36: A Novel Read online

  “What the fuck is there to talk about? If you could pull enough strings to get me out, then you must have my record.”

  I had forced myself to calm. To start thinking. Planning. All I needed was to get free of my restraints. He might be a big, strong fucker, but I’d had the best fighting education in the world. A maximum security prison. You either fought and won, became a bitch, or died. I had avoided options two and three for ten years.

  “Records are so impersonal, but yes. Let’s start there.”

  He reached into his jacket for a folded sheaf of papers. Plucking a pair of wire framed reading glasses from another pocket, he placed them on his face and peered at the file.

  “Up until eleven years ago you’d never had a run in with the authorities. Then you decided to smuggle drugs across the border from Mexico. Twelve kilos of heroin, to be exact. You must have thought you were going to make it, too. Made it almost all the way to Casa Grande, Arizona before a sheriff’s patrol spotted you crossing the desert.

  “They intercepted you. Chased you for a couple of miles across some pretty rough country until you broke an axle. But you didn’t give up. You fought when they tried to arrest you. Killed both deputies and kept running. They arrested you that evening, outside your apartment. Everything correct so far?”

  He cut his eyes up and looked over the top rim of his glasses. With a sigh, I nodded.

  “You were tried and convicted of drug smuggling and the murder of two police officers. Your trial lasted three years, then the penalty phase another four. It’s not in your file, but as I recall, your defense attorney found some irregularities with the prosecutor’s evidence and the trial kept getting delayed as the lawyers filed motion after motion.

  “Eventually your conviction was upheld and you were sentenced to death for the murders. But here’s what I find fascinating. Your claim of innocence. That you were coerced and only defending yourself. That was never presented to the jury. I was in the viewing room for your execution. Do you remember your last words?”

  “I’m innocent,” I said, staring hard at him.

  “Tell me about it,” he said, folding the file and removing his glasses.

  6

  Eleven Years Ago

  It was hotter than hell. Just as hot as I remembered it being in Iraq. At least here you didn’t have to worry about being shot just for walking down the street. Well, at least not too much. But it was fucking hot.

  Late afternoon. June in Phoenix, Arizona, 118 Fahrenheit in the shade. The sidewalk had been baking in the sun since five in the morning and I could feel the heat even through my thick-soled work boots. The bus I’d just stepped off of pulled away from the curb, a thick cloud of stinking diesel fumes swirling around me and sticking to my sweat soaked clothes.

  Another day of roofing rich peoples’ houses was done and all I wanted was to go to my shit hole apartment and take a cold shower. But I knew that wouldn’t happen. When the weather was this hot, the water coming out of the tap was warmer than the ancient water heater could get it in the winter.

  I trudged the six blocks home, thankful for the long sleeves and hat that protected my skin from the blistering sun. Reaching the run-down complex that was the best I could afford, I gave a wide berth to the two buildings where a minor street gang lived.

  Los Locos was what they called themselves. They were minor thug wannabes, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous. They ranged in age from barely thirteen to their jefe, who was no more than 25. I was pretty sure there weren’t any of them that hadn’t done time either in juvenile detention, county jail or state prison. And they always traveled in packs of at least five.

  I’d never had a problem with them as I made a concerted effort to mind my own business and keep to myself. Somehow, I’d managed to stay off their radar. Still, I always made sure the Russian pistol I’d taken off a dead insurgent in Iraq and smuggled back into the country was loaded and easily accessible in my pack. Not that I wanted a fight, but sometimes assholes don’t give you a choice.

  One advantage to the summer heat was that none of them were outside as I entered the apartment complex grounds. They would be holed up inside, most likely still sleeping. Just like vampires, they would start emerging when the sun went down and the temperature changed from fucking hot to just hot. By then, I planned to be showered, have had dinner and be settled in for the night.

