Frank pulled into the parking garage of the Mayview Hotel. In the ticket stall, the attendant, wearing a hair net and blue coveralls, sang to the radio and beat his logbook with drumstick pencils. Frank collected his ticket, passed through the raised gate, found a parking stall and killed the motor. Waiting a moment, he checked for sounds. Someone started a car on a lower tier. The echoes spread through the vast dark underground, tires squealed on the smooth floor and then headlights appeared. Frank held his breath, watching the car pass and then waiting for the next silence. Finally, feeling safe, he headed from the truck toward the elevator.
He passed a rust-eaten Datsun laden with bumper stickers: GET A FAITH LIFT. THE CROSS IS BOSS. JESUS LOVES MY YORKIE. The elevator had metal walls, smelled of gasoline, and after a shuddering two-floor journey opened onto a clean, faded lobby.
The desk clerk, white, early twenties, exuded a bristling tidiness. His skin shone, his hair, his fingernails, his pink ears, everything about him emanated Fear of Imperfection. A text called Food Management lay open before him and he offered Frank the rigid smile of a student driver.
“Single room, two nights,” Frank told him.
His only luggage was a paper bag, filled with underwear and socks bought at the Pac’n’Save. He gave the name Justin Case to the clerk who accepted it with merry oblivion, tapping the keys of his computer as though to an inner song.
“I have one king or two queens,” he chirped.
Frank, drawing upon a reservoir of crank-fed wit, replied, “I haven’t needed two beds since my last out-of-body experience.”
The clerk laughed too loudly, head reared back, revealing a mouth gray with fillings. Frank pictured him managing food.
A bellhop appeared, and he made the desk clerk look normal. He was younger still, with buck teeth and fanning ears set low near his jaw. Tufts of hair shot up on his head like thistle. His hands wiggled beyond his shirt cuffs like little animals.
“I don’t have any luggage,” Frank told him.
The bellhop winked and punched the button for the elevator. “I’ll fetcha some ice,” he said.
“I’ve got it covered.”
“I turn down the beds.”
“No thanks.”
“I show ya how to work the TV.”
The elevator door opened and the kid slipped in, peering back with a grin and holding the door. Frank realized there’d be no getting rid of him. He got in and they rode up together slowly, floor numbers lighting on, then off, the overhead pulleys squealing. The kid studied Frank shamelessly, rubbing his mouth with his fingers.
“Got you bad,” the bellhop said eventually.
Frank had hoped washing up and changing clothes would be enough. He had a knot on his head where Shel had clobbered him with the gun butt, and he walked like he was saddle sore from the groining she’d given him. On top of all that, his hands shook from crank and fear.
“I’m upset,” he said. “Got into it with the missy.”
The kid laughed and pointed as though to say, Right, right. The doors came open and he launched into the hall. Reaching the room, he unlocked the door and barged inside, fussed with the bed covers, flipped on the lights and the television. Frank closed the door behind.
“You can check out through the TV,” the bellhop announced. “Hit channel eighty-eight.”
He turned the selector to the pay channels, Sophisticated Viewing. Shortly two women, both naked, engaged in frottage on a red vinyl sofa. There was a prevalence of head shots. The blonde mouthed Aah, the brunette Ooh. “Come on, come on, we don’t need to see their heads,” the bellhop shouted, hitting the side of the television. Turning to Frank, he added, “You can watch five minutes free.”
Frank was looking around the room. It had a soothing blank decor, theft-proof coat hangers, a small table, a lamp suspended by a chain. Something in the anonymity of it all made him hopeful he would be harder to find here. The bedcovers fell back immaculately, the kid could do that much. The pillows were as tidy as headstones.
The bellhop clapped his hands to his head. “Ice, ice,” he shouted.
“Hey,” Frank told him. He held out his hand, a twenty folded between his fingers. Time to regain control. “You really want to help out?”
The kid looked from the money to Frank’s face. The grin reappeared.
“I need gin, a fifth. Do what you can do.”
The kid took the bill and affectedly checked it front and back. “Tell you what, skipper. Time me.”
Once he was gone Frank sat down on the bed. He removed the rest of his money from his pockets and spread it out across the covers, counting it twice. He had enough for two days, if that. Bending over, he put his hands to his head and uttered a small and miserable laugh.
There would be no further deals, he realized. No come on in, all’s forgiven, let’s talk about it. Lyle was dead. Hack was due to be dead. Seven Mexicans, dead. And if they’d had their way, Frank thought, I’d be dead, too. Left lying in the mud inside a junkyard. If they found him now, they’d make him pay, pay just for making them work this hard. And they wouldn’t just kill him. They’d tune him first, drag it out, make sure he squirmed and begged and pissed himself because killers like a show.
And then there was Shel. To think she’d had a hand in all that, his shiny white nurse. He realized he was hard to live with at times, nobody’s idea of a prince, but even so. He’d gotten even, he supposed. But so had she. His crotch still throbbed, his head throbbed, too. He winced, thinking about it, but at the same time he felt grateful she’d gotten away. At the time he would have killed her, yes, but now, thinking back, that wasn’t what he’d wanted at all. He wanted her to see how he felt. See me for who I am, he thought. The whole number. That so much to ask?
A fast hard knocking came at the door. It sent Frank down to his knees beside the bed. He began to retch, thinking: They found me, the fuckers, they’re here.
Through the door, the bellhop called out, “Skip, Skip, it’s me. Got the fifth. Hey, Skip?”
Frank knelt there, blinking. Street noise filtered in quietly through the window. He rubbed his face, got up one leg at a time and sat on the bed for a second to get his breath, trying to swallow. He collected his money, pocketed it, then worked his way along the wall, chained the door and cracked it open.
“You nod off or what?” the bellhop snapped. His face bristled with Hey Hey Hey. He held up the bottle of gin like it was a chicken.
“Righteous,” Frank murmured. “We’re even.” He took the bottle and closed the door.
Within ten minutes he’d drained half the bottle. He patrolled the room, checking under the bed, inside the closet, paranoia ticking in his head. He put his ear to one wall, then the other, detecting sounds. The clarity he’d felt earlier abandoned him. He clutched the gin bottle to his chest. You’re lucky to be alive, he told himself. That’s why you’re scared.
Life is luck and the lucky are scared.
He indulged in a little more crank. Surfaces bristled. Lamplight made sounds. I’m sorry, he thought. There, I said it, I’m sorry. He got up and went to the bathroom. We must, he thought, get a grip on our drugs. He turned on the hot water spigots to warm his hands, found a towel, drank from the gin bottle. Overhead, the fluorescent ceiling light hovered like a little spaceship. He ran his hands down his arms. Shards of glass nestled in each pore. His hair felt tired.
He found his way back to the bed and turned on the television, craving sound, any sound. It had to be better than listening to his own head. The twenty-four-hour news channel rebroadcast a speech the president had made earlier that morning on the East Coast. The president’s face, in the constant eruption of a camera flash, looked twitchy and false. Nice suit, Frank thought, drinking. The man in the nice suit sounded the old familiar call: Get tough. Get tough on crime. From a piece of paper in front of him, he recited: “We will not rest until this menace is crushed.”
Abatangelo drove across town to a photomat near the Opera House. The morning rain had created a bristling winter clarity. Buildings shimmered. Windshields flared. Outside the photomat, two secretaries leaned against the brick facade, one enjoying a quick smoke, the other a frozen yogurt, both lifting their faces to the sun. A panhandler stood in the doorway, one hand shading his eyes as the other moved in a constant gimme motion. Abatangelo brushed past him through the door.
With a little financial encouragement he got the girl at the counter to run his prints at once. The girl had the face of a ten-year-old, part of her head was shaved, and she breathed through her mouth. A button on her smock read: WHY COMPLAIN? THE WORST IS YET TO COME.
Abatangelo moved to the glass wall dividing the waiting room from the developing area to watch the process. He’d shot his frames of Shel in color, and the darkroom he’d rigged up in his apartment was set up only for black and white. Within a minute the color prints emerged on the vertical conveyor, rising one by one. Shel with her back exposed, revealing the bloody gashes, the bruises and welts. A close-up of her battered face. The bloodred eyes. Another close-up, this one of her neck. Now the girl was looking, too. She closed her mouth.
“I wasn’t the one who did it,” Abatangelo told her when he paid.
His next stop was within walking distance. Across the street from the I-80 skyway, the words ANTHONY J. COHN, ESQ., ATTORNEY-AT-LAW appeared in black Doric lettering upon the frosted glass door pane of a renovated Victorian.
Except for car keys and cash, the only thing in Abatangelo’s pocket at the time of his arrest in Oregon ten years earlier had been a slip of paper with Tony Cohn’s phone number on it. Cohn, though expensive, earned his fee. For three days at the preliminary hearing, the lawyer badgered the arresting agents into a squall of contradictions. They claimed an Anonymous Tipster had led them to Abatangelo and the others, when in fact one of the mutts on the beach crew had been their informant. The reason for the deceit was that an Anonymous Tipster, if he’s not a coconspirator, can remain anonymous forever. They didn’t want their snitch burned since he was working another grand jury out of Portland. The more they lied, the more Cohn hounded them. The government fished around for a good excuse, then just pointed fingers down the chain of command. Cohn, arguing fruit of the poisonous tree, managed to quash most of the informant’s testimony. But not all. Cohn explained the arbitrary nature of the ruling made for a good appeal issue, but at trial they stood to get hammered. This was, after all, rural Oregon, and rumors of the liberal northwest were greatly exaggerated. The jury pool was righteous and inbred. Worse, the defendants were Californian. Abatangelo didn’t need it explained twice. For the sake of reducing the heat on everyone else, he told Cohn to plead out, and Cohn got the best deal he could: a ten-and-five- ten years in prison, with five years probation tagged on because the U.S. Attorney deemed the defendant Of Malignant Character. As bad as it was, it beat risking the twenty-five-year stint he faced at trial, and gave everyone else the break he wanted. Especially Shel. Despite her limited involvement in the Company, the prosecutors were making her out as a full conspirator, using this as leverage against Abatangelo. Through Cohn, he tried to get her a single year, meaning with time served a few more months in prison at best. The feds would hear none of it. She gets three and a half like everybody else, they said, or we go to trial.
Cohn’s receptionist did not look up as Abatangelo entered the law office. The woman’s name was Joanna, an obese, compulsive woman who’d been fresh from community college when he’d seen her last, accompanying Cohn to hearings. She was adrift in her thirties now, and looking older still. As he recalled, she talked to herself. Conversing With The One Who Ought To Know, she called it.
He stood there several moments until finally, still looking down at her desktop, she said: “If you don’t state your business soon, I’m going to ask you to leave.” Her work area reeked of talcum powder. Abatangelo foresaw her developing a passion for cats, cutting her hair just a little bit shorter every year.
“It’s Dan,” he said. “Dan Abatangelo. I stopped by to tell Tony hello.”
Joanna jumped back in her seat as though bitten. “Good God.” She tried to compose herself, but an awkward, wincing smile lingered as she eyed him up and down. “Why didn’t you call first?” She made a fluttering upward gesture with her hand. The stairs. “Go on up. Tony will want to see you, I’m sure.”
Climbing the stairs, Abatangelo detected a new severity to the decor. The rugs were Persian. Tapestries lined the corridor. The track lighting was soft, discreet. Cohn had disclosed in his last few bits of legal correspondence that he was through with drug cases. The counterculture overtones were gone. No aging hippie élan, no Politics of the Mind, no laughs. Now spooks and professional paranoids were involved, only the small-fry got popped, thugs prevailed. There was a lot of death going around.
The door to his office was open, and Cohn stood in the middle of the room in his stocking feet. He was a short, wiry man to begin with and, shoeless, seemed even smaller, but the lack of size only served to enhance his intensity. The eyes were the same, fanatical and charming and vaguely wicked, but Abatangelo sensed something different, too. Immaculately groomed, meticulously dressed, he looked well-tuned but joyless. A winter tan helped obscure the weariness in his face. He held a fistful of paper, puzzling at another pile of paper on the floor.
Abatangelo announced himself with a knock on the door frame, saying as Cohn glanced up, “Back from the dead.” He came forward, shook the lawyer’s hand and smiled, feeling the architecture of thin bones, the ropy muscles, thinking- tennis. True sign of the arriviste; he’s taken up tennis.
Cohn stared dumbfounded. In time he managed to say, “Mirabile visu.”
Cohn was known to throw the Latin around. Jewish lads of his generation, he’d tell you, primed for a career in medicine or law, had little use for French or Spanish. This particular phrase meant: A wonder to be seen.
Abatangelo glanced around the room. “Same could be said for your digs.”
Buddhist phalluses and other fertility charms littered the shelves of a tea cabinet. A temple dragon, chiseled from sandalwood and large as an Airedale, glared from the corner. Above it hung a wool and burlap thing that looked like a french-fried bedspread.
“Apologize to Joanna for me,” Abatangelo said. “I think I frightened her.”
“You’re bigger than you used to be,” Cohn acknowledged, looking him up and down. He gestured as though to convey bulk. “And to be honest, you look a little harder than I remember.”
“Same old me,” Abatangelo assured him.
Cohn smiled. “If that’s so, prison ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
They shared a spate of uneasy laughter.
“You busy?” Abatangelo asked, gesturing to the clutter of papers across the floor.
“Labor omnia vincit,” Cohn replied. Latin again: Work vanquishes all.
Sensing an air of impatience, Abatangelo said, “I’ve got some pictures here. A bit of business, I guess. Shel Beaudry, you remember?”
Cohn flinched a little. “How could I forget?” he said. “You haven’t been in touch with her, of course.” On his desk, a small gold clock chimed discreetly.
“Through an intermediary,” Abatangelo lied. “She took it a little hard the other night.”
Cohn emitted an awkward laugh and sat down. “I suppose I’m going to hear about it.”
Abatangelo took out the pictures of Shel and set them down on the desk. Cohn reached out to collect them, wearing an expression of weary disgust. And yet there was an eagerness about him, too. A curiosity that helped Abatangelo come to a decision.
Driving over, he’d felt half-inclined to give up the notion of making Frank pay for what he’d done to Shel. There were already plenty of hounds out for the kill, though that guaranteed nothing, of course. He’d gathered from what Shel had told him that Frank had an unearthly knack for skating away from his own disasters. But so what? The argument went back and forth in his mind, and as it did he sensed, beneath the abstract moralities at issue, a vaguely sadistic urgency. Seeing Frank suffer, having a hand in it, would feel good. It would scratch a particularly fierce itch. Your motives are hardly pure, he told himself. Think about that.
He was struggling to sort all this out when he looked up and saw Cohn’s hand, strengthened by tennis, reaching across his desk for the photographs. A world came to life in that moment. It was a world in which men such as Cohn- educated, well connected, money in the bank- men who’ve suffered little more than frustration in their lives, enjoy the privilege of viewing photographs of a half-naked, brutally battered woman, doing so as they sit in a lavishly decorated room devoted to costly argument and filled with Third World kitsch. Men like that, they inhabited a realm devoted to one premise: It Isn’t Me. The luckless, the poor, the battered and preyed-upon. The Shel Beaudrys of the world, yearning for a break. They make bad choices. They show poor judgment. Pity the poor fuckers, tsk tsk, but never forget: It isn’t me.
Abatangelo responded to this insight with a bitter sense of helplessness that quickened into fury. The fury told him, in answer to his moral qualms: Do what has to get done. No one else will.
He embellished the story of the dead twins with freakish insinuations. Realizing he was overplaying his hand, he throttled back a little as he described Jill Rosemond, going bar to bar in east CoCo County with her handbills. “Double homicide,” he said, “for starters.” Piecing together what Shel had told him during one of her hourly rousts, he raised the possibility that Frank had been put up to another hit as well, this one on some Mexicans, a sort of disciplinary bang-in from his cranker pals. Shel had gone back to Frank one last time to reason with him, Abatangelo said. She’d tried to get him to find a lawyer, turn himself in. The beating she took was his response. He’d meant to kill her.
“She’s in hiding now,” he said, starting with the truth to ease his uneasiness concerning the lie to follow. “She’s willing to talk to this woman P.I. about the murder of these twins, the other stuff, too, but only through a third party.”
“Me,” Cohn surmised.
“No,” Abatangelo said. “Me. I’m here for my protection, not hers. But yeah, she won’t testify. She won’t dicker with the law. She’ll disappear first. But after what she’s been through I think, she thinks rather, it’s time this Frank guy was brought to task.”
Cohn said nothing. He continued studying the photographs one by one, doing so with an expression of pained indifference.
“For the record,” he asked finally, “you wearing a wire?”
Abatangelo went cold, thinking: Mirabile visu my ass. There’d been a lot written of late about lawyers bankrupted, imprisoned, disbarred or divorced in the wake of a grand jury indictment- typically centered around the testimony of a former client. He figured Cohn was worried he was being set up in some trade for Shel, her freedom in exchange for a lawyer- a lawyer the feds, with their obsessive minds and long memories, would love to destroy. It was nonsense, of course, even insulting. He laughed.
Cohn looked up. “Is that a no?” He wasn’t smiling.
“Yes,” Abatangelo said. “I mean, yes, it’s a no.” He spread his jacket open to reveal its interior. He patted his midriff.
“Don’t be offended,” Cohn said, looking away.
“I read the papers.” Abatangelo let his coattails drop. “I know the trend between attorneys and clients these days.”
“Sorry. I mean that,” Cohn insisted. He shuffled the pictures into a neat stack. “Incidentally, what’s Miss Beaudry doing for money these days?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She back in the trade?”
“She’s unemployed.”
“For someone like her,” Cohn said, “that’s a distinction without a difference. As for getting beaten up, you bed down with a speed freak, I’d call that assumption of risk.”
“Bed down?”
“Apparent consent.”
“Look, Tony, I said she wasn’t going to testify.”
“You just want me to pass along information I have no way of knowing is true or even accurate. But I do have a pretty good inkling it’s motivated by revenge.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Is that you talking or this intermediary of yours?”
Abatangelo glanced uneasily toward the dragon in the corner again. He almost imagined it saying: Distinction Without a Difference.
“You shouldn’t even be talking to this woman,” Cohn went on. “Let alone this. Given all you’ve been through, you are a very slow study, mister.”
“You saw the pictures,” Abatangelo said. “Is a little revenge so out of order?”
“On my bar card?” Cohn got up, moved toward the door. “Look, it’s a story. Even a good story- ”
“I’m not asking for a Supreme Court appearance.”
“No. I know what you’re asking.” Cohn grabbed one of the Buddhist phalluses from his tea cabinet. Not the largest one, not the smallest one. He clutched it like a rabbit’s foot. “You should hear yourself. Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“No fooling. What is this, you miss prison?”
“This guy’s out of control, Tony, he’s overdue. He’s a sociopath.”
“He’s a skank, a tweak. He’s got bad companions. The rest is hearsay, three times removed. And you’re a convicted felon. Credibility zip. Christ, if you’re so bent about it, why not just go out there and whack him yourself?”
“That’d be poetic, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh good God.” Cohn turned away, rubbed the phallus clean of dust and put it back. He went to the door and pushed it open. “I didn’t hear that, all right? There, you came for a favor, you just got one. Look, I’m not brushing you off, but I’ve been bumped up from second chair in a deposition tomorrow. You know how it is.”
Abatangelo ran his hands through his hair. A jet of bile lodged in his chest.
“Tony,” he began. “Look, what I just said, I didn’t mean anything. After what he did to her, sure, I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick. But I’m not about to run on out and clip the guy. You know that, right?”
His voice was quieter than he wanted it to be. It made him sound insincere.
“Prison did something to you,” Cohn said. “You’ve changed, know that? You used to be smarter.” He gestured to the doorway, and for that moment seemed precisely, again, the newfound man.
Abatangelo picked up the photographs from the desk and put them back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said. “So I’m told.”
He dragged himself through the door and down the hall. As he reached the stair, Cohn called out from his office doorway. He sounded vaguely apologetic.
“One last piece of advice?” he said. “Stay clear of friends in trouble. They never want to hear the truth. Not from you.”
To work off his rage, Abatangelo drove south through China Basin then back downtown, weaving among taxis and delivery vans, hitting his horn, cursing out the window. A bicycle messenger spat on his windshield and flipped him off. An executive screamed “Asshole” from the sudden refuge of a car hood. We have changed, Abatangelo thought. We used to be smarter.
The Grant Street Gate outside Chinatown, fouled by birds, reminded him of the temple dragon in Cohn’s office. Assumption of Risk. Distinction without a Difference. Cohn had laughed at him- no baring of teeth, no little heh-hehs, but laughing just the same.
He wondered how Shel was doing. He felt an impulse to call off the hunt and go back, see how she was holding up, but the countering impulse held sway: Press on. The remaining drive dissolved in a frenzy of taillights, the braying rhythm of his horn, a fluid maze of other cars and the brief, urgent spaces between them. He parked in the garage at Fifth and Mission, removed the negatives from the photo packet and locked them in the trunk, tucking the prints into his pocket.
He was looking for a reporter named Bert Waxman, and found him in a bar named Benny’s. The place catered to the newspaper crews, and as Abatangelo broke through the doorway he confronted a bristling wall of noise. It was five o’clock, change of shift. The crowd stood two deep at the bar, the tables were full. Sawdust and peanut shells littered the floor. The men’s room door stood open, revealing mounds of ice melting in the urinals.
Abatangelo wandered the bar’s various rooms, searching the faces. He found Waxman at a corner table all the way in the back, sitting alone, face flushed with drink. His wavy red hair receded in front; he wore tortoiseshell glasses and a bow tie. Across the tabletop before him ravaged envelopes and crumpled mail lay scattered like debris.
Abatangelo had met Waxman during the Oregon trial, which the reporter came north to cover for the local alternative press- the “rad rags.” Alone among the reporters in the courtroom, Waxman refused to feed at the government trough, befriending the defense team instead. Tipped to Tony Cohn’s plan of attack on the informant, he detailed every squirm, every backstep, every lie as it came out on the stand. He followed up with the agents, gave them a chance to hang themselves in private interviews, then pronounced them corrupt bunglers in print. When his stories got picked up by the newswires, he got blackballed from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Local narcs, tipped by the feds, searched his hotel room for drugs.
He returned to the Bay Area after the trial equipped with a sterling new vision of himself. He began talking book projects, courting publishers, naming the editors he’d met or intended to meet. The books never quite materialized. His articles grew repetitious and sparse, he gained a reputation for slant. He started to drink a bit too hard. In the past few years he’d managed to beg his way back from limbo, taking stringer work, puff pieces, anything.
Since his release from prison, Abatangelo had come across Waxman’s by-line a half dozen times or so. There were indications Waxman was hitting his stride again. Though something less than pulsating, his most recent pieces did reveal a little of the old spine. By and large they focused on the radical right, the militia movement, the so-called tax revolt. Waxman brought a feverish devotion to his subjects, his prose teemed with drum-poundings and evocations of doom. All things considered- particularly the botched attempt to bring Cohn on board- Abatangelo found Waxman ripe with potential.
He pulled up a chair and sat down without a word. Waxman stopped reading and looked up, blinking in mild astonishment. Abatangelo extended his hand. “Maybe you remember me,” he said. “Dan Abatangelo. Ten years ago, you covered my trial, a federal CCE bit, up in Oregon.”
Waxman frowned, blinked, then it registered. His eyes flared and he offered an expansive smile. “A decorated veteran of our fabled War on Drugs,” he intoned, reaching out to take Abatangelo’s hand, shaking it avidly. “Ten years, it’s been that long?”
“Got raised a few weeks ago.”
Waxman blew out a gusty sigh and shook his head. “Fucking atrocity what they did to men like you. Marijuana. Christ. And for what? To let the real gangsters take over.”
Abatangelo nodded toward the ransacked envelopes and letters spread out across the tabletop. “Catching up with your admirers?”
Waxman laughed acidly, picked up one letter and tossed it onto a pile of others, as though into a fire. “I wrote a piece last week, about this Christian telethon that took place down around San Diego. They were raising money for their school board candidates, the usual Creationist mob, with some militia kooks thrown in for good measure. There were protestors outside, and this being the north end of the county, this drew out the neo-Nazis, skinheads, and just floor-model rednecks. Armed and ready for the Great Uprising. Fucking melee. I titled the piece ‘A Catfight for Christ’ and said it was a pretty good preview of the next Republican Convention.” He gestured toward his mail. “This stuff’s been sailing in by the truckload ever since.”
Abatangelo turned one letter around, read a little. “Any death threats?”
Waxman looked off with a sort of dreamy smugness. “Nothing so glamorous.” He rolled his glass across his chest and, feigning a grand manner, intoned, “ ‘You spent hack. Take it to the tabs, Jew.’ ”
Abatangelo pushed the letter away. “Tabloids take this kind of thing?”
Waxman waved the question off. “The best of the bunch, or the worst, take your pick, accused me of”- Waxman snapped his fingers- “how did he put it- ’hand-feeding the paranoid delusions of a disturbed and gullible minority.’ ”
It seemed strangely apropos that Waxman would have memorized the invective. “They mean liberals,” Abatangelo guessed.
Waxman gestured for the waitress and when she arrived he handed her a ten, telling her, “Given the crowd, why not bring me two, dear, save you a second trip.” The waitress turned to Abatangelo then and he noticed the weary eyes, the cheerless smile, the heavy rouge. The kind of woman Shel feared becoming, he thought. He ordered Myers neat with a water back, and once she was gone, Waxman said, “So what brings you to this particular watering hole? Lost?”
Abatangelo withdrew his photographs of Shel and set them on the table. Waxman eyed the packet warily.
“Take a look, Wax. Let me tell you a story.”
Waxman reluctantly reached out, collected the plasticine envelope and bent back the fold. He fished the pictures out and sighed, turning them right side up. He made it seem a monstrous chore.
“This is your sort of story, Wax. I’ve been following your work since I got out, and when this thing came my way, your name was the first that came to mind.” He checked Waxman’s eyes for suspicion. “Christians scare me too, Wax. And yet, when all’s said and done, they aren’t half as scary as some of their friends.”
Waxman punctuated his review of the photographs with a laborious sigh. Abatangelo leaned closer.
“I was in the tank ten years. When I first got in, the Aryans were cartoons. A sideshow in the yard. But over time, you know? They held their little conclaves. They went to school, they studied the IRA and the Whitecaps, they read The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf. They sent their converts out into the world. There’s your shock troops, Wax. How many militia contingents are there in this state, couple dozen? In every goddamn one, I promise, there’s at least one guy who got indoctrinated doing hard time. And he’ll be the one everybody listens to when it comes time to talk methods.”
The waitress returned with their drinks. Abatangelo waited till she was gone before resuming. “People in this country think drugs, Wax, they think bangers. Spades, pachucos. It’s bullshit. The white underground, the militias, without crank they’re nothing but a rumor. Crystal’s how they bankroll their ordnance. Which brings us to the pictures you’ve been looking at. You remember the face, right?”
Waxman glanced down at the photographs of Shel he was holding. He nodded.
“She only did three and change, wandered around for four years, then bumped into your average cranker. Some garden variety mutt, low chump on the totem pole, didn’t-know-what-I-was-getting-into sort of guy. The gang he ran with, based out in east CoCo County, they were heavy folks. Biker equivalent of Blut und Ehre. Pushing meth in the Delta, had the market to themselves. Then the Mexicans showed up. Boom, it’s war. And this little mutt, his mother was Chicano I guess, he had sympathies, he got greedy, whatever the reason, he tried to play it both ways. Now he’s in a spot. A spot where he’s had to kill to get back into good graces.”
He paused to judge the effect he was making. Waxman refused to look at him.
“You heard about the Briscoe family, bigwigs up in Lodi. Lost a pair of twins. Whacked. Guess who: same guy we’re talking about here. Same guy who did what you’re looking at.” He picked up one of the photographs and flicked it with his finger. “You’re going to hear word in the next day or two of some shoot-’em-up over in the Delta, too. Some kind of gunfight gone wrong. Again, guess who. Think like a prosecutor, Wax. Start with the little guy, the mutt who did this. Snap that link, then move up the chain. You’ll have the story of your career.” Abatangelo put the picture back down. “I’ve got some other pictures, too. One of a sixteen-wheeler rolling out of a compound at midnight from the property where these guys operate. What do you think the driver was carrying, Wax? Maybe we should trace the license, go ask him.”
Waxman reached up beneath his glasses and pinched his eyes, letting go with a long, burdened groan. “You talk the most incredible trash.”
“Make a few calls on your own,” Abatangelo urged. “Check it out.”
Waxman flinched, uttered a scoffing laugh, then seemed to suffer the inner onslaught of a dozen competing voices. Abatangelo inferred from this he was thinking it over. After a moment, returning his attention to the pictures, Waxman said, “This woman,” raising his hand to his glasses again, this time to lift them onto his brow, the better to study a close-up, “she has haunted eyes.” He ran his fingertip around her face. “I remember her better now.” Rubbing his hand across his mouth, he closed his eyes and said with forced irony, “It’s tawdry. It’s timely.”
“Don’t talk like that, Wax.”
“You’ll never see it out front.” Waxman shook his head, waved his hand. “Buried in back. Below the fold. Maybe just a column inch in the briefs.”
“I can live with that. For now. Come on, Wax. I know what you can do. This isn’t some chickenshit sidebar passed down through six other guys who don’t want it. It has your name all over it. And I’ll be right there with you. I’m no stranger to a camera. Look at these. I can do your art.”
Waxman frowned uneasily. And yet a certain willingness animated his eyes. Abatangelo felt something turn. He glanced at his watch. Shel had been alone for hours, but he couldn’t leave Waxman sitting there without a draft down on paper. Devoid of record, the impulse would die.
“Let’s hash something out right now, Wax.” There were paper place mats stacked atop a nearby piano. He pulled one down and took out a pen. “What’s our tag? Wax, hey.”
Waxman hugged his drink. He looked down at Shel’s pictures.
“If we are going to use this woman as bait for the reader’s sympathy,” he said, “we will have to make her a little less the moll.”
Abatangelo, poised to write, said, “Bait?”
“It’s the yuppie factor,” Waxman explained. “The new wealth, the young folks earning it, they’re sneakily conservative. Fallen women do not appeal to sentiment quite the way they used to. And these days one must, above all else, appeal to sentiment. Trust me.”
“Wax, you’re driving at what, exactly?”
Waxman shrugged. “I mean, well, not to be morbid. It’s just ironic. She needs to be human to be sympathetic. And she would be human instantly if she were dead.”
Asleep in Abatangelo’s bed, Shel dreamed she stood alone in an abandoned foundry, her reflection gazing back at her from a rust-spotted washroom mirror. The cement floor, sooty and broken, grated against the soles of her bare feet. The sink was dry and flecked with cold ash. She felt a terrifying premonition that It was about to happen. And yet, in her paralysis, she felt ready. Sunlight broke through a grainy skylight. A sharp, rattled banging rushed toward her through the silence.
She convulsed, bolting upright. Instantly her head rang in pain, worse than before. Taking in gulps of air, she blinked her eyes open, staring through tears. The walls drifted around as sleep gave way to a grating half-sleep. The sense she was returning from a distance lingered, and for a moment the room seemed more remembered than seen.
Light from a streetlamp filtered in through wafting blinds. A smell of winter rain seeped into the room through a window crack.
She was supposed to be up in an hour, an hour when? She found the alarm clock beside the bed and it told her the time was well past five. No, she thought, putting the clock back down. Can’t be. Not possible. Then she remembered, she’d turned off the alarm as soon as Danny’d left. Dumb, she thought. Pissy and dumb.
She rose up on one elbow, rubbing the grit from her eyes. She tried to sit up but her body felt thick, the pain confused her. That was when the pretense fled and the panic set in.
If every fear she had ever known had suddenly assumed bodily form and crashed through the door that minute, she would not have run. She would have said: What took you?
This pain has got to go, she thought, it’s giving you the willies. Wind scraped the roof and windows. The rain had returned, pattering against the building.
She lowered her feet to the floor and tested her weight. Movement had a watery feel; she quivered, standing. Stumbling room to room, she checked the bathroom for painkillers, the kitchen for a bit more liquor, the front room for Danny, flicking the overhead lights on then off.
Feeling chilled, she stumbled to the window and closed it. The room pivoted and folded into shapes, she had to close her eyes finally to keep from falling. Braced by the window frame, she looked down toward the street and spotted in a shallow doorway a homeless man with stone-colored skin, propped on a cane and draped in a blanket, smoking a cigarette. The ash glowed bright red in the haze. A bed of damp newspaper and oily cardboard lay around his feet. As though sensing her watching him, the man’s face rose and he stared up at her window. The blanket fell away from around his head as their eyes locked. He had thin, haggard features, close-cut gray hair, deep-set piercing eyes of a pale blue color.
Good God, Shel thought. It’s Felix.
She gagged and her legs gave way beneath her. Catching herself against the wall, she clutched the window frame, checking the man’s features again, thinking, No. She stared long and hard, the man staring right back, his face brightened by the ash of his cigarette as he took a long drag, then obscured in a smoky plume as he exhaled. Shel waited him out, studying everything about him, the cock of his head, the size of his hands, the angle of his body as he leaned on his cane. She convinced herself she’d been wrong. It wasn’t Felix at all. Strangely, however, as the illusion drained away, the dread intensified. She pulled the blind and went front to check the door lock.
Where’s Danny? she thought. We have to talk about Felix.
She returned to his room and sat back down on the bed, tallying up the things she felt reasonably certain were true. First, the fact Frank had come back alone last night meant something had gone wrong. Very wrong. Second, the fact none of the Akers brothers in particular had come back with Frank suggested one or more of them was dead. Third, all that meant there would be hell to pay. And Felix wouldn’t take two minutes to decide who was going to pay it.
Sure, they’d track down Frank, and there was no two ways about it, he was running now. After three years of trying to get him to the next safe place, she thought, all you accomplished was helping him sign his own death warrant. What a pitiless waste. Maybe they’ll write that on your gravestone, dear. Because Frank won’t be the one they really want now. Not those boys. Once they’ve put their faith in a woman who’s fucked up, they can’t get back at her fast enough.
Felix had made it clear, he would find her. And not just her. That one little offhand remark he’d made: I’m not gonna worry about my manners. People’ll get hurt. She had to believe Felix knew about Danny. They’d tracked down her case file or her probation report or some damn thing, bribed some bent cop for it. If they hadn’t already, they would quick. And when they did they’d have her life story in their hands and if they couldn’t find her right off one way, they’d flush her out another. Come for Danny. Her mother in Texas. Eddy Igo, any number of people.
As though picking at a scab, she went to the window again, peeked out behind the blind and saw the crippled homeless man leaning in the doorway exactly where he had before. Go, she thought. Run.
But running was ludicrous. They’d last a couple weeks at best. She had two hundred dollars to her name and that was back at the house. Might as well be on Mars. Danny, from the look of his apartment, was worse off than her, and he was on probation regardless. Not only would Felix be hunting for them, the law would, too, and regardless of which one got there first, Felix would mete out revenge. She could be killed in custody easy as anywhere else. Hell, easier. Double that for Danny.
It’s not his price to pay, she thought. You can’t do this to him. Go back.
She turned from the window, ran to the toilet and vomited. Her head rang, the bile was clear and sour. She couldn’t tell if it was her fear or something wrong with her head that brought this on. As though it matters, she thought. She collapsed onto her haunch on the cold tile floor.
The situation had a certain storybook quality, she decided. The maiden who descends into Hell to beg back her soul from the Devil. If memory served, the story did not end well. The maiden gets screwed. And that, she supposed- to use Frank’s expression- is fitting and fair.
If they didn’t already have Frank in hand, they’d use her for bait. Picturing what was likely to follow, she felt sick with terror again and hoisted herself up, preparing to retch, but nothing came. The perfect posture, she thought, for realizing you have no choice. She felt in need of a prayer. In need of a saint who would listen to it. St. Dismal.
She rose, rinsed her face and mouth with cold water then staggered back down the hallway to the bedroom. She looked around one final time. Calling to mind the words on Abatangelo’s scapular, she told herself: Remember me. Remember me, Danny, because I love you. And that’s why I can’t stay. I can’t bring my nightmare here. I’ll take it back where it belongs.
She drove with one hand on the wheel, the other clutching her head, focusing on the road’s white lines. A dull throbbing tinged with nausea was interrupted by a flare of pain from behind one eye. She winced and struggled to keep a grip on the wheel. She wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, but the headache was getting worse, and every time one of these flare-ups occurred, she felt dizzy and everything blurred.
To combat her growing fear she picked a song, the first that came to mind, a number she loved from the old days, Rickie Lee Jones: “We Belong Together.” She sang it to herself, over and over, the way a mother sings to a child in a storm.
And I can hear him in every footstep’s passing sigh
He goes crazy these nights
watching heartbeats go by
and they whisper- We belong together
You’re not gonna look back, she told herself, you’re not gonna whine and whimper, you’re gonna feel good about seeing Danny one last time, letting him know what he means to you, then do what needs to get done. You’re gonna face Felix, you’re gonna tell him the whole deal, you’re gonna get square with him or die. Tell him: You want revenge, here it is.
And you told her to stand tall when you kissed her…
No need to go hunting, Felix. Leave Danny out of it. Leave everybody but me out of it. The deal was you and me. I keep Frank in the saddle, I live, he lives. At least for a while. Can’t say I know all the facts, but I’d be willing to bet “in the saddle” is a reach. So here I am. It ain’t marriage, Felix, granted, but it’s what I bring to the table. I may be a lot of things, but one thing I am not is some two-faced sob sister trying to squeeze pity out of a rock. I don’t try to crawl back over a bridge I just burned down. I don’t beg back my last chance. And if that means I’m stuck, well hey. I can dig it. I’m stuck.
She reached the ranch house an hour later, by which time the song lyrics and monologue had done the trick. She felt braced for the worst. And that inspired a state of mind that strangely calmed her.
She gained the doorway after a dizzying effort on the porch stairs. Rowena stood at the very center of the kitchen, cigarette in one hand, book of matches in the other, looking for all the world as though she’d been standing in exactly that spot for days. A smell like burnt gum lingered in the air. A tin can full of menthol butts rested on the stove. From further within the house the babble of Duval’s television leaked from beyond his bedroom door.
“What the fuck happened to you?” Rowena said as Shel entered the light. Her tone of voice suggested she actually meant to ask: Is it going to happen to me? Shel didn’t answer, but instead concerted her strength to work her way along the wall to the breakfast nook where she took a seat. Setting her head on the tabletop, she closed her eyes.
“Where’s Roy?” Rowena asked, her voice rising. “I been over to the house, walked the whole damn way and back, over a mile. Nobody there. Not Roy, not Lyle. I been back to the compound, three times since dark. Nobody there, neither. I got a bad feeling. You know something, tell me. I got a right to know. I got a kid, remember?” She waited for an answer, and getting none, moved closer. “To hell with you. To hell with Frank.” She clutched the side of the table and shook it. “You hear me? Things were fine, they were going goddamn fine, then Frank. Fuck him and you, the two of you, I got no place to go, I got no money, no car, I had to hitch my ass back here from the movie me and Duval got shipped to last night. You tell me and you tell me now what the hell’s going on.”
She made a halfhearted lunge at Shel, then changed tack and started ransacking her pockets.
“You got money, you give it to me. Give it!”
Her hands pecked at Shel’s clothing. Shel tried and failed to fend her off. In the end she put her hands up, thinking, God help me, touching her hair. Her head felt like it was going to come apart.
“The truck,” Shel said finally. “Maybe…”
Rowena found Shel’s keys in her pant pocket. She ripped them out and backed away from the table.
“ ’Bout time,” she said. She gathered her coat from the back of a chair and strode to the rear doorway, calling out, “Duval, you stay put, hear? I’ll be back.” She struggled with her coat then turned to face Shel. “Look at you,” she said with disgust. “Come back looking like a punching bag. You’re pathetic, know that? You deserve what you get.”
Shortly Shel heard the truck start up and the tires throwing gravel. She set her head back down on the table and looked about the kitchen as though for the last time. The wall clock ticked, the refrigerator hummed. A cobweb hung like a strand of hair in the ceiling corner. On the window ledge, a tiny fern she’d bought at Walgreens struggled to grow inside a Mickey Mouse cup. The ageless mouse smiled back at her with berserk joy. I’ve come back here to save the people I love, she told Mickey. I’ve come back to state my case to the Devil.
