Blood of Paradise (46 page)

Finally, she screwed up her resolve and managed to say, “Did I tell you I heard from my brother in Iraq?” Her voice faltered, and somehow Jude got the sense she wasn't changing the subject exactly. “He shot a kid. By mistake. He didn't go into full-blown detail so I only know part of the story, but they were on the northwest side of Fallujah, this neighborhood called Jolan. It's ancient, with all these twisting streets, a nightmare. He said they had good intel on a stash house—but they always have good intel, you notice? Except when some Hajj phones in that a cop's house is full of guns or
plastique
. They like doing that, letting the marines kill cops. Anyway, Mike—that's my brother—he and his squad busted in, screaming for everybody to hit the ground. This kid, this boy, you've got all this smoke from the flash-bangs and he just—” Eileen put her hand to her mouth, a finger twitching against her cheek. She sat like that for a moment. Then: “You hesitate, you die. Or your buddy dies. Okay. I get that. But what about next time? My brother says he won't let it happen but I know him, he's a good guy and I know he's going to think next time. And that's the jinx.”

“I'm sorry,” Jude murmured. There it was again, that mucky little placeholder.

She downed the last of her weak lemonade. “You're right, Jude. You've got to get out of this work. It's a living death. For you. Guys like my brother. You make mistakes like everybody else, but unlike everybody else you can't forgive yourselves. Build things. Here. Things people really need. You'd be brilliant at it.”

Malvasio was taking a beating at blackjack, waiting for his call from Sleeper. The casino, about the size of your average Burger King, was attached to the Tropico Hotel and reeked, appropriately, like an ashtray. But it was air-conditioned, so why complain?

About three dozen slots lined the walls beneath tilted mirrors, positioned to help spot slug droppers. There were six card tables: four for blackjack, two for poker. All six were manned by a single dealer, business was that slow. He wore a threadbare tux and a chipmunk smile and his obsequiousness only made his cheating more insufferable. The cage cashier had something French about him, which was to say he looked like he'd done time for forgery, and the cocktail waitress wore a short black skirt so tight her tree-trunk thighs whispered
kiss kiss kiss
through her pantyhose when she passed by.

Malvasio was a wee bit drunk.

He was cursing his second sixteen in a row when his cell started throbbing in his pocket. About time, he thought, cashing out. He left a tip commensurate with being played for a sucker and that, at last, wiped the goofy smile off the dealer's face.

Outside, Malvasio headed north in the dark to the caged walkway over the four-lane Avenida Eisenhower, coming down again at the entrance to the Cementerio General.

The gate in the large white archway stood open, but he slipped a coin to the beggar pretending to guard it. The central path was lined with
almendra de rio
trees and Malvasio followed it straight back, past memorial statuary and mausoleums of varying hideousness or ostentation, bigger than houses you found here, some dating back to the eighteenth century, fashioned from marble and granite and enclosed within black iron fences. Others were scruffed with moss or soiled with guano, and more than one had a sapling jutting from a loose crack in the stonework, a little flag of grief's neglect. Stray dogs roamed here and there, scavenging among the bouquets left behind during the day and anything else that resembled food.

A giant
ceiba
tree marked the center of the cemetery—it was sacred to the Mayans—and beneath its dark, sprawling branches he spotted the red glow of a cigarette. He whistled three pitches, low-high-middle, and received in return the same three notes reversed. Sleeper emerged from the dark shade of the tree into the moonlight.

“We're over here,” he told Malvasio, gesturing to a spot farther back among the graves as he dropped his cigarette onto the gravel and crushed it with his shoe.

They walked together in silence through a maze of white headstones to a mausoleum the size of a small garage and built in the form of a Gothic cathedral, complete with vaulted ceilings and bat-winged gargoyles crouched atop flying buttresses. Of course, Malvasio thought, seeing the thing, where else would the
chamacos
hang? Ghoulishness aside, it was quite possibly the most lovingly crafted structure he'd seen in the whole country.

Chucho waited there with Magui, the same huge
marero
who'd been at the house in Puerto El Triunfo, plus a fourth hood Malvasio didn't recognize who was pitching stones at one of the starving dogs. Sleeper introduced him as Toto, and since no one laughed, Malvasio assumed it wasn't a joke.

