Steve Martini - The Arraignment

“Who’s he talkin’ to?”

“My partner.”

“What’s he doin’ here?”

“I don’t know. Adam’s full of surprises. Take a load off. Sit down. Have a drink.”

“Hey man, not me. I’m on duty. I don’t do that. Uh-uh. That’s all I need. Man report me for drinkin’ on duty, the mood he’s in. Get my ass fired, be flippin’ burgers back in Lubbock by Monday.”

“Few minutes ago, you were ready to quit. Besides, I thought you said you were from Detroit.”

“Way of Lubbock,” he says. “ ’At’s when I lost my scholarship. Fucked up my knee and ended up down here.”

“Football?”

“Uh-huh.” Herman steals a furtive glance toward the booth, making sure it’s safe to talk. “Fire-breathin’ shithead scorched all the hair off the backa my neck. Lucky I didn’t take us head-on into one those scuba-flippin’ taco-tenders comin’ the other way with all their shit up top. He be lookin’ like jaws about now, fuckin’ metal tank stickin’ outta his head.”

“Where’s Julio?”

“He’s hidin’ out. Be down in a minute. You notice there ain’t no courtesy bar in the room and no vending machines. This place looks like a fuckin’ tomb. Off season,” he says. He reaches over and grabs a handful of bar napkins from the waitress station, since there is no waitress on duty, and wipes beads of sweat from his forehead and neck, and drops them all wet and rung out on the bar.

“We ain’t had nothin’ to eat since breakfast. No lunch, no supper. Contract says we get a break every two hours. You seen any fuckin’ breaks?”

“Take a break. Have a drink.” A drink might calm him down. I’m afraid if Adam opens his mouth again, given Herman’s mood, he might find the big man’s foot in it.

“You tryin’ to get my ass in trouble, man? Besides, I wanna eat. I’ll drink later when it cools down. That shit ain’t good for you in the heat.” Herman’s obsession at the moment is his empty stomach. I can hear it growling.

The bartender comes over to clean up the pile of napkins Herman has left on the bar, and Herman starts complaining to him about his constitutional right of access to a vending machine.

“No hablo ingles.”

“Yeah. I bet you’d talk some fuckin’ English if I slapped a fifty on the bar and told you to put a round of drinks up.”

“Que?”

“Kiss my ass.”

The bartender scoops the napkins into a trash can on his side, smiles, and moves away from the angry dark mountain next to me.

“This shit ain’t cuttin’ it. I want something to eat.” He turns toward the table and Adam. “Hey you, boss man. Tell me, we gonna eat or what?”

Adam, who has his back to him, turns around, blinks a couple of times, then smiles. “Sure. You hungry, Herman? Good idea. Go get Julio. We’ll have some dinner.”

The conversation between Adam and my partner hasn’t been entirely about the history of flight.

“He told me what happened this afternoon.” Harry spreads a little butter on a hot flour tortilla as he talks. The empty margarita reservoir is on the table where he left it. Harry is feeling no pain.

“What is it, best two out of three falls, you and this guy Saldado?” he says. “How many chances are you gonna give him?”

“It wasn’t my idea to go visiting this time.”

“You know, Adam, I assumed when you told me you were coming down here, and that with security and all, everything would be covered.”

I look at him. Harry keeps talking.

“But I guess even with that, things go wrong.”

“Let me get this straight. You talked with Adam before we came down here?”

Harry looks at me. “Did I say that?”

“Yeah, you did.”

He gives me a sheepish look, then turns to Adam. “Knew I shouldn’ta had that drink,” he says.

“Paul, it’s no big thing. Harry was worried about you,” says Tolt. “And he had good reason, after what happened at Saldado’s apartment.”

“And so you called for lunch, and it just so happened you were taking some vacation time.”

“Well, all right, so we conspired a little.”

“A little.”

“We weren’t going to let you come down here alone,” says Harry.

Now I understand how Harry got here. Empty plane, my ass. Adam sent it back to get him since one of us had to be in the office on Thursday.

“He has a point,” says Adam.

“And look what happened,” says Harry. “Even with the precautions. Security and all. You know what I think? I think maybe we should all take a nice swim, lay in the sun tomorrow morning, have a nice lunch, and then hop on Adam’s plane, say adios, and fly on home.”

“I’ll vote for that,” says Adam.

“Haven’t you forgotten? We have a meeting with Pablo Ibarra tomorrow evening.”

“Forget the meeting with Ibarra,” says Harry. “You met with the son today, the one who talks and whose knuckles don’t drag on the ground, and what did you find out? Nothing.”

“Not exactly.”

“What? Tell me what you found out that you didn’t know before,” says Harry.

“We found out that the sons are connected to Saldado.”

“Excuse me. I stand corrected,” says Harry. “Besides that revelation, which they nearly engraved on your headstone, what else?”

“We know Saldado killed Espinoza and that Espinoza was the link to Gerald Metz. We also know that the brothers had American partners in a prior deal and that the arrangement didn’t work out. What were the words he used? They had to sever the relationship?”

Adam nods. “Something like that.”

“You knew that before you came down here,” says Harry. “When people kill their partners, it’s usually due to some dissatisfaction in the arrangement.”

“No. What we had before was conjecture, guesses. Now we have Arturo Ibarra in his own words telling us, filling in the gaps. If you want to go home, go. As for me, I’m going to talk to Pablo Ibarra, then I’ll go home.”

“Listen to him,” says Harry. “You haven’t had enough of these people? You talk to him.” He turns to Adam and lays his linen napkin on the table next to his plate.

Adam takes a deep sigh, picks up his wineglass, and takes a sip. “First, I should apologize. I admit I lost it this afternoon. I’ve had all the excitement I want for a while. Julio, Herman, I want you to understand I didn’t mean what I said today. And Paul. Well, I think you know. I’ve never been quite that close to a near-death experience before, and it unnerved me. I didn’t handle it with much grace.”

“You got up and followed me out the door,” I tell him. “That’s all the grace required, given the circumstances.”

“I don’t mind telling you I nearly tossed everything on his desk when I turned around and saw him holding the wallets. I thought he knew for sure we were lying.”

“I suspect he did. What he didn’t know was where the other cars were, how many men were in them, and how they were armed. You don’t go to war unless you know where the enemy is.”

“That was Julio’s idea,” says Adam. He raises his glass in a toast to the Mexican, and Julio smiles, looks down, embarrassed. He is starting to lighten up.

I ask him what he threw at the window to get our attention.

“A coin,” he says. “I think it mighta been a ten-peso piece. I don’t know.” The value of this is less than a U.S. dollar.

“Who’s counting?” says Adam. “Put it on the tab.”

We all laugh.

“Damn.” Adam’s looking at his watch again, takes it off, and taps it on the edge of his plate. “Thing keeps stopping.”

“It’s all that cold sweat,” says Harry. “It’s probably frozen.”

“What time is it?”

I look at my watch. “Seven-twenty.”