Triple Crossing (27 page)

They were her favorite earrings, the sun and the moon. She had worn them the night a year ago when she and Méndez had dinner
and Méndez confirmed the rumors: He had been named chief of a new special police unit. And he had recommended that
the legislature appoint her human rights commissioner to replace him. She had laughed with delight and triumph. She told him
they would be unstoppable. They would make Tijuana tremble. That night was the closest they had come in years to talking about
their romance in university days. The closest he came to telling her that he still felt something for her that he felt for
no one else, including his wife. But he hadn’t said it. He had never said it.

Carrasco, Aguirre’s bodyguard, approached Méndez. Carrasco had a cut over one eye, his shirt was torn and his knees were drenched
in blood.

“Licenciado, I’m so sorry,” Carrasco blurted, his face wrenched and tearstained. “It’s my fault, I should have watched her
back.”

Méndez wanted to comfort him, but he found it impossible to speak. The bodyguard seemed far away. Méndez was thankful for
the refuge of his sunglasses. He was overwhelmed by the madhouse sounds racketing off the glass walls of the narrow lobby:
crying, running feet, reporters yelling into phones, the click of cameras and the jabber of police radios. Porfirio Gibson’s
nasal voice chattered somewhere behind him.

All the vultures, he told himself.

Méndez stuck his gun in his belt. He took off his sport jacket, remembering that the plane ticket to Oakland was still in
the pocket. He knew now that he was not meant to use the ticket. He was meant to be alone.

Méndez crouched and spread the jacket carefully over Araceli Aguirre, shielding her, too late.

P
ESCATORE HAD NEVER BEEN
so high in his life.

It was the next afternoon. They staggered back into the house from the van. They flopped onto the couches, shedding their
weapons and body armor. The television blared. Beer cans popped. Joints changed hands. Pelón and Sniper huddled over the mirror
on the coffee table, chopping out lines of cocaine.

Pescatore had been drinking around the clock. But he wasn’t sleepy anymore. The pills that Sniper had handed out at the ranch
near Tecate that morning had cranked him into tooth-gritting, lip-licking alertness. By then, the girl was gone. She left
him inert on a bench. Said she was going to the bathroom and never came back; must have caught a ride home. Somebody told
her something that freaked her out.

What did he remember about her? Her name: Marisol? Soledad? The tops of her breasts swelling out of a leotard. Extra heft
in the hips and thighs. Turning, posing on the dance floor, swaying against him in knee-length leather pants. Marisol-or-Soledad
was from Calexico. Said his accent in Spanish was cute, reminded her of this South American singer on MTV Latino. She was
one of the platoon of women waiting when the homeboys arrived at the ranch. The place was fancied up for a party: mariachis,
an outdoor bar, a disc jockey on the gazebo spinning
tunes. Oldies for
cholos:
“Always and Forever,” “Who’s That Lady?,” “Lean On Me.” But the mood was less than mellow because Pelón wandered around firing
one-armed volleys at the stars with his AK-47.

Time for the Death Patrol to celebrate. Mission accomplished. But nobody bothered to tell Pescatore what the mission had been.
Soon after César had gotten out, the van had left the Río Zone and headed for the ranch. Riding silently, the homeboys heard
traffic on Buffalo’s police radio. César had used the gun on somebody important.

Marisol-or-Soledad was curious too: What are you guys celebrating? Pescatore just mumbled and poured rum in her Coke. He did
not want to think about it. Marisol-or-Soledad was all over him and he responded in kind. He pulled her close on the dance
floor by the gazebo, hungry for her. He pawed at her leotard, her rum-and-Coke-and-nicotine taste filling his mouth. He tried
to coax her into the darkness beyond the firing range. Let’s go see Junior’s zoo: He’s got ostriches, kangaroos, a big ol’
Galapagos turtle. She nuzzled him, toyed with him, told him he was too drunk to be trusted. As they lurched toward a bench,
she said, “
Oye, que borracho estás, no?
You going to vomit?”

She kept asking what they were celebrating. What a pain in the ass. Somebody must have told her. Or told her to stop asking
questions, bitch. That was what had freaked her out.

Time moved in freeze-frames. Pescatore contemplated strange things. The way Pelón’s eyebrows climbed his scalp. The way Pelón’s
lips strained back from a startling outsized mouthful of teeth. Pelón and Sniper sat across the coffee table from Pescatore,
laughing at the screen.

“Aw, ain’t that a fuckin’ pity,” Pelón whooped. “Served her right.”

