It was overcast, but Harbaugh had never sweated so much in her life. It poured down her back, her arms, it flicked off her fingertips as she ran. She should’ve brought a towel. Her barefoot gait was tentative, thrown off by the weight of the sicario’s .40 in her hand. She didn’t want it to jostle out of her waistband, so she sweaty-palmed the entire gun in the hope that no one would notice the barefoot woman running with a Smith & Wesson. And there were crocs, for chrissakes. But she pressed on, afraid she’d lost Gustavo.
In the distance was some refinery or plant, silver pipes and tanks against the pale sky. She ran past old farmhouses, fields of corn and palm trees. She could tell she was still near a laguna, a bay, a river, she wasn’t sure, but the water was heavy in the air. Although the road was mostly dry, even dusty in places, there was standing water everywhere, sometimes huge dirty pools of it in the low bellies of the land. She startled a pair of cranes from the brush.
She didn’t know which way Gustavo had gone, so she’d set off into the cul-de-sac of new builds on a pure hunch and was now worried she’d guessed wrong. In this flat land, the short trees and palms rose in a curtain, not any taller than a tractor, preventing her from spotting him even if he’d gone off road. She began to sprint. The asphalt ended, now dirt, now sand. Still no sign. She took the elevated edge of the road, where a soft duff padded her feet and fine small clouds appeared with every step. She thought about letting him escape. She thought of just keeping on running forever, she always did that.
A pair of men working on some kind of pump stopped what they were doing to watch her pass. She raised her free hand, and one of them nodded as they kept their eyes locked on her. They hadn’t returned to their work even when she glanced back. A strange sight, this white woman in jacket and pants, hoofing it barefoot down the dirt road now. She noticed the gray cloud of her trail, the dust rising in the dead, hot air with the languor of a disturbed seabed.
Or moon dust.
The dream of Oscar came back to her. His boot as he leapt away from her, over the moon’s horizon, the sun’s flash on his visor. She wondered if the dream was the moment his spirit left the world. He’d clung to her all the way down to Mexico and then couldn’t hold on any longer.
Jesus Christ, Oscar, why’d you do that?
She faced ahead and ran forward again, a little dizzy. Overheating now. The sun had peeked out and baked the air. She focused her breaths, tried not to give up even though she couldn’t see Gustavo or Oscar or anyone. You’re not quitting, she told herself, you’re doing exactly what you should. Find him. In some way this will atone for Oscar. For Dufresne. You make the boys cry but you don’t let them die.
Don’t. Let. Them. Die.
Find. Him. Right. Now.
She crossed a bridge and back onto asphalt. The surface wasn’t too hot to run on, but getting there. Should’ve put on her boots. Swamps here, lots of scrub brush and water. A marsh or floodplain. A bright purple wall, for what purpose she didn’t know. Nothing apparently. Just stuck out here and recently painted. She’d probably gone the wrong way, straight for the crocs. A bum hunch. Maybe turn around, go back and ask those guys in the yard. Gustavo didn’t want to be spotted, probably stuck to dirt roads, right? Or maybe didn’t care. Or he already flagged down a ride. In the bed of a pickup, doing bumps at the stop signs.
An old man on a bicycle with a battered cooler resting on the handlebars rode past her. She wondered what he had to drink in there, but she knew if she stopped, she’d quit. She wanted to quit, but instead picked up her pace. A kind of muscle memory, that. At the first inkling of surrender, she always kicked herself forward, kept on.
She topped a small rise and the brush cleared out to the west, and she could see farther ahead. Always stay on the path. That was the simplest thing, less second-guessing. Keep on.
The asphalt ended abruptly again and again gave over to sand, so much here on the shoulder that it was like running on the beach. The scrub receded, there were just palms, though not too many, skinny and squatty both—and there he was.
A lone figure to her west. Yes, fuck yes. Loping into some kind of development, boxy two-story adobes, a store with stacks of tires in front, a rusty tower of some kind. She’d have lost him if he’d been a few more minutes ahead, if she’d panicked and backtracked.
Good work, Hardball. Stay on the path.
She thought to call out, didn’t, and kept running toward him.
