The Starshine Connection (16 page)

He trailed a seductively rich odor to the front of the shop, and found Ortega brewing a pot of very strong Colombian coffee
and dangling a pair of tin cups from one finger, impatiently. He looked up at Slayton and smiled, but said nothing.

Ortega handed him a brocaded shirt. Slayton’s jeans were still filthy, but serviceable. He could always use the boots for
motorcycle riding—or something. Gratefully, he accepted the coffee, cradling the cup in his hands, absorbing its warmth and
strength. It was potent and good.

“What will you do when you go back?” Ortega asked.

“I was investigating the men who make the
agua fria.”

“That is how you ended up here? And you still plan to oppose them?”

Slayton did not quite know how to explain the situation succintly. “They are killers. The
agua fria
kills. If it doesn’t, sometimes it drives the users mad. I have to stop the people who make it. I will, as soon as I go back.
I have men in Los Angeles who will help, and they’re waiting to hear from me. I suspect they’re wondering where in hell I
am.”

“You are committed in this?” Ortega asked, almost insistently.

“Yes.”

“I know of the
agua fria,”
he said, standing up from a low stool and setting his coffee cup on the counter. “I regret I do not know anything that would
help you bring those who make it to justice. That shirt you are wearing?”

Slayton looked down at it.

“It belonged to my son. He lived in the barrio in Los Angeles. He was acquainted with the gang members who worked for the
men who make the
agua fria.
He drank it and died. Before that it was only
mota.
But I know of the
agua jria.
All I have left of my son are the clothes he left behind.” He raised his voice slightly. “I have other sons, but none of
them, as you can see, are here with me. They have gone to live their lives. Arturo drove his automobile down here twice a
month, to see me, to help me with the physical things difficult for an old man. Now he does not come, but I manage. I am proud
of that for myself. The others, I have not seen for years. It is not sad that Arturo is dead; it is sad that he should have
died in such a way. Do you understand?” There was no remorse in the old man’s voice.

“If you are going to fight those who make the
agua jria,”
he continued, bending with careful slowness to open a wooden chest on the floor, “I have another gift for you.”

The chest contained more clothing which, Slayton supposed, had also belonged to Arturo. Ortega brushed it aside and dug beneath.
He withdrew a gun.

Slayton’s brows came down in amazed scrutiny. “Gun” was a misnomer—this was one of the most elegant weapons he had ever seen
or held in his hands.

It was a shotgun of a most unconventional type. It had the smallest stock and the shortest barrels Slayton had ever seen,
even considering the weapons of his sometimes specialized trade. The mouths of the barrels were belled slightly and were mounted
in vintage, aromatic wood carved to accommodate them perfectly. The wood was as hard as steel, and polished to a reflective
sheen. It was inlaid with gold filigree. The twin hammers were ornamental, as was the guard over the single trigger. The entire
weapon was only slightly over fifteen inches in total length.

Slayton marvelled. It was a one-shot weapon that would, for all practical purposes, destroy everything in front of it, given
the right loads. He was sure Ortega would produce those, any moment now. It was beautifully lethal.

“I wish to be with you when you oppose them,” said Ortega. “And for that reason I ask you to take this, when you go. I have
kept it for years, but you need not return it. You see, I have decided that it is all I can do.” He put the stubby shells
into Slayton’s outstretched palm, then resumed his seat and his coffee. “You are not too injured to leave now,” he said, quietly.
“I suggest you consider it before Fuentes and Cholla are able to alert anyone to the loss of their jeep.”

Slayton smiled, realizing the old man had read him like a billboard and operated by grindingly strict, though infinitely subtle,
rules of honor. “No, I did not kill them.”

“Then they will be loose and dangerous to you. Stay here longer, and you gamble unnecessarily. The
yerba buena
will give you stamina.”

“And when Fuentes shows up here? You know he will.”

“I will treat him as I have always treated him,” Ortega said, implying the ease of the matter. “He will not notice. We have
endured each other’s presence for years.” He seemed to ponder this. “I will remove your tire tracks from my lot. You will
take their guns with you. I have burned the shirt.”

Slayton knew that to thank the man for his boundless generosity would be insulting, so he gambled on a different level as
he stood up to leave.