Pescatore found himself suspended head down over the mirror, homing in on the white lines with a plastic straw. A sour stream
blazed up through his sinuses. He snuffled and splut
tered, turning away from the mirror. It was the first time he had done cocaine. It felt like a noseful of chlorine. He slumped
miserably, trying to play it off, hoping the others were too wasted to notice.

Then a flash of awareness cut through the fog in his head. Amid the clutter on the table—pistols, ammo, keys, cigarette packs—he
had spotted a cell phone. The phone was silver. It was decorated with a red-green-and-black decal: an image of a skeleton
wearing a wedding veil and holding a Grim Reaper’s scythe. Santa Muerte, the patron of the
narco-pistoleros.
Sacred Death. Pescatore believed it was Pelón’s phone; he had seen the shaven-headed homeboy fiddling with it. Pescatore
calculated the distance to the phone. More than an arm’s length. Closer to Pelón and Sniper than to him.

The shouting got really loud. Pescatore looked up. The TV showed a corpse. A woman sprawled in a red puddle among cops, bystanders,
discarded paramedic’s gloves.

Cut to indignant politicians. Cut to tearful relatives. Live shot: a funeral. A coffin on a lawn.

A familiar face: Méndez. Unshaven, gray-flecked stubble, red-streaked squinty eyes. Open-collared striped shirt under his
leather jacket.

Méndez walked among mourners. He carried a little girl in a black dress with a frilly white collar, her curls held back by
a black headband. The faces around them were anguished, distorted. Méndez and the toddler were not crying. Méndez held the
girl high on his chest. Her arms encircled his neck. They both looked as if they were staring at a door that was about to
open onto something hideous.

“You’re next,
güey!
” Pelón hooted. “You’re next, Méndez. Gonna kill your ass!”

Oh God, Pescatore thought. The image of Méndez and the girl hit him like a punt in the gut. That’s what we’re celebrating.
César killed that lady. Who was she, Méndez’s wife? Oh fuck.
What did they do? What did we do? The camera zoomed in on a bearded professor-looking guy behind Méndez. The man was crying
so hard his whole body convulsed. Mourners held his arms, practically carrying him.

“Cállate, maricón!”
Pelón made a whimpering noise. Sniper echoed him, egging him on. Pelón took a long hit off a joint, threw his head back and
wailed like a coyote.

The television showed file footage of the dead woman: Araceli Aguirre. Talking into microphones, a Mexican flag behind her.
A big shot. Cute in a skinny, retro-hippie kind of way. The newscaster spewed words: assassination, human rights, crisis of
government.

Pescatore tried to concentrate on the phone on the table. He scanned the mess frantically, shaking his head to focus, until
he located the phone again. But then he saw Buffalo appear behind Sniper and Pelón.

Buffalo had been drinking whiskey all night, brooding and unapproachable. He held the bottle now. He still wore the fingerless
gloves. The sleeves of his turtleneck were rolled up over his bulging tattooed forearms. His mouth was slightly open, the
lips curled tightly inward. He watched Sniper and Pelón cackle and howl on the couch.

“Good idea,” Buffalo said, just loud enough to be heard over the blaring television. “That’s nice: Disrespect the dead. Disrespect
their families. You two oughta shut the fuck up.”

Sniper felt the edge in Buffalo’s tone; he quieted down. But Pelón chortled obliviously. Pelón threw Buffalo a delayed-reaction
glance over his shoulder, not quite making eye contact.

“We just havin’ some fun, man,
qué onda contigo?
” Pelón scoffed. “Why you wanna make a issue out of it, Buffalo? Damn.”

Buffalo’s face contorted. Three steps brought him around the couch. With his left hand, he grabbed the remote control off
the table, killed the sound on the television and hurled the remote across the room.

“What’d you say,
puto?
” Buffalo’s bass voice reverberated. “Now you’re disrespecting
me?!
”

There was sudden silence. The grip of Buffalo’s right hand on the bottle had shifted. He held it straight-armed and thumb
down, around the neck, as if it were a club. Someone’s about to get their bald skull tonked, Pescatore thought, watching Sniper
sidle away from Pelón. Pescatore felt himself cringe as if he were the imminent victim beneath the two-hundred-fifty-pound
shadow.

Pelón glared up at Buffalo through a cloud of disbelief, coming to grips with the reality of the confrontation.

“Disrespectin’ me,” Buffalo repeated in a choked voice. “Talkin’ shit. ’Cause you sat in a van while César shot that lady.
Sat in the van with your hand on your dick. And that makes you a big mafioso. Not a little faggot punk bitch.”

Pelón stiffened. His eyes jumped to a pistol lying next to the mirror, then away, terrified by the impulse.