He halted at the sound of her. Turned and looked directly at her, the plastic sack wrapped around his closed palm. About a hundred feet between them. She petered her pace down to a jog and then a walk. Didn’t want to spook him. She shoved the pistol in her waistband in back.
He just stood there. Was he stopped for her? she wondered. Would he wait?
He did. She walked right up to him.
“Hey,” she said, pleased she wasn’t gassed, that she was so was fit and strong. “Can we try to talk this out?”
She swiped a ridiculous abundance of sweat from her head, shook it off the back of her hand. His own dripped off his nose, soaked his shirt.
“I don’t care, you can talk.”
“Okay. Let’s get us under something. That sun’s brutal.”
“You can’t make me go back.”
They both knew that she’d come to do exactly that.
“I’m walking for the town. You come, you not come, I don’t care.” He looked at her bare feet as though asking her to think about that.
“Maybe there’s someplace for us to stop up ahead,” she said.
They walked together. Orange-pink homes, tricycles in yards, kiddie pools, concrete walls, dogs yipping behind wrought-iron gates. A horse tied to a stake next to the road, feeding on grass. A woman at a sewing machine on her porch. Beneath a shade tree an old man oiling parts of some kind on a card table. No one said a word to them. Houses became stores, became businesses. El Mini Super “Lucy.” An Oxxo with a crazy castle facade, curtain wall, battlements, even a turret.
After a while they came upon a tavern, La Cantina Cosmopolita. Beach-purple exterior. A brand-new Modelo sign. Locked to a grate on the side of the building was an oil-drum barbeque pit, smoke spilling out of it. It was unattended, or she would’ve gone over and bought whatever there was there. She was still hungry. A man without the bottom half of his legs was scooting along the sidewalk on kneepads. He called to her to buy his wares. She ducked her head and followed Gustavo inside.
Dark, quiet, cool. Brick walls. Two men and a bartender who grimaced up at the flood of sunlight into the place. The floor perfectly smooth, the only trouble a few pebbles of roadway stuck to her feet. She discreetly brushed each foot over the opposite calf and minced after Gustavo.
Two men in cowboy hats, one in jeans and a western shirt, one in board shorts and tank top, mutely noted their entrance and returned to their drinks like mismatched twins.
The bartender stirred a pot on the stove, idly observing the muted morning programming. News. Harbaugh tensed. The chase, the ambush—they were on the run, after all. She and Gustavo—hell, the news just walked into the joint. It wasn’t likely that anybody had seen them in the blur and violence, but still. The authorities would be asking for witnesses, someone to help explain all the dead narcos. The television was covering something else, politics of some kind.
You’re just some barefoot white lady, she thought, Gustavo some vaquero, come down to the coast for a bender. An odd couple, but not exactly conspicuous. She hoped not.
They sat a corner table with Corona insignias carved into it that tilted unevenly under Gustavo’s large hands. He turned his chair to face the door directly and hooked the plastic sack over the arm, heavy with bottles of water, the FN making an unmistakable expression in the plastic. She noticed the Ruta de Evacuacion drawn in green magic marker on the bricks, with an arrow pointing at the front door through which she’d just come.
The bartender came out and Gustavo ordered beer and whiskey for them both. Harbaugh almost called him back to change hers to coffee, but there seemed no point. It felt apt to remain in this weird high place her mind had arrived at. Not half bad, honestly, sitting in the new cool and waiting on a late-morning beer. How strange, though. A week ago she’d been running against the cold, and down here she was running for her life—quite a change of pace. A change of stakes.
The drinks came. They raised their glasses as if living in a normal world and downed the shots quickly. She barely felt anything, just the heat of alcohol. She put her beer against her forehead and let it set as Gustavo brooded, taking huge swigs. He burped and called for another within minutes, which she’d known he would. It felt like they’d been together for years. He looked at her in a way she wondered about. A knowing scorn between the two of them. Hers, a mild contempt typically reserved for bosses, shitty neighbors, shifty exes. But something else too—she watched him roll his jaw in a way that she now knew foretold a bump of coke, and there was a weird ease between them. With all of this. They’d become partners, of a kind. Which is why she went ahead and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.
“Drinking.” He sipped his beer, affecting weariness.
“You’ve just decided, fuck it, you’ll take your chances alone?”