Malvasio pulled his money roll from his pocket and counted out a thousand dollars, two hundred fifty per man, half the full amount for the job, the rest due once the thing was done. But Malvasio didn't expect to render that. He was doling out cash to dead men. Even so, money well spent.

“Go home,” he told them as they counted their pay. “Get some sleep. We meet at five am, sharp. No hangovers, no druggy nods, or you hand back what I just paid you and get left behind. And don't get any slick ideas—you don't want me coming to look for you, hunting down my money. We'll circle up at the usual spot. You don't know where it is, ask Sleeper.”

When he got back to the van in the casino parking lot, he sat behind the wheel for a while, trying to think it all through. The drink had him morose, hazy, indignant. That's it, he thought, blame the booze. He took his cell from his pocket and thumbed in the number he needed to call.

A groggy voice answered. “Yeah?”

“Get some sleep tonight, Phil. We're on for tomorrow morning.”

“I
was
sleeping. Fucking heat.” Strock moaned throatily and sighed. The pause lingered. “Remember what I told you.”

Malvasio bristled but kept his head. “I do. And that's the way it'll go down. I wish it hadn't come this far but … Never mind. Not your problem. Let's not talk about it on the cell.”

“Sound a little gassed there, Buckwheat.”

Malvasio rubbed his eyes till they felt raw. “Maybe.”

“I've wondered about that. Seen you zoomed, figured you'd drink to even out. Not the best lifestyle. I speak, sadly, from experience.”

Malvasio didn't intend to sit through this, not from Strock. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“You okay with this?”

Malvasio barked out a miserable little laugh. “Okay? No. It's fucked up. But if I don't take the wheel, it'll just be worse.”

“For Ray's kid.”

“Him, yeah. And me. Some things I just don't mean to live with, you know?”

Strock didn't respond for a moment. Then: “I asked before. I handle your boys—how's this gonna sit with your people?”

“Here's the thing, Phil. Know what? I don't care. I'm done. After this, I'm done. You reach a point, you know?”

The sound of static surged then waned on the line. Malvasio thought he'd lost the signal. Then Strock came back. “Where you gonna go?”

Malvasio looked out the van's window. The casino cocktail waitress was on her break, sitting on the hood of her car, buffing her nails in the moonlit heat. She'd stripped off her kissy pantyhose, which now lay tangled beside her shoes on the ground. “Don't worry about me, Phil. I'm a ghost. I roam at will.”

Strock hung up the phone and went back to what he'd been doing—sharpening the tip of a jagged piece of wood he'd ripped from one of the rotting stair planks leading up to the roof of the garage. It had taken him a while to find a suitable candidate, small enough to hold and thrust, solid enough to puncture flesh. The AR-15 would be good for long range, but if things got dicey up close, he'd need something else. And that was the problem, thinking ahead to how things might go wrong up close.

He'd torn off strips of cloth from a T-shirt, wrapping it tight around the hilt to fashion a handle, but the trick was the sharpening. He'd resorted to using an ordinary rock for a grinding stone and it was thankless work, hour after hour of rasping the edges, honing the tip, working by candlelight now. He tested it against the skin of his inner arm. It'd be useless at slashing, but if he went for the gut, drove it hard and deep and high beneath the ribs to catch a lung, he might buy the time he'd need to finish the guy off with the rifle. Or his bare hands.

It had seemed poetic, using pieces of a rotted stair plank to fashion a weapon. That night he'd ruined his knee, back in Chicago, waiting for Malvasio, expecting to die and perfecting his hate—it had all come back in the gaudy Technicolor of self-pity and he found himself cursing the meager, circular madness of things. Here he was again, reliving the same nightmare, except he wouldn't let that happen. He was going through with the plan because he'd seen a crucial change in Malvasio, a wounded, stymied, bitchy terror that made Strock feel a little like he was looking into a mirror, not just his old friend's eyes. And there, really, was the sad little secret driving the machine. They'd been friends. For all the misery that had come of it, Strock still looked back at those years in Chicago as the best of his life. Did he really think that now, on his own, he could hope for better? Like Bill himself said, neither of them got out unscathed. And so he'd agreed to do this thing, reassured by the bond that had quickened between them again and flattered that he was necessary, after ten years of meaning nothing to anyone, not even his own little girl. Amazing, he thought, when we decide to whore ourselves, how piddling a sum can seal the bargain.

