Fifty Grand (43 page)

Water bubbling underneath me. This is what you get for playing Nemesis.

I scramble away from the blood and the surging water on hands and knees toward a firmer piece of ice a few meters from the bodies.

This looks better. But how would I know? Cuba doesn’t even get frost.

I kneel on the raw plain of ice, completely exposed.

When I was child I used to play a game. If I closed my eyes I could make myself disappear. As long as I couldn’t see me no one else could. Keep ’em closed and you’ll be ok.

The bodies. The blood. The shooting—the rifleman from the parking lot, Briggs and Crawford firing back into the trees.

Don’t look in my direction.

Don’t look.

I’m invisible.

I’m not here.

A grinding, gurgling sound. I open my eyes just as Youkilis slips beneath the surface. Klein follows him into a fissure, his body turning and his cat black eyes staring at me before disappearing into the slime of the lake bottom.

Ice cracks all around me and I get to my feet for balance.

My sweater is dyed red, like a target, like Che storming the barricades, but he had a gun and I’m a sacrificial la—

Wait a minute.

The backpack.

A 9mm and a clip.

My father’s gun.

“Jesus, there she is! Got a shot?” Briggs yells.

“Yeah, I got one, fucking ice breaking, hold on, yeah, try this on for size, ya fucking bitch!” Crawford replies.

BOOM.

Down. Hard. Nose cracking off the surface.

“Missed her!”

“I’ll try!”

Triage. Everything seems—
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM
. Briggs, a gun in each hand. The right firing at the parking lot, the left shooting at me.

I lie flat on the ice, a tough shot for both men, as long as my friend keeps them pinned and I don’t stand up again.

They’re going to have to get lucky—but they need to be lucky only once and I need to be lucky all the time.

Use your brain, Mercado. Do something smart. Work ’em. Jack is the weak link. Work him while you make your way toward the backpack, six meters to the left, on the edge of a hole in the ice.

“I’m a federal agent! We’ve got you surrounded. Drop your guns and surrender and we’ll all get out of this in one piece,” I yell.

“You’re no fucking cop!” Briggs says.

“I’m an agent. Sheriff, this is crazy. You covered up a vehicular homicide. That’s not a huge crime in the big scheme of things. You’ll lose your job and get probation. You won’t do a day,” I yell, switching from the formal English we learned in school to the Yuma English of the movies and TV.

“If you’re the feds, where’s the SWAT team, where’s the fucking helicopters?” Briggs yells. He’s no dummy.

“They’re on the way, believe me. Now cease firing and let’s all get out of this alive,” I shout.

Briggs takes aim at me and pulls the trigger. The bullet whizzes over my head. Close, but he’s gotta stand to get the kill shot.

Work the others. “Crawford, you’re a veteran, you won’t do a night in prison. Jack, if you plea-bargain you’re looking at thirty days. We don’t need to lose our lives for this. I’m the one that’s fucked anyway.”

“What do you mean you’re fucked?” Crawford asks.

Another puff of ice, another rifle crack.

“I’m fucked because I didn’t have the authority to bring Youkilis up here,” I say. “I screwed this whole operation up.”

I slide slowly toward the backpack; its shoulder strap is in the water, the ice cracking around it. Please don’t fall, please don’t sink.

“You hear what she says, Briggs?” Crawford yells.

“You’ve done nothing wrong, Crawford, not a thing. If you kill me, a federal agent, it’s the death penalty,” I tell him.

“If you’re a fed, tell your buddy to stop shooting,” Briggs demands.

“My radio’s at the bottom of the lake. Just cease fire and drop your weapons,” I yell at him.

“What do you think, Sheriff?” Crawford asks.

“She’s fucking lying!” Briggs says.

Five meters from the backpack. Freezing water. Ice burns all over my fingertips.

“Let me show you my ID. We’ll see who’s fucking lying,” I shout. “Cease fire! That’s an order.”

“Yeah, you’ll all be fucking ok, but I’ll go to jail for manslaughter. My career will be finished,” Jack says.

“You’ll be fine. Vehicular manslaughter ain’t jail time, look at your buddy Matthew Broderick. I say we stop this madness right now,” Crawford says.

But the sheriff isn’t falling for any of this bullshit. He looks at me, smiles, and shakes his head. “She’s no fed. She’s got one friend. Two of them. Take ’em out one at a time. That’s the way we do it.”

“How?” Crawford wonders.

“Get a bead on the trees. Look for the muzzle flash and unload a fucking clip, pin him down. I’ll take her. And when she’s dead we’ll get across to the other side, away from our lone gunman and before all this fucking ice cracks.”

“Don’t listen to him, Crawford! It’s a death sentence!” I yell.

“She’s fucking lying,” Briggs says.

Two meters from the backpack. It’s sitting on top of a seven-centimeter
fissure somehow defying gravity. Don’t fall.
Don’t fall.
I keep it from plunging to the lake bottom by sheer force of will.

“What do you want me to do, Sheriff?” Crawford asks.

“Don’t listen to him, Crawford. You’ve done nothing wrong at this point. I’m the only one in real trouble here! Jack, if they kill me, you’ll be accessory to a murder, you’ll get life in prison for that.”

“We’ve got to do what she says,” Jack yells desperately.

The crack widens, the backpack starts to tilt. I spread my weight and try to touch it.

“Like fuck we do! She’s a lying cunt,” Briggs says.

“We can’t just kill her. We’ll get—”

Closer . . . closer . . . closer.

“We’ll get nothing. She’s some dumb Mex on a fucking trip. Never find her. Crawford, you ready?”

I touch the backpack, grab it, start to unzip it.

“I’m ready,” Crawford says.

“Pin the rifleman, I’ll take her,” Briggs says.

