Angel Baby: A Novel (23 page)

Time to go. Somebody’s called about the gunshots by now, and the police must be on their way. Jerónimo shoves the .25 into his front pocket, then picks up the rat’s pistol and drops the magazine. Two rounds left. He might as well take it along. Sliding a hand underneath the guy, he gets hold of his wallet. The two hundred dollars he finds inside it means he won’t have to jack someone for gas money to get him to the border.

The rat is lying motionless on the bed, staring at the ceiling but not seeing it, when Jerónimo walks out the door. Jerónimo feels lucky. If the guy had been just a little quicker on the trigger, Jerónimo knows it would be his ghost haunting this room forever, not the rat’s. And that’s got to mean something. Got to.

Malone wakes in the room in Tijuana, the one out by the dog track, gets up, and goes into the bathroom to splash water on his face. No. That was this morning. No. Yesterday. He tries to lift his head but can’t, turns it to one side instead. Daylight already? No. The wall is white, the curtains beige. The night coming through, the night is. He walks into the kitchen late because she never remembers to set the alarm. The baby is in the high chair. Her eyes are blue, her hair is blond. She feeds Dadada a mushy slice of banana, pushes it into his mouth with. No. The pain is terrible, like two blazing coals stuck up behind his ribs, his ruined lungs the bellows. He turns his face back to the ceiling, and tears spill out of the corners of his eyes and tickle their way down to his ears. The bastard who shot him leaves. Where to? That’s important. Where to? Luz sits in a. No. Luz stands. Luz trudges beside him through the snow. It never snows at the beach, but look, a fog of white flakes that sting where they touch you, that settle like ash on the water. Luz says she’s scared. He takes her hand. It’s the end of the world, she says. But it’s not that, not the world. No. He can move the thumb and ring finger on his left hand, a few others on the right. That’s all. Maybe his toes. The strange taste in his mouth is blood, the stuff he keeps coughing up. No. Make a list. Yes. Takes your mind off it. Tenpenny, twelve-penny, sixteen-penny, twenty, scaffold, common, finishing, roofing, shingle. The bartender at the dog track shows him a trick, makes an olive disappear. The dogs shiver in the snow. Poor things, Luz says. How to explain how it always is? The thud in his head, the amplified beat of his laboring heart, slowly slows. Yes. A passing car’s headlights sweep across the icy expanse of the ceiling, get trapped in the crystals embedded there and wink like glimpsed stars. Annie again. She sits on the kitchen floor, banging a pot with a wooden spoon. Mommy has a headache, he tells her, then squats with his own saucepan and shows her how to make some real noise. In fifteen minutes they’ll leave for the store. In an hour he’ll be unloading the groceries. In an hour and ten seconds. Fuck it. The sooner this is over, the better. A sleep you don’t wake from, a dark that keeps its promise. Everything in him is cold now but the bullets. He trembles. His eyes want to close. He lets them. Yes. Yellowtail, dorado, bonito, sculpin, halibut, sand bass. Pablo Honey’s on the pier. He bought a box of a hundred pocketknives from Home Shopping Network. “Take one,” he says. “Take a couple.” Malone gestures at the falling snow, wants to show him. A groan. A clotted gurgle. Okay now. Yes. Come black, come silence, come peace. Dawn. Dusk. Both minds are fading now, the one that loved him and the one that didn’t. Yes. He steps out of the motel in Tijuana, into the sun. There’s a store down the hill that sells beer and candy. The snow piles higher, drifting into his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and the last lie he tells himself is yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Sitting in his truck across the street from the station, Thacker watches a bus leave. The Mex still hasn’t shown, so he calls the motel again. The clerk sounds funny when Thacker asks for the room, and then someone else gets on, not the Mex, and says, “Who’s calling?” Thacker hangs up.

Something has gone wrong. Thacker isn’t sure what, but he knows he needs to get out of here. He starts the truck and pulls away from the curb, wondering if the cops nabbed the Mex, wondering if the Mex will roll over on him. Another bus leaves the station as he drives off. Looks like the bitch is going to get away after all.

He heads for the freeway and merges onto the 5 going south. The $3,500 he found in Jerónimo’s pants is small change compared to what he was hoping for and nowhere near enough compensation for what he’s been through today, chauffeuring that crazy
vato
around the ghetto and nearly getting his balls chopped off. He had the money in his hands, that’s what sickens him most, a bag full of cash and he blew it, let some stupid whore get the drop on him.

The important thing now is that he keep his cool. He can talk his way out of any mess if he doesn’t get stuck chasing his own tail. He’ll return to San Diego, lay low until Monday, then go into work like nothing happened. His missing gun? It was stolen out of his truck. He’ll break a window to back up the story.