That didn't mean he intended to be a fool. He set 9-1-1 for speed dial and hid the shiv where he could reach it easily, just beneath the lip of the mattress. And if it's your old friend you end up having to kill, he thought, don't blame yourself or even him. Blame the meandering turns of fate that bring you back around, time and time again, to the same ridiculous decision: Choose who you are.

He looked out toward the dark
ceiba
tree, where the big green parrot had perched that afternoon. Strock chuckled at the memory, his moment of churchy weirdness, talking out loud to Ray like that. And then the bird had flown off soon afterward, never to return. Carrying my prayer to heaven, he thought. Or sick of the sound of my begging.

Jude and Eileen decided to sleep in shifts, sharing the couch, two hours apiece, one of them staying awake to keep watch. Once, while he was dozing, Jude cracked his eye open to discover, through the filmy blur, Eileen staring at him. She was sitting nearby in a chair, hugging her knees, her dress tucked just so, revealing nothing immodest. The shotgun lay across her lap.

“Go back to sleep,” she told him.

He readjusted himself on the couch, obediently closing his eyes. “Anything to report?”

“No. Nothing. Quiet as a Quaker with naught to confess, as my grandmother used to say.” She let a moment's silence pass, as though to demonstrate, then let go with a flubbing sigh. “I do like looking at you, though.”

40

A seam of whitish haze rimmed the horizon as Malvasio pulled up to the little church, El Niño de Atoche, above the center of town. The four
mareros
waited beneath the spectral
amate
trees—Sleeper, Chucho, Magui, and Toto—all of them blistered from crank, but Malvasio had expected that. Despite his admonition, he'd figured they'd spend the night horning rails, pumping each other up with feverish talk or sitting off by themselves, blasting around inside their own skulls, rehearsing the killing ahead.

They scrambled into the van, Sleeper up front, the others hunched in back. No one spoke. Malvasio drove them to the isolated strip of country road sheltered by giant
conacastes
where another van sat waiting, this one white with black lettering across the side:

Pintor Contratista—Paintering

Joaquín Mojica

289-9674

Señor Mojica would report the van stolen this morning, but not before it could be put to use. Malvasio had seen to that. Everyone climbed out, and Sleeper strolled to the white van with a hammer and smashed the driver-side window to perfect the ruse. Working by flashlight, he swept away the shatters then pried at the ignition cap with a screwdriver while Malvasio introduced the others to their weapons, conducting his tutorial in the spray of his headlights, to make sure no one missed anything.

He showed them how to load the AR-15 magazines—they held twenty rounds but he told them to stop at nineteen, otherwise they tended to jam—showed them the safeties, and disabused them of the notion that the selector switches, suggesting triple-shot burst and fully automatic firing options, were functional. “But these will shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger,” he said, and let them all try their hand through a magazine to practice not just their aim but load and reload. Birds scattered from the tree branches with the gunfire. Sleeper, after hot-wiring the painter's van and transferring to it the odds and ends they'd need—kerosene, rags, a sledge—came and joined the lesson in time for the last of the shooting. By now morning had seeped its whitish blue into the sky and everybody seemed happy, weapons in hand, the burnt, sulfurous tang of cordite in the air. They got three spare magazines per man and loaded them there, then picked up the spent cartridges in the dirt. Finally, the four
mareros
donned the white coveralls Malvasio had brought along and climbed into the idling painter's van. Malvasio took out his cell phone, recalled from memory the number he needed, and thumbed it in while Sleeper turned the van around, came abreast, and stopped. Only he rode up front; the others sat hidden in back.

“The old man know we're coming?” He meant Osorio, Consuela's neighbor.

“I'm taking care of that now,” Malvasio said, putting the cell to his ear. “Don't go in before seven. That's almost too early as it is. But don't wait longer than that, either.”