up with the PT, rock-hard bodies, switchblade minds. Cocky, sure, but sometimes you just had to grant that. There were plenty of others, though, who’d simply grabbed the back of the gravy train and refused to let go, slack habits, washed-out eyes, the mouthy swagger of small men: users, gasbags, phonies. They didn’t just lack fire discipline; they used their weapons like bug spray. Everything about them stank of self-delusion and the fear of weakness.
The man pulled a chair from another table and sat near Puchi, neither close enough to be part of the circle nor far enough away to seem too much a prick. He wore work boots and cargo pants, with a khaki T-shirt underneath a frayed cammie combat blouse, the name tape removed. That alone was enough to make Godo hate him. His eyes were smallish and filmy green while his skin had a raw red quality just short of a rash. He had a wisp of a mustache blurring his lip and a fistful of sag hiding his belt. His left eye drooped, suggesting some sort of nerve damage, and his left hand trembled till he jammed it in his pocket, which he did the instant he caught Godo’s stare.
Puchi did introductions. The man went by Chuck. He tugged a cigarette from a pack lodged in his shirt pocket and lit up right there, using a yellow Bic. No one behind the counter so much as frowned, let alone told him to put it out; they seemed to be ignoring him, actually. Christ, Godo thought, maybe he owns the place.
“We had a chance to float the boat a little,” Puchi said, slipping into some prearranged code. “I’d say everybody was happy.”
“Not quite,” Godo said, squaring himself in his seat. He’d been wondering how the guy got the weapons in. He’d heard tales of GIs sawing off the bottoms of oxygen tanks, slipping the AKs in, welding the bottoms back on, then loading them into shipping crates for transport back to their unit’s home base, all but impossible to track to a specific soldier. Maybe Chuck here had a guy in uniform working for him, easier that way, no customs. Godo felt certain that, if he asked, he’d only get a lie for his trouble.
Improvising, just to see where it went, he said, “You get the guns in Iraq, that’s one thing. If that’s where you get the ammo too, there’s a problem. Saddam’s factories got sloppy packing cartridges, it’s why they had so many misfires. So the weapons, fine.
Ammunition? Unless it’s Czech or Cuban, Yugoslav, anything but Iraqi, we’re not in the market.”
The guy named Chuck tapped ash onto the floor. His gaze was watery and a little off-center with the sagging left eye. He turned to Puchi. “What’s this guy talking about? You can buy a 7.62 round anywhere.”
“Not the quantity we want,” Godo said. “Not without red flags everywhere.”
Chuck turned to him, squinting against his cigarette smoke. “I don’t know you,” he said, half matter-of-fact, half insulting.
Godo mocked up a smile. “Sure you do. All the guys at Harmon Stern knew me.”
Chuck blinked, turning his cigarette in his fingers. His left hand still sat tucked away, safe in his pocket. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You guys came through my checkpoint four times a day.”
Chuck shot Puchi a glance. “What’s he going on about now?”
Puchi shrugged. “He worked over there. Like you.”
“So what?”
“Harmon Stern Associates.” Godo rocked back in his chair a little. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Chuck took a short tense drag on his smoke. “I didn’t work with that outfit.”
No doubt the guy’s lying, Godo thought. Too vague, too interior. “You sure about that?”
Chuck stood up, said to Puchi, “This is fucked up.”
“Don’t let him bug you, man.” Puchi waved toward Godo like that might make him go away. “He came back with kind of an attitude. Not like he’s the only one, am I right?”
“I’m not fucking around. I don’t care where he’s been. Or what happened.” Chuck’s eyes flicked over to Godo’s face, jittered back. “He gets his shit in check or this is over.”
Godo basked in the power, the situation his to dictate. What did he care if Puchi and Chato scored another AK or two? Chuck looked like he might bolt for the door, Puchi seething in silence, Efraim just sitting there, arms crossed tight. Chato, in a world of his own, fiddled with his straw, making soft trumpet sounds with his lips.
“You think I’m just messing with you?” Godo laced his fingers behind his head. “We had trouble with Harmon Stern, not just once or twice. All the time. They were like a cancer in Al Anbar when I was there. This one time in particular, they shot two unarmed
“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Chuck said, a little stronger now.
“Convince me.”
“Yeah. And don’t be so touchy.”
Chuck dropped his butt on the floor, crushed it with his boot. “You think I’m touchy?” He leaned forward, fists on the tabletop. The inwardness had fled. “I get sick of Molly Mopes shitting on what we did. You were there? Then you know as well as I do there was damn near no way to tell a good
Godo waited for a second, watching as, across the room, the towheaded girl and her walrus of a mother attacked their food. “My gunny got killed because of fuckups like you.”
“That’s it.” Chuck shoved the bad hand back in its pocket. “I don’t need this.” He turned toward the door and stormed out, Puchi watching his back as though waiting for that magic point when he’d stop, cool off, rethink it, come back in, if only to give Godo a ration of shit. But that didn’t happen. The guy who called himself Chuck, the man Godo felt almost certain he remembered now, if not him some guy just like him, climbed into his plain gray van and peeled out so fast his rear axle leapt almost a foot off the ground when it tagged a high-crested buckle in the blacktop. The other parking-lot shoppers stopped everything, staring after the van as it fishtailed away.
Puchi turned back to Godo, eyes glazed with fury. “Vasco’s gonna have your balls for that.”
Twenty-Four
EL CHUSQUERO, AS HIS HENCHLINGS CALLED HIM-THE COMMANDER-took great pride in his wooden English. “I ask only, you know, because it look so, yes? You…” He winked, flourishing his hand back and forth between Roque and Lupe. “And she…”
He had a meaty face with sleep-lidded eyes, an oft-broken nose that sloped back to a glistening forehead. His thinning black hair rustled in the downdraft from the ceiling fan. He wore a blue guayabera and khaki slacks, the crease as straight as a blade.
They were seated in his office, painted a stark white and located at the back of a traditional thick-walled house, his headquarters. The only furnishings in the room were his desk with its leather swivel chair, a huge Guatemalan flag hanging behind him on the wall and two wood chairs for Roque and Lupe.
He was the leader of the gunmen who’d come to their rescue out at the roadblock in the hills. Who he and those men were, exactly, remained somewhat foggy, though it seemed obvious by now they weren’t exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
The desk was arrayed with a yard-long cord of rope with two close knots in it-the better to crush the windpipe of your victim, or so the Commander had explained during their leisurely afternoon together-plus a stretch of piano wire tied to two blocks of wood, a modest if chilling collection of knives, a bayonet honed to razor sharpness, a machete similarly seasoned, a set of nunchuks, even a length of chain he called a
