Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  A lull for a dozen panicked thoughts. Where they could go. What they could do. Run. But where? To who? She glanced down at her phone, wedged between her legs. She wished she’d gotten Carver’s number.

  They were gonna have to run and shoot their way out. She glanced over at Gustavo. First to see if he had his gun and then to just silently rage at him. His fault. All his fault. This man just staring straight ahead.

  “Slow down,” he said.

  Carrizo Springs, Texas. Martinez Auto Works. Fuck, she still remembered. This asshole—

  “Slow down! Stop!”

  Red lights suddenly reared up in front of them. She slammed on the brakes, braced herself with rigid arms against the wheel. Gustavo’s head hit the dash before he flopped back into place. There was no time to savor that. An accident or roadblock. Flashing lights.

  She looked in the rearview. The F-150 pulled up behind the smaller Toyota. Both vehicles flipped off their mounted roof lights. The cars in front of her moved forward, slowly. She could see a cop up ahead, palm up, halting the cars ahead of them.

  “Did one of the bikes wreck?” she asked, before she realized that was impossible. An ambulance wouldn’t be on the scene already, all these dark blue police cars—

  Of course. The cops. She began to power down her window. Gustavo gripped her leg.

  “No.”

  She stopped the window halfway down.

  “Why?”

  “You talk to him, they kill him.”

  “You actually want me to roll by like nothing’s wrong?”

  “They will kill him. And all these other cars, la gente estará muerto tambíen. All the people.” She looked over at him. He gazed ahead. “Don’t say nothing.”

  In the rearview, she watched the shapes in the cab of the Toyota. Just shapes of men. No intentions to read save general menace.

  “So where are we going?”

  “We just go,” he said.

  “Fantastic.” She turned her head around. “What happened to the bikes?”

  “Why you think I know?”

  “Goddamnit! You caused all of this!”

  The cars were stopped for the ambulance to pull out. She remembered the way in, a straight shot back the way she’d come. It was a small airport, not much in the way of security, but maybe enough.

  “They aren’t shooting up the cops,” she said, “maybe they won’t shoot up the airport security either.”

  “They will take us to a little room.”

  “Good. Better than being out here.”

  “No, the policía will come.”

  “Good.”

  “No good! It is them will give us to the Golfos.”

  Traffic wasn’t moving at all. Neither were the shapes in the Toyota. No motorcycles. Eerie stillness. This was madness.

  “We’re not gonna outrun them, no way,” she said. “And we can’t just go till the gas gives out.”

  “Claro.”

  “Fuck you. I’m trying to talk it out.”

  “The airport will not be what you think it is.”

  “All right, all right,” she said. “You have any ideas?”

  Gustavo clucked his tongue. “No tengo más. Never. Nothing. No more.”

  Throw him out of the car right now. Feed the beasts. Maybe somehow get away.

  He just shook his head, eyes still closed, skin squeaking against the window.

  She scrolled through the contacts on her BlackBerry. Dufresne. Held her thumb above the green phone icon. She did not expect him to answer, but at every ring she let herself hope.

  His voice mail clicked on. She hung up.

  The bridge had burned. She was out here alone.

  The traffic started moving, the cop circling his arm. They rolled past him and the scene of the accident. Two ambulances. Three cars. Gnarled metal. Smithereens of glass. She navigated between the deep pink flares, feeling a sudden rich unreality that recalled a fundamentalist Christian haunted house she’d gone to. The tableaus of abortions and drug addictions and one for drunk driving. Except this was worse for being so very actual. The Toyota purred, the F-150 growled.

  She took a moment to consider leaping out. Run. But she stayed at the wheel.

  This is the fastest way to run right now.

  The traffic around the accident thinned out and they gathered speed, passing shuttered shops and gas stations. Darkened billboards. Palms serried in the medians. Parallel to the road a canal with little footbridges. They could have been puttering along any Gulf Coast thoroughfare in the States. Concrete buildings, bright paint, American fast food joints. The breeze, the humidity, the familiar smell of ocean. She could not imagine anywhere they could go.

  Because there isn’t anywhere.

  In the sky a small twin-engine plane taking off. They weren’t far. The airport couldn’t be more than five minutes away now. She scanned for the tower. She didn’t want to miss the turn.

  The airport is all we have.

  Two motorcycles had pulled alongside them now, one on each side. One in front. She could hear the Toyota rumbling close by. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gustavo raise his pistol toward her. She instinctively leaned back, grabbed the barrel, and as the motorcycles raced ahead again, saw his wild and bewildered expression and realized he’d been aiming out the window.

  He threw open his door.

  “What are you doing!”

  He seemed to consider the roadway blurring beneath him, the pistol in his hand.

  “Jump out if you want to end it!” She let off gas. The Toyota was on her bumper. “Do it!”

  He raised the pistol to his head.

  She swerved the car suddenly to the right and caused the passenger door to swing shut, not out of a desire to save his life or even to avoid something in the roadway. She had simply felt something. A startle from nowhere that made her yank the wheel before she realized that it came from between her legs: the phone. When it vibrated a second time, she picked it up and held it in front of her face. An unknown number.

  She answered.

