Do They Know I'm Running? (34 page)

They figured the cleaning lady was heading for the freeway and gave her space, then closed in once she neared the on-ramp, dropping back again once they knew her direction, trying to keep another car between them—not easy, given what a poke she was—then pulling close again as she took the El Sobrante exit. From there she drove east, weaving her way among the tightly curving streets through low hills. They lost her at one turn, caught her down the block, stopped, backed up, followed, until she parked finally outside a clapboard bungalow with a sprawling honeysuckle out front.

She got out of her car. Happy told Puchi to slow to a stop beside her.

“Buenas, señora,”
he said, an engaging smile, getting out as Chato opened the van’s sliding door.

She was plain, matronly, dimpled cheeks, copper-colored ponytail. She froze in panic as Happy stepped close, grabbed her arm hard at the elbow, dragged her toward the van.

—
Make a sound and I’ll kill you right here
.

He’d never said such a thing before. It scared him a little, hearing how like him it sounded.

Chato popped out and the two of them bundled her into the van. Happy glanced up and down the block, wondering if they’d been spotted, while Chato scrambled in behind the woman, boxing her in while he rammed the sliding door closed. Happy
jumped up into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut, barking at Puchi, “Go!”

As the van sped away Happy turned around, looking the woman square in the eye, trying to muster inside him whatever it would take—menace, sympathy, a little of both—to get her to listen, get her to obey. She sat on the floor in a lump of furniture quilting, clutching her purse to her midriff, eyes like balloons. Happy reached out, took the handbag from her, needing only two gentle tugs to get her to give it up. Checking inside, he found her wallet, flipped it open, dug out her driver’s license: Lourdes Trujillo, forty-one years old. He found pictures too, a pair of girls, one twelve or so, homely like her mother, the other closer to eighteen. No baby fat this one, lipstick and eyeliner, almost pretty.

“We don’t want to harm you,” he said, switching to English now. She’d know it, the only question was how well and the answer was important. “But we will if you don’t help us. We’ll hurt you, hurt your daughters. Don’t make us do that.”

Her eyes welled up. “I am nobody,” she said, voice whispery with fear. “Help you—how? You see my car, my house. I buy food, I pay rent, there’s no money left.” She clenched her hands together, pointing them at Happy. “Please, whoever you are …”

Chato, kneeling beside her, dug into his pocket, took out a folding knife and flicked it open. Pressing the blade to her thigh, he began stroking it back and forth, teasing it closer to her crotch with each pass. “Do what he tells
you, abuela
, it’ll be okay. I give you my turd of honor.”

Happy, continuing his search of the purse, shoveled past her keys then stopped. The car, he thought. It would be sitting there when her daughters came home from school, their mother nowhere to be found. The girls would call the police, the cops would back-walk her day, they’d ask the contractor or his family about her, a tip-off that something was wrong.

“Go back to the house,” he said.

“I’m on it.” Puchi seemed to be trying to get his bearings back to the freeway.

“No.
Her
house.” Happy nodded toward Lourdes. “We can’t leave her car back there.” He ignored Puchi’s stare and took out the wad of keys—it had a plastic piglet for a bob—and tossed them into Chato’s lap, thinking: Turd of honor. What the hell was
that
about? “Put the knife away, she gets you’re serious. Take her car, follow us out.”

Chato’s eyes tightened but then Puchi hit the brakes and the van lurched to a stop. They were back at Lourdes’s house.

“Go on,” Happy said, gentler now.

Chato sulked his way out of the van, Lourdes staring at his back as the door slid shut, then Happy snapped his fingers to get her attention. “I apologize,” he said. “I mean it, we don’t want to harm you. We need you. I’ll explain as we drive.”

GODO AND EFRAIM SPENT THE MORNING ALONE INSIDE THE ABANDONED
farmhouse, breaking down the weapons, cleaning them, loading the magazines, every moment or so blowing into their hands for warmth. There was no electricity, no heat. Even the septic was fucked up, so they went out behind the barn to piss and, once apiece, take a windy dump. Now Efraim was gone, off to grab lunch for the crew—Happy and Puchi and Chato were due soon—while Godo stayed behind to wrap up.

