“What?” I said.
“How she—she’s just going to—why? With him? You know the same stories as me about him.”
I said, “She’s not the purest chick, exactly. I mean, come on. She’s a slut.”
“Don’t say that. I don’t need to talk about her like that.”
“Then don’t talk about her at all,” I said. “Not with me.” From the corner of my eye, I could see him glaring at me.
The other thing men liked about Carmen was that she was smart, or at any rate cunning, and clever about the ways men thought. It was hard to write her off as a bimbo. I think a lot of guys thought she was smarter than them, and that can be kind of exciting. I guzzled the last half of the fantastic whisky and spun around.
“You ready?”
I almost thought he’d take a shot at me, but he sighed and nodded in defeat, hoisted himself up and had to steady his legs. I hadn’t realized he was that drunk, and now I was a little worried about the man in Jefferson Heights, Sienkiewicz. “You drive,” he said.
My truck shimmied awake like a wet dog, and the radio’s voice was in the middle of saying something about Jim Bakker getting defrocked. Angelo sat as if deflated. I double-checked the address and took Napoleon north to 90.
He leaned forward and shut off my radio. “You remember,” he said, his voice a little sloshed. “You remember, like years ago, when we broke up those kids selling in Audubon Park?”
I thought a minute. “Yeah.”
“Man. That boy that just started crying. You remember—I mean, we hadn’t even done anything. And the tears just—” He giggled.
“I remember.”
“Please. It’s just to pay for school.”
“Yep.”
“And you say, ‘This is school.’ ” He paused, straightened himself in the seat. “You remember that bag?”
“Oh yeah.”
This was about five years back, just after I’d moved over to Stan’s crew. The kid had had a knapsack stuffed with four thousand dollars and little quarter baggies of blow.
“You remember what we did?” Angelo asked.
“Gave it to Stan.”
“Yeah.” He shifted to face me, hands limp in his lap. “I know you thought the same thing as me. That we could just split it. That Stan didn’t need to know.”
His weak, meandering voice merged with the car lights that flashed across the windshield.
“But we didn’t trust each other,” he went on. “We both thought about it. But we didn’t trust.”
I glanced at him and took a deep breath. “What are you getting at?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just—I been thinking. I mean. What do I have to show? What do you have to show? I’m forty-three, man.”
It was like he just expected a pal, and I didn’t think he had the right. Plus it was pretty pitiful to hear this fat wop trying to talk about his feelings when he didn’t even have the vocabulary to label them.
Him whining about his life when I’d been fitted for a coffin.
I said, “Why don’t you just get yourself focused?”
“Huh.”
He stared out the window and I put in a tape of Billy Joe Shaver, which I knew Angelo hated, but he didn’t say anything about the music.
I felt a little guilty because I’d kind of planned to stab him in the neck tonight, but that would have been about the same as kicking a cripple. You’d need a good reason.
I have a sense of fair play.
Meaning, if I’m given your name on a piece of paper, it’s because you did something to put it in my hand. Something you shouldn’t have done.
Anyway, Angelo just stared out the window and sighed like a teenage girl while I felt the steel guitar pulse up from the door speakers and tingle my fillings. After a while I found the house, a Victorian on Newman Avenue with a yard fenced by wrought iron spears. We circled the block a few times, expanding outward to check if the place was under surveillance. I put the truck on Central so we could creep over between houses.
I checked my gear and stuffed my ski mask in my jacket pocket. Angelo started to put his on and I told him to wait till we got there, which he knew to do, but he was acting like he couldn’t tie his shoes, and I was thinking about just telling him to wait for me. That wouldn’t do, though, and we both slipped through the yards to the other side. Only one streetlight burned on Newman, and it was down past the place we were going. I didn’t hear any dogs and the lights were off in the house.
I told him I’d go around the back and he should knock on the front.
