Scarface (14 page)

“Hey frog-face,” Tony sneered at Hector, “you just screwed up real bad. You steal from me, you’re dead.”

Hector snatched the Baretta from Tony’s upraised arm. He shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter, dead was all the same to him. He sounded almost bored as he spoke his ultimatum: “You gonna give me the cash, Tony, or you want me to kill your brother first? Before I kill you, that is.”

“Try sticking your head up your ass,” said Tony.

Hector shrugged again, then turned and unleashed a stream of hard Colombian slang on the two goons. One of them grabbed Angel and shoved him toward the bathroom. Angel managed to turn and give Tony a fearless look, as if to show him how tough he was. The Colombian dragged him into the bathroom, while his partner stooped beside the bureau and picked up a coil of rope. Marta opened the suitcase on the bed. Clearing away some oily rags, she pulled out a portable chainsaw.

Tony could hear the two men in the bathroom tying Angel up. Angel swore a blue streak till they muzzled him with a strip of adhesive. As Marta attached the chain, Hector returned to his drink and drained it. Nobody seemed to have anything left to say to Tony. Tony kept counting the seconds in his head, screaming inside for Manolo. One of the goons came out of the bathroom and turned up the volume on the TV set. A little blonde pork-chop on the screen was chirping the details of a major drug crackdown.

Marta handed the fully assembled saw to Hector. She then returned to the suitcase and pulled out a voltage adapter and a long extension cord. She disappeared into the bathroom. Hector followed. The goon came forward and grabbed Tony, holding his Ingram tight to Tony’s temple as he pushed him across the room. When they reached the bathroom the goons stood on either side of him, holding his arms and the guns to his head, forcing him to look.

Angel was hanging suspended from the shower bar. He dangled from the ropes like a puppet, and his legs straddled the bathtub. Though the tape covered most of his lower face, the horror was plainly visible. His eyes bugged out, and his skin was chalk white. He gave off a queer sour smell, as if the sweat that drenched his shirt came pouring right out of his gut. Hector was dead serious. He connected the voltage adapter and plugged the saw in the wall socket.

“No!” screamed Tony. “Let him go—you can have the money.”

One of the goons slapped a piece of adhesive across his mouth. He struggled and kicked, but they held him so tight he couldn’t move.

“Course we can have the money, Tony,” said Hector with maddening calm. “But I don’t like your attitude. Omar thinks he can fuck with us, don’t he? He thinks we’re a buncha spics, right?”

Then he smiled amiably and flicked the switch. The chainsaw roared in the tiny bathroom. Marta was crouched up against the wall beside the toilet, watching like a zombie as Hector approached the bathtub. Angel was having some kind of convulsion. Hector reached up with the saw and sliced his arm off at the elbow. Blood spattered all over the room, but only Hector was close enough to be doused with it. The feel of it slick on his face, sopping his shirt, seemed to fill him with exultation.

Angel dangled by one arm. Mercifully he had passed out. The other arm was still tied to the shower bar, swaying like a piece of meat on a butcher’s hook. Tony writhed with rage in the grip of the goon Colombians. The roar of the chainsaw was deafening. Hector stepped forward again, studying the body with a strangely abstract gaze. He reached to cut off the right leg, the same side as the severed arm, but then some grotesque sense of balance seemed to possess him, and he turned instead to the left leg. It took longer to cut than the arm.

When he was finished he stepped back and flicked the chainsaw off. The silence was the most awful thing just then. Hector turned and stared at Tony, who had ceased to struggle in his captors’ grip. The hate in Tony’s eyes would have turned another man to stone. Though his mouth was still bound with the tape, he made it clear he would go to the end of the world to wreak his vengeance. No wonder Hector nodded at the goons to string him up. He couldn’t let Tony go now, or else he was a dead man.

The one goon stepped forward and loosened the strap that Angel swung from, and the body tumbled into the bathtub, a heap of bleeding flesh. The other goon started to bind Tony’s wrist with a length of rope. Daintily, Marta moved away from the toilet, tiptoeing as she walked across the bloody floor. She exited into the bedroom, where the TV was blaring the weather now. She turned down the volume as if she had a headache. She would turn it up again as soon as Hector was ready to cut.

