reached back and pulled out his FN and handed it to her. She set it on the cabinet when he handed over the nine, and kept the .40 and the nine in her hands, where they dangled heavy in her grips.

  “Ta bueno,” Tomás said to both of them.

  “How El Esquimal know where I am?” Gustavo asked.

  Tomás shrugged. “No se.”

  He stepped to the side and leaned against the wall, his neat leather jacket falling open as he propped a foot behind him. Like he was only here to observe.

  “What do you want?”

  He nodded again. “After we talk, then you’ll come with me.”

  “Why the fuck I do that?”

  “Because I’ll convince you,” Tomás said.

  “Psh,” Gustavo said, shaking his head. “No me chingues, güey.”

  “I won’t hurt not a hair on your wet head.”

  “You a liar,” Gustavo said.

  Harbaugh wasn’t so sure. Something straight about him. Or maybe he was just convincing. Maybe she was just primed to hope, to believe that Gustavo would leave with him. To believe that she’d make it out alive. Every trouble she’d gotten into up to this moment had shrunk down to such a scant size, her entire life now so preciously quaint.

  Gustavo pivoted around and hooked a pinkie into the bag of blow. Thought better of it and tapped the small amount against his thigh and brushed it off.

  “Look, everything’s okay, man,” the sicario said. “Your family just wants you to return home. Nothing more than that.”

  She looked at Gustavo, who was smiling now and nodding. “Órale, güey, you don’t got any idea what he want me for?”

  “Not at all,” Tomás said.

  Gustavo turned to Harbaugh. “Tell him why El Esquimal want me.”

  The sicario stood away from the wall, laced his fingers together beneath his belt buckle, and tilted his head forward to hear her out.

  “Go, tell him,” Gustavo said, uncrossing and then crossing his arms.

  “He built a tunnel for his uncle,” she said. She cleared her throat. “For the cartel. He’s the only one who knows where it is. The men who worked for him were killed to keep it secret. And Gustavo thinks that his uncle will do the same to him. So he ran.”

  The Zeta looked up to see if she was finished. A fresh kindness in his eyes.

  “Ah, well there, you see?” he said. “A misunderstanding! This is not a problem. I was told not to harm you. You are family, El Capataz.”

  “Family,” Gustavo said, snorting back a laugh. “Un pinche Zeta cabrón talk to me about family! Family don’t matter when we all narcos. All of us, yo”—thumping his chest with a finger—“la policía, los políticos, la Iglesia, los soldados”—he pointed at Tomás—“todos nosotros!” He turned to Harbaugh. “Los bosses, El Esquimal and the others, they got bankers and brokers to wash money and be all legal. They got oil rigs, lawyers, governors. They got everything! Consultants, that’s what it is now.” He started shaking his head, getting more upset. “Pinche consultants, chingados! El problema!” Now he did turn around and take double snorts of cocaine in each nostril, continuing to mutter about a problem, the problem. He kept saying that over and over, El problema, el problema.

  “The only problem,” Tomás said finally, “is that you won’t do what you need to and leave with me.”

  “No no no. ‘La Empresa,’ ‘El Asunto,’ o algo así,” Gustavo said. “En inglés, ‘the Concern.’”

  The Zeta sicario looked at Harbaugh, amused. “What is this? The Concern?” He lifted his chin to acknowledge the confusion on her face. “See? We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Big players.” Gustavo was also looking right at Harbaugh. It was as if both men were trying a case before her. “Globalistas. Their networks. Security. Insurance. The Concern. Means I am expendable now. The tunnel was my last job.”

  Gustavo was at her side, and now he put a soft palm on the back of her neck. She shuddered at his touch. The sicario stepped in front of the door. She trained the pistols on him and he stopped and raised his hands, and she felt a terrible certainty that something terrible was about to happen. That events were about to spin hard.

  “But maybe you’re right. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. But I called her to save me,” Gustavo said. “And she DEA.”

  She wanted to knock his palm away, but there were guns in her hands, and instinct told her she didn’t want to see what would happen if she took them off the sicario.

  “Do you think El Esquimal be happy we together with this secret?”

  The Zeta squinted, pondering this.

  “This tunnel is perfect,” Gustavo said. “It can move millions of dollars of product every minute. Quiet as a submarine. Es un secreto muy precioso para El Esquimal.”

  She felt him leaning in, close to her ear now, she could feel his breath. “Sos Automotriz, Piedras Negras,” he whispered to her. “To Eagle Pass, Texas. Martinez Auto Works.”

  She popped her head back. A pleased grin spread across his face.

  what has he done, what has he done, what has he said, what has he said

  Her whole body tingled as though he’d shocked her with a live wire.

  “You son of a bitch,�
�� she said to him.

  He’d just told her where the fucking tunnel was. In front of the man sent by the cartel to bring the secret back, safe, sound, and otherwise unknown. She fought a wave of nausea to a draw somewhere in the middle of her throat and kept the nine and the Zeta’s .40 trained on him.

  “Please sit down,” she said.

  The man raised his palms slowly, almost gently, showing her that he wasn’t going to do a thing.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “She know where the tunnel is,” Gustavo said.

  All the Zeta did with this information was nod. As if he understood immediately what this meant, all the fallout. He seemed to be grinning slightly, or maybe now it was a grimace, she could not tell. She tried to parse this expression for his intentions, but she could not. Maybe he didn’t have any yet.

  “I need you to sit down,” she said to him.

  “Where?”

  “On the cot. No, on the chair.”

  He kept his hands up until he turned the folding chair around, and put himself on it backward. To hide behind it? To have a chance? To use it? To throw it?

  “This is not your fault,” the sicario said to her.

  She felt Gustavo take the nine out of her free hand and she let him, concentrating on the sicario, the shepherd, this Tomás.

  You’re fucked. It doesn’t matter who has a gun.

  “I’m fucked, right? You can’t let me go now,” she said to him.

  “You’re giving the orders,” Tomás said. “Not me.”

  “Bullshit. Answer me. You have to stop me now.”

  He made a face that this was correct as far as it went.

  “Su teléfono,” Gustavo said to Tomás, holding the nine on him.

  The Zeta frowned, reached into his pocket, and held out the phone to them.

  “Toss it,” Harbaugh said. She quaked within as the simple flip phone skittered over. She slowly lowered herself to pick it up.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Harbaugh said to Gustavo. Her breathing was ragged.

  He shrugged helplessly.

  You’re so fucked.

  She had to concentrate.

  With gestures Gustavo maneuvered the Zeta into the bathroom. She endeavored to breathe deep and her head pulsed as Gustavo noisily budged the heavy metal desk against the door.