Buffalo followed the look with grim satisfaction. His grip tightened on the bottle. His upper body tilted forward.

“That’s right, Pelón,” Buffalo said, savoring the words, delivering them like blows. “Make a move. Reach for that
cuete
so I can bust your face open. No wait, let’s get Veronica first. That skank
haina
you call a girlfriend. She can watch.”

Pelón made a strangled noise. He did not budge. An invisible force pinned him to the couch. Pescatore remembered one of the
homeboys telling him how Buffalo had stabbed to death an inmate in Mule Creek with a blade fashioned out of a toothbrush.

Buffalo grunted.

“You ain’ shit,” he said. “Now get outta my sight.
Fuera, ya!
”

Pelón rose, keeping a careful distance from the pistol on the table. No front, not a shred of attitude left. He tripped over
someone’s outstretched legs. At a glance from Buffalo, Momo got up fast and followed Pelón out of the room with a gun in his
hand.

Pescatore decided that he’d never get a better opportunity to
grab a phone. He hunched forward as if contemplating the cocaine traces on the mirror. Arm extended, he palmed Pelón’s cell
phone without looking at it. He reclined and slipped it into a pocket of his jacket. His head whirling, his heart hammering,
he stared at the television.

The news program repeated the image of Méndez holding the little girl. Pescatore felt his stomach tighten. His eyes burned
and blurred.

Perfect, Pescatore thought in a panic. I’m gonna start bawling. Crying like a bitch in front of everybody. And Buffalo’s gonna
crush my skull. And then he’ll find the phone.

“Where you think
you’re
going, Valentín?” Buffalo snarled after him.

“Throw up,” Pescatore gasped, stumbling, eyes averted.

By the time he reached the hallway, it was no longer a lie. All the tastes of the night, of the past two weeks, heaved up
inside him: liquor, reefer, pills, coke, Marisol-or-Soledad. What are you celebrating? What did we do?

He caromed down the hallway into the kitchen and retched into the sink. Clinging to the faucet, he drank from the tap. The
water spattered his hair and face and jacket. Camouflaging his tears, swirling them safely down the drain.

For a moment, he saw only blackness. He coughed, gulping air and water alternately. The blackness was disintegrating when
he heard the voice behind him.

“Makes me sick too, homes.”

Pescatore saw Buffalo indistinctly among floating silver spots. Buffalo had propped himself against the butcher-block counter
in the middle of the kitchen. His feet were spread wide. He swigged from the bottle. Pescatore realized how drunk Buffalo
was. Slow-motion drunk, stealth drunk. His voice and face seemed steady. But he teetered. His head nodded in little flurries.
His breathing was agitated.

Pescatore put a hand on the pocket containing the cell phone,
making sure it was still there. He mumbled apologetically about how that cocaine had gotten all on top of him. Buffalo did
not seem to hear.

“Makes me sick, Valentín.”

“What?”

“What happened to that lady. Them braggin’ about it.”

Mystified, Pescatore wiped a sleeve across his mouth. Buffalo’s black eyes glittered, unfocused.

“I told Junior: I vote no,” Buffalo said hoarsely, slurring. “Hell, no. I told ’em, wanna do somebody, do Méndez. He’s askin’
for it. Not that lady,
por Dios.
You don’ do that. That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

“Junior’s all geeked up. Khalid’s encouragin’ him, like darin’ him. Junior wants Khalid to know he’s the
chingón
around here, and he respects Khalid’s advice. Junior’s partyin’ all night, this and that. He won’ listen. I told him and
I told him. But he hadda make a example of the human rights lady. So Comandante Mauro and me, we set it all up.”

Pescatore heard himself say: “How come you did it, if you were against it?”

Buffalo did not look at him. His bandit mustache sagged. His voice had dropped; he could have been talking to himself.

“Tha’s what I do. Tha’s my job.
Así es la onda.
You seen my house, my cars—he gave me everything. I stayed in fuckin’ Colonia Libertad when I was a kid, Valentín. We didn’
even have a toilet. We went north, my
viejo
moved around working
los
fields. We stayed in the projects in Pacas. Had a toilet there. But you know what? We had the
pinche mayates
waitin’ outside to kick our asses every day. Every day.” Buffalo grinned blearily, humorlessly. “Back then the projects was
still wall-to-wall
mayates,
and they didn’ like the Mexicans moving in. You had to be ready to throw down. Do something for your race. Like in the joint.
Except funny thing is, when I was locked up I met some of those same brothers we use to fight back in the projects. And we
got along OK.”