Do They Know I'm Running? (49 page)

“I made no promises.”

“Yeah. I can see why.”

To the west, immaculate beaches melted away into emerald green water frothed with surf. Pelicans strafed the waves for food. The southern end of the Sierra Madres dropped into the sea. Roque wished he could enjoy it all but he could only think of who wasn’t there to enjoy it with him. He’d abandoned his uncle to a lonely grave, far from everyone he loved. It brought to mind his strained conversation with Happy. So much anger, so little grief, but that was hardly surprising. Things have taken an odd turn, he’d said, there might be a bug on Tía Lucha’s phone. What had they gone and done, why head for Agua Prieta? And whose side would they take when it came time to talk El Recio into letting Lupe go?

“That reminds me,” Bergen said. “I did a little nosing around about what happened to you folks on the highway the other night. Appears you were mistaken for somebody else. The governor here is facing something that, in its own modest way, feels like full-fledged rebellion. He sure sees it that way, and he’s not been shy responding, which is why tourism’s in the toilet.

“Word apparently reached him or someone in his camp that members of the EZLN—the Zapatistas, the guerrillas from the next state down, Chiapas—were coming to powwow with the local opposition on tactics. There were rumors of a new general strike. The powers that be decided to nip that little fucker in the bud and they had their men waiting out there on the road.”

Roque glanced toward Lupe, who was staring out at the hypnotic surf. “Why chase us? What made us so suspicious?”

“It’s my understanding,” Bergen said, “that the folks who could answer your question best are unavailable.” A turn toward the sun sent a shock of white glare across the windshield. Bergen flipped down his visor. “I can tell you this much, if those phony IDs you guys picked up from your
salvatrucho
pals were from Chiapas instead of Veracruz? We’d still be back there at that checkpoint, most likely facedown on the pavement.”

Roque caught a whiff of himself, realizing only then just how scared he’d been. “How come we didn’t hear any of this from you before?”

Bergen glanced over his shoulder, his customary smile at half-mast. “You aren’t seriously complaining, are you?”

Roque blanched. “No. I’m not.”

“Good.” Bergen slowed for a
tope
and a pack of women swarmed the windows on each side, holding up bags of oranges, cold drinks, miscellaneous
chácharas
. The windows filled with eager hands, the voices almost accusing in their urgency.

Once the van picked up speed again, Bergen said, “I’ll tell you a story. About the way things are here. I have this friend, delightful lady, used to run a restaurant in Oaxaca de Juárez. Best pork with
mancha manteles mole
you’ll ever know. One morning she was walking to her bank to make the daily deposit when the Policía Federal Preventiva rolled in. This was November 2006, during the teachers’ strike. The PFP came to teach the teachers a lesson. Batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, the whole trick bag. Alix, my friend, she tried to help somebody who’d been tear-gassed,
dabbing their eyes with a hankie dipped in Coca-Cola. Trust me, it works. Anyway, she got snatched up by the PFP along with everybody else, dragged to a van, thrown inside with ten other women. One cop said they were going to get taken out in a helicopter and dropped into the ocean. That’s not an idle threat down here. It’s not folklore, either. It gets done. Good news is, it didn’t get done that day.

“Cops took them to the women’s prison in Miahuatlán, not that things were swell there, either. Alix got questioned, to use the usual euphemism, and the man in charge used a blanket when he kicked her so he wouldn’t leave marks. She was charged with assaulting police, sedition, destruction of public property. Mind you, I’m talking a nice middle-aged lady here, maybe weighs 110 after a heavy breakfast, who was trying to help somebody who was hurt. She closed up her restaurant after that. No more pork with
mancha manteles mole
. Haven’t heard from her in over a year.”

The driver of the truck just ahead signaled that Bergen could pass. He downshifted, wound the Eurovan out in third gear, then ventured his move into the oncoming lane.

“What I’m saying is, that’s the state of things you folks walked into. Just so you know.”