“No se.” He took a drink, wiped his mouth with a backhand. “I feel maybe . . . different in everything.”
“Different.”
He nodded.
“Different as in you got a plan?” she asked.
No answer.
“Maybe you’ve decided to throw yourself on the mercy of your homeboys, your uncle?”
He arched a brow at her. She wiped more sweat off her forehead.
“Did I miss some option? ’Cause I can’t think of anything else.”
“I think I want to get drunk.”
“Maybe do that bag of blow, too?”
“Ay, why not? And then . . .” He made a pistol of his hand and pretended to shoot himself. The same wooden face that she’d seen on Oscar. Worn, warped, self-haunted. It hurt to see it again. And then it made her mad.
“Why is it always violence with you guys? Why is that option one?”
He looked at her like she’d asked him why things drop to the ground. “Why you sometimes so stupid?” he asked.
She sipped her beer. It needed a lime. She needed to talk him out of this. He needed to see how close he was. It seemed like everything was off one notch, everything was just short. They were this close. After everything, so close. And he was ready to give up.
Gustavo breathed through his nose like a bull. In the little whistle of his nostrils, she realized that she was listening closer to everything. The emptiness of the place, the way a set-down beer bottle sounded on the bar, the silence on the tile, the bartender shuffling around in back. She yearned to hear what was outside too. What was coming for them cocked and loaded.
It wasn’t just that she was so close to finishing this. She was sure that time was running out.
“You don’t want to do it,” she said. She didn’t know if this was so, but it was important to say. If only to nudge him away from it.
“Chingate. You don’t know.” Gustavo rose from his chair slightly, and for a moment she thought he might leave. “Otro whiskey,” he called to the bartender.
The man nodded, poured a shot, and brought it over and set it before Gustavo and gathered their empty glasses. She waited for him to leave.
“You’ve been threatening it for days. But you told me about the tunnel so I’d have to help you escape. You made me save you.”
He grunted vaguely.
“It isn’t easy to kill yourself,” she added.
“And how you know?”
“Because I watched a man do it.”
He searched her face to see if this was true.
“And you don’t have the ingredients,” she said. “You’re running . . . from something in here.” She tapped her temple.
“Psh. Don’t be so stupid.”
“Quit calling me stupid.”
“Quit stupid talking.”
“Come on, we’ve been together for a little while now. You’ve got a conscience. I know you do.”
He cocked his head, confused, irritated.
“No se que quieres decir. Conscious? Estas diciendo, I’m knowing?”
“No, no. Conscience. As in your heart, you know, your morals . . . your feelings about what you’ve done. I wouldn’t want to live with myself if I’d done . . .”
He was waving his hands in the air as though he could swat down her words. When she trailed off, he looked at her. Then he laughed, a big booming guffaw. The men at the bar turned to look.
“¿Qué?” he asked. “My feelings?”
“The workers you killed,” she said in a low voice. “They weren’t narcos, they were your men.”
“They took the jobs. They understood risks. That’s why the pay was very big.”
“But they didn’t get to spend it, did they?”
“Wives did, children did. Somebody spent the money!” He slapped the table, which wobbled under his fat palm. He leaned toward her over little ponds of spilled beer, touched his head with an index finger. “The dead are not in here.” He touched his heart. “Not in here too.” He drank the whiskey and set the glass on the table like a man plunking down a winning domino.
Fuck. This isn’t working.
Somehow she had it all wrong. She’d gotten soft on him, spending all this time together. Grafting a morality onto him that wasn’t there. Maybe they weren’t close at all, maybe there was too much ground to cover. Maybe she’d never close the distance.
She stood. She needed to move to clear out her head, to clear out the moment. She took her beer to the bar, a few stools down from the day-drinkers. She clocked the man in board shorts clocking her. The bartender came over.
“Limón?” she asked, making a pinching gesture at her beer bottle.
The bartender nodded and fetched a vivid green lime from behind the bar and cut it in half and then into wedges.
Board Shorts said something then, maybe to her, but too fast for her to understand.
“Lo siento?” she said, returning his smile.
“He says your feet are naked,” the bartender said. He looked at Board Shorts and then at her.
“They are,” she said with a forced grin. “The tile is nice and cool.”
