South by South Bronx (14 page)

Lunch break? Mad, desperate chompings on something soft, breadlike. A flaky crunch.

“Man, I'm glad to be outside. It's been nothing but the stink of offices and the people who work in them. Staplers, paper clips, fax machines. Secretaries rubbing oil on their panty hose.”

Roman would have called for his crew, for that black 4x4 that was his ride of choice whenever moving was necessary. I expected Old Man Santero to be in his bodega, as always. His son owned that Bronco, and if it was gone there was a good chance he was driving Roman around in it. The old man was always good for a chat, but this time the bodega was gated up shut. It couldn't have been just because it was Sunday …

“These people,” Myers said, “work in stretches of fifteen minutes. You say something they don't like or expect, and they call another break. All morning it was like that, all afternoon. I'm glad I got myself this chili dog. Some real Puerto Rican food.”

“Myers, a chili dog is not Puerto Rican food.”

“Sure.
Chili con carne
. That's Spanish, isn't it?”

I was driving again, now thinking about the next checkpoint. The next place I could check for an open door to Roman.

“Anderson has a tape fetish. Looks like he wants to add some of mine to his collection. They've got nothing and they know it, so they're putting the squeeze on me and my operation. Now I'm the one that has to do the tidying up. They're going to involve your captain and your department. They're going to want to talk to you as well.”

“Me? What the fuck for?”

My car shuddered as if I had just rolled over a body. Two bodies. I was doing too much speed. The wheels were squealing again.

“Well, you're the expert, aren't you?”

Eyesight blurred. Snapping the earphone off would not solve the problem with words. Words would still be there.

“Or maybe it's just that you appear on the tapes,” he said.

What was I reaching for? Hands, pockets, steering wheel. The crack of a lighter. The breezes were turning mean. I rolled up the window. Swirling newspapers gum wrappers plastic bottle caps. There, burning in my stomach. Blaze blaze fire dizzy storm. A cigarette-sick knee wobble, a pasty sweat.

“So I'm on the tapes,” I said. “So what.”

“That's exactly what I said. So what.” Myers, punctuating his contempt with those damned munching sounds. “It's no big deal, just you calling up every one of the key players in this investigation on a rather frequent basis, sometimes at odd hours of the night.”

Strong winds, rattle of cans bottles paper products. Rain storm coming. Skies gray all sudden like an
aguacero
appearing over
el monte
. What do dreams of downpours and floods mean? I made a sound into the phone. I don't know if it was words.

“They haven't heard a single strip.” Was he lighting a cigarette? Click click blaze. “I'd rather blow up my truck than let them walk off with it. Their snooping around would only derail this, and who needs that right now? So you see, Sanchez. It's between us.”

“Between us,” I said. A lump in my throat the size of a tomato. A sudden wave of static, or did Myers click off?

I pressed down on that pedal gas daddy gas no stopping for red. The only sound I wanted in my ears was surf. There was an airline stink to my car. The last puff from that ABSOLUTELY LAST cigarette was all filter. If he knew, why didn't he just corner me from the beginning? Somehow or other I must be serving my purpose. I couldn't figure out what game he was playing. We were headed for that big talk. I was headed toward Roman. How was it Myers didn't know about him? When his call came in, I thought it was Myers.

“It's Roman,” he said. “So Spook is really dead?”

“That's right, Roman.”

“Am I next?”

“I don't know.”

“Someone came to see me today,” he said.

I didn't want him to say more, not on the phone, not these days with bread trucks running around. Why hadn't Myers just come right at me? I figured a cop would have. Maybe that was the reason …

“Did she come to stay?”

“No,” Roman said curtly, “but she left something for you.”

Now I felt a fiery panic that went right to my accelerator pedal.

“I'll be right there,” I said.

