The Breakout Page 9

  “Said the man shackled to a bed. I could strangle you to death right now. The only reason you’re alive is I’ve allowed you to live.”

  “You want a thank-you?”

  “I want understanding.”

  “I understand you’re a cunt who has other people do his dirty work for him.”

  Alejandro slapped James Murphy across the face. The man’s utter lack of respect made Alejandro want to gouge out one of his eyes and show it to him, and for a moment he considered it, but he hadn’t gotten where he was by thoughtlessly acting on his emotions. Each decision he made was a considered one. It was how he survived in a dangerous business.

  He released his anger in a sigh and when next he spoke, his voice was calm, free of all emotion: “Let me be clear. I intend to visit you on Tuesday. We’ll sit down together and we’ll talk, but if you don’t tell me what I want to hear, you’ll die on Wednesday. I’d kill you today, but I expect you haven’t experienced enough here to fully understand the situation you’re in.”

  “You won’t kill me if I have information you want.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. If you were a man of importance, if you were a man who had information I needed, someone would be trying to get you out to make sure I never got that information. But you’ve been here three days now and no one seems to care. If you’re disposable to the person or people who hired you, you’re disposable to me. I’m giving you until Tuesday only because I’m curious. Do you understand me?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I do.”

  “Are you going to talk?”

  “I thought I was talking.”

  “We’ll see how you feel on Tuesday, when death is impending. I’m tired of wasting my time with you.”

  Alejandro turned to walk away.

  “Before you go—”

  He turned back, raised an eyebrow. Maybe the son of a bitch would tip today after all. He was curious to see what spilled out.

  “I have this itch behind my left ear.”

  Alejandro walked to the door, stepped through, and slammed it shut behind him. Motherfucker wouldn’t think it was funny come Wednesday. Motherfucker wouldn’t be capable of thinking anything at all.

  * * *

  James watched Rocha leave before he dropped his head to the pillow. His shoulder throbbed with radiating pain. He asked himself whether he believed Rocha really intended to kill him if he didn’t talk, and decided he did, but he still wouldn’t say anything. The man would kill him whether he talked or not, so he might as well keep his mouth shut. Let him wonder.

  But if he wanted to live he’d have to do more than that. He’d have to find a way out of this place. Problem was, he didn’t know where to begin. For now he was stuck here, waiting to be killed, and unless something changed before Wednesday, that was exactly what would happen.

  8

  They were sitting at a table in La Casa de Dora, a small Mexican restaurant just off Santa Lucia. It was past eight o’clock Saturday evening, but the place was still hot. The sun outside was low, glaring at the world from the west, but not yet blocked by the horizon.

  Coop couldn’t imagine working a kitchen in that heat, probably twenty degrees hotter than here in the dining room, and he was drenched in sweat, his T-shirt dark with moisture, fabric sticking to his chest and back, sweat running down his rib cage from his dripping armpits. He sat across from Normal and Bogart, with Pilar to his left. She’d been quiet since they visited the jail and found out James was in the infirmary. Her responses were monosyllabic, her face expressionless.

  A cast-iron skillet sat in the middle of the table, loaded with chicken, shrimp, steak, green peppers, and onions. It smelled strongly of cumin. Beside the skillet were small bowls of grated cheese, guacamole, and sour cream. Also, a nearly empty pitcher of beer.

  Coop picked up his glass, the surface covered in condensation, and took a swallow.

  “I’m staying until I have a chance to talk to James,” he said. “I decided before we left the jail. Hell, I decided before we visited the jail. You guys want to get back to El Paso, I understand, but I can’t abandon him here. At the very least I have to meet with him, find out what the hell is going on. I’ll take it from there, but I’m not going back to Fort Bliss on Monday.”

  “You aren’t fuckin’ around with unauthorized leave,” Normal said. “You’ll end up in the brig, you don’t show up Monday.”

