It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Read online

  At least that’s how my body worked.

  And, where the old time cowboys would roll pebbles in their mouths to keep the juices moving, or buttons from their shirts, or strings of leather fringe, I had my silver nitrate.

  One thing I always wondered about getting busted was what the border cops would do with my sticks, if they found them on a patdown or whatever.

  That they wouldn’t believe they were medicinal was a given; because I was engaged in illegal activities, then of course everything I did had to be illegal, the same way my mom used to be sure that all gay guys were of course pedophiles as well.

  Probably it’d be some version of the story of this Cambodian I’d heard about on the radio, who biked across some border nearly every day, with a big, obvious bag slung across his shoulder. Every day, that same border cop would stop him, inspect his bag, but just find crumpled up newspapers. Old newspapers, that still smelled like fish. But he knew the guy was smuggling something. Twenty years later, then, the two meet in a bar, and the border cop buys the smuggler a drink, finally gets to ask him what he was sneaking across all the time back then?

  “Bikes,” the guy says, smiling, making no eye contact, which was how I always thought my sticks could work, in a pinch — as decoy, giving me time to lose whatever I was really carrying.

  Except, of course, if I’d ever even started to get pinched … I don’t know. So far then, I’d never had a close call, wasn’t on any of the border cops’ dashboards, not as a mule anyway, and, while I told the clients it was skill, the mark of a professional, it had a lot more to do with luck, I knew. A lot more to do with nobody in lock-up on either side of the border trading my name or even the legend of me up for an extra meal, one more phone call, conjugal visit, whatever.

  This was a big part of where the stress came into play, too. Why my mouth was always in a state of eruption; if somebody did say my name to a prosecuting attorney, the name they thought was fake, then that would be the beginning of the end. The moment they said my name, the vague shadow of a border cop would start dogging my backtrail. Then, as they gathered more evidence, zeroed in on me, that shadow would gain more and more substance, until he was a real cop standing over me, taking his chrome sunglasses off one ear at a time, immune to any of the images I’d be trying to push into his mind’s eye: Laurie, alone in the house for that first week, then part of another, until the Garzas next door take her in as one of their own, raise her with a different name.

  And that was the happy version.

  The other version involved Raymond sending one of his helpers to fix the cable, and that helper scooping Laurie up, disappearing south, selling her into the slums of Mexico City or Buenos Aires or somewhere worse, even more anonymous.

  This is why I carried more silver nitrate than I really needed. Otherwise I would have developed bad habits. And now — I still don’t know, I guess.

  What just happened to Larkin on the other side of the room was that the blackened skin of his forearm peeled off like a scab. It made him start crying, hyperventilating.

  I smiled, looked away, because death is a personal thing. But then I thought of Laurie, too, out there somewhere still. The way I know she’s alive is that the sky’s still blue, birds still sing, and I don’t cry every moment of every day.

  Not that I’ve heard from her, or about her.

  But it’s best that way, too. If I do hear of her, I mean, then she can hear of me, too, and I don’t want that. Better that, for her, I just stay that guy who left for work one night, and then had some accident, didn’t come home. For fifteen years.

  God.

  Soon this’ll be over, anyway. Under the black scab that Larkin peeled up, his blood was sluggish, didn’t care. I reach down, touch the lantern, so he can know that I’m not looking away anymore.

  On the way up from Piedras Negras, three thousand in cash distributed in my pockets and pack, a stick in my mouth like I was trying to eat the Fourth of July, the night suddenly slowed down around me. Not because of sirens in the rearview or something on the radio — the radio didn’t even work — but because, canted over in what passed for a ditch was the El Dorado from earlier.

  I swallowed, dropped my stick out into the wind, then circled back after about five miles, eased alongside. The front seat was empty. And the glove compartment. And the dashboard. The trunk was unlatched, too.

  The client rep had broken down, cleaned out his car, took off to make his meet with me. I touched my palm to the top of the Cadillac door and studied the night, as far as I could see into it.

