Finnegan's week
Page 26
Abel could smell the ox. His body odor was powerful, and when Abel’s hand brushed against Shelby’s, the ox’s hand was clammy.
Abel was terrified. He said, “Ees okay, Buey!”
“No!” Shelby said. “Fuck, no! We got six grand comin!”
“I thought I could sell them to my contact for several dollars a pair, but I could not,” Soltero said, reasonably.
Shelby said, “And you got no profit for yourself, right?”
“Not very much,” Soltero said. “I spent most of my profit on your food tonight.”
“Okay,” Abel said. “Okay. Ees okay, Buey!”
“Sure,” Shelby said, very quietly. “Sometimes things don’t work out.”
Abel had heard that tone once before, when the ox had smashed the bottle of beer across the eyes of the bearded biker. Abel was petrified.
Then Soltero yelped! Shelby had grabbed his ponytail with his left hand and jammed the derringer against the bone behind Soltero’s right ear, saying, “Tell your pals to get outta the car or I’ll put one right between your runnin lights!”
The driver reached under his jacket, but Soltero yelled, “No!”
Then Soltero said something in Spanish that Shelby didn’t understand, and his friends opened the doors and got out slowly.
“Buey! Don’ do eet, Buey!” Abel pleaded. He was afraid to even touch the ox for fear he might pull the trigger.
“Get out, dude!” Shelby said to Abel. “You’re drivin!”
“Where?” Abel cried.
“Back to our car,” Shelby said. Then he released Soltero’s hair, but reached inside Soltero’s coat pocket, removing his wallet. Then he said, “Take that fuckin watch off!”
Soltero removed his gold wristwatch and handed it to Shelby Pate, who put it in the pocket of his leather jacket. Shelby said, “We’re gonna take Señor Soltero with us and make sure he ain’t got some hideout money. Then we’re goin home. If this’s a real Rolex maybe it’ll make up for what he owes us.”
“Crazy!” Abel whispered. “Crazy!”
But now there was nothing Abel Durazo could do except go along. He stepped out and started to open the front door. Soltero’s men stood in the headlight beam, whispering.
Then the small one moved out of the light and came toward Abel, saying in Spanish, “The keys. I have the car keys.”
Shelby said to Soltero, “Jist relax and this’ll be over before ya …”
“Aaaaaaahhhhhh!”
A loud sigh. It sounded to Shelby like Flaco was taking a badly needed piss. Then Abel looked in at him through the side window of the car.
His eyes were white in the moonlight. “Buey!” he cried. “Buey!” Abel’s right hand came up to the window and smeared it with blood.
Soltero hit the door handle and fell out onto the roadside. Shelby heaved himself out just before three explosions shattered the bloody glass!
Abel staggered around the car toward Shelby, clutching the steel that protruded from his belly. Then his hands relaxed and he toppled onto the road.
Shelby bellowed and stood over Soltero, who held his palms up to ward off the bullet. Soltero was silent when Shelby kept his promise and fired the derringer point-blank, right between his running lights.
Then an orange fireball exploded at Shelby from the other side of the car.… The explosion revived him.… The fireball seemed to blow him down.… He lost the derringer.… He got up and ran!
The two Mexicans screamed to each other in Spanish and Shelby heard footsteps padding after him. He kept going, running up the hillside, plunging into the mesquite, plowing through it! In a few minutes the Mexicans’ voices grew fainter.
There were two rows of houses on the hillside, and an open field off to the right. There were no streetlights on that hardpan road, not one. Shelby started for that open area but stopped in horror!
Through the darkness, strange shapes loomed up from the earth.… Crypts and gravestones … Figures moving among them … Flickering candles floating as though through the air … It was a graveyard! Shelby screamed and ran the other way.
He doubled back again and scrambled up a desolate hill, away from houses and cars, away from tombstones and flickering candles. Shelby ran into the blackness of the night, which was not nearly as terrifying as those flickering floating candles.