  “He’s my partner in the field, he’s my partner here. I can’t leave him to rot. I might be court-martialed when I get back home, might spend some time behind bars, but James is behind bars right now. We don’t know why. We don’t know for how long. But we all agree he didn’t do what he’s accused of doing.” He took another swallow of beer. “But like I said, I understand if you guys wanna go back.”

  Coop assumed Pilar would stay. She had no reason to return to El Paso if James wasn’t there. She’d only sit in their apartment, waiting to find out what was happening, everything in the place reminding her of the man who wasn’t there but should be. The men sitting across from him, however, he wasn’t sure about.

  Neither of them said anything for a long time. They only looked at one another, communicating silently.

  Finally Bogart turned to look at Coop again.

  “We’re staying,” he said. “Marines don’t abandon their brothers.”

  “Good,” Coop said. “I might need your help.”

  “For what?” Normal said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if he did it?”

  Coop turned to look at Pilar as she sat with slumped shoulders, her expression one of deep worry, her hands clenched together in her lap.

  “He didn’t,” Coop said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Of course I do—and so do you.”

  “Even if he’s cleared of the drug charges, they can nail him for the guns, and that’s enough to keep him behind bars for years. What if he tells us to go back to El Paso and forget about him?”

  “First of all, we don’t know whether the guns were his or not, and we won’t know until we have a chance to talk to him. Second, he doesn’t get to make that call.”

  Pilar’s eyes had a faraway look. Lost in thought. Maybe she was thinking about what she knew and what she didn’t know about James, about her future with him, about what her future would look like without him. A place in her life that had once been filled was now an empty hollow, like the lot where a razed house once stood.

  Coop could read it on her face.

  When James first met Pilar in Jacksonville, North Carolina, near where they were going through scout sniper school at Camp Lejeune, he’d been at Dirty Deeds Bar & Laundry doing a load of civilian clothes and flirting with a bartender named Katie who he thought was annoying but had a hard-on for. Pilar was doing laundry too, and she needed his dryer, which he’d had clothes sitting in for half an hour. She got frustrated waiting for him to empty the machine, so she’d done it herself, folding his clothes. He’d found them in a neat stack, a note on top telling him:

  You owe me a drink, motherfucker.

  I’m not your mother and I don’t fold clothes for free.

  Pilar

  He found her, bought the drink, and promptly forgot about Katie.

  Later, when James was telling Coop about her, he’d said, “I’m gonna marry her. Just you wait. Get ready to be my best man.”

  At the time, Coop thought it was the alcohol talking, but he didn’t think that anymore. Sometimes people met, and like puzzle pieces, they fit together. That was the case with James and Pilar. He envied them. He was thirty years old now, two years older than James, and had never felt anything like love, though he’d been looking for it.

  He met women he liked, dated them, slept with them, sometimes even had relationships with them, but like never turned into love. His heart never opened. He didn’t know why, didn’t want it to be so, but that’s how it was. He had more
love for James Murphy than he’d ever had for a woman.

  “Okay,” Pilar said finally, pulling Coop from his thoughts.

  “Okay what?”

  “You’re right. James doesn’t get to make that call. We’ll do what we need to do. I don’t want to live my life without him.”

  * * *

  Gael parked the Honda in front of his building and walked up the concrete steps to his small bachelor apartment. He unlocked the front door and pushed his way inside.

  He lived in a two-floor stucco building off Calle de Plata, as did all of Rocha’s men. None of the bills came to him. They all went to Rocha, including the phone bills, both cellular and landline. Which meant Rocha knew every call dialed or received, both the number and duration. The man had full trust in no one, not even Diego Blanco, which explained how he’d survived in this business as long as he had while others had been decapitated, disappeared, or both.

