Do They Know I'm Running? (31 page)

Meanwhile Happy had yet to see dime one for his undercover work. The case had moved forward at a bouncing clip, while the wheels of the bureaucracy churned along at their usual speed, slow as a root canal. The money he made from Vasco barely paid expenses. Lucha was broke and he didn’t want her fully in the loop regardless. She’d just fret herself into a state.

No, the only answer was Vasco, hit him up again. And he’d refuse. Too much thrown at this deal already, he’d say, with
pinche nada
to show for it. Your uncle and cousin got themselves snatched? Not my problem. Let Zipicana handle it, the cocaine kingpin with the hard-on for terror. He’s the one who wants to bring the raghead across anyway, right? About time he anted up for the privilege.

And who could argue with that, Happy thought as he eased the moving van into its parking stall, secured the brake, turned off the ignition. He jumped down from the cab and went to his locker.

He left the wired flannel shirt he’d received from the bureau on its hook; he’d done no recording of Puchi and Chato in the phony mover deals for weeks. It didn’t rise to the level of actual fraud, he’d been told—contractual misunderstanding, it could
be said, the money at issue small-claims stuff—and thus wasn’t a crime, federal or otherwise. It was getting to be an issue, the recordings. Pitcavage, the AUSA, was pushing for deeper involvement of Vasco and his crew in the terror angle: Get them to talk about helping pick out local targets, the Fed Building, Coit Tower, Golden Gate Bridge. Think of what Hollywood would want to blow up, he said, then get video of Vasco or Puchi or Chato casing out the place.

But Happy was the least chatty guy on the planet. After that initial meet with Vasco, everything felt forced. He wasn’t comfortable bringing stuff up out of nowhere, it wasn’t his nature. He was convinced everybody would see right through him, then what? That’s why so many of his tapes were filled with brief bits of idle chat separating long, worthless silences. He never engaged and no one took the initiative to engage him. He was the world’s worst rat, except he’d brought them the case of a lifetime, Mara Salvatrucha meets al-Qaeda, and he couldn’t understand why they didn’t seem happier with that, especially since, if Lattimore’s offhand suspicions were true, if Samir wasn’t really who Happy thought he was, that might very well be what they were looking at. His stomach lurched. Samir, a true
jihadi
. Christ. If that’s true, he thought, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life trying to convince anybody who’ll listen I was played just like everybody else. He had a pretty good idea a lot of that convincing would take place in prison.

He took his cell phone, which served as both a transmitter and a backup recorder, out of his pants pocket and placed it on the locker’s upper shelf. Ironic, since he was finally about to initiate a conversation worth recording. But it just seemed best that the next few minutes not exist, not as far as the government was concerned.

Chula was coming down the stairs, dragging little Lucía behind her, as Happy made his way up. As always, the mother had a smoke lit, cigarette dangling from her lips as she stuffed a wad
of bills into her purse; the child was sniffling, her eyes wet and red. Girls’ night out, Happy thought, listening to the heels of Chula’s pumps hammer the wood-plank steps. No words were exchanged as they passed but Chula, as always, tossed him a look of lukewarm want while Lucía, clutching her smoky stuffed bear, regarded him with the distant needy meanness he knew her for. I pity that child, he told himself, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Vasco sat stewing in his usual post-Chula funk, facing the window in the lamplight, chewing a fingernail on one hand, holding a smoke in the other, white sharkskin boots propped on his desk. He’d developed a rash of some kind in the past week, a blotchy redness on his neck, and he’d scratched at it so savagely the skin was bloody and raw. A pair of Band-Aids covered the worst of it. Jiggling one foot like he needed to pee, he cocked an acid eye toward the door as he heard Happy knock, but otherwise did nothing. Happy accepted that as invitation to enter.

The coils of copper wire were gone, the mortgage flyers remained. Happy sat on the sofa and the cushion emitted a stiff vinyl sigh. “We’ve got kind of a situation,” he began, invoking Roque’s words.

To his credit, Vasco heard the story out without a single damning comment or insult. His face remained inert as once or twice he tapped his cigarette against his ashtray. When Happy was done, he said simply, “Kidnapped.”

