by Sam Hawken
Estéban could have told Paloma. Paloma could have endangered Ortíz. And then…
“Did Carlos Ortíz ever commit a murder?” Enrique asked.
Rojas was silent.
“Just tell me this, Marco.”
The quiet stretched on. Rojas did not look up. And then he nodded.
Enrique felt flushed. “He killed one of the girls at a party?”
“I saw him do it. At first I thought he was just choking her while he fucked her. But then he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop.”
Rojas wiped an eye with the back of his hand.
“You don’t get to cry,” Enrique said. “You don’t ever get to cry for this.”
He got up from his chair and went to the door. He knocked twice and the guards came. Behind him, Marco Rojas sobbed.
“I have everything I need here.”
“Wait,” Rojas said suddenly.
“What?”
“There’s more.”
FOURTEEN
THE PALENQUE WAS A DIFFERENT place after dark and when the cocks were fighting. Where the dusty parking lot had been mostly empty during the day, it was packed so fully that trucks and cars were parked all along the roadside leading up to the place. Even if he had tried, Sevilla would have been hard pressed to find Ortíz’s black pick-up among all these others. In the end he saw it in the space nearest the entrance, unwatched by even one of the bodyguards, who must both have been inside.
Cigarette smoke layered against the ceiling and condensed like rain clouds. Sevilla fought his way to the bar, bombarded by loud music, upraised voices and the occasional explosive reaction of the crowd around the fighting arena. He had to shout his order to the bartender.
The alcohol was good, but Sevilla allowed himself only one. After that he pushed to the highest rail overlooking the arena. The concrete seats swirled down in a vortex to the center of the action, the cocks facing each other. Men were betting with the official bookmakers and paper slips from previous fights were everywhere, even on the floor of the battleground itself. Other men were betting with bookies down in the crowd or even with the men sitting around them. Sevilla ignored this and watched faces, looking for the one he needed.
Ortíz was not as close to the fighting as Sevilla expected; he was halfway up the far side of the arena seating. The bodyguards on either side of him carved out a comfortable space so that he was not pressed flesh to flesh against other men. He wore a white suit jacket and slacks and a striped shirt of bright colors made brighter by the stark arena lighting. He didn’t carry betting slips, but made a note of each fight on a pad with a pencil.
Hot breath boiled out of the arena from shouts and curses. The fighting circle was stained with blood that between-match soakings could only partly eliminate. Cocks jumped and clashed and there were feathers and death.
Sevilla didn’t know what he would do if Ortíz never left his seat. Eventually Ortíz rose. He spoke to one of the bodyguards. The man nodded, but didn’t follow. Neither did the other. They kept Ortíz’s place, the only gap in the sea of bodies funneling down to the bloodsport.
The place had two restrooms. Sevilla went to the one closest to Ortíz’s side of the palenque. The air was heavy and humid, smelling strongly of beer and urine. One man combed his hair in a clouded mirror over the sinks. Another used the piss-trough. Sevilla took a stall, but didn’t sit.
Ortíz came in afterward. He said something to the man at the piss-trough that Sevilla didn’t catch, then undid his fly. Another man entered and took the stall beside Sevilla.
Sevilla waited until he heard the sound of water before he left the stall. He had the impact baton in his hand. It clicked open and Ortíz turned toward the sound. The first blow caught him on the side of the neck and he spilled over, falling into the piss-trough and cursing.
When Ortíz put up his hands, Sevilla broke his wrist. He battered Ortíz’s upraised arm until the man couldn’t lift it any longer. Ortíz lost his balance, tumbled free of the piss-trough and collapsed on the floor. Sevilla struck him across the back three times until he thought he heard one of Ortíz’s ribs break.
The door of the bathroom opened. Sevilla turned. The man stood framed there for a moment, seeing Ortíz, seeing the baton and seeing Sevilla’s face.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Sevilla said. The man obeyed.
“¡Pinche cabrón!” cried Ortíz on the ground. The concrete was pitted and filthy from dirty boots and cigarette ash and men too drunk to hit the trough on their first try. “Goddamm you.”