Thanks for the tip, Roque thought, sinking in his seat. It was like they were trapped in some hellish video game where the longer they played the more their enemies multiplied.

They hit two more checkpoints in short order, one just before Puerto Angel, the second at the lighthouse turnoff right before Puerto Escondido. Bergen’s magic seemed to be taking hold, they got waved through each time. After that their biggest problems were road washouts and wandering livestock until they passed Pinotepa Nacional—another checkpoint, but though they got stopped the soldier simply reached in, opened the glove box, checked inside for a pistol or drugs, then directed the van into the
slow-moving queue for a giant X-ray machine, its white crane-like boom arching over the road.

By midafternoon they reached Acapulco—or Narcopulco as it often got called these days, Bergen said. The cartels were jockeying for control of the port, with the predictable rise in body count, at least until the army got sent in. Things were returning to normal, more or less, or the illusion of normal. The southern end of town looked shopworn and sad, the northern more stylish and new. Pingo, from his perch up front, pointed to the top of one particularly stunning cliff with shameless reverence.—
Check it out, that’s Sly Stallone’s house
.

Come twilight they pulled into a modest roadside hotel half a mile beyond a pig-filled swamp just outside Zihuatenejo—only a dozen or so rooms, high walls isolating each of the entrances, an armed guard stationed in the parking lot, another at the office door. Bergen explained it was a
casa de citas;
patrons paid by the hour, not the night, a favorite spot for a poke with the mistress. “I know the folks who run this place,” he said, killing the ignition, lodging the emergency brake. Beyond the hotel, the hillside rose with lush thickets of nameless greenery, crowned with mango and thorn trees. Across the highway, fishing boats thronged a network of docks. “It’s clean, it’s discreet, the van will be safe. And I’m guessing, given prior experience, you’re not all that eager to travel the roads at night. Me, neither.”

EL RECIO PUT HAPPY ON THE FRONT DOOR, KIKI WITH HIS TOP-KNOT
watched the back. Osvaldo with his dumpy suit and roach killers joined El Recio and another man, Hilario, in the kitchen where they got to play butcher.

How had he put it: I think I got something maybe could suit you.

Happy couldn’t tell if this was their standard MO or whether they’d taken inspiration from what he’d described of the Crockett takeover. Maybe they wanted to see how he’d react. Using duct tape, they’d tied and gagged the cop and his wife and their son to chairs. The boy was seven maybe, blue fleece pajamas, matching blue socks. The pajamas had little bucking broncos on them. The parents were naked.

El Recio made the parents watch as Hilario did the boy, using wire cutters and grain alcohol and a box of wood matches. Happy leaned against the wall, back turned to what was happening, but he could hear, he could smell. His memory emptied its sewer, he was back inside that claustrophobic room with Snell and his daughter and he would have sold his soul to get away except how do you outrun what’s inside you? Keep your eyes on the street, he told himself, focus on what’s out there, even if it’s nothing. Especially if it’s nothing.

He threw back another slug
of tejuino
to buck up his nerve. It scalded his mouth and throat and simmered in his gut. El Recio said the Indians fermented it by putting a ball of human shit inside
a cheesecloth and burying it in the corn mash, letting it molder. He clutched the bottle, fearing he might vomit. Worse, faint. What would happen, he wondered, if I went in there, tried to stop it? Nothing. Everybody would just get to watch me die too.

The cop was bent, just not bent enough apparently. He’d talked to somebody, a shipment got stopped—of what? Migrants? Drugs? Guns? Happy wasn’t told, the wisdom of murder. He knew only this: Muffled screams howled into thick swaths of tape—the boy, his mother, his stupid on-the-take-but-suddenly-honest cop father—the rocking of wood chairs against the floor as the parents struggled to free themselves, the acrid smell of burned flesh and scorched fleece and smoke, but Happy was there and not there, unable to get the girl out of his head, like she was living under his skin, struggling to get out, her eyes so huge when he shot her old man, then kicking herself into the corner, trying to get away—from him, from her dying old man, from
it
.

