City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

Pilar turned to the other members of the rurales, who were staring at her with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. ‘We are not anonymous. We are your wives, your sisters; your daughters and your mothers. Think about it!’

  There was a long, unexpected silence that both surprised and heartened Pilar. The chief stared at her for a deadly moment, then slowly nodded. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘We’ll be saving you for last.’

  The men charged the group, grabbing the women by the back of the neck or the hair, one of them falling as he fought with Juana. Abarca lashed out with his boots, shouting to his men with despotic authority. Pilar broke free and rushed him, slapping his face with the force of her entire body, her shoulder aching from the blow. He staggered backwards, falling in a cloud of dust, then fumbled up on his knees, unholstering a Colt .45.

  Pilar would have been shot dead right there and then if it hadn’t been for the stranger who grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her away, putting himself between her and the gun. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Fuentes said, glaring at the enraged man. ‘Put that gun away or I’ll shoot you myself.’

  Abarca looked around. Three other cops surrounded him, hands on Berettas. A pause of humiliation, then reflection; then finally of survival. He holstered his weapon.

  The woman Fuentes was holding in his arms squirmed. ‘Calm down,’ he said to Pilar, loosening his grip a little.

  Then she twisted downwards and bit him on the wrist. It was the bite of a carnivore around its prey’s throat. Ferocious. Furious. Unrelenting. ‘Stop,’ he whispered into her ear. She pressed down even harder, and then her jaw went slack, as though the rage inside her had suddenly subsided, like a tropical downpour, fierce one moment, gone the next; blood staining her lips.

  He turned Pilar in his arms, so that they were gazing at each other, her eyes black with hate. She went to spit at him, but at the last moment stopped herself. Instead she pulled away from his grip, wiping his blood from her mouth as she walked back to join her sisters. Fuentes watched her as he held his wrist, his shirt sleeve going wet, the initial high ringing pain of the bite subsiding to a dull, thick ache. He took out his cuffs, and in one fast move, turned Abarca and snared his hands behind his back. He shoved the stunned man forwards, towards the stable, lifting his wrists while keeping his arms straight. Almost no one can bear the agony of that hold, especially a coward like his prisoner. Fuentes turned to the three other cops. ‘Two of you watch his men, one of you come with me …’

  Fuentes didn’t need two cops to watch the rurales. They reacted as their forefathers would have done if they had seen their hacendado lynched by bandits or executed by Zapata’s men. They folded their arms and stood away, disowning their boss in a second.

  Pilar watched the trio disappearing into the stables, their figures slowly lost in the shadows. She shivered. The creaking darkness of the stables reminded her of something. The smile of the bus driver – that similar falling away from light. She didn’t want to follow them, but knew she had to, and she forced herself to step into the gloom. It was the same kind of compulsion that drives some people closer and closer to the edge; an irresistible terror, combined with the burning need to know.

  The stables were a maze of indistinct shadows, raw with the keening stench of manure, straw heaped underfoot as though scattered to mask a trap. Pilar felt as if the whole floor could give way. There was a terrible expectation, as though she were just one step from a frightening revelation she needed to avoid but had to see – at any cost.

  A horse kicked impatiently against the wall as she passed, making her start. She finally glimpsed them ahead, already at the furthest end of the stables, disappearing round a box stall with its silhouette of a large horse. She nearly tripped on a discarded rake, grabbing hold of the edge of a box for support. She glanced into the stall.

  Then screamed.

  Footsteps hurried towards her as she tried to open the padlocked latch. She scrambled over the top of the stall, landing in a pile of straw. Lying in the corner was a young, naked woman, her hands tied to an iron hoop in the wall. Pilar struggled with the ropes, which were impossible to unknot. The woman just lay there, not reacting. Someone started kicking the stall’s door behind her. It burst inwards, pieces of wood flying, Fuentes kneeling over the woman, listening for a heartbeat. He took off his jacket and covered the woman with it, exposing the hard blue metal of a gun harnessed near his heart. He used a piece of the shattered wood to lever the ring out of the wall, then lifted the young woman up in his arms, stepping over the shattered planks, the hoop dragging in the straw from her still bound hands as he walked towards the light.

