“Where’d you get the necklace? It’s beautiful.”
The girl touched it and smiled.
“My boyfriend gave it to me.”
She pointed at a young man sitting and laughing with a couple of friends. Then she went to sit with them. The laughter continued, and the girl never looked back to see if Ray left the pizza parlor or stayed.
Late that night, after the girl and her boyfriend had stretched a slice of pizza and a soda into hours of fun, and ducked into an alleyway for an hour of fumbling, Ray caught up with the boyfriend.
“Amigo,” Ray said clasping the young man from behind as though he were a long lost friend.
“Do I know you?” the boy said.
Ray could see he was at most seventeen and hiding his terror.
“Let me ask you about your girlfriend’s necklace,” Ray said.
He reached into his pocket, and the young man tried to pull away. The boy wanted to scream, but that would have been uncool. Ray held onto the back of the young man’s neck.
“Listen. This can be hard or this can be easy. Which do you want?”
The boy’s head was bobbing a thousand times a minute with nerves like he was agreeing to everything Ray had asked or ever could ask.
“Easy,” he said.
“Very smart,” Ray said. “Now. Tell me about the necklace.”
Later that night, exhausted from hours of stakeout, Ray tried to make it into the house as quietly as he could, but it made no difference. Esmeralda was waiting for him.
“Anything?” she asked.
“I think so,” Ray said. “I think I learned a lot. Tomorrow, I just have to ask one more person a few questions, then your problem will be gone.”
“Who are you going to ask?” Esmeralda tried, but her brother ignored her.
Ray was up a fraction after dawn and waited. When his niece came out of her room for breakfast, he sat next to her.
“That police officer that came by yesterday. You know him?”
“Of course. That’s Willie. He’s the one that found me in the street and called the ambulance.”
“But you were knocked out, right? I mean, you didn’t actually see him when he found you, right?”
“No, but everybody said so,” Luz Maria said. She sounded unsure of herself.
“And you had talked to him before you got attacked, right?”
“Sure. Plenty of times. He always hangs out in the chicken and pizza place. You know. Doing his rounds. He always stops in.”
Esmeralda had been listening to the back and forth and got into it.
“You think he knows something?’ she asked.
Ray ignored her.
“He pay you more attention than the other girls?” Ray asked.
Luz Maria looked into her plate of eggs and bacon like they might have an answer for her.
“We joke around sometimes,” she said. She looked ready to cry.
“That’s all right,” Ray said patting Luz Maria’s hand. “Eat your breakfast.”
Ray lit a cigarette. It was his first since he’d been on the island.
A few minutes later, Luz Maria went back to her room, a troubled look on her face. Esmeralda turned to her brother.
“You saying Willie had something to do with this?”
She kept her voice low. Ray did the same.
“Willie sold her necklace to another guy. Ten bucks. Said he got it off a ‘puta’.”
“So maybe some puta did give it to him,” Esmeralda said.
Ray waved her off with his cigarette hand.
“Whores don’t give away gold. Not even to cops. He said puta but he meant ‘some bitch I hate.’”
Esmeralda was quiet for a minute, but when Ray got up, she spoke.
“You think him and Luz Maria were…”
Ray waited a second to see if the sentence was going to be finished then he answered.
“Guys don’t hate the girls that say yes. They hate the ones that say no.”
Esmeralda felt better, and Ray went out.
Finding Guillermo Ortiz, Willie to all the young people of the neighborhood, was not difficult. Following him on his beat, round and round, watching him get his lunch and flirt with the teenaged girls, waiting for his shift to end in the early evening, that was all hard. No time for a bathroom break or for a real meal. Just barely enough time for Ray to go into a store and buy the one tool he felt he needed to have a conversation with a cop about an assault on an innocent girl.
The officer went back to the precinct and came out in civilian clothes. He made a stop at the chicken and pizza place, chatted up every girl who came in alone, struck out with all of them, though they were all nice to him and laughed only when he had already moved off. Guillermo was twenty years old and small at the shoulders – it was hard enough for him to command respect when he had on his uniform, badge, and gun. In street clothes he looked like a high school kid and not a senior either.
The officer visited with a prostitute in the park, paid her nothing except a look at his badge, then walked home, Ray Cruz behind him.
On a deserted street, Ray picked up a baseball-sized rock from someone’s ten by ten front yard. He quickened his pace, and Willie turned around at the sound of him.
“You’re…” Willie said, and Ray smashed him in the ear with the rock.
Willie fell flat on his back and moved his arms in the air slowly like he was trying to find a handrail that might help him get on his feet again. Ray moved quickly to get the small frame revolver strapped to the officer’s ankle, then he knelt beside Willie’s head and aimed the gun at his face.
“If you want to live you’re going to be quiet and answer my questions. Understand?”
Ray didn’t wait for a response. He pulled a roll of duct tape from his back pocket, tore off a piece with his teeth and slapped it over the officer’s mouth.
Ray half dragged, half walked the officer to an alleyway between two stores that wouldn’t open until the early morning.
“Two questions. You tell me the truth if you want to live. First, when you talked to Luz Maria a few days ago in the chicken and pizza place, she thought you were joking right? I mean, she laughed right in your face, right?”
