39

The phone didn’t ring till sunset, and a mere glance at the incoming number crushed Jude’s hopes: He’d been waiting for a call from Malvasio, Torres, Sola, anyone. But it was Fitz, telling him that Bob Strickland, Torkland Overby’s chairman, would be landing at Comalapa as scheduled that night, staying over at a hotel on the Costa del Sol, then heading on to San Bartolo Oriente in the morning. He intended to meet with Axel first, a working lunch at the Hotel Gavidia to review his findings, then indulge the Estrella board with some face time. “I’ll e-mail the security plan in a bit,” Fitz said, sounding overwhelmed, as always. “Anything happening on your end?”

Jude squelched a laugh. It did, given events, sound a little like the setup to a punch line. “Weather’s been a beast,” he said truthfully. Then: “Too hot for trouble.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” Fitz pulled back from the receiver to clear his throat. “Look, maybe I did go over the top about all this, your staying there, the woman’s house. Looks like it’s all worked out.”

Give me one more day, Jude thought, I’ll second that. And yet he felt oddly moved by the apology. Something had happened; Fitz seemed untypically subdued. “Nothing wrong with playing devil’s advocate, I suppose.”

“Like sex in the movies—good for you, good for me.”

Poor sad, lonely Fitz, Jude thought. “Well said.” He signed off, taking heart from his enhanced knack for lying, then went upstairs to pass on the news.

Consuela sat on the bed, propped on pillows, ankles crossed, listening to the radio while Axel tapped away on his laptop, sitting in a chair and using the foot of the bed for a desk. The contented couple, Jude thought. With the curtains closed, the air was hot and stale except for a hint of perfume.

“That was Fitz on the phone,” Jude told Axel. “You’re set for tomorrow with Strickland.” He might as well have said they had a funeral to attend.

“We’ll hear something by then,” Axel said, trying to buck everyone up, himself included.

Jude rested his back against the wall, feeling the pitted surface of the cinder block through his T-shirt. “If not, they win anyway. You said so yourself—you don’t have the data to prove the aquifer depletion.”

“That’s not precisely what I said.” Axel returned his glance to his laptop screen. In its glow his facial features hollowed out, his eyes shimmered eerily. “Besides, funny things can happen with data.”

“Funny as in …?”

“Extrapolations, projections, best guesses.” Axel tapped away at the keys. “If I could do it to fudge up an analysis to get that little girl back, I can do it to mock up something like the truth.”

For what, Jude wondered—revenge? It never buys back what you lost. “Your reputation’s on the line, Axel. With nothing to show for it now. Or am I missing something?”

Axel stopped typing. His hands, poised in midair, looked unearthly. “Let’s just say I’m rethinking my reputation.” His eyes turned to Jude’s, bringing with them the saddest of smiles. “Don’t worry, I’ll save my full presentation till I’m out of the country, as I promised. I won’t make your job any harder than it already is.”

Downstairs, Eileen waited in the dining room with two glasses of ice water, squeezing lemon into each, then stirring in sugar. Water, sugar—for Jude they conjured the bottling plant, the judge’s plantation. Even the littlest things struck him as symbolic now. Perhaps it was the candles. They filled the room with a museum of shadows.

“Beating yourself up?” she asked.

She was uncannily wise to him. “Only on the inside.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “It’s how I pat myself on the back.”

She passed him his glass, went back to stirring hers, glancing up now and then. Finally: “Just because you’re doing the right thing doesn’t mean it’s your fault when it doesn’t work out.”

Pithy, Jude thought, let’s sell T-shirts. He couldn’t help himself—comfort felt insulting, and that tapped into a reservoir of bile. “If you decide to run for Queen of the Obvious, let me know.”

Eileen shrank back in her chair. “Touché. Sorry.”

“No. That was out of bounds.” His nerves were shot. So little sleep. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay. We’re both sorry.”

Like sex in the movies, Jude thought.

“I said it before.” She shrugged and sighed. “I get stupid when I’m scared. Whistle a happy tune, that’s me.” She took a sip of her drink, hiding behind her glass. “Mind if I spend the night here? That is … I don’t mean—” She winced.

“It’s okay. I understand.” It felt impossible, this thing between them. Impossible and necessary, like everything else of late. “It may not be safe.”

“Who outside your company knows that Axel’s here?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know.”

“And not even your company knows Oscar’s here. So why would anybody be safer somewhere else?”

Jude smiled helplessly and tipped his glass, a salute. “There you go.”