Happy nodded. “Fucked up, I know.”

“And they’re only asking twenty grand—total, right?”

Happy explained his understanding of things, the likelihood the money wasn’t a ransom at all but a kind of secondhand fee. Vasco heard him out, then: “Doesn’t matter either way. I’m not fronting any more money.”

Down in the truck yard, someone dropped a tin bucket onto the concrete floor. A wail of surprise, a chuckle.

“I don’t blame you,” Happy said, “especially after what Godo did last night.”

He was referring to the sabotage of the gun buy at People’s Fried Chicken. He’d heard about it from Puchi during the shift, Chato chiming in, the usual speed-freak rag.

“Godo can kiss my ass but that’s got nothing to do with this. I’m not throwing good money after bad, simple as that.”

Happy folded his hands and leaned forward. The sofa cushion creaked like he’d squeezed a balloon. “I want to make good on what Godo did.”

Vasco, slit-eyed, took a drag from his smoke. “What do you mean?”

“I want to make it up to you.”

“Yeah? Like how?”

“Puchi told me he got the license number off the van this guy drives, the guy selling guns. I know a girl, works at the DMV, she can trace that plate to an address. Godo’s been training your guys on how to use an M16, how to clear rooms, all that. Puchi and Chato can’t shut up about it, they’re jacked. So—what say we take this guy’s house down?”

Just lay it out for the man to see, Happy told himself. Let the crime sell itself.

Vasco plucked a stray bit of tobacco off his tongue.

“Guy deals in cash,” Happy prompted. “Means he’ll have a wall safe. We make him hand up the combination. Probably got the guns locked away in there too or someplace else inside the house, maybe the basement, maybe the garage. Same deal. We persuade him to cooperate. What I mean is, we let Godo persuade him.”

The merest smile flirted with one side of Vasco’s mouth. Downstairs someone was sweeping now, Happy couldn’t see who: Puchi, Chato, one of the others. The broom bristles whisked against the concrete floor. Vasco said, “What do you mean ‘we’?”

“I’ll be there to look after Godo, make sure he doesn’t get strange, have a flashback, that sort of thing.”

“You.”

“Yeah.”

Vasco’s hand went up to scratch his neck, stopped midway. “And how does one do that exactly, keep a guy from, you know, getting strange?”

Downstairs the man with the push broom started whistling “Watermelon Man.”

“I was over there too, remember. I dealt with some stuff, I told Godo all about it. He knows I understand. He’ll listen to me.”

Vasco stared across the room at Happy as though he was a picture not hanging quite right. “You told him all about it? How about you tell me.”

Happy relayed the story of the ambush on the convoy. Vasco nodded along, then said, “Interesting. But you still want me to front you twenty grand, am I right?”

“In exchange for my old man and me shaving our points on the cocaine deal down from twenty to ten per.”

Vasco cocked his head. His smile broadened a hair. “You want this bad.”

It’s imaginary money, Happy thought, knowing he couldn’t let it sound that way. “He’s my old man. Besides, I don’t get him back here, there’s no deal to talk about. He’s the driver at the port. Without him?” He opened his hands. “That’s true of you as well as me, you know.”

“But you’re the one with the need. You’re the one begging.”

“That how you want to put it?”

Vasco stubbed out his smoke, snagged his pack from the desktop, tapped out another, lit up. Nudging the cigarettes across the desk, he said, “Want one?”

THE FOUR OF THEM STAGGERED OUT TO THE COROLLA IN THE
midmorning light, Roque dragging the guitar, Samir clutching his shoulder bag, Lupe her clothes and medicine, Tío Faustino empty-handed, all of them stiff in joint and cranky of mind from a night of miserable sleep. They’d be resuming their journey across Guatemala, trailing a pickup driven by Chepito, who would have as sidekick and secret gunman one of the other henchlings. Together, the two of them would serve as protection and emissaries of goodwill, or so said El Chusquero, who bid his guests a chirpy farewell now that the wire transfer had cleared.

