“What are you saying?”
“Maybe he needs more time to deliver. Maybe the ten days can become eleven days. And with the hurricane coming who knows if the roads will be open? But if you perform on the stage of the Jaguars, I will give you back the day that has been lost. So that the million dollars can arrive here.”
“You bastard.” Erin whirled and saw the red flush on his pallorous face. She stood and lifted the Hummingbird over her head with both hands and heaved it at him. Armenta scrambled upright with surprising speed and did a little barefoot stutter-step, then caught the flying instrument by its neck and body, balancing its weight as he gathered it from the air. “You sonofabitch.”
He looked woefully from the guitar to Erin. “Then do not perform for yourself.”
“For whom, then? You? For your dead angel of a son? For your living rapist of a son? For Felix the reporter?”
Armenta walked slowly across the tiles and set the guitar back into the case. He closed the lid and fastened the clasps.
He looked at her. “Do it for the child that grows inside you.”
15
Hood sat in the Reynosa motel room and looked through El Universal newspaper while Valente Luna answered e-mails on his phone. Julio Santo had gone for takeout at a restaurant he knew and highly recommended.
Hood thought that Reynosa should be big in the news right now. Yesterday, the U.S. radio stations had been filled with the story of a shootout between narcotrafficantes and Federal troops-four dead in a running shootout that paralyzed Reynosa for hours. But there was no mention of this in El Universal. Hood looked over at the television news but there had not been any reference to the shootout on TV either.
“Nobody in Reynosa talks about Reynosa,” he said.
“Journalism is dead,” said Luna, looking up from his phone. “The editors and reporters are afraid of the cartels. If they say the wrong thing it heats the plaza, and they’re murdered. They have no protection. Thirty reporters killed since Calderon declared his war on the cartels. Some tortured and beheaded. Even the United Nations has been here to see the situation. But they come and they say, yes, this is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Then they leave and nothing changes. The American media named it narcocensorship and I think this is a good word for it.”
Hood stood and looked through motel room curtains at the darkened parking lot and the bakery and mini-super and restaurant across the street. There were diners in the restaurant and a little line out front and it was easy for him to pretend that things were good down here, that the law meant something and there were plenty of good people to enforce it.
“Why did you join the police in Juarez?”
Luna looked up from his phone again. “My father was a Juarez police captain. I was born in Juarez. It was a good city. It was peaceful and proud.”
“You and Raydel were both police.”
“And one more brother, Antonio. Three police. My sister teaches school in Juarez. Sometimes I think of leaving. We only solve one out of every two hundred murders in our city now. That is a terrible truth. Half our department has been fired or has quit. We cannot hire and train new ones fast enough. The government has given us millions of dollars but we still can’t find enough men. Where are they? We run the advertisements and they fail to appear. One morning in Guadalajara last month there was a banner hanging from a freeway overpass. It said ‘Join the Zetas. High pay. Good benefits. An exciting life.’ It was an authentic recruiting attempt. There was a number to call. The banner was removed immediately and the next day it was up again with a body hung on either side of it. Police, of course. Still in their uniforms.”
“I admire your courage.”
“Then I’ll tell you this, my American friend: I called the number on the banner.”
Hood looked at Luna and Luna looked gloomily back. “I wanted to know how much the Zetas would pay me for killing my own kind. No one answered my call. Just a recording machine asking me for information. But I have heard that the Zetas pay ten times a policeman’s salary. Ten.”
Hood looked through the window again and saw Julio waiting in a little group of pedestrians at a traffic light across the busy street, both his hands dangling white plastic bags.
“My dad worked in landscape maintenance but I became a deputy in Los Angeles.”
“Why?”
“I did some investigative work in Iraq, with the Navy. I kind of had a knack for it so when I got back I applied. The pay is okay and the benefits are good. I guess I make about what the Zetas pay.”
“Then money was not your reason. For an American this is not a lot of money.”
“No. It was more going where I was needed. Doing something I believed in.”
“The law?”
“Yes. I believe in that.”
“If you know people who don’t, send them to Juarez. I will give them a personal tour of a city without law.”
Hood heard the knock. Through the peephole he saw the distorted and out-of-focus face of Julio. Hood opened the door to a gun blast and the whack of a bullet against his ballistic vest. A spray of blood hit him in the face and Julio collapsed on the landing with the bags of food still in his hands. The shooter was small and tucked close behind Julio and he swept his weapon toward Hood who twisted it away and broke the boy’s elbow and nose, then instinctively dropped to the floor, drawing his sidearm on the way down. He heard the three roars of Luna’s handgun behind him and the broken-armed shooter fall but two more men rushed from the darkness firing their pistols wildly, as if the number of bullets in the air was the only thing in the world that mattered. Hood rose to his knees and shot the nearest man and Luna cut down the second. Then two more sicarios charged from behind the ice machine but by now Luna was through the doorway and he headshot one, then the other, and they fell grotesquely into the planters filled with cactus and succulents and white gravel.
They knelt over Julio and Hood felt his carotid while he watched an SUV far back in the motel parking lot. Men were gathered around it and they looked undecided what to do. They looked young. Hood saw the glint of their weaponry in the weak streetlights.
“If they try again we will move apart,” said Luna. “At least one of them might know how to aim a gun and squeeze a trigger.” He stood and raised a fist at them, then worked a fresh magazine into the butt of his gun, holding it up for them to see.
Julio lay in a lake of blood and Hood could find no pulse. Across the street people fled from the restaurant and the store, and someone slammed shut the mini-super door from inside. There were families getting churros at the bakery but now the parents were herding away the crying children. Deep in the parking lot the men climbed back inside their vehicle. It was a Durango with a custom purple paint job and a shiny chrome face of Malverde, patron saint of the narcos, affixed to one of the side windows. A deep thumping sound came from the vehicle, then guitars and a mournful tenor sang the first line of a narcocorrido. Hood watched it jump the parking blocks, roll across the sidewalk and wobble over the curb and onto the busy street, where it disappeared in the traffic.
He rose and went the few steps to his vehicle and threw open the liftgate, then he carried Julio over and shouldered the dead man into the back. Luna ran from the room with the suitcase and hurled it onto a back seat.
“To pursue or escape?” Luna asked.
“Pursue. They won’t expect us.”
“Kill or arrest?”
“Let them decide.”