Hector, meanwhile, stared at himself in the mirror above the bathroom sink. He seemed to take enormous pride in the blood that drenched him, the weapon he carried. He caught Tony’s eyes looking at him with murderous hate, and he smiled. He spoke into the mirror, almost gently: “Coke’s not for nice guys, Tony. Coke’s about blood.”

Suddenly there was the sound of a gunshot out in the hall, and the door to the room came splintering open. In the split second before Manolo opened fire on Marta, Hector’s eyes went wide with surprise as he looked in the mirror. The last thing he saw was the blaze of triumph on Tony’s face. Then everything fell apart.

Marta dove for the bed where the Magnum lay. Manolo shot twice and hit her in the eye and the abdomen, and she crashed onto the bed face-down, as if she’d suddenly got real tired. One of the goons erupted out of the bathroom, spraying the room with his Ingram, but Manolo was already crouched by the bureau and fired once, blasting the guy’s stomach and crumpling him to the floor.

In the bathroom, as soon as he heard the first shot, Tony had spun around on the goon who was tying him up. He kneed him in the gut and slipped the rope around his neck. Now he stood back against the wall, lifting the guy off his feet with a stranglehold. Hector flicked on the chainsaw and tried to slash at Tony, but Tony held the goon in front of him like a shield. Hector didn’t care. He began to slash at the goon instead, as if he could cut him away from Tony. Manolo appeared at the bathroom door, holding the Ingram. He raised it to blow Hector’s head off when Tony shouted: “No! He’s mine!”

Hector turned and slashed at Manolo, who jumped back out of the doorway. Then Hector backed away past the sink and slid open the bathroom window. The goon was screaming in Tony’s arms, though he made no noise on account of the rope. He bucked and twitched with his slash wounds, so that Tony couldn’t free himself to go after Hector. Hector held the chainsaw against the window screen and ripped it across. Then he dropped the saw and dove through into the alley.

Just then the goon passed out from loss of blood. Tony let him fall to the floor, picked up the Ingram beside the tub, and snarled at Manolo: “Finish off this motherfucker!” Manolo was standing in the doorway again, gaping open-mouthed at the body in the bathtub. Tony didn’t stick around to hold his hand.

He dove out the window after Hector, landing in a rolling somersault and springing to his feet like a tumbler, running full-tilt already. Hector, squat and slow, had just reached the end of the alley and turned into the parking lot. As Tony came to the corner, Hector was scrambling between parked cars, trying to get to his two-toned Cadillac.

Tony didn’t hurry now. The Ingram swung lightly at his side. The neon bathed him as he stalked through the lot. Several tourists had seen him now, and they ran screaming into the lobby, where several others were streaming in from their rooms, having heard the explosion in Room 18. Tony had no thought of the cops. Revenge was all that mattered. Hector had reached his car now, but there was no way the Cadillac would get past Tony. He’d blow all the tires out. He’d blow the windshield. Hector was his, that was all there was to it.

Hector might have thought he had a chance, as he tore the car door open and fell into the seat. He was probably gambling that Tony wouldn’t open fire on a public street. He was full of delusions, Hector. And worst of all, he’d forgotten the car keys.

Tony strode forward between two rows of cars. He could hear a lot of shouting from the lobby. He was twenty feet from the Cadillac when Hector opened the door and got out. He was holding up his hands and waving, like somebody trying to stop a speeding car. He bawled at the top of his lungs: “We can make a deal, Tony!”

Tony loved the feel of the Ingram as he raised it and squeezed the trigger. And kept squeezing. It was astonishing how many bullets the gun could spit. Hector’s whole body began to dance. Tony raked the barrel back and forth across the Colombian’s belly, unloading the whole clip, methodically blowing the man apart. Hector’s eyes were still staring in horror as the last breath of life burst from his blood-specked lips.

Even the traffic in the street stopped, forty, fifty feet away. The tall cool figure of Tony Montana, the one they would call Scarface, stood bathed in neon yellow, holding a smoking gun. It said something about the gaudy night along the boulevard that he looked just then like a man who’d broken clear. The Monte Carlo came careening around the corner, Manolo yelling from the driver’s window, but for the moment Tony heard nothing. He looked down at the Ingram pistol, weighed the heft of it in his hand, then reached to his ankle to see if it fit his holster. It did. He checked the cuff of his jeans for a bulge. He seemed satisfied.

