Fifty Grand Page 2

  Squeak, squeak, squeak. Clouds. Snowflakes. Squeak, squeak, squeak.

  I walk to him.

  “No,” he says.

  His ass sticks to the ice. He rips it free and the crab walk recommences. It’s so pathetic I’m starting to feel bad. I point the gun at his stomach.

  “No,” he repeats in a whisper.

  Nooo. His breath a ghost that vanishes like all ghosts. Desperation in those red, coke crash eyes. I go behind him and lug him to his feet. Ice-burned skin. Human skin.

  Sickening, but not much farther now.

  “Listen to me, buddy, I can make you rich. I can get you money. A lot of money. Millions. Do you understand? Millions of dollars. Goddammit! Why don’t you understand, what’s the matter with you? Millions of dollars? Do you speak English? Do you understand the goddamn English language?”

  I do. It was my major.

  “I hope you understand me, because you’re making a mistake. A life-altering—I have men, they’ll find me, and when they do I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.”

  Better my shoes than no shoes.

  “You just don’t know who you’re dealing with. You have no idea.”

  What next? You’re connected? You’re high up in the mob? Your movements are tracked by drones piloted by the CIA?

  Just a few more steps: one, two, three, four.

  There, we’re about thirty meters out now, which is far enough.

  I give him the universal “stop” sign and signal him to lie down.

  He shakes his head. I place the barrel of the gun against his heart.

  Still he doesn’t obey.

  I walk behind him and kick him in the left calf. His knees buckle and I push his head down, shoving his face against the ice. His body goes limp. Bracing himself.

  I put the 9mm in my pocket, remove the handcuff key, unlock one wrist, and quickly get out of his way. I grab the gun again and wait. For a moment he doesn’t believe that I’ve unlocked him, but then when he sees that he’s completely free he gets to his feet and begins rubbing the circulation back into his wrists.

  Keeping the gun on him I place the backpack in front of me and unzip the central pocket. I take out the sledgehammer and slide it to him over the ice.

  He looks with astonishment at the vicious maple-handled, steel-headed five-kilo sledgehammer.

  “What’s this for?” he asks.

  I point at the ice.

  His face shows incomprehension, but then he gets it. “You want me to make a hole in the ice?”

  I nod.

  He picks up the hammer.

  As I knew it would, my heart starts to race. This is by far the riskiest part of the whole plan. Now, if he tries his trick, I’m dead.

  Maybe we’ll get that sweet karmic ending after all.

  He’s got a fantastic weapon, he’s strong, he’s angry, he’s free.

  He holds all the cards but one.

  Information.

  He doesn’t know that the gun is empty.

  He stares at my masked face for a moment, smiles unnervingly, and tightens his grip on the maple.

  He looks like Pitt at the party, like Thor at Ragnarok—the hammer, the ice, the bloody face, the blond locks.

  I raise the Smith & Wesson and hold it in both hands. I sight him with the utterly useless gun.

  “And what if I don’t?” he says.

  I nod as if to say, Try it.

  “This is totally insane,” he mutters. He shakes his head in disgust. “What kind of a man are you?”

  No kind of a man.

  Smith & Wesson. Hammer. Blue eyes. Brown eyes.

  “Hell with it then,” he says and violently smashes the hammer into the ice. The first hit cracks the surface. The second makes a hole the size of a football. The third makes a large pancake-size fissure that I can easily lift out.

  I put my hand up to stop him. Then with the flat of my palm I signal him to drop the sledge.

  It would be easier to start speaking now, to actually tell him stuff, but I’m reluctant to reveal that much of myself until he’s completely where I want him to be.

  “You want me to lose the hammer?”

  I nod.

  “How about I lose it in your head?”

  He looks at me and then the gun and he lets the sledgehammer fall out of his hands. Keeping the 9mm on point I walk behind him and push him back to the ground. The car ride and the cold and this last piece of work have so wasted him that he embraces the ice like an old friend.

