Chapter Nineteen
“You’re the guy was looking for Mister Bledsoe, right?”
The pimply-faced youth studied McGuire curiously from the door of the service station office before draining his can of cola and crumpling it in his hand. “You find him?”
“I’m not looking for him anymore.” McGuire stepped out of the car, feeling the cool night air wash his skin. “I’m looking for a place called Catalina. Ever heard of it?”
The boy stared off across the interstate. “Not ’round here. ’Less’n you mean Catarina. Sure it’s not Catarina? That’s up near Crystal City.”
“It could be. How far is that from here?”
“’Bout seventy-five miles. Just go north and take Highway 83. Can’t miss it.”
McGuire thanked the attendant and climbed into his car.
“’Less you mean the Catalina Bar,” the youth offered.
“Where’s that?” McGuire settled back in the seat.
“Just across the bridge. In Mexico.”
“I don’t think I’m looking for a bar.”
“Thought you might be looking for that one.”
McGuire shifted into drive. “Why?”
The youth flipped the crushed soda can in the air, pivoted on one foot, and caught it behind his back. “’Cause it’s owned by Mister Bledsoe. Hell, everybody ’round here knows that.”
The International Bridge stretched from the dark emptiness of downtown Laredo, Texas, to the shining energy of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
Its pedestrian walkways were crowded with two-way traffic. American tourists, returning north with cheap souvenirs and duty-free liquor, wove past Mexicans walking in sullen silence, toting groceries in white plastic bags.
Vehicles on the bridge moved at two speeds. The faster line flowed into Mexico; painfully slow traffic crawled northward, where US Customs inspectors harangued anyone with a brown face and a diffident manner.
Driving into Mexico, McGuire watched the crowds overflowing the streets ahead of him. At the Mexican end of the bridge, an official in a peaked cap gave the briefest of glances at McGuire and the car’s Texas licence plates before waving him past.
The farther McGuire travelled along the southbound main street of Nuevo Laredo, the blacker the night became. Within three blocks, he was beyond the last of the garish neon-lit bars and shops catering to tourists. He swerved into a side street, parked and locked the car, and began walking back to the main avenue.
“Por favor, Señor?”
McGuire almost stumbled over a tiny Mexican girl, perhaps four or five years old, whose face shone in the weak glow of a streetlamp. One small hand, palm up, stretched towards him. She had thick, matted black hair and wore a shapeless and filthy cotton dress. Her feet were bare and dirty.
Fishing a dollar from his pocket, he placed it in her hand. She looked at it solemnly, nodded “Gracias,” and ran away into the darkness.
He walked through another block crowded with children and old women who beseeched him with empty hands and pleading gestures. You can’t save the world, he told himself as he made his way between them, avoiding their eyes and keeping his hands in his pockets.
On the main avenue he shouldered past American tourists in polyester slacks and open-necked blouses and shirts, laughing their way back to the bridge that led home, ignoring bare-footed children with sad eyes who offered packages of gum, shrivelled bouquets of flowers, and strings of dried chilies and garlic buds for sale.
“Buenas naches, Señor.”
McGuire turned to see a cocky Mexican boy in T-shirt and jeans sitting on the fender of a car parked at the curb.
“What can I show you, Señor?” the boy asked, grinning lewdly. “You want donkey show? Young gorls? Young boys? I take you there. Tell me what you want, I take you.”
“Where’s the Catalina Bar?” McGuire asked.
The boy’s smile grew wider and he looked away in mock disgust. “What you want to go there for?” he sneered. “Plenty more bars in town. With young gorls dancing. Nothing on. Nothing on top, nothing on bottom. Good margaritas, good mariachi.”
McGuire thrust a five-dollar bill at him. “Just take me to die Catalina Bar,” he said. “That’s all.”
Shrugging, the Mexican youth crumpled the bill into his pocket and slid from the car. “It’s not far,” he said, walking back in the direction McGuire had come from.
