He next traveled to a place to the southwest of the businesses of Centenario. This was an area comprised almost completely of small, low-income houses. Even here some modern apartment complexes had been built to give the not-quite-so-poor the ability to feel a little better about themselves. The apartments demanded a steady source of income from their tenants and management moved swiftly if someone fell behind in their rent. These dwellings, while certainly not luxurious, were a good deal better than anyplace most of the residents had ever lived, even if they did come with only a view of a storage yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers, or of open sewage pits.
The houses that packed the streets were built so close to one another that the concept of a yard was completely foreign. To Manny’s eye, it appeared there was only enough room between the buildings to allow the people who built them to swing a hammer. Mazatlán Street was typical in this regard. Manny checked his phone for the address and found the place called, according to the internet, Ofe. Aside from a worn wooden sign nailed beside the front door, this house looked like every other on the street. It was a word that had no meaning, at least one that he knew, and when he knocked on the door, an old woman in a brightly colored house dress eventually answered the door. “Lo siento no tenemos habitaciones,” she said, looking toward the ground. Suddenly, she smiled and said, “Tal vez uno.” Finally, she looked at his face and her smile, a frightening collection of broken and rotting teeth, grew even wider. “Sí, definitivamente una habitación.”
Emmanuel smiled at the changed tune, from “Sorry, we have no rooms,” to “Maybe one,” and finally, “Yes, definitely one room.”
“I’m not here to rent a room,” he replied in Spanish. “I’m looking for someone. A fellow named Cara Rota.” Immediately, the woman’s smile disappeared as she, like the hotel maid, crossed herself fervently as she shook her head.
“No, no. He is not here. He has left. It was his room I would have shown you,” she answered, obviously distraught at having to talk about Rota. Manny threw all of his charm into the smile he now showed the woman.
“Perhaps I would like to see it after all. How much is the rent?”
“Fifteen hundred pesos,” the woman answered, a little warily as she nonetheless moved inside the house and beckoned Manny to follow.
“Ah, you charge weekly,” he said, doing a quick conversion and realizing that was a little less than seventy-five American dollars. The old woman stopped, shaking her head. “No. Eso es para el mes.”
For the month! Manny thought. Perfect for an itinerant street-rat with a face so disfigured it caused people to say a prayer of protection at the sight.
The room she showed him was small but clean. Very clean, in fact, as it was now devoid of any sign of habitation aside from a twin mattress on an old iron frame. Attempting to prolong the illusion that he might like to rent the space, Manny pressed on the bed a few times. It wasn’t anyone’s definition of comfortable, unless the person defining the word was used to resting on the hard city streets of Tijuana.
“Do you know much about Cara Rota?”
“That isn’t his name, you know.”
“No?”
She shook her head again, then almost as an afterthought, make a quick sign of the cross. “No. His ‘mother’ named him Danilo. Danilo Aguilar Muñoz.”
Manny could hear the sarcasm in her voice as she spoke the word “madre” and could see from her face that she didn’t hold a very high opinion of the woman. “I heard that she was dead.”
“Oh yes, and good riddance. I have known many like her. They have no skills other than those the Lord gave them to share with a husband, so they sell that. If there ends up being a child, it will have to raise itself. This one turned to the bottle at a young age and later to the heroin. She was murdered when the boy was small, just as are many others of her kind.” This time, the sign of the cross was no doubt for the soul of Cara Rota’s mother. Manny figured it to be wasted. He did it as well, however, in an effort to get the woman to talk more about the man he now knew was named Danilo Muñoz.
“What else can you tell me about him?” Manny asked.
A cloud of doubt crossed the woman’s face. “Did you just ask to see the room in hopes of being able to ask me more questions?”
Manny smiled. Busted, he thought. “To be honest, yes. It is very important that I locate him. But I will need a place to stay while I’m looking.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out six 500-peso notes. “May I pay for two months in advance?”
The woman’s eyes widened, and she crossed herself yet again. “Only the cartel has that kind of money,” she said suspiciously.
“Perhaps among those you’ve known in the past. This is not drug money. It’s money for you to feed yourself, and even if I do not stay the entire time, it’s yours to keep.”
Hesitantly, the woman reached with her gnarled, arthritic hand and took the bills. “Very well. Is there anything more I can tell you?”
Manny smiled, and the woman smiled back at the sight of it. He knew an alliance had just been forged. For the first time, she was offering to give him information. “Yes, please. What are you called?”
The cleaner didn’t realize that he was likely the best-looking person she’d ever spoken to, but nodded when she attempted to appear coquettish, saying, “All of my borders just call me Abuela.”
Grandmother, he thought. “Of course, they do. And so will I. Last question: Is there anything more you can tell me about Danilo, Abuela? Any idea where he might have gone?”
The woman pointed vaguely in the direction of the apartment buildings he’d noticed earlier. “I think perhaps I heard that he had somehow moved into one of the new buildings.”
