Tequila Sunset (27 page)

Nasario and César shot Emilio six more times before Emilio fell. Flip finally had the little gun in his hand, but he was trembling so hard he nearly dropped it. He watched from the side of the road as Nasario came close to Emilio and shot him twice more in the head.

They came back to the car. “
Gracias por tu ayuda
,” Nasario said. “You want to take a shot now?”

Flip shook his head. He was breathing shallowly and words wouldn’t come. The pistol was gripped in his hand as if he were ready to throw it, not shoot it. Already Nasario and César had put their weapons away.

“Get in the car, man,” Nasario told Flip.

He thought to drop the gun right where he stood, but his fingerprints were all over it and surely the police weren’t so stupid that they wouldn’t be able to find him. Flip stuffed the gun back into his pocket and climbed into the back seat, sitting right where Emilio had.

Nasario turned the engine over and gunned down the road with his high beams on, making for a bend up ahead and then a sharp turn north. They were within a mile of the border. If Flip looked toward the United States, he could see bright lights coming from El Paso.

The car crisscrossed its path several times and then they drove on a road parallel to the border fence. Flip couldn’t make his hands be still. The bridge wasn’t far.

“Here,” Nasario said and they turned into the lot beside an auto shop. Cars were parked haphazardly, butting up against each other
like insects in a hive. They came up alongside a long dumpster piled high with metal scrap. Nasario stopped. “Give me your piece, man.”

Flip was happy to be rid of it. He pushed the gun away from himself as if it were a diseased thing and Nasario took it out of the car to the scrap loader. César went with him. Flip watched them use a red mechanic’s rag to wipe the guns down and then toss them in with the metal. They came back to the car in a hurry. Within a minute they were back on the road.

He could still feel the gun in his pocket, only now it was a void where the weapon had been. Anyone who looked at him would know he had just seen a man die, he was sure of it. “Pull over,” he told Nasario.

“What? We’re almost there.”

“Pull over!”

Nasario turned the car onto the shoulder. Flip barely got his door open before the beer in his stomach came boiling up and he vomited into the dust. He spat to clear his mouth, heaved again on an empty stomach and then closed himself in again.

César laughed and Nasario cast a smile over his shoulder. “You didn’t even do anything, dumbass,” César said.

“Don’t tell José,” Flip managed.

“Don’t worry, we won’t tell José nothing.”

Nasario turned up the volume on a song by MC Crimen and they went on. Flip leaned his head against the window and felt the cold glass against his skin. He was not sick again.

FIFTEEN

T
HE FIRST THING
C
RISTINA THOUGHT WHEN
she woke was that the ringing phone on her bed stand would wake Freddie. She smothered the phone with her hand and answered without checking the incoming number. It was four o’clock in the morning.

“Hello? Who is it?”

“It’s Flip.”

“Flip, it’s awfully early to be calling me.”

“I got to talk to you.”

Cristina sat up in bed. With one ear she listened out for the sound of Freddie’s feet hitting the floor, walking the short distance down the hall to her room, but it was quiet. If she was lucky, he was still deeply asleep. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I saw something tonight. I saw a guy get killed.”

Now Cristina was fully awake. It was not chill in the bedroom, but her skin prickled. She slipped out of bed and found her robe. The little bit of light coming through the bedroom window was enough to see by. “Who? Where did this happen?”

“In Juárez.”

“You were in Juárez again? You can’t keep crossing like that, Flip.”

“I didn’t have a choice!”

“Tell me everything from the beginning.”

She listened as Flip told the tale. The party. The order. The
killing. Cristina could hear his voice quavering as he spoke and knew it was all the truth. He had never lied to her or Robinson, and this was assuredly the truth.

“Are you sure Emilio is dead?” Cristina asked. She sat in a rocking chair in the corner, and set it to moving with her foot. It did not relax her. “Absolutely sure?”

“There’s no way he’s still alive,” Flip said. “They shot him too many times.”

“And you didn’t pull the trigger?”

“I never did.”

