Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (2 page)

Chapter Three

They plodded back across the line and down the road to a coffee and taco stand where the cabs always waited. There was only one taxi at this hour, a ten-year-old, battered Chrysler limousine painted shiny red and pink. The driver sat in the rain on the hood, munching from a sack of salted peanuts. A deep knife scar, diamond-shaped, ran from his right cheek down to the lip, which he tried to cover with a mustache, but hair didn’t flourish on the scar. So his mustache was mostly on the left side, below the patch on his eye. He wore a black Texan hat, old and crumpled as if he’d found it smashed on the road, and a long black zoot coat.

Clifford said, “Please bring us to the Paris Club.”

With a grin, the cabbie leaped to the ground. “You going to see La Rosa.” They climbed into the limo and he kept talking. “That one’s an angel, man, I swear to you, I see her lots of times. Hey, you guys want some reefer, I know where it is. Man, I know where everything is in TJ.”

While Clifford sat rigidly glaring at the cabbie, Hickey folded into the rear seat and tried to ignore the springs that gouged him. He sipped mescal as they bumped and lurched over the ruts and potholes across the bridge and into central Tijuana on its one paved road, Avenida Revolución.

Parts of the sidewalk looked like a dark midway, where the men wandered and yelled—soldiers, sailors, dockhands, displaced Jews, Japanese merchants walking skittishly, Bohemians, Gypsies, Chinese. Some walked holding hands with the flashiest Indian whores, argued with the big mestizo pimps. Or they staggered into the alley to piss and came out robbed, beaten, or maybe handcuffed, if they didn’t have money to bribe a cop who prowled on the take. Just enough light spilled out of the doorways so you could see drunks lying on the sidewalk and dark women who squatted, begging, with babies cradled in their arms. Children in rags stood on the corners selling gum and benzedrine. The doormen outside Club Eros and the Climax Bar grabbed at everybody, trying to show them inside. Two Marines came flying out of The Long Bar, and threw curses back at the door.

Hickey screwed open the second bottle of mescal, took a snort and passed it to Clifford, then to the cabbie. He kept wondering what could be so important at the Club de Paris. Maybe the kid just wanted another poke at the guys who’d thrashed him, but he guessed there was more. You could tell by the stiff slowness of his every move that Clifford was deep in pain, all the way to his heart. Probably he wouldn’t talk because words can cheapen the pain—Hickey knew the feeling.

“You looking for pills, opium, I know where that is.” The cabbie wheeled left off the paved road and crashed down a hill on washboard. The limo clattered like a jackhammer but he drove relaxed with one hand and at the same time turned back and grinned. “After you see La Rosa Blanca, man, you wanna chica for your own, I know where she is. You got all the shit in the world right here, man, there’s even spies and you don’t know what else, right here in TJ.”

As they pulled to a stop in front of the Club de Paris, Clifford sat with hands gripping his thighs and his eyes fierce on the cabbie. Then he grabbed a pair of rimless specs out of his coat pocket, fitted them on, and tugged his hat low.

Hickey stepped out of the limo. Clifford paid the fare. Then Hickey walked with an arm around the kid toward the club. It was bordered on the east by warehouses running a few blocks to the river, on the west by a lot full of high weeds and rubble. The stucco was soot-dulled blue adorned with sketched silhouettes of dancing girls. Two thugs stood at the door. The big one welcomed them heartily, while the scrawny one they called Mofeto stayed quiet with his arms folded. Until suddenly his hand shot out and grabbed the pistol from the holster at Hickey’s side.

Hickey stared, gave a wry smile, reached into his pocket and handed the runt a quarter. “Keep an eye on the gun, amigo.”

He walked behind Clifford who paid the one-dollar cover charge. As they stepped inside the stench hit. Like dead things boiled in formaldehyde. It blended from the smoke and vomit and spills that caked the floor and spotted the walls. The place was lit only by a blue neon light above the stage. There a skinny Indian dancer gyrated. She wore high heels, dark stockings, black panties, and a top hat, and balanced herself with a cane.

The club was one large room, all wooden, high-ceilinged. Every footstep, voice, and scrape of a chair leg echoed and mixed with the music, a droning alto sax, somber and lowly, and the conga drum like a dying pulse. There were about twenty small, round wooden tables, half of them vacant, with many of the chairs overturned, kicked around, broken. But along the three sides of the stage tables were filled by gringo troops. The Mexican Army must’ve been on alert tonight, Hickey thought. Cárdenas—the ex-Presidente who’d returned as a general to tighten the border and shoreline defenses—kept his troops on a tight rein. Not one of them was here.

