by Dave Stanton
“Hey, Severino said I should wait in the car. You guys would handle it.”
“That .38 you keep in your coat pocket?” Loohan said.
“Yeah?”
“You know how to shoot it?”
Tuma looked at Norton, his eyebrows lifted, a frown forming on his mouth.
“What the fuck I do to deserve this disrespect?”
“You don’t get respect,” Loohan said, his voice flat. “You earn it,”
“You heard him,” Norton said, reaching under the seat and sliding free a pistol grip shotgun.
“Hold on, now—”
“You ain’t got the balls for this shit, is that it?” Loohan’s face up close, his breath hot against Tuma’s ear. “What would your fellow mobsters think?”
The doors to the pickup opened and three men stepped out onto the hardpan street. The darkening skies made it difficult to see them in much detail. Vinnie Tuma swallowed, his hand in his pocket holding his gun, his palm slick with sweat.
Norton and Loohan climbed out on the driver’s side, leaving Tuma standing near the passenger side fender. They began walking toward the three figures, who waited like dark statues. Norton and Loohan stopped after a few paces.
“I have the money,” Norton yelled. “We inspect the goods, and if we like it, we make the exchange.” He pointed with his arm. “Here, in the middle of the street.”
“Okay,” came the reply. “We have the goods.”
Norton retreated to the SUV, while Loohan walked toward the pickup. Tuma froze where he stood. “Come on,” Loohan said.
“What about Norton?”
Loohan stopped. “We got nothing to worry about as long as he’s back here holding the money, so quit sniveling.”
When they neared the truck, two of the men spread to the sides, leaving a tall man with lank blond hair leaning against the cab. He wore a black overcoat, his arms crossed, the cavalier expression on his face betrayed by deep creases at the sides of his mouth and a quarter-moon shaped scar on his nose.
“I’ll need to test the purity,” Loohan said. The blond shifted his eyes, first left to where a small Asian man stood, then right to his other cohort, a Hispanic with a Pancho Villa mustache. He looked back to Loohan and nodded.
“I’m going to reach in my pocket for a flashlight, a piece of tinfoil, a razor blade, and a lighter.” Loohan raised his head and drew his hair from his eyes with a middle finger. “Okay?”
The men to the sides took a step closer.
“Go ahead,” said the blond. “Do it slow, nice and easy.”
Loohan slipped his hand to the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a plastic baggie containing the instruments. The Asian man was now pointing a pistol at him, a semiautomatic of some make. Holding the bag up, Loohan looked to either side. “Cool?”
“Pull him out a key,” the blond said to the mustachioed man. Walking around the far side of the pickup, the mustache stepped over the sidewall into the bed, his cowboy boots clunking against the steel floor. He unlocked a toolbox bolted behind the cab and withdrew a brown, paper-wrapped package.
“How about one from the bottom of the pile?” Loohan said.
The blond frowned, his eyes flickering with impatience. “Get another one,” he said. When the mustache produced a second brick of cocaine, Loohan stepped to the rear of the truck.
“Open the tailgate and I can test it here.” The blond released the gate, and Loohan carefully unwrapped the bale. He held it in his hands and broke it in half with a dull thud.
All the while, Tuma had been standing as if paralyzed, but the sound seemed to snap him out of his stupor. He walked to where Loohan scraped a few flakes from the middle of the white mass onto the piece of tinfoil. Loohan chopped it into powder with the razor blade. Tuma and the blond stood waiting, the mustache back on the ground next to the Asian, whose gun was still trained on Loohan.
“Snort it,” Loohan said. Using a rolled dollar bill, Tuma inhaled the pile in a quick motion. He twitched his nose, swallowed, and sighed. “Tastes good.”
Loohan scraped a bit more onto the foil and handed the flashlight to Tuma. Then he held his lighter underneath the small pile and watched as it began to smolder, the smoke nearly colorless. After a minute he set it down and looked at Tuma, whose eyes were wide. “That’s got to be the best blow I’ve ever had, man. I’m freaking flying. Whew!”
Loohan put the flashlight and lighter back in the baggie. “Hey,” he said, to the man pointing the pistol. “You’re from Laos, right?”
