“Shit, man,” Dagoberto hissed between clenched teeth, “people who fuck with me always end up dead.” Then he tried to laugh. “But the two of us should be amigos, we have so many friends in common.” He set down his drink, carefully, then I tightened the hold. He just grunted and tried to smile. “Roberto, please.”
The bartender stepped over to hold the swinging doors open. A swarthy guy in a chef’s hat checked a large soup pot while Wynona chopped onions with a large knife. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the place, Lester’s faint cries drifted toward me. Then the doors slowly closed. A moment later Wynona walked out smiling under her red eyes, wiping her hands on a cloth towel.
“If you’d put a kitchen match in your mouth,” I said, “the onions wouldn’t make you cry.”
“I’ll bet your sweet mama told you that,” she said. “I’m so glad you found us, Mr. Sughrue,” she said, “we just missed you at the pharmacy.” I handed her Lester’s medicine, and she thanked me. “He’ll be fine now. We’ll both be fine. Can I get my gear out of your van?”
“Sure,” I said.
“These two Meskin boys,” she said, nodding over her shoulder, “will help us.” Chato and David stood up and strolled over.
I led our little group, followed by Dagoberto, out to the van to unlock it. I reached for the diaper bag in the seat, but Wynona jumped past me into the back, saying, “I see all my stuff back here. Thanks.” Then she handed her gear and the child seat to Chato and David, and without another word, she followed them back to the Quirky Arms.
“I hope Baby Lester’s all right,” I said to her back.
“Thanks,” she said without turning.
Dagoberto smiled at me. “Hey, vato, I don’t know why, but I like you. I got no reason. You come into my place of business wearing a gun, not just once but twice, and you tear the heart out of my armpit with some old judo hold, but still I like you. So let’s have that drink.”
I considered my options: I had my hand on the Glock under the diaper bag, so I could try to bluff him into the van, but I didn’t think that would work; or I could step back into the spider’s web and see what was shaking.
“Why not?” I said. “I’m a professional. I can have a cocktail with the enemy.”
“Believe me, Mr. Sughrue,” Dagoberto said seriously, “I am not the enemy. Like you, man, I am just a hired hand.”
Which told me nothing. Or everything.
Roberto did a pretty good job with the martini. I sipped mine, but Dagoberto gunned his like cheap tequila.
When I stared at him, he said, “Man, I have hated gin since the day I got to the U.K.” I looked a little more amazed than disgusted. “My old man sent me to Oxford. I hated every moment on that foul little island with those pasty-faced pricks. ’Cept for the women, of course; they were fine. But I made this place look like it does to remind me of those bad times.”
“Never had the pleasure myself,” I said.
“Forget it,” he said.
“I never forget anything,” I said. “Mel, Wynona, Lester—they’re like family to me. Their health and safety are your personal responsibility.”
“You make friends too fast, my friend,” he said, smiling at his own frail joke.
“Hurt them and you’re dead,” I said, then finished my drink. “No matter how long it takes, I’ll find you and gut you with a punji stake and you’ll take a long, hard time to die.”
“You old farts,” he said, “still mucking around in that war. Hell, you guys lost the son of a bitch, and that’s the real story, fucking old news, so get the fuck out of my place, man, or we’ll see who dies …”
It wasn’t a great right hook, a little too short and a bit off center, but he was a small, rich Mexican and probably hadn’t been hit in the face in his life. It lifted him off the stool and staggered him into the nearest tourist, a tall, stately type. “See you around, pepper-belly,” I said, in my best Texas twang.
The stately type helped Dagoberto to his feet, then turned on me with one of those educated Texas accents, the type that defies shit to melt in their mouths, and said, “Sir, you’re the sort of Texan who gives the rest of us a bad name.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
David and Chato wanted to laugh, but Dagoberto, who couldn’t even get his eyes focused in time to shout a parting threat, was the boss.
But nobody followed me out to the van, so I assumed they were going to leave it alone for the moment.
If only the FBI would have.