  Gael flipped the light switch by the door and the lamp on the nightstand left of the bed flashed to life, spilling its sixty watts across the single-room apartment. It was furnished with a queen-size bed, headboard against the left wall; a green-clothed La-Z-Boy Peyton recliner pushed against the back wall; and a few tables. Several books were stacked on the end table off the right arm of the chair, a few more on the nightstand, and dozens more on the floor. To the right, a small kitchenette. A mini-fridge, a short counter, and on the counter a two-burner electric hot plate and a toaster. Three fiberboard cabinets hung on the wall above the counter. The walls were painted white, and before he’d moved in, had been unblemished by art of any kind. But it had been so impersonal that he’d felt terribly lonely here, so he ordered a couple prints that might make the space his. Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night hung above the La-Z-Boy and a Vivian Maier photograph of a girl in a car hung above the bed. He’d like to have a picture of Sarah on display somewhere but it was too risky. He wasn’t supposed to have anything here that might give Rocha a clue as to his real identity, and while it was unlikely a single picture of Sarah could connect him to his other life, it was best to be safe.

  But it was hard to cut yourself off from life completely. He had a Polaroid of Sarah slipped between his mattress and box spring. There she was in a tank top and shorts, her body tanned, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, standing in front of the Grand Canyon. Every once in a while, when he was feeling particularly low, he pulled it out and looked at it.

  He didn’t do that now, however. He walked to the mini-fridge, grabbed a bottle of Sierra Nevada, and headed to the La-Z-Boy recliner. Sat down and turned on the table lamp to his right. Took a swallow, grabbed a book, and lit one of his Camels. Tried to read while he smoked, but only managed to go over the same sentence fifteen times, retaining not a single word of it.

  His mind kept turning to thoughts of Danielle Preston. She was one of the girls Alejandro kept around the house, maybe twenty-five years old, very pretty in a conventional kind of way.

  He liked women who had an air of Eastern European exoticness about them, like Sarah did, despite her plain-Jane name. In truth, he liked his women to be Sarah. She was the only woman he thought about. She was the woman he loved and so, in his mind, she represented every woman, and he measured every woman against her.

  They all came up wanting.

  But Dani was smart and funny and open in a way most drug addicts weren’t. The other girls Rocha kept around the house walled themselves off, always detached, both from their surroundings and from themselves. Dani was different. She was a junkie, as several of the women were, and about that he couldn’t kid himself, but she was self-aware and talked often about cleaning up. She smoked heroin rather than shooting it, and she did it in order to maintain. She wasn’t, or didn’t appear to be, hunting for the feeling she’d gotten from her first high. She knew what she was and wanted to change.

  To Gael’s mind, that meant she might prove useful. If he could promise her protection and rehabilitation, she might give him something in return. Information at the very least. Maybe testimony. She’d know talking was dangerous but she might also believe the benefits outweighed the risks. He hoped so, but he wouldn’t know for sure until after he approached her, and once he did there was no going back. She could refuse to speak, or decide to run, or tell Rocha about the request. In the best of those scenarios, the situation would be as it was now, except she’d have something on them; in the worst, he’d be dead. But if she did talk, she’d be able to give him information that would lead to more hard evidence. She’d be able to provide names and dates and locations, and each of those gave the DEA another angle. She might even agree to testify.

  He butted out his cigarette, finished his beer, and got to his feet. Set his book down and shut off the table lamp. Walked to the kitchenette and tossed the empty bottle into the bin under the counter. Pulled open the refrigerator and looked at a bowl of tuna salad he’d made a few days ago. Thought about grabbing a fork and eating some, but decided against it. Closed the fridge, walked to his bed, and slipped his clothes off, tossing them on the floor in a pile. Pulled back the blanket and lay down on the wrinkled sheet. Stared at the ceiling.

  Tomorrow he’d talk to Dani and by the end of the conversation he’d know that either his case against Rocha was stronger or his life was in danger. It was a risk, but he thought it was a risk worth taking.

