Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot) (6 page)

    Pablo dozes through the afternoon and wakes at sunset. They share a dinner of jerky and dried fruit and pass a bottle of water between them stretching the meal into total darkness. He lays his head upon her again and she runs her fingers through his thick black hair. She bends her neck and kisses his head.

    "Momma is proud of you."

    "Why?"

    She punctuates each point with a kiss, "Because you are a good boy. You are smart and brave and you love your momma."

    Pablo smiles. "Who are they, Momma?"

    "Just some people who took us in."

    "Do you know them?"

    "Once. Perhaps."

    "And Ramon? He knows you?"

    "Is that what he said?"

    "He said he knew my father."

    She waits to hear what he might add to that. He rarely asks about his father and she has not volunteered much.

    "He said my father was a pig."

    "Is that what you think?"
    "I don't know."

    "Are you a pig, Pablo?"

    "I don't think so." The statement is open ended, left hanging there for confirmation or correction. She offers neither.

    "Did you love him, Momma?"

    "Not as much as I love you."

    They ride along in darkness and silence, awash in the knowledge of each other's company. The journey has cemented previously untested notions of loyalty, strength and resourcefulness that they will take with them back to their home. Pablo knows something of their situation, but he does not understand desperation the way a fish does not understand water.

    He knows only that they have to bring back the package resting between them. He knows that it is dangerous and that their fortunes are linked for better or worse to each other and to the success of their journey. He is not worried, only awake.

    She knows her son is aware of some of the ways of the world. He is possessed of animal intuition for blood and consequence, but he is still a child. The things she keeps from him are her duty she feels to shelter him and make him feel safe, but the clarity of his instincts is alarming. An understanding hangs between them, of her duty to lie to him and the importance of his ability to see through it.

    "Momma?"

    "Yes, Pablo."

    "Are we going to be okay?"

    She resumes brushing his hair, long strokes from the base of his neck upward, ruffling thick tufts and pushing them down on his forehead. She will follow that with another in the opposite direction, combing everything out of his eyes and smoothing the tangles.

    "Shhh” she soothes him, “
Si
, Pablo everything is going to be alright.”

    He stepped out of his hut into the morning’s oven, set to slowly bake the intoxicants from the residents’ collective systems and leave them parched, sandy-veined and raw from scraping at that great ragged void where some folks keep their soul. By night’s end he would cut someone, break a nose or a finger, go to sleep, and do it again tomorrow.

    Job description: Reign in hell.

    And he had not yet begun to tire of it.

    The air that morning was especially fetid and he lit a cigarette to protect himself from the natural environment. The menthol cooled his nerves some and the smoke improved the general bouquet, but he knew it was only a matter of time before he was subsisting on rock again–the smoky poison that sharpened his senses even as it chipped away at his judgment until he could hardly believe the things he watched himself do. A reputation for appalling capabilities had secured his position here as much as it assured that he would never leave. The gringos would fear him and the whores would obey and that was enough for today.

    He rounded the side of the shack and pointed his footsteps toward the cantina where he saw a crowd had already gathered beneath the vociferous fowl lining the gutterless tin roof. On the turf beside the metal picnic table lay the ventilated corpse of the latest sadist sent down from Polito’s ranks of psychos, rough-necks and punks to dig their own graves quietly and out of the way. They may not know it when they arrived, but most of them figured it out sooner or later–that they’d officially ceased to exist the moment they arrived in this camp.

    Hades’ waiting room.

    The dark man strode toward the body and none of the assembled made a sound. The birds were reluctant to make room for him, but eventually abandoned the meaty tendrils they’d been gorging on, giving him an unobstructed glimpse of the desecrated body.

    Blunt trauma to the head. Impossible to determine how many blows to the nearest dozen. The human melon now looked like a rotten pumpkin spilling seeds. Blunt knife-work split the torso spilling viscera from the gaping cavity, and he tried to calculate the necessary torque and tugging strength to accomplish such a complete job.

   
He looked into the recesses of the body and felt a shiver that ran up his asshole all the way to the back of his mouth. That acid taste, he knew with a sudden clairvoyance, was the flavor of fate.

3. Exodus

Fever enveloped him, and he ranted, gagging back at the devils communicating so brazenly, so plainly with him. They licked with avidity at the obscenity of his wounds, their sulfurous breath filling his lungs. He peered through the tear in mortality’s veil, and was grateful for an instant that his mangled maw prevented what would certainly have been a squeal from escaping. Infection was claiming his wounds, and the bat-winged spectres told him that, as soon as they had finished wrenching his soul from its fleshly cage, he would know true pain.

    So Ramon clenched his fractured jaw, and ran toward the agony. He mashed his ragged gums together and swallowed blood poisoned with demons and death. He strained against unknown bonds toward a flickering, purifying heat that he suddenly sensed was near.

*

His mind returned to him like the tide–advancing and retreating incrementally, the former finally dominating with poky persistence–and he was aware of the opiate effects. Consuela loomed over him administering a wet towel to his face. The slightest pressure should have driven nails through his brain, but he felt nothing. Nothing but the poppy cloud enveloping him. The heroin pussy loving him up.

    “Who were you speaking to?” Consuela pressed gently on the retreating swelling.

    Ramon didn’t try to answer.

