The Dogs of Mexico (6 page)

Her eyes searched his—an uncomfortable moment.

“All you have to do is fill in your name,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

She sighed. “Finally decided to let it go, huh?”

He started to ask what she was talking about, but he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to get into one of those talk-about-it things women seemed to thrive on.
 

“Jill, you take care now.” Not trusting himself to say more, he took up his bags and walked out.
 

“Wait.” She hurried after him. “I’ll give you a lift to…where? Where can I take you?”
 

He had intended to call a taxi to take him to the airport, but in the interim had decided against waiting in the charged intimacy of the trailer alone with her. But in the pickup, outside, in the safety of open spaces…
 

He put on his best, most cheerful noncommittal face. “Want to try out your new wheels? Sure. Works for me. Thanks.”

7

Jail

A
NA FARRINGTON SAT
stiffly in one of the folding metal chairs in the police station’s anteroom in a northern precinct of Mexico City. A darkened mirror on the opposite wall suggested she was being watched from the other side.
 

The door opened and a policeman appeared. When he saw her he squared his shoulders and sucked in his stomach, a response of surprise. Perhaps he hadn’t been watching after all.
 

“Señorita. I am Lieutenant Garza,” he said in English. “How may I be of service?”
 

Ana stood. She had dressed in baggy, unkempt overalls, shirt buttoned at the collar. But the lieutenant’s gaze hardly left her body. She sighed inwardly; it was always this way with certain men.
 

“Lieutenant,” she replied, “I wish to speak to you about one of your prisoners, Helmut Heinrich.”

The lieutenant’s smile shaded unpleasantly. “Ah. Yes. The German. What do you wish of me?”
 

“How much is his fine?”
 

“You are thinking of a financial arrangement,” the lieutenant said without enthusiasm. “Please. Come in.” He turned with a sweep of his hand, but stood his ground in the doorway, forcing her to pass in close proximity—a strong whiff of rose-scented cologne. She felt his eyes on her, on her limp—greatly exaggerated at the moment—until she stood before his desk. He gestured magnanimously at the chair.
 

She seated herself. Lieutenant Garza went behind the desk and sprawled in an old-fashioned swivel chair. The room was plain. Plaster walls painted the same two shades of tan as the anteroom. File cabinets in one corner. Flyspecked photos of
Enrique Peña Nieto,
Felipe Calderón, Vicente Fox, and other dignitaries decorated the walls. A strutty photo of the lieutenant himself. The usual crucifix, and a florid print of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
 

“You are crippled,” the lieutenant said in a tone that suggested he was personally affronted.

Yes, you wouldn’t want me
. Instead, she said, “How much to obtain his release?”

The lieutenant leaned forward on his elbows. “His offense is a very grave matter. This drunken German. Wrecking cars. His abusive mouth. Very serious.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Perhaps we can work something out.” The smile again.

“I have very little money, but I can give you fifty dollars.”
 

Lieutenant Garza laughed and leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “This Heinrich, he is a drunk. He has wreck two cars in three weeks. He is a danger to the peoples of México. And you want I should free him? For fifty dollars? Perhaps five hundred. This seems reasonable. Eh?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have anywhere near that much.”

The lieutenant looked her over again, one eyebrow raised in suggestive appreciation. “Or, as I say, perhaps we work something out. You and me.”

“A hundred. That’s all I have.”

“Why do you care for this man? This drunken pig?”

Ana got to her feet. “You’re right. I don’t care if he stays here forever. I’m through. I can do no more.” She started for the door, surprised to realize that she meant it.

“Señorita
.
Wait.” Lieutenant Garza pushed up from his chair. “This is only a misunderstanding. Do you have the hundred dollars with you?”

She stopped, touched the small leather purse on the strap around her neck.
 

“I will accept the money,” said the lieutenant with a sigh. “But this drunken German, he is no man. Consider this, and my sincere hope for your future pleasure.”

Ana felt her eyes welling up, hot with humiliation and anger. She unzipped the purse and prayed silently that she had a hundred dollars. If not, she would leave him. It would serve him right.