Sevilla put the baton away. He brought out the pistol. His back twinged when he bent over Ortíz and put the muzzle in his face. “Shut up until I tell you not to,” Sevilla said. “You hear me? Do you understand?”
Ortíz had blood on his face and on his lips. His eyes rolled like a horse’s in panic. The second stall door opened and the man inside emerged. He flinched once as if Sevilla were striking at him and then fled for the door.
“Sebastían Madrigal,” Sevilla said. “You know him, yes?”
“¿Que chingados quieres?” Ortíz asked.
“I asked you a question!” Sevilla thundered, and kicked Ortíz as hard as he could. The blow made Ortíz cough blood for a long minute and Sevilla regretted it. “Sebastían Madrigal.”
“I know him,” Ortíz managed to say.
“How do you know him?” Sevilla gestured with the gun for emphasis.
“Parties,” Ortíz replied. “I arrange… please don’t kill me.”
Sevilla raised the gun and brought it down across Ortíz’s skull. The man’s scalp split and blood gushed. Scalp wounds were the bloodiest. The white material of Ortíz’s suit jacket was stained red, black and dirty yellow. “What parties? Where?”
“There is one tomorrow!” Ortíz cried. There were tears.
“Tell me where.”
The restroom door burst open. It crashed against a wastebasket and sent it crumpled to the floor. Used paper towels spilled on the dirty concrete. The bodyguard filled the frame.
Sevilla fired two shots into the man’s chest. The black material of the bodyguard’s T-shirt exploded wet and he toppled backward out the door. The door was blocked open by dead legs and outside the crowd was in a sudden panic. The noise of men and voices changed from celebration to terror.
He caught Ortíz crawling toward the nearest stall. Sevilla’s heart raced and his vision throbbed. Every cut on his face pulsed with angry heat in time with the beat. He pulled the trigger again and Ortíz’s leg was soaked in blood.
“The parties!” Sevilla demanded. “Where?”
Ortíz told him through mucus and tears. Sevilla strained to hear above the shouting. He glanced back once and saw the bodyguard had not moved. Sevilla felt nothing for the man’s death.
The confession did not end. Ortíz grasped at the concrete until his palms were black with filth and his nails were encrusted. Breath hitched in his throat. Blood from his head wound mingled with puddles of water and piss. The smell of cordite and waste made Sevilla gag, but he listened.
And then it was done.
“Please don’t kill me. Por favor, for the love of God,” Ortíz pleaded.
Sevilla was ill, but not from the sight and smell of this place. Everything from Ortíz’s mouth was bitter, poisonous and curdled in Sevilla’s head. Ortíz lolled onto his back and put his stained hands in front of him. He had grime on his teeth.
“No me mate, no me mate,” Ortíz said.
Sevilla wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm. “I didn’t kill you,” he said. “You killed yourself.”
He left the restroom when he was done with Ortíz and joined the throng jamming the exits. He didn’t see the second bodyguard until he spilled out with the rest into the parking lot. Police vehicles were there, strobing the lot with white, red and blue. The bodyguard stood shouting into a cell phone near the big pick-up, the engine running, waiting for passengers that would not come.
The police tried to put up a cordo
n, but there were too many men in the palenque and not enough cops. Cars and trucks pulled away and could not be called back. Others slipped away into the night and would come back when the chaos was over and the police had given up. Sevilla was among these, walking nearly a mile to where his car was parked.
The shaking didn’t begin until he was behind the wheel. In the middle distance he heard sirens, and flickering above the rooftops of houses and buildings there was the dry lightning of police and ambulances. People were out of doors despite the hour, comparing theories, but soon even they went indoors. More death in the city of the dead. It was not worth interrupting a quiet evening at home.
Only when the tremors retreated into his chest and his breathing and heart were calm did Sevilla touch the ignition. He drove a half-mile without turning on his headlights before he remembered them, and then the rest of the way with the slow care of a man twenty years his senior. He was intensely aware of the pistol against his body. When he passed a policeman on the way he tensed, but the car was gone in moments.