When Fin and Nell had left the restaurant they’d found Bobbie waiting at the mouth of the passageway. She’d described the Ford Explorer and told them she didn’t get the license number, but was sure it was a California plate. Then, with nothing further they could do, the three investigators had headed for Nell’s car in the parking lot of the Frontón.
The traffic leaving Tijuana was unusually busy for early evening. The vendors were out in force, and they walked between the traffic lanes hoping to interest the tourists in pottery, leather belts, blankets and plaster figurines.
An old woman in a shawl shuffled among the throng of vendors. She had nothing to sell. She was bony and stooped and so badly wrinkled it would be difficult to say she was a woman were it not for her shawl and long dress. On her feet she wore the remnants of a man’s shoes.
Bobbie thought of the mangy starving dog in the doorway, of how the dog had whimpered in fear. She reached into her purse and handed the old woman a twenty-dollar bill.
* * *
Shelby Pate was hopelessly lost and there was no one to light his way. No one to call him with a golden trumpet. No mother to await him on the Day of the Dead. He was exhausted, panicked, battling wave after wave of hysteria. He’d sometimes hallucinated when he’d snorted this much methamphetamine, and he thought he might be hallucinating now. He wasn’t sure that any of this was real.
He was lying on a dusty hilltop in the darkness and could hear dogs barking, and children shouting in the distance. Out in front of him he saw a road traversing a lonely ridge. A vehicle moved slowly along the road and someone was searching from the vehicle with a flashlight. He was certain it was Soltero’s men hunting him. To kill him with a knife the way they’d killed Abel Durazo. Or to belly-shoot him and let him writhe in agony.
Then he saw a silhouette of a boy coming his way out of the darkness! It was all he could do to keep from screaming! Shelby pressed his face into the earth. When he raised up the child was still there. The child moved without a light, seeming to float through the night. Then the phantom boy vanished into a small tunnel, into the darkness.
Shelby heard a voice down the hillside behind him. It sounded like the Mexican with the Zapata mustache. He got up and ran, staggered, after the boy. Toward the fearful tunnel, and whatever lay beyond!
When Shelby got close he could see that it was not a tunnel but a hole in a tall metal barrier. There was an opening chopped clear through, but he was so fat he almost couldn’t follow the small boy through the hole. He ripped his jacket and cut his hands on the rusty metal. He got stuck for a moment and began to weep, but kept wriggling, finally getting his hips through, tearing his jeans, bloodying his legs. Then Shelby got up and limped across a desolate plateau in the moonlight.
He heard the sound of Mexican music from a boom box far off to the left. He heard voices chattering and laughing off to the right. But there were no lights, none at all, only an occasional dagger of moonlight.
Shelby looked for the boy but couldn’t find him. Then he tripped and fell, rolling down a dusty hillside. When he got up, he couldn’t run anymore. His legs wouldn’t obey him, and he heard a sawing sound, realizing it was coming from himself. His breathing sounded like a hacksaw cutting through steel pipe; a screeching raspy saw-blade was buried deep in his chest. Shelby Pate was sure he would die then, there in the devil’s gorge.
An English-accented voice said, “Arriba las manos!”
Shelby dropped to his knees. In a way, he wanted to die, to get it over with. A flashlight beam struck him like a club. He was blinded. He put his hands up to his face.
A voice said, “Hey, Phil! This guy’s an American!”
CHAPTER 25
It was nearly 11:00 P.M. by the time Nell’s car arrived back at the main gate of NAS North Island.
Before she parked, Fin said, “I was thinking about stopping someplace in Coronado for a nightcap. Anyone wanna join me?”
“Not me,” Nell said. “I’ve had enough for one evening.” She didn’t say enough of what.
“I’m a little tired,” Bobbie said.
“Okay, guess I’ll have to go it alone,” Fin said.
Almost in unison, both women started to indicate he shouldn’t drink alone. They both stopped, and Nell said, “You go ahead, Bobbie. I’ve really gotta run along.”
Bobbie said, “No, I just didn’t want Fin to have to be by himself. Why don’t you join him? I gotta wash my hair and do some ironing.”