HELMUT HEINRICH REGAINED
consciousness in slow, erratic increments—a dull drubbing that increased in intensity with each heartbeat until he feared the swollen mass pulsing inside his skull would blow his eyeballs out of their sockets. His ears rang. His vision was distorted through glimmers of wet light. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He could not swallow, and when he was able to free his tongue he still could not swallow. Water. He needed water.

He struggled to pull his fractured universe together, to bring order to the chaos assaulting his inner vision, to distinguish reality from the delirium tremens flickering shadowlike about the peripheral of his semiconscious mind—
a slathered black dog, an albino quadriplegic strapped to a skateboard…

Concrete. Lying on concrete
. He tried to roll over and sit up, but one arm had no feeling.
 

His car. An accident.
Vague recollections formed, shunting back and forth among the hallucinatory horrors. He had wrecked his car. Or was that the time before…? No, this just happened. Last evening. A wall. He had crashed into a stone wall.
 

He wondered if his dead arm had been severed in the wreck. He saw it then, the fingers on his hand like the legs of a centipede, struggling, dragging his arm across the concrete toward a hole of a toilet in the floor. He shook off the image and with his other hand found his arm in its proper place, saw it through warped fractals of light, intact. Perhaps it was broken. Clumsily, he inspected it, and while it felt normal, it felt like someone else’s. He fumbled for his glasses with his good hand, but they were missing from his shirt pocket. The arm began to tingle and he realized he had been lying on it and that it had only gone numb. Asleep.
 

He realized, too, that he was still drunk—thinking his arm had been severed. If his head didn’t hurt so, he might have laughed at himself, for he had a great sense of humor, though this occurred to him now as sudden and surprising news.

He became aware of a sewer stench, urine and feces and vomit. Crude pornographic images scared the walls. A jail cell.

Simultaneously, he realized he had blown his assignment. Binged at the worst possible moment.

Another hallucination blurred into focus—a female clown sat on the floor across from him, her back against the wall, legs splayed toward him from a red leather miniskirt, pinches of flesh bulging like blisters through snags on her black fishnet stockings. Helmut tried to clear his mind but the apparition lingered—a female clown, bald, a fringe of yellow hair around her ears, green eye shadow, rouged cheeks, orange lipstick—watching him. A clown could not possibly be here like this. Yet when he tried to dismiss the image, it remained. He saw now that the makeup wasn’t clownish but applied with some precision, much as a woman without taste might, a woman with a barrel body and a fringe of pale peroxided curls. A
man
, Helmut realized. An Anglo.
 

The man got to his feet. He took an only cup from a shelf on the wall, turned on a shoulder-high faucet and ran water into it. The toilet hole opened in the floor directly beneath. He brought the cup over, squatted before Helmut and held it out. A mop of curls crawled in and out of the man’s ears like bloodless worms. With a kind of beggarly longing, he looked down on Helmut with limpid wet eyes, the puffy little bags underneath smeared with mascara.

“The woman,” Helmut managed, his accent thick with hangover. “She is hurt?”
 

The man withdrew, nose wrinkling. “Woman? What woman? Here, drink.”

Helmut took the cup, trying to steady it in both hands, trying not to breathe on the man. “There was a woman,” he mumbled. “You did not see her?”

“Naw, hell,” the man said, a dismissive gesture as he stood back. “I was here all the time. There wasn’t no woman.” He gestured at the cup. “Drink up.”

“Thank you.” Helmut took a sip, dizzy, the room sliding about, thinking he might throw up.
 

“What’ve you done?” the man asked. “Why’re you here?”

Again Helmut tried to focus. “You do not know?”

“I woke up when they brought you in.” The big man grinned. “You wasn’t too happy.”

“I wrecked my car. And you?”

“Name’s Jenkins. Call me Jinx.” He shrugged, a small self-effacing smile. “That’s kind of a joke.”

“Jinx. Okay Jinx, why are you here?”

Jinx sighed. “That lieutenant, he’s pissed at me. I’m no longer a cop in this municipality.”
 

“Cop? A Policeman?”
 

Jinx shrugged again. “Yep.
Was,
anyway.”

