City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  A flicker of fear. El Santo has seen this before. It’s not fear of him, it’s fear of what the kid has to say. The Truth. Something no one ever wants to hear. ‘Tell me,’ he whispers, ‘and I’ll stop all this now.’

  ‘Padre Márcio …’ He closes his eyes, ready to receive the bullet he knows his answer’s earned him.

  But the kid’s got it wrong. It’s the most unexpected answer El Santo could ever imagine, but it’s so far off the wall, he believes him.

  Father Holy Holes himself – just another crook.

  It doesn’t make sense – some fucking priest heisting cars. Even in el mondo narco it’s too fucking weird. And the weirder something is, the greater the peril.

  Jaime Santiago grabs the tip of a shim in either hand and has to yank, harder than he expected. He finally pulls them out with a scraping noise, their sharp edges bloody and gleaming with the yellow-blue sheen of cartilage and sinew. He tosses them to the dirt floor and turns to El Feo. ‘I want you to put a tail on Padre Márcio and see what turns up.’

  El Feo stares at El Santo as though his moustache were on fire. ‘You don’t really believe this kid?’

  El Santo figured out the answer to a question like that a long time ago: the wilder a story is, the more likely that it’s true. ‘Take him to the vet’s and have his legs fixed up.’

  ‘But, boss …’

  ‘Then give him five thousand pesos and put him on the bus to Santa Teresa.’

  ‘He’ll talk.’

  El Santo leans down and looks into the kid’s eyes. ‘Do you ever want to go through this again?’ The kid shakes his head, sending dried clots of blood flying into the air, slow as blowflies. ‘If you talk, this won’t be an ending, it’ll be a beginning. Understand?’ The kid doesn’t say a word but he doesn’t need to; the tear that slides from his left eye, gathering dust as it streaks a grimy passage down his face, says it all.

  ‘Where do you drop the cars you steal?’

  ‘Enrique’s garage, just out of town.’

  He nods to El Feo, who drags the chair with the kid still on it across the stony terrain towards his pickup, then roughly lifts him into the cabin of the truck. The next thirty miles will be the longest trip this kid will ever take. Chances are El Feo will pop him and keep the five grand. El Santo doesn’t really care. He has been just. He has acted with honor. He cannot be held responsible for what his peones do. El Feo is just another foot soldier on the slow slide to annihilation, only following orders when it suits him; getting killed when his betrayal is eventually found out.

  The way things are going, that won’t be long.

  Maybe he should just get it over with. Oviedo is lean and mean. Oviedo is smart and hungry; ambitious. Of course, that means he is dangerous. Someone to watch out for in the future. But he has to worry about now, and Oviedo is looking more and more like the present – and El Feo more and more like the past.

  El Santo watches the truck moving off into the night, leaving a sorrowful exhaust stained red with taillight. And then, after a small moment, there is nothing at all.

  He glances all around …

  It’s always this way after a torture or a killing: that dislocating shift from one reality to another. Screams to silence. Mayhem to mundane. As though nothing has really happened, or whatever has happened will never affect you. It was like someone else’s dream. And really: who gives a fuck about a dream that’s not your own?

  On the ground, ants teem around the shims in a frenzy of feasting. He kicks dirt over the swarm, then heads back towards his car, his hand held high, still trying to get that fucking signal.

  19

  Pilar

  Pilar wakes in the car with a start. On the horizon, a henna light glimmers in the distance, radiant and warm. Pilar would consider it beautiful if she didn’t know what happened beneath its sodium glow. Strange shapes begin to emerge, flashing past on either side of the road.

  Women.

  There are only a few at first, walking alone or in pairs, but soon more appear, in groups of three and four. Women coming from the opposite direction hold hands up to their brows as the car sweeps past, eyes glittering like those of wild animals caught in hunters’ headlights. Dozens become hundreds the closer they get to the maquiladoras, the women ordering their passage, taking separate sides of the road. Women like her, mustering the courage for the ordeal of the night shift, who know their suffering will be rewarded when they emerge in daylight and relative safety, all taking the right-hand side of the road.

