Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  “Told her what?”

  “About the tunnel.” He looked in the rearview and side mirrors, half expecting the black SUV. “They’re together in a bar. I can get them, but I need to move now and I need to know how you want me to take care it.”

  The street was empty. El Rabioso was silent.

  “So how should I handle it?” Tomás asked.

  “Handle it? I want you to have already handled it. I want you to have done your job.”

  “I tried. I talked to him. He would’ve come with me, but this—”

  “Shut up!”

  “I am trying—”

  “Man, I don’t want to hear why your failure is my fault.”

  And like that, Tomás realized he was done with the Golfos. If El Rabioso had been sitting in front of him, Tomás would have shot him. Instead he spat out words like bullets.

  “And I don’t want to be blamed for how this went to shit! It is your fault, this is all your fault. I didn’t give a cokehead millions of pesos to dig a hole! I didn’t make him run for his life! You fucked this up! Not me!”

  He’d leaned forward to holler at the man, and now he shot back in his seat, stunned at himself.

  El Rabioso exhaled a cigarette, it sounded like. “You’re dead,” he said. “Talk to me like that? You’re dead.”

  For some reason, El Rabioso’s threat didn’t impact Tomás the way he expected. An old idea had been drilled into him by El Rabioso and the ones who came before, the plaza bosses and bosses of plaza bosses, and the old idea was this: even if he survived all the things the Golfos had him do, the cartel would still have his life at the end. He’d learned the lesson. They use you until you’re dead.

  “Did you hear me?” El Rabioso asked. It was strange that the plaza boss was still on the phone, like he was the one who was too scared to hang up first. What an odd day this one had become. He could feel more strange reversals in store.

  “You got two choices right now,” Tomás said.

  “Oh yeah, asshole? I got two choices? No, you got no choices.”

  “I can go in there and kill them,” Tomás said. “That’s your first choice, and it would bring justice to the man who betrayed you.”

  “You gotta understand something, soldier. Choices? I got all the choices,” he said. “I am all the choices . . .”

  Tomás took the phone away from his ear. The second time today he’d been harangued. He was sick of it. He looked out the window. He’d been hearing seagulls calling out somewhere, but he couldn’t see them. He leaned his head out the window, looked up at the sky and the clouds stacked up there like messy bales of cotton. He twisted his head around until he saw the gulls flying in V formation. He hadn’t realized they did that. Though why wouldn’t they? Made sense, it was just that he’d never seen it. He watched them until the birds were just a wavering indistinguishable shape about to be lost against the clouds. Heading north. An arrow pointing north.

  When he put the phone back to his ear, El Rabioso was still shouting all sorts of things at him.

  “Okay, okay,” Tomás said. “I’m gonna do the other choice. Do you wanna know what it is?”

  “Man, it’s gonna be fun to fuck you up.”

  “I’m not gonna be a soldier no more.”

  “That’s right,” El Rabioso said. “You’re gonna be my little bitch.”

  “No, sir. I’m gonna make sure the nephew and the DEA get to the States. And I’m gonna make sure El Esquimal knows that you had this chance to stop them.”

  It felt good to say this and know there was nothing El Rabioso could do to him. Not now. It felt really good.

  And then the windshield exploded.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  La Balacera

  He plunged out of the cab and onto the ground to take cover behind the Econoline’s left-front end, the engine and front tires. He didn’t even hear the shots, thought he’d been hit in the ear. Gone deaf. He had to move. He dove back inside the cab and reached for the .45 on the seat, but the gun wouldn’t come. His arm, his hand, was slick. He had no grip. He looked at his hand like you would an empty pen. Blood everywhere. The entire right side of him bloody and wet, leaking.

  He peeked into a pocket of clear glass in the windshield and saw the nephew walking from across the street, squared up, gun flashing as he advanced on the van. Fifteen meters away and closing.

