Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  He slammed closed the trunk, looked up the hill at the Serbian, and then assessed Tomás, chewing his cheek as he did so. Tomás was absorbing what the American had said, but it was difficult, the pain he was in.

  “I suppose it goes without saying that Goran will have a bead on you. And you won’t get far on foot in those flip-flops. Not with that hip. Hell, you might not make it down to the highway. You’ll probably need this.” He handed him a silver key, newly cut. “Find that tunnel and then get back up here.”

  The fence was four hundred meters away, and he felt every stone and indentation from his rocky descent down the hill. The going was less clamorously painful on the flat approaching the road, but from the dampness of his bandage, he surmised he’d ripped open the sutures on his hip. It was so hard to think. He was pretty sure he would not retain what the American had been saying about insurance, the Concern, the cartels, business. Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t live much longer. There was a gray cast to the desert sky he was thankful for, given what hell it would be to also bake out here. Even yet, he felt like a wounded animal, like a lizard who’d escaped without his tail, a creature in flight. A reptilian hope.

  He stopped to look back up the hill and see the Serb and his rifle trained on him. His pain standing there with him like another man. A ghost, a brother, a someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t walk away from him.

  “Keep going,” the walkie-talkie squawked.

  He’d looked back only in need of something to keep his mind off the pain. But there was no splitting it off, there was no forgetting it. It was of a piece with him.

  He put the walkie to his mouth. “Do you work for Los Golfos then?”

  “Fuck no. We were considering taking them on as a client.”

  Tomás estimated that it would take the talkative American only a few more seconds before he’d be unable to not hold forth—

  “I mean, we’d done the preliminaries, assessed their financials externally. I thought our presentation went well enough. But the Eskimo was hesitant. It’s always the same shit, right? I mean when we pitch to clients, they just see a kind of protection racket. Even if they get the advantage of our services, they’re still fucking gangsters, right? You can’t expect them to see the bigger picture. But a bigger picture there certainly fucking is.”

  The radio went quiet. But only for a moment.

  “To be fair, CDG’d be our biggest client. I get their hesitation, and was ready to move on. But then they called. Said the piece-of-shit nephew ran. And they had no idea where. I knew we could find him, and I guaranteed it. Of course, we didn’t know why they wanted him, not yet.”

  He made the empty road and crossed it. A sun-and-rubber-hammered snake shaped into an S on the road like a logo. The wind kicked up a dust devil in the lot before him. He paused at the gate.

  The radio scratched.

  “Just yank off one of those sheet-iron panels.”

  He felt for a loose one. No luck.

  “Climb that shit.”

  He thought to say he couldn’t but figured he must. He went around the side of the wall and found a mound of dirt. He cut his hands on the edge of the sheet-iron going over. He was careful of his screaming hip, but the bandage was spongy under his shorts. Full of blood. His head swam.

  “How’d you find him?” he asked into the walkie-talkie.

  “Shee-it. Them’s trade secrets, bruh. I tell you one thing though, I never should’ve reported back to Eskimo where he was. Why that idiot sent another team—you and your guys—I’ll never know. But it’s disqualifying. Get in the shop, dude.”

  He was panting, had barely noticed his surroundings, though he was suddenly reminded that the American was watching the feed. Stacks of tires, rusted-out chassis, piles of interior seats, tailgates. He headed over to the building. The garage doors were chained.

  He took out the key. It fit in the padlock, and he yanked out the chain.

  “Like I said, we didn’t want to get kinetic on your boys. But we also needed to show that we have robust recovery capabilities. That we have a shock-and-awe element, you know. That we can do wetworks, when necessary. We all have other niches, but every last one of us is an operator. Above all it is just a numbers game. Risk assessment. Knowing a killer asset when you see it. Like that tunnel down there. Hopefully. Can you listen and do shit, or is that not in your skill set? Open sesame, homeboy.”

  Tomás realized he meant the door and dropped the chain and heaved the thing up, clattering. A garage. Oil drums. Rags. He walked between two sets of lifts in the oil-change wells. About four feet deep for mechanics. He squatted and peered down.

  “Yep, that’s what I’m thinking,” the American said. “There’s the controls to your right.”

  He hopped down into the well and looked at a dirty control pad the size of a small brick attached to the length of cable. A toggle. An up and down button. He flipped the toggle. He pressed down. The lift shuddered down around him, the tracks level with the floor at his chest, and then down into the well. And then the entire floor descended.

  “Bingo,” came the voice on the walkie.

  The floor dropped and dropped, slowly, and then a black opening rose in front of him and the entire thing shuddered to a halt. He set the control brick down.

  “Go on, don’t be shy.”

  He took a step forward and then another, and a sensor picked up his movement and on came a row of track lights as far as the eye could see, diminishing to a point on an underground horizon.

  “Holy shit,” the American said.

  He stepped forward and touched the walls. Concrete sections, perfectly round, about twelve feet wide. A track running down the middle.

  “You could drive a pickup through here,” he said into the radio. For a moment he thought about breaking for it, but the tunnel was long and gave out in Texas where his chances were just about zero.