“Músico,”
the Commander called out from the porch, waiting for Roque to turn. He twiddled his fingers daintily.—
Use those hands well, my brother
. He offered one last lurid smile, then disappeared inside the thick-walled house with a punctuating slap on the doorframe.

Roque tumbled into the backseat and gave shuddering thanks as the car headed off, Tío Faustino at the wheel. Guitar between his knees like a cello, he let his head fall back and closed his eyes, hoping to snatch back some of the sleep lost because of Sergio. The poor wretch had whimpered like a puppy in the dark all night, the sound inescapable in that dank airless room, keeping everyone awake. Roque loathed himself for resenting that.

He stole a heavy-lidded glance at Lupe. She too was trying to
rest, curled into her corner of the backseat, legs tucked beneath her. He still marveled at her courage, knowing how perverse that would seem to a man like El Chusquero. Only a queer like Sergio, he’d say, would think of a girl as heroic. It brought to mind something Mariko had said, about a certain kind of man—often drawn to uniforms, always fond of weapons—the type of man so instinctively fearful of women he couldn’t even think of intimacy without possession. The kind of man, she’d said, who wants a virgin to fuck and Mom to fight for. Roque had always assumed she was talking about her ex, the airman, Captain Detwiler. Now, however, he had a far more palpable grasp of what she’d meant. And I’m nothing like that, he realized. An orphan knows possession’s a lie. The most crucial thing, by its very nature, is always missing.

Half an hour into the drive, Tío Faustino turned on the radio. As Roque drifted in and out of sleep, he caught bits and pieces of marimba workouts, old-style
cumbias, duranguenses, charangas
—even a few dolorous
rancheras
, so dear to the Commander’s heart.

The next thing he knew two hours had passed and they were careening down a hillside in scattered rain into the sprawling basin that contained the capital. Despite himself, Roque felt a little awestruck. After San Salvador, he’d lowered his expectations to third-world level, but Guatemala City was a real metropolis: shimmering office towers, broad tree-lined boulevards, quaint commercial neighborhoods, choking traffic.

They stopped for lunch at a storefront cantina. Roque ordered
fortachón
, a kind of Mexican hash with pork and jalapeños, and as they sat outside beneath a green umbrella he shoveled it in heedlessly. He would have felt embarrassed if everyone else, even Lupe, weren’t similarly graceless. The only interruption to the chow-down came when a man with shaggy blond hair, wearing a cockeyed ball cap and a filthy tweed jacket, tottered past them down the rain-damp sidewalk, strumming a tuneless guitar. His
eyes were glassy but his smile was serene. Lupe and Tío Faustino glanced up, first at the strolling lunatic, then at Roque, and shared the day’s first smile as Chepito tossed the man a quetzal.

North of the capital, the highway curved through roadcut and cane fields and rubber plantations toward the coastal lowlands. With food in everyone’s bellies the mood grew less tense. Roque played along to the radio and Lupe, prodded by Tío Faustino, sang harmony to Julieta Venegas’s “Canciones de Amor.” When she was finished, the older man lifted his hands from the wheel to gently applaud.—
You have such a gift
, he told her, but instead of inspiring gratitude his words dropped a veil across her eyes; she turned to stare out the window and couldn’t be coddled or goaded into singing again, no matter how invitingly Roque played.

The farther they drove, the greater the number of people trekking on foot along the highway. Roque wondered how far they were going—the next town, Mexico, the States. Crews of children scavenged for scraps of sugarcane that fell off trucks, shoving the reddish brown stalks into burlap bags. Breakdowns created sweltering bottlenecks. Things only worsened in the towns, where the local women stood out in the road, hawking oranges and sodas and coconuts, each with the sagging paunch of recent motherhood bulging beneath her blouse.

Only four roadblocks appeared, each manned by blue-uniformed cops who invariably waved the Corolla through with barely a glance. It was impossible to know whether this was because of El Chusquero’s touted influence, communicated somehow by Chepito in the pickup just ahead, or merely the way of things. As though it matters at this point, Roque thought. Be grateful the car’s moving.