  Tomás tried his other hand, the left, but the gun slid onto the floor. He wiped his palm on his lap. He leaned and reached into the console for the other pistol. He put it under his right armpit and was able to hold it there and cock it. He looked at the blood all over and tried to gauge how much he’d lost. Really had no idea.

  He looked around the open driver’s-side door and then around the front bumper, the small nose of the van not giving him much cover. The nephew was angling, taking a semicircle path to get a better shot. The shock had worn off, and Tomás could hear the shots now. Pop. Pop. Pop. He scrambled backward as the headlights exploded, the front tire exhaled, and the van slumped.

  He took a step sideways away from the van and fired in the man’s direction, just to ward him off, slow him down. The nephew veered, the van between them again. Even now, Tomás thought they might talk. He stepped back to the cab and set the pistol on the driver’s seat, picked up the .45, was able to hold on to it this time, stuffed it in his waistband and then with the other pistol fired two wild shots through the windshield at the nephew. His right arm was limp. He had to go.

  Through the spiderwebbed windshield, Tomás saw the nephew running sidelong to get in front of the van. Tomás threw another wild one around the bumper and then crouched and backwalked along the side toward the rear of the van. Liquid bubbled, the radiator hissed.

  The nephew came around the front of the van shaking a plastic bag off a fresh gun and fired as Tomás leapt behind the van. Bullets dimpled the rear door after penetrating the sidewall. Tomás slunk around the rear of the van to the passenger side. The vehicle pinged like some kind of busted saxophone playing quarter notes. Then quiet.

  The pain focused him for a moment and he realized his right arm was a mess, he was shot through the tricep, maybe also in the heel of that same hand but that might be glass. He could only fire one gun at a time. He didn’t think he’d bleed to death, but he didn’t know it.

  He felt the other man bump up against the other side of the vehicle. A chance to parley.

  “Hey!” Tomás called out. “Let’s talk. We don’t have to do this.”

  No reply.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m not here to kill you.”

  He could hear the nephew edge along the side of the van, corner, and lean against the back of it. So close they could hear one another breathing. The only sound on the deserted street.

  Tomás stepped back, dropped the pistol on the ground so he could open the passenger door with his good left hand, and then removed the .45 from his pants and squared up behind the door. He aimed at the back corner of the van.

  “I’m only here to talk, that’s all. I’m alone.”

  No reply.

  “You fucking shot me, man. Come out. I wanna talk.”

  Nothing.

  And then the nephew swung around the back of the van.

  Tomás let four shots go—the .45 heavy and violent in his palm—all right into the man’s chest.

  The nephew fell, his legs bending beneath him, his shoulder hitting the ground, and then his body flopped up and sprung over, leaving him chest-down in the dirt. Blood spread on his shirt. Like the man was a bag of wine poked full of holes. Near his head lay a boot sole.

  Soft steps behind him. He turned and was immediately slapped backward and he was looking up at the sky and those cottony clouds, that’s what he saw, somehow he was seeing anything at all, how did that happen, where was he.

  He tried to move, but all he could manage was lifting his head. The DEA woman stood there, barefoot, maybe ten meters away with the pistol in both
hands aimed at him. She was looking at him and then past him at the dead man, which is when he leveled his gun at her. As best he could.

  “I just wanted to talk to the crazy fucker!”

  He was speaking Spanish, and he wasn’t sure hers was any good. He could feel his focus ebbing, couldn’t see her eyes, her intentions. He fired and fired. His head fell back from the effort. He expected to be shot again, but then all he heard were soft steps, receding receding receding.

  Sky. He had to close his eyes against it. He’d been out for a minute, less, more, he did not know. The warm pain in his right hip. When he opened his eyes again, he lifted his left leg and twisted himself into some momentum and then used his good arm to launch himself into a roll to his stomach. He propped himself with his elbow and then the pistol to stand. He’d been shot in the hip, maybe his groin, he just knew he had to move. He couldn’t walk really, but he could stand on his good strong leg and he dragged the bad one, hopping across the empty street to the tavern. When he got to the corner, he turned and held himself against the wall. He breathed, wondering what next. He made for the backside of the building, dragging his foot in the gravel. He crossed to a convenience store.

