by Alex Gilly
“There’s going to be a play,” said Linda, translating for him, slipping her hand into his.
“What’s the play about?”
“The little angels.”
“Who?”
“Dead children.”
Finn looked up at the clouds. “It’s going to rain,” he said. And then: “Want another drink?”
“Yes.”
He went to the stall and bought more alcohol. When he got back, the mayor, if that’s what he was, was stepping off the stage. The lights went out. Linda clasped Finn’s hand again. Something had shifted in her mood, and she seemed nervous now, frightened, like she had been back on the Belle when she told him about Cutts. He squeezed back.
A blue spotlight lit up an impressive Aztec step pyramid. A couple of men dressed head to toe in white stood on one side of the stage playing pan pipes, the notes flitting across the square like nervous birds. Finn drank some more. An offstage narrator said some things through the sound system, things that Linda didn’t bother translating. Then a group of children wrapped in white robes entered from the side of the stage farthest from Finn’s position, their hair glistening in the blue light. They shuffled to the foot of the pyramid, the light following them. Someone started banging a drum. The kids looked up. The blue spotlight gave way to a red one, which tracked to the top of the pyramid. The narration stopped. The spotlight settled on an actor in a huge feather headdress, his eyes heavily lined with black, an animal skin draped over his shoulders, a garland of bones hanging around his neck, shells hanging from his clothes. He had what looked like a big feather in his right hand, and through the legs of the altar painted gray to look like stone, Finn saw more feathers attached to a band tied around his right calf. Some kind of shaman, he figured. He had his hand on Linda’s hip now, and hers was around his waist. Somewhere along the line they’d traded up from beer to mescal, the smoky flavor lingering in his mouth, the alcohol wormholing through his brain.
The actor who played the shaman glowered at the crowd, his eyes so wide that Finn could see the whites of them. The drummer let loose and hammered the skins. The shaman raised his hands and was about to speak when, as if on cue, a great bolt of lightning ripped through the sky behind him. There was a collective gasp from the crowd. Thunder cracked down upon the square and all the people in it. The shaman looked up at the sky, hesitated, then continued with the play. He started chanting, slowly at first, then accelerating the tempo and increasing the volume, his voice competing with the screech of pan pipes and the thump and thwack of skin drums and click-clack of hollow-log drums.
The spot with the red gel now lit up the kids from below. They looked like the comic-grim decorations hanging from the lines, the light hollowing their eye sockets and making their little faces seem scrawny. The shaman stamped his feet, shaking the bells on his ankle, and waved his big feather around.
Two adult actors led one of the kids, a girl, to the top of the pyramid and up three little steps onto the altar. They laid her down on her back. The shaman raised his feather. Except, Finn realized, it wasn’t a feather: it was a chiseled stone. The shaman held it above his head against the black sky about to burst. The crowd pressed forward. The shaman chanted deliriously.
Two more great bolts of lightning flashed behind the stage, much closer now; the thunderclaps were instantaneous. Then the clouds broke and the rain came down, hard. The spotlight made a crackling sound and went out. All the streetlamps flickered into blackness.
It was a catastrophe; it was spectacular. Adrenaline pumped through Finn; the water streamed down the sides of his face and soaked through his shirt, already drenched with sweat. He whooped and hollered, saying incoherent things. He knew he sounded foolish but he was too drunk to care.
Linda was still staring at the blacked-out stage, her hair plastered down the sides of her terrorized face. Finn followed her gaze. Up on the pyramid, silhouetted against the flash of lightning, he saw the little girl still on the altar, the shaman still looming over her, the stone blade glinting in his hand.
Finn understood. He shouted in Linda’s ear, “Hey! It’s just make-believe. That’s not Lucy, you hear?”
He took her head in his hands and wiped the wet hair off her face. Then he leaned down and kissed her. A tiny voice in his head whispered, This is a bad idea. He pulled away a little. Linda opened her eyes and in the faint, wet light released a volley of green and gold shards.
“Don’t stop,” she said, her breath hot against his damp cheek.