  The ones who have endured their exhaustion and defeated their hours are now returning home, walking on the left-hand side, which runs below the shoulder of the road. They try to stay in groups. These are the lethal hours; the slice of night most people sleep through. The time of kidnap and murder, of desecration and the disposal of bodies. A nocturnal shield. The killers profit from the closed grilles and curtained windows, the pools of shadow and silence; the deserted streets and the hurried flight of cars with unseen, unseeing drivers.

  After every murder, every violation, the sun rises with stupefied indignation, seeping yellow and sick across the ruined landscape, its fevered dawn light like a scythe, harvesting brutal crops.

  The corpses of women.

  Juan Antonio accelerates past the pedestrians, the women’s faces slapped with the spotlight inquiry of headlights before being tossed back into shadow. Into heightened darkness. Pilar studies the expressions that glide past. They are familiar and humiliating, like bad memories unwillingly recalled then painfully expunged. Even though they have picked up three women, Pilar still feels sick with guilt. She rides; the others walk.

  Juan Antonio begins to slow as the groups of women grow larger still, asserting their right to share the strip of macadam that slices across the barren land like a razor slash across a cheek, great crowds now converging round the thriving hives of the maquiladoras.

  There are no buses to take them to work. No buses to bring them home. They have to walk. Eighty-five percent of the victims were from the night shift, women walking on their own, abandoned to their bloody fate by the municipality, by the factory owners. By their own community.

  By the cold calculations of commerce.

  Market forces as murder weapon.

  Juan Antonio stops the rent-a-car in the parking lot, the three passengers in the back getting out quickly, relieved to have made the journey without incident, to be able to hurry inside to the relative safety of the sweatshops. In the cold desert hush, Pilar can feel the grind of machinery vibrating through the night, and the murmur of footsteps uncertain in the shadows. Juan Antonio gets out; lights a cigarette. Passes it to Pilar.

  ‘Your name is at the door. Fátima Muñoz.’

  ‘Fátima?’ Pilar swears. ‘Why not just Blessed Virgin! I know you pick these names deliberately.’

  ‘I don’t have time to torment you. Even if you deserve it.’ He gives her a fierce hug. It’s unexpected. It’s alarming. It’s too close to a goodbye. ‘Be careful, loca.’

  ‘I will, cabrón.’ Pilar walks towards the gates, the only thing keeping her going the knowledge that they will be striking soon.

  Factories will be shut down and concessions will be forced out of companies that historically have never cared about their workers.

  Basic safety standards will be painfully negotiated; the bosses reluctantly conceding to the rule of law.

  A pittance in pay will be extorted by the threat of more strikes.

  The companies will lose more in two days of closure than they will in three years of concessions, but it’s the principle of the matter. They can’t be seen to roll over so quickly to the demands of a group of nasty women.

  The collective punishment will come later, when the union leaders are all purged from the workforce; when they force the women to work overtime under the threat of relocating to China.

  Still, that is all in the future. Right now Pilar has to focus on the immediacy of the strikes. There will soon come a time when she
will be able to sleep. It won’t be the sleep of the good, or the just, or even the exhausted. It will be the sleep of oblivion: the hardest to wake from.

  20

  Fuentes

  Fuentes pulls up across the road from a small bungalow, half masked from the street by the clutter of two desert willows in flower. He glances up and down the street. Deserted. Windows barred. Doors locked.

  Smart street.

  This is a dangerous neighborhood. All the residents obey the two nocturnal rules of survival. No one comes in. And no one looks out.

  Fuentes will be practically invisible.

  Carrying a small leather tool case, he walks quickly across the road, entering the front yard by a creaking cast-iron gate. A dog worries the silence of the street then gives up – what’s the use? No one really cares and anyway, half the time a bark is answered by a bullet.

