The thought ended in a keck, a kind of choked gasp, and an eruption of tendons in his neck. His face went red, and she’d never seen a more anguished expression in her life. The cab was rocking when the car that had been behind them swept past, illuminating the tableau for an otherworldly moment, his hands gnarled against the seat belt. She fled the vehicle in a sudden helpless revulsion—all that muscle in agony. She couldn’t sit near it. Such a long time he thrashed and spasmed in there and toward the end of it he gibbered and whimpered and she wished he’d put a belt in his mouth or a mouthpiece. Was almost angry at herself about it. Goddamn. She walked away. Where the moon rimmed the clouds, the sky was as purple as a black eye. You have to get out of here, she thought.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dame Refugio
He woke up in a bed covered by blankets, daylight poking through window shutters. As his eyes adjusted, he saw he was in a small room. An old wooden icebox and a trunk covered with lace. A tall antique milk pail, streaked green by rust. None of this for daily use.
A guest room.
The blankets were dense and he was tucked in and he thought he was paralyzed until he moved his head to look around. On the nightstand next to a red faux-gaslight lamp was a glass with a straw. He couldn’t reach it. Someone had kept him hydrated, though. Underneath the nightstand a bedpan. Someone had done all this. Probably cleaned him. Put him to bed. Taken care of him.
He lay there for a long while looking at the air, lines of light the shutters let in, gold bars of sunshine. It was daytime out there, an awake world, and he was alive. His strange luck.
When he shut his eyes, he continued to see those golden bars of sunshine. He wondered about them. Were they a promise. Were they a warning. Could he hold the gold light in his hands. Could he cash it in.
He couldn’t sleep for the pain, for the memories of being sewn up. He tried to move, wiggling, tried to unleash himself from the bedcovers. It took time. The sharp pain in his hip shut him down whenever the blanket moved over his wound, and he couldn’t even feel his right arm at all, or maybe he was feeling it so much that he couldn’t locate it. The body-map in his mind was askew. But he kept slowly twisting, birthing himself. The blankets loosened and sloughed off him like a molt.
On his good side he dropped a hand to the wood floor and then put down his good foot and pulled himself up. Here he rested and sweated. He drank from the straw, leaning over a fresh agony. He looked at his arm, the bandage tight. It smelled okay, it looked okay. His hip was another matter. The bandage was loose and the stitches were ragged. He wondered what kind of doctor had fixed him. If it had been a doctor at all. He scooted himself around on the bed till he was close enough to the door to fall into it and make a noise.
He held himself on the doorknob until someone came.
When the knob turned he lost his grip and put down the right leg, the bad one, and it gave out and sent him to the floor. He couldn’t see anything, his eyes wouldn’t work, but he knew he wasn’t dead because he could smell hardwood and varnish, and that good nice clean smell helped him go safely into black he knew wasn’t death, not yet.
When he woke again it was morning. He heard the rooster.
This time he wasn’t tucked in as securely and was able to rise. There was a crutch here. He drank from the straw and then stood with the crutch and got himself across the room to the door. The hallway was dark and he opened the first door he came to and stood there, unable to find a light.
One came on. A bright hallway light.
“That’s not the bathroom.” A woman was talking behind him. “It’s down the other way. Turn around and I will help.”
Tomás realized he was looking into a closet. It was full of VHS tapes, hundreds of them stacked up neatly, like a video store right there in the closet.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Take my arm.”
She was a small woman, her head barely to his shoulder, but very strong. Wiry gray hair. She held him up and guided him in shuffling half-steps to the bathroom.
“Thank you,” he said when they got there. He felt like someone who’d completed a great task.
“It’s not a problem,” she said.
When he finished she was waiting there and helped him along, this time to the kitchen. It was slow going. They passed the living room. Furniture of wrought iron and wood. Again shutters on the windows. A TV in a wooden console, like his mother had.
In the dining room a long dark beautiful wooden table. It looked like a plank of a giant’s coffin. But they weren’t going to eat in the dining room.
There were more shutters on the windows in the kitchen, he’d never seen so many shutters in a house, they were open and the morning light was full and hot as it came through the windows. But the concrete was cool, as if it were still evening on the floor. He could feel it through the new white socks someone had put on his feet.
In the kitchen he sat at a round mosaic table. She put before him chicken soup with chiles and onions and hominy. A plate of radishes and cilantro.
There was a stack of almanacs on the table. He wanted desperately to flip through one but he didn’t think he had the strength to read and eat at the same time. He wanted to get away. He wanted a lot of things all at once.
He ate. When he finished the soup she brought a bowl of beans and a plate of tortillas and freshly pressed white cheese. He finished all that, too.
“How long have I been here?” he asked as she washed the dishes.
“A few days. You lost a lot of blood. Didn’t look like you’d make it.”
“How did I not die?”
“You’re lucky. We work on animals here, my husband and I. We sewed you up.”
“You didn’t want to take me to the hospital?”
