by Alan Lee
“Get your stuff,” I said.
“I drive. My stuff is in the car.”
Carlos arrived in an old grey Toyota pickup and parked on the street. Manny and I met him outside. The low grey clouds were lightening.
Manny called, “Pon tus bolsas en la parte trasera, amigo mío, e iremos a matar al jodido coyote.”
Something about, Put your stuff in my car and we’ll go kill the coyote.
“Hey, talk American,” I said.
Carlos didn’t move. “Señor August, we are taking the marshal?”
“We are,” I said. “He’s good at this.”
“That’s more like it,” said Manny.
“And if we don’t, he’ll throw a hissy.”
“I’m driving. Get us there quick.”
Carlos looked at the black Camaro and shook his head. “Two doors? I do not fit.”
“Ay dios mio,” said Manny. “Fine. We’ll take Mack’s pretty Accord. But I drive.”
A dazzling red Mercedes purred down the street. Parked in front of my house. And a dazzling blonde unfolded from the passenger door.
“Hello boys,” said Ronnie.
She still wore her work outfit. If she hadn’t been the proprietor of the office, her boss would’ve objected to the length of her grey skirt. Or tried to seduce her out of it. It had stopped drizzling but she popped an umbrella and walked my way.
An enormous man named Fat Susie got out of the driver’s seat and shot us three guys a nod. He went to the Mercedes’s trunk and fetched Ronnie’s overnight bag.
Manny nodded back. “Hola, Fat Susie.”
I said, “Why is Fat Susie driving you around?”
Ronnie shrugged, a motion that always looked good on her. Especially in this spaghetti-strap blouse.
She said, “A grumpy man is mad at me for some nonsense. Or so Marcus Morgan says, and he let me borrow Reginald.”
Manny said, “The hell is Reginald?”
She stopped when our toes touched. We were very close, her breath on my neck, whispers of her blonde hair tickling my chin.
“Ronnie,” I said.
“Yes Mackenzie.”
“It’s nice to see you.”
She raised up further on her toes and kissed me. My chin and then my lower lip. “I know.”
“Why don’t you kiss the other guys?”
“You owe me for babysitting. That’s why,” she said. “And you’re supposed to kiss me back.”
“But they’re watching.”
“Prude.”
I opened the door for her and she and I went inside. She stepped out of her heels, a motion I could watch all day, and set the umbrella by the door.
She said, “Holy shit I love this house. I’m struck by it every time.”
“Who is mad at you?”
“I’m not sure. It has to do with Ruben and marijuana and possibly men in Washington. Who cares. Marcus is taking care of it. That man is in a precarious position.”
“He wants out of his position,” I said, “He should quit shoveling cocaine around.”
Kix made a loud sound, demanding to be noticed from his playpen. When Ronnie did, he beamed and jumped.
I knew the feeling.
She scooped Kix. “Look at this perfect angel baby. I could eat him.”
“Kix thinks you’re dressed a little scandalous for crawling on the floor babysitting.”
“I brought a change of clothes, Mackenzie. I’ve done this before. I had to pay for my own car and cell phone in high school, and I did so by tending children.”
“Are you wearing your new lingerie?”
“I am. Care for a glimpse? A tease?”
My chest tightened. A feeling like thirst and hope blossomed somewhere inside the inner recesses of my sensorium.
I sighed. “I would like that more than all things. But…better not. I wouldn’t be able to aim tonight.”
I showed her the diapers and the baby food and the fruit and the books and the baby clothes. Not nearly as much fun as lingerie modeling.
When I finished, she said, “You have not mentioned my glowing skin. Go on, try to find a blemish. You cannot.”
“You’ve always been without blemish.”
She reddened a little. “I recently returned from a week’s stay at a spa. Sonesta, on Hilton Head. Mackenzie, it was paradise. I am a new woman.”
“I didn’t know you were a spa girl.”
“I’m not. I went on doctor’s orders,” she said. “She said I wasn’t allowed to take you.”
“Doctor?”
“I’m in therapy. Twice a week.”