  “It’s Carver.”

  “Holy shit, what?”

  “I’ve got eyes on you. You need to listen closely, and we’ll get you out of this.”

  “Good god, roger that,” she said. “How’d you—No, sorry, I don’t care. What’s the plan?”

  “Are you the one driving?”

  “Yeah. Gustavo’s with me.”

  “Who is that?” Gustavo asked.

  “Shut up.” She couldn’t hear Carver talking. “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said I got you.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Just keep going like you are.”

  The Toyota truck motor was rumbling like the sound of a battalion behind them. The F-150. She couldn’t see any of the bikes.

  “Can you see the bikes?” she asked.

  Carver didn’t answer. Neither did Gustavo.

  She thought she heard shouting, even over the traffic and the Toyota engine, and the sound of the F-150 peeling. The Toyota pulled to her right bumper.

  “Who you talking with?” Gustavo asked again.

  The Ford pulled up onto her right. She knew immediately that it was going to force her into the Toyota, edge her into the grill guard, and the two trucks would send the little sedan into a sideways skid. She set the phone on the seat and gunned the gutless engine, but the Toyota matched her speed, stayed on her corner. The Ford squeezed over.

  “Fuck.”

  The Ford a few feet from her shoulder, her face. The Toyota on her ass. She tapped the brakes, the Toyota clipped her, braked and skidded. She wrenched the wheel right, swerved free and in front of the Toyota, and sped on. The Ford hung up behind an old pickup in the right lane, the Toyota raced up on her rear. She reached over and grabbed the phone.

  The bikes had appeared again, veering ahead and behind, not doing anything yet, waiting.

  She looked down. Unknown. She toggled to speaker, hit it.

&nbs
p; “I’m here,” she said. “Forgot to put you on speaker. They were gonna run us off the road.”

  “I saw. Nice driving.”

  “I missed the turn.”

  “It’s okay. Stand by.”

  They were coming up on a slow-moving van now.

  “On my signal, pass this van on the right side,” Carver said. “Now.”

  She accelerated in the non-lane between the van and the sidewalk, heard the whoosh of a motorbike’s evasion, and wished she’d knocked the motherfucker over. Tilting the wheel to the left, she cut in front of the van with very little to spare, the antenna in the air vent whipping around like trash in a tornado.

  “It’s open. Gun it.”

  She pushed down the gas and the Hyundai did what it could, not much, but something.

  “Go all the way to the left lane.”

  She drifted over, smooth and swift.

  “When I say, you brake hard. We’re gonna pop you over the median.”

  “Really?”

  “You’ll head back the other way.”

  “Shit, shit. Okay.”

  “Not quite yet, though. Get past these cars.”

  Three vehicles in this lane. She caught and veered around them, and then cut back quickly. Behind her, squeal of tires, honking. The Toyota swerved. A horn. The Ford maybe. She sped up.

  “Now what?”

  Gustavo had turned around, was looking out the back window.

  “They gonna shoot,” he said.

  “Hold it, hold it . . . ,” Carver said.

  Gustavo was blocking the rearview. She shoved him out of the way. She could make out the passenger in the Toyota leaning out his window, the unreal shape of a submachine gun. There was another car in the lane. She was heading straight for it.

  “Hold it . . . don’t slow yet . . .”

  Gustavo said something she couldn’t hear. She kept on right ahead, heading straight for the car less than fifty meters away.

  “And . . . NOW! CUT! NOW!”

  She braked hard, spun the wheel, and the car lurched up onto the grassy median, clipping a palm but bouncing through and across, skidding all the way into the far right north lane, facing back in the direction they’d just come from. Stopped. She watched in awe as the Toyota driver locked eyes with her going the other direction.

  “Punch it!”

  She shoved her foot on the gas, making sure not to hold the wheel too tight, let it find its own high-speed equilibrium.

  “Las motociclistas,” Gustavo said.

  The bikes leapt over the median in front of them, jarred their riders, swerved. Some stalled as the sedan passed through them. And then already there was one outside Gustavo’s window, another buzzing around next to her, yet another right behind them. But she wasn’t scared anymore.

  “Keep going,” Carver said. “You’re all clear ahead for the next little bit.”

  “What about the bikes?”

  “You’re gonna make the turn this time. Get ready.”

  Holding the car steady, she slipped around two cars and then got the car up to 110 kmh. When she heard the Toyota’s engine loud and getting louder very quickly, she gripped the wheel tighter.

  “The small pickup’s coming up behind,” Carver said. “Hang on. Don’t decelerate—”

  A sudden crash threw them forward, her shoulder smashing into the wheel, the phone flying onto the floorboard. The car swerved, she regained control, righted it. In the rearview the Toyota. Fucker had rammed her. She yanked her seat belt on. As did Gustavo. A wonder they hadn’t done so yet.

  “The phone,” she said to Gustavo.

  “What?”

  “The floor. The phone! We gotta make a turn. I need to know when!”

  He unlatched his seat belt and bent to find it.

  “It’s down near my feet!” she shouted. In the mirror she saw the truck coming hard. “Shit, get up!”

  She shoved herself back into the seat again and braced as much as she could.