“People are going to ask me what you were doing there. Whether or not you took a shot. Only one bullet and it’s enough to nail you.”

“I know, but I never shot him.”

“They’re going to say this is a lot like last time. When you went up.”

“It is the same.”

“Only this time you knew there was going to be a murder.”

Flip was quiet. Cristina rocked the chair quickly. This is the chair she sat in when she nursed Freddie and when he would take long rests as a baby. Now the movement was as nervous as she was.

“Flip,” Cristina said, “what do you want to do?”

A sigh. “José suspects me.”

“No, he doesn’t. José wouldn’t bring you in on something like this if he didn’t trust you. You’re on the inside, Flip. All the way. And now that you’ve done this for him, he’s going to trust you even more because he thinks he’s got his hooks into you for a killing. Don’t you see, Flip? He’s blooded you, just like Enrique Garcia blooded you at Coffield.”

“That time it was a stabbing. I wasn’t out to kill nobody.”

“The stakes are higher now.”

“What happens when I keep telling you stuff and you keep
hassling José’s people? He’s going to know it wasn’t Emilio and he’s going to start looking again.”

“We’ll back off,” Cristina said. “We’ll wait a few weeks and let things cool down. If José thinks he’s got the right guy, he’s not going to turn his eye on you or anybody else. We can afford to give him some breathing room.”

Flip paused, and then he said, “Sooner or later, it’s going to come back on me.”

“I don’t believe that. But if you really want to put a stop to it, then I’ll revoke your CI status and you can go back to being one of José’s Indians. That means no more cover from the police department. You’ll be on the hook for everything you do.”

“You would do that?”

“I’d have to. But it’s up to you, Flip. I can’t make that decision for you.”

“I want to do the right thing.”

“Sure, I understand,” Cristina said. “We all want to do the right thing.”

“But…”

“Just say the word and I cut you loose.”

Flip sighed again. “You don’t make it easy.”

“It’s not my job to make it easy. My goal is to put José Martinez in prison and I’ll do that sooner or later. With your help it’ll be sooner, but I can wait. Right now we’re talking about how you can do for yourself.”

Cristina turned on a lamp and lit the corner. The sudden light hurt her eyes. She concentrated on the phone, listening to Flip’s breathing, trying to divine his thoughts out of the silence. What she wanted him to say was that he would go on and the case against José would keep building, but she knew that Flip was on a knife’s edge.

“You’ll talk to your people about Emilio?” Flip said after a long while.

“I’ll tell them exactly what you told me: that you didn’t have a hand in it, that you saw it all go down. But there are going to be questions when the time comes. I’m not going to lie to you about that.”

“Okay. Okay,” Flip said.

“Does that mean we’re still in this together?” Cristina asked.

“Yeah. I’ll do it.”

Cristina could hear the reservation in his voice, in the way he dragged the words out. She could not know what he was feeling, not really. Anything she thought would be speculation. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

“I guess I have to be.”

“I’m here if you need to talk. Anytime.”

“Yeah, all right,” Flip said and killed the connection.

Cristina sat a while in the rocking chair, her mind working, and thought of Flip wherever he was, with the weight of death pressing on his shoulders.

SIXTEEN

M
ATÍAS PICKED UP THE PHONE ALMOST
before it finished its first ring. “Segura,” he said.

“Matías. It’s Felix. I’ve got a body for you.”

He looked around. “Felix, I’m not doing bodies right now. I have things going on.”

“Oh, right, you’re not interested in Los Aztecas anymore.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then come out and see this body. You’ll find it interesting.”

“Okay. Where?”

Felix told him and Matías wrote it down. When he hung up, he gathered his jacket from the back of his chair and headed toward the elevators.

It took twenty minutes for Matías to reach the neighborhood Felix had called from. He made note of how few houses there were here and how many little businesses with chain-link fences or corrugated tin walls. The broad vacant lot where the body lay looked like it used to be something before the building there had been cleared. Lines of concrete still showed in the dirt.