The man’s eyes clicked. “What’s it to you?”
“I was born there, man.” Loohan spread the fingers on his left hand, showing the burn scars on the webs. “Survived three years at Kompong Thom.”
“You did?” he said, stepping forward, the gun lowering. “My brother is still—”
As the man spoke, Loohan replaced the baggie in his coat, and when his right hand reappeared, no one saw the small, black .25 he held. No one had a chance to. Three shots rang out in a quick cadence, Loohan’s arm a blur as he pulled the trigger. The report echoed thinly in the desert air, like a tack hammer hitting a nail. The Asian crumpled, a red dot the size of a dime on his forehead, dead before he hit the ground. The blond took a round in the ear, spinning in a circle as he dropped, the expression on his face perplexed for an instant before the light faded from his eyes. The mustache was last, shot in the heart. He flopped flat on his back, his heels dug into the dirt, his torso soaking in blood. They went down so fast they seemed to fall like dominoes.
Vinnie Tuma stared slack jawed at the bodies. It was quiet and nothing moved. He couldn’t quite process what had happened and stood there as if a spike had been driven into his mind’s gears. Loohan climbed onto the truck bed and began removing the ten kilos from the lock box. His fingers shaking, Tuma fumbled a cigarette into his mouth.
A few seconds later they watched Norton race up in the SUV and jump out, holding his sawed-off at port arms. “Goddamn,” he said.
“Put the drugs in the back of our ride,” Loohan said to Tuma.
Norton moved about the scene coiled in a crouch, his head low, his eyes darting, never looking away from Loohan for long. After inspecting each victim and moving around the perimeter, he finally sighed and straightened. He stared hard at Loohan, who stood in the pickup, overlooking the scene like a vulture waiting for the right moment to swoop down on a carcass.
“This wasn’t the plan, man,” Norton said.
“Sure it was.” Loohan hopped off the tailgate.
Tuma finished moving the bricks to the SUV and stood looking at them expectantly.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Norton said.
“Yeah, Jesus Christ, no shit,” Tuma said. He opened the passenger side door, but before he could get in, Loohan said, “Hold on. Need your help with one more thing.” He motioned with his arm and Tuma stepped away from the vehicle.
Norton watched Loohan’s arm straighten, and Norton’s lips had already started forming the word no when the pistol bucked and a sudden geyser of blood and brains blew out the back of Tuma’s skull. Tuma fell as if his legs were kicked out from under him, and hit the ground flat on his back.
“Aagh!” Norton thrust up his hands, his face contorted and red. “What the motherfucking Christ are you doing?”
“Calm down.”
“Fuck calm down! Do you know who you just blew away?”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I think you’re out of your goddamn mind!”
“You’re wrong.” Loohan opened the rear hatch of the SUV and pulled open the panel to the storage bay. He removed a large roll of clear plastic wrap, the type used by warehousemen to secure boxes on pallets, then handed Norton a pair of rubber gloves.
“The hell are these for?”
“We’re going to wrap Tuma and move him somewhere we can bury him. You don’t want any blood showing up in the car, do you?”
Norton’s hand twitched on his
shotgun as he glared at Loohan. Killing the nephew of a high-ranking mob boss was an almost suicidal act. And now Norton was complicit, thanks to Loohan’s homicidal frenzy. Recruiting Loohan for the drug score seemed a good idea at first, but from the minute Vinnie Tuma got involved, Norton could feel it moving irrevocably toward disaster. Norton closed his eyes tightly and spat. Now his worst fears were confirmed—Loohan had turned out to be a complete lunatic.
For a second Norton considered raising his weapon and blasting Loohan into oblivion. Then he could tell Severino the deal went bad, and Norton was the only one to survive. Would Severino buy that? Maybe, maybe not. What was the alternative? There was a lunch pail packed with a hundred large, plus ten keys of high-grade blow in the SUV. That kind of weight could solve a lot of problems, but it would be tricky.
When he looked up again, if Loohan’s back had been turned, Norton might have killed him. But Loohan was watching, his goddamned oriental eyes calm and calculating. Did Loohan plan on shooting him? If so, Norton thought he’d already be dead.
