The Return: A Novel (36 page)

He took several deep breaths, dashed out across the street, and was spotted immediately. He heard a shout and the sound of a big engine starting. He was across the street, running, a clumsy run: unhappily, he’d never been much of a runner. He was a swimmer like his daughter. But he tried to control his breathing and smooth out his pace.

He reached the end of a short street and cut right. It was a commercial district, full of machine shops, small factories, and mean little office buildings, all closed at this hour, lit intermittently by a stingy line of streetlamps with fluted metal shades. Marder heard someone running behind him—they must have sent someone on foot to keep him under observation. The person was undoubtedly armed, which meant Marder was doomed.

The steps behind him sounder closer, and he risked a look over his shoulder. His pursuer was maybe ten yards behind him, a man in a white T-shirt and dark trousers, twenty years younger than Marder, and running like a deer. Marder tried to increase his pace, but it was clear that the man could catch up anytime he liked; he had probably been told to keep his distance until the van arrived. They wanted Marder alive.

He kept running, his breath now burning and coming ragged into his chest. He heard the screech of a vehicle turning a sharp corner; its headlamps threw crazy shadows of two running men onto the street before him. An alley appeared on his right and he made for it. Perhaps there’d be an open building or a weapon—an old tool or a chunk of wood or even a bottle—so he could go down fighting and not slaughtered like a pig, screaming.

Marder had just ducked into the alley when he heard something unexpected: a long burst of automatic fire and then a crash, the kind made by a large vehicle driving at speed into an immovable object. Marder paused in the darkness. He heard a car or a truck roar down the street and another brief exchange of gunfire—a pistol and another burst of full auto. Cautiously, he went back to the head of the alley and looked out. The van had crushed itself against a power pole; smoke and steam were coming off it. In the center of the street lay his pursuer, the white shirt now black with blood. Near him sat a pickup truck containing half a dozen men, all armed with automatic rifles. One of the men was Skelly.

Marder walked to the truck on rubbery legs, heaving breath into his lungs, shaking with the aftermath of terror. Skelly leaned over the dropped tailgate and helped him into the truck. One of the men rapped on the cab roof with the butt of his rifle, and the truck drove off.

When Marder had caught his breath, Skelly asked him how he was.

“I’m in one piece. Fuck! I’m too old for this shit anymore, you know that? I can’t run worth a damn.”

“You can still shoot,” said Skelly. “If you can shoot well enough, you hardly ever have to run.”

“Oh, let me write that down. I’ll add that to the wit and wisdom of Patrick F. Skelly, soon in your local bookstores. How in hell did you find me?”

“Well, obviously, our Templos followed you and those
federales
out of our place and to where you were taken. Then Reyes called me and sent this truck by to pick me up. We saw the crew waiting for you and laid low and waited for developments. We thought we’d have to yank you out of that van, but you made a break for it, and the rest is history. An uncharacteristically smart move on your part. How did you know La Fam was waiting for you?”

Marder explained about the guy and the rifle-scope memory, then described the man.

“That sounds like the junior Cuello, El Cochinillo. You’re an important man, boss, to bring Numero Dos into action personally. He usually has his people do that shit.”

“I’m flattered. But how did you know that the
federales
would turn me over to La Familia?”

“Oh, Gil and Varela have been in Cuello’s pocket since forever. It’s well known.”

Marder was shaking his head. “No, it wasn’t just that. There was a DEA guy there, in the building. He interrogated me, mainly about who you were. He thought we were starting our own little cartel.”

“Well, that’s not good. Was it an enhanced interrogation?”

“Somewhat enhanced. The main thing he wanted to impress on me is that he had our number and was going to be all over us henceforth, with his gang of tame
federales
. I wanted to tell him he was wasting his time, but I forbore.”

“Yes, but it’s going to be hard to set up our own little cartel with him breathing down our necks. I guess you would be opposed to direct action?”

“You meaning whacking him?”

“Like that.”

“Skelly, quite aside from the fact that we don’t whack people who are not actually firing weapons at us, killing a DEA agent would bring a forty-man DEA strike force into the area, with ten helicopters and a light aircraft carrier. We’ll have to figure out some other way of getting him off our backs.”