  I put the snout of the gun on his neck and let him feel it there for a moment; then I take his hands and place them on his lower back; before he can try anything I quickly recuff him.

  And that’s that. It’s over. No escape. If he gives me the wrong answers he’s dead.

  I lay the gun on the ground, walk to the hole, pick up the ice debris, and throw it out. I widen the hole a little with the sledgehammer and then toss it away as far as I can.

  Before he has the time to think I drag him backward by the cuffs into the ice hole. Takes all my strength, which isn’t much. When his legs touch the water, he begins to buck wildly but I’ve got enough momentum now to finish the job.

  I shove the rest of him into the freezing lake.

  Almost immediately his body begins to convulse in pain. I wouldn’t know but I imagine it’s like being electrocuted.

  For a moment his legs stop kicking and he sinks beneath the water, but then—thankfully—he fights his way back to the surface.

  Treading water, looking at me. His legs are powerful and he’s so strong I suppose he could keep this up for half an hour or even forty-five minutes if I assisted him a little from time to time.

  I sit next to him on the ice and open the backpack.

  I take out the Ziploc bag I found in his nightstand. Inside there’s six rolls of hundreds, a key of scag, and enough crank to animate half the corpses in Colorado. I suppose it’s some kind of emergency treasure. About a hundred thousand in currency and convertibles.

  I catch his eye and make sure that he sees what I’m doing. I place the heavy bag in the water in front of him and we watch it sink to the bottom of the lake.

  Does that help you understand? This isn’t about money.

  In fact I can illuminate this even better for you now that you’re cuffed and in the goddamn hole. I take off the ski mask.

  Recognition dawns immediately, recognition and amazement.

  Good. And now for the most important part of all. This is the bit I’ve been dreaming about. For this I want your full attention.

  I lean forward, crawl toward him, and turn his face so that he’s looking at me. When his eyes meet mine, I raise the gun, tip it vertical to show him the empty chamber, and then I click the magazine release and show him the empty clip.

  Do you get it now, compañero?

  Who did this to you? A girl. A wetback armed only with an unloaded pistol. At any time you could have run away and, my friend, when you had that hammer you could have ended this whole thing. But you didn’t. She bluffed you out. This girl, this perra latina.

  He looks at the gun, says nothing.

  I’m a little let down.

  Where’s the fireworks? The fury?

  Nothing. Well, you can’t have everything.

  He saw and he knows.

  His legs continue to kick furiously but his feet, in the cold currents of the hypolimnion, are beginning to tire already.

  I nod, slide back from the hole, stand, retrieve the hammer, and put it, the gun, and the ski mask into the backpack.

  “Help me! Help me! Help me!” he begins to yell.

  I scan the shore. Nobody.

  “Help me!” he screams, his eyes darting madly. Expecting what? Duck hunter? Ice fisherman?

  No. No one comes here in the winter, and just to be on the safe side I’ve put up a sign, I’ve locked the gate, I’ve wiped the footprints.

  “Help me! Heelp meee!” he screams.

  The words hang for a moment and t
hen freeze onto the ice.

  His lips are turning blue. His skin, red.

  He’s whispering. I can barely hear. I lean in. “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,” he says.

  Words are finite. The set of all the words that will ever be spoken is small and the subset of each human’s allotment is tiny. These could be your last. Is this really what you want to leave the Earth proclaiming?

  “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”

  Apparently so. Well, you’re going to have to give me more than that if you want to get out of this alive.

  After a minute the mantra changes but not by much: “Bitch, bitch, bitch, get you, bitch, you’ll see, won’t be fun for you, get you, teach you, yeah, bitch.”

  But then he whispers something else. Something surprising. “Bitch, you’ve got no goddamn shame.”

