City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  Upstairs, the last of the striking women were being fingerprinted. Their ink-stained fingers fluttered like moths in the smoky air as they spoke and plotted amongst themselves, some in whispered conflict, voices harsh and low.

  Normally Pilar would have stood at the head of the women, protesting that they were being treated as criminals and demanding an attorney, but like the others, right then she was just grateful to be alive. There was so much anger in her heart that she could feel it pressing inside her chest, as though it could burst like a rotten fruit in the sun; exposing everything she wanted to hide. Fear. Grief. Relief. And even, God help her, gratitude at their escape. Pilar knew how close they had come … She knew they had been rescued by a good man working for a corrupt system. As painful as it was, she acknowledged it, and having done so was able to let it go. ‘Why are we being held?’ she said to Fuentes. ‘We’re not criminals.’

  ‘That’s an interpretation of the law you’ll have to leave to a judge.’

  ‘What about the animals who did this?’

  ‘They are all under arrest.’

  ‘You know there are others.’

  Of course Fuentes knew. Only the week before, a squad of mounted police in the capital had been arrested for exactly the same crime. At first they kept the women for themselves. Then they started selling them by the hour. Abarca had been doing the same. The question was: who were his clients? Fuentes aimed to find out. ‘I’ll do my best to see that all the charges are dropped against you and the other women.’

  ‘And against the kidnappers? The rapists? I bet you’ll see their charges are dropped too!’ Pilar didn’t really believe that. But she had to say it anyway. That was her role – to say and do the things that others were afraid of saying and doing.

  ‘I give you my word.’

  ‘The word of a Tijuana labor cop?’ Her laugh was both contemptuous and fearful. He stared at her, his wrist ticking with pain. ‘I demand to visit the kidnapped women.’

  ‘So visit them, if their families will let you. You’re free to go. All of you.’ Then he turned and walked down the stairs leading back to the lock-ups.

  Down in the holding section, Fuentes stared at the faces of the rurales. ‘Who’s the senior man here?’ The men shuffled away from the question – and from one of the other prisoners. They didn’t consciously mean to betray him. It was an instinctive response to danger, like a herd suddenly breaking from a watering spot. A force of nature. The police moved in a single wave, one of them unlocking the gate, the others tugging the isolated man out. He shouted for help and tried to hold onto the bars. One of the cops slashed at his fingers with a nightstick. The man screamed, his voice high in the ceiling, then low on the ground, clutching his hand inside his armpit.

  Cruel fists lifted him up, struck him; threw him across the room. He hit a jutting counter with his ribs. They all heard the crack. He grunted, not from pain but from fear; of worse to come. Fuentes gestured for and received the nightstick – the magic wand of this interrogation. He slammed it hard on the counter, making the prisoner jump. He nodded to the cops and one grabbed the prisoner from behind in a choke hold, while the others held his good hand over the counter, like an offering on an altar.

  Fuentes brought the stick down so hard he cracked the counter, the police all instinctively jerking away from the blow as he just missed the hand on purpose.

  ‘I’m only asking once …’ He plunged the nightstick into the solar plexus, the prisoner bereft of oxygen, then tapped the gasping head under the chin, forcing eye contact. ‘The names of everyone who went to the stables.’ Fuentes gave him a light tap on the collarbone. ‘Everyone.’ The prisoner muttered something and they dragged him to the deposition desk. It took seven hours to verify twenty-nine names. After he read the names to the other prisoners, they all agreed to testify.

  It only took another five hours to get down all their statements. The rest of the interrogation was just to ensure, to the best of Fuentes’ ability, that no one had been deliberately left off the list. He went through it one last time. Apart from a noted doctor, who worked for free in the hospital every Thursday morning and who had been called when one of the girls looked like she might be dying, none of the other names were that significant. Local party members who were only active at a municipal level. An exporter of limes. A local businessman. A primary-school teacher. An ex-radio broadcaster who was notorious for his binge drinking. Respectable enough people in the run of things. People you would trust to help out if the community were in trouble. It all made tragically predictable sense. And yet Fuentes wasn’t convinced. These fish weren’t big enough.