A block beyond McGuire’s car, the boy waved him forward, crossed the avenue and stood at the corner, smirking back at him.
At the end of a short dead-end street, a large adobe building faced the avenue, crowned with blazing red and yellow neon signs. “Catalina Bar,” the sign spelled, “A Favorite Gringo Watering Hole Since 1925.” Two overweight couples were stumbling through the wooden doors, arguing loudly among themselves in Texas drawls. The women wore their hair in beehives; the men growled at each other from beneath sweat-stained Stetsons.
The Mexican youth was already making his way back to the bridge, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
McGuire waited for the tourists to pass, then stepped up to the entrance of the bar and opened the carved wooden door.
He walked into a cavernous room filled with smoke and hard-edged laughter, where groups of tourists sat nibbling food, sipping beer from long-necked bottles, and laughing and poking their companions. Sombre-faced Mexican waiters in white shirts and black trousers with stained aprons tied at their waists sped between the tables and the long bar against the wall to McGuire’s right. Sawdust lay scattered on the floor, faded photographs hung in antique frames on the wall, and an unseen piano player hammered out ragtime music from somewhere at the rear of the room.
It was a contrived reproduction of a western saloon, untidy enough to appear authentic and efficient enough to quiet the qualms of middle-class Americans.
McGuire approached the bar where a platoon of waiters wore blank and weary expressions as they opened beer bottles, mixed oversized margaritas, and dispensed elaborate drinks topped with tiny plastic cactus plants. He leaned against the bar, ordered a Corona, and turned to watch the tourists nibbling on tortilla chips and melted cheese. Their conversation reached him in a muted roar, as thick and mingled as the tobacco smoke hanging in the air above them.
The Corona arrived cold and sweating in a clear glass bottle. McGuire tossed two dollars on the bar and drank the beer quickly, trying to wash away the dust and the visions that clung to him from the mine site. When he finished he motioned to the waiter, who leaned across the bar to retrieve the empty bottle.
“Another Corona?”
“No,” McGuire said softly. “Just tell me where I can find a man named Andrew Snyder.”
The waiter nodded solemnly. “Around the corner, to your right,” he said, wiping the countertop. “Second door down.”
McGuire scanned the room again before walking to where two arrows marked “Señors” and “Señoritas” pointed down a hallway at the end of the bar. With a last glance behind him, McGuire slipped a hand in his jacket pocket to grip his revolver and entered the corridor.
On the frosted glass panel of the second door, McGuire read “PRIVATE” in faded gilt lettering. He withdrew his gun and, with his free hand, turned the knob quietly.
Behind a desk in the middle of the small room sat a man with his back to the door, hunched over a book on a low table.
McGuire quickly closed the door behind him. “Don’t even twitch,” he ordered, the gun extended, “or I’ll blow your head off.”
The man, who had begun to straighten at McGuire’s entrance, nodded his head slowly, still facing the wall. “You Andrew Snyder?” McGuire barked.
The head nodded again.
“Raise your hands where I can see them.”
The head nodded a third time. Then, with deliberate slowness, the arms began to rise from the desk top.
&n
bsp; McGuire swallowed, turned away and lowered the gun, shaking his head in disbelief. Instead of hands, two shiny steel hooks extended above the other man’s head. “May I turn around now?” he asked, still facing the wall.
“Sure,” McGuire replied. “Turn around. Stand up and dance. Do a cartwheel out the door. Who cares?”
Andrew Snyder swivelled in the chair to face McGuire. He had a boyish face, the nose slightly upturned, the eyes clear and large, the hairline just beginning to recede.
“You’re kind of old to be doing this, aren’t you?” Snyder asked. He rested his forearms on the desk, crossing the two hooks in front of him.
“Some days I’m too old to get out of bed.” McGuire dropped his revolver back into his jacket pocket, then frowned and asked, “Too old to be doing what?”
“Working for Mister Bledsoe.”
“Bledsoe?” McGuire snorted. “What makes you think I work for Bledsoe?”