  Fuentes was almost out of the stables when he froze, his head inclined as though someone had just called out his name. He passed the unconscious woman to his colleague, then drew his Colt Python and aimed it at Abarca’s mouth. ‘How many others?’

  Abarca stared at Fuentes, calculating risk. Fuentes cocked the gun, the barrel shifting as he did, now aimed much lower, at his paunch. Three days of agony, and only then death. ‘I’m not asking you again.’

  ‘Five,’ Abarca said, then quickly, correcting himself, ‘Six counting her.’

  ‘Shoot him,’ Pilar said, and it was like a siren call – the one thing Fuentes didn’t want to hear and the one thing he felt he must answer.

  The way God must react to our prayers.

  Only one word came to Abarca’s lips; a word he had heard so often that he had forgotten its meaning. A worthless word suddenly rendered valuable. A word he felt the force of for the first time in his miserable life. ‘Mercy,’ Abarca whispered. It was the worst thing he could have said; begging for the thing he had always denied others.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I’ll take you to them. All of them.’

  Fuentes indicated with his head that Abarca should lead the way and that he would follow.

  ‘You’re letting him go?’ It wasn’t a question so much as an earthquake of disbelief. ‘This pig?’

  ‘There are more captives. I have to find them.’ He followed the ranch chief back into the crypt-like darkness. Pilar started to follow. He turned to her, his voice disembodied in the gloom. ‘Go back to your friends. Make sure none of them are missing. Get them all on the bus and wait for me there.’

  ‘Wait for what, for more cops to kidnap us?’

  ‘Wait to see if I come back alive.’

  32

  El Santo

  ‘I pay these motherfuckers to work for me, not for the DEA or Los Pinos.’ El Santo angrily pokes the coals of the barbecue with a long metal spoon, remembering what his mother used to say: He who sups with the devil should eat with a long spoon. He never did really understand why it had to be a spoon. If you were sharing a meal with the devil, wouldn’t everyone be using a fork?

  ‘But they do work for the DEA and Los Pinos.’ El Feo shrugs the way he does when he has an opinion of his own. He’s been shrugging way too often lately.

  ‘Why do you think I hired them?’ He shoves El Feo hard in the chest, feeling the reverberation of all that fat, like a shout in a tunnel, two seconds late. ‘I don’t give a fuck who pays their pension plan – there won’t be any retirement if they don’t come up with answers. Where the fuck is Mary-Ellen? Who the fuck is this cop, Paredes? And why the fuck was he driving her car?’

  ‘Maybe he killed Mary-Ellen and ripped off her load.’

  Honest to God, it makes him want to kill El Feo. It’s not that he hasn’t thought exactly the same thing – he has. It’s just that he hates hearing it out of the mouth of a moron. ‘Someone’s jerking my chain and I don’t like it. It’s your job to find out who it is. I want results, not fucking opinions.’

  ‘Maybe you need to pay everyone more?’ El Feo suggests, not very helpfully.

  El Santo feels like cauterizing El Feo’s throat with the hot end of the spoon. ‘What, now people think loyalty’s for sale to the highest bidder?’

  El Feo takes a step back, starin
g in shock at what El Santo’s just said: it’s not that people think loyalty’s for sale; they know it is. El Feo’s wondering if he should reconsider that offer from Tijuana. After all, how difficult would it really be to kill El Santo? ‘They work hard for you, boss. Every piece of skinny they give up, it’s always Tijuana or Juárez, never Ciudad Real. They’re doing you a favor. Eliminating the competition.’

  El Santo’s been in this racket long enough to know that when people start justifying other people working something on the side, it means they’re working something on the side too. Maybe he should ask Oviedo to start tailing El Feo. He glances through the walk-in doors leading to the kitchen. Oviedo’s standing there, looking at them, sharpening a meat cleaver with a grooved honing rod. That’s what he likes about Oviedo. Industrious. Never wasting time. The exact fucking opposite of El Feo. If only Oviedo could get that dog of his to shut the fuck up, it’d be a no-brainer. ‘They keep squawking to the DEA and PJF the way they’ve been doing, pretty soon there’ll be nothing left to give up.’ El Feo looks at him as though he doesn’t know what El Santo’s talking about. He’s going to have to explain it to him. Again. ‘Don’t you get it? They’ll be giving us up soon.’