Cromwellington and his twin brother picked me up when I left the Quirky Arms, followed me about town until I found a service station with a hydraulic lift, which is no small feat these days, then bribed the gas jockey to let me look underneath the van. The FBI didn’t seem to mind. They drove past to park down the street and read the morning paper like innocent bystanders. I found the transmitter fixed to the side of the gas tank and pried it off. Then I called Solly.
“… then what is my legal position,” I asked as soon as he stopped lecturing me for losing my only lead and I stopped criticizing his read on Dagoberto and his merry band, “with a bug like this?”
“I don’t know, Sughrue, but I don’t think it comes under the federal wiretap regulations.”
“So what should I do with it?”
“If it belongs to them,” he answered, “they might bust you for destroying government property.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m a lawyer,” he said. “Is there a voice bug inside the van?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have it swept when I get to Denver.”
“What the fuck’s in Denver?”
“Backup,” I answered, truthfully I hoped.
“Norman’s been bugging me. Maybe I should send him and some of his boys down to help,” he said, then added, laughing, “or I could show up again.”
“Norman got me into this mess,” I said. “Let’s keep him at a safe distance, okay? If he really wants to get involved, he can find his own fucking mother.”
“Sure, but what about the women and that kid?”
“That’s my problem,” I said. “If I hurry, the stupid fuck won’t even move them. I’ve got an old buddy who’s a cop in Denver …”
“The big guy from Nam? What was his name? The Big Tamale?”
“Super Nacho,” I said. “But what should I do about the FBI?”
“Worst they can do is pick you up as a material witness, and I’ll blow that bullshit right out of the water. Without a warrant they can’t do a thing except act tough and stupid,” he said, then added, “so piss on them.”
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t. I made do with a pound of roofing nails scattered on the interstate entrance ramp as they tried to follow me to Denver. Their tires went flat all around, as did those of a battered gray pickup just behind them. Down the interstate I tossed their transmitter up against the side of a cattle truck, but the magnet didn’t stick. We all know what “good enough for government work” actually means.
Denver used to be one kind of place, a link between the Great Plains and the Rockies, but now it might as well be Minneapolis. When you can’t see the mountains for the smog, every place is the same.
I found a local electronics guy to sweep my van and verify that it was clean, and in spite of the traffic and the new street scheme downtown, I still made it to the main station by midafternoon. The desk sergeant, as usual, wouldn’t have told me his name without his name tag, but he was a vet. After I showed him my driver’s license and my reduced and laminated DD 214, separation papers from the 1st Cav, he relented slowly, a grin spreading across his face.
“Detective Sergeant Vega. Sure, fellow,” he said, the grin growing, “he’s working juvenile. If you hurry, you can probably catch him at this address.” He scrawled an address for me, then gave me directions.
When I got there, I had to look at the address twice. It was an elementary school. After a bit, I saw Nacho shamble down the steps in a suit way too l
arge for him, followed by a flock of little kids who didn’t seem exactly impressed by his size or his badge, which still dangled from his coat pocket.
As he stalked past the van, I stepped out on the sidewalk to say, “Hey, Blood, you lookin’ downright skinny. You been humping the bush without your fearless leader?”
He stopped his giant, gaunt frame, saying as he turned, “By the Rio Pocomoco, slowly I turned, and step by step …,” then began to advance upon me, his outstretched hands poised to crush my throat, but at the last moment, threw his arms around me, picked me off the ground as if I were a child, and swung me around and around in the brilliant October air while the children watched in amazement. They’d never heard of Abbott or Costello. Which was their loss.
Franklin Ignacio Vega was either the luckiest man I had ever known or the unluckiest. Born in El Paso to a half-German half-black father and a half-Mexican half-Samoan mother, Nacho grew up with no place to call home, no race, creed, heritage, picked upon by everybody on the street with the slightest trace of ethnic purity. His soldier father was killed in a bad jump at Fort Campbell before he could marry Nacho’s mother, so the Army gave them nothing except his last name for Nacho’s first. She cleaned houses on the west side, while Nacho shined shoes and fought every street kid on the east side. Luckily Nacho was nearly as big as a house, early on, which is why football looked as if it were going to save his life.
