The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (112 page)

Calabazas reached into the ice chest for another beer but found only melting ice and water. He went inside to get another six-pack from the refrigerator and rolled himself a fat joint to smoke outside. He had not stayed up all night for years, not since he had worked across the border. But tonight he was wide-awake. He could not stop thinking about Mexico. Rumors and conflicting reports came from village couriers, and from Salvadorian and Guatemalan refugees. Mexico was chaos. The Mexican economy had collapsed, and fleeing government officials had stripped the National Treasury for their getaway. The army and police had not been paid for weeks. Battles had broken out between the Federal police and the local police. The citizens were fighting both the army and the federal police. Fighting between the Citizens’ army and the Mexican army had cut off the Federal District from deliveries and food supplies. Electrical power lines and water-main lines to the center of the city had been dynamited. Thousands in Mexico City were starving each day, but Mexico’s president had refused the people emergency food. The Mexican air force had opened fire on thousands of squatters rioting for food at the entrance to the city’s main dump. Hundreds of squatters, women and children, had died as army bulldozers had leveled miles and miles of shanties and burned lean-tos. Within hours of the big fire at the city dump, hundreds of thousands of rats had swarmed through Mexico City, where starving people in the streets had caught the rats and roasted them. There were rumors of bubonic plague and of cholera.

The army and police had seized food and livestock so the Yaquis and other people once more headed for the high mountains where they had fled during the last revolution. In their mountain strongholds the people had already begun the vigil; the people were praying the white men would kill off one another completely. All the people had to do was be patient and wait. Five hundred years, or five lifetimes, were nothing to people who had already lived in the Americas for twenty or thirty thousand years. The prophecies said gradually all traces of Europeans in
America would disappear and, at last, the people would retake the land.

The old-time people had warned that Mother Earth would punish those who defiled and despoiled her. Fierce, hot winds would drive away the rain clouds; irrigation wells would go dry; all the plants and animals would disappear. Only a few humans would survive. Calabazas knew the story by heart, but he was not sure if he believed it anymore.

THE SPIRIT VOICE in Mosca’s right shoulder groaned and creaked odd messages. Mosca had not been the same since he had discovered the spirit voice in his right shoulder. Root did not ridicule Mosca because he had heard Mosca’s shoulder make creaking or popping sounds even when Mosca had not moved. Root didn’t think the spirit voice could be any crazier than Mosca was himself; the spirit voice might even be an improvement. The spirit voice had told Mosca to get Sonny Blue and his brother and cousin. So Mosca had spent the day at the racetrack, consulting his paid informants in the shade of the grandstand.

Sonny Blue and Bingo had brought two strippers from the Stage Coach to watch Angelo’s filly race. They had made a high-profile arrival in a red Testarossa followed by a Lincoln. Mosca’s spies had taken in everything. Sonny Blue and Bingo had been laughing, bragging to the strippers about “being met” at the airstrip near Yuma. The people behind Sonny and Bingo were so big that a special code had been radioed to the Border Patrol and state police advising them to ask no further questions and to let them go. The authorities had not even opened the back of Greenlee’s truck or touched a single suitcase. “They think they own this town,” Mosca told Root with a big grin. “Those Italian boys are crazy.” Mosca’s spies had got a great deal of information, and he had plans in his mind already. Root had nothing to worry about; Mosca wanted to work on this alone.

Mosca refused to admit he had done anything wrong. The confusion and crowds of tourists milling with Yaqui men and old Yaqui women
on lawn chairs had been exactly what Mosca had counted on for his strike. A great tactician took advantage of the unexpected; Mosca’s spies knew Sonny Blue’s big buyers from New York had been warned about doing business in Tucson. The New Yorkers had demanded a crowded public place for the meeting. Oddly enough, the New Yorkers had specified the Yaqui Easter Dance as the meeting place because they wanted to see real Indians.

The British poet had been much taller than the other spectators at the Yaqui Easter deer dance, and Mosca’s bullets had gone high and missed just about everyone. The bullets had missed children, and anyone seated or kneeling. Mosca said it was the white man’s own fault the bullet had got him between the eyes; the poet had been too tall, and he had been impolite to stand in front of all the other spectators when really, he should have stood far at the back where he belonged. The bullet wouldn’t have found him back there.

What a sight! Here was the British poet lying dead in the dirt under the big ramada of freshly cut cottonwood boughs, and the poet’s three ugly girlfriends all were hysterical and crying. The cops pointed guns at the sobbing women as if they had shot the poet, and not the gunman, who witnesses said was small, thin, and wore a Yaqui pharisee mask, a cowboy shirt, blue jeans, and beat-up cowboy boots. The stupidity of Tucson’s police was amazing. They had immediately suspected the victim—the dead tourist—because he had carried a British passport and lived at a Santa Fe address. Tucson police generally worked on the assumption that victims somehow deserved what they had got; the police task was to determine exactly how the poet had earned a bullet between the eyes. The easy and most reliable assumption for Tucson police had been that the Santa Fe quartet were smuggling cocaine to the rich artists.

The dead poet had immediately been forgotten because the Tucson police now had the three sobbing women. The report of a short, dark Indian male seen leaving the area with a handgun, did not interest the police as long as they had three attractive women to interrogate. By the time the dead man’s three female companions had been cleared of all suspicion, the trail of the gunman was cold. Mosca’s excuse for his bad aim with the pistol had been the mask; the bullet had whizzed over the short wop’s head into the poet standing a few feet behind him. Sonny Blue had known instantly the bullet was intended for him, and Sonny had panicked and both had pulled out pistols. Bingo was already running and pushing and stumbling through the crowd. The New Yorkers had tried to follow.