“We thought maybe it would be worse to move you anymore. You kept screaming.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, that’s a good thing.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Your husband’s at work?”
“In the field, yes. He’ll be here for lunch.”
“I have money for you,” he said. Already wondering if his luck would extend.
She looked at him. “How do you feel?”
He was sweating. “I feel good,” he said.
“We should change your bandages.”
She washed and wiped her hands and came back over to him. He called out when she put her hands under his arms to help him up.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right. You’re very hurt. Try again?”
He nodded, and this time he clamped his teeth down and kept them clamped all the way to the bathroom. He was ashamed to have his pants down, but she covered his privates with a cloth so he could grip the edge of the bathtub on which he sat. She made a tsking sound when she saw the wound.
“It’s infected, I’m afraid.”
He looked down, and the skin was bright red and inflated.
“I should go,” he said, but they both knew he could not.
He didn’t remember walking back to the bedroom. She gave him pills she told him to chew and brought some water.
“We’ve got a little portable TV,” she said. “You want me to bring it in?”
“Maybe I could read.”
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Anything,” he said.
She came back with almanacs and magazines and more water. She told him she’d leave the door a little open and he could call if he needed anything. She didn’t make any plans with him, and he suspected she wanted to consult with her husband.
“I have money for you,” he said.
He’d gotten an almanac and tilted it up on his chest with his good hand, but he couldn’t really make out the words. Something inside felt off. Like a magnet set next to his internal compass. He put the book down on his chest. Maybe he’d be able to do a better job later.
The almanac was still on his chest when he
startled awake, again from pain. It was now night, nothing coming through the blinds. The hall light was on, and standing in the bright door were two dark shapes. He could tell they were police just by the outline and the creak of their belts. He lifted his good arm to show he was surrendering, but it was impossible for him to raise much more than a few fingers.
Maybe they’d think he was dead.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Off Book
Harbaugh drove as Carver shifted around on the back bench seat of the Bronco. For a long time he was quiet and she was alone with her thoughts and worries and memories, the centerline of the highway almost the only real thing as she traveled north and back in time at once. Her thoughts biased toward her father. Moments in his wake at his pantleg. The track, studying a certain gray gelding that lost him a notorious amount of money. A card game she drove him home from, all of thirteen. He was sent to the hospital a few weeks after that with broken ribs, and she realized now how often he’d been a card short, a horse-length shy, chopping cars for parts. Periods he lived in motel rooms. She wouldn’t say she missed a lot of school, but she learned early on it was for suckers, her daddy in an inevitable fury over college tuition, the outrage of having to report an income for her loans. She would become convinced that her going to college was what did him in.
Look at me now, old man. What he’d make of how afield and flung-out she’d become. On the edges, running along the rim, headed for a border. These thoughts of her father and how accustomed she’d become to different derelictions. As an attorney. With Dufresne. With Oscar. She didn’t understand women who felt shame so readily. Her father brooked not a single smithereen of it. And her mother—she kept hers in the bottom of a glass, and never let that tumbler go dry.
Carver pissed himself, but she only knew when he woke and joked about it.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Just if you look back and I don’t have any pants on.”
She’d learn soon that he didn’t smell like anything, maybe just a little salt that would wind up on her lips, which even then felt like a kind of subterfuge.
But that was later. Right now she feared his obscurities, their every sort, shape, and bulk.
“You want me to stop?”
“Thirty-three.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Inseam’s about thirty-three.”
“Jesus, I thought you were losing your mind again.”
“And none of that bootcut bullshit. Just a good straightleg.”
“I’m certain we’re not anywhere near a tailor.”
“Then I’ll see about it in Monterrey.”
“You don’t have anything you can change into?”
“No.”
“You usually travel so light?”
“I don’t do anything usually,” he said. “I better be quiet now.”
“Okay.”
“Talking’s like hammers in my skull.”
“Shush then.”
He had the keys out and only his boxer briefs on when he opened a heavy noisy gate that gave onto a courtyard dense with palms and an understory of flowers. Brick paths choked with foliage, the moonlight weird to see by. They passed a cat silently slapping a floormat with its tail in front of an apartment door and went up a stairway to the second floor. The landing wrapped around the inner verdant courtyard they’d just passed through, revealing a still and untroubled fountain. Carver moved as though taking stock, as did she.
They went around the landing and she noticed that the second floor had doors on each side of the square. She reckoned eight apartments to the building in all. He let her into the place and cleared all the rooms like a bodyguard and then fixed himself something in the small kitchen. A bubbling concoction, lime-green seltzer. He disappeared into the bedroom and she pondered flight. But it felt already like an old hankering. She set her tote on the couch. She noticed where Carver had left the sack with her phone in it on the counter. She noticed the sicario’s pistol on the same counter. She went to the window to notice things there, looked out over the intersection, cars parked almost to the corner. Storefronts girded with metal gates and padlocks. A paved soccer field.
