Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  “Takes a sick mind,” she told him, “to do a thing like that.”

  He chuckled, not to suggest contempt or mockery, but almost sadly. “Tell that to Gaspar Arevalo and his brothers,” he said. “Only problem, they’re dead.”

  One of the huge ones she remembered from the night before followed him in, carrying over his shoulder the sagging form of a semiconscious man, the head obscured by a black cloth hood. His hands and ankles were bound with wire like Snuff’s. The huge Mexican dipped through the small doorway, ignoring Shel, focusing instead on his load, which he promptly dropped like a sack of cement on the hard floor. The cloth hood muffled the ensuing scream. Despite the invisibility of the face, Shel knew by the clothes who it was.

  Lonnie Dayball.

  He reeked of vomit and urine. His clothes were rank with it and stained with blood. His whole body twitched, as though from shock. The second huge one wandered in, carrying a baseball bat over his shoulder like an ax. Seeing the tarp drawn away from Snuff’s body, he chortled, ““Señor Snuffito. Buenos días.”

  “Snuffito-Bufito,” the other big one chimed.

  The smaller one with the birthmark approached the mattress where Shel sat. He gestured with his hand for her to get up.

  “Time for a little walk,” he told her. “Some air will be nice, no?”

  Behind him, the one with the ball bat swung it back, then cracked it ferociously against the base of Dayball’s spine. Dayball convulsed, screaming into the hood. The two large men yipped and clapped. Home run.

  “Please,” the smaller one said, taking Shel’s hand.

  He helped her to her feet. Wrapping her arm across his shoulder, he braced half her weight as she walked. As they ducked through the low doorway, one of the two big ones made kissing sounds from behind. A whispered voice in singsong litled, “Ce-sar-io.”

  The little one turned, shooting a hateful glance back at the two of them. “Bufos,” he said.

  “Ravon,” one of the others shot back. “Pendejo.”

  The kissing sounds returned. The little one murmured something to himself that Shel didn’t catch, then he turned back to lead her away.

  The dirt walls of the root cellar oozed with seeping rainwater. The floors were a slick mess except for the path of flagstones crossing to the far side. The path was flanked by empty wood shelves thick with cobwebs. A scent of old decay lingered. The little one allowed Shel to walk on the flagstones as he trod beside her in the mud. He drew her up the wood plank steps through a pair of hurricane doors just as a second car approached down a long gravel road.

  “Quick,” he said. “Around the house.”

  He hustled her along as the headlights approached. They turned the corner just as the car, a Mercedes with tinted windows, pulled to a stop outside the root cellar. Behind her, Shel heard two doors open and close.

  He let go of her after a moment, to see if she could stand on her own. She tottered but didn’t fall. Smiling, she said, “Thank you.” After a moment she decided to risk his name.

  “They called you Cesario. Can I call you that?”

  He shot her a look of such intense and immediate hostility she almost felt her legs give way. This traffic in names, she realized, it foretold death, but she couldn’t suppress the need to talk, to know this man, at least a little, given the likelihood it would be his duty to kill her. In time he said, “Cesar.” Shrugging, he looked away. “What can it matter.”

  “My name’s Shel,” she told him.

  “I know.”

  Shel smiled. “You do.”

  “It’s written on the back of the picture I have.”

  “The one you had at the house.”

  He reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. As he scratched the flint to create a flame, Shel thought of the bloody black scald at Snuff’s temple.

  “Where’d you get that picture?”

  “From Francisco Fregado.” Cesar grinned. “That’s what we called him. Frank the Mess.”

  She felt light-headed suddenly and searched around for a place to sit. A rock jutted out of the grass not far away. She aimed for it, took two lunging steps, and came within falling distance. She hit the ground in a heap then pulled herself onto the rock. Cesar walked up behind.

  “You all right?”

  “Haven’t had my Wheaties.”

  “You mean your pills.” He sounded angry.

  “I would’ve taken more if you hadn’t stopped me.”