The crowd watching the all-night deer dance had not been alarmed at the sound of shots because all evening Yaqui children had been lighting firecrackers. If Bingo and Sonny had not panicked, if they and their New Yorker pals had remained calm, the Tucson police might never have noticed them in the crowd. Mosca’s years of experience with police had shown him cops were like sharks or stupid fish that respond only to sudden movement.

After he had fired the shot, Mosca had casually tucked the 9mm in his pants under his T-shirt, then coolly moved through the crowd to the attaché case Sonny Blue had dropped. Mosca picked up the case and walked in leisurely mannner until he reached the darkness in the church parking lot, where he removed the mask and tossed it in the back of a parked pickup truck. He didn’t mean any disrespect to the mask or to the deer spirit, but this was war. The 9mm had a date with old man Santa Cruz River, but Mosca had stayed around in the parking lot to watch the police have fun with Sonny Blue and Bingo.

The New Yorkers had been lucky enough to be arrested in the deer dance ramada surrounded with hundreds of witnesses. But Sonny Blue and Bingo had been caught in the dark parking lot. Mosca had watched the undercover cops take turns kicking Sonny Blue and Bingo between the legs and in the belly and face. Mosca had heard the cracks and thuds, Bingo’s groans, and Sonny’s muffled profanity.

Mosca thought it was funny. The cops had got their wires crossed. Max Blue had paid off the police chief, and in return the police had mashed Sonny’s balls and had knocked out two of Bingo’s front teeth. Mosca had waved the attaché case above his head with both hands. “Finders keepers!” he said; he was triumphant. The attaché case was full of New York money.

Calabazas has told Mosca before that he had not expected Mosca to last six weeks, let alone six years in the smuggling business. Mosca always laughs and shakes his head, fully in agreement. He is sincere too. Because Mosca may refuse to admit he has done anything stupid, but Mosca is as surprised as Calabazas about his own survival. As far as Root has been able to figure, Mosca counts survival as the absolute proof. And here he is again, Root thinks. Everything done wrong, the worst possible sequence of events—but Mosca gets away with everything: the money, even the shooting. Because Sonny Blue had stepped right in the trap, panicked after the shooting.

Although things might have gone better, Mosca had been hurt that Calabazas had called him “loco” when almost everything had gone
exactly as planned; and now Mosca would begin phase two, which was “drop a dime,” dial 911 and leave the names of Bingo and Sonny Blue. When Calabazas saw the results, he would understand that the shooting at Yaqui Easter marked the beginning of the end for Max, Sonny, and Bingo. Blow away your Blues! Mosca was counting on maximum trouble and misunderstanding between the Tucson police and old man Blue and his ass-wipe sons. Whatever the “arrangements” were between Max Blue and the Tucson PD, shooting tourists from Santa Fe hadn’t been one of them.

Mosca had been so delighted he had even done a little victory dance before he got in his truck. None of it would have been possible if Sonny Blue had not frozen with panic. Everyone had seen the “Italian stallions” with their pistols pulled after the tall tourist fell dead. Calabazas was getting old and soft; his mind was coming unstrung almost like a white man’s. In time, Calabazas would see the genius of Mosca’s plan.

SONNY COULD FEEL his chest tighten and his heart pound when he remembered them swarming over him with .45 automatics shoved hard against both ears and the top of his head. They had smiled as they’d kicked him in the balls, then in the back; and then they had kicked him in the stomach and in the balls again. Sonny had been on the ground puking when a pig in uniform walked up and kicked him in the side of the head. The cops were talking about the briefcases and who had grabbed what; a suspect had been seen fleeing with a briefcase.

Sonny had let the waves of nausea and pounding pain in his ear and head drive his anger harder and deeper; he wouldn’t just get mad, he would get even. If it took the rest of his life, he was going to fight his own little war with the pigs; and his father would never have to know about it. Fuck the million-dollar payoffs to the Tucson pigs. Fuck all the money! What difference did money make if pigs were all over your ass every time you stepped out the door? What good was anything if the pigs beat you up whenever they felt like it?

Sonny had taken the worst beating because too many curious people
had gathered before the undercover cops could start beating Bingo. People standing nearby had helped pull the undercover cops off Bingo, but there had been no one to pull the pigs off Sonny. Sonny had been trapped on the far side of the car in the darkness.

Max had promised that the undercover officers and cops in uniform who had kicked Sonny would get what was coming to them. Max had asked Sonny to trust him, to leave the matter in his hands. Angelo and Bingo had both tried to calm Sonny, and to remind him everything was okay, and there had been no arrests except for the New Yorkers caught with the cocaine. But Angelo saw the reassurances had only made Sonny Blue more furious, so Angelo and Bingo kept quiet. They would have to leave Sonny alone for a while, and they would meet the shipments for Mr. B. as scheduled. Angelo and Bingo had even talked to Max Blue alone, to ask if Max could send Sonny on a Caribbean vacation for a while. Because all Sonny had wanted to talk about had been ideal assassination weapons and schemes for getting the undercover cops or the pigs in uniform. Sonny had bought detailed information as well as the names and home addresses of undercover police from the county attorney’s office computer. Angelo noticed Max got pale when he learned that Sonny had already got the cops’ work schedules. The three of them were silent for a moment, then Max had excused himself. Sonny Blue refused the offer of a Caribbean vacation.