He went to an all-night liquor store near the tourist district and bought a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker. He didn’t wait to get home before he drank from it. Half was gone by the time he reached the door and the other half he guzzled in the shadow of his unlit kitchen. He fell into bed fully clothed and slept until past dawn.
FIFTEEN
SEVILLA DIDN’T DREAM OF ORTÍZ, but Ortíz was the first one he thought of when he opened his eyes. The feelings he had for the man were not those of pity or sadness; Sevilla had a blank inside himself where Ortíz rested because he could not summon the energy necessary for anything else.
A headache blazed behind his eyes and his mouth tasted like death. Sevilla ate breakfast in the kitchen wearing the fancy sunglasses that hadn’t fooled the Madrigals, burying a handful of aspirin beneath a slurry of juice, fruit, milk and toast. Eventually he knew the only way to make the hangover go completely away was to treat it with more whisky, but for now he resolved to keep a clear head despite the pain.
He tried to call Enrique, but the call wouldn’t go through. He imagined Enrique somewhere in the American desert well away from any town or settlement, blessedly ignorant of what had transpired over the last twenty-four hours. Then Sevilla imagined what Enrique would say when he knew. There was nothing to be done about that.
Sevilla showered with the bathroom light off and the door open for illumination, resting his eyes against the onslaught of the day. When he was done he dressed and put the impact baton in his pocket where he’d begun to get used to its weight. He reloaded the .45 from a box of shells kept in the bedstand. The weapon had the fresh, peppery smell of cordite still clinging to it.
It was almost noon before he left the house, careful to double-lock the door behind him, and stepped out onto the street. Saturday was a good day in this neighborhood, when children played outside and families met in their little courtyards to share food and stories and good company. He saw a pack of kids on bicycles down by the corner in intense discussion about where to ride. The cross street was busy with Saturday traffic. Shops were prime destinations on Saturdays, parkings lots turned into open-air markets. Farmers came into the city with a portion of their crop to sell at near wholesale prices. There were clothes and toys and all manner of other things crowded along sidewalks all over Juárez.
“Hola, Señor Sevilla,” one of Sevilla’s neighbors called.
Sevilla smiled and waved to the old woman. Her daughters and seven grandchildren visited every Saturday. Once Ana and Ofelia had gone over to spend time with them, but only once. “Hola, Señora Pérez.”
“Be careful!” Señora Pérez urged.
“I will. Gracias.”
He drove off the block past the children and their bicycles and joined the ebb and flow of cars and trucks, headed easterly away from his home toward an address given him once by a man about to die on a restroom floor.
He found the building in a place where apartments and businesses freely mixed in a dingy clustering of old buildings stained by age and little upkeep. Auto-repair shops spilled battered vehicles into lots ringed with storm fencing and double curls of barbed wire. There were machine works cradled between decaying apartment blocks. It was not a neighborhood of restaurants and grocerías and the occasional little house left over from some generation gone by. The predominant colors were dead gray and rust of corrugated aluminum and stained concrete.
The first time Sevilla passed it, the place was so plain and much like the others around it. The building hunkered down on heavy foundations, a block of cement and cinder blocks with six-paned industrial windows that could hinge out in a block to vent hot air from inside. Once there had been a long metal sign above the truck-sized rolling doors at the head of the structure, but only a corner remained bolted to the building’s face. The doors themselves were chained shut. An entrance for men stood off to one side, the windows beside it boarded over.
Even having found it, Sevilla circled once more. He looked at the other buildings nearby, particularly a three-story corner apartment building fifty yards away on the other side of the street. There were windows there that offered an angled view of the place. This was something Sevilla put away for later.
He parked along the curb near those apartments and walked to his destination. Somewhere he heard the insistent scree of metal on metal, the sound of machineworks, but he could have his pick of a half-dozen places where the sound could be coming from. Work in Ciudad Juárez never stopped, even for the delights of Saturday, and paused only a little while on Sunday before heading back to the job.