Some gringos lay passed out with heads on their arms. Others shot drinks, whistled and hooted. A few of them hung over the low rail of the stage and tried to goose the dancer as she passed by. She teased, wiggling close in, sprang back, and smacked at them with her cane. Then she ran the cane back and forth, in and out, between her legs.

Hickey followed the kid and sat at a table away from the stage, on the dim side of the blue light. He gazed around the room, noticed three large bouncers leaning against the side wall, then stealthily took out his bottle and swallowed a long pull. He sighed, at better ease now that the drink had started to take him. And mescal didn’t send you into a drunken fog—it carried you to a bright place where a picture on the wall might suddenly change to a window in Rome or the face of somebody you loved could appear out of nowhere. Just far enough from the real world, it sent you. He reached the bottle toward Clifford. But the kid sat in a trance, his face more pallid than ever, under the blue light. When Hickey shook the kid’s arm and finally got him to take the bottle, as he lifted it toward his lips his hand shook wildly. Mescal dribbled off his chin. Yet he managed a long swallow, coughed, and killed the bottle.

Hickey flagged a waiter, signaled for two beers. He looked around the room and wondered again what the kid had brought him here for. He watched the skinny dancer as she peeled down her panties, took them off and used them to wipe the sweat from her face, then pushed out her behind and shook it around just beyond the reach of the grabbing, whooping Marines. She turned and stuck out her tongue, shimmied her pointed breasts, strolled off through the silver-blue curtain beside the two musicians at the rear of the stage. The music fell away, a moment of silence passed, and slowly the room filled with drunken talk. Hickey turned to the kid. “Where is it?”

Looking up vaguely, Clifford gazed around as if the question had escaped him. Finally he muttered, “She’ll be out next.”

“She?” Hickey bolted up straight—this punk had lured him down here on account of a whore. “
She?
” he growled. Clifford stared intently at the stage. Maybe the kid was stoned on some Mexican plant, Hickey thought, and it made him feel immortal. Or he was a natural goon.

The beers came. The kid paid. Hickey decided to leave about one minute after he got an eyeful of this Rosa broad, who must be the piece that Clifford was swooning over. The one the cabbie had got poetic about.

Soon the old humpbacked conga drummer appeared on the stage and rasped, “Okay, troops, now we going to see the beautiful virgin,
la chica mas hermosa
in all TJ. We going to bring her out now. La Rosa Blanca.” The customers stomped and whistled. The announcer sat down and beat a lazy roll on his drum. As the curtain parted, a hush fell over the room. Out stepped the girl.

She was purely naked. No shoes, no beads or ribbons, and her skin shined the color of ivory, only brighter, moonlike. All the men gaped, including Hickey. He got up, stepped closer, put on his glasses, while the kid stayed back in the dark.

She was small, with most of her height in the legs. Long, rounded calves and thighs. The hips were smooth but muscled, slender, tapering gradually up to her waist. Her long sleek arms made circular patterns in the air, and even her long, floating hands wore no rings or polish. The breasts were round and small in profile, the nipples tiny as flowerbuds. Her shoulders sloped gently, her neck was long. And the face, haloed in shaggy golden hair, soft and glowing, stunned you most of all. Her face made Hickey’s breath go shallow.

The skin was pure, the eyes glistened blue then emerald, and darted shyly from the men to the floor. Sometimes they closed. She had round cheeks and pink lips, the bottom one fuller, and it curled up just slightly on the right side, caught between a pout and a little smile. There was no trace of anger, guile, smugness. You might not find a face more innocent in all the world. She looked about fifteen.

And she danced with grace, flowing across the stage, until she caught sight of something in the dark behind Hickey. Then she began to move stiffly with arms at her sides, bouncing woodenly from the knees. Finally she stepped to the rail and looked down at the men who crowded there. She stood still until the first man touched her. And, letting each man touch her in turn, she moved along the rail, her troubled face gazing up from the men to the darkness beyond them.

A giant Marine ran his fingers down the curve of her thigh. A sailor cupped his palm on her behind. Two soldiers did the same. Next a soldier got brave and brushed a finger through her muff of golden hair. A fat blond civilian beside him wedged his whole hand palm up between her legs and squeezed. He laughed and then laughed harder as the girl raised her fists to her eyes.

