Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  “We must hurry,” he said, kicking the desk tight against the door.

  “You bastard,” she said. “You son of a bitch.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Soft Steps

  Harbaugh and Gustavo ran through the darkened rows of piping and gear, their footfalls echoing in the dark like the steps of the headlong idiots they were. Run, you idiot, Harbaugh kept saying to herself.

  The light in this part of the warehouse was so dim that she nearly collided with a beam. The sicario’s heavy pistol swung in her right hand and threw off her stride, but Gustavo receded behind her nevertheless, and in a moment she realized that she could outrun the pudgy Mexican, leave him to his fate, find her way to a car, to the airport, a motel, a hideout, American soil.

  She could call for help yet. She could try to rectify these grave errors she’d made.

  Don’t think. Just fucking run, idiot.

  She arrived at an intersection of rows and slowed, halted to see her choices. Right, and deeper into the brooding dark of the warehouse, the shadow-shapes there. Straight ahead to the offices, toward the scant light of a lamp from one of the rooms. Or left toward the loading bays, the open doors, the overhead lights.

  Gustavo was stomping in his boots, almost upon her. She shot left to the dock, her feet light on the pavement, her breath ragged, her vision blurred and blurring. Run.

  Figures up ahead in the light. Men in her teary vision like elongated mirages. As she ran, she began to make them out. Uniforms. Badges glinting in the pooled light of the loading lamps. Police caps. Jackets that read POLICÍA FEDERAL. She could cry.

  “Hey!” she screamed. “Necesito ayudar!”

  She was maybe two hundred feet away in the vast warehouse, Gustavo clomping behind her.

  The police turned at her call. They shielded their eyes from the lights overhead, the better to see her in the warehouse’s inner murk. A couple of them stood up from where they’d been squatting. They set down bottles like men at a party interrupted. They did not otherwise move.

  She slowed to a jog. She called out again, was almost walking now, trying to catch her breath.

  When a pair of men in white tank tops hoisted rifles and shotguns, she stopped. She could make out the ink on their naked collarbones and shoulders.

  Fuck.

  She stopped. Dread pricked and drew at her skin.

  Not cops, she thought, standing there. Those are not cops, you idiot—you fucking fool—you are dead, Tomás’s Zetas have killed you.

  These men dressed as cops arched and tilted their heads. To hear her better, to smell her better. They swiveled their arms in their sockets like prizefighters. She stepped backward as though the darkness could swallow her back, as though time could rewind itself, as though there were a near place, a choice that didn’t lead to this pass.

  “¡Quiubole, mami!” one of the men called out. Laughter and low murmurs carried over the metal and concrete and rebounded all around like thrown voices. The pistol somehow still dense in her grip.

  The next thing she heard was Gustavo, his footsteps—his receding footsteps. He’d already turned back into the darkness.

  The men tore off after her, no shots, not yet, but she could hear their feet, nylon jackets, the metal buckles of the nylon straps on their submachine guns jangling, the fall of their boots coming for her.

  She made it to the dark intersection, she could hear that she’d outpaced them, and she turned, whispering to her feet—soft steps! soft steps!—toward the dim light from the hallway there. A simple unpromising maw. She jogged inside and again halted. The close narrow air here still possessing the day’s warmth. Her breathing was panicked, not winded. She made herself inhale through her nose. She’d never get through this if she gave herself away.

  She sprinted to the end of the hall to the side door that surely egressed outside.

  Fucking locked, fuck fuck fuck.

  To her left, she clocked the break room, the door to the front office. Ahead to her right, the door to Travis’s office, the light from there giving shape to the hall. The restroom door beyond that. No sound here. No sign of Gustavo, fucking bastard. She tried the door again. The handle rattling. Too loud. Too loud.

  She spun around. Listened.

  Someone coming.

  She stepped inside the office. Travis sat upright in his chair, his arms splayed, his head thrown back, his brains and blood on the wall behind him. Gustavo’s money that had been neatly stacked there was gone.