    “The things you said,” a trickle of water ran from the rag and broke from his brow, down the left slope of his badly-set nose to join the trail of tears irrigating the crags of his face, slowing in the angry, irregular stubble along his distorted jaw. “I could not understand it, but I know that it was not gibberish.” With his eyes closed, Ramon’s consciousness was concentrated and entirely contained inside the globe of water pushing to clear his chin and rush now down the sharp decline of his neck and pool at his collarbone.

    Florence Mexi-gale.

    His mind retreated again in tidal fashion. In his delirium, Ramon dreamed that he was swallowing a great fire. He felt a woman’s mouth on his own, her lips parting his and delivering magma. Consuela’s voice told him that she was burning away the infection and he breathed in the acrid smoke of his own flesh. He walked barefoot through the shanty, feeling invisible flames leaping through the pores of his skin without burning his clothes as he came to the cantina door to receive Polito’s messengers. They arrived in winged, black chariots demanding tribute. He spoke to them with his ruined voice–No more tribute.

    They beat their wings, bared their fangs and spit venom at him from beneath their forked tongues, but Ramon was unmoved. When he opened his mouth an intense heat poured forth from the void where his teeth had been. The mercenaries melted away before the infernal wind issuing from him, and when they were dust, he turned to Consuela behind him.

    She reached her hand up to him and, on that command, he coughed until he caught the now cooled rock in the back of his mouth. Opening his lips, he rolled out his tongue and presented the stone to her waiting fingers.

*

One of the women had retrieved, from the dirt, the teeth that he'd lost, and placed their fragments inside a small leather pouch, which she presented to him with an absurd degree of ceremony. He'd accepted them in the same spirit, and wore the purse around his neck.

    When he could right himself without falling over, the pain and the opiates having reached an uneasy equilibrium, he'd ordered the retard’s body exhumed from its thin blanket of dirt. Consuela consigned two of the women to excavate the grave, and when they had done so, she told Ramon.

    Signaling that he desired privacy, Ramon staggered beyond the last hut and squatted in the shallow hole where the delivery driver’s body shared in eternal unrest and a host of crawling scavengers with Benji Metcalf’s bloated meat jacket. Ramon grabbed a handful of the geek’s hair and hauled him to an upright angle, the better to take the teeth out of his skull.

    Ramon worked savagely with a hammer, more for his own gratification than to clear space for the precision work with pliers, as he was not eager to damage the precious teeth. The gringo’s nose lay flat already, but Ramon smashed the gaunt cheek-bones upward until the skin was ready to tear away completely, and it felt like pounding on a balloon filled with coconut fragments. Then, depressing the frangible chin with his thumb, he slid the teeth from their positions–yellowed, but intact– and inserted them gently into the purse around his neck.

    Ramon repeated the job on the driver, minus the hammer work. Instead he simply reached behind the rubbery lips and scooped away the maggots beneath the tongue with his fingers. Working molars to denticles the pliers slipped them from the gum with minimum effort.

    The next day he scoured the contents of his clutch. He worked patiently with sand and a toothbrush soaking them in a bowl of whiskey until they were clean. Finished, he laid them on the table top behind the cantina and watched them shine, like pearls, in the sun.

*

When the men in dark suits had come, he had instructed the whores to hide inside their huts. Only Consuela had stood with him. His shattered jaw was bound with rags from underneath his chin, up over the top of his head. The swelling had begun to leave, but there was still a dark mask of bruising around his eyes and beneath the rags that covered the lower half of his face.

    As he and Consuela watched the current of automobiles approach in the growing dust cloud, he felt the pouch around his neck lie icy-hot against his skin–home now to fragments of dead voices that were chattering threats and pleas and prayers unceasingly. The liquid procession of obsidian vehicles languidly encircled them and he raised a hand to shield his view from the sun glinting off of their sleek and scaly bodies. He wondered at their teeth and wings.

    He fondled the tooth bag beneath his shirt. Slowly the contents of the sac rolled through his fingers one at a time like a rosary, focusing him, summoning wrath and willing stillness into his muscles. Only his left hand moved, mechanically precise over the smooth surface of the pocket, polishing the enamel inside. His right hand rested atop the club he used now as a cane.

    The Elephant Man From Lamancha.

    When the cars stopped and the dust plume settled, five men emerged baring fangs, scraping the dirt with gore-encrusted talons, hissing and spitting. Promising hell, but withholding it until commanded not to. With contemptuous grace Mr. Peck oozed as much as stepped out of the foremost vehicle at last, dressed as always, in a pressed black suit and sunglasses. Peck strode the grounds with scornful patience coolly inspecting the broken cantina, the violated safe and the cowering, silent whores peeking from their doorways before ever looking Ramon in the eyes. He took in the mess and sneered.

    “You had a chance to redeem yourself.” He smiled, a mocking show of pity that dissolved into open disgust. His lips spread over teeth for a mile. Continually pulling back over venom-dripping fangs. “Instead you’ve disgraced yourself further.” He flicked a split, serpentine tongue to his widow’s peak, and turned his back on Ramon. “Your replacement is here.”

    Peck gestured imperceptibly and the back door of the first sable carriage clicked open behind him. A large African man dressed in a gaudy vinyl track-suit that was already looking lived in for three days unfolded himself from the back seat of the Cadillac. He stood a full head over Peck and leveled a malevolent reptilian glare at Ramon.