Moondogs (15 page)

“Not strictly police,” Reynato cuts him off. “Our shop gets funded by the National Bureau of Investigation, and we operate across jurisdictions. We specialize in kidnapping cases and the prosecution of outstanding warrants … basically we go in for high value arrests when the local cops can’t close the deal. Some newsboy called us
Task Force Ka-Pow
a while back, which has kind of stuck. But I’ll give you fair warning, Efrem, if you join up you’ll be dealing with some real rough folks. From Chinese guns in shabu labs, to armored car hijackers with hand grenades, these boys do not play nice. My crew,” he gestures to Lorenzo, Racha and Elvis, “are stretched thin as we get. Poor Racha got shot in the foot just last week.”

Racha nods solemnly.

“So it’s no dream job,” Reynato says. “But our pay is a step up, I can promise that. And you’ll likely get more chances to fight. You like that, don’t you? How could you not, a man with your record?” He smiles. His gums are bleeding. “If you didn’t enjoy pulling the trigger the ninth
time, then you wouldn’t have pulled it the tenth. So … would you want in on this dangerous silliness? Should I buy you an early discharge by signing my time away to these two slick motherfuckers?”

There’s no choice here at all. Efrem enjoyed his years in the army, sure, but this is Reynato Ocampo. This is his chance to be the hero that his mother, that his whole island expected him to be—a chance to stick up for the unstuckup for. He can almost hear a pulsing beat coming in through the windows, the Ocampo Justice theme song filling the plantation the way it filled the outdoor movie house. Yes, he says, or maybe he just thinks it, because everybody keeps staring at him. “Yes,” he tries again, his voice thick and gurgly.

“Well all right,” Reynato says. “I’ll probably regret this, knowing how hard these jerks will squeeze the lemon.” Reynato puts an arm over Efrem’s shoulder and chuckles. His breath is rot. “You all can fax me his discharge paperwork, and I’ll have my girl back in Manila get him into our system. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I need to get him oriented. Especially if you all plan to bring me on tour.” Together he and Efrem walk out to the yard. Racha, Lorenzo and Elvis follow close behind.

Outside it’s brilliant bright, and everybody must wear sunglasses. Task Force Ka-Pow moves back into the banana trees, up toward the road and the waiting jeep. Efrem feels himself pushed forward by a sea-swell. He can’t grab onto anything, not a branch or vine, because it’s all moving with him.

Chapter 9

It’s crazy-making how heavy this motherfucker is. Ignacio takes his legs and Littleboy his shoulders, but they only make it a few steps before the American slips fatly, wetly, out of their grip. Littleboy takes his legs and
Ignacio his shoulders. Not much better—they get to the curb and again he defeats them with dead heft. This is bad. Late as it is, it’s still Manila. Any minute now a car, a jeepney, a motor-trike or night-roving squatter will be along. Early risers will hit the pavement as insomniacs stumble home. Someone is sure to hear this commotion in the steamy, after-rain quiet. Someone is sure to notice what they’re doing. God, what
on earth
are they doing?

After a few tries it’s clear they’ll never get him up the concrete steps and through the front door without more help. Ignacio goes inside to wake his wife. Waking his wife is hard. She’s crashing after a five-day tweak, courtesy of the rough shabu that Ignacio manufactures in his bathroom and sells to some of his regular taxi customers. Like all of Ignacio’s schemes—the short-lived rental store for pirated movies, the cockfight training academy opened in the wake of Kelog’s retirement—this one is small scale; successful mostly in maintaining their private stock. Always enough meth on hand to chase the dragon, should they care to. And they care to often. Ignacio is chasing the dragon right now. He’s on three days running without sleep.

Finally he rouses her and drags her outside. To his surprise she takes the sight of the American, facedown and bleeding from his head and fingers, in stride. She only asks once what Ignacio is doing, and accepts his hollered response that he has no fucking idea without comment or critique. Together the three of them hoist the fat man up the steps and through the front door, which Ignacio closes and locks behind. Then they pause, catch their breath, and look at one another as though for answers. Kelog, roused by the commotion, hops atop the unconscious man and pecks at the blood spots speckling his shirt.

“Is he dead?” she finally asks.