“You trusted me with the shotgun before. Be good to have someone here who can use it.”

If you tell her no, he thought, she’ll just fight harder. Admit it, she’s staying. He wiped his nose, tickled by tallow smoke. “Sure. Good. Make yourself at home. I can sleep on the floor.”

“No. I will. I just need a sheet.”

Jude pictured it, the two of them lying there, a few feet apart, awake, pretending not to be.

Eileen cut short his reverie. “That poem I wrote, you were never supposed to see that, you know.”

“You told Waxman you didn’t want to see me.”

She blanched. “I overreacted. I’m sorry.”

There she was again. Little Sister Sorry. He could relate. “No need.”

“I’m not so good at the boy-girl thing.”

“Me neither.”

She laughed. “There. A trait in common. Something to build on.” She rattled the ice in her glass. Her shadow quavered on the wall behind her. “What are you going to do after all this is over?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Once Axel’s gone, what will you do?”

Once again, she’d nailed where his head was at. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this work.” He drained his glass. The lemonade tasted even runnier at the bottom, plenty of sugar, though. It made him thirsty all over again. “I want to travel for a while. Then I think maybe I’ll head back home, get a contractor’s license.”

That one hit with a thud. “No. Stay here. You like it here, you told me. And it’s obvious, the way you treat people.” She rapped her finger against the table, to get him to look at her. Candles flickered with the tapping. “You’re thoughtful. It’s one of the things that attracted me to you. People here need homes and schools and clinics. More than back home. You know that.”

“Parts of Chicago don’t look a whole lot better than here, trust me.”

“You know what I mean. Sure, you’ll make more money in the States, but then what? Buy a house, fill it with a lot of stuff.”

Jude stretched and yawned helplessly, like a cat, then nodded. “Land of the free, home of the brave and lots of stuff.”

“Absolutely, yeah. And little by little the stuff buries you.”

“Said like the daughter of a marine.”

“No joke. God knows I’ve got a lot to say about America and the military and the unholy marriage thereof, but I learned some damn good lessons from my old man. I hate him but I dig him, he drives me nuts but underneath all the macho bullshit is a guy who just didn’t fit in. Why? Because he wanted a life that didn’t feel bought and paid for. I admire that.”

Jude pinged his glass dully with his fingernail. “Me too.”

“I know.” She leaned toward him across the table. Candlelight glimmered in her eyeglass lenses. “That night at my place, I tried and tried to get you to talk about your family, but you were so damn cagey I almost smacked you. Lunkhead.” She worked up a smile that could have, another time, melted his heart. “Your dad. There’s something there. I can feel it. I don’t know, I just do. Tell me. Now. Please.”

Jude recoiled at the suggestion. Then, just as suddenly, he surrendered to blind impulse and launched in. Like a first-timer at a Twelve Step meeting: Hi, I’m Jude and I’m the son of a bent cop. To her inestimable credit, she listened patiently. Given her knack for seeing right through him, he wondered how much she’d intuited already, though he decided against using that as an excuse to leave things out. She recoiled ever so slightly when he got to the recent bit about Malvasio and Strock—who could blame her?—but he saw little merit in a half-scrubbed conscience. He played tabletop bongo for comic punctuation at the end, then waited for her to get up and walk out.

She didn’t. But she sat there in silence for what felt like forever, thinking through, he supposed, what it meant to feel for a guy who’d unwittingly been in league with men who’d abducted a little girl—and done God only knew what else.

Finally, she screwed up her resolve and managed to say, “Did I tell you I heard from my brother in Iraq?” Her voice faltered, and somehow Jude got the sense she wasn’t changing the subject exactly. “He shot a kid. By mistake. He didn’t go into full-blown detail so I only know part of the story, but they were on the northwest side of Fallujah, this neighborhood called Jolan. It’s ancient, with all these twisting streets, a nightmare. He said they had good intel on a stash house—but they always have good intel, you notice? Except when some Hajj phones in that a cop’s house is full of guns or plastique. They like doing that, letting the marines kill cops. Anyway, Mike—that’s my brother—he and his squad busted in, screaming for everybody to hit the ground. This kid, this boy, you’ve got all this smoke from the flash-bangs and he just—” Eileen put her hand to her mouth, a finger twitching against her cheek. She sat like that for a moment. Then: “You hesitate, you die. Or your buddy dies. Okay. I get that. But what about next time? My brother says he won’t let it happen but I know him, he’s a good guy and I know he’s going to think next time. And that’s the jinx.”