  El Feo punches a fist deep into the ice crate and pulls out a beer. El Santo raps him on the knuckles with the spoon. ‘Lay off the Noche Buena. It’s months till Christmas and I’m already running low.’

  ‘I was just going to pass it to you,’ El Feo lies, rubbing his hand before snatching up a Pacifico with a resentful flourish. He opens it with his teeth – if you can call them that. ‘So what do you want us to do about them?’

  ‘I don’t know, sometimes I think we should tap them both and just start over with new recruits.’

  ‘But … you can’t tap them. They’re protected.’

  Unlike El Feo, El Santo is not stupid. Of course he knows that if he whacked either Byrd or Gordillo, he’d wake up the next morning covered in a heap of shit about the size of Tamaulipas. But no one has any right to tell him what he can or cannot do – especially some pendejo like El Feo. ‘What’s your problem? Because if you’ve got a problem, I can give the job to somebody else. Oviedo’s got ambition. He’d love to help me out.’

  ‘That sneaky fuck? Are you kidding?’

  ‘He may be a sneaky fuck but at least he doesn’t question my orders.’

  ‘Neither do I, boss, it’s just … complicated.’

  ‘What about Paredes’ partner? We could snatch him, sweat some answers out of him. No one would give a fuck.’

  El Feo seems to brighten – if you could imagine a tub of tar radiating light. ‘Sure, we could tap him along with his new partner, the jerk-off from Tijuana.’

  ‘That way it’ll not only be a warning, it’ll make Gordillo and Byrd look stupid.’ El Santo clinks his beer bottle against El Feo’s. ‘First problem solved. What about that fucking prick, Carlos. Any luck finding him?’

  ‘We tossed his house. His girlfriend hired a car. We think they’re heading to Phoenix.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘We found an address book. He has relatives there.’

  Yesterday was a fuck-up, but today is already looking better. He manages a smile. ‘Find both of them. I need to set an example no one will ever forget.’

  El Feo preens. ‘I’m on it, boss.’

  ‘Any news about that union car bombing?’

  ‘The guy who owned the car is working for the same organization that the piece of toast was working for.’ The piece of toast who wasn’t the actual target. ‘The guy’s the local boss.’

  El Santo needs to follow this one carefully. They gave him a contract on the girl sindicalista and she got away. Later the same day her Red boss is targeted by someone else, who screws up too. At least their fuck-up makes El Santo’s look better, but still it was disrespectful to go to Tijuana or Juárez for a hit in Ciudad Real. El Santo could tell them that he ordered the switch from the girl to the guy when he found out about the car bomb plan. He could make out that nothing happened in Ciudad Real without him knowing about it. He’d present the killing of the guy instead of the girl as a deliberate act; a mark of displeasure for handing a contract to an out-of-town hit team. That would truly strengthen him, and with Los Zetas and El Chapo and the others breathing down his neck, he needs to strengthen. One thing he better figure out fast is why the sudden interest in unions? What’s at stake here – what do people know that he doesn’t? He drains his beer, meditating on the mystery. El Feo’s burp brings him back to reality. ‘Last item. What about these cars the priest is heisting?’

  ‘Padre Márcio,’ El Feo corrects him.

  El Santo doesn’t like the reverential tone, although he could probably put up with it if it were being directed at him. ‘Padre, pope – whatever the fuck you call him. He’s heisting cars and selling them on. He has to pay taxes like everyone else.’

  ‘Come on, boss. He’s helping the poor.’

  ‘I help the poor too!’ El Feo’s eyes flicker at the lie. ‘I don’t know why you’ve got a hard-on for this priest.’

  ‘He’s been marked by God!’

  ‘So what? He’s not the first guy with bullet holes in his paws. Probably put up his hands when the cops showed and they shot him anyway.’

  ‘That’s no way to speak. Those hands are sacred!’

  He grabs El Feo’s left wrist with both hands and forces his hand onto the hotplate. ‘I’ll show you fucking sacred hands,’ he says, his voice rising above El Feo’s scream. He lets go of the smoking hand, and El Feo plunges it into the ice, beer bottles tut-tutting as they rap into each other, floating away from his sunken, steaming fingers. ‘A little fucking respect, is that too much to ask?’ El Santo waits till the fingerprints sear, transparent as white onion, then scrapes the wafers of skin off the griddle and onto the coals, where they flare and cinder.

