The Death and Life of Bobby Z

by Don Winslow

  Good friends, too, Escobar tells him. Bobby’s carnal.

  So carnal, Tim thinks, that two of them—one of the Shanes and the Brittany—end up facedown in an irrigation ditch.

  Tim studies their pictures, their names. He studies books on surfing, he gets lectures from Escobar on how Bobby Z’s empire runs. As much as they learned, Escobar says sadly, before Z’s heart banged out.

  “Bobby’s head guy in the States is someone called the Monk,” Escobar tells him.

  The Monk? Tim thinks. The fuck is this? Only monk Tim knows is the fat guy in Robin Hood.

  So he asks, “Who’s he?”

  Escobar shakes his head.

  “If we knew that, we’d grab him, wouldn’t we?” Escobar asks.

  “I dunno,” Tim says. Cops have cop brains, and who knows what’s going on in there.

  It’s all too much for Tim. He shuts the yearbook and closes his eyes.

  “You better learn this shit,” Escobar warns. “Huertero’s men will ask questions, make sure you’re the real deal, before they make the trade. They better make the trade, ese, or Gruzsa’ll burn you bad. Things can happen on the border at night, you know?”

  Tim knows that. Tim was on the fucking Kuwait-Saudi border when the Iraqi tanks poured in. Yeah, Jorge, bad things can happen on the border at night, pendejo, ese?

  So Tim studies and learns the shit. Couple of weeks he knows everything there is to know about the legendary Bobby Z. And not because he’s so entranced with the boy wonder, but because Tim wants to have at least a shot of living through this little scam on the border.

  Boring couple of weeks, though. They won’t let him go out, of course, and won’t let him bring anyone in. Won’t even bring a working girl up from Oceanside to let him get his rocks off, even though they know he’s been in the joint for months and didn’t go the fag route. Tim asks, though, and Escobar just sneers, “You can get laid after the trade.”

  If I’m alive after the trade, Tim thinks.

  It wouldn’t be half so bad if they’d feed him some real food, but Bobby became a vegetarian and Escobar doesn’t want Huertero to smell any rotten meat on Tim’s breath.

  “That’s stupid,” Tim argues.

  “Isn’t,” Escobar says. “Huertero had Indians working for him. Cahuila. They can smell that kind of shit, man. They’re like coyotes.”

  So no cheeseburgers, no hot dogs, no tacos al carne that Tim’s been dreaming about. Escobar tells him he can have a fish taco if he wants and Tim tells him to fuck himself with his fucking fish taco. Hurts Escobar’s feelings and for three days all Tim gets is pita bread and rice and vegetables and Tim says I know all the shit now, let’s do this thing.

  So Gruzsa shows up and gives Tim a little test. Escobar’s standing there like a nervous father, smoking a cigarette and rooting for his boy as Gruzsa asks Tim a shitload of questions about the late great Z.

  Escobar’s grinning like an idiot when Tim 4.0’s the test.

  Gruzsa doesn’t get all warm and gushy.

  “I guess you’re ready, dumb fuck,” is what Gruzsa says.

  So one night they stick him back in the van and haul him out.

  5.

  Late night in some canyon on the border.

  Tim figures they’re somewhere east of San Diego.

  The moon is out and the sky is not black but silver as Escobar walks Tim down the slope to the canyon floor. Gruzsa’s sitting in his jeep back up on top, watching through a nightscope, a small battalion of DEA guys with M-16s, shotguns and maybe mortars, for all Tim knows, there to back them up.

  The INS guys must have taken a prearranged hike because there’s no green-and-whites around, and Huertero must have cleared the Mexican side because there are no illegals crouched behind the wire to make the dash for the dollars. The usual game is off tonight, it’s just this session of swap and trade with your friends, Tim thinks, and now he can see some figures coming toward them across the canyon from the Mexican side.

  Tim feels the butterflies he used to get in his stomach just before a B&E, the same feeling he had that night when the fucking Iraqis came pouring into Khafji before the troop buildup and it was just a few Marines and the Saudis and all hell broke loose, and he can feel Gruzsa’s nightscope on his back.

