B
ALDY AND THE OTHER GUARD WALK
J
ERÓNIMO TO THE MAIN GATE
of the prison. Neither will answer any questions. They allowed him to put on jeans and a shirt, but then hurried him out of his cell before he could grab anything else. As he was being escorted off the tier, he hollered to Ronald McDonald to watch his stuff, said he’d be back soon, hoped it was true.
Waiting at the gate are two big dudes, one with a shaved head, the other with short dark hair. He’s seen them before: Ozzy and Esteban, El Príncipe’s bodyguards. Baldy opens the gate and says “Go,” and Jerónimo steps into the street. He’s dreamed of the day he’d leave La Mesa, but the relief he should feel is tainted by the strangeness of the situation. He knows trouble when he sees it.
Ozzy orders him into a black Escalade parked at the curb. Jerónimo climbs in and settles uneasily in the passenger seat. Ozzy gets behind the wheel, and Esteban sits in back.
A banana-shaped air freshener dangles from the rearview mirror, and the Escalade is filled with its sickening chemical scent. When Ozzy turns the key, a
corrido
erupts out of the truck’s speakers at full volume. He reaches for the CD player and shuts it off.
“What’s up?” Jerónimo asks.
“El Príncipe wants to talk to you,” Ozzy replies.
Jerónimo nods. Trouble, like he thought. He puts a hand on the dash when Ozzy shifts into gear and pulls out into the street. He’s always been a nervous passenger, can’t relax with someone else driving. Ozzy sighs and rubs his temples with his thumb and middle finger, and this makes Jerónimo even more uneasy, muscle like him showing strain.
They cut through the center of town, and every corner holds an ugly memory for Jerónimo. There’s where he sliced off a man’s ear, and there’s where another man fell to his knees and offered his twelve-year-old daughter as payment for a debt. Jerónimo was damaged before he got here, but this place made him worse. There’s a ruthlessness here he’s encountered nowhere else, as if all that glitter right across the border has driven everyone crazy.
An old man riding a bicycle wobbles into the street in front of the Escalade. Ozzy swerves but still clips him with the mirror, knocking him to the pavement.
“Fuck,” Ozzy grunts.
He stops at the corner and stares into the rearview.
“He’s dead,” Esteban says, twisting to look out the back window.
“The fuck he is,” Ozzy says.
“I’m telling you, he’s dead,” Esteban says. “Drive on.”
Jerónimo watches in the side mirror as the old man raises his head, then slowly sits up. Blood is running down his face from a cut on his forehead.
“Okay, maybe he’s not dead,” Esteban says.
“That’s one tough old bastard,” Ozzy says.
“Probably got nothing but rocks in his head,” Esteban says. “Let’s go.”
They drive up a hill toward El Príncipe’s house. It’s a fancy neighborhood with paved roads and gutters, private security, and plenty of streetlights. The houses are all big, all new. Stucco mansions surrounded by high walls. Jerónimo has been here twice before: once when he started working for El Príncipe, and once when he quit. Both times he wondered on whose backs all this was built.
The Escalade turns into the driveway of the house. A man steps out of the shadows and opens the gate, and the truck pulls forward into a parking area. Two other men are standing on the porch, guns in hand, and every light in the house is on. It blazes like a palace awaiting the arrival of guests. Ozzy gets out, then Esteban, and Jerónimo follows their lead. He’s one of them after all, one of El Príncipe’s men.
They walk up the steps to the front door of the house, past the guard stationed there, and go inside. A man is on his hands and knees in the hall, scrubbing the floor with a brush that he rinses in a bucket of soapy pink water. There are dark stains on the wall behind him. He sits back as they approach and wipes his mouth with his hand. Ozzy reaches over him to tap on a door.
“Come in,” El Príncipe calls from the other side.
Ozzy opens the door and motions for Jerónimo to enter.
El Príncipe is sitting at his desk in his office, the same office where he welcomed Jerónimo to the crew, and the same office where he pulled a gun on Jerónimo when Jerónimo told him he wanted out.
“Apache,” he says. “Good to see you.”
