Under the Skin (32 page)
“A little something to show our appreciation for a job well done,
fellas,” Sam said. “Enjoy.”
I hadn’t told LQ and Brando about the bonus and they were happy
as longshot winners. I slipped the envelope into my coat pocket. All
I wanted now was to get going.
But then Rose said to me, “So? Who’s the guy in the hospital?
Friend of yours, you say?”
I’d intended to have a good story to explain Rocha if I had to, a
story that wouldn’t promote too many questions or involve mention
of Daniela. But on the way over from the hospital I’d had other things
on my mind. All I could think to say now was, “He’s the cousin of a
friend. They’re damn grateful for what you did.” I hoped that would
get me off the hook for having to know anything more about the guy.
The last thing I wanted was to get into a discussion about any of it.
“Come again?” Rose said. “I pulled strings to help a guy who’s not
even
your
friend? Hey, Kid, I aint in the habit of doing big-time favors for just anybody.”
“I know. Like I said, my friend’s grateful. Me too.”
“I get it,” Sam said. “This friend of yours... it’s a girl, right?”
If I said no, I’d have to invent some guy on the spot, and I wasn’t
up to it. “How’d you guess?” I said, smiling big. But now I was going
to have to give them some of it.
“When a guy does something for no good reason, there’s usually a
girl,” Sam said.
“It’s kind of a rough story,” I said.
LQ and Brando had started for the door but paused and gave me a
curious look at Rose’s mention of some guy in the hospital. On hearing about the girl, they exchanged a look and sat down on the small
sofa. Sam lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. Rose tapped his
fingers on the desktop.
Except for saying they were cousins and that I’d met them at a
neighborhood party and taken a shine to them—especially her, I said,
waggling my eyebrows to show what a casual thing it had been—I
told it pretty much as Rocha had told it to me. Why not? But I didn’t
clutter it up with a lot of detail. I said it turned out she’d been kidnapped in Mexico by some rich guy and finally got away from him
and came to Galveston with Rocha. They were staying with friends
of theirs named Avila. Last night a couple of goons who must’ve been
the rich guy’s muscle busted into the house and grabbed her. They
killed the Avilas—dead witnesses tell no tales—and tried to kill
Rocha too but only left him in bad need of a doctor. If I hadn’t shown
up when I did, he probably wouldn’t have made it. Or if Rose hadn’t
got him in the hospital without the police getting involved.
LQ and Brando were watching me closely.
“I gave the cops a call,” I said. “They’re probably at the scene right
now, but they won’t get much. It’s a neighborhood where nobody ever
sees anything, even if they do. Anyway, I figure those two are over the
border by now.”
“With the girl,” Rose said.
“I guess,” I said.
“Some story, Kid,” Sam said. “You weren’t kidding about rough.
You knew the people who got it?”
“Yeah. Nice folk.”
“Jeez, tough break for them.”
“Goes to show you can’t be too careful who you take in under your
roof,” LQ said. “Come on, Ramon, I could use a drink.” They got up
and went out.
I started to get up too, but Rose said, “Hold on a sec, Kid,” and
waved me back down in my chair.
“I better go press the flesh,” Sam said. “Make sure everybody’s
drinking up and staying happy.” Then he was gone too.
Rose studied me over the flame of his lighter as he fired up a
smoke. “This girl... she’s kind of special, huh?”
“I wouldn’t say that. We went out a coupla times.”
“How long you say you know her?”
“Not long. Didn’t really get to know her very well.”
“How long’s not long?”
“Well . . . a couple of days.” I grinned to show him how funny I
He wasn’t buying it. “They say it don’t take long, sometimes—to
get to know somebody pretty good, I mean.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.”
I stood up.
“So what you got in mind now?” he said.
“Do a little drinking with LQ and Brando, celebrate the bonus.
Thanks a lot, by the way.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Kid. Only reason you aint already on
the way to the border is you needed cash.”
I had made up my mind to go after her the minute Rocha told me
what happened—but I’d wanted to avoid any talk about it. There
wasn’t anything to talk about.
“I gotta get going,” I said.
“Let me tell you something about women, Jimmy.”
“I have to go,” I said. I felt like I had a snake twisting around in-
side me.
