The Devil's Redhead (49 page)

“You are trying, goddamn trying, to fuck me up,” he shouted.

She sat there, holding a bloody length of thread, her eyes closed, waiting to die.

“I saved your life,” he told her.

“I didn't ask you to.” She looked up past the gun into his eyes. “I asked you, if they were going to kill me, to make sure you were the one who did it.”

He grinned, thumbing the hammer down gently. “Same thing.” He lowered his chin onto his chest and laughed. Closing his eyes to hide his tears, he put the gun down and wiped his face. “Check the bathroom,” he murmured. “Maybe there's some gauze, some bandages. Anything.”

She pulled herself up on the chair she used for a walker and hobbled down the hallway, stumbling twice, one time banging her teeth against the chrome back of the chair. In the bathroom she checked the medicine cabinet for anything that might ease her pain, finding nothing for her effort but toothpaste, hydrogen peroxide and laxative. Never go to a junkie for drugs, she thought.

Closing the cabinet door, she saw a stranger's reflection in the mirror. Good God, she thought, as recognition finally claimed the image. A sensation of cold swept through her, and she associated the chill with something her grandmother used to say: Someone just walked across my grave. The phrase evoked an image: a tall cloaked figure stepping across fresh earth. It's not my grave, she realized. It's Danny's.

Live, she thought, clutching the sink to keep from falling. Whatever happens, to me or anybody else, please live.

She pulled herself away from the mirror. In the drawer she found gauze squares and an Ace bandage. Shoving them down into her pocket, she turned her chair about and trounced back toward the kitchen where Cesar sat, his head buried in the crook of his good arm, the other arm hanging at his side. Blood dripped from his fingers to the floor.

“Talk to me,” she said, tearing open the wrapper of one of the gauze squares. “Tell me about Hidalgo.”

“I already told you. He's a spike.”

She applied the bandage to the underside of his arm, covering the exit wound, which seeped blood. “Hold that there,” she told him. He obeyed. “How do you know him?”

“Hidalgo? I know him from home. His old man's a
jefe
like mine.”

“What's that?” Shel ripped open the next bandage.

“
Jefe
? It's like a boss. Guy in the community who's connected. Hidalgo's family lives in Netzahuacóyotl, east of the airport.”

“Is that nice?”

“It's a slum. For garbage pickers. Which means it's paradise compared to Chalco.”

She remembered the name. “That's where you're from,” she said, overlaying the first square with the second, forming a Star of David.

“Yeah.” He held the two pieces of gauze in place as she opened the next. “Hidalgo's people know my people. They look down their noses at us. Fucking garbage pickers. Can you believe that?” Shel applied the next bandage to the wound on top of his arm. It was the smaller of the two. Cesar spread his hand, to hold both the top and bottom bandages in place at once. “The joke is,” he continued, “they can bitch about us all they want. We're family. There've been a couple of marriages. I met Hidalgo as a kid at one of the weddings.”

“You're related.”

“He's my cousin,” Cesar said.

Shel began unraveling the Ace bandage. Cesar gestured with a nod back toward the room in which Hidalgo lay in his stupor. “What should I tell his people?” he said. “I've seen him loaded dozens of times. Never like this.”

“Is that where you're going?” she asked. “You're going to hide with his family?”

Cesar cackled. “Papa Cleto wouldn't waste a fucking second to decide. He'd sell me to the highest bidder.”

“That's your uncle?”

“Hidalgo's old man,” Cesar confirmed.

“What about your own family?”

“Worse.”

She wrapped the elasticized bandage around his arm as tight as she dared, enough to hold the bandages in place, not so much as to cut off circulation and risk gangrene. “If you can't trust your family, where are you going to run?”

“We,” he corrected. “Where are
we
going to run.”

The sound of a tow truck from the street below interrupted them. Cesar stood up, hobbled to the window over the sink and peered out from the edge of the curtain.

“Fucking hell,” he whispered.