  Now he can make out a couple of Mexicans holding up what must be Art Moreno, like semi-dragging him between them, and Tim figures Moreno has had a rough ride. It sure doesn’t look like his legs work real well anymore, and as they get closer he can see the agent’s face and it looks some fucking tired.

  So Tim’s happy for Moreno cuz the guy is coming home and happy for himself, too, although he doesn’t want to get too happy until it’s over. But he has to admit to himself that he’s excited about the prospect of freedom.

  He’s spent the two weeks waiting for the scar to heal reading Consumer’s Digest and other useful magazines, trying to decide where to move after this is over. One of the magazines rated cities by quality of life, and it’s mostly midsized cities in the Midwest that rank high. A lot of that, though, is the school systems and similar shit Tim doesn’t care about.

  He’s now tending toward Eugene, Oregon, because it rains a lot, so he’s concentrating on that and on how he’s going to say to Don Huertero’s boys basically “Vaya con Dios,” I like it here in America, and what kind of job can he get in Eugene. And they’re close enough now he can see Art Moreno’s eyes and they look bad, like out of it, like they’ve seen some shit they don’t ever want to see again.

  Escobar sees them, too, because Tim hears him hiss pendejos, then the whoosh of a bullet and Escobar’s brains splatter onto Tim’s face and Tim drops to the deck.

  It’s Khafji all over again, Tim thinks as he flattens himself against the desert floor and starts looking for cover. Tracers streak through the night sky, the noise fucking paralyzes, guys are yelling, feet are stomping and the two Mexicans turn back for the border, still dragging Moreno, except one of them catches a burst in the back and sort of melts like that witch in The Wizard of Oz that used to scare the bejesus out of Tim every Easter. The other guy like freaks, pushes Moreno to the ground and drops behind him like Moreno’s a horse in a western, and starts shooting.

  At Tim.

  Tim’s basic training takes over and he starts crawling to cover and makes it into some mesquite. He thinks for a second about going back to try to help Escobar, but he can see that the body doesn’t have a face anymore so Escobar doesn’t need any help that Tim can give. And anyway, Tim sees fucking Gruzsa roaring down the slope in a jeep, steering with one hand and blasting with the other, and Tim thinks it’s about time to leave.

  He rolls backward out of the mesquite and down into a narrow barranca that runs parallel to the border and must be an illegals highway because it’s got tennis shoe tracks all over it. Which is just what Tim has in mind, to tennis-shoe it out of there because when the whole mess is cleaned up he knows Gruzsa’s gonna blame someone and that someone is going to be named Tim Kearney.

  So Tim starts to trot.

  All of a sudden it’s a zoo out on the border. Now everybody and his dog are out running around in the moonlight. Illegals appear from nowhere to use the chaos as a diversion, the DEA and Huertero’s desperados are punching out a sharp little small-arms engagement, and Tim even startles a coyote that doesn’t know which way to run because the noise is coming from all sides.

  Tim is running with a stream of illegals—men, women, kids—which is okay with him, but then the INS Broncos start rolling in, agents jump out and try to scoop them up some wetbacks, and Tim figures this ain’t gonna get it so he dives into a smoke-tree bush to wait it out.

  As soon as the INS finishes up, Tim thinks, I can just trot out of here and head east and it’s sayonara. Like they wanted me to be Bobby Z for a few minutes and I did and whatever went sick and wrong here is their problem and not mine.

  I’m done.

  Then he hears the hammer click behind his ear and a Mexican voice ask,
“Mr. Z?”

  Of course.

  “That’s me,” Tim sighs.

  6.

  Tim wakes up in starched purple sheets in a guest room bigger than the house he grew up in. He pulls the thick white drapes—the whole room is bone white—and looks out the window at the pale early-morning desert, where sunlight has just started to paint the surrounding mountains lavender.

  The compound—that’s what it is, Tim decides now that he sees it for the first time in daylight—is surrounded by an eight-foot-high adobe wall with guard towers at the corners and parapets. It reminds him of some movie he saw on TV one Saturday afternoon, about three brothers who run away and join the Foreign Legion, but he can’t remember the name of the movie.

  He does remember getting here.