“I will see you again, Chispa,” he said.

The old man smiled broadly.

Mercy had been detained by the authorities almost as soon as she left the warehouse. While Slayton was being pounded inside,
and after she had been raped by a furious Ortiz in the machine room of one of the lower floors, she had been expelled from
the company of the gang with instructions to ditch Slayton’s car somewhere suitable. Ortiz handed her Slayton’s keys, wiped
tears from her eyes with his thumb—his hand lovingly cupped around her neck in the same fashion he had used to choke Slayton—and
told her to meet him after she had gotten rid of the car.

That much, Slayton learned from Lucius Bonnard when he was picked up after his phone call from the border station at Tijuana.
He learned the rest from Mercy after Lucius chauffeured him to the Department’s L.A. offices. She had been on ice ever since
Slayton had been taken into Mexico, though he subsequently discovered most of his time spent incommunicado had been not in
Mexico proper, but in Baja California.

He ignored Lucius’s overenthusiastic tirade concerning his disappearance and sudden return.

Slayton walked through customs carrying a sling bag okayed by the U.S. Treasury Department. To smooth over the less rulebook
aspects of this reentrance into the country, Lucius exploited an old debt owed him by a customs man named Enrico Ricos. “Rich
Ricky” made sure that Slayton’s bag came through unopened, and met Slayton at the opposite end of a procedurally simple check-in.
When Ricky asked Lucius what was in the bag, Lucius had said, “a gun,” and both men had smiled. Slayton was back in the U.S.A.

“What the hell transpired back there?” he asked Lucius as they sped north along the Pacific Coast Highway in Lucius’s BMW.

“Little bit of one hand washing the other,” Lucius admitted. “Graft, for want of a better word. Ricky’s brother had a little
work permit problem about six months ago. I helped him out with it. I had a premonition I might someday have a friend get
into deep shit across the border, and insurance was especially cheap that day. And I was especially expansive.” He cocked
his head, knowingly.

“For once, I’m glad legality didn’t stop you,” Slayton said, evenly. “You’re not as green as I thought, Lucius. I just may
have underestimated you.”

“Everybody does, my man. That’s why I’ll remain a comer. Everybody thinks I can’t do it.” He rolled his eyes. “Do you
know
what a pain in the ass your damned stakeout would have been if that bitch hadn’t turned on you? I know you tipped to it,
I mean, I was there when you did, but how?” He took both his hands off the wheel to shrug exaggeratedly. It was a gesture
native to southern California.

“The suspicion stayed with me ever since the phono call at the hotel room,” Slayton said. “Call it intuition. Things just
could not be as methodical as they came off. Canning her would have been easy, but it wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere. On
the other hand, letting her lead me into a trap got you guys one warehouse location. It got me the gang connections who will
lead us to the top man, who, by the way, is American, not a Chicano.”

“Huh!” Lucius barked. “I see it also got you abrasions and contusions and a busted face. Effective, alright.”

“What’s the status of the warehouse?” Slayton was absorbed in the abstract blur of traffic rushing by on all sides.

“Staked out. When Mercy strolled out and commandeered your car, we followed her—your instructions, you’ll recall. She went
right back to the dump where she bunks in the barrio, not to the Starshine
honcho
’s, as you suspected. We picked her up as she got out of the car. Ortiz had obviously slapped her around, and there were tears
all over her face. When we got back to the warehouse, we found where they had punched you around, but everyone was gone.”

Slayton winced in light pain. If Lucius had had a few extra men storm the warehouse as soon as Mercy exited, they might have
gotten the gang and saved him a pounding—but he had been positive she would rush to a higher-up to report. What if she had
been washed along by the situation, like him, rather than actually being a plotting part of it? There did not seem to be any
extenuating circumstance Slayton could think of, but innocence—at least partial innocence—was a possibility he had automatically
rejected in his quest to kill the case.

Tightly, he said, “Did Mercy say anything?”

“Only that she’d talk to you. She doesn’t care about the detention. She’s apparently terrified of the gang.”

“Nobody’s shown up at the warehouse?”