Helmut tried to separate reality from hallucination. He pressed his fingertips to his temples, yawned to unstop his ears. “Why are you dressed like a woman?”

Jinx gave him a sharp look. “You got a problem with that?”
 

Helmut lifted the palm of his free hand at Jinx in deference. At the same time an idea began to take shape in his tortured brain. “Do you own a car?”

The big man watched him, a touch of humor deepening the lines webbing the mascara around his eyes. “Why? You wanna go for a little joyride?”
 

Helmut took another sip of water, suffered another moment of nausea. “As a policeman you have had experience with surveillance?”
 

The man shrugged. “I was watching a meth lab when the lieutenant brought me in. Yeah. Why the questions?”

“Ah. Methamphetamines. You were undercover? That is why you are dressed as you are? And the lab, they were paying you for protection. Money you were not sharing with the lieutenant. I see. The jefes, they do not like this.”
 

The big man watched him levelly, no longer so affable. “That fuckin lieutenant sent you, didn’t he.”

“No, no. I am looking for a good man to help me keep an eye on a man from the States. If you have a car, you will earn three months police pay in a week. You are interested?”

Jinx hesitated, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Who is this man from the States? What do you mean, keep an eye on him?”

“A policeman with experience. I will pay you, say, fifty dollars a day, US. Plus expenses.”

Jinx looked on as Helmut sipped at the water. After a moment of consideration, he said: “I’ve got this friend. We might do it for fifty each. A hundred bucks a day.”

Helmut lumbered to his feet with difficulty, struggling to keep his balance, guarding against the viscous blackness rising up to drown him. He made his way along the wall, turned the faucet on, ran the cup full again. “Okay. Fifty each. But only if he is reliable, an experienced man like yourself.”

The big man grinned. “You and me, we’re a couple of pretty funny bozos. All this big talk, but here we sit, locked in the calaboose.”
 

Helmut leaned one hand against the wall, closed his eyes. There was no place to sit other than the floor. Nothing at all in the room other than the hole of a toilet. He craved a drink, a little dog hair—as the Americans liked to say. He took his hand away from the wall, looked at it, wiped it on his pant leg.

“How much money to get you out of here?” he said.
 

The big man studied him, as if determining whether he was reliably serious or unreliably delirious. “That lieutenant, he can be a real hard-ass.

Helmut didn’t care for this soft gringo with his round face painted like a woman, but he was readily available and apparently qualified for the work. Regardless, he had to move quickly.
 

“Tell me,” Helmut said. “If you are a policeman, you have a uniform?”

Jinx gestured at a tan policeman’s shirt he had been sitting on, spread on the floor, that Helmut hadn’t noticed. “The pants,” Jinx said, gesturing at a big saddlebag purse resting against the wall.
 

Helmut was about to call out for the jailer when the steel door clanged open at the end of the outside corridor. He was surprised and relieved to see Ana limp-swinging along behind a swaggering police lieutenant. Ana’s faint limp was unusually pronounced, and he was shot through with guilt, believing he had damaged her in the wreck. An armed guard stood back inside the doorway, rifle butt resting on his hip.

The lieutenant threw a lock and swung the cell door back. “You,” he said to Helmut in English. “You are free to go.”

Helmut saw that Ana’s eyes were red and swollen, her mouth drawn in angry silence. She handed over his glasses, then held a handkerchief over her nose against the stench.
 

“You were hurt?” he asked, cleaning his glasses on his shirttail.

She shook her head, not looking at him.

“How much to get me out?”
 

“You are a drunken pig,” said the lieutenant. “Except for this woman and the large generosity of my compassion, I keep you forever.”

“And the generosity of her wallet, ja?
How could you ignore that, ja?”
Even as he said it he realized it was the booze talking.

“Helmut—” Ana began angrily.

The lieutenant darkened. “It is not too late. The door shut the same as it open.”

“And this hombre?” Helmut said of the big man, Jinx. “How much do you require for him?”

The lieutenant looked at Jinx, then at Helmut and Ana, one to the other. “What?” said the lieutenant, gesturing at Jinx with contempt. “You are trade the woman for this maricón?
You wish to buy him for yourself?”