She found herself singing again, the same tune as before. “We belong together,” she repeated, over and over, eyes closed. Outside, the wind picked up. Tree limbs scraped the walls of the house, banging the gutters along the roof. The noise roused her, she opened her eyes.
Duval stood just beyond the table’s edge, staring at her.
“Hey,” Shel whispered. She worked up a smile and reached out her hand. The boy backed away.
“Now don’t,” she said. She struggled upright. The room swam. “Help Aunt Shel to her feet, all right? She’s got some medicine in the basement. She’ll feel worlds better if you just give her a hand.”
Duval continued edging away. All of sudden, with the same blank expression he wore for everyone, he spun around and lunged from the room, fleeing back down the hall. Shortly his door slammed shut and the latch was thrown.
Got a real streak going with the fellas right now, Shel thought.
She gained her balance and removed her shoes, the better to feel the floor beneath her. Using the wall, she edged down the hallway, stumbled to the narrow door, and peered down the wood plank stairway to the cellar. Vertigo greeted her at the bottom. Who put this chasm in my house? The overhead lamp swayed back and forth, tipped by her own hand reaching for the chain. Shadows ballooned then shrank on opposite walls. She drew a breath so deep it made her cough, then gripped the handrail, sliding down step by step.
At the bottom the concrete floor was clammy and freezing cold. A disgusting shiver rifled up her legs at the same time a thunderclap of pain shot down from her head. She faltered, one knee gave way and, holding out her arm, she managed to hit the floor softly, whispering, “Whoa, boy.”
Despite her best effort to be stoic, her face was wet with tears. Every inch of her skin bled sweat, and she sat there panting, holding her head and wondering, Good God, what is this?
After several minutes the pain at least became a known quantity, she could think. Where oh where did I put that stash, she wondered, Frank’s old meds, from the times I took him to the hospital. Unable to reach her feet again, she crawled around the back of the stairwell and found the old blue suitcase in a clutter of sagging boxes. She fumbled with the clasps, then just threw it down, busting it open in a cloud of vaguely familiar clothes. Tucked into the inner flap she found the small brown prescription bottle, inside of which she found Haldol, some Pavulon, Nembutal, a Darvocet. Quite a brew, she thought. Not a painkiller in the crowd, but given the circumstances, I’ll settle for numb.
She swallowed dry the first two capsules that tottled into her palm. Taking a deep breath, she settled down onto the cold floor and prepared to wait.
Abatangelo gave Waxman a lift to the Cantina Corozan, down the street from his flat. It was time for the rituals of sobriety. Coffee. Ice water. Cheap heavy food. Waxman leaned into the pay phone, connecting with the Metro desk to get a go for the next day’s edition.
The article, scrawled on place mats, a third of it in Abatangelo’s handwriting, lay on the counter. It had taken two hours to get it down. After muddled agonizing, Waxman chose a front-on shot of Shel for the art.
This was the way with Wax, Abatangelo remembered, you had to stroke his hand. You had to check his fever, bring him soup, tell him how much you loved absolutely every thought he stole from you. Otherwise he’d stop listening halfway through. The eyes would glaze over. You’d never recognize a word you said.
One of Waxman’s modifications, except for one teasing line, was to downplay the Aryan Menace theme, until the connections seemed a bit less contrived. Abatangelo had responded, “Sure, sounds smart,” secretly feeling a little off the wall for having played this card to begin with. Blut und Ehre, he thought. Blood and Honor. Where the hell did that come from?
Another of Waxman’s self-assertions involved removal of all mention of Abatangelo from the article. In defensive tones, Waxman had argued that an “anonymous source in the narcotics trade” conveyed more credibility to the average reader than a named felon. Abatangelo offered only token protest. Remaining nameless had the advantage of postponing Shel’s awareness that he was the one who’d dropped the dime on Frank. It troubled him, thinking how she’d react once she knew. He made a pact with himself- he would never claim he only did it for her.
Regardless, if all went well, in less than twenty-four hours, Frank would be on the run alone, in custody for murder, or dead. Better than I have a right to expect, he thought. But exactly what Frank had coming. Remember, he’s not just some sorry, hapless twerp. He kills people.
At the pay phone Waxman seemed neither agitated nor terribly pleased. They were dealing, him and whoever. The smell of boiling beans and fatty meat impregnated the tiny cantina. Above the grill, Christmas decorations streaked with greasy dust rattled in the overhead fan’s humming exhaust.
Waxman said, “Sure, sure, sure,” and got off the phone. He scratched his throat and turned, eyes searching out Abatangelo, nodding. They were on. He crossed the room as though the man on the other end of the line were still arguing with him.
“Congratulations,” Abatangelo said. “How’s it feel?”
Waxman sat down and tasted his coffee. “We bump a piece on the American Atheist Society. Twenty column inches somewhere between the obits and the weddings. No art.”
Abatangelo shrugged. “From tiny acorns,” he offered. He would have liked a stronger bid out of Waxman, but he told himself, Be patient. He slid the manila envelope containing the best of his prints- of Shel, the ranch house, the cars coming in and out- across the counter. “Just in case,” he said, trying to sound optimistic. Waxman accepted the envelope, then fingered the article lying out before him, folding it into sixes.
“One o’clock deadline,” he said. “This still needs tuning.” He removed his glasses and put his fingers, short and thick and freckled, to his eyes, massaging them in circles. “Take it to the tabs, Jew,” he murmured.
“You ride yourself too hard,” Abatangelo told him.
Waxman smiled wanly, finished his coffee and put his glasses back on. Away from his face, his hands shook.
“I’ve got two cats to feed,” he announced. He rose and searched his pockets for his keys.
They bid each other good night. Abatangelo, outside the cantina, watched while Waxman trudged uphill along Delores Park, brightened one moment, darkened the next, as he passed through successive wastes of lamplight. When he vanished finally into the shadowed doorway of his apartment building, Abatangelo turned away to find his car.
Steering toward home, he fidgeted with the radio and found a nightfly playing Ellington’s “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set”- winking horns, a Johnny Hodges solo insinuating flesh and romance. At Market and Church, streetlights flashed overhead in a winter mist. Derelicts and leather queens ignored the crosswalks, wandering the street in defiant oblivion. In a high lit window, a man with a sheet gathered around his neck got a midnight haircut from a woman in a red slip.
Abatangelo pictured Shel lying awake in his bed, dressed as he’d left her, in his sweatshirt and boxers. He imagined she’d be restless, staring at the walls. Probably her headaches had kept up. It still seemed a miracle of sorts she was even there.
He stopped at a corner market for another liter of Stolichnaya. Two Lebanese brothers manned the store- one scowled, the other offered a smile of dizzying falsity. Abatangelo asked the two brothers where the pay phone was, and in sudden, familial unison they pointed back toward the ice machine. He dialed his own number, preparing to apologize for not calling sooner. It rang ten times. Eleven times. Behind the register the smiling brother, mimicking a baseline fade-away, ash-canned a crumpled candy bar wrapper from ten feet.
“I not be stopped,” he shouted, fists in the air. “I am Hakeem.”
Abatangelo hung up, barged out of the grocery, threw himself behind the wheel of his car, and headed for North Beach. Don’t go off till you know there’s something to go off about, he told himself. She’s not your secretary, why would she answer your phone? She’s unplugged the damn thing. She’s asleep. He turned onto Columbus recklessly, tires catching the film of fresh oil the rain had lifted off the pavement. Abreast of The Smiling Child Market he braked so suddenly the car fishtailed across the center stripe. He nearly tagged the 30 Stockton heading downtown.
He parked and charged up the stairs. The door was locked, like he’d left it; he tried to believe that was a good sign. He opened and closed the door quietly, in case she was sleeping. Leaving the vodka in the kitchen, he continued back to the bedroom. A note rested atop the pillow on the unmade bed.
Dear Danny:
Don’t hate me, okay? I love you. I mean that. Bottom of my heart. Now and always. But there are people after me, people I don’t wish on anyone. Least of all you.
Don’t follow. You won’t find me.
– Shel
He read it twice, the paper rattling in his hands as he told himself not to panic. You won’t find me, she says. It wasn’t meant as a tease, he realized, she was trying to warn him off. But there was no way he could do as she asked. Follow? You bet. And I know just the place to start.
All things considered, though, a little insurance was called for.
He found a nearby pay phone and dialed. A vaguely toasted voice responded in a tone that suggested availability. “I’m here.”
“This is Dan. Dan Abatangelo.”
Surf music wailed in the background. After a moment, the voice on the other end shouted, “Right. Sure. I’m here.”
The man’s name was Jimmy Toretta. Abatangelo had met him at Dominic’s café. Toretta had introduced himself with an air of breezy respect and said they’d met in the neighborhood long ago. “I was just a kid, but you were a legend, man. Bad Dan. We all knew you around here.” Abatangelo took him for undercover and kept his distance. Then Marco, Dominic’s bartender, gave the all clear. “He’s nobody to worry about,” Marco said. “He’s just him. He operates. Talk to him, don’t talk to him. You’re good either way.” And so Abatangelo talked to him. Just once, at Dominic’s, over wine. Toretta had a boutique operation. Psychedelics. Exotic companions. Weaponry, for discriminating folk. Call anytime, Toretta said. You and me, we’re neighborhood.
“It’s late,” Abatangelo said, “I realize.”
“Not at all,” Toretta responded, turning the music down. “Nighttime. The right time.”
“This is sudden, too.”
“I can deal with sudden. I can deal with late.”
“Can we meet?”
“Sure,” Toretta said. “Absolutely. Know your way to the zoo?”
The zoo, Abatangelo thought, smelling a joke. “Be there in fifteen,” he offered. “West lot.”
“Whoa, chief.” Toretta chuckled. “Make it thirty. Walk, don’t run. Am I right?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there.”
“Me too. In thirty.”
Abatangelo made way for the park, then west on Cross-Over Drive to JFK. At Stern Grove he turned right onto Sloat then out to Ocean Beach. He parked in the west lot near the reflecting pool, spotting Toretta’s maroon Aerostar parked in the cobbled distance near the Irish Cultural Center. For all his talk about slowing it down, Abatangelo thought, he was the first to get here.
He walked to the van’s driver side window. “Anybody here?”
“Door’s open,” Toretta called out.
Inside the van, in the back, two refitted bucket seats faced each other across fireproof carpeting, with padlocked cabinets along each wall. Nothing lay in plain view. A slide window communicated to the front, also locked.
Toretta had a low-key visual style: Top-Siders, corduroy slacks, v-neck cardigan with a white T-shirt underneath. His hair was thick, his skin shone. Every woman’s idea of: Oh. The only thing- sometimes, fresh from the psychedelic kitchen, he smelled of ether.
“Mind if I smoke?” Toretta asked. The perfect host. Abatangelo waved his hand as a go-ahead, and Toretta lit his cigarette. His face yellowed, the eyes hollowed into shadow. He blew out his match, then drummed his fingers on his knee.
“I presume we’re talking a piece here,” Toretta said. “You know I can’t advance you, right? A straight five, up front.”
Abatangelo was at a loss at this, so he laughed. “I thought we were neighborhood, Toretta.”
Toretta exhaled smoke. “You can always try Anthony’s Gun Rack. Except, oh yeah, you’re a felon.”
“So you quote me a prick rate.”
“I smell risk.”
Abatangelo tapped his hands together uneasily. This was arrogance, not caution. He felt an urge to make a scene. “I need a piece. For protection. Where’s the risk in that?”
“I’m not hunting you down for my money.”
“Who says I’m going anywhere?”
Toretta trimmed the ash of his cigarette against the edge of his ashtray. “Just for the sake of knowing, why the rush?”
“It’s not your problem,” Abatangelo said. “Besides, you said sudden was no hassle, remember?”
“I don’t need some low-level idiot with his ass in the fire pointing back my way.”
“I don’t do that, Toretta. I hold my mud.”
“Suppose we’re not talking about you?”
“There’s no one else to talk about. Look, Toretta, are we making a deal or fucking around?”
Toretta crushed out his cigarette and wiped his fingers with a handkerchief. It gave both of them time to reheel. Abatangelo wondered if the handkerchief smelled of ether.
Toretta said, “How much you got on you?”
“Three.”
“Christ.” Toretta sighed and turned away. “I got to tell you, my friend, this tack you’re taking, it’s not flattering. You have a reputation to maintain.”
“I’ll have to talk with my image. We good?”
“Not at three.”
“Okay, fuck me. Three now, the rest later.”
“Next Friday,” Toretta said. “And no telling me Dominic’s good for it. Your merchandise, your debt.”
“Show me what you’ve got,” Abatangelo said.
Toretta turned around, worked the combination on one of the cabinets, opened it and withdrew a hard-shell case. He said he had a few extra pieces with him because it was Fleet Week. He declined to elaborate and Abatangelo didn’t ask him to.
There were three guns in immediate view, each resting in a neoprene mold.
“What’s the advantage of the Colt?” Abatangelo asked.
“It’s the smallest,” Toretta told him. “That’s about it.”
Abatangelo nodded. In a sudden reversion to six years old, he found himself liking the name: Mustang. He also realized it was not a criterion.
“The Beretta?”
Toretta picked up the second weapon and cradled it in his palm. “This has the largest magazine, thirteen rounds. It’s a little thick in the hand. It’s accurate, though. How good a shot are you?”
“It’s never really come up,” Abatangelo admitted.
Toretta stared in disbelief. “You’re not serious.”
“The way I did business, things went better if I used my brain, not muscle.”
Toretta’s brow furrowed. “The brain is a muscle.”
“The brain,” Abatangelo said, “is an organ. My point is that in my day, especially compared to now, things were relatively mellow.”
“Not that mellow. Not possible.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I hit surprise a few miles back. Where there’s money, there’s heat.”
Abatangelo groaned and rubbed his eyes. “I will admit, in the past I’ve resisted the impulse to have weapons around because, to my mind, they carry a distinctly phallic association.”
Toretta laughed. “Exactly.”
They sat like that a moment, staring across a chasm of incomprehension. Finally, Toretta shook his head, put down the Beretta, and held out a black 9 mm.
“This is an Israeli piece, a Sirkis. It aims reasonably straight and you’re likely to stop anything you hit. Go ahead. Hold it.”
Abatangelo took the weapon in his hand and felt an immediate match. It was very light, he could palm it easily. The grip seemed natural and uncomplicated. Like picking a pup from a litter, he thought. You just know. “What are its disadvantages?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager. He still hoped to shave the price.
“It’s a blowback,” Toretta said. “The barrel’s going to return on you to eject the fired round. The site’s not all that hot. It’s double action, the first trigger pull’s harder than the rest. Other than that there’s not much to think about.”
“I like that,” Abatangelo admitted.
“It uses a standard parabellum round. Get them anywhere. Don’t need a permit for ammo. Good news for felons.”
Rowena came back in Shel’s truck an hour after she left. From the sounds of it, she’d brought a man back with her. Shel listened from the cellar. Rowena barked instructions at Duval to leave them alone, go out in the living room. “Play that game of yours with the magazines,” she shouted, slamming the bedroom door.
Through the floorboards Shel heard the drunken tottering steps, the sotted lunge onto the bed, the murmured negotiations. “Hey, call me Roger,” the man slurred, then came the scattering of belts and shoes and clothing around the room and shortly the yawning groans and yelps and the rhythmic knocking of the bed against the wall.
She went out for a trick, Shel realized. She must’ve worked a bar. Otherwise why bring him back here? And she didn’t just want her rate, she wanted every cent he had on him, so a car job wouldn’t cut it. Bring him back here, promise him something special. She’ll make it quick, he was drunk to begin with, she’ll wait till he nods off then roll him. Leave him here to sleep it off. Grab Duval and disappear. In my truck, Shel thought, staring at the ceiling.
She’d been unable to attempt the stairs, too weak, too much in pain, her limbs too soupy from pills. The cinder-block cellar walls smelled clammy and felt cold; a grave vault came to mind. She recoiled from the morbidity. Come on, girl, buck up. The pain does these things, she thought. The pain and the fear, they’re the evil sidekicks in this episode. Which reminded her. She dug the prescription bottle out of her pocket, fought with the cap using first her fingers then her teeth, and swallowed the first three pills that materialized. A Haldol, another Pavulon, one of the green jobs. The pills went down slow and dry.
Come on, she thought. It was time for something to happen.
As things grew quiet in the bedroom above, Shel renewed her search of the junk piled up on a bookshelf against the cellar wall. She’d already ransacked everything within reach, cardboard cartons, suitcases, shoe boxes. The object of interest was the amethyst Danny had given her in San Diego that first week after they met. She wanted to wear it from here on out, whatever happened. If Danny came to ID her body she wanted him to find it among her effects.
She thought it through as best she could, the move to this house, where she’d put what, and finally it came to her. She’d hidden it in a hatbox filled with snapshots, along with Danny’s letters. She’d put the box in the crawl space where Frank wouldn’t go rummaging around for it.
She looked up. Crawl space, dead ahead. Mustering the strength from a reservoir of will she feared was almost empty, she dragged herself up to the low concrete wall. Tongue between her teeth, she propped one knee onto the crawl space ledge, reaching as far as her fingernails could get her. The hatbox tottered from its perch atop a steamer truck, then fell open, spilling pictures. Letters. The black felt box.
Several car doors slammed outside. Withdrawing her hand from the crawl space, she listened. Scurrying down, she shambled to the window well, grabbed a stepladder near the wall and struggled up three rungs so she could peer out. The glass was filthy. She wiped the grime away with her fist, craning to see.
It wasn’t Felix. It wasn’t Dayball or Tully, either, or Roy or his brothers or even Frank.
Six dark men. They wore gray suits. Two of them carried valises. They marched across the gravel toward the house.
She heard the front door splinter off its hinges from one hard kick and Duval screamed in the living room. It sounded less like the scream of a child than the shriek of a bird. Rowena slammed out of the bedroom, running toward the sound and then she was screaming, too, her voice twice as hideous as the boy’s. The sound of blows and angry shouts in Spanish, then the rubbery screech of duct tape and the screams were stifled to whimpers. The men rushed about the house, searching rooms. Duval and Rowena got dragged to the kitchen, thrown to the floor. “Puta madre,” a man cackled. The other men laughed, followed by the muffled shriek of a silenced weapon fired six times- three in rapid succession, a moment later three again- then the same sound slightly softer, as though through a pillow, from the bedroom above. Call me Roger, she thought.
She watched the ceiling, trying to swallow and envisioning the footsteps seeping blood through the floor. The Mexicans, she thought. Christ. How’d they find out about this place? They must’ve captured Roy, or Snuff. Or Frank. This wasn’t part of the bargain, she thought. I didn’t come back for this.
Clambering into the crawl space, she scraped her elbows and knees against the concrete. She shoved the letters and snapshots back into the hatbox and stuffed it behind the steamer trunk where it wouldn’t be seen. Then she grabbed the black felt box and scrambled on, wanting the amethyst now more than ever. Reaching the far wall, she tucked her knees to her chest, pressed the felt box to her heart and prayed for luck.
The stairwell stood directly across from the crawl space opening, so Shel could watch as the cellar door eased open. Two men descended slowly in the harsh lamplight. Shel watched them appear, glistening black shoes, neat gray suits. The Tigers of Bacchus. The smaller one had a lithe, wiry, tap-dancer body. A birthmark erupted from his eyebrow like a smear. The other one was huge, dough-faced, cracking his neck as he walked, like a fighter. With the toes of their shoes they nudged the suitcases, boxes, scattered debris, moving it out of their path.
The large one spotted the cubbyhole first. He tugged at the little one’s sleeve and pointed. They eased apart. From different sides of the room they advanced warily. Each man held his weapon against his leg. Their faces in the light, the eyes in particular, glistened from the bare bulb. The eyes were stony and tense and a little afraid. It made Shel like them just a little, a tremble of hope, they were human after all, like her. Afraid.
“I’ve got no beef with you,” she shouted, trying to claw herself further back into the crawl space. Her voice echoed in the cramped surround. The two men stepped closer.
From his pocket, the larger one withdrew a Baggie filled with chalky crystal, lobbing it gently in one hand. Upstairs, to the tune of “Ave Maria,” one of the others crooned the epitaph Vaya con Dios, laughing as the syllables and the melodic line coincided. Shel inched back, pressing herself against the cold wall, staring at the bony disfigured man squinting at her as though wondering if he knew her. Under her breath, she heard herself tell him, “Be civilized.”
The little one reached into his coat pocket and removed a photograph. Studying it briefly, he murmured something then passed it to the larger one, who held the Baggie between his teeth in order to free his hand. He took the picture, studied it, nodded, and handed it back. The little one gestured for Shel to come nearer.
It occurred to her then what a merciful gesture it must have been: one moment, Amethyst fleeing in terror. The next, turned to stone.
Abatangelo lay the Sirkis on the seat beside him as he drove out the Delta Highway. He couldn’t shake the feeling that having it there was a sign of weakness. An indication of how much, as Cohn put it, he’d changed. In the old days, he’d driven cross-country with a trunk full of product, put down beach crew mutinies, settled scores with wholesalers trying to rob him blind. He’d never felt the need for a weapon till now. He’d been a natural at talking people down from stupid moves and besides, he was blessed, he could walk away, it was only money. Such was the insanity of youth and luck.
He headed down the gravel access road with his lights off. As he broke the first hill and the ranch house came into view he killed the motor, shifted into neutral and let the car glide. When it came to a stop he slipped it into park and dropped the gun into his pocket. Crouching, he ran toward the house.
Something was wrong with the door. It stood crooked in the frame, listing slightly in the porchlight. Moving closer, he saw that the hinge leaves were shorn from the doorjamb.
He scurried down the sideyard, running low, hoisting himself up at the window ledges. Every room lay dark and still. The backdoor remained locked and he broke a small glass pane with his fist. He picked away the glass, feeling through for the lock. Edging the door open, he went to his knees in the dark and crept through the entry.
In the kitchen the refrigerator door stood open, emitting a yellow droning light. Abatangelo could make out two shapes, one large, one small. He clicked on the overhead and withstood a surge of nausea. Bound and gagged with duct tape, a freckled, brown-haired woman he didn’t recognize and a cinnamon-skinned boy knelt lifeless, heaped together side by side. Each had gunshot wounds at the temple and the base of the neck. The woman’s wounds were black and pulpy; the boy’s were worse. On exit, one of the rounds had exploded, shattering his skull into a mangled knit of bloody hair and fissured bone and brain tissue.
Abatangelo lunged back through the entry and out the door, making it to the gravel before retching on his knees. Above him, the moon shone brief and clear through passing clouds. Dogs barked in the distance. He wiped his face with his hands, regained his feet and shambled back into the house.
The blood formed a common pool around the woman and boy. Ants caravanned from the wall to the bodies, scavenging through bone and hair. A coarse white powder, like cottonseed, glittered the bodies. Granules flecked their hair, their skin, their half-open eyes. Abatangelo moistened his finger and caught a taste from the bag crumpled at the dead woman’s side. It was acrid, chemical. Mix of some sort. They wanted it to look like a burn, whoever they were.
Looking elsewhere around the room he noticed a pair of shoes, the ones Shel had been wearing, beneath the breakfast nook table.
He pushed at the swinging door, made the hall and checked the rest of the house. He found a bedroom he thought might be hers: Wadded Kleenex dotted the floor; a pyramid of shoes in the closet. There was no recent sign of her.
In another bedroom he found a third body, this one a man. He moved closer, the bolt of sickness rising again. He wondered for a moment if it was Frank, then realized the man was too old. Overweight, graying hair, facedown on bloody sheets. Blood had congealed at his ears and nostrils. Blood spattered the wall behind. He’d probably been sleeping, Abatangelo thought, one shot to the small of the back, the other to the head. Wakened by one, killed by the other. There was mix scattered here, too, another discarded bag, flung against the man’s back.
A suit jacket lay flung in the corner. Abatangelo searched the pockets and found a wallet containing business cards: Roger C. Quenelle, Vice President, Acquisitions, Founders Financial. He had snapshots of two glaringly dissimilar teenage daughters and a wife whose face shot out like a sunflower from the ruffled neck of her blouse.
In the living room, a breeze rustled the bedsheet curtain, filling the house with cold air smelling of rain and manure and acacia blossom. On his way back through the kitchen Abatangelo spotted the cellar door ajar. The light was on.
He took the gun from his pocket and crabbed down the plank stair, back to the wall. A mindless debris cluttered the floor: faded clothes, twine, crumpled newspaper. Nothing was smashed or destroyed, there were no obvious signs of struggle, more like a search. He called Shel’s name, sifting through the litter. Moonlight through the window well angled across the far wall. Spotting the crawl space ledge, he edged toward it. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he detected, far back against the wall, a small felt box.
He tucked the gun in his waistband, pushed off from the floor, folded his body into the opening and crawled back across the concrete toward the wall. He recognized the box. The amethyst was gone. She’d crawled back here, he thought, trying to hide.
He checked the immediate vicinity for something else, a scrap of clothing, a blood smear, anything. He found only an empty prescription bottle and several mismatched capsules gluey to the touch; someone had spat them out instead of swallowing them. He gathered up the capsules, capped them inside the prescription bottle, pocketed it and the jewel box then crawled back to the cellar floor and returned to the kitchen upstairs, searching for the phone.
He found it on the wall beside the refrigerator. Above it, using a red felt-tip pen, someone had written among the penciled phone numbers: Francisco, The Lady Waits. Come See. Sunday At Three. Same Spot On The River.
It was like finding someone there, someone to tell him what happened. And yet reading the words over again, he told himself: It doesn’t mean she’s alive.
Using his handkerchief, he lifted the receiver and dialed Waxman’s number. A dozen rings, then Waxman picked up and hung up in one move. Abatangelo dialed again and pounded his fist against the door frame, counting. This time Waxman bit on the fourth ring, growling, “Who in God’s name…?”
“Shut up, Wax,” Abatangelo shouted. “Shut up and listen. I got home and she was gone, Wax. I went out to her place in east county and there’s three people dead. Get over here, Wax. Get out of bed, get your car and get your fat ass over here.”
He was panting, his head felt cold. After a moment Waxman said uneasily, “There is no need to insult me.”
In the same breath Abatangelo apologized and gave Waxman directions to the house. “Another thing, Wax, call Tony Cohn. Hear me? Tell him, get over here now, not later, now. You getting this?”
Waxman said, “What do you intend to tell the police?”
“I’m not telling them anything, Wax. You are.”
He hung up. With his handkerchief he wiped the phone clean, his mind rabid with defensive impulses. Sooner or later, he thought, somehow, they’ll get around to pinning this on me. It seemed an utterly chickenshit preoccupation, then he told himself he’d be doing Shel no good in custody. He needed to stay free. He couldn’t help her unless he was free.
Taking one last look at the woman and boy on the floor, he felt an urge to kneel down and brush the ants away.
The entire hollow teemed with squad cars, paddy wagons, evidence vans, ambulances. Cruiser lights spun in all directions, bouncing off the walls of the buildings, the hills, each other. The chaos of swirling light created an odd illusion, in which things appeared and disappeared in circus color. It seemed like both the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
Obscured by the same patch of laurels and scrub oaks he’d used for camouflage before, Abatangelo watched from the hilltop above the ranch house as the police went about the time-consuming business of scratching up evidence. Spotlights brightened the dooryard, flaring through the branchwork of the elm trees and acacias surrounding the house. A pair of officers manned each doorway while another patrolled the yard. A phalanx of officers marched shoulder to shoulder along the road, flashlights trained on the ground. Other units had been sent off to search the barn, the outbuildings, the compound at the back from which three scared, hungry dogs barked manically in the night.
A crowd of curiosity seekers were being held back at the county road. Some parked their cars or trucks out there and stood on top of their vehicles, training binoculars or simply craning their necks, trying for a glimpse of the dingy white ranch house with the stone cladding beyond the first hill, all lit up like a carnival. Ranch houses perched atop hills miles away had lights burning, and even from a distance silhouettes could be spotted at the windows.
Abatangelo checked his watch. Well over an hour had passed since he’d left Waxman alone inside the house. The reporter was sitting with the guys from Homicide now. Abatangelo knew the detectives would pound on him. Something was bound to eke out. Waxman was an easy man to play upon, as Abatangelo himself could testify.
He’d pointed out to Waxman the notation above the phone, addressed to “Francisco.” He’d told him, “If there’s anything you do, make sure they see this.” Given what Shel had said about a botched ambush and the war brewing with Felix Randall, the only reasonable candidates for killer were the Mexicans. He’d obsessed on the phrase “The Lady Waits” for the past hour, managing finally to squeeze from it at least a token optimism. Shel had been taken, not killed, he thought. If the point was simply to kill her, they’d have left her with the others. A deal was being struck, a trade arranged. The ones left behind, they were for show.
Shortly a black Lexus turned off the county road, negotiated entrance to the property with the officers manning the roadblock, and made its way toward the house. It parked beside the coroner’s wagon, and Abatangelo recognized Tony Cohn as he belted his overcoat and stepped from the car. Cohn spoke to an officer outside the house and handed the cop his business card. At that same moment, a second officer rapped on the side of the coroner’s wagon and it pulled away, bearing three bodies.
The fact Cohn showed up on Waxman’s behalf would tie Abatangelo to the killings no doubt. He knew that. But Waxman would need a lawyer to lean on, someone to back him up and get him out of there, and no attorney they could trust would’ve responded to the call as mindfully as Cohn under the circumstances. Besides, tying Abatangelo to Shel would take any cop with a pulse five minutes. Fingers were most likely already tapping on computer keys. If it took till dawn to drag Abatangelo into this, they’d be way behind schedule.
He eased back into the shadows then made his way downhill to his car. He drove along the now familiar, winding county road to Oakley, past the sprawling ranches, the recent subdivisions, circling a strip mall twice, making absolutely certain no one trailed behind. Pulling down a narrow side street with parallel fences towering on either side, he eased halfway down then stopped, waiting for the headlights of a trail car to appear behind him. None did. He listened as the streetlight hummed overhead, noticing a cat perched atop a nearby garage, cleaning itself. Putting the Dart in gear again, he drove to the alley’s end, turned right and pulled into the lot of the same all-night grocery he’d come to that first night out, the one named Cheaper.
The place was lit up like an emergency room. Insomniac shoppers, many obese, all of them white, milled in and out. Within fifteen minutes Cohn’s Lexus arrived, pulling up next to the Dart. Abatangelo waited, again to check for anyone following, then stepped from his car into the backseat of Cohn’s.
The car smelled new, with a hint of pipe tobacco thickening the air. Cohn turned sideways behind the wheel, offering a pained look that, combined with the play of shadows across his face, accentuated its angles and made him look almost skeletal. Waxman sat in the passenger seat, gripping his elbows, arms folded across his midriff as though to contain an upsurge of bile. He was wearing the same shabby tweed jacket and Oxford button-down shirt as earlier, the collar frayed and hanging open; apparently he’d lacked the time to knot a proper bow tie. He looked strangely naked without it.
Neither man looked directly at Abatangelo, preferring instead to acknowledge his arrival with sidelong glances and thin smiles. The tension compressed the space inside the car, making it feel as though their faces were pushed together. Abatangelo nodded to Cohn, then turned to Waxman. “Good to see you in one piece,” he offered. “Things go like you thought?”
Waxman hesitated, glancing out the window at the bright storefront. “They gave me a little tour first, walked me through the rooms, showed me the bodies. The mother and child in particular. I watched as some technician inserted a needle in their eyes, withdrawing ocular fluid. The detectives, they asked me how I felt about it- the murders, I mean, not the bit with the needle.”
Abatangelo flashed on what he’d overheard a cop say once about a witness. Shaken well, ready to use. “It’s part of the process, Wax,” he said gently. “Messing with your head.”
“Well, yes,” Waxman said, waving off the show of concern. “They were remarkably well informed, by the way.”
“About?”
“You,” Waxman said.
Abatangelo chuckled. “I assume you’re not surprised by that. I’m not. This they, who are we talking about exactly?”
“There were three of them,” Waxman said. “The lead detective’s very sharp. Older guy, tall, thin, homely. Could play Ichabod Crane in the local repertory. His partner is a little chunkier; you can smell the coffee on him from across the room. Holds an unlit cigarette the whole time, tells you he’s trying to quit. It’s a very clever distraction.”
“Wax- ”
“There was a narc there, too, young guy- suede jacket, sharkskin boots- natty little goon. Said he worked on some sort of task force out here. An absolute, unmitigated asshole.”
“He threatened you.”
“He kicked me,” Waxman admitted. “In the leg.” He glanced at Cohn and Abatangelo sheepishly, then shrugged. “He threw a tantrum, called me names.”
“Let’s get back to well informed,” Abatangelo suggested.
Waxman nodded. “They brought up your name almost instantly.”
Cohn seemed indifferent to this news, which was hardly a surprise. Or maybe it’s his game face, Abatangelo thought, at the same time wondering what the lawyer and the reporter had found to talk about on the ride from the murder site.
“You showed them the message above the phone,” Abatangelo said.
“Of course I did.”
“And they said?”
“If you’ll wait, I’ll tell you.” Waxman, irked, adjusted his glasses. “Apparently they knew Ms. Beaudry lived out there. They tied you two together from the start. They knew about your recent release.”
“Gee, there goes another secret.”
“I told them about the story that’s running tomorrow, gave them a draft. It’s going to be published within hours. I could hardly withhold it.”
“I never suggested you should.”
“I don’t expose sources,” Waxman said, his voice rising. There was a disagreeable edge in it, too. He looked out at the market again.
“Wax, what- ”
“You protect a source,” Waxman continued, “because the target of your story might retaliate. Whistle-blowers, insiders, they take a great risk coming forward.”
“You handed me up,” Abatangelo guessed. He looked out the back. “They follow you?”
Waxman bristled. “Of course not, Christ- ”
“You want to talk about retaliation?” Abatangelo said, facing back around. “Police aren’t the only thugs here, Wax. Felix Randall, his hoods. Some Mexicans hell-bent on blood from the looks of it. Cops are known for their tactical leaks. Bad enough they’re gonna tie me to this. Now you’re telling me that’s the least of my worries. I’m public record. What else did you tell them?”
“They already knew,” Waxman protested. “Everything.”
“So you confirmed it.” Abatangelo groaned. “And what do you mean, ‘everything’? What the fuck is ‘everything’?”
“You were willing to be openly named to begin with.”
“You said it would help with credibility if I wasn’t.”
“Yes. Yes. But that’s no longer true.” Waxman looked to Cohn, hoping for an ally. Cohn regarded him with an indifference that bordered on loathing. “The police are set to hand out your name to the next guy who stumbles along. Trust me. Some low-level corker working cop shop out here in the Delta somewhere. If I don’t identify you, someone else will.”
In a bid for self-control, Abatangelo laughed softly and looked away. The truly galling part, he thought, was that Waxman was right. At first he’d been perfectly willing to have his name made public. Being named had swagger, it’d flush somebody out, they’d come looking for him, asking who the fuck he thought he was. He’d only relented when he realized the benefit to remaining unnamed, given Shel’s likely reaction to his exposing Frank. All that seemed obscenely irrelevant now. Even so, this smacked of betrayal- not so much what Waxman had done as the way he’d confessed to it. The squirming, the bluster, the milky eyes.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Enough on that. Now did they respond to the message above the phone?”
“I was getting to that,” Waxman snapped. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Look, I’m sorry if I seem back on my heels. It’s just… you’re insinuating that I was there to feed them some cooked-up version of events.”
Cohn, sensing a need for a different tack, stepped in. “Any sense the detectives think this Frank Maas character killed the three people in that house?”
Waxman put his glasses back on. “If they do, they didn’t share that with me.”
Abatangelo said, “It doesn’t make sense, Tony.”
“It doesn’t?” He turned a little, the light catching his eyes briefly, making them glisten within the shadows veiling his face. “This is a guy you yourself described as a sociopath. Your girlfriend, after getting the shit kicked out of her, ran back to him.”
“Not to him,” Abatangelo said.
“Oh, Christ. To what, then?”
“To protect me.”
“From this Frank character.”
“I don’t think so,” Abatangelo said. “Not from the note she left. I think she meant the people Frank was in with. This Felix Randall guy.” It came out rushed, unconvincing. “Look, Tony- ”
“As long as we’re dwelling in the land of I Don’t Think So,” Cohn interrupted, “I’d say my guess is as good as yours, and my guess is she came back, this Frank character was lying in wait, as they say in the penal code, and he went off all over again. He made this thing look like a burn, just like he did with the Briscoe kids. Now he’s on the run. He’s got the woman he loves with him. That woman’s either going to love him back or die. If she isn’t dead already.”
Abatangelo thought it through. It was possible, he supposed. The problem was, it also meant there was no hope.
“I don’t see it that way,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t explain the message above the phone.”
Cohn snorted with disgust and turned to Waxman. “Anything else?”
“They implied,” Waxman said, “that they have information to the effect that Dan and Ms. Beaudry had gotten back together.”
“What information?” Abatangelo asked.
“I don’t know, but whatever it was, it suggested the involvement wasn’t strictly romantic. They think you’re back in the trade.”
“Then their information’s lousy.”
“One of the detectives suspected the murders were meant for the two of you, retaliation for some drug deal gone wrong.”
Cohn closed his eyes and murmured, “Lovely.”
“That’s the way it’s set up to look,” Abatangelo countered. “These cops, they’re not really that stupid. They were playing you, Wax.”
“Yes, well,” Waxman said. “Another detective, the narc I mentioned, came up with a different theory. He suspects you’re the killer.”
Cohn opened his eyes again.
Abatangelo said, “And you laughed, right?”
“He apparently believes that you came out looking for Frank Maas, to get even for what he did to Ms. Beaudry.”
“Which he knew about how?”
“From my article,” Waxman said. “I gave them a draft, remember?”
“Wait. This theory, that I’m the killer, this narc made it up while you were sitting there? What’s that tell you, Wax? It’s horseshit.”
“Be that as it may,” Waxman continued, “the way this narc sees it, when Frank wasn’t there, you killed the people who were, figuring blame would work back to Frank.” Turning to Cohn, he added, “That’s his explanation for why the killings were made to look like a drug burn, like the Briscoe murders.”
“I’m one cold-blooded snake,” Abatangelo said.
“It’s also,” Waxman added, “his explanation for why you were there earlier tonight.”
Both Cohn and Abatangelo snapped to at that one. “How’d they know that?” Abatangelo said.
“I told you, they were very well informed.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Some kind of trace on the phone out here, I imagine,” Waxman said.
“You imagine?”
“He simply said they knew it for a fact.”
“Fucking Christ, Wax. I’m not hearing this. You didn’t confirm it, did you?”
Waxman shrank back a little. “As I said, I gave them a draft of the story- ”
“You haven’t had time to write that part.”
“I’ll be phoning it in,” Waxman said, “as soon as we’re done here.” His eyes hardened. “And if I were you, I might consider taking refuge in the truth for once, instead of this scamming knack for bullshit you seem so fond of.”
“You know what?” Cohn interjected sourly. “I think this is a good time- ”
“You still haven’t told me, Wax, what the cops said about the message above the phone.”
“Nothing,” Waxman said.
Abatangelo flinched. “Come again?”
“They said nothing about it. I brought it up, they acted like I was an idiot.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell them, not me. I said the message suggests she was abducted. Some kind of trade is being arranged.”
“Exactly.”
“They laughed.”
“Wax, come on, you sold it- ”
“It’s not my position to sell anything. I pointed it out, I showed them my story. Once there was no longer any point concealing the fact that you were my source, everything else I proposed came off like canned crap, manufactured by you.”
“Wait, wait- ”
“My guess is they think you wrote the message above the phone, intending it as some sort of smoke screen.”
“That’s nuts. One minute I’m making it look like Frank did it, the next I’m trying to pin it on some Mexicans?”
“I’m just telling you what they suggested.”
“And you said?”
“As little as possible,” Waxman responded. “Though I realize you don’t believe that.”
Cohn pinched the bridge of his nose. “As I was trying to say, this might be a good time for me to speak with my client alone. All right?”
Waxman reached for the door handle then stopped, turning back to Abatangelo. “I have to see it from all sides. Nothing I write will seem credible otherwise.”
“All sides,” Abatangelo said. “I’m a guy who’d come out here, clip a kid and two adults, and use the article you’re writing to point the finger at Frank. Except, of course, I also wrote a message above the phone, implicating a bunch of Mexicans.”
