Thief (13 page)

“Goddamn right I saw it,” said one thief appreciatively. “Best knife fight ever. Sickest move for a win ever, Robin.”

A murmur of emphatic agreement rippled through the brothers who seemed happy at his return, and even those who'd been skeptical were nodding.

Robin hung his head, said, “I wish it had never happened. I wish Julio was alive, and I was fucking dead.”

There was some grumbling, but he held up his hands and they quieted.

“But it's done and I got to live with it,” he went on, before pausing, and letting pain ripple through his face. “I would not wish this feeling on any of you.”

“What's the point of this, brother?” a voice complained.

Robin was confused, but saw that he had Claudio's rapt attention, and decided to speak directly to him and hope the rest would understand.

“Man, this, you,
la fraternidad,
saved me from the garbage piles,” Robin said.

Many of his brothers nodded and grunted in approval.

“But it also dooms you.”

Claudio's eyes hardened. So did Hector's.

“I'm telling you, this shit, this life, it only ends up in a prison cell, or crippled up, or dead. Shot or stabbed. Lights out.”

“Or richer than sin,” Hector said, calling out loudly. “Fucking mansion with them big-booty, titty girls lounging by the pool.”

The brothers erupted in cheers and hoots, and Robin wondered why he'd bothered to come at all. Then he changed course.

“I'm all for the mansion and the girls lounging by the pool, don't get me wrong,” Robin said. “That what flips your switch, have at it. But what if to flip that switch you had to do what you were really meant for.”

“Like safecracking?” asked one of the younger brothers, setting off another round of snickers.

But Robin caught some uncertainty in Claudio's eyes and pounced on it. “What if you really were meant for something bigger than
la fraternidad
?” Robin asked. “An artist, say, or a painter.”

“A painter?” Hector snorted.

Claudio looked puzzled, torn, but then nodded, and said, “Everyone has crazy dreams, Robin. So what?”

“So what if they were all possible?” Robin replied, and then looked to Hector. “Didn't you once tell me you wanted to build motorcycles someday?”

The new
jefe
scowled, said, “That was kid stuff.
La fraternidad
is real.”

“But what if they were both equally real?” Robin said. “I mean, you have a choice, you could be a thief, or you could be a motorcycle builder, or a painter.” He began to gesture around the room at the other thieves, remembering conversations he'd had with them over the years. “Or a guitarist. Or a nightclub owner. Or a chef. Or a clothes designer. Or a cook. Or a writer. Or anything other than being a thief.”

Hector shouted. “But that ain't the way it is, brother. This is the life we've been given. It's been good to us. Saved me from the
ano
. You too.”

“You're right,
jefe
,” Robin replied.

“So there you go,” Hector said. “Fucking end of story.”

Instead of arguing, Robin paused, letting his attention roam the boys and young men in front of him, trying to figure out how to make them understand. And then he believed he did.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Go on.”

One by one the members of the Brotherhood of Thieves closed their eyes and listened when he said, “I want you to imagine what you would be if you weren't a thief.”

He paused. “How does it make you feel? Good?”

Robin watched many shoulders shrugging, but only a few chins nodding.

Robin talked to the nodders. “See? Sister Rachel says that good feeling is God telling you what you are supposed to do. It's showing you like your purpose in life.”

“This is bullshit, and this is over,” Hector said sharply. “You got God now? From that fucking Sister Rachel bitch?”

Robin hesitated, then firmed, letting his eyes roam over his friends. “She showed me a way to start over, and made me take the hardest road I've ever walked. But I feel better every day I keep going in that direction. I came here tonight because I want you to come walk that harder road with me.”

“Say what?” Hector demanded caustically. “Leave
la fraternidad
? Go live with some church bitch and become some slave to rules? Fuck rules. We're not stupid, and we're not slaves, man. We're hunters. We're takers.”

The other brothers broke into cheers, and threw their fists over their heads.

