Do They Know I'm Running

more. He’d already paid the parking fee up front when he’d arrived; this was for discretion. He crossed the street, dodging a weepy drunk, then two women dragging a handcart, and approached the grandfather who was sitting in a white plastic chair, fanning himself with his hat, his youngest grandson at his feet.

“Hola, viejo.” Roque folded the money into the old man’s hand. “Gracias por todo.”

Hurrying toward the car beneath the ancient ceiba, he tried to reconnoiter the area without seeming too obvious, swatting away mosquitoes with one hand as he walked, digging out his keys with the other. He could feel the old man’s eyes on his back as he opened the car door, dropped behind the wheel. The engine turned over-thank God, he thought, having feared they might have taken the distributor cap-and he put the transmission in gear, flipped on the headlights, steered his way out of the lot and into the street.

Someone started pounding on the car door with a meaty fist-Chepito’s sidekick, still carrying the beat-up guitar in his other hand. He was grabbing for the handle, trying to open the door. Roque elbowed the plunger down, throwing the lock, and accelerated.

The crowds were all but gone, he could gain some actual speed, but a pair of tottering vagabundos, holding each other up, blocked the way twenty feet ahead. Roque blared the horn, veering to pass them on the right, hoping to squeeze between them and the sidewalk. The henchling, running alongside, cursed and kept pounding on the car window, then lifted the guitar over his head like an ax and swung it down hard, smashing it against the roof on his second try. The instrument shattered into kindling with a jangled chord, while the two drunks half lurched, half jigged out of the way, still clasping each other. Roque sped on, braking only for the corner, picking up speed again as he laid on the horn, hammering at it with his fist while he dodged the night’s last revelers frozen in the tunnel of his headlights, stony Mayan faces materializing then vanishing in the corner of his eye as he prayed he didn’t hit anyone, didn’t harm anyone, didn’t have to stop as he headed as best he could tell for the bridge into Mexico.

Twenty-Eight

SHEER LUCK THE CLEANING LADY SHOWED UP TODAY, HAPPY thought, sitting in the passenger seat of the plain white van they’d borrowed from Vasco-Puchi behind the wheel, Chato in the back-the better to blend in here, parked down the block from the house.

Happy’s DMV connection had come through with the plate trace: Charles T. Snell, an address in Crockett, half a mile up the hill from the sugar refinery. The house was the largest on the block but like most of the others along the street it looked a little shabby, stucco and brick with flaking trim, chimney mortar gapped in places, mismatched shingles from a roof patch. A general sense the heyday was over, an old company town gone bust.

They were there to scout the place out, reconnoiter, get some ideas about ways in, ways out. In the middle of that, the cleaning lady shows up. What else could she be but a gift?

She was Latina of course, who else cleaned houses in California anymore? He had to hope that would make the whole thing easier. They’d talk la raza, they’d talk la familia. They’d talk mutual interests, like making sure no one got hurt.

She’d been inside two hours and was finally done. Walking out to her car, an ancient Mazda, she dug her keys out of her purse, dropped them on the cracked pavement, scooped them up, opened the door. The engine turned over with a bark of smoke and the car shuddered away from the curb. Happy lifted his hand, signaling for Puchi to wait until she reached the stop sign.

“Easy,” he said. “She drives like an abuela.” A grandma.

He wished Roque would call, days since he’d heard anything. Buy a damn disposable phone, he thought, but how could he say that till the kid got one? It was like a bad joke. And Lattimore, cranking up the heat. They needed to be able to track Samir, he said, they still weren’t sure his story checked out. “I tend to get tense when the radar goes blank. I’m not alone.” Nobody knew where they were. The mighty eyes and ears of Uncle Sam, they’d gone blind, gone deaf. And all my wannabe superstar cousin had to do is lose his fucking cell.

They figured the cleaning lady was heading for the freeway and gave her space, then closed in once she neared the on-ramp, dropping back again once they knew her direction, trying to keep another car between them-not easy, given what a poke she was-then pulling close again as she took the El Sobrante exit. From there she drove east, weaving her way among the tightly curving streets through low hills. They lost her at one turn, caught her down the block, stopped, backed up, followed, until she parked finally outside a clapboard bungalow with a sprawling honeysuckle out front.

She got out of her car. Happy told Puchi to slow to a stop beside her.

“Buenas, senora,” he said, an engaging smile, getting out as Chato opened the van’s sliding door.

She was plain, matronly, dimpled cheeks, copper-colored ponytail. She froze in panic as Happy stepped close, grabbed her arm hard at the elbow, dragged her toward the van.

– Make a sound and I’ll kill you right here.

He’d never said such a thing before. It scared him a little, hearing how like him it sounded.

Chato popped out and the two of them bundled her into the van. Happy glanced up and down the block, wondering if they’d been spotted, while Chato scrambled in behind the woman, boxing her in while he rammed the sliding door closed. Happy jumped up into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut, barking at Puchi, “Go!”

As the van sped away Happy turned around, looking the woman square in the eye, trying to muster inside him whatever it would take-menace, sympathy, a little of both-to get her to listen, get her to obey. She sat on the floor in a lump of furniture quilting, clutching her purse to her midriff, eyes like balloons. Happy reached out, took the handbag from her, needing only two gentle tugs to get her to give it up. Checking inside, he found her wallet, flipped it open, dug out her driver’s license: Lourdes Trujillo, forty-one years old. He found pictures too, a pair of girls, one twelve or so, homely like her mother, the other closer to eighteen. No baby fat this one, lipstick and eyeliner, almost pretty.

“We don’t want to harm you,” he said, switching to English now. She’d know it, the only question was how well and the answer was important. “But we will if you don’t help us. We’ll hurt you, hurt your daughters. Don’t make us do that.”

Her eyes welled up. “I am nobody,” she said, voice whispery with fear. “Help you-how? You see my car, my house. I buy food, I pay rent, there’s no money left.” She clenched her hands together, pointing them at Happy. “Please, whoever you are…”

Chato, kneeling beside her, dug into his pocket, took out a folding knife and flicked it open. Pressing the blade to her thigh, he began stroking it back and forth, teasing it closer to her crotch with each pass. “Do what he tells you, abuela, it’ll be okay. I give you my turd of honor.”

Happy, continuing his search of the purse, shoveled past her keys then stopped. The car, he thought. It would be sitting there when her daughters came home from school, their mother nowhere to be found. The girls would call the police, the cops would back-walk her day, they’d ask the contractor or his family about her, a tip-off that something was wrong.

“Go back to the house,” he said.

“I’m on it.” Puchi seemed to be trying to get his bearings back to the freeway.

“No. Her house.” Happy nodded toward Lourdes. “We can’t leave her car back there.” He ignored Puchi’s stare and took out the wad of keys-it had a plastic piglet for a bob-and tossed them into Chato’s lap, thinking: Turd of honor. What the hell was that about? “Put the knife away, she gets you’re serious. Take her car, follow us out.”

Chato’s eyes tightened but then Puchi hit the brakes and the van lurched to a stop. They were back at Lourdes’s house.

“Go on,” Happy said, gentler now.

Chato sulked his way out of the van, Lourdes staring at his back as the door slid shut, then Happy snapped his fingers to get her attention. “I apologize,” he said. “I mean it, we don’t want to harm you. We need you. I’ll explain as we drive.”