  A car at one of the gas pumps. He looked inside the store. The people in there scattered when he saw them. He looked in the car, a brown mid-1980s Honda. The keys were in it. Automatic, fortunately.

  He threw the pistol on the passenger seat. He started it awkwardly with his left hand, his right arm screaming.

  The rumble of the engine like his father’s voice on a black-eye afternoon.

  The shock had burned completely off and his hip was afire and so was his arm.

  He put the car in gear and pressed the gas with his left foot and drove across the road and through a wire fence. He set out east across a field.

  Tomás stopped the car after going through more than a few fields and across three paved roads. He searched through the back but there was nothing except sweatpants and a half bottle of water. In the trunk a few spare tools, a gigantic monkey wrench, a bunch of plastic bags and bottles of motor oil, a child’s backpack graced by a blue genie—Aladdin, he remembered seeing it when he was a child—and PVC pipe fittings and sockets, a jar of plumber’s putty, and, at the bottom, a smushed and nearly-gone roll of duct tape. He could hear sirens. Distant, faint. He could hear seagulls. He could use the duct tape.

  With his teeth and buck knife he tore the sweatpants and then fashioned a tourniquet with the waistband elastic. He surprised himself crying out, and sweat popped his skin.

  His hip had ceased bleeding, it seemed, but he couldn’t put much weight on it. The bone was shot to hell, he could feel bits of it. He hacked away at the passenger seat and pulled out pieces of cushion and held them onto his hip and side as he wrapped the last of the tape around his body. Cursing and calling out the whole time until he finally stuck a piece of car-seat vinyl between his teeth just so he could bite down and not have to listen to himself anymore. What he’d rigged ended up looking like demented padding for a player of some kind of junkyard American football.

  He drank from the water, left himself a couple of swallows. As soon as he could manage sitting in the driver’s seat again, he put the car in gear and crossed his left foot over to the gas pedal again and pushed down on it and drove on. He went through fields and muddy drainages and over a bridge and down easements and backroads and he had much trouble and kept finding himself with his eyes closed. Times he found himself coming to.

  The Honda gave out in a ditch bottomed with old telephone poles. He pushed down on the gas and threw the gear down into low, but there was no going forward anymore.

  It got dark quickly, or maybe he’d passed out, or both perhaps. He was able to pull himself out of the car and crawl up the embankment into another field. He made his way along furrows, dragging his left leg, sometimes pulling it forward with his good arm, setting it forward again and again as if he were transporting a heavy pillar in fits and starts. He could see police flashers drive past where he’d left the car, they’d missed it in the ditch. Felt like his last dregs of luck. Bottoms up.

  He went on hobbling under starlight, globs of blood swinging from his arm like tree moss.

  At first he thought the black mass he found before him and was heading toward was a house or barn. Realizing almost as he came to it that it was a tractor. When he got to it he sat on the plow, heaving. He could hear ship horns far out in the gulf. He sat there and imagined the lights of buoys or boats since he couldn’t actually see any from this vantage. It was hard to tell how far away the water was, how far anything was.

  With his good hand he felt at the plow blades. The tractor dark and towering above him.

  He reached out to start climbing up into the cab. When he made his first step, his foothold went away from him. He was falling and wasn’t falling and the stars were upside down and he wasn’t sure where the tractor went and then he wasn’t able to wonder about that or look for it.

  BAGRAM AFB, PARWAN PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN

  MARCH 19, 2004, 21:33

  CARVER:

  We went to Karachi to figure out a way to keep Abdul Kalali’s operation stable.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  How?

