Lourdes stood there in the entry, same clothes as yesterday, unwashed hair. I’m a disaster, she thought, remembering the phrase from a movie she’d stayed up to watch a few nights back, the girls in bed so she couldn’t ask them what it meant. She glanced up to check how her script, such as she’d managed it, was playing, at the same time noticing the odd burned smell in the air. “I think I must leave it behind yesterday, when I come and clean. Maybe I look around, I no take time, I promise…”
The smell was smoke. Veronica said, “We had a teeny little accident at the stove this morning.” She was girlishly small and achingly thin, sunken eyes, an insomniac pallor, her head a frizzy eruption of sage-colored hair. The ghost of an angry girl, Lourdes thought, that is what she looks like, what she always looks like. “Samantha has some awful sort of flu, she can’t keep anything down. I was trying to scramble her some eggs.”
Lourdes detected a second smell, the familiar whiff of alcohol, Veronica’s breath, at the same time thinking: The girl is here, I need to tell them. She pointed toward the kitchen. “You need me help you clean?”
Veronica ignored the question, plucking idly at her frayed hair. She tried to chuckle but her voice caught. The self-pity in her eyes splintered. “Charlie’s going to kill me…”
What was she talking about? “Veronica-”
“Christ, he blames me for everything. What am I supposed to do? It was an accident. Okay? If you had any idea what a misery this is, how hard-”
“Veronica, I’m not understand-”
“And for what?” She waved listlessly then laughed so bitterly Lourdes shrank from the sound. “Go on, look around. I haven’t seen your stupid watch but maybe it’s here somewhere.”
Veronica turned toward the kitchen, staggering with her first step, recovering with the next. Then Lourdes’s cell phone rang. Waiting until Veronica was out of earshot, she flipped it open.
– What’s taking so long?
– The girl is here, not just the mother.
In the kitchen, Veronica kicked something metal-a pan, from the sound-across the linoleum floor.
– Where are they in the house?
– The girl is in her room, I think. I have not seen her yet. Veronica is in the kitchen.
– Find out where the girl is.
– The girl, she is sick.
– I understand that, but… What the hell…?
His voice rose sharply then fell away and she heard squealing tires-a car banged into the driveway, chattering brakes, a door slamming. Swallowing the knot in her throat, she drifted toward the picture window, peered past the curtains and saw the husband charging through the drizzle up the walk, hair and necktie flailing in the wind, his face flushed with rage.
Charlie’s going to kill me…
Into the phone, she said:-You see him, he is-
– Stick to your story. I’ll call you back.
The front door slammed open, the husband burst in, breathing through his mouth from the rushed climb up the drive, hair shaggy and damp, skin florid. Spotting Lourdes, he pulled up short. She still held her phone.
“What are you doing here?”
For the merest instant she considered confessing everything, the five vatos outside waiting to rob him, ready to kill him. But she could not trust him to understand. And her girls, what would happen?
“I think,” she announced, “I leave my watch here yesterday. I come back, look for it.”
He’d already abandoned his question, neck craning toward the stairs, the hallway. Veronica drifted out of the kitchen.
He said, “What the hell have you done?”
“I want you to listen,” she began.
“Sam said you damn near set the house on fire.”
“That’s a lie. I was trying to cook-”
“She told you she was sick, she puked up half of last week, she didn’t want-”
“I just thought-”
“She said you were drunk.”
The mask dissolved. She turned away. “I’m not listening to-”
The husband lurched forward, grabbed her arm. “Don’t you turn your back on me.”
Lourdes, suddenly light-headed, reached out for the nearest chair at the same moment her phone rang again-only then did she realize it was still in her hand-the sound startling her so badly she nearly dropped it.
– What’s happening?
– They’re having a fight.
– Can you open the door?
– I don’t… I…
– Nothing’s changed. Do as I told you. Just the way we discussed. It’s going to be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.
The phone went dead. In a daze she backed toward the door. She swallowed another clot of air then called out, or thought she called out, that she would come back some other time to look for her watch.
HAPPY FLIPPED HIS CELL PHONE CLOSED AND TURNED TO THE OTHERS.“Vamos, bravos.”
He considered calling it off, but till when-tomorrow? Next week? Lourdes couldn’t handle it, they couldn’t handle her, she’d bolt, she’d crumble, she’d beg them nonstop, crazy, infuriating: Let me go… And her girls, they’d call the law, all that.
He met the others on the street. “Change in plans. This guy Chuck, he’s in the house, so is one of the kids. The girl. We gotta take them down all at once, not one at a time. It’s gonna be okay. Look, everybody but Godo, you go to the same positions we practiced. Efraim, you got the upstairs bedrooms, you take the girl, make sure she don’t call 911. Godo, you look for this Chuck guy, you handle him, right?” His words met stares, each one with its own distinctive fear or surprise or numb resolve. “Okay then. Be smart, stay sharp.”
As they reached the porch they pulled down their balaclavas, dragged the weapons out of the duffel bags, slammed the magazines home, flipped off the safeties. Happy gave the ready signal just as Lourdes opened the door and backed out, saying, “I call before I come back…”
FOR THE PAST HOUR, CROUCHED IN THE BACK OF THE TRUCK, GODO HAD tried to convince himself there was a right way to do this thing, reminding himself this wasn’t Joe Citizen they were taking down but filth, one of them, the arrogant sloppy goat fuckers who, almost singlehandedly, botched the war. Happy wanted no one dead. Fine, the way it ought to be. Don’t just avenge Gunny Benedict, make him proud-assert control, overwhelming force, stay alert, maintain discipline. He could trust Efraim, he wanted to trust Puchi, Chato was wack. Shoot him if need be, he told himself. Better him than the wife or the girl.
As the front door swung open, he rushed in at the lead, using the AK to track the space left to right, ground floor to the stair, feeling the eerie déjà vu he’d expected but luckily not haunted by it, the ghosts present but silent-Gunny Benedict, Salgado, Mobley, the Iraqi family in the Cressida-as though he were split in two, the old Godo, the guy standing here. Then he spotted him, the contractor, Chuck, frozen in place, halfway up the stairs, gripping his wife’s dress with one hand, the other clenched into a fist. He stood there fright-eyed, hunched over the woman, then survival kicked in, he dropped her like a bag of sand and charged up the stairs but Godo was already closing, adrenalin purging all weakness from his bum leg as he moved to contact, taking the steps two at a time, forging past the wife who covered her head and rolled out of his way to keep from being trampled.
The contractor reached the first doorway, the master bedroom, before Godo gun-butted him from behind, knocked him to his knees. He heard Efraim in the hall behind him, running to the other bedrooms to secure them, take care of the girl, while downstairs Happy hooked his arm around Lourdes’s throat, shouting, “Stay calm! Nobody gets hurt, you do as you’re told.”