“If I wasn’t so manly, I might do a happy dance,” I said. “A psychiatrist?”
“Kinda.”
Kix regarded her suspiciously.
Kinda a doctor?
Ronnie said, “She’s a…you’re going to laugh.”
“Not I. I do not laugh. I’m a big fan of physicians.”
“She’s a holistic psychotherapist.”
“Oh,” I said. “A witch doctor.”
“No.”
“A practitioner of voodoo. She lights incense and turns on Coldplay and gives you kale and prescriptions to luxury resorts, and you’re cured.”
“You be kind. Besides it’s not even Coldplay.”
I said, “I’m sure detoxifying through a diet of homemade hemp enemas and aura cleansing will help you recover from twenty years of abuse.”
Her shoulders fell and she lost some of her light. “I’m trying, Mackenzie. This is new for me.”
“You’re right.” I winced. Mackenzie August, major league butthead. “I went too far. I am an ass.”
She nodded.
Kix scowled at me.
I said, “I apologize. This is new for me too. I have a vested interest in your recovery, but…I shouldn’t. I’ll be a Ronnie fan no matter what, even if you go to New York Mets fans for advice on sexual healing.”
“No one is that stupid.”
“Amen.”
She said, “Also, I’m not interested in having you for a fan. A groupie, maybe…”
I said, “You’re engaged to another man.”
“Ugh! Mackenzie! Stop bringing him up. Marcus asked me to give him a few more days to prepare before I tell Darren. That I’m leaving him. For greener pastures.”
“My pastures are green as heck.”
She smiled, a wicked twist on her perfect mouth. “You keep turning me down and I’ll graze elsewhere and send you nude selfies as punishment. Every. Single. Night.”
My son made a gasping noise.
“Kix just lost his innocence,” I said.
“I can’t wait to take yours. Is it Carlos’s kid who got kidnapped, by the way?”
“His daughter.”
“Poor guy. I like Carlos. Make sure you find her.”
Fat Susie came in with Ronnie’s bag. He looked around my house and nodded approval.
I said, “Your name’s Reginald?”
“Fat Susie my middle name.”
I kissed Kix on the forehead. Then kissed Ronnie’s forehead.
“Take Manny,” she said. “You’ll be safer.”
“I am.”
“It’s like we’re a family. You go off to kill people and I’ll stay home, barefoot, with Kix,” she said.
“Our pretend family is whack. My father will be home soon, perhaps with the sheriff.”
“Ooo, kinky.”
3
We went up Interstate 81 and caught 64 East. Why not take 460, you ask? Is it not the more direct route? Manny wanted long straight stretches to go ninety miles per hour, that’s why.
“We get pulled over,” he said. “I show my badge. Good to go.”
“Do not get pulled over. My weapons are not legal,” said Carlos.
“Relax, hombre. We good. I play the Marshal card, we can do anything.”
I rode in the passenger seat and acted as disc jockey. We alternated between reggae, mariachi, Frank Sinatra, and the Killers.
Carlos shifted uneasily in the back the entire trip, glaring and grinding his teeth.
“This will not work,” he kept saying. “This is loco.”
Thirty minutes outside of Norfolk, I called an associate named Peter. Peter the Private Detective. He worked in this area.
He answered, “It’s late, August. I’m on a hot date.”
“You lie.”
“This important?” he asked.
The connection wasn’t great. Some static.
“What are you doing on your hot date?”
“Watching a fucking romantic comedy at the theater. Actually, talk as long as you need, I’m ready to shoot myself in there,” said Peter the Private Detective.
“I’m inbound, looking for a girl being held by a coyote out of Mexico.”
“Yuck,” he said.
“Yuck indeed.”
“Need help? This movie’s awful. Not sure my date’s hot enough to warrant the pain.”
“I got help. Looking for a starting point. There’s no way the girl’s working yet,” I said.
In the back, Carlos groaned.