“Because he sends people here,” Snyder said. “New people. To see me.” He raised the steel hooks. “As a warning.” Sensing McGuire’s confusion, he dropped the hooks heavily on the desk again. “In case they get any ideas about stealing from him. He tells them to meet me and ask what happened. And I tell them.”
“You tell them what?”
He said it calmly and without emotion, as though he were describing a shopping trip or visit to the dentist. “I tell them Mister Bledsoe cut off my hands with a hatchet for stealing half a kilo of cocaine.”
“What’s your interest in Bledsoe?”
Andrew Snyder gripped a small glass of tequila and ice between the tongs of one hook, watching McGuire warily. They were seated in a rear corner of the barroom, opposite the old upright piano painted a garish pink and purple. Taking a break, the piano player slouched on the stool, looking as tired and tuneless as the piano itself.
McGuire had ordered another Corona. “I don’t give a damn about his narcotics business if that’s what you think,” McGuire answered. “I’ve had enough experience in drugs to know that you can’t get as big as Bledsoe without a lot of important local people helping out, and a lot of other people just not giving a damn. They want to put up with that crap in their own backyard, it’s fine with me, so long as they keep it there and leave me out of it. So whatever you say on that score isn’t going any further than me.” He offered his hand.
Snyder cocked his head and smiled indulgently at the natural gesture, raising his right hook and arching his eyebrows.
McGuire withdrew his hand. “Joe McGuire,” he said. “Boston Homicide.”
Snyder shrugged. “You’re right.” His voice was soft and he punctuated his words with slight grins that vanished almost as soon as they appeared. “People around here know the score. They’ve either been bought off or choose to mind their own business. Everything from here to Brownsville comes through Laredo. What he can’t sell in San Antonio he ships further north. Austin, Dallas, sometimes as far as Tulsa.”
“Cocaine?”
“Yeah, up from Colombia in trucks, vans, whatever’s moving. Then over the border every way you can think of. Some you can’t.”
“How did you connect with a guy like him?”
Snyder sipped his tequila and smacked his lips. “The word gets around. You prove yourself on a few small deals and you get an offer for something bigger, a chance to make more money with less risk at the wholesale end. I’d been doing a little dealing up in San Antonio. Made enough to buy a house. I was like everybody else back then. Thought I would just make enough to get settled and go straight. Find a wife. Have a family. Then my father moved in with me.”
“I met your father,” McGuire interrupted.
“How is he?” Snyder seemed genuinely interested.
“Taking it easy.”
Snyder’s face darkened. “Did he say anything about me?”
“Hardly anything at all. Just told me you were working for Bledsoe. Didn’t even hint it might be illegal.”
Snyder searched for the truth in McGuire’s eyes. “He knows and he doesn’t know. About me, I mean. Doesn’t want to know too much.” He glanced away, then back at McGuire. “Why were you looking for me in the first place?”
“Do you have a sister?”
Snyder grinned. “Hell, no.”
“Ever been to Boston?”
“Never. So what’s this all about?”
McGuire leaned back in his chair, trying to decide whether he could believe this man, watching him in silence. “Tell me why Bledsoe did it,” he said finally, indicating Snyder’s hooks.
“I told you. I slipped a half-kilo bag into my pocket one night. I was working at a place out on the Old Mine Road—”
“I’ve been there,” McGuire broke in.
Snyder looked at him with renewed interest.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” McGuire said before Snyder could speak.
Beginning hesitantly and growing slowly in confidence, Snyder described what happened.
“One of the other guys saw me take the coke. That night, after we finished, Mister Bledsoe and two of the others said they were coming over the border to do some business and have a party. Said there were some new whores in from Mexico City. Told me Bledsoe booked them for us for the night. He owns a brothel west of here.”
Snyder looked around the room, gathering strength to continue.
“I don’t talk about it much,” he said apologetically. “The details, I mean.” A waiter approached with another tequila and ice for Snyder and a Corona for McGuire. When he left, Snyder continued.