  CARVER:

  He used to run his heroin through Iran. But now that Defense wasn’t sharing any op intel with us, there wasn’t a safe route to Iran. We had to go through Pakistan.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  And how did you enlist the DEA’s help?

  CARVER:

  The Karachi office had a decade of diligent surveillance on the heroin trade in Pakistan. They had informants all through the police, army, intelligence. Pakistan’s gangsters wear army uniforms—the DEA couldn’t touch any of them.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  But the pursuit teams could.

  CARVER:

  We could nab anybody. The DEA gave us a name, we’d have him strapped to a waterboard in forty-eight hours. We took a few dirty colonels off the chess board—those DEA guys couldn’t get off Shipley’s dick after that.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  But how did that help move Abdul Kalali’s heroin?

  CARVER:

  It cleared the decks. Shipley helped the DEA bag a few of Abdul Kalali’s rivals.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  Which consolidated his power.

  CARVER:

  And then we turned the spigot back on. The heroin flowed south. Fuck Iran. Fuck the Pentagon’s battlespace. Pretty soon Abdul Kalali was the undisputed boss in Paktika. Poppy production up, al-Qaeda production down. First time that had happened. Ever.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  But it didn’t last.

  CARVER:

  Nope.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  What changed?

  CARVER:

  The DEA got informants in Abdul Kalali’s operation. That really dicked everything up.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Grand Mal

  You’re sure it was him?” Carver asked her. “The one the cartel sent after Gustavo?”

  “Positive,” she said. “Tomás.”

  As far as she could tell, Carver was driving them back into the middle of Tampico. She didn’t know why, she didn’t know what he had planned, and she wasn’t asking. She didn’t even care, in a way. Gustavo was dead. She’d shot the sicario. It was a relief to have someone else at the wheel.

  “Fucking hell. This guy’s persistent. You said you winged him?”

  “I thought I killed him. But he started shooting back,” she said. “I don’t know. He said he just wanted to talk to Gustavo.”

  Gustavo was dead. His big body bleeding in the dirt. His mouth open and still, his face like a fish that’d been slung against the gunwale and smacked dead. He’d been drunk but high and upright as they’d left the bar, sparks of paranoia and cocaine going off in his eyes as they’d stepped out into the sun. And then he’d spotted the Econoline and inexplicably walked into the intersection and began firing
into it.

  “He said he wanted to talk? To Gustavo?”

  “After I shot him,” she said. “He was down. We had guns on each other, I was trying to process everything. He shot at me. He missed. I didn’t stick around for him to find his aim.”

  A van suddenly braked in front of them. Carver skidded their car to a stop. Men conducting some business at a sidewalk stand looked up. At her, right at her. She turned away. Carver pulled the car around, into the flow of traffic.

  “Your phone,” he said to her.

  “What about it?”

  He leaned over to open the glove box and pulled out a sack and set it on her lap. Like a change bag for a bank. It was empty. It was heavy as Kevlar.

  “Turn it off and put it in there.” He looked over at her. “No signals. It’ll keep anyone from tracking us.”

  “Anyone who?”

  “You got any idea how this Tomás found you? So for now, just do as I say.”

  She turned off her phone and opened the sack’s magnetic seal and slipped her phone inside.

  “You still have the gun?”

  “Yeah.” It was resting against her leg on the seat. She put her palm over it. “It’s his.”

  “Whose?”

  “The guy. Tomás.”

  “You shot him with his own gun?”

  “I’ve had it the whole time, since the warehouse. He handed it over when he came to talk Gustavo into surrendering. As a gesture of goodwill or whatever.”

  He rolled his eyes at her fortune. Or something else about the gun’s provenance.

  “Can I have it,” he said more than asked.

  She handed it over. He shoved it in the door well.

  “Okay, stay calm,” he said as he began slowing the Bronco down.

  Looking ahead, she saw brake lights and traffic cones and lights. A checkpoint of some kind. She tensed at the sight of soldiers in camo, ARs strapped around their shoulders.