Peter made a throat clearing noise in the phone. “I don’t know where these pieces of shit keep their girls. But I can get you started. Cops got wise on Backpage, put the heat on Portsmouth, so the action shifted. To, ahh—what’s the name—to Ocean View. You know it? Drive up and down highway 60.”
“The strip motels?”
“The Best Westerns, Express Inn, HoJo, Ocean View Inn, you know the kind of place. Motel 6. Pimps sit in the vans or SUVs or whatever.”
“Ocean View. Thanks. That’ll get me started,” I said.
“Swing by and kill me on the way. This is the new movie with one of the Jennifers, you know? I can’t keep ‘em straight. Christ almighty.”
At 8pm, we turned onto highway 60 and motored south. This was a good place to run cheap prostitution. Quiet but active, not far from the Navy base, close proximity to several beaches, tourist attractions like golf courses and botanical gardens. Good fishing everywhere.
Perhaps ‘good place to run cheap prostitution’ was the wrong phrase. Best not to get too cold, Mackenzie. Maybe instead, these conditions were ideal for traffickers looking to exploit prostitutes and lonely men.
We pulled into an iHop and ordered pancakes. Except for Manny, who got an omelette and coffee. Our waitress, a women in her thirties with the hair and wrinkles of a woman in her sixties, nearly hyperventilated taking his order.
Before drinking, Manny filled his coffee with a powder, “full of good fats and collagen peptides and salt.”
“I drink my coffee black,” I said. “Like Abraham Lincoln did.”
“Mine taste delicious. How is yours?” said Manny.
“Tastes terrible, as it ought.”
“Burn more fat, mi amigo grande, and maybe you get a girlfriend.”
Carlos ate a single bite of pancake and set his fork heavily down. Too antsy to eat. “Isabella. She is near?”
I said, “Probably. Within twenty miles. The only thing we know for certain, we are surrounded by sources of information.”
“Why do we sit here?”
Manny said, “It is only eight. Quarter past eight.”
“We’re giving pimps time to rent rooms and run out their girls,” I said.
“Jesucristo. You say Isabella, she is not working yet?”
“No way. Not yet.” I set my mug of coffee onto the saucer and neatly cut my pancakes into bite sized squares.
“Then…what do we do?”
“We ask the pimps for directions.”
“The pimps, they buy girls from Méjico? From the coyotes?” asked Carlos.
Manny shook his head, made a “Nuh-uh” sound, and ate his omelette.
“Most likely the local prostitution business is completely separate from the coyote extortion business,” I explained. “We don’t know who the coyote is. Or where he is. And the pimps, they don’t know either. But if we hit a pimp hard enough, he’ll point us to his boss. Then we go visit the boss. The boss won’t be involved with coyotes, but he’ll know guys who are. Then we go visit those guys, and so forth.”
Carlos nodded his head, like carefully translating my modus operandi. “Follow the trail?”
“Yes. Working our way up the ladder.”
“Rápido,” said Manny.
“Manny and I used this technique in Los Angeles. Get high enough in the food chain, the guys know each other. Gotta work fast, though. We’re going to piss off some powerful men. We don’t want to be here long, and we don’t want them to know who we are, and we don’t want the coyote getting a warning. We want to be shoving a pistol up his nose just a few hours after we start. Get me?”
Carlos nodded. He set his head down on the table and said, “Jesucristo,” again.
Manny looked at me over his mug. “Carlos be a wild bull tonight. He gonna kill everyone.”
We sat in my Accord in a damp alley across from a nondescript motel, The Oceanside Inn. One of those dumps owned locally, not by a chain. Most of the lights within the big sign were burnt out; so were the sconces. Paper bags from three fast food joints sat wetly in the parking lot, cats prowled the exterior black iron staircase, and the blue light of a television flickered inside the walk-up front office.
But free cable!
From our vantage we could see each motel room door, all twenty-four of them. A Chevy Tahoe from the 1700’s pulled in. The driver spoke with the front office, went back to the Tahoe, and three girls got out. One went into 203 by herself, and two went into 205. Just a guess, the girls were mid-twenties.
