by Dan O'Shea
“Where’s the key?” I ask Cecil.
• • • •
Cindy’s on a mattress in the corner of the basement. She’s unconscious, in a lacy nightgown, wrists and ankles bound. There’s a blue dog collar around her neck, with a small padlock keeping it fastened. The padlock is hooked through the buckle, the eye the prong passes through, and around the end of a retractable leash hanging down from the wire running across the ceiling. The wire runs to the other side of the basement, where there’s a toilet. Then I notice the two other wires.
Connected to those are two other girls, both on mattresses. One is under the stairs, the other is in a corner half secluded by a stack of cardboard boxes. All are sedated. They’re also clean. Their hair is shiny, not greasy. They’re wearing makeup. Nightgowns look spotless.
He’s been keeping his crushes as dolls.
• • • •
I nod to Brian when I get to the top of the stairs. He heads down into the basement. Cecil looks up at me, from the kitchen floor. He’s holding his stomach and grinding his teeth.
“I’ll tell you whatever you want,” he whispers.
I empty the Ruger into his face, neck, and chest.
• • • •
“Going home tonight?” Mikey asks me. Slides a drink he just made across the bar to me. I shake my head no. “Okay. Sleep up on the couch in my office.”
“You ever seen Brian before tonight?” I ask.
“Here’n there. He’s a go-between for some of the girls, you know?”
“So he moonlights as a pimp?”
“That’s an ugly word,” Mikey says. Throws back the rest of his scotch. “I much prefer ‘social coordinator.’ But yeah. He cuts me in on it when the girls’ find their Johns here.”
I look up at the channel I had Mikey put the TV on. The news anchors are talking about the house fire in Omaha. Bad part of town. Three dead found so far. Next story’s about these three young women that were dropped off at the hospital, drugged, incoherent, possibly victims of assault.
Mikey looks at the TV, then at me.
“You should’ve taken his cell. Or his black book, or rolodex, or whatever. It’d given me a lot of names I could use for the shows here. A whole new pool of talent, you know?”
I push the drink back over to him.
“That’s why I stay sober on the job,” I say. “A mistake like that could cost you your freedom and your life.”
“How’s come?”
“You’ve got enough connecting you to Cecil already. You wanna double down on that when they start investigating homicides?”
“Fuck,” Mikey says, picking up the drink. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
He drinks it half down. “Anything I can get you fore I start closing up, go looking for a blanket and pillow?”
“You don’t need those cause I won’t be staying over.”
I stand up from the barstool. Look over at Eddie, sitting in a booth, half watching the last show of the night. And now I remember where I saw Brian before.
Two months ago, he was in my office, in a uniform from the phone company. He installed a new one on my desk. Guess Mayor Karnes got curious about my other business interests.
“I need Brian’s address.”
• • • •
We get back to Linden about sunrise. I take a good long look at the skyline. Bright red, orange streaking out, a few clouds with purple edges.
“What is it?” Eddie asks me as I walk up to the back door of the sheriff’s station.
I stop a few yards from the door. “I do wish that one girl hadn’t got killed.”
“Sucks, kid,” Eddie says, slaps me on the back. “But she was gonna scream. That’d given that feller the drop on you. Sides, she was likely an accomplice to it all. Couldn’t live there and not be.”
“Still,” I say.
“Yup. But it can’t be helped. Nor changed, now.”
• • • •
“So your niece is all right,” I say over the phone to Mayor Karnes. It’s my cell, not the one on the desk. I put my feet up on my desk. “But your nephew won’t be coming to any more family reunions.”
“What are you talking about?” the mayor asks.
“He’s quit the police,” I say. “He’s also quit the procuring business. You want to see Cindy again, you’ll do it through another channel. Don’t worry, I know the guy, so you’ll get the family discount.”
“Earl, what happened to Brian?”
“Just call me Junior, Mayor. I know I can count on your support come election time. I want you to know that I really appreciate that. Your trust in me, in my guardianship, that means a lot.”
“Junior,” the mayor says, “I really hope this doesn’t become something that we both don’t want.”
“Hey, you know I figured out where I’d seen Brian before. Took me all day. Anyway, that doesn’t matter a bit now.”
“Where is he?”
“Was he a good man, or a bad one. Probably I know the answer to that.”
“Junior, did you–
“Cause who he’s talking to now depends on the kind of life he led. I expect he’s having a conversation with a feller just itching to use that old, red pitchfork on him.”
The mayor’s silent.
“Like I said. I really do appreciate your trust. Without it, all kinds of bad things can happen. Folks can get involved in things that ain’t their business.”
I tap my boot soles together.
“One more thing about the girl. Your niece, I mean. Give her a couple weeks to rest up fore you call her. She’s had a bad scare. But I know she’ll wanna see you again. She likes the money you send her. And I know you’ll write her a terrific letter of recommendation when graduation comes near.”
“Junior,” the mayor says, “I don’t want you getting ideas. I mean–
“I’ve already got all the ideas I need. But you oughtta remember to watch where you step fore you go getting in that end of the pool you don’t know too well.”