  When he rode the lift back up to the top, the American was standing at the lip. The Serb was pulling down the door, the rifle slung over his shoulder.

  “You’re going to kill me now?” he asked.

  The American sighed and looked at him. “I’ll never understand how they got the drop on you,” is all he said in response. “Sorry, I’m just obsessed with it.”

  “Now four people know this place,” Tomás said, feeling blood run down his leg. “What your plans are, I don’t know, but you won’t let nobody keep living who knows and is not part of—what you call it?—the Concern.”

  “True, that,” the American said, removing the camera and taking the radio from him. The Serb lit a cigarette. The American looked at him, like he was waiting for an answer, like he’d asked an important question.

  Then Tomás realized what the answer was, what the American had been getting at.

  “It’s not important that they got me,” Tomás said. “What’s important is, I killed the one who wouldn’t stop shooting. And I drove off the woman. My time to die was not then. And also not now.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Simón. I think you want to hire me, cabrón.”

  The Serb snorted and the American glanced back at him. When he turned back to Tomás, he was smiling.

  “Well, look what sprung out of the ground, Goran,” the American said. “The New Guy. All fresh and bloody as the day he was born.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Do the Things

  She broke for the hall, had no choice but to somehow bust through the men herding her inside. She shrieked like a puma and struck the one who came reaching for her first with an exasperated look on his face as the other scanned behind them, down toward the stairs from which she’d come. She kept hitting the man coming near her, both retreating and trying not to retreat into the apartment, both fighting him off and trying not to get surprised from behind by the man at the table. Then the man coming for her had her arm and she tried to take off his ear with her bare hand and kept screaming as he forced her into the apartment. The other man right behind th
em, swinging closed the door.

  She twisted the man’s ear, but only for a moment before he punched at her—landing concussively and decisively twice. Her head snapped back and recoiled into his second punch. She fell silently to her knees. He was holding her upright by her arm and away from him like a wildcat or snake and inspecting his ear with his free hand for blood. The ear was still attached, and he shot the two other men looks of annoyance just before she grabbed his entire genitals through the loose fabric of his black track pants, sinking in with her nails and twisting and squeezing and for some reason gripping her own wrist with her freshly free hand as the man released her and tried to pull away from the torment. He made to pry her off his anguished parts, his nuts and nutsack and dick, which in her grip felt to her like they were liable to come off, as if designed for such a thing—and then blackness.

  She was soaking wet and gasping for breath. All three of the men in the bathroom with her, the one from the table spraying her with the showerhead. She ascertained she was upright.

  She saw a cat in the window, standing, its tail flicking and watching whatever was occurring on the other side of the window with a kind of professional curiosity. Like the animal was a student of human affairs. Her wrists were bound with duct tape and nearly yanked out of their sockets as the men dragged her back into the front room.

  She was thrown into a dining chair. The man in the track pants slapped her with an open palm that spun her face and ruptured her eardrum. She knew because she’d ruptured it before as a little girl, the pain and the way things sounded were same as then.

  She’d been a girl once.

  The men were all yelling at her in Spanish, she was trying to appear calm in the face of their noise but taking them seriously, like she’d done with Oscar, noting her own fear within, the pain in her neck, behind her eyes, she could feel her lip was swollen and there was a throbbing over her eye socket, these assessments happening in the gale of their shouts.

  What did they want?

  A gong went off, a fist, her teeth felt loose.

  “What do you want?” she shouted. “What? What?”

  The man in the tracksuit punched her a few more times and then she sensed him being restrained and pushed back by the others. She imagined they did not want her to go unconscious again, perhaps they were afraid he’d kill her.

  She couldn’t help sobbing. She didn’t mean to, but she hurt everywhere, even the water on her skin hurt, her head hurt, her hair hurt.

  “Who killed my men?” the dark one was asking. He’d knelt and taken her face in his hand and held it up so she could see him.

  “What? What men?”

  “I want names. Los Golfos won’t find them, but I will. I promise to kill every one of them. Look at me. I want the names. DEA, FBI, I don’t care what they are. I don’t care who they are.”

  In the course of his talking one of her eyes had swollen shut and the other had wandered off, away from the man’s close dark face, his black eyes and his damp hot breath, to the window where the cat walked on the narrow ledge. Harbaugh imagined the creature hopping down to the street below, a single story, not too far for a cat. But it stopped to watch. The man was still talking to her, he waved a multi-tool in front of her face, was picking through the tools, the screwdriver.

  “Sí? No?”

  The scissors.

  “Sí? No?”

  The pliers.

  “Sí? Sí.”

  He nodded and the men went to remove her boot, her right boot, and she kicked and toppled struggling as one of the men lay over her legs and the other removed her boot, her sock. She concentrated on the cat.

  Get help, she begged at it.

  When it lifted its leg to bathe itself, the dark man was in her face with the pliers.

  “Nombres,” he said, switching to Spanish. “Dame sus nombres.”