“What I’m saying is, I have an obligation- ”
“Wax, come on. We sat together, side by side, hashing out that story word for word. I didn’t shove it down your throat. You asked me every damn question you wanted and I answered every single one. Now you’re gonna tell me you sat there, played patsy to a bunch of fast-talking cops and not once tried to drive home the fact that Shel’s been dragged off somewhere?”
“Again,” Cohn said, loud this time. “Just a minute, alone, here in the car. Me and you, Dan.”
Abatangelo ignored him. “Wax, do what you’ve got to do, but look at me, you look at me, I swear to God, I… did… not… use you. They did.”
“Now!” Cohn shouted.
Waxman jumped in his seat and, in the same movement, opened the car door to get out. “Of course,” he murmured over his shoulder. “I need to leg all this in to my editor, or we won’t even make deadline for an exclusive.” Glancing one last time at Abatangelo, he left the car and trundled across the parking lot. Taking up position at a phone booth outside the store, he lit a cigarette and dialed, exhaling smoke into the receiver and leaning into the wall, his corduroys bagging at the knees.
Cohn said, “Well, wasn’t that inspirational.”
“Tony- ”
“Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you can fill me in on a lot that’s still missing from the picture. That may prove helpful at some point, but frankly I don’t want to hear it now. The most important thing is, you need to stand clear. The scenario I laid out, the thing about laying all this on the sociopath, this Frank clown, I don’t mean to take the most twisted view possible. Not that there’s a good or better way this thing could’ve gone down. Christ. What I mean is, it’s all hypothetical at this point. And I need to see every way it could have happened, especially since the cops appear keen to pin it on you.”
Abatangelo groaned and started to object but Cohn cut him off again. “No. You listen. I realize the most important thing to you is finding out what happened to your friend. That isn’t my chief concern. My chief concern is you. When this lead detective- I spoke with him, by the way, and Waxman’s right, he’s sharp- when he calls, it’ll be to me, not you. I took care of that much. If they want you for questioning, the two of us go together, period. Given how fast this thing’s spinning out of control, you’re not saying word one without immunity. As for the Bureau of Prisons, if they want to yank you in for a violation- ”
“On what grounds?”
“Any fucking thing they want,” Cohn snapped, his eyes catching the light again. “What are you, dense?” He looked away, collecting himself. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”
“Home.”
“I’m not sure that’s wise. You said it yourself, there may be people after you.”
“I’ve got a home, Tony, that’s where I go.” The thought of possible harm to himself seemed inconsequential. Almost inviting. “I’m not hiding from anybody.”
“It’s not just some redneck bam squad I’m worried about,” Cohn said. “I’m trying to work it so, if your probation gets revoked, you can surrender on your own terms. Instead of being taken down at your apartment like a fucking abscond.”
Abatangelo shrugged. “I smell feds at the door, I’ll shag out the back. Won’t be the first time.”
Cohn grimaced and scanned the parking lot. “No,” he said quietly. “That won’t do. You have to listen to me. You do what I say, and only what I say. It’s got to be like that or I pass this on.” He gestured out the window toward Waxman. “You need a lawyer, not a press agent. You sure as hell don’t need the likes of him.”
Waxman, speaking into the phone now, threw his cigarette onto the asphalt, creating a tiny ricochet of ash. He crushed the butt with the toe of his desert boot then chafed his arm to warm himself.
“Wax is all right,” Abatangelo said. And strangely, he meant it. The remark about a scamming knack for bullshit, it stung. “He just needs to be caught up to speed. Stakes are a little higher than he’s used to.”
“I’m advising you,” Cohn said, “not to talk to him.” His voice was surprisingly calm, almost kind, despite the ultimatum.
“Can’t do that,” Abatangelo responded. “As fucked as the situation is right now, I back away, let everybody else tell my story while I just sit there, I’m screwed. I’ve still got Wax’s attention right now. I’m the best source he’s got. That’s leverage, Tony.”
Cohn let loose with a long, slow, dispirited sigh. “I would have thought,” he said, “after what happened tonight in particular, that I would not have to remind you of your deficiencies in the judgment-of-character department. Good God, we’re talking murder one here.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s always bullshit with you,” Cohn barked. The calming kindness was gone. Abatangelo, choosing to ignore that, knocked on the glass to assure Waxman he’d not been forgotten.
“He’ll betray you the first chance he gets,” Cohn said. “From the sounds of it, he already has.”
“Interesting tone you’re taking.”
“I’m not here to make apologies for myself,” Cohn said, “if that’s what you mean.”
Abatangelo turned to look straight at him. “Lucky you.”
After Waxman finished his phone-in, he returned to Cohn’s Lexus and the two men drove away. Abatangelo, left behind, returned to the old Dodge Dart. It felt small around him as he got in. Digging his key from his pocket, he inserted it in the ignition and turned. The engine started at once, and warmed up quickly. He found himself strangely comforted by so minor a thing as that.
He put the car in gear and pulled out onto the Delta Highway, heading west through scant traffic toward home. Gripping the wheel, he listened to the thrum of the motor, the high-pitched whistle of the wind keening in from the side vent. The highway lines on the empty road darted forward in the cross-eyed skew of his headlights. It’s possible, he reminded himself over and over, that she’s all right, alive at least. He could not tell whether that prospect made him feel more committed to finding her, or simply more afraid she was going to suffer. On reflection, given what he’d accomplished so far- or more correctly, what he’d failed to accomplish- one seemed to go with the other.
He spent the rest of the drive in a sullen brood, and by the time he reached North Beach and entered his flat he felt vaguely hopeful at the prospect of unwelcome company. A fight, he thought, that’s what I need. Catharsis. Blood. The place was just as he’d left it, though, empty and untouched. In the kitchen he downed several glasses of ice cold tap water, then set his empty glass in the sink and wandered. When he came upon his tape player- Maria Callas still cued up in the cassette port- he turned it on. With the music as background, he dragged a wooden chair across the cracked linoleum floor to the window and stared out across the bay, watching as dawn crept upward in the eastern sky, bathing the far-off hills in a mad wash of color.
Shel sat upright on a bare mattress laid out on a concrete floor. The room was small and stark, with a low ceiling and whitewashed walls. A rough crucifix the size of a candy box hung on one wall, directly across from the wood plank door that Shel had tried repeatedly to open. Through its rough-hewn slatwork she could smell damp earth and a faint stench of rot. There was a root cellar out there, with a bare dirt floor. She remembered it from when they’d dragged her down here, locked her in.
She sat there on the mattress, back propped against the wall, panting from the effort of tramping back and forth. She’d slammed herself against the door, clawed at the planks, tried to pry them apart. She’d grown weaker by the hour, blaming it on fear, exhaustion and the stew of pills in her system. The pain in her head didn’t help. It throbbed nonstop behind one eye, erupting from time to time in spearing flashes that made her think her eardrums would crack. Her face and hands dripped with sweat that congealed with the mucus and blood she was constantly wiping away. The wounds Frank had inflicted and Danny had nursed were open and raw again. You’re a nasty mess, she thought, trying to wipe her face on her shirt, her hands on the mattress. Don’t let them kill you like this.
Across the room, a tarp lay in a shapeless form, tucked into the corner. She’d found herself staring at it off and on, ever since the Mexicans had locked her inside the room alone. The tarp was filthy, encrusted with smears of paint and oil. The only thing in the room except the mattress and the crucifix, it spooked her. That’s going to be your shroud, she thought. Then claim it, she told herself. Claim it for your own, wrap yourself in the thing and let them find you like that. Let them know you see right through them, you’re scared but not weak. Show them.
She scuttled across the floor, drew the tarp away from the wall and recoiled screaming.
Underneath the tarp, wrapped in clear stiff plastic, lay the naked body of Snuff Akers. His hands and ankles were bound with wire, a wad of filthy cloth jammed deep into his mouth. A bloody scald the size of a tennis ball blackened his temple. His eyes gazed vacantly. A needle and syringe lay with him inside the plastic sheath.
Shel sat there shaking in the middle of the room. Sobs chirped unbidden in her throat and she told herself, You’re losing it, girl. Hang in there.
She heard the sound of an approaching motor, then tires on gravel. Doors opened and closed. Men brayed in Spanish and laughed.
She crawled back to the mattress, wiped her face and pressed her back against the wall. Heavy footfalls resounded on the wood plank steps into the cellar, then softer ones across the flagstones and mud. A key rattled in the door lock.
The first one through the door was the wiry one, with the birthmark, the one who spoke English. In a glance he saw the tarp had been pulled away, Snuff’s body exposed.
“Takes a sick mind,” she told him, “to do a thing like that.”
He chuckled, not to suggest contempt or mockery, but almost sadly. “Tell that to Gaspar Arevalo and his brothers,” he said. “Only problem, they’re dead.”
One of the huge ones she remembered from the night before followed him in, carrying over his shoulder the sagging form of a semiconscious man, the head obscured by a black cloth hood. His hands and ankles were bound with wire like Snuff’s. The huge Mexican dipped through the small doorway, ignoring Shel, focusing instead on his load, which he promptly dropped like a sack of cement on the hard floor. The cloth hood muffled the ensuing scream. Despite the invisibility of the face, Shel knew by the clothes who it was.
Lonnie Dayball.
He reeked of vomit and urine. His clothes were rank with it and stained with blood. His whole body twitched, as though from shock. The second huge one wandered in, carrying a baseball bat over his shoulder like an ax. Seeing the tarp drawn away from Snuff’s body, he chortled, “Señor Snuffito. Buenos días.”
“Snuffito-Bufito,” the other big one chimed.
The smaller one with the birthmark approached the mattress where Shel sat. He gestured with his hand for her to get up.
“Time for a little walk,” he told her. “Some air will be nice, no?”
Behind him, the one with the ball bat swung it back, then cracked it ferociously against the base of Dayball’s spine. Dayball convulsed, screaming into the hood. The two large men yipped and clapped. Home run.
“Please,” the smaller one said, taking Shel’s hand.
He helped her to her feet. Wrapping her arm across his shoulder, he braced half her weight as she walked. As they ducked through the low doorway, one of the two big ones made kissing sounds from behind. A whispered voice in singsong lilted, “Ce-sar-io.”
The little one turned, shooting a hateful glance back at the two of them. “Bufos,” he said.
“Ravon,” one of the others shot back. “Pendejo.”
The kissing sounds returned. The little one murmured something to himself that Shel didn’t catch, then he turned back to lead her away.
The dirt walls of the root cellar oozed with seeping rainwater. The floors were a slick mess except for the path of flagstones crossing to the far side. The path was flanked by empty wood shelves thick with cobwebs. A scent of old decay lingered. The little one allowed Shel to walk on the flagstones as he trod beside her in the mud. He drew her up the wood plank steps through a pair of hurricane doors just as a second car approached down a long gravel road.
“Quick,” he said. “Around the house.”
He hustled her along as the headlights approached. They turned the corner just as the car, a Mercedes with tinted windows, pulled to a stop outside the root cellar. Behind her, Shel heard two doors open and close.
He let go of her after a moment, to see if she could stand on her own. She tottered but didn’t fall. Smiling, she said, “Thank you.” After a moment she decided to risk his name.
“They called you Cesario. Can I call you that?”
He shot her a look of such intense and immediate hostility she almost felt her legs give way. This traffic in names, she realized, it foretold death, but she couldn’t suppress the need to talk, to know this man, at least a little, given the likelihood it would be his duty to kill her. In time he said, “Cesar.” Shrugging, he looked away. “What can it matter?”
“My name’s Shel,” she told him.
“I know.”
Shel smiled. “You do.”
“It’s written on the back of the picture I have.”
“The one you had at the house.”
He reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. As he scratched the flint to create a flame, Shel thought of the bloody black scald at Snuff’s temple.
“Where’d you get that picture?”
“From Francisco Fregado.” Cesar grinned. “That’s what we called him. Frank the Mess.”
She felt light-headed suddenly and searched around for a place to sit. A rock jutted out of the grass not far away. She aimed for it, took two lunging steps, and came within falling distance. She hit the ground in a heap then pulled herself onto the rock. Cesar walked up behind.
“You all right?”
“Haven’t had my Wheaties.”
“You mean your pills.” He sounded angry.
“I would’ve taken more if you hadn’t stopped me.”
She drew up on her haunch, pulling her legs up beneath her and sitting stiffly on the rock. She chafed her arms. He offered her his cigarette.
“Thank you,” she said.
She took a shallow drag, coughed despite herself, and handed the cigarette back. He waved it off. “I’ll light another.”
It was a cool and blustery morning, the air clear and sharp and scented with rain. Threads of cloud, propelled by an easterly wind, seethed across a crackling, dawn-lit sky.
The house was a two-story farmhouse that seemed to have sat empty for some time. It stood alone on a grassy plane surrounded by low-lying hills. The terrain was lush from recent rain, the air smelled of mud. The road down which the cars had come ran parallel behind a windbreak of eucalyptus trees that flanked an irrigation canal choked with weeds.
To the north a barrier ridge of taller hills gave Shel her bearings. We’re on the north side of the strait, she thought. Not far from the mouth of the Sacramento, near Bird’s Landing, somewhere between Montezuma Hills and Grizzly Bay. Windmills sat atop the nearest easterly hills and that clinched it. She remembered reading something about them, how they’d been built by a consortium hoping to supply cheap electricity to the nearby farms. Funding had backfired, bureaucrats descended, the investors got strangled in red tape. Now the windmills stood there, skeletons of metal, transforming the wind into nothing but sound.
About a hundred yards beyond the eucalyptus trees, vans and trucks filled with squatters crowded a small clearing. The women in the camp were cooking by wood fires beneath canvas awnings attached to the vans. Pozole and nixtamal from the night before simmered for the tortillas the women were roasting now on their stone comals. Children sucking on sticks of rock candy clung to their mothers’ skirts, warmed by the fires. Grizzled men wearing sweat-stained hats sat in folding chairs, waiting for breakfast. A makeshift pen for chickens stood at the edge of the clearing. A group of older children taunted the birds, throwing acorns through the wire.
As Shel turned back from the squatter camp she noticed that Cesar had wandered toward the house. He stood before one of the windows, turning his head at various angles, as though appraising his birthmark. She imagined him hoping it had grown smaller since the last time he’d inspected it.
“You speak English well,” she said, trying for his attention.
He turned away from his reflection. “You talk a lot,” he said.
“My head hurts. I’m trying not to think about it.” She worked up a comradely smile. “So, anyway, like I said, your English, it’s impressive.”
“I’ve been here awhile,” he said, stopping a couple yards away.
“You sound like a guy I knew once in TJ.”
“Spent some time there as well,” Cesar acknowledged.
“Sending mojados over the fence?”
He shot her a look of sly fascination. “It’s a living. I came over the fence a few times myself.”
Near the chicken pen the squatter children stopped pelting the birds with acorns and started in on each other. They shrieked and giggled. It was murder.
“You didn’t grow up there, in TJ?”
He shook his head. “Chalco.”
“That’s-?”
“A shithole,” he said. In a gentler tone, he added, nodding toward the squatters, “Down near Mexico City. Where people like that come from.”
This was going well, Shel decided. It took some effort for her not to blurt out: Save me.
“Poor Mexico,” she intoned, quoting a saying she’d once heard. “So far from God. So close to the United States.”
Cesar laughed. Beyond him sunlight flared across the easterly hills, creating a horizon that was achingly blue, stippled with clouds flecked gold and red by the rising sun.
“Your friends,” she went on, “they seem to enjoy their work.” It wasn’t till after she’d said it she remembered it was something Dayball had said about himself.
“Dumbfucks.” Cesar cleared his throat and spat. “Worthless. Stupid.”
“They’re large, though. It’s a talent.”
“They think in pictures. Believe in death rays and sorcerers. All spine and no brain.”
“So why are they in there instead of you?”
He turned and looked at her, like he was trying to figure out if he’d been insulted.
“I mean,” she added, “they get to stay in there and play rough. You have to sit out here and be a human being. With the woman.”
Cesar drew on his cigarette and exhaled. “Quien va a villa,” he said, “pierde su silla.” It sounded like a curse.
“What’s that mean?” Shel asked.
“The one who goes to town loses his seat.”
He glanced down at her, checking to see if she understood. The anger in his eyes mingled with a breathtaking despair. I wonder, she thought, if anyone’s ever told him he’s depressed.
“How exactly,” she asked, “did you go to town?”
“I was the one who worked up the deal with your old man. Frank the Mess.”
He sighed bitterly and shook his head. She fought an impulse to smile. An outcast, she thought. It seemed strangely hopeful.
“That picture you got from Frank,” she said. “Could I see it?”
Cesar reached inside his jacket, withdrew the snapshot, and handed it to her. It was a picture taken of her by Frank a year or two ago. She was sitting at a table in some forgotten place they’d rented. There was nothing remarkable about the photograph, just one forgettable moment in one forgotten day in a string of over a thousand such days. He’d just shown up and said, “Smile.” She looked weary.
“Why’d Frank give you this?”
“He didn’t,” Cesar said. “We found it in his car.”
She cocked her head. “When?”
“Last time we met, before that fucking disaster out at the junkyard.” He spewed a long trail of smoke and with a flick of his finger sent his cigarette butt flying into the weeds. “I sat with him at the hotel, in the bar, we ran through what was supposed to happen. While he was in with me, Humberto and Pepe, they searched his car.”
Please, Shel thought, no more names.
“Why?”
“He was acting strange.”
“He was drugged.”
Cesar cackled. “Now we know.”
“If you knew he was drugged- ”
“The fact he was loaded, that wasn’t the problem. Half the motherfuckers you deal with anymore are tanked. He just seemed”- he spread out his hand, waving it slowly back and forth- “a little more out of touch than loaded could explain.”
“He was scared.”
Cesar shook his head. “Not scared so much. More like, I don’t know, like nothing would have made him happier than if I’d just stood up at the table and shot him. Get it fucking over with.”
I think I know how he felt, Shel thought. She turned the picture over. On the back, in pencil, Frank had written her name. As though he needed to remind himself who it was on the other side. Cesar reached over and tapped with his finger at the penciled lettering.
“When we found this, Humberto, Pepe, know what they said? ‘Shel- what, like the oil company? A real gusher. Ready to drill.’ ” He withdrew his hand. “Laughed like fucking idiots.”
The sound of another motor came from down the gravel road. A flatbed truck hurtled past the squatter camp down the long line of eucalyptus trees. It arrived in a swirl of black exhaust. Two men rode in the cabin, two more stood in back. As it pulled up behind the Mercedes, Shel spotted within the wood slat framing of the flatbed two bathtubs- the old-fashioned kind, deep, with claw feet. Beside them were several bags of cement.
Cesar put his hand gently under her arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a little further away.”
He lifted her off her perch on the rock and guided her to an oak tree twenty yards from the house. Still barefoot, she walked on her heels, trying to avoid the brown spiny leaves scattered across the yard. When they got to the tree he leaned her up against the trunk, checking to be sure the flatbed couldn’t be seen from there.
Two, she thought. One bathtub for Snuff. The other for Dayball. They’d dump the bodies in, fill the tubs with cement, let it dry, then take them out by boat into the strait, or the deep channel of the Sacramento, wait till dark then drop them over the side, never to be found. Not three, she thought, two. They’re not going to kill you. Not yet.
A gust of wind rustled the oak branches. A flurry of tiny brittle leaves swirled to the ground.
“Such a weird tree,” Cesar said, trying to make conversation. “Come winter, it never loses all its leaves. But it never keeps them, either.”
Shel offered him the photograph. “You can have this back,” she said.
He looked at it in her hand, puzzled, then finally took it. Glancing at the picture and then at her, he said, “Almost didn’t know it was you.”
He was referring to the bruises and cuts on her face. “I’ve looked better,” she admitted.
“Who did that to you?”
“Guess.”
Cesar shook his head in disgust and put the picture back in his pocket. “Fucking loser,” he said. “Anybody could have seen that.”
“Except you and me,” she remarked. “We went to town and lost our seat.”
He chuckled acidly, started to say something then checked himself.
“What else did you find in his car besides my picture?”
“Nothing,” Cesar said. “At least, nothing that would have tipped us off we were going to get fucked.”
“But you were suspicious.”
“It’s the nature of the business. And anyway, we owed the Arevalo family a shot at revenge. They were begging for it. Seemed like a good chance to feel out how far this Felix Randall would take things.”
“You found out.”
Cesar reached down, picked up a small smooth stone and hurled it into the weeds along the irrigation ditch.
“Now it’s his turn,” he said, “to get educated.”
“Is that what Snuff and Dayball are for? Part of the education process?”
Cesar rubbed his face, chafing the skin against the morning chill. “What nobody seemed to understand is that we wouldn’t just send one car out to that junkyard. Me and the idiots, Humberto and Pepe, and two other chavos, we were waiting out on the road. We hear the gunfire go off, I told Humberto, ‘Go, drive, get in there.’ Asshole. Fucking froze.” Cesar shook his head and spat. “Not that it matters. I’m the asshole now.”
“I know how that feels,” she said.
He looked at her, struggling against the kinship she suggested. “Anyway, from the road it sounds like a fucking war, then out pops this Lincoln, fishtails, boom, south, tearing like hell. We took off after it. About a mile, we catch up. Shot out one of the tires. Thing slid into the cattails. Guy driving staggered out and opened fire, so we nailed the motherfucker, boom, dead. Snuffito, he just sat there in the passenger seat, pissing himself. Whining like a puppy. Laid out on the backseat was some guy trying to stuff his stomach back inside his body.”
Shel assumed this was Lyle. Or Hack. She tried to picture it. Then she tried not to. “What happened to him?” she asked quietly.
“What do you think?” He seemed wounded by her tone. “You can say a prayer for him.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that.”
“It took us a while, but Snuffito came around. Big-time.”
“Don’t gloat about that,” Shel said. “It’s beneath you.”
She thought for a moment she detected a slight blush rising in his face.
“I wasn’t gloating,” he said. “That’s how we learned about the house, where we found you. From Snuff.”
“And Dayball?”
“There’s a place Snuff and his brothers deliver money, it’s a front, some plumbing repair outfit in Rio Vista. That’s what he told us. We put a bandista on it- ”
“Bandista?”
“Gang,” he said. “Guy from a gang. New recruit. We put him on this place in Rio Vista, Dayball showed up early this morning.”
Shel looked off toward the northerly hills. They were low and smooth and lush with windblown grass.
“What’s my part in this?”
Cesar picked up another stone, hurling it in almost the exact same place as the last.
“You get traded for Frank,” he said.
She couldn’t help herself, she laughed. “You’re not serious. To accomplish what?”
“Whatever we fucking choose.” He looked away uneasily. “To be honest, the plan’s changed since we picked up Dayball.” He shook his head, shrugged. “Fucking coward. We barely had him in the car before he was telling us everything, anything, begging, trying to work an angle. It was pathetic.”
Shel understood his contempt, at the same time envying Dayball’s having an angle to play. Not that it seemed to be doing him much good.
“So now,” she said. “What’s the plan now?”
Cesar picked up another stone, but instead of tossing it he merely bobbed it in his hand. “That Dayball, very chatty guy. We know enough now to take it to Señor Felix but good. Run him out of here. But you know, knowledge is power. The men who call the shots, they see an opportunity here. So they’re sending somebody back to the plumbing shop in Rio Vista, where we snagged Dayball, they’re gonna leave a message for Felix. He hands up Frank to us, we hand you back to him. Show him. See? We’re not so bad. We’re human beings. Then we talk terms.”
“That’s nuts,” Shel said. She could hardly draw a breath, so it came out sounding like a laugh.
“He goes along, or he goes down, man by fucking man.”
“You don’t know Felix. He’ll never go for that.”
“Too bad.”
For me, she thought, turning away. Too bad for me. Voices erupted from the far side of the house. Shel recognized one of them as belonging to Humberto, or Pepe. One of the big ones. They were out in the open now, out of the cellar, calling to the men in the truck. She heard something drop hard onto the back of the flatbed amid the banter of men at work.
“You hand me back to Felix,” Shel confided, “I’m dead.” Cesar wouldn’t look at her. He knows, she thought. Of course he does. On the far side of the house, the truck started up and began backing around to head out again. “I was supposed to make sure Frank could deliver. That was my side of the bargain, or else they’d just kill him as is.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cesar said softly. “Dayball told us that, too. That’s what makes you valuable.”
“To who?”
The flatbed headed out the gravel road, returning the way it had come, leaving behind another cloud of black exhaust. The truck’s back end was covered now with a large sheet of canvas roped down tight.
“Felix put a price on your head,” Cesar told her. “You disappeared last night. Frank fucked up, the trap they laid turned to shit. Felix figured somehow, some way, you’d been in on the whole thing. He’d put the word out, you get brought to him. Well, okay, we’ll do that. He brings Frank to us, so we can finish what the Arevalo brothers wanted. One for the other. A sign of good faith. He pays his weekly dues, everybody goes back to business.”
“Dues?”
“Twenty-five grand.”
Shel’s jaw dropped. A cough of air came out instead of sound. “That’s crazy,” she said. “A shakedown, Felix? That’s what, a million a year. More.”
“He can afford it.” Cesar grinned. “Like I said, that Dayball, very informative guy.”
And now he’s dead, Shel thought. Informative. Valuable. Dead. “Felix’ll never pay you.”
Cesar shrugged. “Then he’s a dead man. Him and everybody who stays in with him.”
“You don’t understand. He’s a redneck. His mind’s bloated on that Aryan warrior horseshit. Thinks the Alamo was a victory. He’ll wear his blood like a badge of honor. His and everybody else’s.”
“Yeah, well, nothing I can do about that, is there?” Cesar said. “I don’t make this shit up, I just do what I’m told.”
Another wind stirred the oak branches, showering the ground with thorny leaves.
“Either way,” she said, “I’m dead, right? You’re talking to a dead woman.”
Cesar bobbed the stone in his palm one last time, then chucked it high and far, as though to get the thing out of his hand. “Not my decision,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.” Turning to her finally, he added, “For now, though, no. Like I said, you’re valuable.”
Humberto and Pepe appeared, turning the corner of the house and grinning like grade school boys. One of them made kissing sounds again. The other one clapped his hands and whistled, as though for a dog, then gestured for Cesar to come, follow them back inside. Cesar put his hand under Shel’s arm and said, “Time to head back in.”
“I want you to do me a favor,” she said, resisting his pull. He turned back to face her. “When it comes time, I want you to be the one who kills me.”
Cesar flinched. “It’s not going to work that way, I told you. I can’t- ”
“You,” Shel said. “No one else. Don’t hand me back to Felix. Don’t leave it to him.”
Resentment darkened Cesar’s eye. Gradually, something else took its place. The same sorrow as before, tinged with despair.
“Why me?”
“Because we’ve had this talk,” she said. “It’s a favor, a big one, I realize that. But I’m asking. Please.”
Omar’s House of Omelets rested in midtown San Francisco, halfway between the theater district and the streetwalkers. The decor insinuated low-income plush: imitation Tiffany, overstuffed booths, cobwebbed ferns. The early morning clientele consisted of hustlers, cabbies, hookers ordering their ceremonial breakfasts. A few elderly locals joined the mix, sitting at the counter and staring hypnotically at the order window, holding rubbery wedges of toast. The place smelled of stale vat grease and industrial cleanser. The waitresses, older women mostly, wandered table to table without haste. It was not a pressure job.
Frank had found his way into the city during the last wave of paranoia. He’d wakened before dawn in his hotel room, feeling tormented and raw, his skin all but ready to rip away. There was this hazy recollection of a dream involving the president, or the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, he couldn’t quite make out which. Regardless, the end result was: Run.
He’d downed two Thorazine and it evened out his mood but left him feeling light-headed. The shakes were holding fast, but the spooks had faded somewhat. Gradually his mind decided to cooperate. The recent past took form like snatches of a TV marathon watched over a stoned weekend. If it was all true, he had some doing to do. Lie low. Razzle up some money, get to Mexico. Or Canada, maybe. All things considered, Mexico did not seem all that great an idea.
At some point, as he was driving, chow had seemed appropriate. He’d slept on and off for an entire day and it had been over thirty-six hours since his last solid food. Shel would tell me to eat, he thought. She’d always been good about that sort of thing. He missed her so badly it was painful and the pain wasn’t the kind you could just ignore till it goes away. There’d be no end to this pain, he thought.
He sat in a booth along the wall, looking down at a western omelet. His fork lay on the rim of the plate and his home fries sat cold and submerged beneath a vast discharge of ketchup. It was his second breakfast; he’d eaten the first in a dithering fury: a monte cristo sandwich, they served it with a side of lemon mayonnaise here. The remaining mayonnaise glowed in its ramekin like something left behind by a poisonous fish. The waitresses, they circulated like fish, he thought.
“Hey,” a voice said.
Frank looked in the voice’s direction and found at the next table a pimpled youth sitting with a glass of water and a plate of fries. The kid wiped his chin with his shirt cuff.
“You gonna eat your omelet?” He nodded at Frank’s plate. His eyes had a yellow tinge, and tiny white sores coated his fingers. Frank looked down at the plate. Two maraschino cherries sat in a bed of parsley as a garnish; a fly navigated the surface of the omelet. If flies were the size of people, Frank thought, they’d rule the world. He sat back from the plate.
“Take it,” he said.
The kid snatched the omelet away and attacked it with a spoon. Food spilled out of his mouth as he chewed.
Frank looked off and spotted a table of three call girls, sitting several booths down. One was Asian with waist-length hair and nails so long, they curled. She stared brokenheartedly across the table at a pockfaced blonde; the blonde wore fishnets over red tights. The third woman had brown hair and a fake mole. They all sat back from their plates, smoking. Frank looked at them and figured a couple hundred easy per purse if they’d had a decent night. It was a lot of money. And, given his circumstances, a lot of money was, well, a lot of money.
Licking his teeth clean of food, he eased up from his seat and ventured over to the threesome’s table. He smiled, crouching between the Asian and the blonde.
“You’re very pretty,” he said to no one in particular.
They ignored him, smoking their cigarettes and swinging their legs under the table in a cocaine mania. The blonde was thin in the face, with long pendant earlobes that Frank found just ugly enough to make her interesting.
“I said, you’re very pretty.”
The Asian groaned, the blonde rolled her eyes.
“How much for a go-around?” he asked. “Lost my dog the other night. I’m a little down.”
“Check out the pound,” the Asian said. “We’re off the clock.”
Frank smiled good-naturedly. Don’t antagonize anybody, he thought, just get one of them to come along. Grab the purse and scram. Nothing scientific. Nothing rough.
“Check out the pound,” he repeated, chuckling. He pulled every bill he had from his pocket, counted off twenties and fanned himself with them. “What’s it cost to get you back on the job?”
The Asian reached across the table for the blonde’s hand. The hand was ten years older than the face, something Frank automatically associated with motherhood. The blonde exhaled a vast cloud of smoke.
“She said we’re off the clock. What d’you want, a telegram?”
Frank turned to the brunette with the fake mole. “What about you?”
She lifted a french fry from her plate and stared at it. “I’ve got herpes,” she said, returning the french fry to her plate.
“So do I,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I said we’re through for the night.” The Asian again. “I meant it, asshole.”
She waved across the room to a pair of men sitting at the counter. Frank hadn’t noticed them before. One looked like he might be the girls’ driver, slender and neat and fey. The other was a heavyset, clean-shaven thug in a plaid jacket; he yammered nonstop, slapping the back of his left hand into the palm of his right. His bald spot was beaded with sweat. It was the driver who spotted the Asian’s signal. He tapped the shoulder of the heavy guy. Frank put the money back in his pocket.
“What did you do that for?” he said.
“I trust my feelings.”
The man in the plaid jacket crossed the room in a slow walk, bandy-legged, hands in his pockets, smiling with fraudulent good humor. He greeted Frank with, “Hey, Scrape.”
“Waldo, get rid of this,” the Asian said, pointing.
Up close the man’s eyes had a moronic intensity. They were marbles in the face of a doll. He had hairy fingers, nails chewed down to the raw.
“Wrong table,” Frank said, but before he could turn away Waldo locked one hand around his elbow. His thumb speared down to bone. Frank’s arm went numb. Waldo leaned close and whispered, “You go outside, I’ll shoot your pink ass.” He shook Frank’s arm like a rag. “Look at me.”
The top of his head came level with Frank’s nose. Frank stared into a flat, reddish face, cavernous pores, thin hair combed back on a damp skull. Waldo breathed heavily, offering Frank a smile.
“Let’s,” he said.
He spun Frank around and steered him toward the men’s room. The three women waved to his back, chirping “bye-bye” like the Puerto Rican girls in West Side Story. Frank made a quick glance around the room. The waitresses turned their backs. The cooks and busmen kept busy, looking away. It was not a pressure job.
The slender one, the driver, stood watch at the rest room door while Waldo pitched Frank against the sink. An old man tottered out frantically. Frank felt a sudden bond with him.
“Look,” Frank said to Waldo, “go slob the knob with your faggot friend out there, leave me alone.”
With startling quickness, Waldo laid a punch hard to his temple, creating water from the waist down and a nauseating blackness. In the doorway the slender one told someone to use another rest room, a man was inside getting sick. Waldo lodged a handkerchief into Frank’s mouth, took out a penknife and opened the smallest blade, then locked Frank’s wrist in his grip and forced the blade deep beneath the thumbnail. The pain shot everywhere, he fell to his knees. This earned him a kick in the abdomen so violent his arms disappeared, his face hit the floor. He was choking, the linoleum stank with urine.
At the doorway, the slender one said again, “Inside,” louder now. “Getting sick.”
Waldo wiggled his knife free and rifled Frank’s pockets. Coins scattered across the floor. Through a galaxy of black stars Frank watched Waldo count his wad of bills; he tossed Frank’s car keys into the urinal. Another kick struck the base of his skull.
Waldo bent down. “Check it out, Scrape. Who’s the faggot now?”
At the Pierpont Hotel a gaunt bellman with feathery white hair and fleshy eyes Hoovered the lobby rug. Uniform jacket unbuttoned, he sang fiercely over the warm noise and the tickling dust, smiling into the carpet trails.
Frank limped through the Powell Street door. The bellman stood straight and fell quiet. He turned off the vacuum. Frank took shallow breaths, holding his side, ignoring the bellman’s stare. He had a paper napkin wrapped tight around his thumb because blood continued to seep from under the nail, which had turned a purplish black. He moved each foot as though it were weighted down.
He got to the rest room as fast as he could, checking the back of his head for blood. He’d swallowed ten aspirins already, taking them dry from a bottle he’d shoplifted from a Tenderloin Thrifty. Reaching an empty stall he collapsed onto the toilet seat, latching the door as he sat. His heart was racing. He pressed his good hand to his eyes and squeezed, sitting like that till the bellman came in after him. Frank could see the man’s shoes and pant cuffs beneath the stall door.
The bellman said, “Can’t stay in there. You know that.”
“I’m a guest,” Frank said.
“Like hell you is.”
“I’m the guest of a guest.”
“What you is,” the bellman said, “is gone. Else I call the police.”
Frank breathed gently through his mouth. The nausea lessened that way. He looked up and saw an elderly bloodshot eye peering through the door crack at him.
“Tell you what. I’m feeling just a little bit better, I’ll go.”
“Ain’t no junkie gettin’ sick in my hotel, understand?”
“Your hotel?” Frank cackled. “Mr. Pierpont, sir.”
The bellman pulled back from the door. “Okay, smart-ass. Here it comes.”
He turned on his heel and left. Frank closed his eyes as the rest room door swooshed open then closed. Here it comes, he thought.
After a moment he checked his thumb again, probing gently with the forefinger of his good hand, then wrapping the thumb in fresh tissue. The blood had dried on the back of his head; he reminded himself to leave the scab alone. Eventually he rose to his feet, combating a swirl of dizziness, and leaned forward on the door till the latch gave way. He tumbled out, gaining his balance only after he hit the far wall. He looked up into the mirror and once again felt utterly astounded to find himself there, gazing back.
“You need money,” he told his reflection.
He tottered back out to the lobby, flipped the bellman off, crossed to the Powell Street door and ventured back into the street. Pedestrians marched in vacant-eyed unison down the sidewalk. A damp wind howled between buildings. He stuffed the wounded hand inside his jacket, where it would be warm and out of sight.
He could feel people looking at him as he searched out his truck. It rested in a green zone down the block from Omar’s. He checked through the restaurant’s window to be sure Waldo was gone, then hurried past with his head down. When he reached his truck he discovered a parking ticket tucked under his windshield wiper. As he crumpled it and prepared to throw, he glanced up at a newspaper dispenser and saw a headline that stopped him cold: TRIPLE HOMICIDE IN THE DELTA. In smaller typeface, a second lead read: SUSPECTED LINK TO BRISCOE MURDERS.
He moved closer. Beneath the headline, the only words he could read were, “Last night three persons, one of them a seven-year-old boy, were murdered execution-style in a remote…” The rest disappeared below the fold. He tried to open the dispenser, gently at first, but the catch held. Shortly he was pounding on it, kicking it, till passersby stopped and he shrank back. Panting, it dawned on him finally he might have the change. He’d retrieved it from the floor of the rest room at Omar’s after Waldo had left. He checked his pockets but found only thirteen cents; he needed twenty-five.
Just then a salesgirl from one of the nearby shops came out, dropped in her quarter and lifted the dispenser lid. Frank lunged, shoved her aside and caught the lid before it closed, grabbing a paper from inside. The girl recoiled, ready to scream.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said, easing away.
Abatangelo spent the better part of two hours trying to reach Waxman on the phone. The screak of the busy signal seemed particularly galling, given the state of things. Even so, it was never more than a minute before he had the phone in his hand again, redialing Waxman’s number. A little after noon, deciding he needed a break, he went down to the street to see if the early afternoon edition was out. Might as well check the damage, he thought, remembering Cohn’s admonitions on the subject of Waxman’s faithlessness. He bought his copy of the paper from a corner stand and returned upstairs to his flat. Incapable as yet of reading Waxman’s article, he turned instead to the interior pages.
The Saturday edition, as always, was particularly ripe with morbid news, most of it drug-related. One item in particular mentioned a 7.6 mm chain gun, designed for troop support aboard attack helicopters like the Cobra, discovered missing from the Port Chicago Naval Weapons Station; officials feared it may have fallen into the hands of drug traffickers. The term “narcoterrorism” appeared twice, and this was the briefs.
An old veteran of press hysteria on such matters, Abatangelo had little confidence in the objectivity of this particular report. Even so, he felt a vague anxiety, an uneasiness tinged with shame. The point, he reflected, had never been to hurt anyone. Quite the contrary. He’d always considered himself too on the ball for that. Just a hustler on the make for the expanded mind. An epicurean. Such defenses always minimized the money angle, of course. Small wonder, then, the world being what it is, that with such dubious justifications the end result would be a lot of death.
Finally, buried in the outdoorsman pages of the sports section, a piece on the Pacific salmon industry caught his eye. A lifelong fisherman complained that the manufactured salmon from the hatcheries no longer knew their spawning streams. Crossbreeding had all but ruined the wild strains. Once fabled for its spawning navigation, the salmon now got lost. Clogging inlet waterways, it died lost. “The noble salmon,” the author lamented, “has become just another dumb fish.”
Abatangelo returned to the phone, tried Waxman again, but the line was still busy. He felt disinclined to put the receiver down, presuming Cohn would be trying to call. He didn’t as yet have the stomach for lawyer talk. He foresaw a practiced apology from Cohn for the friction between them last night, followed a bit too promptly by discussion of a fee, then a recommendation he turn himself in. Cohn was right, of course- the Bureau of Prisons didn’t need any more reason than they had to yank him back in, conduct a grinding, dishonest, arrogant and sloppy review of whether he’d actually done anything to violate the terms of his probation. If he took the initiative, surrendered himself to custody, he stood a good chance of wiggling out of any real time. None of which, however, conformed to his need to see that Shel was still alive. He told himself it would be wise by day’s end to take Cohn’s other piece of advice, and find somewhere else to stay.
Finally he mustered the nerve to face Waxman’s piece. The story commanded page one with a jump- two parallel pieces, the straight murder account gaining the higher, larger lead, with a column inch for Waxman down the right margin below the fold. The straight piece related the more objective information, identifying the place and time and numbering the dead, leaving them nameless pending family notification. It did note, though, that one was a child.
The nuances were left to Waxman. First he presented the theory that Shel had run a minor dope outfit, with Abatangelo, just out of prison, her once-again partner; the murders, in this scenario, were blamed on some amorphous revenge. Reading it, Abatangelo recalled that this was one of the theories advanced by the homicide detectives, embellished somewhat.
