God Is a Bullet (23 page)

Case does the junkie nose-play shit: sniffing, wiping. She starts with the edgy body ticks. She motions with her head toward the van, tries to bait them out. “I see Granny Boy has got himself a little sex kitten.”

A denuded stare between Gutter and Wood. Punk rhetoric in posturing.

“From birthmarks to teeth marks to needle marks,” says Wood as he winks at Gutter.

“I can smell that Tijuana perfume from here,” says Gutter, sitting back now and watching Case even more closely.

Tijuana perfume. Their old crack about teenage pussy. Unless they scragged some other piece, it had to be her. Had to be …

Errol trails behind Cyrus as he cruises past the bartender. The bartender is a taller man with white hair who carries himself like a judge, or a felon held in high regard. He and Cyrus exchange a few words in Spanish, and the bartender reaches toward a key rack on the back wall. He tosses Cyrus a motel key. Cyrus leans over the bar and the men share private whisperings. The bartender nods diplomatically, then they both make fists and the backs of their hands meet, pentagram to pentagram.

Cyrus turns to Errol. “Party time.”

The Cherokee pulls around the bar into a large open field of weeds, mud, and rusty artless shapes of metal. Electric lights are strung along cables from the back door of the bar to a chorus of Port-O-Sans broken into two groups, each with its own hand-painted sign—one of a naked man, the other of a naked woman. One last bullet-riddled Port-O-San sits off by itself at the edge of an incline, with its own hand-painted sign, of a man taking it up the ass.

The Cherokee pulls up and the van squares alongside it. Case does a read of the situation. She could probably do Gutter and Wood before they even caught on. Probably. Probably get to the van. Maybe it wouldn’t be easy to kill Lena dead on. Maybe not even possible. And what about Granny Boy? It’s the longest twenty feet in the world if you fuck up.

“I know why you’re here,” Bob whispered. “I know. And you lied to me in the worst way.”

She stood there waiting, facing off with him in the magnificence all bad temper affords
.

“I’m looking at you,” he said. “Through the cheap banality of your lies.” He roughed her shirt up. “ ‘I’ll help get her back. Otherwise, if we get close enough, maybe Cyrus will kill her quick.’ Right? Isn’t that what you told …”

She has just a few seconds of luxury to look into the heart of her own debate. Cyrus steps out into the night. He stops just a few feet past the door from which strings of lightbulbs emanate out to the Port-O-Sans.

She is shoved out of the Cherokee. Other car doors open. Slam shut. A few words are spoken. But she is focused on one thing: Cyrus. He walks toward her through the mud.

She could kill him, at least. She could do that no matter what. Blow his whole cosmic empire to ass-dust with as many shots as she can get off.

But she doesn’t. She is not sure if she is suddenly afraid for her own life or if he has some power over her. And what about the child? What would happen to her in the minutes after the fall?

As Cyrus comes up to her he puts his arms out in the way of all kindness. “As Son of Sam wrote so correctly,

When he is just a few feet away she becomes deathly afraid for her own life, but she fights herself past it. Just a few good hours, minutes, and she might get close enough to the girl. She puts her hands out. “Can I come home … please? Can I co—”

He hits her square in the face. Blood shoots out the piping of both nostrils. She falls backward into the mud and lands square on her ass. She totters toward unconsciousness. Lena starts toward her crying, but Cyrus orders her back.

A few of the factory boys are talking by the jakes. They look at the bloody thing sitting there. Cyrus squats down beside Case. He can hear the factory boys talking up their manhood. He stares back at them and offers a few choice threats in Spanish, and Gutter puts an exclamation point to the whole business with a shotgun tapping the window frame of the open Cherokee door. They move off into the darkness silently.

Cyrus turns to Errol. He holds up the motel key and waves it. “You wanted a little blood.”

“I saw Maureen the other night,” Arthur says.

“I know,” John Lee says.

“You do. She told you?”