  He disappeared and the man with the track pants and red ear and scrambled testes sat on her chest wincing and angry and held down her arms. She couldn’t see the man remove her toes but the one on her chest was staring into her face and saying vile things in words she didn’t comprehend but which she nevertheless fully understood. He was going to take her apart like she had tried to take away his parts. Dismantle her in crude ways that would make what was happening to her now seem as painless as a haircut. Imagine that, she imagined he was saying, this pain will be a memory both remote and pleasant. Imagine that. Imagine that.

  When she came to again, the cat was gone and she saw that so were the two smallest toes on her right foot. The pain was like a fire. She was upright in the chair—the jostling must’ve revived her—and the man was in her face again with the bloody multi-tool and he wore an expression benign and benevolent. He touched her face gently. Her blood dripped from his elbow.

  “This can end fast or slow,” he said.

  Her face felt hot and the cold air over where her toes used to be was like an exposed ganglia, discrete fires that when she moved her foot flared and made her almost pass out again.

  He opened the multi-tool. The knife.

  “Names.”

  Carver, she thought. You have to be here now. Yours is the only name I can give, and it won’t matter, it won’t be enough.

  “He’ll get you killed,” the CIA man had said.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He searched her face. Then he said things to the other men, still looking at her.

  “I am going to take you somewhere,” he said, folding up the tool and putting it in his jeans. “Somewhere you can scream to death.”

  A bag went over her head, black but not total, as she could make out through the fabric that the man had stood. The bag was the shock and it was hard to listen to herself, to hear herself thinking about what was left for her, what was possible.

  There was one thing she could do, and she did not want to do it. But the cat had put it in her mind. It would probably kill her. But she said to herself, I do the things.

  She stood. She stifled a scream as her foot slid in the blood that still must have been issuing from the stumps of her toes, the raw openings against the wood floor. She hazarded a step and her boot slipped and she just kept her face in the direction of the light from the window. When the men laughed, she knew she had a split second to run.

  She put her bound hands in front of her and knew it was only four good steps to the window over the street and two of the steps would necessarily be an untold agony, but two would be sure and painless in her boot. So many steps she’d taken, millions, and these would be the most important ones.

  What she did was run. What she did was hit a pane with her fists. What she did was heave her body into the glass.

  What she did was what she always did. Diane Harbaugh did the thing.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A Hole in the Ground

  She remembered none of what happened in the moments after she leapt through the window. The way she pulled at the air with her bound arms and kicked her legs and twisted and tilted forward, it was all darkness to her, the whoosh of the air as she fell over and beyond the narrow sidewalk before her torso struck on the hood of a compact car and startled the driver who screamed and braked and shunted her into the street. She was already in so much pain that no more could be added. She didn’t remember blacking out for a moment. A moment. A moment. She didn’t remember how much she still had her adrenalized wits about her, how quickly she sat up in the roadway, legs splayed almost childlike, trying to get out of her binds and predicament. She couldn’t see or remember the woman getting out of the car and upon seeing Harbaugh stepping back, covering her mouth, and then almost immediately sensing danger, looking around for what activity would deposit such a person as this onto her car and into the street. She didn’t see El Motown looking out from the window or the startled pedestrians start to gather to observe her and the glass on the sidewalk.

  And she didn’t remember Childs running up and ripping the hood off her head, his startlement at her swollen
features, him gathering her up into the van. She didn’t remember all the other DEA agents from Monterrey and San Antonio helping her into a van, some peeling off to inspect the scene and the apartment from which she’d launched herself. She didn’t remember hearing shots fired or the van screeching away. She didn’t remember Childs shouting “Go to a hospital!” and grabbing him by the face with now-freed hands and insisting they get out of the country. She didn’t remember saying No cops no cops no cops. She didn’t remember that she was frightened of everything. She didn’t even remember the bloody triage at the DEA regional office, wrapping her fucked-up foot, someone on the radio saying they’d found her two toes, Childs saying it was lucky they’d come when they did, they were circling and zeroing in on her cell phone when she flew out the window, they were a half block away, he was pointing at the very building when she erupted from it.

  The memories began when they finally got her on a chartered plane and into the air. There, finally, she felt everything hurt all at once and she remembered what those men had done to her and she remembers, still, that she couldn’t stop screaming.

  Four days after surgery to reattach her two toes and tend to her fractured eye socket, broken clavicle, and cracked ribs, she was released and flew home to Los Angeles for several debriefings with Cromer and the brass, the Office of Professional Responsibility, her union rep. The coffee going cold, her body cramping over so many hours in those air-conditioned spaces.

  She had a story and she stuck to it. How she’d gone to Mexico to meet El Capataz, Gustavo Acuña Cárdenas. How she’d been confronted by Quincey and Carver. How she tried to get help from Dufresne. How she and Acuña Cárdenas fled north and were caught by the cartel in a small suburb north of Tampico. How he was killed and she fled to Monterrey. How she called Childs for help, how Childs tracked down her cell, how she leapt out the window.

  She didn’t know anything about the shootout at the warehouse or the dead Zetas in town. Of course she never brandished a gun in some little bar outside Tampico, that was absurd. Carver and Quincey stormed out of Moman’s warehouse that first day, she never saw them again. Yeah, she’d read about herself in the papers. They’d blown it all up into some crazy thing. She’d only been trying to get out of Mexico.