“Interesting,” Manny said, genuinely surprised. Those units cost much more than fifteen hundred pesos per month, he knew. He had a lot to mull over and he thanked Abuela as he walked with her toward the door. She turned one last time to look at him before leaving, sighing as she did so. Manny remembered seeing women exhale that way in old black and white movies of Frank Sinatra crooning with the Tommy Dorsey Band. He also remembered something else he wanted to ask. “Abuela, why did you change your mind about renting me a room when you were looking at the ground?”
She smiled the battered grin again and said “Tus zapatos.”
“My shoes? Okay, I’m confused.”
“People with no money do not wear shoes that look like those,” she said, pointing to the comfortable Sperrys he was wearing.
“Aha!” He laughed as he closed the door. Looking down at the last minute, he saw that Abuela was, in fact, barefoot.
Once alone in the room he walked to the only furnishing. This time, he checked the mattress for signs of bedbugs, and finding none, sat on the edge of the it.
Cara Rota sounded like a very typical, hard-luck Tijuana story. Normally, Manny thought, his story would have ended similarly to that of his mother, with a needle in his arm in some flop even worse than Ofe. For him to have, allegedly, made it to the new apartments would mean a move in the other direction, indicating a rise in his fortunes.
It also made him harder to find, as there were dozens of the identical buildings, and other than a single sentence and a wave of the hand, he had nothing to direct his further search. Nothing except his comfortable shoes and a will to find the man with the broken face.
He pulled out his phone and quickly composed a text to Darlene, which read, “First real lead. Danilo Aguilar Muñoz, aka Cara Rota. More soon.” Then he left the room and walked down the hallway toward the front door. He passed a small parlor in which Abuela sat, giving all of her attention to a telenovela on a small-screened TV, his rent money protruding visibly from her brassiere, and stepped out into the humid air of a quickly dying afternoon.
Cruz walked briskly to the modern apartments and took in the area, looking first to see the big picture. He counted twenty of the structures. As he walked, he noticed a curiosity. There was plenty of parking space in the
area, with each building abutting one, sometimes two different lots. What he did not see were many cars. For the most part, the parking lots were being utilized by the children who lived in the buildings as playgrounds. Several games of fútbol were in progress, as well as some less structured games of tag and something Manny had heard about being popular among primary school-aged Mexican children, “Cops and Narcos.” Even at this tender age, the children of Tijuana were aware of the drug gangs, and in many cases, were captivated by their brazen exploits. The cops were, almost always, the bad guys in the game.
He first talked with the handful of adults present, but he managed to find nothing about Danilo Muñoz. Getting nowhere fast, he sat on a low concrete barrier in one of the lots, watching a group of kids chase after another, their fingers pointed in the universal form of the make-believe handgun, and thought about next steps. So intent was he upon thinking through what to do next that he didn’t notice a young boy, maybe eight, in a dirty striped tee-shirt and shorts that were once probably cream-colored, sit a few feet to his right. When the boy called to one of his friends to “dispararle a la policia” (shoot the cop), Manny looked over at him. He was winded from sprinting wildly about and wasn’t really paying much attention to the man sitting on the barrier near him.
“Oye, chico,” Manny called down to him. “Conoces a Cara Rota?”
The boy turned to look at Manny, squinting a little as he did. “Sí,” he said finally. He pointed to the building that was closest to where they were sitting. “Él entra allí.”
Interesting choice of words, Manny thought. Not “He lives there,” but rather, “He goes into there.”
“Cual piso?” he asked next, hoping that that the boy would indicate one of the lower stories of the block, or, failing that, that the elevator worked.
“No. En el sotano.”
The basement! Manny thought as he stood and reached into his trouser pocket. Extracting a ten-pesos piece, he flipped it though the air to the boy, who snatched the coin with a quick motion of his left hand.
“Gracias, señor!” he exclaimed running to excitedly show the windfall to his friends. By the time he pointed to Manny as the source of his good fortune, the cleaner was three-quarters of the distance to the building, and he ignored the calls of the other children, as they too hoped to earn a similar fortune. He moved to the front entry of the structure.
There was nothing resembling building security, either in the form of an intercom or a doorman, so he pulled on the burnished metal handle of the glass door and walked into the lobby. Two elevators hummed side by side, but needing to go just the one level down to the basement, Manny chose the stairs. As he opened the door leading to the staircase, he crinkled his nose. The smell of urine was unmistakable, and it grew stronger as he descended.
Manny’s family had moved to the States two generations before he’d been born, but he still considered himself a Mexican, and it bothered him that the poor would choose to move into a modern apartment building and immediately begin to treat it like any other slum. As he came to the bottom of the stairs and a dimly lit landing, he pulled open the door and saw that the basement hallway had several rooms located along its length. As he began to walk on the concrete floor, he thought again of his shoes. The expensive Sperrys had signaled affluence to Abuela, and now they allowed him to tread quietly, always a plus. He noticed that, like the bottom of the stairway, most of the light fixtures contained burned-out, perhaps deliberately-broken bulbs. The first frame he came to actually held no door, opening to a laundry room. The machines were idle, however, and a quick glance showed the most had out of order signs on them.