I slipped on my mask, placed my hands between the posts, and vaulted over the fence, through a quiet backyard with a little stone pond that trickled, and its sound was calming and strange. I climbed the stairs to the back door, and I didn’t think about it at the time, but I should have noticed there were no motion lights or anything. I hadn’t noticed that of all the houses on the street, this particular one was draped in darkness.
But I was in a hurry. I could taste my whisky breath trapped by the mask and I could hear it rasping under the burble of that stone pond, and I stood against the back door and listened.
I heard Angelo’s knock on the other side of the house and waited, felt footsteps inside walking to the front door. I stepped back, flipped out my baton, and counted three seconds. Then my boot cracked the door and the wood crashed inward.
I charged into darkness blind, the baton raised. Something heavy thudded my skull and red bloomed out of the dark.
I lost time.
I woke up when someone dropped me on the floor, a migraine kicking my head. My mask was off and I saw Angelo sitting across from me. His face was runny with blood, and he lifted a hand to his nose. We were in the foyer outside the front door, tinted mustard by a tiny lamp on the wall that gave off a scrap of light beneath orange glass. Red wallpaper. A man stood beside me, and another beside Angelo. They wore black jumpsuits and ski masks and each held a handgun fitted with a silencer. They had black vests with bulging pockets and rugged combat boots. Real professional. Their eyes locked with mine, small and cold, like Stan’s.
The one beside Angelo glanced around the wall and we heard footsteps. I thought a woman whimpered. A tang of gunpowder wound through the air, and also the smell of shit. I looked around.
What had to be Sienkiewicz’s body lay off to the side in the next room. His shirt gleamed wetly.
I heard another sob and thought it was Angelo, but my eyes adjusted and I saw a girl sitting on a chair in the dark, in the room to my left. I could see enough of her cheeks to make out the mascara that ran over them. She was clutching herself and shaking.
I understood what was going on and why Stan hadn’t wanted us to bring guns. I looked to Angelo, but he seemed baffled, his eyes wet and useless, staring at the blood his palm collected beneath his nose.
Footsteps came closer and a third man walked around the corner, buckling his pants. He carried a thick folder full of papers pressed under his arm, and he dressed like the other two, hardcore. After he’d hitched his pants he pulled his gun from his waistband.
“Stand them up.” He had a weird accent, not American or European.
Angelo hollered, “What is this? Who are you?” One of the men swatted his face with the butt of his gun, and Angelo covered his mouth and rolled back and forth on the ground.
The girl in the chair started breathing faster and harder, like she was choking.
The man who’d hit him grabbed Angelo’s hair and pulled him to his feet. The one beside me put his silencer on my temple and said, “Up.”
I rose slow and his gun stayed on me. I could feel they’d emptied my pockets and the .380 wasn’t in my boot anymore. I glanced at Angelo. He stood in a little puddle of piss. It was close quarters with three guns and we were unarmed.
People simply do not make it out of things like that.
They moved Angelo over against one wall, measuring the space between him and Sienkiewicz’s body in the next ro
om. I think they were trying to pose us so it might look like we all killed one another, but I don’t know.
The man beside me slapped the side of my head, then he shoved me forward and I acted like I stumbled, fell to one knee.
When he tugged me to my feet I flicked my wrist and whipped the stiletto into his neck. Blood geysered hot over my face and mouth.
I left the blade in and fell behind him as the other two raised guns. One shot at me and smacked plaster off a wall as the other fired at Angelo and the top of his pompadour flew off and he fell to his knees. They both fired at me. The shots went thwap like pneumatic bolts and all struck the third man. He spasmed at the bullets, the blade still in his neck.
My gun was right in front of me, stuck in the man’s waistband. I pulled it out and raised it and fired through the blood fountain at the closest one.
I didn’t have time to actually aim, and I was half-blind with arterial spray, but I hit him in the throat and he twitched and fired and dropped backward.
I never shot like that in my life.
And this—the last man, the one who’d clipped Angelo, his buddy had shot him on the way down. His armpit smoldered and he gripped himself, slumped against the wall. His gun sat a few feet away from his boot.