When Jerónimo was born, he looked so much like a little Indian, with his dark skin, slanted eyes, and high cheekbones, that his dad insisted on naming him after the legendary Apache leader. He said he was honoring his great-great-grandfather, an Apache warrior who fled from Arizona to Mexico in the late 1800s, when the Apaches in the U.S. were being shipped off to reservations or hunted down like dogs. Mexico was paying a bounty for Indian scalps too, but great-great-grandfather managed to find refuge in the Sierra Madre and married a woman there.
That was the story Papá told when he had a few beers in him, anyway. Jerónimo liked the yarn because it gave him a history and explained the restlessness that sometimes gripped his soul. The kids called him the Apache growing up, and he kept the nickname as he got older. The fierceness it hinted at was useful in the world he lived in, one more thing to make someone think twice before crossing him.
Ozzy shuts the door and stands in front of it. Rolando tells El Apache to sit in the chair on the other side of the desk. The Indian has his prison face on, a mask that shows nothing, but Rolando knows he must be confused. One minute he’s behind bars, the next he’s being offered a drink by the Prince himself.
“Beer? Tequila?” Rolando says. “I got brandy too.”
“No,
jefe,
” El Apache says. “Thanks anyway.”
He’s always been respectful, always known his place. Got none of that
cholo
cockiness that assholes from L.A. usually have. Rolando liked him from the beginning, when he showed up fresh out of Juárez, looking for a job. He was older than most of the locos who came to him wanting work, but he proved to be a good man, one who could follow orders, one who got things done. In fact, he might even have been somebody if he hadn’t decided he’d rather drive a cab, though that took balls, too, to come in and ask to be cut loose. Which is why Rolando thought of him first thing for this job.
They sit in silence, listening to the clock tick, and Rolando guesses the Indian would wait all day for him to speak. They’re stubborn that way. He finally stretches in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head.
“How are things in La Mesa?” he asks.
El Apache shrugs. “It’s La Mesa,” he says. “But thanks for the money you send, and the money you give my family.”
“You earned it,” Rolando says. “You didn’t disappoint me like so many others have.”
El Apache shrugs again, unreadable.
“How much time is left on your sentence?” Rolando says.
“Two years, if everything goes like it should,” El Apache says.
“But, wait, here you are now,” Rolando says with a smile.
El Apache smiles too, but doesn’t respond.
Rolando taps his fingers on the arm of his chair.
“You were born in the U.S.?” he says.
“El Paso,” El Apache says.
“But then you lived in L.A.”
“Yeah, I grew up there.”
“And you speak English?”
“Read and write it, too.”
There’s a commotion out in the hall, shouting. Rolando reaches into the desk drawer for his Beretta. Ozzy’s gun is already in his hand. The big man opens the door a crack. The painter who’s supposed to cover the bloodstains on the wall has arrived, and he’s arguing with the guy scrubbing the floor.
“Shut up and get back to work,” Ozzy says. He closes the door and tucks his pistol into his waistband. Rolando leaves the Beretta out, on top of the desk.
“I have a mission for you,” he says to El Apache.
El Apache’s eyes narrow. “A mission?”
“It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do for me,” Rolando says. “How does that sound?”
“Depends on what it is,” El Apache says.
Rolando slides three photos of Luz across the desk. “This morning my wife killed two of my people and ran off with some money,” he says. “I want you to find her and bring her back.”
El Apache looks down at the photos but doesn’t touch them.
“She may be somewhere in Mexico or she may have crossed into the U.S.,” Rolando continues. “She has relatives there, I think, in Los Angeles.”
“Mexico’s a big country,” El Apache says. “And L.A.’s a big city.”
“So I’m lucky you know your way around both,” Rolando says.
“
Jefe—”
El Apache begins.
Rolando cuts him off. “I’ll set you up with a car, cash, everything you’ll need.”
“You’re asking too much of me,” El Apache says. “I’m a taxi driver.”
“Simply for looking for her, I’ll pay you $50,000,” Rolando says. “Return her to me, and you can keep all of the money she took. And you won’t have to go back to La Mesa either. I’ll see to that.”
El Apache swallows the next excuse he was about to make, lets the offer dance in his head. Rolando smiles to see it.
“How’s that sound, taxi driver?” he says.
“Respectfully,
jefe,
I’m not the man for this,” El Apache says. “I only want to finish serving my time and get back to my wife and kids. I’m done with the crazy life.”
“I know your family is important to you,” Rolando says.
“The most important,” El Apache says.
