Suckerpunch: (2011) (21 page)

Jairo reached out to grab a handful of his shirt but stopped just short and made a fist and shook it under his face. “Can you hear me? Do you know what I’m saying?”

The old man flinched but didn’t make a sound or fall off the stool. His right hand slid down his thigh toward the counter and disappeared beneath it.

I grabbed Jairo and yanked him back. He tried to get me with an elbow, but I stayed close and bear-hugged him with his feet off the floor.

The old man watched us with his hand under the counter. Jairo saw it and snorted disgust through his nose but stayed with me.

I set him down and got close to his ear. “The windows are painted shut.”

“Eh?”

The old man leaned forward and shoved the FedEx package off the counter with his left hand. It slapped onto the floor and kicked up a skirt of dust.

“They’re blacked out,” I told Jairo.

“So?”

“So whatever they’re doing here, they don’t want anyone to see it. Take it easy. If we do see it, they might not let us leave.”

“I don’t give a shit what they let us do.” He shook loose and picked up the package.

The old man stared at him. The toothpick went from one corner of his mouth to the other.

Jairo tossed the package onto the counter and pointed at it. “This is from Chops. Woody, tell him.”

“That’s from Chops,” I told him. We could have said it was from Martians and gotten the same response.

He blinked and kept his hand under the counter, and that was it. The door in the corner opened, and a stocky Latin kid with a bandana around his face and a sawed-off shotgun walked across the room to the door and turned the dead bolt. He put his back against the door and looked at the package like it wanted to date his mother. The shotgun was pointed at us by default.

I glanced through the open doorway into the garage area and saw a taller guy standing about ten feet inside under an overhead fluorescent light fixture with his hands in his pockets, relaxed. He looked damn near bored. His black hair was slicked back and he was clean shaven, but there was something all over his face. After a few seconds he said, “Chops sent you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded at the package. “And that?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

He took his time, moved his hands to the back pockets. “Is it a bomb?”

“I hope not. Are you Tezo?”

He tilted his head up to the light with his eyes closed. “Yeah, I’m Tezo.” His head came down. He sized us up and didn’t seem impressed. “Come on back. And tell Pelé there to chill out. He almost got shot by
mi papi.”

Jairo stomped through the doorway, and I followed him into one of the five worst rooms I’ve ever been in.

No, scratch that.

One of the three worst.

The smell hit me first. Like someone tried to clean a hot butcher shop with bleach and dope smoke. My eyes started to water, and through the blinks I could see Tezo smiling about it. Jairo pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose and held the package out to him. Tezo looked at it and pursed his lips but kept his hands in his back pockets.

The door closed behind us. The kid stuck the shotgun into Jairo’s back and kept it there while he used the other hand to check for weapons, wires, whatever.

Tezo watched but didn’t seem interested. He was about as tall as me and maybe forty years old. The something all over his face was tattoos. He had more ink per square inch than a hundred dollar bill. His forehead, ears, cheeks, and neck were covered in black lettering and icons; I could pick out a tombstone on his neck, a pair of dice near his right eye, three dots in a triangle between his eyebrows, and
SUR
in gothic letters across his Adam’s apple. Everything else would have required closer inspection, and I was fine where I was.

The kid moved to me and gave me the shotgun/frisk combo. I didn’t have anything except the truck key and fob; the cell was in the center console, and I rarely had a good reason to carry a wallet.

Tezo caught me looking at his ink and gazed back at me with eyes that did not reflect any light.

I was suddenly fascinated by the ceiling.

We were in the garage bay closest to the entrance, the one I’d tried to peek into from outside. Black garbage bags were taped over the bay door windows. A dividing wall of more bags, broken skids, and stained tarps had been set up on the other side of the bay, putting us in a narrow space that ran from the front of the building to the back. The place looked like it hadn’t been used for detailing since the Model T chugged around.

To my right, past Jairo, there was a card table with a guy sitting at it and an expensive-looking leather couch with two more guys, all of them in their late teens, shaved bald, and staring at me and Jairo. The two on the couch were playing a football game on a huge plasma TV but had it paused so they could look tough without distraction. They had some tattoos on them but nothing like the wallpaper job on Tezo.

I didn’t see anything that looked like it smelled horrible, so it was either one of the guys or something on the other side of the tarps. The kid finished the frisk, stepped to the door, and got both hands on the shotgun again.

Jairo waved the package at Tezo. “So you want this or not?”

“Who are you two?”

“Just the messengers,” I said. I’d let him see what Chops sent before we got into any personal favors.

“Why’d he send two? The package ain’t that big.”

The kid at the card table snorted.

“We can get into that,” I said, “but we’d like to establish some trust first.”

Tezo’s eyebrows pushed two black devil horns up toward his hairline. “Oh, you would? Well, I’ll tell you, I only trust my dog and my boys who I’ve seen kill someone with my own two eyes. Not my old lady. Not
mi madre.
And you’re both too fucking ugly to be my dog, and I ain’t seen you kill anyone yet.”