Angelo’s body finished falling then, thumped sideways on the carpet.
The last man looked at his gun, his foot, and then at me, just as I shot him in the head.
The whole thing took maybe five seconds.
Smoke spread over the foyer like ground fog. The top of Angelo’s face had broken off, his cheeks slicked with tears and blood. I threw up. The girl in the chair cried louder, made a moaning sound.
The three men in black were piled on the floor and thin tendrils of smoke rose from their bodies. The blade stuck from the one’s neck like a big thorn, and the orange light made his flowing blood look like paint.
The girl in the shadows just sat shivering wide-eyed in her chair. I passed her and walked around the hall.
I saw a light in a room toward the back and crept toward it. A woman’s naked body sprawled on a bed, tinted green by a reading lamp on the nightstand. The sheets were bloodied and she had deep bruises around her throat and thighs. She was young, but not as young as the girl in the chair.
I walked back to that girl and said, “Get up. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She didn’t move. She wasn’t looking at me or even blinking. I had to let her sit there a second while I wiped blood from my eyes.
I noticed the folder of papers splayed across the foyer floor, bone fragments spattered on them. I crouched and gathered them up and started for the back door, but I stopped. The girl hadn’t moved.
She’d seen my face, though. I slapped her cheek. I pulled her off the chair by her arm. “Get up. You’re coming with me.”
She stuttered, “What are you going to do?”
“We have to get out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.” I stared at her face clearly for the first time. She was younger than I’d have guessed. She wore her mascara clumsily, too much of it, like spilled ink now. Blond, very short hair, and even with the makeup running down her cheeks she looked almost childish, and there was something else there, too, something like what you could see in Carmen’s eyes at times—rules for self-preservation, a knot of hard choices. I could have imagined it. Whatever I recognized only fluttered past me as instinct or sentiment.
“Come with me,” I said. When she didn’t move I held the gun in her face.
She stared down the barrel and then at my eyes. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were in the low orange light. She looked at the floor. Then she kneeled down off the chair and crouched around the bodies, going through the pockets of the men I’d killed. I reckoned she was searching for money, or something they’d taken from her. I could appreciate that, as it seemed to confirm what I’d sensed about her pragmatic streak.
The whole time I waited for sirens. I stepped to the windows and looked out, but the night appeared still and untroubled. The girl had gathered a big purse from the side room and stuffed some things in it when she was done rifling pockets. She rose up with a fierce, sober look. “Vonda,” she said. “My friend Vonda.”
She started to walk down the hall, toward the bedroom, and I grabbed her wrist. I shook my head. “You don’t want to see that.”
“But—”
I tugged her by the arm out the back door, then across the street and into the shadows, where I still kept waiting to hear sirens from Highway 90. Blood and gunpowder stuffed my nostrils and I could feel the blood drying on my cheeks. I pulled off my shirt and rubbed hard at my face, blew my nose. We slipped between the yards and through the trees’ spotty darkness and we were out of sight.
When we reached the truck I pushed her inside and started the engine. Billy Joe’s singing mixed with the engine noise, and the sounds made me grin. It occurred to me that if I had told Stan about my lungs all of this might not have happened. He might have decided to let nature take its course.
For a second I just sat in the truck, grinning from ear to ear. I guess this scared the girl, because she cringed against the window, faced the floor as I pulled away from the curb and steered us toward the highway.
Now in hindsight I think there must have been more to my bringing her than just that she’d seen my face. Because what did I care if she saw my face? I was dying. I could have shaved my beard, cut my hair. I mean, one of the reasons for keeping my hair long was because if I got jammed up, I could give myself a crew cut and shave and the whole profile would change.
I think that maybe for a second there, in that foyer with its burnt orange light filled with smoke and blood and the gunshot still ringing in my ears, my jaw rigid with adrenaline, something about her face, the fear and grief in her face, was like the feeling that struck me in that empty apartment earlier—the sensation of a thing forgotten but resonating, an intuitional memory, an absence.