“In that case, I’m open to suggestions. What’s this asshole’s name, by the way?”

“He didn’t offer it,” said Marder. “It wasn’t exactly a social occasion. By the way, what did you mean about setting up our cartel?”

Skelly ignored this and turned to one of the men in the truck. “Crusellas, what’s the name of the DEA guy who works with Gil and Varela and them?”

Despite the darkness, Marder recognized one of the men who had paid that extortionate visit to Casa Feliz on the day after their arrival. And the other one, Tomas Gasco, was there too, glaring at him.

Crusellas answered, “Warren Alsop.”

“Thank you,” said Marder, and to Skelly, “Our cartel?”

“Yeah, I explained this to you already. We need to supply some product to the Templos along with the weapons. It’s part of the deal.”

“You can’t do that. I thought I had made myself clear.”

“Don’t worry about it, Marder. You’ll have full deniability. You won’t know a thing.”

“I don’t want deniability. I want it not to be an actuality.”

“Hey, did you just get rescued or not? You’d be losing vital body parts right now if these guys weren’t doing their jobs. What we pay them is chump change; it’s not even a rounding error on their monthly take. They’re in it for dope and weapons. I hope my fucking boat isn’t delayed. It should’ve been steaming into Cárdenas about now. Uh-oh, what’s this?”

The truck had been traveling along the coast road north out of Lázaro Cárdenas, heading for Isla de los Pájaros and home, but now it slowed as it came to the junction with Route 37 and pulled to the side of the road. Crusellas shoved the muzzle of his AR into Skelly’s side, and the man sitting across from him lifted Skelly’s weapon. The other three men in the back of the truck pointed their rifles at Marder and Skelly. Marder could see the flash of their teeth as they smiled.

They heard the door of the cab open, and in a moment Mateo Reyes appeared and dropped the tailgate.

“What’s going on, Reyes?” Skelly asked.

“A change of plans. The
jefe
is concerned about the weapons and product you promised us.”

“Jesus, man, I told you, they left Hong Kong twenty-five days ago. They should be here any day.”

“Twenty-three days is the normal transit time between China and Lázaro Cárdenas.”

“So? It’s not like driving a car down a highway. There are winds and currents and shit, or things break. They’ll be here.”

“I’m sure, but in the meantime you’ll be our guests.” With that, he put up the tailgate and went back to the cab.

Marder and Skelly had their wrists bound with cable ties, flour sacks were placed on their heads, and the truck drove off north on 37.

Marder leaned his head next to Skelly’s and said, “Well, this is a fine kettle of fish.”

“It’s no big deal,” said Skelly. His voice was muffled but clear enough to understand. “It’s a normal business practice with these guys. Don’t worry. We’re not going to be in a cell. We’ll hang out by the pool a few days, play cards, and then the boat will get here and we’ll be golden. Also, it could’ve been worse.”

“How worse?”

“Oh, you know—they could’ve snatched your kid.”

*   *   *

The unsnatched kid spent the start of the day after the night of her father’s arrest swimming laps in the pool, hoping that the endorphins produced by grueling exercise might help to calm her excoriated nerves, but no luck. Of course she was worried about her father’s fate, but what made her grind her teeth and curse was the way that Skelly had manhandled her the previous night. When Skelly explained that Marder had decided to get arrested for shooting the boyfriend, Statch had flatly refused to countenance it and had immediately tried to run out of her bedroom to stop the outrage. And Skelly had grabbed her, restrained her as she had not been restrained since the age of six, a degrading, insulting restraint. She had screamed like a cat, had used all her curses in two languages, to no avail. He had held her in one of his famous Special Forces grips with contemptuous ease, until both the ambulance and the police car had gone. Now Skelly himself was gone, God knew where, leaving her alone—no, not in the least alone; alone would have been fine, but she was far from that. All the problems of this ridiculous establishment had fallen on her shoulders.