  He was gone. The pipes weren’t even warm anymore. By dawn, of course, they would be — hot, even — but that would just be because they’d be in some cargo truck or another, the only thing left on the El Dorado, its paint.

  None of that mattered, though. I didn’t want the car. Could afford not to, even, for once.

  Had the rep radioed ahead for a pickup, maybe? Hitched a ride? Walked on the craggly shoulder with a hundred thousand in one briefcase, moonrocks in the other?

  You might as well paint a bullseye on your back.

  Finally I shrugged one shoulder, climbed back into my car, and started again for Ciudad Acuna, going slower this time, in case the rep was still hoofing it. Not because I wanted to help, so much, but because part of me being on time and not wrapped in a thousand pounds of hogwire was somebody being there to look down at his watch, appreciate my punctuality.

  It was his fault, I told myself, grubbing for another stick, a handful, and leaned into the accelerator. Just in case, I was going to make the meet a half hour early.

  The client rep was waiting for me. Later I would learn his name was Walford. It fit, somehow.

  For now, though, he was just the rep. And not in particularly good shape, either.

  I breathed a laugh out through my nose, looked to the empty warehouse behind him. We were in the sister of the place in Piedras Negras, right down to the wire rolls in the abandoned yard.

  The reason I had to look away to laugh was that the rep’s polyester suit was sweated through, and he was wearing an iced-down towel across the back of his neck. It was rolled up, white, from some hotel or another.

  “Should have turned your collar up,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your sunburn there. You were walking east and north in the late afternoon and there weren’t any clouds yesterday. The burn’ll probably bubble up. Wet some tea bags down, they’ll draw the heat out.”

  He rubbed his mouth, shook his head.

  “Was wondering if I’d beat you out of town or not,” he said.

  I shrugged. What he’d just told me was that I hadn’t been followed, that my stash out in the desert was safe. Either that, or he didn’t want me to know I’d been followed, so was playing dumb. The way he was hurting, though, I doubted it.

  “So you gonna go back, collect the Caddy?”

  He waved it off, turned to the case, the reason we were here.

  “I think it was this Mexican water,” he said, clicking the case open. “Minerals clogged the radiator up. Either that or God hates me.”

  “It overheated?”

  “What, are you a mechanic too?”

  “Sometimes you have to be.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, spinning the open case around to me. “I got other rats to be killing today than that damn car, know what I mean?”

  Fifty thousand in his front pocket, more like.

  I looked down to the case. It was the same as in Piedras Negras.

  “Smile,” the rep said then, and I looked up into his Polaroid, flashing. He peeled the film out, set it aside to develop.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “It’ll be waiting for you in Uvalde,” he said. “Only copy. Just to confirm that there are twelve containers here. These twelve.”

  “Who you been working with, to get this paranoid?”

  “You think it’s me?” he said, pushing his blunt tongue through his teeth in some gesture tha
t was lost on me.

  I closed the case, let him lock it with the key, then tuck the key into his pocket.

  “You’re serious?” I asked, about the key, the lock.

  “Like a woman in a shoe store.”

  “How am I supposed to … What if I get —?”

  “Don’t.”

  Now we were just staring each other down.

  “Say I need to, like, bluff my way through something. I mean, cops’ panties get all wadded the hell up, they can’t look into some briefcase I’ve just told them doesn’t have anything in it they’d be interested in.”

  “Like I said. Don’t involve the law.”

  “I wouldn’t really be doing it on purpose, see.”

  “One more thing,” he said then.

  “What? Want me to go barefoot? I’m supposed to wear a safety vest? Carry a red balloon?”

  “Nothing like that,” he shrugged, then leaned forward — with the key, I thought. It was the only reason I didn’t flinch away in time. That and that his hands were quicker than his belly or his suit suggested.

