Do They Know I'm Running? (38 page)

As Roque reached into his pocket the woman’s eyes never left him, nor did her daughter’s. He could only guess at their respective ages; they seemed not so much mother and child as two reflections of the same idea. He pulled what coins he had and a few wrinkled pesos from his pocket, bought three bags of popcorn from the woman, who clearly wished he’d buy more. That was when the idea came to him.

“Venga conmigo,”
he said—Come with me—pronouncing the words slowly, in case her comprehension of Spanish was as rough as her pronunciation.

He led her and her daughter inside the
picadero
, making a funny face so they wouldn’t be frightened. They entered the ballroom with
Apocalypto
at its midpoint, the parade of the bound slaves into the limestone city with its clouds of white dust, the bloodthirsty crowd in primitive exotica, the cynical priest in his towering headdress prancing atop the sacrificial ziggurat. Roque clapped his hands loud, shouting,
“Oye, cholos.”
Hey, guys.

Heads turned, Victor’s among them. People of the bat, Roque thought. He presented the tiny Chamula woman and her daughter.

—
What’s a movie without popcorn?

He snatched bags from the woven baskets the woman and her daughter carried and tossed them around the room, gesturing with his finger and thumb that payment was due. As he waited for the money to materialize he suppressed an impulse to add: You clowns want to commune with your Mayan roots? Here she is.

LOURDES LOCKED HER CAR, TRUDGED UP THE STEEP DRIVE TO THE
front door, put her finger to the bell. She glanced once Happy’s direction, despite his having told her not to, not under any circumstances, but why get angry? He knew how scared she was.

They’d bonded, he and Lourdes, talking on and off throughout the night. She’d said he reminded her of a friend of her brother’s she’d known back in Santa Clara del Cobre, a young man who’d gone off to El Norte a short time before she had. She hadn’t seen him since but that was the way it was, you grow up with someone, learn to know them, perhaps come to love them, then they leave to make a better life but for you it’s a kind of death, because so often, almost always, they never come back. Happy had let her go on like that for hours, playing the sympathetic heavy, letting her wear herself out with talk, then watching her sleep balled up like a cat until it was Efraim’s turn to keep an eye on her.

A misty winter dampness filmed the ground, the asphalt, the parked cars. His bones felt like tin from the chill. Strange, he thought, how screwed up his inner barometer had become, all that time in Iraq. Maybe he’d head somewhere good and hot when all this was over.

The front door to the contractor’s house opened, Lourdes said something quick to whoever was there, then vanished inside. Happy racked the Glock’s slide to chamber a round, alerting the others sitting in back to get ready, grab the duffels with the guns.
Stuffing the pistol under his belt, he zipped closed his coveralls and glanced at the cell phone on the seat beside him, waiting for it to trill.

“I NO KNOW WHAT I DO WITH IT, VERONICA. MY WATCH, I MEAN. I SO
sorry, I feel stupid, I no want bother you.”

Lourdes stood there in the entry, same clothes as yesterday, unwashed hair. I’m a disaster, she thought, remembering the phrase from a movie she’d stayed up to watch a few nights back, the girls in bed so she couldn’t ask them what it meant. She glanced up to check how her script, such as she’d managed it, was playing, at the same time noticing the odd burned smell in the air. “I think I must leave it behind yesterday, when I come and clean. Maybe I look around, I no take time, I promise …”

The smell was smoke. Veronica said, “We had a teeny little accident at the stove this morning.” She was girlishly small and achingly thin, sunken eyes, an insomniac pallor, her head a frizzy eruption of sage-colored hair. The ghost of an angry girl, Lourdes thought, that is what she looks like, what she always looks like. “Samantha has some awful sort of flu, she can’t keep anything down. I was trying to scramble her some eggs.”

Lourdes detected a second smell, the familiar whiff of alcohol, Veronica’s breath, at the same time thinking: The girl is here, I need to tell them. She pointed toward the kitchen. “You need me help you clean?”