The narc’s scenario got laid out next, with the similarities to the Briscoe murders, the link between Shel and Abatangelo, the possibility of an attempt to frame Frank.
Last came Abatangelo’s account, coming off in contrast to the police renditions as the obsessive rantings of a half-cocked jailbird, angling for God knows what. At the same time, though, on the pickups inside, there was an archive picture of Felix Randall, as well as one of the shots of Shel that Abatangelo had passed along. The pictures, by simply being there, lent credence to his version of events. His name was even listed for attribution beneath Shel’s photo. Apparently, he mused, it only took three people dead to get the editors to change their minds about adding a little art.
All in all, Abatangelo thought, Waxman came off strangely evenhanded. If you could think of ambivalence that way. He raised a lot of questions that made him seem sharp but only hinted at answers. He tried to please everybody and at the same time work up his own stock. It wasn’t surprising, but it wasn’t really forgivable, either.
Abatangelo folded the paper over slowly, then heaved it against the wall. He put his head in his hands, thinking, Just another dumb fish. Then he reached for the phone and kept on dialing Waxman’s number till at long last he got through.
Waxman greeted him with, “I just tried to reach you.” A curious distance abstracted his voice, a skeptical civility that hinted at defensiveness. “I’ve just had a call from Frank Maas.”
Abatangelo laughed acidly. “Don’t fuck with me, Wax.”
“I couldn’t be more sincere.”
“Is she with him?”
Waxman hesitated. “Shel? He didn’t- ”
“Tell me what he said.”
Waxman cleared his throat. “First, I gather from your tone you’ve had the chance to read the article. I realize it may not be everything you would have wished. But understand- ”
“I loved the article,” Abatangelo said. “Read it twice. In particular I liked your art. Tell me what he said.”
Waxman replied, “I don’t think it’s entirely apropos I tell you.”
Abatangelo squeezed the receiver and fought an impulse to bang it against the wall. “You want apropos? Before I showed up last night you were stewed, plowing through hate mail. You wouldn’t even be on this story if it weren’t for me. How’s that for apropos?”
“I have a duty- ”
“You shit little green apples as soon as you’re in a room alone with a few cops. They spot this lovely trait and play you like a goddamn flute. You hand up my name, hang me out to dry. For all I know you’re wearing a wire right now.”
“That is insulting.”
“What did this Frank guy have to say?”
“He’s bitter. He says he had nothing to do with any killings.”
“No fooling.”
“He wants money.”
“How much?”
“What difference does it make? It taints whatever he intends to tell me.”
Abatangelo could hear a cat purring in the background. It was nuzzling the receiver on the far end. Waxman shooed the animal away and resumed with, “He says he’s willing to meet, if I bring five thousand dollars. He’s giving me half an hour to think it over.”
“Offer him three,” Abatangelo said, “and ask him where he wants to meet.”
Waxman groaned. “This isn’t the tabs. We don’t pay sources. Even if we did, I can’t get an editor to front me lunch, let alone three thousand dollars.”
“I’ll pay it,” Abatangelo said.
He did the tally in his head. He could sell the Dart, that’d bring maybe half a thousand. If he gave the Sirkis back, he’d never get the full three hundred, not from the likes of Toretta, but two would do. He could pawn Mannion’s camera equipment; that might get him the rest. It wasn’t his to pawn, of course. If caught, it meant back to prison for sure. No wiggle room at that point. Five more years.
“I’m dead serious, Wax.”
“Yes. I gathered that.”
“Tell him it isn’t payment for his story. It’s to cover the cost of food, a safe place to stay. He’s on the run, we understand that. I understand that. But first he talks. Otherwise no deal.”
In the background, the cat’s purring grew loud again. Waxman didn’t bother to shoo it away this time.
“I guess,” he said finally, “if we’re careful, check out his story so it doesn’t look like we’re just paying for some ruse.”
“There you go.”
“It’s intriguing, your offer, don’t get me wrong. It’s just, ethically speaking, I mean- ”
“Ethics is for philosophers, Wax. Get him to sit down with you. Serve the story, remember?”
Frank approached the restaurant bar of the Brighton Hotel and ordered a double Tanqueray rocks. Taking a stool, he checked his watch, shook it, put it to his ear. He told himself, Sit quiet now, try.
Another restaurant, he thought, bad news. His thumb, courtesy of Waldo, felt hot from infection and large as a bar of soap. His midriff cramped with each breath. Christ, why did I agree to this? Because the reporter insisted. Because the reporter doesn’t want to be alone with you. He watched with relief as his drink arrived and he wrapped his hands around the glass.
The restaurant was new, catering to the icy fashion crowd- ambitious cuisine, stark decor, an intense unpleasant swank among the staff. Artwork of a sort hung here and there. Glass dominated the bar to where it seemed to emit a faint, high sound.
Behind the bar, a television offered the morning news, a segment called “Local Edition.” A bit about hepatitis in the gay community segued into a helicopter shot of the ranch house, beneath which the words SITE OF GANGLAND-STYLE KILLINGS appeared. Shortly an Asian woman with bangs and wearing a peach-colored suit was holding a microphone against a blurred backdrop. The sound was turned too low for Frank to hear everything the Asian woman was saying, but he did catch the word “methamphetamine,” pronounced like it was a kind of napalm. Then the camera cut to a close-up of Felix, standing on his porch. Frank couldn’t tell at first if this was stock footage, a segment shot earlier or what. He strained again to hear, catching through the static bits of what Felix was saying- he had no clue, he said, what anyone was talking about. He mentioned something about a “doctor,” then smiled like a harmless aging redneck, gestured good-bye with his cane, and reached behind him as his wife, Cheryl, offered her shoulder and they hobbled side by side to the car. Going to the doctor, Frank guessed. Can’t get much more harmless than that. Unless you take a good look at his eyes.
Frank glanced around, to see if anyone else was paying attention to the program, or him. The bartender was bent over, stocking his fridge. The owner, a slight balding Persian in a double-breasted suit, patrolled the dining room with hands clasped behind his back, leading with his chin. The hostess, a thin blonde maybe thirty years old, wearing makeup so garish it made her look fifty, stood at her lectern, fussing with the brunch menu.
Frank reached inside his jacket, removed his hand-worn copy of the newspaper piece and smoothed it out on the bar. He’d given it maybe three dozen readings, feeling more naked each time, an effect only enhanced now by the television coverage. But the worst of it wasn’t the fear. The article talked about this smuggler just out of prison, a guy with a long and difficult name. It said he and Shel had been an item years ago, before they both went down on federal charges. Worse, it said that he was the man Shel had run to after Frank had tried to murder her. The article actually used the word “murder.” It also used the word “lovers,” referring to Shel and this other guy. It all made sense now, he thought. What a sick, pathetic, piss-driven fool you’ve been. This was who Shel was secretly mooning over all that time, not Mooch. She’d never said a word about the guy, not once in over two years. How many other secrets had she kept? How many times, when I sat there, pouring out my heart, telling her my plans- not just for me, for us, that was the sick part, for us, damn it- how many times had she really been thinking of this Danny Grab-Your-Banjo, or however the fuck you pronounced his name?
He glanced one last time at the picture of Shel, winced, then folded the paper over again and returned it to his pocket. Shortly a plump, redheaded professor-type came through the entrance, stumbling on the door saddle. He was garbed in tweed and corduroy, checking every face as he came aright, catching his balance. Frank watched in the mirror above the bar, biting his lip, heart pounding.
Spotting Frank at the bar, the professor made the proper mental connection and came forward ardently, extending his hand the last few steps. “I’m Bert Waxman,” he said. Frank detected in the voice traces of jug wine, chalk dust, arguments in the library. He’d sold crank to voices like that. “I appreciate your willingness to meet with me here.”
“You have to pay for my drink,” Frank told him.
They sat at a table against the wall and the waitress appeared shortly. She had chubby legs and wore a crucifix nose stud; a cold sore as large and white as a chancre filled the corner of her mouth. Waxman only wanted coffee but Frank ordered another double gin, asking it be brought at once. The waitress checked out his face, then spun around and vanished. Once she was out of earshot, Frank remarked, “I think I’d shoot my lips off before I let that woman kiss me.”
He and Waxman eyed each other briefly. Frank felt vaguely discouraged. Waxman was coming into focus, impression-wise, and he was exactly the sort of person Frank had been bred to loathe: educated, browbeaten, sincere. The kind folks run to with their inspired lies. A scribe for users. Like I’m one to complain, Frank thought. He hid his throbbing thumb in his lap.
“I’ve had a chance to think through the way you want to work the money angle,” he said. “This third-party thing.”
“Yes,” Waxman said, clearing his throat.
“Won’t work. Where’s my guarantee it’s not just smoke?”
“I think you can understand I’m in much the same position,” Waxman said. “How do I know you have anything genuinely valuable to provide?”
“Oh, I do. Believe me, I do. And it’s a damn sight better than what you’ve got so far.”
The waitress returned, bearing their drinks on a tray. Frank downed half his before Waxman was through tending to his coffee: heavy cream, three sugars.
“Look,” Frank said, “this source of yours. This Italian guy. I’d be careful if I were you. Strikes me as the type to say anything.”
“There were two police versions of events quoted in the article as well.” Waxman pinched his empty sugar packets into sections and set them on his saucer like tiny flowers. “You don’t seem terribly bothered by either of them.”
Frank blinked. “Meaning what?”
“Say what you like about Mr. Abatangelo’s reliability, it’s his story that troubles you.”
“Like hell.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Look,” Frank said, sensing it was time to invent, “Shel told me all about this guy, got it? I can tell you things about him his own mother doesn’t know.”
“His mother,” Waxman enjoined, tasting his coffee, “is dead.”
“Yeah, well,” Frank said, thinking: If she’s dead, she can’t contradict me. “Figure of speech, okay?”
“What in particular did Mr. Abatangelo get wrong?”
The room turned hot suddenly. Frank felt sweat prickling his skin. “Look, what I mean is, if I were you I’d sort things out a little, not just write them down on the jump. Use your head, you know? Ask around.”
Waxman nodded. “Go on.”
“I can help you there,” Frank said. “Unlike this Dan Slab-of-Mango guy, who wouldn’t know the truth if he had to drive it around like a bus.”
“The truth, which is?”
Frank was having trouble with his throat, it kept wanting to close up on him. Worse, little stabs of memory kept jagging across his mind’s eye and scaring him. Wetting his lips he leaned forward.
“The crew that smoked those three folks in that house last night? I can put you through to the chief. Absolutely. Nervy little fucker, mean as a hornet, got a birthmark right here.” He tapped his forehead. “Your article, it got the Mexican angle right, but, you know, it was kinda spotty. No offense. But I mean, that’s the problem, right? That’s why you need me.”
“Who is this crew?” Waxman asked. “What are their names?”
Frank shook his head. “Money first.”
Waxman twisted his pen cap, leaned forward and asked, “Do you concede that you were with the Briscoe twins the night they were murdered?”
Frank grimaced and sat back. He shivered a little. “I’m getting a little sick of being blamed for that,” he said.
“But you were with them.”
“I didn’t do it.” Frank slammed back the rest of his cocktail, at which point he realized he had quite a package on. Everything but his skin seemed warm to the touch. Surfaces gave way a little when he looked at them.
“Look,” he said, a bit loud, “it’s easy to crap on me. I’m easy to hate. But get this”- and he prodded his finger into Waxman’s arm- “by the time those two got sniffed, I was long gone. I never touched them, I didn’t see who did. I liked the little fuckers, why would I smoke ’em?”
Waxman asked, “Where did you go when you left their house?”
Frank shoved the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. His head seethed with fervent whispers. When he took his hands away he reached for the sugar bowl mindlessly and fingered a half dozen packets, slipping them into his coat pocket.
“That’s all I got to say,” he said, looking up in a daze, “till I see some cash.”
Abatangelo waited in his car outside the Brighton Hotel as an immense American sedan drifted from its parking space. Good omen, he thought. Right in front.
Waxman had refused to tell him where the meet was being held, insisting he see Frank alone. So Abatangelo had driven over in the Dart, parked down the street from Waxman’s apartment, and, when the cab appeared, followed. Wax, Wax, Wax, he’d thought- you simply do not understand the stakes involved. I deserve a good look at this character. It won’t do, letting you sit there and get lied to- not if I’m the one who’s got to risk five more years in stir just to pay him off.
He steered the Dart into the parking spot and hustled inside the hotel. Brunch patrons queued at the hostess stand. Abatangelo worked past them gently, murmuring apologies. When he reached the hostess she bristled, glaring up from her seating chart, which she’d rendered into a chaos of crayon smears. She looked ready to let go with a good long scream. Abatangelo smiled, said, “Meeting a friend,” and kept moving.
He spotted them across the room. Obscured behind a waiter pushing a flambé cart, he made half the distance between the hostess stand and the table before Frank looked up. Don’t be hostile, he told himself. Just mosey up, introduce yourself, sit down, and take it from there. For the fraction of an instant it took to tell himself this, the plan worked well. Then Frank’s eyes turned wild. Maybe I’m walking too fast, he thought. Maybe there’s blood in my eye. Whatever the reason, Frank bolted up from his chair, spilling coffee across the tablecloth as Waxman stared down at the stain oozing toward him.
“Don’t,” Abatangelo shouted, sensing it was the wrong word just as the whole situation went wrong.
Frank checked every direction, bat-eyed, ashen, then hurdled the next table. Four middle-aged women launched to their feet, screaming. Waxman stared, dabbing his trousers mindlessly, as Abatangelo, acting on instinct, lunged past the screamers and caught Frank’s ankle. Porcelain shattered, glass and flowers sailed airborne. “Stop it,” Abatangelo shouted as a searing pain shot through his wrist. Frank had doubled on himself, sunk his teeth through the skin, clear to bone. He went at Abatangelo’s face with his nails, gouging the eyes. He broke loose of Abatangelo’s hold, teeth and fingernails dark with blood, and one of the four women collapsed in a faint. Waiters and busmen drifted back against the high walls uttering, “God, Oh God, My God.” Blind, the ripped eye hot against his fingers, blood clouding what he could see, Abatangelo flailed, lunging again, grabbing Frank’s coattail from the back and with the other hand reaching out for his belt. Frank kicked free, tore at him again, hissing like an animal. He twisted back and bit Abatangelo’s face, found the eyes with his nails again. Abatangelo recoiled, Frank scrambled to his feet and shoved his way through the crowd past the hostess stand shrieking into faces, tumbling out into the lobby, pulling fiercely on the heavy brass door.
Abatangelo closed distance behind. Frank tumbled down the stairs onto the sidewalk, struggled up crook-kneed. Abatangelo caught him, snapped him up into a headlock, grabbed his hair, drove his face hard against the Dart’s window twice, dazing him, then lifted him by the scruff with one hand, the other digging in his pocket for his keys. He opened the trunk, lifted Frank and threw him inside.
He drove one-eyed, hyperventilating, not really clear on which turns he made, how fast he took them, who was ahead or behind. What the hell was that, he wondered. His pulse throbbed as his keys chimed faintly against the steering column. Behind him, the constant muffled pounding and shouts from the trunk intensified.
Some time later, how much he wasn’t exactly sure, he was on his feet again, beside the car. Behind him stretched an empty pier in the shadow of a looming skyway. Warehouses, locked up for the weekend, defiled for blocks in each direction. He caught his breath, listening to the shrieks of the seagulls overhead and the fading cries from his trunk, the dull thud of shoes and hands against metal.
He settled down onto the pier to sit, facing the water and dabbing at the cut near his eye. Midday haze obscured the distance, even the bridge dissolved from view. Nearby, the seagulls rose up slowly and then settled down again on the rotting pier. Tenderly, he inspected the places where Frank had bit his face, feeling puffed skin.
Get him to talk to you, he reminded himself. Scare him if you have to, use what force you have to, but get him talking. Keep him talking till he tells the truth.
He rose to his feet, returned to the car and removed his keys from his pant pocket. Frank had fallen quiet inside the trunk, as though gathering up his strength for the next round. In one movement, Abatangelo inserted the key, popped the trunk, and with his right hand stiff like a blade dug deep into Frank’s midriff beneath the sternum cartilage. He drove his left thumb beneath the trapezius, paralyzing Frank’s right shoulder and arm. Frank did not scream. His face turned white and the popping eyes displayed their veins.
“You know who I am, right?”
“No,” Frank whispered. Then: “Yeah. Don’t. I didn’t do anything. I can help.”
“Help what?”
“Find her.”
“Oh yeah? Find her how?”
“I know who’s got her.”
“You don’t have her?”
“Me? No, no.”
“The Mexicans.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you. First- ”
Abatangelo dug his thumb deeper into Frank’s shoulder. “You love her?” Abatangelo whispered. “Come on, cocksucker, you don’t have to think about it. Do you care what happens to her?”
Frank said, “Yes.”
The word made Abatangelo want to spit.
“There’s an envelope in my pocket. Take it out.”
Frank’s left hand, shaking, managed to tug the packet of photographs out. Images of Shel, bruised, scratched and bloody, tumbled across his chest and face.
“Take a good, long look,” Abatangelo said.
Frank began to cry.
“Look at them,” Abatangelo shouted. “Or I’ll kill you right here.”
Frank tried to finger the print nearest his face but his hand shook too badly. He stammered, “I’ll help you, anything, don’t- ”
Abatangelo released his grip finally and stood back a little. When Frank continued sobbing, Abatangelo said quietly, “Stop it.” His eye fastened on one of the prints of Shel, the one showing the bruises down her back where Frank had beaten her with the stock of the shotgun. The next thing he knew he had his left hand around Frank’s throat as the right hand battered his face. He was shouting, “Shut… the fuck… up,” until Frank curled up into a ball, head shielded by his arms. His cries died down to a whimper.
Abatangelo stood back again. He inspected his hand, laced with blood. The fury drained from him and left behind a residue of dread.
You’ve changed, he thought. You used to be smarter.
Shel had been alone in the whitewashed room for about an hour, listening to the rats scuttling inside the walls of the empty house. More faintly, from outside, she heard the squatter children shrieking as they played and tormented one another, or the nearby windmills groaning like a rusted metal choir. Now it was a new sound that rousted her, the approach of a car crushing gravel outside.
Cesar had promised to bring her fresh water, and some medicine for the pain. When she heard the hurricane doors swing open, however, she noticed that it was two sets of footsteps descending the wood plank stairs, not one.
As the door from the root cellar swung open, a plump, tidy, middle-aged Latino ducked through the opening. He smelled of cologne, his hair so flawlessly combed it suggested a mother’s touch. He wore a double-breasted Armani suit, a crisp white shirt and a staid silk tie and Giorgio Brutini loafers. He could not have seemed more out of place had he sprouted a tail.
One of the large ones followed, Humberto or Pepe, she still didn’t know who was which. He was garbed in the same gray suit as before. The tidy one carried a flashlight and a small black medical bag. Somehow he had managed to cross the muck of the root cellar without soiling himself. She pictured him hopping stone to stone. The large one closed the door behind.
The tidy one smiled, handed his flashlight to his companion, then turned back and bowed slightly at the waist. “Cesar informed me that you asked for some relief from your pain,” he said.
His English belonged to an educated man, his voice melodious and cultured. Shel looked at the small black bag in his hand. She recalled the needle and syringe lying inside the shroud of stiff clear plastic wrapped around Snuff Akers’s body.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m better.”
The man looked about the room, as though for a chair. Seeing none, he said something to the other man in Spanish. The only word Shel caught was, “Humberto.” That settles that, she thought; Pepe’s the other guy. Humberto left the room and the plump one turned back to her, wearing exactly the same smile as before.
“Cesar appears to have taken quite an interest in you,” he said.
That’s it, Shel realized. He won’t be coming back. I’m going to be killed here, now, by this fat little fella. Doctor Death.
“Romantic young man, Cesar,” the man continued. “They held a dinner a few weeks ago, at the hotel, for the staff. The maids, the kitchen, the security team, everyone. There’s an operator there, a girl from a village in the south. Cesar has an insufferable crush on her. He can’t even be near her without stammering.”
Humberto returned, carrying a campaign chair and a thermos. With a flick of his arm he unfolded the campaign chair. The tidy one, the doctor, pulled up his trouser legs and sat. Humberto handed him the thermos. As the doctor unscrewed the lid, he continued, “As I was saying, Cesar, he’s really quite lovestruck. It’s not uncommon, of course, for unattractive men to develop profound attachments. The night of the staff dinner was apparently the worst. As it’s been told to me, he planned to draw this operator away sometime during the evening, speak to her alone. Confide his heart. But his nerve failed. He just sat there during the meal, like a stump. Later on, however, in his dreams, poor Cesario could not be silenced.”
He turned to Humberto, mumbled something in Spanish, and the larger man cackled. Pressing his hands to his heart, he sang in a moaning voice, “Angel mio…” Shel recognized the voice. It had been the one singing “Vaya con Dios” at the ranch house as Rowena and Duval were murdered.
“It’s an unfortunate trait, for someone on the security team, to talk in his sleep,” the doctor concluded.
Security team, Shel thought. The euphemism reminded her of watching newscasts from Vietnam as a girl. Damage assessments. Tactical repositionings. Advantageous weather. The doctor had the thermos lid removed. He poured a clear fluid into the cap and offered it to Shel.
“Water,” he said.
“I’m not thirsty,” she told him.
The doctor sighed, as if she’d hurt his feelings. “If it was anyone’s plan to kill you, you’d already be dead.”
It was the first crack in the courtly veneer. His eyes were hard. As though to bring his point home, he glanced about the room. Blood spatters smeared the floor and wall where Dayball’s interrogation had grown especially rough. One stain in particular looked like he’d tried to drag himself away from the ball bat coming down.
The doctor held out the cup again. The man has a point, Shel realized. These guys aren’t the sort to waste time when it comes to death. She took the cup, sniffed, and drank. Something inside her melted. She downed the full amount to slake her thirst and reached out with the cup and he refilled it and she drank again. Closing her eyes, she waited for the first signs of cramping nausea to hit.
“You see,” the doctor said after a moment. “Water.”
He placed the thermos on the floor beside him. Resting his hands on his knees, he said, “I would like to examine you briefly, if I may.”
Shel flashed on Danny rousting her throughout the night, checking for concussion. No hospitals, she’d said. People die in hospitals. She remembered, too, the dream she’d had on waking, the abandoned foundry, the sense that It was about to happen, and saw in a glance how everything in this room had been foretold.
“What for?” Shel said, still holding the cup. “If I keel over and retch or flat out die on you, what possible difference could that make given what’s in store for me?”
“It will not take long,” he said, reaching down to unsnap the small black bag. “And how do you know what’s in store for you?”
“I’m a quick study.”
“Did Cesar say anything to you?”
“I don’t need Cesar to figure this thing out. Come on. Be serious.”
“I could not possibly,” the doctor responded, “be more serious.”
He pulled from the small black bag a zippered leather case the size of a book. Her hands started shaking so badly she dropped the cup. As she reached down to pick it up a thunderbolt slashed through her head and she pulled back her hand. Tears ran down her face from behind her closed eyelids. God help me, she thought.
“The pain,” the doctor asked, “which side is it on?”
She scuttled back from him on the mattress, churning with her legs, but there was nowhere to go. She pressed herself against the wall.
“Come now,” he said. “This is childish.”
“I don’t like doctors,” she said. It sounded childish.
The doctor sighed, turned to Humberto, and nodded. Humberto lumbered over and grabbed Shel by the arm. She struggled, but lacked strength to do anything more than make him laugh. He dragged her within arm’s reach of the doctor, who licked the back of his hand and held it up to her mouth. “Exhale, please,” he said.
She averted her face, shook her head. Humberto grabbed her hair and forced her face front again. She exhaled.
“Very good,” the doctor said.
Next he fingered her jaw and throat and forehead. His fingers were soft and warm. Lifting her chin, he said, “Open both your eyes at once please.” He glanced quickly from one side of her face to the other.
“Your pupils,” he said, “they’re both the same size. That’s good.”
“If they weren’t?”
“It might indicate stroke.”
He searched her nostrils and ears, remarking, “No blood, no cerebral fluid.” He felt for her carotid pulse, counted, felt for the pulse in each wrist, counted.
“Your saliva,” he asked. “Does it taste sweet to you?”
“No.”
“Be truthful, please.”
“No,” she said again.
He sat back, folded his hands. “What examination I can conduct here is limited, obviously. But you have a concussion, I believe. Basically, you need to rest. Allow the bruising of your brain to heal.” He gestured with his hand to his head, rotating the open palm slowly about his ear. Healing. “And I understand you tried to commit suicide. With pills. Is that correct?”
“I don’t see where that much matters.”
“Do you remember which pills?”
Shel rattled off the names of the medications she could remember swallowing.
“No narcotics or barbiturates?”
“You tell me,” Shel said.
He smiled again, a little less kindly. “You’re absolutely certain that Cesar said nothing to you.”
“We watched the squatter kids pelting each other with acorns,” she said. “We talked about oak trees.”
The doctor nodded, looked to Humberto and offered a little shrug. Turning back to Shel, he said, “Let’s take care of the pain, shall we?”
He reached for the leather-bound case and unzipped it. Inside lay a collection of medical instruments, including a syringe, a vial of alcohol, cotton balls, a sterile needle. Reaching down into his case, he retrieved a small medicine vial filled with clear fluid.
It was all just a setup, Shel thought. Quiet you down. They were going to kill you all along.
She tried to swat the medicinal bottle out of his hand but missed. The force of the lunge toppled her over onto her side. “Humberto,” the doctor said, his voice now betraying disgust and impatience. In one movement Humberto flipped Shel onto her stomach, put his knee in the small of her back and with one hard jerk pulled her jeans down below her hips. She kicked and flailed and screamed like a four-year-old but the needle broke skin and shortly a debilitating warmth spread through her, like drowsy smoke. Resistance faded. She felt utterly, rapturously wonderful until the sudden heaving of her stomach forced her to her knees. Humberto pulled her by the hair again, this time to the side of the mattress where she vomited a stew of bile and water onto the concrete floor. Humberto let go of her hair. Her face struck the concrete.
Humberto and the doctor murmured things to each other in Spanish as they collected the campaign chair and the small black bag, disappearing in a rainbow through the low wood door.
Abatangelo sat on a wooden chair in Waxman’s kitchen, watching as the reporter stood at the stove, nursing soup. Waxman’s cats, snub-tailed and obese, purred angrily, sniffing the air and slithering about his calves. Frank was in the bathroom alone. Abatangelo had left him there for a moment, after gathering everything sharp and checking that the window was painted shut.
“You might as well have just killed him at the table,” Waxman said. “Sat down and asked for a menu.”
“I apologize for leaving you there like that.”
Waxman laughed. “You apologize?”
“For the trouble.”
“The trouble,” Waxman said, nodding. “Just so you’re clear, I doled out tips and ass-kissing bullshit to every person who bothered to confront me. And although I welcome your apology, I don’t believe you’ve quite gotten the drift of my objections here.” One of his cats jumped up onto the top of the stove. Waxman gently picked it up and returned it to the floor. “You’ve made me a party to a kidnapping and assault.”
“He wants to talk to you,” Abatangelo said.
Waxman rubbed the back of his neck. “Lovely. A coerced confession. Made for television.”
“No, Wax. Remember, he was the one who ran.”
“Don’t insult me.”
“Look, Wax. I admit, yes, things went haywire. But all I intended to do was show up, sit down.”
Waxman laughed. “Oh, really? That hardly explains the expression on your face as you came toward the table.”
Abatangelo guessed this was so. “Okay, whatever. I came on too hard. He ran. I reacted. The whole thing took on a life of its own. I’m not proud of that. But then Frank and me, we had a meeting of the minds, okay? I drove him to this pier south of the city, I don’t know what I was thinking. Showed him the pictures of Shel. He squirmed and whined, I flipped. It was… not good. And yeah, I hit him.” He looked up into Waxman’s eyes. “But guess what happened then. Come on, Wax, guess.” He chuckled grimly, waited, his nostrils twitching at the smell of the canned soup reaching a boil. “I said I was sorry.”
Waxman averted his eyes. Stirring with one hand, he reached down blindly with the other, nudging one of the cats away.
“You understand, Wax? I told Frank Maas- the guy who almost killed the woman I love- I told him I was sorry.”
“Yes, well- ”
“I’m not saying my motives are pure. I need him, sure, right, he’s the only link back to Shel I’ve got now. And he’s scared, Wax. He’s tired of running. He wants to come clean. So I brought him here.”
Waxman turned back to face him. “Look, not so long ago I’d have had no worries on the matter. The paper would have backed me up. But no more green eyeshades. We’ve got suits running the editorial board. They’re facile types who mouth platitudes and watch their asses. They’re particularly fond of this new buzzword, ‘Public Journalism,’ whatever the hell that means. And don’t ask them today if you want the same answer tomorrow.”
“The story, Wax. That’s your protection.”
“Not anymore.” He turned off the heat and removed the saucepan from the burner. “When the police come around the press room to bitch, when they pound the table and accuse me of harboring a fugitive or abetting a kidnap after the fact or whatever other iniquity they concoct on the spot, the suits won’t so much as blink. They’re going to say, ‘Here, take him.’ Ecce homo. To the tune of a fife and drum they’ll run me up a flagpole and leave me there to hang.”
The door to the bathroom opened. Frank appeared, tottering in the doorway. Gathering his bearings, he guided himself with one hand along the wall while the other hand pressed a washcloth to his face. His skin was mottled with cuts and bruises and flush from the cleansing Abatangelo had given the wounds with Listerine. Abatangelo had nursed his own wounds, too. Scratches ran down his arms. Black and blue eruptions of puffy flesh, detectable as bite marks up close, dotted his face, resembling the ravages of acne from a distance.
Frank shambled into the kitchen, resting his weight on the door frame and looking from one man to the other. “I guess I’m ready,” he whispered. His eyes were glassy. Abatangelo got up from his chair, took Frank’s arm and guided him into the dining room. Waxman ladled out vegetables and broth, dug two slices of wheat bread from a cellophane bag and dropped them onto a saucer.
Waxman’s dining room doubled as a study. Paperbacks tottered every direction on the bookshelves, several rows deep, and they gave the place a smell of mildew. Above the desk hung a portrait of Sandino, the Nicaraguan patriot. A pair of nail trimmers rested on the window ledge beside a withered tea bag and a handkerchief soiled from nosebleeds.
Waxman placed the soup and bread on the table. Frank sat there, staring at it. Abatangelo picked up the spoon and molded Frank’s hand around it.
“You said you’d help us,” he said. “Be a good idea to eat.”
Abatangelo tore off a corner of bread and dipped it in the broth, lifting it to Frank’s lips. After several urgings and refusals, Frank accepted it, eyes still glazed. Abatangelo gestured for Waxman to get his recorder down from the bookshelf and to ready himself with paper and pen. Sighing, Waxman obeyed.
In time Frank stopped resisting, he accepted more bread, more soup, his skin acquired color. His eyes grew steady, but a dullness remained. Finally, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and gestured that he was through.
Abatangelo inserted a cassette into Waxman’s recorder and poured Frank a glass of red wine. Frank accepted it, drinking with his eyes closed and downing the entire glass.
Abatangelo said, “Tell Wax what you started to tell me in the car.”
Frank nodded, still holding on to the glass. He implored with his eyes, and Abatangelo poured out three fingers more. Frank smiled at the portion, took a sip.
“Clean the slate, Frank,” Abatangelo said. “You owe it to her. Remember what you said? Wax here, he can bring you public, and that’s about as safe as you can expect, given the circumstances. I’m still good for the three grand, that’s a promise. You’re going to need it for a lawyer. Turn yourself in, get yourself holed away in witness protection. But first, here and now, you tell your story. That’s the deal.”
Frank nodded. It was difficult to tell if he was agreeing to what was said or simply confirming that he’d heard it. Shortly, without any change of expression, he turned to Abatangelo and said, “You’re gonna steal my old lady.”
Abatangelo studied Frank’s eyes. A little late to be worried about that, he thought. “I don’t want to see her hurt,” he said. “You don’t, either. Not now. Not again. You said so. So what are we going to do, Frank?”
Frank ran his fingertip around a stain on the tabletop and his eyebrows jigged; he looked like a man in furious discussion with his better self. Then, without further provocation, he lifted his gaze to the ceiling and, as though the words were written there, began to talk. His voice droned in a tremulous whisper, which Abatangelo found encouraging. There was little time to deviate, to invent. The words just came. Waxman jotted down what he could, names to get back to, threads of the story left hanging. The recorder caught the rest.
All in all, Frank seemed reasonably in possession of his faculties, though the story bounced around time-wise and he tended to obsess on cryptic digressions till Waxman brought him gently back. His mind was a whirlwind, in contrast to his voice, which droned on vacantly. The phrase “fitting and fair” cropped up a lot, a sort of conversational tic to create a little moral distance whenever the story grew particularly incriminating. Every now and then his eyes flared, a look of puzzlement darkened his features, as though he himself was startled by his own admissions. As though everything had happened to someone else, and that someone was hovering nearby, invisible, whispering in his ear. Hopefully, Abatangelo thought, the invisible someone wasn’t lying too much.
The clincher came when he admitted yes, it was likely true, he was responsible for the deaths of the Briscoe twins. He stammered through the admission, beginning to end, saying he couldn’t quite remember the thing itself, but there was a terrible feeling hanging over the images he had in his mind. The moment he conceded this, looking up into Waxman’s eyes, a palpable change came over him- not so much as though a weight had been lifted, as a light had gone out. His spirit seemed smaller, duller. And ironically, because of that, it seemed more convincing.
Meanwhile, Waxman’s notepad overran with names: a Mexican known only as El Zopilote, others named Cesar, Humberto, Pepe, Gaspar Arevalo, then the Akers brothers, Felix Randall, Lonnie Dayball, Rick Tully. Waxman went back over the story again and again to eliminate the confusions and tie the digressions together. He ran down the names one last time and Frank promised it was every one he could think of.
“Remember,” he said, glancing back and forth between them, “I helped out. Right?”
Waxman sat back, reviewing his notes. Abatangelo pulled his chair up next to Frank’s and leaned close enough to whisper. “Where is she, Frank?”
Frank chuckled nervously, flinched, and went pale. “Just a guess, all right?”
“For now.”
Frank nodded and rubbed his arms. Abatangelo uncorked the wine bottle, doled out another portion, this one larger than the last.
“Thank you,” Frank said.
“Keep going.”
Frank nodded and licked his lips a long while. Eventually he said, “At the hotel.”
“What hotel?” Waxman asked.
Frank gestured with his hand to convey a distance. “North side of the river, around Montezuma Hills. It’s the only hotel out there.”
Abatangelo asked, “Will they keep her alive?”
Frank cringed and the edges of his mouth curled up.
“If you know,” Waxman offered.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. Still more softly, he added, “I’m sorry.”
Abatangelo had to force back the impulse to reach out, grab Frank by the throat and scream, Sorry?
Frank said, “There’s another name.”
Waxman snapped to. “Please?”
“The money man, the one who owns the hotel, the land it’s on, everything. His name, his name is…” Frank looked up at the ceiling again but apparently it failed him now. He shrugged and looked down. “More Air- ”
“Moreira,” Waxman responded.
Frank flinched and wiped his hand across his mouth. “You know these people?”
“Not the others,” Waxman replied. “Rolando Moreira, I know. It’s not a name that’s hard to recognize. He’s been in the papers of late. He gives a lot of speeches. And apparently he’s throwing some giant party for his daughter.”
“I don’t know about that,” Frank said.
“He’s been drumming up aid in the Mission and the Delta, aid for his little projects. Rehabilitating gang members. Providing legal assistance for migrants. There’s talk it’s all just a front.”
“Yeah?” Frank said.
“What I know, I only know secondhand.” Waxman attempted a smile. “From friends. I have friends in the movement.”
“Aha,” Frank replied. The way he said it, it came out sounding like: You would.
Abatangelo said, “This hotel, the one out in Montezuma Hills, how easy is it to get in and out of?”
Frank affected bewilderment. “In, easy. Out, I mean, out how?”
“Out with Shel.”
“I don’t know she’s there.”
“If she is.”
“There’s a zillion rooms, they’ve got guys, Cesar, Humberto, Pepe, the place is crawling with guys.”
“This marina then, the one you mentioned. The writing above the phone, it said something like, ‘The lady waits. Same place by the river.’ ”
“Yeah?”
“You think that’s where they mean to bring Shel?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going to show us where it is. Right?”
Frank shrugged in a way that suggested he meant yes. “Can I lie down somewhere for a little while?”
Abatangelo sat back, took a deep breath and told himself to be careful. Removing the cassette from the recorder, he labeled it, set the tape down on the table where Frank could see it, and said, “This is the truth, right? Not a little story to make us go away.”
Abatangelo shot Waxman a glance that said, Let him answer.
Frank paled and licked his lips. “Honest,” he said quietly. “Please. I’m so tired.”
Abatangelo scooted the cassette across the table to Waxman. “Sure, Frank. Catch yourself a little nap. We’ll need you on your toes for the trip out to the marina.”
Waxman took the covers off his own bed and provided them to Frank on the couch. Frank lay down, tucked up his knees and drew the bedding over his head. Drawn by their own sheddings, the cats materialized, leaping up onto Frank’s body and pumping the blanket with their paws. Waxman gestured for Abatangelo to join him in the hallway. Once they were alone, he whispered, “Are you all right?”
The question caught Abatangelo off-guard. “Why?”
Waxman studied him. “I’m not saying it’s as bad as it was at the restaurant, but there’s a look in your eye. It changes, but something’s always there, and it’s frightening.”
Abatangelo felt exposed. Judged. Frank’s not the only object of scrutiny in this story, he realized. “I’m not sure I can help that.”
“Perhaps you should try,” Waxman cautioned. “Relax.”
Abatangelo laughed. “Oh yeah. Ring for the masseuse.”
Waxman gestured fussily. “Look, I have a call to make. Help yourself to tea, or the fridge. Make yourself comfortable. That’s what I meant.”
He vanished into his room, and Abatangelo watched him go, feeling abandoned to his own intensity. He went back into the dining room, commandeered a chair from the table, sat in it backward, and rested his chin on his folded arms. Shortly his outrage failed him and he realized how tired he was. He catnapped in the chair, unaware of how much time was passing. His thoughts grew dreamlike, and at one point he imagined his father and Frank on the beach at Montara, scattering Shel’s ashes.
The next thing he knew, Waxman was greeting a visitor at the door.
She was a small, thin woman with broad dark features. An Indian, Abatangelo guessed. She appeared to be in her twenties, though a certain hardness about the eyes made her seem much older. She wore a work shirt, flannel jacket, white Keds; her black hair hung straight to her elbows. There was a sadness about her, but a certain ferocity as well. Whatever sorrow she’d endured had been racked into clarity.
She clutched an accordion folder to her chest. Declining introductions, Waxman led her into his own room and closed the door behind them. Waxman’s voice, the woman’s voice, thrummed urgently back and forth beyond the door for about a quarter hour, then the muted voices stopped, Waxman’s door opened again. The woman visitor returned to the entry, studying Frank now with an expression of profound disgust.
As she stood there, Abatangelo noticed something he’d failed to see before. A hatchwork of whitish scars mottled her throat. Her shirt collar, buttoned to the top, partially concealed them.
She removed her stare from Frank’s body long enough to meet Abatangelo’s eye. She did not smile or offer any greeting, and Abatangelo decided against saying anything himself. Her spirit seemed inured to courtesies. Waxman broke the spell finally, guiding her by the arm out the door and thanking her.
The woman gone, Waxman joined Abatangelo in the dining room. Without waiting for a question, he started in quietly with, “Her name is Aleris. Missionaries christened her that. She’s Kekchí, an Indian from northern Guatemala. Two years ago she came to San Francisco to work with the refugees here. I met her while I was working on an article. She’s quite a story in and of herself.”
His eyes betrayed a gravity Abatangelo had not seen before. “Tell me later,” he said.
“Of course,” Waxman replied. “In any event, Aleris brought something. I think you should see it.”
“Bring it to me here. I want to keep an eye on our boy.”
Waxman went to his room, returning with the accordion folder Aleris had left behind. He set it down on the table, then closed the sliding doors connecting the dining area to the living room, leaving just enough space so Frank could be seen. The folder contained news clippings, press releases, human rights reports, written in various languages and worn smooth by repeated handling. Typewritten translations had been stapled to each of the foreign pieces, some in Spanish, some in English.