  The blow pulled her into the seat belt, tight against her breastbone. She could feel her organs bouncing as her head flew forward. The car wobbled and careened. Her vision blurred. She blinked and pressed the gas. Gustavo was gone.

  “Take it!” he said from the floor, handing up the phone. He climbed back into his seat, pulling on the seat belt.

  “I’m back. I dropped the phone,” she said.

  She jammed the phone into her bra strap.

  “You still hear me?” she said, turning her chin to the side.

  “Keep driving. Stay in this lane. It’s not far.”

  The Hyundai was still handling okay, but in the side mirror she could see a panel of the car’s tail razoring in the wind like a flame.

  “We lost one of the bikes,” Gustavo said. “And the Ford, tambíen, I dunno.”

  “This car can’t take more hits like that,” she said.

  “Just listen to me and drive,” Carver said.

  “I am.”

  “Truck,” Carver said.

  She looked in the rearview. It was urging up on them again.

  “Don’t lose speed. Let it come.”

  “I just said we can’t take a hit!”

  She braced—for nothing. The truck lunged, and then it dropped back. A few seconds later, did the same thing. Sped up, got right on her tail, backed off.

  “He’s trying to make you lose control. Don’t.”

  “Okay, sure, no fucking problem.”

  “Don’t brake until I tell you. Pass this car.”

  She cut around the slow vehicle in front of her. She glided back into the center lane and accelerated. They were coming up on a light, changing, yellow, now red. She let off the gas.

  “Can I go thr—”

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  She hit the gas and raced through the light and felt her belly surge with the car. She looked in the rearview to see the Toyota and Ford and motorcycles all ignore the same light.

  “We didn’t lose them.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Why?”

  “Turn right when I say.”

  “Then what?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  The phone was slipping a little under her bra strap. She was sweating. She worried it would fall, but she was going too fast to take her hand off the wheel and adjust it.

  “You’re about to take a hard right into an alley.”

  “Okay.

  “There’s a car dealership and then some kind of store. You see?”

  The phone slipped, she felt it slide down under her armpit. She had to let go of the wheel with one hand to get it, pull it out of the bottom of her shirt, yank it up to her ear.

  “Don’t slow down! Why are you slowing down?”

  “I lost the phone,” she said, loudly, but trying not to panic or yell. She had the sudden stupid thought that she didn’t want him to think she was scared or out of control.

  “Do you see the store?”

  She squinted. It was all just buildings blurring at her.

  “Yeah, I think,” she lied. Scanning the road. “You said paint store?”

  “Roger, the paint store. A hard right.”

  She got ready. Trying not to grip the wheel too tight. She had no idea what the paint store looked like.

  “Is it this one—?”

  “Now! Turn!”

  She cut hard right, fishtailing into an empty dirt and gravel lot. The car momentarily slid, the headlights panned across the alley and onto the corrugated fencing before she passed the wheel hand under hand leftward and gunned it down the pitted dirt road. Fences of different sizes. Barrels, garbage cans, flashed by. An orange cat shot across the road in the headlights. The car dipped and bounded over the uneven broken asphalt, the pure dirt and sand.

  She heard the motorcycles and looked to see their headlights emerging from the dust cloud, two right behind, one farther back with the Toyota truck, its roof lights flipped on, a huge iridescent cloud in the dust. She kept looking for
the F-150 in the juddering mirrors, and then it finally popped up in the rearview too. A strange counterintuitive relief at that. To know what was coming after you.

  “Your seat belt on?” Carver asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Take it off.”

  “Off?”

  “Yes.”

  “On my mark, I want you to slam on the brakes.”

  “They’re right on top of us.”

  “You’re among friends now.”

  “What?”

  “When you come to a halt, shut off the car, duck down. Count to ten. And then get out and run left. Stick to the wall. Got it?”

  “Count to ten. Run left.”

  “The narco hear this?”

  She glanced over. He was wedged against the door in the corner of his seat. He nodded. Winced as the car jounced over a pothole.

  “We got it,” she said.

  “All right. Get ready.”

  She kept the phone in her hand. The motorcycles were in a train behind her, the lead jolting forward as if to get by, but it couldn’t in the narrows of the alley.

  “When do we stop?”

  Nothing. Silence on the line. The ping and punch of gravel.

  “Carver?”

  She looked at the phone, then at the corrugated fencing sliding by in a blur behind Gustavo, at the off-road lights of the pickups filling the mirrors. Flash and racket. Engines rumbling in chorus in these rusted and concrete confines. She smelled their yellow dust, watched the cloud of roar and chug bearing down on them. The narrow alley ahead lifeless as a moonscape in the naked headlights.

  “Carver!”

  She worried that the phone wasn’t working and then suddenly Carver yelled “Stop now STOP!” and she hit the brakes and the phone dropped away or she let it go as in a dream and the braking car turned slightly like a person turning her head at the sound of her name.

  A motorcycle clipped the front bumper. The rider ragdolled over the headlights in front of them, the bike careering riderless into the wall they were facing quarterwise. A second bike skidded past the same left side, avoiding the car and wall, but then he flew off his bike too in a loud pink mist.