  What he had was a pair of cuffs. They snapped around my right wrist, and he clicked them down tight. On the other end of them, a thick cable, maybe three feet long.

  “Bullshit,” I told him, but he was already cuffing the other end of the cable to the handle of the case.

  We were just staring at each other again.

  “I can get this cut,” I said.

  “If you think that’s worthy use of your time,” he said back. “You are on something of a schedule, I believe.”

  I studied the case. Closed my eyes, opened them slow, to the pistol I knew he was going to have leveled on me, to keep me from strangling him with this new cable, beating his face in with the case.

  “Who are these people?” I asked, finally.

  “You don’t want to know,” the rep said, already backing away, rubbing his neck with the towel one last time then slinging the towel down. “I will tell you this, though. They don’t take too awful well to being disappointed. Even by a minute or two.”

  I lifted my right hand, the metal case clunking over on the table.

  “They’re not exactly fitting me for success, here.”

  “You haven’t been paying attention, Mr. Dodd. What that does” — the cable — “it guarantees success.”

  I made myself smile, looked away. Said it in my head over and over: fifty thousand, fifty thousand. Times three.

  “Oh yeah,” the rep called out then, from the door, “Odale says you’ve got a pretty mean bank shot, yeah?”

  To show what he meant, he leaned over an imaginary pool table, lined up on the missing cue. The game last night. The car I’d won.

  I didn’t say anything, just watched him back out, start the old Impala he was driving now. Odale probably had a whole stable of them. The engine was strong, untroubled, but the rep started it with too much pedal, like he expected it to give him grief.

  I lifted the case again, shook my head.

  On the way out I stopped to kick over the rep’s neck towel. Instead of cubed ice slinging across the slick concrete like I’d expected, there was dark blood. It was soaked through the outer layer, all the way to the mushy cold center.

  How long had he walked yesterday?

  I shrugged, found a different door out, and ended up skirting the fence of the abandoned yard, my face buried in the crook of my left arm.

  There were no rabbits.

  For a hundred dollar bill, the guys at the tire shop down the street were happy to clip the cuffs. They were real police issue, meaning we had to get the vice involved, but still, it was stupid. The clients had to know it was the first thing I’d do, and it wouldn’t take me five hours, either. Not in a border town. Not for a smuggler.

  Too late, then, I looked up to the tire guys, suddenly sure one of them was Odale, or Odale’s brother or cousin, and that this hundred of mine he had now was just on top of whatever else he was already getting. I should have gone to the second tire place I saw, not the first.

  Not that there was anything to do about it now. I held the cable up in thanks, dropped it in the greasy trash barrel, and slouched and squinted out into the sun.

  That there was some game being played here, I was sure. It was obvious, like they even wanted me to know. No matter how I tried, though, I couldn’t make it out.

  Behind a gas station lined with all manner of taxis, I felt all over the case for a radio rig of some kind. The idea of being tracked, this close to stepping out into no man’s land, I couldn’t shake it.

  If New Orleans was the Big Easy, then Mexico was the Big Empty. It could swallow you whole if you took even one wrong step, if you trusted even one wrong person. If you didn’t make yourself double-check every last detail.

  Not out in the street, though.

  Instead of the first motel I saw, I picked the fourth, then paid two weeks in advance, just on the chance that, when I stumbled back, I might need to crash immediately, not talk to any fourteen-year-old clerks about one bed or two.

  With the light tools I carried in my pack for dealing with fences and gates and whatever else, I opened the case. Not from the top, but by backing the hinge rivets out of their slots then wedging the screwdriver in, cracking the case like an oyster, shining my flashlight down along the foam and containers to the backside of the latches, to see if they were wired to show I’d tampered. They weren’t, so I went ahead and popped them, lifted the top of the case off.

  Inside, nestled in their dense foam, the twelve little stainless steel canisters, like metal test tubes, or big CO2 cartridges, or tiny little thermoses. The only one not baked into a thin film of hard plastic was the fourth one. I lifted it, shook it, finally screwed the top off again.