He passes a big rig hauling a load of lemons. The ocean is glowing as if lit from below, but he can’t find the moon in the sky. He puts the fan on, aims all the vents at his face, and it’s still not enough air. For a minute he thinks he’s having a heart attack and worries that he’ll pass out and crash the truck. And maybe that’d be better, quicker, than what’s coming.

He’s gotten away with playing dirty his whole life, with stealing from people, with hurting and humiliating them, and one day it’s going to catch up to him. He’s a gambler, he understands the odds. Luck runs out. Today scared him, so he’ll walk the straight and narrow for a while, play by the rules, but six months from now, a year, he’ll get cocky again. He’ll make some
señorita
get down on her knees in the sand, and she’ll have a knife, and she’ll stick it in his belly. He’ll bleed to death out there in the desert, alone, his last breath pluming in the cold night air, then disappearing. And nobody will give a shit.

The premonition rattles him. He shakes it out of his head and grips the wheel tighter, doing his best to reduce the world to the short stretch of road in the headlights and to make everything else mean nothing.

J
ERÓNIMO GETS INTO
S
AN
Y
SIDRO AT MIDNIGHT AND PARKS THE
Civic in a dirt lot next to a twenty-four-hour currency exchange housed in a double-wide trailer. The old man who takes his money is reading a wrestling magazine with the flashlight he uses to direct drivers to empty spaces.

“Vaya con dios,”
he says as he hands Jerónimo the ticket.

It’s as bright as day at the crossing. Powerful spotlights hold back the shadows and would-be runners, and armed men in uniform stand guard at razor-wire fences. This late there’s not much foot traffic: a few drunk college kids returning to the U.S., some swing-shift workers going home to TJ. Jerónimo walks past the souvenir shops, the McDonald’s, and up and over the pedestrian bridge that crosses in front of the massive border station, which looks like a shiny new office building straddling
la línea.
There’s no passport control or customs inspection when he enters Mexico, only a heavy turnstile to push through.

He feels stronger now that he knows what needs to be done. Too many choices have always confused him, and kill or be killed is as simple as it gets. He thought of calling El Príncipe and feeding him enough lies to keep him calm until he arrived at the house but then decided surprise would give him more of an advantage. As long as he’s not already too late.

The driver of the cab he hails is just a kid. Peeking in the rearview mirror at Jerónimo’s battered face, he says, “Please,
señor,
I’m a family man.”

“So am I,” Jerónimo says. “Drive now, and I’ll give you directions on the way.”

He slouches in the backseat as they cruise dark streets toward the hilltop neighborhood where El Príncipe lives in his mansion overlooking the ocean with his swimming pool and his garage full of expensive cars. Somewhere in the midst of all that, Irma and the children are waiting for Jerónimo to take them home. He doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t need one. He’ll start with two guns and six bullets and go from there.

He tells the driver to slow down as they approach El Príncipe’s spread. Peering through the gate, he sees lights on in the house and yard. A large spot also shines on the gate and driveway, creating a bright puddle on the otherwise murky street. There’s no sign of a guard, but Jerónimo is sure there’s one on duty, and since the wall surrounding the compound is rigged with motion detectors, the first thing he’ll have to do is come up with a way to get past him.

When the cab reaches the crest of the hill, he orders the driver to take a right on a cross-street and pull over. He pays the kid, then gets out and watches the car until it disappears. A five-hundred-foot radio tower juts up in front of him like the skeleton of some ancient snake god nailed to the night sky. He can see the whole world from here. The flickering sprawl of TJ to the south and east, San Diego blazing to the north, and, to the west, the dark, brooding slick of the Pacific, a watery ponderousness lurking at the edge of everything.

He punches himself in the nose. The pain makes him gasp, and blood begins to drip from his left nostril. He claws at the buckshot wounds on his face to get them bleeding again too. Taking the .25 from his pocket, he runs along the road for fifty yards or so in the direction the cab went, then returns to the tower at a trot. He’s breathing hard now, sweating. He continues jogging to the corner, turns onto El Príncipe’s street, and heads for the house, keeping to the shadows.

When he reaches the gate, he collapses against it, then steps back and rattles the iron bars with one hand while pointing his gun up the hill to where he just came from. Ozzy is sitting in the front seat of an Escalade that’s parked in the driveway facing the gate. His eyes widen at Jerónimo’s sudden, gory appearance, and he’s quick on the draw, pulling and aiming a Glock through the windshield of the truck.

“It’s me. El Apache,” Jerónimo whispers like he’s afraid of being overheard by pursuers. “Let me in.”

