THE SQUAWKING OF THE KID’S CARTOONS IS GIVING THACKER A headache, but what’s he going to do? If he tells her to shut off the TV and take a nap, she’ll start screaming again, and this is the quietest she’s been since they grabbed her. She’s happy as can be now, sitting cross-legged on the other bed, eating cold French fries and watching a bunch of monkeys or mice or whatever they are kick the shit out of each other.
Jerónimo, on the other hand, is wound tight as a speed freak at the tail end of a three-day run. He’s hunched over the room’s little table and looks like he’s about to get on his knees and beg the phone sitting in front of him to ring. There’s more than money driving him, that’s for sure. He’s got some sort of personal stake in seeing that this girl Luz gets to where she’s wanted, and this worries Thacker, because when it gets personal is when people get stupid, and stupid people do stupid things, like kidnapping children.
He should have said Fuck it right then, should have slipped away. But that cash, man, it’s so close now he can smell it, and if the Mex will listen to him, they can still snatch this out of the fire without burning their fingers. Everything will work out fine: Jerónimo will get Luz, he’ll get the money, the kid will be returned to her aunt, and they’ll all go their separate ways with a friendly wave and a hearty “Fuck you.”
That’s if he listens. Right now it looks like he’s sitting over there coming up with a whole bunch of bad ideas, Plan B’s and doomsday scenarios. Step one is to get him talking instead of thinking.
“So the phone rings,” Thacker says, adjusting his pillow against the headboard of the bed he’s lying on.
“What?” Jerónimo says.
“The phone rings, and it’s—” he glances at Isabel and lowers his voice—“you know. What are you gonna say?”
Jerónimo hisses derisively and mumbles, “I’m not playing games with you.”
“It can’t hurt to figure out in advance how you’re going to respond,” Thacker says. “Things have already gotten a little out of hand, after all.”
The Mex puffs up and crosses his arms over his chest. It pisses him off to have a gringo point out his mistakes. Too bad.
“Ring, ring,” Thacker says.
“I’m gonna tell her to get her ass over here,” Jerónimo says. “What do you think I’m gonna say?”
“With the money?” Thacker says.
“Yeah, yeah, with the money.”
“But don’t let her come up to the room.”
“I won’t.”
“In fact, don’t even mention the motel. Only tell her the corner.”
Jerónimo gets up and steps over to the window, pulls the curtains aside. The room is on the second floor, off an open-air walkway. A no-name gas station and mini-mart skulk at the edge of an empty lot across the street.
“I’ll meet her down there,” Jerónimo says, pointing at the station. “I’ll tell her to come alone and wait out in the open.”
“That’s good,” Thacker says. “We can watch from up here to see if she tries to sneak in any backup.”
“Right,” Jerónimo says. He closes the curtains and returns to the table. “So relax.”
“I am relaxed,” Thacker says. “I just want to get it straight. So she does what you tell her and shows up when she’s supposed to. Then what?”
“I go down and talk to her, and when I’m sure everything’s cool, I signal you, and you put the little one in the truck and come pick us up.”
“She might go nuts when she sees her daughter.”
“I’ll handle that.”
“She might try to grab the kid and make a run for it or causes a commotion.”
Jerónimo pulls his nine from his waistband. “Not with this between her legs,” he says. “This’ll keep her quiet while we drop the kid off and drive back to the border.”
Isabel is watching them now, instead of the TV. She can’t make out what they’re saying, but she’s old enough to know what a gun is, or at least to know that it’s something to be afraid of. Thacker is about to tell Jerónimo to put the damn thing away when the phone on the table flashes and plays a song. Jerónimo snatches it up.
The conversation is a quick one and entirely in Spanish, but Thacker gets the gist. Luz asks Jerónimo who he is, and he tells her it’s none of her business, just be at the gas station in an hour, her and the money. She wants to know how the kid is doing, and Jerónimo says, “Fine, as long as you follow orders.” Then she says something like “Prove it,” because after a lot of no’s, Jerónimo gets up from the table and walks over to Isabel.
“Say hello,” he tells her, and holds out the phone.
“Hello?” Isabel warbles, close to tears. After listening to Luz for a few seconds, she says in English, “I want to go home.”
Jerónimo pulls the phone away, makes a quiet threat, and ends the call.
“She get the message?” Thacker says.
“She got it,” Jerónimo says.
“Good. Good deal.”
Thacker settles back onto the bed and stares up at the stucco ceiling, acting like everything is cool even though it’s not. Worry coils around his backbone like a jungle vine. He’s always known he’s not what you’d call a good man and admitted it to himself readily enough, but this, the kind of bad he’s knee-deep in now, is way more serious than fucking with wetbacks and stealing pussy from whores. This shit is hard-core.
