Under the Skin

hadn’t.

“I keep telling you,” Sam said to him, “you’re worrying for nothing. I was on the phone with our ears in Dallas ten minutes ago. None of them have heard anything.”

“Everybody knows we got ears all over,” Rose said. “If they’re planning a move they’re keeping a tight lid on it.”

“They got no reason to make a move on us,” Sam said. “Ragsdale lost their machines to us, we didn’t steal them. They made a bet on Willie Rags and they lost.”

“Could be they’re sore losers,” Rose said. “Could be they don’t give a rat’s ass it’s Ragsdale’s fault.”

“What can they do, come get the machines back?” Sam said. “As soon as they tried it we’d hear about it and be there before they got the first slot loaded on the truck. They can’t do anything except forget the slots or buy them back. You got them over a barrel, Rosie.”

Rose arched his brow at me in question.

“I’m with Sam,” I said.

He nodded but didn’t look convinced. “Well…keep a close tab with the ears,” he said to Sam.

“And you,” he said to me, “just keep close.”

Lucio Ramirez is about to close his bakery for the day when the little bell jingles over the door and two men enter. One of them flips the sign hanging inside the glass door to the side that says CERRADO and then turns the doorlock.

Angel Lozano and Gustavo Mendez are large men in finely tailored suits and snapbrim fedoras. They could pass for brothers, their chief distinction in their mustaches—Angel’s thick and droopy, Gustavo’s thin and straight— and in Angel’s left eye, which is held in a permanent half-squint by a pinched white scar at its outer corner.

Apodaca is a small pueblo and these men in smart city clothes are obvious outsiders. Even as Ramirez asks how he may serve them, his apprehension is stark on his face.

Angel asks if he is related to Maria Ramirez, who until recently was in the employ of La Hacienda de Las Cadenas.

The baker can see that the man already knows the true answer—and sees as well that he is not a man to lie to—and so he admits that Maria is his daughter and asks what they wish with her.

At that moment his rotund wife emerges from a curtained doorway to the living quarters in the rear part of the bakery and stops short at the sight of the strangers.

Ramirez tells her who they are and she turns back toward the curtain but Gustavo catches her by the arm and yanks her to him and claps a hand over her mouth. Ramirez starts toward them but Angel grabs him by the hair and rams his forehead against the wall and lets the baker fall to the floor unconscious, his forehead webbed with blood.

Angel passes through the curtain and sees the girl sitting on the edge of her bed, her sewing sliding off her lap, her eyes large. Before she can scream, Angel is on her, pinning her down, a hand on her mouth and a knife blade at her neck.

He tells her he will ask her only once—where is the wife of Don Cesar?—and tells her that if she lies he will see the lie in her eyes and he will cut her throat to the neckbone.

He eases his hand from the girl’s mouth but she is terrified to incoherence. He tells her to calm down, for Christ’s sake, and she tries, but as she talks she continues to weep and partially choke on her mucus and he permits her to sit up so she can speak more clearly.

She is at last able to tell him that la dona paid the stableman Luis Arroyo with jewelry to escort her to the border town of Matamoros. At the Monclova station, Maria Ramirez took leave of them and caught a train to Monterrey and from there took a bus to Apodaca.

She doesn’t know—she swears she doesn’t—where in Matamoros la dona was going or why. She knows nothing more to tell except that, on the train trip to Monclova, Arroyo had spoken of a brother who owns a cantina in Matamoros, a place called La Perla.

I left Rose and Sam talking business in the office and went into the lounge and ordered a bottle of beer. At that hour, there were only a few guys at the bar, a few couples at the tables. The place would start filling fast by suppertime and would as always be packed at midnight.

“Say, Kid!”

At the rear of the lounge, LQ stood in the doorway to the billiards room, a cue stick in one hand. He waved me over. Brando leaned into view around the door jamb and gave me a high sign, then stepped out of sight again.

I went to join them. They were shooting eight ball, best of three for five bucks, and had split the first two games.

“Got winners,” I said, and started searching the wall holder for my favorite cue.

“Why not just say you want to play me next?” LQ said. He was in good spirits. Brando had a fresh shiner under one eye.

“Quit the bullshit and shoot,” Brando said.

“Hard to tell who’s winning, aint it?” LQ said to me.

I found the cue I wanted and dusted my hands with talc and slicked up the stick.

The table was showing all of the stripes and only two solids other than the eight ball. LQ laid his cigarette aside and leaned into the light under the Tiffany tableshade and set himself to try banking the six ball into the side. He squinted in the shadow of his hatbrim, sighting and resighting on the six as intently as a surveyor peering through a transit.

He missed by half a foot. The six caromed off the cushion and went banging into several other balls and smacked the eight into a corner pocket.

Brando hooted and said, “Pay up, sucker.”

For all their bluster with a cue stick, neither of them could play worth a damn. I’d seen them knock the balls all over the table for more than half an hour before somebody finally scratched, which was the way most of their games were decided. It was rarely a matter of which of them would win, but who’d be the first to lose.

LQ peeled a five from a wad of greenbacks and flung it fluttering to the table. “Lucky bastard,” he said.

Brando laughed and tucked away the bill. “Like the man said, talent makes its own luck.” He turned to me and said, “Next!”

I fished the balls out of the pockets and racked them, then eased the wooden rack off the balls and returned it to its hook at the foot of the table. There had been a pool table at the ranch and over the years I’d become a fair hand with a cue. I was no match for the hustlers, but Brando and LQ wouldn’t play me for money anymore unless I gave three-to-one odds.

The strong point of Brando’s game was his break. As usual, he broke the balls with a crack like a sledgehammer. They ricocheted in a wild clatter, the seven falling in a corner, the four dropping in a side.

“Yes sir!” Brando said.

He called the two in the corner, straight and easy, and made it. Then cut the five into another corner. Then tapped the three in the side. He grinned at me and blew across the tip of his cue like he was clearing smoke from a rifle muzzle.

LQ groaned in his chair behind me and said, “Shooting out his ass.”

“One in the corner,” Brando called. It was a clear shot but he stroked it way harder than necessary and the yellow ball spasmed in the rim of the pocket before it dropped in.

Brando laughed and banged the heel of his cue on the floor. “Somebody stop me before I kill again.”

The only shot he had with the six was a cross-corner bank. He came close, but it didn’t fall.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Finally back to your normal game,” LQ said.

I sank seven in a row—bank shots, rail shots, combinations—and just like that, there was nothing left standing but Brando’s six and the eight ball.