  She drew up on her haunch, pulling her legs up beneath her and sitting stiffly on the rock. She chafed her arms. He offered her his cigarette.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She took a shallow drag, coughed despite herself, and handed the cigarette back. He waved it off. “I’ll light another.”

  It was a cool and blustery morning, the air clear and sharp and scented with rain. Threads of cloud, propelled by an easterly wind, seethed across a crackling, dawn-lit sky.

  The house was a two-story farmhouse that seemed to have sat empty for some time. It stood alone on a grassy plane surrounded by low-lying hills. The terrain was lush from recent rain, the air smelled of mud. The road down which the cars had come ran parallel behind a windbreak of eucalyptus trees that flanked an irrigation canal choked with weeds.

  To the north a barrier ridge of taller hills gave Shel her bearings. We’re on the north side of the strait, she thought. Not far from the mouth of the Sacramento, near Bird’s Landing, somewhere between Montezuma Hills and Grizzly Bay. Windmills sat atop the nearest easterly hills and that clinched it. She remembered reading something about them, how they’d been built by a consortium hoping to supply cheap electricity to the nearby farms. Funding had backfired, bureaucrats descended, the investors got strangled in red tape. Now the windmills stood there, skeletons of metal, transforming the wind into nothing but sound.

  About a hundred yards beyond the eucalyptus trees, vans and trucks filled with squatters crowded a small clearing. The women in the camp were cooking by wood fires beneath canvas awnings attached to the vans. Pozole and nixtamal from the night before simmered for the tortillas the women were roasting now on their stone comals. Children sucking on sticks of rock candy clung to their mothers’ skirts, warmed by the fires. Grizzled men wearing sweat-stained hats sat in folding chairs, waiting for breakfast. A makeshift pen for chickens stood at the edge of the clearing. A group of older children taunted the birds, throwing acorns through the wire.

  As Shel turned back from the squatter camp she noticed that Cesar had wandered toward the house. He stood before one of the windows, turning his head at various angles, as though appraising his birthmark. She imagined him hoping it had grown smaller since the last time he’d inspected it.

  “You speak English well,” she said, trying for his attention.

  He turned away from his reflection. “You talk a lot,” he said.

  “My head hurts. I’m trying not to think about it.” She worked up a comradely smile. “So, anyway, like I said, your English, it’s impressive.”

  “I’ve been here awhile,” he said, stopping a couple yards away.

  “You sound like a guy I knew once in TJ.”

  “Spent some time there as well,” Cesar acknowledged.

  “Sending mojados over the fence?”

  He shot her a look of sly fascination. “It’s a living. I came over the fence a few times myself.”

  Near the chicken pen the squatter children stopped pelting the birds with acorns and started in on each other. They shrieked and giggled. It was murder.

  “You didn’t grow up there, in TJ?”

  He shook his head. “Chalco.”

  “That’s—?”

  “A shithole,” he said. In a gentler tone, he added, nodding toward the squatters, “Down near Mexico City. Where people like that come from.”

  This was going well, Shel decided. It took some effort for her not to blurt out: Save me.

  “Poor Mexico,” she intoned, quoting a
saying she’d once heard. “So far from God. So close to the United States.”

  Cesar laughed. Beyond him sunlight flared across the easterly hills, creating a horizon that was achingly blue, stippled with clouds flecked gold and red by the rising sun.

  “Your friends,” she went on, “they seem to enjoy their work.” It wasn’t till after she’d said it she remembered it was something Dayball had said about himself.

  “Dumbfucks.” Cesar cleared his throat and spat. “Worthless. Stupid.”

  “They’re large, though. It’s a talent.”

  “They think in pictures. Believe in death rays and sorcerers. All spine and no brain.”

  “So why are they in there instead of you?”

  He turned and looked at her, like he was trying to figure out if he’d been insulted.

  “I mean,” she added, “they get to stay in there and play rough. You have to sit out here and be a human being. With the woman.”

  Cesar drew on his cigarette and exhaled. “Quien va a villa,” he said, “pierde su silla.” It sounded like a curse.