Willie nodded. Would have loved to have explained, but the tape wouldn’t let him.
“You’re doing good. Second, you thought beating her would teach her a lesson, right?”
Willie nodded again. Ray rolled his eyes then raised the gun to Willie’s temple and took the tape off his mouth with his free hand.
“Anything to say?” Ray asked.
“You said you weren’t going to kill me,” Willie said seeing that things weren’t going as he had hoped.
“Not exactly what I said,” Ray answered, and he pulled the trigger.
A half-mile away, Ray reached a beach he had swum at a hundred times before. There were almond trees and nooks with lovers. Some kids had left a small bonfire burning and Ray dropped Officer Guillermo Ortiz’s wallet into it. The wallet was flimsy – plastic – and Ray watched it melt and burn for a few minutes. In the morning it wouldn’t be more than a gob that the police would have no use for if they ever found it. The gun Ray wiped clean. He held it by the grip using a stray fragment of palm leaf then threw it as far into the ocean as his arm would let him.
“Anything?” Esmeralda asked as he entered the house at one in the morning.
“Got him,” Ray answered.
“It was Willie?” Esmeralda asked.
“You don’t need to know any details about anything,” Ray said.
Esmeralda knew he was right, but she didn’t like it. She had a right to know who had done what to whom when her daughter was involved. She was about to press her case; Ray cut her off.
“You just got to get me plane tickets back to New York,” he said.
“When? Tomorrow?”
“Nah. A few days,” Ray said. “I want to see my goddaughter smile again. We’ll go to the beach this weekend. Give me some
time to warm up and get a proper tan. Maybe go for a swim or something.”
I thank Anthony Neil Smith for accepting this story for publication in the second incarnation of his fine ezine, PLOTS WITH GUNS. Ray Cruz uses his skill set to avenge another family member in a novel about him called THE CONCRETE HEART. Will it be coming to Kindle soon? Maybe.
Elena Speaks of the City, Under Siege
It is a city, under siege, and you are out with your grandmother to buy vegetables and, if available, God please, a bit of meat. Your grandmother, bundled in layers and waddling, leads the way. She can’t go alone because it is a siege and the streets are dangerous. Some of the people are dangerous too. Besides, you like her though her walk is slow – her breasts fed your mother. It means something, even under siege.
The sun is out, but you must shove your hands deep into your pockets if you want to feel warmth, and you jog in place sometimes to stay at your grandmother’s side. You wish she could talk a little less if that would add even only one step per hour to her pace. She stops to look down every intersection, even ones where whole buildings have crumbled to block the way so that nothing ever again will come speeding along, heedless. She tells you, since you are both out in the dangerous world, of all the things to be careful about, including men – though most men near your age have long since fled or died or both – and “beware of onions in stew. They can’t be trusted. They take over the flavor.” This explains much in her cooking.
As you near the market, a friend calls out a greeting. She is from your college days, days of sanity, and offers you a drag on a cigarette because when she knew you, you were a nicotine fiend and would take a drag from any cigarette, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, whatever. Months ago, and a different world. There were cigarettes to be had in any corner store or a thousand kiosks or in the pockets of friends. You cast an eye to your grandmother; she has waddled on, still gesturing. You offer the cigarette back to your friend, and she waves it off. You think nothing of it. Her gesture is humanity, normality. You smile and jog a few steps to catch up staying right behind your grandmother to suck the last life out of the cigarette. To her it would be one more thing to warn you of.
Then it explodes. Not the cigarette, of course, the market. Thirty feet in front of you a fruit stand with more customers than fruit blows up. Melons in the air. You land only two or three feet from where you were, hitting your head on the side of a car. You’ve dented the car, but so have the melons. You can’t hear a thing. People are running or they are falling. Your grandmother, whom you crawl to because you can’t bear to stand, is waddling still, but she’s on her back, arms and legs working slowly; an overturned turtle.
A man, running, steps on your right hand fingers and clips your head with his shin. This puts you on your stomach. You try to shout “Idiot,” but who can tell if you made a sound? Not you. On your belly, you pull yourself to your grandmother. You think you are telling her that you’re there, that you’re all right, that she’s all right; your lips, at least, are moving. She looks at you at precisely the moment your hand finds the warm spot of blood near her neck under the layers. Something metal is in there, and her life of sixty years and more has spurt and now trickles away. You pick her head up. She would not like being on the sidewalk.
Her lips move; you can’t read them. She’s probably making no noise. You couldn’t hear it if she was.
Through your hands and knees, you feel another explosion, further down in the market. Maybe the vegetable man, or the woman who tries to sell clothes as though you couldn’t walk into a thousand abandoned houses and take the clothes of a thousand families. There is more running. Your grandmother, her eyes are open, but the lips have stopped, the arms have stopped, the legs have stopped. Another explosion and you are dragged away. You let yourself be dragged.
Later, when someone has asked to see your hand and without a word pulled your pinky straight, when someone else has washed out the cut at the back of your head with water and put in three stitches as you sit on an overturned garbage can, you notice that your hearing has returned and your hands tremble without resting.