  She choked off her gasp at Travis’s body. His desk lamp had gone out of kilter and aimed at the doorway, and she knew she’d occluded its light and revealed herself to anyone approaching from the warehouse.

  Fuck.

  She padded light-footed to the desk and crouched behind it. Pooled blood at her feet in the nap of the carpet. She checked the sicario’s .40 in her hand and wondered when she’d lost the nine.

  How could you have lost it? How could you?

  Calm down. Don’t get upset. If you’re like this, they’ll get you.

  The wall in front of the desk was made of glass, but the vertical blinds were closed.

  The other gun. Fuck.

  Stop. No past, no more unforced errors, idiot. Be quiet, be invisible.

  The light. Use the light.

  She put her knee in Travis’s blood and set her forearm on the desk as a rest for her gun hand and aimed at the open doorway. She was behind the desk and the lamp, and the man was all the way in the room before he saw her.

  “Don’t,” she growled.

  He had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, and he made a slow demonstration of raising his hands up and away from it. She stood. She motioned for him to lose the gun, and he lowered his arm and shook. It clattered to the ground. He did this like he’d done it before.

  She nodded toward the window and he stepped over the gun he’d dropped and went in front of the window, both hands raised. Again as if this action were somewhat rote. He had dark deep-set eyes, and even from here she could smell the beer on his breath. He worked his jaw around in an aborted yawn or some kind of chewing tic.

  “Don’t move,” she said softly, and then “No te,” but she couldn’t remember the Spanish so she just said “No te mover.”

  She opened the desk drawer, feeling for keys. She felt pencils, coins, paper clips, nails, she felt a pack of cigarettes.

  No keys.

  She was making a lot of noise, and she glanced down to look and then immediately up at him again and the man’s gaze cut back to hers the moment she did so.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Sí.” He nodded. “Fuck.”

  “Shut up,” she hissed. “None of this is my fault.”

  His dark eyes seemed to harbor small question marks at that.

  “I didn’t do anything to get me this far into this,” she said.

  “¿Mande?” he asked, leaning forward, and it was the last move he’d ever make as his head leapt open. Gustavo was in the room, off to the right, and her ears were ringing at the abuse the nine-mil round had done to the air. He was pointing at Travis, speaking, she didn’t know what, what about.

  This is a nightmare.

  A circle in hell.

  A horror-show trap.

  Gustavo kept pointing at Travis, talking. She finally realized, after some inconceivable unknowable amount of time had passed, that he meant Pockets. Check the pockets.

  The man’s keys were in his jeans, and by the time she’d fished them out, Gustavo was popping off the nine down the hall and into the warehouse, unloading shots, calm and almost metronomic.

  She crouch-dashed into the front office. Shadows of the Zetas appeared at the window like paper puppets. When someone tried the door, she dropped to the floor behind the counter. Then the windows erupted, bits of drywall and glass raining down. Gustavo was crawling down the hall, and she scrambled over him to unlock the side door, expecting any moment to be shot dead. She got the door open and fell into it and made it o
utside on her knees and elbows. He followed her and she stood and rounds punctured the door and she left off locking it behind them and then they were both running over the ragged asphalt and grass of the side lot into a small Hyundai, the only car parked on the side of the building.

  She felt for the key with the heavy plastic logo and shoved it in the ignition. Another burst of submachine gun fire inside the warehouse disguised the sound of the car starting, and she put the Hyundai in reverse and backed away from the building in a long, mad arc and then put it in drive and kicked up a bucket of gravel pulling away. She swerved to the open security gate, past the dead guard who sat palms up in the corner of the gatehouse.

  “Piedras Negras,” she said. “Eagle Pass. Martinez Auto Works.”

  “SOS Automotriz,” he added.

  She gunned the engine.

  “Goddamnit,” she said. “You motherfucker.”

  It was quiet inside the Elantra. It smelled like new car and the cigarettes Travis Moman had smoked in it. Who was dead now, who’d done nothing but try and help the assholes in his car.

  They swept by houses packed together, closed storefronts in gray blurs, the occasional blast of neon.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “But you needed motivation.”

