John Connolly - The Black Angel

A connecting doorway led from the cantina into the diner. A sign on the diner side announced that the bar was now closed, but the main door to the cantina remained unlocked for the present. Harry heard it open and looked up to see a pair of men enter. Both were white. One was tall and in his early forties, with graying hair and some scarring to his right eye. He wore a blue shirt, a blue jacket, and jeans that were a little long at the ends, but was otherwise largely unremarkable in appearance.

The other man was almost as tall as his companion, but obscenely fat, his enormous belly hanging pendulously between his thighs like a great tongue lolling from an open mouth. His body appeared out of proportion to his legs, which were short and slightly bowed, as though they had struggled for many years to support the load they were required to bear and were at last buckling under the strain. The fat man’s face was perfectly round and quite pale, but his features were very delicate: green eyes enclosed by long, dark lashes; a thin, unbroken nose; and a long mouth with full, dark lips that were almost feminine. But any passing resemblance to traditional notions of facial beauty were undone by his chin, and the tumorous, distended neck in which it lost itself. It rolled over his shirt collar, purple and red, like an intimation of the gut that lay farther down. Harry was reminded of an old walrus that he had once seen in a zoo, a great beast of blubber and distended flesh on the verge of collapse. This man, by contrast, was far from the grave. Despite his bulk, he walked with a strange lightness, seemingly gliding across the sticky, shell-strewn floor of the cantina. Harry’s shirt was streaked with sweat even though the AC was blasting, yet the fat man’s face was entirely dry, and his white shirt and gray jacket appeared untouched by perspiration. He was balding, but his remaining hair was very black and cut short against his skull. Harry found himself mesmerized by the man’s appearance, the mix of terrible ugliness and near beauty, of obscene bulk and irreconcilable grace. Then the spell was broken, and Harry spoke.

“Hey,” said Harry. “We’re closed.”

The fat man paused, the sole of his right foot poised just above the floor. Harry could see an unbroken peanut just beneath his shoe leather.

The foot began to complete its descent. The shell started to flatten beneath the weight.

And Harry was suddenly confronted by the face of the fat man, inches from his own, staring straight at him. Then, before he could even begin to take in his presence, the fat man was to his left, then to his right, all the time whispering in a language Harry couldn’t understand, the words an unintelligible mass of sibilance and occasional harsh consonants, their precise meaning lost to him but their intimation clear.

Stay out of my way. Stay out of my way or you’ll be sorry.

The fat man’s face was a blur, his body zipping from side to side, his voice an insistent throbbing inside Harry’s head. Harry felt nauseous. He wanted it to stop. Why wasn’t anyone intervening on his behalf? Where was Miguel?

Harry reached out a hand in an effort to support himself against the bar.

And the movement around him suddenly ceased.

Harry heard the peanut shell crack. The fat man was where he had previously been, fifteen or twenty feet from the bar, his colleague behind him. Both were looking at Harry, and the fat man was smiling slightly, privy to a secret that only he and Harry now shared.

Stay out of my way.

In a far corner, Harry saw a hand raised: Octavio, who took care of the whores, absorbing a cut of their income in return for protection, and passing on a little of it to Harry in turn.

This was none of Harry’s business. He nodded once, and returned to cleaning off the overspill from the beer taps. He managed to complete his task, then slipped quietly into the little bathroom behind the bar, where he sat on the toilet seat for a time, his hands trembling, before he vomited violently into the sink. When he returned to the cantina, the fat man and his partner were gone. Only Octavio was waiting for him. He didn’t look much better than Harry felt.

“You okay?” he asked.

Harry swallowed. He could still taste bile in his mouth.

“Better we forget, you understand?” said Octavio.

“Yeah, I get you.”

Octavio gestured to the bar, pointing out the bottle of brandy on the top shelf. Harry took the bottle and poured the alcohol into a highball glass. He figured that Octavio didn’t need a snifter, not this time. The Mexican put a twenty on the bar.

“You need one too,” he said.

Harry poured himself a glass, keeping his hand heavy.

“There was a girl,” said Octavio. “Not local. Black Mexican.”

“I remember,” said Harry. “She was here tonight. She’s new. Figured her for one of yours.”

“She won’t be back,” said Octavio.

Harry lifted the glass to his lips, but found that he couldn’t drink. The taste of bile was returning. Vera, that was the girl’s name, or the name she had given when Harry had asked. Few of these women used their real name for business. He’d spoken to her once or twice, just in passing. He’d seen her maybe three times in all, but no more than that. She’d seemed pretty nice, for a whore.

“Okay,” said Harry.

“Okay,” said Octavio.

And, like that, the girl was gone.

There were only three rooms occupied at the Spyhole Motel. In the first room, a young couple on a road trip to Mexico were bickering, still argumentative after a long, uncomfortable journey. Soon they would descend into uneasy, prickly silence, until the boy made the first move toward reconciliation, heading out into the desert night and returning with sodas from the machine by the office. He would place one of the cans against the small of the girl’s back, and she would react with a shiver. He would kiss her, and tell her that he was sorry. She would kiss him back. They would drink, and soon the heat and the arguments would appear to be forgotten.

In the next room, a man sat in his vest upon a bed, watching a Mexican game show. He had paid for his room in cash. He could have stayed in Yuma, for he had business there in the morning, but his face was known, and he disliked staying in the city for longer than he had to. Instead, he sat in the remote motel and watched couples hug each other as they won prizes worth less than the money in his wallet.

The last room on this block of the motel was taken by another solo traveler. She was young, barely into her twenties, and she was running. They called her Vera in Harry’s Best Rest, but those who were seeking her knew her as Sereta. Neither name was real, but it no longer mattered to her what she was called. She had no family now, or none that cared. In the beginning, she had sent money home to her mother in Ciudad Juarez, supplementing the meager income she gleaned from her work in one of the big maquiladoras on Avenida Tecnologico. Sereta and her older sister Josefina had worked there too, until that November day when everything changed for them.

When she called home Sereta would tell Lilia, her mother, that she was working as a waitress in New York. Lilia did not question her, even though she knew that her daughter, before she left for the north, had frequently been seen leaving the gated communities of the Campestre Juarez, where the wealthy Americans lived, and the only local women admitted to such places were servants and whores. Then, in November 2001, the body of Sereta’s sister Josefina was one of eight found in an overgrown cotton field near the Sitio Colosio Valle mall. The bodies were badly mutilated, and the protests of the poor increased in volume, for these were not the first young women to die in this place, and there were stories told of wealthy men behind barred gates who had now added killing for pleasure to their list of recreations. Sereta’s mother told her to leave and not to come back. She never mentioned the Campestre Juarez to her daughter, and the rich men in their black cars, but she knew.