Adrian McKinty - Fifty Grand

“I’m tired and I have to get back. If I don’t a lot of people I care about will be in trouble.”

Paco takes a step away from me and sights the rifle at Jack. Jack puts up his hands, cowers, whimpers. Oh, Jack, please, act the man for once in your life.

“It was him, wasn’t it? Youkilis covered it up to protect him. He was in Fairview that night. He was drunk.”

I shake my head and look hard at Jack: “Tell him. Tell him what you told me.”

“I was after this part and then I was at a bar and Paul, well, Paul,” Jack begins hesitantly.

“Just tell him about the drinking and the drive home,” I interrupt.

“I’d had a few beers. I was too hammered to get back up the mountain. I called Paul and he came and picked me up. He didn’t even know I was in town. He thought I was in L.A. He’d had a few too, but not many. He wasn’t drunk. We were going up the mountain and I’m in the backseat and Paul’s turning around to talk to me, you know, and we hear this sort of clumping noise. Paul looks forward and doesn’t see anything. We stop the car but we don’t see anything. So we drive on. Day after that we read about the dead guy by the side of the road. We put two and two together. Course, by then we’d left the car at the shop. That’s how Briggs tracked us down.”

I’m staring at Paco.

Don’t hit him, please, he’ll crack like the first huevo of the day. Let him be.

Paco looks at me. “This is good enough for you?”

“We’re done here. Finished.”

“But this one, he will go to the police,” Paco says.

“We’ve talked that over. He covered up a crime. He’s an accessory to vehicular manslaughter. He’ll get jail and it’ll destroy his career.”

Paco closes his eyes. Thinks. I take his hand, squeeze it. “No more death,” I whisper.

Two in New Mexico, two here. Four men I’ve killed. Four too many.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

“Yeah. I got shot.”

“You got lucky.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go,” Paco says.

Two bodies under the ice.

A third and fourth faceup, staring at us.

“What about them?”

“Sink them.”

“They’ll come up,” I say.

“Their vests will drag them down.”

“Three cops go missing. Bound to be an inquiry.”

He points at Briggs. “Does this one have a phone?”

“I don’t know.”

Paco hands me the rifle, searches Briggs. He removes a silver cell phone and a wallet. He skims the wallet. About a thousand dollars in scratch, which he puts in his pocket. He takes out his own cell and smiles.

“Find Briggs’s number,” he says. “It’ll be on his menu.”

I flip Briggs’s cell, find the number, and tell Paco.

Paco dials it. Briggs’s phone rings and Paco waits for the voice mail. He grins at me and affects a chingla Mexican accent. “Briggs, man, where are you? We got the fucking stuff but we don’t see you. We went through a lot to get here. If you don’t show, or you try to pull something, man, you gonna be sorry.”

He hangs up. Grins.

“They won’t buy that,” I tell him.

“It’ll give them something to think about. We’ll sink the bodies, put Briggs’s phone in his car, leave the car where someone will find it. Ok, let’s go. Can you guys help?”

Paco stares at Jack and me. We’re both exhausted.

“Hell with ya, I’ll do it,” he mutters in Spanish.

He walks to Briggs, slides him into the nearest ice fissure. Briggs rolls over, floats for a second, and then sinks in a froth of bubbles. Paco does the same to Crawford, who joins his buddies at the bottom of the lake.

Carefully Paco picks up all the shells and puts them in his pocket. He points at Jack. “Ok, we go back. You first, and you better not run and you better not fall in the fucking water.”

Jack begins walking to the shore. Paco puts his arm around me.

“I think we’d better kill him,” Paco whispers.

“No,” I insist.

“Are you sure it wasn’t him?”

“It wasn’t him. Just an unlucky guy. A passenger. Wrong place, wrong time.”

Paco nods. “What’s that you’ve got?” he asks, looking at my father’s gun.

“You can have it,” I tell him. I’m done with guns.

We get to the shore. Paco starts telling Jack about the cars. We’ll drive one each. Jack will take Paul’s BMW. I’ll take Esteban’s Range Rover, which of course Paco drove here since Esteban isn’t expected back until tonight-a white lie of his that nearly got me killed. Paco will drive Briggs’s Escalade. We’ll dump the Escalade at a truck stop on I-25 and Paco will drive Jack back in the Beemer.

The plan seems sound.

I change my sweater, smoke a cigarette, take a last look at the lake.

Cracks already freezing over.

It reminds me of a poem by Basho: An old pond / a jumping frog / ripples .

This was not the way I wanted it to be. I don’t really know what I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t this.

Blood, gore, corpses under the water.

Hector’s niece is a nurse who works in a hospice for terminally ill babies. Babies who won’t live out a year. She feeds them, and cleans them, and loves them, and every night she whispers over them, “Grow, little baby, grow.”

That’s what a hero does.

Not this.

I shiver.

Paco puts his hand on my back. “Ok,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Denver. The Greyhound Station. The bus to El Paso. His unruly hair brushed, his face shaved. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, cowboy boots. The clear green of his eyes twinkles.

Our lips part.

He looks at me.

Not my best. Pale, bruised, and a beanie hat on to cover the bandage above my right ear.

“Do you really have to go back?” he asks.

“I do,” I tell him. “If I don’t, my boss, my mom, and my brother will all get in big trouble.”

He grins. “So the Cubans think you’ve been in Mexico this whole time?”

I nod.

“Quite the little secret agent,” he says.

The bus driver starts the engine.

“It’s a long drive to El Paso. You got something to read?”

I shake my head. “I’ll think.”

“Four hours from now you’ll be sorry.”

“Maybe.”

He looks at me. I look at the ground.

“Well,” he says. “You better…”

“Yeah.”

I kiss him again. This time chastely on the cheek. I pick up my bag.

“Is there anything I can do for you, Paco?”

“Plenty,” he says and grinds his hips.

“Not that,” I say, laughing. “I’m serious.”

He considers it.

“You saved me,” I explain. “I owe you.”

“My mother has cancer,” he says.

I peer into his face. He has never talked about his family. In fact, I know nothing about him at all. Brothers? Sisters? Orphan? He’s a cipher, a nowhere man.

“Your mother has cancer?”

“Yes. It’s breast cancer. The doctors rate her chances as fifty-fifty. I’d like to increase the odds, if possible.”

“Bring her to Cuba, we have some of the finest doctors in Latin America. They will treat her. I’m sure it’s better than Nicaragua. Bring her. And besides, I, I’d like to see you again.”

He shakes his head. “I’d like that too, but I can’t bring her to Cuba. She’s not well enough to travel and I have to earn money in the U.S.”

“What do you want me to do?”

He clears his throat. “If you have the time I would like you to light a candle for me at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“Our Lady of Guadalupe? I’ve heard of it but I’m not sure what it is exactly,” I reply.

“It’s in the north of Mexico City. I know you’re in a rush to get back, you have a plane to catch, but if you get the time.”