“This,” Waxman said, withdrawing an article and pointing to the accompanying photograph, “is Rolando Moreira. The man who owns the hotel Frank told us about.”
Abatangelo leaned closer. The man wore white and addressed a crowd of schoolchildren in a tropical courtyard.
“Moreira,” Waxman continued, “is a hacendado who runs a glass factory in Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border. He also owns a great deal of ranch land in that area, all along the Rio Suchiate, which is to Chiapas what the Rio Grande is to Texas. Immigrants cross it by the thousands daily.”
Abatangelo said, “The point, Wax. We’ve got a drive to make.”
“I understand. Indulge me just this moment. Basically, Moreira positions touts in the border village of Hidalgo, across the river from Tecún Umán. He offers work on his ranches or transport north to America. The touts charge outrageous fees and kick back to Moreira. Sometimes they just drop the pretense, take their pigeons out into the forest and rob them. Rape them.”
“Let me guess,” Abatangelo said. “You just snuck in Aleris’s story.”
Frank groaned on the sofa and pulled the blankets tighter over his head. Waxman regarded him a bit differently now, as though he were a rare and poisonous flower.
“Here,” he said, finding a second clipping and photograph, “is the person Frank referred to as El Zopilote.”
The grainy picture, a decade older than Moreira’s, presented a man with lean features and thick black hair, descending the steps of a small white courthouse.
“His real name is Victor Facio,” Waxman explained. “He’s the overlord of Rolando Moreira’s security apparatus. I don’t know how much you know about recent Mexican history.”
“No history lessons,” Abatangelo said.
“The short version, then.”
“Tell me in the car.”
“I don’t think it would be wise,” Waxman said, “to share some of this information with him present.” He nodded toward the sofa.
Abatangelo sighed. “Go on, wrap it up.”
“After 1972 or so, rumors put Facio everywhere and anywhere there’s money and guns and a smack of anticommunism in the air. There’s only one file in the public record here in the States, though. It’s in U.S. District Court in Brownsville, Texas.” Waxman pointed again to the article Abatangelo was holding, the one with the picture of Facio standing before a courthouse. “It was for trafficking- weapons, primarily, the drug charges were quashed. Facio served twenty-three months in Huntsville, was released, and then vanished underground again.”
Waxman’s tone was almost reverential. There was a newfound purpose about him. Abatangelo found this troubling.
“Wax,” he said. “It’s gonna be dark soon.”
“I’m almost finished,” Waxman insisted. “Come the 1990’s, Facio apparently saw the wisdom of plying his trade in the private sector. The Iron Curtain fell; Castro was isolated. During a return visit to Mexico City he paid calls on several patrones he’d hit up for funds over the years. There were a lot of executive kidnappings then, it was a very tense time. Facio interviewed with Rolando Moreira in the Colonia Roma. Curiously, at the same time as his interview, a prominent financier who’d been abducted a month before was found alive, wandering along the Paseo de la Reforma. There’s always been talk that Facio was somehow involved in the man’s release, and he used it as a calling card. Regardless, he became Moreira’s director of security.”
Abatangelo thought about this for a moment. “What you’re saying is, he plays both sides.”
“The rumor,” Waxman said, “is that Facio is responsible for putting Rolando Moreira together with a major trafficker from Sinaloa. A man named Marco Carasco.”
“A rumor,” Abatangelo said. “This article, the one about the kidnapping, it appeared…?”
“In one of the opposition newspapers from Guerrero.”
“Aha,” Abatangelo said. “What’s that, a Mexican rad rag?”
Waxman bristled. “You put Facio in the picture with Moreira and Marco Carasco, you have the prospects for everything we heard from our friend there on the couch. Stolen goods? Trafficking, kidnapping, murder? I don’t find it a stretch. Not now. I’ll be honest, at first I hadn’t the least faith he would say anything worthwhile, or even coherent. But these people are real. If he knows half what he claims to know, he is a very valuable man.”
Abatangelo eyed Waxman with mild dismay. In a cautioning tone, he said, “You were at the table with me, Wax. You got to watch him work. It was like he was tooling through his mind on roller skates. And it’s not much of a mind.”
“I believe he’s telling the truth.”
“There’s no future in the truth, Wax, not on that plane. Let’s not save the world today, all right? Think small, walk tall.”
Waxman reddened. “We have to get corroboration. Of course. I don’t mean to imply otherwise.”
Abatangelo shook his head. “No time.”
“I intend to make time,” Waxman responded. “I also intend to treat our friend with a little more respect. It’s time we stopped assuming the only way to get him to cooperate is to scare him. You’ll probably laugh if I say we might appeal to his conscience.”
Abatangelo laughed.
“He could use a friend.”
“I’m friendly,” Abatangelo said.
“Aleris is willing to track down other witnesses- ”
“To what- something that happened years ago at the ass end of Mexico? That’s not my fight, Wax. Her kind can’t blame me or my politics. I don’t vote, remember? I’m a felon.” He returned his glance to Frank. “It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. It’s just my focus here is a little narrower.”
Waxman removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with his shirttail. “Excuse my saying so, but given the circumstances of your friend’s abduction- the methods, to use your term- I find this little fit of cynicism less than compelling.”
Abatangelo turned and in one short movement grabbed Waxman’s shoulders, lifted him onto the balls of his feet and pinned him to the wall. He pushed his face close, hissing through his teeth. “Don’t lecture me about her. What happened to her. What to do about her or how to feel about it.”
Waxman stared back blinking. He licked his lips. Abatangelo released his hold and turned away. Waxman gathered his breath, fumbled with his glasses and put them back on. “Forgive me,” he said. “I shouldn’t sermonize. What I said about your friend was improper. I know she means a great deal to you.”
Abatangelo winced at the change of tone. Turning around again, he found himself regarded with immense, pitying eyes. He felt indulged. He felt as though an appeal were being made to his conscience.
Saturday traffic offered little resistance as they headed up the Eastshore Freeway. Waxman sat alone in front, driving the Dart. Abatangelo sat in back with Frank. It seemed best not to make him sit back there alone, like a prize, or a prisoner. Abatangelo urged him to talk, thinking that training Frank’s mind on actual events might keep his more extreme imaginings at bay. Frank obliged, telling again the story of the past few weeks, confirming details. The effort came off like a sort of dreary chant. Abatangelo couldn’t resist the impression that this was the last time Frank expected to say these things.
In time they turned onto the Delta Highway, heading toward the flood plain beyond Martinez. They reached the Pacheco turnoff and Frank told Waxman to leave the highway and head north through the low hills toward the river.
“There’s a turn up here,” Waxman shortly announced from the front. “Which way do I go?”
Frank told him to bear right. They rounded a corner above which a refinery complex crowned a grassless bluff and then the marina came into view. Nearly three dozen boats buffeted a hatchwork of low sagging docks: weathered houseboats fouled with rubbish, listing barks, fishing smacks. Mainsails rattled in the late-day wind. The stench of brackish water mingled with that of rotting food and turpentine.
“This must be where the iconoclasts dock,” Abatangelo offered. A stenciled sign nailed to a fence post read, WELCOME TO THE IRISH PENNANT- THOSE FOUND IN SKIFFS NEAR THE DOCKS AT NIGHT ARE LIKELY TO BE FOUND IN THEM COME MORNING.
Garbage seethed out of brimming Dumpsters. A dog wearing a bandana collar barked from a paintless foredeck as the car eased past, joined by other dogs as yet unseen. A toddler in knee-soiled pajamas, holding a metal cup, stared, reaching behind one-handed to scratch. An inverted kayak rested on sawhorses amid a clutter of paint cans and tangled sail; two shirtless longhairs were stripping the hull with putty knives, sharing a bottle of peach schnapps as they worked. One of them spat into his paint shavings as the car went by.
When the marina lane came back around, a long brick wall standing chest-high ran parallel to the gravel for a hundred yards or more. Only the water stood opposite. A lone oak tree rose from the grass to the west. Abatangelo told Waxman to pull to the side.
“You can walk?” Waxman queried, turning back to Frank.
Frank didn’t respond. He was staring out at the low wall which bore two fresh scrawlings in white paint.
The Son of Man is following out His appointed course.
Woe to that man by whom He is betrayed.
– Luke 22:22
Bring your pants
If you wanna dance.
– Felix the Cat
Waxman followed Frank’s glance, adjusted his glasses, and read along. With forced humor, he quipped, “Proof at last. The Devil does quote scripture. And pop culture.”
“It wasn’t here before,” Frank said. He scoured the distance in every direction, the marina, the waving tall grass, the gravel road arcing back toward the refinery.
Abatangelo said, “Looks like your friends intend to proceed.”
“That’s not all they intend,” Frank answered, flinching as he read the white words over and over. Woe to the betrayer.
“Let’s leave,” Frank said. “Please.”
“Not yet,” Abatangelo told him. “I want a closer look.”
He gripped Frank’s sleeve and pulled him across the seat. Frank stepped out of the car, looking everywhere at once. Sniffing the air, he labored across the weed-choked gravel, Waxman doting alongside.
“Show me what you were talking about.” Abatangelo said.
Frank swallowed, scanning again the various distances. No idling cars. No waiting men. He flexed his hands, wiped them on his sleeves, then pointed. “One group lines up along the wall,” he said, “the other along the water. The drivers trade places, simple and quick. Headlights signal when things are okay. That’s that.” He looked at Abatangelo, who was frowning. “I’m not making this up.”
“I didn’t say you were.” Abatangelo checked the roads in and out, mentally trying to gauge the time it would take to arrive and leave. “Not yet, anyway.”
He stared out at the dull water, the abandoned derricks in the distance, the refinery behind. Winter twilight mottled the sky, a low red sun descending into scattered clouds.
He tried to picture what would happen. It would take a matter of seconds for Shel to be passed from one set of cars to the other. No one would dally. They loathed each other too much for that. He checked back toward the marina, the nearest boat rested 150 yards away at least. He could set up a tripod in the water, shield himself with the hull in the darkness, use the infrared with a telephoto. But the resolution would be poor, he wouldn’t get faces.
He moved closer to the wall, pulling Frank along by the sleeve. A dirt mound abutted the bricks on the leeward side, leaving a trench that a smaller man might fit into, and yet it seemed too obvious. He looked beyond the wall then, across the mound, and spotted an incinerator shelter further into the grass, thirty yards back from the gravel road. The fact he hadn’t seen it at first encouraged him.
“Wax,” he said over his shoulder, “keep Frank company here.”
Waxman sidled forward to Frank’s side as Abatangelo jumped the wall. The ground was marshy underfoot. Mice fled through the tall grass, retreating from each step. The shelter was a cinder-block windbreak, three-sided, waist-high. A wire incinerator black from old fires stood amid a debris of charred paper, blackened soup cans, moldy singed cardboard. Abatangelo kicked the larger cinders into the grass. The interior walls wore a film of soot. Abatangelo crouched down and decided that, kneeling, he could hide here.
He looked back across the mound to a tall hurricane fence, the road back toward the highway in the distance. He could use the refinery lights for bearings, park beyond the railway tracks. It was a plan. He could hide here till the vans arrived, then move up crouching through the grass, burrow down against the wall. It was the least chancy option he had.
He wiped the soot from his hands onto his trousers, sidled back toward the wall and eased back down onto the gravel. If these people were who Frank claimed they were, they’d be here, no matter how rough it promised to be. They wouldn’t miss it. He glanced over his shoulder one last time, studying the long low wall, craning to see the incinerator and feeling vaguely good about it now.
As the three of them moved back toward the car, the marina dogs resumed barking. Faces peered out from the boats. It occurred to Abatangelo that, from this distance, there was no telling if Felix Randall wasn’t one of them. Felix, or one of his men. The two longhairs stripping the kayak had the right testy swagger, he supposed. It seemed wise not to raise this prospect with Frank. He didn’t want him bolting. Once they were in the car again, though, he made sure to keep an eye trained out the back, to see if anyone followed. He wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved or not when no one did.
Once they were safely around the turn, heading back out toward the highway, he asked Frank, “Why would anybody agree to come out here? It’s perfect for a trap.”
Frank sat hunched over, rocking to warm himself, arms tucked close to his body and hands buried inside his shirt. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “Ask the guys who wrote those little slogans on the wall.” He looked up, his face drawn and pinched about the mouth. “They’ll be here. They’ll all be here.”
Abatangelo nodded. It wasn’t an answer. “I hope so,” he said, letting it go. He studied Frank from the side. It was hard to tell how shaken he was.
“You’ve earned yourself an attaboy, Frank. I mean that. You’ve been solid.”
“Yeah,” Frank said.
He licked his lips, and Abatangelo wondered how long it had been since his last little lift. His eyes flitted everywhere at once and settled on nothing. Abatangelo feared his mind was doing the same. Slipping in its tracks. Getting sucked down a hole.
“I had a baby boy once,” was the next thing Frank said.
Abatangelo, sensing he should take a sympathetic tack, said, “What was that like?”
As suddenly as that, Frank closed his eyes and wept. Hands roiling inside his shirt, head down, a sick, withered sound came up from his throat.
“I know the story,” Abatangelo said, trying to soothe him.
“No,” Frank said. “You’ve got to be dead to know that story.”
Waxman cleared his throat. Abatangelo looked up and saw Waxman gesturing as though to ask, Should I stop?
Frank said, “And his mom, you know? I think sometimes, and it tears me up, I think, whose fault was it really? I blamed her every goddamn minute, every goddamn day, but you know?”
“Frank, what’s this about?”
“It’s my fault,” Frank whispered. “Me.”
“That’s not how I heard it, Frank. Shel told me. The killer confessed.”
“It was me.”
“No, Frank.” Abatangelo leaned toward him. “Come on. Bear up. We’ll protect you. We’re almost in the clear now.”
“What do you think about,” he said, “right before they kill you? Do you know?”
“I said ease up, Frank. Come on.”
“It’s just…” He looked up, as though trying to fix on something in his mind’s eye. “I’ve waited, my God, you don’t know, waited so long. To get things clear. You have no idea.”
“Get what clear?” Abatangelo asked.
Frank turned to face him. For an instant the furious confusion seemed to melt away, the eyes warmed with light. Abatangelo saw, or thought he saw, at last a man, not just a whirlwind of battling schemes and terrors and impulses. Their glances met and held for a moment. It was, Abatangelo assumed, the way Shel must have seen him. He felt the sudden need for a camera, he wanted to take this picture, show it to Shel if or when they were ever reunited and say, “I understand.” But then just as suddenly the warming light vanished. Frank turned away, hands working inside his shirt again as his glance darted out the window. Abatangelo realized he would never know anything of real merit about this man, or Shel’s life with him. He would be grasping forever.
Frank said, “I’ve got something to show you.”
Her moments of lucidity dissolved quickly. She could not remember one moment from the next, but in an odd way she remembered the forgetting. Something always out of reach. Like the pain now.
Numbness owned her body while her mind squatted in fog. And yet old memories were welling up from nowhere, swirling round and round like home movies. Odd, she could remember the ancient past vividly, but the last few hours were an enigma. Because the pain was dulled, she did not feel frightened by this. Just sad. The sadness seemed borne upon the old memories and she knew it was a long time coming, this sadness.
You’re depressed, dear.
She licked her lips.
The man came over. He dampened a cloth and wiped her mouth. He brushed her hair off her face. Not kindly, more like he was drying dishes. The other one was kind, the small one. The one with the mark on his face.
He raped you.
No. I’d remember that.
Not the little one. This one.
The man grunted. The big one, she realized, what was his name. Humberto. Oom Bear Toe. And the little one is Cesar. Say Czar. See, this isn’t so hard. Humberto held her chin in his hand and studied her face, as though contemplating her skull.
“I am heartily sorry,” she said, “for all my sins.”
She closed her eyes. Now where the hell did that come from? A prayer, she realized, something Danny had recited for her once. Danny and a prayer and that godawful thing around his neck the Safford chaplain gave him. “Handed them out like suckers,” that’s what Danny’d said. It made her laugh.
Humberto let go of her chin and it dropped like a rock. “Fonny?” he said. “Ha ha. Fonny?” He grabbed the waist of her jeans and jerked her toward him.
No, she thought. Nothing is funny. God help me. I was just thinking about Danny. The Good Thief.
“Turn in here,” Frank said.
A muddy lane curved up through neglected pasture beyond a stand of walnut trees. Waxman put the Dart in park and stared past the gate as Abatangelo got out of the car. He unwound the chain from the gate posts, the metal so scaly with rust it seemed ready to crumble in his hands. There was a lock but it was just for show, having long ago rusted open. He tossed the lock and the chain into the grass beside the road and pushed back the cattle gate, waving Waxman through.
The tires slid in the muddy troughs the lane had become. Waxman downshifted to keep from skittering off into the grass. After a minute of this the car broke the crest of the hill and they peered through the tunnel the headlights created. What they saw was a deserted milking shed, perched atop a rocky knoll lower than the hill they’d just come over.
Frank said, “You’ll see now.”
Waxman descended into the vale and pulled as close to the shed as he could. The knoll was muddy and steep enough to discourage further progress in the car. Waxman lodged the gearshift in park and killed the motor, the headlights pointed uphill so that the shed lay squarely in the beams: a failing structure of crumbled rock and plaster with a sagging roof stripped of half its shingles. Waxman said, “Maybe we should wait here a minute.”
“No,” Frank said, and he opened his door. Abatangelo reached across the seat and caught him from behind, snagging him by the belt. “Whoa there, Frank. What’s this about?”
What Abatangelo got instead of an answer was an eruption of flailing arms and legs. Frank turned, punched, slapped and kicked, breaking Abatangelo’s grip on his belt and at the same time tumbling from the backseat. Abatangelo tried to reach through the onslaught for another firm hold but Frank toppled onto the ground outside the car and scrambled to his feet.
Abatangelo shot out after him, with Waxman shouting, “Stop it,” behind. He caught Frank twenty yards up the hill but Frank broke free again, tore off his jacket, flung it at Abatangelo, the whole time scurrying up the gravel toward the abandoned shed in the widening cone of light from the car.
Abatangelo gained ground, got a firm hold on Frank’s ankle and twisted him to the dirt. Then the blow hit. Frank had found a piece of shale the size of a hubcap, he brought it down so hard it broke in two as it hit the side of Abatangelo’s head. The blow forced a blackout of several seconds and even as he came to he could not see- his only sensations those of the cold mud beneath him, the pounding soreness near his eye, Waxman shouting from the base of the knoll, asking if he was all right.
He did not answer. Struggling to his knees, he dabbed once at his eye to stem the blood and looked up just as a massive flare of light seared the darkness. The sound came an instant later, or so it seemed. The impact sent him rolling back downhill amid a hail of soaring rock and wood and plaster. By the time he righted himself again a plume of smoke rose high above the shed. The roof crumbled and collapsed as flames darted upward against the night sky.
Glancing downhill, he saw Waxman struggling to his feet; he’d been knocked against the car by the blast. A smell of spent ether filled the air. Waxman started up the hill and Abatangelo, not waiting, headed toward the milk shed ahead of him. Aware there might be a second charge, he covered his face with his arm and crouched as he walked.
In time he reached the shattered burning doorway and found what remained of Frank’s body. The upper half of his torso had been shorn away by the blast and scattered in pieces that smoldered here and there. A tangled shred of a blackened arm. The lower portion of his body lay in a senseless tangle almost fifteen yards away, the fabric of his trousers aflame. One foot was shoeless, bent at an impossible angle from the leg. Abatangelo thought: As long as you tell the truth, you’re safe. We’ll protect you.
Waxman gained the top of the knoll. Appraising the scene, he muttered, “Good God,” then turned to Abatangelo. “How badly are you hurt?” Before he’d ended the sentence Abatangelo was skidding downhill in the mud and gravel and debris. He reached the car and opened the trunk, withdrew his camera, then headed back uphill, the camera in one hand, his flash in the other.
Waxman said, “You can’t be serious,” as Abatangelo reached the shed again. He shot the better part of two rolls, searching out body parts and looking for a window through which to shoot the burning interior of the milk shed. Coughing from the smoke, he got so close at one point his sleeve caught fire; he bent down, chafed his arm through the damp grass till the flame was out, and resumed shooting. Waxman scuttled behind.
“This is perverse.”
Abatangelo turned around and put his hand to Waxman’s chest, the better to get his full attention. “Just so I get this straight. What part of this story don’t you want to tell?”
Waxman swatted the hand away. “I’ve had enough of your patronizing macho bullshit. What happened between you and him? After you dragged him out of that restaurant, what happened?”
“You can’t blame me for this. Get serious.”
He rewound his film and headed downhill. His legs shook so badly he nearly fell with every step. Over his shoulder he called out, “That explosion was heard for miles. We’ll be tied up all night explaining things if we don’t leave now.”
Waxman stood rooted to his spot. He looked as if he was searching for something to say. The proper thing. The flames had reached a stack of hay bales inside the shed, the fire was burning hot and high. He turned and followed Abatangelo down the hill to the car.
“I intend to call this in as soon as possible,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “We’ll tell them who it is up there.”
“Fine,” Abatangelo said. Sitting down behind the wheel, he became aware at last just how badly he was shaking. “I’ll stop. But I’m not stopping long. They can place where you’re calling from.”
“I’m having difficulty reconciling your concerns with mine.”
“My concerns will get us out of here.”
“Exactly my point.”
Abatangelo decided against heading back the same direction they’d come. It seemed likely sightseers would gather there soonest. He pointed the car in the opposite direction, heading for the center of the Akers’ property, not sure where the narrow mud lane came out, or even if it did. He’d drive across virgin pasture if he had to, just to put some distance between him and Frank’s body.
“One thing you need to understand,” he told Waxman. “I can’t stay back there. I stay, it’s prison. They don’t need any more reason than that I’m standing there when it happened.” He shook his head. “I won’t go. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I don’t share your confidence in that regard,” Waxman muttered. “God forgive me.”
“No, Wax. No. Damn it, listen to me. It was his bomb. He knew it was there. He set the whole thing up. You see that, right? What did we have to offer him? Three thousand dollars. Witness protection, which is living death, and we couldn’t even guarantee that. This was his only real way out. He was busted, jilted, haunted by ghosts. He’d boxed himself in, he had people who wanted to hang him on every side. You get pressed up to a cliff, sometimes that’s the best way to turn. He looked down, he liked what he saw, he jumped. End of story.”
Waxman regarded Abatangelo with an expression that suggested alarmed fascination. “You beat him into a wreck,” he said finally.
“No, Wax. No. I hit him, yes. I didn’t beat him to where- ”
“I met him first, remember? He was in bad shape, I admit. But he wasn’t to the point that being blown to pieces was his only out.”
“Yeah, right, at that point he figured he could still con you out of the money.”
“I should be grateful.”
“Wax, what is this? Weren’t you paying attention? He’s the one who set it up. He’s the one led us out here.”
Waxman sighed and looked away. “Argument of convenience.”
“No. No, Wax.”
Abatangelo began pounding the steering wheel. To the right he saw through a walnut orchard what he believed was the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Akers’ stockade. It encouraged him. They were on their way out.
“So it’s on my head, then,” he said. “I might as well have shoved him through the door. Is that what you’re going to say?”
“Say to whom?”
“To your public. To the guys in Homicide you enjoyed so much last night.”
“Is that what you think? I’m in league with those detectives?”
“You know what Tony Cohn told me? He said you’d betray me the first chance you get.” He turned to Waxman, glaring. “Well? How about it?”
“If I was going to betray you,” Waxman responded, “I would not be in this car.”
Abatangelo turned back to look out through the windshield. They entered a clearing beyond which he spotted the ranch house.
“I appreciate that,” he said finally.
“I know you do.”
As they came abreast of the outbuildings, Waxman pointed to the house and said, “Pull up at the gate. I’ll use the phone in the kitchen.”
Abatangelo’s jaw dropped. “Here?”
“Why not?” Waxman buttoned his coat in preparation for the cold outside. “Even if they trace the call we’ll be gone by the time they get a car out here. Besides, I know where the phone is.”
Waxman opened his door and got out. Abatangelo, deciding to follow, put the car in park and left it idling. They hurried toward the back porch through the growing wind and a faint mist. They ducked under the yellow crime scene ribbon draped across the stair. Abatangelo reached inside the door pane he’d shattered the night before and threw the lock.
The tape outlines of where the bodies of Rowena and her son Duval had been discovered remained from the night before. The bloodstains seemed to have aged considerably in just the few hours they’d been there. The door frames and cabinet edges and countertops all wore the coarse black dust left by the fingerprint examiner. There were pencil markings left here and there on the walls, the tabletop, the floor, with the initials of the trace specialist circled alongside. For all that, the room seemed as utterly indifferent to human concern as a raided tomb.
Waxman made his way along the wall to the phone. He lifted the receiver and dialed 911. As he waited for the operator his eyes rose to the message left in red on the wall: FRANCISCO. THE LADY WAITS. COME SEE.
The operator answered finally, a woman, and Waxman said, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now. There’s been an explosion out near the Akers’ property.”
The operator responded, “Who is this calling, please?”
“There’s a man at the scene,” Waxman continued, ignoring her. “He’s dead. His name is Frank Maas. He’s a suspect in the murder of the Briscoe twins. He was going to retrieve something. That’s what he said, at any rate. Something hidden out in an abandoned building. But when we got there he broke and ran. The door was rigged. A bomb of some sort.”
The operator broke in, “I need to have your name, sir.”
Waxman returned the receiver to its cradle. Unable to move at first, he stood in place, rereading the message above the phone, written to a dead man. Finally, taking the same path along the edge of the room as before, he joined Abatangelo at the far side as they headed together back out to the car.
Abatangelo got behind the wheel. “Frank said he thought Shel might be out at this Mexican’s hotel.” He put the car in gear. “Let’s find ourselves a place to clean up a little.”
They took a room in the first motel they found along the freeway. Waxman went to hunt up some clothes while Abatangelo stayed behind to shower. Too tired to stand, he sat in the tub, lathering himself, the shower spray pattering against his skin. As he sat there, the scene came back to him, the dash uphill, the look in Frank’s eyes- vacant, terrified, ecstatic- as he brought the rock down. The crash of pain and then Frank’s silhouette scurrying on. The sudden wash of light. The terrifying instant of pressurized silence.
The more he revisited it, the more certain he felt that Frank’s suicide was not the result of some random impulse. It was an act of atonement. He found himself envying that.
The worst of it was, the whole thing just kept shifting on him. Every fact came freighted with a counter-fact. Every insight emerged with its opposite in tow. It was maddening, like a sudden loss of gravity. And in that weightless derangement the one phrase that kept coming back to haunt him was Cohn’s: Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?
He put his head in his hands. It wasn’t that he thought it was true, he just couldn’t convince himself it wasn’t true, and that felt close enough to guilt to settle the point. Regardless, he had a pretty fair idea that Shel would never forgive him. Not completely. There’d always be that doubt- You wanted it. Sure, he could tell her, tell himself, that he was only keen to save her, he was desperate, his intentions were, if not entirely pure, at least clear. But that didn’t explain the vaguely sadistic relief he’d felt, the satisfaction flickering at the edge of his horror as he’d snapped picture after picture of Frank’s smoldering, piecemeal remains. I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick.
So this is the way one learns, he thought- like Faust, like Bluebeard’s bride- there is no greater curse on earth than a gratified wish.
He increased the hot water, edging back the cold, until his skin scalded red and it hurt to sit there. He lifted his head back. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought, fingering his scapular. He pictured Shel as he’d last seen her and shortly he was unable to breathe. He put his face in his hand and the fingers came away with a melting thread of blood. He pulled himself up, stumbled, turned the water off and listened to the drain.
Yes indeed, atonement would most definitely be preferable to this.
In the mirror his eyes seemed fathomless points. On the way to the motel, he and Waxman had stopped at a drugstore to buy a tube of Unguentine. The name reminded him of a high school algebra teacher, Sister Norbertine. Named for the patron saint of soothing ointments. His hand trembled as he put the stuff to his skin.
Waxman returned with a sack of clothes and some toiletries. As Abatangelo pulled the fresh shirt and trousers from the sack, Waxman spread out on the bed a local newspaper and a map of Solano County he’d bought. He sat there staring at them, then said, “While I was out, I made another call to the police.”
Abatangelo froze. “And?”
“I had to, you realize. It was wrong, my just leaving the scene like that.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, hands clenched in his lap.
“You told them it was a suicide.”
“I gave them my name. I confirmed I was the one who’d called earlier, and said I would be contacting them later tonight or early tomorrow with a lawyer to discuss at length what happened out there. But yes, I also told them it was a suicide. I verified that.”
He looked up, his eyes a misery.
Abatangelo said, “Thank you.” Nodding toward the maps and newspaper, he added, “What’s the reading material?”
“That party I mentioned,” Waxman said, turning to open the paper, “the one for Moreira’s daughter. Turns out it’s tonight. There’s a little piece about it here in the Socials. It’s called a quinceañera, a sort of coming-out party for Mexican debutantes.” He checked the map. “From the description they give of this place, it looks like we cut through farmland, then turn south around here, near a place called Bird’s Landing.”
Abatangelo, removing pins from the shirt Waxman had bought, said, “Call your editor, Wax. You’re going to want someone to know where you are, why you’re there, and what to think if you don’t come back.”
Waxman looked up from the map. “If your intent is to frighten me, consider your work well done.”
“No,” Abatangelo said, putting his new shirt on. Stiff from sizing, it felt like butcher paper against his skin. “That’s not my intent.”
Waxman nodded. He went to the phone, called his editor, left a VoiceMail message and returned to the bed. He sat there looking toward the window. The curtains were drawn; there was no view to invite his gaze.
“This is going to sound odd,” he said finally, not turning around. “But ever since the explosion, and our walking around the flames and the debris? I’ve been unable to keep this image out of my head. It’s a schoolbook illustration, from some reader I had in grade school. It’s a picture of Icarus. He’s fallen in flames from the sky.” Waxman chuckled disconsolately. “I can’t seem to chase it from my mind.”
Abatangelo regarded him for a moment, then said, “That wasn’t a fable out there.”
Waxman looked at him finally. “Do you actually believe that these people are going to go ahead with this bizarre exchange? I mean, what has Felix Randall got to trade now?”
“It’s not about that,” Abatangelo said, pulling on his trousers. “I doubt it ever was.”
Waxman turned around to face him squarely, hands folded in his lap. “Then explain it to me.”
Abatangelo sighed. “The trick, Wax, is not to think too hard. God knows they don’t. Just a bunch of hoods, out to save their reputations.” Buckling his belt, he added, “Christ, we were fluff compared to these guys.”
“One would suppose,” Waxman said, “that no one knows that better than they do.”
“I wasn’t trying to claim privilege. Okay? I simply meant, as I recall, it was decidedly not the issue to kill anyone.”
“I think it reasonable to conclude that matters have gotten out of hand.”
Abatangelo laughed. “You’re a big help.”
“What do you want me to say? We were the blissful children of Aquarius? We were hippies and humanists, we got suckered into the concept of progress on the one hand and noble savagery on the other. Didn’t dawn on us the two conflicted just a bit. History was one grand push toward our own irrefutable excellence, except we were excellent to begin with before progress got in the way. That and a few other snags fucked up an otherwise nifty philosophy. Ergo, we learned the usual way, the ugly way, that life indeed is nasty, brutish and short, human nature is in a rut, and noble it ain’t. Basically, we’re pigs.”
Abatangelo sat down beside him on the bed, pulling on his socks. “I remember not feeling like a pig,” he said.
“Absent the grace of God,” Waxman intoned, “we are the scum of the universe. Satan’s little chancres. And, from all available evidence, God has been stingy with the grace of late.”
“Echo,” Abatangelo said.
Waxman regarded him quizzically. “I beg your pardon?”
“Echo. It’s Kierkegaard’s term for grace. Men of virtue perform good acts, it creates an echo of grace upon them and other men who follow their example.”
Waxman grimaced. “Metaphors do not constitute theology.”
Abatangelo stood up. “Yeah, well, back to your point about pigs. I gotta tell you, Wax. I’ll cop to what I’ve done. But the first time I came close to wanting to kill somebody was the past few days. And it had nothing to do with business.”
Waxman reflected on this and after a moment offered a diffident shrug. “The drugs are different. I’ll grant you that.”
Abatangelo shook his head. “There’ve been treacherous assholes all along. If you were smart, they were no big problem. They could be fooled, or avoided. Or bought off. But there’s a different wind these days. Maybe it’s all the crank, the crack, the nasty edgy shit they make people want. Maybe it’s just the money, I don’t know. But there’s so much blood in the air it’s almost sacrificial.”
Waxman rubbed his knees. “There are those who would consider your nostalgia for innocence wildly self-deluded.”
“ ‘Innocent’ isn’t the term I used. I never said ‘innocent.’ ”
“Not explicitly, no,” Waxman conceded. “But crank didn’t show up yesterday. When I was in high school I prowled the Haight for acid like a crazed lab rat. I was a poster child for the scene. But then all that bad product hit the street. They laced the tabs with speed, whoever ‘they’ were, and there were delicious rumors over that, too. Things turned very nasty almost overnight. Even an idiot could have predicted it, given what freaks like me were ingesting.”
Abatangelo studied him. Crazed lab rat, he thought. Freaks like me. “Getting kinda chatty there, Wax.”
Waxman nodded, staring at the curtains again. “I’m frightened.”
Abatangelo went over and placed his hand on Waxman’s shoulder. “Me too. That any consolation?”
Waxman looked up at him. “No.”
They laughed uneasily.
“Anyway,” Abatangelo said, searching for his shoes, “bad acid, speed. What’s your point?”
“My point,” Waxman said, “is that was all a quarter of a century ago. It’s not a question of where have all the flowers gone. The question is, how did characters like you, the ones out to prove what a joke it all was, how did you outlast the scene as long as you did?”
Abatangelo shrugged. “Steered clear of bad acid.”
“No. Be serious. How did you drag out that ridiculous dream for so many more years?”
“What dream? Wax, come down out of your tree, will you? I was a pig, remember? I was venal. I had larceny in my heart. I suffered from bad genes.”
“What charm did you think protected you?”
“Wax, I was lucky. That’s it.”
“You enjoyed the mysterious good fortune of the blind,” Waxman countered. From the sound of the phrase, he’d been working up to it all along. He got up from the bed, went to the sink, unwrapped the cellophane from a plastic drinking cup and drew himself a glass of tapwater. He drank the whole glass down and then another. Avoiding his reflection in the mirror above the sink, he turned around and said, “You are an incredibly proud man, do you realize that? It’s not a criticism. Just an observation. But I’ll tell you a little something I’ve learned, all right? Pride is just a way of thinking you deserve what you want. And in that regard, pride is a sort of cowardice. It takes a lot of courage to simply want something.”
His eyes were strangely kind. Forgiving.
“So tell me what I want, Wax.”
“You want to be with the woman you love,” Waxman said. “But the more I think it through, the less confidence I have she is alive, or will remain alive, no matter what we accomplish by going out there tonight. I wish that weren’t true.”
“Then stop talking about it,” Abatangelo said. He collected his jacket, wallet and keys. “You ready?” Not waiting for an answer, he went to the door, calling out over his shoulder, “Bring the map.”
Abatangelo headed out to the car and checked the trunk. He still had all of Mannion’s equipment with him from the night before. There were two spare cameras, stocked with both infrared film and 3200 black and white. There were flash guns, two tripods, the Passive Light Intensifier, and an infrared focus beam, not to mention a canvas bag to carry it all. He closed the trunk and told Waxman, “All aboard.”
As they drove, Waxman returned to the article from the local social column about the quinceañera. “The daughter’s name is Larissa,” he said, reading aloud. “She’s fifteen. From the sounds of it, her father’s spared no expense.” Rain began to fall, heavily at first, then easing back into a drizzle. Waxman looked out at the verdant fields, then returned to the article in his lap. “Relatives are coming up from Mexico,” he said. “And Papa Rolando is addressing a civic group tonight, too. The Sacramento Valley Mexican-American Cultural Exchange.”
“That’s a mouthful. Speech all by itself.”
“It means there may be other reporters there,” Waxman said hopefully. “The ones covering the speech, they can join the party and add a little color to their coverage.” He folded the newspaper over. “We should blend in, at least to begin with.”
They continued on toward Suisun and turned east along the road to Rio Vista until prominent signs, in English and Spanish, designated the turnoff to the hotel. A trio of men wearing orange reflective vests and bearing flashlights stood out in the rain at the corner of the cross-county highway and the hotel road. The men waved them south toward the river.
The hotel lay beyond a range of treeless hills, and every hundred yards a torch decorated with flowers and gold and white bunting stood at the roadside. The rain had extinguished all but a handful of the torch flames, and the waterlogged bouquets sagged.
The El Parador was a massive hacienda in the Mission style. A searchlight stationed in the parking light scoured the low clouds with its beam. Music echoed festively from the hotel’s bright interior. Abatangelo pulled into a parking lot crowded with limousines and directed the car into an isolated space on the periphery that would be easy to find when it came time to leave. He killed the motor, reached behind his seat for his camera and asked Waxman to retrieve several rolls of film he’d stored in the glove compartment. “Ready or not,” he said, opening the door. They crossed the distance from the car to the hotel portico on a run and shook off the rain once safely inside.
Upon stepping beyond the lobby doors, they entered an extravagant chaos of white-clad revelers, celebratory ornament and antiquarian decor. Abatangelo likened the effect as half Porfirian Gothic, half an acid-laced reverie of Frida Kahlo giving birth to a zoo.
Gold and white bunting, like that tied to the roadside torches, hung in long coiling festoons from every wall. As many as a hundred piñatas, fashioned from a rainbow of bright feathery paper- donkeys, elephants, clowns, angels, gauchos, a princess, a bandit, a whale, sombreros, cacti- hung by ribbons at various heights from the vaulted lobby ceiling. Beneath them as many as four dozen children, varying in age from four to sixteen and dressed in white tuxedos and brocaded gowns, wandered blindfolded, bearing sticks, to the cheers and proddings of manic adults- women crying out and clapping, men holding bottles of Chanaco and bellowing praise.
Absent the decorations, the hotel’s design was simple and vaguely monastic. The floor was fashioned of sandstone palavers; archways connected the various rooms; the white plaster walls were accented with quatrefoils, wood beams and ironwork of medieval severity. Heavy wood doors were fitted with yellow quarreled glass.
Off to the side on a dais, a full mariachi band struck up a song called “El Sueño” with a fanfare of brass arpeggios. The air was thick with the smell of cigars and orchids and café de olla. A pyramid of champagne glasses had been erected at the center of a long white table, behind which sat ice chests filled with bottles of Dom Pérignon. Atop a second table, a cut-glass punch bowl was attended by a servant in white livery, stirring with a ladle a pink concoction swimming with orange slices and melting ice. Further into the room, white-clothed tables bore platters of Oaxacan fare, meats roasted with lime and pasilla chile, tlayudas made with blue corn tortillas, squash blossom soup with purslane leaves and masa.
Beyond the main desk a chapel of sorts had been erected, fashioned of two symmetrical flanks of folding chairs and a temporary altar. A statue of the Blessed Mother, on a pedestal mounted with roses, stood in modest serenity off to the left. Two altar boys sat by themselves beyond the statue, a plate of food on the chair between them. They still wore their cassocks and surplices and, after checking to see who might be watching, drank fast and hard from a bottle of beer.
Waxman and Abatangelo made their way through the crowd, negotiating the maze of ficus trees, maidenhair ferns and palmetto palms the party’s mastermind had inserted to perfect the tropical mise-en-scène. Beneath the escalator to the mezzanine, young girls sporting pink tiaras and dressed like bridesmaids sat in phone booths with glasses of punch and accepted the doting attention of boys. Damas and caballeros: fifteen couples in all, one boy and one girl for each year of Larissa Moreira’s life.
Waxman and Abatangelo were halfway up the escalator when the mariachi band abruptly broke off its tune and launched into a distinctive fanfare. The crowd erupted in a riotous cheer. Rolando Moreira, fresh from his speech, made his entrance, waving to one and all. Bodyguards stood to either side.
Even from such a distance, Abatangelo gained a distinctive impression about the man. He had a vigorous balding portliness, the sort one associated with sybaritic wealth; his features were strong and handsome, a classic jaw, a sculpted moustache, lively eyes. For all this there was something irresolute about him, as though his life was a continuous act of seductive self-deceit. A patrician song-and-dance man.
