Looks at me. I look at him.
A spark.
That man and I know each other. In other lives or other universes our paths have crossed. We’re right to be wary.
Let me see you, Sheriff. Let me really see you.
Skin the tone of a throat-cut murder victim. Eyes the blue ice of an alien moon.
“Asked you a question.”
No muscle in his face moves when he speaks, his voice slipping between his thin lips like one of Mother’s voodoo spirits.
“I must have gotten lost, sir,” I say in Spanish.
“Lost? Christ on a bike, your people managed to fucking walk here from Siberia and you can’t find your way around a town with half a dozen streets?”
“I took a wrong turn,” I suggest.
After this remark, which seems to highlight a prima facie case of falsehood, he hesitates for a moment and then pulls out a packet of cigarettes.
Something’s up, something’s not quite right.
“Lost, eh?” he repeats.
“
“Gonna tell you one more time, cut out the Mex.”
“Yes, sir.”
He opens the car door and gets out. “Gonna search you, sister. If you got any large sums of money on you, you and Esteban are in for the fucking high jump. I don’t care if the INS is fucking with the program, I’m not that desperate. I run this town, not him, get me?”
“Yes, sir, but I have no money, sir.”
Just a ski mask, a gun, a fucking sledgehammer.
“I’ll be the judge of that. Take off the pack.”
I let it drop. Gently.
Towering over me, he pats me down, his big horrendous paws touching my sides and ass. He looks inside my shoes and pulls my sweater forward to look down my bra.
“What’s in the backpack?”
Lies. Lies that won’t get believed.
Here it comes-
The big paws pummeling me. Smashing down and down. Blood pouring from my nose and mouth. From my eyes. Drowning in blood. Screaming nerve endings. Pain. Mercy shot to the head. Shallow grave in the woods. A missing Mex. The world doesn’t hesitate on its ellipse.
“Fucking deaf? What’s in the backpack?”
“Cleaning supplies.”
“Open it up.”
The radio crackles inside the SUV.
“Sheriff?”
Briggs reaches through the window and grabs the mike. “This is Briggs.”
“Sheriff, we got a twenty-two on the Interstate. Messy one.”
“Shit. Deaths?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff, at least three vehicles. One of them’s on fire, so I reckon Channel Nine will send up the chopper.”
“I’ll be right over,” Briggs says and gets back in the Escalade.
“Mex town is at the top of the hill and turn left,” he says.
“Thank you,
“And don’t let me catch you in this neighborhood again. Decent folks along here.”
“No, sir.”
He starts the engine, drives off.
When the SUV disappears over the brow of the next hill my body wilts.
Relief. Exhaustion.
I sit down on the grass verge. December in Colorado, but the sun is shining and it’s warm-not Havana warm, not hot enough to melt that lake in Wyoming; but a dry, wearisome mountain heat.
Get up. Hoof it.
After a klick I find a sign on a forest trail that says ROAD CLOSED-SUBSIDENCE DANGER. That might come in handy. I roll up the sign, put it in my backpack. As I’m zipping another car slows and a voice says, “Me to the rescue. Need a ride?”
13 THE PRINCES OF MALIBU
The white Bentley, Jack leaning his head out the passenger’s-side window.
“Yes, please,” I replied, and once again I was annoyed that I wasn’t wearing lipstick or looking my best.
“Get in. Ever been in a Bentley before?”
“No.”
“Get in, get in. I’ll put the top down. You can’t put the top down without a beautiful girl next to you, it’s obligatory, says it right there in the owner’s manual.”
I sat in the passenger’s seat. He pressed a button and the roof slid back. The Bentley accelerated away from the curb with a feline roar.
“I’m probably the oldest ‘girl’ you’ve had in this car.”
“How old are you?”
I gave him what I hoped was an ironic look.
“Yeah, I know, not the sort of question you’re supposed to ask. Tip-don’t ask actors, either.”
“I know how old you are,” I told him.
“You looked me up in Wikipedia?”
“I don’t know what that is. At that party you had I heard you say that you tell producers you’re twenty-nine, but your older resumes say you’re thirty and really you’re thirty-one.”
“Goddammit,
“I don’t think it was vino.”
“No it wasn’t. A-rated, two-fifty-a-spliff Vancouver hemp-that’s what it was. We got it in for Pitt, except he didn’t stay. His loss-supremo shit. Course I don’t need to tell you, you’re from Mexico.”
I gave him another look that he missed. “If that acting career doesn’t work out, I’m sure they’ll hire you in the diplomatic corps, Senor Jack.”
He burst out laughing. “Yeah, I guess that was a bit crass.”
I smiled to show I wasn’t in the least offended and for some reason this made him grin like an idiot. He touched me on the leg. The Bentley had barely been going thirty but as the undulating road flattened out he gunned it up to seventy. It accelerated so smoothly it was as if we were in a studio and the landscape was a back projection.
“Beaut, isn’t she? Valet parkers fucking kill themselves for the keys. Like it?”
Like it? Nothing in Cuba moved like this. The fifties Yankee cars with Russian engines and jerry-rigged suspensions, the cheap Chinese imports, the Mexican Beetles. I thought all cars rattled and roared until I rode in the back of Sheriff Briggs’s Escalade.
“It’s ok,” I told him.
“Yeah, it’ll do,” he agreed.
It was a break to actually be in this car with him. I couldn’t let it go by.
Men loved to talk about their cars. “Is it from this year?” I asked prepping the ground so I could slip in an