Unlike his neighborhood, this one had deserted streets. A vacant lot sprouted thickets of grass, obscuring the squares of what might have been concrete flooring for some long-destroyed building. A few other cars dotted the curbs, but the atmosphere of abandonment was nearly total. They were not far from an industrial park for two large maquiladoras and Sevilla estimated he could reach Kelly’s apartment in twenty minutes if he knew the right turns.
For a long time he stood before the building. He didn’t want to go inside as much as he knew he must. He wished for an open window on the ground floor, but there were none. Sevilla walked the edges of the structure and passed down a narrow alley between this building and the next. The ground was packed so densely here that even grass struggled to grow. He found another boarded-up window.
The back of the building fronted a long, open expanse of grassy field. Recognition hit Sevilla so sharply that he put a hand on the wall to steady himself. A distant line of brown and white marked the apartment complex where Kelly used to live. As for the field itself… Sevilla had seen Paloma’s body there. He tasted something acid and he felt anger.
Twin tire ruts came away from another set of rolling doors at the back of the building, curving away into the field. It hadn’t rained in a while, but the tracks here were gouged into the earth deeply as if they had been muddy then. Sevilla tried to remember the weather in the days leading up to Paloma’s discovery, but the recollection would not come. He cursed under his breath. He went on.
The fourth face of the building adjoined the vacant lot. An exterior staircase snaked up to the second floor. The metal grating underfoot flaked rust as Sevilla mounted the steps. The door at the top was the same deep red-orange. Double links of chain strung through the handle kept it secured, though there was no lock. Sevilla pulled on it once, vainly hoping the chains would just magically disintegrate, but they didn’t give way.
He completed the circuit and went back to his car. He drove away and was back within the hour with a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters with the price sticker still on them. Sevilla felt exposed on the street with the long-handled tool, but he spotted no one watching from any high window and no car disturbed the near-perfect silence.
Cutting the chain was easier than he expected. Hardened steel cut through one set of links and then the next. The chains snaked out of the handle and fell at Sevilla’s feet, making a noise that s
ounded like a hundred tons of metal collapsing. Sevilla squeezed his eyes shut, listened for commotion from inside. There was nothing.
The door opened onto a small room half-filled with corroded barrels leaking something that stank of benzene. Sevilla’s shoes splashed in the stuff. Overhead the simple aluminum roof had exposed beams and holes that let in sunlight. Birds had made their nests up there, though the fumes must have eventually driven them away.
Sevilla tried an inner door and found it unlocked. He left the bolt cutters there and ventured through.
It was impossible to know what had once been housed in the building. The second floor was a warren of rooms in different sizes, some still storing what looked like machine equipment and others empty. He found one with a naked mattress on the floor and short tables thick with candle wax that dripped into heavy stalactites and pooled white on the concrete below. Steel eyehooks were fixed to the wall with rope loops dangling from them.
Sevilla’s mouth was dry. He swallowed three times to get the flow of spit going again, but the flavor of his mouth did not improve.
He went downstairs.
The high windows angled light into the large space on the ground floor like some plain cathedral without stained glass. DayGlo spray-paint graffiti marked the cinder block walls. The corners were littered with broken or discarded beer bottles. Someone had tried to gussy up the industrial space by hanging tarps in an approximation of tapestries, but the tarps were dingy-colored and sometimes spattered with something that might have been dark paint.
The fighting arena was the dominant feature. Lengths of thick rope marked off the space, strung from metal pillar to metal pillar and lashed in place with wire and bungee cords. It approximated the size of a boxing ring, but there was no matting here. Plain cement was scattered with a thick layer of sawdust, some of it clotted together with unmistakable blood.
Facing the ring was a long table, a feudal lord’s banquet space with a large chair in the center such as the lord himself would occupy. A dozen men could sit and watch the battle, and though the table was bare and rough and even splintered it would be transformed by a feast.