Hector laughed harshly, said, “Someone whack the fucking traitor. Screw that, I'll do it myself.”

He tugged out a pistol from his waistband and started marching toward Robin, gun up, egged on by the brothers' cheering.

Before Hector could aim, Claudio stepped in front of him.

“That ain't right,
jefe,
” Claudio said. “You can't just kill a brother for wanting a better life. I mean, he's delusional, but that's his problem.”

“Can't just let him go,” Hector said.

“Sure you can,” Claudio said. “He was our best earner. Cut him some slack.”

“What if he goes to the cops?”

“I'm no rat,” Robin said.

Hector thought about that, and then lowered the gun. “Get the fuck out of here, man. Never come back.”

 

17

FOUR UNIFORMED OFFICERS DRAGGED
a handcuffed and manacled El Cazador into the cellblock. He'd been interrogated for hours. But he'd never talked. Never spoke a word. Just kept asking for a lawyer.

The cops decided a trip to the central jail in Buenos Aires might loosen his tongue. But seeing the hard and filthy men crammed into the foul cells, and listening to their catcalls and curses, the hunter went somewhere reptilian in his mind.

He had been in prisons and jails far worse than this in Chile and Bolivia. Uruguay too. And one thing he'd learned in all of them? When you spoke to authority, authority punished you. Better to shut up until you knew their game.

The police hated his strategy. They also hated the fact that they couldn't identify him because he had long ago removed his fingerprints and the tattoo on his inner right forearm with battery acid. Once, he had been just Hector Vargas. Then he'd started changing his name so often he began to think himself only as El Cazador, the hunter.

They were far down the cellblock when two of the officers threw him up against a wall, pinned him there. The others drew weapons and told the men in the near cell to back up. The door opened and they threw him on the floor inside.

The cell stank of piss and shit and men who hadn't washed in days if not weeks. It was all too familiar to him. He knew the men in the cell with him. He didn't know their names, or the crimes they were here for, but he knew them just the same.

Murderers. Rapists. Sadists. All slammed inside a confined space.

There was only one way this would go down.

El Cazador expected one of them to strike before he started up off the floor. But the first blow didn't come until he'd regained his knees. A mistake.

He caught the foot kicking at his jaw with both hands. He clamped on the toes and heel, and then bit viciously into the side, hearing the scream before twisting the foot so hard the ankle snapped spirally. He never gave his attacker a second glance, just lurched to his feet and backed toward the cell bars, hands up, ready for a fist or a
faca,
one of the plastic knives men like this always seemed to carry.

But none of them moved. He didn't either, not for a full five minutes, while the shithead with the broken ankle and bleeding foot writhed and moaned on the floor.

Finally, one of them, the biggest of the bunch, said, “You might want to wash out your mouth, man. Chico's feet, you never know what you might catch.”

Several men laughed.

The hunter stepped forward, and spit on Chico. More laughed.

One said, “Piss on his head, man, we don't fucking care.”

It was tempting. It was always smart to mark territory in a pack of dogs.

Instead, he motioned for one of them to move aside on a bunk. The inmate did, and El Cazador took his spot. He pushed back against the wall, pulled his knees up, and went off into a thousand yard stare that kept the others from saying a word to him.

Only then did he let himself think about the shithole he'd gotten himself thrown into, and why. No one had died, but they'd charged him and the two men he'd hired with possession and discharge of high-power weapons in the course of a motorized gunfight with an unknown third party. Worse, after all those years, he'd had his chance to watch Monarch's body dance with bullets and die by his hand. And he'd missed. For a split second, he hadn't been the hunter. He'd been just pissed-off Hector and it had cost him.

Vargas felt the rage roar up through him. He wanted to rant and put his fists down the throats of every man in the cell with him.

You fucking missed! Fucking missed!

Those words rang again and again in his head, and he wondered whether that moment would be his everlasting prison. Did you get a chance like that twice?