“They invited me along. Practically ordered me. I didn’t want to look suspicious so I had to go. I left the drugs in my car. I planned to leave the next day, sell the coke in San Antonio and go back to California. Maybe see my mother. Anyway, they took me to this place south of town.” Snyder clicked one hook around his glass and stared into it. “How much do you want to hear?”
“As much as you want to tell me.”
“As soon as we got in the room, the two guys with Bledsoe grabbed me. They forced my arms down on this old table and Mister Bledsoe came in with a thick leather belt and a hammer. He nailed the belt across my arms. Then they did it.”
McGuire said nothing. He picked up his beer to take a sip but changed his mind.
“They used an axe,” Snyder said in a voice dry of emotion. “First he told me why he was doing it. Then he showed me the towels they had brought. So I wouldn’t bleed to death. He said he didn’t want to kill me and he would even give me a job when I recovered. But I had to learn a lesson.”
“How could you handle that?” McGuire whispered. “Sitting there, knowing what was going to happen?”
Snyder shook his head. “I wasn’t there. Sometimes . . .” He looked away, then back down at his drink. “I met a girl once who had been raped in San Francisco. Over and over again, for hours, by a motorcycle gang. I asked her the same question. She told me ‘I wasn’t there. My body was there but me, my mind and me, we went somewhere else.’ And that’s all I can say about it.”
Snyder told of being driven to the hospital in Nuevo Laredo, the towels wrapped around the stumps of his arms to staunch the bleeding. He described staggering into the hospital unable to speak, welcoming the fog of the anesthetic, and waking with the hope that it had all been a nightmare until he saw the drab grey walls, smelled the aroma of the sick and dying, and felt the pain like glowing coals filling the space where his hands had been.
In the afternoon, a Mexican police officer arrived to cluck over Snyder’s misfortune and suggest that people be more careful when working with hay balers.
“So Bledsoe bought off the police?” McGuire asked.
Snyder fixed him with a cold smile. “They’ve been bought off for years. You go over there now, to the police station, and ask to see my accident report. If you can read Spanish, it will
tell you I lost my hands in a hay baler on a farm south of town.” He snorted, a short sarcastic laugh. “Which shows how arrogant they are.”
“Why?”
“Nobody bales hay around here. There’s not a hay baler between here and San Antonio.”
McGuire nodded. “Why are you still here? How can you associate with a man who would do this to you?”
Snyder bit his bottom lip. “It’s the best deal I can get. I run the place. Make a good profit too. Bledsoe pays me well and I only see him four, five times a year. He acts like nothing happened. Puts his arm around my shoulder, asks how my girlfriend is, how her family’s keeping. She’s Mexican. She’s very pretty, very sweet. I love her and support her family. Without me, they would be begging in the streets. And . . .” He studied the sawdust on the floor. “I don’t want to go home like this.” He gestured with his hooks. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because Bledsoe would have me killed. He promised if I ever cross the border, he’ll kill me. I believe him.”
“So tell the Border Patrol,” McGuire began, before seeing the expression in Snyder’s eyes.
“Come on, McGuire,” Snyder said with contempt. “How do you think a man like Bledsoe moves a hundred kilos of coke across the border every month? You think he’s just lucky?”
“He can’t buy off the entire Border Patrol.”
“He doesn’t have to!” Snyder snapped. “All he needs is . . .” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Look, I could tell you . . .” he began and faltered again. “There’s a car that belongs to one of the guys at the bridge. The way he parks it in the morning, nose in or nose out, tells Bledsoe something. A blind lowered in an office window tells him something else. There’s never any contact. Never any direct payoff. Just some deposits made in bank accounts in Juarez. Ten seconds after I blew the whistle on Bledsoe, he would know about it. He would get rid of the evidence. Then he would get rid of me. In jail, in a safe house, wherever.” He shrugged. “I’m better off here. I’m safe. I’m as happy as a man without hands can be.”
And Leave Her Lay Dying Page 19