  Fuentes peers through a barred window. Nothing. He listens as he pulls on his gloves. Still nothing. He takes out a chisel and hammer and crouches by the lock, aims, and delivers one hard rap. The lock tube explodes inwards. There is a hollow ring as the cylinder rolls along the floor inside. Fuentes pauses, waiting for any kind of reaction from either inside the house or out on the street.

  He levers the chisel through the door jamb to where the second lock is located and pulls. It’s stubborn. Must be a mortise lock. He works the tongue of the chisel in still further, then yanks with both hands. There is the protest of cracking wood and the door pops open with a whine of relief. He enters, closing what’s left of the door behind him.

  Fuentes scans the room with a hooded flashlight, the narrow beam telling a story he expected. The place has already been tossed, the floor strewn with books and papers. Glass snaps underfoot. His beam finds what it’s looking for: the back of a picture frame. He turns it over.

  It is a snapshot of a woman in her thirties, with a knowing smile and peroxide hair. He recognizes her immediately. Marina. This is unexpected. He rescues the photo from the broken glass and pockets it.

  The intruders have also trashed the bedroom. The mattress has been latticed with long slashes, its stuffing ventilated in the night air. Whatever they were looking for, it wasn’t there. The contents of drawers have been scattered, the intimate details of Paredes’ grooming, healthcare and sexual preferences fingered through and discarded.

  Fuentes freezes. Shadows cross the window, the footsteps dying away as a group passes outside on the street: some kids walking their dogs; a reckless attempt at normalcy that Fuentes finds almost as touching as it is alarming.

  He resumes his search, going into the bathroom. By the look of things Paredes had a lot of headaches. He opens one of the bottles, shaking the pills out into his fist, some of them bouncing off his palm and wheeling out of the bathroom into the hallway, spinning to a stop. He rubs the white residue across his gums. Legit. He checks inside the cistern of the toilet. The undercarriage of the lid is still ribbed with rubber bands. Someone has found a stash and removed it. But a stash of what? Cash, a weapon? There is really only one answer. Fuentes hears the shriek of the outside gate opening. He kills his flashlight, watching from the shadows of the bathroom. A beam of light scans the living room, for a second exploding behind him as it hits the medicine cabinet’s mirror and bounces back. There’s a curse. Did they catch his reflection? Fuentes flattens against a bathroom shelf, a whisper, anxious and alert, carrying all the way through the house. ‘What?’

  ‘Caught my face in the mirror.’ Speaking English. One of them is an American. Maybe DEA? ‘Scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘Now you know how Karen feels.’ A Mexican voice.

  Low laughter peppers the darkness. Someone kicks something on the floor, sending a broken cup skittering. ‘Unbelievable,’ the American says. ‘Not even a piece of police tape in sight. Official co-operation, my ass.’

  ‘We can forget about finding anything here.’

  ‘I’ve got another idea.’ The voices are much closer now. Fuentes has nowhere to hide. He hears a bedroom drawer slide open. ‘A little calling card.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ the Mexican says. It’s probably a PJF–DEA arranged marriage. Doomed from the start to early divorce.

  ‘We’ll get Valdez on the phone, make him put someone outside and then inspect the place together in the morning.’

  There is the silence of contemplation. ‘How does that help us?’

  ‘Implicates Paredes.’

  ‘He’s already implicated.’

  ‘This’ll prove it.’

  ‘Prove what?’

  ‘Paredes is innocent.’

  Fuentes cranes his head in astonishment, staring through two sets of door jambs to where the men are standing, silhouetted inside the bedroom across the hall.

  ‘Well, not innocent innocent,’ the American continues. ‘But he sure as hell didn’t know he was being set up today. I mean, no one’s that good an actor.’

  ‘I thought he’d have a cardiac arrest.’ The Mexican laughs. ‘So why would they set him up?’

  ‘A simple diversion. A Mexican cop caught with nearly a hundred pounds of coke crossing into Texas is one hell of a story. It’s all anyone’s going to be talking about for the next few days.’