Never. Definitely not when you're in jail on weapons charges. Vargas had blown it, and now he was going down for a long stretch where the smell of piss, shit, and sweat would be his constant companion, where constant violence would be the price of his place in the pack. He began to steel himself to it, to once again adopt the canine model of surviving on the wrong side of the bars. He had to stay alert now. Attacks could and would come from any and all angles in the coming days. It was just the way things were.

But right now, while the memory of his counterattack and Chico's screams were fresh in their mind, the hunter needed to sleep. He couldn't afford deep sleep. That would come later, after he'd forged allegiances. Until then, he'd doze right on the edge of blackness, ready to surface at a moment's notice.

Vargas stayed in that buzzing state for almost an hour until his cellmates began to shout in alarm. The hunter opened his eyes to see the four guards were back. They all had shotguns and were aiming them directly at him.

“Out,” one of them said. “You've got visitors.”

It was unexpected, but El Cazador uncoiled and went to the door. He knew the drill and put his arms behind him, felt the metal bracelets snap around his wrists before the door opened. They paraded him down the hall. Word of what he'd done in the cell had evidently spread. The inmates were all watching him. One called him
el mordador,
the biter. He wasn't about to correct them.

As he walked, Vargas braced himself for pain. One thing about the Argentine police, they were never afraid to use the heavy stuff and trickery. Don't say a word, he told himself as they led him to an interrogation room and shackled him to a chair bolted into the floor. Whoever they are, whatever they say: give no reply.

The hunter clung to that tactic when they left him alone in the room. He closed his eyes, and imagined he was floating in dark water, deafened to the outside world. He kept his eyes closed even when the door opened and two people came inside. He tracked their footsteps around the table, but kept still, floating and …

“Mr. Vargas, I am Esteban Reynard, an attorney hired to represent you.”

El Cazador kept his eyes closed, said nothing, thought: hired?

The silence went on for several moments before another male voice asked in what sounded like Mexican Spanish, “Why were you trying to kill Robin Monarch?”

Vargas hadn't expected the accent or the question, and he popped open his eyes to find two men across the table from him. The near one was younger, late thirties, Argentine, slick, a sharp suit, the lawyer, Vargas guessed. The other wasn't Mexican. He was clearly a gringo, a dork gringo at that, with short sandy hair, nasty sunburn, and rose-tinted glasses. He wore an ill-fitting, dark linen suit, and licked his lips before saying again in that Mexican accent, “Tell me why you wanted to kill Monarch?”

Every voice in the hunter's head told him to remain mute.

Instead, he said, “Who the fuck are you?”

Reynard, the lawyer, said, “He's the one paying for me to help you.”

“Like I said, who the fuck is he?”

Across the table, Billy Saunders calculated, again questioning his instincts, before saying, “It doesn't matter who or what I am. It only matters what I can do for you.”

Vargas shot the lawyer a hard look before returning his attention to Beau Arsenault's security man. “What can you do for me?”

Saunders liked to bass fish, something he had in common with his boss. He knew well that when trying to lure a lunker out of the weeds, you had to tease him a bit, make the bite irresistible.

“I hear they torture here,” Saunders said. “Plastic bags over the head. Water boarding. Beatings. They'll kill you if they have half a mind.”

El Cazador's eyes never left Saunders. “So what?”

“So I am in a position to spare you all of that,” Saunders said.

The prisoner cocked his head in disbelief and then looked at Reynard, the lawyer. “He can get me out?”

“
We
can,” the lawyer said.

“How?”

“Does it matter?” Saunders said.

“It does if you've got some fucking idea of a jail break. Like you said, they kill people if they have half a mind.”

“Nothing like that,” Reynard said. “You walk out the back door. They report you as killed in a jail fight.”

“That kind of thing takes money,” the hunter said suspiciously.

“It does,” Saunders said. “But that's my business, not yours.”

Vargas leaned back, still skeptical. “Why?”

Saunders calculated again before saying, “As we share a mutual dislike of Robin Monarch, I think you can be useful to me.”