  Keep my head down and don’t draw attention. That’s how I’d survived two tours as an infantry soldier in Sandland, and that’s how I was surviving now. Do my job, earn my paycheck and maintain a low profile. I was scheduled to start school in the fall, attending a local community college as part of my benefits for four years of service. Nothing was going to fuck that up.

  Unlocking the two deadbolts that secured my front door, I stepped into what felt like a furnace. Air conditioning was expensive, and I couldn’t afford to leave it running while I was at work. Stepping over to the undersized unit that had been cut into an exterior wall, I turned it to maximum cool and the ancient thing wheezed to life.

  Sometime around midnight it might drop the temperature in my small place to the low 80s. If I was lucky. I turned on a couple of thrift store fans to get the hot air moving and dropped my pack on the cracked and peeling kitchen floor. Taking a barely cool beer from a fridge that was probably older than I am, I looked around my castle while taking a deep pull on the bottle.

  Water stained ceilings. Old, single pane windows that did little to keep the heat out. Lots of cracks and a few holes in the drywall and a ratty carpet on the living room floor that was some indeterminate shade of shit brown. All things considered, it was a palace compared to some of the hovels I’d seen in Iraq.

  Finishing my beer, I dropped the bottle in a waste can and headed for the shower. Even hot water would feel good as it washed the sweat, dirt and grime of the day off my body. Turning the faucet on, I stripped while the pipes in the wall banged as water began flowing.

  For several minutes it ran brown, giving off a stink I’d never been able to identify. Slowly it cleared, and after nearly five minutes it was good enough that I was willing to step under the sputtering stream. My head was shaved for the summer, so it didn’t take long to lather everything up and get clean.

  Stepping out of the shower, naked and dripping, I thought about Monica. She lived two doors down and was the only person I knew in the complex. A couple of years younger than me, she was a single mom who worked at the local Walmart.

  With her looks, she could have made a lot more money doing any number of things. But she was a good girl. Until we got in bed. Then she was a freak. Smiling, and still naked, I opened the bathroom door, intending to call her and see if she wanted to roll around in the sheets for a couple of hours.

  My place is small and the bathroom is close to the kitchen where I’d left my pack with a cheap prepaid cell phone inside. I was focused on thoughts of Monica’s naked, brown body and reached the kitchen in two quick strides. Looking down, I froze when I realized my bag wasn’t where I’d left it.

  Looking into the living room I saw two large men standing between me and the door. My pack was resting on the floor next to one of them. He was holding my Makarov pistol in his hand.

  “What the fuck?” I said, eyes locked on the weapon.

  There was an illegally short shotgun under the kitchen sink, and if he started to raise the pistol in my direction I was going to dive for it. Then I spotted the shotgun, unloaded, lying on my threadbare carpet by the far wall.

  “Hi Bob!” The man holding my pistol said in a bright, friendly voice. “Come on in and take a seat. We need to talk.”

  I was frozen in place. Naked. Caught completely off guard in my own home. The old anger swelled in my chest, but I tamped it down. At the moment I didn’t have a play.

  “C’mon, Bobby. We just want to talk to you. Have a seat.”

  The two men took a step away from each other and the one who hadn’t spoken moved his hand until it was resting
on a holstered pistol. I took a closer look, seeing the OD Green cargo pants and tan desert boots. The web belts with identical holstered pistols. Coyote tan t-shirts. Cops. What the fuck? I hadn’t done a goddamn thing.

  “What do you want?” I asked without moving.

  “I told you, Bob-O. We want to talk to you. Now quit standing there with your dick waving in the breeze and sit down. Please. That monster is making me nervous!”

  He laughed, his partner smiling. I looked at them for a few more beats and not coming up with any bright ideas, decided to do as they asked. Maybe I’d be able to get close enough to make a grab for one of their weapons.

  As I moved into the cramped living room, the talker took a couple of steps back to keep space between us. His partner did the same, putting his back against the front door and keeping his hand on the pistol butt. I sat on the couch, tucking my very flaccid cock between my legs and pressing them together.