“A woman’s never the reason. It’s always something else. Always.
The important thing is to know what it really is.”
“All I know is,
he’s
not gonna decide how it goes.”
He stared at me without expression for a second—and then
showed that smile that was nothing but teeth.
“Well hell, Kid... now you’re making sense.”
L
Q and Brando fell in beside me as I made my way through the
Studio crowd and headed for the elevator. LQ had his hands in
his pockets and was twirling a toothpick between his teeth. Mr. Non
chalance. Some guy not watching where he was going bumped hard
into Brando and said “Hey Jack—” and started to turn. And then he
caught Ray’s look and shut up and moved on.
We rode down in a packed elevator. When we got out on the street
I said I’d see them later and started around to the parking lot to get
my valise out of the Terraplane. The train station was close enough to
walk to.
They came along behind me, LQ whistling “Happy Days Are Here
Again.” I asked where they thought they were going.
“Name it,” LQ said.
“I got something to tend to that’s nothing to do with business. See
you guys later.”
“Sure enough will, because we’re coming,” LQ said. “Won’t take
but a minute to get our bags.”
“I just told you it’s not a business thing. It doesn’t concern you
guys.”
“Bullshit,” Brando said.
“Goddamn it, it’s personal, I’m telling you—”
“We’re partners,” Brando said.
“Business or personal,” LQ said around his toothpick. “In sunshine
or in rain.”
s soon as we got on the move the snake inside me
settled down, but it felt coiled and ready. We left
Galveston well before dawn, then grabbed the
first westbound connection out of Houston. The day broke
red behind us as we pulled out of the station. I’d called
Rose from the Galveston depot and said LQ and Brando
were going with me. He said he’d figured they would be
and that their visas would be ready too when we got to the
border.
The train made stops at several small stations along the
way and finally pulled into San Antonio a little before
noon. It stopped there long enough for us to get out and
have a café lunch rather than eat in the dining car. It was
the first time I’d been to San Antone since the night two
years before when Rose and I had gone speeding out of it
in the Cadillac, leaving dead men in the street.
We hadn’t talked much on the train, every man pretty
much keeping to his own thoughts, but once the waitress served us our steak sandwiches and slaw, Brando
said, “So how long we got to wait before hearing about
this girl?”
I said she was Mexican and her name was Daniela, she was
damn pretty and spoke good English. I told about meeting her at
the Avilas’ after the fight with Rocha but said I’d first seen her on
New Year’s Eve when she went by in front of us in a beat-to-hell
Model T.
“Hellfire, I remember that!” LQ said. “She was a
fine
looking chiquita. You young rascal—you track her down or what?”
“No. Just luck.”
Brando wanted to know what chiquita we were talking about, how
come he didn’t know about her.
“If you’d pull your head out of your ass every once in a while,” LQ
said, “you might catch some of what’s going on.”
“Catch
this,
” Brando said.
I told about having breakfast with her at the Steam Whistle and
then about our swim in the gulf that night. The part about the hammerhead knocked them for a loop.
“I’ve heard tell about Black Tom since I was a kid,” LQ said, “but
I never believed he was no damn twenty-foot long. I
still
don’t.”
“Well I didn’t put a measuring tape on it but it was like a train
going by.”
“Goddamn, man!” Brando said. “She saved your ass.”
“I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
LQ said, “She took a kick at that thing, no lie?”
“No lie.”
“That’s some girl.”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“I took her home.”
“Well now,” LQ said, cutting a look at Brando, “what I can’t help
but wonder is, did you and this ladyfriend have the pleasure of, ah,
doing the deed, shall we say?”
“Yeah,” Brando said. “That’s what I can’t help but wonder too.”
“None of your goddamn business, either of you.”
They grinned right back at me. “Thought so,” LQ said.
We got back aboard and the train rolled out of San Antone. For a
while we just stared out the window at the changing landscape. The
grass thinned out and the trees got scrubbier and there was more dust
and rock. The sky enlarged as the country opened up.
Then LQ said, “So what’s the plan, Kid? I mean, we just gonna go
knock on his door and ask him to hand her over, or what?”
“I’m not
asking
him a damn thing,” I said.
They both smiled.
“So? What’s the plan then?” LQ said.