During his teens he played ball at a high school so poor they couldn’t afford to buy shoes big enough to fit his feet, but even slipping around the dusty fields in cheap tennis shoes he managed a scholarship to Colorado, where he made the All-Big Eight second team at defensive end three years in a row, where he might have made the first team if he would have talked to reporters, but he didn’t. As far as they were concerned, he was just a big dumb good-looking Mexican kid. And the white girls fell all over him, which never helps.
The pros called before he finished his degree, but he got cut at Boston because he didn’t have enough downfield speed. “Cut by a fucking clock,” he used to say, “without ever playing a down from scrimmage.” So he went to Canada, where he was cut to meet the Roughriders’ American quota. “Then cut for being an American,” he used to say when we were stoned in our hooch. “Do I look like a fucking American to you, Sarge?”
Not a bit. As far as I was concerned, Nacho looked like Tarzan of the Apes should have, like the man who ruled the jungle. Of course, that’s where the Army sent him, shortly after he was drafted. “Maybe if I’d stood up straight that day, they would have cut me, too.” Nacho got in under the Army’s height standards by one-eighth of an inch.
That’s the unlucky part.
The lucky part: Franklin Ignacio Vega survived two combat tours with the 1st Cav carrying an M-60 machine gun, two full tours without suffering a scratch, a scrape, or a day on sick call. That luck followed him into the Denver Police Department: Nacho had never pulled his revolver on duty. Now it looked as if he never would, since his job was to convince inner-city kids that the police were their pals.
After I got my breath back, Nacho suggested catching up over a beer, so we climbed into the van and headed west.
“Hey,” he said, “let’s see if we can’t find that little ant turd, Gorman. The little fuck has probably already run through his route and is dying for a beer and a jukebox.”
“El Hormiga, the fucking ant is in town?”
“Hey, where you been, Sarge? Jimmy’s been in town for years. Works for the post office. Turn right here.”
Jimmy Gorman was a tiny Irish kid from Philly who walked point for us. Unlike Nacho, Jimmy had joined at seventeen and wouldn’t have passed the short end of the height test if he hadn’t spent the night before hanging from a head harness to stretch his spine.
When we got to the post office, Nacho flashed his badge, and the window clerk told us that Jimmy hadn’t shown up. But some confused old woman from Jimmy’s route had. She claimed that the mailbox on her corner was singing. The supervisor was on his way.
Nacho and I pushed it as hard as we could, but the supervisor was unlocking the green route storage box as we parked beside it. When he pulled open the door, Little Jimmy tumbled out, his transistor radio clasped in one hand, and a nearly empty pint of Jack Daniel’s in the other. It would have been better if he had been dead instead of merely passed out.
His supervisor addressed Jimmy in official tones and Jimmy responded like a true postman.
“You can’t fire me, you asshole!” he shouted.
The supervisor just smiled. Jimmy was about to split him open like a pig in a slaughterhouse, but Nacho wrapped his long arms around Jimmy and made peace with the official world. After he had gotten Jimmy locked in the van, he tried to explain to the supervisor that Jimmy was on stakeout for the Denver Police Department. The supervisor’s smile changed to laughter.
By the time we got to the nearest bar Jimmy was cutting the post office patches off his uniform.
“Chill your jets, Jimmy,” Nacho said, then shambled off to the latrine.
“It’s not like you got busted, kid,” I said. “Hell, the government never fires anybody.”
“That’s the fucking trouble,” Jimmy shouted, then looked at me, his drunken eyes finally realizing who I was. “Jesus, Sarge, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Night ambush, kid. You up for it?”
“Don’t kid around, okay?” he said seriously.
“I came to see the Super Nach’, and he said we should …”
“Jesus, you know, where have you been? Nobody’s called Frank that in years,” he said. “And you, you know, I spent—what?—six months in the bush in your squad and I can’t fucking remember your name …”
“Sughrue,” I said, holding out my hand. “Let’s drink to civilian life.”