“Dumb fucking German,” yelled a Marine who sprang up wielding a bottle, and while the other man cheered him, he flew across a table and crashed his bottle over the civilian’s head, but the fat boy still clutched one hand on the girl until she broke free and ran to disappear through the curtain behind the stage. A dozen cheated gringos attacked the civilian, yelling and pounding him good before all ten or so fellows from around the bar, most of them shouting in German, jumped the Marines. Bouncers flew from out of nowhere, mestizos and two large blonds, lashing with blackjacks and clubs.

Hickey’d stepped back out of the light to sit with Clifford and watch the brawl. In a minute the bouncers were herding the troops toward the exit.

The blue light started to flash on and off. The musicians began to pack up. Hickey drew a long breath of the stinking air and shook his head clear enough. He checked his pocket watch. Almost 3:30. He groaned and glanced at Clifford. The kid sat rigidly, right hand clutched around his beer bottle, left hand squeezing the table edge as if the brawl had spooked him.

“Whew,” Hickey said. “She’s a beauty all right. I guess you got reasons to fall for her.” He put his hand on the kid’s shoulder. “But, see, she’s not real. She just looks like an angel, Clifford. You know she’s gotta be a tramp.”

Clifford’s lips pushed out and he snarled something that got lost in the noise of waiters clearing tables, throwing glasses into the trays. Hickey leaned closer, figuring he’d been cussed. He wouldn’t take any guff from the kid, not after he’d dragged himself down here for no good reason. “What’s that you say?”

“She’s my sister,” Clifford hissed.

And Hickey fell back into his seat. He slapped a hand across his eyes while the kid pulled from under his coat and belt a little .22 pistol, sneaked it under the table and pressed it onto Hickey’s leg.

“Sister,” Hickey muttered.

The kid lifted his hand. The .22 started slipping between Hickey’s legs. At the same time Clifford sprang up with a bigger gun of his own, a .45 that had been strapped to his armpit and now hung at his side as he walked stiffly, over fallen chairs, around tables, straight as he could toward the stage.

As he leaped up, Hickey grabbed the .22. He bounded over chairs and caught Clifford by the scruff of the neck. The kid tried to shake him off, lunging for the stage rail. “Wendy,” he screamed. “Let go, Pop! Wendy!”

A flash of blue light stopped everything. Out of the light, a mestizo and a German appeared, with raised arms and sticks that slashed down on the gringos’ skulls. A shot boomed and echoed. Somebody howled. Three or four blows glanced off Hickey’s neck and head before he fell with a pain that stabbed down his back and loosed a storm in his brain. Yet he got the little .22 into the deep pocket of his MP trousers. Then he let himself get dragged away, towed along on rubbery legs, knowing these guys couldn’t hold him up and smash him at the same time. He caught a blurry side-glance of Clifford. Out cold. As he staggered through the exit, Hickey saw a little brown hand fisting around a short length of galvanized pipe. Then the fist, wearing a golden ring with a big saint’s face, a jagged intaglio, crashed his right jaw. It jolted all the way down to his knees, and they gave out again. For a minute things only buzzed and sputtered. No pictures or thoughts cleared until he heard Clifford yell, “Pop, where’d you go?”

They were on the sidewalk now, moving toward an alley, with El Mofeto in front, then the two big thugs dragging Hickey, and finally Clifford. He crawled between the bouncers, who had his arms wrenched backward.

The last thing Hickey wanted was into that alley, but he couldn’t break loose yet. They dragged him there and let him drop, onto his belly with his right arm underneath. Slowly, he wormed his hand down until it touched the .22. He found his grip. Nudged off the safety. Slid the pistol free of his belly and slowly rolled over. The first guy he saw was a bouncer just letting go of Clifford’s arm. Hickey jerked up the gun and squeezed. A blast echoed down the alley. The man heaved back over a stack of cardboard and into the stucco wall.

Rising to his feet as if the ground were a rowboat at sea, Hickey spotted nobody with a gun drawn. He waved the pistol and ordered them to face the wall. The shot one still lay on the cardboard, moaning and squeezing his thigh, but the others did as Hickey commanded. Except El Mofeto. He crossed his feet, scratched his ear, curled his lip, and squawked, “What you going to do now?”