  Just the same rock as it had been in the warehouse. Its weight to the gram surely in some notebook. To the tenth of a gram.

  I lined all twelve up on the air conditioner then peeled the foam up, looking for the transmitter I knew had to be there. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t in the tubing of the handle and it wasn’t sandwiched between the inner and outer walls of the case, which came apart easy, like the case was old, and it wasn’t in the foam itself, which I shredded over the trashcan then dumped into the toilet to soak. I sat back on the bed then, just studied the canisters.

  It still didn’t make any sense.

  For a hundred and fifty thousand, though — a new life — maybe it didn’t need to.

  Just for the feel of it, I took what was supposed to be the last shower of the week and came out into the thick heat of the bedroom. At first I thought it was just in comparison to the cold shower, but then finally figured out that it was because the air conditioner had conked out.

  I stared at it.

  Ten more minutes was all I’d needed from it. Just a few more breaths of refrigerated air. But my week was started, I supposed; I already had the cargo in hand. I was in transit, some stopwatch up in Texas ticking my seconds away.

  “Hundred grand,” I said aloud, as reminder. What was waiting for me up there.

  It worked.

  Before leaving, the pack slung over my shoulder, the canisters each carefully wrapped in toilet paper, I called the front desk, asked them to get the air conditioner working again, por favor.

  What the clerk told me back was that it was brand new.

  I looked at it, turned the dial again, held the phone down to the sick noise. When I pulled the phone back up, the clerk was asking me when was a good time.

  “Anytime over the next six days,” I said, then kept walking south and east, out of town.

  Because this isn’t a suicide note — more of a record, I suppose, if anything — I’m not writing down the next twelve hours, except to say they were routine: I waded across the river at one of my usual places. Or I swam, yeah. Or both, plus a clear plastic kayak I had to inflate by mouth, rebury in Texas. I got across, I’m saying, and if it cost eight hundred in folded bills, with the guarantee of four more, then nobo
dy’s the wiser.

  The reason I can’t be more specific is that Larkin here, he’s almost gone, is just a husk of the businessman he once was. After him, then, there’s only one left, and then it might just come to pass that I need to cross back into Mexico, at one of my old places. Instead of just walking across the bridge like any other American, yeah.

  It’s not just my history with banks that’s keeping me from doing that, either, or all the fugitive years since then, and it’s not so much what I’m doing right now — I’m the last person anybody should be suspecting — it’s that, even under the cover of night, there’ll be floodlights and flashlights when I have to declare my intent.

  At that point, of course, things will deteriorate rapidly, and there won’t just be an international incident, but an event that’ll probably get picked up by whatever tabloids are still around as well.

  And I don’t need that kind of attention, don’t want any recognition for what I’m doing, what I’ve been through. Like Ambrose Bierce, I just want to walk into the Chihuahuan desert, disappear.

  Or wherever he was.

  I’m not telling Larkin any of this, though.

  After asking him the same question I asked all his associates — Remember me? — I haven’t told him anything, or listened to all his claims about family, his offers of cash, of reconstructive surgery, whatever I want.

  Like a doctor could fix me.

  I don’t need surgeons, I need a priest. Though a scientist with a working time machine would probably do the trick as well. Then I could go back, stay with Laurie, or go back even farther, push her mother out of the bank ahead of me, instead of being brave and going first.

  All that did was show them where to settle their crosshairs.

  Except, of course, I was steps ahead of there by the time they actually did settle. Steps ahead, and still holding her hand.

  When I ran to Mexico, yeah, I was running from warrants and all-points-bulletins and a series of bad decisions and friends always calling for all the wrong reasons. At least that’s what it said on the news.

  What I was really doing, though, was still moving away from that bank door as fast as I could. Holding onto the only piece of Tanya I had left, anymore: Laurie. And thirty-eight thousand cash, in a bag.