He put his arm around her and cleared a way through the crowd to the stall, where he made the stall-holder sell him an entire bottle of mescal. Then, to a boy under the hotel’s overhang, water streaming off it in sheets, he paid ten times the going rate for two masks. Linda laughed and slipped one on: a lavishly decorated skull face garlanded with paper flowers.
In the lobby, the storm had cut the power and the hotel staff was lighting candles. A boy with a hurricane lamp led them up to their room. Finn tipped him, followed Linda into the room, and slipped on his mask.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Finn woke drenched with sweat. He felt like he’d stirred an angry swarm of stinging insects behind his eyes. He cracked open his cruddy eyes and saw the blades of the ceiling fan not turning. He raised his head and saw daylight stalking around the edges of the curtains. Linda wasn’t in the bed with him. He glanced through the open bathroom door—no sign of her in there, either.
He sat upright and quickly realized that he’d made a mistake. Last night’s beer and mescal came heaving up his gullet. He threw up on the carpet by the bed, then fell back on the mattress and closed his eyes.
When he felt a little better, he peeled himself out of the bed, slowly this time. A note from Linda was propped against the lamp on the night table: “Meet at boat at noon.” She’d underlined noon three times. No explanation about where she’d gone.
Finn stumbled into the bathroom, turned the shower on as hot as he could bear, then a little hotter. It scalded his blotched and waxy skin when he got under the stream, but he made himself take it. He turned his face up and gargled the hot water, chasing out the sharp tang in his mouth. Then he turned off the hot tap and left the cold running. The sudden drop in temperature kicked the breath out of him, and all the muscles in his torso twitched. He turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, and mustered the courage to look in the mirror.
Finn saw his father staring back at him: the same deserting blue eyes and liquor-distended skin, the same thin mouth curled in disappointment.
Water dripped off his body and pooled on the tiles around his feet. His father had been caught smuggling narcotics into Long Beach. Finn thought, Like father, like son.
With a whip-quick jab of his right fist, he shattered the mirror; shards tinkled into the porcelain sink and onto the floor.
He stepped over the glass, wrapped a towel around his waist, and opened the curtains. The rain clouds had cleared and the light had a post-rain sparkle to it, making the world seem fresh and clean. He slid open the glass door and stepped onto the balcony.
From across the road rose the pleasing sound of children laughing. The orphans had gotten hold of Day of the Dead masks; Finn watched pint-size skull-faces chasing one another around the yard. A girl of around nine or ten was sitting alone on a step leading up to a shaded arcade on the far side of the yard. She looked very serious, sitting very still with her hands in her lap, watching the other children without enthusiasm. Behind her, partially hidden from view, stood a pair of adults in conversation. Finn watched the little girl; she seemed familiar to him. After a moment, the adults stepped from the shade and the little girl stood as though to receive instructions.
Finn instinctively stepped back from the rail.
One of the adults was Linda Blake.
* * *
The hotel room came with an electric kettle and easy-pour packets of Folgers instant coffee. Finn made himself a three-packet cup and sat on the edge of the bed to drink
it. Whatever business Linda had at the orphanage, he thought, she’d chosen not to tell him about it. He looked at the bed’s crumpled sheets. She’d liked the game with the masks, he recalled. She’d said something to the effect that she could be herself wearing the mask. All he’d been able to see through the eyeholes were her crocodile eyes. That, and her naked body. The skull mask he’d worn lay discarded on the floor by the bedside table. He wondered what Linda had seen when he’d worn it. Probably she’d preferred looking at a cheap plastic devil rather than his beat-up face, he thought.
He glanced at the shattered glass on the bathroom floor and knew he did.
He took another sip of coffee and gazed through the balcony door at the blue sky. He told himself, I’m doing what I’m doing for a greater good. He was only smuggling narcotics, he reminded himself, in order to save Linda’s daughter from the ruthless criminal who was holding her hostage—a situation for which he, Finn, was at least partially responsible.