There was a time when the slow taking apart and piecing back together, the wiping and swabbing and brushing, the nutty smell of the oil, would have soothed him. All that crap about don’t get talked into anything, he thought. Now Happy says it has to get done, not just done, done like tomorrow.

He knew about the ransom, knew Vasco stepped up to pay it and that gave him rights, the sly fuck. But he also felt guilty, wondering what might have been if he’d been the one down there, not Roque. Maybe he’d have gotten them out of whatever
spot they’d blundered into. But that was fantasy. You’re damaged, he told himself. The damaged get left behind.

He supposed he should count himself lucky he was able to chip in at all. He was the weapon wizard, the gun guru, maybe he should take pride in that. For a while there he’d felt reasonably in control, a lid on the monster, even the nightmares settled down some. Then came the run-in with Chuck. That’s when the hinges started working loose again.

Strange, him being the target of this thing. Godo found some poetry in that. Serves him right, let him suffer, suffer for all the grief his kind caused, all the mayhem, all the blood. Suffer for Gunny Benedict. Because as the Chevy Blazer with the tinted windows bulled ahead of the rattletrap Cressida with its single headlight and the
haji
family huddled inside, Godo stepping forward, blocking the Blazer’s path, demanding docs, needing to check them against the names on his BOLO list, he’d spotted in the back, passenger side, one of the armed men, a face increasingly whole in his memory—this guy, this contractor, this Chuck—just as the searing white flash switched off the world and the explosion ripped it to shreds.

So much for poetry, he thought, rising to his feet, the scent of the gun oil in his nostrils and the slickness on his hands. Looking out the window, he watched a sudden burst of wind thrash the walnut trees and for a second heard the chugging rotors of the little bird chopper hovering over the blast site amid the screams of the wounded, his included, felt in his mouth the grating dust from the rotor wash. Wiping his numb fingers with a rag, he thought: I can’t function like this, I’ll fuck this thing up and that’s not an option. Using his sleeve he mopped the sweat off his face—check it out, he thought, I’m sweating and it’s maybe fifty degrees, tops—then he bent down to the final M16, pushed the takedown pins into position, refitted the handguards into place, slammed home the magazine.

The three sixteens would go to Puchi, Efraim and Happy;
Godo would use the Kalashnikov. Chato would get the Mossberg.

As he was bagging the brushes and rags and barrel rods he heard not Efraim’s pickup but another vehicle he didn’t recognize thunder up the drive, churning gravel. He edged toward the front window, peeking out at the white van pulling to a stop. Puchi sat behind the wheel, Happy beside him. As he stood there looking out, a flaring ghost of white light rippled across the backs of his eyes; his mouth went dry and he felt certain he wasn’t just imagining it, the taste of dust.

Funny, he thought, how you hear people say: My body has a mind of its own. What am I supposed to do, he wondered, when it’s my mind that has a mind of its own?

He wasn’t prepared for the woman. Happy dragged her forward from the van, not roughly but not kindly, either.

“This is Lourdes,” he said once they were all inside. “She’s decided to help us out.”

HAPPY PLOPPED DOWN WITH HER ON THE FLOOR IN ONE OF THE
smaller rooms. He’d explained to her during the drive why she was so important, speaking to her in English, making her use it with him, practicing their back and forth, figuring if they reverted to Spanish during the robbery the family would suspect she was involved all along. “There’s no stopping what’s going to happen, Lourdes, one way or another, we’re going to do what we need to do. But you can change
how
it happens. Without you, people get hurt.” It had taken awhile, convincing her there was no escape, but the drive was long and he’d ultimately worn her down. There would be no way to beg or wish or talk her way out of it, except to tell him what he wanted.

Strange, he thought, how things were lining up. There was reason to breathe easy. Sure, the thing was crazy but you heard stories all the time, snitches working both sides. And the government
always looked the other way. They were greedy, like everybody else. They wanted what they wanted, wanted it big, wanted it yesterday.