“He says to be careful,” the bartender said, even though Board Shorts had not said anything more. Maybe he’d said that at first.
Now all three men were looking at her, the one in the western shirt leaning forward to see her down the bar.
“Tell him I am careful,” she said flatly. Then to him herself: “Gracias.”
Board Shorts nodded. Went back to his beer. The bartender finished chopping the limes and spiffed open a new beer and put one in the bottle and set it before her.
“Oh thanks, but you didn’t need to give me a new beer—”
He held up a finger and took her bottle away and touched the other toward her almost artfully with a single finger. His hair was slicked back with pomade and his eyes cinnamon colored and he recalled a hot waiter she’d seen at a wedding once, she’d loved the old-school way he did his hair, it was often little things like that that made the difference, and she was thinking of this when Board Shorts said something else. Again, a sentiment she did not catch, but definitely sent in her direction.
She turned to him and a dread washed over her at his expression—she knew this look, a kind of contempt that radiated from certain men who drank in the daytime. A derision that she now knew was there from the moment he first spoke, but which she had chosen to chalk up to her own poor Spanish.
She felt keenly vulnerable in her bare feet now. In this situation. In the glare of this horrid man’s sneer. Her utter lack of jurisdiction or even a badge—which she now realized was tucked up her bag still at Moman’s (dead Moman!). All this exposed in a leer.
Harbaugh was furious. And, she realized, totally unafraid. Did this man have any idea what she had been through, what killers had hounded her, what killers had failed to kill her, what she was made of and faced down, what utter—
“What did you say?” she barked at the man. “¿Qué tu decir?”
Board Shorts just muttered to his partner out the side of his mouth.
She looked at the bartender, who stood with the benign indifference of a baron or bishop.
Before she knew it, she had the .40 in her palm on the bar. The thud of its weight had alerted them all, even Gustavo behind her. She could hear him shift in his seat.
The bartender’s calculation was to stand stock-still.
The other two looked alternately from the gun to her face, as though their eyes were tethered between both and could not escape.
“I asked what you said.”
The bartender repeated her sentence in Spanish, or maybe said something else altogether.
The man in board shorts swallowed, nothing more.
“That’s right,” she said.
Back at the table time stopped or slowed to nothing. Still enveloped in her own white-hot rage—these fucking guys think they can talk to me like some dumb bitch?—and stewing in the quick brine of that degrading pig’s common shit-talk at the bar, she could taste her indignation on her tongue . . . when all at once she realized what Gustavo’s trouble was, his defining psychological iceberg: the guy was an eight-ball of pure, uncut resentment.
He didn’t give a damn about anyone he’d killed or anyone he’d left alive or anyone he’d ever loved. From as far back as the moment she handed him her card, he was less a personality than a vessel of self-loathing.
That’s the way in.
As she sat down and gazed upon him in this new light, she saw a man looking back at her with an almost perfect inversion of her knowing, a face in total confusion.
“Why you do that?” he asked.
“ ’Cause I don’t play.”
“Play?”
“People can’t talk to me like that.”
“He said what?”
She had no idea. “I have no idea.”
Sunlight flooded the room, vanished.
“They leaving,” Gustavo said, alarmed.
“Makes sense.”
“They will return.”
“Looks like the bartender has cleared out too.”
“We gotta walk now.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Probably. But tell me something first. Why did you leave the cartel?”
“What?”
She enunciated every word: “Why did you leave the cartel?”
“I understand the question,” he said. “I said what porque you know why I run. They want to kill me.” He stood, nodded his head toward the door. “Come on. Vamos.”
“Sit down a second. How did you know your uncle was going to kill you?”
“They all got killed. I told you. All the workers.”
“I know, I know. The workers did. But you’re in the CDG, hell, you’re family—”
“I said before, family don’t matter no more. They—”
“You keep saying it doesn’t matter, but is El Esquimal in the business of killing family? He has children, doesn’t he?”
Gustavo waved a hand at her. “His children are protected. He sends them at school in Europe, at hotels in Arabia, de vacaciones—”
“Nieces and nephews. Your cousins. Has he wanted to kill anyone else in the family? Uncles? Anybody?” She’d guessed right. There was no else, she could tell by looking at him. No one prominent anyway. “But you followed orders. You built the tunnel. You even killed all those men who worked on it.”