“Can you get a good shot from the mezzanine?” Waxman asked, but Abatangelo had already removed his lens cap and positioned himself along the brass rail, facing the entrance. Armed with a 28-150 mm zoom, he engaged the long end of the lens to get as much of a close-up as he could.
The mariachi band broke into a waltz and the crowd entreated Don Rolando to come down and dance with his daughter. With a flourish, the father removed his overcoat, revealing a white tuxedo with tails, a red carnation dotting his lapel. This elicited even greater enthusiasm from the crowd. Don Rolando spread his arms, searching the crowd for his daughter, and shortly, through a divide in the revelers amid taunting whispers, Larissa Moreira made way toward her father.
She was a tall, awkward girl, similar in features to her mother, who sat in a circle of aunts and matrons at the far end of the lobby. The mother wore a modest gown of yellow watered silk, with a broad red-ribboned sash. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a mantilla in the old style, and she regarded her daughter’s advance toward her husband with a demeanor of bemused retreat.
The women in her circle shared her attitude of reserve, each woman smiling to convey respect, not indulgence. The priest who’d served the quinceañera Mass sat with them, a slender, fresh-faced man with thinning hair, still wearing his vestments and nursing a glass of the children’s punch. Clustered together on a sofa and a semicircle of folding chairs, and surrounded by presents not yet opened, the doña and her entourage and the lone priest formed a tight-knit pocket of forbearing sobriety.
Larissa Moreira reached the edge of the crowd, stepped forward to the dais that formed the lobby entrance and offered a reverent if ungainly curtsy to her father. Her gown was hooped and frilled, the brocaded bodice tight and sequined, with puffed sleeves erupting from the shoulders like wings. She wore a gold tiara in her auburn hair. Her father extended both hands to her and descended, took her in his arms and, to the sighs and cheers of the crowd, commenced the traditional waltz.
“Pops and Pookie cut a rug,” Abatangelo remarked to Waxman as he rewound his first roll of film. “Should provide some contrast to the shots we took of Frank.”
“I don’t see him,” Waxman responded, surveying the crowd.
“He’s right there.”
“No, I mean Facio,” Waxman said. “The security chief. I don’t see him.”
The father-daughter waltz came to a triumphant end, another round of cheers erupted and Don Rolando led his daughter to where her mother was seated. It was time to open presents.
A handful of reporters, the group who’d covered Moreira’s speech, straggled in, shaking off the rain. One of them consulted a bellman, who promptly pointed upward to the mezzanine. Following the direction of his hand, Abatangelo spotted the entrance of the mezzanine lounge.
“Let’s head in to the bar, Wax. Your friends in the press, maybe they’ll have something to tell us.”
Abatangelo led him inside and took a seat in the nearest booth. Waxman approached the bar and ordered two coffees. The bartender, an old obrero who sang to himself, nodded his acknowledgment of the order. Waxman returned to the booth, checking his watch, and shortly the bartender arrived, delivering their coffees. Humming, he waved off their money and turned back to the bar. Waxman poured in his cream and watched it cloud as the reporters from Moreira’s speech trounced noisily into the lounge. There were two women and three men, none of them older than thirty. Waxman eyed them with interest.
“You see the woman at the head of the pack,” Waxman whispered to Abatangelo. “Her name is Eloise Beaulieu. Or at least that’s the name she uses for attribution. She used to be a movie reviewer for one of the trashier weeklies in town.” The woman was speaking loud and fast, gathering everyone forward to the bar, squirming her hips onto a stool and ordering margaritas for all. “Excuse me a minute,” Waxman said. He left Abatangelo in the booth.
As Waxman approached the bar, the identities of the others came to him. The second woman, a plump assertive type with short-cropped hair, wrote an op-ed column for a Contra Costa daily. Her name was Gayle something, she catered to right-leaning libertarian views. Two of the men were stringers he knew from parties here and there, Smathers and Koch were their names; the third man, from what Waxman was able to overhear on approach, was named Holleran and had come down from Sacramento. Intent on their margaritas, they did not see Waxman closing from behind. One of the stringers, the one named Smathers, said, “You realize, Bing Crosby is the man responsible for bringing tequila to the States.”
“Bing Crosby and Phil Harris,” Koch, the other stringer, corrected. “And it was agave tequila. Like Herradura and Sauza. Not the stuff they put in these.”
Smathers shrugged. “So spank me.”
“I’d rather spank the little princess down there.”
“That little princess,” Holleran, the man from Sacramento, said, “will be wearing that same dress a year from now. Except the fit’ll be a bit more snug.”
“You mean she’ll be at the altar,” Eloise Beaulieu said.
“Barefoot,” Smathers said.
“The other half of barefoot.”
The men laughed, the women didn’t. Above them, the blades of a brass fan rotated drowsily. The bartender freshened their glasses. Waxman cleared his throat. Eloise was the first to recognize him.
“Berty, my God. What are you doing here?”
Smathers, hearing Waxman’s name, snapped to. “Bert Waxman. You did that piece on the hit out near Antioch today.” Waxman guardedly detected intimations of praise in this remark. Then Smathers added: “Man has to fall down drunk in just the right doorway to get a story like that to trip over him.”
Waxman asked, “You folks cover Moreira’s speech?”
“Whoa, Berty, whoa,” Eloise said. “My question came first. You working the same story that appeared this morning?”
“You’ll read all about it,” Waxman replied. “I was wondering, the speech, was there a release given out?”
“Here,” Holleran said, removing from his pocket a press release folded into sections. “Take mine.”
“No,” Eloise said, snatching it from his hand. “First, I want to know, Berty. Why. Are. You. Here.”
“I’m going downstairs,” Holleran announced, sliding from his stool. “Fetch me some vittles.”
“No spanking,” Smathers said.
“It’s a birthday!”
“Only Daddy gets to spank.”
“Well, damn.”
Holleran exited waving absently to one and all, even Abatangelo, whom he spotted on his way out. Waxman made one halfhearted grab for the press release but Eloise snatched it away.
“Is this Moreira guy implicated in the stuff I read today?” Eloise asked.
Smathers and Koch were interested, too, now. They studied Waxman with waggling eyebrows and out-with-it smiles.
Waxman said, “There were some squatters on the property around the time of the killings. They got scared off by the police and, rumor has it, they fled up here. I lost their trail. I thought Señor Moreira, or somebody who works for him, might be able to help.”
Abatangelo, sitting with his coffee, listened in. Figuring Waxman had invented this account on the spot, he thought: Not bad.
“So you came up to ask him on the night of his daughter’s quince,” Gayle, the short-haired woman, said. At the sound of her voice, Waxman recalled her last name: Fruth. She rolled her eyes. “Impeccable timing.”
“It’s bullshit,” Smathers said. He was still smiling.
“I was not aware,” Waxman said, “there was a party planned here for this evening.”
Eloise Beaulieu made a face. Gayle Fruth groaned. Koch said, “Hell’s bells, give him the damn release,” and pushed his empty glass across the bar, calling out to the bartender, “Un otro, amigo.” After suffering a prodding elbow from Gayle Fruth, he added, “Por favor.”
Eloise relented with a dispirited sigh and handed the release to Waxman. He unfolded it and read.
“He’s opening some youth center for gang members, about which he said just about what you’d expect,” Gayle Fruth said. “You know, education, family, free enterprise.”
“Tradition is a buttress for the soul,” Smathers intoned, quoting.
“Fortune favors the brave,” said Koch. He was still waiting for his margarita, hands playing bongo on the bar. “But no spanking.”
“It was preachy,” Eloise agreed. “But, per usual, they ate it up.”
“They,” Koch said, accepting his refreshened margarita from the bartender with glowing eyes. “Who were ‘they,’ exactly?”
“I think it’s a good deal,” Gayle Fruth interjected. “I think he has the best interest of those kids at heart. Convinced me, anyway. He wants them off the street, give them work. Taggers, gangbangers. Nuestra Familia, I mean, that’s the alternative, right? Money’s out of his own pocket, so what’s to bitch about? Not like we’re going to get taxed for it.”
“To Bing,” Smathers said, lifting his glass.
“Bing and Phil,” Koch corrected.
Waxman put the release away. From a different pocket he removed one of the clippings he’d brought along from the accordion file Aleris had brought him from the refugee center. One of the ones with a picture of Victor Facio. He showed it to Eloise, knowing the others would crane to look.
“See him anywhere? At the speech?” he asked.
The bartender, cleaning glasses, looked up from his work. He glanced at the picture and then up at Waxman. Their eyes met.
“His name is Victor Facio,” Waxman said.
The bartender looked away.
“Pretty dapper dude for a squatter,” Smathers remarked.
“I don’t remember him,” Eloise said, studying the snapshot. “I mean, there was a real crowd. Not like here, but big.” She shrugged. “So who knows? Could be.”
Waxman said, “Thank you,” and put the clipping away.
“My point,” Smathers said, “is that this story you’ve handed us about chasing down some squatters doesn’t jive with that picture. Am I right?”
The bartender picked up a hand towel, ambled toward the storage room in the rear and disappeared.
“Thanks. See you around,” Waxman said to Eloise, then nodded to the others to include them in his farewell.
“Why do I get the distinct impression I’ve just been fucked with?” Smathers said.
“Come on,” Koch responded, sliding off his stool and slapping his companion on the shoulder. “Ground floor, tapas galore.”
Waxman returned to the booth and sat across from Abatangelo again. Shortly the other reporters trailed out on their way to the food, making halfhearted gestures of farewell. Eloise in particular. At the doorway, she called back, “I’ll call you tomorrow, Berty. We’ll chat.”
Once they were gone, Waxman leaned across the table toward Abatangelo and whispered, “He’s here. The bartender, the way he reacted when I said Facio’s name- like a switch went off.” He leaned back again, gazed into the distance and sipped his coffee. “I feel confident now.”
“You don’t look confident,” Abatangelo said, smiling. “You look like you just swallowed your wallet.”
The bartender returned from the storeroom and resumed humming to himself as he wiped down the bar. A moment later, a large man in a gray polyester suit appeared from the hallway and sidled up beside Abatangelo’s and Waxman’s table. He loomed over them, rabbit-eyed, his face slack and square. His hands were misshapen, as though from numerous bone breaks. “Vengan conmigo,” he said, gesturing for them to follow.
The man wasn’t one of the bodyguards who’d accompanied Rolando Moreira into the hotel. Moving with a hulking swagger that reminded Abatangelo of prison, he led them to the elevator, which was waiting. Inside, he turned a key in the control panel and punched seven. Together, the three of them stared up silently as the numbers overhead lit and faded one by one, marking their passage floor to floor. The elevator shuddered to a whispered halt and the heavy doors slid open.
The hallway receded in both directions. Brass sconces lined the wall above gilded wainscoting and sedge carpet. The smell of a recent vacuuming still hung in the air, a prickle of dust. Waxman and Abatangelo followed the lumbering man in the gray suit to the end of the hall, where he rapped three times on a large white door. A slight but square-featured landeno youth answered. He wore a ruffled formal shirt, an Edwardian bow tie. His tuxedo trousers bore a crisp press and his patent bluchers shone. Stepping back, he extended his hand toward the interior.
The entry opened onto a suite that was elegant and vast, with furnishings of raw silk. Lilies and dahlias rose from large vases. Above an ample buffet, a crystal chandelier with prismed rhombs showered tiny white reflections across each wall. The man in the gray suit chose a seat in the corner and gestured for Waxman and Abatangelo to sit as well. They waited in silence until the front door opened again and Rolando Moreira charged into the room, followed by a man Abatangelo recognized from his aging photograph as Victor Facio.
“Who are you?” Moreira shouted. His fists were clenched, his skin flushed. Before either Abatangelo or Waxman could answer, Facio placed a restraining hand on Moreira’s arm.
“Rolando, please,” he said.
Facio had a wiry, athletic frame and his voice seemed suited to a larger man. The eyes were hard and intense and disembodied from the rest of his facial expression, which remained dressed into a smile. There was a feral intelligence about him that Abatangelo guessed was the result of long schooling by foreign handlers, men who’d molded him to project an urbanity that might disguise an unseemly youth. Given Waxman’s profile, Abatangelo knew the man was likely in his fifties, but he looked considerably younger. As though the life he’d led had preserved him somehow, like a vampire.
Moreira turned toward the buffet table, trying to contain his rage. Abatangelo withdrew from his pocket one of the snapshots he’d taken of Shel. “We’re looking for someone,” he said, edging toward Facio. “There’s a rumor going around that an exchange is to be made. The woman you see in the photograph here for a man named Frank Maas.”
Moreira spun around. “This is my daughter’s quince- ”
“Rolando,” Facio said again, no louder than before. He didn’t say please this time. Moreira stormed over to a chair and dropped into it like a chastened boy. Removing a cigar and a gold lighter from the pockets of his white tuxedo jacket, he bit off the end of the cigar, drew a flame from the lighter, and began puffing smoke.
Facio came forward and accepted the picture from Abatangelo. After only a moment’s regard he handed it back.
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the article that appeared in the paper today, would it?”
Waxman eased up from his chair. “Yes,” he said. “My name is Bert Waxman. I’m the reporter who wrote that piece.”
“Rolando,” Facio said. “I realize you’ve been busy so let me explain this to you.” He pointed to Waxman. “This gentleman wrote an article which appeared in the San Francisco paper today. The article concerned the murders of some people- ”
“Three people,” Waxman noted.
“Three people, thank you. Murders which took place last night. A woman has been abducted, apparently, and is being held for ransom.” He turned to Waxman. “And I’m guessing that you are here because someone has come forward with the ridiculous accusation that we are somehow involved.” Without waiting for Waxman to respond, Facio turned back to Moreira and said, “Rolando, did you kill someone without telling me?”
No one laughed, not even the large one in the corner, which confirmed for Abatangelo that he didn’t speak English. Turning to Waxman, Facio asked, “Who told you such preposterous lies?”
“A man named Frank Maas,” Abatangelo answered. “He told us- ”
“And you are?”
Abatangelo nodded toward Waxman. “I’m his photographer.”
Facio took a second to consider this. “Frank Maas, you said. I do not know him. Rolando?” Moreira shook his head in disavowal behind his cigar. “We have no idea who this source of yours is,” Facio said.
“He claims,” Waxman interjected, “to have delivered stolen goods to some of your men.”
Abatangelo held out his hand. “Wax, wait a minute.”
“He arranged with those same men,” Waxman continued, “for the murder of a local drug dealer named Felix Randall.”
“Wax- ”
“But the arrangement was a double cross, you lost several of your men, and then retaliated with the kidnapping of the woman in that picture.”
Facio laughed good-naturedly. “And we killed someone. Don’t forget.”
“Three people,” Waxman corrected. “One a seven-year-old boy.”
“Wax, shut up,” Abatangelo said.
“That is simply, wholly, fantastically untrue,” Facio replied.
Waxman stood there with his eyes whirling as though in the thrall of a fierce intoxication. He was high on fear, Abatangelo guessed. Fear and the sound of his own voice.
“I had little doubt you’d say that,” Waxman said. “You realize, though, it won’t prevent me from going forward with the story.”
“You intend to print these hallucinations?”
“Oh, yes,” Waxman told him. “That and more.”
“Then you are not a journalist, Mr. Waxman. You are a fabulist.”
“I’ll incorporate your denials. But I intend to print the story.”
“That will be libel,” Facio advised.
“No. You’ve had your chance to respond. There’s no malice here.”
Facio laughed and moved a little closer to Waxman. “Isn’t it customary for a man to be able to confront his accuser?”
“He’s dead,” Abatangelo said, trying to regain control of the situation, at the same time sensing it was already lost. “Frank Maas, he blew himself to pieces this afternoon. We were there. He’s dead. Okay?” He held up the picture of Shel again. “There’s no need to include her in this anymore. She’s done nothing. There’s nobody to trade her for. You can take her out somewhere, the middle of nowhere, blindfold her, let her go, that’ll end it.”
Facio said, “I have no- ”
Abatangelo stepped forward so their faces were only inches apart. “If you need someone,” he whispered, “need to have someone as a guarantee, take me.”
Facio gestured, and the large man in the gray suit rose from his chair.
“I’m begging you,” Abatangelo went on, the desperation obvious in his voice now. “Let her go. Trade me for her.” He felt a hand on his shoulder. He shook it off, dropped Shel’s picture and grabbed Facio by the lapels. “She means nothing to you. How can it make any possible fucking difference? Take me.”
The large one grabbed him by the collar and withdrew a pistol in the same movement. Abatangelo swung back with his elbow but missed. The move drew him off-balance. The large one, still gripping his collar, twisted him around with embarrassing ease and kneed him hard in the midriff. His lungs emptied, his knees buckled. Shortly he lay on his back, the large man’s knee now lodged on his chest and the gun aimed point-blank at his face.
“Shhh,” the man said, grinning. Abatangelo looked up beyond the gun into the man’s face and saw such a breathtaking lack of intelligence that for the first time he felt true terror.
Moreira shot up from his seat. “I’m calling him,” he said, and fled the room.
“Him,” Waxman said, head spinning toward Moreira then back to Facio. “Him who?”
Facio held up his hand.
“For the record, as they say, we have committed no murders. We are involved in no illegal acts of any kind. And if you bother to learn more about us, you will realize how ridiculous you will sound repeating these charges.”
Waxman reached down into his pocket and withdrew two clippings, unfolding them carefully. “Interesting you should bring up background,” he said. “I noticed some omissions in your press packet.” His hands trembled as he offered the clippings to Facio.
Facio unfolded the articles as though expecting something to crawl out from inside. The first concerned his conviction on weapons charges in Texas. He recognized it and smiled. The second, however, appeared to baffle him. It was written in Dutch, so he resorted to the attached translation in Spanish. It related the account of a Jesuit priest who had debriefed refugees entering Mexico near the Moreira plantation, around the highland village of Niquivil. The refugees told of a massacre across the border in the village of Santa Maria Ixcoy. The village was razed to build an airstrip for drug shipments, and all the adult men were first pressed into use as slave labor, then gathered together on the finished runway and murdered in front of their families, a warning to their wives, sisters and children not to talk. Three women in the village went mad, attacking the gunmen. One was taken into the jungle, tied to a tree, her skin scored with a knife so the insects could lay eggs in her wounds as she waited to be eaten at night by animals. The other two were left hanging from trees, their dead children tied to their backs. The massacre was conducted by paramilitaries led by a commander the refugees knew only as El Zopilote.
“Where were you tonight, Señor Facio, while Don Moreira was giving his speech?” Waxman asked. “Giving a little speech of your own? To the men? Telling them how proud you are, that you could see the bravery in their eyes? You have become famous for that speech, are you aware of that? But that, unfortunately, is a different piece. I didn’t bring that one.”
Facio folded the articles in half, squeezing with finger and thumb down the crease. He looked down at Abatangelo, then back at Waxman, sighing with irritation. He said something in Spanish and the large one lifted Abatangelo to his feet and planted him in a chair. He kept the gun trained on him. Returning his attention to Waxman, Facio asked, “Do you know what is keeping you alive at this moment, Mr. Waxman?”
A gagging reflex shut Waxman’s throat at first. Finally, he managed, “My newspaper knows- ”
Facio cut him off with a gesture and a smile.
“Your white cells,” he said. “Your white cells are keeping you alive.” Facio studied his hand as though to contemplate the underlying tissue. “The white cells work even while your body rests, always vigilant, because infection remains vigilant. Without white cells, even weak, obscure, bizarre infections can kill. You can drown from the microscopic creatures which grow in your own lungs, were you aware of that?”
He lowered his hand.
“I have met your kind before, Mr. Waxman. You show up a lot in our country, coming down like tourists. Then you go back home and cry about the poor. You pronounce them good, honest, and basically gentle. Like you. All of which is nonsense. You come here to ruin us, Mr. Waxman, how gentle is that? It’s this hypocrisy that makes you so jittery. So false.” Raising a cautionary finger, he concluded, “Trust me, we will not be ruined by the likes of you.”
Moreira burst back into the room, smiling with relief. “I just spoke to our friend,” he said. “He has a response that will be filed with the local media, should Mr. Waxman fail to give up this hoax. And he has a contact at the Commerce Department who will prepare a statement as well.”
Moreira looked about the room, to be sure everyone had heard him. Satisfied, he went to the buffet table, poured himself a cognac and downed it, his back to the room. Facio returned to Waxman the two articles.
“There you have it,” he said. “Write what you want, Mr. Waxman. Disgrace yourself.”
He gestured to the large one, who then lifted Abatangelo from his chair. Facio came forward, picked up Shel’s photograph from the floor where Abatangelo had dropped it and handed it to him, saying, “It is obvious you are very concerned about this woman. But I cannot help you.”
He turned away and joined Moreira by the buffet table. The large one reholstered his weapon and gestured for Waxman and Abatangelo to march ahead of him toward the entry. The same landeno youth who’d greeted them earlier opened the large white door and shut it firmly behind them. The corridor stood empty, dimly lit and still. The large one prodded them down the hall to the elevator, rode down with them in silence and led them out through a rearward corridor to a back entrance opening onto the hotel’s loading dock. He whistled harshly through his teeth, as though to shoo a cat, nodding for them to go. Once they’d climbed down in the dark onto the asphalt, he returned inside and bolted the door.
The rain had worsened, with winds tunneling in cold gusts through the hills. Waxman hiked up his collar against the chill, blinking against the droplets hitting his face. Turning to Abatangelo, he winced and said, “Are you hurt?”
Abatangelo recoiled from the question with an enraged and bitter laugh. He still felt short of breath from fear and his bearings drifted in the darkness. He rested his back against the loading dock, closing his eyes.
“Congratulations, Wax,” he said. “If she isn’t dead already, you just killed her.”
The only thing that stopped Humberto from climbing on top of her one more time was the arrival of food. Another one of the gray-suited ones brought it, a picnic basket with brightly colored napkins that suggested party fare. Humberto chortled with joy and rummaged through the basket, removing a bottle of Chanaco and then announcing with satisfaction what else he found. “Picadillo, quesillas, totopas. Bueno.”
Humberto dug in with his fingers as the newcomer’s glance darted toward Shel. He found her the way Humberto had left her, thrown back on the mattress, legs akilter, jeans in a knot around her knees. She reeked of sex, and it mingled with the coppery scent of fresh blood.
Her head rang with pain and her stomach seethed. The last booster of whatever it was they were shooting her full of had worn off about an hour before, draining from her the bizarre hallucinatory defense she’d had against Humberto’s first few onslaughts but leaving behind an inchoate craving, too. Her mind phased in and out, but every now and then she’d snap to like a rousted dreamer and find herself fixed in the present. In those moments she realized what he’d done to her. Given the chance, she told herself, I’ll kill him.
The newcomer took one look and turned back to Humberto, saying something in a tone of disgust. Humberto shrugged. A moment of uneasy silence ensued between them, then the newcomer sighed, turned and left. Humberto snickered at his back, cracking the seal on the Chanaco. He downed half the bottle in record time, stretching out on his side as he ate and leering at Shel drunkenly from beneath the crucifix nailed to the wall. It was the same spot Snuff’s body had occupied earlier.
“You’re not the first to pull this shit with me,” she told him, aware he did not understand English, not caring. She tugged her pants back up to her hips. “So don’t think you’ve made good on some sick bet with yourself. You want to kill me, you’ve got to shoot me.” She struggled with the zipper. Watching, Humberto licked his fingers. “I’m not gonna fall apart, fucker. I’m not gonna just wither and die. I won’t give you the pleasure.”
As though to drown out what she was saying, he started to sing. His voice was boyishly off-key, and even when repeating the same melodic line he couldn’t hit the notes the same way twice. Not that he cared. He trolled along, one hand lilting back and forth as though to conduct an invisible band.
When the door opened again she figured it was the same man who’d brought the food. He’d thought twice, come back, deciding why not, he’d have a go at the guerita. Why should he miss out?
But it wasn’t him. It was Cesar, though it took a moment for his face to register. His features were drawn, his skin pale. Blood soaked one whole side of his suit jacket, and his left arm hung limp at his side. In his right hand he held a gun that he raised as soon as he broke the plane of the doorway. He fired four times at Humberto, still lying on his side like a glutton. The small whitewashed room amplified the sound of the gunfire. Shel cringed from the echo in her ears as the smoke and the smell of cordite hung in the air and Humberto’s head fell back, his mouth gaping with unchewed food soon gorged with blood.
Cesar staggered over and put one last bullet in Humberto’s face. An explosion of blood sent missiles of flesh and bone across the room. Shel tucked her face inside her arms. Cesar reached down, withdrew Humberto’s weapon and pocketed it. Turning around, he approached the edge of the mattress taking short, dragging steps.
“The thing about stupid people,” he said, panting for breath, “is that they think everybody else is as stupid as they are.”
He shoved his gun into his belt and reached inside his jacket, withdrawing a tangled shred of newspaper streaked with blood. “You stink like a whore,” he said as he tried to unfold the newspaper clipping one-handed. Unable to, he ended up throwing it down. Pointing, he said, “You spoke to the press. Your picture’s there. You have to die.”
Shel looked down at the clipping and pulled its edges apart, sticky from his blood. It was an account of the murder of Duval and Rowena and the man she’d brought home. On the second page was a picture of her, one Danny had taken, beside an old stock photo of Felix Randall.
“El Zopilote demands it,” Cesar said, not so much to her as to the room. “ ‘She needs to disappear. She’s already spoken to a reporter. The reporter’s nosing around out here. Him and some photographer. Tonight. It’s a problem.’ ” He turned back toward Humberto. “Your fucking problem, big shot. Not mine.”
Photographer, Shel thought. Danny. Out here. Tonight.
“Guess what else?” Cesar added, his voice rising. “Francisco Fregado, Frank the Mess? He’s dead.” He laughed, a spiteful shrieking sound, hissing through his teeth. “Killed himself. Blew himself up. How’s that for apples?”
He flipped his hand at her, like a prod: Go on, say something. Shel’s body sagged. A feeling of unreality numbed her for a moment, then a damning sorrow took hold. “How do you know?”
“The reporter, him or this photographer, I don’t know.” Cesar inspected his bloody sleeve. “But you should have seen them, El Zopilote, the rest of them, working it out. ‘Does Felix Randall know? Does he know but think we don’t? Will he still be interested in the woman?’ Round and round, till they finally threw up their hands. Hey, Plan B. The hostages are history. Now we go, set up an ambush like they did to us and cut off their balls.”
Spotting the Chanaco by Humberto’s side, he staggered over to the bottle, trying to peel off the left sleeve of his jacket. He trembled and gasped from the pain. Once he had the sleeve tugged down beneath the wound, he picked up the bottle and poured the liquor over his bloody arm. He fell against the wall, gritting his teeth, emitting a woozy howl of pain.
Shel tried to get up. Seeing her move, he pulled the gun from his belt and charged over, pulling back the hammer with his thumb.
“What did you tell them?” he said.
To the gun, Shel said, “Tell who?”
“Don’t fucking play games with me,” he shouted. Saliva dripped from his mouth. He was shaking.
“There was a doctor,” she said. “He came in with him.” She nodded toward Humberto’s corpse. “The doctor called you romantic. He wanted to know what you told me.”
Sweat beaded across his forehead and upper lip. “What did you say?”
“I said we talked about the squatter children. About the rain. The trees.”
He wagged the gun at her, grimacing. “They tried to kill me,” he said, and began to weep. Eyes clenched shut, he lifted the gun to his face as if to hide behind it. “Motherfuckers. Stupid fucking cocksuckers. And Pepe, of all people, they choose Pepe. The fool. Started reaching for his gun while he drove, like I wouldn’t see. I jumped on it, pressed the barrel into his belly and shot him with his own fucking gun, the asshole. He tried to crash the car. Went into a spin, almost went over, he got off a round…” He inspected his arm, tugging at the blood-soaked fabric of his shirt, wincing. “Left him there by the road. Sorry piece of shit.”
He turned so that his wounded arm lay between him and the wall. Using his legs, he pressed his upper body against the lifeless arm to stem the blood or at least dull the pain. He grimaced, eyes shut.
“I said nothing that would make them want to kill you,” Shel told him. “You’re the last person I wanted dead. We had an agreement, remember?”
He laughed, and when his eyes opened they regarded her with terrifying bitterness. “Stop lying to me.”
“I don’t have the strength to lie.”
He turned toward her, pointing the gun. “Walk,” he said.
“I can’t.”
He stumbled toward her. “Walk, or I kill you here.”
Shel found herself staring into the gun barrel again. He pressed it to her forehead.
“Get the fuck up,” he hissed.
She lowered her eyes. Her glance settled on the picture of her in the newspaper clipping. Danny, she thought. He was trying to find her. Frank was dead, she’d have to deal with that sometime, but Danny was alive and doing everything he could. He’d come out here hunting, risking his life, and all that was asked of her in return this minute was to stand up. Walk.
She rolled onto one haunch, put her hands to the floor and tried to pull her legs up beneath her. With effort she squared them under her body, but the moment she tried to apply weight and rise they toppled beneath her like sand.
Cesar grabbed her hair, pulling her up. “Stop acting.” She flailed at his hand and his grip on her hair broke. He tottered back and in the same moment she found herself possessed of the rage and terror she needed and she rose, half on her feet, leaning against the wall.
They stared at each other.
He tucked the gun into his belt again and reached out his arm. He grabbed Shel’s arm and wrapped it around his shoulder. She tried to get her legs to work, but they wobbled beneath her and every two steps she fell. Without the help of the wall she couldn’t support her weight.
“I’m going to carry you,” he said.
He bent at the knees, leaned his shoulder into Shel’s waist and rose up under till her torso leaned across his back. He spread his legs, the better to bear her weight, and lifted her off the ground. It was like she’d drowned; he was carrying her from the river. Her weakness made her body all the heavier and he lunged sideways for the wall so they wouldn’t tumble to the floor. “Let me down, I can walk,” Shel said, but with a howl of determination he shoved off from the wall again. Extending his free hand toward the door, he adjusted her weight on his shoulder and staggered toward the opening.
They made it through, then toppled headlong into the mud of the root cellar, floundering there in a tangled sprawl of arms and legs, trying to get traction in the muck. Using one of the cobwebbed shelves, Shel clawed her way to her feet. “I’ll pull myself along, just give me your shoulder,” she said. He got to his feet, came up beside her and she reached her arm across his body as before. With the other arm she dragged herself shelf to shelf, hopping on the stronger of her legs. They fell twice again before reaching the wood plank stairs. She stared up through the hurricane doors at the dark sky. When he put his good arm around her waist, she told him, “No,” gently, preferring to drag herself up the stairs on her own, out into the drizzling night.
The wind swept through the marigolds, the eucalyptus and the oak trees, combining with the rain to create a gentle, constant hiss. The car stood idling twenty feet away, headlights forming a corridor of light in the rain. A bullet hole had punctured the windshield just to the right of the steering wheel. A spray of blood marbled the shattered glass. Another bullet had shattered the driver’s side window, leaving behind a webwork of fissures circling out from a jagged hole.
She pulled herself to her feet, standing erect on her own for the first time in hours. Cesar came up beside her, offered his shoulder. She reached her arm across it, and together they made it to the car.
In the easterly distance, perhaps a mile away, a searchlight scoured the low winter clouds. Closer at hand, just beyond the eucalyptus trees, wood fires burned beneath the awnings in the squatter camp. The rust-eaten vans and trucks formed an arc around the fires to form a shelter against the storm. The children were out of sight, and Shel guessed someone had seen the bullet-ridden car pull up, or heard the gunfire from within the house. Only the adults remained outside. The women tended the fires, feeding them with scrapwood. The men, wearing straw Stetsons and ragged coats, sat in their folding chairs beneath the awnings, motionless as stones.
From one of the vehicles, a radio blared. As Cesar eased Shel down into the passenger seat, he stopped, listening to the tune. An ugly grin appeared. “Conjunto,” he said, as though it were a newfound insult. “Do you know what the words mean?” He stared through the trees at the squatter camp. “It’s about the ghost of some loca, a crazy woman, who killed her family. The woman wanders the river, the Rio Huixtla, looking for them.” He slammed the door and shambled around the front of the car through the headlights to the driver side. As he opened the door, the overhead light revealed the blood spattered across the door and smeared across on the seat. He sat down as though it weren’t there. When the door closed he said, “Spooks,” gesturing his head back toward the squatter camp. “We Mejicanos, we love our freaks and spooks.”
He turned the car around and headed out the gravel road flanked by the eucalyptus trees. The fires of the squatter camp faded behind them. Around the first bend a man’s body appeared, facedown in the road. Cesar put the car in park and removed a pearl-handled navaja from his pocket, flicking the blade open.
“I’d like to leave a message,” he said, as though speaking into a phone.
He opened the door, tottered out into the rain and knelt down beside the body in the mud. Resting one knee on the dead man’s arm, he began to saw at the wrist with his knife, cutting through the muscle and digging at the bone until the hand came away. He struggled to his feet, spat at the body, and tramped back to the car.
He was drenched when he collapsed again behind the wheel, his wet hair dripping in his eyes. He wiped his face and placed the severed hand on the dash above the steering wheel. It was flecked with mud. The skin was a yellowish-gray color, with a knot of bloody bone and tendon congealed with nerve endings coiled in the gore. It lay there on the dash like a freshly butchered oxtail, except with fingers.
“I know a back way out of here,” Cesar said, putting the car in gear again.
A half mile on he turned into a private road. It was slick with mud and grass. Twice the car’s rear end slid sideways, edging toward the culvert running parallel to the road. Cesar slowed down then, more so than he wanted, and Shel watched as he checked the rearview mirror every few seconds, whispering to himself in Spanish.
“Where are we going?” she ventured as they rounded a stand of pear trees.
Abatangelo drove Waxman to the Vallejo waterfront. As they waited for the San Francisco-bound ferry’s final call for boarding, Abatangelo asked for pen and paper, then began to print out instructions to the coroner’s people or whoever else might find his body that night. When he noticed Waxman staring in puzzlement, he explained, “I don’t want anything I shoot disappearing if it all goes wrong.” He handed the note to Waxman. “Read it.”
The note instructed anyone who discovered Abatangelo’s remains to hand over the cameras, the film, anything found on or near him, to Bert Waxman, care of the newspaper. Waxman nodded, handed the note back and said, “Thank you.”
Abatangelo put the note inside an envelope which he marked, IMPORTANT, then sealed it shut. He then perforated one end of the envelope with his pen tip, unlaced his scapular, threaded the lace through the hole in the envelope, knotted the lace back together again and hung the envelope around his neck. It lay flat against his chest beside the image of the dying St. Dismas.
“What I said back at the hotel,” Abatangelo said, “about Shel, if she isn’t dead already, you killed her? That was unfair.”
Waxman shrugged. “I suppose,” he replied, “when all is said and done, there will be blame enough to go around for everybody.” He chafed his hands between his knees, trying to warm them. “I still maintain it would be best if the authorities were notified.”
“No, Wax, no authorities. I lack your confidence there.”
“Confidence has nothing to do with it. People like Moreira and Facio wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the authorities.”
“Nicely put.”
“But we’re talking about a crime.”
“I don’t know about it,” Abatangelo said. “I heard some garbled trash from a suicidal tweak. You don’t know anything, either, Wax. Everything Frank spewed out is just stuff. Until I come back with the goods, you’d be a fool to believe him. Besides which, if the boys in Homicide didn’t believe you when you told them what I said, I hardly think your credibility will get better when the source is Frank.”
Waxman made a helpless gesture of acceptance. With difficulty, he confessed, “I’m afraid for you.”
Abatangelo smiled at the thoughtfulness. He’d put Waxman through a lot these past two days, manipulating him, cajoling him, accusing him of falsity and begging off when it came time to need him all over again. And in the face of all that, Waxman, for all his faults, had demonstrated a mindful persistence that, in light of his obvious fear, spoke of real courage. Now, Abatangelo thought, he’s saying he fears for me.
“I won’t be any safer if you call the law, Wax,” he said. “I’d probably end up getting tagged with everybody else, and in jail I’m obscenely easy to kill. Besides which, if this trade really is going down, and the cops walk into the middle of it, things’ll go crazy. And in that kind of chaos, with people like this and the heat I’m sure they’re going to bring, Shel’s life won’t be worth the breath it takes to talk about it.”
The ferry for San Francisco began boarding. Waxman glanced at it, then asked, sensing time was short, “Do you honestly think she’ll be there?”
Abatangelo smiled despondently and looked away. “Yes. I honestly do.”
“Alive?”
He remembered the article Waxman had recited to Facio, about the woman left bleeding in the jungle for the insects, the women hung from trees with their dead babies tied to their backs. “No,” he confessed. “But if her body’s there, I want to be the one to claim it.” The ferry sounded three short blasts from its whistle. “Thanks for all you’ve done, Wax. I mean that. Do the story proud, you tweedy motherfucker. No matter what I bring back. Or don’t bring back.”
Waxman blushed and adjusted his glasses. “Yes, sir. Good luck.” He exited the car and waved like a man trying to convince himself the farewell was not final. Then he turned away and hurried through drizzle up the slick gangplank and onto the ferry.
As Abatangelo drove back to the marina, the mist created a slick, oily veneer across the asphalt. It sent a chill through the air, too, and he warded off intimations of death as he peered past the wipers and the rain-streaked windshield at the road. He considered stopping at a liquor store, a pint for warmth, but decided drink would only make him moodier. Get any more depressed, he thought, and you’ll start singing.
When he got to the marina he drove through slowly. The boats sat high and dark in the rising tide, hulls bumping faintly against the sagging pier. No dogs barked as the car drifted past, nor was anyone about to scowl at his presence. It made him wonder if a little forewarning had gone around. He came abreast of the sawhorses he’d seen that afternoon and spotted what he wanted among the debris.
Turning off the ignition he sat awhile, listening. Steam purled off the hood. A wind chime made of sawed-off bottles rattled dully in the rain. He opened the door, navigated the mud troughs in the road, and gathered up a paint-spattered tarpaulin. Scudding back to the car he folded it into his trunk.
Wiping his hands on the upholstery, he drove on to the wall and looked out across the funnels of tall damp grass caught in his headlights. With the rain he’d leave a visible trail, so he’d have to go in from the back.
He drove down to where the access road turned back toward the highway and parked deep in a tree-high thicket of oleander. Opening the trunk he moved the tarp aside and opened his canvas camera bag. He wished he had a clearer idea of what might actually happen. As it was, he’d just drag everything out to the incinerator and improvise. Anything was possible, a shoot-out, a wank fest, a lot of rough talk followed by business as usual. His hands shook. He put the car jack in the camera bag then zipped it closed, hefted it from the trunk and started back, the tarp folded beneath his arm.
His shoes skated along the grass and mud, and by the time he made it to the lone oak tree looming above the grass, he was soaked to the skin. He took a moment in the shelter of the tree to get his bearings, then headed in across the field, keeping to the fence line until he was right behind the incinerator, then made straight for it from the rear, taking long strides to leave as few marks as possible in the sodden grass.
Once inside the incinerator shelter he knelt down, threw the tarp over the top and took out the jack. Assembled and at full height it pushed the tarp up just slightly, enough for a window. He loaded each of the cameras with 3200 black-and-white, feeling the leader onto the sprockets in the darkness. Removing the lens from one camera, he screwed the Passive Light Intensifier onto the camera body, then fit the lens onto the end of the PLI. He set up the tripod and adjusted its height, securing the camera onto it, then looking out through the viewer at the shimmering green phantoms, the grainy, vaguely 3-D effect. He could make out individual bricks in the windbreak. Beyond it the water resembled a stretch of whitish, undulating sand. The vertical and horizontal hatch marks of the sight met in a central circle which he focused straight ahead at a point ten yards beyond the nearest stretch of wall.
The second camera he fitted with a flash and a 35-105 zoom, setting it for autofocus and hanging it from his neck. If he ended up close to anybody he’d let go with that, using a fill flash to make sure he got a decent exposure. The third camera, fitted with a standard 55 and a second flash, he left in the bag in case one of the other two jammed.
He settled back to wait. Over time the rain stiffened, the wind picked up. His legs cramped from the cold and he chafed his wet clothing for warmth. The wound at his temple inflicted by Frank started throbbing again. Eventually he withdrew Shel’s letter from inside his coat pocket and fingered it. He reached inside the envelope, felt the hand-worn paper, recalled the spidery handwriting, not needing light to see it. He pictured her not as he’d seen her last, brutalized by Frank, but as he’d known her long ago, when life still seemed tinged with luck- saw her in a denim shirt and painter pants, sitting barefoot on the porch of a rented beach house near Santa Barbara, wind in her hair, staring out across the ocean with a beer bottle lodged between her legs. The West Texas drawl. The tomboy wisecracks.