Once the child had been returned, he would be free to exact justice from Diego’s killers.
Finn reached the bottom of the mug, where the undiluted instant-coffee granules had formed a muddy brown paste. He remembered Mrs. Gavrilia that day at the Self Help, the old lady filling the little room with her cigarette smoke and tapping her ashes into Mona’s Folgers mug. He remembered her telling him about her cousin’s son, Felipe, and the missing boys, how they’d disappeared from Puerto Escondido, gone to sea on La Catrina, and never been heard from again. He remembered her mural of the Aztec god devouring all the people. He remembered the play last night, the altar and the shaman with the knife.
Finn stood up. He wanted to know what Linda was doing at the orphanage. And he wanted to know why she hadn’t told him.
He dressed, headed out of the hotel, and picked his way through the detritus of last night’s festivities to the orphanage. A big sign next to the door had ORFANATO JESÚS MALVERDE painted on it. Finn rang the bell.
A black-haired woman opened the door.
“I’m looking for a friend,” he said in English. “Linda Blake? An American woman?”
The woman shook her head and gave him an uncomprehending look.
Hell, thought Finn. What’s Spanish for “woman”?
“Un mujer americano? Linda?” he said tentatively.
The woman shook her head some more and said something impatiently in Spanish. She glanced fearfully around the square before slamming the door in his face.
Finn stepped back, turned around. Some workers were disassembling the stage from last night and loading it onto a truck. A couple of men in police uniforms stood near their car. A group of sharply dressed men sat at a plastic table at a café across the square, drinking coffee. Finn had the distinct impression that every single person in the square was watching him.
Time to get the hell out of Escondido.
* * *
Down at the dock, Finn was happy to see that the fishermen were back. The Day of the Dead had been a holiday for everyone, he figured: fishermen and gangsters alike.
He went aboard the Pacific Belle and saw that Linda wasn’t back yet. It was eleven thirty. He grabbed the water jug and binoculars and went back out on deck. He’d keep a lookout for Linda. The sooner they got out of there, the better.
While he waited, he leaned against the bow rail and watched the fishermen work. Down on the beach, the smaller boats unloaded whatever they had managed to hook on their lines. Finn looked through the binoculars to see what they’d brought in: a few wahoo and yellowfin, some sea bass and dorado. He put down the binoculars and turned his attention to the shrimpers on the dock. There were five of them, none of them over thirty feet long. The men were unloading white plastic buckets laden with the morning’s catch onto the dock. The buckets had the names of the boats they belonged to painted on their sides. Finn was taken aback when he saw that one of the boats was called La Abuelita. He put the binoculars back in the wheelhouse and wandered down the dock. When he got closer, he saw DUEÑO: FELIPE GAVRILIA painted on the stern of the boat, followed by what looked like a license number.
He didn’t know what dueño meant, but he knew that Mrs. Gavrilia was known by the nickname La Abuelita. And he remembered how she’d said her fisherman-cousin was named Felipe.
He approached the man unloading shrimp. He was a thin, wiry man in a dirty blue Adidas T-shirt, probably in his sixties, with deep wrinkles and skin darkened by the sun. He looked like a man who’d worked hard all his life.
“Señor Gavrilia?” Finn tried.
The guy ignored him and kept working.
Finn really wished he’d made more of an effort to learn Spanish at Saint Augustine. He just wasn’t good in classrooms.
“I’m a friend of La Abuelita? In Los Angeles? Your cousin?”
Nothing from the guy.
“She told me about your son? The one who disappeared?”
Still nothing. The man kept working, as though Finn weren’t there.
“I’m the man who stopped the boat you said your son went on. I’m with la migra up in California. Do you remember the boat? La Catrina?”
As soon as Finn said the name, the man stopped in his tracks. He looked long and hard at Finn. Then he turned and let his eyes linger on a building on the shore, as though drawing Finn’s attention to it. Finn followed his gaze. The man was looking at a boatyard. It was a ramshackle affair. Several boats in various states of disrepair sat on the beach outside a large shed with a high corrugated roof. The boats didn’t look like they were going anywhere anytime soon. There was no ramp into the water, just a trailer on a cable system to haul boats up the beach and into the shed. Finn turned to thank Felipe Gavrilia, but the old fisherman had already turned away.