“People like us, Sarge, we never get to be civilians,” he whispered, then added suddenly, “You didn’t get hit, you got arrested, right? For fraggin’ that family. Just bad luck. That’s what I told the CID guys. What the hell, though, didn’t I hear that you went to Leavenworth for that? That true?”
“Not exactly,” I said, “I went to graduate school.” Then changed the subject. “What’s wrong with Nacho?” Then quickly wished I hadn’t.
“Ah, fuck, Sarge, he’s dying. Cancer. He’s eat up with it. Started in his gut, but now it’s everywhere.” Then Jimmy hit his beer hard. “Don’t let on like you know, okay? Nobody knows but me and his ex-wife. The cops don’t know. He don’t have another physical for four months. So he’s trying to build his retirement check for his kids. Not that the little fucks deserve it. Poor bastard married the worst white woman in America and believe me when I say that I know what I’m talking about.”
Before I could say anything, Nacho came back to the table, grinning through the gray pallor lurking like a lie beneath his rich brown skin.
“What are you girls gossiping about now?”
“Just catching up, Frank. We ain’t got to old times yet,” Jimmy said, laughing and punching Nacho on the shoulder with so much affection it brought tears to my eyes.
The rest of the night was like an ambush: close, dirty work in a frenzied scramble. One of the few clear moments I remember came as we exchanged a narrow crowded yuppie bar for a Mexican jazz club. We were in an alley somewhere down by the train station. Somehow we had garnered a couple of women passengers, a giant Jamaican doobie, plus an extreme desire to all piss at once.
One of the girls wanted to know if it was all right to piss in this warehouse alley. She had already hiked up her tight skirt and was skinning out of her panty hose and hanging on to a sign so she could lean backward. This was no yuppie chick; this woman had pissed outdoors before.
“This is perfect, ma’am,” Nacho, whom I had started to call “Frank” already, said. “This is a ‘coop,’ lady.”
“A coop?” she said, pissing neatly.
“Where patrol units, cops, come to sleep late on shift. It’s too early, so we’re
clean and green right here.”
“Not me,” the other woman giggled from behind a loading dock, where she tried to be modest. “I think I just pissed on my new come-fuck-me’s, Linda.”
“I told you how to do it, hon,” Linda said, struggling back into her clothes. Then she walked over to Nacho. “How do you know that?” she asked. “About the cops?”
“I am a member of the Denver police force, ma’am.”
“Why aren’t you arresting us?”
“I’m off duty,” Frank said solemnly.
“I’m off base,” Jimmy added.
“And I’m off, period,” I said.
“I’ve never been exactly regular,” Linda said, then laughed wildly.
I dug out the cocaine while the doobie circled the shadows, then Mexican food sounded a little heavy after that, so it was Chinese in what looked like an Italian place way out Colfax.
Somehow about daylight Frank and I were in the middle of an argument in a suite at an airport motel. I put up the money and Frank put up his badge. I think he told them we were on a stakeout. Whatever, we were high enough up on the east side of the motel to watch the sun clear the eastern horizon. Jimmy had collapsed in front of the television. The girls—ah, the girls—had gone into the bedroom together.
I guess it happens that way sometimes these days. Good-looking women prefer each other to asshole men. Linda explained it to us in a long cocaine speech about sensitivity, thanking us for the drugs and drink, trying to compliment us by saying we weren’t bad guys for men, and that sometimes they went out drinking around men just to remind themselves what they weren’t missing, but now they were tired and sleepy and half-horny, would we excuse them.
Frank and I looked at each other after the bedroom door closed behind them. That’s when I opened the drapes to watch the sunrise.
“How come I don’t give a shit?” I asked Frank.
“You always were a fucking hippie,” he answered, which started the argument. “I knew that when you took over the squad, and I know it now.”
The Mexican Tree Duck Page 11
