“Us. He’s still mine.”
Strickland’s hand is strong and dry. She appreciates his calm. She wonders if he maybe doesn’t have her Polish-German-Irish spark, which turns to flame and becomes her fire. Maybe he’s got cool water instead of sparks, she thinks. Cool water that turns to frost, then ice. And the ice allows him to go forward, overcome fear and take risks, just like her fire does. Two different natures. Two different ways of getting to the same place.
“I don’t see you as anxious and afraid,” he says.
“It’s not often,” she says. “But when it hits, it’s hard to shake. I’m prone to dread at three in the morning. I wake up afraid of everything. Hours go by. I can’t sleep and every idea is a bad idea. Everything is doomed.”
Bettina sips her tequila. Strickland has barely touched his.
“I picture you blasting the Escalade,” he says. “Setting that boy straight. Or riding a wave. Or chasing the dognappers down the street with your scattergun.”
“I hope I’m not just hot-tempered and stupid.”
Bettina catches his minor smile. “Shut up,” she says quietly. “All I want out of all of this is my dog.”
“May I knock on your door later?”
“No. I want my own bed and body tonight.”
“I want them too.”
“Soon.”
Strickland lies on his bed in the dark, blankets heaped against the cold and the wall heater glowing feebly.
He’s having trouble believing how profoundly his life has changed since meeting Bettina Blazak at the Coastal Eddy in Laguna not even two weeks ago.
Nothing is the same.
Nothing feels real though he knows it is.
He’s in love with her for starters, an emotion absent from all his thirty-three years.
He’s pledged his hard-earned skills and his life to protect her, paying Godoy a hefty $250,000 to secure her safety. The money didn’t break him but it did sting, Strickland being a lifelong penny-watcher excepting guns, cars, and motorcycles.
He’s told her things about himself he’s never told another human being.
He’s had sex with her, feeling different, and more strongly, than with anyone before.
He regrets his lies and trickery.
But more important than any of that, Strickland is giving Joe to her. It pains him, but his generosity feels whole and good. He’ll get to visit. To Strickland there’s nothing more generous a person can do than give up their dog.
Now we’re here in the perilous Sierra Madre, he thinks, and his feet are cold and he can’t sleep and there’s just one wall between them.
He reaches one hand into the cold air, sets his palm against that plaster wall and wonders if Godoy will betray them.
The battered .45 and eight shells are all he has to protect them here in the beating heart of the Sinaloa Cartel.
So he prays, for the first time in his life, to a God he’s never believed in. Even this feels different, feels true and real for the first time.
Feels his old light dimming and his new bright light burning strong.
42
“Three, two, one...,” she counts off. “This is Bettina Blazak, of Coastal Eddy, live with the head of the Sinaloa Cartel in the heart of the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. Shall I call you El Gordo, or Señor Godoy?”
“Alejandro.”
“We’re standing in front of the house you were born in, Alejandro, is that correct?”
“It was built by my grandfather with his own hands.”
“And the nearest city is Badiraguato?”
“It is a small town.”
Bettina has set up her video camera on its tripod, and positioned Godoy outside his birthplace. The house is a compact one-story, its stones rough and irregular, held fast by thick veins of cement. The roof beams look heavy and old, but their seams shine with fresh mastic.
Armed men loiter in the forest. There’s a flatbed pickup with a mounted machine gun parked near a blue barn, the driver smoking a cigarette and the machine gunner seated at his weapon, watching Bettina.
She has posed Godoy in front of the eastern wall of the house to take advantage of the late morning sun, now coming over the ragged peaks.
Strickland stands in the sun of the eastern wall, too, well off-camera. Bettina thinks that Strickland is the opposite of boyish, well-coiffed Godoy. Strickland looks sullen. He really doesn’t want to be photographed, or recorded, she thinks. A rare find, in her line of work. He also seemed unimpressed when she introduced him to El Gordo, refusing to use his good Spanish. She wonders if he’s threatened by Godoy and his masculine supremacy here. The idea that Strickland is possessive of her feels good. Steam rises from his coffee cup in his gloved hands.
Bettina stands near the camera with her back to the sun, fingers stiff with cold, cussing herself for not bringing gloves.
She’s annoyed that Godoy has refused to let her even see Felix until they’re done with the interview. The interview which, if she’s understanding his not-bad English correctly, will involve some mountain driving and take all day. She hopes Felix is inside the stone house, nice and warm. Sees the thick stream of woodsmoke rising from the chimney. Godoy wouldn’t leave the dog in a freezing barn, would he? She keeps thinking Felix will hear her voice and bark, but no. Maybe he’s been moved off-campus
Godoy looks younger than his forty-eight or forty-nine years. He’s got a slender face, big eyes, curly dark brown hair with a forelock. Gordo he is not.
Bettina was more than surprised when he came to the door dressed in black boots, pressed jeans, a black wool blazer over a white, still-creased-from-the-package cowboy shirt, and a braided leather bolo tie with a silver cross outlined in turquoise. He looked like Springsteen on Tunnel of Love, her mom’s and dad’s favorite album when she was ten.
“What are your first memories of this place?” she asks.
“Collecting firewood with my mother. There is still no heating in this house other than the fireplace. I built my mother and father a new house lower in the mountains. For the cold. It has carpet and a heater — air conditioner.”
“Did you have enough to eat when you were little?”
Godoy frowns. “Almost. There are good cattle here and fruit and beans in the markets. But there was no work. My father grew poppies and potatoes to survive.”
“Can we see the poppy fields?”
Strickland cuts her a look.
Godoy frowns again. “I will show you the clinic and the schools I have built.”
Bettina turns off the camera and unscrews it from the tripod. “Can I just see my dog once before we go?”
“He is with my wife and children in another casa.”
“Is he happy here?”
“He is adored.”
“Do you have lots of homes here in the mountains?”
“Yes, I am always moving. Vamos,” he says, heading for a dusty white Suburban.
El Gordo does the driving, Bettina up front, Strickland and a gloomy-looking gunman behind them.
The Godoy Clinic on the other side of Badiraguato is a new-looking, boxy affair made of cinder blocks and topped with a still shiny aluminum roof. There’s a shaded entryway and when Bettina steps inside, she sees the clean waiting room and the white-clad receptionist behind the counter, peering around a large clay pot of chipper, oversized paper flowers. The waiting room is furnished with rustic mountain furniture, a table stacked with newspapers and magazines, a large mural in the style of Diego Rivera, and is empty of patients.
Bettina pans this interior, then sets up her camera and tripod again and questions the receptionist, Leonarda Cuevas Escobar. The woman speaks almost no English, so Bettina coaxes her along in Spanish. Leonarda smiles shyly and says what she likes most about the clinic is all the free help they can offer to the poor. People with no money appreciate help, she says. Señor Godoy donated the land and the building, so the Clínica Godoy can stay open forever.