“That’s some bump,” the stitcher tells you. He’s not a doctor or a medic. He’s the butcher’s son from when there was a butcher’s shop. Good enough. “It’s the size of an egg now. Tomorrow…” He shakes out his hand in front of himself and you know tomorrow is going to be bad.
“I heard the doctor say that those who feel dizzy tomorrow, should go to the clinic,” he says.
“I feel dizzy now,” you reply.
“Now is not tomorrow,” he says and shrugs.
Someone asks you to step to an ambulance where your grandmother and two others are laid out. You have to identify her. Her purse is gone. Not to be found. They say where she will be taken and where buried and when. Then they close the door on her and drive off, using the siren though there is not a single car in the road to obstruct the path.
Your friend with the cigarettes finds you. She has stitches too, on the underside of her chin. Nine of them, roughly placed.
“Who was that?” she asks; another cigarette is out, burning. She offers you a fresh one and a lit match. The smoke is medicinal; your hands calm.
You pause on the stairs up to the apartment. What will you tell your grandfather? How do you tell him that a shell lobbed from some hillside battery you can’t even see has erased his past forty years? He’s older than grandmother, in his seventies. Do you tell him, “start again”?
“And Julia?” he asks as you enter. He cries, his right hand shakes as it has for some years, but now it has a reason.
There’s nothing to tell him. You move to hold him, but he slips from your hug, and sits on the floor, moaning like a kicked man. Later, a neighbor helps you get him into bed. You know he won’t ever be getting out, and he doesn’t. On the third day, after his soup, you give him another hug, and he slips away from life to death.
An hour of officials and neighbors and then you are alone. And hungry. The soup was the last of the food.
At market, next day, your friend is there. She gives another cigarette. Almost as good as meat.
“Can you get guns?” you ask.
She thinks of being evasive, but sucks on the cigarette instead.
“For what?”
“How much?” you answer.
“I know people. One man. For you…You’re a pretty girl. Not too much. If he’s happy.”
You want to say that you’re no prostitute, but she’s a friend.
“I have gold,” you whisper.
“Ah,” she says. “Then,” she points to a doorway across the street, “meet me there tonight. I’ll introduce you. Something simple?”
Yes, simple.
“With bullets,” you toss over your shoulder as you continue to the market.
That night, beef. A stew with carrots and potatoes. Red wine. You share with the neighbor who helped dress your grandfather before he was taken away.
Two necklaces, quite fine. One bracelet. One brooch. One locket, pictures removed. Two wedding bands. The rings go into separate pockets. The rest go into a small pouch and hidden.
Your friend opens the door to the meeting place at the appointed time. It is the vestibule of an apartment building. The top floors have been smashed. There is a man there, square shouldered, round bellied, unshaven and aromatic even at five paces.
“You have gold?” he says when you say nothing. What were you supposed to say?
You pull out a wedding band. He sneers, not at you, but at your friend.
“Something simple, I was told, but for that, I can give you a rock or maybe a pipe. Very simple, but effective.”
Pull out another ring, and he pulls out a handgun from his waistband, points it at your face. You make fists to cover the rings. He smiles.
“How if I shoot you and take the rings?” he says.
“Then I’ll haunt you from the grave.”
His smile melts, and he hands the gun over. It’s a six shooter, load
ed. You take out the bullets, pull the trigger. Smooth action. Two more pulls and you’re satisfied. You pay and walk out; your friend follows.
“Do you like him?” you ask once on the street.
“Like?” she repeats. The word makes so little sense in a city under siege.
You give her a key and an address.
“There is a little more gold there. A pouch under the sink. Go, if you’re tired of him.”
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
You kiss her on the cheek and take the cigarette she has between her fingers. Then you head off.
Leaving the city is not so hard. Smugglers do it. There are paths. If you’re fit, and you are, and if you’re lucky, which remains to be seen, you can avoid dogs and land mines and patrols and overcome the difficulties of the forest hike. You can sneak your way past the dangers. You can find the battery that killed your grandmother and your grandfather from a great distance. You can walk up to those soldiers as they joke or sing or play cards, and with six bullets you can kill them. Then, if you’ve been that lucky, you can keep walking and leave behind you the city with its siege.
This story was first published in CRIMESPREE MAGAZINE, selected for publication by Jennifer Jordan. It earned a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. The Elena of this story is the one mentioned in my Viktor Petrenko stories which have been collected in KILLING WAYS: STORIES available through Amazon’s Kindle.
Early Fall
Yolanda Morales was on her knees on Farragut Street. There was the distant sound of strays. There was a cricket. There was no life on the street. Whoever worked in the area was long gone. The ladies of the night never worked so far from the main flow of traffic on Bruckner or Hunt’s Point Avenue. To her left was the fencing that kept people out of the transfer station where the borough of the Bronx separated out household garbage from recyclables. To her right was a warehouse loading area. In front of her stood a man with a gun. The muzzle was pressed to her forehead.
She smiled. It was a bloody-tooth-missing smile. One of her eyes had a cut running deep through the eyebrow above it. If she lived, it would swell shut.
Killing Ways 2: Urban Stories Page 5