She prised open the window. It stuck, but the thought occurred that she could jump through it. The street wasn’t far enough to plunge to death, she noticed. She was thinking of herself as a hostage. It was like a dream in her exhaustion, and when he came out with a blanket and pillows and made a bed on the couch, she was so tired her eyes watered. She didn’t argue with him about taking the bedroom.
He was awake when she got up and stumbled out of the pitch-black bedroom into the living room. He’d made up the blankets, and she sat on the couch collecting herself from the dreamless oblivion from which she’d just come. Taking in things anew. The fabric of the old couch as busy against her fingers as a head of cauliflower. The steaming cup of coffee he set on the coffee table before her black as a tar pit. There were decorative swords on the wall, several different cacti that may have been dead, a bowl of fresh fruit. Traffic outside, horns, the skirp and bleat of tires. She noticed that the sicario’s gun was gone, but the sack was still in view. Her phone still inside it. Her eyes flashed away from it when Carver spoke, something about stepping out, there was fruit, some pastries, she should shower, rest again. She feigned more of the state she’d been in—a fugue—then thought better of it and asked how he was.
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said.
She wanted to see if she could make him stay and talk to her. If she had even that much sway.
“What is it that you have?” she asked. “The seizures, I mean.”
“I don’t really know. Hit in my early twenties. Never let on to the Company. It’d be disqualifying.” He could’ve stopped there, but he kept talking. “They’re rare, and I can feel them coming on. At the FOB, I’d hit the latrine or jump in a Hummer.” He shrugged. “Grandpa had fits. Older than dirt when he died, though. It’s just a thing. Like a cowlick or a birthmark.”
She was listening harder than she meant to. Taking this information in a kind of thirst.
“You be all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she snapped.
“I just meant while I’m gone a few hours. Gonna get new wheels.”
She nodded.
“We’ll get you to the States.”
“Okay,” she said.
He patted his pockets, made to leave.
“What did you mean when you called me a fellow traveler?”
He stopped. Turned around. Squared himself in front of her like this could take a minute. But all he said was, “Cops suck. And you don’t.”
“Well, I’m flattered all to hell.”
“I’m not trying to flatter you. I thought since we both had our issues with, uh, management, we might occupy common ground. Philosophically.” He pointed to the folder on the table. That precious report of his. “I gave you that,” he said, “because I wanted you to understand the underpinnings of what I’m doing.”
“The underpinnings of working for the cartels.”
“I don’t work for them. I underwrite black-market enterprises. Their businesses. Their operations.”
“Underwrite? So you sell insurance to criminals?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And this is a good thing because . . .”
He sighed. Winced a bit at the headache or the conversation or both. Maybe trying to make her feel stupid.
“I’m serious. In what universe is this okay?”
“I was trying to explain last night. The origin of all of this was the program we ran in Afghanistan—”
“I don’t want to hear about Afghanistan. You were gonna take my informant back to the cartel.”
“Just listen. What we learned in Afghanistan was that a small force—ten, twenty very highly skilled operators—could bring order to the heroin trade. Granted, the original mission was simply to enlist their help in stopping al-Qaeda, but we realized that s
tabilizing the poppy market actually led to all sorts of tangible dividends. Economic stability. Prosperity. Peace. Sure, whatever, we were helping ‘criminals’ secure their product. Mitigate their rivals. Evade interdiction. But when they had insurance, when they stopped worrying about that cartel shit, they started to behave like rational actors. Like regular business owners, even. Suddenly schools are going up, bridges, all that nation-building shit that State and the NGOs love congratulating themselves for. It turns out, a black market is very easy to stabilize—”
“And you’re telling me that the CIA is doing that here in Mexico?”
“You fucking kidding? Of course not.”
“Of course not?”
“They shuttered the program.”
“Why?”
“Ultimately? The CIA doesn’t want to be in the business of ending the drug war. Neither does the DEA or the FBI or the Justice Department. They want to keep it going forever.”
“But you’re doing it. Here. In Mexico.”
“I took the idea to the private sector. Started an insurance business, essentially. Something goes sideways, the cartel is insured, and that means they don’t need to shoot up the plaza or kill cops. We give ’em a piece of the rock, so they can do business in peace.”
“We,” she said, realizing what he meant. Who he meant. “That man at the hotel, those soldiers in the alley, they’re not CIA or—”
“No, they’re like me, most of them off-book too. Ex-military, intelligence, even a couple gangsters, guys from all over the world. Some of them moonlight in private security, different agencies. It takes a particular kind of expertise, ‘selling insurance to criminals.’ Figuring premiums, investigating claims—like with Gustavo. He essentially stole millions of investment dollars from the Golfos. The Concern is gonna do everything it can to avoid having to pay out a claim like that.”
“The Concern?”
“Sorry, that’s what we’re called. It was the name of Shipley’s program.”
She suddenly remembered Gustavo’s coked-up rant. Going off about globalistas and bankers. “El Problema,” she said.
Make Them Cry Page 24