Anyway, it turned out this girl was from East Texas, too.
The girl said her name was Raquel and everyone called her Rocky. She was mostly terrified, and given what she’d been through, a lot of people might have switched off, but she talked like a mynah bird. I suspect that sometime before the night’s events, she had learned that you can live with anything. “My last name’s Arceneaux.” She pronounced it Arson, oh. “Are you going to kill me?”
“No. Stop asking me that.”
I drove us to my trailer in Metairie. We sat at the edge of the trailer park for a while, in the dark, but my double-wide looked the way I’d left it. No vehicles I didn’t recognize. No light in the windows. So we walked in. I pressed her ahead and kept the lights off.
“This is where you live?”
“Shut up.”
I wondered how long ago the men in commando gear were supposed to check in with Stan. Outside the world was almost too still; the live oak and maple surrounding the park didn’t seem to rustle, just hung over these little boxes in an unmoving air, and the lights in the other trailers didn’t reveal any motion. No one passed in the windows, their lusterless glow lighting the undersides of branches and the plastic toys and tires pocking the muddy yards. I turned on the hall light.
I left my gun on the lid of the septic tank and washed my face in the bathroom sink, scrubbed my forearms and hands with Lava soap and blistering water that drained in a pink whirl.
I grabbed a fresh shirt and from my closet dug out a small lockbox like the kind used in banks for safe deposits. It contained a little over three thousand dollars and a fake driver’s license and passport I’d had made years ago. My retirement plan. I also took a box of .380 shells from one shelf, a clean license plate, some more clothes, and threw it all in an old army-surplus duffel bag.
The girl sat in the living room’s single chair, a large La-Z-Boy where I’d end up sleeping most nights. An army of empty High Life cans covered the floor around the chair—an actual army, because
I’d used a knife to cut little strips out of the can sides so that they folded down, like arms, and I’d pulled the tops upright to resemble heads. I’d done all that while watching Fort Apache, and it was a little embarrassing to have her see. The chair faced my television and VCR and the tape collection beside it.
“You got a lot of movies,” she said. “But no furniture.” Her eyes scanned the beer cans on the rug.
I wagged the gun at her. “Get back to the truck. Move.”
“We just got here. All your movies are old.”
I had a nearly complete collection of John Wayne on tape, and I was sorry to leave it. It had taken me a few years to put together.
“It’s not safe,” I said. “Move. Or we’ll have a problem.”
At the truck I used a screwdriver to switch my license plate with the good one I’d had stamped years ago; it corresponded to a dentist’s Ford in Shreveport.
The thing to do would be to just get on I-10 and drive west till we were out of Louisiana. We could have gone east, but I’m not welcome in the state of Mississippi, and less than four hours west and you’re in Texas, which I preferred.
I dumped my duffel in the truck bed. The lockbox and the folder from Sienkiewicz’s house I kept behind the seat. We merged onto the interstate.
“So why’d those men want to kill you?” she said.
“Some bullshit. Over a woman.” I smacked the steering wheel and realized how pissed I was about that. “That’s what my life’s worth.”
She wanted to hear more about it, but I wouldn’t spill. I asked her how she came to be doing what she did. By this point I understood that she was a whore, her and her friend sent to ground Sienkiewicz at home.
She said, “You still got some blood on your face.”
I looked in the rearview and then her small finger touched under my jaw. “Right there,” she said.
I wiped at it with a little spit. The other side of the tape played Loretta Lynn and the spot on my jaw where she’d touched me pulsed with a slight warmth. I tried to keep her talking because she’d be easier to deal with, and I didn’t want her any deeper in shock. Maybe I just wanted to hear someone’s voice. It was all starting to sink in, and it’s possible I wanted someone to talk to me. I said, “Go on. What you were saying.”
Galveston Page 2
