Do They Know I'm Running

crew that ripped out this particular batch. It was big news in Rio Mirada, the number of public buildings vandalized, the intersections where the streetlights merely flashed because the conduits had been gutted. No sooner would the repairs be complete than Vasco’s malandrines would strike again.

“This is a cash-strapped city,” the police chief had intoned on TV the other night. “We really could use the public’s help on this.”

In the opposite corner, handbills for mortgage assistance lay scattered in haphazard piles: In Foreclosure? Save Your Home! We Buy Houses for Cash! Vasco was the local ghetto hump for the company that worked the scam, tricking people into refinancing plans that stripped out all their equity through cash-back-at-closing schemes, disguising the payouts as costs and fees. Sometimes they snatched title outright, leaving the homeowners with nothing. Happy wondered if they were in league with the crooks who’d screwed his father and Lucha.

Vasco was yammering away on the phone, dressed in a black cowboy shirt with white piping, black jeans, white sharkskin boots with a matching belt, rocking in his chair and clutching his cigarette like a dart. He’d wrapped up the conversation minutes ago but was dragging it out, trying to show Happy who was boss, who could be made to wait.

Finally Vasco signed off and tossed the phone onto his desk, after which he rubbed his eyes, scratched his paunch, gazed out the window. His neck bore a patch of shiny flesh, the ghost of a tattoo he’d had removed. “Pinole was a problem?”

Happy didn’t answer right away. Two could play this game. “That a surprise?”

Vasco waved the question away while exhaling a final plume of smoke, stubbing out his butt. “You said there was something to discuss.”

Happy could feel, like a thumb flick, the pulse in his throat. “I’ve got a proposal. Not just me. Me and some people back in El Salvador.” The words sounded odd inside his skull, bats fluttering out of a cave.

Vasco mustered a yawn but his eyes betrayed his interest. “What people?”

“The guys who helped me get across.”

“I never heard this.”

“Heard what?”

“That you were involved with any, you know, people. Crossing over.”

“How the hell else was I gonna do it?”

“Beats me.” Vasco was already lighting up another smoke. “You still in contact?”

“Would I be pitching this if I wasn’t?”

“I dunno, you tell me.”

Happy resisted an urge to get up, cross the room, tip Vasco out of his chair like a pumpkin from a wheelbarrow. “You don’t want the offer, I’ll take it to Sancho.”

Emilio “Sancho” Perata was the shot caller for the 23rd Street Locos Salvatruchos, out of Richmond, as yet the only quasi-legitimate northern MS-13 clica outside San Francisco.

Vasco said, “Sancho would laugh in your face. Then he’d string you up by the balls.”

“Not for three million a year.”

For a moment, it felt as though gravity had loosened its hold on things. The whole room seemed to float.

Vasco said, “Get outta town.”

“Things’ve been loose up till now, right? No el mero mero calling the shots for everybody. That’s gonna change. And the clicas that get in first, make the connection to the chiefs below the border-”

“You mean L.A.”

“L.A. answers to El Salvador now. That’s something you should know. Fuck, El Salvador is Los Angeles now. All the deportees.”

“How the fuck you know these people?”

“Prison. After I got sent down myself.”

Vasco tipped back and pondered that, rocking. His face was pockmarked and sagging from all the abuse, the crank and the liquor, the pills and the smoke, plus the stress of his petty empire. The purplish fluorescence of the overhead light didn’t help. “Why should I trust some mensos in lockup? Especially when they’re thousands of miles away?”

“Because if you don’t, somebody else will. Sancho, for one. You wanna end up answering to him?”

“Won’t happen. Not me.”

“Oh yeah. You.”

“Bullshit. What is this, some kind of threat? You come in here, try to shake me down?”

“I’m offering you a shot at one and a half mil a year.”

“I thought you said three.”

“Three tops, one and a half guaranteed. That sound like a shakedown to you?”

In the window behind Vasco the moon peeked beneath a vast ledge of cloud. Downstairs, one of the vatos cackled, “Te lo dije, el es un malapaga.” I told you, he’s a deadbeat.

Vasco met Happy’s eyes and let the stare linger. “Smuggling what, exactly?”

“First thing, you help me get my uncle and another guy across the border.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“You wanna get to phase two it is. My people are in with the Valle Norte cartel. They’re gonna move the product by boat, it’ll sail out of Turbo, Colombia, hidden on pallets under loads of tropical fruit-bananas, plantains, mangoes. After a layover in Acajutla it’ll come into the Oakland port, my dad and I will know which shipments, he’ll work it so he gets the load. He’ll truck it to a warehouse in Richmond owned by an importer who’s already on board. You’ll divide up the shipment, send it to the various wholesalers around the bay. They pay you, you skim your share, the rest goes back south through the channel.”

“These people have names?”

“You buy in, then you’ll know what you need to know.”

“This is bullshit. You’re winding me up. Buy in?”

Happy reminded himself this was all for his father. “How else you think this happens?”

“How much?”

“Thirty grand.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“That’s five jobs like the couple in Pinole today. For one and a half mil a year on the back end. Guaranteed.”

“Nothing’s guaranteed.”

“You’re not paying attention to what I’m telling you.”

“You think I’m handing thirty large to you with nothing but-”

“You’re not handing it to me.”

“Who then?”

“You’re wiring it to El Salvador. Once it gets there, my father and this other guy I mentioned? They get brought up across the border. Once that’s done, you’re in on the franchise.”

“Okay, that’s twice now you’ve mentioned this other guy. Who is he?”

Happy paused for the proper effect. “He’s from the Middle East.”

Vasco blanched. “You saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Once he’s here, he vanishes, you have no more connection to him.”

“And when he does whatever he’s gonna do, and they connect all the dots and find out how he got across?”

“There’s no way to tie you to it.”

“You said I’m wiring money.”

“From somewhere here in the Bay Area to San Salvador, happens a thousand times every day. You smurf it down in smaller amounts, use a fake name, or have everybody on the crew send a piece, fake names again, and we bribe the guy at the envio de dinero window. It gets picked up by someone on the other end, again a fake name, he vanishes on that end. Who knows where he goes, who he meets or what he does with