Rolando nods thoughtfully, but inside he’s gloating. Today’s lesson, you fucking idiot, is
Never love anything too much.
The air-conditioning is on high in the office, but sweat still skitters down Jerónimo’s chest. Once again, here he is, sitting across from El Príncipe and a gun, telling him he doesn’t want to work for him. The proposal is definitely tempting. The money would be great, but more important is the free pass out of La Mesa. If the officials investigate the killing of Salazar, he could be looking at twenty years tacked on to his sentence.
El Príncipe motions for Ozzy to leave the room. He runs his fingers lightly over the pistol on his desk.
“Do you know where the name Jerónimo
comes from?” he says.
“He was an Indian, an Apache,” Jerónimo says. “My dad’s hero.”
“Yes, yes, but why was he called Jerónimo?”
Jerónimo shrugs, wonders if the man is going to shoot him, wonders if he can get to the gun first.
“He had another name in the beginning,” El Príncipe continues. “Big Bad Wolf Dick or something, Man Who Smells Like Horse Shit. But one night his god came to him in a dream and told him he had special powers, that he’d be a great leader, and that no bullet could ever kill him.
“The next morning he and his warriors ambushed a squad of Mexican soldiers. Believing the words he’d heard in his dream, Old Owl Tits led the charge, riding into battle carrying only a knife. All the soldiers shot at him, and all of them missed. People said the bullets swerved around him like bees returning to a hive.
“This scared the shit out of the soldiers, of course, and they began to cry out to Saint Jerome for help, ‘Jerónimo, Jerónimo,’ as this crazy Indian tore into them with his knife, cutting throats and gutting fuckers left and right. ‘What better way to frighten my enemies than to take the name they shout when they’re about to die,’ the Indian thought, and from then on he called himself Jerónimo.”
“That’s a good story,” Jerónimo says.
“That’s history,” El Príncipe says like he’s giving him a magic word. He then picks up one of the photos of the beautiful woman, his wife, the one in which she’s wearing a red dress and a flower in her hair, and stares down at it.
There’s a knock at the door. The Prince drops the photo and picks up his gun.
“Come in,” he says.
Jerónimo falls off a cliff when his daughter, Ariel, walks in, followed by Irma carrying Junior. Rising to his feet, he doesn’t know whether to go to them or to rip El Príncipe’s head off. The gun pointed at his belly decides for him. He hurries across the room to gather Ariel into his arms and hug his wife and son.
“A gift from me to you,” El Príncipe says. “The best gift a man can receive, right?”
Jerónimo ignores him. His son is confused. He was only two when Daddy went to La Mesa, has only seen him in photos since, and doesn’t recognize him now.
“It’s me,
mijo,
” Jerónimo says. “Your Papá.”
“I didn’t want you to worry about them while you were away, so I brought them here, where they’ll be safe until you return,” El Príncipe says.
Jerónimo kisses Irma, Ariel, Irma again. He should have known that El Príncipe didn’t spring him from prison to
ask
him to find his wife; he’s ordering him, and neither he nor his family will leave this house alive if he refuses. Newly elected officials down here often receive a package in the mail containing a bullet and a bundle of cash. It’s a message from the local cartel:
Plata o plomo?—
Silver or lead? Cooperate or die. That’s what El Príncipe is asking him now:
Plata o plomo?
Your choice.
“Did they hurt you?” Jerónimo whispers to Irma.
She’s close to crying but keeps it under control. “No,” she says.
“And the kids, they’re all right?”
“What do you think? Two men come to the house in the middle of the night, carry them out, drive them all over town.”
“I’m sorry,” Jerónimo says.
“So this is your fault?” Irma says.
It’s a difficult question. She always asks the difficult questions. That’s one reason he loves her.
“I can’t explain right now,” he says, glancing at El Príncipe’s gun, directing Irma’s eyes toward it. “Do what they tell you, and I’ll be back in a day or two.”
“Do you promise?” she says.
He straightens the collar of her blouse and pats Junior’s head. “What good would that be, coming from a
cabrón
like me?” he says with a grim smile.
“Promise me, Jerónimo,” Irma says. “Promise your wife.”
“On my life,” Jerónimo says.
“So, listen,” El Príncipe says. “Why don’t you spend this evening with your family, and you can get started in the morning.”