  That’s more like it. Where did that line come from? Shame—how old-fashioned. Hector says that shame was one of the casualties of the twentieth century. Hector comes out with a lot of stuff like that. Hector says that Cuba is a woman’s mouth, her lips squeezed together in a grimace, bruised and twisted at one end from all the beatings she’s taken over the years. You’d dig Hec, maybe we could get him a job in Hollywood. A character actor. A cigar-chomping Miami cop. Do they still make cop movies?

  “No shame, get you, bitch . . .”

  But you’re wrong. I have no morals, no husband, no children, but shame I have by the bucketload.

  He starts to scream again.

  “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

  The duct tape is still in the backpack. I could cover his mouth, but what’s the point? Let him scream.

  “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

  In a minute he wears himself out.

  His teeth chattering. His eyes closing.

  I pull out the pack of Faros and put two in my mouth. I flip the Zippo and light both. I offer him one of the cigarettes. He nods and I put it between his lips. It’ll help him. In a couple of seconds the dissolved nicotine molecules will be firing neurotransmitters that’ll release small quantities of dopamine into his brain. As the cold starts to get to him, blood will retreat from his extremities and his brain will become overoxygenated, perhaps releasing more dopamine and endorphins. The feeling will not be unpleasant.

  I put my hand beneath his armpit and lift him a little.

  He draws on the cigarette and nods a thank-you.

  “I just g-gave up. M-man, this is ironic, it r-really is,” he says.

  Oh, compañero, don’t you read the poets? Irony is the revenge of slaves. Americans are not permitted to speak of irony, certainly not Americans like you.

  He grins.

  He probably thinks I’m starting to crack, that I’ll change my mind about this business.

  I won’t but I am so caught up in that grisly smile and the fading blue of his eyes that I don’t see the black Cadillac Escalade idle its way to the locked gate behind us. I don’t see the doors open, I don’t see the men with guns get out.

  I don’t see anything.

  I’m in this moment with this man.

  Are you ready?

  Are you ready to speak the truth?

  Or do you want to wait until the black angel joins us on the ice?

  “D-d-don’t d-do this. D-don’t d-d-do this.” His voice drops half an octave, keeps the imperative, but loses the tone. “Don’t, p-please.”

  Much more effective.

  A call to prayer in the wilderness.

  We Cubans are the vagabond descendants of the Muslim kingdom of Granada. We appreciate that kind of thing.

  A call to prayer. Yes.

  The dogwood minarets.

  The ice lake sajadah.

  The raven muezzins.

  “How d-did it c-come to this?” he asks, crying now.

  How did it come to this?

  Mi amigo, we’ve got time. I’ll tell you.

  CHAPTER 2

  BLOODY FORK, NEW MEXICO

  T

  he future paid a shivery visit to the back of the car. I woke, half opened my left eye. A yellow desert. Morning. I let the eyelid fall. Blackness. But not the blackness of negation. Nothing so fortunate. Merely the absence of light. Too hot to sleep. Too uncomfortable, too much background noise: radio in the front cab, annoying chitchat, stones churning against the bottom of the vehicle like lotto balls.

  I felt weak, my bones ached, my jeans and sneakers were drenched with sweat.

  The Land Rover rattled over a bump on the coyote road, the engine grumbling like an old horse.

  No, no point trying to sleep now. I removed the cheap plastic sunglasses, wiped the perspiration from my forehead, rubbed at the dirt on the rear window.

  Vapor trails. Red sun. Hot air seething over the vast expanse of the Sonora. No cacti, no shrubs. Not even a big rock.

  Where were we? Was this a double cross? Easiest thing in the world, drive half a dozen desperate wetbacks to the middle of nowhere, kill ’em, rob ’em. Happens all the time.

  I turned to look at Pedro, our driver. He caught my eye in the rearview, nodded, and gave me a tombstone grin. I nodded back.

  “Yes, we’re across,” he said.

  We crunched into a pothole. Pedro grabbed the wheel and cursed under his breath.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” someone said.