“Don’t know yet. A guy’s meeting us at the border with the kind
of information we need for a plan.”
“This rich guy,” Brando said, “he’s bound to have some muscle on
the payroll, right? Maybe more guys like the two he sent to snatch
her?”
I said I didn’t know, but Daniela had told Rocha the place had cattle, so the guy had plenty of ranch hands for sure.
“Cowboys, shit,” LQ said. “If all he’s got is cowboys, I don’t care if
he got a hundred. I never met a cowboy any damn good with a gun.”
“Jimmy here’s a cowboy,” Brando said.
“Not since we known him he aint,” LQ said.
T
hat afternoon we reached the border at Del Rio. A dapper and
neatly barbered Mexican named Lalo Calderón was at the station to greet us. He spoke good English and wore a white suit, dark
sunglasses, and a mustache as thin as a line of ink. He smelled
strongly of a flowery perfume. My face had healed up pretty well except for the shiner, and he gave it a look but made no remark on it.
The only thing Rose had told me about him was that he was “a former associate” and very efficient. He now owned an import company
hadn’t told him anything more than necessary about us.
We went into a café and took a table in a front corner by the window and ordered a round of beers. Calderón handed me our passports—mine in the name of Michael Chavez, LQ’s and Brando’s
identifying them as George Thompson and Leon Buscar. He also provided a roadmap with a route marked for us in red ink all the way
from Villa Acuña to a small town called Escalón, and a folded sheet
of paper with a hand-drawn map of the way from Escalón to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, a distance noted in pencil as about twenty
miles. He said the estate was deeded to one César Calveras Dogal. On
another sheet of paper was a diagram of the hacienda itself, with several notations in Spanish.
“The nearest station of police is in Jiménez. That is fifty miles
from Escalón. At Las Cadenas, Calveras is the police.”
He gave us directions to Sanchez’s filling station across the river in
Villa Acuña and said a car would be waiting for us there. He stood up
and apologized that he could not stay longer but he had another
pressing engagement. He hadn’t touched his beer except to toast our
health.
“Good luck with your business, gentlemen.”
He went out and crossed the street to an idling Chrysler waiting
at the curb and got into the backseat and the car took him away.
“You get a good whiff of that fella?” Brando said. “About like a
whorehouse parlor.”
I
t was an altogether different smell when we walked over the bridge
and caught the Rio Grande’s ripe stink of shit and dead things.
“Fall in there and you’re like to die of poisoning or some godawful disease before you can even drown,” LQ said.
The town was a tangle of rutted dirt streets flanking a large plaza.
Dogs and chickens dodged rattling burro carts and honking jalopies
and grinding trucks. We went past an open marketplace full of hagglers and snarling with flies, hung with the butchered carcasses of
calves and pigs and what Brando was absolutely sure was a dog. One
stall held a row of skinned cowheads. The air was hazed with the
smoke of cooking fires. Street vendors hawked sticks of meatstrips
roasted on charcoal braziers. The sidewalks were full of squatting old
women beggars in black rebozos.
Jesus,
look
at this goddamn place.”
“Wish all I had to do was look at it and not smell it,” Brando said.
The Sanchez filling station consisted of a small tin-roofed garage
and two gasoline pumps. The ground all around the building was
black and pungent with drained motor oil, littered with torn tires
and rusted car frames and half-gutted engine blocks. Sanchez was a
little guy in filthy overalls. I told him my name was Chavez and he
said yes, yes, he had been expecting us. We followed him around to
the back of the garage and there stood a black Hudson sedan.
Gleaming from a fresh washing, it was the cleanest-looking thing
in town.
Sanchez beckoned us to the rear of the car, saying, “Hay una sorpresa para ustedes en el portaequipaje.”
He worked the key in the trunk lock and took a squinting look all
around, then raised the lid and gestured grandly into the trunk. It
contained a pair of lever-action Winchester ten-gauge shotguns and a
huge rifle of a sort I’d never seen.
“Son of a bitch,” LQ said. “That’s a BAR.” He took out the
weapon—and Sanchez had another nervous look around.
A Browning Automatic Rifle, LQ said, U.S. Army issue, .30-06
caliber, with a magazine holding twenty rounds. He said he’d fired
one many a time during his army days. He detached the loaded mag