“Well, I won’t be stopping,” Nell said.
“I gotta run along home,” Bobbie said.
Fin said, “All this indecision makes me wanna just go home and improve my mind. Maybe I’ll stop and buy that new book by our country’s greatest living naked author, Madonna.”
When Fin and Bobbie got out, Fin said, “We’ll all team up right here at noon on Monday, right? I’m sure we got enough to arrest Durazo and Pate based on the navy shoe on the severed foot. But I think somebody should positively identify that shoe as being from the stolen shipment. Okay, Bobbie?”
“That’ll be done first thing Monday morning,” Bobbie said. “I’ll go to the morgue myself.”
“After seeing Pate in action tonight, I’m more convinced than ever he’ll spill his guts,” Nell said. “The guy’s a complete psycho in addition to being a doper.”
“I can’t wait till Monday!” Bobbie said.
“But you will, won’t you?” Fin said.
“I’m not gonna go off and do something stupid,” Bobbie said, mischievously. “Like moseying back down to T.J. and staking out Durazo’s car to see what the gang was up to.”
“That’d be about as smart as Julius Caesar moseying on down to the Senate to see what Brutus and the gang was up to,” Fin said.
Bobbie said, “Don’t worry. I’m going straight home, Sherlock.”
“Okay, Watson,” Fin said. “See you Monday.”
Bobbie kissed Fin on the cheek and said, “I wanna be just like you when I grow up.”
He stood watching her drive off, when Nell interrupted his thoughts, saying, “Good night … Sherlock.”
“Give her a break, will ya?” Fin said. “She’s just a kid.”
Before she could stop herself, Nell blurted, “Why don’t you give her a break. She’s obviously ga-ga over the big-city detective. Or is it goo-goo at her age? Kee-rist, you’re old enough to be her …”
“Big brother.”
“Father.”
“I’m only … seventeen years older.”
“Like I said: father.”
Fin didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Forty-five is a real tough time for an actor, Nell. She just allows me to pretend I’m not over-the-hill. That’s all she does for me.”
While he was walking away, Nell said, “Still wanna have that drink?”
Four separate Border Patrol agents had a crack at Shelby Pate that night. Their questions varied slightly. His answers not at all, usually delivered in a monotone. The chase through the darkness had sobered him a lot, but he was still twitching and perspiring as he sat in the interrogation room.
The last agent to question him was almost as big as Shelby. He gave Shelby a can of Pepsi and said, “We’ve checked your record. You’ve been in jail a few times.”
“Not for running drugs over the border,” Shelby said. He tried to focus on his questioner’s eyes, but his own eyes kept leaping away of their own volition.
“That’s a nice watch you got.”
“My mother gave it to me.”
“You’re loaded on something, aren’t you?”
“Did some drinking early in the evening.”
“You’re loaded on something else.”
Shelby said, “I already told the other guys, a taxi driver offered to take me to a whorehouse up in the hills somewheres. And when I got there three Mexicans tried to mug me. See these cuts on my hands and legs? I was lucky to get away. I was lucky you guys found me.”
“And how’d you know where to get through the fence?”
“I jist followed the shadow.”
“What shadow?”
“Jist a little shadow that went through the tunnel.”
“What tunnel?”
“It turned out to be a hole in the fence. A little boy jist went through it.”
“And what happened to the little boy?”
“He got lost, I think.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“I never did. I hope he found his way home, is all.”
“We think you were carrying a load of drugs and got ripped off passing through Deadman’s Canyon. That’s what we think.”
“Is that what you call that place?”
“It’s what the Mexicans call it. The Canyon of the Dead.”
“Then maybe it was a ghost that took me in the tunnel,” Shelby said, and his eyes popped wide. “I think maybe it was.”
“What tunnel? You mean the hole in the fence?”
“Yeah. I thought I was going into hell when I went in that tunnel.”
“Then why did you go?”
Shelby Pate said, “I thought I belonged in hell.”