  “What road?” Pedro replied.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

  “We’re across the border? We’re in the United States?” I asked.

  “For the last kilometer,” Pedro confirmed. Both of us waited for any kind of emotion from the others. Nothing. No one applauded, cheered, reacted in any way.

  Most of them had probably done this journey dozens of times. Pedro, however, was disappointed. “We made it,” he said again.

  I peered through the window and wondered how he could be so sure. It looked like fucking Mars out there. A thin brown sand worrying itself over a bleached yellow ground. Nothing alive, all the rocks weathered into dust.

  “The land of Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Lopez, Jorge Bush,” Pedro was saying to himself.

  “Thanks for getting us over,” I said.

  Pedro tilted the mirror down to look at me. He gave me an ironic half smile. My friend, I don’t do this dangerous job for praise, but I certainly appreciate it.

  I’d made my first mistake. Now Pedro had singled me out in his mind as a classy sort of person, different somehow from the others. Someone with enough old-fashioned manners to say thank you. That, my demeanor, and my odd accent—all of it more than enough to burn my way into his consciousness.

  Keep your mouth shut in future. Don’t do anything different. Don’t say a goddamn word.

  I stole a look at him, and of course all this was in my head, not his—he was far too busy. The windshield wipers were on, he was smoking, he was steering with one hand, shifting gears with the other, while repeatedly scanning the radio, tapping the ash from his cigarette, and touching a Virgin of Guadalupe on the dashboard every time we survived a pothole.

  He was about fifty, dyed black hair, white shirt with frills on the collar. The M19 spiderweb tattoo on his left hand meant that he’d probably feel bad about leaving us for the vultures but he’d do it if it came to that.

  The kid looked at me. “United States?” he asked, pointing out the window.

  “What’s the matter with you, don’t you speak Spanish?” I was going to say but didn’t. He was an Indian kid from some jungle town in Guatemala. His Spanish probably wasn’t so great.

  “Yeah, we’re across the border.”

  “So easy?” he asked, his eyes widening. He, at least, was impressed.

  “Yeah.”

  He craned his neck through the glass I’d cleaned.

  “United States?” he asked again.

  “Yes,” I insisted.

  “How?”

  From what I’d been led to believe we were somewhere on a sovereign Indian nation that didn’t allow fences, or
the border patrol, or even the local cops. Law enforcement was done by the FBI and they had to come in specially from Austin or Washington, D.C. It had been a coyote road for years.

  “We just drove over,” I said with a smile.

  The kid nodded happily. He was the youngest of us. Sixteen, fifteen, something like that. Sweet little nonentity.

  He and I and three others jammed into the back of the ancient Land Rover. Seats opposite one another. No way to stretch your legs out. Empty chair next to Pedro but he wouldn’t let anyone sit up.

  I drifted for a bit and felt drool on my arm. The old man from Nogales was napping against my shoulder. I wiped the spittle with my T-shirt sleeve.

  Yeah. Five of us. The Indian boy, me, the old man, a deaf woman from Veracruz, and a punk kid from Managua who was sitting directly across from me, pretending to sleep.

  Didn’t know any of their names. Didn’t want to know.

  I stared through the window at the sameness.

  So hot now the air itself was a gigantic lens distorting the landscape, bringing distant mountains dizzyingly close, warping the flatland into curves.

  I pressed my face against the glass. Time marched. The heat haze conjuring ever more intense illusions from the view. The yellow desert: a lake of egest. The cacti: dead men crucified. The birds: monstrous reptiles from another age.

  I watched until nausea and vertigo began to zap my head.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and for the hundredth time since that last interview with Ricky I wondered what exactly I was doing here. Revenge is a game for pendejos. Hector says that tit for tat is a base emotion, from the lizard brain, from way, way down. He says we’ve evolved beyond revenge. Witnesses at executions always leave dissatisfied, and he would know, he’s seen dozens. But it’s not about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infinity of nothing—it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on the chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.