Suckerpunch: (2011) (20 page)

“What is it?”

“Didn’t I tell you to save your questions?”

“Aren’t you done?”

“Hmm. Go on.”

I said, “Can’t you just call him?”

“Got no phone.”

I pulled mine out. “Here you go.”

Chops closed his eyes. “First of all . . .
First
of all, what the fuck are you doing bringing one of those here? Congratulations. You’re being tracked right now, and so am I. Jets are scrambling out of Nellis as we speak. Fucking brilliant.”

“So let’s make the call, and we’ll get out of here.”

Chops shook his head and grinned. “I don’t have a phone. Why would I know any phone numbers?” He bounced the folder off his forehead and kept it held high while he spun around and went through the door into the house. He said, “Back in five,” and the door slammed behind him.

Jairo raised his eyebrows at me.

I asked him, “You got any guys like this in Brazil?”

“Crazy, yes. Like this? No. This is pure American crazy.”

“We’re doing our best to export it.”

He started to pace.

I checked the phone display; it was almost a quarter to three. Just over four hours until we had to be at the arena. Some of the undercard fighters might be there already, getting loose and checking out the mat to see where the footing was good and bad.

I joined Jairo, and we paced back and forth and gnawed on the cardboard boxes for a year and a half.

I checked the time again: 2:50.

Jairo walked close to the table. He peered down at the AR with his arms crossed. He glanced at the closed door, then back at the gun.

I cleared my throat, and when he looked at me, I flicked my gaze to the video camera in the corner of the ceiling.

Jairo rolled his eyes and kicked over a stack of boxes. One of them split open and let out a dozen bootleg copies of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits. It made as much sense as anything else.

At just past three the door opened and Chops came out with a FedEx shipper wrapped with a few passes of wide brown tape. He started toward me and did a poor job of feigning surprise at the toppled boxes. “Hey.”

“Neil didn’t mind.” I took the package from him. It wasn’t heavy. “What’s the story here? Am I treating this like the recipe for Coke or nuclear launch codes?”

Chops stood at parade rest and said, “Don’t speed.”

Meaning don’t get pulled over with it. Big help. “We’re in a bit of a hurry,” I said.

“Well, this’ll hurry your ass right to a bunker under Gitmo if you get caught with it.”

I handed the package to Jairo and asked Chops, “Where we going?”

“You know Fremont and Bruce?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Southeast corner,” Chops said. “It’s an auto detailing shop.”

“And we just go right in?”

He thought about that one. He looked at Jairo. “Hold the package out in front of you.” To me: “And keep your hands open where Tezo can see them.”

Jairo said, “You’ll open the gate.”

“As soon as you get to it, brother.” Chops didn’t move.

They stared at each other for a moment; then Jairo turned and headed for the truck. “Come on, Woody.”

I started walking backward. “Thanks, Chops. We’re good now?”

“Roger that. But technically you still owe me one.”

I slowed down. “I thought the whole Fed thing straightened it out.”

Chops smiled. “No, not that. You owe me for the time I had you in my scope and didn’t pull the trigger. Come back with some beers, and I’ll tell you about it.”

I hurried to the truck and locked the doors, and we got the hell out of there.

Jairo asked, “You know this place?”

“Close enough.” We were going west on Owens, back into civilization and traffic. I swept in behind a cab and stuck to his bumper and started making good time. “Does the name Tezo mean anything to you?”

Jairo frowned. “Me? I don’t know anyone here. Just you and Gil.”

“It sounds kind of Latin, and there are some gangs from El Salvador running around town. So if Tezo means ‘God of Death’ or something in, what, Aztec, we’d have an idea of who we’re dealing with.”

“I don’t know any Aztec.” Jairo pointed at me but didn’t look my way. “And something else: I don’t care what it means. If he can get us to Marcela, he’ll tell us what he knows or take us there, whatever. If I have to pull his arms off, even.”

“Let’s try giving him the package first.”

Jairo picked it up and flipped it over a few times, checking the seams. “What do you think it is?”

I swerved around my taxi escort when he braked for a fare and immediately missed the drafting. “Chops said Tezo and Kendall are connected through money, so maybe account numbers? Probably wouldn’t put that in writing, though. Could be shipping routes for something Tezo wants to steal, could be info on a witness for the prosecution. I’m going to assume it’s Chops’s Christmas list.”

“I want to open it,” Jairo said.

“For Marcela, don’t. People get upset when you peek, and we need Tezo happy. We’re going to ask him to give us someone he probably has a profitable relationship with, and I’m still not quite sure how to ask for that.”

“We don’t ask.”

“Jairo, this is tricky.”

“No.” He dropped the package between his feet like he was done with it. “If this Tezo has any honor at all, we tell him what is happening and he is with us.”

“All we know so far is that he deals with Kendall,” I said, “so assuming he has honor is out. I’m not saying we go in there on our knees, but we need to be respectful and give him some room before we start knocking things off tables. And Chops said he runs a gang, so chances are good he won’t be alone.”