Manny got out with white electrical tape to disguise my license plate. Crouched at the rear.
In the back, Carlos began jacking shells into a pump-action twelve gauge shotgun, painted camouflaged.
“Carlos, the shotgun,” I said. “It won’t be necessary.”
“Por que?”
“These guys are low level. They know next to nothing. And if you shoot them we gotta call the whole night off.”
“But…my daughter.”
“I know. Maybe you wait here,” I said.
“I talk to those pendejos,” he said. “But the shotgun will stay.”
Within twenty minutes two cars had pulled up and an indistinct man went into each motel room. First customers of the night.
Manny, Carlos, and I got out of my Honda Accord, our three doors opening in unison. We didn’t even plan it—you can’t teach preternatural bravura.
The driver in the Tahoe didn’t notice us until I knocked on the window. It was dark and the only things I saw inside were illuminated by the light of his phone. He was scrolling through pornography when I knocked.
The guy jumped. Strong kid, maybe twenty-five. His head was buzzed, skin pockmarked, and his hands were tattooed. He was by himself. Gun on the passenger seat.
The kid watched me. Watched Manny beside me. Started taking deep breaths. He didn’t buzz the window down.
“Easy,” I said. “We’re not here for you.”
“Take a walk,” he told me through the window.
“After you give me some information, we’re gone,” I said. “No one gets hurt.”
His words were muffled. “Information? Who the hell are you? Get out of here.”
On the other side of the Tahoe, Carlos shoved both hands into the passenger door. Hard enough to scare the hell out of the driver, and hard enough to rock the car.
“Jesus,” said the driver. His hand started pawing the passenger seat, searching for his gun. “What do you want?”
Manny casually removed his .357 and placed the muzzle flat against the window. The kid’s eyes went wider.
I said, “Relax. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t go for a gun. We’re all walking away. Understand? I want to talk to your boss.”
“My boss?”
“Your boss.”
“The fuck?”
I nodded encouragingly.
“Yeah that guy.”
C
arlos hit the Tahoe again. Guy inside flinched.
“Man, get out of here!” he shouted. “I ain’t doing anything wrong!”
“You start the car, we break both windows and haul you out,” I explained.
“What do you want with my boss?”
“I want to know his name and his location. And I want to talk to him. I’ll never mention you. Scout’s honor,” I said.
“You tryna get me killed? That it? I can’t tell you nothing, buncha motherfuckers.”
Behind us, one of the motel doors opened. Weak light spilled out and a man hurried to the stairs. He was kind of hopping and working at his belt.
“Johnny! Johnny!” called the woman, stalking out after him. She wore a little black skirt and a stained wife-beater t-shirt. No shoes. “Johnny he ain’t paying!”
The guy hurrying down the steps shouted at no one in particular, “No, I…please…I changed my mind! This…this isn’t…not what I thought…”
“Johnny he’s leaving! He ain’t even pay me!” She was shouting in a screech.
I pointed my finger at the guy in the Tahoe. “Don’t move, Johnny.”
“This is where I work!” he shouted through the window. “That asshole is skipping payment!”
Manny tapped the glass with his .357 and said, “Stay, mi amigo.”
When the guy who was fleeing reached the bottom of the stairs, Manny was there. The man—early thirties, trim, meek-looking guy, maybe an accountant—pulled up short. Manny wrapped an arm around his neck. Kinda friendly, but also kinda like a headlock. He still held the pistol and it laid against the man’s chest.
Manny said, “Señor, you pay the girl?”
“What, no…I…we didn’t…I mean…”
“No? Yes?”
The guy gulped. “Nothing happened…I mean, you know…not like it should.”
The girl on the balcony kept going, hard on the ears. “Little prick got his money’s worth. Believe me. And he ain’t pay. Johnny, you hear me?”
Johnny glared at me, unable to get out of his Tahoe, me on one side and Carlos on the other.
I smiled back.
“But…” the meek guy told Manny at the bottom of the black iron staircase. He was pale. Staring at the unexpected audience. “I mean, it happened…you know, so fast, and—”
