Cool in Tucson (24 page)

The staticky voice said something and the nearby voice went on, “Affirmative, I have it in sight.  You want to send a tow?  Uh…no, no keys.  Locked, yes.  Roger, I’ll hold.” 

Hector eased up in the stairwell till he could just see over the top step.  A young officer stood by the open door of his squad car, facing away from the stairs with the mike in his hand.  He looked relaxed and easy, chewing gum.  Hector thought about Ace’s Ruger right here in the bag, eight rounds left in it. 
I could blow his
head off right now
.  He held the thought for about ten seconds, enjoying the feeling of power it gave him, before he told himself,
Forget it.  They’d follow you forever
.

The officer was looking around the parking ramp, and as his head turned toward the stairwell Hector ducked and went quickly back down to the door and pulled it open.  The ticket stub fell to the floor as he went through.  He closed the door quietly, walked back up the aisle and went out through the lobby into the still-hot night.  He turned away from the bright lights to his right, around the corner onto darker Edison and into Tahoe Park where, earlier, Denny had pointed to the pajama-clad boys practicing Tai-kwan-do.     

The tiny park was dimly lighted, but empty and quiet now.  Hector moved into the shadow of some bordering bushes, took his phone out of its holster, pulled up his speed-dial menu and called a cab.

Ace had made him put that taxi number on there.  “If I ever need to pull out and leave you I will,” he said on their first night together, “and then if you’re lucky you might need a ride home.” 
Good ol’ Ace, all heart. 
   

Waiting for his cab made him wonder if that little girl named Denny had found her way home yet.  Was she sitting in her house, holding his money in her thin hands, smiling?  He got mad all over again, double and triple mad from having to squat in the bushes listening to that police car—he could still hear it up there on the top level of the ramp, the radio squawking away. 

The tow truck arrived while he waited for his cab.  There was a lot of talk and maneuvering, the
beep beep beep
of the truck backing up, and then the whole procession came down, the tow truck pulling the old brown Dodge backwards, the squad car behind with its roof lights flashing.  Hector watched, burning with anger, longing to put a shot through the cop’s windshield.  He hugged himself, trying to calm down. 
Be cool
. 
You
still got your papers and
your
gun and Ace’s car
. 

Ace’s car
.  He said it over and over, as he walked around the block to wait in front of Bookman’s, where he’d said he would meet the taxi. 
Long as I got Ace’s car, I’m  still in business. Just gonna revise the plan a little. Take this cab home, get my gear and money outa there . Go get Ace’s car, drive it to that address on Lurlene Street and find the freaky kid with the braids. Get my money back from her — the easy way or the hard way, however she wants it. And then get out of this town.  

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Didn’t it just figure?  All the other aggravations he’d already dealt with today, and now he got one of them freaky Mooslims for a taxi driver.  Had on some kinda long gray dress with a vest thing, a full beard and bushy black hair around a white cap.  Kind of a guy Hector and his buds called Ali Outzenfree, Indian from fucking India for Chrissake, not one you could talk to from down here on the rez.

            Hector said, “You know where Ohio Street is?”

“South of the highway, is it not?”  Talked English like the Queen of England with a lilt.

“Uh-huh.  Take I-10 to I-19 and I’ll tell you from there.” 

When they got to his neighborhood Hector had him drive right past his house, turn left on Fifteenth and come back up on Missouri.  Most of the yards looked like trash heaps, car bodies sitting on blocks, piles of lumber and old furniture.  Hector’s house was old and beat-up, but Mama kept it neat. 

He didn’t see anybody watching the house, so he directed the driver back to Sixth Avenue and got out in front of Playa de Mariscos.  When he paid the ten dollars he owed, almost all the change he had left on him, he said, “Fifty more in it for you if you’ll wait for me here.”

“I can not wait more than fifteen minutes.” 

“That’ll do.”  Hector walked back down Ohio, circled into the alley, unlocked the little iron gate and moved silently into his own back yard.  His mother had a ramada in the yard where she did some cooking and laundry and sometimes snoozed in a hammock.  Hector sat among the pots and jars for two minutes, listening.  Nothing moved.  The only sound was a dog barking a couple of blocks away. 

He turned his key in the back door and eased inside, moved past the soft breathing of his sisters on the daybed and stopped by his mother’s open bedroom door.  She turned over and groaned in her sleep; he stood listening to the whir and trickle of the swamp cooler in her window till her breathing was regular again.

The hinges on his bedroom door squeaked a little.  He took his time and closed the door from the inside before he turned on one tiny lamp on his dresser. 

First the money
.  He was a little too big to get all the way under his bed, but he knew exactly where the loose tile was.  He stretched, and in a minute had the tight roll of bills in his hand.  He sat on the floor by the bed to unwrap it —his own two thousand, saved up one bill at a time over four months.  The cash in Ace’s bag, unexpected riches, had felt like good times.  This money still smelled like baking soda, sweat and fear—afternoons in the single-wide, nights in the car with Ace.  It was wages, earned the hard way with hustle and worry, and as usual not nearly enough. 

For now it was all he had, though, and losing Ace’s white envelope had taught him something: keeping all your money in one place was bullshit.  He stuck a fifty in each of the two big cargo pockets of his pants, slid a couple of bills into pockets in Ace’s windbreaker and zipped them up.  The new canvas duffel he had recently bought and sneaked into the house was under the bed in its box.  He slid it out carefully, trying not to scrape, and opened it on the bed.  He was packing, sliding hundred dollar bills into socks and underwear and tucking them into neat zippered pockets in the bag, when his door swung open and there stood Mama with the hammer in her hand.