Rifle shot. Muzzle flash.

Crawford gets up on one knee, bites through the pain of his wound, stands, and starts firing at the trees. But Briggs doesn’t keep his side of the bargain. He’s too chicken. He’s still trying to shoot me lying down.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
All misses. Get up and kill me, asshole. Where’s your
huevos
? Thought you were a fucking war hero.

“Did you get her?” Crawford asks.

“Angle’s wrong,” Briggs replies. “Don’t worry, I’ll fucking kill the bitch. Keep plugging at that shooter.”

“Rifleman’s reloading,” Crawford says. “We got ten clicks.”

And now Briggs does stand up. All six foot five of him and still somehow wearing his fucking cowboy hat. He flinches, bracing himself for a bullet in the brain.

I rummage through the stuff in the backpack: pepper spray, ski mask, rope, duct tape, finally the loaded 9mm Stechkin APS pistol that hadn’t been cleaned or fired in years.

Briggs walks toward me, striding over the ice fissures, holding his .45 in both hands. Six meters away. Impossible to miss. He beads me, lifts the gun. “No more chances now, whore,” he says. His eyes narrow, focused, concentrating, his grin wide.

“None necessary,” I reply, sliding up my father’s pistol and shooting him in the neck.

Briggs falls to his knees, drops his weapon.

Hands at his throat, blood seeping between his fingers.

Ssssfff!
The rifleman in the trees has evidently reloaded. Crawford hits the deck.

“Did you get her?” Crawford says.

The ice cracks beneath me as I walk to Briggs’s .45 and kick it into the water.

“Damn it, man, did you get her?” Crawford says, firing the last of his clip at the marksman in the woods.

The sun breaks over the tree line. New-born photons bisecting the lake into a world of shadow and a world of light. Water seeps into my shoes, I lose my balance, put my arms out, regain it, step over a widening fracture, and come up behind Crawford.

He turns.

“Cocksucker,” he says and slams home a fresh clip but can’t get off a round before I put one in his groin, one in his thorax above his body armor, and one in his mouth.

I wave at the man in the parking lot.

He stands up, waves back.

It’s too skinny to be Esteban. It has to be Paco.

I wave my hands over my head. “Stop! Stop! That’s enough! They’re dead.”

Silence and then a distant voice. “Are you ok?”

“Sí.”

“I’m coming.”

I walk to Jack and kneel beside him.

He’s terrified. He smells bad. He’s defecated himself.

I smile in a kindly way.

“W-who are you?” he asks, his voice quivering.

“I’m María.”

“Why have you done this?”

Well, it ain’t because you’re a lousy tipper.

A groan behind me. Briggs, living yet. That type needs a stake through the heart at a midnight crossroad.

“Wait here,” I say to Jack. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Dodging cracks and fissures, I walk back to Briggs. The ice is cracking all around him. Blood and water, water and blood.

I kneel beside him.

Our eyes meet.

Are you close now? Do you have any answers?

I don’t. Hector says the meaning of life is to be found in the quest for the meaning of life. But that’s Hector.

Briggs looks at me. A croak. “Help me,” he says.

I look at the wound. I suppose if we rushed him to a hospital there’d be an outside chance.

I shake my head.

“Why?” he asks.

Why indeed?

I can’t tell you about the tarot or the Book of Changes or that I am sent by our lady of the moon. But I must tell you something. I must tell you because, before the minute hand on your watch makes another revolution, I will be the instrument of your transfiguration.

For you, I suppose, it was the fifty thousand.

“The fifty grand. The price of a dead Mex.”

He thinks about it, doesn’t get it.

“That my father’s life could be bought so cheap,” I explain.

He nods.

His breath has taken on the sweetness of death. His face is white, his eyes crimson. There are splinters of ice in his hair.

“Is there a deity with whom you confer?” I ask.

“No, no, wait . . .”he gurgles.

“Make thy peace.”

He grabs my arm with a bloody hand.

I release his grip, step back, raise my father’s gun. This is not retribution. I have no authority for that. Nevertheless, I deliver you from this world of tears.

“No, wait, we can make a—”

Lead crosses the space between us, rips his skin, passes through muscle and bone, punches a hole in his skull the size of a baby’s fist, and exits through his spinal cord.

He looks at all the blood and lies backward on the ice, dead.

Jack’s hands are above his head.

He’s crying. “Don’t shoot me. Please. I’m so sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Whatever I did, I’m so sorry.” Tears, an anguished look. More tears. “Oh God, please don’t, please.”

“This is your best performance,” I say.

“It’s not a performance, I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“For whatever it is that you’re so angry about,” he says. Lips quivering. A cackle at the back of his throat. Snot, spittle.

The scent of death all around me, in me, makes me want to throw up. On the edge of the ice lake I see Paco in a black coat and carrying Esteban’s rifle. He waves. I wave back.

He yells something but I can’t hear what it is.

“I can’t hear you!”

“I said, I saved your Cuban ass.”

Gingerly he begins walking across the ice. He’s almost comically slow. I imagine they don’t have many frozen lakes in Nicaragua.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, you’re going to kill me, I’m going to die,” Jack says.

He bends over and throws up what’s left of the hors d’oeuvres from Tom Cruise’s house.

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“You’re going to kill me. You’re going to murder me like you killed those others. I’m going to be dead. This is the last thing I’m ever going to see. I don’t even know where we are, I don’t even know where we are!”

“Wyoming.”

I sit down next to him on the ice. I turn his face so that he’s looking at me.

“Listen to me, Jack, that’s my friend Paco coming over to us. That kid has a jones for killing. He says he fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua when he was only a boy, and he was so good with the rifle that I think I believe him.”