  He leaned over and shut off the bedside lamp. The white ceiling turned gray. He lay on his back and looked up at it. He was tired, but his mind continued to turn over on itself. He wouldn’t be able to sleep feeling how he felt. He closed his eyes and projected images of Sarah onto the backs of his eyelids. He thought about the day he’d be able to see her again.

  * * *

  Pilar and the others had rooms on the second floor of Hotel Amigo. She lay in bed now, hugging a pillow, listening to the TV in Normal’s room. She couldn’t tell what he was watching, the voices muted by the wall, but it sounded like some sort of action movie. Lots of yelling and what sounded like gunfire.

  Pilar put the pillow she’d been hugging over her head to block the noise. She closed her eyes and thought about James in jail. Thought about the drugs found in his trunk. About his sister’s overdose. About the guns and what he might have been doing with them. But maybe they’d been planted too. She didn’t believe it—but maybe.

  James loved Layla as much as one person could love another. Before he left for Afghanistan, they talked at least twice a week on the phone, their conversations sometimes lasting an hour. Pilar would lie in bed, watching television, listening to James talk to his sister. In truth, it made her jealous. James spoke to Layla the way she wished he’d speak to her. Every thought that entered his head during those conversations left his mouth. He laughed a lot. He offered advice and friendship.

  Pilar loved James, and she knew he loved her, but she’d been jealous of the relationship he had with his sister.

  But now that Layla was dead, Pilar felt petty for that jealousy. She felt stupid for not understanding the hollow Layla’s absence would leave in his heart. With his sister gone, the hole might be filled by something corrosive.

  Had she been a better girlfriend she’d have sensed the hollow in his heart and tried to fill it with her love. She’d have been able to stop him from coming to Mexico and doing what he’d come here to do—whatever that had been.

  It was too late for that. But it wasn’t too late to do something.

  She wanted James out of jail. She wanted the two of them to have another chance at finding happiness together.

  9

  James spent most of Sunday in the infirmary. He woke up at six o’clock to a nurse pushing meds and asking how he felt. His right hand was uncuffed for breakfast at nine o’clock and he spooned food into his mouth. His hand was cuffed again and he lay there staring at the ceiling. To his right lay a man who had attempted suicide the night before—he was dragged in at around two o’clock in the morning, protesting, saying they should let him die—his wrists stitched an
d bandaged with gauze. He’d been crying intermittently for the last several hours, gasping and sobbing, and James thought that if he were free he might be tempted to hold a pillow over the man’s face just to shut him up. Instead, because he was cuffed, and because he had nothing better to do, he turned to look at him.

  Man about forty: pockmarked face, high cheekbones, large earlobes, Native American features, black hair clipped close to the head, bright brown eyes. Something about him made James think he wasn’t a man of the city. Maybe grew up in a wattle and daub house in southern Mexico, spent his days farming.

  “You speak English?”

  The man turned to look at him with red eyes that glistened with tears. “Yes.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Your wrists.”

  The man said nothing for a long time. He wiped at his eyes. He coughed into the side of his fist. Finally he spoke: “My daughter.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s dead. Nine years old.”

  “What happened?”

  “Anti-Zapatistas nailed shut schoolhouse door and burned to ground. Three people dead—my daughter, another girl, their teacher. She was all I had.”

  Though James didn’t have children, he wanted them, and he couldn’t imagine outliving a son or daughter. Small coffins were heartbreaking even when empty; what they represented was enough to make them heartbreaking.

  The only time he’d come close to failing in Afghanistan was when a child suicide bomber had been his target. Eight or nine years old. Kid running with an IED toward a group of Marines entering a village to capture an al-Qaeda cell. If James hadn’t pulled the trigger, the kid would still be dead—and twelve Marines would have been injured or killed as well—but it was hard to do what he had to do. Hard to line the face up in his sights and squeeze his trigger. He still saw the young face in his dreams, filled with innocence despite the murder cradled like a baby in his arms.

  He thought about his sister. The person he loved most in the world. The fact that she was dead. The fact that Alejandro Rocha was still alive.