  He called the first prisoner in again. A doctor had taped his broken fingers. They were a powerful negotiating tool for further down the line. Fuentes told him he needed the real names, and if he didn’t give them to him, he was going to lock him up with Abarca. Incredibly, the prisoner still didn’t talk.

  He was even more scared of something else.

  There was only one thing more frightening than death itself.

  Narcos.

  But why would the Tijuana cartel be even indirectly associated with a worm like Abarca? Fuentes had a hunch that the answer must lie in the identity of one of the young women he had saved.

  38

  El Santo

  El Santo sits with his legs dangling off the gurney, holding an increasingly wet and heavy compression pad to his stomach as the doctor cuts through his jeans.

  He has sent Oviedo to the mall to get some new clothes, and now he’s wondering if that wasn’t a major fucking mistake.

  His shooting might already be all over the narco grapevine. The problem with your average narco is that ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re sitting on their asses, drinking beer, smoking crack, and gossiping about their bosses or their bosses’ women; or even their bosses’ women’s women. It is just like school, only everyone has an Uzi and is totalmente alterado.

  But now El Santo realizes that his quest for privacy has left him unprotected. Anyone could walk through the door and catch him literally with his pants down. He knows what would happen then. Shims under kneecaps would be the least of his problems. Just thinking of it makes his heart race, and that makes his blood run faster and that makes … ‘How about another fucking bandage, I’m bleeding out here!’

  The doctor sighs as he crosses to a cupboard and pulls out a diaper-sized bandage, the rip from the sterile strip being torn open making him flinch like fingernails on a blackboard. ‘I said hold it tight.’ He presses it hard against the wound, and takes El Santo’s hand like he’s a puppet, pushing it down on the bandage. ‘You need to apply pressure.’

  This doctor has a real fucking attitude – always the sign of a good surgeon, even if it makes you want to kill him. El Santo has forgotten what it’s like to be talked down to. ‘Lie down and try not to move.’ The lights come on, showering him in their hot homogenous lux. He blinks up at the clusters of halogen lamps hovering inside the UFO-shaped dish elevated above him. In the background he can hear all the prep noises: the snap of plastic gloves, the rustle of paper face masks and hair nets, the bright metallic click of surgical instruments. A needle appears, its point pearled with a transparent bead.

  He grabs the doc by the sleeve. ‘No funny business!’

  The doctor steps back, pulling free of his grip. ‘Do you want that bullet out or not?’

  Long pause. Even pissing blood, El Santo could leap to his feet and beat the surgeon unconscious. And what good would that do? He’d still be stuck with this copper-tailed slug trying to squirm its way further inside his guts, like a burrowing insect. He nods to the doc, consoling himself with the thought that he is superior to El Feo and all the other narcos, who live in the now because they have abandoned their past and sold their future. They are impulsive the way a blowfly is: never mind the smell, they always go for the hot shit. El Santo is like Amado. A planner. Someone who is in it for the long haul. Which means getting rid of this bullet.


  A jab in his arm. Big fucking deal. He’s up for this.

  The cold squirt of Betadine across his body. Red, then orange. Shiver, tickle, shiver. Rub, rub, sting. Then the doc’s holding a wad of cotton gauze at the end of some tongs. ‘This is going to hurt,’ he says.

  He ain’t lying. ‘Shit, what is that?’

  The doc doesn’t say anything but El Santo can see the smirk through the mask. The surgical lighthead seems to glow stronger, as though it’s in on the gag too. ‘Now I’m going to inject the local anesthetic,’ he says in a robotic monotone, the way they deliver safety instructions on an airplane. They know the plane’s not going down and even if it does, no one’s going to survive. No one’s going to be able to reach for the life jacket under seat. It’s just yabber-yabber filler until they can get on with the real work, and start serving lunch.

  ‘You’ll feel a little prick.’