Ozzy opens the door of the Escalade, and a
corrido
booms briefly until he shuts off the radio. “What’s going on?” he says.

“I was bringing the boss’s woman back, but some fuckers who used to work for El Samurai pulled me over and took her and the car,” Jerónimo says.

“Where?” Ozzy says, getting out of the truck.

“Up the road, by the tower,” Jerónimo says. “Let me in,
hombre.
They were right behind me.”

Ozzy hits a button on the gate’s control box. The gate slides open, and Jerónimo slips inside as soon as the opening is wide enough. When Ozzy pushes past him to peer in the direction of the radio tower, Jerónimo leaps onto the man’s back, slamming a knee into his kidney and wrapping an arm around his throat.

Ozzy drops his gun and brings both hands up to try to ease the pressure on his windpipe. Jerónimo yanks him backward and drags him to the ground. The man lands on top of him, but not hard enough to break the chokehold. Grunting fiercely, Ozzy attempts to sit up, to roll over, to grind Jerónimo into the pavement beneath him. Without oxygen he quickly loses strength and is reduced to slapping the asphalt with his palm in a gesture of submission or frustration. Jerónimo tightens his arm and wraps his legs around the man’s thighs to keep him still.

He continues to squeeze Ozzy’s throat long after his struggles cease, listening all the while for any sound from the house to indicate that an alarm has been raised. All he hears is faint music and a couple of dogs grousing in the distance.

Slipping out from under the dead man, he rifles through his pockets and comes up with a ring of keys, a wallet stuffed with pesos, and a six-inch lock blade. He takes the Glock too. Ozzy’s face is frozen in a horrible grimace, his tongue, protruding between his teeth, nearly bitten through. Jerónimo avoids looking at it as he drags the man’s body into the bushes.

Two other vehicles are parked in the driveway, a pickup and a little Audi Spyder. Jerónimo uses the knife to slash their tires. When he reaches the house, he crouches in a flowerbed with his back to the wall and scans the compound for movement. Nothing except bugs circling a light on the porch. The detached garage with its second-story apartment is quiet too.

He creeps along the wall. The blinds are lowered on all the windows, so the only glimpses he gets inside are flashes of empty rooms seen through the narrow gaps between the slats. The music he heard at the gate is playing throughout the house, Led Zeppelin turned up so loud that the windowpanes rattle with each bass note.

At the back of the house is a pool with a waterfall spilling into it. An inflatable raft sits becalmed in the shallow end, and another lies atop one of the deck chairs lined up under the thatched awning that covers a wet bar and a large gas grill. The music is being piped out here too. Robert Plant’s wails rise up toward a trio of palm trees nodding overhead.

Jerónimo freezes when he spies a mound of towels lying on the patio and remembers El Príncipe’s comment about swimming lessons. With one eye on the big glass slider that opens onto the pool from the house, he moves cautiously toward the towels and prods them with his foot until he’s satisfied there’s not a small body hidden beneath them.

On the other side of the slider is the kitchen, which is dark except for the bright rectangle of an entrance to a hallway and the soft blue glow imparted to the stainless steel appliances by the lights around the pool. The slider is locked, so Jerónimo moves on to another door farther along the back wall.

A window in this one reveals the laundry room—washer, dryer, bottled water dispenser. It’s locked, too, but Jerónimo reaches into his pocket for Ozzy’s keys and tries them one by one. Number four is it. No alarm sounds when he opens the door and steps inside. A gust from the air conditioner blows cold across his sweaty body, raising gooseflesh and making him shiver, and “Whole Lotta Love” pounds in his head. He crosses the room and twists the knob on another door.

The kitchen. It’s spotless except for a couple of pizza boxes on the counter and an empty two-liter Coke bottle in the sink. Kid food, Jerónimo convinces himself, proof they’ve been taking care of Junior and Ariel. He quicksteps to the hallway, the pool shining through the slider like an image from a movie. Peeking around the door frame, he determines that the hall is empty and starts down it, Ozzy’s Glock out in front.

He ignores the closed doors he passes, wants to clear the main part of the house first. The hallway ends in a two-story foyer that flows into the expansive living room. Jerónimo recognizes it from his previous visits. He creeps toward the living room but stops short when he spies Esteban, El Príncipe’s other bodyguard, sitting in a recliner and watching soccer on a flat screen.

He retreats to the hall, stows the Glock in his waistband, and takes out Ozzy’s knife. He’ll do this with the
filero
in order to avoid gunshots that’ll alert everybody else in the house. He creeps up low and slow on Esteban until the bodyguard senses him coming and turns his way. Then it’s a mad dash.

