The Third Rule Of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (26 page)

“And yet your wife and daughter live here.”

He shrugged again. “The Mexico I grew up in no longer exists.” He changed the subject. “Have you ever been shot, Señor Ten?”

I pointed to the scar on my temple. “Once, but it was just a graze.”

“Four times for me. Death and I have danced cheek to cheek four times.” He nodded to himself, as if remembering the gun battles fondly.

“What am I doing here?” I asked.

Chaco set down his beer quietly and fixed me with his flat, unblinking eyes. “Last year, because of you, a good deal of my product was confiscated. My brother Pepé was arrested, along with my wife’s brother. They remain behind bars. Some might see that as a disaster. I saw it as a blessing. They were becoming too close to each other. Pepé was on that
panga
moored in the cove without asking my permission, and my wife’s brother was not supposed to be anywhere near that aspect of my business.”

He smiled. “You thought you caused me harm. You did not. Thanks to you, the two biggest threats to my authority were removed, without my having to lift a finger against my own blood. And by exposing the weakness in my smuggling method, you inspired me to make much-needed changes. To reinvent myself, if you will. To be born again. Not only that, you forced me to move away from a saturated market, to diversify. I have tripled my income since we last met.”

He lifted his bottle again, as if toasting me, and drained it.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

He grabbed beer number three. “For me,” he continued, his voice expansive, “there are no mistakes. Every personal interaction offers either an opportunity for pleasure or a lesson to be learned. But with you, I seem to experience both outcomes at once.”

“What have you done with Clara Fuentes?” I said.

Chaco narrowed his eyes, as if calculating the worth of my words. “I understand you very well, Señor Ten. You are a man who does not give up. Your actions over the past week? They have added—what to call it?—a certain spice to my life. And yet, I find myself having to once again dismantle what I have so recently built. Because of you.” His voice hardened. “Immigrants who have found a way to blend into this country will be returned to their previous hell because of you. People in constant pain will go back on the streets to quench their need for relief because of you. So I ask you, who is bad and who is good?” He gave a little shrug. “Still, you impress me. Even as I know I must kill you, I have come to admire you. This is not a frequent occurrence in my world. In fact, I cannot remember feeling such esteem for another man since my mentor, years ago.”

“Who was your mentor?”

He smiled. “You see? You do not ask why I admire you. Instead you ask about my mentor. Always choosing knowledge over praise. A man with such a loose hold on his ego is very powerful—and very dangerous.” He leaned forward. “Tell me, Señor Ten, what do you think of me, now that we’ve had a chance to talk?”

“I think you’re surprisingly intelligent,” I said.
For a greedy, murdering brute
.

“You expected me to be an illiterate peasant.” It was a statement, not a question, but I decided to answer anyway.

“Yes,” I said.

“I am a peasant, that much is true. But I spent four years in a Mexican prison when I was very young, and I was befriended by a brilliant man, a Ph.D. in philosophy, who was a victim of a roundup of corrupt bureaucrats by corrupt politicians. He taught me English and made me read at least one book a week. I owe everything to Tio José.”

Good old Uncle Joe. Touching. “Is he still alive?”

Chaco shook his head. His face darkened, and my blood chilled at the look in his eyes. He grabbed his beer and chugged it. He reached for another, his fourth.

I took note.

“What happened to José?” I said.

“He died,” Chaco said. “It was necessary. After four years he could not control himself. He was desperate with loneliness. He begged to touch me. He tried to touch me.”

“Ah. So you killed him. That must have been hard on you.”

In this way, at least, Chaco proved no different from the rest of humanity, today or back in the time of the Buddha. He took a long pull of beer to numb the pain of an unhealed wound. “I did not want to be touched. He knew that. He had weaknesses. In prison, as in life, one must control one’s weaknesses.”

I probed deeper. “He should have shown you more respect. A man of your brilliance.”

Chaco nodded. He was now on beer five, in addition to several shots of tequila he’d downed earlier at the party. His eyes still looked deadly, but they were coated with the sheen of too much alcohol.

I might just have a chance.

I tested the looseness of his tongue.

“Tell me,” I said. “How did you evolve from a peasant to the man you are today?” I waved toward the party. “A man who can afford all this?”

