David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

Happy’s cell phone rang. He plucked it from his coat pocket, listened briefly, and said first “Okay,” then “ Cuídate ” before snapping it shut and stuffing it back in his pocket. To Roque, he said, “I’ll drop you off at home. Start packing. You’re on the redeye to Comalapa.”

HAPPY SEEMED UNUSUALLY SOLEMN ON THE DRIVE TO THE AIRPORT, even by his standards, but that didn’t keep him from repeating the same instructions over and over. Roque nodded absently, occasionally adding a “Sure” or “I get it” just to convince Happy he was listening. As they pulled up to the curb outside the international terminal, Happy put the truck in park, clicked on his flashers and reached across the seat for Roque’s arm.

“One last thing. This is important.” Happy licked his lips, an odd show of nerves. “You’re not gonna just be bringing my dad back. Okay? There’s another guy coming.”

Roque felt like a hundred pounds of deadweight just got lashed to his back. “How long you known this?”

“He’s Iraqi, I met him over there. His name’s Samir.”

Something wasn’t getting said. “Iraq?”

A woman cop pacing a nearby crosswalk let out an earsplitting whistle shriek, trying to get traffic to move. The crowded terminal glowed and hummed, a temple of chrome and glass.

“He was our terp, for the company I worked for. He went out on convoys with us.”

“How am I supposed to find him?”

“It’s taken care of.” Then: “He’s a good guy. If things get tricky, you can trust him. He’s smart, he knows his way around. He can help you.”

The roar of an airliner in takeoff drowned out everything else for a moment, the honking horns, the cop and her whistle, the cries of the skycaps, the loudspeaker announcements. But Roque felt it even stronger than before, a charge in the air, something left hanging.

Finally, Happy said, “Samir saved my life.”

It came out like a guilty secret. Roque couldn’t help feeling he’d just been enlisted in an impossible promise. “This another one of those long stories you’re always coming up with?”

“Yeah.” Happy seemed to drift back from somewhere far away. “You better go. But ask him about it. Samir. He’ll tell you.”

Roque murmured, “Whatever,” and reached for the door handle, but Happy reached across the cab again, gripping Roque’s shoulder and turning him back. Their eyes met. Happy’s were hard and grave as he said, “I’m proud of you-know that? We all are.”

EVEN THE STUFFED PANDA ON THE SOFA REEKED OF CIGARETTE smoke. Happy nudged it aside to sit, conceding he wasn’t really one to judge, given his own habit of late.

The bear belonged to Vasco’s daughter, Lucía, who often got stranded here for hours. “Time to myself,” the mother called it, which struck a more suitably parental tone, Happy supposed, than “heading out to tweak with the bitch patrol.” El otro equipo. Las marimachas . The other team. Lesbos. That’s what Vasco called them, at least when Chula, his wife, wasn’t in earshot.

Vasco ran Puchi and Chato’s crew, a mishmash of rough-edged and luckless Salvadorans, most of them present or former Brown Town Locos who’d outgrown street dealing. They had big-heist pretensions now, with hopes of being regarded as bona fide salvatruchos: members of Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13. The gang had become to Salvadorans what La Eme, the Mexican Mafia, was to mejicanos , bigger even, because their territory covered all of Central America south to Nicaragua, and cities as distant as Boston, Washington, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco and the hub: Los Angeles. But as yet it was a sprawling, hydra-headed mess. No one had established the kind of command and control that could confer on any of its would-be clicas status as bona fide or bogus. There were too many wannabes, even out-and-out phonies.

But that was Happy’s in. He had a message from the emperor. He had status to confer.

Vasco’s office sat perched atop the garage for the truck yard where they parked and maintained the three long beds used for American Amigos and the other strong-arm movers. Downstairs, Chato and Puchi and a few other vatos were working late, sharing a blunt as they lazily swept out the bays and hosed down the trucks.

Lucía wasn’t there, for which Happy felt grateful. The child was a homely rag of a girl, both needy and remote. More to the point, she was mean. Not that Happy blamed her. She always seemed to be suffering from pink eye, a phlegmy cough, some kind of rash, and who wouldn’t get a bitch on with Vasco and Chula for parents.

Coils of copper wire lay stacked in the corner, stolen from empty houses and office buildings and even the pull boxes for streetlights, from which the wire had been dragged out by force after sawing through the bundled cable, latching it to the hitch on the back of a pickup. Quite an operation, as Happy knew firsthand; he’d been part of the crew that ripped out this particular batch. It was big news in Rio Mirada, the number of public buildings vandalized, the intersections where the streetlights merely flashed because the conduits had been gutted. No sooner would the repairs be complete than Vasco’s malandrines would strike again.

“This is a cash-strapped city,” the police chief had intoned on TV the other night. “We really could use the public’s help on this.”

In the opposite corner, handbills for mortgage assistance lay scattered in haphazard piles: In Foreclosure? Save Your Home! We Buy Houses for Cash! Vasco was the local ghetto hump for the company that worked the scam, tricking people into refinancing plans that stripped out all their equity through cash-back-at-closing schemes, disguising the payouts as costs and fees. Sometimes they snatched title outright, leaving the homeowners with nothing. Happy wondered if they were in league with the crooks who’d screwed his father and Lucha.

Vasco was yammering away on the phone, dressed in a black cowboy shirt with white piping, black jeans, white sharkskin boots with a matching belt, rocking in his chair and clutching his cigarette like a dart. He’d wrapped up the conversation minutes ago but was dragging it out, trying to show Happy who was boss, who could be made to wait.

Finally Vasco signed off and tossed the phone onto his desk, after which he rubbed his eyes, scratched his paunch, gazed out the window. His neck bore a patch of shiny flesh, the ghost of a tattoo he’d had removed. “Pinole was a problem?”

Happy didn’t answer right away. Two could play this game. “That a surprise?”

Vasco waved the question away while exhaling a final plume of smoke, stubbing out his butt. “You said there was something to discuss.”

Happy could feel, like a thumb flick, the pulse in his throat. “I’ve got a proposal. Not just me. Me and some people back in El Salvador.” The words sounded odd inside his skull, bats fluttering out of a cave.

Vasco mustered a yawn but his eyes betrayed his interest. “What people?”

“The guys who helped me get across.”

“I never heard this.”

“Heard what?”

“That you were involved with any, you know, people. Crossing over.”

“How the hell else was I gonna do it?”

“Beats me.” Vasco was already lighting up another smoke. “You still in contact?”

“Would I be pitching this if I wasn’t?”

“I dunno, you tell me.”

Happy resisted an urge to get up, cross the room, tip Vasco out of his chair like a pumpkin from a wheelbarrow. “You don’t want the offer, I’ll take it to Sancho.”

Emilio “Sancho” Perata was the shot caller for the 23rd Street Locos Salvatruchos, out of Richmond, as yet the only quasi-legitimate northern MS-13 clica outside San Francisco.