Peeling the plastic sheathing from the roll, Norton began wrapping Tuma’s bloody face, first removing the still lit cigarette from his lips. Loohan reached in Tuma’s jacket pocket and found his cell phone, then raised Tuma’s shoulders, and soon the corpse was mummified, tightly bound and unrecognizable. They lifted the body and jammed it into the back of the SUV, shoving to make it fit. Ten minutes later they were on a dark two-lane road, heading north. Save for a thirty-minute stop in the Imperial Sand Dunes National Park, they drove thirteen straight hours back to Lake Tahoe, arriving just as the sun rose and cast a blinding swath of white over the deep waters.
13
When the phone rang, Pedro jerked awake, his breath caught in his throat. His ribs were on fire, as if he’d been stabbed with a heated blade and every motion caused it to twist.
“This is Pedro,” he gasped.
“Have you heard from Rodrigo yet?”
“No.”
“Until he returns, you’ll be in charge.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll be contacted by one of our men in a day or so. Until then, lie low.”
“I’ll keep Rodrigo’s phone with me.”
“You’ll be contacted in person.”
“By who?” Pedro asked, risking a question.
There was a long pause on the line. “The Angel is coming,” the voice said.
Pedro took the cellphone from his ear and stared at it, his eyes trancelike and unbelieving. He shook his head, hoping he could somehow reverse what he’d just heard. A bitter taste flooded his throat and he took several shallow breaths, fighting a bolt of nausea. Then he rolled off the bed, staggered to the bathroom, and puked his guts out, his viscera roiling, his ribs cracking with every heave.
“Hey, Pedro, you okay?” one of the younger gangbangers said, standing in the doorway.
Pedro finished spitting and turned his bloodshot eyes to the kid. “Bring the car around. I need to go visit Rodrigo.”
“It’s too soon, Pedro. He’s in bad shape, man. They got to wire his jaw. The nurse said not to come until tomorrow, maybe the day after.”
The tattoos on his fingers blurring in his vision, Pedro pushed himself up and shuffled back to his room. He lay on the bed, staring at the textured pattern on the ceiling. Back in Juarez, he could have been relaxing in the small cantina his mother ran, eating enchiladas and drinking a margarita. The sun would go down and his friends would join him to play cards and talk about girls. A stray Chihuahua that came around would be curled up in the corner of the restaurant, enjoying the warm odors and the sounds of friendly conversation. Every now and then Pedro would reach down, holding a tortilla chip for the dog to take from his hand.
But that life hadn’t been good enough. Not when men were making more in a day than his family made in a month. Everyone there was getting rich from the drug trade, including the local police. Teenagers fresh out of poverty were cruising the streets in shiny Cadillac SUVs, smirking at the poor working-class shop owners and the factory laborers. The best-looking senoritas in town hit the streets parading in new wardrobes and sparkling jewelry, and their parents knew it was wrong but said nothing. The lure of the drug money was simply too much for the impoverished people of Juarez to resist.
Pedro rolled to his side and tried to get comfortable. He had known of the shootouts and seen the dead bodies in the streets and heard the stories of men abducted in the night and found decapitated. The reports of torture and of entire families massacred became frequent and no one doubted their authenticity. Juarez had become the murder capital of the world. The cartels owned the city.
He talked with his family about moving away from the violence. To Baja perhaps, maybe all the way to Cabo San Lucas, where the tourist trade was booming. He’d heard the American-owned hotels and resorts paid well. His English was decent, and the coastline along the Sea of Cortez was said to be the most beautiful on earth.
But then Pedro learned Juarez’s most powerful cartel was recruiting men, offering a chance to work not in Mexico, but in an American town 1,200 miles away. The money offered was incredible. If he was paid as promised, it would only take six months to put away enough to launch a new life, perhaps open his own cantina in Cabo. In the end, it was his dreams that seduced him. Pedro felt it was the best chance he’d ever have to escape the squalor of the violent border city where he’d been born and raised.