“It is not so difficult to reinvent yourself. You, of all people, should understand this. How? Simple.” He held up a fist and unfolded three fingers, one at a time. “Bribes. Bribes. And bribes.” He laughed softly, glancing at the gun. “Also violence, but only as a last resort. Alas, narcos do not have recourse to the courts to enforce their laws, as others do.”

“But how did you get your start?”

He shrugged. “Family business,” he said. “Some people inherit a farm. I inherited a smuggling route. Turned out, I was very good at smuggling.”

“What about now? Goodhue? And Chuy Dos, for that matter? They don’t strike me as your equals in any way.”

“You really don’t know, do you?” Chaco said. “You really don’t know how far the greed reaches.”

For some reason, this comment bothered me more than any of his others. I opened my mouth to dig further, when the band’s rousing rendition of a nationalistic march wafted across the sand, amplified by the drunken singing of the fiesta revelers. Chaco put one hand over his heart and slid directly into the land of the maudlin.

“You want to understand me? To understand how I ripened from peasant to warrior? Listen to my country’s song. ‘War! War without a truce!’ We are called to shake the earth at its core!” He made a fist. “I feel the suffering of my people, Señor Ten. Here!” He thumped his chest. “In my heart, in my blood! Do you have any idea what it feels like to live for centuries with the heel of the enemy’s boot on your neck?” His face looked like that of a gargoyle, his twisted lip menacing in the half-light of the cabaña.

“Yes,” I said. “Although in my case, the boot is Chinese.”

“S’not the same,” he said. “S’not the same at all.”

Good. He was starting to slur his words, and his inner victim was surfacing. Deep down, most people think their suffering is worse than everyone else’s. I don’t buy the premise. Three hundred years of suffering is no better or worse than three years or three seconds. Suffering is suffering.

Chaco’s eyelids had lowered to half-mast. His reaction time, not to mention his aim, would be sorely tested in a fight. I calculated the distance between my right hand and the Glock. Chaco’s head dropped toward his chest.

I started to shift my weight forward.

He moved like a striking snake and pointed the muzzle straight at my sternum, his finger curled around the trigger. So this was it, then. I had completely underestimated my enemy—again.

I closed my eyes and silently repeated
Om mani padme hum
.

I’m sorry, my friends
, I thought,
sorry for my failure to save others, to save myself.

“Get out,” I heard.

I opened my eyes. The gun was still trained on me, Chaco’s hand as steady as a rock. Why was he sparing me my life?

“Get out,” he said again. “And stay the fuck out of my business. I love my wife, Señor Ten. She was Miss Tijuana. Did you know that? So beautiful, my Gloria Teresa. I went under the knife for her. Risked my life to return here for her. Named our only child for her. And I promised her no blood would be shed on a day that celebrates our daughter’s purity.”

He sighed. “I have kept my promise. But if I ever lay eyes on you again, I will not only kill you, I will slaughter you like a pig, and mail your dripping parts to your loved ones, free of charge.”

Any semblance of intelligence—of humanity, for that matter—had left his face. He glittered with malice, and for that instant, I believed in the Satan of his Catholic faith. Carnaté, evil incarnate.

“And just so we’re clear, you were never here.” His eyes were slits. I half-expected a forked tongue to flicker from between his lips. “And neither was I.”

I stood upright, expecting at any moment to feel the gut-punch of a close-range bullet and then to feel nothing at all. I walked to the opening in the cabaña and ducked outside. The two bodyguards were gone. Maybe they were finally getting to dance.

I started to run, alone in the dark except for a sliver of moon, a devil, and a big, black ocean.

C
HAPTER
16

I woke up with a headache burrowing behind my forehead and settling in for the day. I barely remembered getting into bed last night. I had jogged up the beach and back to my car, avoiding the blue-and-white tent, still filled with revelers. Clancy’s car was gone. Only the fish would know if he’d called me. I was weak with hunger and headed to a nearby strip mall, where I found a Thai hole-in-the-wall. It was full of hipsters dressed like gangsters, if gangsters cared about being hip. I was starving and needed something fast—and soft enough for my swollen mouth to negotiate. When I stepped inside, the small but fierce female proprietress scurried up to me. My upper lip made smiling a challenge, but I gave it my best shot.