The Border Patrol agent left him alone then, and later said to his supervisor, “The guy’s whacked out on drugs, but I don’t think we really have anything. He probably got burned trying to make a drug buy, and did have to run for his life. What’ll we do with him?”
“He’s sober enough now,” the supervisor said. “May as well cut him loose. He’s obviously a nut-case as well.”
Shelby Pate called a cab to pick him up at the Border Patrol station. When he was delivered by taxi to Hogs Wild, he was mildly surprised that nobody had stolen the helmet off his bike, a common occurrence at that time of night.
There were still a few bikers in the bar, and two mommas having last call. He recognized one of the bikers, a little guy with a scraggly fringe of red hair down to his shoulders. The biker was trying to persuade one of the mommas to ride home with him.
Shelby interrupted them by tossing a gold Rolex onto the bar. “Gimme an eightball and five hunnerd bucks and it’s yours,” he said.
The biker picked up the Rolex and took it over to the broken sconce next to a jukebox rocking with the thud of heavy metal. The biker examined the gold bracelet more carefully than he did the watch itself, then said, “It’s genuine.”
“Good call,” Shelby said. “Deal?”
The guy handed back the Rolex and said, “I can give you a teener and two-fifty. That’s all I got.”
“Deal,” Shelby said. “Gimme.”
Ten minutes later, Shelby’s bike was roaring toward the pier at Imperial Beach. And twenty minutes after that Shelby was lying on the sand, sweating and shivering. The methamphet-amine made the crashing surf sound like the roar of howitzers. Shelby burrowed into the sand to escape the explosions and to find some warmth. He spilled as much of the meth as he snorted. He lay on his belly and rooted, licking the meth and tasting sand in his mouth.
He was like a giant crab burrowing on his belly on a mist-free night, when a dagger of moonlight inflicted agony on his sensitive eyes.
The Coronado pub was full of Navy SEAL team members who were trying to drink the joint dry before closing time, those who weren’t busy trying to pick up one of several young women who were there to be picked up by the strapping young sailors.
Fin and Nell took a table in the corner after ordering a cognac.
He said, “Here I am, dying of a mid-life crisis, and I have to pick a j
oint where everyone thinks aging is like AIDS: It can only happen to people who aren’t careful.”
“Wonder if Bobbie comes here,” Nell said. Then, “She’s a pretty good kid, I guess.”
“You sure didn’t seem to like her much.”
“I don’t know who or what I like lately,” Nell said. “This is a cruddy age, isn’t it?”
“I gotta admit, I’ve had a good week though. Getting to know both of you.”
“Both of us?”
“I know you a lot better than I know Bobbie.”
“It didn’t look that way.”
“Was I giving her coy glances?”
“You looked more coy than Princess Di. Middle-aged men who want a woman their own age are so rare they could get on the next Geraldo.”
“Having a young girl pay attention to me made me a little goofy.”
“It’s a cruddy age,” Nell said, patting his hand.
“You just touched me!” he said.
“Does this mean I get to wear your class ring?”
“Wanna go to the beach tomorrow?”
“Why the beach?”
“I wanna see you in a bikini. Got one?”
“A woman my age wears a one-piece,” she said.
“Okay with me. Wanna go?”
“Whadda you look like in a swimsuit?”
“It ain’t pretty,” he said, “but I can build a mean sand castle. I got lots of experience building castles, most of them in the air.”
“Okay,” she said, “let’s go to the beach tomorrow.”
* * *
They were drifting and floating away from him, all the dark shadows holding flickering candles. They were leaving him and he was trying to scream: “NO! NO! I’M ALIVE!”
He couldn’t get the words out because the dry acrid dust of Mexico was in his mouth and in his nostrils. He was slowly suffocating in a grave under a tall tombstone with a portrait of a boy on it. The boy was Shelby Pate, ten years of age. It was his tombstone!
Then a shadow figure approached. It was a woman in a shawl. She might’ve been the mother of the boy with ringworm. She looked down at his grave, and he tried to scream: “DIG ME UP! I’M ALIVE.”