And this fucking pool was too short for proper laps, an absurd eight meters in length, a pool suitable only for the sport of children with inflated animals. She stopped swimming with a curse and slithered up to sit on the tiled rim of the pool. She could see them now, despite Amparo’s efforts, gathering like abandoned pets on the edges of the terrace. They were terrified, the poor bastards. The sun that had illuminated their lives for the past few weeks had departed, who knew where? Off with the police, into a black hole, and what would become of them all? This was what they wanted her—La Señorita, perhaps the new
patrona
—to tell them, and she hadn’t any idea.

However, eighteen years of high-quality American education had given her sufficient expertise at impromptu bullshitting, so she dried herself off, slipped into a terry-cloth robe, and addressed the little crowd. She said she had heard from her father and that he was fine, that he would be back soon, and that everything would remain as it was. He had promised them, and he was a man of his word. She saw nods, hesitant smiles. These people wanted to believe, even in the land of
no importa
. The group dispersed, with some of the women coming up to her with little touches, as she were a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a church.

To her surprise and relief, she found that she didn’t mind it. Her mother had something to do with this; maybe this was the unlived life of the mother sprouting in her child, like a seed long buried in unsuitable earth, turgid, bearing spines, hungry for the light, irresistible. Or maybe old D. H. Lawrence was right about Mexico; maybe the chthonic powers still ruled at some deep level, because what else would explain what had happened to her father and what, obviously, was now happening to her. Of course, Statch had never exactly been ashamed of being a Mexican, but she hadn’t advertised it either. It was like the label on the back of a blouse: no need to tear it out, but you tucked it away when it popped out and tickled your neck, a label like those worn by everyone in America’s diversity-obsessed anomic society, ultimately of slight importance compared to talent and looks and money.

Still, she was enough of an American to want to cause an action, to generate some change. She fished through her bag and found Major Naca’s card. She called him on her now-functional (five bar!) cell and he answered, with a lightness in his voice that told her the call was not an imposition. She told Major Naca what had happened last night, leaving out the business of who had really fired the shots. The point was that Richard Marder had been picked up by the
federales
and she wanted to know what had happened to him.

Naca listened, asked no irritating questions, promised he would check and get back to her as soon as he knew anything.

Statch waited. She fired up the laptop, played a little solitaire, read her Facebook and LinkedIn pages, declined to update her hundreds of friends (“Guess what? Dad arrested for shooting Mexican gangster—arrested by federal cops!!!! LOL!”).

Her phone rang. Major Naca reported that the
federales
had released her father after questioning on the previous night. They had declined to charge him, pending an investigation.

“But they won’t charge him,” he added, “not for shooting a thug who was trying to stab a girl. I would say they would regard such an act as a public service.”

“Fine, but where is he, then?” she asked.

“Our informants report Templos in the area where he was released, and there was a minor gun battle there last night too. A bunch of La Familia gangsters got shot up in a car.”

“So the Templos have him?”

“It looks that way. Assuming your father’s deal with them is still in place, he should be fine.”

“And if not?”

“Then I don’t know what to say. I truly wish I could marshal the Mexican Army to help find him, but just now we’re in the middle of an operation and I’m not free. I will alert our intel resources to keep an eye out, but I’m afraid that’s all I can do at the present moment. I am most dreadfully sorry, Señorita Marder.”

She thanked him for the information, said that she understood his problem and that she’d make inquiries of her own. Lourdes didn’t mind distracting the sole Templo guard at the roadhead, and Statch was able to roll her motorcycle by the vehicle in which the distracting was taking place. Then she went to visit the only Templo who might be inclined to give her information: her uncle, Angel d’Ariés.

15

They drove into the mountains for what seemed to Marder a long time. Remarkably, Skelly had fallen asleep, his body loose and jouncing against Marder’s shoulder as the truck turned on the twisting roads, demonstrating yet again the man’s astounding ability to sack out in absolutely any situation that did not require thought or violent activity. Marder was wide awake and suffering: from the bondage, from the bag on his head that muffled his senses, from rising visceral panic. He felt the scream build in his throat as the old nightmare returned but worse, because this was more real. He was not in the grip of sadistic children but of awful men who cared nothing for him, and the grown-ups would never come. He was going to lose control. He would piss and shit himself or fling himself off the truck—anything was better than this constraint in the dark.