  The Mexican who pulled the gun on him put it away when he confirmed that Tim was Bobby Z, and with great deference ushered Tim to a fucking humvee and drove for hours over some tortuous mountain trails until they reached what seemed like an oasis in the middle of the desert. They’d passed through an electric barbed-wire gate past some armed guards and then down a road into the compound. The man showed Tim to his room and said that Brian, whoever the fuck Brian was, would see Tim in the morning.

  Tim, looking at luxury for the first time in his whole fucking life, sank into the circular bathtub for about an hour, dried himself with a towel the size of a flag and then plopped into bed and channel-surfed until he fell asleep. Tomorrow would take care of tomorrow.

  So here I am, he thinks now as he puts on the white terry-cloth robe and slides open the glass door and steps out onto the little patio outside his room. He sits on the cane deck chair and puts his feet up on the little wrought-iron table and tries to remember some of the orienteering shit he learned in the Marines. He doesn’t try real hard, though, because the sun is hotting up and that feels fine, and it just feels so damn good to be alone and outside.

  Sort of alone, anyway. Off to his left, inside the compound, he hears the sound of someone whacking a tennis ball and from the same general direction the sound of someone swimming smooth, steady laps. A Mexican woman walks by holding fresh linen, spots him, and with a worried look comes over.

  “Lo siento,” she says. “I did not know that you are awake.”

  “That’s okay,” Tim answers. “I’m not so sure myself.”

  “¿Café?” she asks.

  “Sounds great.”

  “¿Solo o con leche?”

  “Con leche, por favor,” Tim answers.

  With milk, he thinks, lots of milk,

  “¿Y azúcar?” he adds. He wants it thick and sweet.

  She smiles at his Spanish.

  “¿Desayuno?” she asks him. Her teeth are snowy white against her full lips and brown skin and that’s what makes Tim realize that he’s finally out. Not out of the jam, maybe, but out of the joint. Into the world of milk, sugar and women.

  “¿Desayuno?” he asks, not understanding.

  “Breakfast?” she translates.

  Not knowing now whether he looks like more of a dick if he answers in Spanish or English he just nods his head and smiles.

  “What you like?” she asks.

  Which confuses the hell out of him. No one’s asked him that question about anything for a long time.

  “Whatever.”

  “Huevos, toast …” She struggles for the next word. “Bacon?”

  “No, thanks,” he says, pissed at Z for being a vegetarian.

  “I will tell the cook,” she says, then adds apologetically, “It will take a few minutes, but I will bring your coffee right away.”

  “Hey?” he asks after her.

  “¿Sí?”

  “Where am I?”

  She thinks for a second before she answers, “In a nice place.”

  No shit, Tim thinks. And thinks also that he’d have started being Bobby Z years ago if he’d known it was going to be like this.

  He glances at her legs and breasts as she comes back with the tray but looks away when she bends down to put it on the table.

  “Gracias,” he murmurs, feeling stupid.

  “De nada,” she answers, and off she goes, leaving him with just himself and the sounds of money, the hollow thunk of racquet meeting ball and the whoosh of a body gliding through water. A child’s laugh.

  Not bad, he thinks, for a dead fucker.

  After coffee and breakfast and no word from Brian, he meanders back into his room and starts looking in closets and drawers. They’re filled with clothes that fit him.

  Nikes, Gucci loafers, fucking Calvin Klein polo shirts in pastel colors. Two Armani suits the color of sand. A white Adolfo blazer. Stacks of folded T-shirts, most of them black, one plum, one yellow, a few white. No advertising slogans on them, either, just pure color.

  He showers and shaves—no aerosol can but a sleek gray tube of shaving cream from something just called M—then gets dressed. He puts on some Ocean Pacific trunks, a cotton Mexican peasant pullover, the Armani shades and a khaki ball hat, and heads toward the sound of the water.

  A fucking waterfall in the desert. Cascading down rocks into a pool that’s shaped like a Saudi window—a long oval with a circles on the top, bottom and two sides. Tiled at the bottom. In the center in Arabic-style script the letters BC. The pool’s big enough to hold a Mormon family reunion and there’s a Jacuzzi you could do laps in. Big tall fucking date palm trees in case you get tired of lying in the sun.