  “What’s that mean?” Shel asked.

  “The one who goes to town loses his seat.”

  He glanced down at her, checking to see if she understood. The anger in his eyes mingled with a breathtaking despair. I wonder, she thought, if anyone’s ever told him he’s depressed.

  “How exactly,” she asked, “did you go to town?”

  “I was the one who worked up the deal with your old man. Frank the Mess.”

  He sighed bitterly and shook his head. She fought an impulse to smile. An outcast, she thought. It seemed strangely hopeful.

  “That picture you got from Frank,” she said. “Could I see it?”

  Cesar reached inside his jacket, withdrew the snapshot, and handed it to her. It was a picture taken of her by Frank a year or two ago. She was sitting at a table in some forgotten place they’d rented. There was nothing remarkable about the photograph, just one forgettable moment in one forgotten day in a string of over a thousand such days. He’d just shown up and said, “Smile.” She looked weary.

  “Why’d Frank give you this?”

  “He didn’t,” Cesar said. “We found it in his car.”

  She cocked her head. “When?”

  “Last time we met, before that fucking disaster out at the junkyard.” He spewed a long trail of smoke and with a flick of his finger sent his cigarette butt flying into the weeds. “I sat with him at the hotel, in the bar, we ran through what was supposed to happen. While he was in with me, Humberto and Pepe, they searched his car.”

  Please, Shel thought, no more names.

  “Why?”

  “He was acting strange.”

  “He was drugged.”

  Cesar cackled. “Now we know.”

  “If you knew he was drugged—”

  “The fact he was loaded, that wasn’t the problem. Half the motherfuckers you deal with anymore are tanked. He just seemed”—he spread out his hand, waving it slowly back and forth—“a little more out of touch than loaded could explain.”

  “He was scared.”

  Cesar shook his head. “Not scared so much. More like, I don’t know, like nothing would have made him happier than if I’d just stood up at the table and shot him. Get it fucking over with.”

  I think I know how he felt, Shel thought. She turned the picture over. On the back, in pencil, Frank had written her name. As though he needed to remind himself who it was on the other side. Cesar reached over and tapped with his finger at the penciled lettering.

  “When we found this, Humberto, Pepe, know what they said? ‘Shel—what, like the oil company? A real gusher. Ready to drill.’” He withdrew his hand. “Laughed like fucking idiots.”

  The sound of another motor came from down the gravel road. A flatbed truck hurtled past the squatter camp down the long line of eucalyptus trees. It arrived in a swirl of black exhaust. Two men rode in the cabin, two more stood in back. As it pulled up behind the Mercedes, Shel spotted within the wood slat framing of the flatbed two bathtubs—the old-fashioned kind, deep, with claw feet. Beside them were several bags of cement.

  Cesar put his hand gently under her arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a little further away.”

  He lifted her off her perch on the rock and guided her to an oak tree twenty yards from the house. Still barefoot, she walked on her heels, trying to avoid the brown spiny leaves scattered across the yard. When they got to the tree he leaned her up against the trunk, checking to be sure the flatbed couldn’t be seen from there.

  Two, she thought. One bathtub for Snuff. The other for Dayball. They’d dump the bodies in, fill the tubs with cement, let it dry, then take them out by boat into the strait, or the deep channel of the Sacramento, wait till dark then drop them over the side, never to be found. Not three, she thought, two. They’re not going to kill you. Not yet.

  A gust of wind rustled the oak branches. A flurry of tiny brittle leaves swirled to the ground.

  “Such a weird tree,” Cesar said, trying to make conversation. “Come winter, it never loses all its leaves. But it never keeps them, either.”

  Shel offered him the photograph. “You can have this back,” she said.

  He looked at it in her hand, puzzled, then finally took it. Glancing at the picture and then at her, he said, “Almost didn’t know it was you.”

  He was referring to the bruises and cuts on her face. “I’ve looked better,” she admitted.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “Guess.”

  Cesar shook his head in disgust and put the picture back in his pocket. “Fucking loser,” he said. “Anybody could have seen that.”