“What’s fast and good?”

“No service,” she said.

“But the sign says you’re open until midnight.”

She pointed to my bare feet. “No shoe, no service.”

Oh.

I stepped outside the door, then leaned back in. “What’s fast and good?”

That earned a half-smile. “Soup.
Tom yam nam khon
. Cook just made fresh. Or we have—”

“I’ll have that,” I said, my wounded mouth watering in anticipation of the mix of spicy lemongrass and sweet coconut milk. “To go.”

I’d downed the entire container of soup then and there, on the sidewalk, before driving straight home. As I approached my house, I reached for my iPhone to disengage the Guard-on. Then I remembered I didn’t have a phone anymore. Then I remembered I didn’t have a connected Guard-on, either. I was shedding electronics faster than Tank shed hair in the summertime.

Tank himself had been ready to disown me, but I couldn’t deal with him. I fed him the last of the liver bits and crashed without even flossing.

Now I found his warm body with my foot and stroked his back with my bare sole. His low purr let me know I was once again forgiven. We humans could learn a lot from our cats about letting go of resentment.

I lifted my head, which felt like a bowling ball. From the rectangle of sunlight reflected on my wall, I deduced it was mid-morning already. I explored the laceration inside my upper lip with my tongue. It was mostly healed, though the lip itself was still puffy.

I swung out of bed, wincing. I had a long day ahead of me. But first on my list, after two Advil, was trying to make contact with Yeshe and Lobsang. My near-death moment last night had knocked some clarity into me—woken me up to my stubbornness, like the loud gong the elder monks used to strike at Dorje Yidam every dawn, to rouse us from our sleep.

It was 12 hours later there. With any luck, I would catch them before they went to bed. I moved to my computer, opened the Skype app, and put in a call. As I waited for a response, my heart unfurled like the petals of a lotus, and I wondered what perverse instinct had made me think I should deny myself their support.

Yeshe’s image swam into focus. He was smiling so hard that his eyes were squinting. “Tenzing!” he shouted. Deep down, Yeshe didn’t believe I could hear him on the computer unless he pitched his voice loud enough to reach across the miles.

“You don’t have to shout, Yeshe. I can hear you, my friend,” I said, smiling.

“Yes. I remember that now,” he said. “Can you wait for a moment?” He disappeared from view, and I found myself staring at the familiar simple furnishings of their shared abbot’s office, the same space that my father had once occupied while fulfilling his monastic responsibilities. A sharp twinge in my heart, like a muscle cramping, let me know I still harbored hurt from my father’s death.

Yeshe reappeared. Next to him, Lobsang’s bald head floated, as bright and round as the moon.

“
Tashi delek
,” I said, touching my hands to my forehead in greeting.

“Good health to you as well, venerable brother,” Lobsang replied. His eyes narrowed with concern. “Your lip is swollen.” His expression grew stern. “Where are you?”

I tipped my screen. “Here, in my living room in Topanga Canyon,” I said.

“No, Ten. I mean inside.” Lobsang’s voice rang with authority, and I realized he was not only growing up, he was growing into his position as abbot. “Where
are
you inside? Where has your
spirit
gone?”

“Are you in danger?” Yeshe added. “Ever since we last communicated, I’ve been feeling dark emanations, a concentration of shadow-energy surrounding you.”

I wasn’t ready to go there yet—to the two corpses sprawled outside my garage. Instead, I told them about the previous night: the quinceañera celebration, the cabaña incident, my close encounter with two thugs, a gangster, and a Glock.

Lobsang and Yeshe already knew about Chaco from the previous time he and I had tangled.

“I do not like that you have attracted this man back into your life,” Lobsang said. “You are inviting great risk. Why?”

“Funny, Chaco said almost the same thing,” I said, keeping my voice light. “Don’t worry. I’ve got Tank here to keep me nice and safe.”

Yeshe smiled, but Lobsang’s expression remained serious. He was not fooled, not one bit.

“I am concerned, Tenzing,” Lobsang said. “I feel you may be dancing very near the edge of a steep cliff.”

I didn’t reply. He was right, but that didn’t mean I would step back.

“How can we help?” Yeshe asked.