  Prick, my ass. The jab’s more a stab. In the stomach. The tender spot. He remembers as a kid, hearing about the rabies vaccine and deciding he’d rather go mouth-frothing mad than take ten shots to the gut. Thank you, El Feo. If he weren’t already dead, El Santo would murder him right then and there. Another jab, deeper still. More painful, if that were possible. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Don’t move. I’m making the incision.’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘You can feel that?’

  ‘Fuck yes.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what’s not possible. I need a general anesthetic.’

  ‘You told me yourself that you’ve eaten not an hour ago. You told me you’ve been drinking and ingesting drugs all day.’

  ‘A little blow, so what?’

  The needle gleams under the unwinking glare of surgery lights. ‘Exceptionally, I’m giving you another shot.’

  Exceptionally, I’m not putting a bullet through your head, El Santo thinks. Doctors are supposed to be healers. They’re supposed to have compassion. More bullshit. They’re just upmarket butchers. ‘Well? Are you giving it to me or not?’

  ‘I already have.’ Good news at last. ‘Sometimes the reaction is delayed. Could be because of all the narcotics in your system.’

  He wishes the doc would lay off with the lecture about drugs. ‘It was just a little blow … Ow!’

  ‘I can’t do this if you keep moving.’

  ‘I’m moving because you keep hurting me.’

  ‘It’s impossible that you felt anything just then.’

  ‘I fucking felt it.’

  ‘You must have a low pain threshold.’ El Santo isn’t sure what this means, but it sounds like an insult. ‘I’m giving you another sedative.’

  This time the shot hurts his arm. He tries not to react. Fuck this doctor and his low pain threshold. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you give me this before?’

  ‘I did. Sometimes drug addiction can make you hypersensitive. Or else your system is so loaded with toxins, it’s immune.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, right?’

  ‘Try not to move, I’m making the incision.’

  ‘Fuck me!’

  There is a clatter as the doctor tosses his scalpel into a stainless-steel, kidney-shaped bowl. ‘Listen. I need you to co-operate.’

  ‘I’m lying here, trying to be as still as possible while you slice me open without anesthetic. What am I supposed to do?’

  The doctor grabs El Santo’s cheeks, squeezes open his mouth, shoves five or six wooden spatulas between his teeth, then pushes his mouth shut. ‘Endure,’ he says.

  El Santo bites hard, until it feels like there’s just a thin wooden membrane between his teeth. He gives a low, long groan as the doctor slices his gunshot wound open, his body flexed but unmoving. There is the cold tremor of clamps, going far inside him, and something white shifts fast behind his eyes, the doctor muttering curses to himself, wet flowing down El Santo’s waist and thighs. Then something huge as a heart and heavy as a horse is extracted from his stomach and dropped against metal. It makes a sound like the gates of hell slamming shut. The doctor’s already stitching. El Santo raises his head and peers into the kidney-shaped bowl. All this misery for that – a tiny fucking .22? Goddamn El Feo. ‘I always knew he was a baby.’

  ‘Consider yourself lucky. If it had been a .45 ACP, this would be an autopsy, not an operation. Don’t move, I’m still sewing.’

  El Santo hates the way this doc talks to him. At least they’re alone so no one else can hear this disrespect. He’s glad he sent Oviedo away to get some clothes. It was the right decision after all. He sits up with a grunt, shifting his weight and dangling his feet over the edge. ‘Take it easy,’ the doctor says. ‘No sudden moves.’

  If anyone comes through the door right now, El Santo will be able to respond. He could snatch up his SIG Sauer P226 9 mm and empty all fifteen rounds into them. He will not be taken alive. Things are already looking up. The doctor sees where his eyes are. And just that glance makes him feel better; stronger. Angrier. ‘Call yourself a man of medicine?’

  ‘You came to me dying. Now you’ll live.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  ‘You would have bled to death.’ He walks up close to El Santo, and that’s when he notices that the doctor’s face mask is speckled with blood – his blood. He looks at the bandages sitting inside the surgical waste: sopping with red. No wonder he feels light-headed. The doctor tears the mask off with a sudden rip, his voice no longer flat and muffled but direct and close. Judgmental. ‘And if you hadn’t, you would have developed septicemia and died.’