“No, Arthur, her mouth stays closed only for me. But the moment you picked this shanty of a bar I knew something was wrong. I was hoping maybe you’d knocked somebody up, something interesting like that, but …”

The Bugle is a pit stop out on Sierra Highway. A place that’s earned its reputation for afternoon drunks and for the recorded jazz version of taps they play at last call. The place is run by a proprietress with huge sagging breasts, index-finger-long painted-on eyebrows, and a pirate bandanna turbaned around her head to cover up a bald spot. The place even has a cooler of sorts for milk, butter, cheese, and cold
cuts, which works as a cover to the state so drunks who live on food stamps have a watering hole where they can waste their lives away.

“You got to lay off Maureen, friend. I mean it.”

John Lee’s eyes narrow. “Do you really think there is such a thing as friendship? I don’t mean like when you’re kids. When you’re kids you’re just moments and friendship is those moments. But when the horse is out of the gate and you’re racing through the adulthood of your life—the hard years, Arthur—do you think there’s such a thing as friendship? Or are all friendships just excuses to get things you want? Need. Get things accomplished. Close deals.”

Arthur looks out across the bar from the dark back table by the washroom where they sit. “I don’t like where this is going.”

“You don’t like where we’ve been, do you, friend?”

“I don’t.”

John Lee leans forward. “Our friendship is the past. Lest we forget.” He smiles. “But we have our good days, don’t we? As for the old lady …”

“I know she had an affair with Sam.”

This gives John Lee pause. “How do you know this?”

“Sarah told me.”

“Sarah … not Maureen?”

“Sarah.”

“You’re lying.”

“She told me a week before the murders.”

“And you said nothing to me?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“But you’re willing to hurt me now.”

“I do not want you hurting your wife.”

“What makes you think that’s what we fought about, if she didn’t tell you?”

“You will not hit her again.”

“Or? Will you put me up for public scandal? Am I to be
thrown out of the temple with the money changers? The cunt went right to you—”

“Do you want Gabi found?”

John Lee can hear himself shifting against the leather booth.

Arthur continues. “Your wife was having an affair with one of the victims of a homicide. It might seem to some that you wouldn’t be in a position to devote yourself cleanly to solving that crime. Some might wonder,
if
those facts become part of the public record. I would be forced to wonder myself.”

“So we’re not talking about Maureen anymore, are we?”

“I am talking about you.”

“You don’t give a shit about Maureen. This is just a come-on to keep faith with your business partner and social standings.”

“Find Gabi. I mean it. Find her.”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

“I think you’re beating your wife and watching your videos and—”

“Have you heard from Bob and his junkie queen? How they doin’ out there on the road? What would some think of that? Why didn’t you stop them? Huh? And how much did you subsidize them? Huh? You mind your fuckin’ business now …”

Arthur sits back. He rubs his palms against the wooden tabletop. He sits there like a great boar caught in the brush and unable to decide whether to charge or back off.

John Lee looks into the stark pattern of half-light the bar affords, where wayfarers drink and ramble through the small talk of their lives. How many, he wonders, carry the secret of murder within them?

“Maybe you and I overreached ourselves, Arthur. Maybe there’s no difference between us and that collection over there except for one clean shot.”

He presses his jaw in the direction of the bar, where the
proprietress is belly-laughing at some private joke with a collection of garrulous barstoolers.

Arthur does a slow turn through John Lee’s cryptic comments: We have the good ole days … Maybe we overreached ourselves back then … The difference between us and them is one shot … Arthur eyes his “old friend.” “Are you fuckin’ with me? Threatening me? Warning me?”

John Lee stands quietly.

“Did you go after Sam? Did you hire someone to go after him? Do you know what happened at the house?”

John Lee does not ignore the questions, he just lets them dangle there in space. He drops down cash for the bill. As he goes to leave, Arthur heavily grabs him by the hand.

“Sarah’s death,” he whispers, frightened, “Gabi … It wouldn’t have anything to do with—”

“Don’t go there,” John Lee warns, “unless you are prepared for the fuckin’ outcome.”

A small tracer is wedged up into the dashboard of the Dakota, knocking out its yellow heartbeat signal on a marked grid. The signal has been holding steady for the last ten minutes, making it at least humanly possible for Bob to track Case. Bob drives south on Benito Juarez to where Mexicali breaks away into a gallery of arroyos and stream-beds.