“I’m sorry,” Jude murmured. There it was again, that mucky little placeholder.

She downed the last of her weak lemonade. “You’re right, Jude. You’ve got to get out of this work. It’s a living death. For you. Guys like my brother. You make mistakes like everybody else, but unlike everybody else you can’t forgive yourselves. Build things. Here. Things people really need. You’d be brilliant at it.”

Malvasio was taking a beating at blackjack, waiting for his call from Sleeper. The casino, about the size of your average Burger King, was attached to the Tropico Hotel and reeked, appropriately, like an ashtray. But it was air-conditioned, so why complain?

About three dozen slots lined the walls beneath tilted mirrors, positioned to help spot slug droppers. There were six card tables: four for blackjack, two for poker. All six were manned by a single dealer, business was that slow. He wore a threadbare tux and a chipmunk smile and his obsequiousness only made his cheating more insufferable. The cage cashier had something French about him, which was to say he looked like he’d done time for forgery, and the cocktail waitress wore a short black skirt so tight her tree-trunk thighs whispered kiss kiss kiss through her pantyhose when she passed by.

Malvasio was a wee bit drunk.

He was cursing his second sixteen in a row when his cell started throbbing in his pocket. About time, he thought, cashing out. He left a tip commensurate with being played for a sucker and that, at last, wiped the goofy smile off the dealer’s face.

Outside, Malvasio headed north in the dark to the caged walkway over the four-lane Avenida Eisenhower, coming down again at the entrance to the Cementerio General.

The gate in the large white archway stood open, but he slipped a coin to the beggar pretending to guard it. The central path was lined with almendra de rio trees and Malvasio followed it straight back, past memorial statuary and mausoleums of varying hideousness or ostentation, bigger than houses you found here, some dating back to the eighteenth century, fashioned from marble and granite and enclosed within black iron fences. Others were scruffed with moss or soiled with guano, and more than one had a sapling jutting from a loose crack in the stonework, a little flag of grief’s neglect. Stray dogs roamed here and there, scavenging among the bouquets left behind during the day and anything else that resembled food.

A giant ceiba tree marked the center of the cemetery—it was sacred to the Mayans—and beneath its dark, sprawling branches he spotted the red glow of a cigarette. He whistled three pitches, low-high-middle, and received in return the same three notes reversed. Sleeper emerged from the dark shade of the tree into the moonlight.

“We’re over here,” he told Malvasio, gesturing to a spot farther back among the graves as he dropped his cigarette onto the gravel and crushed it with his shoe.

They walked together in silence through a maze of white headstones to a mausoleum the size of a small garage and built in the form of a Gothic cathedral, complete with vaulted ceilings and bat-winged gargoyles crouched atop flying buttresses. Of course, Malvasio thought, seeing the thing, where else would the chamacos hang? Ghoulishness aside, it was quite possibly the most lovingly crafted structure he’d seen in the whole country.

Chucho waited there with Magui, the same huge marero who’d been at the house in Puerto El Triunfo, plus a fourth hood Malvasio didn’t recognize who was pitching stones at one of the starving dogs. Sleeper introduced him as Toto, and since no one laughed, Malvasio assumed it wasn’t a joke.

Malvasio pulled his money roll from his pocket and counted out a thousand dollars, two hundred fifty per man, half the full amount for the job, the rest due once the thing was done. But Malvasio didn’t expect to render that. He was doling out cash to dead men. Even so, money well spent.

“Go home,” he told them as they counted their pay. “Get some sleep. We meet at five am, sharp. No hangovers, no druggy nods, or you hand back what I just paid you and get left behind. And don’t get any slick ideas—you don’t want me coming to look for you, hunting down my money. We’ll circle up at the usual spot. You don’t know where it is, ask Sleeper.”

When he got back to the van in the casino parking lot, he sat behind the wheel for a while, trying to think it all through. The drink had him morose, hazy, indignant. That’s it, he thought, blame the booze. He took his cell from his pocket and thumbed in the number he needed to call.

A groggy voice answered. “Yeah?”

“Get some sleep tonight, Phil. We’re on for tomorrow morning.”

“I was sleeping. Fucking heat.” Strock moaned throatily and sighed. The pause lingered. “Remember what I told you.”

Malvasio bristled but kept his head. “I do. And that’s the way it’ll go down. I wish it hadn’t come this far but … Never mind. Not your problem. Let’s not talk about it on the cell.”

“Sound a little gassed there, Buckwheat.”