  “Except you and me,” she remarked. “We went to town and lost our seat.”

  He chuckled acidly, started to say something then checked himself.

  “What else did you find in his car besides my picture?”

  “Nothing,” Cesar said. “At least, nothing that would have tipped us off we were going to get fucked.”

  “But you were suspicious.”

  “It’s the nature of the business. And anyway, we owed the Arevalo family a shot at revenge. They were begging for it. Seemed like a good chance to feel out how far this Felix Randall would take things.”

  “You found out.”

  Cesar reached down, picked up a small smooth stone and hurled it into the weeds along the irrigation ditch.

  “Now it’s his turn,” he said, “to get educated.”

  “Is that what Snuff and Dayball are for? Part of the education process?”

  Cesar rubbed his face, chafing the skin against the morning chill. “What nobody seemed to understand is that we wouldn’t just send one car out to that junkyard. Me and the idiots, Humberto and Pepe, and two other chavos, we were waiting out on the road. We hear the gunfire go off, I told Humberto, ‘Go, drive, get in there.’ Asshole. Fucking froze.” Cesar shook his head and spat. “Not that it matters. I’m the asshole now.”

  “I know how that feels,” she said.

  He looked at her, struggling against the kinship she suggested. “Anyway, from the road it sounds like a fucking war, then out pops this Lincoln, fishtails, boom, south, tearing like hell. We took off after it. About a mile, we catch up. Shot out one of the tires. Thing slid into the cattails. Guy driving staggered out and opened fire, so we nailed the motherfucker, boom, dead. Snuffito, he just sat there in the passenger seat, pissing himself. Whining like a puppy. Laid out on the backseat was some guy trying to stuff his stomach back inside his body.”

  Shel assumed this was Lyle. Or Hack. She tried to picture it. Then she tried not to. “What happened to him?” she asked quietly.

  “What do you think?” He seemed wounded by her tone. “You can say a prayer for him.”

  “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

  “It took us a while, but Snuffito came around. Big-time.”

  “Don’t gloat about that,” Shel said. “It’s beneath you.”
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  She thought for a moment she detected a slight blush rising in his face.

  “I wasn’t gloating,” he said. “That’s how we learned about the house, where we found you. From Snuff.”

  “And Dayball?”

  “There’s a place Snuff and his brothers deliver money, it’s a front, some plumbing repair outfit in Rio Vista. That’s what he told us. We put a bandista on it—”

  “Bandista?”

  “Gang,” he said. “Guy from a gang. New recruit. We put him on this place in Rio Vista, Dayball showed up early this morning.”

  Shel looked off toward the northerly hills. They were low and smooth and lush with windblown grass.

  “What’s my part in this?”

  Cesar picked up another stone, hurling it in almost the exact same place as the last.

  “You get traded for Frank,” he said.

  She couldn’t help herself, she laughed. “You’re not serious. To accomplish what?”

  “Whatever we fucking choose.” He looked away uneasily. “To be honest, the plan’s changed since we picked up Dayball.” He shook his head, shrugged. “Fucking coward. We barely had him in the car before he was telling us everything, anything, begging, trying to work an angle. It was pathetic.”

  Shel understood his contempt, at the same time envying Dayball’s having an angle to play. Not that it seemed to be doing him much good.

  “So now,” she said. “What’s the plan now?”

  Cesar picked up another stone, but instead of tossing it he merely bobbed it in his hand. “That Dayball, very chatty guy. We know enough now to take it to Señor Felix but good. Run him out of here. But you know, knowledge is power. The men who call the shots, they see an opportunity here. So they’re sending somebody back to the plumbing shop in Rio Vista, where we snagged Dayball, they’re gonna leave a message for Felix. He hands up Frank to us, we hand you back to him. Show him. See? We’re not so bad. We’re human beings. Then we talk terms.”

  “That’s nuts,” Shel said. She could hardly draw a breath, so it came out sounding like a laugh.

  “He goes along, or he goes down, man by fucking man.”