  Good view of the house here, too. It looks just like a goddamn Arab fort. One central building with two wings. Arched doorways, windows, the whole nine yards. He half expects to hear the imam calling the faithful to prayer. Tennis courts—not court, courts—swimming pool, an emerald-green rectangle of clipped lawn with croquet shit on it. A couple of adobe outbuildings. All surrounded by the adobe wall, in which Tim can make out motion and sound detectors.

  So Brian C must have himself some enemies, Tim thinks.

  And some nice friends, too, because now Tim sees her, lying on her stomach on a chaise, her top unstrapped, her back evenly tanned, her dark auburn hair pulled up off her neck. Long legs and a small ass.

  She senses him there and cranes her neck a couple of inches off the chaise to check him out. She smiles at him under her wraparound shades.

  A secret smile, Tim thinks.

  He smiles back.

  She drops her head back down.

  He peels off the peasant shirt. He’s in good shape. Good prison shape anyway, lots of push-ups and sit-ups. Pale, though.

  She sees it. She says, “Jesus, you’re white.”

  Low voice. Very sexy.

  Without looking up she reaches under her chaise and hands him a tube of 30 blocker.

  He mumbles, “Thanks,” stretches out on a chaise behind her and starts lathering his body.

  He’s getting down to his feet when a Mexican boy comes out and says, “Mr. Z? Brian would like to see you if it’s convenient.”

  Of fucking course.

  He slips his shirt back on and follows the kid into the house.

  7.

  Brian turns out to be Brian Cervier, “with a hard C like ‘curvier’ not a soft C like ‘servier,’ but Tim figures that C is the only thing hard about Brian.

  Brian is obese, like round, like the Pillsbury doughboy on a Twinkie binge. Tim makes Brian to be maybe in his late twenties, already balding—there’s some red Brillo clinging to the sides of his head—and if Tim is pale, Brian is a freaking albino. Not really, Tim thinks—Brian doesn’t have pink eyes or anything—but the guy is like Casper the Friendly Ghost he’s so white.

  For one thing, he’s wearing a full-length white caftan you could hold a revival meeting in and he still looks fat. He’s got these fat toes shoved into sandals and his cheeks are sinking down into his fat neck, and Tim figures that if Brian-with-a-hard-C Cervier has like one more doughnut, it’s going to be a Richard Simmons suicide situation.

  Right now Brian’s sitting in a big wooden chair and he
’s drinking some fruity shit with vodka in it and he’s just about wetting his pants he’s so happy to meet the legendary Bobby Z.

  “An honor,” Brian trills. “Would you like a drink?”

  Tim would. He asks for a beer and a Mexican boy appears the next second like the room is miked. The boy could be seventeen or twenty-three, and he and Brian share a glance that Tim recognizes from the joint. The boy hands Tim an icy Corona.

  Tim sits down in another wooden chair. He and Brian look at each other for a few seconds, a real love fest, and finally Brian says, “Don Huertero sends his apologies he couldn’t come in person. But he’s asked me to extend you every hospitality. He’s going to make it up over the weekend. So, mi casa, su casa.”

  “It’s some casa,” Tim says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Reminds me of a movie …”

  Brian is pleased. He smiles and says, “Beau Geste. My favorite film. I watch it all the time. I had the place designed like the fort, sans the dead bodies, of course.”

  “That’s wild,” Tim says. What he’s thinking is that Brian Cervier has too much money and not enough to do.

  “Well,” Brian says, “I wanted to go with a desert theme and you get so tired of the Mexican shit, you know. And the Santa Fe thing has been done to death—”

  “To death.”

  The fuck we talking about? Tim thinks.

  “—likewise the Taliesen West bit,” Brian continues, “soooo …”

  “Here we are,” Tim says. He’s afraid to really ask where exactly “here” is, because maybe Z is supposed to know.

  “What happened last night?!” Brian suddenly screeches. When he grins, his piggy eyes roll up into fat and disappear.

  Tim shrugs.

  “A lot of shooting is all I know.”

  Brian shrugs. “It can get edgy on the border.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No. I sent representatives,” Brian says. “Call it an overabundance of caution.”

  Tim raises his beer in a salute.

  Brian goes on, “Don Huertero is furious at his people for botching the exchange.”