The air conditioner is roaring, but he can still feel the heat from outside pressing against the windows, the walls, the roof. Jerónimo peeks out between the curtains like Luz might already be waiting across the street, then turns to Isabel, who’s lying on the bed, crying softly, her face buried in a pillow.
“What’s the matter, mija?” he asks her.
“I want my aunt,” comes the muffled response.
“You’ll be back there soon,” he says. “Right in time for dinner.”
The room is closing in on Thacker. He gets up from the bed and grabs a Styrofoam cup off the table. When he goes to step outside, however, Jerónimo stops him with a hand on his arm.
“What’s up?” the Mex says.
Thacker shows him his tin of Skoal. “Having a dip,” he says. “Want one?”
Jerónimo takes his hand off him but says, “Leave the door open.”
Out on the walkway, Thacker steps to the rail and tucks a bit of tobacco between his cheek and gum. A car exits the gas station across the street and speeds off, leaving behind a cloud of black smoke that hangs in the air for some time afterward. A man comes out of the market with a broom and a long-handled dustpan and begins sweeping up. Jerónimo’s right; they’ll have a clear view from here when Luz arrives—the parking lot, the surrounding streets. That’s one thing in their favor.
But Thacker is still uneasy. The kid changes everything. With her around the possibility for disaster is huge. She gets hurt or, God forbid, killed, and the shit storm that will rain down on them will be fatal, as in Special Circumstances, as in Death or Life-Plus-One. He spits into the cup and scratches a new mole he discovered on his neck last week. What the hell did you get into? he asks himself.
Luz closes the phone and sets it on the dashboard. One hour, the man said. Don’t be early, don’t be late. He won’t be the one to kill her, Luz is pretty sure of that. He’ll take her back to Tijuana and let Rolando have his fun. She’s also pretty sure he’s not going to listen to any pleas for mercy. Rolando wouldn’t have trusted this job to someone who could be swayed.
Perhaps a small request. Five minutes with Isabel. If she’s going to believe that this guy will release the little girl when she turns herself over to him, she might as well also believe that he’ll grant her five minutes to hold her and tell her how much she loves her. It’s something to look forward to at least, something to keep her going.
The resignation she feels now is a relief after the agony that overwhelmed her when she learned they’d taken Isabel from Carmen. At first, she was so ashamed of putting her daughter in danger that all she wanted to do was die. But then it hit her that she was the only person who could save the girl, and that gave her the strength to finish this. Her escape attempt was a failure, but at least she’ll have a chance to clean up the mess she made before she pays for crossing Rolando.
Malone is trying to pretend he’s not watching her out of the corner of his eye. He looks sadder than she does. The man had a shotgun pulled on him and still hasn’t cut and run. God sure picked a crazy one.
“He wants me to come to Central and Walnut in an hour,” Luz says. “A gas station there.”
“Do you know where that is?” Malone asks her.
“Right off the freeway, I think,” she says.
“All right,” he says and takes a swallow of vodka.
His face ripples like the surface of a pond disturbed. He’s not done yet, Luz can tell. He’s got more to say. He caps the bottle and slides it under the seat, straightens his shirt and brushes back his hair.
“I know the cops are out of the question,” he begins.
“Stop,” Luz says.
“It’s just, there has to be—”
He needs to leave it alone. Now.
“I stole from him and killed his people,” Luz says. “I made him look stupid. He’s not American, okay, he’s Mexican, and for a woman to do that, he’s not gonna quit until he gets back at me.”
“What about someone above him?” Malone says. “He has a boss, and that’s the guy you need to talk to. You go to him with the money and make your case, tell him how this asshole treated you and why you did what you did.”
“They’ve got my baby,” Luz says. “I’m going to do whatever they want.”
Malone strokes the stubble on his chin and turns away from her.
“I wish I was smarter,” he says. “Smart enough to come up with something else.”
Luz wishes she was smarter too. She starts going over things she might have done differently when it came to planning her escape, and in seconds her mind is revving toward panic. She concentrates on her surroundings—a woman unloading a washing machine in the Laundromat, a stray dog trotting past, the little girl who tries to pet it and the old man who warns her not to, the way the reflection of the parking lot in the window of the liquor store pulses every time the door opens and closes—but it doesn’t help.
She tries to think of somewhere quiet nearby where they might wait out the hour left to her. The answer is like a kick in the stomach when it comes, and she rouses Malone and tells him there’s one more place she’d like to see before he drops her off.
They get onto Greenleaf and go west. The sun is low enough now that it’s shining right into their eyes. Even with her visor down, Luz has to squint through her lashes to see the road ahead. They drive past the entrance to the cemetery the first time and end up circling the block to get back to the gate.
SACRED GROUND, 15 MPH a sign orders. Malone cruises slowly past the graves while Luz tries to find the spot she’s looking for. She remembers a tree and a fountain. It’s been almost four years, though, and a whole lot of life since she was last here. The best she can do is get them what she thinks is close.