In the kitchen, El Recio sang in a clownish baritone:

There were no questions to ask, nothing to learn. This was a message. The killing would go slowly, over hours, then the rumor mill would kick in and every other cop in Sonora would learn that the boy died first, died horribly and slowly in unthinkable pain, followed hours later by his mother, most likely driven crazy by then, and only several hours after that, at the cusp of dawn, by the father, the man whose chickenshit conscience could be blamed for it all. After that, who with a badge wouldn’t take the money?

There was a lull in the kitchen. Happy dared a glance over his shoulder. Hilario was wiping his hands with a towel, Osvaldo lit
up a smoke. El Recio stepped into the doorway, looking skeletal without the snake.

He approached slowly, almost wearily and Happy wondered what depths got tapped in the torturing of a child, then recoiled at his own phony righteousness. A birdlike hand reached out, resting on Happy’s shoulder.

“Didn’t have time to tell you,” El Recio said. “Finally got word about Lonely. Now, what I heard, it’s like secondhand, thirdhand, some don’t even make sense, all right? But word I got is damn near his whole clique went down.” His lips were drawn. A vein the size of a night crawler throbbed on the side of his shaved skull. “Cops sent the riot squad in, storm-trooper shit, snipers and dogs and choppers overhead, shut the whole barrio down, went door to door like it’s fucking Baghdad. You know how those assholes love a show. Lonely and ten other dudes, slammed with gang beefs and that’s like no bail, no luck, no hope, know what I’m saying?”

Happy had expected this explanation. It was most likely true and thus the perfect lie. The weightless hand lifted off Happy’s shoulder, vanished into a pocket, reappeared with an asthma inhaler. Two quick pumps: bob of the Adam’s apple, hiss of albuterol. He didn’t seem particularly short of breath. Maybe he just liked the taste.

“And here’s the shit,
güey
. Way I hear it, this Guatemalan
comandante
your cousin got tangled up with, this clown named El Chusquero?”

“I know who you mean.” Happy worried his hands around the
tejuino
bottle, the rough glass reassuringly solid. “We had to wire down money to pay him off.”

“Yeah, well, he’s the one who made the call. Maybe it’s bullshit, you know how some of these idiots think, but this is what I’m hearing, all right? Supposedly this El Chusquero cocksucker got fucked out of some deal by your cousin, they was supposed to take some boat up the Mexican coast or some shit—”

“I heard about this, look—”

“Just listen, all right? Your cousin and uncle, they skipped out, last minute, and this El Chusquero asshole said: Okay motherfuckers, try this. He picked up the phone, tapped some old pals in uniform down in El Salvador, called in a favor, whatever. And the hammer came down.”

Another thumb-punch on the inhaler, eyelids fluttering, a clenching swallow of mist.

“So, like, even if you did have some deal with Lonely, it’s useless now. I swear to God, I never heard word one, never saw a fucking dime, and now I’m not gonna, no matter what. Sorry, just the way it is.”

He slipped the inhaler back into his pant pocket, rubbed at his eye. From the kitchen, ragged sobs.

“Chécalo
, there’s guys who seriously want to fuck your cousin up, given all the shit that came down back in San Salvador.”

“Look, Roque’s not perfect, I get that.” Happy again had to bite back mention of his father’s death. “But way I hear it, Roque turned down this El Chusquero to honor the deal with Lonely. So why’s he in the shit for that?”

“Law of unintended consequences, just the way it is. Besides which, there’s some girl supposedly in the picture too. I never heard about this till yesterday, some chick Lonely sent up to gain a little juice with Don Pato.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You don’t need to know. I need to know. Right? Just like I need to know who ropes the
pollos
, who rounds up
the guías
, who watches over the safe houses and makes the bribes and launders the money. I need to know all that because they rely on me. They rely on me to enforce the motherfucking law, right? You need to know one thing—what I tell you.”