When it came time to take the stand, he’d tell the jury: I had to do it, they gave me no choice. It was all Vasco’s idea. Ladies and gentlemen, the only way to get my father back to the States was to go along with the plan, this stupid home invasion. My father was kidnapped, we needed the ransom, the government wouldn’t front the money. What was I supposed to do? But I was afraid that, if I told Mr. Lattimore what I was doing, the government would pull the plug, my father and cousin would get stranded. My father, he’s not a young man, he could die down there just waiting, while I’m scrambling around trying to scratch up the money all legit. It was a lot of money, more than my family could put together. And this was the only way to keep the case on track. We don’t bring my father and Samir to the States, the thing falls apart. I was doing the prosecution a favor.

I did it for my family. I did it for the government. I did it for this country I love so much.

Remember, he thought, you won’t be the one on trial. It will all work out, so long as nobody gets hurt.

Efraim returned with
tortas
for lunch and Happy sent him right back out for paper and pens. They shared a sandwich and a soda, he and Lourdes, while the others ate in another room. The intimacy was intentional on his part and apparently welcome on hers, she seemed to hearten a little. Her nibbles turned to bites, she settled into her body.

He asked about her life and in a voice that gradually lost some of its fearful whisper she explained she was from Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán, a village known for its copper artisans. Many in her family were in the trade but she had no such skill and so, when she was twenty-one, she traveled north to work. She’d been in California twenty years, wanted to improve her English but could never get to adult school regularly. Both her
daughters were born here, their father left five years ago for another woman. He sent money sometimes. “He a weak man, not a bad man,” she said. “Señor Snell—he is weak
and
bad.”

Happy sensed it, the turn. Don’t overplay it, he thought. “How you mean?”

She corkscrewed her hips, trying to get comfortable. “This family I work for them three years now maybe. But him I talk no more five, six times, okay? He away at work when I there. But each time him, me talk, he treat me like I am stupid. Treat his wife, Veronica, like that too. Yell at her like she is a child. To myself, I think, how lucky for her if he die in Iraq. But he come back. And he is worse. Veronica, she cry sometimes, talk to me, tell me his business. I not supposed to see them, the guns—they all in the basement, I don’t go there—but she show me. She is very strange, Veronica, very lonely. She drink.” She picked at a bit of lettuce caught in her teeth. “She crazy a little too, I think.”

Happy stopped chewing. “Crazy dangerous?”

“No.” Her copper-colored ponytail wagged back and forth. “Crazy scared.”

He took a sip of soda, passed the bottle to her. The house felt as cold as a cave. “You understand, Lourdes, those guns, the ones in the basement, it’s all against the law.”

She nodded timidly, took a sip, handed the bottle back.

“He won’t complain to the police. He knows he’ll have to lie about what we came for, about what we take. He won’t risk that. Better to lose the money, the guns, than risk that. They find out what he does, who he sells to, the taxes he doesn’t pay? He goes to prison.”

Her eyes drilled his face. “He not need the police, a man like that. He come for me, my daughters. He come alone.”

“When we tie up the family, Lourdes, we’ll tie you up too, make it look—”

“He have this hate, this thing inside him—”

“You’ll have to tell him you don’t know nothing. You’ll have
to convince him.” A conspiratorial wink. “Don’t tell me you haven’t lied before.”

“He will come, hurt me. Hurt my girls.”

“You’re going to have to be an actress, Lourdes.” He felt a surge of impatience, fueled by guilt, pitying her, resenting her for it. “There’s no other way, I’m sorry.”

Out in the front room, a sudden spate of goofy laughter: Puchi, Chato. Not Godo.

“Why you do this?” Her hand drifted across the space to touch his hand. Her fingers were ice-cold. “You are different, not like them, out there, those
pellejos
, those
chusmas.”
Lowlifes. “I can tell you have family, you love somebody, somebody love you—”

One of those
chusmas
is my cousin, he thought of telling her, though he imagined Godo’s face had made an impression that wouldn’t get undone with words. Then the front door opened and closed—Efraim, back from the store. Happy pulled his hand from under hers. “You’re right, I have family. You wonder why I’m doing this? For them.”

Efraim appeared in the doorway but Happy realized something else needed saying. He asked for just another moment. Efraim, clutching the bag with Happy’s paper and pens inside, glanced curiously at the woman as though trying to determine if she was still their prisoner or something else now, then set the bag on the floor and shuffled down the hall, joining the others just as another spurt of idiot laughter erupted.