He pictured her suddenly appearing then, real as the moon. She stuck her head in beneath the sagging wet tarp and said, Don’t. Not for me. Live, you idiot.
Cesar reached the cross-county highway and turned east toward the interstate, where he veered south. He got off at the final exit before the Carquinez Bridge and headed for a cluster of run-down apartment buildings overlooking the Maritime Academy.
“Where are we going?” Shel asked, her voice so weak she barely heard it herself.
Cesar parked at the end of a cul-de-sac. An empty field sat beyond the apartment complex, dotted with sickly trees, where a hulking figure in a hooded sweatshirt walked two mottled pit bulls through the trash, weeds and broken glass. The pits swaggered through the debris, noses down, ears erect, moving with a gait as close to a pimp roll as a dog could manage.
“Who lives here?” Shel asked. A whisper.
The craving had intensified, the result of no more boosters of whatever it was the doctor had given her. The withdrawal created an aching body sickness that, combined with the throbbing pain in her head, redoubled the weakness in her legs. She lacked faith she could duplicate the efforts to walk she’d managed back at the house. At the same time she knew Cesar would never let her sit out here alone. He’d lost a lot of blood, almost fainting at the wheel twice. In the end he used rage to fuel his will, wagging his gun, calling her names. Once or twice she’d thought he’d finally decided to be done with the bother and was pulling to the side of the road, ready to kill them both.
Breathing through his mouth, Cesar checked his bloody arm, then removed Pepe’s severed hand from its resting place above the dash and stowed it beneath the seat. Murmuring inaudibly to himself, he got out, the cloth of his jacket and trousers sticking to the bloody upholstery, then came around, opened the passenger-side door and dragged her across the seat.
“You can walk,” he hissed. “You know you can.”
Propelling herself from one filthy car to the next, one arm wrapped around his shoulder, she hobbled beside him as they passed an abandoned Datsun with SHIT HAPPENS finger-written in the grime on its windshield. Shit doesn’t just happen, she thought, pulling herself along. It hunts you down. The row of cars ended, and without anything to push against, she fell. Cesar just kept moving, pointing toward one of the apartment buildings as he dragged her up and along. At such moments she found it was true, she could walk. The way a dying woman walks.
Cesar led her to the breezeway of the apartment building nearest the cliff. Vato graffiti snarled across the wall. The stairway was steep and stank of piss. A shaft of dust angled down through a grime-smeared skylight. Their steps rang out on the metal stairs as they climbed to the top, by which time her head was spinning. Surfaces rippled at the edges. The floor swayed. With one hand on the wall, the other around Cesar, she made it to the end of the hall. He knocked at one of two facing doors then tried the knob.
The door, unlocked, eased open.
“Primo,” Cesar called. No one answered.
A guttering haze beckoned from within, created by candles burned down to the quick. The entry gave way to a dark hallway, down which successive doorways glowed with the same twitching light.
“Something’s wrong,” Shel said, looking at a table awash in melted candle wax.
“It’s weird,” Cesar agreed. He glanced around a corner into the first empty room. “I’ve never been here when there wasn’t somebody hanging out. Hidalgo’s junkie pals. The chicks who come up to boost spikes, raid his stash cans.” In the next doorway, another flickering ooze of candle wax greeted their stare. “He’s a nod, he knows a dozen other nods, and on any given day, half of them are here.” He shuddered. “Never seen the place this quiet, even when everybody’s swacked.”
He walked stiffly from pain and dizziness, turning his whole body to look inside each room. Shel staggered behind, using the wall for support and mesmerized by the Rorschach of smeary bloodstains across the back of his jacket and trousers. Finally, at the end of the hallway, they peered into the last room and came upon a near-naked youth, sprawled across a bare mattress with a tangled sheet kicked onto the floor. The young man had indio features and a body turned gaunt from excess. Dressed only in socks and underwear, he rubbed his arms, eyes glazed as he stared at the ceiling with an impersonal smile.
“Primo,” Cesar said. “Hidalgo.”
Hidalgo lowered his glance from the ceiling, his eyes milky as he tried to focus on the figures in the doorway. Dried saliva clung to his lips which moved but no sound came out.
“I don’t think he can hear you,” Shel said. “He always like this?”
“No. Which is why nobody stuck around, is my guess.”
With an air of wanton grace Hidalgo finally recognized Cesar. He lifted his hand, his lips cracking into an oblivious smile as his fingers twitched. He was waving hello. Leaving Shel propped in the doorway, Cesar tramped over to a soiled pile of clothing balled up in the corner and searched the pockets, finding a small bindle of wax paper. He also discovered a modest wad of bills, which he pocketed as Hidalgo’s head fell back onto the mattress with a heaving, oblivious moan and his eyes closed.
Returning to Shel, Cesar showed her the bindle and said, “You may need this. You want it now or later?”
Shel felt ashamed at how conflicted she felt. The craving already had her by the throat, not because of the pain.
“Later,” she said, swallowing.
Cesar put the bindle in his pocket. “Maybe there’s some thread in the kitchen, a needle.”
“For what?”
“My arm,” he shouted, instantly furious, as though she should know. “Stitch it up.”
In the kitchen he found some rum. He removed his jacket. Much more gingerly, he removed his shirt. The sleeve came away like a sheath of skin and he screamed through his teeth. Blood seethed from the wound again. He rinsed it in the sink, wiping away the dried blood and the seared flesh, and discovered that the bullet had gone straight through. There’d be no need to dig it out. This seemed a good sign, despite the fact he had no strength in the arm. The rim of the muscle hung in shreds.
“All we have to do is clean it up and sew it closed, both sides,” he said. “Find a towel.”
She tried to get up from her chair but her legs collapsed beneath her. He pulled his gun out from under his belt and slammed the butt against the counter. “I’ve had enough of this,” he shouted. “When the mood hits, you walk. Do it. Now.”
She drew herself up using the chair and the table, then lunged across the kitchen to the cabinets. She reached them on her knees, pulled herself up, sucking air, and searched drawers until a towel appeared. She had no idea if it was clean.
“Here.” She held it out for him to take.
The floor was sticky and there was a smell of mildew brewing in the sink. Cesar snagged the towel, dried his arm, and said, “Come over and sew up the holes.”
“I was never much at girl stuff,” she began, but he aimed the gun at her.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he said, in a mocking whine.
“You can’t just darn it up like a sweater.”
“Do it.”
He kicked a chair across the room for her and, using it like a walker, she forced herself around the room, pulling open the drawers she hadn’t already checked. One drawer seemed the catch-all: In a tangled heap lay buttons, matchbooks, a church key, dice, string, safety pins, pennies, rubber bands, candles, a shoelace, gum- and a spool of black thread with a single needle.
She worked her way back to the table, sat down and wet the thread with her tongue. Her hands shook. He told her to hurry, pressing the towel to his arm to keep the wound clean and stay the blood. Finally, she had the needle threaded and told him to bare the wound. He drew the towel away and she gagged. The flesh was black and mangled. Muscle and bone gaped through the tear.
“You need a doctor,” she said.
He slammed the gun butt down again, this time on the table. “What I need is you to do what I tell you. Stop telling me why you can’t.”
She took a moment to regain control of her hands. Once they stopped trembling, she started with the wound on the upper side of the arm, where the skin was softer. She set about looping the thread through his skin, aiming the needle tip at a shallow angle, having no idea if she was doing it right or wrong. Her hands grew sticky with his blood. Cesar drank from the rum bottle, he cursed, he bit his fist. The thread broke twice, his skin ripped where the thread tried to hold and the whole thing fell apart. He savaged her with obscenities then told her to try the underside, where the skin was thicker. That was when the needle broke. He jumped up, screaming. He pulled back the hammer of his pistol and pressed the barrel to her head.
“You are trying, goddamn trying, to fuck me up,” he shouted.
She sat there, holding a bloody length of thread, her eyes closed, waiting to die.
“I saved your life,” he told her.
“I didn’t ask you to.” She looked up past the gun into his eyes. “I asked you, if they were going to kill me, to make sure you were the one who did it.”
He grinned, thumbing the hammer down gently. “Same thing.” He lowered his chin onto his chest and laughed. Closing his eyes to hide his tears, he put the gun down and wiped his face. “Check the bathroom,” he murmured. “Maybe there’s some gauze, some bandages. Anything.”
She pulled herself up on the chair she used for a walker and hobbled down the hallway, stumbling twice, one time banging her teeth against the chrome back of the chair. In the bathroom she checked the medicine cabinet for anything that might ease her pain, finding nothing for her effort but toothpaste, hydrogen peroxide and laxative. Never go to a junkie for drugs, she thought.
Closing the cabinet door, she saw a stranger’s reflection in the mirror. Good God, she thought, as recognition finally claimed the image. A sensation of cold swept through her, and she associated the chill with something her grandmother used to say: Someone just walked across my grave. The phrase evoked an image: a tall cloaked figure stepping across fresh earth. It’s not my grave, she realized. It’s Danny’s.
Live, she thought, clutching the sink to keep from falling. Whatever happens, to me or anybody else, please live.
She pulled herself away from the mirror. In the drawer she found gauze squares and an Ace bandage. Shoving them down into her pocket, she turned her chair about and trounced back toward the kitchen where Cesar sat, his head buried in the crook of his good arm, the other arm hanging at his side. Blood dripped from his fingers to the floor.
“Talk to me,” she said, tearing open the wrapper of one of the gauze squares. “Tell me about Hidalgo.”
“I already told you. He’s a spike.”
She applied the bandage to the underside of his arm, covering the exit wound, which seeped blood. “Hold that there,” she told him. He obeyed. “How do you know him?”
“Hidalgo? I know him from home. His old man’s a jefe like mine.”
“What’s that?” Shel ripped open the next bandage.
“Jefe? It’s like a boss. Guy in the community who’s connected. Hidalgo’s family lives in Netzahuacóyotl, east of the airport.”
“Is that nice?”
“It’s a slum. For garbage pickers. Which means it’s paradise compared to Chalco.”
She remembered the name. “That’s where you’re from,” she said, overlaying the first square with the second, forming a Star of David.
“Yeah.” He held the two pieces of gauze in place as she opened the next. “Hidalgo’s people know my people. They look down their noses at us. Fucking garbage pickers. Can you believe that?” Shel applied the next bandage to the wound on top of his arm. It was the smaller of the two. Cesar spread his hand, to hold both the top and bottom bandages in place at once. “The joke is,” he continued, “they can bitch about us all they want. We’re family. There’ve been a couple of marriages. I met Hidalgo as a kid at one of the weddings.”
“You’re related.”
“He’s my cousin,” Cesar said.
Shel began unraveling the Ace bandage. Cesar gestured with a nod back toward the room in which Hidalgo lay in his stupor. “What should I tell his people?” he said. “I’ve seen him loaded dozens of times. Never like this.”
“Is that where you’re going?” she asked. “You’re going to hide with his family?”
Cesar cackled. “Papa Cleto wouldn’t waste a fucking second to decide. He’d sell me to the highest bidder.”
“That’s your uncle?”
“Hidalgo’s old man,” Cesar confirmed.
“What about your own family?”
“Worse.”
She wrapped the elasticized bandage around his arm as tight as she dared, enough to hold the bandages in place, not so much as to cut off circulation and risk gangrene. “If you can’t trust your family, where are you going to run?”
“We,” he corrected. “Where are we going to run?”
The sound of a tow truck from the street below interrupted them. Cesar stood up, hobbled to the window over the sink and peered out from the edge of the curtain.
“Fucking hell,” he whispered.
Coming up behind him, Shel saw a patrol car and a tow truck positioned at opposite ends of the car. The tow truck’s yellow light spun in the opposite direction of the cruiser’s blue-and-red flasher, the beams intersecting in circles across the grime-caked cars parked along the cul-de-sac. The cop pointed his flashlight through the windshield, holding it like a spear. The light refracted through the shattered glass, creating an etchwork of shadows across the bloody upholstery. Wait till he finds the hand stuffed under the seat, Shel thought.
“Get back,” Cesar hissed as a second cruiser pulled up behind the first.
He pulled her away from the edge of the window. There’d be other cruisers soon, they both knew that. Turning his back to the curtains, Cesar put his hand to his head, gritting his teeth. Eyes closed, he started pounding his forehead with the heel of his hand, whispering, “Think, motherfucker, think…”
Shel clutched the kitchen counter for balance. Through the fog of her pain and fear an idea took form. “We get out of here somehow,” she said, “before they start doing a door-to-door. Hole up in the bushes if we have to. Tomorrow morning, we make the ferry, I know a guy in San Francisco. Name’s Eddy, owns a body shop out in the avenues. We can get a car.”
Cesar cracked his eyes, which were milky from tears. He turned toward her, unsteady, grinning. “You said, ‘we.’ ”
A half hour after the rain stopped, a line of seven cars appeared and rolled slowly past the marina. Abatangelo rose onto his knees and sighted the caravan through his viewfinder. The cars sagged from the weight they carried, their suspensions creaked. The procession crept steadily across the loose muddy gravel until all seven cars lined up parallel to the windbreak wall.
The men got out, Latinos, three dozen or so. No more than six looked older than twenty, and the older ones had the yeomanly manner of hired men. They wore identical jumpsuits, like prisoners. Some wore black hooded parkas, either pulled over the jumpsuit or wrapped around the waist, sleeves knotted in front. A few of the young ones sported a hint of jewelry, a bit of personal flash. Abatangelo thought of Moreira’s press release, his promise to lift young pachucos off the street and offer them steady work.
They unloaded firearms from the car trunks in a steady, methodical hush, carrying the weapons in their arms like firewood, passing them over the wall to companions standing ankle-deep in the grassy mud. There were pump guns and bird rifles, sighted hunting carbines. Then came the serious stuff: riot guns, streetsweepers, strikers, one or two MAC-10’s for the hirelings. Ammunition boxes followed, passed hand to hand, along with cartons filled with jars of gasoline, knotted rags, cans of spray paint, the stuff of hand-to-hand street combat.
The men jumped the wall, spreading out in both directions, as the cars pulled away. One of the leaders signaled back toward the marina with his flashlight, kicking the gravel around to hide the tire tracks. Abatangelo fixed him in the telephoto lens, everything rendered vivid and immediate through the PLI. The man’s skin became the dark green of leafage; the background resembled the rippled green of pool water.
Three tottering vans appeared in the distance. They were old and rusting along the chrome lines, the wheel wells. The vans queued past the marina and, guided by the leader with the flashlight, pulled in slowly along the wall. The gunmen spaced themselves between the vans and on either end, setting up their ambush, stacking the rifles side by side along the wall, barrels up, stocks in the high wet grass. Abatangelo honed in on faces as the men loaded beehive rounds into the pump guns, deer rounds into the hunting rifles, then passed the jars of gasoline, the rags, the spray cans, up and down the line, setting them down with care. The parkas came on for shelter from the rain. Once the men were settled, one by one they removed handcrickets from their pockets and signaled down the line.
Abatangelo settled back on his haunches. Even if Shel was down there, he thought, inside one of the vans, the Mexicans had no intention of simply handing her over and being done with the matter. That much was obvious from the manpower and weaponry. They’d had their war council. Felix Randall and his men, if they bothered to appear, were low enough, hated enough, to take down without fearing much of a manhunt. Nobody at the Justice Department would so much as yawn. As for the locals, who cared? It actually made things simpler, tidier, if the Mexicans ran the meth trade. No more renegade biker romanticism, no more Aryan warrior myth. They could all join hands against the foreign menace. Blame immigration.
Abatangelo leaned forward again, returning his attention to the vans. The drivers remained in place, swallowed up in shadow, behind which firewalls separated the cabin and cargo areas. There’d be no telling if Shel was there, inside one of those vans, or even if she was alive, until they opened the doors and either brought her out or didn’t. He pulled away from the viewfinder again and massaged his eyes.
An intimation of the lunacy, the pointlessness of his being there, overwhelmed him. It combined with a gutting sense of loss. She’s dead, he thought. If they haven’t done it already, they’ll make it part of the show. And I’ll be here, he thought, peering through the viewfinder as she gets dragged from one of the vans, marched to the middle of the gravel road, given a little shove so the gunman can get a proper aim, then murdered.
Don’t do this, he told himself, shaking off the image.
He considered giving up the subterfuge, revealing himself and walking down, trying to barter for her. They’d kill him on the spot, he realized- drag his body into the grass and go back to waiting for Felix Randall’s men. A minor distraction. A little sidelight before the main event.
There’d be no saving her. Not here. As that sank in, the full weight of Shel’s death, already accomplished or imminent, bearing down, he thought to himself, “I’m sorry.” The words felt foolish, the sentiment wretched and small. If he’d simply had the courage to want her, like Wax said- the courage to comfort her when she came for help, be thankful for her being there, not connive some inane, scheming justice- she would very likely be safe and well. Frank might even be alive, he thought, or at least the blame for his death would lie elsewhere. He remembered Waxman, after the explosion, confiding he was afflicted with the image of a schoolbook drawing, Icarus in flames. What he left unremarked, of course, was the other half of the story- the vanity of Daedalus. His vanity and, in the end, his guilt.
He returned his eye to the viewfinder and photographed every grouping of shooters along the wall, as well as the drivers slouched down inside the vans. It might provide leverage later, he thought. Somebody with his face in a picture would add just a little more to the story to save himself. And if that didn’t end up keeping anyone alive, it would at least tell the tale.
A few of the men lit cigarettes, sheltered from sight by the wall but still cupping the ash glow with their hands and exhaling into the mud. A crack pipe made the rounds. One man, rocking on his haunches, fingered a cross hung from his neck by a leather thong. Two of the younger ones held hands and lowered their heads, praying. Rendered green and hazy by the PLI, the figures seemed strangely innocent through the lens, as though their images were mere projections- evil, mutinous projections- not their real selves. Their real selves remained elsewhere, asleep in bed, with their alibis.
The rain brought an acrid stench out of the ground, suggestive of petrol mixed with sewage. In the distance a short queue of tank cars pushed by a diesel tender rolled along the rail tracks inside the refinery perimeter; every man along the wall peered up, trying to see how close it was. Abatangelo braced himself against the incinerator wall for balance, hoping not to fall, betray his presence. His legs cramped. His feet had fallen asleep; his clothing, wet and cold, clung to his skin like cellophane. Using the noise of the train as cover, he pressed the shutter release and ran off seven frames, intending to catch the faces before they turned back toward the water.
The handcrickets started up again. Abatangelo caught the faint sound of motors approaching from beyond the marina.
Four new vans appeared, rolling quietly forward. The shooters along the wall grabbed their weapons, fingered the triggers and crouched, waiting for the signal to stand and fire.
The first three vans queued up as expected, but then the fourth shot past and spun back around, the bay door open. What followed defied comprehension at first, and then Abatangelo flashed on the article he’d read that morning, the weapon theft from the Port Chicago Weapons Station. A 7.6 mm chain gun. It opened fire from its mounting inside the van, targeting the Mexican vehicles at the level of the drivers’ shoulders, heavy rounds cutting through the metal, shattering the windshields and window glass. Using this as cover fire, a stream of men emptied from the three far vans, flattening themselves along the roadbed and opening fire with carbines.
The first Mexicans to return fire were cut down, their heads shot piecemeal in eruptions of bloody bone. One man, screaming, went down firing his shotgun into the man beside him. Another lay on his back firing rounds into the sky, sobbing. Then the Mexicans’ sheer numbers took a toll. The shotguns rained spinning darts across the road, taking out the first row of Felix’s men, and the rifles added in with scattered fire. Two of the Mexicans fired their MAC-10’s crazily, unable to control the muzzle lift and spending rounds into the air before leveling them out and taking proper aim.
The newcomers changed tactics quickly. The chain gun aimed low for the gas tanks of the sitting vans. There was no hostage to kill, no money to ruin. Each side had come to steal what the other refused to bring. The nearest of the Mexican vans exploded, blown off its wheels and caroming against the two beside it in a blur of flame and black smoke. For a moment the driver of the nearest van was visible inside the cabin, kicking at the door, then he disappeared in a billowing dark cloud.
Abatangelo covered his head with his arms as the chain gun aimed high again and rounds cut across the grass, tearing at the incinerator wall. Flecks of brick caught him in the face; he flattened, feeling for the wound. His ear was wet with blood. An explosion shook the ground, his tripod fell on top of him and when he looked up he saw a greenish-black cloud and flames engulfing a second van.
The Mexicans began heaving their jars of gasoline at the chain gun, forsaking the rags, hoping the muzzle exhaust would trigger the fumes. With the pelting of gas the chain gun finally caught fire- a small pop of flame then the ammunition went, rocking the van off the ground in the explosion, turning it thirty degrees in the road. Two men fell free. They crept along the ground screaming, flailing at themselves in an effort to put out their blazing clothes.
With the chain gun gone, a ragged cheer went up among the Mexicans, a new fervor, some men crouching to reload or claiming another gun from among the dead, others standing to pick off the unarmed men rolling afire across the gravel. A portion of the windbreak gave way like sand, chewed apart from gunfire. Acrid smoke crept low across the ground, obscuring the two sides from each other. The few vans not consumed in flame had their tires shot flat or ripped clear off their wheel rims in a smoldering shag of rubber.
Gradually the gunfire grew sporadic and men pulled back. Deserters, alone or dragging wounded friends, ran low across the grass field. Abatangelo unscrewed his camera from the tripod, turned and fired shot after shot as the men fled past the incinerator, oblivious to it and him, seeing the hurricane fence in the grassy distance beyond the lone oak tree and reaching it finally, pushing their bloody friends up the chain-link barrier and trying to pull themselves up as well. One man was left there on the sagging fence, hanging dead. On the far side the survivors hit a dead run and vanished.
Back in the gravel lane two men fired at each other point-blank, their arms and heads pulpy with blood. Beyond them the last of Felix Randall’s men, wounded, staggering, fell back, limping into the water. Firing under their own vans and using the gas tank explosions as cover, they slipped away, wading through the reeds toward the marina.
Finally sirens could be heard, coming from somewhere far off, sounding small and comical. Unspent rounds went off like firecrackers in the various fires. The road was littered with dead or those who wanted to be dead, crying out or sobbing, scattered around the charred metal husks of the vehicles spewing smoke. An odor of gasoline, cordite and methyl alcohol filled the air, mixed with the stench of smoldering rubber and vinyl and flesh.
Abatangelo rose to his feet, pulling the tarp away. His knees buckled under him, his legs numb. Feeling returned to them gradually as one of the older Mexicans, sitting not fifty feet away, his legs a mash of savaged flesh and blood, put a gun to his own head and fired.
Abatangelo undid the lens cap of the camera around his neck and moved forward, dazed, sick, intent on photographing the carnage as he found it. Serve the story. Shel could not possibly be alive, not now. They’d never have brought a living hostage into this. He felt inhabited by a morbid weightlessness, as though something within him had fled, deserted him. There was nothing to be done. Nothing but go through the motions. She was dead. Accept that. Live, you idiot.
A scavenging dog appeared from the marina, skulking along the edge of the firelight and sniffing the smoke-filled air. Charred bodies littered the gravel. Except for clothing there was no telling one side from the other.
One of the men Abatangelo passed looked up, his face disfigured, a honeycomb of pellet wounds. His dark hair was matted with blood. A gold cross hung around his neck. His whole body shook and he reached out a strangely immaculate hand to clutch Abatangelo’s trouser leg as the flash went off.
Farther along the road another of the Mexicans crawled toward the water, his back smoldering. Other men lay dead in bloody grass. The sirens grew closer then stopped, suggesting a roadblock of some sort put up by Felix Randall’s crew, one of whom now lay at Abatangelo’s feet, curled in his own blood, clutching what remained of his stomach as pieces of his viscera slithered through his hands. He was huge, black-haired, staring up hatefully through his shock as Abatangelo armed his flash. Recalling the name and description Frank had given, he said, “You’re Tully. Rick Tully,” and took the man’s picture as he died.
Beyond him, engulfed in smoke, a Chicano boy of fifteen or so sat propped against the wall, just below where his compatriots had written the phrase WOE TO THE BETRAYER. The boy sat there mumbling, face wet with tears, his chest a blackened mass of blood and hanging flesh. Sobbing, he gestured with his hand, opening it, closing it, opening it again. Abatangelo went to the boy, knelt before him and said, “Hold on.” He placed the boy’s arms across his chest to stay the blood, took his own coat off and lodged it there. By the time the police arrived and got the triage unit on the scene, the boy would be dead, he knew that, but even so, he told him, “You’re gonna make it out, you understand?”
The boy convulsed from shock, eyes glazed.
“You look at me,” Abatangelo shouted. “Start counting backwards, understand? Start counting backwards by threes. Like this: one hundred, ninety-seven, ninety-four, come on…”
The boy moved his mouth but no words came. He reached out one hand and Abatangelo had to put it back. “No. No. You’ve got to press down, you’ve got to hold that there.” Shortly the boy’s lips stopped moving. Blood pooled inside his mouth. The eyes stiffened. Abatangelo rose, stepped back and cursed, shouting at no one and everyone.
One of the Mexican vans remained intact. The metal was pocked with bullet holes at shoulder height. The lower rounds had taken out two tires, missing the gas tank. It sagged into the road. It occurred to him that, despite the insanity of it, Shel, or what remained of her, might actually be in there. He couldn’t leave without knowing. Stumbling, he came abreast of the van, fingering the torn metal, watching his firelit shadow ripple across its coarse gray paint. He reached for the bay door handle, turned the latch and slid the door back fast on its runners.
Another boy faced him, this one younger still. He looked no more than twelve: thin dark face, all teeth and eyes. He was holding a shotgun.
“Don’t,” Abatangelo said.
The boy raised the barrel anyway and Abatangelo was barely able to bat it away before the shock of flame and noise erupted, spraying white-hot bird pellet inches from his ear. The concussion knocked him back, off-balance, his ears pounding and ringing as he hit the mud hard, gravel chewing at his skin. He scrambled to his knees, all but deaf, arms raised, pleading with the boy, screaming words that sounded dull and far-off inside his own head: “Don’t do it, don’t shoot, don’t…” The boy stared at him in an agony of terror, mouth gaping, eyes livid with tears.
Abatangelo reached for the gun barrel. It scalded his hand and he let go, howling. The boy went to aim again and Abatangelo swatted the barrel, reached for the stock and wrestled it away in one hard pull. Two-handed, he hurled the weapon out into the flame-spangled water.
He reached out his good hand. “Come,” he said. The boy recoiled in dread. Forsaking English, Abatangelo said, “Venga. Venga!” He looked off in the directions of the approaching sirens. He mimed running and pointed to the hurricane fence. The boy cringed, huddling against the van’s far wall. No, Abatangelo thought. This ain’t gonna happen. He scrambled into the van, grabbed the boy, threw him over his shoulder and jumped back out onto the gravel and started to run as the boy kicked halfheartedly, squirming. Reaching the end of the low wall, he set the boy down, shoving him in the direction of the hurricane fence. He pointed and shrieked in the boy’s face: “Run!”
The boy lifted his arms, put his wrists to the side of his head, weeping. Abatangelo could see the lights of an approaching cruiser a half mile up from the marina. There was no more time. He turned and ran himself, reaching the incinerator in a half dozen lurching strides. Seeing the damage to the brick from gunfire, he marveled at his own survival. He gathered up the two other cameras, left the rest of the equipment and made off in a crouching run for the fence, heading for a spot twenty yards away from the dead man left there hanging.
It wasn’t till he reached the fence that he realized the boy was behind him. Panting, they stood there together as the cruiser reached the marina’s far end. Abatangelo made a stirrup with his hands, fitting the burned one under the other, gestured with his head and shouted, “Up.” The boy inserted his foot, Abatangelo snarled from the pain but heaved him upward and the boy latched on to the fence top, brought his leg over and dropped on the far side. He did not flee. His eyes still dripping tears, he gestured with his hands for Abatangelo to follow. Abatangelo wrapped his camera straps around his neck and scaled up after.
Once he dropped clear on the other side, the boy grabbed his sleeve, but Abatangelo, raising his hand, said, “Momento.” Knees bent, he hurried down the fence line to the man left dead. Legs dangling on the far side, torso impaled on the top, his head gazed down lifelessly at the side from which freedom had beckoned. Abatangelo knew this was the shot he had to take, the one that defined the whole insane business. He checked the camera; he had two frames left. He crouched down, armed the flash and shot twice, the lens pointing straight upward. The flash erupted like lightning, illuminating the vacant eyes, the horrific maw. The film rewound in a humming whirl. Abatangelo rose, stepped back and collided with the boy.
“Roberto,” the boy whispered, staring up at the body.
The highway was thick with police cruisers wailing toward the marina. Abatangelo wound his way along back roads, weaving through the wooded hills to the south of the strait, beyond the refineries and the Delta Highway. The boy rode beside him silently, staring out the window, hands folded in his lap. They reached downtown Martinez fifteen minutes shy of five o’clock. Given winter light, sunrise remained an hour off. Streetlights flashed in the misty predawn dark. The streets were empty.
Abatangelo pulled to a stop and finally took a moment to wrap a handkerchief around his scalded hand. Taking heart from the fact no blistering had appeared, he reached across the seat for the glove compartment. He pulled out the plasticine envelope containing his pictures of Shel. Producing one, he held it up for the boy and said, “Dónde?” Where?
The boy looked lost, sitting there chewing his hand in the intermittent light-and-dark of the flashing overhead streetlight. His brow furrowed, he looked from the picture to Abatangelo and back again. He shrugged and shook his head.
“Try,” Abatangelo said, pushing the picture closer to the boy’s face. Licking his lips, the boy studied the image closely. He shook his head again.
“Do you know her?” He fished his memory for the Spanish word for “know,” then ended up just pointing to her image and saying, “Sí?”
The boy continued shaking his head. Abatangelo wasn’t sure he’d ever stopped.
“Okay,” he said gently, surrendering. “All right.”
The boy looked out at the empty corner, the bus terminal to one side, a shabby park to the other. Abatangelo had no idea how close to home the boy was, or how he’d get back. Wondering how he should convey that he’d drive the boy wherever he needed to go, he reached up with his burned hand, wrapped in his handkerchief, and dabbed at the side of his own face. Blood still seeped from the wound inflicted by the splintered brick sent flying in ricochet by the chain gun. This, added to his other wounds, made him look vaguely menacing, he supposed. What could be more menacing, after all, than a man lucky to be alive?
The boy turned around and stared at him. In time, licking his lips again, the boy said, “Gracias.”
Abatangelo smiled, inspecting the handkerchief for pus. “De nada.” He fished for the words to say he was sorry about his friend, but his memory refused to oblige so he said it in English. The boy blinked, glanced sidelong at him, then looked out the window again.
“Cómo está?” Abatangelo ventured.
The boy chuckled bitterly. “Escantado de la vida,” he said, gesturing with a mocking wave of his hand.
Abatangelo studied the boy more closely. Terror lingered in his eyes, he couldn’t sit still. How long, Abatangelo wondered, before the macho lust for revenge appears. He wanted to tell the boy, Take a tip from me: Don’t. Remember what happened tonight, all of it, the false promises, the bravado, the sloganeering, the butchery. Take it to your grave. He wanted to reach across the car, grab the boy, connect eyes and tell him: Remember your friend, left to die, impaled on a fence. Don’t avenge him. Grieve for him.
Before he could muster a way to convey even a part of this across the language barrier, the boy pulled the door latch, put one leg out onto the asphalt and turned, glancing across his shoulder. He nodded to himself, as though trying to devise something to say. Abatangelo, feeling the moment to be crucial in some way and afraid it would pass unfulfilled, placed his rag-wrapped hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Comprende.” He wasn’t sure whether he’d said that he understood, or whether he was issuing a command that the boy do so. Regardless, the boy merely nodded again, repeated softly, “Gracias,” and got out.
“Be careful,” Abatangelo called after him as the door slammed shut. The boy waved without looking back, darted across the pavement into the decrepit park and vanished beyond a bank of ceanothus.
At least someone gets spared tonight, Abatangelo thought.
With no one sitting there beside him consuming space, he found himself addressing a void. Shortly the void responded. His mind surged with fragmented images- decimated human flesh, the trace of bullets through thick smoke, fire, a scream-filled darkness. The next thing he knew he was gripping the steering wheel with both hands and trying to breathe. A burning sensation erupted not just in his eyes but everywhere, his skin, his viscera. He shrank away from the nightmare, then shrank away from the knowledge it was not a nightmare at all.
And, of course, there was Shel. Or, more to the point, there wasn’t.
He pictured her again as she’d materialized at the marina, an apparition. Live, you idiot. Sound advice, he thought. For all concerned. He found himself at one and the same time cursing and marveling at the irony of it, spending ten years looking forward to freedom, to finding her, to loving her again, only to reach this moment, robbed of her forever, trapped at a point in time when looking forward to anything seemed counterintuitive.
There was nothing to hope for now. No home. No tomorrow. And strangely, despite everything that had happened, that truth came to him unfreighted with bitterness. He was no longer tempted to lash out, to scheme, to devise his next step or even think ahead. At that moment, given what he felt and all he’d seen, thinking ahead seemed cheap.
He sat there for perhaps a half hour, awash in grief, feeling lost, but feeling, too, a perverse unburdening. In time he realized why. He no longer felt angry. After so much plotting, treachery, botched hope, insanity and carnage, anger seemed ridiculously beside the point. And that absence of anger, it felt like grace. Like being freed from prison.
He got out of the car, climbed atop the trunk and sat there, watching till daybreak smeared the easterly horizon with its glare. He knew that regret would soon take hold of him. He’d be wrestling with it for the rest of his life, he supposed, but at that particular moment he felt nameless, free of the illusions embedded in his past and no longer fooled by the future. Even the present seemed immaterial. Like light. And that, he guessed, was its perfection.
He got back in the car, put it in gear and drove to the center of town. In the cramped shelter of a gas station pay phone, he fished quarters out of his pocket and fed them into the coin slot, dialing Waxman’s number.
Waxman picked up quickly.
Abatangelo said, “No sign of Shel, Wax, but I’ve got some art for you.” He barely got it out. Waxman talked over him manically, his voice clipped with phone static. Abatangelo caught the word “alive” and said, “Yeah, I’m alive. I’m fine. Fucking lucky, actually, you’ll see what I mean- ”
“Listen to me, damn it,” Waxman cut him off, shouting.
Abatangelo recoiled a little from the receiver. Fitting it back to his ear, he heard Waxman tell him, “She’s alive.”
The discovery by the police of Pepe’s severed hand, stashed under the front seat of the shot-up car, gave Cesar and Shel the distraction they’d been waiting for. Hugging the shadows, they shuttled down the breezeway stairs and out the back of the property to a steep wooden stair built into the hillside under the eucalyptus trees. The handrail had rotted. Shel took the steps on her fanny, scooting down one by one till they reached the base of the hill.
At the bottom Cesar drew her up, wrapped his arm around her and half-guided, half-dragged her as he had all night, through the trees and the manzanita to the patchy lawn of the Maritime Academy. Down among the Quonset huts they found a pay phone and called a cab.
Cesar had changed into a set of Hidalgo’s clothes, but already blood was seeping through the fabric of his jacket. The stained sleeve hung lifeless beside his body. For strength, just before leaving the apartment, he’d taken three last pulls from the rum bottle and scarfed down two fistfuls of raw liver he’d found moldering in the fridge. Shel’s strength ebbed and surged, one moment propelling her a few more steps, the next failing her altogether. She functioned on nerve alone. No rum for her, no raw meat. When she faltered, Cesar goaded her on with snarls of, “You don’t fool me,” or more simply, “You want to die?”
He pointed to a set of concrete benches near the entrance to the campus, and they made their way among the buildings, trying to avoid the glances of dog walkers already on the Academy campus for morning strolls along the water. High above on the overlooking cliff, the Carquinez Bridge spanned the strait, noisy already with Sunday traffic. Barges drifted underneath, heading inland toward the Delta.
The cab arrived as the police patrol began scouring the top of the hill with flashlights. Beams flickered through the haze among the eucalyptus trees like large distant fireflies. Shel caught herself staring, then Cesar dragged her into the cab.
“The ferry,” he told the driver.
The cab eased up the hill past the guard station, where a gray-clad cadet glanced vacantly into the backseat then waved them on. Halfway up the hill they passed the turnoff into Hidalgo’s cul-de-sac. Over a dozen cruisers gathered at the end. The driver, a husky, older black man, stoopshouldered, wearing a snap-brim cap, followed the swirling lights with his eyes.
“Some damn drug mess, gotta be,” he growled, shaking his head. He looked into his mirror at his passengers, choosing precisely that moment when Cesar was prodding his arm, as though trying to goad it into movement. Shel, fearing the scrutiny, said, “Maybe there’s something on the radio. About the drug thing.”
The driver’s eyes, reflected in the overhead mirror, shifted from Cesar to her. She shot him back a game smile. Nodding, he reached over and tracked the radio dial through sparks and gurgles of static, weak signals and noise. Finally he tuned in a talk station, offering standard Sunday morning fare: Charles Osgood sang the praises of the five-string banjo. A local gourmand touted lime pickle. When the local update came on, the bloodbath at the marina made the lead story. Fourteen men, all nameless, dead. Eight wounded, all critical. Few if any expected to live. “Believed to be drug-related,” the announcer said, and then linked the deaths to those at the ranch house, the junkyard on Andrus Island. The announcer’s voice had a maddening, forced breathlessness to it, like some promotional windup. Even so, at the mention of drugs, the cabby eyed them once again in his rearview mirror. Shel could think of nothing to deflect his attention this time. How had Cesar put it, she thought. Plan B, cut off their balls. Fourteen dead, and that was just the last go-around. Twenty-five total, with more soon to die. One of them, of course, being Frank. Farewell reckonings ticked through her mind with hopeless pity. Three years trying, she thought. Three years gone. And what of the others? She glanced toward Cesar for some form of shared grief, only to watch his eyes turn to stone, staring out at the leaden morning as the cab pulled up to the ferry building.
Cesar paid with money he’d pilfered from Hidalgo’s pocket. Counting off the bills, he shot the driver a look of such guileless menace that Shel forced herself to laugh, like it was some sort of twisted joke between them.
“Why not just pull your gun,” she said as the cab drove off. “Tell the guy to zip his mug or you’ll drill him.”
“That’s what I did,” Cesar said, without irony. He edged away, looking for a door that might be open. Over his shoulder, he added, “Stop nagging.” He tried a door. “When the fuck’s this place open?”
Stop nagging, she thought. Like we’re some old married couple. The idea whistled through her like a cold wind as she searched for a place to sit. She found a concrete bench under the roof overhang, facing the street, out of the weather.
“It’s early,” she called back after him. There was a schedule on the wall he’d completely ignored. “First ferry doesn’t sail till nine.”
He didn’t hear, hobbling around the building, attacking other doors. The building- an octagonal structure of metal and glass, painted aqua, with a low-pitched roof- sat perched at the center of a long promenade, directly across from the Mare Island shipyard. Flagpoles defiled along the landscaped walkway, each flying a different state flag at full mast in the drizzling rain. A marina sat to the north. To the west lay the vast high derricks and dry docks of the shipyard. A destroyer sat anchored at one end of the channel, an aircraft carrier at the other.
A runty man with a gnarled, whiskered face disembarked from a city bus in front of the ferry building. He passed not twenty yards from where Shel sat, trundling with singular focus toward a kiosk that he unlocked and set about tidying. Shortly, a newspaper van motored down the hill, turned sharp along the waterfront boulevard and braked at the ferry plaza, disgorging three bundled stacks of the Sunday edition. She wondered if there was a picture of her in today’s paper, like there had been yesterday. She was struggling with what that might mean as, like a spider, the gnarled little man scuttled out from his kiosk, retrieved the bundles and dragged them back to his lair where he attacked them with wire snips.
A police cruiser appeared up the boulevard, traveling slow. The cabby, she thought, he made the call. The cops wouldn’t think twice about it, not with Cesar packing two guns and dragging that arm around. Not with her barely able to walk, face tattooed with bruises. If they took her into custody, she’d have Felix to worry about all over again. He’d slip someone into jail to kill her. That or bribe some guard to do it.
Cesar was on the far side of the ferry building, out of sight. Gathering up her strength and using the kiosk to block the cruiser’s view, she lurched over to the ugly little man, grabbing at a trash bin and a post along the way.
