Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Since they’d started out from the restaurant, he’d felt more awake than he had in a long time. Longer than he could remember.

The warehouse door was locked. Dobbs knocked, and in response there was only silence.

“It’s me,” he said. That brought a stirring, what sounded like chair legs sliding across concrete.

A thick arm wrapped in flames held open the door just wide enough for Dobbs to see through.

“What do you want?” Mike said.

Dobbs could make out the shape of Tim sitting at the card table. Neither of them was smoking, but Dobbs could smell their cigarettes. The water and sewerage van was parked in the garage next to Mike and Tim’s gray pickup truck. Sergio was nowhere in sight.

Dobbs put his hand on the knob, but Mike held it in place.

Across the garage, Tim’s cell phone screen flashed yellowish green and then went dark. A message sent to Sergio.

Dobbs turned back around, but Constance wouldn’t meet his eye. She was looking past him, into the gap, trying to make out what lay beyond. The door started to close.

Dobbs felt his shoulder buckle on impact. But the door swung back open, and he stumbled in. Mike looked down on him in surprise as Dobbs slid to the floor, his shoulder a spiraling kaleidoscope of pain.

Both men were on him in an instant, but Mike was first, propping his boot on Dobbs’s head, pinning it in place. As if Dobbs had somewhere to go.

For good measure, they drew their guns, too, and they were so distracted, trying to decide whether to shoot him then and there or wait for Sergio, that they didn’t notice Constance come inside. Not until she stood beside them did Tim finally catch her shadow out of the corner of his eye.

“Who the fuck is she?” he said, shaking his gun in Dobbs’s face.

Though it felt like his ear was tearing against the cracked concrete, Dobbs tried to turn his head to see into the far room, where everyone — he hoped — was sleeping. But his eyes were going dim.

As she adjusted to the darkness, Constance noticed another room beyond the garage, a large space crammed with mattresses. There must have been a hundred, probably more. And here and there she saw movement, bodies large and small. Some of them appeared to be asleep. But it was hard to tell which lumps were people and which were bags and clothes. Along the far wall, in the faint moonlight, there was a silhouette resembling a woman with a baby at her breast.

Constance said, “I’m the one that’s going to feed them.”

The village was only two hundred miles from Mexico City, but to get there took eight hours on four different buses. With each transfer, the towns grew smaller. Each vehicle was worse than the last. The fourth and final bus was a metal skeleton stripped of anything soft — unpadded seats on unpaved roads. The windows were open to let in the breeze.

On that final stretch, all the other passengers were locals, peasants hefting cardboard suitcases secured with string. A few had even brought chickens, tough old birds, indifferent to the bumps. They were wiry and dusty and of no particular breed he could identify. Scavengers, able to survive anything.

Most of the time the bus seemed to be climbing uphill. But by the end of the trip, Michael Boni discovered he’d reached the coast after all.

Late in the afternoon, the bus dropped him off alone by the village square, a pale slab of cement sterilized by the sun. The place was empty; it looked as if it had always been empty. Adjacent to the square was the intersection where the town’s two roads met. One of them was the road he’d come in on. Finding no one to ask for directions, Michael Boni picked up his bag and started up the other street, following the dense, heady smell of the ocean.

The road was wide and vacant, lined with brightly painted concrete walls. Over the top of the walls spilled the occasional spindly vine and the arm of a dusty tree. At regular intervals, the walls gave way to iron gates. Beyond the gates Michael Boni caught glimpses of private courtyards. A few potted plants, a leaning broom, a cracked, faded chair.

“A sleepy seaside town” was what the guidebook had called it. The book was ten years out of date, the entire entry only a paragraph long. But Michael Boni had liked the idea of a place that could be so easily summarized, containing only the barest essentials.

Up ahead the road rose slightly and then crested. At the top of the hill, a second-story balcony stood out against the blue sky. He saw something moving up there, somebody swinging almost imperceptibly in a hammock. The sign on the facade said HOTEL.

Michael Boni stopped in the shade of an open doorway and rested for a moment. He’d had no idea it could be so hot, especially in mid-December.

The guidebook had claimed there was only one hotel in town, a fact that didn’t seem to have changed in the years since it was written. The town was too remote for foreign tourists, for anyone not looking to get away from everything.

The dining room was an open patio separated from the sidewalk by a low plastic fence. Even with the breeze pushing through, a sour perfume of fried fish hung in the air. Through the doorway into the kitchen, he saw a stooped old woman and a girl with long dark hair standing at a table, chopping tomatoes and onions. The older of the two saw Michael Boni and came out to greet him.

At first the old woman didn’t seem to understand he spoke no Spanish. The problem had been following him across the countryside. No one seemed to know what to make of a Mexican gringo.

But what he wanted now was easy enough to convey. The old woman pointed to a sign above the bar listing rates. There were two prices; the second floor, with its view of the ocean, was twice as much as the first. Michael Boni didn’t need to count his pesos to know which one he could afford.

The woman called to the girl in the kitchen, Marisol. Marisol appeared at once, pausing only to brush a few loose strands of hair from her eyes. He thought he saw her smile, as if she recognized him.

“ Bienvenido .”

The words, appearing out of nowhere, sounded like a name: Ben Venida, garbled in Texas drawl. Michael Boni turned to find the source striding toward him down the corridor. The man was dressed in khaki cargo shorts and a white linen shirt. Fit and tanned, with tousled, sandy blond hair. A shark’s tooth dangled from a leather lace around his neck.

“ Me llamo Shim,” the man said. He took Michael Boni’s hand as if he were bestowing a prize. “ Y usted ?”

“I don’t speak Spanish,” Michael Boni said.

“No kidding!” Shim looked delighted. “It’s nice to see a fellow countryman.” Shim motioned toward the empty street and the empty restaurant. “I was beginning to wonder if there’s some sort of plague here no one told me about.” His smile framed rows of bleached white teeth. “Well, people don’t know what they’re missing.”

Michael Boni nodded, turning away.

“The señora will take good care of you,” Shim said, aiming a grin at the old woman, who in turn regarded him with a complete absence of expression.

The girl leaned over one of the tables, wiping a circle on the plastic tablecloth.

Shim pointed to Michael Boni’s lone bag. “Traveling solo?”

He nodded.

“Too bad,” Shim said. “Such a romantic spot. The sunsets are beautiful.”

Shim was constantly moving. In an instant, he was behind the bar. “You pour your own here.” As Shim lifted a bottle from the shelf, the señora clenched the towel draped over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes.

Shim hoisted his glass. “Let me buy you a drink.”

Michael Boni picked up his bag. “Maybe later.” The señora was moving down the corridor, and he started after her, happy to have an excuse to get away.