Malvasio rubbed his eyes till they felt raw. “Maybe.”

“I’ve wondered about that. Seen you zoomed, figured you’d drink to even out. Not the best lifestyle. I speak, sadly, from experience.”

Malvasio didn’t intend to sit through this, not from Strock. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“You okay with this?”

Malvasio barked out a miserable little laugh. “Okay? No. It’s fucked up. But if I don’t take the wheel, it’ll just be worse.”

“For Ray’s kid.”

“Him, yeah. And me. Some things I just don’t mean to live with, you know?”

Strock didn’t respond for a moment. Then: “I asked before. I handle your boys—how’s this gonna sit with your people?”

“Here’s the thing, Phil. Know what? I don’t care. I’m done. After this, I’m done. You reach a point, you know?”

The sound of static surged then waned on the line. Malvasio thought he’d lost the signal. Then Strock came back. “Where you gonna go?”

Malvasio looked out the van’s window. The casino cocktail waitress was on her break, sitting on the hood of her car, buffing her nails in the moonlit heat. She’d stripped off her kissy pantyhose, which now lay tangled beside her shoes on the ground. “Don’t worry about me, Phil. I’m a ghost. I roam at will.”

Strock hung up the phone and went back to what he’d been doing—sharpening the tip of a jagged piece of wood he’d ripped from one of the rotting stair planks leading up to the roof of the garage. It had taken him a while to find a suitable candidate, small enough to hold and thrust, solid enough to puncture flesh. The AR-15 would be good for long range, but if things got dicey up close, he’d need something else. And that was the problem, thinking ahead to how things might go wrong up close.

He’d torn off strips of cloth from a T-shirt, wrapping it tight around the hilt to fashion a handle, but the trick was the sharpening. He’d resorted to using an ordinary rock for a grinding stone and it was thankless work, hour after hour of rasping the edges, honing the tip, working by candlelight now. He tested it against the skin of his inner arm. It’d be useless at slashing, but if he went for the gut, drove it hard and deep and high beneath the ribs to catch a lung, he might buy the time he’d need to finish the guy off with the rifle. Or his bare hands.

It had seemed poetic, using pieces of a rotted stair plank to fashion a weapon. That night he’d ruined his knee, back in Chicago, waiting for Malvasio, expecting to die and perfecting his hate—it had all come back in the gaudy Technicolor of self-pity and he found himself cursing the meager, circular madness of things. Here he was again, reliving the same nightmare, except he wouldn’t let that happen. He was going through with the plan because he’d seen a crucial change in Malvasio, a wounded, stymied, bitchy terror that made Strock feel a little like he was looking into a mirror, not just his old friend’s eyes. And there, really, was the sad little secret driving the machine. They’d been friends. For all the misery that had come of it, Strock still looked back at those years in Chicago as the best of his life. Did he really think that now, on his own, he could hope for better? Like Bill himself said, neither of them got out unscathed. And so he’d agreed to do this thing, reassured by the bond that had quickened between them again and flattered that he was necessary, after ten years of meaning nothing to anyone, not even his own little girl. Amazing, he thought, when we decide to whore ourselves, how piddling a sum can seal the bargain.

That didn’t mean he intended to be a fool. He set 9-1-1 for speed dial and hid the shiv where he could reach it easily, just beneath the lip of the mattress. And if it’s your old friend you end up having to kill, he thought, don’t blame yourself or even him. Blame the meandering turns of fate that bring you back around, time and time again, to the same ridiculous decision: Choose who you are.

He looked out toward the dark ceiba tree, where the big green parrot had perched that afternoon. Strock chuckled at the memory, his moment of churchy weirdness, talking out loud to Ray like that. And then the bird had flown off soon afterward, never to return. Carrying my prayer to heaven, he thought. Or sick of the sound of my begging.

Jude and Eileen decided to sleep in shifts, sharing the couch, two hours apiece, one of them staying awake to keep watch. Once, while he was dozing, Jude cracked his eye open to discover, through the filmy blur, Eileen staring at him. She was sitting nearby in a chair, hugging her knees, her dress tucked just so, revealing nothing immodest. The shotgun lay across her lap.

“Go back to sleep,” she told him.

He readjusted himself on the couch, obediently closing his eyes. “Anything to report?”

“No. Nothing. Quiet as a Quaker with naught to confess, as my grandmother used to say.” She let a moment’s silence pass, as though to demonstrate, then let go with a flubbing sigh. “I do like looking at you, though.”