I liked him better when he was thinking. “Not trust, then. Let’s go for professionalism. You want us to open it?”

Tezo moved toward the dividing wall. “Slow.”

Jairo ripped the tape apart and got a corner of the package in his mitt and held it against his leg with one hand so he could pull with the other.

Tezo shook his head. “I say slow, this fool gets a live wire up his ass.”

“We’re on a tight schedule,” I said.

“Who gives a shit?”

Jairo sweated and cursed and got the corner to break and pulled a two-inch strip off the end of the package. He dropped it and stuffed his hand in and came out with a mess of shredded newspaper. All three of us stared at it. Jairo let it fall and went in, came out with more shreds.

“What the fuck?” he said and pressed the edges of the envelope together so he could see inside. He stabbed a hand in and pulled out a single sheet of paper folded in half. Looked into the envelope once more. He held the paper up and frowned at me.

I wasn’t happy. “What’s it say?”

Tezo plucked the sheet away from Jairo and unfolded it. He blinked a few times and smiled. Looked at me, then Jairo, the smile getting bigger. Without looking away, he told the kid at the card table, “Make some calls. Get everyone here. We’re gonna have a show tonight.”

To us, he said, “Get on your knees.”

We didn’t move.

Tezo looked amused; then that was gone. “Get down.”

“Wait a minute,” I said.

The kid behind us jammed the shotgun into my right shoulder blade. It hurt.

“Get the fuck down,” Tezo said.

“What is this?” Jairo asked.

“Down!”

The kid was looking at Jairo when I turned and grabbed the sawed-off barrel and pointed it at the ceiling and push-kicked him in the bladder. His legs went out from under him, but he held on to the gun, and I had to bend over to keep him from pulling the trigger. I was ready to stomp on the back of his head when I heard people shouting at me. I stared at the black automatics aimed at me from the couch and card table.

Jairo had his hands near his ears and was in a half crouch.

Tezo had a gun out, a short and blocky chrome revolver, but it was pointed at the floor. He said, “Let go of him and turn to me.”

I did. The kid scrambled up behind me, and I braced for it. But Tezo shook his head, and the kid settled for breathing on the back of my neck. He had to get on his tiptoes to do it, so good for him.

Tezo said, “So stay on your feet. Whatever. You’re gonna be walking soon, anyway.”

“What’s on the sheet?” I asked.

Tezo turned the paper around so we could read it:

2 4 Pit

Truce?

I tried glaring at it until it made sense. Sometimes it works. “Meaning?”

Tezo tucked the pistol into the back of his pants and took his time folding the paper until it would fit in his jeans pocket. “Chops and me, we had a misunderstanding a while ago. Lately we’ve been, uh, actively unfriendly toward each other, you know? But now it looks like he sent you two as a makeup gift. I guess you had a misunderstanding with him too, huh?”

“No, look—”

“You look,” Tezo said. He pulled an oily yellow tarp aside and let one of the video gamers slip through into darkness. The other gamer got off the couch and walked over and put his pistol in Jairo’s ear. The shotgun settled against the vertebrae at the base of my skull. A string of caged work lights came on in the area behind the tarps, and through the opening I could see where the smell was coming from.

They took us through the triangular opening, and we had to stop three steps in at the edge of the concrete. The two overhead doors on our left were completely boarded over, and the combined garage bays made a large space. The six-foot-wide walkway we were on went around the area on three sides like a capital C. The fourth side, on our right along the rear of the building, was wider and had a square room sticking out of the far corner. It also had a four-tiered set of bleachers that faced the middle of the room, where the pit was.

“Down,” Tezo said. “All the way.”

The kid behind me kicked me in the small of my back, and I went in. It was an eight-foot drop onto the moist dirt, and I landed off balance and had to roll to absorb the impact and immediately wished I’d stayed on my feet. The dirt was spongy with a stagnant liquid that had probably started out as water, but after mixing with blood and piss and shit, it had become something entirely new. I stood with my arms out from my sides and let the stuff slough off me in chunks.

The pit walls were vertical panels of particleboard nailed together with scraps of wood and sheet metal, three panels at each end and five along each side. That made the pit twelve by twenty. The panels were swollen and rotten at the bottom from the fluids, and the rest of the surface was covered with random stains and matted blood, hair, fur, and feathers.

I felt the juices seeping into my shoes. It burned. I searched for higher ground, but there wasn’t any.

We were in a swamp.

Jairo had landed on his feet and was facing Tezo and the others.

Tezo tapped a heavy boot on the pit’s edge. “Come on, big boy. Put your fingers under here just for a second.”

Jairo scowled at me. “What is this?”

“This is . . . not good.” I didn’t mention how it had been his idea to come in like we had. Maybe it was moot, but I didn’t feel responsible for us being in the pit. You know, small victories.

He turned back to Tezo. “We didn’t come for this.”

“Nobody does.”

“We came for my cousin.”

Tezo said, “Your cousin ain’t here,
esse.”

“You might know where she is. That’s why we came.” Eight feet down in a pit, standing in a CDC Petri dish, Jairo still managed to exude authority.