Veronica ignored the question, plucking idly at her frayed hair. She tried to chuckle but her voice caught. The self-pity in her eyes splintered. “Charlie’s going to kill me …”

What was she talking about? “Veronica—”

“Christ, he blames me for everything. What am I supposed to do?
It was an accident
. Okay? If you had any idea what a misery this is, how hard—”

“Veronica, I’m not understand—”

“And for what?” She waved listlessly then laughed so bitterly Lourdes shrank from the sound. “Go on, look around. I haven’t seen your stupid watch but maybe it’s here somewhere.”

Veronica turned toward the kitchen, staggering with her first step, recovering with the next. Then Lourdes’s cell phone rang. Waiting until Veronica was out of earshot, she flipped it open.

—
What’s taking so long?

—
The girl is here, not just the mother
.

In the kitchen, Veronica kicked something metal—a pan, from the sound—across the linoleum floor.

—
Where are they in the house?

—
The girl is in her room, I think. I have not seen her yet. Veronica is in the kitchen
.

—
Find out where the girl is
.

—
The girl, she is sick
.

—
I understand that, but … What the hell …?

His voice rose sharply then fell away and she heard squealing tires—a car banged into the driveway, chattering brakes, a door slamming. Swallowing the knot in her throat, she drifted toward the picture window, peered past the curtains and saw the husband charging through the drizzle up the walk, hair and necktie flailing in the wind, his face flushed with rage.

Charlie’s going to kill me …

Into the phone, she said:—
You see him, he is
—

—
Stick to your story. I’ll call you back
.

The front door slammed open, the husband burst in, breathing through his mouth from the rushed climb up the drive, hair shaggy and damp, skin florid. Spotting Lourdes, he pulled up short. She still held her phone.

“What are you doing here?”

For the merest instant she considered confessing everything, the five
vatos
outside waiting to rob him, ready to kill him. But she could not trust him to understand. And her girls, what would happen?

“I think,” she announced, “I leave my watch here yesterday. I come back, look for it.”

He’d already abandoned his question, neck craning toward the stairs, the hallway. Veronica drifted out of the kitchen.

He said, “What the hell have you done?”

“I want you to listen,” she began.

“Sam said you damn near set the house on fire.”

“That’s a lie. I was trying to cook—”

“She told you she
was sick
, she puked up half of last week, she didn’t
want
—”

“I just thought—”

“She said you were drunk.”

The mask dissolved. She turned away. “I’m not listening to—”

The husband lurched forward, grabbed her arm. “Don’t you turn your back on me.”

Lourdes, suddenly light-headed, reached out for the nearest chair at the same moment her phone rang again—only then did she realize it was still in her hand—the sound startling her so badly she nearly dropped it.

—
What’s happening?

—
They’re having a fight
.

—
Can you open the door?

—
I don’t … I
…

—
Nothing’s changed. Do as I told you. Just the way we discussed. It’s going to be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise
.

The phone went dead. In a daze she backed toward the door. She swallowed another clot of air then called out, or thought she called out, that she would come back some other time to look for her watch.

HAPPY FLIPPED HIS CELL PHONE CLOSED AND TURNED TO THE OTHERS.
“Vamos, bravos.”

He considered calling it off, but till when—tomorrow? Next
week? Lourdes couldn’t handle it, they couldn’t handle her, she’d bolt, she’d crumble, she’d beg them nonstop, crazy, infuriating: Let me go … And her girls, they’d call the law, all that.

He met the others on the street. “Change in plans. This guy Chuck, he’s in the house, so is one of the kids. The girl. We gotta take them down all at once, not one at a time. It’s gonna be okay. Look, everybody but Godo, you go to the same positions we practiced. Efraim, you got the upstairs bedrooms, you take the girl, make sure she don’t call 911. Godo, you look for this Chuck guy, you handle him, right?” His words met stares, each one with its own distinctive fear or surprise or numb resolve. “Okay then. Be smart, stay sharp.”

