“I’m coming.”
I walk to Jack and kneel beside him.
He’s terrified. He smells bad. He’s defecated himself.
I smile in a kindly way.
“W-who are you?” he asks, his voice quivering.
“I’m Maria.”
“Why have you done this?”
Well, it ain’t because you’re a lousy tipper.
A groan behind me. Briggs, living yet. That type needs a stake through the heart at a midnight crossroad.
“Wait here,” I say to Jack. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Dodging cracks and fissures, I walk back to Briggs. The ice is cracking all around him. Blood and water, water and blood.
I kneel beside him.
Our eyes meet.
Are you close now? Do you have any answers?
I don’t. Hector says the meaning of life is to be found in the quest for the meaning of life. But that’s Hector.
Briggs looks at me. A croak. “Help me,” he says.
I look at the wound. I suppose if we rushed him to a hospital there’d be an outside chance.
I shake my head.
“Why?” he asks.
Why indeed?
I can’t tell you about the tarot or the Book of Changes or that I am sent by our lady of the moon. But I must tell you something. I must tell you because, before the minute hand on your watch makes another revolution, I will be the instrument of your transfiguration.
For you, I suppose, it was the fifty thousand.
“The fifty grand. The price of a dead Mex.”
He thinks about it, doesn’t get it.
“That my father’s life could be bought so cheap,” I explain.
He nods.
His breath has taken on the sweetness of death. His face is white, his eyes crimson. There are splinters of ice in his hair.
“Is there a deity with whom you confer?” I ask.
“No, no, wait…”he gurgles.
“Make thy peace.”
He grabs my arm with a bloody hand.
I release his grip, step back, raise my father’s gun. This is not retribution. I have no authority for that. Nevertheless, I deliver you from this world of tears.
“No, wait, we can make a-”
Lead crosses the space between us, rips his skin, passes through muscle and bone, punches a hole in his skull the size of a baby’s fist, and exits through his spinal cord.
He looks at all the blood and lies backward on the ice, dead.
Jack’s hands are above his head.
He’s crying. “Don’t shoot me. Please. I’m so sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Whatever I did, I’m so sorry.” Tears, an anguished look. More tears. “Oh God, please don’t, please.”
“This is your best performance,” I say.
“It’s not a performance, I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“For whatever it is that you’re so angry about,” he says. Lips quivering. A cackle at the back of his throat. Snot, spittle.
The scent of death all around me, in me, makes me want to throw up. On the edge of the ice lake I see Paco in a black coat and carrying Esteban’s rifle. He waves. I wave back.
He yells something but I can’t hear what it is.
“I can’t hear you!”
“I said, I saved your Cuban ass.”
Gingerly he begins walking across the ice. He’s almost comically slow. I imagine they don’t have many frozen lakes in Nicaragua.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God, you’re going to kill me, I’m going to die,” Jack says.
He bends over and throws up what’s left of the hors d’oeuvres from Tom Cruise’s house.
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“You’re going to kill me. You’re going to murder me like you killed those others. I’m going to be dead. This is the last thing I’m ever going to see. I don’t even know where we are, I don’t even know where we are!”
“Wyoming.”
I sit down next to him on the ice. I turn his face so that he’s looking at me.
“Listen to me, Jack, that’s my friend Paco coming over to us. That kid has a jones for killing. He says he fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua when he was only a boy, and he was so good with the rifle that I think I believe him.”
“Wait a minute, I’m not going to-”
“Shut up. This is important. Paco’s going to come over here and he’s going to say: ‘No witnesses. This one too. I don’t care if he’s a big star. All of them in the lake. We gotta protect ourselves.’ ”
“What are you doing?” Paco yells. I look up. He’s not advancing at record speed. The ice is spooking him but we’ve got about five minutes here, tops.
Shit. This is not the way I thought it was going to be. Rushed. Bloody. Incompetent. This isn’t the kangaroo court of my imagination. Me remembering the good times and telling my dad’s killer what I’ve lost because of him, because of his drunken carelessness.
“It was you, Jack, you were driving the car, you were drunk. You knocked my father off the Old Boulder Road. You killed him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. Please don’t kill me,” Jack says, tears running off his eyelashes in his greatest-ever audition tape.
“I’m not going to kill you, Jack. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of all this.”
He’s looking at me with a desperate hope in his eyes. Can she really mean that? His cheeks vermillion. A green stain on his neck. His jeans soaked with piss.
“I want only one thing from you,” I tell him.
“What?”
“I want the truth, Jack. I want you to tell me what happened that night. The night you hit the Mex and Youkilis covered for you and said that you were in Malibu and had been there for days.”
“I wasn’t there, I don’t know-”
“Look, look over there at Paco. He’s coming. Now, I’m not going to kill you, but he’s going to want to and it’s going to be up to me to persuade him otherwise. You understand? You dig?”
“I understand.”
“Youkilis told me everything. Let me hear it in your words. And fast.”
“W-who are you?”
“I’m the daughter of the dead Mex. The anonymous fucking wetback that you killed and that your manager decided was worth fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand bucks. How much do you get for a picture?”
“It depends, sometimes I work for scale on a-”
“How much?”