  “Now, you may not like what we have to say, Bobberino. But you’d better behave. We can just as easily shoot you as not, and with this illegal shotgun, no one’s going to give a shit about you. So, you keep your ass glued to that couch and listen. Understand?”

  He smiled, reminding me of a shark. After a moment I nodded. My mind was swirling. Wondering what they wanted. Trying to come up with a plan to get to a weapon. But for the moment at least, I was fucked.

  “So here’s the deal. Your little brother was working for us and he really and truly screwed the pooch. That’s why we’re here.”

  “I haven’t seen him in months,” I said.

  Internally, I groaned. Tim, my little brother by five years, had always been into shortcuts. Easy money. Anyway he could get it. He’d work harder to pull off some harebrained scheme than I would roofing mansions in Scottsdale in the summer heat. But it was on his terms, which seemed to be all about not punching a clock or answering to a boss.

  My parents had spent a small fortune on lawyers for him over the years. They finally cut him off while I was on my second leisure cruise in Iraq. I’d seen him a couple of times since I’d been home.

  The first, he had been flush with cash, driving an Escalade and playing the big shot. Eight months later he’d shown up at my door in the middle of the night. He begged for money to pay a loan shark who was threatening to ventilate his kneecaps with a power drill.

  Against my better judgment, I’d cleaned out a savings account I’d had since junior high. He’d taken the money with promises of repaying me every penny, with interest. That was almost a year ago, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him since. But he was still my little brother.

  “What the fuck did he do?” I asked.

  “Well, Roberto. Let me tell you. He was working for us. Was supposed to bring some merchandise from old Mexico to us. But he was stupid. Instead of just picking it up and making the delivery, he took a side trip after collecting our property. Stopped at this little whorehouse in Nogales. Got his rocks off, then got in an argument with the proprietor who wanted more dinero. Seems little brother has some rather unconventional tastes. They accommodated him, but he didn’t have the cash to pay for the premium add-ons.

  “An argument turned into a fight, and he wound up as a guest of the Mexican government. Real shit hole prisons they got down there, too. Hot and cold running syphilis. Guys that don’t care what the hole they’re fucking is attached to. Gangs. Rats as big as dogs. Last I heard, little Timmy had become a bitch, being pimped out by a real nasty piece of work that runs the prison from the inside.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked with a sinking feeling.

  “Well I was just getting to that, Booby Boy! You see, we were able to get in and have a little chat with the Timster. He stashed our stuff before going to get laid, and he won’t tell us where it is unless we get him out and back home to the good ole US of A. Now ain’t that a bitch?”

  “So why don’t you get him out? What are you guys? Cops? Feds? Maybe Border Patrol?”

  “See, I told you this one was smart!”

  The talker turned to his partner and grinned. His partner nodded. He looked back at me and smiled even broader.

  “Well, to answer your question, Robby my man, nothing happens south of the border unless there’s cash changing hands. The prison warden wants a lot of American greenbacks to spring your baby bro. More than we’ve got.”

  “I ain’t got no fucking money,” I said. “Maybe ten bucks in my wallet ‘till payday next week. What the fuck do you want with me?”

  “We got to thinking,” he said. “What we need is for little Timmy to tell someone where he stashed our shit. Then that someone could retrieve it and bring it to us. Once that happens, we’ll have the cash to pay off the warden.

  “But he won’t tell just anyone. No, he doesn’t trust us. What we need is someone he will trust. That’s where you come in. You go see your little brother and convince him to tell you where he hid our property. Then you get it and bring it to us. You do that, we give you the cash to get him out.”

  He stood there watching me, smiling like a TV preacher who’s just revealed the secret to guarantee your place in heaven.

  “You think I was fuckin’ born yesterday? Why the hell would you give me money to get my brother out once you’ve got your drugs?”

  “Whoa, Bobster! Who said anything about drugs?”