  This fucking doctor’s got one hell of an attitude problem. If he wasn’t feeling so queasy, he’d teach him a lesson in manners. But fuck that. A saved life is a saved life.

  All he wants to do now is settle the debt, clean the rest of the blood off his thighs and sides and stomach and walk out of here in new clothes. He reaches for his wallet – which is next to his P226 – and notices the doc flinch. That makes him feel better too. His usual world order has been restored. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  This is something El Santo was not expecting and he doesn’t like the unexpected. ‘Bullshit. Fifty grand should cover it.’

  The room fills with the hiss and snapped release of gloves freed and discarded. ‘I don’t want your narco money. I spend enough time with your victims.’

  The way things are going this will end very badly. ‘You know something? I don’t give a fuck what you want. You take the money I give you.’ The moron shakes his head.

  He stands. His bare feet look puny outside his cowboy boots, like an animal without its shell. He feels ridiculous, naked except for a blue paper operating smock tied up at the back, his ass exposed, the hem corroding and crenellating into papier mâché from his blood. This is the part where he’s supposed to be threatening. ‘Otherwise, I’m going to have to waste you.’

  The doctor stares at him like he’s the moron, then slowly turns and points to a computer across the room. ‘Have you ever heard of a webcam?’

  As a matter of fact, El Santo hasn’t, but he gets the drift. ‘You filmed my operation?’ He hurriedly fans his hands across his balls. ‘Pervert!’

  ‘Not perversion, insurance. Harm me, or my family, or any of my staff, and the film goes to the media.’

  El Santo cocks his head in disbelief. Is this guy for real? ‘There’s nothing to stop me from stealing the film right now.’

  The doctor points to this weird orb on a tripod next to the computer. ‘It’s a live feed to a secure storage site.’

  He doesn’t know what that means but he guesses that he’s fucked. ‘You didn’t have to go to the trouble, I am a man of my word. A man of honor.’ Something flashes across the doc’s face that could be a sneer. He grabs his wallet. He may as well have picked up some prime tenderloin, it’s so raw and bloody. Even the sanguine-puffed leather exterior feels like a slice of newly killed meat. The bank notes he takes out are actually dripping. ‘A man like me always
honors his debts.’

  ‘And a man like me always honors his patients.’ The silence in the surgery is broken only by the beading drops of blood from the bank notes. ‘Give it to someone who needs it, someone who has never had anything to do with you. Give it to someone like Padre Márcio.’

  That was almost worth a laugh. El Santo tosses the ruined wad of wet money into the kidney-shaped bowl. ‘Wipe your ass with it, I don’t care.’ Just then Oviedo walks in, not even knocking. ‘We all set?’ he asks, tossing him a new pair of Calvin Kleins.

  ‘Fuck yeah, we’re all set.’ He groans as he puts on his briefs. ‘Say, do you know anything about computers?’

  Oviedo shrugs. ‘Typing’s not my thing.’

  ‘You know anyone who knows anything about computers?’

  ‘Sure, boss.’

  The doctor looks at him anxiously. He knows where this is leading. ‘It’s too late, there’s nothing you can do.’

  Bullshit, there’s always something you can do – he’s been doing it since he was a kid. He reaches for his piece, his stitches aching from the stretch, and shoots the doctor in the chest. The doc slams back into the wall, leaving a slurred trail of blood as he sinks lopsided to the floor. El Santo points to the computer set-up with his gun. ‘He’s been filming me. Find someone to figure it out and get rid of it.’

  Oviedo goes over to the computer, rips out some electrical cords and hefts up the tower, balancing the weight against one hip.

  ‘What about the screen and the camera?’

  Oviedo shakes his head. ‘We got all we need here. We good, boss?’

  El Santo looks back one last time at the doctor, his glasses broken from his fall. ‘Hell yeah, we’re good.’

  39

  Nomen Nescio #352 (Jane Doe #352)

  Fuentes enters into the shimmer of contained cold and an abattoir stench dampened by the high sting of chemicals. Gomez follows him into the morgue, crossing himself instinctually.