The Monte Carlo lurched to a stop. Manolo jumped out, threw open the back door, and growled at Tony in a voice that was hardly human. Tony turned and ducked into the car, easy as a millionaire. The traffic stood still to let them peel out, and they tore off like an ambulance. The air was already shrieking with sirens as the reaper, Miami-Dade division, came racing in with the body bags.

Manolo was panting and shaking so hard, it sounded as if he was having a coronary. He drove through two red lights in a row. Chi-Chi, who had seen nothing, was so jumpy beside him he seemed to be having withdrawals. Manolo took a wide curve to get off the boulevard, gunned across the pavement and knocked a mailbox over, then lurched back into the street. About two blocks later they shrieked to a stop beside an exhausted playground. Manolo slumped to the wheel, still shaking so hard it was almost a fit.

Tony sat silent in the back seat, breathing evenly as he stared out at the empty playground. His face wore no expression at all, and it almost seemed that his heart must be as dead as his eyes, that he’d grown so hardened he couldn’t feel any more. But then he leaned slightly forward and laid a hand on Manolo’s quaking shoulder. Right away Manolo stopped gasping. The fit seemed to pass.

“What happened? What happened?” Chi-Chi kept whispering it over and over, first at Manolo and then at Tony. Frantically he dug his hands in the pockets of his jacket, as if he’d lost his stash.

Suddenly Manolo shook free Tony’s hand, reached over and smashed a fist in Chi-Chi’s face. “Shut the fuck up,” he snarled. Chi-Chi whimpered into silence.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Tony was boss; the next move was his. There was an implicit assumption here that their survival depended on following orders. The whole reason for having a boss was to get through a crisis like this. After half a minute Tony spoke: “Turn around. Go back to the motel.”

Manolo questioned nothing. If it seemed like madness to return to the scene of the bloodbath, he kept it to himself. As soon as they turned onto the boulevard, they could see the flashing lights blocks away. As they approached closer, traffic was being diverted away from the Sun Ray. Its parking lot was jammed with patrol cars, blinking red and blue. They had enough firetrucks backed up into the street to put out a forest fire. Tony directed Manolo to turn into a gas station just across from the Sun Ray. They drew to a halt beside a bank of phone booths.

Tony grabbed up the canvas bag of cash and stepped out of the car. He moved to the phone booth, dropped in a dime, and dialed information. “Sun Ray Motel,” he said. As he dialed the number the operator gave him, he looked across the street toward the motel. There must have been a hundred people milling about in the lot, hookers and drunks and runaways and tourist couples in polyester finery, all of them clustered around and gaping at the sheet-covered remains of Hector. In the lobby a team of paramedics attended to several people who’d fainted from shock.

A rattled voice answered. “Sun Ray, may I help you?”

“Yeah, Room 18 please,” Tony said.

Miraculously, the desk clerk put the call through. Perhaps any semblance of normality was welcome. Equally extraordinary, somebody actually answered the phone. “Carlson here,” said a grim and ashen man who’d clearly had enough of Room 18.

“Yeah, is the lieutenant there?” asked Tony.

“Just a second.”

As Carlson went off to get him, Tony could hear a lot of commotion through the line. People shouting, people crying. Someone who sounded like the motel manager was shrilling his own innocence. Then a new voice came on the line. “This is Highsmith,” it said.

“Right,” said Tony. “You think I could have a word with you, Lieutenant?”

“Who
is
this?”

“I think you got something of mine.”

A half second’s pause. Then Highsmith continued, very very cautiously. “And what might that be, Mister . . . ?”

“Montana. Tony Montana. I’m up from Miami.”

“I see. What is it you’re looking for, Mr. Montana?”

“Suitcase. Brown suitcase. It was on the bed. Course, somebody mighta moved it—”

Highsmith interruped coldly. “I think you’ve made a mistake, Mr. Montana. That object you’re talking about is mine now. If you’re smart you’ll get lost before I start tracing this call.”

“Now ain’t that a funny thing, Lieutenant. I coulda sworn this bag I got right here belongs to you.” There was silence now on the other end of the line. Tony smiled as he continued. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s got your name all over it, Lieutenant. We musta picked up each other’s bag by mistake.”

A pause. Then Highsmith’s voice dropped to a murmur. “Where are you calling from?”

“I’m right across the street, Lieutenant. You can’t miss me. There’s a whole row o’ telephone booths.”