“Hey Mama,” he whispered, pushing money under a pile of shorts, getting his smile started, “did I wake you up?”

“What’s going on?”  Tiny and wild-eyed in her blue nightgown, hair flying around, toenails long and ragged on her bare feet.  She stared at the half-packed bag.  “You getting ready to go someplace, Hector?” 

“Mama, put the hammer down, I’m sorry if I scared you.”  He reached out for it but she backed up a step.

“What happened to you Monday night?” If she got mad enough she still might hit him with that hammer.  She had not raised three kids by herself in south Tucson without having plenty of juice.  “You forget where you live?”

“Hey, I called you Tuesday morning, remember?”

“Uh-huh.  From Benson.  Said you’d be home in a few hours.  What, Benson got moved farther down the road?”

“Well—” He shrugged helplessly, his hands held wide.

“Well—” she imitated his gesture.  “So now it’s almost Thursday morning and I’m asking, where you been?  And where do you think you’re going?

“I been around, Mama, right around here in Tucson.”  He tried a lofty tone.  “I had business.” 

“Oh, business, listen to the big tycoon.  I had a call from your parole officer, that’s what I
had.  You forget you were suppose to check in yesterday?”

“Guess I did.”  It seemed like a hundred years since he had cared about that nagging little prick.  He pulled a couple of new shirts, still in their plastic wrap, out of the back of the closet.  Didn’t care if she saw them now.  He had been hiding his preparations for weeks, but now he tossed in the new chinos he had clipped to the coat hanger inside his raincoat.  “Don’t matter, I’m leaving anyway.”   

They had started out whispering but Mama’s whisper had quickly turned into her normal voice so Hector spoke up too.  As they got louder, his sisters appeared in the doorway, clinging to each other, their eyes wide with fear.  “What’s happening?” Luz asked, and then, relieved, “Oh, Hector’s home!”  They ran to him with hugs.  They imitated Mama, who usually acted as if he walked on water.  Mama followed the old Mexican ways that said the man should be king in his house.  Till she got angry—then you better be ready to duck. 

Hector had worried so much about what Mama would say when she found out he was leaving, that in the end he’d decided it would be better for everybody if he didn’t tell her.  Without really admitting it to himself in so many words, he had intended to sneak away and call her later from Mexico.   

But now the taxi was waiting, Evil Mama’s car was in the hands of the police with, come to think of it, his fingerprints all over it, and the neighbors on Princeton Drive might decide to report those gunshot noises any time.  And he had just realized he never thought to pick up the shell casings from the last two bullets he fired into Estes the Bestest.  So his mother’s anger was no longer his biggest worry.  He brushed his sisters aside, walked past his mother without looking at her, went into the bathroom and got his shaving gear and toothbrush and came back and put them in another of the clever little pockets in the new duffel.  He took the Gatorade bottle out of the Trader Joe’s bag, folded the bag as flat as it would go with the gun and wallet and jacket inside, and laid it on top of the rest of his gear.  The duffel wasn’t quite full, so it sagged a little when he zipped it shut. 

“Mama,” he said, “I gotta go.”

She was still holding the hammer, but Hector watched her expression fade from rage to sorrow and knew she wasn’t going to use it on him.  “Twenty years’ hard work since I started to carry you,” she said, “all I get is, ‘Mama, I gotta go’?”

Damn,
why did everything have to be so hard?  He remembered one of his uncles saying, “Women always want more.”  He picked up the new duffel and walked to her side, gave her a quick hug with one arm and moved away fast so she couldn’t grab him.  Didn’t need to worry about that, though.  Her body felt stiff as a stick and she never moved.  “I’ll call soon,” he said, “take care now.”  She stared past him into the closet, didn’t even turn her head when he walked away. 

Maria Elena said softly, “’Bye, Hector.”   Luz ventured one quick, scared little bye-bye wave, watching her mother covertly.  He moved quickly through the back yard, stopped to lock the back gate, and still got back to the taxi in fourteen minutes.  The driver was hunched over the wheel with all the doors locked, spooked by the neighborhood.  Hector knocked on the back window and laughed when the guy jumped.  When Ali finally got a rear door open Hector got in and said, “Okay, my man, time to go get my wheels.  Take me to the Fry’s store at Kolb and Golf Links.”    

  “First I must get my fifty,” the man said, and Hector, grunting with irritation, dug one out of his right-hand pocket.  The driver grabbed it and drove out of there fast.  Hector sat back against the seat and let his mind go blank.  No use figuring out anything more till he was in the Excursion and ready to hit the road.  Then he’d decide how to get his money back from the hellcat with the braids.  But he wanted that feeling, of the big powerful car under him, before he forced himself to decide anything more.  All he knew right now was that it had to be quick. 

Pulling into Fry’s lot, he told the cabbie to drive around to the back of the store.  

As soon as they rounded the corner he could see the big shiny rear end of the Ford poking out between a couple of employees’ cars.  And right behind it,
shit shit
shit! 
Another one of those blue-and-white patrol cars was pulled up crosswise, fucking light strip flashing like a goddamn merry-go-round, pale green light inside from the PC screen on the dash.  Behind the wheel, big motherfucking goddamn shitforbrains Tucson cop talking on his fucking cell phone, stupid fuckhead!