“What is this?” Jairo asked. “What is with the bitch talk?”

“Bitch talk?”

“You say
respectful,
he might not be
alone,
and we should be
nice.
No. We smash fucking faces and get Marcela home.”

I took a deep breath, and the steering wheel creaked. “I’ve done that. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. I’m just saying we should adapt to the situation.”

“You’ve done it before, huh?” Jairo looked out his window. “Maybe you weren’t doing it right. Maybe
you
should wait in the truck now.”

I almost made the steering wheel into an oval. “I’m trying to keep us from getting killed for no good reason.”

“You’re trying to save your ass for your big fight.” He spit out the window and turned to me. “If it was me,
this
would be the fight. Get Marcela back. Everything else? Gone.”

“Man, I have no idea why you think that. Fuck the fight. If I have to choose, it’s her. But I’m trying not to have to make that choice.”

“You say it, but . . .” Jairo grimaced. “This would never be me. I would not have let them take her.”

“I wasn’t there,” I said.

“I would have been.”

“So it would be okay if I’d spent the night in her hotel room?”

The look I got said no.

I didn’t mention that he and his brothers were right down the hall when Kendall had come for Marcela. Jairo was looking down on everything from a throne, and anything I tossed out would get swatted away or answered with a lightning bolt.

“I was wrong,” Jairo said. I opened my mouth to tell him it was all right; then he said, “I thought you were a man.”

I went cross-eyed for two seconds. I had to open my mouth to get enough air. All I wanted was to keep everyone calm and civilized until that wasn’t going to work anymore, and this guy had me wanting to pull over and stomp his head through a storm grate.

I was so focused on not jumping across the truck that I almost missed the turn and had to cut across the left lane to the accompaniment of horns and fingers in order to get south on Eastern. We got stuck in a backup for ten very quiet minutes because some fucking moron had T-boned another idiot and blocked two lanes. Once we were clear I pushed the truck up to sixty and risked a ticket until I turned right on Freemont and slowed down so I could look for the place.

“It’ll be on the right,” I said. “Auto detailing shop.”

Jairo was already looking out that window and didn’t bother to nod. We were about three-quarters down the block when Jairo pointed and said, “There.”

I goosed it into the parking lot of Dan’s Auto Detailing and Tire Shop. It was a dirty white cinder-block rectangle with a flat roof and three closed garage doors starting at the left end, each door with two dark oblong windows. Then a door into what had to be the office and from there to the corner a set of large windows showing all kinds of tires and rims. The displays had backdrops, making it impossible to see inside the building.

There was another pickup in the parking lot, but it and mine weren’t from the same family. It was lowered with a metallic teal paint job, smoked glass, and chrome rims with some kind of unreadable script across the back window.

I pulled in near the door—glass with a faded poster for Armor All covering the inside—and reached for the FedEx package, but Jairo scooped it up and got out his side. I got out too and waited for him at the bumper. I wanted to revise our strategy of bickering and pouting, but he walked right past and stiff-armed the door on his way inside. It slowed on the way back and thumped shut.

I took a deep breath and listened to the traffic go by and shook my head. Marcela would think this was equal parts hilarious and disgusting. We’d tell her the story, us thumping our chests and butting heads, and she’d roll her eyes and call us idiots.

Or we’d never see her again, and she’d get left somewhere in a pile with the residue of Steve on her. I’d relive the story, trying to convince myself that I’d done everything I could but knowing she was dead and gone because of me.

Or Jairo.

He was probably in there kicking magazines off the waiting room table and jumping on the couch, holding his breath until someone gave him a face to smash. I walked over to the closest bay and cupped my hands around my head and peered through the window. I searched for something shiny catching the light or the back end of a car getting detailed, but there was nothing. Not even an oblong patch of light on the concrete floor.

I looked at the other windows, and it hit me that they weren’t dark; they were blacked out. I shoved off the window and bulled through the door and got ready to smash faces.

I almost ran into Jairo. He had his back to me, staring at an old man sitting on a stool behind a counter in the small waiting area. There was a door behind him in the corner that led toward the garage area, but the wire-mesh window was covered on the other side with a piece of stained cardboard. They weren’t trying as hard to look normal once you got inside.

Straight ahead was a soda machine with yellowed buttons for RC Cola and Fanta. To the right of that a bowed and dusty couch squatted behind a heavy glass table piled with car magazines and accessory catalogs. The backs of the window tire displays were unpainted particleboard.

“Do you know him or not?” Jairo asked.

The old man slumped on the stool and stared at him with his hands resting on his thighs. He was from somewhere south of the border, probably close to seventy but still with a full head of black hair puffed up into something you could stash an extra pair of saddle shoes in.

I put a hand on Jairo’s arm.

He shook it off.

“Jairo,” I said.

He dropped the package on the counter and leaned on the chipped Formica with both hands. Something in the counter or the old man creaked. “I want to talk to Tezo. Right now.”

The old man opened his mouth. A toothpick popped out from somewhere in there and slid into the corner and danced a bit before coming to a rest.