The next two were marked “Trastero” (storage room), and had number-pad-operated locks on them, which, annoyingly, seemed to be in working order. He tried the handles anyway, but to no avail. A third door, with a sign identical to the first two, was open a crack. He pushed on it and found the room was completely unlit. The dim illumination of the hallway barged in ahead of him, however, and he saw that the area was littered with cardboard boxes seemingly tossed about in a random manner. Garbage could be seen (and smelled) in piles scattered among the other debris. He stepped farther in, extracting a small flashlight from his blazer pocket.
At that moment, three things happened. The door, which had no working mechanism to close it automatically, slammed shut, plunging him into absolute darkness. His flashlight clicked on, pointing directly at perhaps the most hideous face he’d ever seen. And a thudding impact to the back of his head, which seemed for an instant to provide a flash of light, but was followed immediately by the blackness of insensibility.
When Emmanuel Cruz regained consciousness, it was in, he was sure, the same pitch-black storeroom, and he heard a voice that was scratchy, yet at the same time annoying in its nasally tone. Nothing he heard made any sense to him.
“He walks in darkness like a ghost,” said the voice somewhere to the right of where Manny sat. His first instinct was to jump to his feet and charge in the direction of the sound, but he quickly realized he was bound around the wrists and ankles. Also, even moving his head in the direction of the voice caused his skull to throb.
“He stands like a giant over me.” The cleaner had little doubt that he was hearing Cara Rota speak. He’d seen the “broken face” in the beam of his light right before the blow to the back of his head. The voice matched it perfectly and it was moving. Manny sensed that Muñoz was walking slowly from right to left.
“He will bring us all out of beggary,” came the voice once more. The Spanish word, “mendicidad,” was spoken almost directly into his left ear. He snapped his head toward the sound, and again felt the dull throb rise to the level of searing pain.
There was a clicking sound, and Manny’s flashlight switched on. Danilo Muñoz stood directly in front of him. He pointed the beam of the light upward, illuminating his twisted visage in a perfect Halloween cast, appearing even more disfigured than it would in full sunshine. It also showed Manny that Cara Rota was small, maybe reaching just five feet in height, and that his spine appeared to be markedly curved, giving him an off-center stance that was as alarming as the contorted face.
“He dances in hell.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, you toad,” Manny said in English. The sound of the cleaner’s voice interrupted the troll-like man’s soliloquy. Some part of the disruption, either that it came in English or that it came at all, clearly angered Cara Rota, and he threw the torch at Manny, striking him squarely in the nose. Another flash of internal light was followed by a gush of warm liquid running down the cleaner’s face. He knew instantly that his nose had been broken by the impact. The light ricocheted off his face and landed on the floor, still functioning, but at an angle that no longer showed Muñoz’s face. An improvement in his fate, Manny thought.
“I waste my breath on you, filthy Yanqui,” came the voice, growing more distant. The door to the storage room was pulled open, and the area of the chamber that Manny could see was once again warmed slightly by ambient light from the hallway. He could make out the bent silhouette of Cara Rota as he turned to face back into the room. “Even now he ascends to remove you, blight.”
At that moment, Manny shuddered as he realized that Cara Rota stood directly in front of him, but that a shadow had appeared from his left, in the direction of the fallen flashlight. It was then that it occurred to him the he had been hit on the back of the head while Cara Rota had been standing directly in front of him. He turned his head in time to see another man, who in contrast to the one he’d come to find, stood straight and tall. Manny looked up into a handsome brown face, and into the barrel of a very large revolver. He quickly formulated a line of conversation that he hoped would gain him enough time to come up with a brilliant escape plan.
But before either he or the man who held the gun spoke a syllable, Manny saw one final flash of light, accompanied by a loud report.
Then Emmanuel Cruz saw no more.
4
&nb
sp; Your Pinup Boy
Darlene was thrilled to receive Manny’s text. Once he was certain this Muñoz character was the killer, he could take him out and get back to California. Talk of night time gun battles in the Tijuana streets was certainly not news, but in the past week, the violence had escalated and there were now reports of lengthy shootouts in broad daylight that far too often dealt no significant damage to either cartel. That was not to say they didn’t leave bodies like litter in the gutters. They did. Innocents, mainly, and although Manny didn’t quite fit comfortably into that category, she still wanted him out of the city as soon as possible.
But it had been twenty-four hours since she’d received the text, and Manny had clearly indicated there would be more information coming “soon.” A full day was not soon, and she was already fearful. She had resisted the urge to attempt to contact him. Two-way communication in the field was a rarity, because it could, potentially, expose both parties to unwelcome scrutiny. Cleaners’ “work” phones could be used in the Espionage Textbook as the ideal example of how to list contacts. No names, only initials. All calls and SMS messages directed to or coming from CUC were routed through a series of relays that left the people on both ends relatively well insulated from prying eyes and led the curious bearer of those eyes down multiple dead-end rabbit holes.
The Terror of Tijuana Page 3