I can hear him breathing. Likely as not, he’ll sleep with a gun under his pillow tonight.
That’s good. I can work with that.
JUEVES
Hector Acosta
The blood pooled by my left foot and mingled with the fibers of the carpet, forming a white and red rorscharch test that I had no interest in analyzing.
“I’m going to get a cleaning fee for that you know” Carlos said, turning his attention back to the television in front of him and making a swinging motion with his arms. The video game avatar on the screen duplicated his movements, sending a pixelated ball flying through the air.
I pointed to the bloody knife resting on the counter next to him. “You probably shouldn’t have stabbed me then.”
Talking hurt. As if a knife wound on my right side wasn’t bad enough, I’m pretty sure I had at a couple of broken ribs, along with a variety of cuts and bruises on my face and body. I could blame that on Carlos too, or if you wanted to be specific, the three mafiosos that brought me to him. They currently waited outside of the hotel room, while I stood in the middle of the living room and admired the view the twentieth floor provided.
And as far as views went, it wasn’t bad. For El Paso.
From out the hotel window I could make out the Bridge of the Americas, one of the four bridges that shackled the cities of El Paso and Juarez together. They all served as a way for people to head to work, visit family, and back in my day, provided a ten minute walk into Mexico and the many bars where serving beer and checking I.D didn’t go hand in hand. Even now at this hour and with Juarez being what it was, there were hundreds of tiny little lights that I knew to be cars slowly making their way from one end of the bridge to the other.
“To be fair” Carlos said, lining up a putt and watching his avatar dance after sinking it, “I did warn you. Three times in fact. But you kept interrupting my shots.” He spoke good English, with an almost nonexistent accent. Guess that’s what an education
in American private schools got you. That and a love for talking. No wonder he’d been dubbed El Filosofo by the Mexicans newspapers- The Philosopher.
“Sorry, next time I’m taken off the streets and dragged to some hotel room, I’ll try to be more patient.”
With a sigh, Carlos set the video game controller down and turned around, picking up the knife,. “Three things Thu..”
“Mr. Malone’s fine,” I interrupted.
Carlos dug into his coat pocket and took a piece of cloth, using it to wipe the knife clean. “You don’t care for your name.”
“Never said that.”
Waving the now spotless knife in my direction Carlos said, “Your body did. You tensed up as soon I started addressing you by your first name. I will admit it is a strange name to be burdened with.”
I shrugged, “So I’ve been told.”
“They are a funny thing aren’t they? Names I mean. Rarely are they chosen by us, and yet, they can so often define us. Like mine for instance-the Philosopher” he chuckled, “a name that would have fit as good levied against me in the school yard back in my younger days, as it is now when it’s written by reporters hoping to win Pulitzers. Now, I’ll be the first to say that I am no Plato or Socrates, but I would like to think that I have my moments.”
“I’m pretty sure neither of those guys went around stabbing people,” I said.
“Three things Mr. Malone,” Carlos said, the asshole stretching out and over emphasizing my last name. “Half an hour of this little diversion,” he pointed to the screen, “adds fifty dollars to my hotel bill. Two, I’m currently in competition with my nino. Tonight I felt I would finally be able to catch up to him. That is, until you arrived and could not keep your mouth shut. And finally,” he turned and glanced at me, “you now know I carry through with my threats, yes?”
He looked to be in his fifties, with graying, swept back brown hair and a thin, neatly groomed mustache. He wore a blue buttoned up shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a simple pair of tan khakis. It’d taken me a moment to realize that I stood taller than him. He might have been short-even by Mexican standards, but the way he carried himself apparently made me miss that detail at first.
Funny, the narcorridor that they played about Carlos at the bars made no mention of his stature. The song, or at least what I remembered of it talked about the way he outwitted both the Mexican army and the U.S border patrol, of his generosity to those that he viewed as allies, and of the way he used his tongue (and not only to talk), but nothing of his size.
“You weren’t going to beat your son’s score” I said. Why, I’m not sure. Let’s blame it on the blood loss.
“How would you know that?”
“I spent a holiday working for a toy store and ended up playing that golfing game more than I helped customers. The last three holes have this glitch which causes the game not to recognize your motions correctly. To compensate, you have to line the shot further to the left than normal. And you won’t be able to do that.”
“I won’t?”
“You favor your right side. My guess is that you got shot some time ago. You and your son have anything on this game?”
“If he wins, I will buy him the car of his choice. Permitting he passes his driver’s license test.”
“Bet he picked the game. You should get someone else to play for you.”
“That would not be true to the spirit of our competition.”
“You’re going to owe him a car then.”
“If he knew his enemy’s weakness and used it to his advantage, he deserves one.” Carlos sounded proud.
All of a sudden I started to feel dizzy. Adrenaline and fear had carried me so far, but I don’t think they were willing to carry me a lot further. “What am I doing here man?” I asked.
Carlos clapped his hands. “Finally, we get to the business at hand.” He walked over to a door on the left side of the living room and said, “You have a reputation as a man that can find things, correct?”