  ‘Tone squelch?’

  ‘You got it. If you can’t maintain radio silence – and we know down here that’s impossible – it’s the next best thing.’

  ‘Got to be a huge deal.’

  ‘Has to be.’

  ‘And if they’re offering up Paredes …?’

  ‘It’s got to be someone a hell of a lot bigger.’

  The Mexican’s voice drops an octave. ‘Valdez?’

  Fuentes leans forwards, listening so intently that his shoulder brushes the shelf. A glass falls …

  He catches it with both hands. Freezes.

  Recovering his breath, he turns his attention back to the conversation outside, anxiety spreading through him at what he hears …

  Absolutely nothing.

  Finally, a whisper: ‘What is it?’ And the choking rasp of someone racking the slide of a Glock in reply.

  Fuentes feels more than hears the approach of the armed DEA agent. He edges down towards the floor, his body trying to absorb shadow. There are footsteps coming towards him, and then the shatter of something exploding underfoot, the crunch echoing throughout the darkened house. The agent bends down to examine what he’s trodden on, the crown of his head passing through the entrance into the bathroom.

  In that instant Fuentes could have acted. He could have hit him across the head with the glass or even with the shelf itself, but what good would it do? He’d then have to deal with the Mexican, and under the circumstances, there would be only one way to deal with him. Besides, a blow to the back of the head rarely does what it’s intended to do: knock someone out cold. Hit someone too softly on the head and all you do is enrage him. Hit him too hard and he’s dead. Fuentes pays attention to biology. He strikes opponents in the head to sting and distract, never to stop. There are plenty of other, safer options to knock someone out.

  ‘What is it?’ the more distant of the two voices says.

  There is a groan of protest at the salicylic bitterness as the agent tastes part of the tablet he’s just stepped on. He shines the light into the bathroom, this time prepared for the presence of the mirror, using its reflection to examine the room. ‘I thought I heard something.’ He turns, the beam glancing across Fuentes for a fraction of a second. The agent doesn’t notice. ‘Someone bigger than Valdez,’ he says, walking back into the bedroom. ‘Someone huge.’

  ‘You mean …?’ The silence of confirmation. A ringing phone makes Fuentes jump, almost dropping the glass. ‘Hello?’ The whole house simmers with intensified silence, as though it too were trying to eavesdrop. Fuentes can just make out the burr of a voice on the other end of the line and then there’s the click of disconnection. ‘We better get back.’

  ‘What about Gomez?’

  Fuentes’ eyes widen w
ith the need to hear more. Does Valdez know Gomez is an active suspect? Has he fed them Gomez to protect himself?

  ‘I’m not losing any more sleep over him. He can wait till morning.’

  Fuentes listens to them leaving, then steps out and watches them getting into the car. He has their faces, the model of the vehicle and its registration number as it drives away. By tomorrow, he’ll have their names. The one thing he doesn’t have is why they were here. What were they looking for? He can’t be sure, but he has a feeling that, whatever it is, it concerns him …

  He goes into the bedroom; opens drawers. Finds it straight away, which was the intention. A half-kilo of coke, probably heavily cut. But why? They think Paredes was set up, so what do they do? Try to set him up again. He pockets the cocaine, just to fuck with them. Besides, you never know when it might just come in handy.

  21

  Ventura

  Ventura has just slipped her key into the lock when the door is pulled inwards with such violence that she falls forwards, almost toppling onto the floor. Carlos scans the street, then slams the door shut behind her. The anxiety that rushes through her slides away into astonishment when she sees the four suitcases huddled together. ‘What’s going on?’

  Carlos stares at her with eyes she’s never seen before: eyes that don’t recognize her. ‘Were you followed?’

  ‘Carlos, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Everything’s the matter. Webvan, SanMarTel. Nycos and Inktomi – they’re fucked. Every single one of them is fucked!’