studio, the walls of the room stapled with cheap acoustic foam. That was when Roque saw her for the first time.
She was seated on a milk crate in the far corner, knees clenched tight, fists tucked beneath her arms. She had the slinky build of a dancer, a graceful neck, two dark moles dotting the hollow of her throat. Her lips were ripe and womanly but real, not plumped by a needle. She wore a white cotton top, jeans, sandals, her long black hair parted on one side and tied into a ponytail-a simple look, Roque thought, but this was no simple girl. She was a
Roque guessed the thug in question was one of the two sitting at the desk backed up against the wall, the pair of them watching a video track on a twenty-four-inch wide-screen iMac G5.
It wasn’t the only big-ticket toy in the room. He noticed as well a Sony camcorder, a Butterscotch Blonde Stratocaster with a Vibrolux Reverb amp, a Martin Marquis acoustic, a Korg Triton keyboard, a Digidesign 003 control surface, JBL monitors, Bluebird microphones. He realized now why so much had been made of his being musical. He was here to work.
Sisco caught a glance at what the other two were watching and drifted in behind, leaning toward the monitor. A snarling vocal track-just voices, the usual gassy blustering bullshit, half-assed hip-hop-droned from the JBLs. Roque let his knapsack slip from his shoulder and traded a quick glance with the girl, who regarded him with the same cold fear and barely disguised hate she directed toward the others. I’m not one of them, he wanted to tell her. Given what he’d come to El Salvador to do, though, and who he’d have to deal with to get it done, he wasn’t quite sure how true that was.
Finally, one of the two
The other cat was huge, shaved head, weight-lifter pop to his muscles, shirtless like the doorman, all that skin ribboned with freak-show ink from his skull down to his waist. To his credit, it wasn’t the usual garish chaos. The designs seemed to cohere, with a theme involving dark towers, billowing flames, redemptive lilies.
Glancing at the monitor, Roque realized much of the video had been shot in the front room and featured the tattooed giant, with Sisco and the doorman and the Jesuit popping up here and there among nameless others, all of them vamping in poses of cliched menace, posturing wildly, throwing
As for the video, he’d seen dozens like it, the Web was crawling with them. Surprising, he thought, given what he knew of guys like this, that they hadn’t added a shot of the girl’s jacked-up face. Maybe they were saving that for a later take.
The Jesuit offered a nod in greeting but did not extend a hand. “Ever hear of a guy named Piocha?” His English lacked accent, the voice raspy and deep.
“Yeah,” Roque said. Piocha was the stage name of Jorge Manuel, El Salvador’s most famous guitarist.
“We got him slotted to do the music track for this video. But Sisco here, he talked to your uncle. He says you know your way around a studio.”
Bullshit, Roque thought, Piocha wouldn’t come near these guys. “Not sure how my uncle would know that,” he said, not wanting to seem overly agreeable. He knew this sort, not so different from Godo or Happy, really. Avoid confrontation, they saw you as weak. “But yeah, I’ve spent some time at a board.”
It wasn’t a total lie. He’d sat with Lalo during his recording sessions, paid decent enough attention. He could muddle his way through. The Jesuit invited him to sit and Roque called up the program, noticing a lack of manuals, at which point it dawned on him the stuff was stolen.
It took him ten minutes to figure out their settings, plug everything into the right ports, check to be sure their version of Pro Tools and their Mac OS were compatible, test the Digi 003 for gremlins. Beyond that, without a MIDI to complicate things, it was basically just a digital tape deck.
“Okay, before I start-I’m Roque, by the way?”
The tattooed hulk and the Jesuit traded glances. “Chiqui,” the big one said. Short for Chiquitin, Roque guessed: Tiny. The Jesuit followed, “You call me Lonely,” said with a pinpoint stare. Roque remembered the name from the wall. Assuming it answered to the same reverse logic as Tiny, he figured it meant the guy was never at a loss for company, female company in particular, clarifying finally who the girl in the corner belonged to.
“Okay,” he began again, “I guess I need some idea of what it is you guys are after.”
Chiqui began to say something but Lonely cut him short. “How about you show us what you got, put something together for us to judge, then we’ll see who needs what.”
Roque got that it wasn’t a suggestion. “Right.”
He replayed the vocal track, got a feel for the beat, a standard rap rhythm, apparently kept with nothing but an inner metronome. The good news, they could hold a beat. That permitted him to lay down a click track for reference.
“Okay,” he said to no one in particular, “I’m gonna add a drum bit on the Korg. See what you think.” He trolled through the samples on the keyboard, chose one heavy on the backbeat with a Bo Diddley shuffle, fashioned a four-minute loop and played it through the monitor. The wave patterns jagged hypnotically on the computer screen and the Digi dials self-adjusted like a ghost was working the panel. A little theater, he thought, amp my cred. With just the drum track the video instantly seemed bolder, more polished. He glanced around the room. “Sounds like money to me, what you guys think?” The answer was in their faces.
Lonely pointed to the corner. “What about the
Up until that moment, Roque had no inkling the girl was anything but window dressing. “What about her?”
“The bitch is here to sing.” Lonely gestured for her to get up, come over. “She knows it.”
Roque hadn’t felt truly dirty until that moment. He reminded himself this was all for Tio Faustino. He had no choice who to rely on, who to deal with, but the girl’s eyes made no distinctions. She rose, arms crossed, and edged up to the pop filter on the microphone.
Roque asked, “What, exactly, is she singing?”
“You figure it out,
If these two are lovers, Roque thought, it was one of those fucked-up death-do-we-part situations, where you can’t tell the love from the hate, the pain you suffer-or inflict-only deepens what you feel. But the girl’s body told him different: no catty arched spine, no cocked hip, no pout. And the light in her eyes was cold with fright.
“Let me get a few instrumental tracks down first,” he said, hoping to buy some time. “And I have to move a few things around, get situated.” He turned to her then. Hoping to sound kind but not arouse any jealousy, he said, “You can sit down for now.”
“She don’t speak English,” Lonely said. Accusing. Mocking.
Roque, trying again:
For the merest instant, her glance settled on him with something other than hate. Please, he thought, don’t. Almost instantly the fear returned and she pivoted around, walked back to the milk carton, sat.
He tuned the Stratocaster and the Martin using the keyboard, adjusted the tone and volume dials for the cobalt pickups on the Strat, striving for the spooky hollowed-out bite the guitar was known for, then fiddled briefly with the Digi’s volume levels, making sure the waveforms were full and set as high as possible without peaking into distortion. He could feel his heart pounding and once or twice snuck a chance to wipe his damp palms on his jeans. He ran the video twice more to make sure the rhythm track was properly synched, then dubbed in a bass track, again using the Korg, choosing a fat round punchy tone. On top of that he laid down an organ effect, a churchy thrum, with a Hammond B-3 sample.
As he worked, he felt the mood turn in the room. Everyone got quiet, calm, almost reverential. Then a boy appeared in the doorway.
Roque pegged him at ten years old, but kids grow up small down here, he thought. The boy had a cloth bag in one hand, a bottle of Champan in the other, the local variety of cream soda. Lonely gestured him forward. The kid stole a glance at Roque first, then did as he was told.
