Rudolph had chain-smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes over the course of a couple hours. He’d smoke three or four inside, then remember that his old lady had scolded him for smoking in the trailer on account of the landlord and the hundred-dollar deposit, and smoke the next couple pacing the porch. He couldn’t keep still, and that was one of the reasons Rodriguez had always preferred junkies to tweakers.
Rod had his eyes closed, partly pretending that he was nodding out on the couch but mostly because there was so much smoke in the room that his eyeballs were burning like someone was slicing onions. He’d talked Rudolph into letting him stay the night in hopes that sooner or later he could mine his phone for numbers when he wasn’t looking. The problem was, Rudolph was always looking. He was always chewing and scratching and walking and talking and blabbing about everything from clogged toilets to deep-state conspiracy theories.
He had his shirt off and there were stainless bars pierced through both of his nipples. A line of hair climbed to his belly button and he kept twisting it into a little knotted spire. Rod heard him mumble something about needing to mow the lawn and just like that he disappeared out the front door. About two minutes later a Weed Eater fired up outside. That old spiky-haired son of a bitch was slinging string at two o’clock in the morning, wide-eyed and sweating off a steamroller of crystal.
The inside of the trailer was meticulously clean. Soon as they walked in, Rudolph made Rod take off his shoes. He went straight to cleaning then, wiping down the coffee table and bookshelves with paper towels and Windex. The place smelled like a janitor’s closet, but there wasn’t a speck of dirt or even so much as a fingerprint on the glass. Rodriguez surveyed the room and tried to make sense of how a man who couldn’t cling to a single thought for more than fifteen seconds could keep a house spotless enough for open-heart surgery.
All of a sudden the Weed Eater cut off outside and Rod could hear Rudolph in a shouting match with one of the neighbors. Whatever the man was saying was muffled by the thin walls, but Rod could hear everything out of Rudolph’s mouth. “Fuck you, I’ll mow my grass any goddamn time I want.” “You can kiss my white ass, buddy, this is America.” “You step one foot in this yard and I’ll come upside your head with this weed whacker.” “Call the law, you old cocksucker. What’s stopping you? This is my property. Call ’em!”
For the life of him, Rod couldn’t figure out how in the hell he wound up in a place like this. He was first generation. His mother and father had survived the Caracazo riots and emigrated from Venezuela after two failed coups in the early ’90s threatened to turn the country upside down. Rod’s father drove a forklift in a warehouse, while his mother cleaned hotel rooms. They pushed their only son hard, and when Rod graduated high school, he decided to join the Marines. After a brief tour in Afghanistan, he used his GI Bill for college, where he got a degree in criminal justice. Now here he was inside a trailer in Bum Fuck Egypt scrolling through some meth head’s phone for a number that most likely wouldn’t lead anywhere. He was living the American dream.
The Weed Eater fired up outside and Rod could hear Rudolph trimming the grass along the singlewide’s skirt. They’d gone to score the dope sometime around eight P.M. At seven forty-five there were three calls made to the same number. Rodriguez pulled his wallet out of his pocket to try and find a scrap of paper. Out of nowhere the front door slapped open and the whine of the Weed Eater engine was so loud it rattled his teeth. Rudolph was standing in the open doorway when he hit the kill switch.
“What the fuck you doing with my phone?”
“I needed to make a call.”
“Don’t you bullshit me.” Rudolph set the Weed Eater on the porch and came into the room. He pulled a stainless folding knife from his pocket and flipped the blade open with his thumb. With the knife clenched in his fist, he stepped forward and hovered over the couch where Rodriguez sat, his jaw gnawing, the sinews flexing in his chest. “You trying to steal my goddamn phone. That’s what you was doing.”
“No,” Rodriguez said. He slid the phone onto the table and raised his hands in front of him. He couldn’t swallow. “I was trying to make a call.”
“Who was you needing to call this time of night?”
“My girl.”
“Your girl?”
“Yeah, I was trying to call my girl.”
“Where is she?”
“Over in Asheville.” Rod tried to build off the lies he’d already told about where he’d come from and how he wound up in Jackson County.
“What’s she look like?”
“What do you mean what’s she look like?”
“I mean is she Mexican like you?”
“No, she’s a white girl. A blonde.”
“You sneaky little son of a bitch.” Rudolph cracked a smile and his eyes got so wide it looked like they were going to pop out of his skull. He closed the knife against his leg and slipped it back into his pocket. “You was holding out on me. You think she’d ever go for a threesome?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, call her up, amigo. There ain’t but one way to find out.”
Rodriguez picked the phone up from the table. He tapped a random number onto the screen and dialed, hoping to God that no one would answer. After a half dozen rings, he hung up and shrugged it off, saying she must’ve already fallen asleep.
“That’s a real shame,” Rudolph said. “Me, I’m just getting good and woke up.”
Outside, a pair of headlights were coming down the road. Rudolph walked to the door and stared out into the night like a barred owl.
“Goddamn if he ain’t call the law on me for weed-eating,” he said. “I’m telling you what, amigo, a man can’t have nothing.”
As Rudolph strutted down the front steps, Rodriguez buried his face in his hands. He took a deep breath, trying to will his wits about him as his heart pounded his chest like a drum. There was a reason the DEA had done away with this type of solo deep-cover bullshit and in most instances they were right. The problem was that this wasn’t some big city where you could run two or three teams to keep everyone safe and sound. In places like this, there was only one empty seat at the table. Either you were inside or you were out.