Coming up behind him, Shel saw a patrol car and a tow truck positioned at opposite ends of the car. The tow truck's yellow light spun in the opposite direction of the cruiser's blue-and-red flasher, the beams intersecting in circles across the grime-caked cars parked along the cul-de-sac. The cop pointed his flashlight through the windshield, holding it like a spear. The light refracted through the shattered glass, creating an etchwork of shadows across the bloody upholstery. Wait till he finds the hand stuffed under the seat, Shel thought.

“Get back,” Cesar hissed as a second cruiser pulled up behind the first.

He pulled her away from the edge of the window. There'd be other cruisers soon, they both knew that. Turning his back to the curtains, Cesar put his hand to his head, gritting his teeth. Eyes closed, he started pounding his forehead with the heel of his hand, whispering, “Think, motherfucker, think …”

Shel clutched the kitchen counter for balance. Through the fog of her pain and fear an idea took form. “We get out of here somehow,” she said, “before they start doing a door-to-door. Hole up in the bushes if we have to. Tomorrow morning, we make the ferry, I know a guy in San Francisco. Name's Eddy, owns a body shop out in the avenues. We can get a car.”

Cesar cracked his eyes, which were milky from tears. He turned toward her, unsteady, grinning. “You said, ‘we.'”

CHAPTER

23

A half hour after the rain stopped, a line of seven cars appeared and rolled slowly past the marina. Abatangelo rose onto his knees and sighted the caravan through his viewfinder. The cars sagged from the weight they carried, their suspensions creaked. The procession crept steadily across the loose muddy gravel until all seven cars lined up parallel to the windbreak wall.

The men got out, Latinos, three dozen or so. No more than six looked older than twenty, and the older ones had the yeomanly manner of hired men. They wore identical jumpsuits, like prisoners. Some wore black hooded parkas, either pulled over the jumpsuit or wrapped around the waist, sleeves knotted in front. A few of the young ones sported a hint of jewelry, a bit of personal flash. Abatangelo thought of Moreira's press release, his promise to lift young pachucos off the street and offer them steady work.

They unloaded firearms from the car trunks in a steady, methodical hush, carrying the weapons in their arms like firewood, passing them over the wall to companions standing ankle-deep in the grassy mud. There were pump guns and bird rifles, sighted hunting carbines. Then came the serious stuff: riot guns, streetsweepers, strikers, one or two MAC-10's for the hirelings. Ammunition boxes followed, passed hand to hand, along with cartons filled with jars of gasoline, knotted rags, cans of spray paint, the stuff of hand-to-hand street combat.

The men jumped the wall, spreading out in both directions, as the cars pulled away. One of the leaders signaled back toward the marina with his flashlight, kicking the gravel around to hide the tire tracks. Abatangelo fixed him in the telephoto lens, everything rendered vivid and immediate through the PLI. The man's skin became the dark green of leafage; the background resembled the rippled green of pool water.

Three tottering vans appeared in the distance. They were old and rusting along the chrome lines, the wheel wells. The vans queued past the marina and, guided by the leader with the flashlight, pulled in slowly along the wall. The gunmen spaced themselves between the vans and on either end, setting up their ambush, stacking the rifles side by side along the wall, barrels up, stocks in the high wet grass. Abatangelo honed in on faces as the men loaded beehive rounds into the pump guns, deer rounds into the hunting rifles, then passed the jars of gasoline, the rags, the spray cans, up and down the line, setting them down with care. The parkas came on for shelter from the rain. Once the men were settled, one by one they removed handcrickets from their pockets and signaled down the line.

Abatangelo settled back on his haunches. Even if Shel was down there, he thought, inside one of the vans, the Mexicans had no intention of simply handing her over and being done with the matter. That much was obvious from the manpower and weaponry. They'd had their war council. Felix Randall and his men, if they bothered to appear, were low enough, hated enough, to take down without fearing much of a manhunt. Nobody at the Justice Department would so much as yawn. As for the locals, who cared? It actually made things simpler, tidier, if the Mexicans ran the meth trade. No more renegade biker romanticism, no more Aryan warrior myth. They could all join hands against the foreign menace. Blame immigration.

Abatangelo leaned forward again, returning his attention to the vans. The drivers remained in place, swallowed up in shadow, behind which firewalls separated the cabin and cargo areas. There'd be no telling if Shel was there, inside one of those vans, or even if she was alive, until they opened the doors and either brought her out or didn't. He pulled away from the viewfinder again and massaged his eyes.