  “That’s the only thing that gets smuggled in from Mexico that’s worth anything, asshole. Quit fucking talking around it and just call it what it is. You guys are cops of some kind, and you’re dirty. You’re drug dealers, or working for drug dealers. I think I’ll pass, but thanks for letting me know where Tim is.”

  “Now, that’s not exactly going to work,” he said. “You see, there’s more than one thing we can pay the warden down there to make happen. One is to release little Timbo. The other is to have one of the gangs slit his throat. And guess which is cheaper? Enough cash to get him a new smile carved into his neck? Hell, son. That’s cheap in Mexico. We’ve got that much squirreled away for a rainy day.

  “So, the choice is yours. You can do this, or you can tell us to fuck off and we’ll leave. But. If we leave, tomorrow morning we pay a visit to the warden and hand him a nice, fat envelope. Tim-Tim will be a corpse before lunch.”

  I wanted to come off the couch and beat these two guys to death. Part of me thought I was fast enough to pull it off. The thought must have shown on my face as the quiet one suddenly drew his weapon and held it in front of him in both hands. It wasn’t pointed directly at me, but he could have it on target and fire before my bare ass made it off the couch.

  7

  Nogales, Mexico reminded me of Iraq. Too much so. No one spoke the same language I did, and everyone looked at me with distrust in their eyes. That didn’t bother me. What did were the openly hostile looks I was receiving as I made my way through a dust choked neighborhood.

  Several times, young men who were sitting in the shade stood up and flashed guns. Challenging the gringo. Daring me. I studiously avoided making eye contact with them, keeping my gaze on the dirt road I was walking on.

  The pair of cops had given me two grand in cash before they left my apartment. That, and a slip of paper with a hand written phone number. I was supposed to go to Nogales and talk to my estranged brother. Convince him that he had no choice other than tell me where the drugs were. And promise him I’d be back to get him out.

  They had been gone for less than five minutes and I was still sitting on the couch thinking when there was a knock. Expecting they had come back for some reason, I didn’t bother making any attempt to cover my nudity before answering the door.

  I was surprised to see Monica Torres standing there, as beautiful as ever in a lightweight sundress. She looked me up and down and smiled.

  “Expecting me?” She asked playfully in thickly accented English.

  Stepping across the threshold, she kissed me lightly on the lips and gently raked her long, red nails across my bare upper thigh. I tingled f
rom head to toe, little Bob instantly responding to her presence. She came to an abrupt stop when she spotted the pistol and shotgun on the floor where the cops had left them. I closed the door, shot both the dead bolts home and moved behind her to circle my arms around her narrow waist.

  “What is going on, Roberto?”

  From the moment we met, she had insisted on using the Latin version of my name. I’m not sure she was even capable of uttering “Bob”.

  I thought about lying to her. I didn’t owe her any explanations. We were nothing more than what pop culture labeled as friends with benefits. A couple of times a week we got together and satisfied each others’ needs. That was it. But if that was it, why did I feel better when she was around?

  “It’s about my little brother.”

  I pulled her tight against me. Automatically she pressed her ass back against my growing erection, then paused and pushed away from me.

  “What’s wrong?” She asked, dark eyes full of concern.

  I don’t know for sure, but I think it was that exact moment when I fell in love with her. She was a good woman, and that had always been part of what attracted me to her. But the obvious concern for me, as well as someone she had never even known existed… well, it kind of melted my heart and pushed me over the edge. So I told her everything.

  “Do you trust them?” She asked when I finished speaking.

  By this time, we were both on the couch. Drinking the last of my beer. I was seated at an end and she was turned sideways. Her sandals were on the floor and her feet were in my lap, legs stretched the length of the small sofa.

  “Not as far as I can throw them,” I said, draining the bottle in my hand and leaning down to place it on the floor.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t have a choice,” I said, absently rubbing her smooth calves with one hand.

  “We always have choices, Roberto. They may not be the choices we want, but they are there.”

  She turned one of her feet sideways and wiggled her toes against my limp cock. Explaining my problems had killed my desire.