He’d sewn a bug into the canvas coat he’d thrown to Case. He had hidden the coat behind the Dakota’s front seat on the chance Case fucked him over and split with the truck somewhere on the road. Now it’s his only lifeline to her.

The miles go by in slow black. He’s alone there on the road but for a few rigs blistering past him up toward the border.
Moving south through that trace of scraped-out turf, Bob passes great scaffolds of metal abandoned along the roadside. They loom large as girdered dinosaurs against a moon come back from the clouds, thanks to a gulf wind. Most of it is toxic waste; drums and columns, laths and welding joints.

Now and then Bob can see pathetics loading trucks and makeshift pickups with scrap to sell in the colonias. The wound across his chest rages and he rages back, feeling he is part of that ferric landscape. A part of its dire reckonings.

Cyrus has Gutter and Wood drag Case through the reeking mud and into the Cherokee. Errol tries to back off from the whole business, but Cyrus edges him toward the van with a look that is childlike and bemused and wholly without sincerity.

From the back door the bartender watches the two vehicles cross that sumpy prado toward a fake adobe horseshoe-shaped motel on the far road. He smokes a gnarled cigarillo and regrets missing the skelterish pricking that may go down in that room while he serves headless mules.

The motel used to be a whorehouse that catered to Anglos who preferred their stuff with a little color in it. Now it’s a roach hole for factory workers stacked sixteen to a room. Except for the back two units. One is where the bartender lives; the other is a playpen of sorts that’s seen a little blood in its time.

When they pull up by those grimly attired units and try to get Case out of the car, Gutter finds her gun. He hands it off to Cyrus without anyone else seeing. Cyrus holds the gun in both hands, staring at it as if it were a piece of petty foolishness. He slips it into his pocket.

They half-carry Case in, shunting her between the shoulders of Granny Boy and Wood. Lena follows, but again Cyrus cuts her off. “Whoa, Batgirl,” he says to her. “You gotta baby-sit Robin.”

“Fuck the little cunt. She’s almost totally out.”

“Then just think how equipped you are for the gig.”

Case’s eyes pinch to focus, and she opens her mouth to pull in as much air as possible. She finds herself looking down past the wooden chair she sits on, through her legs, to a shoddy burgundy shag rug.

Her eyes come up with a bleary blinking wideness. The room is lit by two lamps. Cyrus sits facing her with his arms and head propped on the back of a chair. Errol stands behind him by a few feet, near the bed.

“We all want to come home in the end, don’t we?” says Cyrus.

Case nods, adjusts to the light, to consciousness. Feels some blood still dribbling down her nose and into her mouth. She looks over toward a bureau where Gutter is sitting, and beside him Granny Boy and Wood have a spoonful of arm juice heating up.

“How much is it worth?” says Cyrus.

She turns to him. The room stinks of cheap fragrances. She goes to speak but Cyrus stops her.

“You better know the right price,” he warns.

He leans over and takes a few spittles of the blood that has trickled down around her lip onto his finger and puts it to his own lips and tastes.

“It’s worth all I have,” Case answers.

Cyrus takes her gun from inside his shirt and holds it up. “Good answer.”

The adrenaline clears her head quick now. Cyrus looks back at Errol.

“You know what the real equalizers are? Suffering and death. Everything else is day care. Suffering and death, they lay it out fast when it comes to who you really are.”

He looks back at Case. “How do I know I can trust you coming home? How do I know you’re not trying to fuck with me some way?” He holds her gun near her face. “What was this all about? Maybe you wanted to punch a few holes in the Messenger, huh?”

She sits there without so much as moving.

“You come tripping over the border, I wonder …” Cyrus looks at Errol. “People have all kinds of games. You too, Errol. You like games. Don’t you, chief?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Mister Firewater. Mister fuckin’ yuppie redskin phony who changed his name so nobody knows he’s a piece of scum meat from the reservation. Wants to be Mister unqualified white bread.”

“What does this have to do with anything? I’m half …”

“How do I know you and baby dearest here haven’t gotten together and are planning a little court politics against me? You help her get back home. I go do the score, pick up your stuff. And then she does me. And maybe the others. Maybe she sets me up for a couple of your coolies? How do I know? How?”