And now the most feared killer in Juarez was making a special trip to Lake Tahoe, coming to meet face to face with Pedro. It was rumored very few had actually seen The Angel in person and lived to speak of it. Would Pedro be considered a liability once he laid eyes on him? It was a too real possibility. Pedro knew working for the cartel would be risky. He had accepted this, but did not anticipate his dreams of escape would turn so quickly into a nightmare.
• • •
The hardware store didn’t open until nine, and by the time I finished repainting the garage door, it was almost noon. I sat at my picnic table and closed my eyes for a moment, letting the sun warm my face. Through the screen door I could hear a mixed martial arts match on TV. When I went in, Cody had my Remington pump shotgun disassembled on the kitchen table and was cleaning the shortened barrel.
“You got ammo for this bad boy?”
“There’s a box of shells in the closet.”
“How about lunch?” he said, eyeballing the breech.
We drove down 50 toward a sandwich place and were passing Zeke’s when Cody said, “Whoa, pull in here.” I hit the brakes and bounced over the curb into a parking lot split by a huge redwood, its bark chipped away where countless drunk patrons had scraped their bumpers against it. I had a hazy recollection I might have been one of them, back before Zeke Papas died and his son gutted the dining room.
“You hoping they’ll fire up the kitchen for us?” I said.
“Let’s just see if anyone’s around.”
The large two-story building, painted an odd peach color, looked like it may have been a fancy home in the past, just shy of a mansion. Neon beer signs lit up every window, and no one had bothered unplugging one that advertised BBQ chicken. On the siding next to the front entry, a hodgepodge of concert flyers were pasted over one another.
“Looks like the moral majority have an event planned for tonight,” I said, pointing at an advertisement for a headlining band named Blood Screw, and a backup act that called itself Suicide Pact.
The sign on the door said CLOSED, but a couple cars were parked out front, and I could hear laughter from inside.
“Must be early cocktail hour,” Cody said, pushing open the door.
“And they didn’t even invite us.” I followed him in, leaving behind a bright spring afternoon and wading into the gloom of what was once the best Old West-style restaurant and saloon in the region. At least the bar was still intact, but the floor planks had been pulled out to reveal a sunken concrete foundation. The area was cleared of tables and the chairs shoved to t
he walls, I assumed for death metal fans to stand on to better view the mosh pit and stage. The cacophony of odors inside was a potent brew of mildew, beer, sweat, unwashed clothes, and skanky sex. The latter emanated from the single female in the place, a shorthaired brunette with a face studded and ringed through the nose and eyebrows. She sat on the bar, her breasts perky, the nipples visible through a skimpy halter. Her legs were spread lazily and dark public hair curled from around the frayed crotch of her cut-off jeans.
“Hey,” said one of the three men at the bar, a scraggly dude with long hair. “We’re closed. Can’t you read?” His buddy pulled a mirror smeared with white powder off the bar top and moved it out of sight.
“I must have left my reading glasses at home,” Cody said. “How’s tricks, toots?” he said to the woman. She blew a stream of smoke at him and shifted her heavily lidded eyes away, feigning boredom.
“I’m looking for Zak Papas,” I said.
The men eyed us, maybe figuring we were cops, but it was hard to say with this bunch. They were unshaven, eyes dilated, chewing their cuds like cokeheads do, blown away on blow and not particularly concerned we’d wandered in.
“You got him,” said the shortest of them, a rotund, prematurely balding fellow with a red goatee.
“You got somewhere we can talk in private?”
“Why don’t you weirdos split, man?” the lady said. “You’re bringing me down.”
“Have another drink, then,” I replied. Zak Papas looked at me uncertainly, then shrugged and motioned for me to follow him. We climbed a narrow flight of stairs to his office, a room lined with bookshelves and cluttered with model replicas of schooners and countless dust-coated knickknacks.
“I’d met your old man a few times,” I said, as he sat behind a relic of a desk. “He was a good guy.”
“Some people say that.”
“Served damn good food, too.”
“Yeah, yeah. What is it you want, mister?”
“Besides a good plate of BBQ? I want to know about your relationship with Hard Core United. They your buddies?”
His jaw fell a bit, but his eyes didn’t leave mine. “My buddies? I wouldn’t say that. We dig the same music, but that’s about it.”