“Of course he’s not!” Ignacio pauses to check. And there it is—the tiny, regular spasm of a pulse. “Of course he’s not.”

She is clearly pleased by the news. “Well, where’s he going to stay?”

“He can have my room,” Littleboy says. “I can take the couch, no problem.”

“Guys.” Ignacio removes Kelog from the American’s chest. “He’s not a fucking houseguest.”

“Ah-ha,” his wife says, breathing evenly. “All right then, what is he? Who is he?”

A good question. Ignacio goes through the fat man’s pockets and finds a ratty wallet, swollen and old. An expired driver’s license inside identifies him as Howard Bridgewater, from Illinois. Ignacio had been confident he was from the States when he barked obscenely into his cell phone back in the taxi, but now there is no question: the man lying on his living room floor is American. Why does this thought thrill him so? Why, he wonders, does it terrify him so?

Ignacio’s wife takes the wallet and inspects it carefully, leafing through the contents with her fingertips as though turning the pages of an old book. “No money,” she says. There is nothing accusatory in her tone. She’s just voicing an observation.

“Of course there’s money.” Ignacio snatches the wallet back and upends it on the floor. But she’s right—nothing in there but faded paper and some generic-brand condoms. “He’s got to have money. He was going to the Shangri-La. And he promised to pay me meter plus a hundred.”

“Maybe he was going to rob you,” she says, smiling a smile that makes her look old. Then her smile fades. “I don’t see why you had to hurt him that badly. He can’t have run away.”

“Someone like him doesn’t have to run.” Ignacio leans over the unconscious American—over
Howard
—to search him. With Littleboy’s help he tips him over to get at his back pockets, finding a key-card for the hotel as well as another wallet. This second one is new and cheap, containing nothing but two crisp hundred-peso notes. Junk change considering the risk Ignacio has taken, but it’s promising—obviously a decoy for pickpockets. Which means there must be a real stash somewhere else.

They find it in his socks and shoes. Twenty-thousand pesos, rumpled and stinking and wet from the rain. Not bad at all. Ignacio keeps searching while his wife and Littleboy lay the notes out to dry them. He unzips Howard’s pants, hoping for one of those gut-hugging
money-belts popular with tourists. But all he finds is a naked abdomen rubbed bare of body hair and rutted with stretch marks like the weathered slope of a mud hill. He zips Howard’s fly back up and buttons his pants. Of all the things he’s done tonight this is the only one that makes him squirm, just a little, with self-reproach.

“Do you want to bring him somewhere?” his wife asks. “We could leave him close to a hospital.”

Ignacio shakes his head. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows he isn’t done with Howard yet. “You were right,” he says. “We should put him in Littleboy’s room.”

“I’ll make the bed,” she says, nodding. Littleboy stands to help.

“Don’t,” Ignacio says. “Move it. The bed … everything. Let’s get it all out of there.”

And so they do. Still sore from dragging Howard inside, the three of them empty Littleboy’s bedroom, moving the well-kept secondhand bed frame, the rattan hutch and electric fan like roomies helping a departing friend. They even take his Ocampo Justice posters off the walls, hanging them instead in the living room beside Ignacio’s extensive collection—relics from his short-lived video rental place. Charlie Fuentes looks right at home beside Tim Roth and Kiefer Sutherland. Now that Littleboy’s room is totally bare it becomes Howard’s room. They drag him inside and close the door. Then they mill about, quietly. What do you do with your morning when you’ve already done this?

“I’m going to bed,” Ignacio says. Then, to his wife: “You coming?”

“No,” she says. “You know how it is.”

He does know how it is. He pulled her out of a crash, and now that she’s awake it’ll be a few hours before she gets that urge to tweak again. She’ll have some early breakfast, maybe watch some television. Ignacio, for his part, is ready for a crash of his own. He’s ready for the clear head that he knows will follow sleep, and holy shit, he feels like he could sleep for hours, if not days. He goes into the master bedroom and curls into the still warm hollow his wife left in the mattress. Out in the living room she and Littleboy turn on the televison, filling their home with the booming lullaby of international news. Ignacio is out in seconds.

