Fifty Grand (28 page)

I wait for him for a minute. Two.

Bathroom. Mirror. Sink. Splash water. Reflect. My fault. A conversation I should not have had. There’s a time for the truth and there’s a time for silence. Any good interrogator knows that. Paco’s too young to understand. Too immature to be any kind of a confidant for me.

Faucet off.

He opens the door, comes in, crying.

He falls on his bed like a kid.

I sit beside him, stroke his back.

“What will I do after you go home?”

“You’ll be fine. You’ve got a job, friends, you’ll be fine.”

“I should have stopped those guys in the desert.”

“No. You should have done exactly what you did. You kept a cool head and I’m proud of you.”

“You’ve a boyfriend in Havana?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’ll come see you when I’ve got some money saved.”

“Sure.”

Sure.

“I saw you praying.”

“Yes.”

“What’s that like?”

He shakes his head. He doesn’t understand the question. He yawns.

Time flowing forward in single breaths. Entropy maximizing.

“I’m tired,” he says and yawns again.

He starts breathing like a cat.

Up on Obispo, at the Casa de los Arabes, lies Havana’s mosque. You can get in only if you’re a foreigner or a diplomat or a cop. I went once with Hector to question a man from the Iranian Embassy about activities proscribed by the Koran and also by Cuban law. We were there at dawn, when, Hector explained, an additional line is sung by the muezzin:
Come to the mosque, for prayer is better than sleep.

I’ve always liked that. Prayer is better than sleep.

But what if you don’t know how to do either?

I want to pray, I want to sleep, both, either, I want to feel something, or nothing. Paco starts to snore, unmoved by such concerns.

“I wish I was more like you,” I whisper in his ear, kiss him, and put my blanket on him.

But anyway, it’s a lie. I wouldn’t want his certainty, the clarity of a believer.

Not yet.

I’ll lean into the confusion. The gray area. The dark. Embrace it. Sleep can wait and prayer can wait and into the comfort of the profane world I’ll go.

I
need a gun. In Havana I was lit by neon. A rep. The kind that floats up. Only my immediate superiors and the goons in the DGSE or the DGI could fuck with me. But in America the border taught me that life is cheap. The life of an illegal worth less than a dog. And Paco’s right. It’s Saturday. I’ve got one day left. The investigative part of this operation is almost over.

Not Mrs. Cooper.

If I can eliminate Esteban’s Range Rover and the silly golf cart, it will all boil down to the garage.

There were only two cars in for repairs in the Pearl Street Garage that whole week. Mrs. Cooper’s Mercedes and Jack Tyrone’s Bentley.

But Jack was in L.A. the night of the accident.

Youkilis was here. Youkilis driving Jack’s car? Got to be. It fits with the man, it works with the evidence. Twenty meters from Jack’s house, fifteen from Youkilis’s front gate. Jack’s car and Youkilis drunk or high or both. Coke and ice. Ice and coke. Foreign and domestic. Gives you two trips, two lives.

Youkilis. Take him. Break him. Make him talk. Make him admit it.

And then . . .

Is there any real alternative? The Cuban Interests Section of the Mexican Embassy?

Sure. The ministry claims that Luis Carriles put a bomb on a plane that killed seventy-three people. To this day the Yankees have refused to extradite him to Cuba.

It has to be in-house. I’m ok with it. It feels right.

For all of recorded history and for the million years before that humans have taken vengeance into their own hands. A simple code. Kill one of ours, we’ll kill one of yours. The simplest code there is. Only in the last century or two have people given this job to outsiders. To police, lawyers, courts. And no one really buys into that 100 percent. Certainly not in Cuba, where the old ways walk the streets of Cerro and Vedado. This is what Ricky doesn’t understand. He’s never walked those streets. Cops and the rule of law are a blip in deep time.

No, we don’t completely believe in them and some part of us remembers that revenge isn’t just a right—it’s a sacred obligation.

And why else did I come here? Why?

Overthinking. Need to be doing, not thinking.

Supplies. Duct tape, cuffs, map, markers, sledgehammer. And most of all—a gun.

In another ensemble from Angela’s cupboard I walk out of the motel. Brown cotton skirt, beige blouse, black sweater, black jacket. Backpack. No lipstick, no makeup. Wool hat low over my eyes. No attempt to look my best. This is the business end of my journey here. An ugly business.

I turn left for Fairview and again note that Toyota with the New York plates. No man sleeping inside this time because it’s later.

One sighting was bad but two have me worried. Someone’s keeping an eye on the motel. An INS agent? A fed following up a lead from New Mexico?

It’s
something
. Think about it.

Down the hill to town. I walk past Starbucks and Dolce and Gabbana and a Ferrari dealership. Dean and Deluca. Whole Foods. Past a paradise of fruit and bread.

I turn on Arapahoe Street and enter the Safeway.

Aisle 2: Hardware. Knife, tape, rope.

Aisle 3: Winter clothes. Ski mask, gloves.

Aisle 6: Electrical. Flashlight, batteries.

Aisle 8: Grocery. Coffee, butter, bacon—so the purchases don’t look quite so menacing.

Pay.

Load up my backpack.

How many dollars left from my carefully husbanded bribe money, payoff money, and wages?

Six twenties and a five. Is that enough for a firearm? I walk down Manitou Road to what passes for the bad part of town.

A 7-Eleven, a couple of liquor stores, boarded-up shops—notices on the boards that all this has been rezoned for urban renewal.

Next to a sex shop is Fairview’s only pawnbroker.

In the window: a bicycle, a baby stroller, a fur coat, guns.

