"Mmmmmfffffffff." Morales struggled.
"Wass yo' name, amigo? Pace? Listen, douchebag, you really like taking pictures of the little kids, eh? You and your pal Juan," he exaggerated the name, "get off on the kiddie stuff. So I'm going to fix you up good." A straight razor flashed open from nowhere and Spain showed it to the man. Then he pocketed it and wired Morales' ankles, pulled the razor out, slit the man's fly of his trousers, and picked up his pliers. The eyes were like golf balls now.
"Hey, I'm not going to hurt your pecker with this," he said gently to the bound man. "This, is jus' so I don't have to TOUCH your filthy excuse for a cocko, Paco." He carefully pulled the limp brown penis from the man's pants and undershorts using the pliers. "No, see, I'm not goin' to hurt you with this." The razor flicked open again. "I'm going to hurt you with THISSSSSSSSS," he said, making the final cut on the last Morales scene.
"This is a little something my daughter wants you to have as a going away present, you spic greaseball garbage." Smiling real big, he stuffs the thing in the man's mouth. "You like the little kids so much, you motherfucker," he says in his tight, fierce whisper, "now you got yourself a little kid's pecker." And he started wiping off prints, careful not to step in the blood.
He took a last look at the two on the floor and walked out to the stolen van, parked right there in broad damn daylight across the road from the Bacardi Bar. Fucking Reynosa.
"Adios, Taco, or Paco, or whatever your fucking slimebag name was." Spain drove back the way he'd come. Driving calmly now. Driving past the back of the Vivir un Poco billboard and heading toward Jon Belmonte's. Five names were now lined through at the bottom of his long list: Greg Dawkins Roger Nunnaly Charles Freund Bobbie Freund Paco Morales
He picked up a sixth name back across the Mex-Tex border. The only one of the first six that was the least little bit tricky. Of course the Nunnaly punk had been a gift from God. But he couldn't just go up to La Bellamonde and gun his ass down in the street. He needed more names and corroboration of the way the Blue Kriegal thing worked. He didn't want to miss anybody because of an itchy trigger finger. Turned out he had to shoot him anyway.
The Mel Troxell people had been achingly explicit about the part Belmonte/La Bellamonde played in his daughter's torture and demise. Another insult on top of insult was the way nobody had even bothered to be very secretive about the snuff movie. Like it was so protected who'd bother them? The cops in Mexico are in with the beaner wise guys anyway, but you'd think Belmonte would at least have been a bit circumspect.
Spain knew he'd have to exercise the greatest degree of self-discipline to keep from whacking Belmonte out immediately.
He found him in back of his house, beating two little tables with a chain. He had the tables out in the hot sun of his courtyard working them over to age them. He hit the captain's desk about a dozen times, not hard shots, but just enough to bite a little wood out each time, and he was going to start on the honey pine chest when he heard Spain walking across the courtyard toward him.
Spain could tell his reflexes were good the way he turned with a graceful, balanced half-spin still holding the chain down by his right leg, and nodding to Spain as Spain said, "Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to this address," as he pulled a folded up piece of paper from his shirt pocket.
Spain looked at the paper as he got closer and shook his head as if perplexed. But he could see Belmonte shift his weight a little. He was moving back as Spain moved forward. Spain read off a fake address and held the note in an outstretched hand but J.B. wasn't having any of it.
He shook his head politely and said, "Sorry, bud, but I haven't lived around here long myself," moving a little as he spoke, wary and experienced, keeping the piece of chain beside him as he stayed a chain-length away from the stranger with the outstretched arm.
Spain read the situation and clocked the guy for a pro, shrugging as he folded the note back up and smiled, saying, "No problem, pal, I'll ask back at the gas station," turning as if to leave as he dropped his sport coat around the .25 Browning and turned firing low. The shot made a loud SSPPPAAAKK as it blew a hole in the coat and hit Belmonte in the hip. He dropped the chain as he fell in a shout of pain, and Spain got to him fast, kicking the chain away and clipped him lightly, then dragging him into the nearby garage.
He had the man bound and gagged and the blood flow stopped within a couple of minutes, and was backing into the garage and loading him into the trunk. He went in the back door of the house and checked it fast, racing through the house with the gun ready, but it was empty. He got in the car and drove out of town until he found some country roads that didn't look like they had much traffic on them.
Juan La Bellamonde came to with his hands wired behind him, bound to a tree. Spain reached down on the grass beside where he'd been sitting and got a straight razor and a small bottle of smoky-looking liquid. Dr. Spain pulled on his rubber gloves, which he'd picked up at the hardware store, and bent to his task. Spain's rubber-covered fingers ever so gently blotted the watering eyes and removed the glass stopper from the acid.
"Do you believe in an eye for an eye?" he asked the man, rhetorically.
The man's eyes teared again, lidless, as he soaked the front of his trousers with urine.
"You've got one chance. And goodness gracious, stop pissing all over yourself — you've got to learn to control your emotions a little." He picked up the wadded tissue and held it in front of the screaming man. "Know what these are?" La Bellamonde knew before he looked into the bloody tissue. "These are your eyelids, freak," he said through gritted teeth.
"And this" — showing him the smoking stuff —"is your acid, you see." The man tried to bite through the gag and began to choke. Spain pulled the gag out for a moment, and when his choking had subsided he told him, "One chance. I want everything about the Kriegal operation. Every name in the mob you can think of. Every address. Every method of contact. Take me through the whole thing by the numbers, from what Blue does with the little boys and girls to who he buys 'em from to what brand of rat poison you put on your cornflakes in the morning. All the dirt. You miss a comma in there. You even ACT like you're getting tired. You leave out one fact and I catch you . . . " He holds up the acid.
La Bellamonde was voluble and forthcoming. He told him all the nitty 'n' every bit of the gritty, but in the end it didn't help. Spain was getting bored with him and he sighed, picked up the acid, and removed the stopper, smiling, holding it real close and saying liltingly, "Murine time . . . " as the man fainted.
Spain was in a great mood by the time he'd taken up temporary residence in a motel a week later. He was doing several things at once, constructing his cover, cultivating a cutout, building a mail-drop legend, all the things he'd done a score of times before, but doing it with a difference now. For the first time he wasn't working for pay. He was working for revenge and it filled him with something akin to glee. The singer was wrong. Living well wasn't the best revenge. REVENGE was the best bloody, fucking revenge there was, and anything less was just kidding yourself.
When a worker wants to insulate himself — or for that matter, when a dealer wants to protect himself — an innocent party is used. Mules, mokes, they're called different things. Square johns who can be spotted, isolated, cut from the pack, cultivated, and put into play without their knowing it. Spain had newspaper ads set to hit the next day at a motel he was using only for fake screening of job applicants. A girl-Friday executive assistant for a mail entrepreneur. He would set some turkey up with a cheap storefront office first. Have her depositing real checks, opening a mail drawer, all that shit. Then he'd use her to take care of details like dealing with realtors — all the things he'd be needing where he didn't want personal contact.