“I repo cars, yeah.” Shit, had I repoed one of his cars? If fucking Gunther sent me to do a job on a cartel’s car, I swear that German would pay.
Chuckling, Carlos shook his head. “No, I don’t mean that. The ever ephemeral word on the streets is that you can be hired to find more than just cars.”
I doubted that Carlos had ever walked any streets in which my name was associated with. But plenty of his men did, and somehow my name must have gotten to them.
“I’ve been known to find a kid or two” I said. “Mostly they party too hard in Juarez and don’t have enough to bribe la policia.”
“Is that all?”
“Sometimes the border patrol pays me to try to find the next of kin for a drowned mojado.”
“You are selling yourself short Mr. Malone,” Carlos said. “What about the Guadalupez thing?”
A beat. Fuck, I should have known. It’s always the Guadalupez thing.
“If I was any good, I would have found the kid alive.”
“But you found the men that did it. Faster than the people I had looking for them. And while I would have preferred if you hadn’t handed them over to the parent’s neighborhood, I think I can understand why you did it.”
I said nothing.
“I can assure you that the men to blame did so without my knowledge. They were a pair of stupid, greedy men that thought they could improve their lot in life.”
“Yeah, so stupid that they didn’t realize that the kid they grabbed didn’t belong to the political candidate that was swearing up and down he would get the cartel out of Juarez.” Carlos said nothing, so I added , “I hear the politician’s gone missing now.”
“Has he? A shame. I really hate to see my city so out of control. The Mexican army patrolling the streets is not something any child should be seeing.”
A braver, stronger man would have said something about how maybe Carlos and his cartel should leave Juarez then, but I was neither. I was just a man bleeding on a hotel room carpet.
“But enough of that” Carlos said. “Back to why you are here. I find myself in need of your talents. Something has transpired in this room that I can’t very well bring to the police. However, since you turned property over that was rightfully mine; it would be fair to say you owe me a favor no?”
He opened the bedroom door and motioned for me to step inside. After a moment’s hesitation I did just that. The first thing I noticed was the king size bed, and how soft and comfortable it immediately looked. I just wanted to throw myself into its goose down arms and let it carry me to sleep. Or death, as either seemed about as viable of an option to me right now.
I might have continued to stare at the bed if the man tied to the chair over in the corner of the room didn’t suddenly jerk to life. His eyes bulged and darted rapidly from me to Carlos, as if overcompensating for the rest of his trapped body. He tried to say something, but the tape covering his mouth kept his words prisoner. A bruised and bleeding face implored me for something I couldn’t hear but could guess at, all while blood continued to drip down his legs. I pointed to the carpet.
“They’re going to charge you for that you know.”
• • • •
“Where’s the money Jose?” I asked in Spanish.
“Te dije que no lo tengo!”
“Carlos seems to think you do.”
“I would never betray Carlos” Jose said, the duct tape still hanging from the corner of his mouth like a flag of surrender. “I swear on my mother that I had nothing to do with the money going missing.”
“You gotta look at it from his point of view” I told him. “Carlos said that after the deal went down, the money was left in this room, along with you guarding it. Everyone else heads down to the hotel restaurant to eat and drink, and when they come back, they find you passed out and the money gone. I don’t know you and even I think you’re guilty.”
Then again, Carlos promised me a nice little finder’s fee and a doctor to check me over if I managed to fi
gure out what happened here, so I was probably a bit biased. But Jose didn’t need to know that.
“I took nothing” Jose shouted.
“Who took the money then?”
Jose’s shoulders slumped and he put his head down. He’d probably gone through all this at least once before and his posture told me he didn’t think going over it again would do any good. But he did so anyways. “No se. It’s true, I drank too much, but everyone else was celebrating, so why not me?”
“Because you were in charge of guarding the money?” I glanced at the number of tiny empty bottles around the bed. “And that’s all it took for you to pass out?”
“A lot of them were tequila” Jose muttered.
“What time did you pass out?”
“I think around nine.”
Carlos told me that they left the room at 7:45 and came back a little before ten. That meant that there was an hour of unaccounted time if I believed Jose.
And the annoying thing was that I did. I just had to look at his swelled and battered face to know that any truths were beaten out of him long before I got to him. Carlos probably believed him too, but being the head of a cartel demanded that he either get the money back, or showed what happened when someone failed him.
I tried not to think what that might mean for me.
Out of nowhere, the room suddenly started to spin, and it took a few minutes before it settled back to normal. Or as normal as I currently saw things-meaning everything tilted at a forty-five degree angle.
“You don’t look so good” Jose said.
I wiped the sweat off my forehead and tried to ignore the bed close by. Taking a deep breath that my made ribs ache, I walked over to the closet and opened its doors, looking down to the safe where the money had gone into and then disappeared. It looked pretty much like any other hotel safe I’d seen, about a foot high and two wide, and with a digital number pad on its door.
“Who knew the code to get into this thing?” I asked.
“Just Carlos.”
“So he’s the one that put the money inside, and checked it once he came back into the room?”