  She swerved to miss a dog that in her rearview hunched up, seemed to shake its head at the close call and tiptoe away. The road bent, gave onto a larger boulevard, divided by a median of palms.

  “Pero you gave no choice,” he said.

  She looked over at him, settling back in the seat.

  Fuck him. He deserves nothing.

  She slammed the brakes, and the sedan slid to an angled stop in the middle of the street.

  “Get out,” she said. She removed the .40 from where she’d jammed it under her leg.

  He ignored her, looking out the back window.

  A distant whine, the plaint of a small engine like a model plane. No, not model planes.

  She swung all the way around to see several motorcycles bursting out of the curve, cutting across the boulevard in a braiding swarm, wending heedless of the palms like loosed hounds, which, of a sort, they were.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tunnels Everywhere

  The truth? If the bathroom didn’t smell as badly of the man’s cologne and tamales and the shits he took, Tomás would have been content to sit on the rusty throne and just read until the prison Zetas drinking on the loading dock ran out of mezcal and beer and came looking for him. But the shitbox did reek, and he didn’t have his book. So Tomás jammed the flathead screwdriver on his multi-tool into the door hinges and used his boot to hammer out the pins. That’s when the shots started. Then more gunfire. The nephew’s nine, the Zetas submachine guns firing back. Ni modo.

  In moments, he had the door free of the hinges. He was climbing over the heavy metal desk when two Zetas burst in, one of them firing wide into the wall before the other stopped him from killing their boss. Tomás paused in his climb over to sigh at these fools. Then he sat on the desk lacing his boot as they waited for an explanation, an order, but he really had neither. This was such an entire mess, the whole thing gone to la chingada. Un desastre. Un problema.

  El Problema. El Motown had said that, and then this stupid nephew of the boss said it too. And him with a DEA agent. Telling her about a tunnel. Realms burrowing into realms. What the fuck was he talking about, globalistas and consultores? It was messy. Muy messy. Shitty. Tamales and cologne.

  He watched the prison Zetas who’d almost killed him pass a little joint in the doorway. This is how it’d end for him. Something like this. Today or someday. But probably worse.

  More gunfire. Automatic. What would the bosses do with a dead DEA agent? That kind of heat? They’d turn him over to the Americans. His house in Los Feliz wouldn’t hide him then. No, the Americans would search it and pull up all those dead bodies. And then he’d fry in an American death chamber. But he’d already be doing that for the dead DEA agent. Even pinche gringo barbarians can’t kill a man twice.

  And what would the bosses do if she got away and gave up the tunnel? El Esquimal would barbeque his ass for letting that secret go.

  “Where’s the phone?” he asked.

  The prison Zetas shrugged.

  Worthless.

  He walked through the warehouse, breathed the comparatively fresh air. The coolness of the night. They were waiting on the motorcycles when he made it to the loading dock. He told them to hold on. They rocked and urged like fighting dogs.

  He got in the van and fumbled around the dash, the glove box. A phone in the cupholder. He dialed. He yelled at the men to kill the engines, he couldn’t hear. He waited for them to gutter out.

  “It’s Tomás.”

  “El Rabioso’s not here.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. This is urgent.”

  “Not here,” the guy said, and hung up on Tomás.

  El Rabioso should’ve told him there was a tunnel. That the nephew was running to America. He would’ve approached it differently. He looked at the useless phone.

  He got out of the van and nodded. The Zetas pounced on the kick-starters, the pickups roared to life.

  He walked back to the warehouse as their engines screamed in the night and diminished away. The front office windows absent, the door all shot up. He went inside and over the shards of glass into the hall and then into the office where he had killed the owner of this place. He regarded the dead Zeta there. It would be a wonder for some cop to identify him, try and piece together how a convict with a military record from Penal del Topo Chico had to come die with this gabacho businessman in Tampico. They would puzzle over that one.