And he dreams. A wonderful dream wherein he, Charlie Fuentes,
Roth and Sutherland rob a bank. They shoot up the place. They torture the safe combination out of the manager’s throat. And they get away with millions.

TWO DAYS LATER
, a Monday, Ignacio and Littleboy head to the Shangri-La hotel. Ignacio’s plans at this point are still murky. Part One is find Howard Bridgewater’s room. Part Two is steal whatever they discover in there—presumably luggage, jewelry and a shit-ton of cash. Part Three is yet to be determined, though Ignacio has vaguely considered a ransom note of some kind. Or a false suicide note. Or a fire. He’s still in the brainstorming stage, really.

But even before Part One, at
Part Zero
, he and Littleboy run into complications. Ignacio had hoped to arrive in the morning, before the commotion of checkout and the attendant bustle of housekeeping. But he hadn’t reckoned on how much the already-terrible Manila traffic would be worsened by the elections. He hadn’t, in fact, even remembered that today was Election Day. But there it is; a big-ass rally right in the middle of EDSA, with Charlie Fuentes appearing in person to get out the vote. Littleboy asks if they can stay and watch and Ignacio says no. But it makes no difference. They idle in the gridlock for over an hour, catching most of the speech, Littleboy clapping and cheering out the passenger window.

It gets no easier when they finally arrive at the Shangri-La. Guards at the giant glass entryway take time patting them down and staring into their faces. They are allowed inside but aren’t in the lobby—and Christ,
what a lobby
—for a full minute before a prim little concierge sets on them. “What do you want?” she asks, wasting no time on hospitality, or English.

“We are guests from—”

“What room?” she asks, a hand already on each of their arms, already walking them back to the giant glass doors.

“Room 506,” Ignacio says, setting his heels but unable to resist the pull of her hard, tiny fingers.

“There is no room 506,” the concierge says.

“I bet you there is,” Ignacio says.

“Fine,” she says, “there is. But it isn’t yours.” They have reached the glass doors now. Not wanting to make a scene, Ignacio frees himself from her grip and exits on his own steam. But the concierge follows. “These two,” she says, talking now to the guards. “
No. No
. They are
not
allowed.” The guards look at their shoes, ashamed. And Ignacio and Littleboy retreat to a Starbucks across the street, drinking frothy iced drinks for hours as they wait for a shift change.

THEY TRY AGAIN
in the afternoon. Through the glass doors, past the new guards—staring, patting, cupping just as suspiciously—and into the shiny lobby. There’s the bank of elevators just ahead and Ignacio goes for it at a jog-walk with Littleboy stumbling gape-mouthed behind. “Iggy,” he says, “Iggy, are you
seeing
this?”

At the elevators Ignacio presses the button, hard. He and Littleboy wait. He presses the button again. And again.

“What do you want?” He turns and sees another concierge, this one just as prim, just as little, just as beautiful and cold. But now he’s ready for her.

“Driver, ma’am,” he answers, in broken taxicab English. “Boss stays here,” he points above, vaguely. “Sends text he needs me.” Then, remembering Littleboy: “Us.”

“What room?”

“Room 506,” Ignacio says. He has to restrain his smile. He feels that by repeating this arbitrary number he is somehow sticking it to them. And he is.

The concierge sighs—a light, scolding sigh—and tells them to next time use the service entrance. Then she takes a card from her uniform pocket and inserts it into a slot above the elevator button. The doors open promptly. Ignacio and Littleboy step inside and wave thanks to the concierge. The doors close, and now Ignacio restrains nothing. He smiles and he laughs and he gives her the finger. Littleboy does as well. And they remain like that, flicking off their reflections in the shiny doors as they are ferried upward to the fifth floor of the Shangri-La.

THEY DON’T GET OFF
when the elevator stops, though Littleboy tries, saying: “But, 506?” when Ignacio pulls him back. Together they wait for the doors to close again. Then Ignacio removes Howard Bridgewater’s key-card from his wallet. He’s noticed a slot above the polished regiment of numbered buttons—a slot much like the one in the lobby below. Could it really be this easy? Howard’s key-card fits in perfectly and gives Ignacio the appealing sensation of sliding a hot knife through brass. He removes it and one of the buttons lights up, as though pressed. Jackpot, he thinks.