Brian stops short.
“We know it was one of you,” Dennis says. “The question is, which?”
Neglecting to mention that it doesn’t fucking matter who actually pulled the trigger. But if Brian doesn’t know that, tough shit. Ignorance has its costs. If you’re going to be a criminal-know the fucking law, asshole.
“I don’t think it was you,” Dennis says. “You don’t strike me as the type who’d kill a girl. You just don’t. I think it was Duane, but he’s in there sobbing that he watched you do it… he has nightmares… ‘Brian just blew her brains out. He was laughing as he did it.’ Juries love that shit, Brian.”
Brian gets this look of feral cunning on his face.
“Wouldn’t I be guilty anyway, though?” he asks. “Even if I was just there? Which I wasn’t, but if I was?”
Goddamn it, Dennis thinks. If there’s anything he hates it’s a half-intelligent skell with a little information. Law amp; Order has totally fucked up the interview room.
“True,” Dennis says. “But there are distinctions in terms of sentencing. One of you gets life, the other gets the cocktail. Which you’re not going to think is a big distinction until they strap you down, and then you’re going to think it is, because Duane will still be eating meals and taking shits and jerking off, and you… well, they say it’s painless, but they say a lot of things, don’t they?”
Brian toughens up. “I don’t know anything about those killings.”
“That’s too bad,” Dennis says, “because now you can’t give me what I want.”
He starts out the door, then stops and turns.
“If you haven’t already figured this out,” Dennis says, “Duane and the boys can’t risk keeping you around.”
“You’re saying they’re going to kill me?”
“No, they’re going to give you a pony,” Dennis says. “What the fuck you think they’re gonna do?”
Dipshit.
218
Lado has kept one of them alive.
To watch the dissection of his friends and learn.
The man is naked and chained to a wall, and now Lado takes the point of the bloody knife and presses it into the man’s stomach, just enough to draw blood.
“Tell me now,” Lado says.
“Anything,” the man sobs.
“Which guero?”
“What?”
Lado presses the knife a little harder. “Which American agreed to the assassination of Filipo Sanchez?”
The man gives it up.
Raised in the slums of Tijuana, Lado found many of his childhood meals in the garbage dumps that rose in his barrio like Mayan temples. When his father had work, it was as a carnicero, a butcher, and when the family got meat, it was usually a cabra, a goat.
So he knows the sound of a goat when you slash its belly, and that’s what the man sounds like as Lado lifts the knife through his guts.
219
INT. HOLDING CELL — NIGHT
CROWE sits at the table as DENNIS comes in.
DUANE
I want a lawyer.
DENNIS
Bad call, but yours to make.
DUANE
Right.
DENNIS
I know who you’re going to call-I think I have him on speed dial-but before you do, you need to know that evidence isn’t going to disappear, the chain of custody isn’t going to get fucked up. Maybe this guy can get ten years chopped off, but so what?
DUANE
I want a lawyer.
DENNIS
Then let’s get you a phone, loser.
220
“What did you give them?” Chad Meldrun asks, sitting across the table.
“Nothing,” Crowe says.
“Don’t jerk me,” Chad says. “I need to know.”
Yeah-Duane knows who needs to know.
It’s been the deal forever. You get busted with serious weight, you’re allowed to play certain cards-you can give up locations of stashes, safe houses. You just tell the lawyer, who tells the boys so they can move the stuff.
What you can’t use to trade your way out are people. You do that, it’s a problem.
“I gave them shit,” Duane says.
“Go ahead and give them something,” Chad says.
Duane shakes his head. “They don’t want it. They just want the guys.”
“And you didn’t do that.”
“How many times you need to hear it?”
“Okay, we’re good,” Chad says.
“No, you’re good,” Duane says. “I’m fucked. This was a setup. The fucking fed is in bed with Leonard. Leonard set us up.”
“If you knew that, why did you do the deal?”
“I fucked up,” Duane says. “I thought he was, you know, cowed. And thirty-five cents on the dollar… shit.”
“Okay, okay,” Chad says. “What about Hennessy? Will he hold up?”
Duane shrugs.
“We have another lawyer coming for him,” Chad says. “He’ll get Hennessy out on bail.”
“Fuck him,” Crowe says. “Get me the fuck out of here.”
“I’m going to do my best, cowboy.”
“I’m not a cowboy,” Duane says irritably. “You see boots and a dumbass hat?”
Cowboy…
Fuck.