I go inside.

Skinny kid in a blue T-shirt reading an SAT prep book. Looks up at me briefly and back down at his book.

A whole row of handguns in a glass cabinet in front of him, the cheapest a .38 police special for $180. I’m fifty-five bucks short. But it doesn’t matter anyway—a sign on the wall says
HANDGUNS FOR SALE TO US CITIZENS ONLY
and another informs me that
BACKGROUND CHECKS WILL BE ENFORCED AT ALL TIMES
.

This kid doesn’t seem the type who is authorized to haggle or bend the rules.

Damn it. I turn, go to the door. Kid looks up again.

“Help you with anything?” he asks.

“No, thank you.”

He goes back to his college book, and as I nod goodbye I notice something that actually might be very useful. Behind him on a rack are half a dozen sets of police handcuffs and above that, cans of pepper spray. I’ve used pepper spray before in the PNR but it’s a controlled substance in Havana and private citizens are not permitted to purchase it. Pimps like it, though—gun possession is an automatic year in jail, whereas having a can of pepper spray can be bribed out of court. Once I traded two cans of CS gas for twenty bucks and a week’s tickets from the ration book. Eggs, sugar, flour. Ricky and I made a birthday cake for Mom.

“How much for the pepper spray?” I ask.

“Twenty dollars.”

“Do I need a permit to buy it?”

“No.”

“And how much for the steel handcuffs?” I ask.

The boy looks at the price label.

“Fifteen.”

Out into the street two minutes later. A snow flurry. I pull on my wool hat.

I still need a gun.

Plan B.

I fish out the ad from the
Fairview Post
: “For sale: Thorpe hunting Rifle new 750 dollars. Smith and Wesson M&P 9mm good con with ammo 400 dollars OBO.”

The address is 44 Lime Kiln Road, about two kilometers north out of town.

I don’t have the cash but my plan is not to buy the weapon.

Risky, but I don’t see any other choice. Esteban has a rifle in his apartment but Esteban’s in Denver, the apartment’s locked, and no one else in the Mex Motel owns a gun.

Noon.

Go there now before you lose your nerve.

I walk to the crossroads at the liquor store. Lime Kiln is a narrow two-lane curving northwest into the mountains. No sidewalk but there is a trail next to the tree line.

Walk it.

Twenty minutes along the wood.

Cars and SUVs racing past on the downhill lane at close to a hundred kilometers per hour.

The dull clothes better than camouflage, just another Mex going about her silent business, just another invisible with no plans or dreams or thoughts in her head. No one slows to avoid showering me with stones, no one notices me at all.

After half an hour the gradient increases and the trees thin out and there are half a dozen houses next to one another. I read numbers on mailboxes.

Number 44 is a little yellow trailer home set off from the others.

A whole lot of people around. Kids playing, people raking leaves, a lady with a blanket over her legs reading a book.

All these witnesses. This is fucked. Should have scouted this yesterday. This is a night op.

It’s two kilometers back to town. I’m not going back.

Before they notice me I dart into the woods to check out the approach from the rear.

Some of the houses have tall antibear fences but number 44 does not. Just a grassy yard and a well-worn path leading into the woods.

Tires, a workbench, a lathe, half a Dodge pickup parked in the yard.

If I was a pro I’d scout and make notes and wait but I have no time for
that, and besides, something tells me to go for it, now. That something is desperation.

I walk out from under the tree cover and approach the rear of the trailer home. I reach into the backpack, remove the ski mask, and pull it over my head. I put the knife into the lock on the screen door. Pull. The plastic gives with a loud snap.

Two houses over, a dog barks. The barking becomes a low growl and then stops.

Heart hammering.
This is crazy. Get out now.
I turn the handle on the back door and enter a tiny, dirty kitchen. Pots and pans on a gas stove, a box of pancake mix on a table next to a carton of milk. A smallish black dog is sleeping in a wool-lined box near a washing machine. The dog blinks and looks up at me. He registers my presence and rests his head back down on his paws.

This is stupid, Mercado. Get out of here
.

I tighten the grip on my knife and push the door to the next room.

A living/dining room and a man, watching TV in a reclining chair. His back is to me but I can see a white hand holding a can of beer. I can’t tell if he’s big, small, young, old. The other hand must have the TV remote because every fifteen or twenty seconds the channel flips.

The room is painted a dull yellow and, apart from a few newspaper fragments on the floor, is quite tidy. There are cupboards along the wall, and through the front window I can see the children throwing an American football to one another.

The longer I stand here the harder it’s going to be.

I pad gently across the floor with as much silence and economy of movement as my nerves will permit.

I look at the knife.

How am I going to do this?

Quickly.

One op. No second chances.

I stand behind him, look down at the top of his head. Bald, with a gray fringe around the edge.

I grip the knife, take a deep breath, and in one fast slice of air it’s at his throat.

“Don’t move,” I tell him.

“The fuck,” he says but doesn’t move.

“This is a hunting knife and it’s on your jugular vein. Don’t move or I’ll cut the vein and you’ll be dead in under a minute. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand,” he says with surprising equanimity—as if one of the hassles of everyday life was the occasional knife-wielding maniac jumping up from your sofa while you’re watching TV.

“Put down the beer,” I tell him.

“What do you want from me?” he asks.

“Put down the beer.”

He sets the beer can on a side table next to the chair.

“What do you want from me?” he asks again.

Keeping the knife against his vein, I reach out with the handcuffs and place them on his thigh.

“Very slowly handcuff your wrists together,” I tell him.