David, David, what were you thinking? There's never an easy way to become a millionaire. What went wrong, why didn't I just do my job? I was tired of my job. I fell through the cracks. All the king's horses and all the king's men didn't give a fuck if I came, if I played, if I stayed. I was out of the club two years ago. David knew it, he felt it. He almost told me I was making a mistake going after Dirty Harry. After that, he saw I was only going through the motions. Office, not so much street. Death threats. A roomful of cops, and not one single bastard to have a cup of coffee with. Only Jack to step through the window with for a smoke. Only Jack. The one person in all of this that I will truly miss. How it would hurt him to know—David showing me those pictures of Mallorca. Sun. Sand. Stitch. The guy's name was Stitch. A small-time musclehead who stuck to small-time shit. Smuggled stolen goods, ran credit card scams on the elderly. I knew him well because I knew Roman, and one led to the other like shit leads to flies.

I swerved sudden braking, to stop smack against curb sharp like a diamond. The street was streaked with blue light like a film set. I was running fast up some rickety back stairs. I took the steps two by two fast, footfall thumps like sonic booms. The super used the room as his office. His name was Montero. He was an old man who didn't want trouble, so he allowed Stitch to appropriate the office from time to time for his business needs. I never made trouble for Montero. His information always helped me track Roman. I never made appearances there. I wanted the house to stay “safe.” It didn't matter much now that I made a racket on the stairs. I was sure I was expected.

Stitch opened the door. It was a small room, no window. A lone bare bulb on a string. A table, some chairs. Roman was working the hot plate. There was a coffee pot on it. Flames glimmered underneath like crooked teeth.

Roman looked sharp in his black suit. The eye patch seemed to keep his face stiff. He dismissed Stitch with a vague motion. We both listened for the thump of his steps on the stairs going down, waited for the slow creak slam of the storm door below.

“What took you so long?” he said.

Roman liked long silent moments when he could just sit and stare. He never liked to be the one to start anything. He could play that calm parry-and-thrust like a haughty duke. But this time I could tell he was nervous.

“Are the feds after me?”

“They're after the blonde.”

“Yes, but because of the blonde, are they after me?”

“Not yet,” I said.

I was trying to take my mind off the slow puffs he was taking. I could hear the paper crackling with burn, taste the smoke at the back of my throat. The immediate dry mouth sensation. He lost some of the stiffness, which I suppose passed for relief.

“Fucking David, man.” There was a mixture of grief and fury. “He got me into it. He got you into it. She wasn't supposed to come to me, you know that. If you think I would've hung around waiting for you, you're crazy. I'm only here because of him.”

His one eye seemed to unfocus. It was a dark pebble. An extra couple of puffs on the cigarette. He felt the back of his head with his hand.

“She came to my place. Snuck in through the window, no less. What am I doing, leaving my windows open at a time like this? She pulled a gun on me, the same gun I got for David!”

The coffee pot was a steaming locomotive. It was hard to see where Roman's one eye was looking. At me, past me, beyond me. Fuck that. I snatched the pack of cigarettes off the table, tapping out a few. (Something for the jacket pocket.) That perfect little tube rolled tight—I pulled the filter off. I reversed it and lit the filter side for a straight tobacco hit. The first puff the first puff

electric tendrils spinning hot fiery swirls—I closed my eyes a moment. I wanted to say a hundred things at once. His mouth was moving. I wasn't hearing words, just sounds just a feeling like the one that hit me when I was locked in that elevator with Ava Reynolds. I was in something, a part of something. No blinking lights on a dispatcher's map just yet. No clear, defined path. Roman took the coffee pot off the flame, while I felt myself dissolving in wisps of cigarette smoke. Roman poured his coffee black, not even sugaring it, and shot it back.

“She must've thought I was going to grab her or something. She bonked me, man. Knocked me out! Crept back out the window.”

“Could you tell where she went?”

“Nah. I didn't have the time for a search. I was making my own move just then.”

“But why did she come to you?”

“David.” His eye went glassy. He winced as he passed his hand over the back of his head, where maybe there was a bump. “He sent her to me. It's the only reason she came.”

“She didn't want your help.”

“No. David wanted you to have this.”

He reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, then held up the audio cassette. The moment I saw it, I knew what it was. It was a black cassette with white letters that said INCOMING MESSAGES. It was one of the tapes that came with that old Panasonic answering machine.

“Did she happen to have the machine with her?”

Roman was touching his head and wincing. “Next time get a messenger service.”

“She mentioned me directly?”

“That's right. Like she knows all about you.”

I held the tape in my hand, bombarded by images that flashed like the speeding cars of a train. I could see those last hectic moments. A mounting nausea. I could not extinguish my cigarette even though I had lost the appetite. (You start something, you finish it.) The small cassette player was blue, with speakers on either side like a shrunken ghetto blaster. I put the tape on, right in front of him, because he was in on it too. I needed him to be in on it. I started to think about the moment in any investigation when the path becomes clear. Milagros talked about waiting for a door to appear, but the Buddhists kept the best for last: It's not one door, but two. Not one straight path, but a fork in the road. There's always a choice to be made. I pressed my cigarette into the ashtray but it would not go out. The sizzling embers spun like snakes and kept reigniting the tobacco. I rolled it I stamped it crushed it down to torn paper and black ashy fingers. I could not keep the stink off. Roman only had one eye, but I could not look in there. It was full of flames. A fine, cold sweat on my burning face. Roman behind the cigarette was the scientist watching me climb the walls of my petri dish. He had seen my face during the Dirty Harry time. He knew, the instant I heard that voice on the tape. His words were more confirmation than query.

“
Coño
meng,” he said, “so you know the murderer?”

At first I couldn't make sense of it. Why would Myers phone someone he was about to kill? Was it just the usual reckless American arrogance, a man with RIGHT on his side and no time for bothersome little details? Maybe he hadn't even planned on killing David but had to correct his mistake, realizing the man had something on him. Myers swiped the answering machine after all. It might not look good for him to be on there saying,
“They've got your brother and you're next, unless you give me what I want.”
That careful phrasing hardly made it a convincing case. I was frozen, I was pulled this way, that. I listened to it again and again, over and over, until Roman shut it off. I couldn't see walking it over to the captain, who would roll his eyes and curse his luck. Internal Affairs or the FBI would probably be the same song and dance, plus how would I explain my role in all this? I felt sure David wanted me to have this tape because he wanted me to do something about it.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “We have to get to the blonde.”

“And what?” Roman scoffed. “Stop her? Join her? I'm not the one who trusted her.” His legs were stretched out under the table, crossed at the ankles. Boots of Spanish leather. “David trusted her. He's dead. Do you trust her?” He got up from the table to face me. “I don't want to hear this shit about ten million. That's theoretical. I've never been religious and I don't expect no manna from heaven. Tony and David are dead. I saw you go after a cop once because he was shooting spick kids in the back.” He pulled out a cigarette with an angry motion. “I want to know just what the fuck you're going to do about this.”

Flash as he lit up. Why did he have to bring up Dirty Harry? Was he trying to say that because I went after a cop I was NO COP? LESS of a COP? That I had descended to a lower level and was no longer the SAME as a cop? Where did that leave me in the eyes of someone like Roman? Did that at least make me human? On the street there is a different justice. Nobody waits for the cops to come. Nobody even expects them. People prefer to take care of things themselves. Looking into that one flaming eye, that round glowy pit, I finally got the message. Cops are sometimes outside the loop. The bulb on a string was moving. I felt the urge for a cigarette and fought it off.

I was thinking about her now, in a totally different light. Anderson's words, Roman's. How it seemed Myers disappeared just when I had questions to ask him about her. If he planted her there to find the gold, maybe it wasn't that she “went” with David against Myers. Maybe she just took the gold. She could have set up Spook and then she could have killed David—it could have been her

somehow someway she could have set them both up to get knocked out of the way because she was working Myers all along

“You think she killed him?”

my question spilling out, no thought no real look at the facts but trying to find that personal level. A slow bewilderment on Roman's face, the eye blurring with thought.