April Smith: Judas Horse

Hanging on a rack is a beat-up leather jacket from the sixties. Originally, it was a designer piece — creamy yellow, square pockets and a belt — but now it looks like Jackie Kennedy on the skids. Who would wear this jacket? From a single clue, I have seven minutes to invent another persona — someone criminal, the shadow side of me. Okay. She bought the jacket in a thrift shop. She doesn’t give a damn about the rules. Hates authority. Steals. She’s a soft touch for animals because she is a stray herself.

And more. She grew up in one of the older tracts in Long Beach, California (not far from Ana Grey) — cheap housing built in the forties for oil refinery workers, now a mixed ghetto of the unemployed. Her name is Darcy DeGuzman. Darcy because it is innocent and bouncy, although she is driven by the ruthlessness of a starving child. That’s the DeGuzman part. Ethnically ambiguous. (Filipina? Spanish?) Deserted by her parents, a pair of depressive alcoholics. Growing up, it was necessary to perform favors for boys. She learned how to use people. She’s streetwise and impulsive, lonely, young and foolish, and somewhere in a violent past, in a crumbling neighborhood where the working class has become obsolete, she killed somebody.

I slip my arms through the cool satin lining of the sleeves.

But I know it fits before I even have it on.

They put me in a van with blacked-in windows. We leave the Marine base and follow curving roads until we are at an outdoor mall. They give me forty dollars, a phone number, and an empty pistol secured with a plastic tie so it can be drawn but not fired.

I walk past a drugstore and a food mart. Normal citizens are wheeling carts filled with groceries, little kids in tow. It is 8:35 p.m. I intercept a pair of girls on their way into a fried chicken restaurant.

“I’m all turned around. How far is D.C.?”

“Oh,” says one, giving the stained-up jacket a stare, “you’re an hour and a half from D.C. If you exit here and go right, you’ll be on I-95.” I have my bearings. I’ve been deposited about thirty miles south of Quantico. Beautiful.

I sit outside a Dairy Queen and devour a milk shake and a double cheeseburger. A sign claims this franchise sells the most ice-cream cakes in Virginia.

I am having a wonderful time.

Two hours later, the mist has settled in but good, and I am shivering in a stupid tank top and miniskirt torn at the hem, which I chose to wear under the thin leather jacket. I cannot see anyone observing me, but the parking lot has been busy. Now it is deserted and everything has shut down except a twenty-four-hour gym. I walk over there and sit on a bench. I go in and use the restroom. I sit on the bench some more.

A woman trainer comes out of the gym. I noticed her when I ducked inside; she was working out with a man with a shaved head. The trainer is wearing a pink sweatsuit and carrying a workout bag. Black ponytail, military posture. An alarm goes off: She’s fit. She’s alert. She’s an agent.

“You haven’t seen a white truck circling around, have you?” she asks with a nasal twang.

“Haven’t seen one.”

“My husband’s supposed to pick me up.”

I nod. “I think I’m supposed to meet you.”

“Meet me for what?”

I don’t answer right away. We walk together.

“What’s your name and where are you from?” she asks.

I say it out loud for the first time: “Darcy, from California.” “California?” Her voice drops. “What are you doing here ?” “Staying ahead of the cops.” I am making this up as I go along.

She seems to know it. “Crap,” she says.

“Why?”

She looks around nervously. I follow her gaze. A minivan of off-duty Marines has pulled into the entrance of the Days Inn motel. My grandfather stayed there when I graduated from Quantico as a new agent. As far as I knew, it didn’t have hookers cruising the parking lot then.

“You’ve come all the way from the West Coast? Where’s your car?” Car!

“I got a bunch of different rides.”

She lowers the bag between her feet, starts redoing her ponytail. A signal? I glance at the parking lot, but there is no movement.

“I know you’re not for real,” she hisses. “And life’s too short, honey.” It scares me. I feel Darcy falling away.

“There’s my husband,” she says, and now comes the white truck.

“We can do business.” I step along eagerly. “We’re here to do business, right?” “Give me a break,” she says contemptuously, and calls, “Lloyd!” as the truck noses up to the curb. “We can go now.” Game over?

Be cut? Never find the trash that killed Steve Crawford?

Not until they tell me to have a good trip home.

“Hey, bitch,” I call.

And Darcy DeGuzman, my new undercover identity, is born.

The woman turns on a dime, feet planted like a fuzzy pink ninja.

“Excuse me?”

“Get over here.”

“What?”

A shaved head sticks out of the truck. “Jennifer? We got a problem?” Right on cue. They’re wearing hidden microphones.

“Tell your old man to chill.” I swagger up to where she stands in the fluorescent wash of the drugstore window. “This is what I’m talking about.” I flash a twenty from the money I have been given, pretending it is counterfeit.

“So, Jennifer ?” I say. “You got copies good as this? I know a buyer.” I feel ridiculous, acting out a role in the middle of real America. But she takes the bill and examines it closely. Maybe she is giving me a chance to be creative. Or, hell, maybe it really is counterfeit.

“Jennifer!” calls the guy in the truck.

The woman in pink raises her eyes and searches mine.

“I don’t know,” she says warily.

Great acting.

“I need a million dollars.” My confidence is building. “Top-quality.” Jennifer nods slowly. “I have a friend.”

I press the advantage. “One condition. I have to see the operation.” “No way. Are you nuts?”

I shrug. “That’s what my boss wants. He said to check out the source, make sure the bills aren’t traceable.” “They’re not traceable.”

“I can’t take your word.”

I give her apologetic. She understands. We are both in the same fix: men.

She shakes her head. “They’d never agree to something like that.” “Ask. Nicely.”

She hesitates. “Wait here.”

She confabs with the guy in the truck and comes back and tells me the “friend” wants $100,000 in cash, for the million in fakes.

We are inching toward a deal, but where to get the money? There is one more clue, waiting in my pocket.

I say I have to make a call.

She accompanies me to a pay phone, where I dial the number I was given in the van. A voice I do not recognize says, “Yeah?” I do not break character as I tell my “contact” to bring a hundred grand in cash to the mall. Twenty-five minutes later, a low-rider Chevrolet, driven by a black man I have never seen, pulls up and parks away from the lighted rim of stores. A hip-hop bass seems to fill the empty space of the parking lot.

“Be right back,” I tell Jennifer, aware that I am approaching an unknown individual alone.

The window is down. He watches with glittering eyes, fingers flicking the wheel. He is thirty, taut, wearing a do-rag and chewing gum. When I get close, I see his nose is running, and his hand trembles as he draws it across chapped lips.

“You it?” he says.

“Guess so.”

“You guess ? Who sent you?”

He is out of the car. So we were to play another scene for Jennifer and her husband?

“Hey, motherfucker,” I muster. “What’s your problem?”