As they reached the porch they pulled down their balaclavas, dragged the weapons out of the duffel bags, slammed the magazines home, flipped off the safeties. Happy gave the ready signal just as Lourdes opened the door and backed out, saying, “I call before I come back …”

FOR THE PAST HOUR, CROUCHED IN THE BACK OF THE TRUCK, GODO HAD
tried to convince himself there was a right way to do this thing, reminding himself this wasn’t Joe Citizen they were taking down but filth, one of
them
, the arrogant sloppy goat fuckers who, almost singlehandedly, botched the war. Happy wanted no one dead. Fine, the way it ought to be. Don’t just avenge Gunny Benedict, make him proud—assert control, overwhelming force, stay alert, maintain discipline. He could trust Efraim, he wanted to trust Puchi, Chato was wack. Shoot him if need be, he told himself. Better him than the wife or the girl.

As the front door swung open, he rushed in at the lead, using the AK to track the space left to right, ground floor to the stair, feeling the eerie déjà vu he’d expected but luckily not haunted by it, the ghosts present but silent—Gunny Benedict, Salgado, Mobley, the Iraqi family in the Cressida—as though he were split in
two, the old Godo, the guy standing here. Then he spotted him, the contractor, Chuck, frozen in place, halfway up the stairs, gripping his wife’s dress with one hand, the other clenched into a fist. He stood there fright-eyed, hunched over the woman, then survival kicked in, he dropped her like a bag of sand and charged up the stairs but Godo was already closing, adrenalin purging all weakness from his bum leg as he moved to contact, taking the steps two at a time, forging past the wife who covered her head and rolled out of his way to keep from being trampled.

The contractor reached the first doorway, the master bedroom, before Godo gun-butted him from behind, knocked him to his knees. He heard Efraim in the hall behind him, running to the other bedrooms to secure them, take care of the girl, while downstairs Happy hooked his arm around Lourdes’s throat, shouting, “Stay calm! Nobody gets hurt, you do as you’re told.”

Chuck the contractor scrambled to his knees, wobbly but clawing at his pant cuff. Godo moved in, planting his foot down hard on the man’s calf, feeling the ankle rig beneath his boot. “Leave it!” He prodded with the tip of the AK’s barrel, a poke in the small of the other man’s back, then reached down, felt for the holster, unhitched the strap, pulled the chrome-plated .25 free and shoved it into the pocket of his coveralls.

“Take us down to the safe, open it up.”

Chuck tried to drag his leg out from under Godo’s weight. “What are you talking about? There is no safe.”

Godo studied his face. It was him, he thought, the guy in the back, passenger side, the Blazer at the checkpoint. Him or someone just like him. Applying a little more pressure on the leg, he said, “Don’t be stupid.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “I know who you are.”

Godo’s mouth went dry. Knows me how, People’s Fried Chicken or the checkpoint? Maybe it was the weapon, the AK, he’d sold it to Puchi after all. Lifting his boot, “Get up.”

“Or what, you’re going to kill me? Then what, genius?”

Godo made an instant read and figured two things: One, threatening the wife would go nowhere, the guy was thumping her when they busted in, he could care less. Christ, might even be grateful. Two, that left the girl or Thumper here himself and he wasn’t gonna be impressed with mere displays, it was gonna take pain, which meant a change in the ROE. Nobody Gets Hurt had to downgrade to Nobody Gets Hurt Too Bad.

He took out the .25 and fired into the man’s calf. The burned tang of cordite, a strangled scream, floret of blood on the trouser leg.

Godo shouted down to Happy, “It’s okay. It’s me.” Then, turning back, a soft voice: “Infield hit, Chuckles. Man on base.”

Face white with pain, that sour breath, the guy hissed, “You’re dead, I fucking swear.”

Godo fired a second round, the right bicep this time. Another gargled scream. More blood, not too much. “Sacrifice bunt, perfect execution, third-base line. Runner on first advances. We have a man in scoring position.” His face beneath the balaclava itched, damp with sweat. Somebody on the stair struggled with the wife, the screech of duct tape. “The safe downstairs, shit dick, or the girl’s next.”