He brings the knife down hard, but Esteban is already rolling out of the chair, so the blade merely nicks his upper arm. Jerónimo keeps going, scrambling up and over the recliner and launching himself at the man, who’s drawing a gun from a shoulder holster. Jerónimo lands on top of him and begins stabbing wildly at his midsection, twisting every thrust.

Esteban pushes him off, and Jerónimo trips and falls, taking a lamp with him. He’s back on his feet in an instant, charging again. Esteban has his gun out but doesn’t have the strength to lift it. Blood is spreading across his T-shirt from wounds in his chest and stomach.

“Príncipe!” he yells as Jerónimo lays into him with the knife. “Príncipe!”

Again Jerónimo finds himself on the floor. Esteban grabs his own forearm and brings his gun up that way, trying to blink things into focus. Jerónimo pulls the Glock and fires five times, at least two of the rounds striking the bodyguard in the head. He drops like a hanged man cut down from the gallows, but Jerónimo doesn’t see it. He’s already looking for cover.

El Príncipe steps into the room. “Good-bye, you son of a bitch,” he shouts as he squeezes the trigger of his Beretta.

Jerónimo dives behind a pool table and makes himself as small as possible. Bullets thwack into the wall behind him. He rests the Glock on the edge of the table and fires blindly, trusting that El Príncipe’s survival instincts will take over and back him off.

Sure enough, when he pops up, the Prince is nowhere to be seen through the haze of gun smoke. Jerónimo makes for an open door beside the fireplace. El Príncipe reemerges and looses another barrage. Dropping and rolling, Jerónimo finds himself in a tiny bathroom, where he crouches next to the toilet until the shooting stops.

“Have you gone crazy?” El Príncipe yells.

“I’ve come for my family,” Jerónimo replies.

“Like this?”

“Give them to me, and I’ll let you live.”

Jerónimo stands and wedges himself next to the doorjamb, ignoring the light switch digging into his back. The movement draws another shot from El Príncipe, the bullet shattering a mirror over the sink.

“What about our deal?” the Prince says.

“I did the best I could,” Jerónimo says.

“So where’s Luz then?”

“I don’t know. She got away.”

“And you couldn’t just come here and tell me that? You had to break into my house and kill my men and threaten to kill me? I thought we were
compadres, hombre.
We always did right by each other before.”

Jerónimo hesitates, wondering if there might have been another way to handle this, a way without blood, but then he remembers everything he knows about El Príncipe, every betrayal and atrocity, and tightens his grip on his gun.

“My family,” he says.

 “I’ll give them to you after you give me your gun,” El Príncipe says.

“As easy as that?” Jerónimo scoffs.

“As easy as that.”

Jerónimo cranes his neck to look through the doorway. He can’t see El Príncipe, but his voice sounds like it’s coming from the hall. He draws the .25 with his left hand, keeps the Glock in his right.

“Where are they?” he says.

“Throw down your gun,” El Príncipe says.

“It’s a simple question: Where’s my family?”

“You’ve got two more seconds.”

“Are they here?”

“You already know, don’t you?” El Príncipe says. He moves out of the hall and into the foyer, stupid pride making him fearless. “You already know they’re dead.”

Jerónimo steps into the living room to meet him. They stand face-to-face twenty-five feet apart, blasting away at each other. A round nicks Jerónimo’s ribcage, tearing his shirt. El Príncipe is hit in the shoulder but keeps shooting until he empties the Beretta. He then hurls the pistol at Jerónimo and runs across the foyer to the stairs leading to the second floor.

Both of Jerónimo’s guns are empty too. He searches the floor near Esteban’s body for the knife, but then feels the weight of the rat’s fancy .45 in his back pocket and pulls that instead.

El Príncipe is halfway up the staircase when Jerónimo reaches the bottom. Jerónimo fires one of the two rounds in the gun and hits the Prince in the back of his left leg, the bullet destroying the kneecap as it exits. El Príncipe goes down with an agonized scream and rolls onto his back to watch Jerónimo climb the stairs toward him.

“I won’t beg,” he says. “Not a dog like you.”

Jerónimo stands over him and lets him look down the barrel of the .45. He knows that even the toughest men shit themselves when they see the end coming, and he wants this bastard to die terrified.

El Príncipe doesn’t crack though. He grins up at Jerónimo and says, “I liked your family, I really did. Especially your boy.”

Jerónimo plants his foot on the man’s shattered knee and grinds.

“What a tight little ass he had!” El Príncipe roars.

Jerónimo can’t hold off any longer. He sends his last round into the center of the man’s forehead, then steps up to kick the smirk off the corpse’s face.