“Not since your buddies fled into the woodwork after customizing your face. But they weren’t my job, remember?” Lucius’s tone
bore no malice. He was crisp and businesslike, even though he was glad to see Slayton nearly intact.

“They didn’t do this. I got stomped, but it was a fast symbolic stomping. The gang did not want to do the killing—that’s something
else you’d better pay attention to. I got my medals here from a creep across the border. As tough as Ortiz and his bunch act,
I don’t think they have any stomach for killing; they’re too into theatrical threats.”

“Except for Kiko.”

“Yeah, I wonder about that.” He wondered all the way back to Los Angeles.

“Oh, my
god—!”

The last syllable was drawn out into an upward-inflected cry of nearly physical pain. Mercy was responsible for the exclamation,
which erupted from her as soon as Slayton walked into the interview room. Tears brimmed in her eyes, and she made a helpless
sort of gesture to him, her hands dancing meaninglessly in the air.

Slayton walked ahead of Lucius into the room. It was paneled entirely in drilled, white acoustic cork tiles. A one-way mirror
connected with an adjacent observation room, and the place was lousy with electronic bugs. Two mikes were concealed in the
table itself, leads running inside the legs through hidden holes drilled into the floor. Others, in the walls and ceiling,
were activated by a man at a sound board in the next room. Beside the sound board was a video camera and taping hookup. Chairs,
uncomfortably hard, and several ashtrays were the only other furnishings. People had confessed here, had been beaten here.
It was antiseptically clean and spartanly neutral, yet for Slayton it evoked the same tightening of the gut that the death
cell down south had. He had been inside that cell a little over twenty-four hours ago. The memory of it would stick throughout
his life, but it was notably stronger and more disturbing at the moment he walked through the door and saw his betrayer sitting
there at the table.

She had cried out in shock upon seeing the obvious physical evidence of his fate since seeing her, particularly the broad
strap of white across his nose.

“Mercy,” he nodded, a chilling deadness in his voice. Lucius faded against the wall; for all intents he was not present. And
Slayton had instructed that the observation room remain empty.

She fidgeted in the chair, wringing her hands, then looking up and meeting his eyes with a whipped expression.

“I guess if I jumped up and ran into your arms and said I was glad you’re alright”—she swallowed unnecessarily and gave a
weak little shrug—“that you might not buy it. Jesus
Christ,
Ben, I—you don’t know how sorry I am. Everything went sideways, everything got screwed up. I’m not doing this very well,
am I?” Tears began to run down her face, and she made only a token attempt to wipe them away.

Slayton stood as rigidly as a column of basalt. “Let’s have the story first,” he said. “From before the warehouse.”

She sniffed. She had had a lot of time to think about what she had to tell him.

“The gang had you made as soon as you hit the barrio. They didn’t know who you were, but they had instructions to find Kiko
and squeeze him until he led them to you. He wasn’t supposed to get killed; that’s when I first saw things were going bad.
Ortiz says Kiko’s death was an accident—his guys were really wired up for action, and it got out of hand.”

“You might say that, considering the bastards stabbed an essentially blameless man thirteen or fourteen times. Happens all
the time in L.A. Nobody gives a damn about a derelict, right?” Slayton’s tone was icy, his eyes as passionless as steel ball
bearings.

“Oh, Ben, I’m so goddam
sorry.
I didn’t want to hurt poor Kiko…”

“Or poor Ben.”

“You don’t understand!”
she screamed at him, standing up. Her depleted reserves of terror and remorse gave way to healthy anger, bright and piercing.

“You don’t understand! You
don’t
know what it’s like down there, how people have to live! You don’t know anything about the way Chicanos do things! You don’t
give a damn—you don’t
have
to give a damn! Nobody who doesn’t have to live like a cockroach in a place like that understands!” She slammed her fist
down on the desk with a thump. “I was Ortiz’s
woman,”
she said, gilding the term with disgust. “I ran away from him, embarrassed him in front of the gang; you don’t
do
that. He’s the
machín,
and you don’t do it to him. I went with him for a kick, to try to power-play my way out of the ghetto, and all I found was
a way to sink deeper. I got to meet the top guy
once,
I went to bed with him
once,
and that was the end of it. Nothing.”