“I did not pull the trigger.”
“You let it go down. You were a good lieutenant, a boss.”
He sat back, his eyes searching hers for whatever she was getting at.
“Weren’t you?”
“Sí. Era el mero mero,” he said defiantly, crossing his arms.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The best, the toughest man.”
She had him.
“So if you were el mero mero,” she said, staring into him, “why’d they want you dead?”
Gustavo’s face darkened. He started blinking. He looked away. He shook his head.
She pressed the lime into her bottle and tipped it upside down and watched it gingerly drown upward into the beer.
“Why would your uncle want to kill someone as useful as you?”
Then she turned the bottle, slowly, right side up, and slid her thumb just so, and the carbonation spiffed out steady and neat. No mess. Her father had taught her this, shown her how to avoid spraying the pent-up beer all over the place.
“Hmm?” she asked.
“No se.”
“Oh, come on. You have no idea why they’re willing to sacrifice you?”
“No se,” he repeated.
“What’s this little bitch answer you keep giving me, ‘no se’?”
He looked at her like he’d been slapped.
“Did you matter to them or not? You can answer that.”
He arched back in his chair to get into his jeans pocket, and then, keeping the baggie in his lap, lifted a finger full of coke to his nose.
“Why was I to build the tunnel?” He sniffed and cleared his throat and then did another before pocketing the bag again. “They chose me, that’s all.”
“Sure,” she said. “Or maybe they chose you because they were always going to kill you once you’d done the job for them. Maybe it was always going to end this way.”
“No.”
“Maybe family only ever meant something to you, not them. Not your uncle. Maybe to him you were someone capable enough for the job, someone who’d wipe out all the workers, but not trusted enough to keep it secret. Maybe they let you think you were el mero—”
He stopped her by putting his hand over hers. He dropped his head.
When he addressed her, he was holding her hand like a groom.
“Every vato knows I am el sobrinito, the nephew. They knew always. I feel them taunting me when I leave the room. But also, I don’t know! Maybe I could be wrong. Because no one says nothing, no one treats me like different or nothing. I am family, right? They don’t fuck with me. So I’m thinking then I’m just . . .”
“. . . paranoid.”
He looked up at her, eyes wasted and cracked. “Yes, that. Paranoid.” He licked his lips and went on. “Porque I never did nothing wrong, they got no reason for this.” He took his hand away, clenched his fists.
“When were you sure? Tell me what happened.” She needed him to remember it. He’d go with her if he felt this again. The disrespect again. “Tell me.”
“Nothing I could say was certain. Like, vatos not looking at you, but through you, like I’m a window or something like that. No one tells things happening, I have to ask for news. The talk stops when I enter the room. You know, things of this way.”
“And when they put you in charge of the tunnel . . .”
Say it. Admit it out loud.
“Then I know I am deleted.” He released his hands, palms up and open. His eye was on the door, then back at her. They’ll have to go soon, but she almost has him. This close.
“But you knew you were in trouble long before that,” she said.
“What you mean?”
“When you were arrested in the States and took my card, you knew. And you know why you kept the card and eventually reached out to me?”
His eyes flashed around in some emotional algebra, some reckoning of what he could admit to himself and to her.
He wiped his nose. His breathing slowed, his face softened.
“Ay, I know why I keep the card,” he said. “Respeto. Me you treat con respeto.”
“And I promise I will continue to treat you that way right to the end. You can believe that.”
He sighed. He nodded.
She stood up, adjusted the gun in her waistband. It was time.
“We’re gonna see your uncle go to a Supermax prison where he’ll be all alone forever. We’re gonna cripple the Cartel del Golfo. We’re gonna show them what a mistake it was to not respect you.”
She made to move, and he held up a finger. He dug into his pants and set a key on the table.
“What’s this?”
“To get into the tunnel. In Piedras Negras. You take it.”
He looked at the door.
“We have time for another whiskey?” he asked.
She didn’t know, but she went behind the bar and fetched the bottle. The place was empty and possessed the contentment of a vacated chapel. She padded over to Gustavo. Even though all hell would break loose in a few moments, it was hard not to feel like the running was over, all troubles were past, that the end was just a couple shots of whiskey away.