He walked down the beach to the boatyard. The big sliding door into the shed was open. Finn saw a small shrimper sitting on a cradle, her rudder off. He heard the crackle of a gas welder from the back of the shed and recognized the pungent, ozone smell that welders give off.
He walked deeper into the shed, past the trawler, toward a workbench at the back. A man in gray coveralls was busy working on something hidden from Finn’s view.
“Hello,” said Finn loudly.
The man wheeled around, looked at Finn through the dark rectangle of glass in his helmet. He killed the burn on his welder and flipped up the visor. He looked unhappy to see Finn.
“Sí?” he said.
“La Catrina. Know it?”
The guy looked at him steadily. Shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
Finn noticed what was on the workbench. It was a fire extinguisher. The top had been cut off and was now being welded back on, its dome clamped into place over the cylinder, weld marks along the join. His mind flashed back to the fire in La Catrina’s engine bay. He remembered how the extinguisher he’d found aboard had failed. He looked to his right and saw dozens of fire extinguishers standing in the corner—some cut open, some welded back together but with their red paint missing and their weld marks visible, some with their weld marks ground down but yet to be painted, and some that looked like ordinary fire extinguishers.
He marveled at the simplicity of it: fire extinguishers were so ubiquitous aboard boats as to be invisible.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the welder flipping his mask back down. The torch switched on with a blinding flash of light.
Oxyacetylene burns at six thousand degrees. The mechanic would’ve seared off Finn’s face if he hadn’t scurried back in the nick of time. Finn kept scurrying and the mechanic kept coming at him until the hoses from the tanks feeding his torch were fully extended. Then the guy hesitated, unsure what to do next. Finn didn’t—he turned and ran out of the shed.
Outside, a police car was pulling up at the road leading to the dock, and for a microsecond Finn was relieved. Then he remembered that Perez had been a cop.
He pirouetted and ran back into the shed, where the mechanic had ditched his mask and traded his torch for a heavy ri
veting mallet.
For a few short seconds, Finn and the mechanic danced around each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Then the mechanic swung double-handed at Finn’s head. That was a mistake. Finn ducked the swing and the weight of the mallet pulled the mechanic off-balance, giving Finn time to deliver a four-shot combo, two body blows to the kidneys, then two hard uppercuts, one-two-one-two, like that. The mallet flew out of the guy’s hands and with a clang hit the trawler’s hull, and the guy stumbled back from the force of Finn’s hits. This time, Finn took the offensive and glided in on light feet and finished him with a single, perfect neck-snapping jab. The mechanic crumpled and lay still.
Finn heard the policemen’s voices outside getting nearer. His eyes searched the shed for another exit and found none.
He looked at the shrimper, picked up the mechanic’s body, lifted him high like a lucha libre fighter, and flung him into the boat, making sure he was out of sight behind the freeboard. Then he ran back to the bench, pulled the welding mask over his face, his heavy breathing fogging up the glass, and switched on the torch.
A second later, he heard the cops walk in. Finn turned to face them. There were three of them. One of the cops was pushing a wheelbarrow. The other two had AR-15s slung over their shoulders.
Acting like he wasn’t surprised to see them, Finn went back to his work and focused on welding the dome back onto the cylinder.
The cops walked up and said something to him in Spanish. He nodded and hoped to God it was just banter and they would go about their business.
The cop with the wheelbarrow pulled up and started unloading bricks of plastic-wrapped narcotics onto the workbench. He said something to Finn that made the other cops laugh.
Finn nodded vaguely, kept welding, kept breathing deeply beneath his mask, trying to slow his heart and the release of cortisol in his brain.
Once they’d unloaded all the bricks from the wheelbarrow, the cops heaved four of the finished extinguishers onto it.