  El Feo starts to blubber. It’s got to be deliberate; El Feo knows if there’s one thing El Santo can’t stand, it’s waterworks. ‘Cut it out!’ he shouts, grabbing a bottle of Noche Buena and breaking it over El Feo’s head, glass skipping in agony across the hotplate. There’s a rush of sudden silence, only disturbed by the sizzle of beer evaporating in the heat.

  El Feo struggles to his feet, blood from the gash on his left eyebrow streaming onto his shirt. El Santo stares at the neck of the broken bottle he still holds in his hand, then tosses it across the lawn. ‘See what you made me do? I have to wait till fucking winter to replace that one!’

  El Feo says something. It sounds like, ‘I didn’t mean to …’

  ‘If you don’t shut the fuck up about that priest, so help me God, next time it won’t be your hand, it’ll be your fucking tongue I’ll be barbecuing.’

  ‘Sinner.’

  Something is wrong. El Feo is still talking after he’s told him to shut up. ‘What?’

  ‘You fucking, dirty sinner.’ El Santo hears the shot before he sees the smoke cough its way out of the gun. Then the next thing he knows, he’s lying on his side, his face aching from being sucker-punched by the ground, El Feo’s shoes doing an excited little dance just in front of his nose. It’s as though there is no connection between the two events. First, bang; then lying here on the ground, like he’s always been down here, bleeding.

  ‘I am sending you to hell, you—’ The ground jumps just a little; enough to slap him on the cheek, the spray of blood disproportionate to the tremor that he felt. El Santo crawls away from the twitching body of El Feo. Only one handgun could make a sound like that, let alone such a pulpy mess of El Feo. S & W Model 29. And only one of his sicarios is kitsch enough to make a point of always carrying the Model 29.

  Oviedo.

  El Santo scrambles to his knees. His crotch is wet. He panics, but it’s only blood. His dignity is saved. El Feo’s bullet has passed right through the solid silver buckle on his crocodile leather belt, traveling on through his pre-shrunk Levi’s and the waistband of his Calvin Kleins, before calling it a day and
stopping, exhausted and snub-nosed, in the shallow creases of his skin.

  ‘You okay, boss?’ Oviedo asks, with the same flat delivery of a shopkeeper saying cash or credit?

  ‘Just a fucking flesh wound.’ Flesh wound or not, this is serious. His right-hand man just tried to kill him. Word will get out. Before he knows it, everyone will be after him. Assassination attempts are like the clap – contagious as hell.

  ‘You’re pissing blood, boss. We better get you to the vet.’

  El Santo gingerly explores the wound. Fragments of metal, leather and cloth have been driven into his skin in a livid splatter of debris, centered on a hunk of lead, the end of which is only just visible. He could almost worm it out with his fingers, but there’s a risk he’d end up pushing it further inside that mysterious cavern known collectively as your guts. Then he’d be royally fucked. Plus the risk of infection. ‘Fuck the vet. This needs a real clinic.’

  ‘I know just the one.’

  ‘Get some men. Get rid of this tub of shit. Make an example.’

  ‘Sure, boss.’

  ‘I want his whole fucking crew taken out.’

  ‘I’ll look after it.’

  ‘Tomorrow. His family will be at the Heartbreak, for Curro’s birthday. That’s the time to do it.’

  ‘You got it, boss.’

  Shit. With co-operative killers like Oviedo around, why the hell did El Santo put up with El Feo for so long? Loyalty? Friendship? They’re just bullshit myths, like Christmas and bad luck, invented to make you feel weak and guilty. ‘Wait.’ He grabs Oviedo by the arm, leaving a red mark on his white sleeve. ‘Do you believe in God?’

  Oviedo screws up his face. ‘Who the fuck is that?’

  El Santo smiles. ‘My kind of man.’

  33

  Pilar

  The makeshift home of the late Isabel Torres was deserted. Fuentes lifted the fiberglass sheeting at the back of the shack and looked inside, just to make sure no one was hiding. He braced a neighbor, who held out for twenty pesos. She said Isabel’s mother had left with a young woman an hour ago. They were going to Rosario Flores’ place. She nodded to the south, narrowing her gaze against the sun. He asked her who Rosario Flores was.