“Joe, come! Joe, come!”
The Roman draws his sidearm, a .40-caliber Glock 35 with a laser sight that holds twenty-two rounds and will not jam. He calls Joe again but the dog is gone. The gunfire subsides while footsteps land in the smoky silence. The Roman runs from his cover toward the rear exit of the warehouse. Then a volley and a high-pitched yipe from Joe. The Roman strides straight toward that yipe, shoots down a slender sicario in a white cowboy hat and a Shakira T-shirt, turns and center-shoots another man, twice — boom, boom — the bullets slamming into the far wall before his body plops to the floor. The Roman is a big man; he knows he might take a bullet someday doing shit like this.
But he loves it.
You wear the crown, you wear the target.
Joe whimpers to his left and the Roman charges the sound, zigzagging down a long aisle lined with mile-high shelves like a big-box store, and the Roman senses the enemy behind him, turns, and blows him down with three shots, the sicario’s machine gun clattering to the concrete.
The Roman and his employers press the running battle toward the rear exit and the loading docks and the street. The Sinaloans are fewer, just as the Roman had thought. They’re running hard for the steel sliding door through which they entered; it is still cracked open. Two escape, but the Roman and his confederates cut down two others as they try to squeeze out.
Followed by Joe, who clambers over the bodies and limps crookedly through the door and into the night.
“Joe, come! Come!”
Outside, the Roman scans the dark barrio with his pistol raised, trying to watch the cars and the houses and the buildings and the street, trying to keep from getting shot, trying to see his wounded dog. The Sinaloans have apparently taken off. Two boys run down Coahuila Street, oversized athletic shoes splashing potholes filled with rain. Sirens wail and citizens stoically observe the Roman from behind windows and cracked doors. They’ve seen this before — their city among the most violent cities in a violent country in a violent world.
The Roman calls out to them in anguished Spanish: “Where is my dog? Where is my dog?”
No one answers.
“Joe! Here, boy! Come!”
The Roman searches the sidewalks and beneath cars, under the festive furniture on the porches and the tiny front yards, even the gutters running black and throwing up wakes over pale sandbags that just maybe could be Joe.
The sirens force him away.
He’s the last to pile into the white-and-green van parked on a side street. It’s the one with the Ciudad de Tijuana Policía Municipal emblems on the sides and the orange light on the top and the three green cartridge cases on the floor beside the badly wounded Domingo. The driver runs the wet city streets fast, no warning light and no siren. Just the high beams. And the stink of blood and fear and gun smoke, and the pounding of the Roman’s heart.
Five minutes later the van pulls into Superior Automobile Repair and Service, and the motorized wrought iron gate with the big sign on it rolls closed behind them. The compound is surrounded by an impregnable ten-foot concrete wall with broken bottles cemented to the top. A man in street clothes waves the driver in to the high bay and the repair stations inside.
Domingo has died, so the others climb over him and out. The Roman is first among them, carrying one of the three ammunition cases, his pay for the night’s work. He loves the feel of $28,880 in his hand, but his heart aches with the loss of Joe.
Another man in street clothes walks the Roman to his car.
“It is terrible what happened, Señor Román.”
The Roman has rehearsed a lifetime for what just happened. Which prepared him poorly for it. He’s killed three men just now. His first, not counting war. He feels gutted and surprised.
“Fuck off, Amador.”
The Roman’s car is a green Maserati Quattroporte parked over a platform jack in one of the repair stations, as if to be worked on first thing in the morning. The Roman sets the ammo case in the trunk and tosses the ski mask beside it. Runs his hands through his short blond hair.
Behind the wheel now, he nods to the man, who throws a toggle on a cabled control box. The platform jack shudders and lowers the Maserati into the ground. The Roman looks at himself briefly in the rearview as the darkness claims him, blame and anger in his bloodshot gray eyes. Blame and anger. He thinks: Joe. I’d go back and look for him if la colonia wasn’t crawling with cops, some on cartel payrolls but some not.
Five minutes and a slow mile through the dark underground tunnel later, the green Maserati rises from its grave, safe within the high spiked walls of Platinum Foreign Car Specialists in Otay Mesa, California.
The Roman waits as the gate swings open, then drives through it into the California night.
35 Days After the Shoot-Out...
2
Joe lies on his pad in the Clínica Veterinarea San Francisco de Asís, looking out from his ancient rock-and-iron-grated cell at the blustery winter day.
The clinic director, Dr. Félix Rodríguez, has named him El Perro Disparado, Shot Dog, because, well, he’s been shot, and Tijuana street dogs don’t have name tags, and he has to call the dog something.
Joe has named the doctor Good Man. He understands that Good Man brings the food. He understands that Good Man has done something mysterious to him. That he has a good face. That he scratches good — under the throat and behind the ears — like Teddy and Dan.
On his belly, head resting forward between his trim front feet, his saber tail curving along his hind legs almost to his chin, Joe watches and listens and lets the smells of the world drift past.
The clinic door opens with its clunk and long squeak. Through the rusting bars of his cage, Joe sees Good Man enter the row of kennels. With him is a Woman he has not seen before. From their expressions and bodies, Joe sees that they are not a Team.
Joe has no concept of luck, but the doctor knows that this animal is fabulously lucky to have been brought here by a boy, who, smeared with the terrified dog’s blood and intestinal fluid, carried him over a kilometer in the rain.
But the doctor also knows that luck has two faces: Shot Dog’s miracle rescue and touchy surgery have landed him at the end of his allotted thirty-day adoption period, which expires today. Baja California state policy, beyond the doctor’s control. Shot Dog will be euthanized in the morning unless he is adopted before then, odds that Dr. Rodríguez knows are smaller than small. Not a single prospective dog owner has come by today, and the expected rain bodes ill for a late-hour miracle.
Last week, an elderly man was interested in Shot Dog but had no money. When the doctor offered to waive the modest adoption fee and give him a week’s worth of food, a leash, and some good flea-and-tick pills, the man had promised to return the next day but never came back at all. Rodríguez turns away dozens of dogs every week because his clinic is 100 percent full. He’s even got portable crates set up inside the hospital and lobby, but these, too, are full of yowling, hopeful, pathetic dogs.
It’s been a long thirty-something days for Joe. No Dan. No Team. No work. No play. No meat treats. No sleeping on his couch in the living room or in Dan’s bed when the women aren’t there. No swims in the pool. Sure, his pain is mostly gone, and the itchy stitches, too, and so is the slobbery plastic cone once tied around his neck. But these are small things compared with the immense sadness that seems to run through every part of him. There are memories and there are dreams, dreams of memories and memories of dreams. They are one story. His dog mind is never fouled by time, beginnings, middles, and endings. He knows that Dan will return and they will be the Team again, but the long hours in the cell are wearing him down.