The body was worth only a handful of police. Felix was the lone federal presence, the other cops part of the local force. Stakes had been driven into the ground and police tape strung between them. A white van from the city stood by to take the corpse away.

Matías shielded his eyes from the sun when he left his car. The day was dry, tending toward hot. Summer crept further and further
into spring every year. The scientists called it global warming. What would it be like when he was old? Would they ever see a winter?

“Matías,” Felix said when Matías came near. “Man of mystery. What do you have cooking in those offices of yours?”

“Show me the body.”

“Over here.”

The corpse was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt heavily stained with blood. Its face was deformed by a pair of bullets put through the center of the skull. Matías tried to estimate the number of entry wounds, but it was such a mess he couldn’t tell for sure. “Expensive shoes,” he said at last. “Nikes.”

“He still has his jewelry and his wallet was in his pocket,” Felix said. “You’ll like this: he’s an American.”

“Really?”

“Emilio Esperanza. Address in El Paso. And look here—” Felix bent down to push the dead man’s head to one side, exposing a tattoo with the stylized numbers 21.

“Azteca. One of theirs,” Matías said.

“They say he’s been out here three days.”

“Three days? He’s right by the roadside. Anyone could see him.”

Felix shrugged. “I guess no one thought it was worth reporting until now.”

“I can’t say that’s it really worth our time, either,” Matías said. “So the Aztecas from the American side lose one of theirs in Juárez. It’s happened before a hundred times. Two hundred times.”

“This one was under indictment in El Paso,” Felix said. “Come on with me.”

They went to Felix’s car, which squatted hot and black under the sun. Felix brought out a thick folder full of papers from the passenger seat and pulled out a thin sheet of fax paper. He handed it to Matías.

“Emilio Esperanza, out on bail,” Felix said. “They put a warrant
out on him when he didn’t show up for his court date and faxed us just in case he crossed the border. Looks like he did, but I’m thinking maybe he didn’t go willingly.”

“They killed one of their own.”

“Like you said, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“So why bring me in?”

“You’re in tight with the Americans on the Azteca thing. I thought maybe there might be a connection.”

Matías touched Felix on the arm and smiled. “There may be. May I keep this?”

“Sure. You need the stiff for anything?”

“No.”

Matías went back to his car. On the lot the technicians were coming for the body with a black, rubberized canvas bag. Behind the wheel he started the engine and turned on the air conditioning to chase off the heat. His jacket was too heavy for standing out in the sun.

He called a number in El Paso. The face of Emilio Esperanza stared out at him from the fax paper, obviously a booking photo. There was nothing of that face left on the corpse.

The phone was answered. “McPeek.”

“Jamie, it’s Matías.”

“Matías. I was going to call you.”

“I have a body here,” Matías said. “I’d like to find out where it came from.”

“Tell me everything.”

SEVENTEEN

E
NOUGH TIME HAD PASSED THAT
F
LIP HAD
begun to think things were improving between himself and Alfredo. For one, they had started eating lunch together again, though their conversations were very short and to the point. For another, Alfredo put on the radio when they drove to and from the warehouse, which was better than the stony silence of their drives before.

When Flip had been sick from seeing Emilio killed and stayed up all night, he almost thought Alfredo was going to ask him what was wrong, but he hadn’t and they went to work as usual. Alfredo didn’t even reprimand him when he made a mistake that day and almost crushed one of his workmate’s hands.

Alfredo hadn’t said anything about what transpired between them to Flip’s mother, and for that Flip was glad. He was also glad when Alfredo took his mother out for dinners and dancing because she always seemed lighter and brighter the following day, as if illuminated from the inside. Never in his life had he seen his mother that way. When Flip and Alfredo treated Flip’s mother to a Mother’s Day meal, she was overjoyed.

Now they sat opposite each other at one of the picnic tables, Flip eating cold cucumber soup his mother had made, Alfredo with a sandwich. Not much had passed between them that day.

“Payday today,” Alfredo said.

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do with your money?”