An intimation of the lunacy, the pointlessness of his being there, overwhelmed him. It combined with a gutting sense of loss. She's dead, he thought. If they haven't done it already, they'll make it part of the show. And I'll be here, he thought, peering through the viewfinder as she gets dragged from one of the vans, marched to the middle of the gravel road, given a little shove so the gunman can get a proper aim, then murdered.

Don't do this, he told himself, shaking off the image.

He considered giving up the subterfuge, revealing himself and walking down, trying to barter for her. They'd kill him on the spot, he realized—drag his body into the grass and go back to waiting for Felix Randall's men. A minor distraction. A little sidelight before the main event.

There'd be no saving her. Not here. As that sank in, the full weight of Shel's death, already accomplished or imminent, bearing down, he thought to himself, “I'm sorry.” The words felt foolish, the sentiment wretched and small. If he'd simply had the courage to want her, like Wax said—the courage to comfort her when she came for help, be thankful for her being there, not connive some inane, scheming justice—she would very likely be safe and well. Frank might even be alive, he thought, or at least the blame for his death would lie elsewhere. He remembered Waxman, after the explosion, confiding he was afflicted with the image of a schoolbook drawing, Icarus in flames. What he left unremarked, of course, was the other half of the story—the vanity of Daedalus. His vanity and, in the end, his guilt.

He returned his eye to the viewfinder and photographed every grouping of shooters along the wall, as well as the drivers slouched down inside the vans. It might provide leverage later, he thought. Somebody with his face in a picture would add just a little more to the story to save himself. And if that didn't end up keeping anyone alive, it would at least tell the tale.

A few of the men lit cigarettes, sheltered from sight by the wall but still cupping the ash glow with their hands and exhaling into the mud. A crack pipe made the rounds. One man, rocking on his haunches, fingered a cross hung from his neck by a leather thong. Two of the younger ones held hands and lowered their heads, praying. Rendered green and hazy by the PLI, the figures seemed strangely innocent through the lens, as though their images were mere projections—evil, mutinous projections—not their real selves. Their real selves remained elsewhere, asleep in bed, with their alibis.

The rain brought an acrid stench out of the ground, suggestive of petrol mixed with sewage. In the distance a short queue of tank cars pushed by a diesel tender rolled along the rail tracks inside the refinery perimeter; every man along the wall peered up, trying to see how close it was. Abatangelo braced himself against the incinerator wall for balance, hoping not to fall, betray his presence. His legs cramped. His feet had fallen asleep; his clothing, wet and cold, clung to his skin like cellophane. Using the noise of the train as cover, he pressed the shutter release and ran off seven frames, intending to catch the faces before they turned back toward the water.

The handcrickets started up again. Abatangelo caught the faint sound of motors approaching from beyond the marina.

Four new vans appeared, rolling quietly forward. The shooters along the wall grabbed their weapons, fingered the triggers and crouched, waiting for the signal to stand and fire.

The first three vans queued up as expected, but then the fourth shot past and spun back around, the bay door open. What followed defied comprehension at first, and then Abatangelo flashed on the article he'd read that morning, the weapon theft from the Port Chicago Weapons Station. A 7.6 mm chain gun. It opened fire from its mounting inside the van, targeting the Mexican vehicles at the level of the drivers' shoulders, heavy rounds cutting through the metal, shattering the windshields and window glass. Using this as cover fire, a stream of men emptied from the three far vans, flattening themselves along the roadbed and opening fire with carbines.

The first Mexicans to return fire were cut down, their heads shot piecemeal in eruptions of bloody bone. One man, screaming, went down firing his shotgun into the man beside him. Another lay on his back firing rounds into the sky, sobbing. Then the Mexicans' sheer numbers took a toll. The shotguns rained spinning darts across the road, taking out the first row of Felix's men, and the rifles added in with scattered fire. Two of the Mexicans fired their MAC-10's crazily, unable to control the muzzle lift and spending rounds into the air before leveling them out and taking proper aim.