“Do you want me to wait in here?” Malone asks when she opens her door.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You can come if you want.”
He gets out of the truck, too, and follows her up a hill toward a sickly pine with downcast needles. The ground is covered with more weeds than grass, but at least they keep the place mowed. The markers in this section are all identical granite rectangles that lie flat on the ground, row after row of them. There’s enough room on each for the name and dates and maybe a brief tribute or a small etching of a cross or a lily.
Luz moves from stone to stone, searching for Alejandro’s. She passes a baby’s marker decorated with a drawing of Minnie Mouse—Camilla Washington, May 19, 2006–January 5, 2007. A wilted bouquet sits on Daniel Martinez’s grave, and someone has left a New Testament for Donita Hughes, Beloved Mother, Sister, and Friend. Luz is jealous of them all. Nobody will remember her when she’s gone, and there’ll be no grave to visit.
She comes to the end of one row and moves on to the next. Malone trudges along behind her, head down. He’s thinking about his little girl, Luz knows. After being with him less than a day, she already recognizes the face he gets when the memories come blacking. Three ravens circle overhead, their ugly croaks like curses. Luz almost trips, glaring up them, and then there it is, right at her feet.
Alejandro Delgado Gonzalez, May 19, 1991–October 5, 2009. His nickname’s on it too: Smiley. Luz is sad to see it again, but the sadness is different now, after so much time, mellower but truer. For a month after he died she came here every couple of days, her and baby Isabel. She’d bring a boom box to play her and Alejandro’s favorite CDs—Morrissey, Selena, RBD—and sit on the grass beside the stone and weep until her eyes burned and her chest ached. Her grief was real back then, but she realizes she was crying mostly for herself, for her loss. The tears that sting her eyes today are for a sweet, big-eared boy with a silver tooth and the softest lips in the world.
Malone is standing beside her. “Who is it?” he asks.
“Isabel’s daddy,” she replies.
“So young.”
“Something was wrong with his heart.”
It’s true. One day he just fell down dead. He was the first and last boy Luz ever loved, the embodiment of so many words that have lost their meaning for her since then: good, kind, honest. He lived on the same street as Carmen and her family, but Luz barely noticed him during her first hectic years in L.A. Thinking about it later, she wondered if that’s how it was when it was real. You didn’t crash into each other and hang on for dear life the first time you met. Instead, you came together slowly, a long succession of revelations and reassessments gradually closing the gap.
How clearly she remembers some of the things that made her love him. There was the time she watched him comfort his little sister after she’d fallen off her bicycle, rocking and tickling her until she laughed away her tears. There was his voice when he tried to sing a song he knew Luz liked, even though they were still months away from holding hands.
And she’ll never forget the morning they were walking to school with all the other kids and the two of them fell behind because they were talking so much and the sun hit his green eyes exactly right and whatever had been smoldering between them for so long finally burst into bright, billowing flame.
They were inseparable after that. If Luz wasn’t at his house, he was at hers. Carmen was as crazy about him as Luz was, and Alejandro’s parents treated Luz like a daughter. None of them were happy when Luz got pregnant, but her and Alejandro’s love was like a steamroller, flattening any opposition. In the end, both families swallowed their disappointment and did what they could to help. Isabel was born with Alejandro’s eyes and Luz’s mouth. The nose they couldn’t figure out.
Three months later Alejandro went to play basketball with some friends and didn’t come home. He collapsed on the court and was gone before he hit the ground. The doctor told Luz he didn’t feel any pain, but how could he know that?
And so she was alone again. An eighteen-year-old illegal with a new baby. The daughter of a whore with her back against the wall. She’s glad Alejandro can’t see what a mess she made of everything.
She crouches to brush a leaf from the stone and lets her fingers trace the letters carved there. Malone shifts from one foot to the other, uncomfortable.
“I’m gonna wait over there,” he says, pointing to the fountain.
Luz says a prayer for Alejandro and another for Isabel. Keep her safe a little longer. Something is wrong. She’s always believed in a God who listens to the pleas of the wretched, but today she feels like she’s talking to herself, like the words are going nowhere. He’s turned away from her, she realizes, even Him.
She walks to the fountain. It’s not working, hasn’t in a long time. Four angels stand back-to-back blowing trumpets. The pool surrounding them doesn’t have any water in it, only dead leaves, a Burger King cup, and a condom wrapper. Malone is staring at the freeway in the distance, where ten lanes of cars and trucks crawl along under a noxious pall. To the west a few wispy clouds are starting to color as the sun drops lower.
“I better get going,” Luz says.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Malone says.
“I’m ready.”
On the way back to the truck, Malone suddenly reaches out and wraps an arm around Luz. Her first instinct is to pull away, but she stops herself, and then, just like that, folds into Malone so that he’s supporting her as they walk. She says sorry, and he says it’s okay, and it feels so good to be propped up for a second, to not have to bear everything by herself.