“How’s it going?” she offered, steadying herself on the kiosk ledge and panting. She looked down at the front page of the paper to hide her face. The small stack of papers on the ledge was weighted down with a rock.
The man inside the kiosk sat atop a tall metal stool. The space around him reeked of sweat and stale cigarettes.
“Buck and a half,” he said in a rasp that suggested cancer. Shel looked. Sure enough, just above his collar, a small clotted scar appeared, and in an instant it brought back Felix, his sitting there in the kitchen with her, clutching her hand, asking if Frank would hold up. Telling her there was nowhere to run.
“Dollar-fifty,” the man said, louder now. His eyes were a flinty green and his breath smelled the way his teeth looked. He held out his hand, the palm concealed beneath a fingerless glove of ratty black wool.
“Let me check,” she said, searching each pocket she knew was empty. The man waited, his breath whistling in and out.
“Well, darn,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. The cruiser had moved on, down the boulevard. “My pal’s got the money.” Cesar had stayed put behind the ferry building; maybe he’d seen the police as well.
“You wanna paper or don’cha?” the man barked. He slid one of the papers from under his rock, folded it over, held it out in one hand while the other extended once again for payment. “Buck and a half,” he said, back at the beginning.
“No thank you,” she said, turning away to lurch and hobble back to her bench. How long, she wondered, sitting down, till another cruiser comes by. This one without warning. Her only chance was to get to the city, connect with Eddy. She’d called from Hidalgo’s apartment, left a cryptic message. Knowing Eddy, he’d already sounded the horn to Danny. That was her chance. And then? She’d fled Danny to save him, now she was running back to save herself. It was cowardly. I’m sorry, she wanted to tell him. Sorry and scared and buying time.
Cesar returned from his hiding place beyond the building, staring after the police cruiser that turned back uphill toward downtown. He collapsed onto the bench beside her.
“Fucking cold out here,” he said, as though nothing had happened. He clutched the lapels of his jacket. His face was damp, but Shel couldn’t tell if it was from rain or sweat.
“Tell me something,” she said. “The men who died, what was the point, exactly?”
Cesar uttered a caustic laugh and wiped his face with his coat sleeve. “You’re funny,” he said.
Shel exhaled and the breath stung as it left her. Tears dammed up behind her eyes for reasons she couldn’t place. “I want you to tell me about the men who died,” she said.
Cesar looked away. Following his gaze, Shel saw terminal derricks in silhouette against the winter morning sky. They looked like skeletal giants clutching one another.
“We got a little speech,” he said, “last night, from Facio, the guy in charge. El Zopilote, he’s called. The Buzzard. He told us, ‘There are cases in which the greatest daring is the greatest wisdom.’ Like that? He read it from a book. After a little more of that horseshit he finally got around to talking about Gaspar Arevalo.”
“He’s who?” Shel asked.
Cesar glanced at her. “I thought you wanted to hear about the men who died.”
“I do.”
“Well, he was the first. The mojado Felix Randall’s people strung up like a dog a few weeks ago.”
“The thing that happened out on Kirker Pass Road?”
Cesar chuckled. “Yes. The thing.” He worked up a wad of spit, let it form at his lips and then dropped it in a long, slow stream to a spot between his feet, inspecting it for blood. “Know what else Facio told us? The guy that road is named for, a norteño named Kirker, he got rich scalping Mejicano peons. Women, children. Pretended they were Apache scalps so he could claim the reward. In Mexico, he’s despised. Up here, they name a highway after him.”
Shel studied his face. It betrayed nothing she did not already know about him. The eyes were the same as always, hard and quick and focused on something a little ways off.
“Nothing like a little local color,” she said finally. “What else did he tell you? This leader of yours, what’s his name- ”
“Facio.”
“Him.”
“He told us to bring honor to ourselves and our families.”
Cesar leaned back, spread his serviceable arm across the back of the bench and cackled. “Honor,” he murmured. “He plays me for a fool. Orders Pepe to shoot me like a pissy little sneak.”
Inside the ferry building a custodian appeared, unlocking the doors one by one. Cesar shot to his feet, wrapped Shel’s arm around his shoulder in a single motion and drew her up after him. Side by side they staggered across the plaza, their bodies leaning against each other till the door came open and they ducked inside.
The interior was a few degrees warmer at best. Cesar planted her in a seat then hurried to the rest room, where, she imagined, he’d run hot water over his hands, splash his face with it. He was gone several minutes, and when he came back out he was as pale as before, warming his hands in his armpits.
“I’ve thought about it,” he said as he sat down next to her. “We’re driving to Chicago. Lot of Mejicanos there, we can blend in.”
He was sweating again, and trembling. His eyes seemed more remote than before.
Shel said, “I’m going to blend in with who?”
“This guy you called,” he said, ignoring her, “who is he?”
“He’s my friend.”
“Friend how?” A blatant inference of sex strained the question.
“We were arrested together.”
Cesar regarded her with a look of barely suppressed relief. And surprise. He seemed impressed.
“Pot smuggling,” she added. “Ten years ago.”
Cesar looked away again. “That doesn’t mean I can trust him,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “It means you have to trust me.”
Eddy Igo’s body shop sat midway to the beach along the Noriega streetcar line, deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Sunset District. The shop was a single-story cinder-block structure painted daisy yellow and kelly green. Even in the fog, it looked perky. Abatangelo pulled up in front where two work bays faced the street, each with a corrugated aluminum door, above which appeared, in stenciled lettering: I-GO YOU-GO BODY REPAIR.
He entered the customer waiting room, triggering a small bell. There was a vinyl chair, a matching vinyl sofa, an end table covered with grease-stained copies of Car & Driver, a counter with a cash register and Coke machine. Inside the work bay, the chassis of a VW Bug sat hoisted on a hydraulic rack, its roof cut away and its hood removed. A 3100 engine hovered over it, machined for oversized cylinders and suspended by pulley chains. Coiled rubber hoses hung from grapples. A smell of gasoline and cold metal hung in the air.
The place was still. Abatangelo called out Eddy’s name.
A moment’s silence, then from the back: “Danny, yeah. Back here.”
He followed the sound down a dark narrow corridor past a grease-stained washtub, startling himself as he passed the filthy mirror. The wound at his temple had stopped bleeding, but the scab was fresh and large. His eyes were hollowed out by shadows and he still had a handkerchief wrapped round his blistered hand.
He turned into a dingy room lit from the ceiling by buzzing fluorescent tubes. Two battered file cabinets and an ancient Frigidaire lined the far wall. Across from them, soiled work orders fixed to clipboards hung by chains from a pegboard panel.
Eddy sat at an old metal desk, loading a Browning shotgun with buckshot. A Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum with two speedloaders sat on an oilcloth at his elbow. His eyes were wired, his skin wan. His bald spot gleamed from the overhead light, hair curled and tufted around it like he’d jumped out of bed and come here running.
“Got the call on my machine,” he said, not looking up from his task. “The line forwards through to my house after hours. Saw the light blinking when I got up.” He shook his head, kept loading. “God damn lucky Polly didn’t pick it up. Tried to reach you. Then I called that doofus at the newspaper.”
“Waxman,” Abatangelo said.
“That’s the one.”
Eddy pumped a round into the Browning’s chamber then stuffed extra shells into each of the breast pockets of his coveralls.
“Why all the firepower?” Abatangelo asked.
“She said ‘we’ on the phone,” Eddy said, leaning back and setting the shotgun in his lap. “I don’t know who ‘we’ is.”
“Are,” Abatangelo said.
“Don’t fucking start with me,” Eddy responded. Glancing up, he added, “You look like death warmed over, by the way.”
Abatangelo collapsed into the empty chair across the desk. He rubbed his eyes. “Ed, bear with me here a minute, okay? I just came away from a…” He waved his hand, struggling to claim a word. Nothing came, so he settled for “nightmare” and took a deep breath. “First I watched Frank Maas, the character Shel was involved with, blow himself to shreds with a homemade bomb. I mean, pieces of him just lying around, some on fire. Then I sat out near a marina along the Carquinez Strait as somewhere between thirty and fifty men went at each other with guns and more guns. I photographed the dead, among other things. They looked a lot like meat by the time I got to them.”
Eddy heard him out, waited a moment, then shot him a peace sign. “That’s deep,” he said.
Abatangelo felt the air in his throat turn thick like cotton. “Excuse me?”
“Stop preaching.”
“Oh, that’s rich.” Abatangelo shot out his hands, as though to measure the insult. “You know, I remember sharing a motel room in Corona Del Mar one time with a guy looks a lot like you. There was two million cash stowed under the bed. I don’t remember any weapons around.”
“We were young and dumb,” Eddy said. “Dumb with luck. I don’t get the sense your old lady’s bringing any luck with her.”
“Let me handle it.”
“This is my property.”
Abatangelo sank a little in his chair. “That what this is about?” He looked around the small, dim, grimy room. “Just to fill you in, Ed, the last guy I heard extol the virtues of private property was one of the numbnut rednecks out at Shel’s place. He came waving a shotgun, too.”
“Can you promise me this numbnut, or somebody just like him, won’t be coming through that door?”
“He’s probably dead.”
“Probably. Great. You want rich, try that.”
Abatangelo sensed he was losing and felt a little desperate. Feeling the Sirkis in his pocket, he reached in, grabbed it, and set it down on the desk between them.
“What the hell is that?” Eddy said.
“It’s one more weapon, Ed. I don’t want it. This place means so much to you, if it’s worth putting up this kind of a fight, you take it. Feel safe. Go on.”
Eddy’s mouth dropped open but failed to produce a sound. Gathering his wits, he sat forward, eyes locked with Abatangelo’s. “I told you. Your old lady’s bringing somebody here. I don’t know who, I don’t know how many, and I’m not even real sure why, except she said they needed a car.”
“So kill them.”
“Fuck you. Listen up. Ten years went by, Danny. You don’t call the shots anymore.”
The fluorescent tube overhead cast a sickly light across their skin. It made them both look old.
“Ed, nobody’s giving orders. I’m asking. I saw- ”
Eddy slammed his hand on the desk.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you saw or how bad it spooked you. You didn’t hear her voice on the machine. I did. If this thing wasn’t fucked, she would have sounded a hell of a lot different, trust me.”
He got up, tossed the empty cartridge box into the trash and checked the clock. “You want to talk love and brotherhood, be my guest. But the final say here, inside these walls, is mine.” He picked up the.357, shoved it into one hip pocket, and put the speedloaders in the other. He looked at the Sirkis, too, but left it where it was.
“Now you can sit there contemplating the horror of it all,” he said, his tone softening a little. “Or you can spend a minute here with me so we can figure out how we’re gonna do this thing.”
The ferry arrived and disembarked on schedule. Shel and Cesar crossed the bay drinking hot coffee and looking out at the seagulls keening out across the waves, tailing back to land along the rocky, fogbound shore of Alcatraz. Cesar seemed increasingly abstract. He disappeared twice into the men’s room to inspect his arm, returning with a look of grim concern. He’d stare at the clock, rocking in his seat, murmuring to himself. He wasn’t calling her names anymore. He didn’t seem to have the strength.
Shel sought out a phone booth once they reached the dock in San Francisco and tore out the ad in the Yellow Pages for I-GO YOU-GO BODY REPAIR. They caught a cab on the Embarcadero, gave the driver the address and, after a reeling drive through the Tenderloin, the Western Addition then the Park, they arrived at Eddy’s green-and-yellow body shop in the Sunset District. Cesar paid the cabby with the last of Hidalgo’s money as Shel got out, gathered her balance on the sidewalk, clutching a street sign. Looking up and down the street, she noticed that no pedestrians were out as yet, but she did notice Danny’s Dart parked halfway down the block, across the street. As she spotted it, she thought she saw someone dive down, out of sight, behind the wheel. As the cab drove off, Cesar grabbed her arm, drew her toward the shop and peered through the window glass into the waiting area. Seeing no one, he nudged her in front of him toward the door, gesturing for her to open it and go in.
Sitting in Eddy’s office, Abatangelo heard the bell at the body shop’s front door. He had a fresh bandage on his scalded hand, one on his temple as well. Pushing up from his chair, light-headed from fatigue, he mustered the will to move by telling himself, It’s almost over.
He walked down the long dark hallway to the front and entered the waiting room blinking at the change in light. As his eyes adjusted, he felt startled at what he saw. Shel’s bruising rivaled his own; she looked on the verge of collapse. Breathing through her mouth, eyelids fluttering, she needed the wall to stand up straight and her skin lacked color. For all that, the mere fact she was here, alive, seemed a miracle- a miracle to which he had no claim. The saint in this particular miracle was the little guy with her, who looked even worse than she did.
“Hey,” Abatangelo said to him in greeting, and offered a nod. Turning to Shel, he added, “You okay?”
“No,” she admitted, leaning toward a vinyl chair and collapsing. “I’m fucked up.”
“We came for a car,” Cesar said. “She called.”
“Yeah,” Abatangelo said, still looking at Shel. “I know.”
It took every ounce of reserve he possessed not to walk across the room to her. A tension flickered between her and the guy, a sort of bickering neediness. Abatangelo guessed it had kept them alive. He saw the birthmark and thought, Cesar, recalling the name from Frank’s description. The guy had jumpy eyes, a wiry frame and a dazed intensity. Abatangelo had seen boxers like that, usually ones at the end of a hammering. There was also something very wrong with his left arm. Blood stained the sleeve above the elbow, front and back. The limb hung there lifeless. The fingers were gray.
“Ground rules,” he began. “You carrying a piece?”
Beyond Cesar’s shoulder, he saw Shel gesturing with two fingers. Then she patted her stomach and the small of her back.
“We came here for a car,” Cesar repeated, squaring off.
Abatangelo raised his hands. “Steady. You’ll get one,” he said. “Unless you try to strong-arm me. Not a car in this shop you can drive out of here. It’s the weekend. Keys are in a safe. Only Ed knows the combination and he’s not here.”
“Where the fuck is he?” Cesar’s good hand drifted from his side, hovering near his belt buckle.
“He’s a phone call away. He left this for me to handle.”
Through the window Abatangelo could see his Dart parked a little ways down, across the street. Eddy sat behind the wheel, the shotgun across his lap and the.357 in his hand. If he knew Eddy, the engine was running. He was ready to pop the clutch and race in shooting. Having him outside, not in, was the one concession Abatangelo had managed to get.
Cesar said, “Who are you?”
“A friend.”
Cesar made a hissing little laugh and shook his head.
“I say something funny?”
Cesar looked at Shel, offering an ugly grin. “Another friend,” he said.
Abatangelo told him, “Look, I’m serious. I’m unarmed. Think about that. You come in here, I don’t know who you are, what you really want, but I’m willing to work it out. That said, I’m not gonna get muscled for the privilege. You try anything, you leave here on foot.”
“You’ll be worse off than that,” Cesar murmured. He leaned toward the work bay, peering inside.
“No one’s in there,” Abatangelo told him. Silently, he calculated how quickly he could jump across the space, pin the limp arm to the wall. The wound’s bad, he thought. The guy might go into shock.
“Better not be,” Cesar said, righting himself.
“You know, I don’t think I’m getting through to you.”
“Where’s our car?”
“I don’t know where you’ve been,” Abatangelo said, “but something happened last night. Been on the radio, maybe you heard. Your men met Felix Randall’s men. They cut each other to shreds. Men you probably know.”
Cesar, turning so his bloodied, motionless arm came forward, said, “See that? I got it from men I know.” He grimaced and spat. “Fuck them all.”
Abatangelo felt helpless, his mind slipping. “My point,” he said finally, “is there’s been plenty of bloodshed already. Look at you. You’re hurt. She’s hurt. You both need care.”
“Not your problem,” Cesar said, grimacing. “A way outta here, a car. I’m getting tired of asking.”
“Where are you trying to get to?”
“None of your business,” Cesar said, voice rising. His hand edged a little closer to the jacket button.
“Sure it is. Where determines what car. If you don’t want to tell me where, tell me how far.”
“Give us a car,” Cesar hissed.
“Us?”
“Her and me.”
Abatangelo looked past him again. Shel listed in the chair like it was everything she could do to stay upright. Her face was wet. Her eyes drifted. He doubted she’d stay conscious long.
“She needs a doctor.”
“You keep bringing up stuff that’s none of your business.”
“She stays,” Abatangelo said. “Gets treated. You get a car. That’s not a bad deal.”
Cesar squinted, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Deal?”
“I want her taken care of. I’m a friend. I told you.”
Cesar bent a little at the waist and whispered, “Yeah? I saved her fucking life.”
He used the shock of that statement as a distraction and unbuttoned his jacket. The handgrip of his weapon stuck out from under his belt. He rested his hand on it.
Abatangelo, his eyes locked on Cesar, asked Shel, “That true?”
She forced herself upright in the chair, wincing from the effort. “It’s a little more complex than that,” she managed. “Short version, yeah. I’m alive because of him.”
Cesar grinned. From behind, Shel added, “He greased the fucker who was supposed to do me. To be honest, though, he did it for his own reasons.”
Cesar spun around, like he’d been mocked. His hand hadn’t moved, poised on his gun. It was the way he looked at her that tipped Abatangelo off. Possessive. Resentful. There’d be no finessing this thing.
“Thank you,” he said, edging closer. “For saving her life.”
Cesar turned back laughing. “She comes with me.”
“Hold on,” Abatangelo said, keeping his voice level and easy. “You saved her life, all right. I’m grateful. So is she.”
“You talk for her now.”
“You’re also on the run. Without a car. You steal one, that’s just more heat to deal with. She got you here. That’s a gift. Be grateful. Otherwise you’d be stuck. In your position, stuck means dead.”
“Be grateful,” Cesar repeated. “A gift.” His voice had grown softer, but the harshness remained, as though the words were hitting his teeth. He looked at Shel one more time, then back at Abatangelo. “You people love to talk.” His face was turning pale and his breath was coming faster. The breaths were shallow. He was starting to wet his lips a lot.
“What did you think was going to happen?” Abatangelo said, taking the next step closer. “You save the princess, she falls in love? Kinda fairy tale for a guy like you.”
Cesar tightened his grip on the gun.
“Problem with that kind of thinking, it assumes you can earn her feelings. But you can’t. She either feels something for you, or she doesn’t.”
Cesar backed away from him, to preserve the distance he’d need to aim and fire. He seemed uneasy on his feet, and yet his body looked coiled and ready. He stopped less than a yard from the wall, in the corner formed by the Coke machine.
“Trust me,” Abatangelo went on, “I’ve thought about this long and hard. It’s why we want it so bad. A woman’s love. Best thing going, and there’s not a damn thing we can do to earn it. Am I right?”
“Get me a car,” Cesar said, tugging the gun from his trousers.
Abatangelo lunged, caught the hand gripping the weapon and in the same movement crushed Cesar’s wounded arm against the wall. Cesar gasped and uttered the beginning of a scream that died in a rush of spent air. His knees buckled but he didn’t lose his grip on the gun. Abatangelo tried to pin his wrist back. Cesar butted him, catching him right at the bloody gash near his temple. Abatangelo lost his grip on Cesar’s gun hand. Cesar lurched with his shoulder into Abatangelo’s midriff and drove him back, far enough so he could aim.
Shel shot out of her chair. “Don’t do it,” she screamed.
The Dart screeched to a stop right out front and the car door flew open. Cesar’s eyes followed the sound, giving Abatangelo the chance to bat the arm away. Shel saw it and dove. As Abatangelo struggled with Cesar again, she found the strength and speed and lurched across the room, grabbed Cesar’s hand and sank her teeth into the flesh of his wrist, down to bone, as Abatangelo pinned that arm against the Coke machine and drilled the other, limp and bloody, over and over against the wall. Cesar found his scream then, dropping the gun with a curse. Shel stumbled away, her mouth bloody, scrambling on the floor for the gun and shouting, “Watch out for the other one. The gun. At his back.”
Eddy charged through the door, triggering the tinny little bell again. Abatangelo didn’t dare turn. He reached around, trying for the second gun as Cesar, gritting his teeth, flailed with his legs. Cesar caught Abatangelo in the groin, Abatangelo howled, clenched his jaw and kept reaching for the gun. Crouching down, bending at the waist, Cesar got his hand back to the weapon before Abatangelo could. Abatangelo picked him up bodily off the floor, slammed him against the wall, ramming his shoulder over and over into Cesar’s chest, driving the air from his lungs.
Eddy shouted from behind, “Put your hands out. Now. Let me see ’em.”
Cesar looked up, his tongue lolling free as he fought for breath. He met Eddy’s stare but kept his hand where it was. Abatangelo leaned his entire weight against him, pressing him against the wall, his hand locked on Cesar’s wrist, pinning it behind his back. Abatangelo’s head spun, he gasped for air, too, fighting an urge to hurl. Shel sat there on the floor, wiping Cesar’s blood away from her mouth and getting a proper hold on his gun.
“Don’t do it,” Eddy shouted, edging closer, training the Browning shotgun on Cesar’s face. “Your hands, get ’em out. Ain’t gonna say it again.”
“Come on,” Abatangelo said, straining for a tone of compromise. “Doesn’t have to be this way. Let go.”
Cesar lifted his chin and smiled. He regarded Abatangelo, eyes darkening. “The problem with stupid people,” he murmured. His good arm jerked and the gun went off. He fired into his own body, arching his back, aiming for Abatangelo, too. The discharge jerked him half around, his side exploded in blood and Abatangelo jumped back unthinking, shielding himself with his arms as Shel screamed, “Danny… Danny…”
In the end, it was the pictures. They appeared with Waxman’s articles, the paper running a series of multipage layouts, the largest since the mass suicides at Jonestown: frames shot from the hilltop above Shel’s house, showing Felix Randall and his henchmen gathering just before the Andrus Island shoot-out; Shel herself, brutalized by Frank; Frank’s remains, smoldering piecemeal amid the smoke and flame and charred debris of the bomb-blown milk shed; Rolando Moreira’s surreal fete for his fifteen-year-old daughter, celebrated only hours before the bloodbath at the marina; the massacre itself, the dead and dying left behind, crowned by the image of a youth named Roberto, offering a death gaze to the camera, snared atop the hurricane fence.
There was also a shot of Cesar Pazienza from Chalco, sprawled in stillness and his own blood on the waiting room floor of I-GO YOU-GO BODY REPAIR. Abatangelo didn’t take that picture. Someone in the coroner’s unit did. Abatangelo at that point had joined Shel, the two of them wrapped in blankets, dazed, weak, fouled with blood, sitting in Eddy’s small airless office and waiting for the marshals to arrive.
Abatangelo had called them, using a telephone in the waiting area after watching Cesar’s body convulse, his eyes swimming in their sockets as one hand flailed blindly behind him for his gun, the other pinned at an impossible angle beneath his body. Face to the floor, Cesar had arched his back, trying to regain his feet, then his knees slid back and he lay still. Closing his eyes, he coughed up tangled spumes of blood. Abatangelo, finding himself caked in human muck but whole, reached for the small of the dying man’s back and withdrew the gun. It came away lathered in gore. Cesar, white-faced, dull-eyed, gasped for air and moved his lips, trying to draw breath. Eddy dialed 911, but the small feral man with the thumb-sized birthmark was dead before the paramedics arrived.
It seemed grotesque but apropos- fitting and fair, as Frank would have put it- for Abatangelo to begin haggling for his freedom drenched in the blood of a man lying dead only a few feet away. He told the operator at the marshal’s office who he was, gave his CID number and his P.O.’s name, told her where he was and why he assumed the Bureau of Prisons would insist on his being detained. Now that Shel was safe, he wanted to nip it in the bud, lay the story out himself, what he’d done and why, before somebody on the review committee waxed righteous over having to do it himself. Once the operator confirmed that a detail was en route, he put the phone back down, gathered Shel in his arms and guided her back to Eddy’s office to wait.
The marshals arrived as the coroner’s people were bagging up Cesar’s body and homicide inspectors were grilling Eddy, trying to find out how anyone but a contortionist could shoot himself in the back. Evidence techs scoured the waiting room for trace evidence, while the street outside was logjammed with patrol cars, uniformed officers milling about, knocking on the doors of neighboring businesses and walk-ups, canvassing everyone and anyone who had something to say. Abatangelo and Shel deferred answering questions till Tony Cohn arrived, and though he’d been called he wouldn’t get there before the marshals did. Abatangelo murmured good-bye into Shel’s ear, kissed her brow, her hands, her cheek, then left, one marshal on each side. An hour later they delivered him in come-alongs to the detention center in San Bruno.
Tony Cohn did the legal work for his parole review, Waxman worked the press angle. The double-team paid off. Once his pictures hit the papers, and Waxman told the story of the price paid to get them, an outcry arose on Abatangelo’s behalf. And it came not just from Waxman’s usual readership. Average citizens wrote letters. Editors of the major local dailies chimed in. Assembly members and Congressmen, keen for a sound bite, put themselves on record. This man, they said, deserves our thanks, not punishment.
Not everyone on his review committee agreed. A penology wonk named Trimble, with designs on a state-level appointment, argued that the law’s the law, choices have consequences. He was a sharp-featured man with a boyish haircut and hard eyes, who had a strangely soulful manner of speech. He talked a lot about responsibility and used the phrases “send a message” and “the letter of the law” as part of a droning litany. “There is no demonstrable evidence,” Trimble claimed, “of true reform or even remorse on this inmate’s part.” He ticked off the violations, as he saw them- contact with a known felon; conspiring to conceal evidence in at least one homicide investigation; obstruction of justice; battery; harboring a fugitive; felony murder. “These are material crimes, and the list goes on and on,” he intoned, pushing hard for full revocation, a return to federal custody for five years with prosecution on additional charges. “Is this what we’ve come to, where we’ll even condone the systematic breaking of the law for a few good pictures? What’s next? Paying rapists for the rights to live coverage?”
Abatangelo, allowed five minutes to speak on his own behalf, took only two. Dressed in his orange jumpsuit, the rim of his T-shirt peeking through the open collar and a patch bearing his inmate number stitched above his heart, he stood before the committee members without written notes or prepared remarks, hoping that, if he spoke directly and impromptu, the sincerity of his words would outweigh their disjointedness. When he was finished he sat back down, no questions ensued, and the committee took the matter under submission.
They conferred for three weeks before issuing a decision. During that time, Trimble, the hard-liner, provided the text of his remarks to a right-leaning talk show host who recited selected segments in his broadcasts. “The Founding Fathers would spin in their graves,” the radio voice thundered, “if they saw the way deadbeats, pornographers, and, yes, criminals hide behind the First Amendment.” He called any comparison between what Abatangelo had done and the work of real photojournalists or, as some had suggested, combat photographers, “phony” and “insulting.”
“There can be no neutrality in the war against crime,” he roared. “Not on our streets. Not in our neighborhoods. Not with our children at stake.”
It created the desired effect, a backlash against the previous sympathy Abatangelo had enjoyed. Even with the momentum the radio show created, though, Trimble couldn’t muster the votes. In a split ruling, the committee decreed, “Daniel S. Abatangelo poses no discernible threat to the community at large. Charges of crimes committed, in particular the most serious allegation, felony murder regarding the death of Frank Maas, do not bear up under thorough scrutiny. What questionable acts said probationer performed in violation of his release conditions are arguably outweighed by the service he has provided to law enforcement and the general citizenry.”
Release from custody was ordered; his probation, however, remained intact. Reading the report, and wincing at the rhetoric, Abatangelo wondered if that meant he was no longer Of Malignant Character.
Three months to the day from the Sunday morning on which he surrendered, Abatangelo walked out of the San Bruno NIC. He passed through sign-out, headed out through the gate and down the walkway to the waiting car. It wasn’t a cabby in an aging Checker this time. It was Eddy Igo, driving the Dart.
“All the cars at your disposal,” Abatangelo said, getting in, “mine’s the best you could do?”
“Damn straight,” Eddy said. “The Mighty Dart. Dinosaur that refused to die, just like you and me.”
They took Skyline Boulevard into the city. The road traveled a pine-thick ridge looking down at the vast ocean to the west, the bay and its far hills to the east. The sky was clear except for scrolls of faint white cloud. After taking in the vistas for a bit, Abatangelo leafed through the paper, which Eddy’d brought along. To mark the occasion of his release, the Sunday magazine had a profile of him that Waxman had written.
“At the risk of making you impossible to live with,” Eddy said, “I insist you read the thing now. I wanna see the look on your face.”
Abatangelo thumbed through the glossy pages. Some of the pictures already published were repeated here, plus a few that had slipped through the cracks. There were also some archive shots from the Oregon trial, in which he looked breezy, cocksure and young. The text recounted Abatangelo’s life and career, and was glowingly ham-handed, even by Waxman’s standards. Abatangelo got no further than the bottom of the first page before he put the thing down.
“What a merry dose of horseshit,” he said.
“Ah, the price of fame,” Eddy cracked. “Just damn hard, being the hero.”
Abatangelo looked out the window. He’d spent much of his time during the last three months in protective custody. The isolation had taxed him, to where he still suffered sudden surges of almost hallucinatory moodiness, during which the voices in his head all seemed to be shouting at once. And what the voices sometimes- too often- cried out was this: Doesn’t have to be this way. The words came to him drained of all heart, shrouded in a pitiless futility. Same thing I said to Cesar, he thought, right before the gun went off. Same thing Joey “The Twitch” Costanza’s enforcers said to my father as they led him away. Ironic, that resonance. That’s not Gina’s boy. That’s Vince’s boy. Shel would detect in it inklings of Fate.
“Heroism,” he said finally, “is a vastly misunderstood phenomenon.”
Eddy glanced sidelong at him. “You doing okay?”
Abatangelo smiled. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’m good. Thanks.”
They entered the Sunset District from the south, heading for the campus of a small private college near Golden Gate Park. “Polly and Shel are waiting at the pool,” Eddy explained. “Pair of trunks in the back for you.”
Abatangelo looked, reached across the seat and collected a minimal black Speedo from its box. “Whose idea was this?” he said, holding up the spandex suit. Unstretched, it was smaller than a hanky.
“Three guesses,” Eddy said.
“She must be feeling better.”
Eddy chuckled, then puffed his cheeks and sighed. “There’s good days and bad days. The swimming’s getting her legs back together, but walking’s still a minor miracle at times. It’s an iffy process. Could take months. Longer.”
Abatangelo glanced out the window as they passed a woman cyclist straining up the hill. “Longer as in…”
“No saying,” Eddy admitted. “Just like there’s no saying if she’s headed for a stroke, or an aneurism, from the head-bashing she got. Limits of current medical science and all that.”
The woman on the bicycle turned up through a brick gateway, vanishing. “Been worried about that, actually,” Abatangelo admitted. “Doctors mention any precautions, meds?”
“No such luck. They say it’s a case of sit tight. Wait. See what happens.”
How apt, Abatangelo thought. Just like prison. He sank a little further into his seat. Sensing the sudden funk, Eddy said, “You doing okay?”
“You already asked me that.”
“I’m asking again.”
Abatangelo snorted. “Sure. Ducky. I’m the latest freed man.”
Eddy nodded, puffed his cheeks again. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“Any rate, on a different front, Shel finally stopped fighting the doctor over the pills he prescribed. Still going back and forth on dose.” He shrugged, to suggest cluelessness on all sides. “For the depression, I mean.”
Abatangelo absently wiped his fingers across the dash, removing a ribbon of dust. The sickness unto death, he thought.
They pulled into the campus, navigated a roundabout, and followed a tree-lined lane to the natatorium. Once inside, Eddy pointed out the dressing room, explaining, “Miss Beaudry’s orders. You are to appear before her in your Speedo.”
Abatangelo groaned, but headed through the door. Checking in with the white-clad monitor, he found a locker and proceeded to undress. The echoes from the showers, the locker stalls, the musty chlorinated smell of the place, it all brought back memories from his days as a pool rat, and the remembrances conjured a wholeness he found inviting.
He emerged from the dressing room with a towel wrapped around him. Reflections from the overhead lights flickered in white serpentine trails across the pool water and ricocheted along the domed roof, triggering another jolt of nostalgia. Eddy sat in the bleachers, hooting and clapping. Shel clung to the side near the five-foot mark, with Eddy’s wife, Polly, beside her. Both women wore black one-piece suits, like Channel swimmers.
Shel turned toward him at the sound of Eddy’s applause and broke into a breathless smile. Abatangelo felt his heart kick, like he was on a date. She was wearing the amethyst.
Her bruises had all but vanished. It made her seem younger, despite the fact her hair had dulled a little, traced with gray. She’d stopped using henna. There was something else, though, too- a lost, loopy cast in her eye. Antidepressants.
Seeing the towel, she mocked up a grimace and quipped, “Chicken.”
Abatangelo stepped to the edge of the pool. “I am not chicken. I’m modest.” She splashed him. He dodged, smiled, and nodded to Eddy’s wife. “How do you do?”
“I’m Polly,” she replied, extending a wet hand.
She was, he thought, the very picture of a Polly- short and strong without any shape that registered sex appeal in the conventional sense, except, as Eddy put it, “The hips will bear and the rest is there.” She offered a selfless smile in a face that was square and round at the same time, with cornsilk hair, a pert snub nose and freckles. The kind of woman, Abatangelo thought, that a lot of men just don’t get. To Eddy, though, she was the find of a lifetime.
Shel said to Abatangelo, “Time to get wet, big fella.”
Making a little bow, he let the towel drop. He still had his shape from prison lifting, which the Speedo showed off to grand effect, barely covering his basket.
Wiggling her fingers, Shel said, “Yummers.”
Polly climbed out of the pool, her head thrown back. “Your turn,” she said to Abatangelo, shaking her hands of water. “Make sure she kicks.”
“Show Polly-Wogs how pretty you are in the water,” Shel hollered, clapping her hands. The sound echoed through the vast domed space, and surrendering to the mood of celebration, Abatangelo made a racing dive, skimming the surface with barely a splash. He took one fast lap, switching from Australian crawl to backstroke to butterfly as the mood dictated, then came up behind Shel and slipped his arms underneath her breasts. Her nipples hardened at the touch, sprouting under the slick black fabric.
“Come on,” he said. “Kick.”
He pulled her behind him as she made knifing thrusts with one leg then the other, the right clearly abler, stronger than the left. He wondered how long it would take, getting her to walk again. Wondered if she’d even survive that long. Stroke, he thought. Aneurism. To lose her now, after all they’d survived, wouldn’t that be a nice little valentine from the gods. Once he felt confident they were out of Ed’s and Polly’s earshot, he said softly, “Tell me the truth, how are you?”
She stopped kicking and wiped a gluey strand of hair from her face. “I’m an old woman,” she whispered. “You’re still gonna love me, right?”
He dunked her under the water, held her for a second, then let her up. She gasped, wiped the water from her face and sputtered, “Asshole.”
“Tell me how you’re doing.”
She gauged the space between them and the bleachers. “I don’t sleep much,” she admitted.
“Scared?”
“God yes.”
He moved a little further into the center of the pool.
“Not just me,” Shel said. “Eddy freaks every time a Mexican walks into his shop. Boy’s jumpy as a bug. It’s nuts, he knows it, but it’s got him beat.”
“I think I know how he feels,” Abatangelo said.
Despite his attempts to keep a low profile, word of Abatangelo’s presence at San Bruno had circled quickly inside. It was the kind of notoriety that would make him a prize to some lowlife mutt or desgraciado eager to make his name, which was why he’d elected for solitary.
As for Shel, she’d been granted immunity through Cohn’s intercession in exchange for a series of interviews with the law. She still got calls at least once a week to come in, sit down with Detective So-and-So, he wanted to go over just one more aspect of this thing, tie up a little loose end. It was a good-news-bad-news sort of arrangement; she’d be safe but at the mercy of law enforcement for a good long while, and when she was no longer at their mercy she’d be cut free to fend for herself.
“It’s not just the scared part, though,” Shel went on. “These pills, there’s times I feel like I’m watching myself watch myself watch something. And the thing I keep seeing is him. Cesar, I mean. I tricked him, gave him the idea it was him and me, baby, on the run.”
“Shel- ”
“I had to, I know that, it was my only way out. If he didn’t exactly save my life, though, he did at least refuse to kill me. It’s the only reason I’m here. But then, like I said, I see him. Up against the wall, you holding him there, trying to get him to listen, to see, to stop, and that thing in his eyes when he figured it out and the hate and then the gun going off- ”
“I didn’t want,” Abatangelo began, stopping because he caught a whiff of self-pity in it. Changing tacks, he said, “Not much of a sleeper myself these past few weeks.”
He lay awake most nights till dawn, trying to negotiate a truce with his foreboding. Felix Randall was back in Boron. He’d been able to keep his empire alive before from inside prison, but his organization lay in shambles now. Dayball, Tully, his other lieutenants were dead or in lockup. And in that void, the Mexicans accomplished their principal goal, tightening their grip on the Delta meth trade. Rumor suggested the stranglehold would be short-lived. It’d be only a matter of time, they said, before the locals reclaimed the territory, taking it back inch-by-inch as the homegrown masterminds learned the ephedrine cooking process and their labs cropped up everywhere again.
Regardless, Rolando Moreira hadn’t stuck around to gloat, not with the press coverage Waxman had caused. He’d fled to Mexico, claiming family business interests beckoned and leaving behind a phalanx of lawyers and straw men to deny all. Victor Facio, never one to relish the public eye to begin with, vanished completely. Rumors placed him back in Mexico, now fully in the service of Marco Carasco, the Sinaloan trafficker behind Moreira’s operation. The El Parador Hotel, out in Montezuma Hills, sat empty, still cluttered with the debris from Larissa Moreira’s quince.
“Sometimes,” Shel said, breaking the silence, “I wake up in the middle of the night with the taste of Cesar’s blood in my mouth. The way it tasted when I bit him.”
He tightened his arms around her. “I get the same thing,” he admitted. “Except with me it’s the smell that hung in the air right after Frank triggered his bomb.”
She rested her cheek against his arm. “Poor, sad, fucked-up Frank.”
He flinched a little at her tone, and caught himself again wanting to say, I didn’t want…, or some such, but she beat him to it. “If I had a nickel for every good intention gone bad,” she said, “we’d be set for life. Good intentions gone bad and people I never meant to hurt.”
He trolled her backward around the pool, glancing up at Ed and Polly on the bleachers. They sat close, sharing the Sunday funnies, him in his street clothes, her wrapped in a towel. Suddenly they laughed out loud, knocking against each other, rattling the comics between them. Shel glanced up then, too.
“Polly’s been the queen’s kid sister,” she said. “Even helps me dress sometimes, when I’m just… such a klutz. I feel stupid. And Eddy, God. Eddy’s been stellar.”
“It’s his nature,” Abatangelo said.
“If anything happens to them,” she said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”
Abatangelo kissed her hair. It smelled of chlorine and shampoo. “They’re not here,” he said, “because it’s easy. It’d be nice if we could wish the risks away, but we can’t.”
“We could disappear.” The words came out rushed, hopeless. “Leave them out of it.”
“You tried that once, remember? Where’d it get you?”
“It’s not fair,” Shel said. “Not for them. I’m serious, Danny.”
“Everybody’s serious,” he responded, “and everybody’s scared. Too bad that’s no excuse. If people care about you, return the favor. Love them back. Have the guts to be grateful, make it worth their while. Running’s chickenshit and there’s no guarantee it’ll protect anybody, anyway. I realize, like a lot of sound advice, that’s easy to say and hard to live by and doesn’t seem to solve much, but…”
He tightened his grip around her and kept moving, kissing her hair again. Swirling the water with her feet, she watched the froth dissolve behind her and settled back against his arms, lulled by the rhythm of his breathing. In time, he lay his cheek against her hair and hummed a tune she couldn’t quite place at first. Gradually, it came to her- it was one of the songs he’d sung that night at his flat, when he dropped her into the tub of scalding water and nursed her. A comical song, except now she detected sadness in it. Not tragic or crazy-making or wrong. Gentle. True. Maybe it’s the way he’s humming it, she thought, or just your imagination, or these pills. Then again, maybe it was there all along, that sadness.
Something broke inside her then, a tension wire in her heart, snapping. Her body started to shake with sobs and behind her Abatangelo slowed his pace through the water, whispering in her ear, “Talk to me.” She clutched his arm with one hand while the other signaled that she was good, fine, keep moving. He did so, enveloping her in his arms, and as he did the sorrow rising up inside revealed itself as something familiar, long lost. Like the called-out greeting from an old friend, a wise friend, one who’s been away, it seems, forever.