  Puzzle pieces. Everything was enmeshed, everything could touch everything else. No one was out of reach. Nothing could be locked away. Realms within realms. Tunnels everywhere.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Dead End

  Three motorcycles buzzed the Hyundai, riders kicking the doors and slapping the hood, surging in front of the car, speeding ahead, braking, speeding ahead again. They slowed, fell back, then ripped past like guided missiles, engines screaming and then whining almost dolefully as they shot by and into the scant cross traffic. They wound through parked cars and utility poles and the few unfortunate pedestrians. Red lights, green lights, it didn’t matter, they were heedless of wreckage or death.

  Harbaugh gripped the wheel, tried to keep the car moving. But she knew these men would soon kill them. These men would not give up.

  Gustavo had climbed over and now slouched in the passenger seat, melting into the door. A stopped motorcycle waited for them to pass and then fired into the street and pulled alongside. Two men on the bike, making Halloween faces. The driver kept them upright when Harbaugh swerved to miss what turned out to be a plastic bag. The man in back reached inside his jacket for a garish silver pistol. The filigree shone in the moonlight as he tapped it on the window. Gustavo scarcely moved. He would not budge. She braked. The pair zoomed ahead.

  “Where do we go?” she asked.

  “Ahead,” he said.

  “To where?”

  He just waved his hand vaguely onward. As though he’d heard this story before, seen this part of the episode.

  “You gotta do a little better than that, asshole.”

  She swerved again, testing the new pair of riders, but they simply swept onto a sidewalk, their engine noise blasting in intervals from behind the parked cars like horns.

  She dialed Childs. Straight to voice mail. She shoved the phone back under her thigh.

  Think. You’re still alive. You still have some kind of a chance—

  Another motorcyclist appeared at Harbaugh’s window, scraping the side of the car with something. He shouted. He spat. He smiled at her.

  They headed south in the Hyundai, traveling out of the Zona Industrial to the airport and the city proper. Screaming through the night. The three bikes kept them in this lane of the roadway, a hellish motorcade, a fury of popped clutche
s and backfires, swerving in mad helixes in front of the car, sideswiping in delight. It was a wonder none had crashed. They dodged her lurches right and left, her accelerations and brakings. She couldn’t turn or stop. She sensed a dead end. A trap. She didn’t dare be too evasive for fear of the same. No unforced errors, no mistakes.

  There were two more bikes trailing behind, five total by her count. A Toyota pickup with a deep purring engine and a jacked-up Ford F-150 that bellowed and brapped on a set of giant off-road tires. Farther back, she clocked a white van that had to be part of the convoy, the caboose of the train. Ten, maybe, twelve guys.

  “There’s about a dozen of them,” she said. “We can’t . . . I don’t think we can . . .”

  Gustavo watched out the window as she trailed off. In the intermittent streetlights he looked old, almost senile, disinterested. Like it didn’t matter what was happening outside. Which was right, she realized. It didn’t make any difference how many men were trying to kill them.

  Run, idiot.

  She slowed at an intersection, scanned right then left and sped through.

  “We gotta think of—” she started. A loud crack startled her. And then another. “The fuck’s that?”

  The thwacks continued, like a hatchet or axe. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the road, the motorcycles veering and converging ahead of them but she glanced into the rearview. A bright headlight sent hard coronas of shine into her eyes. She blinked, tried to train her eyes on the roadway. Thwack. Thwack.

  “Es un antena del carro,” Gustavo said as the motorcycle pulled alongside him. As though it were a mere curiosity, this rider on the motorcycle striking the car. The next blow actually broke the sideview mirror, and Gustavo patted his shirt pockets. The rider kept at it till all the glass fell out.

  “Chingao,” Gustavo said.

  “What?”

  “I had cigarettes,” he said sadly.

  “Jesus Christ, you motherfucker. Cigarettes? We need a plan to get out of this!”

  The bike jerked forward a bit, and the driver jammed the antenna into the hood’s air vent. It twanged back and forth, right in front of Gustavo. Yet there he sat, inert. In a bray of exhaust the bike spun ahead, swerving right in front of the Hyundai and then on up the road, quickly out of sight. The palm trees were painted white at their bases, and the headlights gleamed off them. She jumped a bit whenever they leapt out.